Ivan the terrible, p.37
Ivan the Terrible, page 37
I have not rooted all of you out because I have not really started, but I intend to make every effort to destroy you so completely that no memory of you will survive. I hope I shall succeed, but if I fail and bring God's punishment upon me, and must give way to my enemies, I would far rather yield to Him in a great matter than appear ridiculous before you, who are my slaves.47
But Viskovaty and Funikov were not the only targets.48 The heads of many other prikazy such as the prikaz of landed estates (Pomest'nyi), the principal office of revenue (Bol'shoi Prikaz), the office against brigands (Razboinyi Prikaz) were all rounded up.49 When, where and how the victims were arrested and tortured and where they were kept is not known.
Behind Ivan's savagery there lay a determined push by the members of the oprichnina, both aristocrats and service gentry, to eliminate the old princely families, leading boyar families and the leading d'iaki, in charge of the government offices and of the administration of the zemshchina. There was also a secret vendetta against some of Ivan's original servants in the oprichnina, such as Prince A.D. Viazemsky, and the Basmanovs.
The final scene was dramatically enacted on 25 July 1570: ‘on the feast day of St James the Apostle’ Ivan's executioners prepared the public square, the Poganaia meadow, with twenty huge stakes driven into the ground, joined by transverse beams, and supplied with cauldrons of cold and boiling water. The Tsar then appeared, on horseback, dressed all in black, fully armed, and carrying a bow and arrows and an axe, and escorted by 1,500 mounted strel'tsy (musketeers). Schlichting, who was an eyewitness (as were the Livonian nobles Kruse and Taube), describes how some three hundred nobles, in various stages of disintegration, prostration and decrepitude, crawling on their broken legs, were brought before Ivan and his sixteen-year-old son, Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich. ‘Seeing the people were frightened and unwilling to behold a scene of such dreadful cruelty’, wrote Schlichting,
Ivan rode about on his horse telling them not to be afraid, and ordering them to draw near to witness the spectacle. He admitted that he had originally intended to destroy all the inhabitants of the city but declared that he had now laid aside his anger. Whereupon the people came close to the Prince, who asked whether it was right for him to punish those who had betrayed him? The people shouted ‘long live our glorious Tsar’ and expressed their approval. The Tsar now had one hundred and eighty-four of the three hundred brought forward and gave them into the custody of nobles who were standing by, saying: ‘Here you can have them. I make you a present of them … I have no further quarrel with them.’50
Vasily Shchelkalov now appeared with a long screed listing the charges. The first to be accused was Viskovaty, who as late as 12 July was recorded as still negotiating with the Lithuanian envoys with the rank of Keeper of the State Seal.51 He was charged not only with intriguing with Lithuania but with the most unlikely accusation that he had been secretly intriguing with the Ottoman Turks and the Khan of Crimea, inviting them to attack Russia. As he read out each charge Shchelkalov struck Viskovaty on the head with a stick, or whip. The executioners tried to persuade Viskovaty to admit his crimes and beg for mercy, but he denied his guilt, and loudly put himself in the hands of God who would judge both Ivan and himself in the next world. ‘You lust to shed my blood, go ahead and drink your fill of the blood of an innocent man. Accursed be you, bloodsuckers, and your Tsar’ were his last words. Strung up between the stakes, Viskovaty was cut to pieces. Maliuta Skuratov cut off his nose, another cut off his ears, and at last another, named Ivan Reutov, cut off his privy parts, whereupon he died. But Ivan, suspecting that Reutov had done this out of pity, to hasten his death, shouted to him ‘You too will soon have a drink out of the same cup from which he is drinking.’ (In fact luckily for him Reutov died of the plague.)52
