Fearful Majesty

by Benson Bobrick

  † Dee, a Renaissance magus, was to become Queen Elizabeth’s court astrologer. He determined the date most propitious for her coronation, and she remained his steadfast patron despite his lurid renown. John Aubrey in his Brief Lives wrote: “The vulgar did verily believe him to be a conjurer. He had a great many mathematical instruments and glasses in his chamber, which did confirm the ignorant in their opinion, and his servitor would tell them that sometimes he would meet the spirits coming up his stairs like bees.” Elizabeth, not one of the vulgar, allowed him to do what he wished in alchemy “and none should check, control, or molest” him.

  ‡ Not out of tolerance, but as an encroachment on canon law.

  * * *

  17

  Hanseatic Merchants and Red Cross Knights

  IN THE MID-1550s, two great foreign policy objectives were hotly debated within the inner councils of the Kremlin. Most, if not all, of Ivan’s cabinet and a clear majority of the Duma advised the tsar to consolidate his conquests of Kazan and Astrakhan, aggressively retrench and refortify the Oka defense line, and undertake an all-out campaign to put an end to the perennial Tatar raids from the south. A series of reconnaissance patrols and trial expeditions was planned to culminate in the march of a vast Muscovite host, under the personal command of the tsar, across the Wild Field to strike the Crimean Tatars in their lair. Such a campaign, launched from Tula across 700 miles of steppe – a remorselessly inhospitable vast stretch of plain – would have been extraordinarily difficult, especially without a network of navigable rivers to facilitate the transport of troops and material, and without advance bases like Vasilsursk or Svyazhsk to serve as supply depots, refueling stops, and fortified sanctuaries in the event of retreat. Moreover, an aggressive military action on that scale was almost certain to provoke a response from the Ottoman Turks. Yet in other respects the plan seemed opportune. Kazan and Astrakhan were in Russian hands, the Crimean Tatars had been intimidated, and their Nogay allies decimated by drought and disease. The Crimeans were also riven by factions, and in 1556 one of their grandees, Tokhtamysh, a grandson of Khan Ahmad of the Golden Horde and the second cousin of Shah-Ali (a grandson of Ahmad’s brother, Bakhtiar) fled to the Little Nogays. In July 1556, Ivan wrote to Ismail, their chieftain: “We need Tokhtamysh for our state affairs,”1 and wrote also to Tokhtamysh himself, inviting him to Moscow. In December he came, perhaps as the projected Muscovite candidate for the Crimean throne. Meanwhile, in 1556 and 1557 respectively, the dyak Rzhevsky, military commander of Chernigov, and Prince Dmitry Vishnevetsky, a Dnieper Cossack chieftain, explored attack approaches to the Crimea and carried out successful raids to the shores of the Black Sea. Vishnevetsky, an anti-Tatar fanatic, had established a Cossack stronghold on the Dnieper island of Khortitsa as a base of operations; and though a Lithuanian, he was furnished by Ivan with a training camp, money, and supplies. In February 1559, a double expedition was launched – Vishnevetsky down the Don with 5000 troops, and Daniel Adashev (Alexei’s brother) with 8000 down the Dnieper. Vishnevetsky won a skirmish near Azov; Adashev captured two Turkish ships, sailed into the Black Sea, landed on the Crimean Peninsula, and attacked several camps. Khan Devlet Giray pursued him back up the Dnieper but failed to catch him. The khan surmised that these were but preludes to a full-scale invasion.

  Ivan himself, however, backed by a rising corps of new advisers, had his eyes on Livonia, a rich, strategically placed, but composite and dissolving state to the west, roughly comprising modern Latvia and Estonia, plus Courland and the islands of Dago, Oesel, and Loon. The case for intervention in Livonian affairs was strong. Among Moscow’s rivals, Denmark “dreamed of expanding her commercial interests throughout the entire Baltic area,” Sweden “of consolidating the position she had already acquired in the northern part of the country,” where the coastal ports were economically tied to Finland, while “both Sweden and Poland wished to gain control of all of Livonia in order to check the ambitions of Moscow, which had emerged as a new and vital factor in the Baltic power equation.”2 Conversely, Russian acquisition of Livonia would enable her to attack Lithuania from the north as well as from the east, curb the growth of Swedish might, break a de facto Western blockade on certain specialized goods sought by Moscow, eliminate the Livonian middlemen and their punitive tariffs from the scene, and give Russia a real seaboard, beyond her small coastal outlet at Ivangorod, with all that that was bound to mean for the development of commerce and industry. If Russia failed to seize the prize – coveted by every one of the Baltic powers – Poland, Sweden, or Denmark surely would.

