A Lithuanian marriage had the most appeal but was clearly far-fetched. Sigismund August had two unmarried sisters, Anna and Katerina; and though Ivan’s envoy hoped to court the latter, the king allowed him only a fleeting opportunity to peep at her one Sunday out of a little window across from the cathedral where she attended Mass. The Swedes proved equally unenthusiastic; and on August 21, 1561, Ivan married the Circassian Princess Kucheney, rechristened Maria, whose father had already sworn allegiance to Ivan in 1558, and whose baptized brother, Mikhail, was fighting at the head of a Tatar contingent in the Livonian War.
Ivan’s foreign marriage may have spared the court prenuptial intrigue, but Maria, not unlike Elena Glinskaya, was soon resented as an outsider by the aristocracy as a whole, and her allegedly wild, cruel, and dissolute behavior established a very different atmosphere at court. An ominous and prophetically inscrutable note was also struck when as a security measure Ivan decreed that on the day of his wedding “no person (certeine of his householde reserved)” was to be allowed into the streets.6
HISTORIANS CUSTOMARILY DIVIDE Ivan’s reign into two parts: the first, “good” period – extending from his coronation to the death of Anastasia and the fall of the Chosen Council – as distinguished by far-sighted foreign policy initiatives and enlightened domestic reforms; and its bloody, tyrannical sequel, with all that has yet to be unfolded in our tale. In this, historians take their cue from Ivan’s earliest biographers and from Ivan himself, who sometimes blamed his subsequent cruelties on Anastasia’s death. “If only you had not taken her from me,” he would write, vaguely accusing the Chosen Council, “there would have been no sacrifices to Cronus.”7 However, Ivan’s documented inclination to cruelty was already long-standing, while his policies can scarcely be so plainly characterized. If a division must be made, it might (with much qualification) be said that the early part of Ivan’s reign was largely preoccupied with the religious duties of a divinely ordained monarch, as reflected in the program of the Chosen Council; the second, obsessed with the dimensions of his secular power. Unfortunately, this corresponded on the one hand with his willingness to be guided and on the other with his “emancipation,” so that in all things his will was at last his own. Ultimately, Ivan theologized his power in a way that gave eschatological sanction to his tyranny.
Giles Fletcher the Elder, sometime English ambassador to Russia and a close student of Ivan’s career, was to write in The Rising to the Crowne of Richard the Third:
Blood and revenge did hammer in my head,
Unquiet thoughts did gallop in my braine:
I had no rest till all my friends were dead,
Whose helpe I usede the kingdome to obtaine.
My dearest friend I thought not safe to trust,
Nor skarse my selfe, but that perforce I must.
He wrote of Richard, but he wrote of Ivan too.
As sovereign Ivan had every right to disband the Chosen Council and to dispense with, and even execute, its membership; but in doing so he afterward acted, and reacted, as one who had overthrown a legitimate government and usurped the throne. Though certainly by 1557 (if not before) Ivan was master at the helm, he had governed so long under guidance that he was psychologically assailed by a kind of insidious doubt as to the legitimacy of what he had done. And in subsequent anguished (and belligerent) reaffirmations of his “divine rights” as a monarch can be heard a kind of protesting too much. Though no one in Russia really questioned his lineage, like any usurper he seems to have felt the need almost to prove his royal line; while in his contest with the hereditary aristocracy, the fact that the House of Rurik, as ennobled by a bogus mythology, was repudiated by the rest of Europe, added a psychological twist to his frantic search for security. Formerly afraid of advisers meeting behind his back, after 1560 Ivan “lived in great danger and fear of treasons,” wrote one contemporary, “which he daily discovered, and spent much tyme in the examinacion, torteringe, and execution of his subjects.”8
FORESTALLED BY THE military stalemate in Livonia, the tsar tried to advance his interests there by resuming Muscovy’s perennial war of conquest along the Lithuanian frontier. This time the target was Polotsk, a key border fortress on the Western Dvina and, historically, the “gateway to the Kingdom.” On November 30, 1562, Makary (who opposed the Livonian War but shared his monarch’s obsession with “gathering in” the historic Russian lands) received Ivan in the Cathedral of the Assumption to bless the campaign, while a Muscovite army of 50,000 assembled at Mozhaisk and marched to Veliky Luki, the staging point for the attack. From there, the troops fanned out through the woods, but in a near fiasco they became entangled with the supply train. Enraged, the tsar on some pretext slew a prince in his own retinue with a mace. The Lithuanians, however, failed to take advantage of the confusion – apparently refusing to believe the Russians were coming. Suddenly they were there. Heavy artillery smashed the outer fortress walls, forcing the garrison to retreat to the upper citadel, where the guns, now advanced to within the perimeter of the town, relentlessly bombarded the defenders. Fires broke out which could not be quenched. On February 15, 1563, Polotsk surrendered.
