The Russians had with them a great, prefabricated mobile fortress that they hastily assembled atop a nearby hill. It bristled with cannon, and as Khvorostinin retreated before a counterattack, he lured the enemy well within range of their fire, with devastating effect.
The Tatars regrouped; the Russians entrenched themselves around their fortress and stationed some 3000 musketeers at the foot of the hill. In a massive Tatar assault on the following day the musketeers were annihilated, but around the fortress the fighting raged until evening, and enemy losses were such that although the Russians were outnumbered three to one, the khan spent the next two days trying to reconstitute his army. Meanwhile, the Russians were running out of provisions, and in starvation began to slaughter their horses for meat.
In this grim stand-off, luck tipped the scales. During a rash reconnaissance foray close to the fortress, Divey Mirza, Devlet’s eldest son and heir, was captured. At first the Russians were ignorant of their prize, but during the interrogation of some captives, one of them, asked what the plans of the Tatars were, replied: “All our plans are with you, because you have Divey Mirza.”8 The prince was located and brought to Vorotynsky’s tent, where his witless admirer confirmed his identity by throwing himself at his feet.
Devlet resolved to liberate his son at all costs. In suicidal abandon on August 2 he threw everything he had against the fortress, and in conjunction with cavalry charges, thousands of Tatars actually rushed to the walls and tried to push them over with their hands. Toward evening, Vorotynsky secretly led a large contingent out of the fortress, “made his way along the bottom of a declivity behind it, and came out to the rear of the enemy.”9 Khvorostinin remained inside with a small body of cavalry and a skeleton crew to man the artillery. At a signal, the cavalry charged, artillery fired, and Vorotynsky attacked the Tatars from behind. The result was a complete rout.
Ivan learned of the victory at Novgorod on August 6, and immediately sloughed off his abject humility like a serpent’s winter skin. He wrote another insulting letter to Johan, and promised to invade Swedish Estonia before the end of the year.
THE BATTLE OF Molodi was one of the three most important battles of Ivan’s reign. It delivered a telling blow to the power of the Crimea coincident with the Turkish defeat at Lepanto, and helped persuade Grand Vizier Sokollu once again to postpone the Russian problem and concentrate on securing Turkish positions in West Africa and the Mediterranean. In domestic affairs, it presaged the abolition of the Oprichnina. A reintegration of the nation was begun, as the two separate hierarchies in military and civil administration were gradually fused. Tellingly enough, when the fusion was complete, the numerical domination of the nobility in the Duma was not appreciably different from what it had been before the Oprichnina was born.
The restitution of confiscated property was less satisfactorily achieved, for in the burning of Moscow not only some of the property at issue but most of the petitions, records, and receipts needed to adjudicate claims had perished in the flames. What Ivan had appropriated for himself he also kept, and to some degree the Oprichnina itself continued, discreetly metamorphosed into his expanded Dvor, or Court. To the end of his reign, a large proportion of his staff remained former Oprichniki, now called “Court people,” while the tsar’s abolition decree of 1572 was certainly in keeping with the spirit of the institution† itself: “Anyone guilty of chattering about the Oprichnina is to be stripped to the waist and publicly beaten with a knout.”10
* * *
* Ivan’s colorful counsel against reckless territorial ambition was evidently derived from the Byzantine emperor Basil’s advice to his son Leo: “If thou hast strived to subject by arms the whole world, thou shalt have nonetheless after death but a space of three cubits.”
† Stalin in 1947 told the great film director Sergei Eisenstein (whose Ivan the Terrible, Part I, had been awarded the Stalin Prize, first class, in the previous year) that “the only mistake Ivan had made was his failure entirely to liquidate those who opposed him, and that the Oprichnina had been a positive force in Russian society.” Though implicitly warned, Eisenstein had his own interpretation, and in the following year Part II was condemned by the Central Committee of the Communist Party for showing Ivan’s “progressive army of Oprichniki as a band of degenerates in the style of the American Ku-Klux-Klan.”
