The Livonians acquiesced, promised to pay, and were compelled to sign a nonaggression pact with Moscow that prohibited them from entering into any anti-Muscovite alliance with Poland. The treaty was nothing but a tactical delay. Everyone knew it – and everyone knew they knew. The border war with Sweden had begun, and Ivan needed time. But he had not failed to tell the ambassadors that he understood what a tiny country Livonia was, and that, though he was not thirsty for blood, he would personally come for the tribute if he had to – and as sure of it as if he already held it in his hands.
As expeditiously as he could, Ivan secured for himself considerable freedom of action. Within the next three years, he had “pacified” Kazan, completed the annexation of Astrakhan, concluded an armistice with Poland (August 6, 1556), and imposed a truce on Sweden (1557). In 1556 and 1557 he had also raided into the Crimea, to further contain the Tatar threat from the south.
Thus, the “Livonian option” formed a continuous background to all the famed initiatives of Ivan’s early reign. Those initiatives may even be seen as the deliberate and systematic prelude to what ensued.
Meanwhile, in Livonia the work of self-destruction went on. While Ivan and Gustav Vasa were burning each other’s homesteads, Sigismund August of Poland advanced his scheme of linking a secularized Livonia as a vassal duchy to the Polish crown. The archbishop of Riga, Wilhelm of Hohenzollern, who thought his brother had done rather well for himself in Prussia, was provisionally chosen to be the future duke. But he was not very popular. Wilhelm von Fürstenberg, the new grand master of the Livonian Order and a kind of old-fashioned knight, opposed the Polish plot, and the result was civil war. The archbishop sent a coded appeal to his brother for 10,000 troops, but it was intercepted and he was arrested for treason. At about the same time, one of Sigismund’s envoys was murdered by the grand master’s son. The king now intervened, citing (as legal justification) two documents: one, from 1354, in which Emperor Charles IV had appointed the king of Poland protector of the Riga See, the other from 1392, in which the pope had named the king mediator in disputes between the archbishop and the Order. Faced with an attack by Poland, von Fürstenberg capitulated, and on September 5, 1557, at Poswol, signed an interim agreement that imposed a Polish-Lithuanian protectorate on Livonia and committed the Order to an offensive and defensive alliance against Moscow – in explicit violation of the Russo-Livonian accord. Though the pact furnished the practical and legal basis for the king’s further intervention in the event of war, it made Russian wrath inevitable. It could even be said that it forced Ivan’s hand, to prevent Poland from bringing the whole area within her sphere of influence. Sigismund, however, gambling that a Russian onslaught was almost certainly impending, perhaps hoped the pact would give Ivan pause.
Thus was the stage set for the Livonian War, one of the longest and most complicated wars in Eastern European history.
* * *
* In 1466, by the Peace of Thorn, West Prussia was incorporated into the Polish Kingdom as an autonomous province, and East Prussia, still under the rule of the Teutonic Knights, was enfeoffed to Poland as a vassal state. Subsequently, as the spread of Lutheranism depleted the grand master’s ranks, he struck a bargain whereby in exchange for submission the king would enfeoff him as hereditary duke of a secularized domain. This arrangement was consummated in 1525.
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18
The Second Wave of Reforms
THE LIVONIAN WAR was to dominate Ivan’s foreign relations for the remainder of his reign, and it is in the context of his preparations for it that the so-called Second Wave of Reforms must be viewed.
In 1553, it will be remembered, the Duma had neglected Kazanian affairs, despite imminent tribal uprisings, and had turned instead with enthusiasm to the subject of kormlenie. In the intervening years, the government prepared to abolish the system entirely – a development usually understood as the natural and enlightened culmination of the Law Code reforms of 1550.
But these reforms, which imposed restraints on the system, had in no obvious way aimed at its abolition. On the contrary, they had modified and corrected kormlenie administration so as to enable it to continue as a viable form of provincial government. Ivan himself had declared that the code, as written, was to stand “for centuries.”1 Such an effort at putting the system on a more solid basis would scarcely have been made if the purpose at the time had been to prepare the way for its demise.
