The boyars were said to have wept at the “maturity” of Ivan’s speech, and perhaps also in hopeful anticipation that one of their own daughters would be espoused. However, Ivan had already settled on Anastasia Romanovna Zakharina, the niece of Mikhail Yurev Zakharin, one of Vasily III’s trusted confidants, and the scion of an untitled boyar family which had long proved loyal to the princes of Moscow. No Zakharin had been seriously implicated in plots during Ivan’s minority, but the choice displeased the class-conscious titled nobility. One remarked: “The sovereign offended us by his marriage, taking his boyar’s daughter, his slave, for a bride. And we have to serve her as if she were our sister.”2 They would have to serve her bloodline for a long time. Mikhail, the grandson of her brother, Nikita, was destined to be the first Romanov tsar; and a Romanov would occupy the throne until the Revolution of 1917.
Ivan was crowned Tsar and Autocrat of all of Russia in the Cathedral of the Assumption on January 16, 1547. He was anointed and invested with the regalia of office by Metropolitan Makary, who had conceived the entire ceremony, and who crowned him twice, first as Grand Prince “with our ancient titles,”3 then as Tsar “according to our ancient custom.” The regalia, which symbolized the unity of the monarch with his imperial ancestors, was jointly carried into the cathedral by a priest and a government official, to symbolize the unity of spiritual and secular power. On a red-carpeted dais, Ivan and Makary sat side by side on thrones. Makary proclaimed him “chosen by God, designated and given power by supreme design,”4 and intoned a prayer of divine blessing for the coronation act: “King of kings and Lord of lords, who by the servant Samuel the Prophet, didst choose David and anoint him to be king over the people Israel, hear now the prayers of thine unworthy servant, and look down from Thy sanctuary upon Thy faithful servant Ivan whom Thou blessed and raised up as Tsar of Thy holy people, and hast redeemed with the most precious blood of Thy only-begotten Son.”
In a vigorous precept, Makary emphasized the coequal powers of Tsar and Church, the role of the Church in Ivan’s elevation, and the holy character of the imperial office. He exhorted Ivan to be good: “It befits thee either to be wise or to follow wise councilors; for verily, God is in them as in the throne.”5 And he elaborated upon an admonition supposedly addressed by the Byzantine Emperor Basil I to his son Leo the Wise: “Though an Emperor in body be like all other, yet in power of his office he is like God, Master of all men. For on earth, he has no peer. Therefore as God, be he never chafed or angry; as man, be he never proud. For though he be like God in face, yet for all that he is but dust, which thing teaches him to be equal to every man.” *,6
Following his anointment with myrrh, Ivan partook of Communion and then proceeded across the square to the Cathedral of the Archangel Michael to pay homage at the tombs of his ancestors. His brother, Yury, poured silver coins over his head and scattered them in his path.
On the Byzantine model, anointment symbolized the divine source of imperial power; the crown the ruler’s imperial rank; the scepter, his temporal power for the protection of his land; and Communion the God-given nature of the empire. Perhaps the cape or barmy took the place of the Byzantine diadem to signify that the ruler was a soldier. Coin-scattering (which placed the wealth of the empire at his disposal) also formed part of the Byzantine rite. Omitted only was the public acclamation, which called for the emperor to be hoisted by soldiers upon his shield.
Thus did Ivan become the first tsar of Russia, and thereby officially laid claim to the mantle of the Byzantine emperor as Lord of the Orthodox Christian world. Use of the title became “general for both foreign relations and domestic proclamations from the date of Ivan’s coronation,”7 and recognition of its legitimacy by other powers became an idee fixe of his diplomacy.
On February 3, Ivan married Anastasia in the Cathedral of the Annunciation. A fortnight later the couple made a penitential pilgrimage to Trinity Monastery, forty miles to the north, going “the whole way on foot, in spite of the bitter cold.”
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* The passage is actually from a sixth-century treatise on ideal kingship presented by the deacon Agapetus of the Church of St. Sophia in Constantinople to the Emperor Justinian.
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6
The Glinskys
FOLLOWING THE DOWNFALL of Kubensky and Vorontsov in 1546, the leading role in the government had been assumed by Ivan’s two maternal uncles, the princes Yury and Mikhail Glinsky. Together with their mother, Anna, they had long remained in the background. Now their hour had arrived. They might have made the best of it; instead they made the worst.
