The Russians also liked to swap tall tales: of the freakish tribes beyond the river Ob, for example, who died every autumn and revived in the spring; or of an astonishing creature called the “vegetable lamb” which resembled a lamb in every respect, even to its hairy hooves, yet grew like a plant on a stalk. The stalk was attached to its stomach, and when it had devoured all the grass it could reach, it died.§
Like many Europeans, the Russians also believed some remarkable things about the Lapps: that they could change their shape at will, bring the dead back to life, and “by tying and untying three knottes on a stryng like a whyp” control the weather and the tides.69 Mariners feared them, especially off the North Cape; and in a related story (which seems some sort of distillation of the Scylla and Charybdis myth) believed Lapland women engendered dog-headed children by sipping water from the sea.
(Enterprising Russian merchants had in fact been trading with the Lapps for years – as they had with the Samoyeds, who nevertheless fared no better in common repute: for they “eate one another sometimes”70 and “if any merchants come unto them, they kill one of their own children to feast them withal.”71)
On any given evening, peasants in outlying villages might also be found gathered around campfires or in low wooden huts to hear storytellers sing or recite from memory the timeless folk and epic heroic tales. These starina (“what is old”), handed down by oral tradition from generation to generation, father to son, told of the stalwart warriors of Kiev who with their mighty sword-strokes had split their foes in two; or of Ilya, the cripple of Murom, who triumphed over Nightingale the Robber; the comic adventures of Sadko the Novgorod merchant, who used a cathedral bell as a helmet and its clapper as a walking stick; or (a popular ghost story) of the wizard-prince Vseslav of Polotsk, conceived by enchantment, who judged the people by day, but by night raced as a wolf, from Kiev to Tmutorokan. And everyone wept for love of valiant Prince Igor, the twelfth-century prince, who had stood with the Russe against the nomads, declaring: “With you I wish to lay down my head, and to drink of the Don in my helmet.”72
* * *
* Strictly speaking, the genealogical and service records, carefully maintained by eminent individual families, were not formally compiled into unified central directories until the 1550s.
† In the Eastern Orthodox Church, a metropolitan ranks above an archbishop but below a patriarch. In 1533, there were four patriarchs: at Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. The Russian primate was granted patriarchal status in 1589.
‡ This Catholic innovation in the Creed (established at Constantinople in 381) apparently first appeared around 589 in Spain. In 809 Charlemagne approved it at Aachen; and in 1014, Pope Benedict VIII sanctified it at his anointing of King Henry II.
§ Botanists have since identified it as the cotton plant.
* * *
3
Interregnum
THE SELFLESS DEDICATION of Igor to his subjects was scarcely to be found among those who vied for power after the death of Vasily III. Over the next decade and a half Russia would be ruled by the faction-ridden aristocrats. In the words of Igor’s lament: “Now brother said to brother: ‘This is mine, and that is mine also,’ and the princes began to say of little things, ‘Lo! This is a great matter.’”
Everything Vasily had been afraid of came to pass. No one had listened. He had wasted his dying breath. Prince Yury, whose ambitions were undeterred by Ivan’s birth, had begun canvassing the nobility for support even as Vasily lay dying, and a few days after his funeral made a bid to become Yury I. The plot collapsed immediately because those he thought he could count on doubted his prospects and turned him in. Starved to death in a dungeon, his body before entombment was rubbed down with oils “in an attempt to remove the marks left by chains.”1
Yury’s challenge to the Regency Council proved much easier to thwart than that contemplated from the Duma, some of whose senior ranking members resented their exclusion from the new regime. From the beginning, relations between the two were strained.
Elena Glinskaya, Vasily’s widow, also prepared to stake her claim. According to Russian law a widow was the rightful guardian of her children’s inheritance, and “like Olga in olden times,” writes one historian, “the grand princes’ mothers continued to play important roles and influence their sons even when they became adults. Such precedents established Grand Princess Elena as guardian of Ivan and entitled her to administer the grand duchy as a matter of course.”2 But such precedents were frail. One would have to go back to Olga herself to find an example in Russian history where a grand princess assumed power “as a matter of course,” and only two others had even met with foreign envoys – the wives of Vasily I and Ivan III. Nor could a mother’s right to dispose of her son’s property be said to extend casually to the vast, imperial chain of possessions so tediously enumerated in the royal title. Though later official chronicles (composed to please Ivan) portrayed Elena as the designated regent, the whole drama of Vasily’s deathbed scene suggests otherwise.