Between the first and second wave of reforms, something had happened. Revenue had increased but (as Lobanov-Rostovsky had anticipated even before the exertions required to complete the pacification of Kazan), not enough to offset the expenditures of recent campaigns. The brief border war with Sweden had been fierce. The Astrakhan venture, and Moscow’s attempt to expand its control along the Volga, were continuing strains. The result, evidently, was the bankruptcy of the Central Treasury.
The new reforms emerged in part as another revenue scheme, while the boyars arranged for themselves in the process handsome compensation for giving up their kormlenie posts.
The time for this was ripe from every point of view. To begin with, the kormlenie governorships of old were no longer the sinecures they’d been. Over the years, the average term of office, territory of jurisdiction, and latitude of action had all been gradually reduced as local revenues had come under closer scrutiny and the magistrate had to reckon with district representatives at every step. Even if he discharged his responsibilities with reasonable competence, a flurry of lawsuits tended to follow him out of office. A new administrative era was inexorably dawning, and the boyars were determined not to be left out. At the same time, residual hatred of the old order conveniently enabled the Duma to draft its new legislation with popular support.
A number of experimental charters, each framed as a response to a local petition, replaced the district governor with a council of locally elected officials. In compensation, the boyars, “coveting wealth” – not justice – in Viskovaty’s illuminating phrase, arranged to collect a regular salary from the State Treasury, where the local revenue (once fed upon by them) was now to be deposited safe and sound.2 To ensure the money got there (and that there was plenty to go around), they granted their replacements a negligible salary and made malfeasance in office punishable by death – a penalty no governor had ever had to face.
What the local community got out of the arrangement was increased self-rule and a kind of tax break, for a portion of the property of convicted felons was credited against the “quitrent” of the district, or its collective tax. That quitrent, however, which replaced the fees and subsistence allotments formerly collected by governors, was considerable (on the average, about a hundred rubles per annum) and represented no discernible amelioration in the economic burden of the folk. Moreover, other revenues traditionally due the tsar still had to be paid in full. Nevertheless, with a fine political flourish, Moscow called the new impost a “redemption tax.”3
What Moscow got out of the arrangement, in addition to increased revenue, “was the free services of officials who knew local conditions more intimately, and who presumably had a greater personal interest in maintaining law and order than their predecessors.”4 Moreover, high-ranking military servitors, formerly dispersed to administrative seats throughout the realm, were now free to devote their attention more fully to military affairs.
After an experimental period, in 1556 Ivan, “out of pity for the people,” he said, declared the new reform general for the nation – except along the frontiers, where military governors remained.5
But the boyars paid a price for their gains. In 1550, Ivan had told the Stoglav Council that he had undertaken a comprehensive census “to measure and record all resources… so I shall know who has been granted what, who needs what, and who renders service on the basis of what resources.”6 Now, six years later, this bore fruit in a decree (issued on September 20, 1556) that established for the first time an explicit and proportional connection between landholding (of whate
ver kind) and military service. Henceforth anyone who possessed an estate had to provide a fully equipped, mounted man-at-arms for every 400 acres of arable land, with an additional horse for distant campaigns. Any landowner who provided more than his quota was entitled to a cash subsidy; in lieu of service, a landowner had to pay a substantial fine. “Thus,” goes a Chronicle summary attributed to Adashev, “nobles and warriors owning much land but performing little service hold their patrimonies against the sovereign’s wishes. The sovereign has taken steps to equalize holdings, has surveyed them, has given each his due, and has distributed the surplus among those who lack.”7 Active service was to begin at age fifteen and continue until death or incapacitation. Upon a man’s demise, his estate, with all its obligations, was to pass to his sons who, if their divided inheritance came short of the service norm, were entitled to additional land grants and perhaps a monetary salary. Outstanding soldiers could expect a bonus.
