Ivan the Terrible (31 page)

The general cessation of hostilities may, however, have been the result of a deep-rooted division of opinion at the Russian court: should Ivan now concentrate on fighting the Crimean Tatars to secure his southern
border and achieve an opening on the Black Sea, or should he accept the truce with the Tatars and concentrate on fighting Sigismund, to outside appearances the most dangerous of his enemies, to secure Livonia and the Baltic shore? Most historians consider that the court was deeply divided, and that the exile and eventual disgrace of Adashev was due to Ivan's loss of confidence in an adviser who took a line opposed to his own, in contrast to Ivan Viskovaty. As usual, however, there is really no evidence of Adashev's opinion. It is assumed that because he was disgraced he must have opposed Ivan's forward policy in Livonia, whereas his fall may have been caused by a sudden revulsion in Ivan against his closest advisers, as the domestic structure of the last fourteen years crumbled around him.

Only three months later the first stage of the underlying conflict between Ivan and his cousin Vladimir of Staritsa came to a head. Always suspicious of him, though able to conceal it under a friendly exterior, Ivan was given the pretext he needed. A clerk of Vladimir's, imprisoned by him on some pretext, found a way to denounce his master to the Tsar, already in his quarters in Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda, for plotting to poison him. Ivan demanded that the man be produced, launched an inquiry with all the usual tortures, and called upon Makarii and the Holy
sobor
to intervene to judge Vladimir. Makarii as usual warded off the lightning, and the Princess Evfrosin'ya defused the situation by declaring her intention to become a nun. Whether she chose to or was compelled to take the veil is uncertain.
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She was allowed to depart, her dignity intact, and properly escorted by her own boyars' wives, and military servitors, who were granted land in the vicinity of the convent which she had founded near Beloozero and to which she retired, while Ivan removed all Vladimir's boyars and service gentry and exchanged them for others under his own control and confiscated a great deal of his property.
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Skrynnikov suggests here, again, that in accordance with Russian laws at the time members of the Boyar Council could not be subjected to punishment unless a properly conducted trial was carried out by the judgment of their peers, the boyars. But the Staritsky ‘affair’ created such a tension between the Tsar and the boyars that the former did not want to have recourse to the proper procedures – if any actually existed. It is difficult to accept Skrynnikov's portrayal of the Russian judicial process and the respect in which it was held, in view of the endless arbitrary executions, notably of the remnants of the Adashev connexion, which were taking place at this time.
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The outgoing year 1563 saw two natural deaths of great significance in Ivan's immediate surroundings: the first was that of his brother, Iuri,
on 24 June 1563.
⁴⁵
Iuri was always treated by Ivan with consideration, even affection, as a tsar's brother who posed no danger; he was given his own household, boyars and men-at-arms. His funeral was attended by boyars and magnates; only the dying Metropolitan Makarii was absent. Iuri was extremely fortunate in his wife, who on his death retired to the Novodevichii convent and maintained a great name for devotion and charity in the luxurious quarters Ivan insisted on having prepared for her.
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Ivan inherited all the childless Iuri's appanage. It is impossible to assess the extent of Ivan's loss, because we do not know the extent of Iuri's disability.

On the last day of 1563 Metropolitan Makarii, in the fullness of years, died. He was probably already over eighty, and had never quite recovered from the accident he suffered during the fire of 1547 (see Chapter IV, pp. 61ff., above). Although he was very active in the 1550s his influence had been declining, possibly since Ivan's serious illness in 1553, possibly because he had vexed the Tsar by his systematic – and very often successful – use of his right of
pechalovanie
or intercession in favour of those whom the Tsar wished to disgrace.

The Metropolitan's influence on the religious, political, intellectual and artistic life of Russia had been considerable. He had, for instance, encouraged the introduction of printing.
⁴⁷
Printing had begun to penetrate into Russia by 1553, and the first book printed in Russian, in Russia, an elaborately decorated edition of the
Apostol
(or readings from the Acts and Epistles of the Apostles used in the liturgy) appeared in March 1564, after the death of Makarii, by order of the Tsar and the new Metropolitan, Afanasii. It was intended to be a witness to Russian ecclesiastical merit by being widely distributed in captured Polotsk. The Tsar in 1564 ordered the setting up a of printing house (at his expense) under a master printer, Ivan Fedorov, a Russian educated at Cracow University, and it rapidly produced the required texts. Printing of course gave rise to problems about the reliability of the manuscripts used, and the danger for the editor and printer in making unauthorized alterations to the text by mistake. In any event, Fedorov and his assistant both left Moscow in 1565, as Fedorov explained later, in 1574, as a result of ‘great persecutions which we frequently suffered, not from the Lord himself [Ivan] but from many officials and ecclesiastical powers’. Fedorov goes on to make clear that they were accused of heresy by ignoramuses, and having suffered such hatred and envy they chose exile and left for unknown lands.
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Printing, however, continued under Ivan's own eye, in Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda.