It was now the turn of Funikov, the treasurer, who also hardily proclaimed his innocence and said that ‘the tyrant's soul would suffer if he killed guiltless men’. Ivan replied: ‘I have not caused or instigated your death nor am I responsible for it. Your associate, to whom you listened [Viskovaty] is the entire cause of your ruin. Even if you had not committed any crime you acted in concert with him, and so you both must die.’ Funikov was slowly killed by being doused alternately with icy and boiling water. Several other heads of prikazy followed, in some cases with their wives and children; Grigory Shapkin, together with his wife and two children was beheaded by a Prince Vasily Temkin, an oprichnik, who laid their bodies at Ivan's feet. Lev Saltykov, who had distinguished himself so greatly in the sack of Novgorod was killed. A total of 116 victims were dispatched in various ingenious ways,53 some having their ribs torn out, others flayed alive or impaled until finally an old man who could barely walk tottered up. Ivan ran him through with a spear, then stabbed him sixteen times and had him beheaded, before at the end of four hours, he had had enough and withdrew to his palace.54 In the words of the Russian historian A.A. Zimin, ‘The Russian capital had seen many horrors in its time. But what happened in Moscow on 25 July, in its cruelty and sadistic refinement, outdid all that had gone before and can perhaps be explained only by the cruel temperament and the sick imagination of Ivan the Terrible’.55
The reprisals were not yet quite over. In the following days, some fifty to seventy prisoners brought from Novgorod were dealt with, together with some eighty of their wives and children.56 It was evident that the oprichniki were being torn apart by their own rivalries, by the prevalence of denunciations of all kinds, and by changes in Ivan's policies in regard to the Staritsky family since the engagement of Duke Magnus to Vladimir's daughter, and by Ivan's own growing distrust of his henchmen. It is around this time that three of the highest ranking members of the oprichnina disappeared in circumstances which are not clear but which suggest that they had shown lack of sympathy with Ivan's policies, and in particular that they too had perhaps been involved in plots to hand Novgorod over to the King of Poland–Lithuania and had tried to control Ivan's excesses. According to Schlichting, Prince Afanasii Viazemsky had been a leading light in the oprichnina since its foundation, a man so close to Ivan that the Tsar would take medicine from no hands but his. Schlichting, who was in service with Ivan's Belgian physician, Dr Arnold (aka Dr A. Lindsay) would be likely to know this.57 But Viazemsky, in common with the two Basmanovs, seems to have opposed in his heart of hearts (if he had one) the planned destruction of Novgorod. Some oprichniki were themselves beginning to think that Ivan was going too far, and there is a suggestion that Viazemsky attempted to warn Archbishop Pimen. Denounced by a client of his, one Lovchikov, for having leaked the Tsar's decision to destroy Novgorod, Ivan ordered Viazemsky's servants to be killed, whereupon the Prince concealed himself for a few days in the house of Dr Arnold (where Schlichting may have seen him). But Ivan succeeded in laying hands on him and submitted Viazemsky to the special daily beating inflicted on debtors, pravezh, to extract all his wealth from him, until his body swelled up and he turned to denouncing others in order to bring his torment to an end. At this point in the tale, Schlichting fled Russia and took refuge in Lithuania so that he was unable to provide an eyewitness account of Viazemsky's eventual fate. The German now offered his services to Sigismund Augustus.
