Fearful Majesty

by Benson Bobrick

  Ivan’s army proceeded in two columns from Kolomna to Svyazhsk (one through Nizhny Novgorod, the other through Murom), linking up at a ford on the Sura River before advancing to Svyazhsk. A third, a supply train with heavy artillery, advanced from Nizhny Novgorod down the Volga. Contingency plans were wisely drawn up for a rapid redeployment of troops, if necessary, to meet a Crimean challenge on the southern frontier.

  Adashev planned the campaign, but Makary inspired it, and it was permeated with his anti-Tatar fanaticism and ideology of Holy War. As archbishop of Novgorod, it will be remembered, he had starved 149 unconverted Tatars to death in his diocese, and in a send-off oration to the troops invoked the names of the Virgin and all the Russian saints. Perhaps without being cynical it can also be supposed that the possibility that Kazan might suffice to replenish Ivan’s pomestie fund – thus diverting attention from Church land – added something to his zeal.

  Meanwhile, Muscovite propaganda had begun to build up a tripartite legal, historical, and messianic claim to the territory. The legal claim rested on the precedent of investiture and the several contracts (signed by Muscovite puppets) reconfirming it over the years; the historical, on a passage in the Primary Chronicle which averred that local tribes had once paid tribute to the Russians of Kiev, and that Vladimir I had also conquered the region – making it twice over an ancient patrimony of the crown; and the messianic, on the obligation of Orthodox Christendom to crusade against the heathen.

  Sylvester was behind Makary on this 150 percent. In a letter to Ivan in 1550, he placed the coming conquest of Kazan in a world-historical context that linked it to the slaughter of Sennacherib’s army under the walls of Jerusalem at the hand of the angel of the Lord; to two major victories won by the Byzantines over the Turks prior to the fall of Constantinople; and to Ivan III’s confrontation with the Golden Horde on the banks of the Ugra River in 1480. Thus, the anticipated Russian event was seen to crown a series of victories “won by the people of God against the infidel.”8

  Sylvester went further. In a startling encomium based on passages from the Psalms, he proclaimed the universal supremacy of the Russian Empire: “And Thou shalt be blessed, and Thou shalt have dominion from sea to sea and from the rivers unto the ends of the universe, and all temporal tsars shall fall down before thee and all nations shall serve Thee.”9 Makary had been content in his coronation prayer to hope that Ivan might subdue “all barbarian nations,” but he never imagined the Russian Empire exceeding the Russian plain. Sylvester idealized the tsar as a kind of Messiah, subduing the world, and it is therefore to Ivan’s moral disciplinarian (ironically enough) that we owe the first explicit prophecy of Russian world domination.

  Meanwhile, in the real world of the Kazanian war, an epidemic of scurvy together with a complete breakdown in military discipline had created a dangerous situation in Svyazhsk. Thousands of former Tatar captives, including women and pubescent girls and boys, had crowded into the frontier town and were going wild over their freedom. The Russian garrison, surrounded by hostile tribesmen and facing impending battle, was in a desperate carpe diem mood. Moscow might be the “New Jerusalem,” but Sodom and Gomorrah were assuredly in Svyazhsk. A horrified Makary got wind of the debauchery, and on May 25 an archpriest raced out of Moscow with flasks of holy water. When he got to Svyazhsk he made a fiery speech in the town square exhorting the troops to remember that they were involved in a crusade. Meanwhile, Ivan had withdrawn to Trinity Monastery to pray before the relics of St. Sergius, whose assistance he invoked in memory of Dmitry Donskoy.

  On the morning of June 16, he set out from Moscow to join his troops. Anastasia, grief-stricken to see him go, secluded herself in the terem “like a swallow in its nest,” we are told, “or a bright star going under a cloud, and stayed there and shut all the windows and would not look upon the light of day until the tsar should return victorious.”10

  There was much for her to fear. When Ivan reached Kolomna on June 21, he was immediately informed that the Crimean Tatars (under their formidable new Khan, Devlet Giray) were besieging Tula. Three detachments from Kashira, Rostislavl, and Serpukhov converged to repel the attack. Devlet retreated, but Ivan lingered nervously for almost two weeks before proceeding northeast through Vladimir to Murom. There, on July 13, he received a long letter from Makary designed to strengthen his resolve. It reviewed the causes of the war, and after the fashion of The Great Menology grandiloquently flattered the tsar by comparing him to Constantine the Great, Vladimir I the Saint, Vladimir II Monomakh, and Alexander Nevsky, among others. After such a buildup it must have come as something of a shock to find himself sternly admonished to avoid the abominations of Svyazhsk. In a terse reply he promised to do his best.

