Fearful Majesty

by Benson Bobrick

  On the very next day, however, Ivan’s worst fears were realized to the north, when Johan at last took Narva. “I set the snare,” Batory remarked, “but my brother takes the game,”3 as the Swedes proceeded to subdue Ivangorod, Yama, and Koporye, and before long occupied the whole eastern coast of the Gulf of Finland.

  The tsar began to be more attentive to Possevino, promising papal envoys free transit through his realm to Persia and Catholics freedom of worship on his soil. On September 12 he told him: “Go to King Stefan; greet him in my name, and treat for peace with him in accordance with the Pope’s instructions. After you have done this, be sure to come back to us, for you will always be welcome, both because of the Pope and because of the loyal and devoted services you are rendering in this cause.”4 He furnished Father Campano with gifts and a letter to Gregory XIII, and turning to Father Drenocki, ominously began to stroke the man’s head. “You are to stay here in Muscovy with me,” he said, then noting Possevino’s alarm, added, “Antonio, be of good cheer; we shall treat your man well. It will be the same as if you were staying yourself.”5

  Winter had come early to Pskov, and when Possevino arrived on October 5, he found snow on the ground, a scarcity of tents, and low morale among Batory’s troops. After a month of hard fighting they had failed to crack the Muscovite defenses, and though many had managed to scale the city walls, those who made it over had perished to a man, either between the ramparts or after being driven into wooden houses, which were set ablaze. The Muscovite artillerymen, unassailable in their enclosed tower bastions, kept up a continuous fire, while every tunnel dug by the king’s sappers had somehow been discovered, countermined, and destroyed. Meanwhile, Batory’s main munitions stockpile, at Susha, had blown up in an accident, and his powder had begun to run out. New shells had to be shipped all the way from Riga. On October 28, one of Batory’s specialty teams, equipped with mattocks and crowbars, advanced like a great bronze tortoise under large overlapping shields, and began to dig and wrench about the base of a corner tower. Before they could do much damage, the Russians drove them back with buckets of boiling tar. His convoy of fresh ammunition finally arrived, but another attempt to storm the city failed. The Pskovians were simply heroic. Women and children stood with their husbands, fathers, and brothers on the ramparts, piling up stones and pushing them down from the walls, sifting lime to throw into the eyes of the enemy, carrying food and munitions, or other matériel, back and forth in baskets, aprons, and sacks, and repairing breaches made in the ramparts with amazing speed. They gave “an extraordinarily fine account of themselves,”6 wrote Possevino; and Heidenstein, the Polish historian, could not but salute their “unbelievable fortitude.”7 Batory himself would not disparage them either, and confided to Possevino that he had found Muscovite soldiers in other fortresses who had subsisted on nothing but water and oat dust for a long time, and though “scarcely breathing, still feared their surrender would constitute a betrayal of their oath to serve their Prince to the last.”8

  At the end of October, Batory withdrew to winter quarters and organized a blockade. Thinking to restore confidence to his men, he sent crack divisions with artillery to take the fortified Pskov-Pechery monastery thirty-seven miles away. A Muscovite contingent operating out of the cloister had carried out a number of damaging hit-and-run attacks against his supply lines, but it was really the monastery’s mystique Batory sought to smash. To his dismay, if not humiliation, a fierce bombardment and two major infantry assaults on the monastery failed.

  As a result of the developing stalemate, in mid-November Kiverova Gora, a tiny hamlet near the ruined village of Yam Zapolsky (equidistant from Veliky Luki and Pskov) was designated as the site for negotiations. Across the war-torn zone the drinking water was contaminated, and the plenipotentiaries had to quench their thirst with freshly fallen snow. Meeting in Possevino’s wooden hut, “between a temporary altar and a stove,”9 they made determinations that would affect the fate of Eastern Europe for more than a century.

  Batory’s negotiating team (supervised and directed by Zamoysky), was headed by Michael Haraburda, a Greek Orthodox Lithuanian and a veteran diplomat. The Russian delegation was headed by Roman Alferyev, a veteran of the Oprichnina who had once served in the Treasury Department. He was now a privy councilor. A self-confessed illiterate (“I never read reports,” he once blurted out, “because I can’t read”10), he nevertheless had substantial military and negotiating experience and was presumably chosen because of his clear understanding of Russia’s strategic needs.

