Fearful Majesty

by Benson Bobrick

  After 1556, regular army patrols sought to enforce the tsar’s authority along the Volga trade route, and a series of expeditions designed to crush or subdue outlaw bands culminated in 1577 in a great sweep along both sides of the Volga. With the tsar’s cavalry in hot pursuit, some fled down the river to the Caspian Sea, others to the Terek. A third group, under Yermak, the most notorious river pirate of his day, raced up the Kama River into the wilds of Perm – where they were enthusiastically welcomed into the Stroganovs’ frontier service.

  Exceeding the tsar’s commission, the Stroganovs organized a military expedition with a threefold aim: to secure the Kama frontier; bring part of Siberia within their mining monopoly; and gain access to Siberian furs. Their principal objective may have been the third.

  Fur was Russia’s most valuable export commodity. Especially prized were sables “unripped, with bellies and feet,”7 but quality pelts of all kinds had been exported in such abundance by 1558 to Western Europe, as well as to Bukhara and Samarkand, that a domestic shortage resulted, with hats and coats having to be pieced together out of mangy remnants of rabbit and squirrel. The price of furs rose sharply; by the 1570s, foreign consumption (which helped finance the war effort) had led to the near extermination of fur-bearing animals in the North. Already a large proportion of the best pelts displayed on the Volga markets or at Solvychegodsk were obtained by barter with Siberian natives, who (as no American will be surprised to hear) proved pathetically willing to part with their precious merchandise in return for a couple of trinkets or cheap manufactured goods. Indeed, like the United States and Canada, Siberia owed its opening and first exploitation primarily to the fur trade.

  On September 1, 1581, a Cossack army of 840 men, including 300 Livonian prisoners of war, two priests, and a runaway monk impressed into service as a cook, assembled under Yermak on the banks of the Kama River near Kankor. The official chronicles tell us that the men set off “singing hymns to the Trinity, to God in his Glory, and to the most immaculate Mother of God,”8 but this is unlikely. Who knows what they sang; but their secular fellowship was given muscle by a rough code of martial law.

  Anyone guilty of insubordination was bundled headfirst into a sack, with a bag of sand tied to his chest, and “tipped into the river.”9 Some twenty grumblers were “tipped in” at the start.

  Such a force hardly seemed adequate to conquer a khanate, but the odds against surviving were not as bad as many thought. Though vastly outnumbered, they were well-led, well-provisioned (with rye flour, biscuit, buckwheat, roasted oats, butter, and salt pig), and armed to the teeth. The Tatars of Sibir were “Tatare” – comparatively primitive; Yermak’s army had the new technology, and it was their military superiority through firearms that would prove decisive, as it had for Cortes in Mexico and Pizarro in Peru.

  Yermak proceeded along a network of rivers to the foothills of the Urals, where he pitched his winter camp. In the spring, he embarked downstream, swung into the Tura River, and for some distance penetrated unmolested into the heart of Kuchum’s domain. A skirmish at the mouth of the Tobol proved costly, but it was downstream where the river surged through a ravine that the Tatars laid their trap. Hundreds of warriors hid in the trees on either side of a barrier created with ropes and logs. The first boat struck the barrier at night. The Tatars attacked, but in the enveloping darkness most of Yermak’s flotilla managed to escape upstream. At a bend in the river, the Cossacks disembarked, made manikins out of twigs and fallen branches, and propped them up in the boats, with skeleton crews at the oars. The others, half-naked, crept around to surprise the Tatars from behind. At dawn, just as the flotilla floated into view, they opened fire.

  The result was a complete rout.

  Infuriated, Kuchum resolved to annihilate the intruders before they could reach his capital, even as Yermak knew he had to take the town before winter or his men would perish in the cold. Though so far victorious, their provisions were dwindling, while ambush and disease had already reduced the expeditionary force by half. Still they pressed on, past the meadowlands whitening with hoarfrost and the hardening salt-marshes glazed with ice, toward the tall wooden ramparts of Sibir.*

  The decisive confrontation came in late October, at the confluence of the Tobol and Irtysh rivers, where the Tatars had erected a palisade at the base of a hill. Kuchum himself, blind and carried in a litter, listened at some distance for Tatar shouts of victory.

