In a composite description, the Tatars were of moderate height, with short legs, nimble bodies, broad, flat, tawny faces and “fierce, cruel looks.”7 They shaved their heads but had wisps of hair on their upper lip and chin, spoke “very suddaine and loude, as it were out of a deepe hollowe throate,” and when they sang, “you would think a cow lowed, or some great bandogge howled.”8 Though strong and courageous, they were said to be “preposterously depraved,”9 and though able to go for days without food, otherwise “gorged themselves beyond measure” on savage cuisine: such as raw flesh (“steak Tatare”) and the intestines of horses and cows washed down with “mare’s milk soured”10 or “mylke mingled with bloude”11 drawn fresh from a horse’s vein.
The seminomadic among them on the whole were the least belligerent. “We won’t break the chicken’s leg,” they told the Muscovites, “if you don’t cripple our colts.” In wandering from place to place, they guided themselves by the stars – especially the Pole Star, which they called the “iron nail”12 – while a favorite curse among them was: “May you abide in one place continually like a Christian, and inhale your own stink.”13
But often war parties seemed to strike out of nowhere – eastward from Kazan, or riding “crouched like monkeys on greyhounds”14 from out of the feathergrass or wormwood steppes all the way from the Crimea 1000 miles away. Typically armed with a bow and arrow, short scimitar, spear, and iron darts, they tended to draw out their forces in a winding arc. On extended campaigns each warrior took two or three remounts to increase his range and speed. Skirting the main river crossings and picking their way along shallow ravines and intervening plateaus, they approached under cover of darkness in widely spaced bands, “but once into the target zone would coalesce, and move on like a whirlwind, detaching raiding parties thousands strong to turn the countryside around it into a wasteland.”15 They burned settlements, seized crops, led away herds of cattle, and took captives – especially children, whom they bore off in great baskets like panniers. Many raids had no other purpose but mass abduction – to procure youths for the Turkish military corps, men to work the oars of Mediterranean galleys, women for Levantine harems, and slaves for Tatar estates. The traffic in Slavonic slaves, in fact, had long been multinational big business, from Kaffa and Constantinople to North Africa and the Middle East. While the Muscovites had been “gathering in” the Russian lands, the Tatars had been “harvesting the steppes.”16
In response, the Russians gradually created a formidable network of defense lines along their southern frontiers. Fortified towns, stockades, and watchtowers established at river junctions, fords, portages, and other strategic points were linked together in chains, and variously defended by castellated walls, trenches, earthworks, abattis made of brushwood, and log palisades. One line followed the Oka River from Nizhny Novgorod to Serpukhov, before hooking south toward Tula; a second (in advance of the first) connected Ryazan, Tula, Odoyev, and Lichvin. Between the strongpoints, outposts of varying sizes filled in the gaps. To thwart the Tatar cavalry, certain heavily forested areas were left uncut, riverbeds spiked with pointed stakes, and bridle paths and other trails blocked by fallen trees. Farther out, into the hazardous woodland steppe between the Oka and the headwaters of the Don, lonely watchtowers scanned the far horizon as outriders patrolled the plains.
Partly to staff this effort and to garrison the major frontier towns, there was an annual spring mobilization of some 65,000 troops, assembled at various rallying points along the Oka, and drawn from every district south of Moscow. This army was divided according to Muscovite custom into five main regiments, with the principal regiment stationed at Serpukhov, the right wing at Kaluga, the left wing at Kashira, the advance guard at Kolomna, and the rear guard at Alexin. Thrown out in front of these was a sixth regiment or “flying column” which served as a body of scouts.
The social cost of such exertions was enormous. “If we consider,” wrote the great and eloquent historian V. O. Klyuchevsky,
the amount of time and resources spent upon this grim and exhausting struggle, we shall have no need to ask ourselves what the Russian people were doing when the West was progressing rapidly in industry, in social life, in the arts and sciences, and in trade…. Fate set the Russian nation at the Eastern gate of Europe and for centuries it spent its forces in withstanding the pressure of Asiatic hordes while Western Europe turned to the New World beyond the seas…. Outpost service, however, is everywhere thankless, and soon forgotten, especially when it has been efficiently carried out. The more alert the guard, the sounder the slumbers of the guarded, and the less disposed the sleepers to value the sacrifices which have been made for their repose.17
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* This and many other inflated statistics were repeated by numerous contemporaries even among Moscow’s neighbors, especially when it came time for them to put together “defense budgets.”
