Ivan the terrible, p.31
Ivan the Terrible, page 31
He sought for refuge, and a rest from the tensions which pulled him in all directions, in the serious contemplation of retirement to a monastery and taking the cowl. In 1567 it was the monastery of Beloozero which attracted him. It was far away in the north, safe from attack by either Lithuania or the Tatars. It was also on the road to the port of St Nicholas and safety on board an English ship. In May 1567 he went on a pilgrimage to the monastery during which he held long talks with the abbot and a number of elders, withdrawing into a cell, away from the clamour of the world. In these sessions he openly spoke of his wish to become a monk. And the monks described to him the severities of monastic life, ‘and when I heard of this godly life my vile and despairing heart was at once comforted for I had found a divine bridle for my ungoverned heart and a refuge for my salvation’16 – words which reveal all too clearly Ivan's own awareness, in moments of lucidity, of the instability of his character. The Tsar asked the monks to prepare a cell for him and gave the abbot 200 rubles to furnish it, and in the following years he sent a number of icons for his future use.17 He also gave the monastery a valuable economic privilege, namely the right to trade without paying customs dues throughout the territory of the oprichnina.18
In the meantime he incorporated a monastic ritual into life in Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda, where he and the members of his oprichnina court wore a monastic garment of his own devising and lived according to a monastic rule (when he felt like it and was there), ringing the bell at 4 a.m. for matins and continuing to enforce a strict discipline and observe the hours throughout the day. Ivan acted as the abbot, Prince Afanasii Viazemsky was the cellarer, Maliuta Skuratov the sacristan. Ivan particularly liked to sing and was knowledgeable about church music. Having summoned his ‘monks’ to the refectory, he would remain standing, perhaps singing ‘songs of repentance’19 while the others ate, and he only sat down to eat when they had finished. After he had completed his religious duties he would attend the torture chambers next door, and then went to bed about 9 p.m., where three old blind men told him stories, tales and fantasies about the past.20 The state of Ivan's mind did not of course escape the attention of the senior boyars around him, and nurtured the perhaps not unwelcome belief that he might be thinking of abdicating.
The verdict of the Sobor of 1566 had determined Ivan to continue with the campaign in Livonia, and he now sought to revive his alliance with the King of Sweden, Erik XIV, who was convinced that the leading Swedish families were conspiring against him. By an extraordinary quirk of fate Russia and Sweden were at this time both ruled by men of original character and extreme irascibility, suspiciousness, fearfulness and mental instability. Erik, throughout 1566 and 1567 had alarmed his courtiers by seizing on the slightest pretext to arrest, torture and execute anyone who had seemed to mock him or had failed to serve him properly.21 And indeed, in July 1566, there had been a secret meeting of indignant nobles in which Erik's youngest half-brother Karl took part.
Erik was also faced with the ongoing war against Lithuania and Denmark, and by the consequences of the treaty of Dorpat of 1564 with Russia.22 Some minor points of that treaty were still being negotiated when Erik heard that Ivan too wished to reopen the subject and had added a new condition. He now demanded that the King of Sweden should hand over to him the wife of his brother John, Duke of Finland, Catherine Jagiellonka of Lithuania–Poland. Quite what Ivan intended to do with the lady is not clear; the general opinion was that he intended to make her his wife or his mistress (he was after all already married to Maria Temriukovna). People about the court knew of the previous rejection by King Sigismund of Ivan's offer for his sister, and may have seen in his insistence a desire for revenge. It also showed a total disregard for the bonds of Christian matrimony scarcely likely to be endorsed by the Russian or any other Church. It has also been suggested that Ivan intended Catherine to be a hostage in his eventual negotiations with Sigismund Augustus, and that her removal to Russia would serve to create a permanent breach between Poland and Sweden, thus strengthening Ivan's position.23 At any rate the Swedish council, when consulted, unanimously rejected Ivan's demand to separate John's wife forcibly from him, and deliver her to Ivan.
