Fearful Majesty

by Benson Bobrick

  Beatings should not be administered in the presence of others but in private, in order to teach, and to say a word, and to show affection…. And for an offense, do not strike on the ear, nor in the eyes, nor with the fist under the heart, nor push, nor prod with a stick and do not hit with a stick either;… many injuries result therefrom…. Strokes of the whip should be inflicted carefully while the lesson is being taught; this is both reasonable and painful and awe-inspiring and healthy. And only for a great wrongdoing and fearful disobedience, should the shirt be taken off and a thorough beating administered while the hands are held.10

  Many a disciplinarian in Western Europe would have found such caveats indulgent.

  NEXT TO SYLVESTER, and eventually coequal in influence and perhaps in the tsar’s affections, was Alexei Adashev, a courtier of service gentry stock from Kostroma, whose father, Fyodor, was a government official. Originally brought into the Kremlin as one of Ivan’s playmates (they were about the same age), and subsequently appointed to his personal bodyguard, in 1547 Adashev was promoted to chamberlain – a post only superficially analogous to that of valet de chambre – with responsibilities that made him Ivan’s chief of staff. In time he would prove an exceptionally versatile minister, with a major impact on legal, Treasury, and foreign policy affairs. From 1547 on, his name appears on almost all important state documents.

  Adashev’s private character, however, may have surpassed his public renown. He was, wrote an admirer, “like unto the angels, so noble, decent and refined that coarse and mundane men would find it difficult to believe.”11 Much given to fasting and prayer, he also secretly maintained and tended invalids in his own home whom he washed and fed, “many a time wiping their sores with his own hands”12 – even as he had once washed the tsar in his bath.

  A THIRD AND equally precocious member of the Chosen Council was Ivan Viskovaty, a civil servant who had entered the government around 1537 as a clerk in the nascent Foreign Office. In 1542, he had drafted the armistice agreement with Poland-Lithuania and met with the king’s ambassadors – responsibilities technically far above his rank. The Foreign Office, in fact, as it was then emerging into a highly organized, independent bureau, owed its creation largely to Viskovaty’s initiative, and within two years of Ivan’s coronation he would become Russia’s first true foreign minister. As a bolshoi dyak, or great secretary, he enjoyed a seat on the Duma, and his name often appeared in conjunction with Adashev’s on official documents. No Russian diplomat or statesman of the sixteenth century was more capable, or would be more widely admired both at home and abroad.

  To complete the grand quartet (supreme within the council) Makary’s role deserves to be restressed. It was to Makary that Ivan had gone with his court for advice on how to deal with the uprising and whether to repudiate the Glinskys, and Makary who may have thwarted an attempt by the Shuyskys to use the Glinsky affair to return to power. This had bought time for the Zakharins, Ivan’s new relatives, to close ranks with other loyalists behind him, and for the Chosen Council to take a more definite shape. Before long, the cabinet was in place – “a gathering of Ivan’s friends ‘who wished him well.’ ”13 In supplanting the rapacious and arbitrary conduct of the boyars with a moral atmosphere conducive to enlightened policy, the council acted as Ivan’s tutors to a degree that would not have been possible had he not already been “so accustomed to guardianship.”14 It could almost be said that he entered upon a second minority. Nevertheless, though he relied on the council to help him rule, its very existence depended on his continuing favor, while there were two objective factors that imposed constraints upon it from the start. First, its initiatives had to take account of, and to some degree work through, the ruling institutions such as the Duma, its Privy Council, and the synods of the Church. And this meant considerable compromise. Secondly, there were personality and other strains within the council itself.

  Viskovaty resented Sylvester’s autocratic presumptions, while Sylvester and Makary emerged as rivals. When Archbishop Feodosy, Makary’s protégé in Novgorod, sent Easter gifts in 1548 to the court elite, the only person of importance he neglected was Sylvester. But in the beginning at least, the Chosen Council was presumably united by loyalty to the tsar.

