Fearful Majesty

by Benson Bobrick

  With considerable political foresight, since his elevation to the metropolitanate Makary had also appointed Josephian hierarchs to the sees of Kolomna, Novgorod, Saraisk, Perm, Ryazan, Suzdal, Rostov, and Yaroslavl. Ivan, on the other hand, had recently appointed a Non-Possessor as archbishop of Ryazan, had installed a monk and radical reformer by the name of Artemy in the Chudov Monastery in the Kremlin, and at a private meeting with Makary on September 15, 1550, revealed his renewed determination to enforce the controversial articles of the code. Makary protested, assembled numerous documents “proving” long-standing imperial recognition of Church immunities – including, of course, the Donation of Constantine – and reminded him that even “unclean tsars,” meaning khans of the Golden Horde, had abided by the precedent it set. Archbishop Feodosy of Novgorod sent Ivan a similar remonstrance.

  Nevertheless, the tsar and his advisers sought the imprimatur of the ecclesiastical hierarchy on their initiatives, and accordingly in January 1551 a Church Council was convoked by Makary at Ivan’s request to assess the new Law Code and to take up questions bearing on Church reform. The questions Ivan posed to the assembly established its agenda, and because its acts and pronouncements comprised one hundred articles, it was to be remembered as the Stoglav Council or Council of a Hundred Chapters.

  In his opening address Ivan managed to place the Church on the defensive while sounding a conciliatory note. He quoted Genesis concerning the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah and told the hierarchy to set its own house in order (as the state was trying to do), and announced that in response to his appeal two years before, outstanding litigation connected with kormlenie abuses had been peaceably resolved. As in 1549, he spoke of his youth with a mixture of confession and accusation – how he was “orphaned” and “grew up neglected and without guidance, accustomed to the boyars’ evil ways,” committed “sins and iniquities beyond number,” and even when he attempted revenge on his enemies “nothing turned out right.” “I even tormented hapless Christians,” he admitted, “until God unleashed the dreadful fires, my bones trembled and fear entered my soul. I grew humble and acknowledged my transgressions. I begged forgiveness and pardoned all.”32

  On controversial matters before the council, he also left himself room for an honorable and pious retreat: “In your deliberations, reason out and confirm so that everything in our Tsardom conforms to divine law.… If I do not agree with you [in your righteous decisions], admonish me; if I fail to obey you, interdict me without fear, for the sake of my soul and the preservation of the faith.”33

  Preservation of the faith was one aim of the council and some of its rulings in that regard were perhaps conservative to a fault. For example, in ritual it ordained the use of two fingers, not three, in making the sign of the cross (to symbolize the dual nature of Christ), and likewise condemned the triple alleluia as a Latin error. In icon-painting and music Byzantine tradition was upheld, and a committee was appointed to review manuscript copies of Church manuals and religious books to correct discrepancies due to careless transcribing. Folk music and drama were denounced as profane amusements; beards, “worn by the prophets, the apostles, and by Jesus himself,”34 were declared an essential trait of Orthodoxy in men, and those who shaved were to be denied a religious burial. In a curious dietary edict the eating of “blood sausage” was prohibited.

  Nevertheless, the council gave the reformers something to celebrate. It strongly condemned the sloth, corruption, illiteracy, drunkenness, debauchery, and ignorance of the lower clergy, and in answer to the tsar’s ironic question, “Is it pleasing unto God that the treasures of the Church and of the monasteries be given in usury?”35 flatly repudiated the practice. Much of the Law Code and several sample charters for the reform of provincial administration were also ratified with alacrity. But with something like unanimity, the council rejected all encroachments on the inviolability of Church property and privileges and inserted into its digest of acts and pronouncements emphatic documentation defending its position. Only on the provision curbing the growth of Church suburbs did the council acquiesce, agreeing henceforth to seek the tsar’s permission in acquiring land. As for the establishment of poorhouses to care for the indigent, the Church declined to volunteer its wealth to help subsidize them, or even to help ransom Russians from Tatar captivity, advocating instead a general tax. Ivan, who thought the Church in both cases should pick up the tab, went out of his way to solicit from ex-Metropolitan Joasaf, a Non-Possessor, his extraconciliar dissent.

