Fearful Majesty

by Benson Bobrick

  THOUGH PRACTICALLY LANDLOCKED, with a small, unindented northern coastline icebound much of the year, Muscovy’s internal commerce and communication was facilitated by a providential network of river highways, “that emptying themselves one into another, runne all into the Sea.”1 The Volga (the greatest river in Europe) was said to empty into the Caspian Sea through seventy-two mouths.

  Providence was more obscure with regard to climate, which was marked by fierce extremes: a blistering summer, and a long polar winter, a brief and tumultuous autumn and a still briefer spring. The average latitude of sixteenth-century Muscovy was coincident with that of Alaska. As far south as the Ukraine, the ground was covered by snow a quarter of the year, and northward toward the Arctic frozen eight months out of twelve. When the January cold came on, and the blizzards rolled up in a whirlwind from the Arctic gales, the very sap of the wood burning in the fire was seen to freeze at the brand’s end. Even about Moscow the earth split into clefts, yet remained so hard that the dead were stacked stiff and uncorrupted in their coffins to await interment till spring.

  “The sharpenesse of the aire you may judge of by this,” wrote a visitor,

  for that water dropped downe or cast up congealeth into yce before it come to the ground. In the extremitie of Winter, if you holde a pewter dish or pot in your hand, or any other mettall... your fingers will friese fast unto it, and drawe off the skinne at the parting… you shall see many drop downe in the streetes; many travellers brought into the Townes sitting dead in their Sleds. Divers lose their noses, the tips of their eares, and the bals of their cheekes, their toes, feete, &c. Many times the beares and woolfes issue by troupes out of the woods driven by hunger, and enter the villages, tearing and ravening all they can finde.2

  Spring brought surcease, but also widespread flooding as rivers, overflowing from the melting ice and snow, flooded the fields and turned the roads to mire. Yet by May, from such a thorough drenching of the ground, the countryside was transformed into one great garden of beauty and delight “so fresh and so sweete the pastures and medowes so greene and wel growen,”3 full of ecstatically singing birds (especially nightingales) that it could seem a vision of paradise.

  “GOD IS ON high and the Tsar far off,” goes a Russian proverb. Though not quite a “tsar,” Vasily had been remote enough, ruling his kingdom from the Kremlin, then as now a stone battlemented triangle on a hilly terrace above the Moscow River. Surrounded by water – by the Moscow River to the south, the Neglinnaya River to the northwest, and by a wide, deep moat which joined them to the east along the edge of Red Square – it was an island fortress, a mile and a quarter in circumference, defended by monumental towers, advanced blockhouses, barbicans, drawbridges, and immensely thick walls up to sixty feet high. Its parapets bristled with heavy cannon; its serrated ramparts were cut with scores of gun-loops and embrasures. One tower, overlooking Red Square, soared to 200 feet; another, the massive northwest corner Arsenal Tower, included an underground reservoir fed by a spring from which water was also diverted to the moat by a secret canal. Altogether, the citadel was virtually unassailable – “fully as powerful as the castles of Milan and Metz.”4

  Ivan III had made it so, with a brigade of Italian master-builders, engineers, and artisans of all kinds commissioned to transform Donskoy’s white-stone edifice into an imperial palace. An extraordinary elite of Renaissance talent had assembled under his patronage. Perhaps the most versatile was Aristotele di Ridolfo di Fioravanti of Bologna, whose competence ranged from cathedral architecture to casting guns and bells. He set up a kiln for baking bricks, showed the Russians a new way of mixing lime so that, “when dried, it could not be cut with a knife,”5 and contrived a machinery of ropes and pulleys for raising blocks of stone into place. Vasily III continued the construction, and by 1533 the Kremlin covered sixty-five acres, enclosed a complex of palace, office, and cathedral buildings, and was a town unto itself.