Muscovite propaganda justified the campaign on a number of grounds, including the tsar’s sacred obligation to extirpate the “Lutheran heresy” from Russian soil. Ivan didn’t find many Lutherans in Polotsk, but he did find Jews, who faced death if they would not convert. Three hundred heroically refused and were drowned in the Western Dvina.
Sigismund’s failure to relieve the siege may be connected to a crisis developing at the time among the other Baltic powers. That crisis had its germ in Sweden, where Erik XIV, a brilliantly endowed but tragically unhappy monarch, whose self-torturing ways were to inspire Shakespeare’s Hamlet, had become embroiled in a mortal duel with his brother Johan that threatened the very destruction of his realm.
Erik’s three half-brothers – Johan, Magnus, and Karl – had each inherited an independent duchy. Though bound by their father’s testament to remain faithful to the crown, they were “not warmly attached to one another,”9 to put it mildly, and even before his coronation Erik had persuaded the Riksdag or national assembly to radically curtail their powers. There was a kind of suppressed ferocity in the formal proclamation which the royal herald read out: “This be known unto all loyal inhabitants of Sweden, that one is our king, the illustrious Prince and Lord Erik XIV; and though ye may see more crowns than one, ye must not think that they be royal. One is king of the Swedes, Vandals and Goths.”
Erik XIV (Stephen Van der Muelen, 1561).
Nevertheless, Johan as mighty duke of Finland pursued his own foreign policy, and imagining (like Denmark’s Magnus) that he could carve out a principality for himself from the Livonian mess, had conducted secret negotiations with Kettler even as Erik was evicting the Knights from a string of Estonian ports. When Kettler submitted to Poland, Johan followed his lead and sought a Polish bride. Erik, on the other hand, decided on a policy of accommodation with Moscow and pursued the hand of Elizabeth of England, crowned in 1558. Erik at first had better luck. Though he was prepared, if necessary, to assassinate Robert Dudley, the queen’s reputed paramour – or challenge him to a duel, in a scenario that cast his fainthearted adviser, Nils Gyllenstierna, as proxy – by the summer of 1561 his prospects seemed so bright that as he set sail for England, London woodcuts already showed him enthroned by Elizabeth’s side. Stormy weather, however, defeated his connubial hopes as he zigzagged for weeks about the Skaggerak.
Other such disappointments followed as throughout his reign Erik’s failure to find a suitable, strategic match – despite subsequent approaches to Poland, Saxony, Mecklenburg, Hesse, and Scotland – contributed to political disarray within his realm. But it was the marriage of Johan to Sigismund’s sister, Katerina, the recent object of Ivan’s designs, that had a critical impact on state affairs.
Sigismund promoted the marriage, both to restrain Erik’s rapprochement with Moscow (which also dismayed the Danes), a
nd to link Poland to Sweden’s naval power. But when Erik wavered, Johan defied him and hurried to Vilna in October 1561, where he celebrated his marriage to Katerina and lent Sigismund a small fortune, for which he received in pledge seven castles in Livonia. One of them, Weissenstein, was surrounded by Erik’s troops. Obviously, Johan’s technical possession of it was Sigismund’s last best hope for its defense. Erik took it anyway and got the Riksdag to condemn his brother for treason.
Johan and Katerina sought refuge in Abo Castle on the Gulf of Finland. Erik stormed the citadel on August 12, 1563, captured the couple and interned them in Gripsholm. Scores of Johan’s confederates were hanged, and Finland was “confiscated” for the crown.
