He therefore made alliance with Venice and Genoa, fulminated a new excommunication against Frederick, and convoked a council at Rome to ratify his ban in 1241.
In December 1898 he convoked a diplomatic conference in Rome to discuss secret means for the repression of anarchist propaganda and crime in view of the assassination of the empress of Austria by an Italian anarchist (Luccheni), but it is doubtful whether results of practical value were achieved.
A general assembly of his inquisitors was convoked at Seville for the 29th of November 1484; and there he promulgated a code of twenty-eight articles for the guidance of the ministers of the faith.
Having convoked his boyars he reproached them collectively with robbing the treasury and committing acts of injustice, and he caused one of them, a Prince Shuiski who happened to be in power at the moment, to be seized by his huntsmen and torn in pieces by a pack of hounds, as a warning to others.
As a precaution against Tatar invasions he founded fortified towns on his southern frontiers - Tambov, Kozlov, Penza and Simbirsk; but when the Don Cossacks offered him Azov, which they had captured from the Turks, and a National Assembly, convoked for the purpose of considering the question, were in favour of accepting it as a means of increasing Russian influence on the Black Sea, he decided that the town should be restored to the sultan, much to the disappointment of its captors.