Fearful Majesty

by Benson Bobrick

  Quite apart from whatever temperamental peculiarities he may have possessed, however, Ivan’s first conception of the high dignity of his office unfortunately derived in a deleterious way from the continuing spectacle of hypocrisy around him. Men who ignored or abused him in private behaved like fawning lackeys at official functions, while his first actual taste of power came in a corrupted form, as each boyar clique endeavored to use him as a pawn to eliminate its rivals. Yet throughout his childhood and adolescence it was the grotesque discrepancy between his actual helplessness and his nominal might that absorbed him. He could strike back at those he deemed his enemies only in his thoughts – yet as a monarch he could also take comfort in knowing that the scenes of savage justice or revenge he acted out in his imagination might one day come to pass.

  Thus Ivan grew up morbid and excitable, mutely raving at the discrepancy between his title and his power. His natural timidity was warped and exaggerated into nervous terror by the revolting lawlessness around him, and the instinct of self-preservation began to dominate his conscious life.

  Under various tutors he underwent a complex and contradictory development. The boyars had shown him how little life was worth, and in emulation of this school, he soon found surrogates for his rage. An enfant terrible, at the age of twelve, he began torturing animals for fun, and dropped dogs off the Kremlin battlements “to observe their pain and convulsions.”6 At fourteen, he gathered about him a gang of teenage thugs from among those brought in to be his playmates, and not unlike the Emperor Nero (who similarly mingled with the folk) he roamed the streets and squares of Moscow, roughing people up. In the rampaging of his youth, he tried to make up for the childhood license he had missed. The Glinskys (ascendant at last) did not restrain him, but on the contrary encouraged him to do as he pleased. Politically, however, they selected his targets, and “from this moment on,” wrote a chronicler, “the boyars began to fear and obey the sovereign” – not as a monarch, but as a willing tool of revenge.7

  But as the government was reshuffled to fill the vacuum created by Shuysky’s execution, the results were confused. Vorontsov was returned from exile and appointed to the Duma. On December 16, 1544, Prince Ivan Kubensky (a ringleader in the conspiracy against Belsky and Joasaf that had brought Shuysky to power, and one of those who had attacked Vorontsov) was deported to Pereyaslavl. The following May he was released, only to be deported again in October (1545), along with three associates. Meanwhile Vorontsov himself fell from favor for having presumed to take Shuysky’s place; that is, for trying to dominate the government and distribute favors in the grand prince’s name. No one was secure.

  In the following May at Kolomna, as he was strolling on the outskirts of town, Ivan was importuned by some fifty Novgorod musketeers who wished to submit a petition. He told his attendants to clear the men out of the way. The Novgorodians reacted badly and began whacking his guard with their helmets and pelting them with mud. Ivan called for help; retainers came running; swords were drawn, clubs raised, and in a sudden skirmish Ivan’s archers cut the men down.

  Convinced that the incident had been an insurrection instigated by someone close to the throne, Ivan empanelled an investigatory commission (chaired by a lowborn dyak) that boldly fingered Kubensky and the two Vorontsov brothers, Fyodor and Vasily. All three went to the block.

  In a solitary but curiously revealing glimpse of Ivan at this time, a chronicle’s entry records that (joining playfully in a bit of sympathetic magic), after sharing in the spring plowing at Kolomna and planting buckwheat seeds, he walked on stilts and decked himself out in a shroud. Yet there was another face to the young prince, more conspicuous perhaps to his tutors than the nation, which as he emerged from his minority seemed to justify the highest expectations for his impending reign. A big, strapping youth at sixteen, he looked every bit a monarch – muscular, broad-shouldered, and just under six feet tall, with a lofty brow, gray eyes, auburn hair, and a long, thin aquiline nose that could be traced to his Greek grandmother, Sophia. Moreover, his budding intellect was considerable – strong, supple, sardonic, even profound – and despite the alleged neglect of his adolescence, he had evidently been schooled according to a demanding curriculum that made him as versatile in his accomplishments as any Renaissance prince. He was (or was becoming) skilled as a musician, writer, and rhetorician; a connoisseur of icon painting; a fine horseman; and an expert in the military arts. Though (untypically of Renaissance princelings) he lacked Latin and Greek, these languages were known by few in Muscovy.†

