Selim, the pitiable remnant of his father’s filicide, had none of his predecessors’ aptitude for government or war. His one, modest talent, was for poetry, but on the whole it was consumed by his passion for wine. Wine, he confessed, was sweeter to him “than the kiss of a young girl,” and he actually once broke peace with a major power to seize an island whose vineyards he prized. As it happened, the power was Venice and the island, Cyprus; and its acquisition was of such strategic importance that perhaps never has a dissolute impulse produced so significant a policy result. Its immediate harvest, however, was to consolidate a “Holy League” between Venice, Spain, and the pope, which made possible the historic Turkish naval defeat at Lepanto.
Generally speaking, Selim was “out of it,” and relied heavily on advisers, especially on Mehmet Sokollu, his capable grand vizier. During Selim’s sober interludes, Sokollu tactfully secured his imprimatur for policies already devised. In 1568, after negotiating a truce with the Hapsburg emperor, Sokollu decided it was time to address the Russian problem to the north.
The plan he came up with included an engineering project of fantastic ambition – a ship canal linking the Don River to the Volga – with a threefold aim: to enable the Turks to check Russian expansion into the north Caucasus by recapturing Astrakhan, and thereby cutting Russian trade with the East; to confirm the sultan’s prestige as Grand Caliph by reopening the pilgrim route to Mecca; and by linking the Black Sea, already an “Ottoman Lake,” to the Caspian, to enable the Turks to attack Persia from the north.
For some reason (which only lack of experience can explain) the canal itself was not seen as a difficulty, because the two rivers bent relatively close together where Don Cossacks were said to portage their boats across.
Kasim Pasha, a Treasury official, was given command of the expedition, and throughout the spring of 1569 at the Black Sea port of Kaffa he assembled ships, troops, munitions, and other supplies, including thousands of shovels, picks, and spades and big stores of hard biscuit for the march through barren terrain. Heavy cannon were shipped from Constantinople; skilled laborers and carpenters were brought in from Moldavia and Wallachia, along with veteran sappers and miners who had shown their mettle during the Hungarian wars. The Crimeans contributed their cavalry, and joined Kasim at Azov, where his flotilla of galleys arrived in June.
In early July, the galleys began threading their way up the Don, but almost immediately shallows forced delays, and it soon became apparent that heavy cannon and other material would have to be unloaded for transport overland. On August 15, the easternmost bend of the Don was reached, but it was found that the rivers were still forty miles apart, and the hilly topography not what Kasim had anticipated. He concluded at once that a canal was out of the question. Instead, for fifteen days his forces labored to level the land so that planks could be laid down to form a road. Some ships were hauled ashore and mounted on wheels, but a whole day’s exertions advanced them just a few hundred yards; and then the wheels broke. Extrapolating, Kasim calculated that the portage alone would take a year. Back to Azov went his galleys and heavy cannon, as he marched at the head of a diminished but still mighty host across to the Volga. On September 16, he arrived at the ghost town of old Astrakhan. The new city, built ten miles downstream on a midriver island, was strongly defended with artillery; around it, the wide, deep waters of the Volga formed a natural moat.
Ivan, kept apprised of Turkish plans by his well-connected envoy in Bakchiseray, had offered the shah of Persia muskets for an armed diversion in the Caucasus, but once the expedition got under way, he had to rely on rough dispatches from the field.
Unwilling to strip his regiments on the Western front, where battle lines were being drawn anew, he gathered reserves at Nizhny Novgorod and despatched a relatively small relief force to Astrakhan, which arrived just ahead of the Turks. This proved enough. Kasim discovered that the island stronghold was out of reach of his field artillery, while the Volga moat rendered his sappers useless. After Tatar reinforcements failed to arrive with provisions, he also despaired of mounting a blockade, especially with winter coming on.