* * *
36
A Medley of Monarchs
THE DEATH OF Sigismund August without heir on July 9, 1572, brought the Jagiellonic dynasty (1386-1572) to a close and threw the crown of the second most powerful state in Eastern Europe open to competition. For years, in anticipation of this day, ministers representing every court on the continent had been intriguing on behalf of various candidates. Their power, influence, and industry flattered the vanity of the Polish nobles, as their wealth aroused their greed. The German emperor Maximilian and his sons, the imperial archdukes Ernest and Ferdinand, Johan III of Sweden, Henry of Valois, duke of Anjou (the son of Catherine de’ Medici and brother to the king of France), and, strange to say (but shortly to be explained) Tsar Ivan IV himself, all rushed to the starting gate.
The Polish-Lithuanian constitutional union was still extremely fragile, and Sigismund August’s talents as a monarch were only truly appreciated by his subjects once he was gone. Upon ascending the throne in 1548, he had looked insufficient to fill his father’s shoes: physically slight and effeminate, and at twenty-eight, less energetic than his father had been as an octogenarian. His speech was soft and deliberate, clever and witty, like that of the ladies and corrupt priests of the Italianate court in which he had been raised, but there was hidden kingship in him, a far-sighted aptitude for policy backed by stamina and patience, and a broadminded cosmopolitan intelligence that made him the right man to manage the state through some of the most turbulent days it would see. The Catholic monarch of a Catholic land, he had taken Jews under his protection and allowed Protestants of all denominations refuge in his realm. Despite the subsequent arrival of capable papal nuncios to regenerate the Catholic Church, followed in 1565 by the first Jesuits – the vanguard of the Counterreformation – Lutheranism remained strong in the cities, Calvinism among the nobility, and the Orthodox faith among the Lithuanian masses. A number of the Orthodox were Uniates, who favored a conditional union with Rome. At the same time, a powerful educational movement, launched in emulation of the new Jesuit seminaries, attempted to check the spread of Catholicism in Lithuania through the founding of Orthodox schools. The chief figure in this endeavor was Prince Konstantin Ostrogsky, a fabulously wealthy magnate who set up three printing presses (with the help of Fyodorov and Mstislavets, the fugitive Muscovite typographers), as Kurbsky, Artemy, and other exiles threw themselves into the cause.
Despite the ethnic, class, religious, and other divisions within his double kingdom, Sigismund had miraculously forged the new union; and to preserve it from religious strife, his subjects had nobly committed themselves “in matters of faith to keep the peace among ourselves” by the Confederation of Warsaw on January 28, 1573.
In the jostling for electoral advantage, however, that solidarity began to come apart.
The Archduke Ernest was the favorite choice of the Catholic party; Johan, of many Protestants, because he appeared to be one himself and, having married the late king’s sister, inspired hopes the dynasty might continue by lateral descent. Henry of Valois, whose cause was richly advanced by Medici gold, was promoted by those afraid that a Hapsburg triumph would lead to confrontation with the Ottoman Empire. Support for Tsar Ivan (or his son Fyodor as a compromise choice) came largely from the Lithuanian gentry, who were ambivalently drawn to Russia by their Orthodox faith, and to Ivan by his reputation for humbling his nobility. They had also suffered the most from the interminable frontier war, and saw this as a stratagem for bringing it to an end. On the other hand, there was Ivan’s fearsome reputation, and the danger that if Russian power was brought to the edge of the Balkans, the sultan would launch a preven
tive war. It was not forgotten that the head of the last Polish king to march against the Turks had ended up in Constantinople preserved in a pot of honey. Yet Ivan’s candidacy appeared serious enough to prompt Kurbsky to write, at a furious rate, a whole History of the Grand Prince of Moscow, which chronicled the development of Ivan’s tyranny from his sadistic childhood (“conceived in ferocity, born in transgression and concupiscence”1) to 1573. His narrative of the tsar’s cruelties was conveniently corroborated by a harrowing eyewitness account composed by a Pomeranian, Albert Schlichting, who had served as a translator in the Kremlin from 1565 to 1569.