  Above all, in fact Ivan was bookish. Though he had learned his letters in the traditional way, by memorizing and reciting passages from the Breviary and the Psalter, he advanced quickly to a thorough study of the Bible, the church fathers, Roman history, Church history, and the Byzantine and Russian chronicles. He read about David, Solomon, Augustus, Constantine, and Theodosius; about his own great Russian ancestors, such as Alexander Nevsky (“taller than any man on earth, with a voice like a clarion call, in visage like Joseph the Beautiful, in strength next to Samson, endowed with the wisdom of Solomon and the courage of the Roman King Vespasian”8); and by extrapolation of what could be expected of himself because of the lineage to which he belonged. Inevitably, too, as he contemplated tales about “God’s Anointed,” he encountered allusions to “false councilors,” and in an extremely subjective way applied it all to himself. In forming his own notions of governance, therefore, he had on the one hand the example of the boyars, and on the other the heroic literature; but he had no living figure to mediate between the two extremes. He had personally never witnessed a sovereign in action. He had his feelings about his own royal dignity, and about its violation, and a literary or iconographic idea as to what true sovereignty was.

  In Makary he had a teacher who tried to unify his grasp of who he was supposed to be.

  WHEN MAKARY HAD arrived from Novgorod in 1542, he was already adorned “with the halo of literary fame.”9 A bibliophile and archivist-compiler of unmoderated zeal, early on he had resolved to gather into one collection “all the books for reading in the Russian land.”10 With a gifted editorial staff and a battery of scribes, he had compiled by 1541 the first edition of The Great Menology, an encyclopedia of Christian literature in Slavic that filled 27,000 folio pages of script. Divided into twelve volumes according to a calendrical cycle of monthly readings subdivided for daily devotion, it contained hundreds of saints’ lives, sermons, Biblical commentaries, paraphrases of whole books of Scripture, copious selections from the church fathers, the Areopagitica (a Christian Neoplatonic work of the sixth century ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite), apocrypha, the works of Flavius Josephus, monastic statutes, and four translated Byzantine collections of sermons, maxims, laws, and homilies called the Pearl, the Emerald, the Bee, and the Golden Chain. Makary’s compendium also included every anti-Catholic work translated into Slavic or composed in Russia up to that time, such as the sermons of Basil the Great against the Arian heresy and the famous legend of how Alexander Nevsky had once dazzled ambassadors from the pope with his knowledge of theology. The whole Byzantine Greek inheritance was thereby shuffled together with Russian religious literature, while many new saints’ lives were composed for the compilation, which was meant “to catalogue, exhibit and define” Moscow’s cultural heritage.11

  Furthermore, in The Great Menology and subsequent analecta, Makary gathered together and made official a number of myths contrived since Moscow’s emergence “to impart an authentic aura of antiquity and majesty to the kingdom and its rulers.”12 Chief among these were the legend of St. Andrew the “first-called,” the Tale of the White Cowl; legends concerning the imperial regalia; and the theory of Moscow as the Third Rome.

  Together they were to shape the worldview of Russia for centuries – even down to the present day.‡

  The Legend of St. Andrew, Apostle to the Slavs (based on Eusebius’ fourth-century Ecclesiastical History), had already appeared in the Primary Chronicle, which related
that Andrew had sailed from Sinope across the Black Sea to the Greek city of Korsin, ascended the Dnieper and on the hills marking the future site of Kiev planted a cross, and prophesied: “ ‘The favor of God shall shine upon them. On this spot a great city shall arise, and God shall erect many churches therein.’ And he drew near the hills, and blessed them.”13

  Makary revived the legend to stress that notwithstanding Russia’s late conversion, the origins of her faith were as ancient as those of the Latin and Greek Orthodox churches – in fact enjoyed a kind of priority because St. Andrew, “the first-called,” had introduced Peter, his brother, to Christ.

  At the same time, Russia’s belated embrace of Christianity was inversely understood as a sign of special election – of the favored sonship of the Russian Church – by analogy to episodes in the Bible (with numerous folktale variations) where two older brothers are repudiated for the sake of the third and youngest son.

