Fearful Majesty

by Benson Bobrick

  This is not impossible. History affords numerous instances of incredible gallantry or courage in the face of unbearable pain. A contemporary Englishman, John Stubbs, condemned to lose his right hand for a pamphlet that had offended the queen, was hauled into the marketplace at Westminster where sentence was carried out with a butcher’s cleaver and mallet. No sooner was his right hand severed, than Stubbs pulled off his cap with his left, waved it in the air, and cried, “God save the Queen!” Under Charles I one of Cromwell’s “iron followers,” executed at Charing Cross for regicide, was hanged, cut down alive, promptly disemboweled and presented with his own entrails. In the madness of his agony, he rose up wildly and punched his executioner in the face.

  In England, at least, such punishments had followed due process. In Russia a kind of judicial terrorism began to hold sway. Torture, once an instrument of the code, began to dominate it; hearsay permitted a judge “to begin to pull a person’s joints out and break his bones, to lacerate his body with the knout and burn him with fire.”10 Peresvetov’s anecdote about how the Sultan Mohammed dispensed with corrupt officials begins to describe the pitiless new procedure of the law: “He did not accuse them, he simply ordered them flayed alive and said: ‘If they grow new skins, the fault shall be forgiven them!’ And he bade to be inscribed on their skins, ‘without such terror, justice cannot be brought into the realm.’ ”11

  GRADUALLY, THE OPRICHNINA acquired the wealthiest part of the state: the industrial middle, most of the North (remote from the Tatars), together with the chief trade routes and their flanking network of market towns. In the central provinces, Oprichnina holdings were interspersed with Zemshchina land in a crazy-quilt patchwork improvised to prevent the Zemshchina from comprising an integrated or continuous realm. Thus Russia was subdivided twice over, as the lands allotted to the new regime formed a wedge from north to south, dividing the nation-at-large in two. The borderlands and front-line towns – Novgorod and Pskov, Veliky Luki, Smolensk, and Seversk – were left to the Zemshchina to defend.

  In Moscow, a suburb was taken, with the Neglinnaya River serving as the boundary line. All those to the west were evacuated. Ivan himself moved out of the Kremlin to an Oprichnina palace in the occupied zone.

  Estate holders throughout Muscovy who happened to live in the reserved districts were evicted to make room for Ivan’s new servitors. Although large-scale resettlement and deportation, as used by Ivan III in the conquest of Novgorod, Vasily III in subduing Vyatka and Pskov, and Ivan IV in the pacification of Kazan and parts of Livonia – not to mention his experiment with the Chosen Thousand – were by now almost a familiar feature of Muscovite policy, nothing so wrenching had ever been attempted before. Some resettlements were orderly; but others were abrupt, harsh, and without pretext of equity. In exchange for vast estates, a magnate might get a small pomestie plot on a distant frontier or a patch of arid soil. Those not assigned land to begin with had to search for it themselves and stake their claim. Because many boyars were uprooted from their home bases of power, local military organization and criminal justice were thrown into disarray, as administrators were dispersed and replaced by inexperienced Oprichniki who knew nothing about the district to which they were assigned. In ways that eventually surpassed the worst days of kormlenie, they took a purely mercenary interest in how justice was pursued. Nor was the plight of the peasants under them improved. Most Oprichniki hoped to get rich quick or live high while the phenomenon lasted. Their rapacious conduct as landlords dealt devastating blows to the economic viability and legal status of the peasants and destroyed traditional manorial relations without putting anything stable in their place. “Many beautiful estates,” wrote a contemporary, “were quickly neglected and ruined as if an enemy had passed through.”12

  It is probably not coincidental that at this time Russia’s first Colonial Department, administering Kazan, was upgraded to prikaz or ministry status. Henceforth much of its work was taken up with the logistics of deportation, as the land under its jurisdiction became a place of exile for both dissidents and prisoners of war. In the absence of a unified prison system, the headquarters of the prikaz itself contained cells for temporary incarceration of offenders. “Kazan” anticipated “Siberia.”

