Fearful Majesty

by Benson Bobrick

  AS THE NEW crown auction got under way in Poland, the Emperor Maximilian dispatched a high-level delegation to Ivan to ensure his support. The second time around, the candidates were identical, except that Henry had been succeeded by Stefan Batory, prince of Transylvania, as the favorite choice of the Turks. Their recommendation was powerfully and immediately expressed through Devlet Giray, who in early October carried out a huge raid in the Ukraine. In November, the Electoral Diet gathered on the outskirts of Warsaw, and though a Senate proclamation restricted the retinue of each magnate to ten, and the weaponry they carried to the usual halbert and sword, some nobles were accompanied by as many as 1000 retainers, and every voter carried a musket, mace, spiked battle-ax or lance. Fierce political debate was accompanied by the clank and scrape of chain mail. Auxiliary cavalry outnumbered the voters, and a nearby field had to be converted into an artillery park.

  Stefan Batory (unknown artist, 1576)

  The Commonwealth appeared on the verge of civil war.

  The Senate was dominated by the papal legate Vincenzio Laureo, a partisan of the Hapsburgs; the Lower House, by Jan Zamoysky, “who fulminated so eloquently against ‘the craft and cruelty of the House of Austria’ that it determined, on November 30, by an enormous majority, to elect a native Pole.”16 No one, however, stepped forward to accept the honor, whereupon the Senate declared the issue settled and prevailed upon the primate of Poland, Uchanski, head of the interregnum government, to proclaim Maximilian king on December 10.

  The Lower House rebelled, nominated Stefan Batory, and on December 14, in the Old Town Square of Warsaw, elected him king of Poland by acclamation. Thus, at the end of 1575, Poland had two kings-elect.

  Coincident with these events, Maximilian’s delegation to Ivan, led by Hans Kobenzl, a vice chancellor of the Empire, and Daniel Printz, a counselor of the Imperial Appellate Court in Bohemia, had made its way to Muscovy. Detained and interrogated at great length at the border, however, they were not received by Ivan until January 24, 1576, at Mozhaisk, where in part to make up for the discourtesy, he made every effort to enchant them with the extent of his wealth, piety, and charm. Kobenzl in particular was impressed by Ivan’s cap “with a ruby as big as an egg on it that shines like a lighted lamp,”17 and his crown “more splendid than the Pope’s, so thickly studded with gems as big as walnuts that I marvelled how his head could support the weight.” Told of Ivan’s zeal for building churches, and of the pious ferocity with which he beat his forehead on the ground, Kobenzl was soon convinced that religious reconciliation with Rome might be achieved without difficulty – “increasing the number [of Catholics] at a stroke by three times the loss incurred recently in Germany and France.”18 This, despite the fact that he himself was clearly viewed as a schismatic, and during an Orthodox Mass had to wait outside in the church parvis with a dejected company of men “who had not bathed and washed since lying with women.”19 The credulous Kobenzl also found it hard to believe that the tsar, according to his reputation, was really “addicted by nature to all rigour and cruelty” (as another contemporary put it), especially since “he hath not an illiberall or misshapen countenance as was said of Attila the Hun.”20 On the contrary, he thought Ivan “friendly and sweet,”21 and his stature “so obviously noble that among several hundred peasants dressed exactly the same he would be recognized instantly* as a great lord.”22 Printz, more critically observant, has left us this brief but priceless portrait of the tsar at age forty-six:

  He is very tall and physically very powerful, though somewhat tending to fat. He has large eyes which are perpetually darting about, observing everything thoroughly. He has a red beard with a somewhat black coloring and wears it rather long and thick. But like most Russians he wears the hair of his head cut short with a razor…. They say that when he is in the grip of anger he foams at the mouth like a stallion, appears close to madness and rages against everyone he meets.23

  * * *

  * Compare an admirer on Louis XIV in his prime: “Even should he disguise himself, one would recognize immediately that he is the master, for he has the air by which we recognize those whom we speak of as having the blood of the gods.”

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  37

  The Enthronement of Simeon Bekbulatovich

  IVAN’S HABITUALLY ANXIOUS demeanor had of course been long in the making, but there were, at this time, new and remarkable reasons for it, which allude to the strangest episode of all in Ivan’s reign.