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10
Kazan
BAKCHISERAY AND MOSCOW confronted one another. Though the enmities between them were legion, in the 1550s the ripening apple of their discord was Kazan. And as a result (though he could not have known it) Ivan stood trembling on the edge of immortality.
Since the birth of Kazan as a state in 1436, the khanate had been the sometime antagonist and uneasy vassal of Moscow. Moscow dated its right to invest the khans with their title to 1487, when Ivan III had intervened in a dynastic struggle and installed his lackey, Mohammed-Amin. Mohammed later broke away, prompting an attack from Vasily III who in 1516 obliged him to reconfirm Moscow’s right of investiture. The Kremlin immediately took advantage of this in its foreign relations and began to refer to Kazan as its patrimony. After Mohammed died without heir in 1518, Moscow replaced him with a thirteen-year-old Tatar princeling named Shah-Ali. In 1519, Shah-Ali, together with representatives of the Tatar nobility and clergy, signed an agreement recognizing Russian suzerainty.
These developments were hotly disputed by the Crimean Khan, Mohammed Giray, whose own candidate for the throne was his brother, Sahib. Sahib had considerable support within Kazan itself, and in 1521 he arrived with a detachment of troops and toppled Shah-Ali. This marked the real beginning of an attempt by the Crimea to dominate the khanate. Later that year, in a coordinated onslaught, Mohammed Giray crossed the Don as Sahib struck Vladimir and Nizhny Novgorod. When the two Tatar armies converged on Kolomna, Vasily III fled northward and reputedly hid for several days under a haystack. Meanwhile the eastward colonizing drive by the Russians had also prompted local tribes (notably the Cheremis and Mordvinians) to look to Kazan for their defense. The Kazanians boldly
converted this defensive war into an offensive conflict and attacked the Russian frontier, ravaging dwellings and farmland and leading away prisoners. The war with the Cheremis which “went on without end” in the Trans-Volga region, not only depressed the economy of the farmers but obstructed routes of commerce and colonization. Communication between the center and the northeast (Vyatka and Perm) of the Muscovite state could be accomplished only by a detour far to the north.… It was with reason that the Russian people sang in their songs that “the city of Kazan is built upon bones, the stream of Kazan runs with blood.”1
Kazan was 425 miles from Moscow – almost as far to the east as Vilna to the west. Past military action against the khanate had proved inconclusive because, without forward bases of operation in hostile terrain, the Russians had been unable to hold their ground. To meet this problem, Vasily III in 1523 had founded Vasilsursk, a new Russian fortress about halfway between Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan at the mouth of the Sura River. Its immediate utility was demonstrated the following spring when it served as a supply depot for a punitive expedition; and again in 1530 when Vasily bombarded Kazan itself. Meanwhile, Sahib had fled to Istanbul, to be succeeded by his thirteen-year-old nephew, Safa. In 1532, Moscow managed to replace him with another puppet, Jan-Ali.
In exile Sahib developed a close relationship with the sultan and dreamed of uniting all th
ree Volga khanates – the Crimea, Kazan, and Astrakhan – under his rule. Unfortunately for Moscow, he was destined to prove a shrewd, energetic, and tenacious foe. He assassinated his chief rival for the Crimean throne in 1532, subsequently strengthened Crimean power in the Steppe, tied the khanate economically and culturally more firmly to the Ottoman Empire, built a solid relationship with the Nogays, undertook a number of campaigns in the Caucasus to bring the Circassians under his rule, and turned the Astrakhan khanate into a Crimean vassal state. When he finally died in 1551, his realm extended from Bessarabia to the northern Caucasus and represented a substantial increase in Crimean power. During Ivan’s turbulent minority, Kazan, with Sahib’s help, had also sought to reassert its independence, and upon the assassination of Jan-Ali, Safa was re-enthroned.
