Fearful Majesty

by Benson Bobrick

  In March the Russians came to the port of Narva and began to bombard it. This was one prize they meant to seize.

  The Livonians appealed for a truce, hastily collected the overdue tribute, and dispatched an embassy to Ivan as reinforcements hurried to Narva from Fellin and Reval. The mood of the garrison, thus strengthened, changed from despair to reckless defiance and shots were fired across the river into Ivangorod, killing a Russian soldier. Ivan canceled the negotiations, rejected the tribute, and resumed the siege. Taking advantage of an outbreak of fire in the town (later attributed to a miracle), the Russians stormed the fortress on May 11, seized the heavy guns that stood on the outer walls, and turned them against the defenders. Under the protection of their fire, they inexorably advanced. After the port capitulated, it was reported that on the previous evening drunken Livonians had broken into the house of a Russian merchant and had flung two icons onto his flaming hearth. “And all that fire struck upwards, and immediately the top of the room caught fire, but there were no traces of fire where the icons had been thrown.”2

  Livonian morale cracked. Syrensk fell on June 6; Neuhausen (after a month-long siege) on June 30. In July the Russians beleaguered Dorpat, where the bishop and others were in clandestine contact with the Russian camp. After reinforcements failed to arrive, the city offered to surrender in return for the preservation of its traditional liberties. This was accepted by the commanding Russian general, and subsequently confirmed by Ivan, who also granted the burghers free trade privileges in Novgorod, Pskov, Ivangorod, and Narva. Resistance dissolved; “the idea of submission took hold.” To foster it, the Russians readily exchanged prisoners and prohibited their troops from molesting the population. “A serious effort” was even made to improve the lot of Estonian peasants by supplying them with bread, seed, cattle, and horses, and by converting confiscated estates into communes.3

  By October 1558, the Russians had captured some twenty fortresses and towns, controlled eastern Livonia, and by their occupation of Narva transformed the world of Baltic commerce almost overnight. Workmen constructed a breakwater and enlarged the harbor installations, as traders from as far away as Antwerp and Marseille, long frustrated by the Livonian middlemen, hastened to trade directly with the Muscovites. In Russia the price of Western imports fell sensationally, as Narva promised to become the chief emporium of East-West trade. At Reval the merchants wept openly onshore as they watched the ships go by. Meanwhile, English shipwrights sent to Muscovy in response to Nepea’s embassy began laying the foundations for a Russian merchant marine. In time, they built dockyards not only at Narva, but at Nizhny Novgorod on the Volga, and later at Vologda and Kholmoghory on the Northern Dvina. At Narva a few merchant vessels were swiftly converted into warships.

  A French Protestant in Wittenberg prophetically wrote to the theologian John Calvin: “If any power in Europe is destined to grow it is this one.”4

  In crisis, the Livonian Knights elected a new grand master, Gotthard Kettler, who immediately sought to sell his country to the Poles. However, Reval and the surrounding provinces of Harrien and Wierland preferred to place themselves under Danish protection, and appealed to Denmark’s King Christian III to cut off the Narva trade at the Sound. Before he could do anything, Russia invaded again in January 1559, swept through southern Estonia toward Riga, and crossed the Western Dvina into Courland, plundering at will. Christian III dispatched an embassy to Moscow and Ivan, on the advice of Adashev and others, reluctantly agreed to a six-months’ armistice, from May to November 1559. However, he also insisted that the back tribute be paid regardless, and that the grand master himself or his adjutant come to Moscow to acknowledge his suzerainty.

  Russia in 1598

  In their negotiations the Danish envoys claimed Livonia as a protectorate of their king. Viskovaty scoffed at this and questioned the legitimacy of the embassy itself, since the Livonians, as the tsar’s “subjects,” had no business appealing to a foreign power. He reminded them of the Russian founding of Dorpat, the history of the tribute at issue, and produced two weighty old tomes with records “beyond the memory of man” to substantiate his tale. Ivan himself was so displeased by Danish presumptions that he facetiously refused the king’s gift of a beautiful clock on the grounds that he “believed in God and would have nothing to do with planets and signs.”5

  The German emperor (Livonia’s nominal overlord) also sent a delegation, but it was so low-level and ill-equipped that Ivan almost refused to acknowledge it. He scornfully told the envoys that instead of worrying about Livonia, the emperor ought to be trying to regain Hungary from the Turks. Meanwhile, the Imperial Diet raised such a pitiful sum of money for Livonia’s defense that Kettler’s representative was said to have declined it.

