Fearful Majesty

by Benson Bobrick

  Most Russians disparaged the Old Testament, believing that the Law and Commandments had been “made disauthentique and abolished by the death and blood of Christ.” Accordingly, they refused to read publicly from the four last books of Moses (Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), and were reluctant to read from the Prophets, “as preceding the Savior and therefore pertinent only to the nation of the Jews.”30

  Jews, in fact, were barred from the country. Though Ivan III had enlisted a couple as confidential agents, Vasily III had stressed to an Italian envoy in 1526 that he “dreaded no people more.”31 Among other things he accused Jewish merchants from the Ukraine of importing “poisonous herbs.” But the enmity was religious not racial, for the Muscovites were also a messianic people and refused to admit any rival in this sphere. Thus any deviation from official dogma was apt to be labeled “Judaizing” in order to stress the inherent heresy of un-Orthodox views.

  More generally, the Russians were profoundly xenophobic, and even foreign technicians and artisans, lured to Muscovy for their coveted skills, often regretted coming, and occasionally met with an appalling fate. One doctor who abandoned a prosperous practice in Venice for the court of Ivan III rashly staked his life on a cure for the prince’s eldest son. When his patient died, he was beheaded. Another who failed to cure a vassal Tatar prince was led under a bridge “and killed with a knife like a sheep.”32 (Not surprisingly, medicine made little headway in Russia under foreign tutelage.) The same Fioravanti who served Ivan III so ably as cathedral architect, mint master, and military engineer was placed under house arrest as soon as he asked to go home. The renowned scholar, Maxim the Greek, summoned by Vasily III from Mt. Athos to correct the translation of certain liturgical texts, was tortured in chains after completing his task.

  Foreigners in turn distrusted the Russians and on the whole despised them as brutish, dishonest, and vile. Some regional differences in character were alleged, but these were not flattering. Those who lived in Moscow, for example, were said to be more degraded and less courageous than those who lived in Novgorod and less refined than those who lived in Pskov. The commonest Russian supplication was, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on us”; but when aroused and angry, “May a dog defile your mother.”33

  Despite their calendar of punishing fasts, most Russians were reported to be “somewhat grosse and burley.”34 The typical male was short, foursquare, flatheaded, and “mightily brawned,”35 with gray eyes, a long, broad beard (carefully “nourished and spread”), short legs, and a big belly. “Bellies bygge that overhang the waste”36 were considered desirable in both sexes, and girdles were fastened low to give them prominence.

  Men commonly wore shirts embroidered about the neck and fastened high with a pearl or copper clasp, kaftans belted with a sash, linen breeches (“hose without feet”37) and long, tight coats with narrow sleeves done up on the right with buttons. On their heads they wore fur kolpaks or triangular pointed hats “picked like unto a rike or diamond,”38 and cleated ankle-high boots of red or yellow leather. Women wore linen gowns or long embroidered dresses, sometimes with pearls attached to the flounces, broad wool capes or fur shubas, kerchiefs, or velvet caps. Poorer Muscovites went about in rough blue serge or cow’s hair gowns, sheepskin jackets, and buskins.

  Muscovite women were heavily into makeup. They plastered their faces, necks, and hands with red and white dyes, painted their nails, daubed their eyebrows “black as jeat,”39 and in a savage affectation that borrowed an ideal of beauty from the Tatars, blackened their teeth with mercury and even, somehow, the whites of their eyes. Visitors attributed their cosmetic preoccupation to the “bad hue of their skinne.”40 One wrote: “I cannot so well liken them as to a miller’s wife, for they looke as though they were beaten about the face with a bagge of meale.”41 Whoredom was said to be rampant and many women “easily and for a small price allured to lechery.”42 But, among the nobility at least, women were kept in relative seclusion – “seldom bydden foorth to any feastes,” and “shut up with nothing to do but spin and sew.” When “abrode upon some great consideration,” they were expected to “diligently observe their walkes, and have an eye to theyr chastitie.”43

  The more remote the region, the more freedom women had. One visitor encountered a group near Vologda wearing tall headdresses made from hoops of bark and sauntering gaily through the woods. He asked how they managed so lightly. They replied: “We pass through like the stag.”