  Batory returned to Poland to exact from his Diet one last grant of funds to sustain the siege. Attempting to set an inspiring example for his subjects, he committed his entire personal fortune to the cause. Zamoysky, remaining behind to consolidate the blockade, almost immediately had to hang a number of officers to quell a rebellion, when his troops learned they might have to remain through winter into spring.

  Stefan Batory’s Siege of Pskov (Karl Bryullov, 1843)

  The pressure on Moscow was just as intense. After the fall of Narva, Ivan regarded it as pointless to continue fighting with Poland, but considered it an absolute priority to recover Narva from Sweden at any price. For this reason, although the Poles had wanted Sweden included in the negotiations to constrain Johan from further conquests, the Russians – and the Swedes, who now enjoyed a free hand – both refused. However, Moscow’s military situation suffered each day a settlement was delayed; and therefore, as the negotiations got under way, although the Russians at first refused to cede a number of major towns, they were gradually whittled down to two fortresses, Nevel and Velizh. The Polish delegates threatened to walk out if no settlement was reached by December 28. On the night of the 27th, the Muscovites, “weeping,” went to see Possevino, “asking him what they should do.” Possevino told them to yield. They replied that they had already yielded forty fortresses, far exceeding their instructions, and that Ivan would probably kill them as it was. Possevino promised to go surety for them with his own head and to sign a document that he had compelled their capitulation. They responded that even if each of them had ten heads, Ivan would cut off every one. On the following day the two sides compromised. The Russians kept Nevel, but yielded Velizh in exchange for Sebezh, an outpost commanding the outlet from the Velikaya River valley.

  The question of the language of the treaty remained. Ivan repeatedly endeavored to insert such formulations as “Hereditary Ruler of Livonia” into the document in order to have a pretext for future claims against the region. For the same reason, he wanted Riga and Courland included among the towns and territories he had relinquished. And of course his envoys also insisted on his title as Tsar. Possevino rebuked them, saying: “If the Grand Prince desires a valid title and a legitimate dignity, he should first negotiate with the Pope, like other Christian rulers,” since “ ‘Tsar’ is only an oddity borrowed from the Tatars in an effort to approximate the title held by other Kings.”11 In their spirited but confused rejoinder, they asserted that Ivan’s crown had been sent from Rome to Vladimir I by the emperors Honorius and Arcadius. Possevino promptly pointed out that Honorius and Arcadius had lived 500 years before Vladimir. When Alfereyev replied that they had meant another Honorius and Arcadius, Possevino exclaimed, “You have come here not to negotiate but to steal!”12 and angrily seizing him by the collar pushed him out of the hut.

  In the end, the Treaty of Yam Zapolsky, as the document was called, was given a dual text, with the unofficial Russian version more flattering to the tsar. Substantively, the two were the same. Signed on January 15, 1582, the treaty imposed a ten-year truce on the belligerents, obliged Russia to relinquish all of Livonia (aside from territory held by the Swedes) and all recent strategic conquests in Lithuania to Poland. With the loss of Ivangorod, Ivan had even managed to undo the initiative of his grandfather, Ivan III. Thus did his drive to the Baltic, which had begun with a series of quick successes in 1558, end twenty-five years later in catastrophic defeat and humiliation without a sq
uare inch of Livonian soil to his name. Estonia was now firmly in the grasp of a resurgent Sweden, and southern Livonia in the power of an expanding Polish Empire directed by a monarch who still hoped, eventually, to bring Moscow to its knees.

  Stefan Batory Near Pskov (Yan Mateyko, 1872)

  It is difficult to tell to what extent Ivan felt the defeat as a personal one. “We know,” he apparently told Possevino, “what is due to the majesty of Princes. But the Empire is majesty, and above that majesty stands the Sovereign in his Empire, and the Sovereign is above the Empire.”13

  But the empire was not above tragedy, and the sovereign, apart from his majesty, was not above anything at all, and had begun to taste of hell itself. “Is this then ‘contrary to reason,’ to live according to the present day? Recall to memory Constantine,” he had written to Kurbsky in 1564, “mighty even amongst the tsars; how he killed his own son, begotten by him, for the sake of his kingdom.”