  On August 13, he reached Svyazhsk, where discipline had been restored, and from there wrote to Yadigar promising clemency in return for surrender. He received no reply.

  Having refreshed themselves in their fortress sanctuary, the troops crossed to the left bank of the Volga, forded streams and tramped over brushwood paths till on August 23 they emerged onto a broad, smooth meadow which stretched for about a mile before Kazan.

  Kazan was a major metropolis, almost the size of Vilna, built on a hill, with vertical escarpments to the west, steep pathways leading up to it from the east, and high walls of oak beams reinforced from within by hardened mud and gravel. Encircling it entirely was a deep moat filled from the Kazanka River, which flowed below the acropolis to the west. The immediate suburbs were cut by a large ditch, across huddled streets and long avenues leading to heavily fortified gates. From where the army was encamped along the Volga, minarets, mosques, and a white-stone inner citadel could be seen in silhouette against the sky.

  There were roughly five ways to subdue a fortified city: to starve the inhabitants into submission by a lengthy siege, scale the walls, breach them with battering rams or artillery, tunnel beneath them, or blow them up. The Russians came prepared to do whatever was necessary.

  Ivan deployed his main regiment to the east and south, the vanguard to the north, the rear guard and left wing to the west, and the right wing to the marshy ground south of the Kazanka River. Despite such impressive preparations, an eerie quiet enveloped Kazan itself. “We saw the citadel standing as it were empty,” recalled one general. “No one could be seen, nor a single voice heard.”11

  Shah-Ali (technically commander in chief after Ivan as the khanate’s erstwhile head of state) acted as “a special adviser” to Princes Ivan Mstislavsky and Mikhail Vorotynsky, the two generals in actual charge. No one was likely to tangle with Mstislavsky in a mestnichestvo dispute. He was of triple royal descent and could trace his genealogy back to Gedymin, Rurik, and Genghis Khan. His grandfather, Prince Kudaikul of Kazan, had married the sister of Vasily III, and his mother was their daughter. He was therefore also Ivan’s cousin and one-fourth Tatar.

  However, as he was exactly Ivan’s age (twenty-two), the tsar probably looked to more veteran heads for overall guidance – while everyone looked to Rasmysl, the head of the sappers’ unit and a Danish engineer.

  In a rousing field speech to his officers, Ivan exhorted them to remember their Christian brethren in bondage and, promising to look after the families of all who fell, to be willing to lay down their lives for the faith. Behind him fluttered his mighty standard, which bore an image of Christ “not made by human hands.” In addition to his own great pavilion and another which served as the headquarters of the high command, three large church tents were erected, dedicated to St. Sergius, the Archangel Michael, and St. Catherine the Martyr.

  The Russians began to build a network of trenches to link their gun emplacements, and erected earthworks to protect their infantry. Behind great wickerwork baskets, eight feet in diameter, packed with earth, they placed their heavy guns.

  The first skirmish took place on August 25, when a regiment fording a muddy stream to the west was rushed by Tatars from one of the city gates in a bold sortie. Momentarily routed, the Russians regroupe
d and drove the enemy back.

  Almost immediately, violent weather caused concern. Rains deluged the encampment and sank artillery barges; food and ammunition was lost; high winds tore up the soldiers’ tents. Tatar cavalry, concealed in the forest of Arsk northeast of Kazan, ambushed Russian supply lines, in charges coordinated with sorties from the fortress by signals from the towers. Army rations were tightened. The men “lived on gruel.”12

  Prince Alexander Gorbaty (Ivan’s best general) undertook to clear the Tatars from the woods. As he approached an abattis erected between two swamps, his cavalry dismounted and split into two groups, one mounting a frontal assault, the other hacking its way through the forest to attack from the right. As the Tatars fled, Gorbaty pursued them to their stronghold in the town of Arsk itself, plundered it for supplies, and roamed the countryside ransacking Tatar estates.