  Kettler went to Vilna, not Moscow, as the rest of Livonia began to deliver itself up piecemeal to its Baltic neighbors.

  On August 31, 1559, he signed an agreement with King Sigismund August that made Livonia a Lithuanian protectorate, and by September, without much coaxing, the archbishop of Riga was persuaded to go along. Lithuanian troops immediately occupied land along the Western Dvina from Riga to Dünaburg. It deserves to be noted, however, that Sigismund in this instance acted only in his capacity as grand duke of Lithuania, not king of Poland, since the Polish Diet as yet did not wish to commit its resources to the cause. As dual monarch, he had two disparate kingdoms to hold together (and ultimately to unite); and he shrewdly discerned that it was premature to arrange or otherwise enforce a similar treaty between Livonia and Poland because this would come about almost automatically, and on the best possible terms, in reaction to the developing threat from Moscow. His Livonian policy, indeed, was subordinate to his overall strategy for union – to demonstrate to Lithuania and Poland that they needed each other to survive.

  Though Sigismund was not yet prepared for a military confrontation with Ivan, in writing to him to protest Russian aggression, he seemed to mock the premise of Viskovaty’s lecture to the Danes: “You call Livonia yours. But how was it that the war between Moscow and Livonia at the time of your grandfather was brought to an end by a truce? What ruler concludes a treaty with his subjects?”6

  In October 1559, an emboldened Kettler broke the cease-fire with Moscow and besieged Dorpat, just as a Crimean raiding party attacked from the south. Fearing a coordinated campaign, Adashev and Sylvester sent an urgent message to Ivan at Mozhaisk, where he had gone with an ailing Anastasia on pilgrimage. The couple hurried back to the capital in a blizzard, only to discover that their exertions had been unnecessary. The garrison in Dorpat had repulsed the Knights; the Tatars vanished into the steppe.

  Meanwhile, Christian III of Denmark had been succeeded by his young and ambitious son, Frederick II. Frederick immediately bought the island of Oesel from its bishop (who absconded with the episcopal treasury) and traded it to his younger brother, Magnus, for Holstein, a far more valuable property. Magnus, led to believe that he could build up a dominion of his own in the eastern Baltic, landed on Oesel in the spring of 1560, crossed over to the mainland, purchased the castle of Sonnenburg, and bought out the bishop of Reval. Unfortunately, the alacrity with which he had become a little king himself went to his head, and he recklessly undertook a campaign to extend his authority along the littoral.

  Now, at this time, a number of the south-central provinces that today form part of Sweden belonged either to Denmark or to Norway, which was subject to the Danes. Thus Denmark controlled the southern Baltic and every one of its outlets – the Great and Little Belt, as well as the Sound. Sweden, on the other hand, held only a narrow strip of coastline a few miles wide at the mouth of Gota Alv to the west. Her dominions therefore opened toward the east where, across from the Gulf of Finland, she now beheld a Danish duke trying to stake his claim.

  Fearing encirclement by her historic foe, Sweden began to concentrate on acquiring Reval. Meanwhile, Russian operations in Livonia in the spring and summer of 1560 resulted in the complete military collapse of the Ord
er. Marienburg fell in February; Weissenstein was besieged in March, where in a nearby battle one hundred and seventy German officers were captured. In April, the Russians surrounded Fellin – with three stone inner citadels, wide, deep moats, some 450 cannon in mint condition, and houses sheathed in lead – probably the strongest fortress in Livonia. But morale was desperately low; and though von Fürstenberg, the garrison commander, tried to rally his men by promising them the whole of his private fortune, after a three-week siege their will to fight was spent.

  The fall of Fellin occasioned the second major miracle-legend of the war, which attributed the victory to Our Lady of Pechery, an icon copied from Our Lady of Vladimir and belonging to a monastery near Pskov.

  At about this time, Ivan (perhaps inspired by Sigismund’s use of Kettler) began testing the idea of setting up a puppet Livonian regime. His first candidate was the captive von Fürstenberg, Kettler’s predecessor. But the knight refused to cooperate. Ivan told him, “Do you not see that we have the power?” to which he replied, “I have sworn an oath to the Holy Roman Empire and I will live and die by it.”7 Ivan accepted this, and eventually settled him comfortably in the town of Lyubim in Kostroma, northeast of Moscow.

