On June 21, 1547, disaster befell the capital when Moscow was destroyed by fire. Nearly two thousand people were killed and thousands more became homeless. Rumors spread that the Glinsky family was responsible for the conflagration. They were accused of ripping out human hearts and soaking them in water, and wherever they then sprinkled the water, flames had risen up. An antiboyar riot turned against the Glinskys directly. Ivan’s uncle, Yuri Glinsky, was killed in the cathedral where he had sought shelter from the mob.
After the angry throng marched on Ivan’s home in Moscow, he ordered the summary execution of the leaders. The Glinskys’ grasp on the reins of power had been destroyed, and Ivan was compelled to acknowledge that his own rule was a tenuous one. It was time to cement his authority. The czar created a Chosen Council, composed of a select, trusted cadre of advisers. To Ivan’s credit the council included a trio of men who were anything but sycophants: Metropolitan Makary; Father Sylvester (a no-nonsense priest from Novgorod who didn’t mince words when it came to criticizing Ivan’s use of brutality to subjugate his subjects); and the kindhearted Aleksei Adashev, known for his sympathetic care of lepers. The Chosen Council’s goal was to reform government, although Ivan’s concept of “reform” was to further strengthen his autocracy.
With the council’s advice, Ivan enacted a series of laws and measures designed to leach power from the boyars and the Orthodox Church and concentrate it instead in the person of the czar. “Starting from this day, I shall be your judge and your defender,” he told the people of Moscow. Ivan promised tax relief, and punishment of corrupt government officials. He ordered his laws to be uniformly followed throughout the realm (in the past, outlying areas under the control of powerful boyars tended to ignore the ruler’s decrees). If the Church wanted to increase its real estate holdings, it had to apply to the crown. Literate priests were ordered to open schools. Ivan’s goal was to rival the courts of western Europe, which were far more progressive and enlightened.
Another of Ivan’s aims was to expand his empire westward; he had his eyes on Poland, Lithuania, and Sweden. His greatest threats, however, lay to the south and to the east, where the brutal Tartar khans ruled khanates (kingdoms). Every spring, Tartar horsemen astride sturdy ponies thundered into Russia, wreaking havoc. Unleashing death from their quivers, they plundered villages, raped women, and kidnapped children, especially blue-eyed blondes, and sold them into slavery in Asia and the Mediterranean, where their fair coloring fetched high prices.
Ivan mustered an army of streltsy, or shooters—an early form of riflemen or musketeers—to combat the Tartar archers. He hired them for their marksmanship, unconcerned with whether they were commoners or came from the nobility. With his eye not just on defense but on offense, Ivan set as his target Kazan, the capital of the khanate of the same name, a city on the Volga of a hundred thousand citizens that was the size of London at the time. The czar intended to conquer the kingdom and add it to his empire, converting its Muslims to Christianity. It seemed that the doomsday prophecy uttered by the khan of Kazan to Ivan’s father at his birth was coming true.
By 1552, Ivan had already attacked Kazan three times without success. On his fourth try, when he found the city walls to be impenetrable by his cannons, he cut off the water supply. His army dug two large tunnels under the walls and set off explosives inside them on October 2, 1552. That day, Ivan was hit with a bout of nerves, and spent the day praying while his army attacked Kazan. His aides-de-camp finally convinced the czar to saddle up so that he could inspire his troops—which he did, as long as his horse was stationed on a hilltop high above the fray. Ivan was never a courageous fighter; if there was any risk of injury to his own person, he was particularly craven. However, by the early afternoon his men had conquered Kazan, slaughtering thousands. The khan, Yediger Makhmet, and his family were captured and brought in chains before Ivan, where they prostrated themselves and begged for his mercy. The czar spared them, but most of Kazan’s citizens weren’t so lucky. However, it would take five more years before Ivan could add the region around Kazan to his empire, and Russia still remained threatened by the Tartars in the Crimea, at his southern borders.
On his return journey to Moscow, Ivan was greeted with the news that his beloved Anastasia had given birth to a son, Dmitri. She’d already borne him a daughter, Maria, but a girl could not inherit the throne. With Dmitri’s birth, Ivan had his heir.