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  * In Russian, Pskovo-Pechersky Uspensky Monastyr, also known as Pskov-Caves Monastery, had been founded about 100 years before by hermit monks who lived in the caves atop which the monastery is now built. Ivan IV famously sought to take the tonsure here. It is almost unique among Russian monasteries for never having been closed, even under Soviet rule.

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  “Recall to Memory Constantine”

  IN 1581, IVAN’S namesake and elder son, Ivan Ivanovich, was twenty-seven years old. Thoroughly schooled for the throne, he had from at least the age of eighteen the sound and sensible universal maxims of kingship impressed upon him by his father, who in his Last Will and Testament before the Battle of Molodi had set forth this advice:

  You should become familiar with all kinds of affairs: the divine, the priestly, the monastic, the military, the judicial; with all patterns of life in Moscow and elsewhere. [You have to know] how the administrative institutions function here and in other states; and what are the relations between this state and other states. All this you have to know…. Then you will not depend on the advice of others, but will give directions to them.1

  The tsar, of course, had known all these things in his own way, and already at the age of twenty-three himself (according to the Englishman Chancellor) had regarded it as essential to know everyone who served under him directly, and what duties he discharged.

  By most accounts the tsarevich emulated his father in this regard, accompanied him on his complex round of government and diplomatic functions, sat with him at court weddings and receptions, and stood with him at the executions in Red Square. They were even rumored to revel together in vice, to share the same women and, in consonant depravity, to take turns torturing the condemned. The evidence on this score, however, is mixed. Taube and Kruse denounced him as “cruel like his father”2; but Printz reported that he was endowed with “abundant virtues.”3 The more objective Possevino thought him “capable of ruling” and divined that he was “popularly beloved”4 – corroborating Horsey’s observation that the people’s esteem for him made the tsar fear for his own power: “He was the hope of their comfort, a wise, mild, and most worthy prince, of heroicall condicion, of comly presence, beloved… of all men.”5 Whatever his qualities, the one thing we know for certain is that Ivan and his son were not of one mind.

  Differences between them surfaced early. The tsarevich had his own court circle (Chelyadnin had belonged to it), in which the tsar had uncovered treason; and aside from publicly admonishing his son more than once for insubordination, Ivan had not stopped short of threatening to disinherit him – for example, at a Kremlin reception for Duke Magnus in June 1570, attended by foreign envoys. Nor had the tsar been happy with his son’s choice of wives – banishing the first two, Evdokia Saburova and Petrova Solovaya, to nunneries, and persecuting the clan to which his third wife, Elena Sheremetova, belonged. One of her uncles had been executed, another imprisoned, and a third had defected to the Poles. Her father, too, was in disfavor. As for Elena herself, Ivan apparently couldn’t stand the sight of her, but in the fall of 1581, as Batory was closing in on Pskov, she was very much in view and conspicuously pregnant with a potential heir.

  Coincident with this, the tsarevich had emerged at the head of a kind of “war party.” With all of Livonia, including Narva, and part of Russia itself in jeopardy, he became alarmed at the spectacle of his dwindling inheritance, and began to quarrel with his father about the defense of Pskov. Urging him to commit his reserves (held back under Bekbulatovich at Staritsa) to the fray, in a theatrical gesture he also proclaimed himself willing to lead an army to the rescue.

  Under the best of circumstances, Ivan could not bear contradiction; but his son’s bravado dug at an old wound: the charge that he was a coward. He had heard it before – from Kurbsky, who had documented his timidity at Kazan; from the whole nation in 1571, after his flight before the khan; later from the khan himself; and from Batory, who had called him less valiant than a hen. And now his own son, by implication, had flung the challenge down.

