Fearful Majesty

by Benson Bobrick

  It is not known precisely with what aims Devlet Giray had set out – whether to re-annex a slice of Russian territory or merely to launch a devastating raid. The khan was now an old man, and apparently ill. Two years before, Ivan had been told that “the insides were falling out of him and sometimes he cannot sit on a horse.”2 But on a horse he certainly was, and riding hard.

  Fortified positions gave the Russians the advantage, but it was undercut by two things: first, the hostility between the Zemshchina and Oprichnina units, who belonged almost to two separate homelands and lacked feeling of common cause; and second, the inside knowledge given the Tatars by Russian defectors acting as their guides. Thus, the khan knew roughly how the Russian forces were disposed, and one turncoat told him of a gap in the line through which he could ride straight to the capital, for “there is nothing standing in your way.”3 When one of the Tatar chieftains looked down at him doubtfully, he added, “If you fail to reach Moscow, you can impale me!”

  The Tatars overran Tula, bore down on Serpukhov, then swept west in a wide arc and crossed the Ugra River, just as Ivan, marching from Alexandrova Sloboda on May 16 with a bodyguard of 1500 streltsy, reached the outskirts of Serpukhov. It was now suddenly reported to him that his entire army had been outflanked and that Tatar detachments were just twenty miles to the west. He learned too that Temriuk, Cherkassky’s father, had gone over to Devlet’s side – perhaps because Ivan, in abandoning the Terek fortress, had proved an unreliable ally. Immediately he supposed that Cherkassky too might be a traitor, and had him shot.

  Meanwhile, Vorotynsky’s advance guard had been overwhelmed. Convinced of an impending coup, Ivan turned his back on his own country and “marched a wrong way,”4 as one contemporary put it, hastening first to Alexandrova Sloboda, where he stuffed as much treasure as he could in one night into chests for transport, then hurried on to Vologda, where he made ready for a swift escape up the Dvina to the White Sea where, if necessary, he could board a ship for England.

  The tsar’s flight utterly demoralized the army, which began to retreat in disorder toward Moscow. With the swift Tatar cavalry on its heels, the commanders were barely able to regroup in a coherent defense. Mstislavsky deployed his troops into the western suburbs inside a loop formed by the Moscow River; Belsky occupied the river’s north bank from the Kremlin to the Yauza; across the Yauza, to the east, Vorotynsky was erecting barricades; while the Oprichniki, organized by Temkin-Rostovsky, took up positions in their own district. All tactical planning, however, was frustrated by the tens of thousands of refugees streaming into the city, crushing one another against the gates, where in a mingled tumult soldiers and civilians trampled each other down.

  Just before sunrise on the 24th of May (Ascension Day in the Orthodox calendar), the Tatars crossed the ford near the Novodevichy Monastery, stormed the Oprichnina quarter, and set it ablaze. As in the conflagration of 1547, the day had dawned “clere, fayre & calme,”5 but an unlucky wind arose and blew like a gale. The fire spread through the suburbs, devoured the Kitaygorod, surged over the Kremlin walls, and set off explosions in the powder magazines in the towers. Soon “ther was nothynge but whirlwynds & such noyse as thoughe the hevens shuld have fallen” as the fire “went on with such rage that it consumed the greater part of the citie almost within the space of foure houres.”6 At the beginning of the siege, it is said, all the church bells in Moscow began pealing, then one by one fell silent as they cracked, melted, or fell.

  The Tatars had surrounded the city. No one could escape. The metropolitan shut himself up with some of the clergy in the Cathedral of the Assumption. Belsky, to whom the defense of the city had been particularly entrusted, was asphyxiated in a Kremlin vault. The tsar’s English physician, Arnold Lindsay, and twenty-five London merchants also perished, along with the English lions Ivan had kept in the Kremlin moat. Those not burned to death were smothered by the “fierie eyre”7: fully half the population of Moscow and its environs – some 60,000 at least, it is conservatively believed, though contemporary accounts claimed up to a million. “Mosco,” wrote one eyewitness, “is burnt every sticke”; another: “The citie is nothynge but walls.… I pray God I never see the lyke agayne.”8

  As the Tatars withdrew into the Steppe (with Vorotynsky in brave but hopeless pursuit), they took with them thousands of captives and laid waste far and wide. “What with the Crimme on the one side, and with his crueltie on the other,” wrote an Englishman, “[the tsar] hath but few people left.”9 Russians had not seen such destruction at a stroke since the days of Khan Tokhtamysh of the Golden Horde. It would take many months just to cleanse the rivers, ditches, cellars, and streets of the dead, when “noe man could pass for the putrefaction of the air”;10 and the outer town of Moscow was not to be fully restored for another twenty years.