Ivan made an effort to be tempting. He told the Polish envoy who brought him word of Sigismund’s death: “I do not stand for Polotsk, and I am willing to yield it and all its suburbs if only Livonia up to the Dvina is ceded to me. And we shall conclude perpetual peace with Lithuania.”2 Though he declined to make Fyodor available as a candidate (“I have only two sons and they are like the eyes in my head”), he acknowledged his reputation for severity, but declared he had been harsh only to traitors. “Look,” he said, “to a good man I would give the jewelled collar from about my neck and the gown from off my back,” and as he spoke made as though he would remove them.3
The Poles had no desire to explore Ivan’s candidacy. But the Lithuanians, acting independently, sent an emissary to Moscow in 1573 to obtain assurances that if elected he would respect their constitutional liberties and return Smolensk. Ivan replied:
We know that the Emperor and the King of France have been soliciting support, but that is no example for us to follow. They are begging for honours, whereas we are sovereigns descended from Augustus Caesar. And this is known to all men. We wish to hold the Moscow State and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as one, as Poland and Lithuania have been. Polotsk with all its suburbs and Courland go to Lithuania, and Livonia to Moscow. The Dvina shall be the frontier.4
Ivan’s offer accorded with a scheme to partition the Commonwealth secretly proposed to him by the Emperor Maximilian, who hoped to unite Catholic Poland with Austria. In his communiqué, Maximilian had also condemned Henry of Valois for his part in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of Huguenots (August 24, 1572). In reply, Ivan had deplored the carnage as “so much blood shed without sufficient reason.”5
Nevertheless, in late April 1573, some 40,000 electors pitched their tents on a vast plain outside Warsaw, and in a great “Election Diet” reluctantly chose Henry of Valois to be their king. Before his coronation, however, he had to agree to a number of constraints on his power, including adherence to the Confederation of Warsaw and a pledge not to undertake any military campaign or levy taxes without the electorate’s consent. He was also expected to maintain a fleet in the Baltic at his own expense, replenish the royal treasury, and marry the late king’s sister, Anna.
Henry, twenty-two years old at the time, absolutely refused to marry Anna, who was forty, but otherwise acquiesced; and on February 21, 1574, he was crowned king in the Cathedral of Kraków.
Meanwhile, Ivan had resumed his aggression in Livonia. Keeping his threat against Johan, he brought a large army through Novgorod to the frontier, and on Christmas Day invaded Swedish Estonia, capturing the fortress of Weissenstein on January 1, 1573. Skuratov was felled by a cannonball in the assault, and in revenge Ivan roasted the fortress commander alive. Subsequently, dividing his army into three columns, he sent one south against Karkus, the second westward as far as Lode, while a third, diversionary force, attacked into Finland as far as Helsingfors.
Ivan was exhilarated. Resurrecting Magnus, whom he now affianced to Staritsky’s youngest daughter, Maria, a thirteen-year-old child “still devoted to her playthings,”6 he promised once again to make him King of Livonia. At their wedding in April, he personally conducted a choir of young monks – whose musical lapses evidently so annoyed him that he beat time on their heads with a stick – and afterward rambunctiously took part in the festivities, dancing and singing songs.
Two of Ivan’s most spirited and sarcastic letters also date from this time. One was to Vasily Gryaznoy, recently captured in a raid by the Crimean Tatars who hoped to exchange him for Divey Mirza. Gryaznoy encouraged the plan, but Ivan rejected it as absurd. He wrote to him:
Why did you tell them you were a man of prominence? When we were confronted with the treason of the Boyars, we had to surround ourselves with people like you, of lowly birth. But do not forget who your parents were!… As for trading Mirza for you, all you want is a soft bed. But Mirza will raise his sword against the Christians.
You should have been more careful, my little Vasily, when you rode after the Tatars. Or did you think that everything would be as easy in Bakhchiseray as cracking jokes at my table?
In a kindred spirit, Ivan wrote to the White Lake Monastery, whose abbot appealed for help in disciplining two tonsured ex-boyars who were living it up there in high style. “Why ask me?” Ivan exclaimed,
stinking dog that I am, evil and vile? Yet because I am half a monk, I will tell you: It is written, Angels are the light of monks, monks the light of the laity. So it is proper for you to enlighten us…. You have the great example of your founder, St. Kirill, and you have his monastic rule…. Is it the way of salvation when a boyar becomes a monk and does not shave off his rank? It is not they who have been tonsured by you, but you by them. And now one sits among you in his cell like a tsar and the other calls upon him, together with other monks, and they eat and drink as they did in the world.7
As usual enlightened observations combined with mindless violence: the hero of Molodi, Mikhail Vorotynsky, accused by a dismissed servant of witchcraft, was executed along with Mikhail Morozov, Kurbsky’s successor as governor of Dorpat. Morozov’s crime can only be guessed.
