The good! ah, I would give them the robe and the chain that I wear! My subjects would have given me over to the Tatars, sold me to my enemies.

Think of the enormity of the treason! If some were chastised, was it not for their crimes, and are they not my slaves--and shall I not do what I will with mine own ?" His grievances were real.

His _boyars_ were desperate and determined, and even with their foreheads in the dust were conspiring against him.
They were no less terrible than he toward their inferiors.

There never could be anything but anarchy in Russia so long as this aristocracy of cruel slave-masters existed.

Ivan (like Louis XI.) was girding himself for the destruction of the power of his nobility, and, as one conspiracy after another was revealed, faster and faster flowed the torrent of his rage.
In 1571 he devoutly asked the prayers of the Church for 3470 of his victims, 986 of whom he mentioned by name; many of these being followed by the sinister addition: "With his wife and children"; "with his sons"; "with his daughters." A gentle, kindly Prince had been converted into a monster of cruelty, who is called, by the historians of his own country, the Nero of Russia.
He was a pious Prince, like all of the Muscovite line.