  Its hub was Cathedral Square. Along one side stood the sovereign’s residence, a five-story brick building that included an inner courtyard, a large veranda fitted with a folding lattice gate, a famous throne room or Golden Chamber, and an upper wing known as the terem, where in Asiatic fashion the women of the royal family and their attendants were chastely sequestered from common view. Connected to it was the gray-stone Granovitaya Palata or Palace of Facets, so called from the diamond-point rustication of its facade. Inspired by the Pitti Palace in Florence and the Palazzo Bevilacqua in Bologna, its principal feature was a seventy-foot-square throne room and reception hall supported by four cross vaults and one massive central pier. Adjoining the Palata was the small Cathedral of the Annunciation, paved in mosaics of jasper and agate and designed and built by architects from Pskov. Its cask-shaped roof with superimposed arch was uniquely Russian, though the ornamentation of its architraves and portals exploited Italian motifs. The high altar iconostasis or sanctuary screen was decorated with icons by two great masters, Andrey Rublev and Theophanes the Greek. Across from this church stood the red-brick Cathedral of the Archangel Michael, a large six-column, five-domed edifice where the grand princes were entombed. Built between 1505 and 1509 by Alevisio Novi of Milan, its Italianate facade of Corinthian pilasters, blind arcading, entablature and scallop-shell niches in the gables formed “a Renaissance catalogue of Northern Italian decorative detail.” Within, the royal tombs were arranged in genealogical order to form “a sepulchral chronicle of the monarchy.”6 Occupying another corner of the square was the Cathedral of the Assumption, the largest church in the Kremlin, where the grand princes were crowned. Erected under the direction of Fioravanti, its great central cupola was placed on four huge circular columns that also buttressed the vaulting of four smaller satellite domes. In this cathedral the last will and testament of the sovereign were kept in a silver casket, and the most precious icon of the realm, a portrait of the Virgin Mary believed to have been painted by St. Luke “from life.”

  Other historic buildings in the complex included the palace of the metropolitan; the Chudov Monastery, founded in 1358; the Convent of the Ascension, where royal princesses were interred; a bell tower fitted with a clock striking the hours; and the Oruzhyonaya Palata or Armory, administered as a division of the Treasury. In the Treasury proper were housed the imperial regalia and wardrobe, court uniforms, gold and silver plate, and in separate vaults the sovereign’s vast private inheritance of insignia collars in filigree, oriental carpets, gem-encrusted gospel covers, cameos carved on semiprecious stones, embroidered silk vestments, furs of every description, ornamental bonework, and a hoard of sapphires, diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and pearls. It is said of Ivan III that when he learned of a pearl that had once belonged to the wife of the khan of the Golden Horde, “he knew no rest”7 until he had obtained it for himself.

  To the northeast of the Kremlin lay Red Square, as huge as it is today, and in the midst of it, opposite the Kremlin’s Savior Gate, stood the Lobnoe Mesto or Place of the Brow, a circular limewood dais with a stone balustrade, from which the grand prince or metropolitan made proclamations or addressed the people, and where public executions were frequently carried out. When a foreign diplomat of importance was about to be received, all businesses in central Moscow were closed and crowds, deliberately swelled by people brought in from the suburbs, were assembled to impress the envoy with Russia’s manpower might. But on an ordinary day Red Square resembled a Turkish bazaar. Collapsible trading stalls were set up in rows (one row for each kind of item) and not only Muscovites but merchants from as far away as Holland and Persia haggled over the merchandise. This included just about everything under the sun: sheepskins, caftans, kerchiefs, smocks and boots; pelts, mangy and sleek, from red fox and sable to the hides of domestic cats; bone for buttons; walrus tusks for the shafts of knives; vegetables and fruits, culinary delicacies such as gingerbread and, for the more discriminating palate, sweet melons grown in horse manure and straw.

  In late fall the market moved onto the ice of the Moscow River
, where butchers displayed their cows and pigs in little herds “frozen whole... skinned and standing upright on their feet.”8

  Adjoining Red Square to the east was the merchant quarter or Kitaygorod (“Basket Town”), so called because woven baskets filled with earth like gabions had once reinforced a surrounding palisade. In 1534, this district, where many nobles, wholesale merchants, and foreign ambassadors lived, was surrounded by a masonry wall.

  Beyond Moscow’s bustling central zone were numerous suburbs, distinguished from one another by trade and class. Blacksmiths lived in the Blacksmith’s Quarter, for example, armorers in the Armorer’s, while the middle and lower classes in general were divided between Belygorod or “White Town,” where the lesser nobility, courtiers, and retail merchants dwelt, and Zemlygorod or “Earthen Town” (surrounded by an earthen rampart) where semi- and unskilled laborers called the “black” people lived. Some “blacks” worked in the mills along the Yauza River, or as menials in the main armament plant, or pulled carts or carried lumber, or scrounged for mushrooms in the forests on the outskirts of town.