  Muscovites tended to marry young. Girls were considered eligible at twelve, boys at fifteen – the legal age of manhood. No marriage was allowed within the fourth degree of consanguinity. Divorce and a second marriage were common; a third was allowed only for some extraordinary cause; a fourth was considered uncanonical.

  In courtship, the man asked the father of the bride for her hand, and then, we are told (in a somewhat fanciful account):

  when there is love betweene the parties, the man sendeth unto the woman a small chest or boxe, wherein is a whip, needles, threed, silke, linnen cloth, sheares, and perhaps some raisins or figs giving her to understand, that if she doe offend, she must be beaten with the whip, & by the needles, threed, cloth, that she should apply her selfe diligently to sowe, and by the raisins or fruits that if she doe well, no good thing shalbe withdrawn from her, nor be too deare.44

  Weddings were solemnized much as in the West, with vows and a ring given to the bride, who then prostrated herself at the bridegroom’s feet, “knocking her head upon his shoe in token of her subjection and obedience.”45 In turn, the bridegroom “casteth the lappe of his gown over her in token of his duetie to protect and cherish her.” Both drank from a cup, which the man crushed beneath his heel, as the ceremony concluded with guests merrily pelting them with kernels of corn.

  Once the honeymoon was over, husbands were often tyrannical with their wives. “One common rule amongst them is, if the woman be not beaten with the whip once a weeke, she will not be good, and therefore she lookes for it” as proof of her husband’s love. “Beat your shuba and it will be warmer, your wife and she will be sweeter,” advised a popular proverb – not unlike the contemporary English rhyme:

  A wife, a spaniel, a walnut-tree,

  The more you beat them the better they be.

  CULTURAL NORMS, HOWEVER, are elusive. The swarthy prototype of the Muscovite male, for example, contrasted strangely with that of the Muscovite fop, who adopted effeminate ways and devoted himself overall to a life of epicurean lassitude. Depending on the fashion, he curled his hair, or wore it long, or fluffed it out with some sort of wig; plucked out unwanted body hair with tweezers, and sought “to make himself soft and glossy”46 with aromatic salves and oils. He might (according to some diatribes) wear perfume, rouge, and even lipstick, mince about in small, tight boots that pinched his toes, and talk in a supercilious and affected manner, “neighing like a horse.”47

  Some, but not all, dandies were homosexual; but even among the burly peasantry the obsessive sexual “deviation” of the time was sodomy – “not only with boys but with men and horses.”48 The clergy were constantly fulminating against it, and foreigners were amazed at how prevalent it was. One wrote: “This people live, flow and wallowe, in the verie hight of their lust and wickednes of the crienge Sodomiticall sines”;49 and another: “The whole countrie overfloweth with all sinne of that kinde.”50

  Alcoholism, however, was already judged the great national vice. “Drinke is the joy of the Russes; we cannot do without it.”51 So Vladimir the Saint was supposed to have told envoys from Islam in declining to embrace their faith. In this fundamental legend of Russian history, love of alcohol providentially intercedes to save the nation from an infidel creed.

  But however the joy began, it tended among Russians to end in their cups. To quench their thirst some beggared themselves by pawning their valuables and clothing; others “dranke away their children” and “impawned themselves.” 52 “To drinke drunke,” wrote one contemporary, “
is an ordinary thing with them every day of the weeke… manie to the verie skinne.”53

  Disorderly conduct led to periodic crackdowns on the sale of liquor, while the Church appealed for temperance. In a popular collection of aphorisms called the Emerald, the people were told: “Blessed are those who drink wisely. But if a fool is drunk and does not fornicate, even the dead must be amazed.”54 Nevertheless, in Moscow and other great cities at least, the workday tended to end at noon, when Muscovites trundled off to the local taverns. Drink could be had in great variety. Aside from imported wines that embellished court feasts, there were numerous native brews of wine and ale: a beer made of honey mixed with juniper berries strained through a hair sack; another of “honey and hoppes sodden together” aged in pitched barrels. Kvas, the cheapest and most widely consumed, was a black bread beer resembling penny ale. There were also raspberry, black cherry, gooseberry, and currant wines, and a birch-tree root concoction available only in spring. Vodka (a derivative of the Renaissance medicinal elixir aqua vitae) did not yet dominate the market, but was gaining. Finally, there was a drink of indeterminate composition consumed chiefly at meals for the prevention of flatulence, “to which their diet renders them prone.”55

