Fearful Majesty

by Benson Bobrick

  Though autocratic, Batory was not a tyrant. In council he encouraged free and open discussion, and though a fervent Catholic who supported the educational and proselytizing work of the Roman Curia, he preached religious toleration and increased the privileges granted to both Protestants and Jews. “I may reign over persons,” he once declared, “but God has reserved unto himself three things: the creation of something out of nothing, knowledge of the future, and the government of conscience.” Indeed, despite the limited intelligence some thought to divine from his low brow and “savage Magyar face,” Batory was a man of broad Renaissance culture and capacities. Heidenstein, the contemporary Polish historian, wrote of him: “He was the incarnation of majesty, yet possessed of a strange sensitivity and simplicity, together with great humility. A high seriousness marked his contact with everyone, and as a lover of truth he easily recognized it in others and never avoided it on his own behalf. In many people’s eyes, he was unduly given to anger and to cruelty, but no person forgave more readily, and he had a long memory for services rendered.... It is impossible to say whether he was more feared than loved.”3 So, we may remember, it had been said of the young Ivan, in 1556; yet unlike the tsar, Batory conspicuously sought to the end to be above reproach – from his heroic entry into Kraków (to remind the Poles, after Henry, what a true king was), to the stern self-abnegation and chastity of his private life. Though his marriage to Anna was scarcely a romantic one, he took no mistresses; and in his disdain for luxury and all the ostentatious vanities of court display, hauled out his regalia only when it seemed necessary to demonstrate the authority and dignity of the crown.

  Despite numerous physical complaints – chronic rashes, hereditary epilepsy, and (like the legendary Greek archer Philoctetes) a mysterious, unhealing wound in his left leg – he made a constant show of vigor, especially to his troops on campaign. He spent whole days in the saddle, scorned stockings under his boots, ate his meals off a bare wooden trestle, and slept in his tent on straw or a heap of dry leaves.

  The works of Caesar were always by his side, but his knowledge beyond military affairs was also enormous, encompassing theology, history, medicine, magic, and alchemy.* Though he did not speak Polish, he did speak Latin, which was the language of the Polish court; and his knowledge of Polish history and contemporary issues was exact. Needless to say, he knew the pattern of the Russian invasions, which territories were under dispute and why.

  Though perhaps not Ivan’s literary equal, Batory had a convincing reputation for eloquence, “his every word,” according to Heidenstein, “so weighted that his speech assumed an oracular quality.”4 John Kochanowski (the “Polish Ronsard”) had nothing but praise for his Latin style – which meant something in a realm which boasted “more Latinists than ever there were in Latium.”

  When first notified of Batory’s election, Ivan derisively exclaimed: “Who ever heard of this man before?”5 He was to grieve that he had ever heard his name.

  THE FOREMOST EARLY challenge to the king came from the “free city” of Danzig at the mouth of the Vistula, which controlled the main artery of Polish commerce with the outside world. Under the pretext of remaining faithful to the Hapsburg cause, it immediately attempted (with Danish connivance) to secede.

  Batory mounted a blockade, declared the burghers outlaws, and after failing to subdue the city by land assaults and heavy bombardments, began building a Polish squadron at Elbing to intercept the Danish convoys resupplying the port by sea. When he started to dredge an artificial channel to divert the Vistula from Danzig to Elbing, horrified Danzigers tried to plunder the rival port but were driven off by Hungarian platoons. Danzig’s ultimate capitulation ended a challenge which might have destroyed Batory as a king, but instead reinforced his reputation for invincibility. Meanwhile, he had managed to mend his relations with the pope, who had favored the election of Maximilian, and had reaffirmed his amicable relations with the Turks, who pledged to restrain their Crimean vassals from raiding the Ukraine. Thus, by 1577 Batory was freed to concentrate on defending the borders of Western Christendom, as he saw it, from the onslaughts of Moscow and its “Scythian Wolf.”

