God’s Playground. A History of Poland, Vol. 1. The Origins to 1795

(^326) BATHORY
Thus did the Muscovites celebrate a severe defeat.
Bathory's triumph soon cooled. Having made his reckoning with Muscovy,
he began to dream of grandiose alliances on a continental scale. In 1583, he
made a bid to win the Tsar for a joint crusade against the Crimea. In 1584, he
was thinking in terms of an expedition against Constantinople, and then, after
the death of Ivan, of a federation of Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, and Muscovy.
The Sejm was not impressed. Its last meeting in 1585 broke up amidst the end-
less Zborowski quarrel, and no taxes were voted. The King fell into a deep
depression. On 15 May 1585, at Niepolomice, where he was shunning the com-
pany of his wife and court, he composed his will, berating the Poles for their
ingratitude and confining his largess to the interests of his native Transylvania.
He languished in this mood for more than a year, and died suddenly at Grodno
on 12 December 1586, unshriven. There were fears of poison.
Bathory's reputation was not entirely unblemished, therefore. If he was
largely remembered as the hammer of Ivan the Terrible, there were voices at the
end which called him, too, a tyrant. His success was largely personal. By sheer
force of character, he had imposed his will on the Republic, and drove the creak-
ing governmental machine into motion. But little of his achievement was
durable. By the time that the protracted autopsy was complete, and his body
interred in its elegant tomb in Cracow, the Republic was floundering once more
in the same quagmire of chaos with which the reign began.