The strong man of the Regency Council was Mikhail Glinsky; the strong man of the Duma, Ivan Ovchina-Telepnev-Obolensky, whose family had held top positions in the government since the days of Vasily the Dark. Like Glinsky, Ovchina was a renowned and dashing soldier who had been Vasily III’s last master of the horse. It was Ovchina who had patrolled outside the bridal suite, with sword drawn, on Vasily’s wedding night. And perhaps he got a little closer than that. The grand prince was not long in his grave before he was reported to be Elena’s lover. If Ivan had a secret father, Ovchina was probably the man. In any case, his competition with Glinsky was complicated by their mutual connection to Elena in other respects. While Glinsky was Elena’s uncle, Ovchina’s sister, Agrafena, was Ivan’s dedicated nurse.
Elena’s private life posed an obvious threat to Glinsky’s authority. And he apparently upbraided her for it. As Vasily’s speech to the boyars had made clear, he was regarded as an outsider, and when he committed himself to defending Ivan unto death, who aside from Yury was he supposed to be defending the infant against? Every disaffected boyar present must have wanted to protest aloud, “O Lord, surely it is not I?”
Though Glinsky had his supporters, the considerable bad blood between him and other nobles, especially Ovchina, dominated the court, and the contest between the Regency Council and the Duma was, in effect, decided by Elena’s choice between the two men. Elena chose Ovchina, whose help she needed to come to power. In August 1534, Glinsky was arrested and charged with having sought to usurp the crown. Several other nobles were imprisoned as his accomplices. Two fled to Lithuania. The Regency as constituted by Vasily had lasted less than a year.
Like Yury, Glinsky was starved to death in a Kremlin tower. It was a cruel and perhaps unwarranted fate, but the coup unquestionably brought greater stability to the helm. Ovchina represented a satisfactory bridge between the Duma and the Regency Council, and though Elena herself had little training in governance, after an unsteady beginning she ruled with surprising competence for the next four years. In foreign affairs, she concluded a treaty with the king of Sweden which affirmed the principle of free trade between the two countries and bound the Swedes to neutrality in the event of war between Moscow and Lithuania; maintained cordial relations with the Austrian Empire, and good relations with the hospodor of Moldavia, an enemy of Poland; and promulgated a controversial but long-lasting currency reform by withdrawing from circulation denominations debased by clipped or counterfeit coinage, and by striking a new silver standard called the kopek, after the image it bore of a knight on horseback carrying a spear (kope) rather than a sword. She also continued Vasily’s vast program of building churches and monasteries in accordance with the notion of an Orthodox kingdom, while strengthening frontier fortifications and founding new towns. Ustyug, a major settlement, sprang up in the north. In the capital, an Italian architect, Peter Friazin, began a stone wall to surround the Kitay Gorod.
However, this litt
le cameo of order was carved on a field of blood.
King Sigismund I of Poland-Lithuania, who had been following recent developments in Moscow with great interest, was encouraged by prominent Muscovite defectors (linked to Glinsky) to take advantage of what he supposed to be his enemy’s disarray.
Sigismund was a formidable monarch – tall, powerfully built, energetic, and fearless – who bore himself as a half-barbaric warrior-king. He had broken the power, once and for all, of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia, converted their grand master, Albrecht, into a vassal duke, and secured access to the Baltic through Danzig. But he had lost Smolensk to Moscow, and in 1516 the Crimean Tatars had carried off tens of thousands of captives in one tremendous raid.
