Fearful Majesty

by Benson Bobrick

  In an attack coordinated with Ismail’s troops, the Russians sped down the Volga, fought their way past poorly fortified outskirt defenses, and occupied the city on May 21, 1554. Yamgurchey and his partisans fled; Derbysh-Ali was installed as khan; and Nogay fratricidal strife reached awesome proportions. Then, in April 1555, Derbysh-Ali defected to Devlet’s side. The Russians launched a second flotilla down the river, recaptured the city, and subsequently built a new metropolis, with a large and permanent garrison, on a midriver island one mile to the south.

  TO IMPERIAL MYTH had now been added mighty imperial fact. “Tsar of Kazan” and “Tsar of Astrakhan” were adopted into the tsar’s litany of titles and the conquests were assiduously used by the government in pressing for foreign recognition of Ivan’s title of tsar. While the forged genealogies and Third Romism of Muscovite theorists had been previously disregarded (if not scorned) abroad, the Russians had now incontrovertibly subdued two states ruled by descendants of Genghis Khan.

  In talks with Poland in 1556, the campaign for recognition was pressed. In 1557, Ivan dispatched a letter to the patriarch of Constantinople asking for confirmation of his title as “tsar of all Russia,” and in 1561 received a flattering reply which addressed him as “tsar and Orthodox sovereign of the whole Christian community from the East to the West as far as the ocean.”5 In return the patriarch expected donations. And he got them.

  When the patriarch of Alexandria got wind of Ivan’s generosity, he dashed off a letter to him too. “It is written in some Greek books,” the patriarch declared, “that a king will come from the Orthodox country of the East; with God’s help he will conquer many kingdoms, and his name will be glorified in East and West like that of Alexander, King of Macedonia, in ancient times. He will ascend the throne of Constantinople and rescue us from the infidel Turks.”6 This sufficed to garnish a handsome subsidy for the Orthodox Church in Egypt.‡

  No one, however, was prepared to acknowledge Ivan’s descent from Caesar Augustus. The patriarch of Constantinople flirted with the idea in a thank-you note, but would say no more than that he knew Ivan belonged to “a really royal lineage and blood,”7 and would remember him in the commemorative diptychs, as with the emperors of old.§

  In the West, the conquests were eventually used by Muscovite diplomacy to encourage the idea that the tsar might make common cause with Europe against the Turks. This excited the Vatican as well as the patriarchs, and as early as 1550 (before the conquest of Kazan) Pope Julius III had evidently addressed a letter to Ivan as “supreme Lord and Emperor of all Russia, Grand Duke and Prince.”8 The papal mission to Moscow, however, had been interdicted by the king of Poland, because the “all Russia” in Ivan’s title might be construed to encompass Lithuania.

  Ivan in fact had no interest in a Turkish Crusade, and even as he communicated one set of sentiments to the West, he was careful to declare a policy of tolerance toward Islam. Repeatedly, his envoys assured the sultan that the tsar was not his foe. There were many unconverted Tatars in Russian service, as well as baptized Tatar nobles at the Russian court. And to keep them coming, it had to appear that a change in allegiance did not necessarily require a change in faith. A copy of the Koran was kept in the Kremlin to facilitate the swearing of oaths by Muslims, while Tatar chieftains were not averse to quoting the Gospels in appealing for peace.

  Muscovite imperial pretensions were also being enshrined in massive productions of official court historiography akin to The Great Menology: especially, The Book of Degrees, a comprehensive compilation and thoroughgoing revision of the Chronicles from the official Muscovite point of view; the History of the Empire of Kazan (completed 1566), which set forth the fate of Kazan from its founding to its conquest by Ivan; the Chronicle of the Beginning of the Tsardom, confined to Ivan’s reign; the enormous 20,000-page Nikon Chronicle adorned with 16,000 miniatures, which began with the creation of the world, connected Russian history with the universal historical developments of antiquity, and ended in 1552; and the so-called Tsarstvennaya Kniga or Imperial Book, a somewhat more secular survey. Altogether these voluminous historical and religious treatises represented an attempt to organize, catalogue, and interpret the national heritage in a definitive way.