  BATORY INVESTED HIMSELF with all the historic enmity of his adoptive kingdom and confronted Moscow like the most partisan Pole. Convinced that a negotiated settlement to the Livonian War was impossible, he left no doubt in his initial message to Ivan as to where he stood. Calling himself Sovereign of Livonia as well as the King of Poland, he addressed his counterpart as grand prince rather than tsar, and omitted to acknowledge him as lord of Smolensk and Polotsk. But at that passing moment, Ivan had the upper hand. While the king’s energies had been diverted by the Danzig rebellion, Ivan in 1575 had captured Pernau, reoccupied part of Estonia in 1576, and in a direct challenge to Batory in the summer of 1577 had overrun two important fortresses, Wenden and Wolmar, in territory supposedly under Polish control. At Wenden the garrison chose death over surrender and blew itself up. At Wolmar, where Kurbsky had written his first, famous letter of defiance more than thirteen years before, Ivan resumed the polemical correspondence, boasting: “In our old age we have gone beyond the far-off towns where you sought refuge…. And on the legs of our horses we have ridden all over your roads, from and into Lithuania, and on foot we have gone, and we have drunk water in those places…. And who now takes the strong German towns?… And to Wolmar, too, your place of rest, has God led us.”6 But there was no rest for Ivan at Wolmar, for none of his old wounds had healed. In the midst of his triumphant taunting, he again reviled Sylvester, who had fallen, he said, only because “I stood up for myself;” and though affirming, as ever, his divine right and qualifications to rule, yet acknowledged “sacrifices to Cronus,” and in the guiltiest way anticipated the charge against him of sexual license: “You will say I did not bear [Anastasia’s] loss patiently and did not remain true to her – well, we are all human. What about that soldier’s wife you took?,” adding, “If only you had not stood up against me with the priest! Then none of this would have happened.”7

  AS THE RUSSIAN campaign of 1577 proceeded, Magnus attempted to act independently and to capture towns on his own account. Many capitulated, hoping to avoid Russian reprisals by coming under his protection. So impressed was he with his own success that he warned the tsar not to molest his new “kingdom,” listing a number of towns and castles as his own. Ivan rode directly to Kokenhausen, the nearest one on the list, and executed the garrison.

  Ivan’s fresh conquests were also facilitated by tragic developments in Sweden. On February 24, 1577, Johan had served Erik a bowl of poisoned pea soup, and afterward seized with remorse, tried to bury himself in the study of theology. Long his favorite subject, if never so urgent, he apparently convinced himself that he was destined to be the architect of a universal religious reconciliation, uniting the opposed currents of Protestant and Catholic doctrine into a single stream. He compiled a compromise Manual on Church organization and practice, and a compromise Liturgy, known as the Red Book (after its red parchment cover) massively annotated with his own reflections. He also wrote to the pope, whose agitation for a Catholic restoration in Sweden had already recruited the queen, and had led to at least one covert Vatican operation involving two Jesuits posing as Lutherans sent to Stockholm to infiltrate the faculty of a new Protestant seminary. There, their highly regarded lectures, which deliberately made use of Reformation texts in such a way as to impugn their authority without seeming to do so, had produced classes full of confused and troubled students ripe for conversion.

  To convert the king, the pope sent Antonio Possevino, a former general secretary of the Jesuit Order and one-time rector of Avignon, who as a vigorous agent of the Counterreformation in France had hunted Waldensian heretics through the Alps. Learned, politically savvy, if somewhat impetuous and vain, Possevino was prepared to use every means at his disposal to advance the Catholic cause.

  On Christmas Day in 1577, he arrived in Stockholm accredited as an imperial envoy and disguised as
a cavalier. Johan had approved the masquerade so as not to alarm his subjects, and after several long discussions extending over several months, the king was swayed, made his general confession to the priest, and received communion at his hands. At the conclusion of the Mass, Johan is said to have exclaimed: “I embrace thee and the Catholic Church forever.” Six months later, however, he angrily recanted when the pope rejected his compromise reforms and bluntly implied that his Red Book was heretical.

  Possevino returned to Sweden, this time openly as a Catholic priest, and supposing pro-Catholic sentiment to be widespread, ordered his confrère to throw aside their disguises. Panic seized the Swedish Church and incited anti-Catholic riots in Stockholm, but in the end it was revealed that there were only a few thousand Catholics in the entire realm.