  WITH APPALLING UNANIMITY, the English interpreted the calamity as a “fear-full reveng and spectacle to al generacions,”11 and “juste punyshment of God on such a wycked natyon.”12 And more often than not they singled out sodomy as the principal reason for celestial wrath. Few tears were shed for suffering humanity.

  Ivan looked for scapegoats to extinguish the memory of his cowardice. The Russian defeat had profoundly discredited the Oprichnina troops in his eyes, and to begin with he executed three of its commanders: Lev Saltykov, Temkin-Rostovsky, and Peter Zaitsev. Zaitsev (a charter member of the guard) was hanged from his own court gate. A staged confession of complicity was also exacted from the senior Zemshchina commander, Ivan Mstislavsky, after Vasily Schchelkalov arrested one of his servants and “threatened to roast him over an open fire”13 if he refused to charge his master with collaborating with the khan. By prearrangement, however, Metropolitan Kirill and other Church worthies “interceded” for his life, and three boyars put up 20,000 rubles for his bond. This sum in turn was collected in varying amounts from 285 others, in a flamboyant display of collective responsibility.

  Mstislavsky, who remained Ivan’s confidant, cooperated in the sham. Briefly “banished” to Novgorod, an inconceivably horrible doom would surely have been his fate if he had really been responsible for the catastrophe.

  DURING JENKINSON’S PROVIDENTIAL delay at Kholmogory, Ivan’s new misfortunes had tempered his wrath toward Elizabeth and her envoy. He needed England now more than ever, even as the personal danger he faced had recently been brought home to him anew by the death of his third wife, Marfa Sobakina, from poison two weeks after their marriage in the fall of 1571. It was therefore a most conciliatory tsar that Jenkinson met with at Alexandrova Sloboda on March 23, 1572:

  I came before his majestie, who caused mee to kisse his hande, and gave gratious audience unto my oration, gratefully receiving and accepting the Queenes majesties princely letters, and her present, in the presence of all his nobilitie…. Then sitting downe againe, he commaunded all... to depart, and avoyde the chamber, saving the chiefe secretarie and one other of the counsell, and willing me to approoch neere unto him with my interpretor, said unto me these words.

  Anthony, the last time thou wast with us heere, wee did commit unto thee our trustie and secret message, to be declared unto the queenes majestie herselfe thy mistresse at thy coming home, and did expect they comming unto us againe at the time wee appointed, with a full answere of the same from her highnesse. And in the meane time, there came unto us at severall times three measengers... about... merchaunts affaires,

  which embassies he reviewed until at last, he explained, a tentative understanding had been reached with Randolph at Vologda about “princely affaires,” which Savin had endeavored to consummate.14

  Jenkinson replied that Randolph had denied reaching any new agreement, and that the queen had also conferred with Savin until everything had “seemed to his own contentment.”15 Paraphrasing Elizabeth’s letter, he again reminded the tsar of the special shipments Russia had received, and that English ships (under Sir William Garret) two years before had “fought with the King of Poles shippes freebooters, and burnt the same and sl
ew the people, and as many as were taken alive delivered unto thy captaine at the Narve, I trust thy highness doth not forget.”16 Accordingly, he asked for restoration of company privileges, and that Rutter, Glover, and Chappell – “such rebels of our nation as… lye lurking here seeking to sowe dissentions betwixt our majesties”17 – be remanded into his custody. After pausing a while, Ivan biblically replied: “It is nowe time which we spend in fasting, and praying, being the weeke before Easter, and for that we will shortly depart from hence… you shall goe and tary us upon the way, where wee will shortly come, and then you shall knowe our pleasure and have your dispatch.”18

  Actually, the immediate item on Ivan’s agenda was his marriage to Anna Koltovskaya, the daughter of a minor noble from Kostroma. Since a fourth marriage was considered uncanonical, Ivan proclaimed that his third wife Marfa had died a maid. Archbishop Leonid of Novgorod, interim head of the Church after the death of Metropolitan Kirill on February 8, 1572, convoked a council of bishops in March essentially to condone the tsar’s wish, but in a face-saving measure the body imposed penance on Ivan for a year.

