plundering alike both friends and enemies. At length being afraid that all would be opposed to him as to some common plague, and seeing that there was no place in which he could be safe from snares, he took to himself a certain number of freebooters and fled to the prince of Moscow, and came with certain ships into the river Narva to Ivanogorod, a fortress of the prince of Russia; thence by a land journey he came to Moscow the same year that I was there. Being discharged at the request of the emperor Charles V, he died in his service, pierced through with a cannon ball at the siege of Florence, a city of Italy.
Concerning Tithes.
Vladimir, who was initiated into the mysteries of the life-giving font in the year 6496 (A. D. 987), instituted, in conjunction with the metropolitan see, tithes of all things to be given on behalf of the poor, orphans, the sick, the aged, strangers, prisoners, as well as for the burial of the poor; for the assistance also of those who had a numerous offspring, or who had lost their property by fire,—in short, for the relief of the necessities of all the wretched, for the churches of poor monasteries, and chief of all, for the solace of the dead and of the living. The same Vladimir subjected all abbots, presbyters, deacons, and the whole establishment of the clergy, to spiritual power and jurisdiction, as well as monks, nuns, and those women who make proscura for the services, and are called proscurnicæ,[1] also
- ↑ These words, proscura and proscurnicæ, appear to have been taken by Herberstein from hearsay, as from the description contained in the following paragraph, "proscura" is evidently written in error for "prosphora", the usual term for the loaves offered in the sacrament.