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  24

  English Interlude

  COMMERCIAL RELATIONS WITH England remained unaffected at first by the domestic turmoil – though xenophobic tendencies showed themselves in other ways. Symptomatic of Muscovy’s regression, her solitary printing press was smashed by a superstitious mob aroused by the “guild” of professional scribes headquartered in the Armory, which saw its livelihood slipping away. Perhaps Josephians were behind it, for the two printers, Fyodorov and Mstislavets, both Non-Possessors, were accused of “Lutheran heresies.” Escaping to Lithuania, they joined Artemy and others in contributing to a great Orthodox revival.

  Though in some ways the Russian economy was prospering through the new flood of imports, its base was showing strain. To keep the war effort going, “both merchants and peasants,” wrote a contemporary, “are burdened with enormous taxes, extorted from them by unmerciful bailiffs. When one lot has been collected, others are being levied, a third is being sent for, and a fourth is being thought out.”1 Each peasant commune also had to produce one to three men to haul artillery and to sign a notarized guarantee that the men sent would remain with the guns unto death. In gradually increasing numbers, commoners had begun to “flee beyond the frontiers” into the wilds.

  Ivan counted on the English to shore up his strength. After Jenkinson had met with Viskovaty in 1558 to discuss an expanded trade agreement, the Russia Company had been digging in. Its three principal agents, Richard Grey, George Killingworth, and Henry Lane, operated out of Moscow, Vologda, and Kholmogory. Soon a fourth agent was established at Yaroslavl.

  Organized as a joint-stock company (the first of its kind to be fully incorporated in England), it traded as an entity, meaning that its members were not to trade individually for themselves or anyone else within the area of the company’s monopoly. All members were shareholders and by definition shared in the fortunes of the company as a whole. In the hierarchy of its organization, there were agents, salaried clerks, stipendiaries, and apprentices, most maintained at company expense. Though only a few were also employees of the English government, company and state affairs were closely intertwined. After Queen Elizabeth’s accession in 1558, some of her chief ministers – including Sir Francis Walsingham and Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley – had a financial interest in the venture, and whatever privileges the company sought from Ivan were usually first expressed in a memorandum to Lord Burghley, who “laid the matter before the Queen.”2

  Compared to the traffic at Narva, English-Russian trade by the northern route was modest, for the voyage was difficult and the port of St. Nicholas icebound from autumn to spring. Theoretically the shipping season lasted from May to October, but ships had to leave England no later than June if they hoped to manage a round trip, which meant returning from Russia by early August. The voyage out averaged more than a month, homeward about two.

  Nevertheless, the northern trade, on which England had a monopoly, was alone secure from blockade.

  The first stopover upon arrival was Rose Island, at the mouth of the Dvina, where the company had a mansion set in a pinewood clearing, supplied by a freshwater spring. Red rose and damascus, violet and wild rosemary grew in luxuriance about the grounds.

  After goods were unloaded, most were sent up the Dvina to Vologda, thence to Yaroslavl en route to Moscow. English exports included broadcloth, kerseys, raisins, prunes, almonds, pewter and salt (oddly enough) – nine and a half tons of salt, for example, in 1560. In exchange the company imported wax, tallow, flax, train oil, furs, tar, and hemp.

  At Kholmogory the merchants had their principal dwellings, warehouses, offices, and a great ropewalk where hemp was combed, spun, tarred, and laid into cable. Another complex almost as large stood at Vologda, 70
0 miles upstream.

  With Russia to preoccupy it, the company had more or less given up its attempt to round the north of Asia to Cathay. In 1556, Stephen Burrough, Chancellor’s one-time shipmate, had sailed past the White Sea, and continuing eastward until he “went in over the dangerous barre of the Pechora,”3 cast anchor near Vaigach Island. There he made the acquaintance of the Samoyeds, whose extensive reindeer culture he was the first to describe. However, he did little to improve their reputation. In exchange for a mirror and a couple of pewter spoons, a local fisherman led him to their “bloodie idols,”4 facing “bloody blocks... the tables whereon they offer sacrifice.” But his discovery of the head of a unicorn (presumably a narwhal) also suggested the proximity of Cathay, and he therefore pressed on, through polar mist and rain, until on August 22 he was nearly crushed by an iceberg at Novaya Zemlya. No further attempt would be made until 1580, when Arthur Pet and Charles Jackman failed to get past the pack ice of the Kara Sea. Pet barely made it back alive; Jackman went down with all hands off the Norway coast. For many years their observations represented the extreme eastern limit of what was known of the Arctic coast.

