Fearful Majesty

by Benson Bobrick

  alluding to his contingency plan to abscond to England with the public treasury.

  Obviously, Elizabeth’s contribution to the Russian war effort was ongoing and considerable. As of 1579, Ivan had twenty great new ships at Vologda alone, and at least twenty more under construction.

  The tsar’s “favorette standinge by” was probably Bogdan Belsky (unrelated to the great Belsky clan), appointed armorer in 1578, and subsequently chamberlain. Another man on the rise was Boris Godunov, of Tatar princely extraction, who had enrolled in the Oprichnina under the sponsorship of Malyuta Skuratov in 1571, and whose sister a few years later married the tsar’s son Fyodor. In 1578, Boris himself married Skuratov’s daughter, Maria – which further assisted his advance at court. After his elevation to boyar in 1580, he emerged as the tsar’s chief adviser on state affairs.

  IVAN LIKED HORSEY’S “readie aunswers” and told him: “Be thou trusty and faithfull, and thy reward shal be my goodnes, and grace hereafter.”4 Since it was too late to voyage by the northern route, he was dispatched overland through enemy terrain, with gold ducats sewn into his boots and quilted into his clothes, and the tsar’s letters to Elizabeth concealed in the false side of a brandy flask suspended under his horse’s mane.

  In one night he rode the 90 miles to Tver, and covered 600 miles in the next three days. At Neuhausen, in Livonia, he was arrested, interrogated, and released, but detained again on the island of Oesel and imprisoned as a spy. Admitting nothing, Horsey managed to convince his captors that he was a refugee. All the while he kept the flask “close under my cassock by daie, and in the night my best pillow under my head.”5 Upon his release, he traveled to Pilton (where he met “King Magnus,” who had become an alcoholic), through Courland to Danzig, Lübeck, and Hamburg, where he boarded a ship for England. Home at last, Horsey carefully opened the flask, “toke owt and swetned the Emperors letters and directions, as well as I could; but yet the Queen smelt the savier of the aquavitae when I delivered them to her Majesty.”

  MEANWHILE, BATORY HAD perfected his military machine. Before his advent, the Livonian War had been a war of sieges and attrition, of few pitched battles in the open but many incursions, marauding expeditions, and raids. Pillaging had been the principal occupation and preoccupation of the troops, as the possession of districts, citadels, and towns ebbed and flowed. Despite the new weaponry, tactical emphasis on infantry, and so forth, the war had been conducted largely on medieval lines. It was the king who brought to its last phase a method to the long-drawn-out madness of sieges and a strategy of lasting historical note.

  At his council of war at Svir in July 1578, he began to unfold his plan: to evict the Muscovites from Livonia, not by a massive counterinvasion, but indirectly by a series of surgical strikes along the Russian frontier that would force Ivan to evacuate most of his army of occupation in order to protect the Russian heartland. At the same time, by opening secondary fronts in Livonia, Batory would oblige him to scatter his remaining troops into isolated strongholds from the Baltic to Moscow. As a result, the Livonian garrisons would fall like dominoes into Polish hands.

  Ivan, in fact, had already begun to distribute his Livonian divisions among twenty-four towns, and had split his main army between Novgorod, Pskov, and Smolensk. But the Tatar menace could never be ignored, and though the Crimeans for the moment might be preoccupied with Persia, recent Nogay raids in the Volga Basin had been devastating, obliging Ivan to place detachments at numerous points along the Volga, Oka, Dnieper, and the Don. To make matters worse, the tsar’s intelligence network utterly failed him. At Novgorod in July he first learned for certain that Batory had rejected the truce proposed in January, yet was also told the king had been unable to assemble more than “a small army of Lithuanian volunteers.”6 Indeed, the obscurity of the king’s encampment at Svir, surrounded by dense forests, as well as “the skillfull division of his forces on the roads leading to this trysting place,”7 had enabled him to conceal his preparations to the eleventh hour.

  From his headquarters Batory issued a vigorous manifesto, “crammed with dates, diplomatic texts and epigrams,” which reviewed the history of the war, scornfully refuted Ivan’s Roman pedigree, and explained that as King of Poland he had drawn his sword not against the people of Russia but their tyrant.8 He promised to avoid unnecessary devastation and bloodshed, to respect the rights and property of all civilians, and issued specific regulations against wanton killing, rape, and the destruction of crops. To establish a high moral tone, he instituted pious passwords like “Lord, forgive us our sins!” and “God punishes the wicked.”9

  Thus heralded, and accompanied by two official historians, a wind-instrument military band, two printing presses for churning out propaganda, a rabble-rousing theologian to exhort the troops, two Italian doctors and a Polish specialist on syphilis, Batory embarked on the first of his three great Livonian War campaigns.