He considered transforming old Astrakhan into a barracks and holding out until spring, when heavy cannon could be brought up the Don and portaged across for a full assault. But opposition to this plan was nearly unanimous, as the winters in Astrakhan were known to be bitter, with an average temperature below freezing, high winds, and heavy snows. The chosen alternative was no less grim, as the army set out for Azov, 500 miles away, across trackless wastes of unmitigated sand. The Tatar contingent, inured to the hardships of seminomadic life, sustained themselves on horseflesh and mare’s milk. But at the end of the month-long trek most of the Turkish army lay buried in the sands.
It is said that Devlet Giray was not unhappy about all this, because a canal would have enabled the sultan to expand his power in the Steppe, and in time to annex the Crimea as his own, ending the Giray dynasty. It is even said that he purposely doomed the retreat by leading the Turks astray, so that they invariably failed to encounter the few groves or oxbow lakes that might have relieved their march. However true, the Turkish venture had not been in vain. Ivan elected to abandon his fortress on the Terek (in 1571), and vouchsafed passage for pilgrims to Mecca through Astrakhan.
In the end, of course, it would be the Russians, not the Turks, who would succeed in building a Don-Volga Canal, though not until after the Second World War.
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The Sack of Novgorod
IVAN TOOK LESS comfort from the Turkish fiasco than one might expect, and seemed to attach more significance to the fact that when his cousin Vladimir passed through Kostroma on his way to take command of the reserves at Nizhny Novgorod, the whole population turned out to cheer him. This combined in his mind with some other recent unpleasant surprises. In January, the Russian defector Timofey Teterin, disguised as an Oprichnik, had persuaded the night watch at the fortress of Izborsk to open the gates. A Lithuanian detachment of 800 men rushed in after him, and though Ivan recaptured the fortress two weeks later, he went to extraordinary lengths to get his hands on the fortress commander, Afanasy Nashchekin, who had otherwise enjoyed a distinguished career. He traded a number of Lithuanian prisoners for him in August, and rode all the way from Vologda to Alexandrova Sloboda to see him tied to a stake and, like Saint Sebastian, riddled with arrows.
Beset by fears that Pskov and Novgorod might emulate the example of Izborsk – that is, capitulate at the first opportunity – he deported 500 “suspect” families from Pskov and 150 more from Novgorod to Tver; at the same time, profoundly shaken by Erik’s fate in Sweden, he looked through a glass darkly at Johan and saw Staritsky, the nobility’s favorite, who was also popular with the folk. Then, on September 6, 1569, Ivan’s second wife, Maria, died of poison. Though their marriage had been “politically” inspired, a chronicler reports that Ivan had also fallen in love with her at first sight. Reputedly wild, cruel, and dissolute, Maria had evidently inspired Kurbsky’s rhetorical question in a letter to Muromtsev, “Who is there to accuse the Queen of love of gold?”1 and it has even been alleged that the Oprichnina was her idea. In any case, Ivan reacted to her death by refortifying Alexandrova Sloboda and by expanding the Vologda Kremlin, which was now to include an adjacent shipyard to facilitate the transport of his treasure to the White Sea.
Staritsky of course was doomed. In October, a conspiracy was concocted around the palace cook, who had gone to Nizhny Novgorod that summer to procure salmon for the royal table. Apprehended, the cook “confessed” that Staritsky had bribed him with fifty rubles to lace the fish with poison. Vladimir was summoned to the Sloboda to confront his accuser, and in a brief trial at a posting station nearby (Skuratov and Gryaznoy presiding) he was condemned to drink a cup of poisoned wine. Afterward, his entire retinue and family were cut down by Oprichniki, and an assassin was sent north to strangle his mother, Evfrosinia, in her convent cell. The cook, his two sons, and even the fisher
man who had caught the fish and the vendor who had sold it, were likewise executed.
Two months later Ivan embarked on the most infamous atrocity of his reign.
According to the Chronicles, a vagabond malcontent by the name of Peter, from the Lithuanian province of Volynia, had a score to settle with the Novgorod authorities for some discipline he had received at their hands. Resolved to be revenged upon the whole city, he composed a treasonous letter to Sigismund August, as if from the archbishop and other inhabitants, which he concealed in the Cathedral of St. Sophia behind an icon of the Virgin opposite the archbishop’s throne. He then hurried to Moscow to disclose the conspiracy to the tsar. Ivan dispatched a secret agent to Novgorod who, of course, discovered the incriminating document in the designated place. And this led to the reprisals.