  Overall the tsar, who had hoped for consensus in compromise, was profoundly disappointed, and in May removed from office Archbishop Feodosy of Novgorod, Makary’s most powerful ally. On June 18, he dismissed the Josephian bishop of Suzdal – though Makary promptly replaced him with another of like mind. Ivan did not relent. He designated the radical Artemy as abbot of Trinity Monastery (a key post within the Church) and demanded the return of all pomestie lands that had come into the Church’s possession since the death of Vasily III.

  THOUGH THE EARLY reforms seemed to mark the beginning of sweeping changes throughout Muscovite life and to justify Ivan’s growing reputation as a high-minded and enlightened ruler, they were scarcely revolutionary, and in coupling reaffirmations of former privilege with measures which tended to diminish vested powers, reflected considerable compromise behind the scenes. Every law that issued from the Duma was now to be introduced, “thus hath the tsar commanded and the boyars ordained,”36 and a codicil to the Law Code itself required that any crown amendments had to be ratified, implying a constitutional limitation on Ivan’s power. What the aristocracy gave up in provincial administration, it gained back in the central court system, which it supervised; and it enjoyed a new oversight role with regard to the work of the government ministries. The mestnichestvo decree and bechestie statutes both guaranteed continued recognition of pedigree. Finally, the Church had effectively rebuffed significant encroachments against its eminent domain.

  The new legislation had in fact one overriding aim: to increase the revenue of the state – from the centralization of the judiciary with respect to major crimes (the most lucrative ones to try), and the elaboration of fines for beschestie suits, to the new laws bearing on tax immunities and the establishment of a new land tax unit (the great sokha) which weighed more heavily on Church property. Indeed, under Ivan’s new Law Code, redress against an oppressive provincial governor could not be had unless a district kept Moscow furnished with up-to-date tax rolls, while penalties were to be imposed on anyone who underestimated the value of his taxable property. Impending, too, was a tax on vodka, and the opening of the first public kabak or tavern as a revenue venture, since the government now had a monopoly on the sale of alcohol. Finally the attack on Church property, though rhetorically directed against the monastic abuse of wealth, obviously aimed at the enrichment of the tsar’s pomestie fund, out of which he paid his military salaries. It cannot be coincidental that during this period Adashev reportedly moved his offices into the Treasury. Military affairs formed a continuous background to the legislative debate. From revenue flowed military might. And part of the program of the Chosen Council was war.

  * * *

  * A monastery located on an island in Lake Lagoda northeast of the Gulf of Finland.

  † Originally composed in Arabic around 950 A.D., the Secreta Secretorom had been translated into Latin in the thirteenth century and subsequently into a number of the vernacular languages of Europe. The copy in the Kremlin Library was exceptional in having been translated from the Hebrew.

  ‡ Historians remain divided as to whether sufficient crown land about Moscow was found to support a resettlement on this scale.

  PART TWO

  EMPIRE

  * * *

  9

  Military Affairs

  IVAN PRESIDED OVER a considerable military machine. Its traditional core was the cavalry, increasingly supplemented (since the days of Ivan III) by musketeers, artillerymen, Cossacks or frontiersmen, Tatars in Rus
sian service, mercenaries, and an irregular infantry that included men to haul cannon, dig earthworks, and load and unload wagon trains. There were sappers, wasters, miners, and other “specialty” teams, expert at building or destroying fortifications and roads and at devastating the resources of the enemy – for example, crops. All in all, the tsar had at his disposal perhaps 100,000 troops – one of the great armies of the day, but far short of the 300,000 claimed by Muscovite propaganda, which tried to create the impression that he had an inexhaustible reserve of manpower on which to draw. Russia, in fact, could not mobilize an army of 200,000 until the eighteenth century.*

  Roughly two-thirds of Ivan’s army at any one time was on garrison duty along the Oka defense line to the south of Moscow “to repress the eruptions and depradations of the Tatars,” or stationed along the Lithuanian, Livonian, and Finnish frontiers.