Viazemsky does not seem to have been executed, for his name does not figure in a Sinodik; he probably died in prison.58 The names of Aleksei and Fedor Basmanov also disappear about this time, but they were clearly executed for they do figure in Sinodiki; Fedor Basmanov was allegedly compelled to execute his own father. Ivan sent 100 rubles to the Trinity monastery for prayers for Fedor Basmanov and eventually returned some of the family's estates to his children,59 one of whom, Peter, became a strong and effective supporter of the first False Dmitri, and died for it in the Time of Troubles. He may have been cured by the fate of his father of all loyalty to the Riurikovichi. The elimination of the previously all-powerful Viazemsky and the Basmanovs is attributed by Skrynnikov to the intrigues of Maliuta Skuratov and of V.G. Griaznoi, who had once been in the service of Vladimir of Staritsa and then helped in the campaign to destroy him and rose in Ivan's confidence in consequence.60
The impact of these terrible days on the people of Moscow was profound. And evidently on Ivan too, for never, after the massacre on 25 July, did Ivan show the same confidence in his ‘brothers-in-arms’.61
Chapter XVI
Foreign Policy and the Tatar Invasions
While Ivan was conducting the fearsome purge of his armed forces and administration, the horizon on his external relations darkened. Shortly after the overthrow of Erik XIV of Sweden, and his coronation as King of Sweden, John III, in July 1569, had sent an embassy to Russia under Paul Juusten, Bishop of Åbo, to negotiate with Ivan. At first Ivan had proved conciliating, suggesting that he had only asked for John's wife, Catherine Jagiellonka, to be handed over to him because he thought John was dead (which John was unlikely to believe) and he hoped to rescue her from the prison in which presumably Erik had incarcerated her, when he had sentenced his brother to death for his rebellious behaviour.1
Juusten arrived in Novgorod on 14 September 1569, after the return to Moscow of Ivan's embassy to Sweden under the boyar V.M. Vorontsov, which had been sent in 1567 to finalize the arrangements made with Erik for the collection and delivery to Russia of Catherine. From the beginning Juusten was faced with the demand that he should negotiate with the Governor of Novgorod and not expect to deal with the Tsar himself, particularly as it could be argued, since the deposition of Erik, that John was not an hereditary king, but an elected king of an inferior kind. The Tsar had been outraged at the news of the attack on his ambassador Vorontsov by John's supporters, and insisted that the Swedish envoys should treat the Governor of Novgorod as ‘the brother of their king’ which Juusten refused to do. The Russians were then ordered by the Governor to attack the Swedish party, and robbed them of their clothes and boots. They forced them to expose themselves in the streets in their underwear, displaying their buttocks and their private parts; they rifled their belongings, ‘penned them like pigs in a sty’, and deprived them of food and drink. ‘None of us had ever before drunk water to quench his thirst save at times of dire necessity and then as little as possible’ wrote Juusten plaintively.2 Ivan's spokesman made it quite clear that this rough treatment was a reprisal for the Swedish attack on the Russian embassy in 1568.3 Fortunately for them the Swedes were now dragged ‘like captured felons’ to Moscow in 1570, thus avoiding a meeting with Ivan who was approaching with the oprichniki to launch his assault on Novgorod. They escaped just in time.
When Ivan returned to Moscow, in May 1570, from his punitive expedition against Novgorod, he still refused to receive the Swedish envoys. What is more he soon had a free hand to bully them for he no longer feared a Commonwealth attack in the event of war with Sweden since the conclusion of the three-year truce on 20 June 1570. Yet Ivan's policy, in May and June 1570, when the Swedish envoys were finally received in Moscow by Ivan Viskovaty and Andrei Vasil'ev (both shortly to be executed) is difficult to grasp, for the Tsar now asserted that the ‘concessions’ he had previously made to Erik were conditioned by Swedish willingness to surrender John's Queen. If ‘Sweden were prepared to hand her over immediately’, the treaty signed with King Erik in 1567 could be renewed. It seemed as though the Tsar were seeking a breach with Sweden. Summoned for a second interview to the Kremlin on 6 June 1570 and under threat of exile, torture and imprisonment, the Swedish diplomatic mission agreed to negotiate in Novgorod in order to mollify Ivan, but still the Russian secretaries insisted on the surrender of Catherine Jagiellonka as a precondition to any negotiation. What her status was to be now, as before, is never made clear: wife (Ivan was at this moment a widower), mistress, or political pawn? In a later letter of 11 August 1572 to John III himself, Ivan was more open and accused Erik of having wanted to hand Catherine to him ‘by deceit’, a policy which was followed by his loss of his throne. And then, continued Ivan, ‘in autumn they told us that you had died, and in spring that you had been chased out of the land by your brother Karl … and now they say that your envoys are coming and that you are in your lordship … and that you are besieged in Stockholm and your brother Erik is advancing on you.’4 In this way the Tsar covered his past negotiations over Catherine with confusion.