Recent scholarship suggests that although the facts are askew, the essence of the account is right. Apparently, a prominent Zemshchina boyar and artillery commander, Vasily Danilov, who permitted the mutiny and flight of certain Lithuanian prisoners of war, confessed on the rack to intriguing with Sigismund August against the tsar, and wildly implicated whomever it was suggested might also have been involved, including the Novgorod authorities.
This incident dovetails with the recollections of a Venetian abbot, who happened to visit Moscow a few months later, that a traitorous letter had been intercepted, either to or from Poland – evidently alluding to a “Polish note,” mentioned in the Kremlin archives, that two state secretaries had turned over to the tsar. Just as Chelyadnin and Philip (a prominent boyar and a hierarch) vaguely linked in a conspiracy had occasioned attacks on both the nobility and Church, so now Danilov and Archbishop Pimen (just as vaguely linked) occasioned the same opportunities for plunder, random violence, and revenge. One of the first boyars to be executed as a result was a certain Grigor Volynsky, hence the “Peter of Volynia” in the Chronicles’ account.
Yet perhaps “Peter of Volynia” is a still richer clue than that. As Ivan’s tyranny had increased, he feared that Novgorod and Pskov, as former democracies with past political affinities to Lithuania, would be even more strongly drawn by the new and powerful constitutional union that now joined Lithuania with Poland. The political ambivalence of the two former principalities had of course long been a factor in Russian foreign relations, and it cannot be forgotten that in most negotiations between Muscovy and Lithuania for a century or more, Lithuania had claimed both Novgorod and Pskov as her own as firmly as Moscow had claimed Smolensk and Polotsk. The spectacle of the new union, in beckoning contrast to the oppression under the tsar, might well have rekindled whatever democratic sentiment remained. And Volynia had shown the way, for after Sigismund’s famously bold act incorporating the province into Poland, its deputies had independently sworn allegiance to the king, compelling the rest of Lithuania to go along. What’s in a name? In the compressed and folktalelike Chronicles account, Volynia stood for the attraction of the union – that which Ivan feared most, and which called forth his wrath.
Whether the Lithuanian secret service arranged for some incriminating document to be intercepted, or not, as one Soviet historian suggests, is perhaps not so important as the story itself, which goes to the heart of what was felt to be at stake.
Ivan huddled with his favorites at Alexandrova Sloboda and decided to sack the two cities and to exterminate everyone in them on his “enemies list.” An army of 15,000, including 1500 streltsy, was mustered, and the night before setting out, Ivan got up twice before daybreak to go over his plans with Vyazemsky, in whom he apparently had absolute trust. It is said, in fact, that he would accept medicine only from Vyazemsky’s hands.
LOCATED ON THE Volkhov River about two miles below its outfall from Lake Ilmen, and about 110 miles southeast of where the Neva flows into the Gulf of Finland, Novgorod (much like Budapest) was divided in two. Its kremlin or inner citadel, with great stone walls and nine towers, stood on the left or west bank of the Volkhov and enclosed the archbishop’s sumptuous palace and the city’s five-domed Cathedral of St. Sophia. On the right or east bank stood the commercial quarter, where organized guilds of merchants had once flourished in conjunction with the Hanseatic factory Ivan III had destroyed.
Novgorod could trace its democratic institutions to 1019 when Yaroslav the Wise had issued the town a charter of self-government. Through its veche or town meeting, the people had elected their chief officials by direct democracy, much as in the ancient city-state republics of Athens and Rome. But sovereignty resided in the town itself, which was quaintly styled Gospodid Veliki Novgorod (“Lord Novgorod the Great”).