To commemorate his great victory in Kazan, Ivan commissioned a glorious cathedral to be built within the Kremlin walls on the site where Saint Basil, a yurodivy or holy fool, was buried. Later known as the Cathedral of Basil the Blessed, during Ivan’s lifetime the edifice—constructed of multicolored bulbous domes, ribbed, covered in shingles resembling the scales of a fish, and faceted like jewels—was called the Cathedral of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin. According to one of Ivan’s twentieth-century biographers, Henri Troyat, the cathedral was intended to be “an act of mystical madness.” It was important to Ivan to select a Russian architect for the project, to prove to the world that his empire boasted as much talent and ingenuity as the West; his choice was a man named Postnik Yakovlev.
Paid for by the conquered inhabitants of Kazan, the cathedral took six years to build, and even at the commemoration, the central spire had yet to be completed. Legend has it that Ivan asked Yakovlev if he could ever again design a cathedral quite as beautiful, and when the architect enthusiastically responded in the affirmative, the czar had him blinded so he could never duplicate his masterpiece. With so many verifiable atrocities attributed to Ivan, there’s no need to invent any. This anecdote is apocryphal; the fully sighted Yakovlev went on to design several more cathedrals, including one in Kazan.
St. Basil’s was a spectacular monument to Ivan’s triumph over Kazan, but he was not able to enjoy his victories for very long. Toward the end of 1552 and into the new year the conquered Kazanites rose up in violent rebellion against the czar’s tax collectors. Ivan began to wonder whether he should have heeded the boyars who’d told him to leave some troops stationed there after his military victory.
His elation at having an heir lasted less than a year as well. In March of 1553, Ivan became too ill to rule and left Moscow to recuperate. In his absence some of his Chosen Council members had backed the succession of his cousin, Prince Vladimir Staristsky, over the czar’s infant son. Before Ivan returned to Moscow he insisted on duplicating a trek his mother had made when she was pregnant with him, embarking on an arduous pilgrimage to various holy sites, including the monastery of Saint Kirill (Cyril) to commune with the pious hermit, or starets, there. Although the source of the warning is attributed to different people, depending on the historian relating the incident, Ivan was told that if he insisted on traveling to Saint Kirill with his wife and baby, the boy would never return to Moscow alive.
As Ivan was about to board the ship for his return voyage to Moscow, Dmitri’s nurse stumbled on the wobbly gangplank and the nine-month-old czarevitch flew out of her arms and tumbled into the river, where he drowned. However, according to Ivan’s biographer Henri Troyat, the infant died of a cold he’d caught during the journey. Seeking someone to hold accountable for the death of his heir, the czar blamed his old friend and trusted adviser Aleksei Adashev, whom Troyat credits with cautioning Ivan about his son’s fate.
In June 1553, little Dmitri was buried in Moscow at the feet of his grandfather Vasily III. But Ivan wasted no time begetting another heir. Nine months later, on March 28, 1554, Anastasia gave birth to another son, whom they named Ivan.
And that year on August 25, his twenty-fourth birthday, the czar received another fabulous gift: He learned that the Tartar kingdom of Astrakhan to the south had fallen to Russia the previous month. It was welcome news, but it wasn’t enough; Ivan wanted access to the Baltic, which would mean control of wealthy port cities and lucrative trade routes. He decided to annex Livonia (where Latvia and Estonia are today). Although his two closest advisers, Father Sylvester and Aleksei Ad
ashev, had cautioned against waging war against Livonia, in January 1558, forty thousand Russian troops invaded, seizing the port city of Narva, which gave them immediate access to western vessels laden with merchandise. But Livonia would prove no easy conquest. The Danes, Swedes, and Poles threatened to join forces with Livonia against the Russians, and the war dragged on for more than two decades.
More bad news arrived on the domestic front. Anastasia had given Ivan six children, three girls and three boys, but only two of them had lived past their second birthday: Ivan, and his younger brother, Feodor. Feodor’s birth in 1557 had weakened Anastasia and she had never fully recovered. Her specific ailment remained undiagnosed and the imperial couple resorted to prayer and the worship of special icons. But the saints weren’t listening. In November 1559, after journeying with Father Sylvester to the monastery of Mozhaisk, Anastasia was seized with a sudden illness; neither doctors nor medicine were within reach. Her condition worsened during the following months. In July 1560, while she was bedridden, a fire broke out in the Kremlin. Fearing the flames were growing nearer, Anastasia panicked and left her bed. Ivan had her transported to the royal residence at Kolmenskoye, a few miles away, but the czarina remained delirious and feverish, imagining that the fire was on the verge of consuming her and her young children. On August 7, 1560, she died. Her age at the time is unknown, although if Anastasia had been Ivan’s age, she would have been about thirty. Perhaps she was a few years younger. It is doubtful he would have chosen a bride older than he was. She was buried in the Ascension Convent in the Kremlin.
