Page:Notes upon Russia (volume 2, 1851).djvu/92

tress. The king was willing to aid the attempt with corresponding subtlety.

He sent one of his people, in whom he could place confidence, to demand of the governor of the fortress, as the servant of his tributary, to supply him with whatever he required, and to come himself to him. The governor, however, Ivan Kovar, who was well acquainted with warlike matters and with the stratagems employed therein, could not be induced on any account to leave the fortress, but simply replied, that he had not yet learned that his prince had become the tributary and servant of the Tartars, but that when he should be officially informed on that point, it would be necessary that he should receive instructions as to what he should do. Whereupon the prince's letters, in which he had bound himself to the king, were produced and exhibited. While the governor was thus perplexed by the exhibition of these letters, Eustace, in pursuance of his own plan, approached nearer and nearer to the fortress, and in order the more perfectly to conceal his plan, the Knes Feodor Lopata, a man of distinction, with several other Russians who had fallen into the enemy's hands, in the taking of Moscow, were restored upon payment of a certain ransom. In addition to this, several of the prisoners who had been too negligently guarded, or who had in any manner been relieved from labour, had escaped into the fortress, and as the Tartars approached the fortress in great multitudes to demand them back again, and did not withdraw from the fortress, although the Russians in their fright gave up the refugees, this accession of new comers greatly increased the number of the Tartar assailants, so that the terror and despair of the Russians on account of the danger which threatened them was so complete that they were quite at a loss what to do. At this juncture one Johann Jordan, an artillery-man, a German, who came from the Innthal, estimating more clearly than the Russians the magnitude of the danger, of his own accord