Despite Moscow’s failure to maintain its client khans in Kazan, Kremlin officials continued to refer in contacts with foreign powers to the khanate as a subject state. In 1535, for example, a Russian envoy told the Lithuanians: “You know that Kazan has long belonged to our Sovereigns, who install the tsar there”2 – at a time when the tsar there (as the Poles and Lithuanians well knew) had been installed by the Crimean khan. Sahib, of course, saw everything in reverse: “Kazan is my yurt [patrimony],” he wrote to the Kremlin, “and Safa belongs to my royal house. Don’t meddle in Kazanian affairs. If you do, watch out for me in Moscow!”3
With the Russian government in disarray, the Kazanians in 1539 and 1540 had raided deep into Muscovite territory, as far as Murom and Kostroma, while the Crimeans attacked from the south. In the spring of 1542, Emin-Giray (Sahib’s eldest son) besieged Seversk; and in December 1544 (with the Russian commanders, mired in a mestnichestvo dispute, neglecting to marshal their troops), Belaya and Odoyev.
In April 1545, however, with Ivan nearing maturity, Moscow renewed its bid for control. A small river force advanced along the Volga, another from Vyatka down the Kama, with the two linking up near Kazan “at the same hour on the same day, just as though they had both come from the same estate.”4 Though they killed as many Kazanians as they could, a third unit, belatedly advancing from Perm, was surrounded and exterminated.
Nevertheless, the Russian offensive had the effect of aggravating factional strife in Kazan. The Crimeans had been a heavy-handed overlord, and many Kazanians were even less enthusiastic about Bakchiseray than Moscow. Alerted that a coup was imminent, in December 1545 Ivan had gone in person to Vladimir on the eastern frontier to await the latest news. On January 17, 1546, Safa was overthrown. By June the Russians had reinstalled Shah-Ali, but in July Safa returned, toppled him from power and liquidated many of his supporters in a bloody purge.
Nevertheless, Shah-Ali was to prove the most resilient puppet ever fielded by Muscovite Central Asian policymakers. Though “most unwarlike,” with an “effeminate and degraded constitution of body” and a goatish little beard, he was a descendant of Genghis Khan, and of all Tatar exiles continued to have the best dynastic claim.
After Ivan’s coronation in January 1547, the tsar and his advisers made the subjugation of Kazan their paramount foreign policy objective. On this they were all united, while the degree of focus and concentration brought to bear on the problem would not have been possible without the continuing military stalemate with Poland-Lithuania, sustained by an uneasy truce, in the west.
In February, one of Ivan’s most capable commanders, Prince Alexander Gorbaty, led a reconnaissance expedition along the hilly right bank of the Volga to explore approaches of attack. In December, Ivan himself set out from Vladimir at the head of a large army. His artillery train followed in January (1548). In February, he proceeded from Nizhny Novgorod to the island of Robotka, but an unseasonably warm winter swamped the roads and turned the ice on the Volga to pulp. As cannon were being dragged across, the ice gave way, and Russian losses were heavy. Bitterly disappointed and reportedly in tears, Ivan returned to Moscow.
In 1549, the armistice with Lithuania (where a new monarch, Sigismund August, was endeavoring to consolidate his position) was renewed. In a timely development for Moscow, a fresh succession crisis also arose in Kazan, when Safa Giray, apparently drunk, slipped in his stone bathtub and broke his neck. He was survived by his beautiful wife, Sunbeka, daughter of the Nogay chieftain, Yusuf, and a two-year-old son, Utemysh. Sunbeka appealed to the Crimea for help, but Muscovite service Cossacks ambushed the envoys and delivered her letters to Ivan.
Ivan attempted a preemptive strike. Securing a pledge of noninterference from one of the Nogay factions, he advanced to Vladimir. Makary joined him there and addressed the officer corps directly, exhorting them to fight for Orthodoxy and not to get caught up in precedence disputes. Apparently Ivan’s recent decree had met resistance, and indeed, when the troops reached Nizhny Novgorod in January (1550), it had to be publicly repeated. By mid-February the army had come within sight of Kazan, but again unseasonable weather aborted the campaign.
The tsar decided to build a more advanced base. In the past, Russian troops had assembled at Nizhny Novgorod (about 175 miles from Kazan) and reprovisioned at Vasilsursk, still 100 miles away. In May 1550, Russian troops once again encircled Kazan, sacked the outskirts in a sudden assault, withdrew to the mouth of the Svyaga River some thirty miles distant, and there on a thimble-shaped hilltop called the “Round Mountain,” built the fortified stronghold of Svyazhsk. Erected in two months flat like a huge Tinkertoy set, its components, all carefully numbered and marked, had been floated down the Volga from Uglich.