  While at Mozhaisk, Printz heard a rumor that Ivan had secretly abdicated and enthroned another in his place. And this, incredibly enough, was true. The tsar’s country estate at Mozhaisk had been hastily embellished to simulate a palace, and the embassy’s delay at the border had also been due in part to elaborate efforts to conceal from foreigners what was going on. The tsar confided the facts (if only vaguely) to Daniel Sylvester on November 24, 1575, shortly before Printz and Kobenzl arrived. “We highlye forsawe the varyable and daungerous estate of princes,”1 Ivan told him,

  and that as well as the meanest they are subject unto chaunge, which caused us to suspect oure owne magnificence, and that which nowe inded ys chaunced unto us, for we have resyned the estate of our government which heathertoo hath bene so royally mayntayned into the hands of a straunger whoe is nothinge alyed unto us our lande or crowne. The occasion whereof is the perverse and evill dealinge of our subjects who mourmour and repine at us, forgettinge loyaull obedience they practice against our person. The which to prevent we have gyvene them over unto an other prince to governe them but have reserved in our custodye all the treasure of the lande withe sufficient trayne and place for their and our relyefe.

  According to correlative information Printz obtained, this “straunger” had been anointed grand prince by the metropolitan in August, but without the Duma swearing allegiance (an essential part of the coronation procedure); and though invested with the barmy or mantle, was denied Monomakh’s crown. The conditional nature of his enthronement was more obliquely stressed by Ivan to Sylvester in a second interview on January 29, 1576:

  Although we manifested to thyne aparaunce to have enthronysed an other in th’empyryall dignitye and thereunto have enthrowled bothe us and others, yet not so muche and the same not so farr resyned, but that at our pleasure wee can take the dignitye unto us againe and will yet for that same ys not confirmed unto him by order of coronacion nor he by assent elected, but for our pleasure. Behoulde allso seaven crownes yet in owr possession with the cepter and the rest of the stately ornaments apertaynynge unto th’empyre with all the treasures belonginge unto each.2

  Who was this hand-picked “other... nothing alyed unto us our lande or crowne” – that is, neither a Russian nor a descendant of Rurik – elevated to take charge of the administration of Muscovy?

  He was a Tatar, Sain-Bulat, baptized Simeon Bekbulatovich, of royal blood and the former tsar of Kasimov, where he had succeeded Shah-Ali in 1566. A descendant of the eldest son of Genghis Khan, and the great-grandson of Khan Ahmad of the Golden Horde, he had converted to Christianity in February of 1573 and married the daughter of Prince Ivan Mstislavsky, whose mother was a niece of Vasily III. Though not a blood relation, he was therefore an in-law of Ivan IV, and his genealogical background and connections were impeccable. Moreover, as a Muscovite general he had recently distinguished himself in the attack on Swedish Estonia in the winter of 1572-1573.

  The Chronicles and other sources relate that after Simeon’s enthronement Ivan assumed the role of an appanage prince and called himself simply “Ivan of Moscow.” He lived in a residential suburb, “rode simply, like a boyar,”3 and passed on to Simeon “all the offices of the tsardom.” At the palace, he “sat with other boyars at a distance from the tsar’s place”4 and addressed Simeon in self-effacing terms, as in one petition which began:

  “To the lord and great prince Simeon Bekbulatovich of all Russia, Ivanets Vasiliev with his children Ivanets and Fedorets incline their heads.”5

  Why this very r
isky charade, such as “few princes would have done in their greatest extremitie”6?

  No one really knows. The most obvious explanation is that it was some sort of interregnum experiment, with a caretaker regime, while Ivan was under consideration for the Polish throne. But if so, Ivan was evidently also propelled to it by other factors. To begin with, according to the Piskarev Chronicle, soothsayers had warned him that in Anno Mundi 7084 (that is, the year in the Muscovite calendar beginning September 1, 1575), “there would be a change: the Moscow tsar will die.”7 He therefore perhaps untsared himself, and by putting another in his place, sought to give the fates a scapegoat. At the same time, ever the cunning politician, he made use of Simeon to implement one of his most controversial and abiding policy aims:

  All charters graunted to bishoprickes and monasteries, which they had enjoyed manie hundred yeares before, were cancelled. This done (as in dislike of the fact and of misgovernment of the newe king) [Ivan] resumed his scepter, and so was content (as in favor to the Church and religious men) that they should renew their charters and take them of himselfe: reserving and annexing to the crowne so much of their lands as himselfe thought good.

