Fearful Majesty

by Benson Bobrick

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  * All these statistics refer not to a single cadastral survey in a single year, but to a cluster of surveys in the late 1570s and early 1530s.

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  45

  Sir Jerome Bowes

  JEROME HORSEY’S URGENT mission to Elizabeth had resulted in new military shipments from England in 1581, though obviously not enough to affect the outcome of the war. In May 1582, while still fighting the Swedes, Ivan had also despatched Fyodor Pissemsky to England to reopen discussions for a comprehensive military alliance, and this time sought to bind and consummate the pact by marrying a relative of the queen’s. The ill-fated Elijah Bomel had apparently once suggested to Ivan that “yt was very feacable for him”1 to marry Elizabeth herself; more recently, his new English physician, Robert Jacob, had commended Lady Mary Hastings, daughter of the earl of Huntington, a descendant of George, duke of Clarence, and Elizabeth’s niece. Though Ivan’s seventh wife, Maria Nagaya, was then pregnant, Pissemsky was authorized to declare that in order to marry English “bloud royall,” the tsar was prepared to put her aside. Perhaps Ivan was cynical enough to assume that a daughter of Henry VIII would have no problem with the idea of marriage as a consecutive career.

  But he wanted the lady’s particulars first: some confirmation of her pedigree, and details as to her figure, age, and complexion, as confirmed by her portrait painted on paper or wood.

  Pissemsky arrived in England on September 16 (just prior to the Swedish assault on Oreshek), but failed to obtain an audience with Elizabeth’s advisers until December 18 or with the queen herself until January 18, 1583. She was very gracious, but hedged on the alliance and was quick to disparage her niece as a suitable bride: her face, she explained, was pitted by smallpox; she had not yet recovered from the disease. Then embarrassing news arrived that the tsarina had given birth to a son. (This was the tsarevich Dmitry, destined for tragedy in a later reign.) It was therefore not until April that Pissemsky was allowed to behold Lady Mary (briefly) in the lord chancellor’s garden. According to one account, he “cast down his countenance; fell prostrate to her feett, rose, ranne back from her, his face still towards her, she and the rest admiringe at his manner. Said by an interpreter yt did suffice him to behold the angell he hoped should be his masters espouse.”2

  But according to another, he merely stared at her, exclaimed “Enough!” and walked away. No rapture, in any case, is evident in his report, which evasively describes her as “tall and slender, with a pale face, grey eyes, a straight nose, and long tapering fingers.”3 Perhaps the portrait was supposed to fill in the blanks.

  Lady Mary’s friends playfully began to call her the Empress of Muscovy. She didn’t want to be anything of the sort. For humane and other reasons Elizabeth also discouraged the match: familiar with Ivan’s infamous attempt to procure Katerina from Erik, she doubtless assumed he would automatically incorporate Lady Mary into his English policy as a hostage.

  In her discussions with Pissemsky, she inevitably concentrated on issues of trade. In particular she was upset that in contravention of the White Sea monopoly a Dutch merchant, John de Wale (known as White Beard) had been doing business that way since 1576, and that after the fall of Narva the French had moved their trade in wines and manufactured goods to Kola, another Arctic port. Pissemsky insisted that England alone could not possibly meet all of Russia’s import needs.

  Elizabeth, in fact, was just as unwilling as Ivan to put all of her eggs in one basket, and had recently signed broad trade agreements with the sultan that launched the Levant Company, or the “Company of Turkey Merchants.” In November 1582 (with Pissemsky still patiently waiting to see her), she had appointed her first ambassador to the Sublime Porte.

  Her new ambassador to Russia was Sir Jerome Bowes. Though adept at court intrigue and a well-educated diplomat of the rhetorical school, in other respects he was an irritable, conceited, petty, insolent fop. He arrived at Rose Island on July 23, 1583, and almost immediately began to draw up a laundry list of complaints. No Muscovite official, from Kholmogory to Moscow, seemed able to treat him right. Two miles from Moscow he was met by a large cavalry escort, but refused to dismount to receive a message from the tsar. On his way to the palace, crowds filled the streets, and a thousand streltsy in red, yellow, and blue uniforms lined the route – surely no insult here; but when three hundred noblemen, led by Prince Ivan Shuysky (the hero of Pskov), were sent to accompany him, he thought Shuysky’s horse better than his own and demanded its equal. This kept the tsar waiting. In the Kremlin the reception prepared for him was lavish, but he complained at having to address Ivan from a formal distance, “as yf I had been to have made a proclamation,”4 and at having to deliver the queen’s gift and letter to the foreign secretary, Andrey Shchelkalov, “esteminge me unworthy to delyver them my selfe,”5 though this was standard.