  Pomestie economics were a motivation too. The conquest and pacification of Kazan had been hard, but a campaign against the Crimea was even less prepossessing – “to the mass of military servitors, the most uninteresting imaginable”3 – since it would be impossible to settle in the Crimea itself, and in the waste steppes of south Russia there was nothing to be appropriated. On the other hand, an invasion of Livonia promised the swift acquisition of already well-organized and cultivated farms and estates, ready-furnished with slaves and serfs.

  Adashev, Viskovaty, Sylvester, and others were evidently not blind to the Livonian option, but believed they could open the trade and perhaps secure a Baltic port by diplomacy, threat, or (if necessary) by a very limited war. It was a question of how best to use Muscovy’s resources. The split went deep, and in the breach the dragon’s teeth were sown.

  OFFICIALLY, LIVONIA WAS defended by the Fratres Militiae Christi or Brethren of the Sword, a medieval chivalric order founded in 1202 by Bishop Albert of Riga and affiliated after 1237 with the Teutonic Knights. Like the Knights of Dobryzn on the lower Vistula, formed by a Cistercian bishop at about the same time, they were an efficient body of cavalry to aid and abet the arduously slow baptism of the native population. The Knights of Dobryzn wore a star on the hilt of their swords in commemoration of Bethlehem; the Livonian Knights a Red Cross on their mantles and shields.

  All these knights, including the Black Cross or Teutonic Order, were variously linked to the so-called Northern Crusade which had been launched by the pope, and which came to serve, in effect, as the cutting edge for German colonization, which after the founding of Lübeck in 1143 spread along the entire southern coast of the Baltic Sea.

  In theory the mission of the Knights was conversion, and with a sort of anticipatory penance, they endeavored by stern privations to make themselves fit for their holy work. On the one hand, the Brethren took a triple vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and on the other committed themselves “to fight with a pure mind for the supreme and true King.” The militarized language of the cloister (echoing Ephesians) facilitated the transition from cleric to man-at-arms, and comfortably enveloped their fusion in the mission of the warrior-monk. But though St. Augustine’s doctrine of “Just wars avenge injuries” had furnished some rationale for the three great crusades to Palestine to recapture the Holy Land and its sacred shrines (the “patrimony” of Christendom), the war against “the heathen of the North” remained anomalous. The only charge against them was that they happened to be there – and didn’t believe in Christ.

  Livonia, according to Olearius’ cartography (1573-78).

  The original ten knights to gather in Albert’s household had probably not been conceived as the nucleus of a subjugating army, but to hold the fort at Riga while his priests proselytized in the field. However, as the bishop expanded his control over the Dvina Valley, their numbers grew in order to garrison the strongholds – fortified monasteries, stone blockhouses and hill-forts, which formed the nuclei of future towns – to rivet their gains. There were reverses, of course: rebellions in Latvia (1212) and in Estonia (1223); and in an immortal engagement on April 5, 1242, Alexander Nevsky defeated the Knights on the ice of Lake Peipus. Employing tactics reminiscent of Hannibal’s at Cannae (and not incidentally anticipating Red Army tactics at Stalingrad), he caught the galloping iron triangle in a pincer movement and shattered its power. Nevsky’s victory put an end to German
expansion eastward, but within Livonia (as in Prussia, under the Teutonic Knights) the Germans built up a kingdom for themselves as an outpost of the Holy Roman Empire.

  After the see of Riga was raised to an archbishopric in 1253, the rule of Livonia was divided among five powers: the archbishop; his three bishops of Courland, Oesel, and Dorpat; and the Brethren of the Sword. The bishops and knights enfeoffed secular vassals, and the archbishop chartered a community of burghers at Riga. In time the principal towns became a third and coequal force in the centrifugal division of authority.