  Beyond the suburbs Moscow was protected by a half-ring of semifortified monasteries – Novodevichy, Borovsk, and Zvenigorod, among others – some maintaining permanent garrisons, such as the great Trinity Monastery to the north which was “walled about with bricke very strong like a castle, with much ordinance of brasse upon the walles.”9 Moscow was also graced by many churches, though it was not yet the city of “forty times forty” churches with gilded domes for which it was later famed. Nevertheless, every visiting foreigner was impressed by the city’s size. It was frequently compared to contemporary London, and the comparison was apt. Like London it had about 50,000 inhabitants, stretched for five and one-half miles along the banks of a river, but from a distance, as viewed from the Sparrow Hills, appeared larger because of its many firebreaks, gardens and spacious yards. Overall, its circumference was about twelve miles. To feed the inhabitants, some 700 to 800 cartloads of grain rolled into the capital daily along the Yaroslavl road alone.

  IN 1533, THE economy was growing. Agricultural production was prodigious, despite broad belts of varying vegetation and soil, and in the heart of the farm belt, across Vladimir, Nizhny Novgorod, and Ryazan, the harvests were spectacularly abundant. A single acre might produce twenty to thirty thousand bushels of grain a year, and the ripening corn made a sea so thick that horses could not charge through it, “nor the quail fly forth.”

  There were also booming timber and fur industries, and through Muscovy’s seemingly inexhaustible forests of spruce and birch, aspen, oak, and elm ran moose and deer, large black wolves, bear, fox, sable, marten, rabbit, squirrel, and other animals prized for their hides and pelts. The best black fox came from Vologda; the best squirrel from Perm, Vyatka, and Ustyug; the best sable was traded by the Samoyeds at Postozersk for kettles, bacon, and flour. The uplands were the home of splendid falcons and hawks; beaver flourished in the northern streams. On the southern steppes, wild boar stalked through the wormwood, antelope roamed on the grasslands, and the estuaries were as warm with pheasants and swans. Fishing villages flourished everywhere. For those willing to brave the wild frontier, the Terek, Don, and Yaik rivers were a fisherman’s paradise of herring, barbel, salmon, sturgeon, and carp. Beekeeping was big business outside of Tula; glazed tilemaking was inimitably and quietly pursued as a craft at a monastery near Pskov. There was also iron smelting at Serpukhov, and salt panning at Staraya Russa, Nizhny Novgorod, and the great Solovetsky Monastery on an island in the White Sea. Salt could occasionally be obtained by trade with the Astrakhan Tatars, who scooped it out of great hills “cast up”10 by the Caspian Sea. One river that had its source in the White Lake district carried “sulphur in abundance down on its surface like foam.”11

  In foreign trade, Muscovy exported to Western Europe raw materials such as timber, flax, hemp, pitch, hides, wax, honey, and furs, and imported finished goods such as cloth, linen, metal utensils, spices like saffron and pepper, and wine from as far away as France. Silk was imported from Transcaucasia and Persia, woven cloth from Bukhara, Khiva, and Samarkand.

  But the economy was built on the backs of the peasantry.

  There were three categories of landholding in Muscovy: votchina, or inherited patrimonial or Church estates; pomestia, or lands held in exchange for military or other government service; and state or crown land, which encompassed the remainder. The peasants worked it all, yet did not own a single acre: “Naught therof is ours,” went a saying, “but the plowing and the rye.” Nevertheless, they enjoyed a toiler’s right on the land they tilled, and every autumn once the harvest was in, in the week before and after the feast of St. George’s Day (November 26), a peasant might settle his accounts and move on.

  But to settle his accounts was no mean task. He had to pay taxes to the state, a fixed tithe or quitrent to the landlord, and usually the interest on a loan required at the outset to purchase seed, livestock, and farming equipment. Sometimes that interest had to be paid in labor – tending to servitude. Ostensibly to lend the peasant a helping hand, but actually to bind him immovably to the estate, kabala loans (as they were called) eventually became a standard feature of peasant-landlord agreements.

