Ivan the Terrible (63 page)

The financial extremes to which Ivan had now been reduced led him to examine his resources again. A meeting of the Church Council, jointly with the Tsar and all the boyars, was called for the beginning of 1580 which passed a resolution on monastic lands. The text has survived in two forms, one of 15 January 1580, the other of 15 January 1581. In the preamble it was stated that the Council had met in view of the fact that the Crimeans, Nogays, the King of Lithuania, the Livonians and the Swedes were determined to exterminate the Orthodox religion. Moreover many monastic lands had become derelict because of the drunkenness and improper way of life of the monks and the military servitors had become impoverished as a result of lack of land and labour and were unable to serve. It was therefore resolved that the monasteries should keep the land acquired before 15 January 1580, but that all payments made thereafter for prayers for the dead should be in cash. Monasteries were neither to buy land, nor to lend money on it. The ownership of monastic lands by princes should be examined by the Tsar, and princely lands owned by monasteries should be confiscated.
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This resolution seems to be a very moderate tidying-up process, by which the rights of monasteries to own land are confirmed, but their right to acquire land is limited. It favoured all secular landowners, without distinguishing between the various types, at the expense of the church holdings, but there was no question of the wholesale confiscation of church lands. Evidently Ivan did not feel it advisable to tackle the Church head on. On the other hand Horsey gives what he calls a verbatim translation of the text of Ivan's original attack on the Church hierarchy at the Council, for its greed and rapacity, its accumulation of property ‘by witchery, enchantments and sorcery’. He quotes Ivan, ‘thundering out his thrasonical threats’ to the clerics for the horrible sins they committed of ‘oppression, gluttony, idleness and sodomy and
worse, if worse, with beasts’. He referred also to Ivan's frequently felt desire for the dissolution of the monasteries in order to return the land to the nobles to whom it originally belonged, thus creating a ‘fair commonwealth’, as Henry VIII had done in England. (English Protestants were particularly critical of prayers for the dead in Russia because the Orthodox Church did not believe in Purgatory, therefore prayers served no purpose.
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) One may surmise, however, that Horsey's frequently expressed contempt for Russian monasticism is colouring his judgment of the Russian political scene on this occasion.

The turmoil about church lands was related to the far more serious subject of the agricultural crisis in north and central Russia. The causes were many: the ravages of the
oprichnina
, the casualties of war, the flight of the peasant population, harvest failures, increasing taxation, epidemics, rising prices and famine. In the Novgorod area, the cadastres of 1580 registered in some places a reduction of population to 7 per cent of what it had been before the
oprichnina
and the Livonian war; in the city itself the population was reduced to 20 per cent of what it had been before Ivan's destructive raid of 1570. In the Shelonskaia fifth of Novgorod 91.2 per cent of the homesteads were empty. In the centre of Russia the figures were similar; the peasants had simply deserted to the outlying districts. Taxes mounted steadily. Even the English merchants were asked for a contribution of 1,000 rubles in 1580, 500 in 1581.

It is this devastation which has led to a debate among historians on whether an
ukaz
was issued in the early 1580s introducing what is known as the ‘forbidden years’. Traditionally the peasants could leave their masters to seek another master around St George's Day in the autumn, when the harvest had been gathered in and the dues paid. But there is evidence that this right was suspended around 1580/1, 1582/3 and in other years in the decade 1580 to 1590, in order to curtail the loss of manpower caused by the departure of peasants to new lands, with the consequent decline of agricultural production, and the consequent inability of the service gentry to equip themselves for war. The ‘forbidden years’ are regarded as the first step in the introduction of serfdom, hence the interest in discovering if and when they were actually enacted. A careful sifting of the evidence suggests that forbidden years were indeed introduced in this decade, not every year but haphazardly, and not in an organized, nationwide way. It was a policy that undoubtedly led eventually to the development of serfdom, for the next step after forbidding the departure of the peasants was to hunt them down if they did depart illegally, and bring them back forcibly, however long ago they might have fled.
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Faced with this serious crisis there was all the more reason to bring the war to an end, and by autumn 1581 Ivan had resigned himself to the loss of Livonia, and given up his hope of winning a port on the Baltic. At a farewell audience to Possevino he addressed him:

There was a further exchange of presents; Possevino received valuable sables which he only reluctantly accepted, and then used in order to ransom some prisoners. Seeing that Possevino and his companions were busily converting anyone they could speak freely to, Ivan was clearly showing great self control in adversity.
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The Tsar then left for Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda.