Sigismund immediately forged an alliance against Sweden with Frederick II of Denmark in an agreement that abrogated the Russo-Danish accord – and the day after Abo capitulated, a Danish herald delivered Frederick’s declaration of war in Stockholm.
Frederick quartered the Three Crowns of Sweden in the Danish shield. Erik, in response, incorporated the Danish Three Lions in his standard.
Thus began, as a “sideshow” to the Livonian War, the Seven Years’ Northern War (1563-1570) – a remarkably futile conflict that sapped the strength of all belligerents to no gain. Russia, with nothing to lose, remained aloof from the fighting while opening her Baltic harbor to all nations, as the contradiction of interests between her various antagonists repeatedly frustrated efforts to mount an effective embargo on the Narva trade.
IVAN WAS NOW “at the apex of his power. He had an outlet to the sea at Narva, held much of the eastern half of Livonia, and had hewn for himself a commercial and military road to the Western Dvina,”10 which flowed directly to Riga, the largest Livonian port on the Baltic. Moreover, the Northern War had neutralized the potentially disastrous coalition against him in the West.
Heroic iconography expanded across the walls of the Kremlin palace and cathedrals. In 1563-1564, a gallery joining Ivan’s residence to the Cathedral of the Annunciation was adorned with haloed portraits of Moscow sovereigns from Daniel I through Vasily III, and in 1564-1565 the whole Russian imperial house (beginning with Caesar Augustus) was frescoed on murals and pillars in the Cathedral of the Archangel Michael. At this time, Ivan also devised a new State Seal, recasting the insignia of his forebears into a Seal of Empire. On one side a dragon-slaying knight in armor – representing Moscow – was centrally and impressively depicted on the breastplate of a double-headed eagle. The eagle’s heads were spanned by a single crown, and the whole image encircled by twelve territorial medallions or seals, arranged clockwise to correspond to their sequence in Ivan’s title. A thirteenth seal, surmounting them all, depicted a three-beamed cross with the skull of Adam on Calvary. The three beams stood for the Three Romes of Christian history, and the cross itself (established by the Stoglav Council in answer to Ivan’s eighth question, “What should the form of the Cross be?”) for the Orthodox Christian Empire. On the reverse, likewise encircled by twelve territorial seals,* was depicted a unicorn, signifying the power of the righteous (Deuteronomy 33:17 and Psalm 92:10), and perhaps universal dominion: “And his horns are like the horns of unicorns: with them he shall push the people together to the ends of the earth.” The two inscriptions read: “The banner of Christ gives honor to the Christians,” and “Jesus Christ, the King of Salvation, reigns – Calvary leads to Paradise.”11
Ivan’s new state seal.
Yet, another reality was unfolding behind the scenes. To begin with, Ivan’s Livonian intrigues were not panning out. In the fall of 1563, he made contact with a certain Count Artz who controlled the castles Sigismund had pawned to Johan for his loan. Erik and Sigismund both claimed them, but Artz offered to sell them to the tsar; and on November 8, 1563, confirmed the deal. Unwilling to tolerate their loss, the Poles captured Artz, brought him to Riga, and had him publicly torn apart with iron hooks. None of the castles fell into Ivan’s hands. Disappointed, he plotted revenge. In January 1564, after negotiations with Poland had concluded, according to tradition, with an exchange of insults and impossible demands, Russian troops from Polotsk and Smolensk converged on Minsk to the south. But near Vitebsk one regiment was ambushed and, driven south toward Chasniki, wiped out on the banks of the Ula River. Units marching to meet it were annihilated near Orsha.
These setbacks took place against a background of deepening domestic turmoil and personal loss. On November 24, 1563, Ivan’s brother Yury died, and one month later, the venerable Metropolitan Makary.
Toward the end of his life Makary had exerted little influence over the tsar, but in May 1563, he interceded with him on behalf of Vladimir Staritsky and his mother Evfrosinia, who had been denounced and arrested. Though a trial was averted, Staritsky’s retainers were disarmed and replaced by Kremlin spies; and in August, Evfrosinia took the veil.