  Instead he heard tumult and confusion, followed by cries of despair. As the Cossacks charged, they fired their muskets into the densely massed defenders with devastating effect. Many of the Tatars, conscripted by force, at once deserted; more fled as the palisade was stormed. This gave the Cossacks a chance. In hand-to-hand combat, the battle raged till evening, 107 Cossacks falling before they prevailed.

  A few days later, when they came to Sibir itself, they found it deserted, with few of its fabled riches left behind. Instead (for which they were probably more grateful) the men discovered stocks of barley, flour, and dried fish.

  Immediately there were scattered defections to the Russian side as Yermak began accepting tribute from former subjects of the khan. But to consolidate his position he needed reinforcements and artillery, and to obtain them he dispatched Ivan Koltso (also a renowned bandit, and his second in command) with fifty others to Moscow. Traveling on skis and on sleds drawn by reindeer, they took the fabled “wolf-path” shortcut over the Urals disclosed to them by a Tatar chieftain who acted as their guide.

  Yernak Timofeyevich (unknown artist, 1700s)

  Back in Moscow, however, the expedition was in disgrace. No one yet knew of Yermak’s achievement, but they knew that in retaliation for his invasion the Voguls had been rampaging through the upper Kama Valley, burning Russian settlements to the ground. This had prompted the military governor of Perm to accuse the Stroganovs of leaving the frontier undefended, and in a letter dated November 16, 1582, the tsar had bitterly reproved the industrialists for “disobedience amounting to treason.” Narva had just fallen to the Swedes; the Poles had just blockaded Pskov, when Koltso arrived to cheer the gloomy capital with his sensational news. Prostrating himself before the tsar, who had planned to hang him, he announced Yermak’s conquest of Sibir and proclaimed Ivan Lord of the Khanate. To a stunned court he displayed his convincing spoils, including three captive Tatar nobles and a sledload of pelts equal to five times the annual tribute demanded from the khan. Ivan pardoned Koltso on the spot and Yermak in absentia, promised reinforcements, and sent Yermak a magnificent suit of armor embossed with the imperial coat of arms.

  At the Kremlin, Koltso kissed the cross in obedience; back in Siberia, as Yermak struggled to extend his authority up the Irtysh, natives were made to swear allegiance by kissing a bloody sword. Those who resisted were hanged upside down by one foot (which meant an agonizing death), yet in his own way Yermak tried to Christianize the tribes. In one contest of power, a local wizard ripped open his own stomach with a knife, then miraculously healed the wound by smearing it with grass; Yermak simply tossed the local wooden totems on the fire.

  By the end of the summer of 1584, his jurisdiction extended almost to the river Ob. In November, long-awaited reinforcements tramped into Sibir on snowshoes, but having brought no provisions of their own, Yermak’s reserves were rapidly consumed. During the long winter, part of the garrison starved. In the spring, Kuchum’s adherents stepped up attacks on foraging sorties; and in two grievous blows to the garrison’s hopes for survival, twenty Cossacks were killed as they dozed by a lake, while Koltso and forty others were lured to a banquet and massacred.

  In early August 1585, a trap was baited for Yermak himself. Informed that an unescorted caravan from Bukhara was nearing the Irtysh, he hastened with a company of Cossacks to meet it, and that night bivouacked on an island in midstream. A wild storm arose and drove the watchmen into their tents. A party of natives disembarked unobserved, attacked, and killed the Cossacks almost to a man. Yermak managed to struggle into his armor
and fight his way to the riverbank. But, as he plunged into the water, the tsar’s fatal gift bore him down beneath the waves.

  The Cossack remnant retreated to the Urals, where as they made their way through a mountain pass, they met a hundred streltsy equipped with cannon moving east – too little, too late. Yet the way had been shown; and over the next few years the reconquest of Western Siberia was to be accomplished with remarkable speed.† River highways facilitated the advance, with outposts established at strategic locations and blockhouses scattered through the forests and tundras of the north. After the founding of the city of Tobolsk in 1587, no tribe could doubt that the Russians were there to stay.