Nevertheless, the military situation of Sweden seemed in Erik's eyes so parlous that he authorized his envoy, Nils Gyllenstierna, sent to Moscow to complete the negotiations in October 1566, to agree in a treaty signed in February 1567, to hand Catherine over to Russia in exchange for a Russian cession of lands in Estonia more favourable to Sweden. Misled by Erik in this way, in May Ivan sent an impressive embassy, led by Ivan Mikhailovich Vorontsov, to Sweden to fetch Catherine, and made all the necessary arrangements for her reception in Moscow even though the treaty had not been ratified. He thus forced Erik to the wall. Erik did not want to break with Russia, but he found it impossible to carry out his undertaking to Ivan, whereas Ivan regarded the handing over of Catherine as essential to the treaty. Catherine proved loyal to her husband and shared his captivity in the castle of Gripsholm, and Ivan's demand to seize John's legal wife by force could only increase suspicion in Sweden that both Erik and Ivan were mentally deranged.
The Swedish Estates had been called to meet in May 1567 in Uppsala. Before they met a number of Swedish nobles were condemned to death on the grounds of treason. One of Erik's potential rivals, Nils Sture, now returned from Germany, where he had been on a mission for the King, and was arrested. At this point Erik's mental balance broke down completely; first he begged the forgiveness of his enemies, then the insinuations of one of his advisers made him change his mind, and marching into the cell of Nils Sture, on 27 May 1567, he personally stabbed him to death. Rushing away from the scene he ordered the execution of a number of noble prisoners, changed into peasant clothes and wandered around the forests.
For six months Erik let the government slide into the hands of a committee of nobles, who were profoundly shocked that the King himself should assassinate one of their number. Yet he was composed enough in the summer of 1567 to make a remarkable proposal to the Russian embassy which was still waiting to escort Catherine Jagiellonka to Russia. It was communicated most secretly by a Swedish emissary to the interpreter who, in Erik's name, asked the Russian envoys to take the King of Sweden back with them to Russia when they left Stockholm. When asked why Erik wanted to go to Russia he had replied that the King was now afraid of his ‘boyars’. The Russian envoys then described the scene in which the King had killed Nils Sture and the diplomatic negotiations caused by the Swedish refusal to surrender Catherine Jagiellonka, and their own anger at the endless procrastination of the Swedes.24
The two major enemies in Livonia, Russia and Lithuania, continued their secret plotting against each other, though the exact timing and what they were up to is difficult to establish. Sigismund tried to inspire the Russian aristocracy to act against Ivan while Ivan tried in turn to induce the Lithuanian magnates to help him with his secret dynastic plans. These had now become more urgent since it was becoming obvious that the death of the King, who was seriously ill, would lead to a dynastic crisis in Poland–Lithuania, for Sigismund Augustus was the last of the Jagiellos and had no male heir. Ivan had been attracted for some time by the idea of being ‘raised’ [elected] to the Lithuanian grand ducal throne, which had become de facto hereditary in the Jagiellonian line (the throne of Poland remained elective) and might indeed have remained so had Sigismund Augustus had children. It was his failure even to have male relatives which created the crisis, a nephew, Jan Sigismund Zapolya of Transylvania, whom he had hoped to make his heir, died in 1571. He had not even a daughter, only sisters.25
But, as the Polish diplomats had urged in February 1561, when they had turned down Ivan's first suit to Catherine, Sigismund II Augustus was an annointed ‘King’, not merely a grand prince like Ivan (Sigismund did not of course recognize Ivan's title of tsar), and Catherine was a king's daughter (Sigismund I). Nevertheless Ivan thought that he had a good chance of being accepted as ruler in Lithuania if not in Poland and no doubt this had influenced his original offer of marriage to Catherine Jagiellonka in 1559/60,26 and also his determination to acquire possession of her person. One of the arguments he put forward was that he wished to secure Catherine ‘for the sake of his honour’ and in order to stand above the King of Poland, his and the Swedish King's enemy. Had the purely dynastic question been the main issue however, Ivan could well have applied for the hand of the remaining unmarried – and older – sister of Sigismund, Anna, when his wife Anastasia died.27 This did not escape the Swedish negotiator, Peter Brag, who pointed out to the Russian envoys that if Erik could get hold of Anna, he could arrange for her to be handed over to Ivan. The Russian envoys avoided the trap by the simple argument that they had no instructions to deal with such an important matter.28