  Sir Jerome Bowes (unknown artist, 1583)

  All such slights, real or imagined, he blamed principally on two of the tsar’s chief councilors, Shchelkalov and Nikita Zakharin, whom he claimed were Anglophobes in the pay of the Dutch.

  His initial discussions with Ivan were stormy. Reiterating Elizabeth’s position that an alliance was possible only if Ivan agreed to attempt third-party mediation of disputes before hostilities were declared – “thinking it requisite,” she wrote in her letter, “both in Christianity, and by the law of nations, and common reason not to profess enmity, or enter into effects of hostility against any prince or potentat, without warning first given”6 – he had come prepared, for example, to mediate between Russia and Sweden in their ongoing war. But Ivan scoffed at the offer (which had come too late) and rejected the conditional alliance as practically useless.

  On the marriage question, he would not be calmed. The queen’s letter indicated that there had been resistance on the part of Lady Mary’s family and that “as over the rest of our subjects, so especially over the noble houses, and families, we have no further authority than by waye of persuasions to induce them to like of such matches as are tendered them.”7 Ivan found this incredible, yet remained “so inflamed with his desier” for an English bride that he was secretly prepared to make any concession for it – even to promise that “her yshue should inherit the crown.”8 He swore “he would send againe into England to have one to wife,” according to Horsey, “and if her Majestie would not send him such a one as he required, himselfe would then goe into England, and cary his treasure with him, and marry one of them there.”9

  This passion threatened to interfere with the plans of Boris Godunov, whose dynastic hopes were linked to Fyodor, and he reportedly began plotting “to cross and overthrow all such designes.”10

  IVAN WAS OF two minds as to how Bowes should be handled. Though the envoy had made enemies right and left by his petty complaints and “unreasonable and needless findinge fault from tyme to tyme, so much to disquiett the Kinge and state, as never any ambassador did,”11 at one point, to try to elicit concessions from him, Ivan apparently had the Shchelkalov brothers and Nikita Zakharin beaten, and thereafter they smoldered with desire for revenge. On another occasion, however, Ivan pelted Bowes with insults, even disparaging Elizabeth as a petty monarch. When the ambassador allegedly leaped to her defense, declaring her “as great a prince as any was in Christendome, equall to him that thought himselfe the greatest,”12 Ivan fumed, but (according to Bowes) was secretly overcome with admiration for his performance and told his ministers he “wished himself to have such a servant.”13 Thus, “I became a great man with the Emperor,”14 Bowes wrote, and secured new privileges for the company.

  His tale may be doubted: other evidence indicates that the negotiations ended in a deadlock, while not far from St. Nicholas the Dutch had already begun to dig their great new port of Archangel, destined to become “the center of the maritime trade of the Empire.”15

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  46

  The Conquest of Siberia

  As momentous as the founding of Archangel was, a developm
ent of far greater magnitude was also at hand. Scarcely had the signatures dried on the Treaty of Yam Zapolsky signifying Ivan’s ignominious defeat when “at the other end of his huge dominions an unforeseen and mighty compensation for the loss of Polotsk and Livonia was beginning to appear. Siberia, distant, mysterious, far extending, was opening her arms.”1

  How far-extending Siberia really was no one could have guessed. First mentioned in the Chronicles in the eleventh century, a fragment of the region had long been familiar to Novgorod merchants trading in furs with tribes of the lower Ob, and in 1376 St. Stephen of Perm had bravely established a church in the Upper Kama, where a former missionary had been skinned alive. Before his death he managed to discredit local idolatry and stop the sacrifice of reindeer. Subsequently the Tatar Khanate of Western Sibir, extending east of the Urals to the Irtysh River, had fallen well within the orbit of Muscovite political and military relations. Ivan III and Vasily III had meddled in Siberian politics, and in 1555, the khan, by paying a token tribute, had acknowledged the suzerainty of Ivan IV. Somewhat prematurely Ivan had thereupon incorporated “Tsar of Sibir” into his title. But no one knew that, beyond the Ob, Greater Siberia comprised the whole of northern Asia between the Urals and the Pacific Ocean. This was as unimaginable to the most daring Russian explorer as the Pacific Ocean itself had been to Balboa and his men.