Ivan’s grief knew no bounds. He sought solace in drinking copiously and accusing his boyar enemies of poisoning Anastasia. Several men were punished for the purported crime, although Ivan had no firm proof of it beyond his suspicions. However, according to Isabel De Madariaga’s 2006 biography, Ivan the Terrible: First Tsar of Russia, latetwentieth-century forensics may sustain his allegation.
During Anastasia’s illness, Ivan lost much of his profound, and genuine, religiosity. According to one of his confidants, Prince Andrey Kurbsky, “The Tsar came to detest the narrow pathway laden with sorrows which leads to salvation through repentance. Instead he ran joyfully along the broad highway that leads to Hell. Many times I heard from his own lips—when he was depraved he would say these things in the hearing of all: I must make my choice between this world and the other world! He meant: the broad highway of Satan or the sorrowful pathway of Christ.” Kurbsky noted that Ivan “embarked on all sorts of things in an ungodly manner,” beginning his awful walk on the wild side when he realized that his beloved wife was dying.
After Anastasia’s death, Ivan became more paranoid than ever. Any inclinations he might have had to act as a righteous ruler evaporated. Instead he became a bloodthirsty despot, seeing spies and foes everywhere. These perceived enemies included his two most trusted advisers on the Chosen Council. Ivan charged Father Sylvester and Aleksei Adashev with witchcraft and placed them on trial. Neither man was permitted to speak in his own defense, and it was a foregone conclusion that they would be found guilty. Adashev was imprisoned and died two months later; Father Sylvester was exiled to a remote island off the Arctic Circle, where he also died mysteriously within a matter of weeks. Known allies of both men, including Adashev’s twelve-year-old nephew, were executed as well.
In August 1561, Ivan remarried. His bride was a seventeen-year-old Circassian princess, Kocheney Temrjukovna, a Muslim beauty who took the name Maria when she converted to Russian Orthodoxy. Ivan had fallen head over heels for her exotic Asiatic looks and decided to marry her on the spot, forgoing the traditional beauty pageant. But the new czarina was detested by the Russians for having an aggressive personality and for never fully assimilating into their culture. They accused her of being a witch and manipulating the czar. Ivan, too, was soon disappointed in his choice, finding his wife uncouth and uneducated, and—perhaps worse—uninterested in raising his sons by Anastasia.
Historians generally tally Ivan’s spouse count at seven, but he actually made eight trips to the altar. His second wife, Maria Temrjukovna, died in 1569, leaving no surviving children. She was so unpopular with the Russians that Ivan suspected poison again—his fallback position because he always needed someone to blame for every ill that befell him.
He called another bridal beauty pageant and surveyed two thousand virgins. From this lineup, he chose Marfa Sobakina, a merchant’s daughter, wedding her on October 28, 1571. But she was ill when they married and died just sixteen days later. It had almost been a double wedding; on November 3, the seventeen-year-old czarevitch was married to the first runner-up, Eudoxia Saburova.
Naturally, Ivan needed somewhere to place the responsibility for young Marfa’s death, so he accused the late czarina’s brother of killing her and impaled the man on a pike. For good measure, Ivan also executed a handful of others.
According to the Russian Orthodox Church, a man could marry no more than three times; but Ivan insisted to the bishops—when he sought their permission for an unprecedented fourth wife—that the marriage to Marfa had never been consummated. That’s hard to swallow, given the czar’s rampant priapic urges, but no one was about to gainsay him.
On April 29, 1572, Ivan wed wife number four, Anna Koltovskaya. But Anna was banished to a convent three years later for failing to conceive a child. Wife number five was another Anna—Vasilchikova—who lasted from 1575 until 1577, when she succumbed to illness.
Ivan’s sixth spouse, the perky and voluptuous Vasilissa Melentieva, whom he married in 1577, was similar to Henry VIII’s fifth wife, Kathryn Howard, in that she was caught cheating on her royal husband. Astonishingly, given Ivan’s temper and reputation for brutality, Vasilissa got off more lightly than her English counterpart. Dispatched to a convent and shorn of her hair, Anna at least got to keep her head, although she was forced to witness her lover being impaled to death on a spear in the courtyard below her window.