A distinguished Lithuanian commander, Jan Glebowicz, had been taken prisoner at the Russian conquest of Polotsk in 1563, and before he was repatriated to his country he had bound himself by a written oath to serve Ivan in future by persuading three of the great Lithuanian magnates to agree never to accept a lord from any other dynasty but the Russian, either the Tsar himself or one of his sons.29 In May 1566, as Ivan was preparing himself for a further campaign in Livonia, a secret messenger arrived bearing a letter from Glebowicz in Lithuania to Prince I.F. Mstislavsky. He was arrested and tortured on his return journey by the Lithuanian authorities; his master, Glebowicz, denied that he planned to desert Lithuania for Russia, but revealed the terms of the oath of loyalty he had sworn to Ivan and admitted that he had agreed to urge a number of Lithuanian magnates to ‘serve’ Ivan, by persuading them that whenever they might wish to appoint a new ruler they should choose one of his – Ivan's – family, namely himself or one of his children. Glebowicz succeeded in convincing the Lithuanians that he was only thinking of what might happen after the death of Sigismund Augustus, and was acquitted of treason but this episode may have given Sigismund ideas, or led him to take up an idea possibly suggested to him by Prince A.M. Kurbsky. This was the devising of a plot to win over leadingboyars of the lands bordering on Lithuania, or Lithuanian in origin, to desert to Poland–Lithuania as Kurbsky had done, with the promise of substantial political and social rewards. Such defections would seriously undermine Ivan's military strength by the loss of his best generals and possibly many of his service gentry who would follow their leaders.30
At this point the story becomes almost impossible to disentangle: in the summer of 1567 King Sigismund and the Grand Hetman of Lithuania, Grigorii Chodkewicz, allegedly wrote and sent a series of letters in which they attempted to lure a number of distinguished Russian princes and boyars to desert Ivan and to join with him – Sigismund – in replacing Ivan by his cousin of Staritsa on the throne of Russia. The originals of these letters have not been found so far either in the Lithuanian or the Russian archives, but there is nothing improbable in such letters having been written by or on behalf of Sigismund. It was just the kind of plotting and counterplotting that both Ivan and Sigismund engaged in, but unfortunately there is no evidence that such letters were ever written at all. The agent allegedly carrying the letters from Sigismund and Chodkewicz, a certain Ivan Kozlov, had once been a servant of Prince Mikhail Vorotynsky; he was to travel via Polotsk, where Ivan Petrovich Fedorov was now voevoda, after his disgrace in the early summer of 1566. Fedorov had pressed for the liberation of Vorotynsky from captivity in 1566.31 One of the letters, supposedly from Sigismund, was directed to him. The others were addressed to the two distinguished Gediminovichi, Prince I.D. Bel'sky and Prince I.F. Mstislavsky, and to Prince Mikhail I. Vorotynsky, now one of three senior men in Ivan's Council. The three years he had spent confined in the monastery of Beloozero (see above, Chapter IX, pp. 149–50) and the loss of much of his votchina land, might have turned him against the Tsar. They were all great magnates with their own military retinues. However, if the original letters from Sigismund have not been found, the replies to his letters have survived and are published in the records of the Russian Posol'sky Prikaz, or Office of Foreign Affairs.
Sigismund's alleged letters had been supported by a further set of letters to the same recipients allegedly from the Lithuanian Grand Hetman Grigorii Chodkewicz which also have not been found. The replies to letters he supposedly wrote to the four Russian boyars have also been published. All the letters were dated between 2 July and 6 August, the last being those ‘from’ Fedorov in Polotsk, dated 20 July 1567 to Chodkewicz, and 6 August to Sigismund Augustus.