The escorts who were to accompany Possevino back to the camp of the King of Poland outside Pskov were given strict orders not to let him travel through Novgorod, perhaps so that he should not see the ravages Ivan had caused there, perhaps because he could not count on its loyalty. On 5 October the priest arrived at Bathory's camp before Pskov. The failure of the Polish assault on Pskov had undermined Polish morale and the army was beginning to feel the strain of the campaign in the worsening weather, with no tents to shelter the soldiers from the snow.

Yet if both sides needed peace, neither Ivan nor Bathory was willing to be the first to climb down, and both were feeling a certain distrust in Possevino who seemed to be putting the interests of the Papacy before those of the belligerents in his anxiety to achieve the peace essential for the building of a coalition against the Ottoman Empire.

Possevino set out before the King the peace terms he had received from Ivan and it was decided to seek the latter's consent to adjourn the discussions to the village of Kiverova Gora, near Yam Zapol'sky, some 100 miles from the Polish camp. A month was to pass before Ivan's agreement was received and the talks finally began in the new location. The two parties lodged some distance apart, in tents or extremely primitive and ill-heated huts, and met in the smoky hut allotted to Possevino.
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This was the first major diplomatic conference between Russia and a Latin power, in which the diplomatic conventions which had been maturing in the West played a formal part.
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The full powers granted by Ivan to his envoys were rejected by the Poles as inadequate,
and certainly Ivan's brief acknowledgement that his envoys ‘spoke for him’ was very incomplete compared with the elaborate list of powers granted by Bathory to his envoys. The Russians argued that this was the way they had always granted powers to their envoys, and they saw no need to change them. Possevino succeeded in winning both sides over to beginning formal talks without waiting for a solution to the problem of the extent of the Russian powers.

The manoeuvring between the two sides began with Bathory demanding the whole of Livonia, and Ivan rejecting his demand, but ceding ground little by little, and adding to the forts he would be prepared to surrender, while Bathory agreed to return some Russian forts and towns (Velikie Luki for instance) still in Polish hands. A difficulty arose over Possevino's demand to allow the King of Sweden to be a party to the negotiations. This did not suit Ivan who had every intention of going to war with Sweden after concluding peace with the Commonwealth in order to recover Narva, whereas Bathory was, on the contrary, anxious to have Sweden included in the peace as a means of forcing the Swedes to refrain from extending their conquests in what he regarded as his Livonia. Thus Ivan's envoys stressed that their instructions did not mention Sweden, and they could not discuss the matter.

As the talks went on, it is clear from Possevino's journal that he was throwing his weight into the Polish scale. He had expressly assumed that Poland was the victor in the conflict and Russia the vanquished, hence it was the right of Bathory to state his terms first, and Bathory never wavered from the demand for the whole of Livonia, and for the exclusion of any mention of the province in the titulature of the Tsar, in order to prevent the Tsar from ever making any claim to Livonia on the ground that it had once been his. Possevino was of course aware that the inclusion of Sweden in the peace served Polish ends.
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However the Russians pointed out that as the Swedes were not present there was no one to negotiate with, and moreover they could not cede the whole of Livonia to Bathory since they did not in fact possess it, an argument which they later used the other way round.

Arguments over which forts were to be ceded were interspersed with threats to break off the negotiations, with Possevino doing his best to keep the parties engaged, and at times almost driven to violence in order to force an agreement. The problem of the release of prisoners also led to recrimination. The Russians proposed that both sides should release them all; the Poles proposed a ‘one for one’ release (a soldier for a soldier, an officer for an officer). The Poles also demanded the release of
merchants and of the Livonians held in Russia since the beginning of the war,
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while the Russians asked the Poles to cease kidnapping Russian peasants and taking them to Lithuania.