  AT LONG LAST, Ivan’s adversaries began to coalesce. Batory wrote to Johan proposing Reval as a base of operations against Narva. Johan advised Batory to draw his battle lines from Wenden to Pskov – by implication yielding him southern Livonia – while he marched toward Novgorod. If this worked out they could link up for a drive on Moscow. After that they could talk about Russia from Narva to the White Sea and make a race for Kholmogory.

  This sort of playful correspondence did not bode well for the tsar. Before the end of the year (1577), the Lithuanians had captured Dünaburg†, and in January 1578 the Polish Diet voted subsidies for war. Ivan proposed a three-year armistice not applicable to Livonia, but as his two ambassadors made their way across war-torn territory to Batory, they were deliberately delayed by officials appointed to engage them in prolonged discussions as to how the two sovereigns should be designated in the text. By the time they struggled into Warsaw in December, Batory was on the march. Early in 1578, Polish cavalry took Wenden by storm; then Karkus, Helmet, and Ermes fell, securing western Livonia almost in a line from Pernau to the Dvina eighty miles inland from the coast. Magnus barricaded himself up in Oberphalen. When the Swedes captured it, he fled to Courland and renounced his thorny crown.

  Ivan resolved to retake Wenden, but the Poles and Swedes combined in defense of the town. As the Russians began their siege, they were attacked from all sides, and only nightfall seems to have spared them extermination. Under cover of darkness, some of their officers fled. Dawn broke and the remaining troops faced massacre. In despair and humiliation, eighteen Russian cannoneers strangled themselves across their own guns.

  These Muscovite reversals gave Kurbsky an opportunity to reply to Ivan’s taunt of the previous year. He predicted a total Russian defeat, quoted Cicero to prove that enforced flight was not treason, contrasted the virtuous Sylvester with Ivan, who “used the name of virtue” but did “not understand what virtue meant,” and accused him of having “shut up… free human nature,” making Russia “a fortress of hell.”8

  Batory was absolutely determined to break that fortress open, and when the Muscovite envoys were finally ushered into his presence, he neither rose from his seat nor asked after the tsar’s health, as protocol required.

  They promptly declared themselves unable to discharge their mission – precisely what he had wanted them to do.

  AT LEAST AS early as March 1578, Batory had confided to a handful of advisers that his ultimate aim was to conquer Russia itself. By April, he had begun to hammer out his overall strategy, and every limited campaign he subsequently undertook was so constructed as to fit into this larger design.

  He had few firm commitments from allies. The pope promised to promote his cause in Europe; the elector of Brandenburg sent him a few cannon; Denmark agreed to neutrality; Sweden (despite their collaborative action at Wenden) promised nothing in the way of a definite agreement on Livonia, and seemed prepared to rely on the fortunes of war. For the next year or so the Crimean Tatars were out of the picture, since the new sultan (Murad III) needed them for his Persian campaigns. (In 1577 Devlet Giray had died, succeeded by Gazi Giray II. In 1578, Crimean cavalry helped the Turks capture the strategically important “Iron Gate,” a mountain pass near Derbent, on the southwestern coast of the Caspian.) Grand Vizier Sokollu was openly skeptical that Batory could prevail: “Great is the power of the Muscovite,” he told the Polish ambassador. “With the exception of my master, there is no mightier sovereign on earth.”9 Russia’s resilience had certainly been remarkable, yet Ivan realized he could not stand alone. His quest for allies, however, was almost fruitless. When his envoys arrived in Vienna, they found Maximilian dead, and his successor, Rudolph, uninterested in any alliance that did not acknowledge his sovereignty over Livonia. In late August 1578, a Danish embassy under Jacob Ulfeld met with Ivan at Alexandrova Sloboda to conclude a trade agreement, but it was subsequently nullified because Ulfeld had exceeded his instructions. Queen Elizabeth continued to “make dayntie” with his appeals.

