Fearful Majesty

by Benson Bobrick

  On September 5, Ivan’s courier, Istoma Shevrigin, set out from Moscow to Rome accompanied by two interpreters, Wilhelm Popler, a Livonian convert to the Orthodox faith who knew both Russian and German; and Francesco Pallavicino, a Milanese merchant and sometime Russian agent in Lübeck who knew German and Italian.† They traveled by way of Pernau, Denmark, and Saxony to Prague, where Shevrigin delivered a letter from Ivan to the Emperor Rudolph; on to Venice, where he delivered a second letter to the doge, promising Venetians commercial privileges in Muscovy; and then to Rome, where he arrived on February 26, 1581, with Ivan’s letter to the pope. “We want to be in alliance and agreement with you,” Ivan wrote, “and with the Emperor Rudolph and to struggle together against all of the Muslim rulers in order that from now on… no Christian blood will be shed, and Christian people will live in peace, emancipated from the Muslims. And we ask that you… command Stefan [Batory] to break with Islam and stop shedding Christian blood.”1

  Though Ivan never mentioned the possibility of religious union, hopes were inevitably raised, and just one week after Shevrigin’s arrival, Pope Gregory XIII commissioned the Jesuit Antonio Possevino (whose recent missio suetica had been a disaster) to undertake a missio moscovitica and mediate a negotiated conclusion to the Livonian War. Though technically no more than a courier, Shevrigin had thus succeeded in bringing about the appearance of a reconciliation between Rome and Moscow, achieving almost automatically what under any other circumstances would have taxed to the utmost the talents of the most gifted and capable ambassador.

  The pope was forthright. In his letter to Ivan dated March 15 he made religious union his central theme: “There is one Church, one Christian flock, one only after Christ is his vicar on earth and universal shepherd,” and urged Ivan to study carefully the proceedings of the Council of Florence. In the secret instructions conveyed to Possevino on the day of his departure, Church union was set forth as his paramount aim.

  Ivan’s canny maneuver serves as a useful reminder that while Muscovy’s masses may have known little of the outside world, the tsar himself and his advisers were up to date on European affairs. In addition to envoys sent abroad, the Kremlin coordinated a network of spies, culled intelligence from visiting dignitaries, artisans, and merchants, and received regular reports from agents stationed in all the major Baltic ports. Russia’s excellent pony express had also long since been extended into Livonia. The Vatican, on the other hand, knew almost nothing about Muscovy. Its staff, for example, had prepared a gift for Possevino to give to Anastasia, who had been dead for twenty years, and described Muscovy as extending northward “from Scythia and Sarmatia, between the Borysthenes [Dnieper] and the Rha [Volga],”2 thus using geographical (not to mention geopolitical) terms borrowed from Ptolemy and obsolete for a thousand years.

  SHEVRIGIN RETURNED THROUGH Denmark, Lübeck, and Livonia to Moscow. Possevino stopped at Graz (where he was briefed by Kobenzl), Vienna, and Prague en route to Vilna. At Vienna he was joined by two Jesuit brethren, Paolo Campano and Stefan Drenocki, the latter a Croatian specialist in Slavic languages.

  Batory was appalled at how easily the Vatican had fallen for the diplomatic snare. Although documents also reveal that some of the pope’s advisers clearly understood the opportunistic motives behind Ivan’s appeal, the Vatican in so responding risked alienating a king whose fervent support of the Counterreformation was unrivaled by any other monarch in Europe. Not only had he taken a leading role in fostering Jesuit seminaries throughout Poland, but more recently in Livonia on the heels of his military gains. When Possevino met with him in Vilna in mid-June, and explained his mission – “to negotiate a just peace, and overlook no opportunity of restoring the Prince of Muscovy to the bosom of the Church” – Batory disparaged “the whole idea as useless, because the Muscovites would soon be compelled to give up all of Livonia in any event, and had thought up the entire scheme solely in an effort to improve their chances.”3 Nevertheless, he agreed to cooperate with his embassy.