One additional service was performed by Makarii as part of his policy
of raising the status of the metropolitanate and its ascendancy over the whole of Russia: he brought the ‘white cowl’ worn by the Archbishop of Novgorod with him to Moscow. The legendary white cowl was a gift from the Emperor Constantine the Great to Pope Sylvester I, symbolizing the primacy of the spiritual power over the secular power (a further dimension of the Donation of Constantine); at first highly revered by the Popes it was nearly destroyed at the time of the schism beginning in the ninth century. But it was saved and sent to Constantinople with the instruction that it was to be forwarded to the Archbishop of Novgorod, where the true faith subsisted. Its fate now became linked to the theory of the Third Rome, because it was foretold that the imperial city (Constantinople) would fall to the Hagarenes, and the true faith would perish there. But in the Third Rome (Russia), though the imperial crown would be given to the Tsar, the white cowl must be given to the city of Novgorod the Great.
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Makarii of course wore the white cowl when he was Archbishop of Novgorod, but by taking it with him to Moscow he was making a statement about the growing authority of the see of Moscow over that of Novgorod. At a Holy
sobor
held jointly with a session of the Boyar Council in February 1564 the new status of the white cowl was approved. The Archbishop of Novgorod did not lose the right to wear it, but the Metropolitan acquired it.
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One of Makarii's further services to Ivan came to fruition just before his death, namely the endorsement by the Patriarch of Constantinople of Ivan's title of Tsar.

Makarii was a man of great moral authority, though he has been accused by some historians of moral cowardice. He was impressive as a speaker and preacher and probably one of the few men of integrity and culture in Ivan's entourage in his youth. More than anyone else he had contributed to the cultural formation of the young ruler, above all with his conception of Ivan's high station and God-given power. But power, in Makarii's view, went with responsibility and there is some suggestion that at the end of his life the Metropolitan wished to retire to a monastery, sickened by Ivan's cruelties which he could do nothing to control. Whether he was instrumental in bringing Sylvester to Ivan's notice cannot be confirmed, but certainly both men provided a formidable moral obstacle to the indulgence of Ivan's capricious whims. Some historians (for example Karamzin) criticize Makarii for being vainglorious, lacking in the courage to stand up to Ivan, yet all admit that he did not hesitate to reproach the Tsar for his dissolute life and for the cruelty of his repressions, and that his intercession saved many lives – if only for a time. Makarii was also not a fanatic, and his treatment of
heretics was milder than that of his predecessors (his contemporaries attributed Ivan's fanaticism rather to Sylvester). But he was a consistent champion of the anti-Moslem crusade and a firm supporter of the symphony between ecclesiastical and secular authority and of church ownership of landed estates.