In revenge for having been ostracized throughout Ivan’s minority, and for family blood spilled, the Glinskys dealt ruthlessly with all who stood in their way. They sought to dishonor and disgrace numerous boyars who had once offended them, milked the public treasury for their own aggrandizement, and appointed district governors who were exceptionally predatory even among their kind. Ivan had been led to trust them fully by apparent community of interest and close ties of kinship, but their failure to restrain their minions from acts of lawlessness aroused widespread discontent. Bribery ruled, slander and rape. Now that Ivan was tsar and of age, they saw themselves as the final faction, fixed at the summit, in the ultimate turnover in power.
The abuses of district governors, in addition to their customary extortions, now went to almost unbelievable extremes. “In their double dealing and diabolical practices,”1 testified a contemporary, “they even exhume newly buried corpses and thrust them, hacked up and bloodied with a boar-spear, into the houses of decent citizens, whom paid informers then charge with homicide.”
Social protest began to show itself by arson.
Moscow was especially vulnerable, as a city of wood with resinous fir-tree pavements and log cabin-like houses typically built foursquare “without any lime or stone.”2 Though built to “resist and expell all winds that blow,”3 with low doorways, high thresholds, little casement windows, and moss pressed into every chink and seam, they were liable to rapid combustion, and “once fired burneth like a torch.”4
In city planning the Muscovites did what they could: by quartering smiths, metal casters, and other artisans who used fire in their crafts in outlying suburbs; by requiring firebreaks between the houses and outdoor cooking to be closely shielded by a bast screen, or by regulations prohibiting the burning of candles at night. But their chief weapon was a unique mass-production technology in housing, which used prefabricated lumber, variously tenoned and mortised, marked and numbered for assembly, enabling dwellings of almost any size to be bought, transported, and erected within a few days.
The lumberyards were busy. Throughout the spring of 1547, the capital was plagued by fires. On April 12, one blaze ravaged the warehouse district of Kitaygorod, where a tower, used to store gunpowder, exploded, blowing part of the city wall into the Moscow River. On the 20th, new fires destroyed the district beyond the Yauza River where the smithies and tanneries were concentrated. Suspects were executed, but the vandalism increased, as responsible protest was frustrated or ignored. The fate of the Novgorod petitioners was almost repeated on June 3 when seventy petitioners from Pskov caught up with Ivan at Ostrovka, one of his country estates, and tried to lodge a complaint against their governor, Prince Turontay-Pronsky, a Glinsky appointee. Perhaps they expected to find the prince transformed by his coronation. But he refused them a hearing, and showing an inclination to theatrical cruelty which he would demonstrate all his life, singed their venerable beards with a candle, splashed boiling wine into their faces, and had them stripped naked and stretched on the ground. He might have killed them if a courier had not arrived with word that a great bronze bell had fallen from a Kremlin tower. In superstitious alarm, we are told, Ivan returned to the capital at once.
Understandably, Pskov fumed at the shoddy treatment its delegates had received. Rebels seized the border fortress of Opochka. A regiment crushed the rising, but its sparks carried and dissident crowds gathe
red in towns throughout the realm. There was looting. Civil disorder spread.
Then, on June 21, at three o’clock in the afternoon, someone put a match to Moscow’s Church of the Holy Cross and it went up like a torch. Though the day had dawned clear and calm, an unlucky wind arose and the flames leaped from roof to roof westward through the city in a rapid relay of fire. They reached the Kremlin and surged in sheets over the walls. As the wind made a whirlwind of the smoke, the blaze threatened the Cathedral of the Assumption, crumpled the roof of the palace, engulfed the Cathedral of the Annunciation, the Treasury, the Chudov and Ascension monasteries, the Armory and its warehouses, and the metropolitan’s residence. Ivan and his court fled across the river to the village of Vorobyovo, but Makary lingered in the Cathedral of the Assumption, desperately trying to salvage precious manuscripts and icons. He emerged heavy-laden, made his way to a secret passage that led to the Moscow River, but found it blocked by smoke. Soldiers tried to lower him over the battlements in some kind of wooden cage, but the rope broke and he was badly injured by the fall. Somehow he managed to reach the Novodevichy Monastery on the outskirts of town.