  Livonia prospered through its involvement in the Hanseatic League, a loose confederation of north German towns and overseas merchants, which had its headquarters at Lübeck. It controlled the vital overland trade route across the base of the Danish peninsula, and coordinated a huge commerce flowing to the east as far as Russia and west even to Ireland. Well over a hundred towns belonged to the League at its height, including Oslo in Norway, Stockholm in Sweden, and Kraków in Poland, which lay on the famed “amber road” into the Balkans. In addition, there were major overseas “factories” (warehouse markets) or Kontore (counters) at London, Bruges, Bergen, and Novgorod, together with key if lesser depots scattered from Iceland to Spain. Until the end of the fifteenth century, the League absolutely dominated the commercial life of northern Europe.

  From the rich hinterland to the south and east were drawn raw materials such as grain, timber, pitch, tar, train-oil, potash, charcoal, wax, honey, hemp, flax, and furs; while from the relatively more industrialized west came manufactured goods in exchange, such as textiles, implements, and rope. Livonia in particular served as the chief artery of Muscovite trade.

  The League, however, was not a true political federation. A representative assembly of its members met periodically at Lübeck, but with the rise of authentic nation-states in the region, whose economic and political coherence it could not hope to match, its power was gradually broken, and in a predictable scrimmage for self-advantage its members began to stab each other in the back. The misguided destruction of the German Kontor at Novgorod by Ivan III also contributed to the League’s decline, but the critical development was the resurgence of Denmark, which expelled the League from its territory and seized control of the gateway to the Baltic, the Danish Sound.

  By the sixteenth century the League was in a shambles, and the Livonian economy reflected the disarray. Riga collaborated with Reval to block Narva from membership, and sought to set up its own merchants as the exclusive middlemen for Russian trade. This naturally antagonized Lübeck, whose own merchants had formerly bartered directly with the Russians in Novgorod.

  Ivan followed the squabble with angry interest. Regardless of who prevailed, the aim was the same: to squeeze the commerce with heavy transit dues. Especially during Ivan’s long minority, the burghers had exploited their advantages to the full, while Russia continued to face a Western embargo aimed at repressing her technological development. In a famous incident in 1547, a German entrepreneur, Hans Schlitte, had recruited 123 Western technicians – engineers, architects, physicians, jewelers, and so forth – to serve in Muscovy, but en route through Lübeck he was arrested and his experts admonished and dispersed. All this was happening, too, at a time when unhindered trade with Europe “might have insured Muscovy a favorable balance of trade.”4 It must be said in fact that whatever the machinations of his policy, Ivan apparently made a peaceful effort to secure a coastal outlet, for as late as 1557 he offered Narva the right to establish a Kontor across the river in Ivangorod. Narva should have been grateful. But with a kind of ruinous greed, her burghers insisted on the same monopoly Ivan was trying to surmount.

  Meanwhile, the lives of the Livonian Brethren had long since ceased to be exemplary. Once content to serve as the “poor soldiers of Christ,” they had acquired large estates, hired mercenaries to do their fighting, kept concubines, and pitilessly wrung from the subjugated peasant population of Livs, Letts, and Estonians the wealth they needed to subsidize their luxuries and wars. It is not at all certain that the local population was converted, but it is quite beyond doubt that they were forcibly baptized, butchered, or enserfed.

  Throughout the land, ethnic enmity was aggravated by class hatred. Non-Germans were excluded from positions of influence, and after 1500 no one could acquire property who did not already own it. As the establishment grew fat, the typical peasant “counts himself happy,” wrote a contemporary, “if he has a bit of bread with his mush, and clean water to drink.”5 Nor were the prosperous content among themselves. The archbishop and the grand master quarreled constantly, and both vied for power with the free-market towns. The Protestant Reformation gnawed away at the ruling classes from within. Livonia’s whole reason for being, in fact, disappeared. Originally created as a province of the Holy Roman Empire for the conversion of the heathen under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Church, it was now a mostly Protestant state belonging to an Empire that had ceased to exist. In 1556, in tacit acknowledgment of the emptiness of his titles, Charles V abdicated and divided his realms. Thereafter, the Empire meant little more than a loose federation of the different princes of Germany, lay and ecclesiastical, under the presidency of the House of Austria.