Ivan the Terrible and Malyuta Skuratov (Grigory Sedov, 1871)
A mile and a quarter to the south, on the other hand, where the Volkhov rises in Lake Ilmen, stood the so-called Rurikovo Gorodishche or Rurik’s hill-fort, traditionally the residence of princes expelled by the veche for malfeasance or for attempting to exceed their authority. As such, it came to symbolize hostility to democratic liberties, just as the Cathedral of St. Sophia symbolized the town’s freedom, prosperity, and independence. “To stand and die for St. Sophia” meant to fight and die for Novgorod.
St. Sophia was a great Orthodox cathedral, inspired by the original Russian cathedral in Kiev. Its western portal was furnished with a magnificent pair of embossed bronze doors dating from the twelfth century; and its large, beautifully proportioned interior was divided by rows of powerful, cruciform piers into five aisles, with three semicircular apses and a choir gallery. The nave and transept were beautifully lit by windows; the iconography included enthralling figures of eight prophets and the four evangelists; while the huge head and shoulders of Christ Pantocrator looked awesomely down from the central dome.
AS IVAN EMBARKED on his infamous revenge, the utmost pains were taken to conceal his intentions. “No one in Moscow,” wrote a contemporary, “even knew where he was.”2 Even the commander of the advance guard was kept in the dark, as each morning Ivan gave him a map pinpointing the next night’s encampment, with a warning to keep the location secret and under no circumstances to pick another spot. The expedition made a wide detour of the capital, and in accordance with methods he would soon use to enforce quarantines during epidemics, any wayfarer the troops encountered was killed at once so as not to herald their advance.
Wholesale killing and looting started in Klin, a small town en route, and continued in Tver, where the “rebellious” Novgorod families had been resettled. The inhabitants of Tver could only compare what was happening to them to the historic massacres by Khan Uzbek in 1327. On December 23, Skuratov rode to the Otroch Monastery, entered the cell where former Metropolitan Philip remained confined, and sought his blessing for the expedition. Philip refused, and knowing what Skuratov had really come to do, opened his arms to God.
As Skuratov left the monastery, he told the prior that he had found Philip’s cell “stifling,” and the former metropolitan already dead, “of neglect.”3 The prior found him smothered under his bedclothes.
In Torzhok and Medyno, families recently deported from Pskov were massacred, and many Polish and Lithuanian prisoners of war were shot. Nineteen Tatar nobles faced the same fate, but when they learned what was in store for them they managed to conceal long knives under their robes. As their executioners lined them up in a courtyard, they attacked, killing two. Skuratov was wounded in the stomach, and Ivan himself grazed before the Tatars were cut down.
On January 2, 1570, Ivan came within sight of Novgorod. An advance detachment had completely cordoned off the city with roadblocks and hastily erected watchtowers, while cavalry brigades charged through the suburbs slaughtering local militia and the armed retainers landowners kept on their estates. All the treasuries of neighboring monasteries were impounded, and some 500 clerics – abbots, elders, and deacons – were rounded up and placed under guard. Over the next several days they were regularly subjected to pravezh or cudgelings to extort a minimum of twenty rubles from each, and to force the disclosure of any s
ecretly sequestered wealth. Meanwhile, squads of Oprichniki fanned out through the city and sealed up the great mansions and parishes, posting sentinels at the doors. Most of the local dignitaries were likewise confined.
The Chronicles assert that Novgorod was taken by surprise. Ivan thought otherwise, but aside from a few high officials (who were helpless to oppose him) the Chronicles are probably right. In any case, Novgorod was so rapidly and efficiently occupied by Ivan’s guard that there was little strategic need for the elaborate earthworks and fortifications hastily created to secure the tsar’s encampment at Gorodische.
On January 6, he ordered the massacre of all monks who had not paid their twenty rubles or “redemption tax.” On Sunday, the 8th, he made his dreaded entry into the city. The clergy, carrying icons and crosses, met him on the Volkhov Bridge. Archbishop Pimen attempted a benediction but the tsar refused it, vehemently cursing the prelate as “a thief, a murderer, a traitor, and a wolf.”4 He proceeded to the Cathedral of St. Sophia, heard Mass (with a trembling Pimen officiating), and reputedly prayed with great fervor. Afterward, he went to the episcopal residence where Pimen had done his best to prepare a banquet.
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