On December 3, Ivan visited the dying hierarch. They reminisced together about the metropolitan’s long and illustrious career, but despite the lingering affection between them, when Makary asked (on the 21st) to be allowed to die at the monastery of his novitiate, Ivan refused. On December 31, Makary was dead.
His successor, promptly chosen by the tsar and confirmed by a Church Council in February 1564, was Afanasy, Makary’s protégé and the archpriest of the Chudov Monastery. Formerly called Andrey, he had been the tsar’s confessor since 1550, and (it is conjectured) chief editor of the Book of Degrees. As metropolitan, he would be the first to don the white cowl “with the cherubim sewn on each shoulder.”12
The mantle was to prove a heavy one to wear.
* * *
* Some of the medallions representing Livonian localities had been hastily incorporated: the coat of arms of Reval, for example, was confused with that of Wenden, and Riga was represented by the escutcheon of the von Fiirstenbergs. Oddly enough, Smolensk was also confused with Tver.
* * *
22
Sacrifices to Cronus
THE CHOSEN COUNCIL and its allies had constituted a bridge within the government between various factions and interests, especially in mediating between the nobility and the tsar. It had helped to strengthen the monarchy, but it had also helped restrain it. As a composite group, made up of lord and gentry, lowborn and high, its art of government had combined striking initiative with broad compromise. In the wake of its demise came polarization and strife. Long-standing issues between the sovereign and his nobles over their respective rights and prerogatives were resurrected anew. Ivan stood upon his lineage and divine right to rule; they idealized the vanished era of their independent princedoms, while having before them the “progressive” example of contemporary Poland, where the magnates, in a “democracy of nobles,” had so reduced the style and power of the king as to make him almost a first among equals.
Though inconceivable in Muscovy, such a spectacle sharpened the aristocracy’s awareness, by contrast, of how much their dignity had declined.
Nor was the end of that decline in sight. Like other sixteenth-century monarchs, Ivan had allied himself with the rising gentry, who shared an interest in breaking down the bastions of wealth and privilege in favor of a strong centralized state. As a youth, he had helplessly watched certain families “wax mightie and enlarge themselves,”1 but once enthroned had begun “by degrees to clip of their greatnes, and to bring it down to a lesser proportion.”2 With the help of the Chosen Council, he transformed their holdings into service tenure estates; obliged many to find peers willing to guarantee their loyalty by posting bond; confiscated all property bought or sold by princes during his minority, on the grounds that they had neglected to secure the throne’s permission; and in 1562 decreed that the land of anyone without male heirs was to escheat to the tsar, “who would provide a life portion for the widow, dowries for the daughters, and prayers for the deceased.”3 He encouraged precedence disputes; “made advantage [among the aristocrats] of their malice and contentions, the one against the other, by receiving devised matter [slander] and accusation
s of secret practise and conspiracies to be intended against his person and state,”4 so that in punishing individuals for treason, he “cut them off with the good liking of the rest.”
But though Ivan enjoyed a kind of tyranny over individuals, in ruling jointly with his boyar and Church councils he increasingly chafed over the limitations of his power. Particularly with respect to the imperatives of precedence, no slow promotion of comparatively lowborn gentry through the ranks could, within his own lifetime, replace the boyars in sufficient numbers so as to place the administration of policy under the direction of a true civil-servant class. This situation was intolerable to him – for autocratic, not “progressive,” reasons: he wanted people who would do his will.
Accordingly, he began to surround himself with sycophants and flunkies – men who, “kissing his fingers and wallowing at his feet, flatter and placate him in every way.”5 Clergymen began to “show too much indulgence to him,” wrote a dissident. “No one intercedes, but all seek to get rich. And if any man is faithful to the Lord and speaks the truth, he is imprisoned, tortured, and killed.” He grew more licentious, was apparently drinking heavily, and in keeping with a certain developing addiction to masked balls, began to show his talent for theatrical executions. One victim, Prince Mikhail Repnin, a member of the Duma, had publicly rebuked him for his unseemly behavior. A few days later, as Repnin stood in church during an all-night reading of the Gospel, he was slain “at the very altar like an innocent lamb of God.”6 That same night another noble, Prince Yury Kashin, was slain “on his way to Matins.”7
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