  By this practise hee wrung from the bishoprickes and monasteries (besides the landes which he annexed to the crowne) an huge masse of money. From some 40, from some 50, from some an hundred thousande rubbels. And this aswell for the increase of his treasurie, as to abate the ill opinion of his harde government, by a shewe of woorse in an other man.8

  In other words, Ivan attempted to test through Simeon the possibility of confiscating ecclesiastical property, and used him as a surrogate to show the Church and people how bad things could get, so that after conjuring up the hateful specter of the Tatars, his own re-enthronement would be greeted with relief. Whatever property he deigned to return would therefore be gratefully received.

  Yet another explanation can be extrapolated from one of the petitions Ivan submitted to Simeon in the name of himself and his two sons, which allowed him to select a new cadre of servitors, and to expel those he did not trust. “And when we have sorted the people out, then, O Lord, we shall submit their names to you and thereafter we shall take none without your Lordship’s express permission.”9 This lent a pretense of legality to an Oprichnina-like reshuffling of his court – but with Simeon, not Ivan, assuming responsibility for the action, in a procedure far more orderly than the formation of the Oprichniki corps.

  Peter the Great, incidentally, was to emulate Ivan’s morality play of self-demotion at least twice: once when he “enthroned” Menshikov and withdrew to a little wooden house; and secondly, when after the Battle of Poltava he “handed in his ‘colonel’s report’ to Romodanovsky, set upon a throne and dressed up to represent Caesar.” In both instances he “desired to give his subjects a striking example of the obedience due to the universal law of service.”10 In the summer of 1576, in what could be construed as a similar example of obedience, Ivan and his elder son were “assigned” by Simeon to Kaluga on the southern frontier “to serve against the coming of the khan.”

  Yet it is on Ivan’s rash remarks to Sylvester that we must finally rely. And they ring with psychological truth. Due to the “perverse and evill dealinge” of his subjects “who mourmour and repine,” he had decided (whatever his other reasons) once again to make a spectacle of going away.11 Just as in his abdication of 1564, he did this finally in order to be recalled – as Simeon’s role in expropriating church property makes clear.

  To the end, some part of Ivan would remain the hysterical child.

  But hysteria on the throne turns gruesome – inevitably, at least, in the case of Ivan IV – and the background to Simeon’s elevation is awash with blood. The preceding summer (1575) had indeed been a tumultuous one for the tsar. Among other things, he had sent his fourth wife, Anna Koltovskaya, to a convent; married a fifth, Anna Vasilchikova; defrocked Archbishop Leonid of Novgorod for witchcraft, sodomy (“keeping boyes and beastes”12), and the counterfeiting of coin; ransacked the house of his brother-in-law Nikita Zakharin in a punitive measure for some unknown offense; and obliged his new foreign secretary, Andrey Shchelkalov, “to gash the naked back of his young and beautiful wife with a scimitar as a sign of renunciation.”13 In the midst of these events, on August 2, 1575, he had also sent a number of officials to the scaffold; and on October 20 (a month before his revelations to Sylvester) some forty others accused of plotting his assassination were executed in the Kremlin’s Cathedral Square.

  A central figure in the generation of these purges appears to have been Ivan’s sinister court astrologer, apothecary, and necromancer, Dr. Elijah Bomel, a Westphalian by birth who had studied medicine in Cambridge, England. Imprisoned in London for sorcery in the summer of 1570, he managed to make contact with the Russian ambassador, Savin, who invited him to Muscovy. Possibly enlisted as a double agent, he was nevertheless anathema to Burghley, who was glad to be rid of him. After Dr. Lindsay was asphyxiated in the Moscow fire of 1571, Bomel supplanted him as the tsar’s physician and “lived in great favour and pompe,” casting horoscopes, concocting poisons, and surreptitiously conveying a fortune out of the country.14 Perhaps he was the mysterious soothsayer who had injudiciously predicted 1575 as a fatal year. In any case, by that summer he had begun to intrigue with Polish and Swedish agents with whom he communicated in cipher and, guessing that some part of his correspondence had been read, shaved off his beard, disguised himself as his own assistant (to whom the tsar had issued a pass to buy herbs at Riga), and with gold sewn into the lining of his coat, fled toward Livonia. But as he passed through the fish market at Pskov, he was recognized and arrested. Charged with treason and placed on the rack, he “confessed much and many things more then was written or willinge the Emperor should knowe. The Emperor sent word they should rost him.” Bomel’s revelations about plots and other (unrecorded) matters apparently led to the fall executions. Among those to perish was Archbishop Leonid, who was sewn up in a bearskin and mauled to death by dogs. Eleven members of his staff were also hanged, and “his woemen witches shamfully dismembred and burnt.”15