  Meanwhile, the Russian artillery, “operating from both concealed battery positions and a moveable wooden tower”13 had surprisingly little effect. The ramparts were too elevated to be pounded with sufficient power, at least from where the forward trenches were cut, so that the shells fell upon the suburbs, which were blasted to smithereens. Several infantry assaults were repelled by the Tatar archers, whose stealth and marksmanship made it impossible for those in the front lines to get any sleep or enjoy a peaceful meal.

  In frustration, at one point Ivan had all his Tatar prisoners tied to stakes within earshot of the walls. He thought their piteous cries might induce the defenders to surrender, but instead they riddled their brethren with arrows, shouting: “Better to die at the hands of true believers than of infidels.”14

  Meanwhile, the continuing rough weather so beleaguered the troops that they began to attribute it to witchcraft. One general testified that as soon as the sun began to shine, wizened old men and women would appear on the city walls, shout something, lift their robes and fart in the Russians’ direction. “Then straight away the wind would rise, and clouds would come with tremendous rains, but only over our army,” so that even a few intelligent officers were spooked. In response, Ivan’s coronation crucifix containing a sliver of the True Cross was hurriedly brought from Moscow, and great tubs of holy water were sanctified with it as priests fanned out through the camp to sprinkle it everywhere. “And from that hour onwards,” we are told, “all trace of the pagan magic disappeared.”

  Nevertheless, the siege dragged on for five weeks. Increasingly, the army looked to Renaissance technology – specifically mining, in combination with gunpowder blasting – to work the wonders for which every Russian prayed.

  And indeed, during all this time Rasmysl and his sappers had been digging away.

  After a Tatar turncoat disclosed that the Kazanians obtained their drinking water from a nearby spring reached by an underground passage, Rasmysl located it, undermined it, and blew it up. Part of the city wall came crashing down. The Russians failed to fight through the breach, but by the end of September two corner towers had also been undermined and forty-eight barrels of gunpowder rolled down the long tunnels into place. Meanwhile, the moat was stuffed with earth and trees to facilitate a charge. Everything awaited the blast. Winter was coming on. The Russians could not remain much longer in the field.

  On October 1, the troops were told the assault would come at dawn. That evening, Ivan was so overwrought that he “distinctly heard” the church bells ringing in the Simonov Monastery in Moscow.

  After a brief, fitful sleep, he buckled on his armor, went to the church tent of St. Sergius, and prayed before the icons. Meanwhile, as legend has it, Rasmysl lit two candles – one above ground to time the blast, the other below, next to the powder charge. The first burned out more quickly in the open air. When no blast ensued, Ivan supposedly reacted with fury – but in fact, he was far from the scene.

  He was at the morning service, where he tarried almost to disgrace. The two explosions reputedly punctuated the liturgy: “Your enemies shall bow down to you” coinciding with the first; then, “There shall be but one fold and one Shepherd,” as the second shook the air.15 Breaches were made in the east and south walls, and Russians by the thousands hurtled through. Ivan lingered. A boyar rushed in: “Sovereign, the moment has come.” Ivan replied: “Prayers are weapons. We must complete the service.” Time passed; another appeared: “The assault is faltering. Sire, you need to be seen.” And this was true. At first the defenders had been routed from the walls and towers, and in desperate hand-to-hand combat in the streets, steadily forced to give ground. Whereupon the Russians, believing the contest won, began to plunder the town. As looters emerged with their spoils, even those pretending to be dead or wounded jumped up and joined in the sack. Before long, as many were leaving the city as had entered it, and when the Tatars saw this, they regrouped and counterattacked.

  Where was the tsar? “He kissed the miraculous picture of St. Sergius, drank a little holy water, swallowed a morsel of host, received his chaplain’s blessing, spoke to the clergy, prayed for their pardon, claimed their blessing,” and at last reluctantly emerged from the tent and called for his horse.

