Fearful Majesty Read online

  Fearful Majesty

  The Life and Reign of Ivan the Terrible

  Benson Bobrick

  Also by Benson Bobrick:

  The Caliph’s Splendor: Islam and the West in the Golden Age of Baghdad

  Master of War: The Life of General George H. Thomas

  The Fated Sky: Astrology in History

  Testament: A Soldier’s Story of the Civil War

  Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution it Inspired

  Angel in the Whirlwind: The Triumph of the American Revolution

  Knotted Tongues: Stuttering in History and the Quest for a Cure

  East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia

  Labyrinths of Iron: Subways in History, Myth, Art, Technology, and War

  Parsons Brinckerhoff: The First Hundred Years

  This edition is dedicated to:

  EDWARD W. TAYLER,

  Scholar, Teacher, Friend

  Copyright © 1987, 2014 by Benson Bobrick

  Copyright to all work in this volume is governed by U.S. and international copyright laws. Work may not be reproduced in any manner without the expressed, written permission of the copyright holder. For permission to reproduce selections from this book, contact the publisher at the address below.

  Cover image: The “Lion of Reval” Cannon, in St. Petersburg’s Artillery Museum. The rear of the cannon features the only extant sculpture of Ivan’s face made in his lifetime and bears the inscription: “The Reval magistrate named me Lion, so that I would defeat his enemies, those who do not want to live in peace with him. I was cast in 1559 by Karsten Mitteldorp and that is the truth.”

  Photo courtesy Daniel Belousov.

  Cover design: Vanessa Maynard.

  Material reprinted from The Moscovia of Antonio Possevino, S.J., translated by Hugh F. Graham by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press, © 1977 by University Center for International Studies, University of Pittsburgh.

  ISBN 978-1-880100-84-4

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014943597

  Russian Information Services, Inc.

  PO Box 567

  Montpelier, VT 05601-0567

  www.russianlife.com

  [email protected]

  phone 802-234-1956

  Acknowledgments

  This book has been long in the making, and I am grateful to all who helped along the way. At one time or another I received needed information or advice from my brother Peter Bobrick (on whom I could always rely for expert translations from the German); from Diana Ajjan, Hugh F. Graham, John W. Hawkins, Joe Kanon, Tim Meyer, Christine Schillig, Cecilia de Querol, Fred Sawyer, Peter von Wahlde, and Victoria Zubkina; from Victoria Edwards at Sovfoto; and from various members on staff at the New York Public Library, Butler Library at Columbia University, the Library of Congress, and the Library of the British Museum. I should also like to acknowledge here, too, those numerous yet exemplary scholars and historians whose bookish company I was privileged to keep in the quiet of my study every day. If my own book has anything new or useful to offer, it is surely because I was able to take my “prospect round” from atop the shoulders of their work. My extensive Bibliography represents an earnest attempt at a full and democratic roll-call of my debt.

  Finally, I am especially grateful to my editor, Lee Ann Chearneyi, who gave me leave to write as I wished, but not license to be redundant or pointlessly obscure; to Marguerite Woerner for crucial technical assistance; and above all to my wife, Danielle, whose intercessory support helped prevent the sometimes tyrannical exactions of my task from inscribing my name (in a manner of speaking) as a posthumous addition to Ivan’s dread Synodical.

  Contents

  Muscovy in 1530 (Map)

  Rulers of Russia (to 1598)

  Genealogy of Ivan IV, “the Terrible”

  Metropolitans of Moscow

  Russia in 1598 (Map)

  Foreword to the New Edition

  Preface

  A Note on Names and Dates

  PART ONE: MUSCOVY

  1 The Death of Vasily III

  2 The Realm of Muscovy

  3 Interregnum

  4 The Education of a Tsar

  5 Tsar Ivan IV

  6 The Glinskys

  7 The Chosen Council

  8 The First Wave of Reforms

  PART TWO: EMPIRE

  9 Military Affairs

  10 Kazan

  11 The Crisis of 1553

  12 Vassian Toporkov Versus Maxim the Greek

  13 Art and Heresy

  14 On to Astrakhan

  15 A Hammer for Lapland

  16 “A Thousand Kingdoms We Will Seek From Far”