  At about this time, various Livonian exiles in Germany, clustered about a certain Count Georg Hans, also concocted a scheme for the invasion of Russia from the north. Predicting that a mercenary army of 75,000 men in 200 ships would suffice, the idea was to occupy the Arctic harbors, push south, blockade Moscow, capture Ivan alive, collect his treasure from numerous caches scattered across the land, and deposit it with the Emperor Rudolph – to whom, in fact, this whole scheme was calculated to appeal. Rudolph would get the treasure, Poland and Sweden could carve up Russia as they liked, the Livonian Knights would get back their country, and Ivan would be given an earldom in some foreign land. The bankrupt Rudolph, who would have done almost anything else to replenish his treasury, dismissed the scheme as preposterous, as did every other monarch approached.

  Batory, whose plans were real (and more practical than any skeptic could divine), reduced his expenses at court, persuaded a recalcitrant Diet to levy new taxes, stockpiled supplies, and drilled his troops. On the Hungarian model, he diversified his cavalry into light-horse and the heavily mounted and equipped, rearmed his infantry with battleaxes and muskets, tripled its size by new levies among peasants on crown estates, and introduced aristocrats into its ranks to develop its leadership and prestige. Townsmen, too, were called to arms; and to encourage volunteers, he promised liquidation of debts. Foreign auxiliaries were enlisted – Germans, Hungarians, and Scots – along with battle-hardened battalions from the Transylvanian Alps. Dnieper Cossacks were integrated into his machine as a cavalry reserve.

  Artillery began to roll out of cannon foundries at Danzig, Marborg, Warsaw, and Lvov. From the mouth of the Nieman, it was floated downstream and portaged overland to Svir, where an army of 60,000 had assembled by July 1579.

  * * *

  * John Dee, incidentally, met three times with Batory in the course of a transcontinental tour devoted to crystal gazing in 1585.

  † Today known as Daugavpils, Lithuania.

  * * *

  39

  Polotsk and Veliky Luki

  ENGLAND EMERGED AS the wildcard in the war. Hoping to avoid, if possible, a permanent rupture with Muscovy, Daniel Sylvester had hurried back to England in the spring of 1576, where several versions of an Anglo-Russian treaty were apparently prepared. Its wording may never be known. Upon his return, as he was trying on a new satin jacket in an upper room of his lodging at Kholmogory, “the tailor gone scars down the stears,” a thunderbolt reputedly “stroeke him dead… killed also his boy and dogg, burnt his descke, letters, howse, all at an instant.”1

  Sylvester’s curiously absolute incineration, which destroyed every document connected with his embassy, may have been an Act of God, as historians have tended to assume, but in context it is hard not to suspect some other instrument, since so many interests, foreign and domestic, had a stake in keeping England and Russia apart. In any case, the assassination cannot be laid at Ivan’s feet. “ ‘Gods will be donn!’ ” he said when he heard about it, “but raged and was in desperatt case; his enymies besettinge and besiegginge three partes of his countrye,” with Narva “shutt up” (under blockade), in need of powder, saltpeter, lead, and brimstone, but “knew not howe to be furni
shed thereof but owt of England.”2

  This crisis conducted onto the stage another remarkable Englishman, Jerome Horsey, who had risen from company stipendiary to agent, spoke fluent Russian (as well as Polish and Dutch), and much like Jenkinson won Ivan’s affectionate trust. Having originally come to the tsar’s attention as an interpreter, he was now summoned to convey a secret message to the queen – though not before Ivan had questioned him closely to assure himself that he was the right man. Horsey remembered:

  He asked me if I had seen his great vessells and barcks built and prepared at Vologda. I told hime I had. “What traitor hath shewed them you?” – “The fame of them was such, and people flockinge to see them upon a festival daye, I ventured with thowsandes more to behold the curious bewty, largnes and streinge fashion of them.” – “Whie, what meane you by those words, streinge fashion?” – “For that the portrature of lyons, draggons, eagles, oliphonts and unicorns, wear so lievlie made and so richly sett forth with gold, silver and curious coullers of paintinge, etc.” – “A craftie youthe, comendes his own countrimens artificerie,” said the Emperor to his favorette standinge by. “Yt is trew: yt seems you have taken good vew of them: how many of them?” – “Yt pleas your Majesty I sawe but 20.” – “You shall see fortie, err longe be, noe worss. I comende you. Noe doubt you can relate as much in forren place, but much more to be admired, if you knewe what inestimable treasur they are inwardly to be bewtified with”3 –