  A somewhat more rewarding, but no less hazardous, undertaking from which Ivan also hoped to benefit was the company’s exploration of a trade route through Russia to Central Asia, India, China, and Persia. Entrusted with letters “unto sundry kings and princes,” Jenkinson had set out on April 23, 1558, from Moscow with a Tatar interpreter and two companions for Astrakhan.

  At Astrakhan he saw what Russian conquest had wrought. The Nogays were treated as outcasts, and the city horribly ravaged with famine and disease. “I could have bought a thousande Tatar children, of their own fathers and mothers,” he surmised, “a boy or a wench for a loaf of bread. But we had more need of victualles than any such merchandize.”5

  Instead they bought a boat, sailed boldly into the Caspian Sea, and “sette up the redde crosse of St. George in our flagges, for honour of the Christians, which I suppose was never seene in the Caspian Sea before.”6 Sailing eastward along the coast of the Mangishlak Peninsula, they disembarked and joined a caravan of a thousand camels bound for Turkestan. When Mangishlak tribesmen harassed them, Jenkinson wisely sought out their chieftain who lived in a field “in a little rounde house made of reedes covered with felt.”7 On the 11th of October he reached Urgenj on the Oxus, where he delivered a letter from Ivan to the governor, and was told by some holy men who wrote “certaine Characters”8 in bone dust and blood on the ground to beware of thieves ahead. Shortly thereafter he was ambushed by Turkoman tribesmen looking for loot and Christians to enslave. Drawing his wagon train into a circle and making skillful use of a handful of muskets, he beat off the attack, but over the next several days his party was forced to eat their own camels, with only brackish well water to drink. On December 23, they staggered into Bukhara – the first Europeans to enter the city since Marco Polo three centuries before.

  Though welcomed by the local khan, Jenkinson failed to interest him in a trade agreement since the inhabitants were too poor to buy English commodities. He planned to push on to China (again like Marco Polo) but since it had already taken him nine months to get to Bukhara, and he was told it would take him nine more to get to Peking, he abandoned the idea.

  After wintering in Bukhara, Jenkinson departed for Russia on March 8, 1559 – as ever, his guardian angel by his side: one week later the city was savagely sacked by troops from Samarkand. For two months he trekked through waste wilderness, then, in a kind of improvised ship, with broadcloth sails and an anchor made out of a cartwheel, battled stormy weather on the Caspian Sea.

  Yet he did not return to Moscow empty-handed. Accompanied by envoys from Bukhara and Urgenj, twenty-five Russians liberated from Turkoman captivity, and a Tatar girl he would later present to the queen, he also had with him a generous sampling of merchandise and two gifts Ivan would prize: a yak’s tail and a Tatar drum.

  Back in London, Jenkinson prepared a valuable map of his travels that was included in the great Ortelius Atlas of 1570. Among other things, it corrected at least two important errors in the current knowledge of geography by showing that the axis of the Caspian Sea was greatest north to south, and that the Don did not branch from the Volga.

  No Englishman was to cross the same terrain for another 300 years. Though Jenkinson’s travels had shown that overland trade with the Orient was out of the question, trade with Persia for silk, spices, and other luxuries appeared more promising. Accordingly, in the summer of 1561, he set sail again from England, this time with goods to test on the Persian market and with letters addressed from Elizabeth to the shah. Ivan furnished him with safe-conducts, entrusted him with a secret mission, and arranged that he be accompanied by the Persian ambassador as far as Astrakhan. From Astrakhan (in the spring of 1562) he was escorted by fifty gunners on two brigantines across the Caspian Sea to Derbent, where he met with the local governor, Abdullah Khan, a small, fierce, but surprisingly friendly man who entertained him royally in his richly carpeted pavilion. Abdullah promised duty-free trading privileges for the English within his own jurisdiction and provided Jenkinson with a military escort to Kazvin, where the reigning Persian monarch, Shah Tahmasp, had his capital.

