Ivan the Terrible (66 page)

Bowes, having failed to obtain what he wanted from the boyars, now demanded, through Dr Atkins, a private interview with the Tsar. But when Ivan received him, he denied that he had made any such demand, while insisting that in all his other posts he had always spoken directly with the ruler, and not through an intermediary. Ivan replied shortly that it was not the Russian custom for the Tsar to negotiate in person with envoys (indeed it was not the custom anywhere,
pace
Bowes). Ivan could not get any information out of Bowes regarding the Queen's ten nieces, and the Tsar spoke to him about nothing else. Bowes even put forward a kind of bargain: let Ivan restore all their privileges to the English merchants and the Queen would join him against the Lithuanians and the Swedes; let him send ambassadors with this message and they could examine the ladies together. But the English ambassador backed down when asked to commit himself to English assistance in Ivan's recovery of Livonia. Elizabeth was pious he said, and had already refused the offer of the crowns of the Netherlands and France. Was Livonia really Ivan's ancestral land? Ivan responded angrily that he was not asking Elizabeth to be a judge between him and the King of Lithuania, as he referred to Stephen Bathory, but that she should be his ally against him. Talks between the two had reached a dead end.
⁴¹

The death of his eldest son in November 1581 finally broke Ivan's spirit. The Tsar seemed to have lost the will to control the machine of government, to discipline the boyars surrounding him, and he began to redress some at least of the injuries he had caused. He took steps in 1582 to punish false denunciations.
¹
He forgave some of those in disgrace, and tried to save the souls of those he had dispatched unshriven to their deaths by sending sums of money to monasteries for prayers for their souls. The
Sinodiki
which list his victims were begun at this time as part of his repentance: seventy-four names were included in the first list sent to the Simonov monastery in Moscow, seventy-five in the second sent to Solovki; in May 1582 the Pskov Pechersky monastery received the order to pray for seventy-five victims, which included some of the most prominent executed in the early days of the
oprichnina
, such as Prince Alexander Gorbaty-Shuisky and Ivan Petrovich Fedorov, executed in 1565 and 1569. The Monastery of St Cyril at Beloozero received 2,000 rubles to pray for the Tsar's son, Ivan Ivanovich, and a hail of gold descended on monasteries for prayers to be said for some three thousand victims, including the many ‘whose names were known only to God’. According to the cynics among historians, this was designed primarily to pave the way for the Church to support the unopposed ascension of Fedor Ivanovich to the throne on the death of his father.
²
And Ivan's remorse for his many executions did not extend to releasing his many prisoners from their jails. It relieved the dead more than the living.

Ivan IV had suffered a serious illness, about which almost nothing is known, in the late 1570s, and it is generally assumed that ever since then, or perhaps even before, he had suffered from a spinal condition which made movement very painful, so that he had to give up riding and be carried in a litter.
³
As early as 1572, when he stopped outside
Novgorod to talk to the Swedish envoy, Juusten, Bishop of Åbo, whom he had so badly treated, he was in a carriage and not on horseback.
⁴
Yet in 1578, when the Tsar and his son Ivan ravaged the Livonian colony, ‘Narva and Dorpat’ in Moscow, they were on horseback.
⁵

There is one eyewitness account of Ivan's death, but not perhaps a very reliable one, namely Jerome Horsey's. Nevertheless, Horsey had no particular self-interest to serve in lying about the circumstances of Ivan's death, and there is therefore little reason to distrust his account of the Tsar's last day – though he does not give the date, which was 18 March 1584.

On the day of his death, Ivan was carried as usual in his chair to his treasury chamber, called for precious stones and jewels to be brought, and proceeded to lecture those about him on their properties and virtues. Taking coral and turquoise stones on his hand and arm, Ivan declared, according to Horsey: ‘I am poisoned with disease; you see they show their virtue by the change of their pure colour into pall; declares my death.’
⁶
(Turquoises were supposed to change colour in the presence of poison.) In the afternoon Ivan looked over his will (no text survives, but he is said to have left the crown to his son Fedor and the appanage of Uglich to his son Dmitri), ordered his physician and his apothecary to attend him to the bath, and then sent for a report from his witches, because the day foretold for his death was coming to an end. But he was warned that there was still time, for the day only ended when the sun went down. In the afternoon he went to the bath, ‘solaced himself and made merry with pleasant songs as he useth to do’. He then went to bed, well refreshed, in his loose gown, shirt and linen hose, and sent for a chess board. Bogdan Bel'sky and Boris Godunov stood by the bed. Suddenly Ivan fainted and fell back. The apothecary sent for marigold and rose-water, for the physicians, and for Ivan's confessor. ‘In the mean he was strangled and stark dead’ (sic), writes Horsey, and added that an attempt to save him was made, to still the outcry. But it was too late. Horsey does not mention any effort to tonsure Ivan as a monk at the time, and he died without the last rites. But his confessor did hurry in to clothe him afterwards in the ‘angel's form’ as a monk, under the name Iona.
⁷