  Until 1552, the only route into Siberia lay to the north. After the capture of Kazan, the Kama River and its tributaries had opened a route to the south. Past the Urals and into Siberia the Russians plunged, in a clash of forces not inaptly symbolized by the culinary opposites of “beef Stroganov” and “steak Tatare.”

  The Stroganovs were financiers and industrial magnates, the Rockefellers and Rothschilds of Muscovy. Their wealth was founded on salt, ore, grain, and furs (the mainstays of the economy), and their assets and properties, accumulated through shrewd dealing over the course of two centuries, extended by the mid-1550s from Ustyug and Vologda to Kaluga and Ryazan.

  Though Novgorodians, their political loyalties had always been Muscovite. In 1445-1446, they had helped ransom Vasily II from Tatar captivity, and after Ivan III subdued Novgorod, a Stroganov was commissioned to arbitrate disputed real-estate claims along the Northern Dvina. Needless to say, his official report gratified the Kremlin. The Stroganovs had always had an influential friend at court. In 1517, Vasily III granted them forest land in Ustyug to support their newly established salt works on the Vychegda River at Solvychegodsk, with tax-exempt status for colonists and legal and administrative jurisdiction over the local population that gave them remarkable autonomy. At a time when appanage principalities were becoming a thing of the past, the government allowed a new and semi-independent principality to develop in the North, which became the vital center of the Stroganovs’ huge commercial empire.

  In the sixteenth century, the paterfamilias of the clan was Anika Stroganov (1497-1570), a fabulously wealthy patron of the arts who wore hand-me-down kaftans, built churches “with the same zeal as he showed in the construction of his salt works,”2 and, notably before his deathbed, took monastic vows. As commercial agent in the 1550s for both Ivan and Metropolitan Makary, he had enjoyed an inside advantage over such industrial rivals as the Solovetsky Monastery, and at an opportune time had enrolled his family in the Oprichnina. After his death, Stroganov interests were promoted at court by Boris Godunov.

  A rapid series of land grants secured the family’s absolute commercial domination of the Russian northeast: in 1558, along the Kama River and its tributaries south of Perm; in 1564, upstream on the Orel “where there is brine”; in 1568, in the Chusovaya River valley; and in 1570, on the Sylva and Yaiva rivers. The charter of 1558 (drafted by Adashev) served as a model for the rest. In each case, in return for long-term tax-exempt status for themselves and their colonists, the Stroganovs pledged to fund and develop industries, break the soil for agriculture, train and equip a frontier guard, prospect for ore and mineral deposits, and mine whatever was found.

  They enjoyed jurisdiction over the local population and had the right to protect their holdings with garrisoned stockades and forts equipped with artillery. Thus, a lengthening chain of military outposts and watchtowers soon dotted the river route into Siberia. The stone fort of the Stroganovs on the Orel was to Siberia what Veliky Luki might have been to Lithuania, or what Vasilsursk and Svyazhsk had been to Kazan.

  As the colonization advanced to the foot of the Urals, the Stroganovs endeavored to subject a number of native tribes, such as the Voguls and the Ostyaks, to their authority. This brought them into conflict with the new khan, Kuchum, a fiercely ambitious and anti-Muscovite prince who had recently come to power by a coup.

  A lineal descendant of Genghis Khan, Kuchum had proclaimed himself “Tsar” of Western Sibir, and after purging the Ostyak and Vogul leadership of opponents, felt strong enough by 1571 to renounce the tribute to Moscow. Moscow, indeed, was in flames, and Ivan quite unable to reassert his claim.

  A 1575 map shows the lack of knowledge of what lay in Siberia.

  The advancing Stroganov settlements also provoked increasing native unrest. Russian suzerainty was one thing; Russian occupation of the land another. In 1572, there were massacres near Kankor and Keredan, and in 1573 a general uprising of the Cheremis, who struck at settlements along the Kama and Chusovaya all the way to Kazan. To quell the revolt, Ivan sent a large expedition into the region.