  Upper-class banquets were lavish. Dishes customarily included roast swan, spiced crane or geese seasoned with saffron or dressed with ginger and served with rice, pickled cucumbers and sour cream; hares with dumplings and turnips; confections of coriander, aniseed, and almonds, washed down with malmsey, Burgundy, Rhine and French white wines.

  Needless to say, most Russians subsisted on humbler fare, such as onions, garlic, cabbage, and (so foreigners complained) “grosse meates and stynking fishe.”56 These commonly contributed to dietary maladies, among which the Russians counted syphilis, which they blamed on imported wine.

  Whatever their ills, Muscovites had few trained physicians to heal them, and relied primarily on faith, fasts, pilgrimage, works, and prayer. Some wore amulets (such as the elk hoof against epilepsy) or doted on icons of particular saints supposed to cure certain diseases. One physic, however, to which everyone subscribed was the riverside public steam bath: “You shal see them sometimes (to season their bodies) come out of their bathstoves all in a froth, and fuming as hote almost as a pigge at a spitte, and presently to leape into the river starke naked, or to poure colde water all over their bodies, and that in the coldest of all the winter time.”57

  Such heroic therapy was thought to inure them to all physical hardship and temperature extremes.

  LIKE WESTERNERS TODAY, many foreigners assumed the people were given to idleness and heavy drinking because they were oppressed. And this was plausible enough. The society was tightly controlled, and the capital set the style. At night it was governed like a district under military occupation: selected streets were cordoned off, barriers erected, log beams thrown down across the way. Watchmen took up their positions, and anyone caught wandering about was treated as a security risk. Trespassers were fined, whipped, or imprisoned; even noblemen were firmly escorted back to their homes.

  In fact, throughout the land, day or night, virtually everyone was restricted in their movements in some way. “Formal written authorizations” were required to travel from place to place, and at various checkpoints documents had to be verified.58 If a Muscovite tried to go abroad without permission and was caught, he was usually killed – “that the people may learne nothing of other lands.”59 Everyone was supposed to stay put – wherever they had last been recorded in the census – in their city or on their farm or tax-paying commune. Even a laborer looking for work away from home had to post bond that he would return. A stranger was automatically suspect – as a highwayman, runaway, deserter, or spy – and local officials were expected to “establish his identity” promptly and register his particulars in the appropriate book.60

  Not even important envoys or merchants were exempt from the rigors of constant surveillance. To and from the border they were escorted by gendarmes or pristavs (ostensibly to protect their persons and goods) who, in order to keep them “from knowing anything certain about the country,” took them by a roundabout or confusing route. They were diligently prevented from any unauthorized contact with Russians not officially appointed for them to meet or with other foreigners with whom they might share information. Once in the capital, they were placed under a kind of house arrest. Ambassadorial residences were surrounded by tall stakes, and no one could come or go unaccompanied, not even a mere servant venturing out to water the horses in the barn. At night, armed sentries guarded the embassy gates and built fires in the courtyard to prevent anyone from slipping out under cover of dark.

  Other governments, of course, kept a close watch on foreign missions, but the situation in Muscovite Russia was extreme. Nor can any “emulation” of Mongolian etiquette (which required visiting diplomats to be escorted, protected, housed, and fed for free) entirely explain it. Certainly visiting dignitaries did not experience it as a “courtesy.”