Meanwhile, central Moscow was gutted. Thousands were left homeless; two thousand died. “And every flower garden burned up,”5 wrote a chronicler, “as well as all the vegetables and grass.” For some time afterward heavy clouds of smoke hung over the city. Survivors searched hopelessly among the charred rubble for relatives and redeemable property. Everyone suffered some loss. A monk noted, “God punished us for our sins” – but soon the abject mood of the people turned to anger. As the Glinskys looked for scapegoats, their wheel of fortune turned.
Ivan paid a visit to the recuperating Makary on June 23, where an emergency meeting of the Duma was held. Several anti-Glinsky partisans (some with ties to the Shuyskys) left no doubt as to whom they blamed. Grigory Zakharin (Anastasia’s uncle), whose own clan was now in the ascendant, accused the Glinskys outright of having started the fire. An investigation was launched, but the populace was already convinced that the grave-robbing, heartless Glinskys, especially “the old witch Anna,”6 had brought about the catastrophe by witchcraft. Specifically, it was charged that they had plucked human hearts from corpses, soaked them in water, and flying over Moscow “like magpies,” let them drip upon the town. And wherever the water dripped it burned.
Yury Glinsky heard the rumors, came to Moscow to reason with the mob, and was present on Sunday, the 26th, when as part of the investigation the citizenry was invited to Cathedral Square to answer questions put to them by certain boyars. Anti-Glinsky partisans worked the throng. “Who started the fire?” the crowd was asked. The people thundered back, “Anna the witch.” The mood was savage, and Yury, grasping the situation at once, sought sanctuary in the Cathedral of the Assumption. The crowd pursued him into the parvis, dragged him out and killed him. He was not the only one. His bodyguard was stomped, and anyone associated – or assumed to be associated – with the Glinskys was attacked.
Meanwhile, Yury’s brother Mikhail and their mother, Anna, had remained on their estates in Rzhev. The mob did not know this, and three days after Yury’s murder massed before Ivan’s temporary residence at Vorobyovo on the outskirts of Moscow to demand their surrender. Some of the rioters were dressed in full military gear and threatened to kill the tsar if he did not comply. Ivan told them he was hiding no one, and had the ringleaders arrested; but sympathy for the rebels was widespread, and fugitives found asylum throughout the realm.
To restore order, Ivan confined Mikhail and Anna to their estates, vigorously began rebuilding central Moscow, circulated rumors of coming social reform and, at some calculated risk, allowed the usual precautionary summer mobilization against the Tatars to go forward as planned along the southern frontier. In the fall, he celebrated the marriage of his younger brother, Yury, to one of the princesses Paletsky, of titled boyar stock – perhaps to appease the nobility. Overall, he sought to create the impression of firm and continuing, calm authority at the helm.
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7
The Chosen Council
IT WAS NOT an illusion. After the uprising of 1547, a government of compromise rapidly emerged made up of far-sighted individuals of both noble and gentry birth whose overriding goals were to consolidate the central administration and gradually reduce the political and economic power of the clans. These men had an eye for the great outlines of Muscovite policy, for the broad prospect of Russia’s plowlands and pastures, thronged markets, and slowly emerging industries, and an instinct for what the people were thinking and feeling throughout the land.
During Ivan’s minority, few men of character or ability could find advancement, but there now coalesced around him a remarkable coterie of favorites and councilors subsequently known as the Izbrannaya Rada or “Chosen Council.” This council was not an administrative organ (like the Privy Council of the Duma) but an unofficial inner cabinet or “company of honestly-disposed advisors,”1 who in the words of one probable member urged upon Ivan “what was best and needed to be done.”2 The tsar, in turn, reputedly “felt such affection and friendship for them that he undertook nothing”3 without their advice and consent. Fundamentally, their program was based on the spiritual conception of the duties of a ruler, with the idea that he is answerable to God for his realm. Although Makary did not dominate the council, he almost certainly promoted its formation, and his coronation advice to Ivan “to follow wise councilors; for verily, God is in them as in the throne”4 was probably aimed at encouraging his submission to their direction. Moreover, there was a powerful consensus that whatever Ivan’s potential, this was a tsar who had to be taken in hand. The same men who wished to exalt him also wished to restrain him, both for his own sake and the sake of the realm. Scholarship may wish to debate it, but it was obvious to his contemporaries that Ivan was profoundly sick. He was brilliant, but he was wild and cruel, and intermittently confessed as much even to the end of his days. This alone sets him apart from many a tyrant, and merits our close attention to his tragedy.