Sometime in mid-June 1570 Ivan banished the Swedish delegation to Murom,5 where they were kept under house arrest in very cramped quarters until November 1571,6 forced to buy their own food with their depleted supplies of money, and make their own clothes. It seemed that Ivan was determined to secure an acknowledgement of Russian suzerainty over Sweden, by means of the claim that Sweden could only negotiate with the Governor of Novgorod and not with the Tsar, as had been usual in the past, when Novgorod was an independent republic. He argued that Sweden was not in fact a kingdom of equal rank with Russia, but a province,7 whose status was similar to that of Magnus's kingdom of Livonia, now a vassal of Ivan's.
By the summer Savin arrived in Moscow with Queen Elizabeth's reply to the offer of alliance. Whatever she may have meant, Ivan was obviously so agitated by the terms of her letter that he replied in language such had probably never been used to Elizabeth before. He sent a letter through the interpreter Sylvester on 24 October 1570 in which he recapitulated the whole history of Anglo-Russian relations, accusing the English merchants of dishonesty and complaining that none of the letters he had received from England had been properly sealed with the same seal, but always with a different seal, a method which commanded no confidence between states. He complained that he never received any news of ‘Anthonie’ or ‘Onton’ (Jenkinson), who did not accompany Randolph when he had been sent as English ambassador, and that Randolph spoke only of merchants’ and boorish affairs, and refused to speak of ‘princelie affaires’. Ivan stressed that the reason why he insisted on Jenkinson's return was that he wanted to know if he had spoken to the Queen about the secret matters, i.e. the asylum to be offered to Ivan. In a final rhetorical accusation Ivan declared:
We had thought that you had been ruler over your lande and had sought honor to your self and profitt to your countrie … but now we perceive that there be other men that doe rule, and not men but bowers [boors] and merchaunts … who seek their owne profitt of marchauntdize; and you flowe in your maidenlie estate like a maide
Whereupon the irate Tsar withdrew all the trading privileges which he had granted to the Russia Company.8 The Tsar had not so far connected the negotiations for an alliance with English trade privileges. He was now ready to do so and to exercise pressure on England. There were still moreover differences of style which led to misunderstandings. Whereas Elizabeth might think that a verbal agreement was enough, Ivan needed an agreement in which the Queen committed herself by oath, swearing to every paragraph.9
With the passage of time, the war in Livonia was becoming more and more of a burden for both Denmark and Sweden and the third partner, Lübeck was also suffering from the loss of much of her trade to other Hanseatic towns. But Ivan's hopes of Danish support for King Magnus of Livonia were doomed to fail: Frederick of Denmark was not interested in conquering Livonia for Ivan's vassal, even though he was his younger brother. A peace congress, organized behind the scenes by the Emperor Maximilian II, the King of France and Sigismund Augustus negotiated a treaty of peace at Stettin on 30 November 1570,10 which brought to an end the so-called seven years, Northern War. This was, however, no help to Ivan since it freed all the other powers involved in the war in the Baltic to unite against him. Meanwhile the Russian siege of Swedish-controlled Reval, in Estonia, conducted by King Magnus, was faltering. Denmark of course refused any assistance, and Ivan was too strapped for troops to send any. He had hoped that Magnus would be successful enough to be able eventually to reinforce him against the Tatars. More serious for Ivan was the fact that after the peace of Stettin, the King of Sweden, who could count on the passive support of his brother-in-law Sigismund Augustus, stepped up the war at sea. He interfered with Russian supplies which had been landing freely at Narva, whose trade now almost rivalled that of Riga, while no longer attacking and capturing Danish ships. By the end of March 1571 Magnus gave up the struggle for Reval and abandoned the siege.11 He was now useless to Ivan. So were the Livonian nobles Taube and Kruse.