  In the initial diplomatic back-and-forth, Ivan offered to cede the whole of Livonia except for the four towns of Narva, Dorpat, Fellin, and Pernau;‡ Batory insisted on Narva, plus a war indemnity of 400,000 gold crowns. Emboldened by Possevino’s mediation, however, Ivan on June 29 retracted his earlier concessions, demanded thirty-six Livonian towns (yielding only Veliky Luki and twenty-four forts), rejected the indemnity as infidel “tribute,” compared Batory to Amalek and Sennacherib, and hypocritically appealed to the Council of Florence of 1439 (which the Russians had rejected) as having ruled that the Greek Orthodox and Latin faiths were one: and therefore, “Why do you object to an extension of the Greek faith over Livonia?”4 Though Ivan told his ambassadors not to insist on his title “being written out in full in the text of any truce,” they were nevertheless to declare: “God gave our sovereign his royal title and who can take it from him? Our sovereign is not of yesterday, but the one who is knows that himself.”5 To drive the insult home, he signed his own letter “Tsar and Grand Duke of Russia… by the Grace of God, and not by the turbulent will of men.” At about the same time, he launched a counteroffensive from Smolensk and sent Russian cavalry across the Dnieper to strike at Orsha and Mogilev. In July, he attempted to retake Kholm and Velizh.

  When Possevino asked one of the Russian ambassadors why the tsar had altered his proposals, he declared flatly: “The New Testament wipes out the Old.”6 Possevino’s task was a very difficult one. On the one hand, the Poles feared he would sell them out, since Russian enthusiasm for discussing Church union might seem to depend on whether he performed his mission to Moscow’s satisfaction; on the other, the Muscovites suspected him as a Catholic of being an instrument of the king. Meanwhile, however, his very presence on the scene helped Ivan by fostering expectations of peace that, coupled with the tsar’s threat to break off negotiations, undermined Polish morale: no one wanted to be a casualty in the last days of a needlessly prolonged war.

  On July 21, Possevino and his companions crossed the Russian frontier and after a harrowing night camped outside in the rain – during which “Ukrainian Cossacks imitated the cries of wild beasts in the woods to frighten us” – they were met at dawn by sixty Muscovite cavalrymen, who escorted them to Smolensk.

  Ivan had told the bishop of Smolensk to spruce up his churches, and by a special dispensation had granted permission for Possevino to visit them, even though “it had been a long time since Latins were in communion with the Universal and Apostolic Church.” Ivan did not realize that Possevino was under a similar ban, being forbidden to worship with heretics or apostates. Accepting an invitation, as he thought, to dinner (obyed), he declined at the last moment in embarrassment when he realized he had been invited to attend an obyedna, or Orthodox Mass.

  His irritation increased as he was conducted (in a deliberately confusing and disconcerting manner) from Smolensk to Staritsa, and he began to chafe at Muscovite protocol. He heard Ivan’s interminable titles at every turn, yet noted that everyone else was called by their first name only, “in an undignified manner.”7 At Staritsa, he was greeted by the cavalry commander thus: “Antonio. Ivan Vasilyevich, by the Grace of God Great Hospodor and Tsar and Grand Prince of all Rus, Vladimir, Moscow and Novgorod, Tsar of Kazan, Tsar of Astrakhan, Lord of Pskov, and Grand Prince of Tver, Ingria, Perm, Vyatka, Bulgaria, etc., Lord and Grand Prince of Nizhny Novgorod, Chernigov, Ryazan, Rostov, Yaroslavl, Beloozero, Livonia, Udorsk, Obdorsk, Kandinskaya Zemlya, and all of Siberia inquires concerning the health of the Most Holy Father, Gregory XIII, the Pope of Rome.”8

  “He is well,” replied Possevino simply, “for which God be thanked.”

  On the following day, he was told to prepare himself “to behold the serene eyes”9 of imperial majesty, and upon encountering Ivan and his elder son both enthroned with heavy, glittering tiaras “bigger than the Pope’s,”10 bridled to hear himself announced: “Antonio and his companions strike their foreheads to the ground before you.”11 When Ivan asked after the pope’s
health, Possevino seized the opportunity to competitively enumerate his own master’s honorifics: “Our Most Holy Lord, Pope Gregory XIII, Shepherd of the Church Universal, Vicar of Christ on Earth, Successor to St. Peter, Lord of Many Realms and Regions, Servant of the Servants of God, greets your Highness and gives you his blessing.” Presenting his letters (to Andrey Schchelkalov), he described the gifts he had brought: a sliver of the true cross embedded in a carved rock-crystal crucifix; an image of the Lamb embossed on silver and inscribed with red Cyrillic characters; a beautifully bound copy, in Greek, of the proceedings of the Council of Florence; a rosary of precious stones; ten gold prayer beads; and a crystal goblet with a gold rim. Ivan examined the crucifix “for a long time” and declared it “a gift worthy of the Pope.”12