  More downtrodden still was the slave, who might be a former prisoner of war, a juridically insolvent debtor, or one born into bondage. Slaves had no legal rights and, like inanimate property, could be transmitted by will or dowry, bought or sold, used and abused by their masters at will. Some enlightened masters freed their slaves, of course, but only those who escaped from Tatar captivity were automatically emancipated.

  THOUGH AN AUTOCRAT, the Muscovite grand prince was not all-powerful, and stood at the pinnacle of a social order made up of various classes with privileges to defend. In social rank, the mightiest were the boyars. They were the nobility, and advised the grand prince through the Duma (from dumat, “to think”), the chief legislative and administrative council of the realm. The grand prince set the Duma’s agenda and presided over its deliberations, but he could not always control the debate. And he was obliged by tradition to select his Privy Council from its ranks.

  The boyars made up a complex group. Some had been in Moscow service for a long time; others, as various principalities were annexed, had more recently flocked to the capital along with the princely families they had formerly served. The latter and their direct descendants comprised the hereditary, titled aristocracy of Russia, and formed the upper crust of the boyar class. But their pedigree itself did not guarantee their power. “Boyar” was the highest rank a grand prince could confer. It was therefore in his service to the monarch that a prince’s authority tended to reside, and in his capacity as a boyar that his stature was affirmed. From the mid-fifteenth century on, more than one hundred and fifty princely families joined the Moscow court, and by and large their scions monopolized the highest civil and military offices in the state.

  Nevertheless they formed a restless caste, for their eminence served but to remind them of the higher rank and dignity they had once enjoyed. Whereas the Muscovite grand prince was committed to strengthening the monarchy, they belonged to families that had once ruled elsewhere, and to some degree they lived in “the recollection of glories past.”

  Occasionally those glories seemed rather near to hand. A prince’s submission to Moscow did not invariably mean a complete revolution in his fortunes, and he often continued to reside in his appanage as an hereditary landowner on a large scale, with a considerable court and military entourage.

  The old nontitled Muscovite boyars, however, who had directly assisted in creating the new state, viewed their status in a different light. Whereas the former regarded themselves as the administrators of the realm “by right of origin,”12 the latter owed their rise to the monarchy, and strove to see it maintained. This division in the class was compounded by genealogical subdivisions among the princes, some of whom were descendants of Rurik, others of Gedymin (the founder of the original Li
thuanian royal house), while still others were direct or indirect descendants of lesser lines. A number of noble families were also of Tatar origin, and some of the Tatar princes were descendants of Genghis Khan. The descendants of Gedymin and Rurik were considered equal; those of Genghis Khan stood higher than all but the family of the Muscovite grand prince himself. This reflected not only a kind of cultural infatuation with noble ruling houses, but long-term imperial policy: for Moscow laid claim to both Lithuanian and Tatar land. Indeed, after the dissolution of the Horde, “thousands of baptized and unbaptized Tatars had merged with the ranks of men in service,” so that coincident with Russian emancipation from the yoke, the Tatar element ironically “possessed the country’s soul, not outwardly but from within, penetrating its flesh and blood.”13

  What united this newly compounded but not blended aristocracy in general was its resentment against the compulsory character of state service. In appanage days, boyars had been free to “depart” – usually to serve another prince – and this right had facilitated the growth of the Moscow court. But by the reign of Vasily III, departure meant treason. To whom could a boyar depart except to a foreign power? Thus had the nobles flocked to their own cage.

  Now, the respective rank of all these illustrious families in state service was regulated by a complicated system known as mestnichestvo (place order) based on two official books, the Genealogical Directory and the Service History Directory. Taken together they comprised a sort of “Who’s Who in Muscovy,”* and the data they contained determined not only high appointments but where officials were placed at banquets or other court functions (such as weddings), or at receptions for foreign ambassadors.

  In computing the qualifications of a candidate for a post, it was therefore lineage and family service history which counted most, not talent, competence, or proven worth. When one candidate stood against another, their ancestors did battle along their lines of descent. The grandson of a former chairman of the Boyar Duma (even if he happened to be an idiot) automatically enjoyed a stronger hand than the brilliant scion of lesser stock. One could not inherit an office, but one automatically inherited a relative claim.