  17 Hanseatic Merchants and Red Cross Knights

  18 The Second Wave of Reforms

  19 “To Subdue and Conquere His Enemies”

  20 The Collapse of Livonia

  21 Turning Point

  22 Sacrifices to Cronus

  PART THREE: SCHISM

  23 Satan’s Band

  24 English Interlude

  25 The Zemsky Sobor of 1566

  26 The Tsar at Chess with Elizabeth and Erik

  27 Conspiracies

  28 The Martyr’s Crown

  29 The Great Messenger

  30 Muscovy’s Neighbors Regroup

  31 The Sack of Novgorod

  32 Faith and Works

  33 The “Evil Empire”

  34 “A fearfull reveng and spectacle to al generacions”

  35 The Battle of Molodi

  36 A Medley of Monarchs

  37 The Enthronement of Simeon Bekbulatovich

  PART FOUR: DEMISE

  38 Stefan Batory

  39 Polotsk and Veliky Luki

  40 Missio Moscovitica

  41 Pskov

  42 “Recall to Memory Constantine”

  43 Tsar and Jesuit Debate the Faith

  44 Aftermath

  45 Sir Jerome Bowes

  46 The Conquest of Siberia

  47 Endgame

  Bibliography

  Source Notes

  About the Author

  Muscovy in 1530

  Rulers of Russia (to 1598)

  (Ancestors of IVAN IV are capitalized)

  Genealogy of Ivan IV, “the Terrible”

  Metropolitans of Moscow

  Iona (1448-61)

  Feodosy (1461-64)

  Philip (I) (1464-73)

  Geronty (1473-89)

  Zosima (1490-94)

  Simeon (1495-1511)

  Varlaam (1511-21)

  Daniel (1522-39)

  Joasaf (1539-42)

  Makary (1542-63)

  Afanasy (1564-66)

  Gherman (1566)

  Philip (II) (1566-68)

  Kirill (1568-72)

  Antony (1572-81)

  Dionysius (1581-87)

  Foreword to the New Edition

  THE FAMED TRAVEL writer Lesley Blanch once remarked that “Russia is not a state but a whole world – a world where everything is on another scale: where excess prevails… The tempo of everyday life seems, to other less extravagant peoples, a compound of violence and inertia, both carried to extremes, in love or war, politics, human relationships, architecture,” and other spheres. If so, Ivan the Terrible epitomizes something inherent in the Russian soul. Everything about him was writ large. His learning and capacities had a Renaissance range; and his tragic evolution from fearful child to fearsome man was inextricably bound up with Russia’s emergence as a great power. His benign domestic governance warped into police state terror; his domestic life oscillated between ascetic self-abnegation and the abandoned lusts of a libertine. Almost the whole of the sixteenth century, in its richness and diversity, archaic force
and luminous, dark grandeur, are reflected in his life and rule. Any student of psychology, history, literature, theology, military science, and geopolitics cannot fail to come away from a right study of Ivan without an enlarged understanding of these fields.

  When my biography was first published in 1987, it was singled out by the History Book Club as “the most objective and comprehensive analysis of Ivan which has ever appeared in English.” I’d like to think it earned that accolade in part because I’d managed to bring him alive in the full context of the period he spanned. That, in any case, is what I’d hoped to do. Yet he is in no sense a quaint, or merely historic figure. Russian history may not be done with its pageant of tyrants yet; or with the curtained world imposed by their regimes. As long as autocrats exist – in Russia or elsewhere – Ivan will be of interest, since his reign was the very paradigm of tyrannical rule.