Possevino, on his own initiative, also interfered in the question of the Tsar's title, which was crucial in many respects. The Russian delegation had failed to obtain the use of the title ‘Emperor’ or ‘Tsar’ in the text of the treaty; Possevino tried to dissuade them on the grounds that such a title could only be granted by the Pope. He took the opportunity to raise again with the Russians what seemed to him a far more important question in a manner which reflects the gulf separating the two sides, both as to the meaning of words and as to the perception of status. Possevino explained that the title of ‘single Emperor of the Christians’ had been brought to the West at a time when ‘the Byzantine emperors began showing less loyalty to the Catholic Church than they should’. If the Grand Prince wanted to enjoy a valid title and a legitimate dignity, he should negotiate with the Pope, like the rest of the Christian rulers, who were well aware that the acquisition of two Tatar principalities did not justify a title such as ‘the other Caesar’, which meant emperor or king. ‘If the Prince tried to call himself Caesar everyone would know that this title meant only Tsar’, not Caesar and that it was an oddity borrowed from the Tatars in an effort to approximate to the title held by other Kings.’
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The Russian envoys replied with the usual formula, that the imperial title had been granted by the Emperors Honorius and Arcadius (AD 384–423) to Grand Prince Vladimir, a reply which Possevino brushed aside as nonsense, because they had lived 500 years before the Grand Prince. But the envoys explained that they meant a different Honorius and Arcadius, who had lived at the same time as Vladimir (980–1015). The Russians then asked Possevino as mediator to use the titles ‘Tsar of Kazan' and Astrakhan' in the treaty as these titles were much more important than any of the forts to be ceded to Bathory, but again Possevino rejected this request on the ground ‘that the kings of Poland could never be induced to allow Christians to call a Christian ruler by a Tatar or Turkish title like “Tsar of the Tatars”’. It is clear from the discussion that neither Possevino nor the Poles had a clear conception of the origin and meaning of the word ‘Tsar’, and the Russians, who did have a clear conception of what they meant by it, were not strong enough or knowledgeable enough to formulate and press their own conception clearly.
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It was now already New Year 1582, and maybe because all were weary, cold, uncomfortable, suffering from frostbite, and lacking in food supplies, general agreement was reached on 5 January 1582, the
fourteenth session of the negotiators. But there was still plenty of opportunity for dispute over the manner of implementing the stipulations of the eventual treaty, the return of supplies of arms and ammunition from the fortresses to be surrendered by each side, the escorting of Orthodox priests and their ecclesiastical impedimenta back from Livonia and Lithuania to Russia, and of course the exchange of prisoners. But a new crisis which the Tsar had himself created, which is dealt with below, led to a speeding up of the negotiations. Relations were eased when a letter was received from him containing a much fuller definition of the powers he was granting to his representatives. But though the Tsar might be a novice in the established ways of diplomacy he was unexpectedly skilled in all its tricks (or his advisers were).

When almost all details had been agreed, and the draft treaty was being examined clause by clause, Ivan's envoys suddenly demanded the inclusion of a clause to the effect that he was also ceding Riga and Courland, which of course he did not possess. But therein lay the crux of the matter. By ceding these two territories in the treaty, he implied that they were his to cede, therefore that he was their legitimate owner and might on some other occasion have the right to ask for them back. Possevino saw through the manoeuvre, threatened the Russian delegation with the breaking off of the negotiations by Bathory, and persuaded the Russians to withdraw this new demand. Nor did another Russian ploy succeed, namely a demand for the inclusion of the statement that the fortresses ceded to Bathory amounted to a reduction of the Tsar's total patrimony, which could also serve as the ground for a claim to that part of Livonia he had not surrendered to Bathory. Possevino worked his magic again, and finally on 15 January 1582 the treaty was signed.