This Emperor of Moscovia hath used lately great cruelty towards his nobyllyte and gentlemen by puttynge to death, whyppynge, and banyshynge, above four hundred with confyscation of Lands and goods for small offence, and specyally toward four of theym, viz., one wurryed with beares, of another he cutt of[f] hys nose, hys tonge, hys eares, and hys lyppes, the thyrde was sett upon a pole, and the fourth he commanded to be knocked in the head, and putt under the yse in the Ryvar. His Majestie is now buyldinge of a castell which wylbe fowre square and two thousand four hundred fathom in compas. A fort most strange and sumptuous, having dayly in number above ten thousand men. The stones for the sayd buyldynge ar fetched five hundred mylles.1
This was the Oprichnina Palace in Moscow, located “a gunshot away”2 (as one Oprichnik quaintly put it) from the Kremlin on a square of high ground to the west, where some of the original Chosen Thousand had been settled, and where the anti-Glinsky insurrection in 1547 had begun. If there was a hotbed of antiboyar “populist” sentiment in Moscow, it was there.
Encompassed by white-stone and red-brick walls, the palace had three gates, each surmounted by a double-headed eagle with extended wings carved out of oak and painted black. The gates to the south and east were sheathed in lead; the north gate facing the Kremlin was covered with iron plates and flanked by a sculpted pair of snarling lions with mirrors set in their eyes. Archers and musketeers continually patrolled the walls.
The principal buildings of the compound had stone column supports, but Ivan’s own residence was beautifully chiseled, carved, and planed out of fir wood, with a porch next to a low stretch of wall where he liked to dine and “catch the sun and breeze.”3
Nevertheless, Moscow could never be secure enough for him, and he also began to construct a separate, Kremlin-like fortress in Vologda – roughly midway between Moscow and the port of St. Nicholas – from where he could flee north if necessary, with family and treasure, to English ships on the White Sea. Urgently built over the course of several years, the Vologda citadel, with great towers and ramparts, had its own Cathedral of the Assumption, and was defended by 300 cannon and an army of musketeers.
AS THE LULL in the Livonian War continued, fighting on the Lithuanian front had heated up, though recent action was inconclusive. Veliky Luki had been assaulted by Lithuanian troops commanded by Kurbsky, but the Muscovites refortified Usvyat and built Sokol, a new fortress, on the Drissa River just twenty miles from Polotsk. The most urgent item on Sigismund August’s agenda was to unite his two kingdoms into a single realm, a task exacting every morsel of his strength. He desperately wanted peace, and the Lithuanian delegates accordingly arrived equipped with serious proposals. To begin with, they were prepared to cede part of Livonia – namely, Dorpat, Narva, and several lesser towns – to Ivan without contest. It was not a concession to be ignored, for it recognized much of what Ivan had obtained and gave him precisely what he had sought at the beginning of the war. But in the arrogance of victory, he insisted on territory west of the Dvina (to within a few miles of Vilna) and also the port of Riga, to which the king could scarcely consent.
To intimidate the envoys as the talks got under way, Ivan in a striking and unexpected move convoked a National Assembly (Zemsky Sobor) to confirm support for his objectives in the war. Such an assembly was almost unprecedented, except for the less diversified gathering summoned in 1549.
But it was not democratic. Made up of representatives of the Duma, the upper clergy, the gentry, the state bureaucracy, and the merchant class, it merely resembled the assemblies to which the Lithuanians were accustomed, in a kind of parliamentary dumb-show or “constitutional seduction.”4 All of its 374 members were Muscovite officials, selected by the crown, gathered at its pleasure, and obliged to deliberate on subjects of the sovereign’s choice. They were not there so the tsar could learn their opinions – their opinions were already known, and were known to agree with the tsar’s. They were expected to proclaim their support and transmit the will of the government to localities.
On another level, however, the Sobor showed Ivan’s common sense, for in order to prolong a costly and difficult war, he needed a public consensus among leading members of his nation. By giving representatives from the gentry (automatically excluded from the Duma) numerical dominance in its deliberations, he also acknowledged their incontestable political and military importance in sustaining the state.