In his last days, Makarii hoped to be released and allowed to withdraw to a monastery, but Ivan did not allow him to go. However, he did, according to one late chronicle, make a final attempt to frighten Ivan with the thought of death and the Last Judgment. When the Tsar asked Makarii to send him suitable devotional works, the Metropolitan sent him a book of funeral prayers. This angered the Tsar, who exclaimed that such books were not allowed in his tsarist apartments. Makarii replied that having been asked for suitable devotional books ‘he had sent the most satisfying for the soul, for he who reads it attentively will not sin’. He was said to have had a vision of the horrors to come on Russia and prayed to God: ‘Dishonour and the shedding of blood and the division of the land are coming upon us … Oh God have mercy on me, turn aside thy wrath. If thou canst not forgive us our sins let it not happen when I am alive, do not let me live to see it …’ His death removed the last moral obstacle from Ivan's path to unlimited power.
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Archpriest Andrei, who had worked with Makarii on the
Stepennaia kniga
or Book of Degrees (a chronicle of the joint activity of the heads of the Church and the state in Russia, started by Makarii in the 1560s and going back to the beginning of the Riurikovichi, indeed to the mythical Prus, the brother of Augustus, emperor of Rome), had been appointed Ivan's confessor (not surely an easy task) in 1549. He had taken the cowl under the name of Afanasii in 1563, retreated to the Chudov monastery in the Kremlin, and was appointed Metropolitan after the death of Makarii, on 24 February 1564. His appointment was clearly engineered by Ivan, who wanted a change of style from Makarii and Sylvester. Afanasii as a confessor had evidently been gentle and unassuming, but as a metropolitan he was to prove unexpectedly strong. He had hoped to achieve the canonization of Makarii, but it did not happen. In the new world that Ivan was introducing there was no room for such as he – and Afanasii soon left his post.
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Throughout 1563 Ivan must have been turning over in his conscious and subconscious mind new conceptions of the theory and practice of power, of what he had the right to do and what he had the power to put into practice. For a man of his uncontrollable temperament, obsessed with power, the last few years must have been frustrating. He met with treason and betrayal at every turn, yet whenever he tried to eradicate it, he came up against the opposition of the Metropolitan, the Church Council, the boyars, the senior
d'iaki
.

Executions of any likely opponents or critics of Ivan's behaviour multiplied in the first half of 1564. Prince Mikhail Repnin Obolensky, for instance, who had distinguished himself at the conquest of Polotsk, was unwise enough to protest when he saw Ivan indecorously ‘dancing in masks’, but the Tsar responded by urging him to join in and forced a mask onto his head. This was a practice condemned by the Church.
¹
When Repnin tore the mask off and trampled on it, the Tsar was furious, banished him from the feast and had him murdered some days later in church (or in a cellar), at the same time as another boyar, Prince Iuri Kashin Obolensky, was also dispatched as he attended a service. A slightly different version of this incident suggests that Ivan had always hated the Obolenskys because one of them was alleged to have been the lover of his mother, the Grand Princess Elena, and he turned on Repnin Obolensky because he was constantly quarrelling with Fedor Basmanov whom he accused of being Ivan's paramour. It was also said that Ivan was jealous because the two men had distinguished themselves at the siege of Polotsk. There is a further suggestion that the two Obolenskys were executed four days after a courier brought news of a severe defeat of a substantial Russian corps by Lithuanian troops on the River Ula, on 26 January 1564. Ivan may have suspected them of having provided secret information to the Lithuanians, thus contributing to the Russian
setback. One of Ivan's best generals, Peter Ivanovich Shuisky was killed in this engagement, a serious loss, and many
voevody
were captured.
²

It was essential for Ivan to find a scapegoat for the defeat, and to negotiate a truce. But the terms he had previously put before a large embassy from Lithuania which had arrived in December 1563, for a ten-year truce, leaving Polotsk and all the Livonian lands conquered by Russia in Russian hands, were now totally unacceptable to the Lithuanians. Their embassy had departed from Moscow three weeks before the murder of the two princes. A third Obolensky, Dmitri Fedorovich Ovchina Obolensky was thrown to Ivan's huntsmen with orders for him to be strangled, for quarrelling with Fedor Basmanov and accusing him of being the Tsar's catamite.
³

It would be tedious to list every one of the boyars, often princes, who suffered now, with total disregard to such legal procedures as existed. Some victims had close or distant connexions with Adashev, some were rich, like Prince Dmitri Khilkov (whose lands were confiscated by Ivan), or the two Sheremetev brothers, Ivan bol'shoi (major) and his brother Nikita, distinguished commanders, members of an old boyar family. The latter was strangled, possibly in connexion with the battle on the River Ula. Ivan bol'shoi, ‘a sharp and wise man’, was loaded with the heaviest iron hoops and chains and kept in an airless dungeon to force him to tell Ivan where he had hidden his wealth. Sheremetev replied that his treasure lay where Ivan could not lay hands on it, for he had already given it away to the poor. The intervention of the new Metropolitan Afanasii was to secure his release in March 1564; over twenty-five high ranking boyars,
okol'nichie
and nobles stood as his sureties, the lower nobles staking their heads and 10,000 rubles. There were no princes among the sureties, only boyars.
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Eventually Sheremetev took the cowl in the monastery of Beloozero. His lands were seized by the Tsar, but he does not seem to have lived in dire poverty.
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