  Every couple of years the government would carry out a census of its military servitors by district in order to determine their numbers and how many men and horses each could provide. Taxable property was the basis of conscription, with a quota of fully armed men and their mounts levied per sokha. A money indemnity was sometimes allowed in lieu of service.

  In the marshaling of forces for a major campaign, troops were organized into five regiments, with the great regiment in the center, a right and a left wing, an advance and a rear guard. When proceeding against the enemy, whichever regiment happened to be attacked first became the vanguard in relation to which the rest were redeployed.

  For the most part the Muscovites relied on numbers rather than skill in battle, and ran “hurling on heapes” in efforts to surprise and overwhelm the enemy. They avoided pitched battles in the open field, where they tended to fare poorly, but once dug in or barricaded up in a fort or town were incredibly tenacious in defense. They “bore cold and hunger without a murmur, died in their thousands on the earthworks, and never gave in till the last extremity.”1 Their generals therefore made considerable use of portable defenses or movable forts, based on the technology of Muscovite housing. “Being taken into pieces” they could later be re-erected “without the helpe of any carpenter or instrument.” Some were fairly elaborate; many

  nothing els but a double wall of wood to defende them on both sides behinde and before, with a space of three yardes or thereabouts betwixt the two: so that they may stande within it, and have roome ynough to charge and discharge their pieces and to use their other weapons. It is closed at both endes, and made with loope holes on either side, to lay out the nose of their piece or to push foorth any other weapon.2

  Most Muscovite cavalrymen wore light armor or woolen coats quilted thick enough to stop an arrow, and were typically equipped with a sword, a short Turkish bow, an ax in a bearskin sheath, a long dagger, and a “caestus” or club from which depended clusters of spiked iron balls. They rode Tatar-style with a short stirrup, feet drawn up high, and “executed their maneuvers with tremendous speed.” Their small, unshod geldings, which possessed great stamina, were spurred on by little drums at the saddlebow. Cavalry commanders had larger drums with which to signal deployments, and on great campaigns four horses yoked together supported huge drums on boards. A “horrible noyse”3 of trumpets, shawmes, drums, and shouting often heralded a charge.

  The Muscovite soldier was incredibly tough. “When the ground is covered with snow frozen a yard thick,” it was said,

  he will lie in the field two months together without tent, or covering overhead; only hangs up his mantle against that part from whence the weather drives, and kindling a little fire, lies him down before it, with his back under the wind: his drink, the cold stream mingled with oatmeal, and the same all his food: his horse, fed with green wood and bark, stands all this while in the open field, yet does his service.4

  One Westerner remarked: “How justly may this barbarous and rude Russe condemne the daintinesse and incense of our Captaines, who living in a soile & aire much more Temperate, yet commonly use furred boots and clokes.… I pray you amongst all our boasting warriors how many should we find to endure the field with them but one moneth.”5

  The chief foe of the Muscovite was unquestionably the Tatar. And he was as mighty as any to be faced. Indeed, it would not be until the reign of Catherine the Great, after two and a half centuries of bloody struggle, that he would cease to be a fearsome fact of Russian life. If the popular notion (conveyed in many history books) were true, that the Tatars were basically tribal warriors who roamed the steppes and occasionally raided savagely into Muscovy and the Ukraine, the course of Russian history would be incomprehensible. Some were nomads (principally the Nogays, who had been an integral part of the Golden Horde as one of its tribal confederations), but most were gathered into four main khanates: Sibir, east of the Urals; Kazan in the Middle Volga; Astrakhan near its mouth; and the Crimea, north of the Black Sea. The seminomadic Kabardians and Circassians occupied land between the western end of the Caucasus and the Kuban River; the Nogays roamed largely to the east of the Volga along the banks of the Yaik River down to where it pours into the Caspian Sea.