Ivan’s seventh wife was Maria Dolgorukaya, but on their wedding night the czar discovered that she wasn’t a virgin after all. Betrayed and humiliated, he sought revenge. And this time he had no one but himself to finger for the demise of his wife. On the following morning, Ivan ordered Maria to be tied up inside a carriage and driven to the river, where she was drowned. The czar took an eighth and final bride in 1580. Maria Nagaya, who survived him, was the daughter of a court dignitary. She bore Ivan a son who lived to the age of nine, when he was assassinated in 1591.
None of his subsequent wives succeeded in tempering Ivan’s behavior the way his first czarina, Anastasia, had done. In fact, as time went on, his contemporaries observed that Ivan just became more and more brutal. His paranoia grew as he saw spies and conspiracies at every turn, and his customary excesses of liquor and women grew even greater. With all of this overindulgence came an increased desire to punish those who had done him wrong, the more brutally, the better.
Some years were worse than others. In 1563, for example, Ivan suffered a number of setbacks. Vasily, his infant son by his second wife, Maria, died, as did the czar’s sweettempered deaf-mute younger brother, Yuri. With little use for Yuri’s wife hanging around, and perhaps to rid himself of any reminders of his brother, Ivan shoved his kind, pious sister-in-law into a convent, but when she didn’t appear appropriately grateful, he had her murdered.
During his second marriage Ivan had begun to carry a steel-tipped staff wherever he went, striking people at will, and occasionally killing them. The czar would become so violent that he “foamed at the mouth like a horse,” according to his contemporary Daniel Prinz von Bruchau. Prinz left a colorful description of Ivan’s appearance at the time. “He is very tall and physically powerful, though somewhat tending to fat. He has large eyes which are perpetually darting about observing everything thoroughly. He has a red beard with a somewhat black coloring and wears it rather long and thick. But like most Russians he wears the hair of his head cut short with a razor.”
Metropolitan Mak
ary had also died in 1563, replaced by a priest named Afanasy, who was not afraid to criticize Ivan, warning him that “no Christian tsar has the right to treat people like animals.” But Afanasy was far from the only source of resistance. Ivan’s cruelty had already engendered a backlash, and by 1564 his support among the ruling classes had significantly dwindled.
So on December 3, Ivan pulled a publicity stunt, packing up all his household goods, jewels, wardrobe, and furniture on sleighs. Everything was taken to the remote, fortified Alexandrova Sloboda (the word sloboda means “large village”), a hunting lodge about sixty miles from Moscow. On January 3, 1565, Ivan sent letters to the leading boyars and clergymen of the capital, accusing them of the basest forms of corruption. “With a heavy heart,” he added, he was resigning his throne to seek life elsewhere, “wherever God may lead him.” In another letter to his subjects, which was read aloud to the gathered commoners in the Kremlin square, Ivan told them that he had no quarrel with them, but they would get far worse treatment under the boyars than they had ever received from him.
Naturally, this engendered a public outcry along the lines of “bring back the czar!” and rumors spread among the people that the boyars had driven him away, countered by other tales that the masses planned a retaliatory attack on the boyars. The nobles urged Ivan to return, giving him carte blanche to punish any corrupt evildoers among their ranks.
Ivan’s stunt had worked. But when the thirty-four-year-old czar returned to Moscow, he was a shadow of his former physical bulk. His hair had fallen out in clumps, his features were sunken, and his skin was sallow. His eyes had a crazed, glazed look about them.
Things were going to be different around Russia from then on. Ivan divided his territory into two regions. He would rule the oprichnina—the “land apart.” The balance of his realm, to be known as the zemschina—would be ruled by the boyars, subject to the czar’s jurisdiction. Ivan created a team of special forces called the oprichniki—the men apart—policemen and personal bodyguards who swore undying loyalty to him. The home base for these licensed marauders was Alexandrova Sloboda, where the men lived monastic lives, robed in black cassocks and addressing one another as “brother.” They worshiped as ascetic monks did—with long hours and limited personal possessions.
Royal Pains: A Rogues' Gallery of Brats, Brutes, and Bad Seeds Page 11