  A tsar did what he had to do. “Recall to memory Constantine…” The tsarevich thus had three mortal strikes against him: his wife, his personal popularity and conspicuous competence to rule, and his rebellious mind. In his outbursts Ivan presumably told him he didn’t have any real grasp of Russia’s strategic interests or even know how to choose a suitable consort for the helm; and on November 14, when he came upon Elena “sitting on a bench in a warm room,”6 immodestly attired (unlike a tsarina) in a single chemise, he told her she didn’t know how to dress. He struck her fiercely; the tsarevich intervened; Ivan raised his iron-tipped staff and drove the prong of it deep into the side of his head. Some say Boris Godunov was present and in attempting to restrain the tsar was brutally knocked aside.

  Ivan the Terrible at the Deathbed of his Son (Vyacheslav Schwarz, 1861)

  Elena miscarried. The tsarevich languished, consumed by fever. The wound’s infection spread: five days later he died. His remains were brought in procession from Alexandrova Sloboda to Moscow, to be interred in the Cathedral of the Archangel Michael, and when the cortege reached the outskirts of the city, boyars dressed all in black bore the coffin aloft on the tips of their fingers, as Ivan followed behind on foot.

  He was beside himself with grief. He “tore his hair and beard like a madd man, lamentinge and mourninge”7; unable to sleep, he cried out at night and “scratched the wall of his chamber with his nails.”8 He grew unkempt, “laid aside his diadem and all other bright adornment,”9 and donated large sums of money to monasteries throughout Muscovy and the Orthodox East, pledging the faithful to pray for his son’s soul. On January 6, 1582, after attending Mass with his confessor at Holy Trinity Monastery, he summoned to his bedroom two venerable monks and “began to weep and sob and to implore them” to remember the tsarevich every day in their prayers, “forever, as long as this monastery stands, till the end of time.”10 Yet even in this extremity he could not truly humble himself, but had to couple his pious appeal with an imperial threat: “And whoever will forget and fail to fulfill this will and request… will face a trial with me before God at the Second Advent.”11 Whatever was most “terrible” about Ivan is perhaps to be discovered here.

  Oral tradition refused to accept the filicide. In the bylina or historical songs about it, the plot is reworked: Fyodor falsely accused of treason by his older brother, Ivan Ivanovich, is sentenced to die. Like Shakespeare’s Bolingbroke in Richard II, who asks: “Have I no friend will rid me…,”12 Ivan asks: “Have I no terrible executioners left?”13 and a resurrected Malyuta Skuratov at once volunteers. He leads the saintly Fyodor “by his white hands” to the Lobnoe Mesto, but the good Anastasia (still alive!) appeals to her brother Nikita Zakharin to intervene, and like a knight rescuing a maiden, he gallops bareback into the square and whisks Fyodor away in the nick of time. Meanwhile, the tsar has learned the truth and rejoices at Fyodor’s reprieve. The tale (as folktales will) thus has it both ways: the father is spared the murder
of his son, but the son he actually did kill is stamped with the mark of Cain.

  Not long after the tsarevich’s interment, Ivan began to compile his Synodical, or list of the victims of his terror, to be remembered by the clergy in their prayers. Over 1500 names were inscribed from the sack of Novgorod alone, many followed by the words “with his wife,” “with his wife and children,” “with his daughters,” “with his sons”; while unremembered others were acknowledged by the relentless, sad refrain: “As to their names, O Lord, you know them.”14 Copies of the Synodical were circulated to all the principal monasteries in Muscovy for services, supported by special funds.

  This “posthumous rehabilitation of the disgraced, whose names it had been forbidden to mention for years,”15 had “political as well as moral overtones.” Unless Ivan could appease powerful relatives and survivors, among whom the simple-minded heir-apparent, Fyodor, Ivan’s second son, would have to find support in order to rule, the House of Rurik would be doomed. Openly acknowledging before the Duma that Fyodor was unfit to succeed him, he invited the nobles to choose one from among their own to take his place. No one was fool enough to propose a name.

  Ivan dictated a new will which established a regency council of five to assist his son in affairs of state: Nikita Zakharin, Ivan’s brother-in-law; Ivan Mstislavsky, chairman of the Duma; Ivan Shuysky, the hero of Pskov; Bogdan Belsky, the armorer; and Boris Godunov, de facto chancellor, whose sister was married to Fyodor.

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