King Sigismund
The loss of Smolensk had brought the Russians to within 250 miles of the Lithuanian capital of Vilna. Sigismund could not accept this, and for twenty years had waited for revenge. In the summer of 1534, when a longstanding truce between the two states expired, Lithuanian troops raided the environs of Chernigov, Bryansk, and Starodub. The ease with which they carried out their exploits seemed almost too good to be true – and it was. The military and administrative chain of command, temporarily thrown into confusion by a flurry of defections and arrests, had been sorted out by late October, and renewed attacks by the Lithuanians near Smolensk were repulsed. Russian troops counterattacked to within thirty-five miles of Vilna. In 1535, they built a lake-island fortress at Sebezh in Lithuanian territory and attacked Mstislavl. In retaliation, the Lithuanians besieged, mined, and blew up Starodub. In February 1536, however, they failed to capture Sebezh, while the Russians managed to construct two important new frontier strongholds: Zavoloche in the district of Rzhev, and Velizh near Toropets.
Sigismund’s military gamble had resulted in a net loss. He offered to negotiate and the Muscovites speedily agreed, for the Tatars had recently launched coordinated attacks against their southern and eastern frontiers.
Nevertheless, the negotiations were arduous, as each side haggled over preliminary details. The Lithuanians wanted the talks held in a no-man’s land on the border; the Russians said this was unprecedented: the king’s envoys had always come to Moscow. Eventually the Russians prevailed, and a high-level Lithuanian delegation arrived. Then they argued over how the war had begun, and tediously reviewed the whole history of their relations. Each side refused to be the first to present its demands. Again the Russians prevailed, and the Lithuanians made their statement. The Russians walked out.
In subsequent sessions the Russians demanded acknowledgment of Smolensk as their patrimony, preliminary to further discussions. The Lithuanians replied: “Our ruler will never accept any unequivocal formula acknowledging the loss of Smolensk.” The Russians inquired what an “unequivocal formula” meant. The envoys explained: “If your sovereign intends to keep Smolensk he should hand over a comparable town” – meaning Novgorod or Pskov.3
No permanent peace could be achieved, and at length a five-year armistice was hammered out to take effect on March 25, 1537. Beyond that the two sides could not even agree on a prisoner exchange.
Meanwhile Elena had been endeavoring to root out treason, and to consolidate her hold on the government had dealt ruthlessly with dissent. Under her administration, it is said, “no one came out of the dungeons alive.”4
After Glinsky, her most celebrated victim was Vasily’s youngest brother, Andrey.
PERHAPS THE LEAST enviable position in a dynastic crisis (next to being an infant monarch under the “protection” of ambitious men) is occupied by the brother of a dead monarch, since he is automatically seen as a rival to the crown. His benevolence (otherwise cherished as avuncular) is invariably taken for guile, his reticence for hatching of plots, his melancholy for hatred, and his boldest professions of loyalty for desperate attempts to conceal malicious designs. It could be said that he might as well immerse himself in plots, since secret intelligence is about the only way he can hope to anticipate the blow before it falls.
This didn’t work very well for Yury – but then most historians agree he wore usurpation on his sleeve. But the fate of Andrey Staritsky is another story, and a classic case of how untimely uncles fare.
After Vasily’s death, Andrey had served briefly on the Regency Council until Elena’s accession obliged him to withdraw to his estates at Staritsa where, apparently, he wished to live in peace. Surely the demise of his two brothers weighed him down. He also had another life to lead. On February 22, 1533, he had married Evfrosinia Khovanskaya, a descendant of Gedymin, and on January 9, 1535, they had celebrated the birth of a son, Vladimir. Though Evfrosinia was destined to prove mortally ambitious herself, her disposition before 1537 is quite unknown and cannot be fairly judged apart from subsequent events.
Andrey ought to have let well enough alone. But in anxious retirement, he sought reassurance of Elena’s goodwill. Accordingly, he casually asked her to increase his holdings by a couple of towns – what a large monastery, for example, might acquire in a year. To his surprise she sent him instead a couple of racehorses and a little plate – “in memory of the deceased.”5 He grumbled, and she got wind of it and asked for a meeting. From that moment on he knew he was a marked man. The metropolitan guaranteed his safety, but the conference went badly and he had to sign documents reconfirming his “duty to renounce” and prohibiting him from expanding his retinue.