Such salaries had to come out of the State Treasury. Obviously both reforms were intertwined. In short, the new system of provincial administration, which replaced kormlenie, was designed to pay the debt “for campaigns recently undertaken or upon which the tsardom was about to embark.”8
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19
“To Subdue and Conquere His Enemies”
RUSSIA’S BUDDING TRADE relations with England were important for her war effort, but they failed to develop as rapidly as Ivan hoped. On the return voyage in 1556, not even Chancellor’s expert knowledge and incomparable quadrant could secure the fleet from mercurial weather and the turbulent arctic seas. The Bona Confidentia “was seene to perish on a rocke” off the coast of Norway; the Bona Speranza vanished without a trace; and the Bonaventure, after four months’ stormy passage, reached the Bay of Pitsligo on November 7 only to be “dashed to pieces by a tempest on the Aberdeenshire coast.”1 Chancellor, in a valiant effort, sacrificed himself to save Nepea, but seven other members of the embassy drowned. Whatever cargo washed ashore was thoroughly picked over and plundered by the “ravenous” Scots.
The Philip and Mary alone survived the voyage, but did not wander into the mouth of the Thames until April 18, 1557.
Nepea, detained for two months in Scotland by an official inquiry, finally reached the outskirts of London on February 27. A mounted escort of “fourscore merchants with chaines of gold and goodly apparell”2 rode to meet him, and on the following day he was treated to a fox hunt. Afterwards “divers lustie knights, esquiers, gentlemen and yeomen” accompanied him into London proper, where the lord mayor and the city aldermen all in scarlet conducted him to a house in Fenchurch Street. Ivan, rumored already to be “the most rytch prynce of treasour that lyvethe this day on earthe, except the Turk,” was well represented by his ambassador whose sumptuous wardrobe included a “nyght cap sett with perles and precious stones.”3
On March 25, Nepea was presented to the king and queen, and began a round of conferences with their advisers; on England’s St. George’s Day (April 23), he participated in a service in Westminster Abbey, and on the 29th was honored at a banquet at the Draper’s Hall.
Although his dignified solemnity was praised at court, the London merchants sensed trouble ahead. One wrote to a colleague in Moscow: “Hee is very mistrustfull, and thinketh everie man will beguile him; therefore you had need to take heed how you have to doe with him, or with any such, and to make your bargaines plaine.”4 Nepea for his part had reason to be wary. What he had really come for was armaments. What Mary granted was the right to trade with England on the same terms “as other Christians” – a not very generous or even useful concession since the only ships Russia possessed were two-masted lodia or flat-bottomed coasting sloops with twenty oars for river navigation. Nevertheless, these privileges were fulsomely set forth in a Latin epistle to the tsar drafted by the rhetorician Roger Ascham.
Behind the scenes, however, Nepea had apparently secured the right to hire technicians, including shipwrights, and a few may have returned with him to Russia in the summer of 1557, perhaps in the guise of Russia Company personnel. Also on board were two coopers to fashion casks for the export of tallow and train-oil; seven rope and cable makers; a furrier; an apothecary; a doctor; and a crossbow maker to scout for yew trees. Their custodian was the new English envoy to Russia, Anthony Jenkinson, who also conveyed two gifts from Mary for the tsar: a suit of parade armor and a pair of lions.