  Daring prospectors had meanwhile located deposits of silver and iron ore east of the Urals on the Tura River, and it was not erroneously supposed that the same district contained sulfur, lead, and tin. And scouts had seen the rich pastures by the Tobol River where the Tatar cattle grazed. In 1574, the Stroganovs petitioned for a new charter “to drive a wedge between the Siberian Tatars and the Nogays”3 by means of fortified settlements along the Tobol, Tura, Irtysh, and Ob, in return for license to exploit the resources of the land. The new land allotted to them amounted quite literally to the northern half of the Khanate of Sibir. In a singular measure (impelled by the manpower drain of the Livonian War), the Stroganovs were also permitted to enlist runaways or outlaws in their militia and were urged to organize and finance a campaign, spearheaded by “hired Cossacks and artillery,” against Kuchum “to make him pay the tribute.”4

  Enter Yermak Timofey, enemy of the state, future hero of the empire. Yermak was a Cossack; that is, he belonged to that turbulent border population of frontiersmen whose ranks were a moil of disaffected elements – tramps, runaways, religious dissenters, itinerant workers, fugitive slaves, bandits, and adventurers driven into the noman’s-land of forest or steppe by taxation, famine, debt, serfdom, repression, and hope of refuge from the long, strong arm of Muscovite law. In the wild country, where they “mingled and clashed” with the Tatars, adopted Tatar terminology and ways (including the horse-tail standard as their common emblem of authority), and gradually displaced certain tribes, they carved out for themselves a new and independent life.

  That life was seminomadic, sweet with freedom, bitter with strife. The Cossack might be a hunter, fisherman, or farmer; a solitary wanderer or rough mystic; a freebooting cutthroat or buccaneer. Though some, like Yeats’ Irish recluse, chose to “live alone in the bee-loud glade,” most gathered into homesteading communities and lived in fortified villages strategically placed on river islands or high riverbanks.

  Armed societies arose to protect them, and the most famous were those banded together under atamans or chieftains into semimilitary confraternities along the Volga, the Dnieper, and the Don. They raided Tatar settlements or poached on Tatar land, preyed on Muscovite river convoys and ambushed government army patrols sent out to catch them and “hang ‘em high.” The whole Cossack story, in fact, with its rugged individualism and worship of democracy, its “badmen,” posses, ranchers, cattle rustlers, sheriffs, and so forth bears close comparison with the folkloric picture of the American “wild west.” In the simplest and most obvious configuration, the Cossack repres
ents the American pioneer, the Tatar the Red Indian, and the Russian Army the U.S. cavalry.

  Some Cossacks were half-breeds. The word itself derives from the Turkish kazak, meaning “rebel” or “freeman,” and the original Cossacks were not Russian but Tatar renegades. As late as 1483, the Tatar element predominated, when Moscow complained that “Cossack bandits from the Crimea, Azov and Kazan” were attracting malcontents from its border towns. By 1549, the situation was reversed. Don Cossacks had built several river forts from which to launch attacks on the Nogays, and by 1551 it was not the tsar but Suleyman the Magnificent who was complaining (with prescient exaggeration), that “the hand of the Russian Tsar Ivan is high.… He took the land and rivers away from me. His Cossacks from the Don collect tribute from Azov.”5 By 1556, a mighty Cossack stronghold – the Zaporozhian Sech or “clearing beyond the rapids” – had been established on the island of Khortitsa in the Dnieper as a hideout, south of the river’s thirteen cataracts; and by the late 1570s, the Tatar component had so far dissolved into the Slavic mass that Ivan could refer to the Cossacks generally as “runaways from our state and the Lithuanian lands.”6

  Yet he could not disown them. He had long since recognized their usefulness in extending his southern frontiers, and at various times had used them as auxiliary troops. But they were unreliable allies. Manipulated as an instrument of policy, they often willfully went against its grain and clashed with the Crimeans and Nogays at diplomatically inconvenient times. Government policy acknowledged a clear distinction in their ranks. Those lured to frontier service (as scouts, trackers, and so forth), were known as “town” Cossacks, and came under the jurisdiction of the Streltsy Bureau; relations with the free Cossacks were supervised by the Foreign Ministry.