  The theory of Moscow the Third Rome was akin to this in idea, and received its classic statement in a letter to Vasily III in 1510 from Filofey, a monk of the Lazarus Monastery of Pskov:

  Our ruler of the present orthodox Empire is on earth the sole Emperor of the Christians, the leader of the Apostolic Church which stands no longer in Rome or in Constantinople, but in the blessed city of Moscow. She alone shines in the whole world brighter than the sun.… All Christian Empires are fallen and in their stead stands alone the Empire of our ruler in accordance with the prophetical books. Two Romes have fallen, but the third stands and a fourth there will not be.14

  This theory in turn was closely connected to a document known as the Tale of the White Cowl, composed about ten years before, which traced the progressive transfer of a sacred vestment from Rome to Constantinople, the “Second Rome,” to “radiant Russia,” the Third. Its transfer or migration was symbolically understood as the migration of the true faith – from Rome to Constantinople to Russia – where “all the kingdoms will be united into one.”

  Notions about the migration of the faith were paralleled by myths about the migration of imperial power. To link Moscow to Rome, it was said that the House of Rurik derived from the Emperor Augustus himself, for “Rurik was a descendant of Prus,” the emperor’s (imaginary) brother, who had been sent by Augustus to the banks of the Vistula (Prussia) to help “organize the world.”§ To link Moscow to Byzantium, it was alleged that at the time of his conversion Vladimir I the Saint had been crowned by both Byzantine emperor and patriarch, and that Prince Vladimir II Monomakh had received his imperial regalia – the Russian crown (or Shapka Monomakha), a silk mantle of pearls and jewels called the barmy, a chain of Arabian gold, and a crucifix containing a piece of the True Cross – from Emperor Constantine IX Monomachus.¶ (This, despite the fact that Vladimir II and Constantine Monomachus had ruled three-quarters of a century apart.) To bind the two stories together it was said that the regalia had been presented to Vladimir II in a sardonyx box “once prized by Augustus himself.”15 Thus, the dynasty of Rurik was traced by a fraudulent genealogy to the imperial house of Rome, while its inheritance of the Byzantine symbols of world empire were just as fraudulently traced to a chronologically impossible act. Nevertheless, such fantastic theories were to serve as the primary historical basis of Muscovite political claims.

  Shapka Monomakha

  What Russia had created for itself was not unlike what Pepin and Charlemagne, in reviving the Biblical kingship of David, had done for the Franks, who after their victory over the Arabs had begun to think of themselves as the new Israel or chosen people – and not incidentally, also claimed for themselves Trojan descent. The king became the priestly king, through his consecration with holy oil, like David the anointed of God. Jerusalem wandered to Gaul (long before Rome wandered to Moscow) where medieval rulership by divine right first emerged. Later “Jerusalem” (Christian Biblical universalism) and “Rome” (political world government) were combined in the Holy Roman emperorship of Charlemagne.

  In Muscovy, rulership by divine right had managed to combine the pious absolutism of the Byzantine autocrat with the arbitrary despotism of the Mongol khan. But the trend was toward despotism, and to restrain it Makary laid especial emphasis on a fundamental Byzantine principle, accepted by the old Russia of Kiev but uncomfortably embraced by Moscow, of “symphony” between Church and State. “There are two great blessings,” the Emperor Justinian had written, “the priesthood and the empire (sacerdotium et imperium). Each was established by God and has its own appointed task. But as they proceed from the same source they are also revealed in unity and cooperative action.”16 Makary harped upon this idea, and took care in The Great Menology to include many texts that stressed not only the sovereign’s high calling but his heavy responsibilities, and his obligation to respect the authority of the great Synods, Fathers, and traditions of the Church. In his own mind, at least, the state mythology he was helping to foster was subordinate to this ideal.

  Ivan emulated the literary interests of the metropolitan, became thoroughly familiar with the great editorial work going on around him, and fell under the influence of the complex of ideas being elaborated by Makary and his chosen staff.