  His target was Polotsk.

  Before Ivan even knew where Batory was, his advance guard had stormed Krasny, Susha, and Sitno, three of the city’s auxiliary strongholds, while his main army, marching obliquely to the Disna River from Svir, had rapidly crossed over by means of pontoon bridges and was hacking its way through the woods towards its goal.

  Meanwhile, Ivan had sent a cavalry regiment over the border into Courland as a diversionary thrust, but hastily withdrew it when he realized Batory was somewhere in the Ukraine. Yet he still couldn’t figure out where the king meant to strike; and though he sent one relief force to Polotsk, he sent others equally strong to Nevel and Smolensk. Batory’s advance guard intercepted the reinforcements destined for Polotsk and drove them into the fortress of Sokol ten miles to the north.

  On August 11, the king emerged from the woods and began bombarding Polotsk with fireballs.

  In gruesome defiance the Russians killed the first few prisoners they took, roped them upside down to beams (to brand them as infidels) and floated them down the Dvina River past the king’s encampment.

  But their own situation was grim. Nor could Ivan promise relief. Johan had 17,000 men in the field, supported by a first-class fleet, and in July (with Batory still at Svir) had bombarded and set fire to the suburbs of Narva. As Swedish infantry also gathered at Reval, Russian forces were tied up by developing battles at Wesenberg and Hapsal, while Batory had opened a third front with raids near Smolensk and across the Dnieper as far as Starodub. Narva was infinitely more important to Ivan than Polotsk, and the cavalry regiment withdrawn from Courland was therefore sent to the Estonian front.

  After a three-week siege, Polotsk capitulated. The slaughter was dreadful. One veteran officer said he had “never seen so many corpses together,” and despite Batory’s Christian regulations, the Polish and Hungarian soldiers “lined up and rushed at each other” in a dispute over the spoils.10 In ransacking the cathedral for hidden treasure, a priceless library of chronicles and Slav translations of the church fathers was apparently committed to the flames.

  When Sokol fell on September 25, the defenders were massacred to a man. Numerous fortresses in the area surrendered throughout the fall.

  Kurbsky, who served on Batory’s general staff, wrote letters to Ivan from Polotsk and Sokol to celebrate the Russian defeats. In the first, he appealed to the tsar to repent and reminded him that before he had been “corrupted by toadies” and had fallen into “foul despotism, pharaonic disobedience and hardness of heart against God,” he had “lived in the commandments of the Lord, surrounded by chosen men of eminence; and not only were you a brave and courageous fighter and a terror to your foes, but also you were filled with Holy Scriptures and sanctified by holiness.”11 In the second, he deplored Ivan’s sodomy, his many marriages, and insatiable lust – violating “hordes of pure maidens, dragging them along in wagon-loads” – and cursed the Oprichniki as “Satan’s band.” “You were corrupted,” he reminded him, “and then you repented, but afterwards returned to your first state of filth.”12 On that unpleasant note (for Ivan was never
to reply), their historic correspondence came to an end.

  AS IVAN’S CHIEF accuser, Kurbsky’s own doings merit scrutiny. His life as an expatriate had had its ups and downs. Initially greeted with much fanfare and an extensive grant of estates (including ten villages with 9000 acres of land in Lithuania, plus towns, villages, and Bona Sforza’s old castle of Smedyno in Volynia), he had ridden to war against the tsar, and in return for “good, shining, true, and manly service”13 Sigismund August in 1567 had made his property hereditary. Twice elected to the Diet, he also married into a wealthy branch of the landed aristocracy.

  A diligent scholar as well as a venomous pamphleteer, Kurbsky’s knowledge of Latin was sufficient to enable him to translate into Church Slavonic the works of several Greek Fathers from Latin redactions, and in the same way to read Aristotle as well as Cicero. In other literary activity, between 1572 and 1576 he compiled an annotated 900-page anthology of Church literature called the New Margarit, wrote his polemical history of Ivan’s reign, and was active in the Orthodox educational movement sweeping Lithuania. This movement brought him together with many gifted fellow refugees, including Ivan Fyodorov and Peter Mstislavets, the pioneer printers of Moscow. Under their auspices, the first full text of the Bible in Church Slavonic was printed at Ostrog in 1580.