  The soldiers came in waves, followed by the hunters and trappers in a “Fur Rush” as frantic as the Gold Rush of Alaska. With any luck a man could strike it rich in a season. A few good fox pelts alone, for example, could buy fifty acres of land, a decent cabin, five horses, ten head of cattle, and twenty sheep. Yet a progressive exhaustion of the hunting grounds drove the hunters ever farther east. In their wake came farmers, and after the farmers, artisans and state employees. For three-quarters of a century, in fact, despite all the perilous hardships of pioneering equal to the experience of “winning” the American West, nothing would arrest the Russians’ advance, until they entered the Amur Valley and were stopped by the Chinese.

  Yermak was to be posthumously canonized in both Russian and Tatar folklore, and the names of the Cossacks who had fallen in the battle for Sibir were engraved on a memorial tablet in the Cathedral of Tobolsk. Legend has it that some months after Yermak’s death his body was dredged up from the Irtysh by a Tatar fisherman who recognized it at once by the double-headed eagle emblazoned on the chain-mail hauberk. Beneath the armor, Yermak’s flesh was “found to be uncorrupted, and blood gushed from his mouth and nose.”10 In awe, the natives buried him at the foot of a pine tree by the river, and for many nights thereafter the spot was marked by a column of fire.

  * * *

  * Sibir (Qaslik to its residents) was located about 17 kilometers from modern Tobolsk.

  † The complete conquest of Greater Siberia (1,555,448 square miles of land) was another matter.

  * * *

  47

  Endgame

  SIBERIA BELONGED TO Russia’s future. Ivan had nothing to do with its conquest, and though it fell like a ripened apple into his lap, before he could possibly taste what it meant he belonged to Russia’s past. Not even the addition of another khanate to his imperial dominions could undo the tragedy of his life and reign. And notwithstanding his continuing pursuit of complicated policy, his third (if least crafty) abdication, and his masterful debate in the midst of his grief with a leading Jesuit apologist of the age, the contemporary judgment was, and may be right, that “his mourning and passion after his sonnes death never left him till it brought him to his grave.”1 Possevino was told that he often “called out to the tsarevich in a lamenting voice, and acted as if he talked with him,”2 as if he were still alive. And whereas in his youth he had composed hymns of praise to the Vladimir Icon and to Metropolitan Peter, a fourteenth-century saint of the Russian Church, his despair now moved him to compose a canon to the Angel of Death.

  Tyrants tend toward pitiable declines, and in his last days Ivan was as bloated and riddled with disease as Henry VIII; as fatuously ascetic as Suleyman the Magnificent, who stopped listening to the singing of choir boys and began to eat off earthenware plate; and as hopelessly superstitious as the Byzantine emperor Andronikos II, who kept asking the stars if they could do any better for him than his doctors.

  For some time Ivan had suffered from a painfully severe form of ankylosing spondylitis (a crippling malady akin to rheumatoid arthritis), which resulted in the degeneration of his joints and eventually fused the vertebrae of his spine into a single rod. Long, hot baths and mercurials in the form of ointments and salves were used to relieve the pain and inflammation, but the mercurials may also have affected his mind. His robust and athletic habits (as vouched for by Kurbsky) and straight-backed regal posture were coincidentally therapeutic, but the former were steadily undermined by dissipation, and in the end his back was bent like a bow. “Age doth not rectify but incurvate our natures” is a wise and witty adage, and seldom more apt than in Ivan’s case.

  It has sometimes been suggested (to explain his aberrant behavior) that Ivan was made “criminally insane” by some form of syphilis. Though he probably had a number of venereal diseases, his pathological behavior was not obviously progressive (which also complicates a diagnosis of extreme paranoia), and he remained brilliant and lucid to the end. Only slightly more interesting is the notion that there was something wrong with his “stock”: namely, the “vitiated blood of the Paleologi, with all that predisposition to nervous complaints which was so strongly marked among them.”3 This theory associates Ivan’s high-strung temperament with the fact that his brother was a deaf-mute; his son Fyodor an imbecile; and his last-born, Dmitry, suffered from epileptic fits. Perhaps a geneticist can connect such afflictions; but whatever his stock bequeathed, there is no doubt that his vicious life also caught up with him in the end.