The Crimean Khan, no longer hampered by Ottoman policy, was also free to embark on a new campaign against Russia. He began by clearing one obstacle out of the way: he sent his son to attack Ivan's quondam father-in-law, Temriuk, Khan of Kabarda, who was seriously injured and two of whose sons were taken prisoner, while the Khan of the Crimea then turned to cultivate the Khan of the Nogai horde, one of the Tatar tribes of the Caucasus. The main Russian defence forces were stationed on the Oka river under two of the most prominent Russian commanders, Princes I.D. Bel'sky and I.F. Mstislavsky, but in 1570 the Crimeans indulged in only a few skirmishes.
The death of the Tsaritsa Maria in 1569 does not seem at first to have affected Mikhail Temriukovich Cherkassky's position in Russia. The fate of Maria Temriukovna's brother was probably decided early in 1571. Normally he would have been appointed to command one of the main Russian corps in a campaign against the Khan of Crimea, but he disappeared from view. There is a good deal of mystery about when and how he died, and there are stories about Ivan tying up a wild bear on either side of the gate to his house, rendering access very risky, and the odd report of the execution of his sixteen-year-old wife, and her six-month-old son, as early as 1568.12 Mikhail Cherkassky's death is attributed by two leading historians to the period around May 1571 when the Crimean army was advancing on the Oka river. According to one story, a false rumour spread in the Russian army that Maria and Mikhail's father, Temriuk, had joined Devlet Girey in the invading Crimean army. Mikhail was thereupon given a lower rank in the oprichnina army and then ‘disappeared without trace’.13 A more reliable story tells that he was sent to command the forces in Serpukhov and between 13 and 16 May 1571 he was shot down or cut to pieces by harquebusiers belonging to the oprichnina.14
But Viskovaty and Funikov were not the only targets.48 The heads of many other prikazy such as the prikaz of landed estates (Pomest'nyi), the principal office of revenue (Bol'shoi Prikaz), the office against brigands (Razboinyi Prikaz) were all rounded up.49 When, where and how the victims were arrested and tortured and where they were kept is not known.
Behind Ivan's savagery there lay a determined push by the members of the oprichnina, both aristocrats and service gentry, to eliminate the old princely families, leading boyar families and the leading d'iaki, in charge of the government offices and of the administration of the zemshchina. There was also a secret vendetta against some of Ivan's original servants in the oprichnina, such as Prince A.D. Viazemsky, and the Basmanovs.
The final scene was dramatically enacted on 25 July 1570: ‘on the feast day of St James the Apostle’ Ivan's executioners prepared the public square, the Poganaia meadow, with twenty huge stakes driven into the ground, joined by transverse beams, and supplied with cauldrons of cold and boiling water. The Tsar then appeared, on horseback, dressed all in black, fully armed, and carrying a bow and arrows and an axe, and escorted by 1,500 mounted strel'tsy (musketeers). Schlichting, who was an eyewitness (as were the Livonian nobles Kruse and Taube), describes how some three hundred nobles, in various stages of disintegration, prostration and decrepitude, crawling on their broken legs, were brought before Ivan and his sixteen-year-old son, Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich. ‘Seeing the people were frightened and unwilling to behold a scene of such dreadful cruelty’, wrote Schlichting,
Ivan rode about on his horse telling them not to be afraid, and ordering them to draw near to witness the spectacle. He admitted that he had originally intended to destroy all the inhabitants of the city but declared that he had now laid aside his anger. Whereupon the people came close to the Prince, who asked whether it was right for him to punish those who had betrayed him? The people shouted ‘long live our glorious Tsar’ and expressed their approval. The Tsar now had one hundred and eighty-four of the three hundred brought forward and gave them into the custody of nobles who were standing by, saying: ‘Here you can have them. I make you a present of them … I have no further quarrel with them.’50