  From Fellin the Muscovite army advanced on Ermes. In May, Alexei Adashev departed for the front with a train of heavy artillery; on August 2, the Landmarschall of the Order, Philip von Bell, boldly sauntered out of the fortress to challenge what he supposed to be a modest Russian incursion. Almost at once enveloped by the Muscovite host, he was captured by Adashev’s squire and his troops were annihilated.

  In captivity the Landmarschall charmed and impressed the Russian generals, who commended him to the tsar. But Ivan, “who had already begun to be fierce and inhuman” (or at least tired of valiant Livonian knights) had him tortured and executed.8

  With the demise of the Order, Latvian peasants rose in revolt against their German overlords; farmers volunteered to help the Russians as scouts; various elements within the ruling elite scrambled to ingratiate themselves with the invader before it proved too late. Some fortresses capitulated without a fight. Pro-Russian sentiment among the Livonian populace was strong as the invader roamed unhindered over the countryside.

  Nevertheless, as long as the two principal harbors of Riga and Reval remained outside his grasp, Ivan was not likely to be recognized as ruler of the country; while the Russian victories served to spur the active intervention of other powers. Lithuania mobilized; Reval, disappointed with Denmark, turned to Gustav Vasa of Sweden for some arrangement that would bring the city under his protection. And though Gustav died before he could respond, his son and successor, Erik XIV, immediately occupied the city. Ivan anticipated war between Poland and Sweden; Sigismund, war between Sweden and Russia. Denmark awaited the results of another embassy to Moscow, while the German Empire made ineffectual pronouncements from afar. In the suspended animation of these powers, Erik, swept west along the coast in the fall of 1561 and took Padis, Leal, and Pernau. These strongholds could be protected and resupplied by his navy, which now operated out of a powerful triangle of bases at Stockholm-Abo-Reval. Indeed, if the Volga could be called a “Russian river,” and the Sound a “Danish strait,” Erik could almost claim the Gulf of Finland as a “Swedish stream.”

  The next twist was inevitable. By a treaty concluded at Vilna and signed in March 1562, both the Order and the Archbishopric of Riga were secularized, Kettler was made hereditary duke of Courland, to be held as a Polish fief, and Riga and its environs submitted directly to King Sigismund,* who styled himself accordingly “Sovereign of Livonia.”

  Russia immediately countered by recognizing Danish claims to Oesel, Courland, and part of Estonia, and by a Russo-Danish accord of economic cooperation that promised to frustrate efforts by other Western powers to mount a Narva blockade. On September 15, 1562, Viskovaty left for Copenhagen at the head of a large delegation.

  But he could scarcely reverse the trend of events. The partition of Livonia into four occupied zones – with Russia holding the eastern portion, Denmark staked out on Oesel, Sweden in possession of Reval and northern Estonia, and Poland-Lithuania occupying the southwest – meant that by the latter part of 1562, instead of a weak Order and a disinterested Empire, Ivan faced three comparatively strong opponents, who were all bound to forestall further Russian conquests.

  * * *

  * Sigismund, fearing some additional arrangement between Moscow and the German Empire (Poland’s long-time political antagonist in Eastern Europe), also procured the support of the elector of Brandenburg by agreeing to delay the day when the rule of East Prussia would revert to the Polish crown. This costly gambit was to haunt the history of Poland well into the twentieth century.

  * * *

  21

  Turning Point

  IVAN BLAMED THE swiftly developing complications in the war on the untimely truce he had been persuaded to accept in 1559. He believed (and tactically speaking he was probably right) that it had arrested Russian momentum and allowed the enemy to regroup. He held Adashev, Sylvester, and others responsible, and unfortunately his simmering feud with these advisers coincided with a fatal decline in the tsaritsa’s health.

  By all accounts, including his own, Ivan’s marriage to Anastasia had been a happy one. In sickness or in health, his “little heifer,” as he once affectionately called her, was often by his side, and their arduous, postnuptial midwinter trek together on foot to Holy Trinity Monastery had proved emblematic of their solidarity in love. Together they had six children – Anna, Maria, Dmitry, Ivan, Evdokia, and Fyodor (born May 31, 1557) – but only Ivan and Fyodor survived past the age of two.