  The Book of Degrees epitomized the others, and amounted to a wholesale rewriting of Russian history. Its fundamental myth was that Russia had been ruled from the beginning by a family of saintly princes presiding over the kingdom in harmony with outstanding representatives of the Russian Church. The Mongol conquest was blamed on envious magnates who had grasped at the power that God had placed in the hands of a single sovereign; and Russia’s subservience as “wilful humiliations designed to spare the people and expiate their sins.”9 Beginning with Donskoy, the sins were evidently expiated, and God’s favor restored. But no inkling was given that Russian princes had ever collaborated with the infidel. The antagonism between Moscow and other principalities was also heavily edited out, as local developments were portrayed as organically antecedent to the history of the united Muscovite state. That state, moreover, was exalted as a divinely ordained empire standing at the pinnacle of history and ruled by a dynasty that could be traced to Augustus himself. The book’s title typified its insufferably bombastic style:

  This is the Book of Degrees of the Imperial Genealogy of the Illustrious God-ordained Scepter-Holders Who Ruled in Piety the Russian Land; Who Like the Groves of Paradise, Were Planted of God by the Water Springs and Given to Drink of Orthodoxy and Made to Grow in Wisdom and Grace…. And Many From the Roots and From the Branches by Manifold Efforts Like Golden Steps, Erected a Rising Unfaltering Staircase to Heaven, and by it Ascend Humbly to God.10

  St. Basil’s Cathedral in a 1656 woodcut by Adam Olearius.

  The entry about Yaroslav the Wise began: “Of a noble root the fruitful and unwithered branch, of an imperial stock a seed productive of Russian autocrats, was this Great Prince Yaroslav.”11 And that devoted to Ivan I “Moneybags” Kalita: “This noble, God-appointed heir and blessed inheritor of the noble realm of the God-loving Russian empire, Grand Prince Ivan Danilovich, called Kalita, grandson of blessed Alexander, was the tenth degree from the apostolic St. Vladimir I, thirteenth from Rurik.” Ivan IV was revealed to be the seventeenth degree from St. Vladimir I and the twentieth from Rurik. His birth was treated as miraculous, but his power as a sovereign and his limits as a mortal were perhaps pointedly circumscribed by the quotation from Basil (Agapetus) that Makary had built upon as a subtext in the coronation rite. Nevertheless, the book “so embellished its material stylistically as to produce the effect of one continuous high-flown and flowery panegyric.”12

  Another amazing compilation of sorts was St. Basil’s Cathedral, commissioned by Makary to commemorate the conquest of Kazan. Designed by the brothers Barma and Postnik Yakovlev, architects from Pskov, it was originally called the Church of the Intercession of the Virgin; later, the Cathedral of St. Vasily (Basil) the Blessed, after a Holy Fool. In its combination of Byzantine, Russian, and Oriental elements the church at once became, and has remained, the most celebrated in the realm¶.

  With eight distinct, domed, satellite chapels encircling the main sanctuary, its unique configuration and appearance have challenged the prose of art historians. One of the most evocative describes its steeples as “banded together like an immense bundle of fantastically shaped plants,”13 and the variegated shapes of the cupolas as “faceted, like pineapples,” or “reminiscent of Oriental turbans” – though its flamboyant use of colored tile was not added until the seventeenth century.** In its sheer clutter and extravagance, however, the cathedral was unquestionably connected in style with the new official historiography and art. It was yet another of Makary’s productions; and to glorify the tsardom was its theme. For each chapel was dedicated to a saint whose feast day coincided with an important victory over the infidel.

  Indeed, a remarkable consistency binds together Moscow’s whole encyclopedic program of synthesis and consolidation as an expr
ession of national destiny. In this light, the physical gathering of the Russian lands, paralleled politically by the gradual concentration of all boyars and appanage nobles at the court of Moscow, had their religious equivalent in the canonization of local saints into one great national pantheon. Similarly, the collection in the capital of holy relics and icons from throughout the realm coincided with the gathering of “all the books for reading in the Russian land” into one great Muscovite compendium, followed by the compilation and blending of local chronicles into a spurious if unified national history.

  One may wonder, in fact, if even Stalin was to exercise a more totalitarian grip on Russia’s cultural life than the court of the first tsar of the tsardom the Revolution helped to overthrow.