  He was terrified. Though a considerable part of the army had been assigned to guard him, when he was told the fight still raged, “his face changed, for he had hoped that Christianity had already prevailed.”16 His generals, however, abruptly ordered the tsar’s standard to be raised within view of the battle, and taking his horse by the bridle, placed him near it “whether he liked it or not.”17

  The Russian cavalry elite, held till then in reserve, entered the fray, as anyone caught with plunder faced death on the spot. The tide turned. At length the Tatars saw that their cause was lost. Hastily arranging a field truce, they surrendered their khan, Yadigar – as a point of honor, so that their own valor would not cost him his life. “And the rest of us,”18 their representative said, “are going to drink with you the last cup.” And so they did, as the Russians “swooped swift as famished eagles and hawks upon the ruins”19 and hunted the Tatars down like hares. Many fought their way across the Kazanka and into the forests and swamps where they were stalked by the Russian light cavalry. “No quarter was asked and none given. The flower of the Tatar nobility perished on that day.”20

  In the conquered city, Ivan ordered a Te Deum sung and planted a great cross where the standard of the khan had flown. The Muscovite dead were buried; Tatar corpses were bound at the ankles, hung upside down from logs, and floated down the Volga. Messages, however, were sent to all the subject tribes – the Chuvash, Votyaks, Mordvinians, Bashkirs, and Cheremis – promising peace and security in return for their submission. Two tribes (the Votyaks and the Highland Cheremis) accepted these terms with alacrity. On October 4, Ivan made a solemn, ceremonial entry into Kazan, where he selected a site for the city’s first Christian cathedral and laid its foundation stone.

  Gorbaty, a man of broad capacities, was appointed governor, but along with Adashev and others he warned that a major military presence would be required to effectively administer the khanate and pacify the countryside. Ivan himself, they said, might have to remain until spring. But the tsar violently rebelled at this advice: Anastasia was expecting a child, and his own nerves had been stretched to the snapping point. His officers were also eager to go home, for most of the troops were not regulars as in a standing army, but special levies mobilized at their expense. The troops were just as impatient to depart.

  Only a fragment of the army – 3000 streltsy, 1500 crack cavalry, and several Cossack detachments – were given to Gorbaty to garrison both Kazan and Svyazhsk. Under the circumstances it was little more than a police force.

  Ivan returned by boat up the Volga to Nizhny Novgorod, where he was greeted wildly; and to Vladimir, where he received word that Anastasia had given birth to a son. He named him Dmitry (probably after Donskoy), and in his joy gave the messenger the cloak off his back. At Trinity Monastery he knelt in grateful prayer with former Metropolitan Joasaf, and on October 29, “clothed as for bright Easter Sunday, in ar
mor and silver raiment, with a gold crown on his head,”21 made his triumphal entry into Moscow. The whole population turned out to greet him. Thousands massed along the banks of the Yauza River for a distance of four miles, while others climbed to the rooftops or onto the battlements and towers.

  Makary’s welcoming speech compared him to many heroic worthies, including Donskoy, and rejoiced that God through Ivan had destroyed “the dragon in its lair.”22

  Ivan’s address (preserved only in summary) quoted Job and Isaiah in comparing the recent Tatar captivity of the Russians to the Babylonian and Egyptian captivity of the Hebrews.

  THE CONQUEST OF Kazan had a tremendous impact on the Russian psyche. In folk tradition, ballad, and song, it eclipsed both 1380 and 1480 in the story of the overthrow of the Tatar yoke, and in reality transformed Russia into a multinational empire.

  Despite Ivan’s personal timidity at the critical moment of the siege, he underwent a kind of apotheosis. Henceforth the epithet grozny begins to be attached to his name. The word, mistranslated as “terrible,” actually means “dread” or “awesome,” denoting majesty. If we wish (at this stage of his career) to translate it conventionally, it can only be as in the “terrible swift sword” of heavenly wrath revered by Americans in The Battle Hymn of the Republic. That, indeed, in the eyes of his people, was the holy sword he brought to Kazan. To commemorate his victory, a gigantic icon, known as “The Church Militant” or “Knights Blessed by the Almighty,” was painted for the Cathedral of the Assumption, depicting him at the head of an army that included all the Russian princely saints and the heavenly host led by the Archangel Michael. Sodom, symbolizing Kazan, was shown in a circle of flames opposite the Heavenly City, surrounded by angels, symbolizing Moscow the Third Rome. The Russian people – “onward Christian soldiers” advancing in triple rank – were the “new Israel.” Above Ivan, three angels held Monomakh’s Crown aloft.