  The depth of Ivan’s personal commitment to the council’s ideals, however, are harder to assess. Ultimately, he proved a consummate politician. In pondering the degree of popular discontent the Moscow fire had illuminated, he seems to have realized four things: his own need for guidance; the need for reform; the importance of his public image; and the potential for using popular discontent as a weapon against the boyars.

  * * *

  8

  The First Wave of Reforms

  PLANS FOR THE implementation of broadly conceived reforms, affecting local and central government, military and financial administration, the judiciary, and the Church community, were drawn up at the beginning of 1549. While the reformers, motivated on the whole by the desire for a more just and righteous society, could expect considerable opposition from many boyars, through his power of appointment Ivan somewhat modified the character of the Duma by the elevation of men on whose loyalty he thought he could count.

  The legislative planning took place against a background of intellectual ferment – a kind of revival of inquiry (if not of learning) in Muscovite court circles – which presumably reflected the restless intelligence of the tsar. All topics were discussed – political, social, religious, and ethical: Church-State relations; the efficacy of the law; economic exploitation; corruption in monastic life; and the oppression of the poor – in public and private conversation, and in letters, pamphlets, treatises, and a number of petitions to the tsar.

  A monk from Pskov, Ermolai-Erasmus, for example, drafted a memorandum that condemned the exploitation of the peasantry on boyar estates and called outright for the abolition of kormlenie. Another polemicist, who wrote a pamphlet against monastic landholding entitled “A Discourse of the Sorcerers of Valaam,”* suggested that national assemblies be convoked every year to air complaints and to keep the tsar informed of abuses perpetrated in his name.

  But the pamphleteer Ivan ultimately hearkened to most was the Lithuanian condottiere, Ivan Peresvetov, who had served in Hungary, Bohemia, Wallachia, and Poland before coming to Muscovy in 1538 with a patent for producing leather and iron shields of the “Macedonian type.” In two petitions presented to Ivan in the fall of 1549, he advocated the emancipation of slaves, promotion according to merit in government and military service, a return to fair but rigorous justice in the Russian courts, and the creation of a standing army. His accent on building a class of military servitors was paramount. “Maintain a warrior,” he advised, “as one keeps a falcon – always gladden his heart”1; and in a challenge to mestnichestvo presumptions he reminded the tsar that both Caesar Augustus and Alexander the Great had disregarded wealth and origin in making high appointments.

  Peresvetov cast his main petition in the form of a thinly veiled allegory in which he blamed the fall of Constantinople on the timidity of an emperor who, having ascended the throne at the age of three (like Ivan), came under the sway of a corrupt nobility and neglected justice and military affairs. Conversely, he extolled the example of Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror who, though an infidel, had ruthlessly swept from his path all who opposed his reforms. “When an emperor is mild and gentle with his empire,” concluded Peresvetov, “its wealth declines and his fame decreases. When an emperor rules in terror and wisdom, his empire broadens and his name is known in all lands.” Ivan’s task was clear. “The true Christian faith of Moscow must be joined with Turkish justice, to create God’s Kingdom on Earth.”2

  Peresvetov’s ideas were neither original with him nor arcane, but the manner of their presentation revealed an “occult” source. In his allegory he had mentioned that Mehmet the Conqueror had learned right governance from certain Greek “books of wisdom” discovered in the palace library of Constantinople – evidently referring to an esote
ric work called the Secreta Secretorum,† which Ivan had (in Slavic translation) in the Kremlin library in Moscow. This book, reputed to be the secret advice of Aristotle to Alexander the Great, contained precisely the advice Peresvetov declared Mehmet had found, and which he now urged upon the tsar. In particular, it harped on the need to rule by inspiring awe (groza), advised the sovereign to correlate the service of his nobles to their wealth, and to “test their loyalty by what each will suffer on your account.” It also specifically recommended the institution of a foreign bodyguard, and ominously cautioned: “Do not fear things which are past and bloody, for this is the way of women and frivolous men.”3