  Tradition ascribes to Anastasia beauty, wisdom, and grace. Ivan “being young and riotous,” it was said, “she ruled him with admirable affability and wisdome.”1 One contemporary relates that she was “benign and bore no malice towards anyone”; another, that she was “honored, beloved, and feared of all her subjects” for her “holiness, virtue and government.”2 Formulaic as such eulogies may sound, a huge crowd apparently turned out to mourn her at her funeral.

  Oddly enough, though one might have supposed Adashev and Sylvester her natural allies, they ostracized her, apparently for some indiscretion – Ivan said bitterly, for “one single little word.”3

  What remarkable word that was we cannot know. But the crisis of 1553 had revealed a profound antagonism between certain Chosen Council members and her family, and doubtless Anastasia shared in Ivan’s resentment at any interference in their domestic life.

  That life, however exalted, had not been an easy one, for aside from the ceremonial demands of being a tsaritsa, relentless parturitions coupled with nearly continual grief from losing her children gradually sapped her strength. The program Ivan prescribed for her recovery, under Sylvester’s guidance, may be divined from the therapy recommended in the Domostroy: “If God send any disease or ailment down upon a person, let him cure himself through the grace of God, through tears, prayer, fasting, charity to the poor, and true repentance.”4 The pilgrimage by the couple to Mozaisk in October 1559 (where Ivan received word the Livonians had broken the truce) typified the cure. Unduly alarmed, and notwithstanding Anastasia’s fragile condition, they had hastened back to Moscow through snow and freezing rain, as the truce violations flared and expired. Anastasia, however, never recovered, and fell into the grip of some wasting disease. Rashly, Sylvester tried to explain her decline as a divine chastisement for Ivan’s “disobedience” to the council (or rather, its antiwar faction) in pursuing the Livonian War. Immediately, however, he realized he had gone too far and sought sanctuary in the White Lake Monastery. Subsequently Ivan supposed his wife had been poisoned, or bewitched, and accused Sylvester of complicity.

  Adashev’s influence was also fading fast. Though the tsar was loath to do without his considerable gifts, he was unwilling to abide his advice, and in the summer of 1560 appointed him governor of Fellin, a post of semiexile. Unfortunately, Adashev’s treme
ndous popularity there, combined with his original opposition to the war, convinced the tsar that he was an enemy sympathizer even though his reputation for justness might have done much to convince the Livonians of Russian goodwill. Ivan’s fear of subversion, however, was uppermost, and in July it was exacerbated by another Kremlin fire that forced Anastasia’s evacuation to the village of Kolomenskoe, where she died on August 7, 1560.

  In late September a joint council of Church and Duma convened to try Sylvester and Adashev on various trumped-up charges, including witchcraft. The assembly was packed with their opponents (Vassian Toporkov among them), and neither was allowed to appear on his own behalf. This brought a protest from Makary, even though he was about to behold the annihilation of the most powerful Non-Possessor faction remaining in the realm. He declared: “They ought to be brought here to face their accusers, and we ought to hear what they have to say.”5

  His opinion was disregarded. Adashev, taken in chains to Dorpat, was either poisoned or committed suicide there in December. Sylvester, deported to the Solovetsky Monastery, died an unknown death.

  Others close to them, such as Alexei’s brother Daniel, were summarily executed, and Dmitry Kurlyatev, a probable member of the Chosen Council (but one of the last to take the oath of allegiance in 1553), was later murdered at the tsar’s behest.

  Despite his personal bereavement at Anastasia’s loss, Ivan at once began to consider how a second, foreign marriage could assist his affairs of state. His threefold aim was to advance his prospects in Livonia, enhance his international prestige, and preempt an untimely contest among boyar families hoping to promote one of their nubile relations to be his bride. Accordingly, deputations were sent to Lithuania, Sweden, and Circassia: to Lithuania (speaking politically) in order to check the king’s Livonian policy and perhaps facilitate new gains for Muscovy on the frontier; to Sweden, to encourage a satisfactory arrangement in Estonia and security on Russia’s northwestern flank; and to Circassia to obtain additional Tatar allies in the Caucasus against the Crimeans.