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the necessity for unfettered autocracy. It is to be noticedthat, when pressing genealogy into his service, Ivan madeno use of his grandmother, Zoe Palaeologus, but harkedback either to his Kiev inheritance and the connexionsof St Vladimir and Vladimir Monomakh with the empirein the days of its strength, or for preference to a mythicalPrus, own brother to Caesar Augustus himself. Anystigma of subservience to Byzantium was similarlyavoided by the new prominence at this time given tothe old legend of St Andrew as the apostle of theRussians.While for Ivan the Terrible the Byzantine empire inits final stage of collapse served as a warning, thetriumphant Ottoman empire could serve as an example.One of his supporters against the magnates, an experiencedand much-travelled military man, eulogizedboth the justice and the severity of sultan Mahmudprecisely because his rule was autocratic: "as a horseunder a tsar without a curb, so is a tsardom withoutterror." He went on to suggest the adoption of thatsultan's reforms and above all the reconstruction of thearmy, with particular praise for the janissaries: tsarismshould be based on a good army and the masses, not ona privileged aristocracy and serfdom. Such praise ofthe Turks was exceptional among Russians, who as yethad little direct knowledge of them, but they had knownonly too well at first-hand another arbitrary and cruel,but organized and at times efficient, military despotism.In the make-up of tsarism the ideas and ritual traceableto Byzantine influence were fused with the hard fact andpractice of the Tatar khans.The degree of Tatar influence during the period ofsubjection to the Golden Horde has been variouslyjudged by Russian historians, though almost all agreein ascribing to it brutalizing and degrading effects.While most give chief weight to local causes and Byzantinetradition in the growth of the power of the grand-princesof Moscow into tsarism, other writers ascribe theautocracy of the tsars to imitation, conscious or unconscious,of the Tatar despotism.There is no doubt that the emergence of the grand-90