  (As for the embarrassing letter to Anastasia, Possevino remarked laconically in his memoir: “We learned that she had died a long time ago, and that the Prince’s present wife was actually his seventh.”13)

  Meeting with Ivan’s inner council of advisers, Possevino set forth the pope’s “understanding”: namely, that once the war with Poland was over, Ivan would join a league against the Turks, allow papal envoys free transit through his kingdom to Persia, and Catholics freedom of worship in Muscovy. He also expressed the hope that Ivan would acknowledge the primacy of the Holy See.

  Ivan led him on. He threw a tremendous banquet in Possevino’s honor, proved a pious and most attentive host, “always looking around to see that everyone had everything he wanted, no matter how far away from him they were sitting,”14 and toward the end of the repast “called for silence and made a most impressive speech,” that seemed to acknowledge the pope as “the general shepherd of the Christian Republic and the Vicar of Christ.”15 Nevertheless, no headway was made on the subject of religion in discussions with Ivan’s councilors (Ivan even forbade his intepreters to translate whatever pertained to it), but at length the tsar unenthusiastically agreed to take up the whole issue at the conclusion of the war.

  Though Possevino had come to Moscow inadequately briefed on Russian affairs, he was a man of unusual discernment, and exceptional in not being bowled over by Ivan’s pomp and court display. In his report to Gregory XIII, he unmasked the whole charade:

  The Prince takes great pains to encourage a view of himself as High Priest as well as Emperor, and in the splendor of his attire, his courtiers and his other appurtenances he rivals the Pope and surpasses other kings. He has borrowed these trappings from the Greek Patriarchs and Emperors, and it could be said that he has transferred to his own person the honor that it is proper to pay to God alone. When seated on his throne he wears a tiara stiff with pearls and precious stones, and keeps several others by him, changing them to emphasize his wealth, a practice he claims to have inherited from the Byzantine Emperors. In his left hand he carries a crook or staff with large crystal balls, like knobs, attached to it. He is dressed in long robes, such as the Popes are accustomed to wearing when they solemnly proceed to Mass, and he wears rings set with huge stones on all his fingers. There is an ikon of the Savior to his right, and one of the Virgin above the throne. Both wear white cloaks, and standing as they do on each side of the Prince with wings attached to their shoulders they look like royal bodyguards…. When I was engaged in protracted discussions with his Councillors he had various documents and treaties brought out from remote archives in order to buttress his position and oppose the stance taken by the Polish King. He was anxious to have these documents brought to the Pope’s attention, as those he had chosen were designed to illustrate the fact that unbroken friendship had existed between his father Vasily and the Popes, Emperors and other rulers since the days of Popes Leo X and Clement VII, as well as between Your Beatitude and himself. They also argued the need for extending the boundaries of his realm.… It was the sort of performance the Turks used to give in years past, when they employed the skills of unscrupulous persons to solicit or profess friendship with Christians while they drove on into the heart of Europe.16

  Not unlike the shah, however, who had obliterated Jenkinson’s infidel footprints in the sand, Ivan after his contact with Possevino could not refrain from a ritual insult and “washed his hands in a silver bowl placed openly on a bench in general view, as though he were performing a rite of expiation.”17

  AS BOTH SIDES jockeyed for advantage, Possevino’s arbitration effort stalled. Meanwhile Batory had replied to Ivan’s letter of June 29 with an acromonious forty-page rejoinder which heightened tensions considerably. He compared the tsar to Cain, Pharaoh, Nero, and Herod; ridiculed his bogus Roman genealogy; denounced him as a “sneaking wolf” and a “vile venomous cur”18; challenged him to single combat; and taunted him as a coward. “Even the humble hen covers her chicks with her wings when a hawk hovers in the air above her,” he wrote. “But you, the double-headed eagle, for such your seal proclaims you, do nothing but skulk away and hide.” For his coup de grace, he enclosed a couple of Latin pamphlets recently published in Germany that described Ivan as a bloodthirsty despot.