  But Kurbsky was no saint. He wrangled with his neighbors, who regarded him as an interloper, and when he thought they were poaching on his land, carried out retaliatory raids. He oppressed the peasants on his estates, and his steward was a notorious sadist whose cruelties he failed to curb. His Lithuanian marriage was a disaster. In 1578, he caught his wife in flagrante delicto with a valet, but his divorce settlement was unfavorable, and because he failed to secure it on canonical grounds, his subsequent offspring from a later marriage were declared bastards under the law, without right of inheritance. Costly litigation failed to set things right. By the end of his life (in 1583) there was nothing to inherit, since his remaining assets were impounded against his debts.

  IVAN’S MARITAL PROBLEMS were of another kind. After his fifth wife, Anna Vasilchikova, died in 1577 (of natural causes), he had married Vasilisa Melentyeva, but remanded her to a nunnery before the end of the year. In the summer of 1580 he exceeded the nuptial record of Henry VIII and took his seventh and last wife, Maria Nagaya, the daughter of his long-time foreign-service official Afanasy Nagoy. In Ivan’s favor it must be said that (so far as we know) unlike Henry he executed none of his wives.

  But his charity had a very narrow range. His immediate reaction to the loss of Polotsk, for example, was to sack the foreign suburb of Moscow. For some time its privileged status had aroused the anger of the Church, especially since its inhabitants had flaunted their modest liberties. Perhaps its seductive role as a prototypical showcase village was now also deemed obsolete. In any case, one night Ivan “sett a thowsand gunors” all in black, like Oprichniki, “to robb and take the spoill of the people; stripped them naked, most barbarously ravished and deflowered both yonge and old weomen without respects,” and burned the suburb’s two Protestant churches to the ground.14

  In other areas he tried to reconstitute his resources, so thoroughly drained in countless ways. At a Church Council convoked on January 15, 1580, by Metropolitan Anthony (Metropolitan Kirill’s indifferent successor), the tsar told the clergy that because of recent military setbacks the Orthodox faith itself was in jeopardy, and that although he, his son Ivan, and the whole civil and military establishment were working night and day to preserve the state, the Church had been standing idly by. The council responded positively by prohibiting Church institutions to acquire any more land or to receive it as a gift by any device under any pretext. Lands currently under mortgage to the Church were to be taken over by the state at once, as were all princely appanage estates the Church had acquired “to the end that there be not loss of service.”15

  But the problem was not so much the land as peasant flight because of the social calamities that had repeatedly struck the population. For at least two decades, war, famine, pestilence, and domestic terror had transformed a once carefully fostered and regulated migration to the borderlands into a frantic flight en masse. This had radically thinned out the working population, ruined numerous service estates, thereby reducing the army, whose gentry no longer had the wherewithal to serve – and destroyed the tax base of the economy. Grain prices rose steadily, a problem exacerbated by hoarding, while monasteries competed for the peasantry that remained. Accordingly, the gentry urged the government “to curb the freedom of peasant movement,” and in 1581 this led to an edict prohibiting peasants from leaving their plots during certain “forbidden years.” By its partial abrogation of the St. George’s Day law, it set a precedent for subsequent decrees that would culminate by the end of the century in the outright institution of serfdom. Thus the real momentum toward serfdom derived not so much from measures needed to sustain the pomestie system itself, which had become the cornerstone of Russian military power, but from Ivan’s overall social and military policies.

  THE FALL OF Polotsk had given Batory a communications and supply line all the way to Riga, and from Riga to the sea. Ivan’s gateway to Lithuania had become Batory’s bridgehead into Muscovy.

  The king’s next objective was Veliky Luki, long a staging area for Muscovite operations along the frontier. Advancing from Chasniki in July 1580, he skirted Nevel and proceeded east through Vitebsk, as if against Smolensk. Just before crossing the Dvina, however, his army divided into two columns: one, under Jan Zamoysky, the Polish chancellor, cut its way through thick forests to Velizh, a fortress on the lower Dvina; the other, under Batory, crossed the river on pontoon bridges to advance on Usvyat, to the northwest. A third but smaller cavalry contingent (under a daring Lithuanian commander by the name of Filon Kimita) rode from Orsha toward Smolensk.