  Jenkinson tarried in Tver until May 13, when Ivan summoned him to Staritsa. Declaring himself satisfied that Jenkinson had been a faithful envoy between himself and the queen, he nevertheless rejected the notion that any satisfactory alliance had ever been forged between the two nations; and though he was prepared for the moment to let it go, “because our minde is now otherwise charged, and we will not ymportunate our Syster any further,”19 at a later date he let it be known, “when occasion shall move us to the like, wee will talke of those matters againe.”

  Ivan restored the company’s privileges, but (as he was wont to do) coupled his generosity with a veiled threat: “If the queene our sister had not sent thee Anthony unto us, God knoweth what we should have done to [certain offending] merchants, or whether we would have called back our indignation.”20

  * * *

  35

  The Battle of Molodi

  IVAN’S CONDUCT TOWARD other monarchs soon discarded all pretext of civility. His diplomacy with Sweden, in particular, was based on insult. Aware that Johan was struggling to consolidate his hold on the throne, he hastened to impugn his right to it by casting aspersions on his lineage. “Your father, Gustav,” he wrote, “whose son was he? When our merchants used to go to Sweden with wax and tallow in his reign, did they not see him put on gloves and go as far as Vyborg to turn the merchandise over, and haggle about the prices? And you talk of the kings who were your predecessors! What kings? Where did you find them? In your larder?”1

  But Ivan got as good as he gave. Shortly before the conference with Jenkinson, Devlet Giray’s envoy had arrived, accompanied by an imposing mounted escort of Tatar nobles in long black sheepskin kaftans with “curious rich scimitars” buckled to their hips.2 The tsar at first disparaged their office, shut them away in windowless dark rooms, and fed them on “stinking horseflesh.” But “tym was com they must have audience,” and, according to one account, the Tatar envoy, ushered in, “thundered owt without reverence in a hellish, hollow voice” that his master wished to know how his vassal (Ivan) “did like the scourge of his displeasur by sword, fier and famen.” Then, “pulling owt a fowll rustie kniff,” he invited the tsar to cut his own throat to end his misery. Four bodyguards seized him and in a scuffle hustled him out. The khan’s official letter to Ivan was comparably brusque: “I came to Russia to avenge Kazan and Astrakhan. I searched for the tsar everywhere but could not find him. Where did the coward go? If you don’t relinquish the khanates, beware! I have seen the roads and highways of your kingdom, and I know the way!” In an “agonie of madness” Ivan “tore at his haire and beard,” 3 but having recovered himself in a few days’ time, composed the following reply: “Tell the miscreant and unbeliever, thy master, yt is not he, but for my sins and the sins of my people against God and Christ, that hath given him, a lym of Satan, the power and oportunitie to be the instrument of my rebuke. [But] by [God’s] pleasur and grace I doubt not of revenge.”4

  He had to buy time. Through his ambassador in Bakchiseray, he indicated his willingness to cede Astrakhan in return for an alliance against Lithuania. “The sword remains sharp only for a little while,” he pontificated. “Too much use blunts it, and the blade might also break,” and he proposed one of Devlet’s own sons as the new Astrakhan sovereign, assisted by a boyar, to conduct the khanate’s affairs.

  The khan, however, had an agenda of his own. Russian prestige had rapidly declined all along the Volga, enabling him at last to unite under one banner most of the disparate tribes, including the Great Nogays, in an almost monolithic anti-Muscovite coalition. He saw no reason to settle for less than Russia itself. So certain was he of prevailing that he actually divided up the towns and provinces of the empire beforehand among his own nobility – who would govern Novgorod or Ryazan, for example, who Vladimir or Zvenigorod – and enlisted members of the Ottoman Secretariat for administrative advice.

  Hoping to withstand the inevitable coming attack, Ivan frantically endeavored to implement some of Vorotynsky’s recommendations, and according to guidelines laid down by the Zemshchina Privy Council, blended battalions of Zemshchina and Oprichnina troops into unified regiments.