  By January 1584, he had begun to show signs of internal putrefaction, to “griviously swell in his coddes,”4 wrote Horsey, “with which he had most horriblie offended, boasting of a thowsand virgins deflowered.” Carried each day from room to room in a chair, he doted often on his fabulous treasury, tormented at all he would have to leave behind.

  Sixty Lapland witches, “sent forth owt of the North,”5 were brought in haste to Moscow where they were daily consulted by Bogdan Belsky, who conveyed their predictions to the tsar. Belsky dared not tell Ivan all, for the witches unanimously agreed that “the signes constellaccions and strongest planetts of heaven were against the Emperower,”6 and flatly predicted his death for March 18. Belsky warned them they had better be right.

  One day, from the palace balustrade, Ivan saw a comet flash through the sky, its tail forming a nebulous cross that lingered between the domes of two cathedrals. He stared at it gloomily and proclaimed to his attendants: “This portends my death.”

  Circulars were sent to all the monasteries of the realm soliciting prayers.

  March came. On the 10th, he was too ill even to discuss state affairs and directed that a Lithuanian embassy, on its way to Moscow, be delayed at Mozhaisk. But on the 15th, he rallied, gave it clearance to proceed, and later that day invited Horsey and others to accompany him into his treasury, where he discoursed on the occult properties of sundry items in the vaults. “The load-stone you all know hath great and hidden vertue,”7 he began, “without which the seas that compas the world ar not navigable, nor can the bounds or circle of the earth be knowen.” He explained that magnetism enabled the steel tomb of the Prophet Mohammed at Derbent to hover in midair, and marveled at some magnetized needles hanging in a chain. Proceeding next to his gem collection, he commanded one of his attendants to place brightly colored turquoise and coral on his hand and arm. The colors paled. “Declares my death,”8 he exclaimed, “I am poisoned with disease. Reach owt my staff roiall!” A unicorn’s horn garnished with gems was fetched and used to scrape a circle on a board. “Seeke owt som spiders!” Three were obtained: one ran off; two placed within the circle died. “It is too late,” cried Ivan, “it will not preserve me.” He was carried over to his precious stones. Pointing first to the diamond, he said: “I never affected it; yt restreyns furie and luxurie and abstinacie and chasticie; the least parcell of it in powder will poysen a horss geaven to drinck, much more a man.” Next, the ruby: “O! this is most comfortable to the hart, braine, vigar and memorie, and clarifies congelled and corrupt bloud.” Then the emerald: “An enemye to uncleannes. Try it: though man and wiff cohabitt in lust together, havinge this stone aboute them, yt will burst at the spendinge of natur.” Fourth, the sapphire: “Preserves and increaseth courage, joies the hart, pleasuring to all the vital sensis, precious and verie soveraigne for the eys, clears the sig
ht, takes away bloud shott, and strengthens the mussels and strings thereof.” Finally, he took the onyx in his hand: “All these are Gods wonderfull guifts, secreats in natur, and yet reveals them to mans use and contemplacion, as frendes to grace and vertue and enymies to vice. I fainte, carie me awaye till an other tyme.”

  Ivan IV shows his treasures to Ambassador Horsey (Alexander Litovchenko, 1875)

  March 18 arrived. Ivan awoke with gusto. In the afternoon he read over his will, yet supposing himself now “unbewitched,” looked to confirm his optimism by some astrological sign. He summoned his chief apothecary and physicians to apply their ointments and rubs, others to draw his bath, and dispatched Belsky again to the witches “to know their calculacions.”9 Belsky, furious and tired of the whole routine, confronted them: “The daye is come; he is hartt and holl as ever he was,” and swore to see them all burnt for their “fals illucions and lies.”10 They answered: “Sir, be not so wrathfull. You know the daie is com and ends with the settinge of the sun.” Belsky hurried back, found Godunov and others standing about, dutifully assisted the tsar with his ablutions, and soon they all heard him “as he useth to do,” splashing about and singing in his bath. Four hours later Ivan emerged refreshed, sat down on the edge of his bed in a loose gown, and called for his chessboard. He began to assemble the pieces but could not make the king stand up. Suddenly he fainted and fell backward. There was a “great owt-crie and sturr,” aqua vitae, marigold and rose water were fetched to revive him; physicians, apothecary, and confessor all came running, but found him “starke dead.”