  Authoritarian regulations hemmed in the nobility too. The upper classes were laced with an ever-growing network of political informers, and it was understood that everyone had a “duty to denounce.” This duty (to be ranked with serfdom in Russian history as an evil) had originated innocuously enough in interprincely agreements of the mid-fourteenth century, which bound both parties to have “common friends and enemies,” and to keep each other informed “for good or ill.” As the monarchy was consolidated and centralized in Moscow, and the other principalities absorbed, the contract degenerated into a one-sided loyalty oath on the part of the noble to the grand prince. Specific oaths were soon appended to a general pledge of allegiance. For example, one boyar might have to report anything he heard about “messages” or “poison”; another about “Polish-Lithuanian plots”; a third (if he belonged to a turbulent or ambitious family) about what his relatives were thinking. The servitors, friends, or peers of a noble all had “a personal stake in his continued good behavior,”61 for they might be held accountable if he lapsed. In ways correlative to mestnichestvo, this system kept the nobility divided, for “boyars kept busy watching each other found it harder to unite in opposition to the sovereign’s power.”62 Eventually, through a process of ever-widening obligation, the whole population became bound by this “duty” until in the following century it became general law. Nevertheless, it was sufficiently entrenched in the life of the nation by 1533 for one political informer to complain bitterly from his cell: “What I heard, Sire, I reported in the way in which I served thy father. I could not plug my ears with pitch. Had I not reported it, but someone else had, I might have been tortured. For is that man worthy who has heard but will not tell?”63

  YET THIS IS not the whole story. In the “rude & barbarous kingdom” not everyone drank himself into a stupor, or beat his wife, or turned his neighbor in; not every noblewoman whitened, withered, and died like a gourmet mushroom in the sepulchral recesses of a terem; nor did every district governor plunder the local population given over to his care. Though in countless ways oppressed, many Muscovites were not only decent and industrious but liked to play, and found time to do so. Depending on the season, they went swimming, boating, skating, skiing, sledding, or horseback riding; wrestled and boxed; kept pets, grew flowers, gathered mushrooms, played cards or chess, or told fortunes with grains. There were swings, seesaws, and a kind of Ferris wheel erected in a meadow on holidays, and street musicians who played wind, string, and percussion instruments and orchestrated the antics of trained dogs and bears. Occasionally the government sponsored gladiator-like sports spectaculars, when men armed with pitchforks fought it out with polar bears on the ice of the Moscow River or in a specially constructed pit. Everyone looked forward to the splendor of court and religious processions, sometimes accompanied by fireworks. On New Year’s day (September 1), the grand prince and the metropolitan would ascend the Lobnoe Mesto together and bid farewell to summer as the metropolitan blessed and scattered holy water over both prince
and people.

  On Palm Sunday a large tree, hung with apples, raisins, figs, dates, and other fruit was bound upright fast to two sleds and drawn in procession as five white-robed boys stood on the branches and sang. A parade followed with candles, banners, and icons, a priest with a large lantern “that all the light should not go out,” and the metropolitan on a horse, led by the grand prince himself on foot, holding a palm branch.64 Thirty men spread their caftans in the horse’s path, and as the horse passed over them, would “take them up and run before, and spred them againe.”65

  Every year on Good Friday a prisoner was released in commemoration of Barabbas; and every Easter Russians high and low would dye Easter eggs red and give one to their parish priest, and carry another about with them “for love, and in token of the resurrection, whereof they rejoyce. For when two friends meet during the Easter holy dayes, they come & take one another by the hand: the one of them sayeth, the Lord Christ is risen, the other answereth, it is so of a truth, and then they kisse and exchange their egs, both men and women, continuing in kissing 4 dayes together.”66

  One great source of popular entertainment were the itinerant skomorokhi – actors, minstrels, mummers, and puppeteers – whose folk drama was the only organized theater Russia knew. The Church habitually denounced them, along with any kind of handclapping, folk music, or dancing, as evoking pagan passions or ideas. “A dancing woman,” counseled the Emerald, “is called the bride of Satan. It is a sin and a shame even for her husband to copulate with her”; 67 and at least one contemporary church mural depicted a wandering player as the Antichrist. But the people knew better, and were defiant. The birthday of John the Baptist occasioned all-night revelry – “games and masquerades, satanic songs and dances, hopping and drinking, roaming along the waterside, splashing about, and,” declared one sour cleric, “when the moon is full, people jump through bonfires and do other things disgusting to God.”68