Ivan the Terrible (14 page)

Was there a library? Not in the sense of a room specially designed for keeping books on shelves and reading them in comfort. But there seems to have been a collection of manuscripts, often in Greek, such as the ones Maksim Grek worked on, but also of course in Church Slavonic and in
contemporary Russian. Manuscripts had been collected by Ivan's predecessors, and possibly Sofia Paleologa had brought a few. Ivan received manuscript books as presents from foreign envoys and visitors, and he ordered books to be copied for his use. There were manuscripts of various books of the Bible, the Apocrypha, the prophecies of Enoch or Esdras, all of which may have been kept in Ivan's private
kazna
or treasury, housed in his private apartments, from which he could send for whatever he wanted to read or consult – if he could read. The Greek text of the Donation of Constantine, mentioned
in extenso
in chapter sixty of the
Stoglav
(see Chapter V), was looted by the Polish forces from the Tsar's treasury in the Kremlin in 1611, and handed over as a present to the Pope by the King of Poland in 1633. Manuscripts were, of course, also widely held in monasteries, from which the Tsar could borrow and to which he presented copies.
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Lists of Ivan's personal property at his death, and of the contents of his archives in the 1570s have survived, but they give no indication that he owned any books, while the list of 1611 of the contents of the private treasuries of Tsars Fedor Ivanovich (r:1584–98), Boris Godunov (r: 1598–1605) and Vasily Shuisky (r: 1606–11) comprises a total of fifty-three manuscripts and printed books.
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One of the most striking differences between Russia and the West was the lack of daylight in Russia. In winter, darkness covered the land by three o'clock; during the day some light might pass through mica windows (glass was little used as yet), but at night lamps and chandeliers were widely used – the consumption of beeswax was huge. Access to the Tsar's residence, up the Red staircase, was limited to boyars and others with official positions and Council ranks, and guards were always on duty. Religious services took up a good deal of the Tsar's time. Ivan was personally devout, indeed he seemed to have had a kind of exalted spirituality, which sought an outlet in church services in times of personal or political crises.

The Tsar also spent a lot of time travelling between various monasteries, villages and estates, either his own or those of his relatives, or those he had confiscated and kept for himself. He would inspect the quality of their administration and consume their produce, staying in monasteries which had to be equipped with the necessary accommodation and supplies, since he usually brought his wife and children and attendants with him, as well as other members of his family such as his brother Iuri with his wife and attendants, and sometimes his cousin Vladimir of Staritsa and many boyars. His travels were punctuated by hunting expeditions. As in England and most other countries, travel
from one estate to another was not merely undertaken in order to consume its produce locally. It was essential after a few weeks in any one place to clean and refresh with herbs the accommodation used by large numbers of courtiers and men-at-arms at a time when sanitation was primitive.

Ivan was now crowned and married. But he was still only seventeen, and it remained for him to assert his authority as Tsar and impose his will on the surrounding boyars. It is interesting to compare the way the young Ivan reacted to power with the way of his almost-contemporary, the short-lived King Edward VI of England. Edward was only nine when he came to the throne, and he was surrounded by his overpowering uncles, the Duke of Somerset and the Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour. But the intrigues among the English ‘boyars’ led first to the execution of the Lord Admiral and then, after the victory of Dudley, the future Duke of Northumberland, to the execution of the Duke of Somerset. Edward may have been fond of one or both of his uncles, but he seems to have signed their death warrants without a murmur. And standing over him there was an influential priest, Cranmer to Ivan's Makarii.
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It is unlikely that Ivan himself thought in terms of a reform programme, or that his role presented itself to him in terms of problems to be solved on the way to a teleological end, nor had his education prepared him for governing. It was more a question of what life would throw up at him, and the extent to which he could, at such a young age, act independently of the advice of the boyars. This is not the approach of some of the Russian and Soviet historians of the 1920s up to the 1970s who conceived of the Tsar's activity in terms of a programme of
zakonomernyi
(‘in the order of things’, but perhaps here ‘historically inevitable’) – action imposed on him by the laws of history, the ineluctable advance of the historical process, driven forward by the class struggle towards a pre-ordained end, the establishment of Russian absolutism as the progressive way of overcoming feudal fragmentation. Others, however, have assumed that Ivan at the age of seventeen was limited in the exercise of power by ignorance, deference to boyar authority, and a lack of the maturity which might have enabled him to
concentrate on matters of state rather than on roistering in the streets and jostling innocent civilians. What the young man had already seen, the way people behaved to each other and to him, was likely to give rise in him to fear, suspicion, distrust, self-defensiveness and cruelty. There was no adult man in his entourage, or member of his family, whom he could look up to, whom he could regard as a model, whom he could even regard with affection, as far as is known (except possibly Makarii, Aleksei Adashev, and his brother, Iuri). But he had a profound sense that the ultimate power was his and that he should be free to exercise it.

Karamzin, who more than most Russian historians sees Ivan as a human being, though a very wicked one, describes him at this stage of his life as an unbridled colt, given over to idleness, noisy festivities, using his powers as Tsar to play capriciously with disgrace and rewards. He was tall, well made, physically powerful, light on his feet, ‘like a leopard’, and in everything like his grandfather Grand Prince Ivan III.
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But political power was in the hands of his Glinsky uncles, and woe betide those who complained against the mighty to the Tsar. In spring 1547, seventy-five citizens of Pskov complained in Moscow against their governor. The Tsar did not heed them and, seething with rage, poured boiling wine over them, singed their hair and beards, and ordered them to be undressed and laid on the ground. They thought that their last hour had come, but at this moment the great bell in Moscow fell down, and the Tsar rushed off to see what had happened, forgetting about his victims. The point of this sad story is that neither marriage nor power had served to teach Ivan to restrain his savage impulses, which already at this tender age had become uncontrollable. Whether he already felt that any advice which ran counter to his own inclinations was a limitation of his sovereignty, as consecrated in his coronation, we cannot tell, but his unpredictability was already manifest. The next lesson he was to learn was that he could not control people.