There are many other versions of Ivan's death, most of which assume that he did not die naturally. Pastor Oderborn's
Life of the Grand Prince of Moscow
, published in Latin in 1585, very soon after Ivan's death, reports that the Tsar had been seriously ill for a long period, during which he could neither speak, eat nor drink, and his body was covered with maggots. He called out for his son Ivan, who was of course already
dead. But Oderborn tends to exaggerate wildly, he was not present, and his account does not correspond with Horsey's who on this occasion seems more reliable.

Was Ivan murdered? Did Horsey's account imply that Bel'sky and Godunov had hastened his end? It is not clear from his words.
⁸
If the Tsar was ‘strangled’ or suffocated, the two men would have had to act together, for to act alone would have been impossible without being detected. The crux of the issue is what did Horsey mean by ‘he was strangled’? Did he mean stifled or suffocated, or actually throttled by some outside agency, or did he mean that Ivan choked, on food perhaps, or as a result of poison taken in the bath, a perfectly possible cause of death?

There are many descriptions of the Tsar by foreign visitors to Russia, and they coincide on a number of physical and psychological traits. An autopsy was carried out on his bones, which were exhumed in the year 1963, together with those of many other members of the tsarist family, from sarcophagi in the Archangel Cathedral. The exhumation of his body, moreover, provided an opportunity for the pioneer Russian expert in facial reconstruction, M.M. Gerasimov, to produce a ‘virtually real’ bust of Ivan which does suggest the real man, with the eagle nose of the Paleologues, the high brow, sensual mouth and dominating countenance which one would expect. His eyes have been described both as small, and as large; they were light-coloured, bright, and flickered rapidly from place to place. The imperial envoy, Prinz von Buchau, describes Ivan in 1575 as very tall, strong and full-bodied. His hair and beard were long and thick, and rusty black; like most Russians, Prinz added, he shaved his head. He was so given to anger that he would foam at the mouth like a horse, and seem beside himself.
⁹
Horsey, who had seen him often, wrote that he was a ‘goodly man of person and presence, well-favoured, high forehead, shrill voice; a right Scythian, full of ready wisdom, cruel, bloody, merciless; his own experience managed by direction both his state and commonwealth affairs’ (though Horsey did think Russia was too large for ‘one regiment’). Others spoke of his looking like an ‘angry warrior’. It was also frequently remarked that he had an excellent memory and a quick, sardonic, wit. He certainly enjoyed dramatizing his clashes with his boyars, and with foreign envoys.
¹⁰
Did he smoke? In 1575 Prinz von Buchau presented Ivan, as a gift from the Emperor Maximilian II, with a pipe for smoking the herb hitherto unknown in Russia, namely tobacco, procured for him by his Spanish cousins.
¹¹

Very little, if anything, is known about Ivan's medical history. As a small child he seems to have suffered briefly from a boil, or possibly a
carbuncle, on the back of his neck, if one accepts the simplest explanation – from scrofula, if one accepts the most far-fetched portrayal of the physical and mental constitution of the Russian ruling house.
¹²

The Tsar is believed, by modern medical opinion, to have suffered from spondylosis. The disease leads to the formation of osteophytes along the spine, which may press on the nerves as they leave the spinal cord. This condition may, though not necessarily, cause intense pain. But there is no evidence other than the state of Ivan's bones that he suffered in this way. However, it is assumed by many historians that he did so.
¹³
Since 1963 there have been further medical and chemical analyses which have been pondered over at length by Russian and American experts.
¹⁴