Jenkinson was a most remarkable man – exceptionally capable and fearless, and a great adventurer in an age when many lesser men deserved to be called extraordinary. Still in his thirties, as ad hoc envoy and merchant, he had already traveled through Flanders, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, “sailed through the Levant seas every way,” been to Rhodes, Malta, Sicily, and Cyprus, tramped through Greece into Turkey (where he had met the sultan), “passed over the mountains” to Damascus and Jerusalem, and had visited, along the coast of northern Africa, Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers.5 On November 4, 1553, when Chancellor was casting anchor in St. Nicholas Bay, Jenkinson was at Aleppo in Syria, to witness “the manner of the entering of Solyman the Great Turke with his armye” into the city, “marching toward Persia against the Great Sophie.”6
He had survived uncounted perils. Now under his guidance, the four ships he commanded made it safely past the Lofoten Islands, not far from where Willoughby’s course had gone fatally astray, steered around a whirlpool that formed a roaring cataract (where a whale was seen to perish with “a pitifull crie”7), and survived Svatoy Nos, a headland known for its riptides at the western entrance of the White Sea. Over his head a rainbow appeared in the heavens, “like a semicircle, with both ends upwarde,” which seemed to signify divine aid.8
From St. Nicholas, Jenkinson ascended the Dvina fifty miles to Kholmogory, lingered to examine the rope walk and the spacious warehouses the company had under construction, then, venturing farther upstream, explored the alabaster rocks and “Pyneaple trees lying there since Noes flood”9 – probably fossilized logs of fir or larch. After roaming with surprising freedom about the Russian North (sometimes camping out in the wilds), he finally reached Moscow in December, where Ivan’s court was aswarm with Tatar chieftains, “men of warre to serve against his enemies,”10 and other signs of a military buildup. In a striking gesture of trust, the English were invited to watch the Muscovites at artillery practice on the outskirts of the capital, which proved something to behold. Two large houses, with targets marked on the sides and filled with earth, were erected at one end of a large field, along with man-sized blocks of ice, two feet thick, ranged in a quarter-mile row. A large and varied arsenal – “faire ordinance of brasse of all sortes” – was brought out, including “canons double and royall,” mortars that “shoote wild fire,” and six great bombards, all escorted by musketeers marching precisely “five and five,” each “carying his gun upon his left shoulder, his match in his right hand.” Twice the cannoneers let loose their barrage, “beginning with the smallest and so orderly untill the biggest and last,” reducing the houses to smithereens. With equally devastating fire, the musketeers at a signal “began to shoot off at the banke of ice, as though it had bin in any skirmish or battel, and ceased not untill they had beaten it all flat on the ground.”11
“Now what might be made of these men,” Chancellor had wondered a few years before, “if they were trained and broken to order and knowledge of [modern] wars?”12 The answer was becoming clear.
Perhaps to offset the impression, however, that Ivan was a warmongering prince largely surrounded by barbarians, Jenkinson and his compatriots were also invited to witness him at the pious blessing of the waters (an annual ritual) on the Moscow River, where he stood bareheaded in the bitter wind over a large hole cut in the ice; and on another occasion heard him exalt Metropolitan Makary “to be of higher dignitie then himselfe; for that, saith he, he is Gods spiritual officer, and I his temporall.”13 Moreover, at a royal banquet in their honor, it was observed that near Ivan “was set a Mon
ke all alone” (perhaps Sylvester) “in all points as well served as the Emperour.”14
The combination of impressions had their effect. One Englishman concluded:
[The tsar] is no more afraid of his enemies than the Hobbie [larkhawk] of the lark. Not onley is he beloved of his nobles and commons, but also held in great dread and feare through all his dominions, so that I thinke no prince in Christendome is more feared of his owne than he is, nor yet better beloved…. Hee delighteth not greatly in hawking, hunting, or any other pastime, nor in hearing instruments or musicke, but setteth his whole delight upon two things: First, to serve God, as undoubtedly he is very devoute in his religion, and the second, howe to subdue and conquere his enemies.15
In fact, Ivan loved hawking, hunting, and music. As to whether or not he served God one dare not surmise, but that he delighted in conquest is quite beyond doubt.
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20
The Collapse of Livonia
IN NOVEMBER 1557, Russian troops began to assemble on the Russo-Livonian frontier. On January 22, 1558, they advanced from Pskov and crossed the border in three columns near Neuhausen. Over the next several weeks they cut a wide swath through the country with an army that included a vanguard of 7000 Tatars and 1600 tracking dogs. The general staff was a composite group: Daniel Adashev, Alexei Basmanov, and the Crimean defector Tokhtamysh in the vanguard; Prince Andrey Kurbsky in the rear guard; with overall command given to Shah-Ali and Ivan’s uncle, Mikhail Glinsky, whose disgrace of a decade before had apparently been erased.
“And we went through their land,” remembered Kurbsky, “fighting on a front of more than forty miles.”1 On the 23rd, they stood at the gates of Livonian Marienburg; on the 26th, at Wesenberg. Without attempting to take the towns, they devastated the northern quarter of the country all the way to the Gulf of Finland. Mikhail Glinsky was particularly random in his looting, carting off works of art, bullion, and gold and silver chalices for the Imperial Treasury.
Fearful Majesty Page 21