  Ivan, who either read the Secreta Secretorum or imbibed it in large draughts through Peresvetov, variously assimilated its “wisdom.” The seeds were sown, and they grew. But Peresvetov’s own immediate contribution to the early reforms may be doubted. He stressed social “justice,” but something of the primitive intelligence he brought to the matter may be glimpsed in a refinement he proposed for judicial duels: “Let the litigants be left, unarmed and naked, in a dungeon where a single razor is hidden. Whoever finds the razor wins the duel, and has the right to butcher his opponent on the spot.”4 As a mercenary, Peresvetov was probably good with a razor, and clever at guessing where one might be concealed. But if there was any wisdom buried in the Secreta Secretorum, he was probably not the one to find it.

  Indeed, in a very different spirit Ivan had already convoked a “council of reconciliation” preliminary to launching his reforms. This gathering, sometimes called an Assembly of the Land, was a landmark event, for it pondered a new idea – the “land’s affairs,” meaning those of the nation as a whole, as distinct from the governing powers. To the opening session held in the throne room of the palace on February 27, 1549, attended by high state and church officials, the military high command, and selected members of the minor nobility and gentry, Ivan recounted, in a powerful speech, the tribulations of his minority, the abuses of the boyars (whom he called “usurers, bloodsuckers, and unrighteous judges”), and called upon them forthwith to rectify their ways. In a premeditated response the boyars declared themselves changed and contrite, and begged the sovereign “not to set his heart against them.”5

  Ivan’s speech, not incidentally, appealed so much to the popular imagination that a later Chronicle interpolation portrayed him as having delivered it on Easter Morning from the Lobnoe Mesto in Red Square.

  The tsar also called for a fresh slate. Concerning provincial misrule, he said: “I cannot now redress all wrongs or undo all the taxes. But I beseech you to cease from enmity, the one against the other, and from all your strivings at law. In the future I shall judge and defend you as best I can, and root out injustice and restore what others have stolen.”6 To lend credibility to his pledge, that afternoon he appointed Adashev head of a newly created Petitions Bureau, declaring: “Alexei, I have raised you from low and humble station to be my assistant. You have not sought this position; I have conferred it upon you. I charge you to receive and examine carefully petitions from the poor and oppressed, without fear of the illustrious, but also without attention to the hypocritical tears of those paupers who, pretending to be righteous, calumniate the rich.”7

  The next day his legislative program was launched when a “reformed” Duma cut deeply into the kormlenie system with a decree that prohibited governors from judging members of the minor nobility and petty gentry except in cases involving brigandage and homicide. Charters confirming this decree were dispatched to officials throughout the realm.

  The assembly also endorsed the tsar’s proposal to revise and expand the Russian Law Code, and formally established a system of government departments or ministries – chiefly, the Foreign Office, the Land Office, the Office of Military Affairs, the Bureau of Criminal Affairs, and the Treasury – which had been inexorably emerging since the time of Ivan III.

  As the bureaucracy was consolidated, the Treasury was subdivided into various Taxation Chancellories, each headed by a boyar assisted by two dyaki. The bookkeeping was meticulous. “In every chancellory,” we are told, “all affairs large and small were written down.”8 Numerous underclerks, each equipped like any Western scribe with paper, inkpot and quill, made duplicate copies of all official documents, and cleverly ensured their integrity against tampering by writing across the inside binding where the document was glued. On the outside, the clerk wrote his own name and above it the date, in small letters. On the top of the first leaf, in large cursive, he wrote the name of the tsar. In the Tax and Treasury bureaus, where a small army of accountants did their sums with plum or cherry stones, all disbursements had to be countersigned.