The possibility that Ivan was poisoned has also been talked about because in the autopsy carried out in 1963 on the skeletons of Ivan and other members of the tsarist family, mercury and arsenic have been found in varying quantities, ranging from 12.9 mg of arsenic per 100 gm of bones (Princess Evfrosin'ya of Staritsa) to 8.1 mg of arsenic per 100 gm of bones (her granddaughter Maria Vladimirovna of Staritsa). This seems to confirm that the child Maria Vladimirovna was indeed forced to drink poison and that Evfrosin'ya was poisoned and not suffocated by smoke (see above, Chapter XIV, pp. 240–1). The quantity of mercury was also higher than the maximum tolerated in the human body: 0.10 mg per 100 grams of bones, in the case of Evfrosin'ya, 0.2 mg per 100 gm of bones in the case of the child Maria. However, the amount of arsenic was really considerable and this seems the likelier poison as it would be quick-acting in such quantities. Of the remaining figures none provides convincing evidence for poisoning, except that Prince Mikhail Skopin Shuisky, the nephew of Tsar Vasily Shuisky, who was murdered during the Time of Troubles, had 0.13 mg of arsenic in his bones, and was probably poisoned. In all cases there was more arsenic than mercury. In the case of Ivan IV himself, the amounts of arsenic and mercury are very low (As. 0.15, Hg 1.3), and the level of mercury (Hg 1.3) is the same as in the body of his son Ivan Ivanovich.

The figures for mercury found in Ivan's bones do not suggest that he suffered from syphilis and was subjected to the intensive mercury steam treatment, at the time the main remedy in use. He may have taken mercury compounds medicinally or in the form of calomel (mercurous chloride) for some other illnesses, which may have led to intense bouts of uncontrollable rage.
¹⁵
If he did indeed suffer great pain from osteophytes, and if indeed Bomelius was a Paracelsian, he may well have
been treated with opium or laudanum to keep pain under control. Poppy seeds are mentioned twice in the available records of the pharmacy which supplied the Tsar. He is also reputed to have drunk large amounts of alcohol, a painkiller which leaves no trace.

What kind of medicine did the physicians in Russia dispense? Needless to say physicians were all foreign, mainly from Germany or the Netherlands. The first English-trained physician (though actually a Westphalian) who seems to have left a really lasting impression both on Russians and on foreigners at the court of Ivan IV, was Bomelius, who practised from 1569 to 1579. These years were particularly critical for the development of medicine in Europe and in England, for it was at this time that medical theories, founded on the traditions derived from Hippocrates and Galen, and their many disciples in the Eastern Roman Empire, in the Arabian world and in Europe, were seriously challenged by the theories of the maverick Swiss physician and alchemist Paracelsus (
c.
1490–1541). Traditional medicine was based on the four elements,earth, air, water and fire, corresponding to cold, dry, wet, and hot, to the planets, Saturn, Venus/Jupiter, the Moon and Mars, and to phlegm, yellow bile and black bile, and blood. If the balance between these ‘humours’ was disturbed a ‘distemper’ occurred, which had to be remedied by restoring the balance.

But the tempestuous Paracelsus was an alchemist, at a time when the boundary between alchemy and chemistry was not yet defined, with his own cosmology and mystical theology.
¹⁶
He rejected the humoural medical theories of his predecessors, and replaced them in the field of medicine with a theory based on the study of nature, and a
materia medica
which included chemical products designed to cure particular ailments. For Paracelsus the primary substances were mercury, sulphur and salt, but he introduced others such as antimony, zinc and alcohol.
¹⁷
One form in which mercury occurred and was extensively used was
mercurius dolcis
, or calomel. Paracelsus was the first to produce laudanum, the alcoholic tincture of opium, which became the principal treatment for pain.
¹⁸

The university medical establishments in most countries closed ranks against what seemed to them the extravagancies of Paracelsus. But the royal and princely courts proved more open, particularly in Germany and in northern Protestant courts, and possibly in southern Europe (where the Greek Fioravanti was based) though it was the court of Catherine de' Medici which first patronized these new ideas.
¹⁹
In England John Dee was familiar with Paracelsian ideas, and so was Queen Elizabeth, while Burleigh asked Dee to transmute base metal into
gold for him.
²⁰
In view of these circumstances it seems not unlikely that Dr Bomelius ended up in the King's Bench Prison in 1567 not just for practising without a licence from the University of Cambridge where he claimed to have studied, but for being a Paracelsian.
²¹