Efrem tied a reliquary of a splinter of the True Cross around the boy’s neck, then blessed his head and pronounced the benediction as if ordaining a priest, an act of consecration. Next he placed on his head the fur-rimmed Crown (or Cap) of Monomakh, embellished with rubies and emeralds, and handed him the orb and sceptre. Michael sat on the throne of Monomakh. The Cap had never been owned by the Byzantine emperor Constantine Monomakh who gave it his name, but was a royal Mongol helmet, adapted in the fourteenth century, while the wooden throne, carved with lions and Byzantine scenes, had actually been built for Ivan the Terrible. Efrem declared Michael to be grand prince, tsar and sovereign autocrat of Russia. Afterwards, Michael took off the crown, placed it on the golden salver and passed it to his uncle Ivan Romanov, handing the sceptre to Trubetskoi (who had grumbled about this order of things) and the orb to his cousin Sheremetev. His head was then anointed with the holy oil that bestowed his sacred charisma. Then, in the ritual followed by every tsar until 1896, he emerged to walk to the Archangel Cathedral next door to pray at the graves of Ivan the Terrible and Fyodor, while Prince Mstislavsky thrice threw coins over the tsar to celebrate the prosperity of Russia’s bridegroom. In fact he was in dire straits.9
Michael was surrounded by fractious boyars, some of whom had aspired to be tsar themselves. The kings of Sweden and Poland were gathering armies to crush him; the Tatar khan ravaged the south and the Baby Brigand, the false grandson of Ivan the Terrible, held court in Astrakhan. The country was ruined. The chances of success must have seemed no better than even.
Michael was inexperienced politically and even his supporters described him as dim and placid. Foreigners noticed his genial smile, but during his long reign there are only a couple of occasions when he became angry enough to make any impression. He was ill much of the time. His eye twitched and his legs were unsteady, but it is hard to tell whether he was simply a weak nonentity or whether his frailties were the symptoms of traumas experienced in the Troubles. He was punctiliously pious – as was expected of a true tsar. He liked new technology, collected clocks and enjoyed Western entertainments, employing a troupe of acrobats, clowns and dwarfs in his Poteshnye (Amusement) Palace. Dwarfs and freaks were regarded as lucky mascots, but they were also expressions of the exceptionalism of royalty: Michael’s favourite companion was the dwarf Mosiaga. There was dancing, drums were played and tightropes walked. The tsar was an avid gardener and hunter. Everything suggests a passive, good-natured and cheerful boy who lived for routine and order. We have no lifelike portraits: his image as sweet-natured tsar was more important than his ability to make decisions.10
The boy tsar initially shared power with the boyars and the Assembly. He agreed that he would not ‘execute anyone without fair trial and in conjunction with the boyars’. The Assembly remained almost permanently in session. The Kremlin was dominated by Pozharsky and the heroes of the uprising, who were despatched in every direction to fight the regime’s enemies. Michael’s election was an act of patriotic defiance, his mission to co-ordinate the rout of foreign invaders, and thus from the very start the Romanovs had to provide military leadership.
First his generals defeated the army of the Baby Brigand and Marinka the Witch, both of whom were captured. Her latest husband, the Cossack ataman Zarutsky was impaled with a spike up his rectum on Red Square; Marinka was starved to death; the four-year-old Baby Brigand was hanged from the Kremlin walls. This was no time to take chances. Tatars, Poles and Swedes were at least bloodied. On 15 October 1615, the Swedes agreed the Peace of Stolbovo. Novgorod was returned, but Gustavus Adolphus laid the foundations of a Swedish empire in Livonia; Russia was cut off from the Baltic.
Michael could now concentrate on the chief enemy, the Poles, with Pozharsky as his best commander. Yet no one could forget that Michael’s father, Filaret, was still a Polish prisoner. The tsar’s first letter to Filaret made clear that the old man was potentially the real force in the government: ‘to the most venerable and exalted Metropolitan, father of fathers, Great Sovereign Filaret, worthy of sacred and divinely adorned rank, diligent seeker of lost sheep: your son, scion of your eminently illustrious stem, Michael, Tsar and Grand Prince, Autocrat of all Russia, bows his head zealously to the ground . . .’
In Polish captivity, meeting his son’s first envoy under the eyes of his captors, Filaret had to square his former allegiance to the Poles with the election of his son as tsar: ‘I’ve acted in good faith until now, but now my own son has been elected sovereign. In this way, you committed an injustice to me. You could have elected someone else but now you did this without my knowledge . . .’ And here was the crux: ‘He became sovereign not through his wish but by the Grace of God.’ While the Poles were determined to destroy Michael, they were unlikely to release his father – and at some point the tsar would have to call a brideshow to choose a wife.11
Michael and the people who had elected him desperately wanted a real sacred tsar with the splendour of a royal court – to make it seem as if the atrocities of the last ten years had never happened. Ritual had to be performed, antiquity restored, but the court had to be created afresh – and everything new had to seem traditional. The disintegration that followed the death of Ivan the Terrible had shown what could happen when the autocrat had destroyed all opposition but left the autocracy without a base. From the very start, the Romanovs ruled with a core of great families whom they rewarded with grants of land, pomestia, held temporarily in return for military service.
First Michael’s retainers restored the ceremony of sacred monarchy. In the vaulted audience chamber, illustrated with biblical scenes, the young tsar, wearing robes set with diamonds and a diamond-studded sable-trimmed hat, the gold sceptre in his hand, sat on a raised throne with four gilded pillars each surmounted with a golden eagle. Beside the throne was a gold imperial apple as large as a skittle ball on a silver pyramid and a gold basin and ewer and towel. On each side stood boyars and officials in white damask robes, lynx-fur hats and white boots with gold chains around their necks, gleaming silver axes over their shoulders.
Michael’s life was dominated by religious services that could often last from dawn till dusk, and strict observation of all festivals – which covered nearly all the days of the year. On the Feast of Epiphany, 6 January, the tsar, surrounded by courtiers and his musketeers, the streltsy, an elite regiment founded by Ivan the Terrible, gathered around a hole broken in the ice of the Moskva River to ‘bless the waters of the Jordan’, a ritual that promoted Moscow as Jerusalem, Russia the Holy Land.
The calibrated hierarchy of court was recreated. In all autocracies, favour is measured by proximity to the ruler. In Moscow this was expressed as ‘beholding the bright eyes of the Sovereign’. The court was the entrepôt of power where the nobles offered their recognition and service to the monarch, who in response distributed jobs, land, power, titles and marriages and in turn expected them to help command his armies and organize the mobilization of his resources. The court brokered power, enabled participants to amass wealth, bonded them in their shared loyalty to the monarchy – but it also allowed them to compete without resorting to civil war or revolution. Here they played out their conflicts – political rivalries, sexual intrigues – which were adjudicated by the monarch and his trusted henchmen. No one could forget the Troubles, and the autocracy was regarded as essential not just to unite the country and reconquer lost lands but also to prevent any slide back to mayhem. Once established, the Romanovs were rarely challenged as the rightful dynasty.
Every morning the boyars and courtiers* approached the Red Stair case that led from Cathedral Square up to the private apartments in the Terem Palace. The junior officials, ‘the people of the square’, waited at the bottom, but the lucky few, ‘the people of the apartments’, could go on up. The royal suite was a line of rooms of increasing and impenetrable sanctity. Only the very highest could reach the Golden Chamber, the third chamber next to the royal bedchamber. The tsar was so sacred that no one was allowed to l
ook him in the eye, and he was greeted by his subjects with total prostration. If he was bled by doctors, the blood was blessed and buried in a special blood pit to prevent sorcery.
As ever in the Kremlin, security was paramount. Just in case his much promoted, sweet-natured sanctity was not enough, Michael ordered that anyone hearing ‘the tsar’s word or deed’ – a fearsome phrase which meant that someone suspected treason – was to inform his enforcer, Prince Yuri Suleshov, a converted princeling of the Tatar Golden Horde, who ran the Office of Investigations. Even now, the court had a strong Tatar flavour with many converted princelings, none more powerful than Michael’s half-Tatar cousins, the princes Cherkassky.12 The court was restored, but Michael could no longer afford to wait for his father to return. He had to find a wife, a magnificent but perilous role in a court where poison was just another political tool. In late 1615, he called a brideshow.
Courtiers fanned out across the kingdom to select teenaged virgins, mostly from middling gentry families, who were despatched to Moscow where they lived with relatives or in a specially chosen mansion. These candidates, perhaps as many as 500 of them, were reduced to around sixty girls, primped and groomed by their families.
The contestants first appeared before a jury of courtiers and doctors who weeded out the weakest. Descriptions were sent to the tsar and his advisers, but apart from beauty and health, the essential details were any kinship ties to Kremlin clans. As they waited nervously, their family trees were researched in detail.
This ancient tradition fascinated foreign visitors who regarded it as the most exotic of Muscovite customs. It projected the mysterious but wholesome majesty of autocracy but was really a practical response to the tsars’ difficulty in attracting foreign wives to their isolated and faraway court. The shows were designed to calm the brutal competition between court factions by using an open ritual to choose a respectable maiden from the provincial gentry. The tsars wished to marry beneath themselves to avoid any links to boyar factions who did not want the bride to be connected to their rivals. Yet they each secretly hoped to promote a girl related (however distantly) to themselves.
The best girls were selected for the next stage, the viewing (smotriny), at which the tsar himself whittled down the contestants, who were now examined by the head of the Great Court Office and by royal doctors to assess their fecundity, the point of the entire exercise. The rejected were given presents and sent home, but the lucky six or so finalists moved into a special Kremlin mansion, then were presented to the tsar who signalled his choice by giving his handkerchief and gold ring to the chosen maiden.
The brideshows were not as fair as they looked: they could not be rigged but they could be manipulated. The last girls presented to the tsar were the result of the very intense politicking that the ritual was designed to avoid. The art of winning brideshows was to get more than one suitable candidate into the viewing. More than that the courtiers could not do. The tsar did not control the finalists, but no one could control whom he chose at the final viewing.
The winner and her father changed their names to signify their new status as royal in-laws; the girl assumed the title of tsarevna, and she and her mother moved into the Terem Palace to be trained – but also to be guarded because, as Michael’s bride was about to discover, the winner was in danger.13
Just before Christmas 1615, the girls arrived to be inspected by Michael who chose Maria Khlopova, of middling gentry, by giving her the ring and kerchief. Changing her name to Anastasia, and receiving the higher title ‘tsarina’, she, her grandmother and her aunt were installed in the top storey of the Terem Palace while her uncle Gavril Khlopov joined the royal retinue. But this threatened the most powerful of Michael’s courtiers. Fyodor Sheremetev, the cousin who had travelled to Kostroma to offer him the throne, ran much of the government, but Mikhail Saltykov, nephew of the tsar’s mother Martha, who had been with them in Kostroma, had the most to lose. Saltykov and Martha opposed Khlopova.
About six weeks after the betrothal, the tsar, Saltykov and the fiancée’s uncle Khlopov were inspecting Turkish sabres in the Armoury. ‘Such sabres could be made in Moscow,’ boasted Saltykov, who as royal armsbearer ran the Armoury. The tsar handed a sabre to his prospective uncle-in-law asking if he really thought the Armoury could match the workmanship.
‘Not as good,’ replied Khlopov. Saltykov grabbed the sword back and the two men argued in front of the tsar.
Soon afterwards, the bride vomited and fainted before the whole court. She had eaten too many sweets, her uncle later testified, but this case of possible food poisoning raised fatal questions: was she healthy enough to bear children and had her family hidden a secret disease? The tsar, or his mother, ordered Saltykov to supervise the girl’s health – with breathtaking naivety or malevolence. Saltykov started dosing her with potions from the Pharmacy, after which she began suffering convulsions and vomiting. Everyone was horrified – as they were meant to be. Probably backed by the tsar’s mother, the mastermind behind this malign intrigue, Saltykov suborned the doctors to say the girl was concealing an incurable disease and was incapable of having children. The poor girl along with her family were exiled to Siberia, her father appointed governor of faraway Vologda. After six weeks of royalty, the girl and her family were ruined. Michael loved the girl, yet he did not investigate further: he did not feel strong enough to overrule his mother. But this was not the end of the story.14
In October 1617 Prince Władysław of Poland advanced with his army to Viazma, 150 miles to the east, and dug in. On 9 September the following year, Michael summoned the Assembly to mobilize the nation, his appeal reeking of panic. On 1 October, the Poles attacked Moscow and reached the Arbat Gates, but as winter set in, mutinies and famine broke the Polish army in this last battle of the Troubles. On 2 February 1619, Michael agreed to the fourteen-year Truce of Deulino that gave Poland possession of Smolensk. It was a humiliation, but Michael had held the kingdom together, no small feat – and he got something back that was almost as important.15
On 14 June 1619, Michael, now aged twenty-three, accompanied by excited crowds, travelled to the Pryesna River five miles outside the city, and waited. A carriage with its own escort was approaching. When it was close, his father, Filaret, grey-bearded, and almost seventy, climbed out. After nine years’ separation, son and father were both so moved that they hugged and prostrated themselves on the ground for a long time, weeping with joy. When they set off home, Filaret rode in a sleigh while Michael walked alongside back to Moscow, which welcomed them to the sound of bells and cheers. A week later, in the Golden Chamber, Filaret was nominated patriarch by the visiting Theophanes, patriarch of Jerusalem.
Filaret, masterful and cantankerous survivor of Ivan the Terrible and Fyodor, of exile and tonsure, of two False Dmitris and Polish captivity, was never going to be a mere clergyman. Michael appointed him grand sovereign, effectively co-tsar – they ruled together in a diarchy. The patriarch, who had only a ‘fair knowledge of the Scriptures’, had waited too long for power. He was ‘irascible, suspicious and so imperious that even the tsar was afraid of him’ – and his political skills have led some to compare him to his contemporary, Cardinal Richelieu.
The letters of tsar and patriarch show how father and son addressed each other formally. ‘We pray Almighty God that we shall see your holy fair and angelic face and kiss your Holiness’s head and bow down to do obeisance,’ wrote Michael. Filaret went through the motions of advising – ‘And how will you, Sovereign, command on the Crimean business?’ – but then he answered his own question: ‘To me, the Sovereign, I think that . . .’ They received ambassadors sitting side by side on identical thrones, sometimes diplomatically playing different roles. ‘Don’t declare it is written by me,’ Filaret instructed Michael in one case.
There was respect but not intimacy. ‘The natural affections of the son’, noticed a Dutch envoy, were ‘directed much more towards his mother than towards his father on account of the long separation.’ Ye
t they worked things out together. ‘It’s written, O Sovereign,’ wrote the tsar to his father, ‘that you Great Sovereign and our father and pilgrim, wish to be in Moscow for the Feast of the Trinity but that’s not convenient for you because the roads will be impassable in your carriage. Perhaps it would be better if you came on the Monday . . . But let it be as our Great Sovereign wishes.’
Filaret was the strongman of the Kremlin, and no one did more to establish the Romanovs. He was the impresario behind an array of ostentatious ceremonies and architectural improvements to project the prestige of the crown.* He ruled through a trusted coterie – his much younger brother Ivan, and his cousins, Sheremetev and the half-Tatar Prince Ivan Cherkassky. If any boyar stepped out of line, he was liable to be imprisoned. Nine of them were exiled. Filaret spent much time adjudicating between boyars, who feuded constantly over precedence and frequently resorted to physical violence. Many boyars remembered him as one of them: the gruff but loyal Prince Lykov-Obolensky once swore at Filaret in church. Now it was lonely at the top: Filaret grumbled to his son that his only friends were Cherkassky, Lykov and his brother Ivan.
Yet Filaret’s purpose, the Romanov mission, was to mobilize Russia. He ‘administered everything concerning tsardom and army’, and he saw his most urgent task as preparing for vengeance against Poland. Tax collecting was reformed; the Church disciplined and its lands co-opted by the dynasty, laying the foundations for its wealth. The landowners were given greater control over their serfs in return for their readiness to fight. As border clashes with Poland intensified, Filaret knew that his Polish and Swedish enemies were technically far ahead of Russia, but with Europe now being ravaged by the Thirty Years War, experienced mercenaries were plentiful and he hired English and Scottish officers to modernize the army. But the dynasty needed an heir: the tsar must marry.16
The Romanovs Page 6