  Other initiatives followed. In November, Ivan issued a decree prohibiting the application of precedence (mestnichestvo) during military campaigns in order to allow him latitude over the appointment of commanders, though he judiciously appeased the great clans by declaring that whoever served “not according to genealogical rank” should “incur no prejudice” in other spheres to their ancestral claims.9 At the same time, to strengthen in one dramatic stroke the role of the gentry in the army and administration, it was decreed on October 3, 1550, that one thousand select personnel were to be registered in a special “Book of the Thousand” and settled on service tenure estates near Moscow, where they were to hold themselves in readiness for any administrative, diplomatic, or military tasks that might arise.‡ In a related development, Ivan established Russia’s first standing army – the streltsy or musketeers, with a corps of 3000 – under gentry command.

  EVEN MORE MOMENTOUS reforms were enshrined in the new law code that Ivan and his advisers had compiled for Muscovy by 1550. Though substantially based on its predecessor, among other things it confirmed the new curb on provincial governors, facilitated lawsuits against them or their agents in central courts, required the presence at all trials of district elders, and sought to curtail judicial corruption by making it a punishable crime. Judges caught with a bribe were to be fined “the sum at issue in the lawsuit plus all fees connected with the suit, thrice multiplied,” and were liable to “whatever additional punishment the sovereign shall decree.”10 Lesser officials who tampered with court records were subject to fine, whipping, and imprisonment.

  Harsher retribution was meted out, in turn, to convicted felons. For example, not only bandits, but anyone who collaborated with them or harbored stolen merchandise were to be turned over to the authorities for execution, while the death penalty was prescribed for a new treasonable offense – surrendering a fortress to the enemy. On the humanitarian side, hired laborers denied their rightful wages were entitled to double compensation, and a real effort was made to curb the spread of slavery: by prohibiting the sale of children; by ordaining the emancipation of any slave who escaped from enemy captivity (Tatar or otherwise); and by imposing restrictions on kabala loans, to prevent the proliferation of indentured servitude.

  A curious, but not incidental, feature of the code was its regulation of beschestie litigation, which established a scale of fines for offenses against “injured honor” – basically any kind of insult, from being cursed or slapped in the face to “being pushed off a bridge into a stinking moat.”11 Damages were awarded to the victorious plaintiff specifically according to his place in the social scale – so that, for example, it was automatically more costly before the law to insult a boyar or a wealthy merchant than a peasant or a prostitute. Verbal affronts (called lai or “barking”) were common pretexts for a suit, as when one man called another a jerk or a bastard – especially a bastard, because it impugned his lineage. In a society obsessed with mestnichestvo, this made perfect sense. On the other hand, even beggars, prostitutes, and witches were acknowledged to have honor, and women as a whole were entitled, within each class, to twice the compensation of men. Moreover, a great crown secretary, whose services were deemed invaluable to the state, might be entitled to the largest sum of all – “whatever compensation the Tsar shall decree”12
– suggesting that honor conferred by merit was beginning to compete with that rooted in pedigree.

  Though beschestie litigation proved a lucrative new source of income for magistrates – where court fees regularly came to one-tenth the sum at issue – it probably restrained antisocial behavior, since offenders had to pay damages or face pravezh, while false accusers were subject to 100 strokes of the knout.

  Finally, considerable attention was given in the code to the turbulent, complex, and potentially explosive problems of land tenure.

  IIN MUSCOVY, AS noted earlier, there were three categories of landholding: 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.

  Though the pomestie system – originating in the Mongol period on a very limited scale, but since vastly expanded under Ivan III and Vasily III – had come to form the basis of Muscovy’s national defense, it had also long been apparent that the new gentry army could not be adequately financed by the resources of the crown alone. Not only was more land needed for the pomestie fund, but a wider distribution of landholdings to facilitate rapid mobilization on various fronts – against the Lithuanians, Baltic Germans, and Swedes to the west, and the Tatars to the south and east. But like his father and grandfather before him (for whom the land fund was also an issue), Ivan dared not attempt to expropriate the property of the boyars, for example, as a class (though they were the most likely target) at the risk of his own demise. The only other land reserve belonged to the Church. Accordingly, the possibility arose of seizing ecclesiastical property. In 1550, the Church owned about one-third of all arable land in Muscovy, comparable to what the Catholic Church had held in England before the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII.