NOVGOROD. 



333 



not all equal before the law, and while the " Whites," or privileged classes, were 

 at constant feud with each other, the "Blacks," or common herd, continued to 

 toil for all. In the middle of the fifteenth centur\% when she had to defend 

 herself against the growing Muscovite power, Novgorod rapidly lost her north- 

 eastern possessions, too remote to be succoured, and at that time brought into 

 relationship with Muscovy through Ust-Yug and the course of the Vichegda. 

 Then she fell herself, and henceforth her history became a long series of 

 calamities. In 1471 her armies were overthrown by the Eussians and Tatars of 

 Muscovy, aided by the jealous Pskov ; in 1478 the veche, or popular assembly, was 

 abolished, and the citizens forced to tender their allegiance to the Muscovite 



Fig. 177. — Church near Novgorod, built under Ivan the Terrible. 



autocrat. Espionage now becomes an organized institution, the suspected are 

 massacred, and a thousand families exiled in 1479 ; the murders are renewed, and 

 over a thousand families again banished in 1497 ; and so it goes on till the nation 

 is nearly exterminated and partly replaced by Muscovite colonists in the sixteenth 

 century. But the place is still suspected by Ivan IV., who nowhere better than 

 here earned for himself the title of " Terrible." If the annalist can be trusted, 

 "the most pious Czar " destroyed 60,000 persons in Novgorod ; for several weeks 

 from 500 to 1,000 citizens were daily cast into the "Volkhov; the river was 

 dammed up by the coi'pses ; and, according to the tradition, the water never freezes 

 on the site of these wholesale drownimrs. 



