by Will Durant
Polish art could not keep the pace that Veit Stoss had set at Cracow in 1477. The splendid tapestries of Sigismund II were woven in Flanders. Architects and sculptors from Italy raised the monuments to Sigismund and Báthory and Anna Jagellon in the Cracow cathedral, the baroque churches of the Jesuits in Cracow and Nieświez, and the famous Sigismund III Column in Warsaw. Painting languished under the Protestant attack upon religious images, but Martin Kober made a revealing portrait of Báthory.
Education, like the graphic arts, suffered from the religious turmoil. The University of Cracow was in passing decay, but Báthory founded the University of Wilno (1578), and at Cracow, Wilno, Poznań, Riga, and elsewhere the Jesuits established colleges of such excellence that many Protestants favored them for the mental and moral training of their sons. Better still was the Unitarian school at Rakow, which attracted a thousand students from all the creeds. Jan Zamojski, the humanist Chancellor of Báthory, organized in Zamość a new university devoted chiefly to the classical curriculum.
There was an abundant literature. Religious controversy was often rude in epithets but polished in form; so Stanislas Orzechowski, who defended Catholicism, laid about him with violent intolerance, but “in wonderful Polish, among the best in our history.”33 Equally noted for its style was The Polish Courtier (1566), by Lukasz Gornicki, an adaptation of Castiglione’s Cortegiano. The Jesuit Peter Skargo was eminent in prose and verse, in education and politics. He passed from the presidency of Wilno University to be for twenty-four years the Bossuet of Poland as the leading preacher at the royal court; and he denounced without fear the corruption that surrounded him. He predicted that unless the nation could evolve a more stable and centralized government it would fall a prey to foreign powers; but he called for a responsible monarchy limited and restrained by law. The poetry of Jan Kochanowski remained unrivaled in his own field and tongue till the nineteenth century, and is still popular today. He reached the height of his inspiration in his treny (threnody or lament) for his daughter Ursula, dead in the full charm of childhood.
All Polish culture in this age was disturbed by the conflict of creeds. In the first half of the sixteenth century Protestantism seemed destined to capture Poland as well as Germany and Sweden. Many nobles were won to it as a rebellion against royal authority and ecclesiastical corruption, and as a means of appropriating Church property.34 Sigismund II granted a wide religious toleration. A year after his death a committee of the Diet drew up (January 28, 1573) the “Confederation of Warsaw,” guaranteeing religious liberty to all dissidentes de religione without exception. When put to a vote it was opposed by the episcopal members of the Diet, but it was unanimously approved by the ninety-eight lay members, including forty-one Catholics.35 It represents a landmark in the history of toleration, for no previous official proclamation had gone so far. Under this broad protection a variety of sects flourished: Lutherans, Calvinists, Zwinglians, Anabaptists, Bohemian Brethren, Anti-Trinitarians. In 1579 Faustus Socinus came to Poland and began to organize a church on Unitarian lines; but the Cracow populace dragged him from his house, destroyed his library, and would have killed him had not the Catholic rector of the university come to his aid (1598).36 The Calvinists united with the Lutherans in demanding the expulsion of the “Socinians” from Poland. The Diet in 1638 ordered the closing of the Unitarian schools, and in 1658 banished the sect from the country. They fled to Transylvania, Hungary, Germany, Holland, England, and at last to America, to find their most genial voice in Emerson.
Popular intolerance, Jesuit pedagogy, Catholic discipline, and royal politics joined with Protestant sectarianism to destroy Protestantism in Poland. The new sects fought one another as vigorously as they opposed the ancient creed. The peasants clung to the old faith because it was old; it had the comfort of custom on its side. When the kings—Báthory and Sigismund III—rallied to it, many Protestant converts or their children found it pleasant to make their peace with the Church. The fact that most of the Germans in Poland were Protestants gave Catholicism the help of nationalist sentiment. And the Church actively co-operated with these extraneous aids to reclaim Poland for the papacy. She sent some of her most subtle diplomats and most enterprising Jesuits to win the kings, the women and children, even the Protestant nobles themselves. Ecclesiastical statesmen like Cardinal Stanislas Hosius and Bishop Giovanni Commendone warned the kings that no stable social, moral, or political order could be based upon the fluid and clashing Protestant creeds. The Jesuits proved themselves well able to defend the old incredibilities against the new. Meanwhile the Catholic clergy, submitting to the decrees of the Council of Trent, underwent a rigorous and impressive reform.37
The Catholics too had a problem. The union of Lithuania with Poland brought the Greek Orthodox Church into irritating contact with the Roman. Their creeds differed slightly, but the Orthodox services used the Slavonic ritual, and the Orthodox priests had wives. In 1596 Jan Zamojski, by the Union of Brześć (Brest Litovsk), formed a middle group of clergy and laity into a Uniat Church, which adhered to clerical marriage and the Slavonic rite, but accepted the Roman creed and the papal supremacy. Roman Catholic leaders hoped that the compromise would gradually win the Greek and Russian communions to the papal obedience, but the new church encountered passionate resistance, and its archbishop at Polock was murdered by the Orthodox populace.
The Polish kings continued throughout the sixteenth century a religious toleration more advanced than in any other Christian country, but the Catholic population frequently returned to the old policy of violent hostility. They attacked a Protestant church in Cracow and exhumed and scattered corpses from Protestant graves (1606–7). They destroyed a Protestant church in Wilno and beat—some say killed—the ministers (1611). In Poznań they burned down a Lutheran church and demolished a conventicle of the Bohemian Brethren.38 The Catholic clergy took no part in these popular theological demonstrations, but they profited from them. All circumstances conspired to favor the old Church, and by 1648 her victory was complete.
IV. HOLY RUSSIA: 1584–1645
1. The People
“You have only to look upon a map of the world,” said Nadiezdin in 1831, “to be filled with awe before the destiny of Russia.” As early as 1638 it had reached through Siberia to the Pacific, and along the Volga to the Caspian; not yet, however, to the Black Sea—hence many wars. The population was only ten million in 1571.39 The soil might easily have fed these millions, but reckless tillage exhausted farm after farm, and the peasants moved on to fresher fields.
This migratory tendency seems to have shared in bringing serfdom. Most tenants received advances from their boyar landlords to clear, equip, and plant their farms; they paid as much as 20 per cent on such loans;40 many of them, unable to repay their borrowings, fell into servitude to their landlords, for a law of 1497 made a delinquent debtor the slave of his creditor till the debt was redeemed. To escape such servitude some peasants fled to Cossack camps in the south; some won freedom by agreeing to develop new and difficult terrain—and so Siberia was settled; some migrated to the towns to join the craftsmen there, or work in the mines or in the metallurgical or ammunition industries, or to serve the merchants, or peddle goods in the streets. The landowners complained that the desertion of farms by tenants—usually leaving debts unpaid—disrupted agricultural production, and made it impossible for the owners to pay the rising taxes demanded by the state. In 1581 Ivan the Terrible, to assure continuous cultivation, forbade the tenants of his administrative class (the oprichniki) to leave their farms without the owner’s consent. Though that class was now losing its distinctive existence, the serfdom so established continued on its estates, and was soon demanded of their tenants by the nobles and the clergy who owned the greater part of Russia’s land. By 1648 most Russian peasants were in fact, if not in law, serfs bound to the soil.41
Russia was still close to barbarism. Manners were coarse, cleanliness was a rare luxury, literacy was a class privilege, education was primitive, li
terature was largely monkish chronicles, priestly homilies, or liturgical texts. Of five hundred books published in Russia between 1613 and 1682, nearly all were religious.42 Music played a prominent role in religion and in the home, and art was the handmaid of the Orthodox faith. Architecture built complex churches bulging with chapels and apses and bulbous domes, like the Church of the Virgin of the Don in Moscow. Painting adorned churches and monasteries with frescoes, now mostly covered over, or raised iconostases (icon panels) rich in pictorial invention rather than artistic skill,43 as in the Church of the Miracle of St. Michael at Cracow. By 1600 icon painting had ceased to be an art and had become an industry, producing stereotyped pieces on a large scale for domestic piety. The outstanding art product of the age was the hundred-meters-high bell tower of Ivan Veliki (John the Great), raised by a German architect in the Kremlin Square (c. 1600) as part of Boris Godunov’s program of public works to relieve unemployment.
In the picturesque churches, bright with costly ornaments, somber with calculated gloom, hypnotic with solemn ceremony and sonorous chants and prayers, the Orthodox clergy molded the people to piety, obedience, and humble hope. Seldom has a religion so closely co-operated with the government. The czar gave the example of faithful religious observance and beneficence to the Church; in return the Church invested him with awesome sanctity, made his throne an inviolable altar, and inculcated submission and service to him as a duty owed to God. Boris Godunov established the patriarchate of Moscow as independent of Constantinople (1598); and for almost a century the metropolitan of Moscow rivaled the dignity, sometimes challenged the power, of the czar. When (1594) an embassy came to Moscow from Pope Clement VIII to propose a union of the Orthodox and Latin churches under the papacy, Boris rejected the plan with scorn. “Moscow,” he said, “is now the true orthodox Rome”; and he caused prayers to be offered up for himself as “the only Christian ruler on earth.”44
2. Boris Godunov: 1584–1605
As yet he was ruler in fact only. The Czar was Feodor I Ivanovich (1584–1598), the feeble son of Ivan IV the Terrible, and the last of the Rurik line. Feodor had seen his elder brother die under his father’s demonic blow; he had allowed his own will to be broken; he took refuge from the dangers of the palace in devotion to religion; and though his people called him a saint, they recognized that he lacked the iron to govern men. Ivan IV had appointed a council to guide the youth; one member of it, Feodor’s brother-in-law, Boris Godunov, made himself dominant and became the ruler of the reign.
Ivan IV, by the last of his seven wives, had left another son, Dmitri Ivanovich, who was now (1584) three years old. To protect the child from intrigues other than their own, the Council sent him and his mother to live in Uglich, some 120 miles north of Moscow. There, in 1591, the young Czarevich died, by means not yet determined. A commission headed by Prince Vasili Shuiski (a member of the Council) went to Uglich to investigate; it reported that the boy had cut his throat in an epileptic fit; but Dmitri’s mother charged that he had been killed by an order of Godunov.45 Boris’ guilt was never established, and is questioned by some historians.46 The mother was forced to take the veil, and her relatives were banished from Moscow. Dmitri was added to the calendar of Orthodox saints, and was temporarily forgotten.
Like Richard III of England, Boris ruled more successfully as regent than later on the throne. Though lacking formal education, and perhaps illiterate, he had a shrewd ability, and seems to have labored earnestly to meet the problems of Russian life. He reformed internal administration, checked judicial venality, favored the lower and middle classes, undertook public works to give employment to the urban poor, mitigated the lot and the dues of the serfs, and—says a contemporary chronicle—was “beloved of all men.”47 He enjoyed the respect and confidence of foreign powers.48 When Czar Feodor I died (1598), the Zemski Sobor, or national assembly, unanimously asked Godunov to take the crown. He accepted it with coy protestations of unworthiness, but there is some suspicion that the assembly had been prepared by his agents. Several nobles, resenting his defense of the commonalty,49 contested his right to the throne, and conspired to depose him. Boris imprisoned some, exiled some, and compelled Feodor Romanov (father of the first Romanov czar) to become a monk. Several of the defeated group died so conveniently for Boris that he was accused of having them murdered. Living now in suspicion and fear, he spread spies everywhere, deported suspects, confiscated their property, put men and women to death. His early popularity faded, and the poor harvests of 1600–04 left him without the support of the starving populace against the persisting intrigues of the nobility.
One intrigue became famous in history, literature, and music. In 1603 a young man appeared in Poland who claimed that he was the supposedly dead Dmitri, the legitimate heir to the throne of Feodor Ivanovich. Boris, on good grounds,50 identified him as Grishka Otrepieff, an unfrocked monk who had been in the service of the Romanov family. The Poles, fearful of expanding Russia, were pleased to find in their midst, available to their use, a claimant to the crown of Muscovy; they were further delighted when “Dmitri” married a Polish girl and joined the Roman Church. King Sigismund III, who had just signed (1602) a truce with Russia for twenty years, connived at Dmitri’s recruiting of Polish volunteers. The Jesuits warmly espoused the pretender’s cause. In October 1604 Dmitri crossed the Dnieper with four thousand men, including Russian exiles, German mercenaries, and Polish knights. The Russian nobles, professing neutrality, gave him secret support; fugitive peasants joined the advancing force; the starving people, longing to be deceived, accepted the new Dmitri at his word, and carried his banner as the symbol of monarchical legitimacy and their desperate hopes. While the shouting, praying mob moved upon Moscow from the west, the Cossacks, always ready for a fray, dashed up from the south. The movement became a revolution.
Seeing it as a Polish invasion, Boris sent his army westward. It defeated a detachment of Dmitri’s forces, but missed the rest. In his Kremlin chambers Godunov received no news but of the swelling and advancing mob, the spreading disaffection, the toasts drunk by the boyars even in Moscow to the health of Dmitri, whom they heralded to the people as the holy czarevich chosen by God to be czar. Suddenly, after doubts and agonies known to Pushkin and Moussorgsky rather than to history, Boris died (April 13, 1605). He had commended his son Feodor to the care of Patriarch Basmanov and the boyars; but the priest and the nobles went over to the pretender. Godunov’s son and widow were killed, and in a delirium of national ecstasy the “False Dmitri” was hailed and crowned as Czar of All the Russias.
3. “Time of Troubles”: 1605–13
The new Czar was not a bad ruler as kings go. Unimposing in stature, unprepossessing in face, he could nevertheless handle a sword and ride a horse like a born boyar. He had a perceptive and furnished mind, eloquent address, genial manners, and an unaffected simplicity that shocked the protocol of palace life. He surprised his staff by assiduity in administration, and his army by training it in person. But his superiority to his environment was too conscious and manifest. He openly expressed his scorn of boyar coarseness and illiteracy; he proposed to send noble sons to be educated in the West; he planned to import foreign teachers to establish high schools in Moscow. He laughed at Russian customs and neglected Orthodox ritual; he failed to salute the images of the saints, he dined without having the table sprinkled with holy water, he ate veal, which was considered ritually unclean. He concealed—perhaps he had never taken seriously—his conversion to Catholicism, but he brought to Moscow his Polish Catholic wife, escorted by Franciscan friars and a papal legate; he himself had Poles and Jesuits in his entourage. He spent too freely the revenues of the treasury, doubling the pay of army officers and allotting to his friends the estates confiscated from the Godunov family. Restless and martial, he planned a campaign against the Khan of the Crimea, and practically declared war by sending the Moslem ruler a pigskin coat. When he almost denuded Moscow of soldiers by ordering them south, the boyars feared that he was opening th
e capital to Polish invasion.
A few weeks after Dmitri’s accession a boyar faction under Shuiski conspired to depose him. Shuiski confessed that he had recognized the pretender only to get rid of Godunov; now the tool must be cast aside and a real boyar enthroned.51 Dmitri discovered the plot and had the leaders arrested. Instead of summarily executing them, as tradition demanded, he granted them a trial by the Zemski Sobor—which, for the first time, was now chosen from all ranks and classes. When it condemned Shuiski and others to death, he commuted the sentence to banishment, and after five months he allowed the exiles to return. Many who had believed him to be the son of Ivan the Terrible felt that such unorthodox clemency cast doubt on his royal parentage. The pardoned conspirators renewed their conspiracy; the Romanov family, upon which Dmitri had rained plums of patronage, joined in the plot. On May 17, 1606, Shuiski and his followers invaded the Kremlin with their armed retainers. Dmitri defended himself well, killing several of his assailants with his own hand, but he was overcome and slain. His body was exposed on the place of executions; a ribald mask was thrown over his face, a flute was placed in his mouth; later his corpse was burned, and a cannon shot his ashes to the winds to discourage further resurrections.