  The Russians dug in along a fifty-mile stretch of the Oka River behind double palisades, with a long barricade of wagons and, to deprive the Tatar mounts of feed, burned the grass on the open steppe from the sources of the Vorona to the Dnieper and Desna rivers.

  Fearing the worst, however, Ivan decamped to Novgorod at the beginning of June and (it is credibly reported) brought with him 450 cartloads of treasure weighing 164 tons. By mid-July, the attack had not yet come, and Ivan wrote anxiously to an officer at Staritsa, “You must tell me without fail when the Khan approaches the river, and where he will cross, and which direction he will take. Keep a courier ready, equipped with two horses, and see to it that couriers are kept ready at Tver. At all costs keep me informed.”

  On July 31, a courier at last brought news of the invasion, but could tell Ivan nothing to ease his mind. A day or two later, in a fearful, tense, and penitential mood, the tsar sat down to draft his will, and began with a confession of his sins:

  I, the much sinning and poor slave of God, Ivan, write this confession…. My understanding is covered with sores. There is no physician to heal me. I have waited for someone to pity me, but found no comforters. From Adam to this day I have surpassed all sinners. Bestial and corrupt, I have defiled my mind by a liking for unworthy things, my mouth by words of murder, lewdness and other foul acts, my tongue by self-praise, my throat and chest by pride and arrogance, my hands by indecent contacts, by theft and assassination, my loins by monstrous lechery, girding them up for every possible evil deed, and my feet by hastening to commit murder and plunder.5

  He advised his two sons, Ivan Ivanovich and Fyodor, to master the responsibilities of kingship, but seemed to warn them against following the example he had set:

  Those who serve you in a straightforward manner you should favor and love, protect them from all, so that no one persecutes them…. And upon those that are evil you should place your disfavor, not hurriedly but after consideration, not in wrath. And accustom yourselves to all affairs: God’s, the priest’s, the monk’s, the soldier’s, the judge’s; to the way of life in Moscow, and to all the customs of daily life, and how the various ranks of government are dealt with here and in other states – this you yourselves should know….

  And you, son Ivan, should hold, and protect, and love Fyodor, your younger brother, and favor him and wish him well in all things….

  And you, son Fyodor, hold Ivan in the place of me, your father, and obey him in all things.… Do not negotiate with traitors and evildoers. And you two must not bicker, for even if one acquires much wealth or land he cannot avoid a grave of three cubits, when all that remains is only one thing: that which we have done, be it good or evil.*

  On his elder son Ivan he bestowed the
imperial regalia and the tsardom, but concluded: “Concerning the Oprichnina which I have established, it is now within the power of my children, Ivan and Fyodor [to do with it as they wish]; in the manner most advantageous to them, so should they do, but the pattern has been made ready for them.”

  Though in most respects Ivan’s testament conformed to Muscovite princely tradition – with its brief invocation, disposition of territories and possessions, and exhortation to his sons to live together in harmony – its long “confession” was unique, and (we must assume) reflected authentic anguish and contrition at the time.

  Meanwhile the Tatar vanguard had raced toward Tula, intending to cross the Oka above Serpukhov. Vorotynsky concentrated his troops south of Kolomna to interdict the routes leading from Ryazan to Moscow, and stationed his vanguard under Prince Dmitry Khvorostinin at Kaluga to prevent the enemy from advancing from the Ugra as before. When the first wave of Tatar cavalry reached the Oka on July 26, Khvorostinin “beat them back from the fords.”6 Devlet’s main force now drew up opposite Russian fortified positions, and on the night of the 28th Nogay cavalry seized several key crossing points. At dawn Khvorostinin hastened to cut the Tatars off, but was hopelessly outnumbered and withdrew. Other Russian regiments, trying to block them at the upper reaches of the Nara River, were repulsed. Suddenly Devlet Giray “emerged to the rear of the Russian army and began making his way unopposed along a broad highway toward Moscow.”7

  Khovorostinin, in pursuit, shadowed the Tatar rear guard, commanded by Devlet’s sons, and near the small village of Molodi, about thirty miles south of Moscow, took advantage of a break in Tatar ranks and attacked. The khan sent back reinforcements and the fighting spread. Gradually the march on Moscow was arrested as the Tatars redeployed. The main Russian army drew near. A pitched battle promised to develop in the open field.