After the Moscow fire, he was near nervous collapse. Crowned, married, and almost overthrown within the space of six months, his palace in ruins, forced to place his own remaining family under house arrest, “there came to him a man,” wrote a contemporary, “a priest by rank, Sylvester by name, a newcomer from Novgorod the Great, divinely rebuking him with holy scriptures in the terrible name of God.” “Just as fathers scare their children with imaginary horrors to turn them from senseless or wicked games,” so Sylvester told him of “miracles and apparitions,” and “like a physician scraping at gangrene with a knife, as far as the live flesh, [so] he healed and purified his soul from leprous sores and rectified his depraved mind.”5
Though not quite a newcomer, Sylvester had originally been recruited by Makary in Novgorod to work on The Great Menology, and by 1540 had become a man of considerable influence. He had forged ties to both the Shuyskys and the Belskys, and during the Belsky administration had apparently helped to secure the release of Vladimir Staritsky and his mother from confinement. As a Church progressive he may have been close to Metropolitan Joasaf, but when Makary was called to take Joasaf s place, probably accompanied him to Moscow. Like Makary, he seems to have been adept at cultivating contradictory connections that assisted the advance of his career.
In the summer of 1547, he was appointed archpriest of the Cathedral of the Annunciation, which placed him in almost daily contact with the tsar. Entrusted with the cathedral’s redecoration and repair, and with the creation of new palace frescoes for Ivan’s edification, his power grew steadily until, in the resentful opinion of one colleague, he became “all-powerful. Everybody obeyed him and nobody dared to oppose him.… He gave orders to the metropolitan and the bishops… and the boyars and the dyaks… and the military commanders and members of the gentry and everybody else. To put it baldly, he directed both spiritual and temporal affairs… and was in complete command of both spheres, spiritual and temporal, as if h
e were tsar and metropolitan.”6
However exaggerated this account, there can be no doubt that Sylvester gained a kind of mastery over the mind and imagination of the tsar, and placed even the everyday organization of Ivan’s life under his control.
Silvester and Ivan IV during the Moscow fire of 1547. (Pavel Pleshanov, 1855)
The phenomenon of a spellbinding starets close to the throne was, as it happens, not without precedent, and of course had a notorious future. But though Sylvester might deliberately prey upon Ivan’s credulity – “scaring me with bogies,”7 the tsar would later say – he was no Rasputin, and more aptly to be compared with Vassian Patrikeyev, a boyar-turned-monk who for many years served as chief adviser to Vasily III. “I was not so afraid of my sovereign,” one of Vasily’s courtiers recalled, “as I feared and hearkened to the monk.”8
Patrikeyev’s noble birth had facilitated his rise. In coming to power, Sylvester had taken the only route he could. As a married priest with a wife and son, he had no future in the ecclesiastical hierarchy; nor, because he was a priest and humbly born, could he ascend the political ladder by ordinary means. He had to rely on charisma. Yet he appears to have been a righteous man, and from certain remarks addressed to his son, we get some idea of the conduct he espoused. He was resolutely opposed to slavery, for example, to usury and dishonesty in commerce, and to all inequities under the law. But Sylvester’s tyrannical side – which spooked Ivan for his own good – can also be glimpsed in his widely disseminated Domostroy or “House Order,” a manual with advice on religious, dietary, disciplinary, and other matters that seemed designed to convert the whole of life into a ritual. Its maxims were phrased in rhythmical (and sometimes rhymed) prose suitable for chanting, and some were harsh: “Punish your son frequently, that you may rejoice later”; or “Give him no power in his youth, but crush his ribs while he is growing to save yourself from suffering and shame”; or “Save through fear.”9 But generally speaking the context was more humane:
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