  Such was the literary diet and indoctrination Ivan received. In the estimation of his contemporaries, he emerged an erudite young man of natural eloquence who through “an exceptional shrewdness and remembrance of God’s writ” developed into a “rhetorician of lettered cunning.”17 In the opinion of Russia’s great historian, V. O. Klyuchevsky (whose judgment is widely shared), he became “one of the finest orators and writers of the century.”18

  * * *

  * Not to be confused with Elena’s uncle.

  † Nevertheless, it is a pity. The Kremlin library was said to contain a priceless collection of some 800 rare Greek, Hebrew, and Latin manuscripts (including a copy of the Homeric hymns) preserved in part from the famous library of Yaroslav the Wise and supplemented by volumes brought to Russia by Sophia Palaeologa and Maxim the Greek. Maxim indeed lamented that many had been abandoned in a basement of the Kremlin as “food for worms.” As late as 1960, Soviet scholars were still hoping to locate them in a Kremlin crypt.

  ‡ Thus, for example, Helmut Schmidt, former chancellor of West Germany, quoted in The New York Times, September 16, 1984: “The political behavior of Russia hasn’t really changed much since Ivan III or Ivan IV... I think it’s a mix of a never really satisfied drive for expansion and a strong and subconscious belief that Mother Russia will bring salvation to the world. This idea of salvation by Russia was in the minds of Russian intellectuals... long before Communism, Moscow as the Third Rome, after Byzantium.”

  § This tale was first promulgated in the Legend of the Princes of Vladimir, composed at the end of the fifteenth or beginning of the sixteenth century.

  ¶ The Shapka Monomakha, probably of Central Asian origin, would be featured in every coronation ceremony, if not worn by every Russian tsar, until the revolution of 1917. The earliest mention of the barmy and crown is to be found in the Testament of Ivan I Kalita, ca. 1339; of the sardonyx box in the Testament of Ivan II (ca. 1358); of the cross, in the Testament of Vasily II (1423). In one version of the legend, the sardonyx box becomes a cup from which Augustus “once made merry.”

  * * *

  5

  Tsar Ivan IV

  THE WHOLE PURPOSE of Ivan’s education had been to prepare him to be the pious ruler of an Orthodox realm. Makary determined the new and more lofty title he was about to assume, even as he judged that after the turmoil of Ivan’s minority, it had become a practical necessity that he be recrowned.

  In September 1546, Ivan began a round of the great monasteries and churches of his kingdom, as if to equip himself spiritually for his forthcoming coronation. From Trinity Monastery he went to Mozhaisk, Volokolamsk, Rzhev, and Tver, but after two months of pilgrimage and conspicuous piety it was a restless young sovereign who entered Novgorod with a bodyguard of 4000 troops on the morning of Sunday, November 14. Curious (
if unenthusiastic) crowds turned out to greet him, but he treated them with contempt, and in revenge for the “insurrection” of the Novgorod musketeers, fined the city treasury. It is said he also desecrated the Cathedral of St. Sophia. According to the Chronicles, someone had told him of ancient treasure hidden in the choir loft. He subjected the cellarer and sacristan to torture, but they professed to know nothing about it. Ivan mounted the staircase himself, groped about, knocked here and there on the walls, heard something, and had his cohorts break in the paneling on the right-hand side. Out poured gold and silver coin.

  Upon his return to Moscow on December 12, Ivan met with Makary, and after Mass in the Cathedral of the Assumption on the 14th, summoned a surprise meeting of the Duma. With Makary by his side, Ivan made three momentous announcements: first, that he had decided to marry; second, that he would choose a Russian, not a foreign, bride; and third, that he intended “to study the coronation formula of his ancestors,” specifically that of Grand Prince Vladimir Monomakh and, in emulation of that prince, to be crowned Grand Prince and “Tsar,” meaning Emperor. Etymologically, the word “tsar” derived from caesar, but had entered Church Slavic through the Greek as a translation of basileus, meaning “emperor.” However, from the days of the Mongol conquest, Russians had applied it not only to the Byzantine emperor but to the Tatar khans. At the Moscow court only Tatar descendants of Genghis Khan who had also been rulers in their own right were honored by the name. Not inappropriately, Ivan III had occasionally called himself “Tsar” after repudiating the Tatar yoke, for as one contemporary defined it, it meant “a king that giveth not tribute to any man.”1 But he had not been so crowned.