Vasily Shchelkalov now appeared with a long screed listing the charges. The first to be accused was Viskovaty, who as late as 12 July was recorded as still negotiating with the Lithuanian envoys with the rank of Keeper of the State Seal.51 He was charged not only with intriguing with Lithuania but with the most unlikely accusation that he had been secretly intriguing with the Ottoman Turks and the Khan of Crimea, inviting them to attack Russia. As he read out each charge Shchelkalov struck Viskovaty on the head with a stick, or whip. The executioners tried to persuade Viskovaty to admit his crimes and beg for mercy, but he denied his guilt, and loudly put himself in the hands of God who would judge both Ivan and himself in the next world. ‘You lust to shed my blood, go ahead and drink your fill of the blood of an innocent man. Accursed be you, bloodsuckers, and your Tsar’ were his last words. Strung up between the stakes, Viskovaty was cut to pieces. Maliuta Skuratov cut off his nose, another cut off his ears, and at last another, named Ivan Reutov, cut off his privy parts, whereupon he died. But Ivan, suspecting that Reutov had done this out of pity, to hasten his death, shouted to him ‘You too will soon have a drink out of the same cup from which he is drinking.’ (In fact luckily for him Reutov died of the plague.)52
It was now the turn of Funikov, the treasurer, who also hardily proclaimed his innocence and said that ‘the tyrant's soul would suffer if he killed guiltless men’. Ivan replied: ‘I have not caused or instigated your death nor am I responsible for it. Your associate, to whom you listened [Viskovaty] is the entire cause of your ruin. Even if you had not committed any crime you acted in concert with him, and so you both must die.’ Funikov was slowly killed by being doused alternately with icy and boiling water. Several other heads of prikazy followed, in some cases with their wives and children; Grigory Shapkin, together with his wife and two children was beheaded by a Prince Vasily Temkin, an oprichnik, who laid their bodies at Ivan's feet. Lev Saltykov, who had distinguished himself so greatly in the sack of Novgorod was killed. A total of 116 victims were dispatched in various ingenious ways,53 some having their ribs torn out, others flayed alive or impaled until finally an old man who could barely walk tottered up. Ivan ran him through with a spear, then stabbed him sixteen times and had him beheaded, before at the end of four hours, he had had enough and withdrew to his palace.54 In the words of the Russian historian A.A. Zimin, ‘The Russian capital had seen many horrors in its time. But what happened in Moscow on 25 July, in its cruelty and sadistic refinement, outdid all that had gone before and can perhaps be explained only by the cruel temperament and the sick imagination of Ivan the Terrible’.55
The reprisals were not yet quite over. In the following days, some fifty to seventy prisoners brought from Novgorod were dealt with, together with some eighty of their wives and children.56 It was evident that the oprichniki were being torn apart by their own rivalries, by the prevalence of denunciations of all kinds, and by changes in Ivan's policies in regard to the Staritsky family since the engagement of Duke Magnus to Vladimir's daughter, and by Ivan's own growing distrust of his henchmen. It is around this time that three of the highest ranking members of the oprichnina disappeared in circumstances which are not clear but which suggest that they had shown lack of sympathy with Ivan's policies, and in particular that they too had perhaps been involved in plots to hand Novgorod over to the King of Poland–Lithuania and had tried to control Ivan's excesses. According to Schlichting, Prince Afanasii Viazemsky had been a leading light in the oprichnina since its foundation, a man so close to Ivan that the Tsar would take medicine from no hands but his. Schlichting, who was in service with Ivan's Belgian physician, Dr Arnold (aka Dr A. Lindsay) would be likely to know this.57 But Viazemsky, in common with the two Basmanovs, seems to have opposed in his heart of hearts (if he had one) the planned destruction of Novgorod. Some oprichniki were themselves beginning to think that Ivan was going too far, and there is a suggestion that Viazemsky attempted to warn Archbishop Pimen. Denounced by a client of his, one Lovchikov, for having leaked the Tsar's decision to destroy Novgorod, Ivan ordered Viazemsky's servants to be killed, whereupon the Prince concealed himself for a few days in the house of Dr Arnold (where Schlichting may have seen him). But Ivan succeeded in laying hands on him and submitted Viazemsky to the special daily beating inflicted on debtors, pravezh, to extract all his wealth from him, until his body swelled up and he turned to denouncing others in order to bring his torment to an end. At this point in the tale, Schlichting fled Russia and took refuge in Lithuania so that he was unable to provide an eyewitness account of Viazemsky's eventual fate. The German now offered his services to Sigismund Augustus.
Viazemsky does not seem to have been executed, for his name does not figure in a Sinodik; he probably died in prison.58 The names of Aleksei and Fedor Basmanov also disappear about this time, but they were clearly executed for they do figure in Sinodiki; Fedor Basmanov was allegedly compelled to execute his own father. Ivan sent 100 rubles to the Trinity monastery for prayers for Fedor Basmanov and eventually returned some of the family's estates to his children,59 one of whom, Peter, became a strong and effective supporter of the first False Dmitri, and died for it in the Time of Troubles. He may have been cured by the fate of his father of all loyalty to the Riurikovichi. The elimination of the previously all-powerful Viazemsky and the Basmanovs is attributed by Skrynnikov to the intrigues of Maliuta Skuratov and of V.G. Griaznoi, who had once been in the service of Vladimir of Staritsa and then helped in the campaign to destroy him and rose in Ivan's confidence in consequence.60
The impact of these terrible days on the people of Moscow was profound. And evidently on Ivan too, for never, after the massacre on 25 July, did Ivan show the same confidence in his ‘brothers-in-arms’.61
Chapter XVI
Foreign Policy and the Tatar Invasions
While Ivan was conducting the fearsome purge of his armed forces and administration, the horizon on his external relations darkened. Shortly after the overthrow of Erik XIV of Sweden, and his coronation as King of Sweden, John III, in July 1569, had sent an embassy to Russia under Paul Juusten, Bishop of Åbo, to negotiate with Ivan. At first Ivan had proved conciliating, suggesting that he had only asked for John's wife, Catherine Jagiellonka, to be handed over to him because he thought John was dead (which John was unlikely to believe) and he hoped to rescue her from the prison in which presumably Erik had incarcerated her, when he had sentenced his brother to death for his rebellious behaviour.1
Juusten arrived in Novgorod on 14 September 1569, after the return to Moscow of Ivan's embassy to Sweden under the boyar V.M. Vorontsov, which had been sent in 1567 to finalize the arrangements made with Erik for the collection and delivery to Russia of Catherine. From the beginning Juusten was faced with the demand that he should negotiate with the Governor of Novgorod and not expect to deal with the Tsar himself, particularly as it could be argued, since the deposition of Erik, that John was not an hereditary king, but an elected king of an inferior kind. The Tsar had been outraged at the news of the attack on his ambassador Vorontsov by John's supporters, and insisted that the Swedish envoys should treat the Governor of Novgorod as ‘the brother of their king’ which Juusten refused to do. The Russians were then ordered by the Governor to attack the Swedish party, and robbed them of their clothes and boots. They forced them to expose themselves in the streets in their underwear, displaying their buttocks and their private parts; they rifled their belongings, ‘penned them like pigs in a sty’, and deprived them of food and drink. ‘None of us had ever before drunk water to quench his thirst save at times of dire necessity and then as little as possible’ wrote Juusten plaintively.2 Ivan's spokesman made it quite clear that this rough treatment was a reprisal for the Swedish attack on the Russian embassy in 1568.3 Fortunately for them the Swedes were now dragged ‘like captured felons’ to Moscow in 1570, thus avoiding a meeting with Ivan who was approaching with the oprichniki to launch his assault on Novgorod. They escaped just in time.