  On September 1, 1576 (Anno Mundi 7085), Ivan reassumed the tsardom and rewarded Simeon for his service with the governorship of Tver.*

  * * *

  * Simeon was eventually to pay a heavy price for his prominence. Removed from office after Ivan’s death, he was subsequently blinded and died at the Solovetsky Monastery in 1616 as the monk Stephen.

  PART FOUR

  DEMISE

  * * *

  38

  Stefan Batory

  WHATEVER THE EXPLANATION for Simeon’s enigmatic enthronement, it was symmetrical with Ivan’s habits of rule. Having at one time or another divided the territory, people, and government of his realm – choosing an “elect” even among his mendicant population – what was there left for Ivan in the ingenuity of his madness (or political game) but to split his kingship and give duality itself a seat on the throne?

  Meanwhile, the potentially bloody but wholly different double kingship of Poland had come to a swift but surprisingly peaceable end. Couriers dispatched to both Transylvania and Vienna had separately congratulated Batory and Maximilian on their election, but while Maximilian temporized (until he believed he had a promise of Russian military support), Batory sped for Kraków, as the sultan warned Vienna that any attempt to interfere with his accession would mean war.

  Thus onto the Baltic scene strode an obscure figure of Napoleonic genius – a relatively unknown prince from a tiny principality, whose unhoped for intercession in the Livonian War was to change the course of Eastern European history.

  Born at Somlyo on September 27, 1533, Stefan Batory had studied at the University of Padua (Europe’s foremost university), and after 1552 had devoted himself to the Transylvanian independence movement. He soon proved an outstanding general in battles with Austrian troops, and after 1562 took charge of the truce negotiations in Vienna, where his inflexibility so infuriated his Austrian co
unterparts that they arrested him. Imprisoned for three years, he emerged in 1571 as the Turkish candidate for the Transylvanian throne against Gaspard Bekes, the choice of the Hapsburgs. At this time Transylvania was caught as in a vise between the two great empires, each seeking to dominate the principality as a vassal state. Inevitably, civil war ensued, continuing for four years until Bekes was decisively defeated at the Battle of Maros on July 10, 1575. A few months later, Batory was elected king of Poland – suddenly making him the lord of two realms. Accepting the greater crown without hesitation, he entrusted the government of Transylvania to his brother Christopher, hurried across the Carpathians, and on March 23, 1576, accompanied by 500 Transylvanian knights “with leopard skins slung over their golden breastplates,”1 entered the Polish capital. Astride his huge bay charger, he looked every inch a warrior-king, while a black heron plume, fixed to the front of his tall fur kolpak by a ruby, completed the Turkish style of his majesty.

  The nobility, church hierarchs, and great merchants rode in stately procession to meet him. Near the castle gates, a triumphal arch had been erected with a mechanically operated eagle attached to the keystone. The bird flapped its wings thrice in salute and inclined in submission as Batory passed beneath. Cannons thundered their tribute from the castle walls.

  Batory agreed at once to the various constraints imposed on his predecessor, and even to marrying Anna; but if the turbulent nobility imagined for a moment that he was to be their marionette they were sadly mistaken. Convoking a Diet directly after his coronation, he warned that all who failed to appear would be condemned as traitors. And to the assembled aristocrats, he declared: “I was born a free man and I will guard my freedom with my life. You called me to this throne and placed the crown upon my brow. I will not be a painted or a ballad king.”2 No magnate, however mighty, could intimidate him. One of the mightiest tried and was executed.