A careful reading of these eight letters addressed by the Russians to Sigismund Augustus and Chodkewicz leaves one in little doubt that they were all in great part written or dictated by Ivan himself, or under his supervision. Not only do they reproduce the Tsar's language and cast of mind as expressed in his first letter to Prince Kurbsky, they also deal with current political problems. They provide many fascinating glimpses of the mental processes of the Tsar and of the way in which Russian foreign relations were conducted. In the course of the five weeks over which the letters extend Ivan presumably worked on the different replies from his boyars, thus providing some indication of the nature of the alleged plot he was going to have to foil. He was at the same time carrying on the negotiations with Erik of Sweden for a truce.
The letters supposed to have been written to King Sigismund Augustus by the two Lithuanian princes in Russian service are almost identical. They start with an invocation to God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Trinity which is omitted in the translations published in the Soviet Union in 1951.32 The princes use their full titles as Gediminovich princes of Lithuania, and address the Grand Prince of Lithuania, Sigismund, as ‘brother’. In view of Ivan's obsession with the order of precedence between rulers, and in particular with the superiority of rulers by inheritance over those by election, this shows him willing to make use of the Gediminovich princes in his service to denigrate the Gediminovich Grand Prince of Lithuania and King of Poland, Sigismund, in this case hereditary but confirmed by election – and who was indeed descended from a junior Gediminovich line. The titles were used with care, Prince M.I. Vorotynsky, for instance, was not described as a Lithuanian prince – he was after all a Riurikovich, with an appanage and all its attendant privileges on the Russian borders of the Grand Principality. All four aristocrats described themselves as ‘boyars of the Council (sovet)’ of Ivan.
The replies from Bel'sky and Mstislavsky start off by referring to the offers said to have been made to them by Sigismund, out of his compassion for the oppression of all Ivan's people, great and small, and his disapproval for Ivan's disregard for their interests and rank:
If we [the princes] become your [Sigismund's] subjects, as you wish, our brother, you promise to show us great honour and to make us lords (gosudari) in your land, in every way equal to the princes subject to you, and you will return our old appanage lands to us in your grand principality of Lithuania … and you want to show this grace not only to us but also to all those we bring to you who are worthy of your service.33
Thus far Ivan is referring to what Sigismund is alleged to have written and promised, using the King's language; but the real Ivan now takes over: ‘How could you, brother,’ he addresses Sigismund in the name of Bel'sky and Mstislavsky ‘write like scoundrels and rascals; it is unworthy of a great ruler to create discord with such absurd letters between rulers, and when you are unable to win by courage, to overcome your enemy like a thief, seizing on him like a snake.’ But continues Ivan/Bel'sky, ‘the sovereignty of our ruler is protected by God’. He calls the messenger Kozlov a hound, wickedly oozing his poison, who had stupefied Sigismund, just like Eve. ‘Our ruler [Ivan] like a true Christian rewards his people according to their worth and service and guards his realm against all evils, punishing all evildoers.’
Ivan/Bel'sky then enters on a discussion of principle, on an argument allegedly put forward by Sigismund, which makes one regret the absence of Sigismund's ‘original letter’. In view of the lack of precision of the Russian language in the definition of abstract ideas at that time it is difficult to be certain whether Ivan, when he writes about ‘freedom’, is referring to free will in the theological sense, or to total freedom of action, the original sense of the Russian word volia or volen. ‘You wrote, my brother,’ explains Ivan to Sigismund, in the name of both Bel'sky and Mstislavsky,
that God created man, and gave him freedom and honour, but what you write is far from the truth. For God created the first man, Adam, and gave him free will (samovlastie) and placed a prohibition on him, he was not to eat the fruit of one tree, and when he broke this prohibition, how cruelly was he punished! This was the first loss of freedom, the first dishonour, the first fall from light to darkness … from rest to labouring for his bread, from incorruptibility to corruption, from life to death.34
After a further discourse on biblical history, Ivan concludes that in Deuteronomy criminals were cursed unto their death, and this same truth was laid down by Jesus Christ: ‘commandment, law and the punishment of criminals’. Ivan/Bel'sky continues: ‘See you not that there never was any freedom anywhere and that your letter was far from the truth’,35 and he concludes, ‘Was it a good freedom (samovol'stvo) that your lords turned you [Sigismund] into a scoundrel setting his hand to such rubbish?’