  For all these reasons, I hope my book, reissued after twenty-seven years, will be of interest, too.

  Benson Bobrick

  February 8, 2014

  Preface

  IN 1492, THE year Columbus “discovered America,” most Russians expected the world to end. Like the Byzantines, they dated their calendar from the Creation, believed the world had been created in 5508 B.C., and that it would endure for 7000 years – a calculation based on the idea of the Cosmic Week, as extrapolated from the week of Creation: for to God a thousand years are as one day. As 1492 approached, the apocalyptic signs were unmistakable, as long-standing prophecies appeared to be fulfilled. The greatest of these by far was the fall, after the reign and splendor of over a thousand years, of Constantinople to the Turks – “the Ishmaelites” – an event that marked the end of the Byzantine Empire and seemed to warrant comparison with the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans and Christ’s death upon the Cross. Such was the general foreboding, that the Russian Church actually failed to calculate the date of Easter for the following year.

  The world survived, of course; the Last or “Terrible” Judgment (as the Eastern Orthodox called it) was delayed, and when a new Easter calendar was compiled for the eighth millennium by the Metropolitan of Moscow (the primate of the Russian Church), the grand prince was described in the prologue as “the new Emperor Constantine” – and Moscow as “the New City of Constantine”1 – thereby laying claim to the religious and political inheritance of Byzantium. In 1547, Ivan IV (“the Terrible”) officially ratified this claim by assuming the title of Tsar. At the same time, he married Anastasia Romanovna, a member of the family later known as Romanov, destined to supplant the House of Rurik as the ruling dynasty of the realm. His coronation was thus the seminal setting for the course Russian history would follow from that day forward until 1917.

  Ivan’s reign, though chronologically remote, has relevance for anyone caring to understand the people of Russia and the place of their nation in the world. Indeed, despite the Revolution of 1917, some part of the Russian soul will always remain Muscovite, and to a degree most readers might find surprising the Soviet state elaborated under Stalin represented less a repudiation of the world of the tsars than a kind of recrudescence of the Muscovy Ivan ruled. Traces of old Muscovy continue to this day, and are broadly reflected in everything from popular customs to government organization and foreign relations. It is in Ivan’s time, for example, that Russia’s great confrontation with the West begins, and ideas formed then seem almost to have been cast and set in a mold. “Evil Empire” speeches belong to a long tradition, and one urgent admonition delivered in 1569 by the king of Poland (describing Russia as “an enemy to all liberty under the heavens”2) stands as the progenitor of all such diatribes.

  Ivan was cruel – and “terrible” – and great. His considerable reign saw the conquest of the Tatar strongholds of Kazan and Astrakhan, and (despite a disastrous drive to the Baltic) the consolidation of Russia as a nation from the Caspian to the White Sea. His ongoing duel with the princely aristocracy, or boyars, laid the foundations for an autocracy supported by a nonhereditary serving class, while his permanent initiatives in opening up diplomatic ties to Europe bound Russia ever after to the West. No ruler of the age had more staying power. Eight popes would succeed each other to the Holy See, four monarchs each to the thrones of France, Poland, Portugal, Germany, and England, three to the throne of Sweden, and three Turkish sultans to the Sublime Porte before Ivan met his own demise. Within Muscovy itself, his judicial and other reforms for a time made him an exceptionally popular ruler, and though his Oprichnina – or “government apart” – would eventually develop into a terror machine, its inception brought lowborn gentry into the councils of government and arguably at first had the welfare of the country at heart. In certain respects, at least, he may not have been unworthy of the adoration bestowed on him by Peter the Great, or of his twentieth-century reincarnation as the ambiguous national hero of Sergey Eisenstein’s film.

  Yet however great his achievements, they were matched by his despotism and atrocities; and despite his colossal stature, historians disagree about him on almost every level and on many important details. He has remained the most controversial of tsars, and part of his fascination for a student of history lies in the changing fortunes of his fame.