  The shah, however, was hostile. When Jenkinson tried to present the queen’s letters to him (written in English, Latin, Italian, and Hebrew) the shah said, “We have none within our realme that understand those tongues,” and demanded to know if Jenkinson was a Mohammedan or an unbeliever. Jenkinson said he was a Christian. “What is that?” he asked an aide, who told him Christians believed in Jesus Christ. “Dost thou beleeve so?” asked the shah. “Yea that I doe,” replied Jenkinson. “Oh thou unbeliever sayd he,” and expelled him from the tent. As Jenkinson left, sand was scattered behind him to obliterate his tracks.9

  Elizabeth I (The Darnley Portrait)

  Subsequent expeditions to Persia met with mixed success, but eventually the changeable shah agreed to negotiate a wide grant of privileges for English trade in return for “all sortes and colours of London clothes,” chain mail, handguns, suits of armor, brushes “not to be made of swines hair,” and “a mill to grinde corne in the field as they goe.”10 The English (always on the lookout for weaponry as well as spices) wanted to know how the Persians forged their thin but durable armor, and were gratified to find (after the forests of Russia proved disappointing in this regard) many yew trees at Shemakha fit for crossbows.

  A formal agreement was impressively written out in characters of azure and gold, and the Russia Company optimistically changed its name to the “Companie of English merchants Adventurers for Russia, Persia and Mare Caspium, with all the landes and countries adjoyning to the same.”

  But the company’s privileged status in Russia was in jeopardy. In 1564, Raphael Barberini, an undercover agent for a consortium of Antwerp merchants and uncle to the future Pope Urban VIII, had managed to obtain a letter of recommendation from Queen Elizabeth to the tsar by telling her that some Englishmen in Russia owed him money. Apparently not eager to see the company used as a sanctuary for fugitive debtors, she wrote in good faith to Ivan, on June 23, 1564, that “though an Italian [he] is dear to us.”11

  Her affection was misplaced. Barberini’s purpose was to discredit the English trade by convincing Ivan that the commodities he was receiving were actually not English but German and Dutch, and that just like the Hanseatic and Livonian scalpers, the English were jacking up the prices and skimming a profit off the top.

  Ivan may not have wished to disbelieve him, for in addition to wanting to press the English for better terms, regular trade with Denmark and other countries remained one of his principal aims. The Russo-Danish treaty of 1562, for example, had provided for Russian warehouses at Copenhagen and Visby, and Danish warehouses on Russian soil. Thus Barberini easily secured the privileges he sought, hurried home to Antwerp, loaded a sizable ship with goods, and set sail for Narva in summer of 1565. By prearrangement, the Danish king gave him
free passage through the Sound. On board were a number of items Ivan had specifically requested, including armor, turkey cocks and hens, kidney beans, cauliflower, pumpkinseeds, “good wine but not too sweet,” thick paper for printing, and marcasite for the composition of type. (Evidently, he had set up a press at Alexandrova Sloboda for his own use.)

  Queen Elizabeth was naturally mortified, and on May 4, 1566, dispatched Jenkinson (who had lately been chasing pirates off the coast of Scotland) to set things right.

  Her gracious but ironical note* to Ivan began, “We understand that Your Majesty holds our letters in such esteem that, out of respect to their contents You grant more favours to our subjects and even to foreigners, out of courtesy to Us, that We ourselves ask for them. This happened last year, when we recommended to you a certain Italian, named Raphael Barberini, not as a merchant, but as a traveller.”12 Explaining too that Barberini had misrepresented himself, she charged that he had meant all along to “deface her subjects trade.”

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  * The extensive and very revealing correspondence between Ivan and Elizabeth has been unaccountably neglected by Elizabeth’s biographers. Her letters reveal her at her shrewdest, wisest, and literary best, and Ivan’s responses are cumulatively as rich in revelations about his character and sryle as his celebrated correspondence with Kurbsky.

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  25

  The Zemsky Sobor of 1566

  FROM THE BEGINNING Muscovite diplomacy had sought to conceal the Oprichnina from the outside world, and before Lithuanian envoys arrived for important discussions in the spring of 1566, the Russian negotiating team was instructed to deny it existed. They were also to explain that the tsar was now living in a new palace, surrounded by his loyal subjects; and that those not so loyal lived farther off. To calm the domestic waters a bit, Ivan pardoned some of the disgraced, but on May 19, Metropolitan Afanasy resigned anyway in protest and withdrew to Chudov Monastery, destroying the appearance of a united front. When Jenkinson arrived on June 11, he immediately became aware of the new institution, which was clearly being felt as a domestic calamity. On June 26, 1566, he wrote to Lord Burghley: