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upon the tsar with the eyes of the magnates. It issymptomatic that one of the king of Poland's secretaries,closely connected with the last years of the Livonian war,should express his surprise that "for all such cruelty ofhis there could exist a singular and incredible love of thepeople towards him, which is the faith of the sametoward their princes . . . and they showed unbelievablesteadfastness in the defence of fortresses.'' It is symptomaticagain that for the next century Ivan livedin the memory of his countrymen far less as the Terriblethan as the Conqueror, the subjugator of Kazan, theepitome of the deep, popular resurgence against theTatars. This glorification of Ivan was not dimmed byhis failure to win his way to the Baltic as he had to theCaspian: the Livonian war left no such deep mark onthe Russian people, for whom the touchstone was theVolga and the steppe, Asia not Europe.Although "Bloudinesse is a slippery foundation ofGreatnesse," Ivan's reign of terror was not solely theeruption of personal vindictiveness and aberration, butwas accompanied by definite policy. He did succeedto a large extent in smashing the power of the old aristocracy,not so much by physical extinction as by severingthem from their historic local roots in this and thatregion and by impoverishing them. One result of hisreign was the greater dispersal and the rapid changingof hands of the estates of the aristocracy, and in particularthe great subdivision of the land round Moscow itself.Unlike the magnates in Lithuania and Poland, hardly anyof their equivalents in Muscovy henceforward held theirlands in such solid blocks as might form compact centresof resistance or develop into new territorial principalities.In the century following Ivan the Terrible a newaristocracy grew up, merging with the remnants of theold, but it never regained such dominance as before andits numbers were very, small, comprising only aboutsixty families. The magnates continued to be muchdivided by family rivalries, and they failed to unite andshow themselves the indispensable leaders of nationalunity during the prolonged crisis of the Time of Troubles(1604-13; cf..pp. 82-83).101