The rapidity of its construction near Kazan naturally made a great impression on some of the local tribes, and in the summer of 1551 the right or highland-bank Cheremis, Chuvash, and Mordvinians swore allegiance to Moscow. The tsar reciprocated with charters confirming their tribal organization and exempted them from taxes for three years. The Kazanians appeared to capitulate, agreeing to the return of Shah-Ali, the extradition of Sunbeka and her son, Utemysh, to Moscow, the emancipation of all Russian captives, and the partition of the khanate. The highland bank of the Volga was to be annexed outright, with the Kazanians retaining the left – “the Meadow-side and Arsk” – “the fishermen to fish in their respective halves.”5
All this was too much for most Kazanians to take. The point of the negotiations had been to preserve the khanate as a political entity and to prevent a crushing Russian attack. Their delegates had warned the Russians that they “must not do this, dividing the land”;6 and even Shah-Ali thought Moscow had gone too far.
Nevertheless, on August 16, 1551, he entered Kazan with a bodyguard of 300 Kasimov Tatars and 200 streltsy – the first time a Russian garrison had been quartered within its walls. Over the next several weeks, despite initial resistance, thousands of Russian captives were released and assembled for repatriation at Svyazhsk. “Just as in antiquity,” wrote a chronicler, “when Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt, so in our time our Orthodox Tsar led a multitude of Christian souls from captivity in Kazan.”7
The Biblical resonance was not inappropriate. In addition to those enslaved in the Crimea and elsewhere, it is said that in 1551 there were about 30,000 Russians held in Kazan alone. Popular feeling about their bondage was enshrined in Muscovite law, both in the Code of Ivan III – “And if a serf is captured by Tatar troops and escapeth from captivity, he shall be free” – and in the expanded provision of Ivan IV.
Any campaign against Kazan could therefore be regarded as a defensive war. Yet there were other, opportunistic reasons for regarding the khanate with covetous eyes. It was located at the junction of several main trade routes – the Volga route to the Caspian Sea leading to Bukhara, Khiva, and Samarkand; the Kama route to the Urals; and the old steppe caravan route to Central Asia – which Russian merchants hoped to control. Moreover, it may already have dawned on Ivan and his advisers that, with the Turks in control of the eastern Mediterranean, European trade with Persia and Central Asia might have to pass along the Volga – which the Russians as yet held only in the North. Finally,
the fertile farmland of the khanate itself promised to richly replenish Ivan’s pomestie fund. Indeed, Peresvetov had cynically remarked in a pamphlet that even if Kazan were a friendly neighboring state, she was too handsome a prize not to be seized.
In 1551, force seemed unnecessary. The new political arrangement was all the Russians could wish, and even Shah-Ali’s unpopularity seemed to work in Moscow’s favor, for the Tatar nobility decided they might as well just trade him in for a military governor. Unfortunately, Shah-Ali had several scores to settle first, and having invited some of his leading critics to a banquet, had them butchered in their seats. This discredited the Russian policy and started sentiment in another direction.
In February 1552, Adashev proceeded to Kazan with a regiment of troops to install the new governor. But Shah-Ali, perhaps suddenly mindful of his place in history, refused to participate directly in the abolition of the khanate, and in a fatuous bit of bravado rode out of the city before their arrival, still a khan. Once the gates closed behind him insurgents seized control. As the Russians approached, the Kazanians feared an impending massacre, and during the stand-off offered the throne to Prince Yadigar of the Nogays, who instigated uprisings among the Chuvash and Cheremis and hemmed in the Russian garrison at Svyazhsk. The whole political arrangement came apart.
In April, Ivan resolved to take Kazan by storm. He stripped his frontier defenses, widened conscription, and in an all-out effort threw the bulk of his army into the campaign – archers, cavalry, streltsy, Cossacks, and service Tatars, backed by 150 cannon, against a garrison of some 33,000 Tatar warriors in Kazan. A tightening Russian blockade frustrated Yadigar’s attempt to bring in reinforcements, but within his means he brilliantly organized the city’s defense.
Fearful Majesty Page 14