In Poland, meanwhile, young King Henry was proving his unfitness for the throne. Accustomed to the frivolity, obsequious flattery, and profligacy of the Parisian court, he had begun to curse the day of his election. Among other things, he was
disappointed by the poverty of the Polish countryside: by the wooden houses and gray fields which looked their worst in the damp spring. He disliked the Italian furnishings of the Royal Castle, and ordered a complete refit. He was bored by the constant debates in Polish and Latin which he could not follow, and was affronted by the argumentative demeanor of the senators and envoys.… He took to taking pills and potions, to diplomatic absences from court, and to long weekends at the royal hunting-lodge.8
In mid-June, when the death of his brother, Charles IX, made him heir to the throne of France, fraternal grief (if any) was expunged by his sudden reprieve. The Poles, to prevent his departure, virtually confined him to his castle, but on the night of June 18 he donned a disguise, slipped out by a secret exit to a gate that an accomplice had unlocked, and before Polish cavaliers could catch up with him had crossed the Moravian frontier. Poland’s loss was not France’s gain. Henry had been a non-king. In France he was destined to rule ignominiously as Henry III – “the New Herod” – until his assassination at the age of thirty-eight by a Dominican monk.
In Sweden, Erik in captivity (like Johan before him) had naturally become the hope and instigation of various plots. Johan moved him from dungeon to dungeon; his higher clergy counseled fratricide. “It is to be feared,” their spokesman said, “that we have rather offended than pleased God by not killing him thus far.” As the king pondered their advice, his German mercenaries in Livonia rebelled at not getting paid. When he gave them three fortresses – Hapsal, Leal, and Lode – as security, they mortgaged them first to Frederick of Denmark, then (when he failed to come up with the capital) to the tsar.
Soaring with confidence, Ivan reopened the whole treaty issue with Queen Elizabeth. Though Jenkinson had smoothed things over, new tensions had since appeared. Elizabeth complained of debts to the company that were piling up, Ivan of English soldiers fighting for the Swedes. Elizabeth replied, “They must be Scots.”
Ivan, who had Scots in his army too, nevertheless repea
ted his charge in August (“many Englishmen stood up against us with the Swede”9) and in a rambling, repetitive tirade again disparaged her “maidenly” estate of governance, and concluded: “If you wish for more amity and friendship from us, ponder upon that subject and do that business, by which you may increase our amity towards you. Order also your men to bring us ammunition, arms, copper, tin, lead, and sulphur.”10
In May 1575, Daniel Sylvester tried to persuade Ivan that the queen’s two letters of 1570 had amounted to the treaty he sought; and in her own communiqué she explained that in order to keep the league between them secret (as Ivan had required), she had been unable to confirm it, according to his demand, “by oath” because “the leagues which wee confirm by othe doe ordinarily passe our greate seale: which cannot be done but that the same must runne through the hands of so great a numbre of our ministers as in no possibilitie they can be kept secret.”11 As for right of refuge in his realm, she dared not ask for it, because if word got out her subjects might suppose she had some reason to fear them, which “would breed so dangerous a mislikynge in them towards us, as might put us in perill of our estate.”12
Ivan scoffed at all this in a meeting with Sylvester in November. He noted that he himself had been able to transmit sensitive information to Elizabeth in such a way that only one of his own counselors knew of it; and in a later meeting complained that he detected “a kynde of haughtynes in our systar toward us moved tharto by th’abasynge of our selfe towards her.”13 Sylvester asked him to elaborate. Ivan said: “Our mislyke consisteth in the scruple aunsweres of our systar, that she maketh dayntye to requiar the like of us as our requeste is to have of her accordinge to the symple and playne meaning of our demaunds.”14 Threatening to revoke the company’s privileges, transfer its trade to the Venetians and Germans, and negotiate a refuge in Austria, he indicated (as if England were Elizabeth’s private property), that had she merely been more forthcoming, “trewly our whole countrye of Russia hadd bene as much at her pleasure as England ys as frelye to have sent or commanded anye thinge thence as out of her own treasurye or wardrope.”15
Fearful Majesty Page 36