Ivan the terrible, p.23
Ivan the Terrible, page 23
Another magnate, more clearly associated with Aleksei Adashev (his is the only name ever mentioned as forming part of Adashev's so-called government), was also disgraced, on 29 October 1562, namely Prince Dmitri Ivanovich Kurliatev Obolensky, who was ordered to take the cowl together with his wife and two sons. Kurbsky, who regarded him as a man of integrity and good counsel, was outraged at the forcible tonsure, calling it an unheard of crime that a whole family should be forced in this way to become religious, even though forcible tonsure was not unknown in the case of individuals.35
While the Tsar busied himself with the further organization of his private life, the war in Livonia – which had so far been primarily a war between Russia and the Livonian Order – was spreading more widely and beginning to involve all the Baltic powers. Denmark, under its new king, Frederick II, was claiming the island of Oesel.
The various Baltic maritime powers were at this time deeply divided by their conflicting policies towards Russia. All of them wanted to control trade with Russia and to prevent the import of munitions of war by the Tsar through Narva, and indeed on English ships through the White Sea. The propaganda against such a dangerous trade was directed from the Hanseatic League and the remnants of Livonia, but all the Baltic powers were convinced that Russia could only wage war against them if she received substantial cargoes of armaments, munitions and food – even salt and herrings – to keep her armies supplied and her soldiers fed. Intense pressure was brought to bear by the Livonians and the Hansa through the Imperial Diet, and by Sigismund Augustus even on Queen Elizabeth, to curtail trade with Russia. All believed that armaments were somehow reaching Ivan IV, since in German opinion the Russians were quite incapable of providing their own.
The Emperor, now Ferdinand I, supported a ban, and Sigismund Augustus informed Elizabeth of England in 1560 that he would detain ships trading with Narva, because she was bound to know that the Russians were ‘enemies to all liberty under the heavens’ and if Ivan were provided with weapons at present unknown to him he would vanquish all other nations. Elizabeth well knew how cruel and powerful Ivan was, what tyranny he used on his subjects and ‘in what servile sort they be under him’. In fact it was the duty of all good Christians not to supply the Tsar with munitions. Elizabeth of course denied that she was supplying Ivan with arms, and if she did send any, it was probably not often and not much. For in fact the Russians did not need to import arms, and most of the ships captured in the trade with Narva were carrying exports from Russia, not imports to Russia. But the whole episode is an interesting example of the use of propaganda, influential to this day, devised in this case by Russia's commercial rivals to exclude her from direct trade with the West.36
The Grand Master of the Livonian Order appealed in vain for help to all those who might have an interest in perpetuating their control of the Baltic: the Holy Roman Emperor, the Hansa, Lübeck in particular, but all were more interested in obtaining their share of Livonia. On 28 November 1561 a convention was signed between Sigismund Augustus and Kettler dissolving the Order. Kettler converted to Protestantism and became Duke of Courland, as a vassal of Sigismund's, and considerable pressure was put – unsuccessfully – on the burghers of Riga to consent to the occupation of the city by Polish forces. The final treaty ratified in March 1562 between Sigismund and Kettler still excluded Riga from Polish control, and the Commonwealth was compelled to fight for this most important and strategic port.
Meanwhile, the twenty-year truce between Sweden and Russia was going to reduce the pressure on Russia considerably, since it left Ivan to face only Poland–Lithuania. In March 1562 the existing Russian truce with Sigismund Augustus ran out, and Ivan sent a force under I.V. Sheremetev and I.M. Vorontsov and a number of Tatar princes to carry out a destructive raid on the borders between Russia and Lithuania, while Prince A.M. Kurbsky undertook a raid on Vitebsk, thus carrying the war into Lithuanian territory. Ivan himself took part in May in an unsuccessful operation which had to be cut short to cope with an attack from the Crimean Tatars in the south, concerted with King Sigismund Augustus. In August 1562, Kurbsky was wounded in a battle which Ivan later reproached him with having failed to win, and Russian forces had to give up a number of previous conquests to the Lithuanians. In September 1562 the Tsar returned to Moscow. Hostilities broke out again with the seizure by the Lithuanian General Radziwill of the Livonian fort of Tarvast, later abandoned to Ivan and razed by him.
Ivan's concerns fluctuated at this time between keeping a watchful and repressive eye on possible defections, and pursuing his military objectives in attacks which were concentrated against Poland–Lithuania and which culminated in one of the greatest Russian successes of the war, the capture of the key city and centre of communications, the one time Riurikovich city of Polotsk, which controlled the western Dvina and the road to Riga. At the end of November 1562 the Tsar in person led a vast array, said to be of some 280,000 armed men and two hundred guns, accompanied as usual by his cousin Vladimir of Staritsa, by the two baptized Tatar tsarevichi Alexander and Simeon (described in the chronicles as the Tsar's brothers), and by four other Tatar tsarevichi (Ibak, Tokhtamysh, Bekbulat and Kaibula). Stopping on the way to batter a prince Ivan Shakhovskoy to death with a mace, Ivan laid siege to Polotsk on 31 January 1563.37 After three weeks it capitulated.
For Ivan this was not only a major military success, it was also the recovery of a votchina which had belonged to his ancestors, a step on the road to the recovery of Kiev, and he now added ‘Polotsky’ to his title. During the campaign the Tsar's headquarters had been in the monastery of SS Boris and Gleb, near the town, and prayers had been offered to the princely martyrs of the old Kievan dynasty. It was also the recovery of a city for the Orthodox Church, and the freeing of the cathedral of St Sophia, the source of whose cult was located in Kiev.38 Ivan promised the citizens of Polotsk personal freedom and security of their property, but did not keep his promise. He seized the property of the prominent and rich people, dispatched the bishop, many important citizens and the voevoda to Moscow as prisoners, ordered the Latin churches to be pulled down and the Jews to be converted to Christianity or thrown into the River Dvina to drown. He spent several days celebrating the recovery of this ancient city of his ancestors, saved – as Karamzin puts it sardonically, by its early subordination to Lithuania – from the ravages of the Mongols.39 Russian accounts stress the welcome given to Ivan as the head of the Orthodox community by the many Orthodox Lithuanians. This overwhelming Russian victory led Sigismund, fearful of a Russian advance on Vilna, to negotiate through his councillors with the Russian boyars for a truce, which Ivan granted until the end of 1563; it also led to the successful conclusion of Russian talks for a truce with the Khan of Crimea.40
So pleased was Ivan with the conquest of Polotsk that on his return to Moscow he stopped in Staritsa to attend a splendid banquet arranged by Princess Evfrosin'ya, the mother of his cousin Vladimir, and to reward his cousin, and soon after he had the joy of hearing of the birth of a son, Vasily, to the Tsaritsa Maria; thus the events after the conquest of Kazan' were repeated. (Alas, the baby died on 3 May.) Ivan then went off on an extensive tour of the lands he had confiscated from the Vorotynsky princes, and then returned to what had become a favourite residence of his, namely Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda, in the district of Pereiaslavl'. This picturesque, wooded property on the banks of the River Sera had once been a hermitage and was supplied with an abundance of hares, bears and wolves.41 It had been the happy hunting ground of Grand Prince Vasily III, who had built a palace and a church, and used it as a hunting lodge.
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.42 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.43 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.44
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.46 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.48 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.49 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.50 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.51
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.52