  Ivan was probably not unaware of such circulars, since the Livonian War, in fact, had produced a fairly substantial body of literature. The typical pamphlet was four pages long, illustrated by a single woodcut, stitched and bound, with a lengthy heading made up of sensational slogans. The Battle of Nevel had been celebrated as a sort of Trojan War, in which the gods took sides and heroes opposed each other in single combat; hexameter panegyrics had saluted the Lithuanian victory on the banks of the Ula in 1564. Balthasar Russow, a pastor in Reval, had composed an invaluable Chronicle published in 1578. After 1578, Batory dominated the “news” with official manifestos and frontline dispatches. His field presses turned out a continuous stream of Latin propaganda that was rushed by couriers to translators all over Europe, and rendered into German, Polish, Hungarian, Italian, and other tongues. Not surprisingly, the fall of Polotsk and Veliky Luki precipitated a flood of minor epics, panegyrics, and odes, while the redefection of the Livonian turncoats, Taube and Kruse, inspired a lampoon. Even Jan Kochanowski (no minor poet) celebrated a daring raid into Staritsa. So many encomia were bestowed on Batory that within a few years they could be gathered into hefty collections published in Rome and Cologne, while Johan III was the subject of at least one history, written by a German Protestant, Laurentius Muller, who also claimed to have discovered the gravestone of Ovid on the lower Dnieper. By contrast, Ivan fared poorly. Almost invariably described as some kind of savage, and typically depicted in woodcuts as “a cruel, cunning Asiatic in a turban or cap,”19 he was variously known in Europe as “Ivan the Hun,” the “Scythian Wolf,”20 or the “Basilisk”21 (from a pun on Basil, the Greek spelling of his patronymic), a fabulous monster with a deadly gaze.

  RUSSIA’S BRIEF REBOUND collapsed as Batory drove his challenge home with raids into Starodub and Tver, and a cavalry feint towards Novgorod that threw the city into such panic that it torched its own suburbs to prevent enemy foraging. Along the way outriders approached the tsar’s residence at Staritsa, where it is said he could see the glow from the fires. Then, on July 21, Batory set out with 40,000 troops from Polotsk, marched swiftly along forest paths cut in advance by an Hungarian engineer, subdued Ostrov on August 21, and on the 25th appeared before Pskov, “like a wild boar,”22 wrote a Russian chronicler, “emerging from the wilderness.”

  * * *

  * Vatican promotion of his marriage to Sophia Paleologue was fundamentally a scheme to win Russia for Catholicism and, collaterally, the first attempt to enlist Russia in a pan-European, anti-Turkish crusade.

  † The two men did not like each other, and on their way back from Italy Popler assassinated his colleague.

  ‡ Ivan’s ambassadors, Evstafy Pushkin and Fyodor Pissemsky, incidentally, were also instructed to rebuke Kurbsky for his “rude letter” to the tsar.

  * * *

  41

  Pskov

  THE BATTLE OF Pskov was to prove one of the immortal battles of Russian history. A city compara
ble in size to contemporary Paris, or so it seemed to a member of Batory’s staff, for “whole centuries the chief care of the Pskovians had been to make it impregnable to the attacks of the Livonian knights.” It had an oblong triangular Kremlin on a hill above the Velikaya River, wide moats, and colossal stone walls some eight miles in circumference, sixteen feet thick, and thirty feet high. Its considerable garrison – about 16,000, in addition to the local population (which had drastically fallen during Ivan’s reign from about 35,000 to 20,000) – bristled with what remained of Muscovy’s best arms.

  Religious fervor animated the city’s defense. Prince Ivan Shuysky, of the still mighty Shuysky clan, was given the command and made to swear before the Icon of Vladimir to defend the city unto death. The whole populace had to repeat the oath when he arrived, as icons were brought in from the Pskov-Pechery Monastery*, and the holy relics of St. Vsevolod were carried in procession around the walls. A local gunsmith was visited by the Virgin Mary, “who told him where the cannons should be placed and assured him that the town would not fall.”1 An old man, probably St. Nicholas the Warrior – or was it Kornily? – was seen to ride in a cloud of radiance back and forth between the monastery and Pskov.

  Batory’s troops dug in, began their artillery barrage on September 7, and on the 8th “made a general assault with such elan that two of the principal bastions were captured.”2 From his distant observation post in a bell tower, the king saw his standards waving over the battlements. His officers exclaimed: “Sire, we shall dine with you tonight in Pskov!” But the Muscovites rallied and hurled the assailants back with heavy casualties.