  A decisive verdict is made difficult by serious gaps in the factual evidence on which a biography can be based. This is true with regard to Ivan in particular, and to his period in general – one of the most abstruse in Russian history. The situation so dismayed the great historian S. F. Platonov in 1923 that he doubted a biography of Ivan could be written, though he wrote one himself nevertheless.

  The obstacles today are less daunting than they were. In the past half-century, research in the field has claimed the talents of a number of remarkable scholars, east and west, whose insights and discoveries have been considerable. By and large, however, this new archive of material has remained the preserve of specialists, and is scattered far and wide through learned journals seldom read beyond the halls of academe. This book is substantially an attempt to gather much of the best of it under a single roof.

  Beyond that, I have tried to place Ivan more clearly in his contemporary context, to fill in the historical background and often neglected landscape of ideas, and to evoke Muscovy itself as vividly as possible – for even among popular historians it can no longer suffice to say merely that Russia was “barbarous” and “medieval” before Peter the Great. However, though I have occasionally tried to carry my own lamp into the recesses of the story, I cannot claim to have resolved the fundamental contradictions that must baffle any biographer of Ivan IV. On the contrary, I learned to live with them – even as his contemporaries did. One contemporary miniature remains for me inimitably succinct: “He was a goodlie man of person and presence, waell favored, high forehead, shrill voice; a right Sithian; full of readie wisdom; cruel, bloudye, merciles.”*

  * * *

  * Sir Jerome Horsey, in his account of the 1584 coronation of Fyodor Ivanovich, Ivan IV's son.

  A Note on Names and Dates

  NO TWO BOOKS on Russian history agree completely on the spelling of names. In this book anglicized (if not always English) forms have been used, for ease of recognition and pronunciation. The soft sign, usually rendered by an apostrophe (as in Sil’vester), has been dropped.

  All dates are according to the Julian or Old Style calendar in use in Western Europe until 1582. Sixteenth-century Russians celebrated their New Year on September 1 and based their calendar on the date of the creation of the world, which they placed in 5508 b.c.

  “[Mercy] becomes

  The throned monarch better than his crown;

  His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,

  The attribute to awe and majesty,

  Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;

  But mercy is above this sceptred sway.”

  – Shakespeare ,

  The Merchant of Venice,

  Act 4, Scene 1, 11. 188-193.

  “If all the pictures and patterns o
f a merciless prince were lost in the world, they might all again be painted to the life out of the story of this King. For, how many servants did he advance in haste and with what change of his fancy ruined again, no man knowing for what offense? To how many others, of more desert, gave he abundant flowers from whence to gather honey, and in the end of harvest burnt them in the hive? How many wives did he cut off, and cast off, as his fancy and affection changed? How many princes of the blood (whereof some of them for age could hardly crawl toward the block), with a world of others of degrees did he execute?”

  – Sir Walter Ralegh,

  History of the World, on Henry VIII

  PART ONE

  MUSCOVY

  * * *

  1

  The Death of Vasily III

  IN 1533, VASILY III, grand prince of Muscovy and the father of Ivan IV (“the Terrible”), Russia’s first tsar, was in his fifty-fourth year (and the twenty-eighth of his reign) when his life was cut short. No one was more surprised at this development than Vasily himself. Though he had reached a comparatively venerable age, throughout his careworn years as sovereign he had never felt so rambunctious. Seven years before, he had cast off a barren, gloomy, and hypochondriacal wife for a Lithuanian princess half his age whose beauty and animal vitality absolutely infatuated him. He had defied the whole Eastern Orthodox Church to have her, and she had since borne him two sons, securing the succession after a quarter century of doubt. His might unchallenged and supreme, still in love, lusty and optimistic, as he set out in September for a holiday of hunting and feasting at Volokolamsk, northwest of Moscow, he cannot have been much alarmed when a crimson sore containing a tiny pimple appeared on his lower left thigh.