The Sobor met from June 28 to July 21. Each “estate” made its recommendations separately; all backed the tsar’s negotiating demands and called for vigorous prosecution of the war. There was but one cautiously dissenting voice, and predictably it belonged to Viskovaty, who suggested that Russia refrain from demanding Riga so long as the Lithuanians also agreed to “leave Riga alone.” His recommendation was ignored.
Such “policy-making” by acclamation (which mimicked the rule of unanimity in the Polish Diet)* no doubt dismayed the Lithuanians, for whatever they thought they knew about the Oprichnina, it had apparently not divided national sentiment with regard to foreign policy. They left Moscow in gloom, convinced they were faced with a long and bloody war.
Yet Ivan’s intransigence in 1566 was to prove the greatest foreign policy blunder of his career. And its immediate domestic repercussions were dire.
In bringing so many officials together, Ivan had risked a coming together of dissent. Disparate elements met, conferred with one another, and concluded that the tsar might agree to abolition of the Oprichnina in return for their moral and financial support of the war. Having given him this, in the words of a contemporary chronicle, “they petitioned him orally, and handed him a signed petition [in mid-July] saying it was improper for such a thing as the Oprichnina to exist.”5
Meanwhile, a successor had to be found for Metropolitan Afanasy, who had laid down his pacificatory office in despair. The ecclesiastical component of the Sobor met as an authentic Church Council and after voting on secular issues, approved Gherman Polev (archbishop of Kazan since March 12, 1564), after his nomination by the tsar.
Gherman, a strict disciplinarian of the faith and a former prosecutor in the Bashkin case, had signed his name to the assembly’s resolution endorsing the Livonian War; but he deplored the Oprichnina and apparently lost no time in admonishing the tsar, in private, to stop the persecutions and give the experiment up.
Ivan, taken aback, secluded himself with his inner circle. His acolytes vehemently reminded him of his days of bondage to Sylvester and Adashev, and insisted that Gherman was trying to revive them. Fyodor Basmanov is said to have hugged Ivan about the knees and begged him to continue to be free.
Two days later, Ivan went to Gherman and said, “You have not yet been elevated and already you are trying to bind me,”6 and ordered him out of the metropolitan’s residence before he could unpack.
To the bitter disappointment of Novgorod’s Archbishop Pimen (who coveted the post) Ivan next nominated Philip, abbot of the Solovetsky Monastery, who had just arrived from his White Sea island parish as the assembly prepared to disband. Though he was also a risky choice – a Non-Possessor who administered one of the largest and wealthiest monasteries in the empire, yet the man to whom Makary had entrusted Sylvester’s imprisonment – in deference to the memory of the venerable Makary, Ivan was apparently not yet prepared to see a toady in the metropolitan’s see.
Born Fyodor Kolychev about 1510 of untitled but distinguished boyar stock, Philip had been strongly drawn as a youth to the Moscow court. His grandfather had served Ivan III as envoy to the Crimea, governor of Novgorod, and fortress commander in Ivangorod; his uncle had been an adviser to Andrey Staritsky; and his father tutor to Ivan’s brother, Yury, during Ivan’s minority. In 1537, however, several Kolychevs had taken part in Staritsky’s revolt and been hanged on the road to Novgorod.
Neither Fyodor, an up-and-coming young courtier at the time, nor his father had been implicated, but two months later as he stood listening to the Gospel in church, “he realized he could not serve two mast
ers” and that very night fled the capital with little more than the clothes on his back.7 Making his way anonymously by a circuitous route past the tributary lakes and swamps of Lake Onega, into ever more desolate terrain, he arrived at last at the Solovetsky Monastery, the northernmost cloister of the realm, located just within the Arctic Circle on a wild island in the White Sea.
Despite its growth as a community since its founding a century before, the monastery’s polar isolation was still almost too much to bear for many monastics. The rough-clad brethren were called to worship not by the resonant peal of copper bells from the towers of gilded cathedrals, but with an old stone hammer and gongs, and knelt before an altar slab of granite and a large irregular cross carved out of walrus tusks.
