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In the year 1553 an English navigator, whilst seeking for a short route to China and India, had accidentally discovered the port of Archangel on the White Sea, and since that time the Tsars had kept up an intermittent diplomatic and commercial intercourse with England. But this route was at all times tedious and dangerous, and during a great part of the year it was closed by the ice.
It has preserved the old oriental type: in its palaces has been displayed the barbaric pomp of the Muscovite Tsars of which much yet remains, not only in their renovated halls but also in what is left of the plate, jewels and ornaments with which they once abounded.
In view of these difficulties the Tsars tried to import "cunning foreign artificers," by way of the Baltic; but their efforts were hampered by the Livonian Order, who at that time held the east coast, and who considered, like the Europeans on the coast of Africa at the present day, that the barbarous natives of the interior should not be supplied with arms and ammunition.
The policy of religious non-intervention has not always been practised by the Government. Soon after the conquest of the Khanate of Kazan in the sixteenth century, the Tsars of Muscovy attempted to convert their new subjects from Mahometanism to Christianity.
When the Grand Princes of Muscovy, in the fifteenth century, united the numerous principalities and proclaimed themselves Tsars, they accepted this obligation for the whole country, and conceived much grander schemes of territorial aggrandisement. Towards the north and northeast no strenuous efforts were required.
Not to hope blindly, in the exceeding anxiousness of her passionate love, nor blindly to fear; not to bet her soul fly out among the twisting chances; not to sap her great maternal duty by affecting false stoical serenity: to nurse her soul's strength, and suckle her womanly weakness with the tsars which are poison when repressed; to be at peace with a disastrous world for the sake of the dependent life unborn; lay such pure efforts she clung to God.
As soon as the Grand Princes of Moscow, in the sixteenth century, threw off the yoke of the Tartars, and made themselves Tsars of all Russia, their power was irresistible and uncontested. Complete masters of the situation, they organised the country as they thought fit. At first their policy was favourable to the development of the towns.
The tsars have exalted the Church as the fountain of order and holiness; as a veritable ark of the covenant have the clergy magnified and extolled the autocracy. A remodeling of the secular government of Russia along autocratic lines was another achievement of Peter the Great which long endured. At the head of the state was the tsar or emperor, possessing absolute, unlimited powers.
The Georgians had often appealed to the Tsars for protection, and in 1810 the treaty was signed which incorporated the suffering kingdom with Russia. A portion of the state passed to Russia in 1801, at the commencement of Alexander's reign; but the formal surrender of the whole by treaty was not until 1810.
The first few weeks of my stay in the ancient capital of the Tsars were spent in the ordinary manner of intelligent tourists.
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