  Scouts kept Ivan posted, but again he found the king’s deployments indecipherable. He had to guess – and again guessed incorrectly – and rushed his reserves to Smolensk, Dorogobush, and Toropets.

  Velizh capitulated on August 5, Usvyat on the 26th. Kimita, after a sweep around Smolensk to the north, doubled back sharply: all roads to Veliky Luki were cut. In a perfectly timed conjunction, Zamoysky and Batory linked up on August 26 a few miles from their objective, and by September 5 Veliky Luki had been reduced to rubble by fireballs and mines. The garrison tried to surrender, but Hungarian mercenaries, who “counted on sacking the town when it was stormed,” killed the delegates sent out to offer terms.16 Ozerishche fell a few days later; Nevel on September 29; Zavoloche on October 23. Meanwhile, Batory’s light-horse cavalry squadrons roamed almost at will as far north as Porkhov and Opochka, burned Kholm on the Lovat River, and dared even to raid the environs of Staraya Russa, near Novgorod. In Livonia itself his troops took Kreuzberg south of Riga and stormed the castle of Smilton, while the Swedes under Pontus de la Gardie, a French soldier of fortune, swept through Ingria and Karelia. Kexholm fell in November, Padis after a thirteen-week siege, and Wesenberg, Tolsburg, Hapsal, Leal, and Lode by the summer of 1581.

  Russia’s position appeared hopeless – so hopeless in fact that most Poles and Lithuanians assumed the war had been won. They were tired of fighting, had suffered their own crop failures and epidemics in recent years, and it was therefore with a groundswell of popular support that the Diet which convened at the end of January 1581 not only stated its reluctance to vote funds for a third campaign, but in a move exasperating to the king (who pointed out that the Muscovite ambassadors were listening), declared them the last he would get.

  * * *

  40

  Missio Moscovitica

  IN A MOVE that took his adversaries completely by surprise, Ivan appealed for the intervention of the pope. Sudden as it seemed, the way had been carefully prepared. To begin with, Ivan’s widely publicized talks with Kobenzl had improved his image in Europe, especially at the Vatican, and as a follow-up in March 1580, he had sent an envoy to Vienna to pretend his enthusias
m for an alliance against the Turks. Then in August, in conjunction with the Duma, he decided to invite the pope to mediate the war. As Ivan well understood, the pontiff was almost bound to respond favorably in the hopes of advancing the two projects nearest to his heart: an anti-Turkish Christian league, and the reunification of the Eastern Church with Rome.

  A number of things contributed to the Vatican’s preoccupation with the Turks. The most obvious, of course, was the relentless growth of Ottoman might, and the alarming fact that the infidel, fought three centuries before in faraway Palestine, was now bivouacked in the heart of Europe. At the same time, the supranational unity that had once made possible the great medieval crusades had long ago vanished, along with the unity of the faith. For more than a century the Holy See had been unable to stay the erosion of its power, and the Catholic sovereigns of France and Spain were just as unwilling as their Protestant counterparts in England or the Burgundian states to tolerate papal interference in their ecclesiastical or secular affairs. After the papacy had been Italianized in 1523, it enjoyed political power only in Italy, while the nepotism of the Curia, the debauchery of some of the pontiffs, and the secular aspirations of intriguing cardinals who hoped to realize their family fortunes in a papal dynasty accelerated the dismal decline in Vatican prestige. To many Christians the call for an anti-Turkish league seemed an obvious bid on the part of the papacy to revive its ecumenical pretensions and recoup the stature it had lost.

  All these issues, however, were eclipsed by the spread of Protestantism, and by the Catholic dream of recouping its numerical losses by garnering the Orthodox East, and especially Russia, for Rome.

  From the time of Ivan III, in fact, the Vatican had endeavored to lure Russia to its fold* – even as Poland and Livonia had tried to foster the idea that wars against the Muscovites were essentially religious crusades. Poland was especially apprehensive that the pope might one day be induced to recognize Muscovite sovereignty over Lithuania, while during the reign of Ivan IV the Vatican had already made at least five unsuccessful attempts to communicate with the tsar – every one thwarted by the Poles. What was altogether new in 1580 was that the initiative had come from the Muscovites.