Fyodor, who arrived under an assumed name, was accepted as a novice, tonsured, rebaptized Philip, and eventually prepared under the tutelage of a starets or elder for the post of ecclesiarch, the monk who supervises the ritual of the liturgy. Over the course of several years, his exemplary piety, obvious intelligence, and devotion to the rigorous monastic routine repeatedly brought him to the attention of the abbot, who came to regard him as his likely successor. At length elected, in 1544, he unexpectedly declined and withdrew for three years into the forest as a hermit. Elected again in 1547 (the year of Ivan’s coronation), he accepted, and soon revealed the extraordinary administrative capacities that would bring him his first renown. Over the next several years, he set the brethren to clearing fields for cultivation, established a dairy farm, a mill, and a workshop for making leather and fur apparel, and developed a saltworks which eventually grew to vast proportions, producing 3500 tons of salt annually by 1565. Great storage bins had to be erected to house the monastery’s grain. To drain the swampland and bring water into the monastery from surrounding lakes, he built dams, an artificial reservoir, roads, and a network of canals. One of the canals, for sanitation, passed directly beneath the cloister itself. He also erected a hospital for pilgrims, new dormitories, and a fortresslike cathedral crowned with five cupolas, and furnished with a great copper bell weighing over 6000 pounds. In the island’s harbor he planted majestic crosses atop artificial mounds as beacons for ships at sea.
During Philip’s tenure, the monastery’s stupendous expansion transformed it into one of the great industrial complexes of the empire. It owned many villages and hamlets along the White Sea coast, and in return for the “privilege” of working and subsisting on its land, peasants had to donate considerable labor and produce on terms that were typically stiff. Yet it remained a community where monks also worked the land, and where agricultural and industrial labor was consecrated to God. Philip himself continued to reside in a humble wooden cabin where he sought to preserve intact the spirit of his vows.
Of all this no tsar could fail to take note. Ivan sent gifts: money to help finance construction, silk robes and satin shrouds to enrich the vestry, and two gold altar crosses adorned with rubies and pearls. To Philip personally he sent one of his favorite books, Flavius Josephus’ The Jewish Wars.
If there were others Ivan might have turned to in 1566, Philip’s life bore the circular stamp of destiny, as three decades after fleeing the court of Moscow in such desperate haste, he was summoned to return – “to wear the white cowl, and the martyr’s crown.”
Nominated for the metropolitanate on July 20, like Gherman before him Philip felt obliged to urge Ivan to abandon the Oprichnina and “concentrate on bringing unity to the land.”8 The tsar vehemently insisted that the Oprichnina was his “court,” and therefore his private affair. But he could not afford to force another holy cleric to decline. Uneasily, the two men came to terms. Philip publicly signed a document in which he pledged not to interfere in the tsar’s “domestic” arrangements, but pointedly did not forswear his right to intercede.
What did this mean?