  During the confrontation in the 1550s between Sweden and Russia, Gustav Vasa had dispatched a secret agent to Livonia to assess what could be expected from his ally. The agent’s report (an up-to-the-minute picture of the situation) must have made old Vasa’s eyes roll. Instead of “knightly labor” he had found “much eating and feasting, pomp with costly gems and gowns”; and rather than sturdy warriors, an amazing number who were either alcoholic or physically deformed. He supposed “no mustering had been held in Livonia since time out of mind”6 and revealed that instead of investing in new armaments or fortifications, the Knights had been smuggling money out of the country into safe overseas accounts.

  MOSCOW’S PLANNED INTERVENTION naturally occasioned a propaganda blitz. Rival powers in the region also put forth their claims. That of the Germans, incidentally, was neither more nor less old than that of the Danes, who under Waldemar the Magnificent in 1238 had conquered part of Estonia. At about the same time, the Swedes had crossed the Gulf of Finland to secure a beachhead on the Estonian coast. Poland, on the other hand, relied on hoary legalities that established the king as a mediator in Livonian affairs in the event of internal political disputes. But insofar as all such claims had meaning, the Russians carried the day. The Primary Chronicle documented that various local tribes had once paid tribute to the Russians (or Varangians) of old, and in 1030 a hill-fort, Yuriev (which evolved into the Livonian town of Dorpat) had been founded by Yaroslav the Wise – two centuries before Bishop Albert established himself at Riga. The first Christian missionaries to proselytize in Livonia had come from Kiev not Riga, and even into the sixteenth century many Livonian towns were familiarly known in Russia by translated Slavic names: Narva as Rugodiv, for example, or Wenden as Kess.

  Aside from putting their archivists to work to manufacture titles to the deed, each power sought to locate and court within the country potential allies. Denmark reminded the burghers of her control of the Sound; Poland endeavored to persuade the archbishop of Riga to follow the example of his brother, Duke Albrecht of Prussia, and secularize his “diocese” and enfeoff it to the Crown.* Sweden lobbied her cause with Narva and Reval. Russia looked for, and found, expectations of deliverance among the peasantry, based on Ivan’s reputation for humbling his lords.

  Finally (a factor not to be overlooked), the persecution of Russian merchants in Livonia and the desecration of local Orthodox shrines had fired up the Russian population. “Just wars avenge injuries,” so Augustine had written: but times had changed. If the medieval concept of Holy War had meaning for any power in the region, it was no longer to be read in the Red Cross of the Livonian Knights, but in the doctrine of the Third Rome and the banner of the Russian Orthodox Christ. Like Pope Urban II, Ivan was spellbound by the Old Testament God of Hosts
and by the military feats of Joshua, Samson, Judas Maccabeus, and Jephtha. Biblical notions of personal election and national destiny had accompanied his eastward march against the infidel, and had glossed his bloody road to Kazan. In Livonia, he faced the apostate Latins, the heretic Lutherans, and the apocalyptic expectations of a downtrodden native population that was prepared to welcome him as a redeemer with open arms. And what a prize he had to gain! A port on the Baltic, a “window on the West”!

  A pretext was ready to hand. In 1503, after a border war with Moscow, the grand master had “ransomed the Order from capitulation” with a fifty-year treaty entailing an annual tribute (revived from “of old”) to be paid by the bishop of Dorpat. This was supposed to be for certain rights in a territory called the “Honey Meadow” – a belt of wild country between Neuhausen and Pskov. Once upon a time it had been paid in the form of ten pounds of honey. In 1503, it had been converted into a token monetary sum. The Livonians had never bothered to pay it and the Russians had not pressed. Then, in 1554, the treaty expired.

  The Livonian ambassadors came to Moscow to renew it for thirty years.

  Ivan offered to renew it for fifteen, and then only on condition that (1) the Orthodox in Livonia were allowed freedom of worship, (2) Russian merchants were allowed freedom of trade, and (3) the accumulated debt in tribute was paid in full within three years. This was now fixed at one mark for every inhabitant, with arrears amounting to 50,000 crowns.

  The ambassadors professed confusion: what tribute was this? Adashev, who met with them, said: “Your ancestors came to Livonia from beyond the seas, and thus invaded the patrimony of the Russian grand prince. Much blood flowed, and to stop it his forebears in exchange for tribute allowed you Germans to remain. You may not wish to remember this, but it is so.”7