  They were a foe of many faces, occupied a vast territory (comparable in size to Muscovy itself) south and east of the kingdom, and their very diversity made them both hard to attack and impossible to contain – in the sense that Muscovy could work out a coherent, long-term border strategy with regard to her antagonists to the west. While there were conflicts among the Tatars that Kremlin diplomacy could exploit, conversely no durable peace could be made with them as if they were one. Yet at times they coalesced. And behind them stood the Ottoman Empire.

  In addition, the khanates (or their capitals) were not just strongholds or enclaves to which the raiders could retreat, but had their own pretensions to statehood and even empire. As succession states of the Golden Horde they competed for control of its former lands. The situation recalled that of Russia just prior to the Mongol conquest, when it had broken into independent principalities ruled by rival branches of the House of Rurik. Only now the tables were turned. This presented opportunities for aggrandizement that were not lost on Moscow (herself a kind of Mongol succession state), as she emerged with the Crimea as a chief rival for hegemony.

  At this time the Crimean khanate was one of the principal states in Eastern Europe, meeting all the criteria by which statehood is judged. It possessed a viable government with a central administration staffed by officials specializing in military, political, and economic affairs; a judicial system based on Central Asian traditions and Turkish-Islamic law; a social configuration with both a rural and an urban population; an economy based on trade; an educational system more advanced than that in Muscovy; architectural monuments; and a literature.

  Like Muscovy, the khanate was ruled by a dynasty, the House of Giray, which belonged to the lineage of Genghis Khan. On that rock its historical legitimacy and political pretensions were based. Moreover the khans, like Muscovite sovereigns, governed with the advice and consent of a council made up of the leaders of the most important clans, which claimed hereditary possession of much of the land. Their claim had more weight, however, than that of the Muscovite titled nobility, for like the appanage princes of old, they commanded private armies. Though in theory the succession passed to the eldest son, a candidate could not succeed without majority clan support.

  The palace of the khan was in the capital of the khanate, Bakchiseray. Built in the 1530s by Sahib Giray, it somewhat resembled the Topkapi Palace of the Sultans in Istanbul, though more modest in adornment and scale. It had three courtyards, the innermost (reserved for the royal family) furnished with a famous Golden Door.

  Ethnically at least, the Tatars were basically of Mongol-Turkic mix. But to contemporaries, who looked at things historically, they were a mysterious people – either the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, the “sons of Hagar,” or the Gog and Magog of Scripture. Speculation that they were the lost tribes was based on Biblical passages in 2 Kings, Isaiah, and Revelation, on the apocryphal book of Esdras, o
n the Jewish Antiquities of Josephus, and on an etymological mistake, that the word “Tatar” signified “remnant.” The “sons of Hagar” was basically an ethnic slur, as was the (Western) superstition – based on an etymological coincidence (Latin, Tatarus = Underworld) – that they were devils. Archaeology vaguely appeared to support the third conjecture, because Alexander the Great had reputedly built a continuous stone rampart north of his empire to contain the Scythians (with whom Gog and Magog were often identified), and it was known that a battlemented wall with towers extended inland from Derbent along the ridges of the Caucasus for miles.

  The Russians themselves, however, were sure that the Tatars were “the sons of Hagar, the descendants of Ishmael.” Their propaganda called them many other things besides, but a certain reluctant esteem – as captured in the following passage from one of the Chronicles – ever remained in the Muscovite psyche for these descendants of their former overlords:

  The Ishmaelites are capable; they learn warfare from their youth; therefore they are stern, fearless, and fierce towards us, the humble. They have been blessed by their ancestors, Ishmael and Esau, who was full of pride, and they live by their arms. We are [descended] from the gentle and humble Jacob, and therefore we cannot oppose them, but humiliate ourselves before them, as Jacob did before Esau. Yet we defeat them with the arms of the Cross: this is our help in battles, and our support against our enemies.6