From the beginning, the spiritual independence of the Church and the loftiness of its moral truth had been epitomized by its “custom of intercession on behalf of the disfavored and the accused.”9 That intercession was seldom disregarded, especially when attempted by the metropolitan, the second most powerful figure in Muscovy. Yet, except for a certain resurrection of its dignity under Makary, the office of metropolitan had long been in decline. Under Ivan III it had become politicized, as the appointment and deposition of Zosima, for example, had followed the fortunes of the grand prince’s campaign against Church property. In the following reign, Metropolitan Varlaam, a man of Non-Possessor sympathies, had enjoyed the support of Vasily III until 1522, when he was deposed because of his “constant intervention in favor of persons who had incurred Vasily’s disfavor.”10 Varlaam was succeeded by Daniel, whose notorious record as a marionette was to be unrivaled in the history of the Russian Church. Sigismund von Herberstein, the German ambassador, memorably described him in 1525 as “a man of about thirty years of age, of large and corpulent frame, with a red face, who, so as not to be thought more given to gluttony than to fasting, vigils and prayers, used on all occasions when he had to perform any public ceremony, to expose his face to the fumes of sulphur to make himself pale.”11 Another contemporary, the boyar Beklemishev-Bersen, said of him: “He does not instruct. He does not concern himself with anyone. He does not intercede. I don’t understand. Is he the Metropolitan, or just a plain monk?”12
During Ivan’s minority, the office became a plaything of court factions. Daniel, deposed by the Shuyskys, was exiled to the Volokolamsk Monastery and forced to sign a document in which he confessed his moral and physical unfitness to continue in the post – “an abasement which even Zosima† had been spared.”13 Joasaf, elevated in his place, tried to assert his moral independence but was publicly beaten and defrocked. Only with the appointment of Makary in 1542 did the office regain a measure of its clout. Initially a creature of the Shuyskys (or so they thought), Makary brought to his responsibilities exceptional political acumen and a strong, spiritual sense of Russia’s national destiny. In glorifying the Church, he had tried to furnish a living example of its majesty, and energetically revived the right to intercede. He interceded constantly, in fact, as if to re-educate both tsar and nation as to this unique privilege in the metropolitan’s role. His protégé Afanasy, however, had been unable to follow his lead; and after him Gherman had lasted as metropolitan but a day. The recent failure of the Church to intercede and remonstrate with Ivan about his overall behavior had also formed the core of Kurbsky’s complaint to Muromtsev, while previous intercessions had also been the foremost target of Ivan’s abdication letter to the establishment in 1564. It was the issue, because ultimately the Church was the only power that could limit the tsar’s tyranny. No one really questioned the tsar’s right to punish the disobedient – or even to execute. But the right of the Church to appeal for mercy – a mercy that was above the law – was also inviolate. “Executive clemency” cannot fathom its meaning: it referred to a principle higher than any secular prerogative. Moreover, every hierarch had a sacred obligation, as stated in the Epanagoge, a Byzantine law manual with which every metropolitan was familiar, “to speak the truth to the emperor and fearlessly defend the dogmas of the faith before him.” In fact, this very injunction was paraphrased and elaborated in the metropolitan’s own consecration vow – “not to be silent before the tsar in matters of truth. And if the tsar or his magnates attempt to force us to speak other than the holy laws, then we shall not listen to them, and we must not obey even if death is threatened.”14 Makary had reminded Ivan of this in their early struggle over the secularization of Church property; and the tsar himself had acknowledged it in admonishing the Stoglav Council: “Do not be silent. Correct me without fear.” Even Joseph of Volokolamsk, the arch Church apologist of autocracy, had ventured: “You should not obey a king or prince who is himself overruled by unclean passions, or who causes you to perform dishonorable and deceitful acts, even if he should torture you or threaten you with death. The prophets, the apostles and all the martyrs confirm this, for they
gave up their lives to infidel kings, rather than submit to them.”15
IN THE FULLNESS of his understanding of all such matters, Philip bravely accepted the metropolitanate and was invested with the office on July 25 in the Cathedral of the Assumption. On the floor of the nave a large double-headed eagle with extended wings had been drawn, and at the midpoint of the liturgy Philip was led from the altar to stand on this image, as he donned the white cowl – “representing the Lord’s resurrection” – and received from Ivan himself the primate’s staff.
As metropolitan, he then completed the liturgy himself.
* * *
* From 1505 on, no law could be passed unless it was ostensibly the unanimous wish of the Diet. The simple utterance of the phrase “I protest” not only put an end to further discussion of an issue; it ended the session of the Diet.
† Among other things Zosima had been charged with alcoholism and sodomy.
* * *
26
The Tsar at Chess with Elizabeth and Erik
IVAN’S MANEUVERING IN international relations inevitably began to reflect the derangement of his domestic policies. Perhaps Sergey Eisenstein meant to suggest this, as well as the complexity of Ivan’s strategic thought, when in his cinematic biography he showed the tsar at chess silhouetted against the gigantic, distorted shadow of an astrolabe with its intersecting bands encircling his head.
Fearful Majesty Page 27