  * * *

  * Yadigar, baptized Simeon, fought loyally for Ivan as a general in the Muscovite Army until his death in 1565. Utemysh, often seated next to Ivan at court banquets, died prematurely in 1566 at the age of nineteen, and was buried in the Cathedral of the Archangel Michael, near the tsars.

  † Located on the Kerch Strait, not at the mouth of the Volga.

  ‡ In the second edition of The Great Menology it was claimed that the patriarch had addressed Ivan as “pious sovereign, Tsar and Grand Prince… Autocrat of all Russia… crowned by God… our new ruler and good and chosen master.”

  § Insecurity about their title would trouble the tsars of Russia even to the time of Peter the Great. When a letter addressed by the German emperor Maximilian to Vasily III as emperor was unearthed in the Kremlin archives in 1717, Peter was so pleased that he promptly had it translated into several foreign languages and distributed to all the foreign ambassadors.

  ¶ The famous apocryphal story about the blinding of the “foreign” architect, however, probably comments as much on Moscow’s tradition of brutal ingratitude toward foreign artisans as it does on either the uniqueness of the church’s beauty or Ivan’s sadistic whims.

  ** In the time of Ivan IV, the entire cathedral complex, including the sheet iron over the cupolas, was white.

  * * *

  15

  A Hammer for Lapland

  IVAN’S TRIUMPH OVER the two Tatar khanates had aroused his neighbors to the west. Lithuania had the most to fear; but the first to test his strength was Sweden, along the Russo-Finnish frontier.

  Sweden held Finland as a subject province (as Denmark held Norway), and this was not really disputed by the tsar. The line of demarcation had been fixed by the Treaty of Noteborg in 1323, and most of the border conflicts since had been provoked by the Swedes. But the treaty left much to be desired. While the Varanger Fiord had been designated the boundary in Lapland, elsewhere certain unmapped rivers, supposed to trace the frontier, were found to divide and merge as they twisted and coiled among the deep forests and many lakes of Karelia. Near Olea stood a great stone monolith on which three boundary marks were cut: a lion for Sweden, a cross for Russia, and a hammer for Lapland.

  Sweden bore Russia a long-standing grudge. A century before, when the Scandinavian union of the three kingdoms (Denmark, Sweden, and Norway) had collapsed, Denmark conspired with Muscovy to reunite them under Danish rule. Finland may have been Moscow’s promised reward. In 1492, Ivan III (obviously skeptical of the Apocalypse) had built Ivangorod opposite Narva as a beachhead on the Baltic, and in 1493 signed a mutual aggression pact with Denmark. As the Danes prepared to invade Sweden, Russia opened a second front and bombarded Vyborg in the summer of 1495. Vyborg held out, but in February 1496 the Russians threatened Abo. In April, a third Russian army crossed the White Sea to the Kola Peninsula and raided the northeastern shores of the Gulf of Bothnia. In retaliation, a Swedish armada of seventy boats, attacking across the Gulf of Finland, sacked Ivangorod. With Swedish forces thus dispersed, the Danes in July of 1497 marched all the way to Stockholm, where an insurrection toppled the regent, Sten Sture, and enabled them to recover the Swedish crown. However, they could not hold it; the people of Norway and Sweden rose in revolt; and after Sten Sture was reinstated in 1501, the independent Kingdom of Sweden was born.

  These were two great issues between the nations. A third devolved upon a matter of diplomatic protocol. By tradition, Sweden had negotiated its Russian treaties with the governors of Novgorod, because prior to the concentration of power in Moscow, the principality of Novgorod had been the area power with which to deal. Now that the governor was merely the tsar’s lieutenant, royal Swedish envoys expected to be escorted to the capital. Vasily III had rejected this as an affront to his dignity; and Ivan IV followed suit. Ivan pointed out that Gustav Vasa (king since 1523) was not a hereditary monarch but a merchant’s son, whereas the Novgorod governors were the “sons of kings.” Politically, this put Sweden on a par with a dependent principality.

  Ivan, not incidentally, suffered comparable humiliation in his turn. Though he called himself Tsar and Autocrat of vast dominions, in the diplomatic pecking order at the courts of Europe he was seen to be “on a par with the Italian princes, below the Electors of the Empire but above the dependent dukes and republics.”1 However pretentious the battery of his titles, it is worth asking whether a scheme which placed him below the elector of Brandenburg made any sense.

  His specific territorial claims were actually more objective than most. Sigismund August of Poland, for example, styled himself “by the grace of God, King of Polonia, Great Duke of Lithuania, Russia, Prussia, Massovia, and Samogetia”; and King Edward VI “our most dread and soveraign Lord by the Grace of God King of England, Fraunce and Ireland,” even though the only part of France England held was Calais, and in Ireland effectively governed only suburban Dublin.

  Tensions between Sweden and Muscovy built. In the early 1550s, Gustav Vasa encouraged illegal homesteading on the Karelian Isthmus, and to justify the settlements produced a forged treaty showing the border considerably farther to the east. In tacit acknowledgment of how provocative this was, he scrambled to secure armed assistance from Livonia. The Kremlin archives, however, were nothing if not compendious, and to refute Gustav’s claims a great tome containing the whole history of Russo-Swedish agreements was promptly produced from a dusty crypt.

  Inevitably, a series of skirmishes culminated in a major outbreak of fighting. Gustav refortified the castle at Vyborg and dispatched musketeers to Kivinebb. On March 11, 1555, several hundred Finnish hornbow marksmen launched a surprise attack on skis and routed a much larger Russian contingent at Joutselkai. A few months later, the Russians repulsed a combined land and sea assault against Noteborg.

  Ivan prepared to invade Finland, and concentrated his troops in Novgorod for a strike at Savolax. Gustav in turn proclaimed a levée en masse throughout Finland, rearmed his infantry with halberds and pikes, and for the first time in Swedish history brought light artillery into the field.

  On January 12, 1556, the Russians poured across the border, overran Kivinebb, and bombarded Vyborg, where the garrison had already been depleted by a typhus epidemic. Before Gustav could marshal reinforcements, the Russians withdrew, devastating the Karelian Isthmus in their wake. Gustav, stunned, immediately appealed for a truce, and in March 1557 humiliated himself at Karajakallio, where he signed a forty-year treaty with the governor of Novgorod. This notable document reconfirmed the old boundaries (to be more precisely drawn by a joint commission), and contained a commercial coda giving Swedish merchants the right to trade through Muscovy to Central Asia, and their Russian counterparts right of transit through Sweden to Spain, France, England, Lübeck, and Antwerp. Ivan well understood that he was now master of the water road from northwestern Europe to Turkestan and Persia. And he was determined to turn it to account.

  * * *

  16

  “A Thousand Kingdoms We Will Seek From Far”

  IVAN’S GRASP OF his international position had been immeasurably enhanced by the momentous if wholly unexpected “discovery” of Russia by the English. Sooner or later Russia’s comparative isolation was bound to fall victim to the great age of ex
ploration, whose brave and stalwart mariners and adventurers fanned out across the globe in frantic competition to discover new worlds. The Cape of Good Hope had been rounded in 1488, the West Indies revealed in 1492, the Indian Ocean crossed in 1498, and the Americas (New India) identified as a separate continent in 1513 when Balboa forced his way through the steaming forests of the Isthmus of Darien and stumbled upon the Pacific Ocean. But outside of itinerant merchants of the Hanse, the German diplomatic service, some Venetians, and perhaps a few Eastern European specialists in the Vatican secretariat, few Westerners had any real conception of what the world of Muscovy was. Her immediate European neighbors had clear propaganda reasons to stress whatever was savage about her, and clear strategic reasons for not wishing to see her admitted to the civilized company of nations. Almost mysteriously she had seemed to emerge as a nation-state, then suddenly as a great colonial empire. Even as Ivan’s cavalry was storming Kazan, far away in England the learned cosmographer Sebastian Cabot and the mystic mathematician and alchemist John Dee were plotting an expedition to find the Northeast Passage to China or “Cathay,” unaware that Russia lay along the route.

  Thus it was that on August 24, 1553, an English ship, the Edward Bonaventure, wandered utterly lost to the mouth of the Northern Dvina and cast anchor in St. Nicholas Bay.