He returned to his estates in gloom. Shortly thereafter he was summoned to Moscow to attend a session of the military high command about Kazan. Fearing arrest, he pretended to be ill. Elena dispatched a physician to ascertain if it was true and the man reported back that Staritsky had “but a mere spot on his thigh”6 – an odd remark in light of Vasily’s fate. Twice more he was summoned, and twice more declined. Threatened with the confiscation of his estates, he protested that he “shouldn’t have to come to court carried in a litter.” Meanwhile, Elena’s spies were telling her that he was surrounded by a great many people not normally present at his court. It may be so; but Staritsky was evidently more anxious than ever to convince Elena of his loyalty. In naive desperation, he threw away the one wild card he held – the large military guard it was his right as an appanage prince to command. In April 1537, he transferred most of it her service.
Elena seized opportunity by the forelock and sent a regiment under Ovchina to Volokolamsk and another toward Novgorod. Alerted, Staritsky assembled what troops he could and on May 2, 1537, rode hard out of Staritsa for Torzhok. From there he probably meant to cross into Lithuania, but a third column moved to interdict him, obliging him to turn toward Novgorod where anti-Muscovite sentiment, rekindled by recent disturbances over the currency reform, held out some promise of support. Preceded by a simple proclamation: “The grand prince is a boy. The boyars are in charge. Whom can you serve? I shall be glad to show my favor to you,”7 he called the local gentry to arms. Some joined his band, but these were no match for the forces racing to meet him, and Novgorod shut its gates to his cause. This was the decisive development. Thereafter Staritsky’s allies “melted away.” As it was, his ranks were riddled with turncoats. One informer, trussed up and immersed in a lake with only his mouth and nose above water, named so many confederates that the prince cut short the interrogation because “it was impossible to hang them all.”8
Ovchina arranged a parley, promised Staritsky clemency for surrender, and escorted him to Moscow. Staritsky entered the capital on a Thursday; on Saturday he was dragged off to a dungeon and clamped in an iron mask. His wife and son were disinherited, and thirty prominent members of the Novgorod gentry from among the insurgents were hanged at fixed intervals along the main highway all the way from Moscow to Novgorod.
Thus far Elena had artfully played one faction off against another, and had managed to retain the loyalty of the Church hierarchy despite modest legislative initiatives against monastic landholding. Metropolitan Daniel and Archbishop Makary of Novgorod were among her closest advisers, and in a meeting between the
three on January 9, 1535, she had empowered Makary to administer Novgorod on her behalf. Her confidence was not misplaced, for he had helped turn the tide of Staritsky’s revolt and proved indispensable in securing local support for her currency reform.
Elena’s position in fact had never seemed so strong. She had weathered several major trials, and although regarded, like her uncle before her, as a “sojourner” at the Moscow court, she had an outstanding general to protect her. Yet her repressions had multiplied her enemies, and Ovchina’s power had also gone to his head. It was hard enough for the boyars to put up with a titled monarch, but he had lorded it over everyone, and they seethed with discontent.
On April 3, 1538, Elena was felled by poison. Six days later, Ovchina was locked in a little stone cell “behind the palace near the stables,”9 and his sister, Agrafena, was shorn and exiled to Kargopol. With unseemly haste, Elena herself was buried without ceremony in nearby Voznesensky Convent. Such complete disregard for public feeling, not to mention the niceties due an eight-year-old sovereign upon the death of his mother, foreshadowed the callous days ahead.
IN ASSUMING THE direction of state affairs, the Duma split into factions. Two rival coteries vied for power, one led by the princes Shuysky, the other by the princes Belsky. The Belskys, descendants of Gedymin who had transferred their allegiance from Lithuania to Moscow in 1482, were comparatively late arrivals in Muscovy but had married into the ruling house. The mother of Ivan Belsky, clan-head, was a niece of Ivan III. Generally speaking, they did not oppose the monarchy so long as the high position of the Duma and other aristocratic privileges were not infringed. Their natural allies were the nontitled Muscovite boyars and the clerical staff of the state bureaucracy.
Fearful Majesty Page 7