The summer of 1547 was very hot and a number of fires occurred in the capital. Fire was always the main danger in this largely wooden city and it needed only a spark to set it off. On 24 June Moscow went up in flames. The fire swept into the Kremlin, blew up the gunpowder stores in several of the towers on the walls, and destroyed stocks of goods and food. Many of the official buildings and records were reduced to ashes, and Metropolitan Makarii nearly lost his life and was badly bruised in a well-meant attempt to rescue him from the Cathedral of the Dormition by smuggling him out through a recess in the Kremlin wall and lowering him down by a rope into the Moscow river. He seems never to have fully recovered from the shaking. He was taken to a safe monastery, where
Ivan and the boyars came to his bedside for a Council meeting.
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Anything between 2,700 and 3,700 people died in the conflagration (aside from children) and some 80,000 were left homeless. Ivan himself and the magnates took refuge in his hunting lodge on the Vorob'evo hills, outside the town.
⁴

The disaster may have been used (or even provoked) by rivals of the Glinsky family, notably the Zakhar'ins, who were relatives of the new Tsaritsa and of non-princely boyar rank. They might have been plotting to dislodge the Glinskys from power by instigating an outbreak of rioting directed against them. Ivan's uncle Prince Iuri Vasil'evich Glinsky, who had taken refuge in the Cathedral of the Dormition in the Kremlin, was seized by the rabble and stoned to death within the church in front of Metropolitan Makarii, who was conducting matins. This, of course, amounted to sacrilege.
⁵
The rioters then turned on the boyars and the retainers of Iuri Glinsky. The Tsar set up a body to discover those guilty of the arson which all assumed had taken place. When the authorities asked the people who they thought responsible for setting fire to Moscow, the rumour spread that the fire had been caused by witchcraft, the main witch being the old Princess Anna Glinskaya, Ivan's grandmother, who was accused of stripping the hearts out of the dead bodies and soaking them in water which she sprinkled on the streets of Moscow. The authorities took severe measures, and those suspected of being responsible were tortured, beheaded, impaled or thrown into the fires.
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On 26 June the crowd, in what appeared to be a clandestinely organized demonstration, marched to Vorob'evo, where Ivan had taken refuge with his family, and clamoured for Princess Anna, her children and her servants to be handed over.
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But at Vorob'evo, Ivan, the boyars and the men-at-arms with him proved able to put down the revolt.
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Soviet historians have spilled much ink in the attempt to link this popular revolt with specific individual boyars or social groups, such as the service gentry rising against the misrule of the boyars and the neglect of their own landed interests, notably the abuse of justice when they were forced to go before boyar courts in the provinces; or the people as a whole rising against the service gentry in defence of their class interests. Present-day historians have discarded these interpretations as farfetched and consider the outbreak of violence as a straightforward primitive revolt inflamed by the catastrophe of the fire and by tales of witchcraft, a revolt which had but little effect on the balance of power at court between the aristocratic boyars and the service gentry and did not in any way reflect a conflict of interest between those, namely the boyars, assumed to favour ‘reactionary’ decentralization and the service
gentry, assumed to favour centralization and the ‘progressive’ strengthening of the absolute power of the Tsar. But it provided an opportunity for a fresh round of the conflict between the boyar and princely clans over the division of power around the throne, regardless of policy.

There remains the question of the impact of these events on the young Ivan. He had been faced with the frightening spectacle of popular clamour for his grandmother to be delivered to the mob, and of the murder of his uncle at the hands of an incensed crowd, as well as popular disregard of his authority. Historians of Peter I have often remarked on the psychological effect on the ten-year-old Peter of the horrible death of the elder statesman, A.S. Matveev in 1682 at the hands of the
strel'tsy
(musketeers) in Moscow, and the possibility that this may have left him with the tic to which he was always subject and inured him to spectacles of cruelty. Ivan IV had already shown himself unbalanced and cruel in his relations with human beings. He had now experienced fear, and probably also outrage at the sense of his powerlessness when faced with a howling horde which, he probably suspected, was being directed against him by a hidden hand. This episode may well, in his case, have fostered an incipient paranoia. In an address to a meeting of the Church Council four years later, in 1551, Ivan remembered these events and described his own reaction to the threatening multitude: ‘and fear entered into my soul and trembling into my bones’.
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In his letter to Prince A.M. Kurbsky dated 1564, seventeen years later, Ivan describes these events in burning language, blowing them up into a suspected attack on his own life in order to force him to hand over his grandmother.
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At any rate the rising spelt the end of the power of the Glinskys. The remaining brother, Mikhail Vasil'evich, attempted to flee to Lithuania, was intercepted, arrested and then forgiven, but he lost the post of Master of the Horse, which he had briefly held. The winners in the struggle for power were the non-princely relatives of the Tsaritsa Anastasia, the Yur'ev-Zakhar'in Romanov clan, two of whom were promoted, Danila Romanovich, her brother, to the rank of boyar, and her cousin, Vasily Mikhailovich, to the rank of
okol'nichi
.

One cannot do better than turn to the description given by the historian Karamzin of the ensuing events, for he imparts to them an atmosphere of drama which brings out their flavour:

Sylvester's powerful oratory won the young Tsar over to the desire to fulfil these divine injunctions, impressed his heart and soul, inflamed his imagination and achieved a miracle: Ivan became a different man and begged Sylvester to help him.
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But it was not quite like that, as will be shown.
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