Ivan the Terrible (11 page)

With adolescence the range of Ivan's activities increased. He was evidently fond of the chase and spent a lot of time hunting bears and other wild animals. A record of his travels in 1544, 1545 and 1546 shows that he was constantly on the move in spring and summer, nearly always with his brother Iuri, and often with his cousin Prince Vladimir of Staritsa. These hunting expeditions were combined with pilgrimages to many important monasteries, attendance at church services, and the giving of alms and gifts for memorial services.
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On 21 May 1545 Ivan went to the Troitsky monastery, then to Pereiaslavl', and leaving his
companions to return to Moscow, he continued to Rostov, to the Kirillov monastery at Beloozero, to the Ferapont monastery, to Vologda, Prilutsky, Kornilov, Pavlov, Boris and Gleb on the Ust'ia, then again on 15 September he was at the Troitsky monastery, in Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda, and in Mozhaisk for the hunting.
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It is possible that on his travels in 1545 Ivan was in contact with Maksim Grek, who addressed two missives to the young Grand Prince at that time, with advice on how to be a good ruler: a genuine tsar strives after justice, issues good laws and tries to conquer his evil passions, namely malice, anger and the lawless caprices of the flesh; he closes his ears to slander.
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Also around this time the priest Sylvester admonished the young Grand Prince, asking him to send young people guilty of sodomy away from his court.
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Judging by his letters to Kurbsky, and by his
poslania
(missives), which he had probably dictated, since writing was often at that time considered a menial occupation fit only for clerks,
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Ivan was very familiar with both the New and the Old Testaments and with the Apocrypha. Indeed, he must have been surrounded by priests and have attended numerous church services every day, which imbued him with a deeply religious image of the world. Biblical language and dramatic symbolic images were ideally suited to his passionate, poetic and angry imagination. He was also familiar with many sermons and homilies by the fathers of the Orthodox Church, and must have been taught the catechism and the psalter, which he probably heard so often in church services that he knew it by heart. He appears also to have enjoyed singing in church. Was Ivan able to read? Or were tales read to him? Learning to read is not, after all, so difficult – even a sixteenth-century Russian manuscript.

At some stage Ivan must have become acquainted with the Tale of the Princes of Vladimir,
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since it formed the subject of one of the most dramatic propaganda frescoes on the walls of the Dormition Cathedral in the Kremlin and the Russian princes' descent from the Emperor Augustus Caesar's brother Prus was worked into the liturgy for Ivan's coronation. Did he know the Tale of Dracula, based on
voevoda
Vlad
epe
Dracul, who ruled Wallachia from 1456 to 1462 and again in 1477?
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It may well have been another influence on Ivan's attitude to his subjects, possibly connected with his family background through his mother. Around 1458–60 Vlad
epe
Dracul, already famous for his cruelty, had invaded Transylvania (then under Hungarian control). Stories of the atrocities he committed on that occasion against the Saxon towns were current in the court of King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, and records of Dracul's lurid doings were carried away to the monastery
of St Gallen in Switzerland by Catholic monks who escaped the Turkish advance. The invention of printing made the reproduction of tales of Dracul's real or imaginary atrocities into the best-selling horror stories of the age in the German-speaking world.
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When Fedor Kuritsyn was sent by Ivan III, in 1482–4, on an embassy to Matthias Corvinus of Hungary and Stephen the Great of Moldavia, he met the widow and children of Vlad
epe
Dracul in Buda, and could have found some things out for himself. A group of narratives of the Dracula tales, written in Church Slavonic, the only written language of Wallachia, found its way, probably by means of Orthodox monks fleeing from the Turks, possibly by means of Kuritsyn, to the monastery of Beloozero. They were then put together by Evfrosin, the well-known copyist and later abbot of the monastery, and cast a somewhat different light on Dracula as a ruler severe and cruel not for cruelty's sake but for the sake of his subjects.
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As we know, Ivan IV was a frequent visitor to this monastery, and it is not unlikely that he read these tales or had them read to him. On the whole they belong to the species folklore and propaganda rather than true stories: propaganda which proliferated in the wake of the constant and savage warfare between different national groups (Germans, Wallachians, Poles, Hungarians, Turks) breaking in great waves over people living in fear of what the next day and the next world might bring. Impaling his enemies may well have been a form of execution borrowed later by Ivan from the Ottoman Empire through Wallachia and tales of Vlad the Impaler. It does not seem to have been used by Russian rulers either earlier or later. It was not extensively used by Ivan, but mainly, it seems, where he felt particular personal vindictiveness, or against service gentry and boyars who fled to Lithuania. A moment's reflection will show that it was not a very practical form of execution on a large scale, and there are no reports of impalements in Russia similar to the equally unlikely reports of the executions carried out as Vlad
epe
sat down to his dinner. The English representative of the Russia Company, Jerome Horsey, reports one case, and for good measure throws in that the victim's wife was made to watch the death throes of her husband and was subsequently raped by a hundred gunners – again hard to believe.
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Tales of the heroic deeds of past princes, such as the Tale of Dmitri Donskoi's victory over the Tatars in 1380 and the
Alexander Romance
(dealing with Alexander the Great and widely read throughout Europe), together with
byliny
(heroic ballads) and fairy tales, probably formed the background to Ivan's childhood and adolescence. The coming of the
last Emperor and of Antichrist, foretelling the end of the world, and the Last Time, were also subjects frequently dealt with, as well as the Homilies on the Second Coming of Christ, ascribed to Ephraim the Syrian, and the Tale of Christ and Antichrist, ascribed to Hippolytus of Rome. Fears of the end of the world were revived by the fall of Constantinople in, for instance, the Tale of the Fall of Tsar'grad, in which the returning emperor defeats the Ishmaelites and is crowned in the Church of St Sophia in the Last Days. At some stage Ivan probably saw the
Secretum secretorum
, a mirror of princes, said to have been written by Aristotle for the education of Alexander the Great.
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Judging by his letters to Kurbsky, Ivan was familiar with tales from the
Iliad
.
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He was also certainly familiar with the
chet'i-mineii
or menologies, comprising collections of extracts from the Bible, the Apocrypha, the writings of the Christian Fathers, sermons and homilies, grouped according to dates in the Christian calendar. At some stage, too, Ivan must have been introduced to the Chronographs, which dealt with world history, and to the Chronicles themselves, for which the material was collected in the court and some of which were composed in all probability in the Office of Foreign Affairs. Could Ivan write? No writing which has been identified as his has survived, but this proves nothing.
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