When Ivan returned to Moscow, in May 1570, from his punitive expedition against Novgorod, he still refused to receive the Swedish envoys. What is more he soon had a free hand to bully them for he no longer feared a Commonwealth attack in the event of war with Sweden since the conclusion of the three-year truce on 20 June 1570. Yet Ivan's policy, in May and June 1570, when the Swedish envoys were finally received in Moscow by Ivan Viskovaty and Andrei Vasil'ev (both shortly to be executed) is difficult to grasp, for the Tsar now asserted that the ‘concessions’ he had previously made to Erik were conditioned by Swedish willingness to surrender John's Queen. If ‘Sweden were prepared to hand her over immediately’, the treaty signed with King Erik in 1567 could be renewed. It seemed as though the Tsar were seeking a breach with Sweden. Summoned for a second interview to the Kremlin on 6 June 1570 and under threat of exile, torture and imprisonment, the Swedish diplomatic mission agreed to negotiate in Novgorod in order to mollify Ivan, but still the Russian secretaries insisted on the surrender of Catherine Jagiellonka as a precondition to any negotiation. What her status was to be now, as before, is never made clear: wife (Ivan was at this moment a widower), mistress, or political pawn? In a later letter of 11 August 1572 to John III himself, Ivan was more open and accused Erik of having wanted to hand Catherine to him ‘by deceit’, a policy which was followed by his loss of his throne. And then, continued Ivan, ‘in autumn they told us that you had died, and in spring that you had been chased out of the land by your brother Karl … and now they say that your envoys are coming and that you are in your lordship … and that you are besieged in Stockholm and your brother Erik is advancing on you.’4 In this way the Tsar covered his past negotiations over Catherine with confusion.
Sometime in mid-June 1570 Ivan banished the Swedish delegation to Murom,5 where they were kept under house arrest in very cramped quarters until November 1571,6 forced to buy their own food with their depleted supplies of money, and make their own clothes. It seemed that Ivan was determined to secure an acknowledgement of Russian suzerainty over Sweden, by means of the claim that Sweden could only negotiate with the Governor of Novgorod and not with the Tsar, as had been usual in the past, when Novgorod was an independent republic. He argued that Sweden was not in fact a kingdom of equal rank with Russia, but a province,7 whose status was similar to that of Magnus's kingdom of Livonia, now a vassal of Ivan's.
By the summer Savin arrived in Moscow with Queen Elizabeth's reply to the offer of alliance. Whatever she may have meant, Ivan was obviously so agitated by the terms of her letter that he replied in language such had probably never been used to Elizabeth before. He sent a letter through the interpreter Sylvester on 24 October 1570 in which he recapitulated the whole history of Anglo-Russian relations, accusing the English merchants of dishonesty and complaining that none of the letters he had received from England had been properly sealed with the same seal, but always with a different seal, a method which commanded no confidence between states. He complained that he never received any news of ‘Anthonie’ or ‘Onton’ (Jenkinson), who did not accompany Randolph when he had been sent as English ambassador, and that Randolph spoke only of merchants’ and boorish affairs, and refused to speak of ‘princelie affaires’. Ivan stressed that the reason why he insisted on Jenkinson's return was that he wanted to know if he had spoken to the Queen about the secret matters, i.e. the asylum to be offered to Ivan. In a final rhetorical accusation Ivan declared:
We had thought that you had been ruler over your lande and had sought honor to your self and profitt to your countrie … but now we perceive that there be other men that doe rule, and not men but bowers [boors] and merchaunts … who seek their owne profitt of marchauntdize; and you flowe in your maidenlie estate like a maide
Whereupon the irate Tsar withdrew all the trading privileges which he had granted to the Russia Company.8 The Tsar had not so far connected the negotiations for an alliance with English trade privileges. He was now ready to do so and to exercise pressure on England. There were still moreover differences of style which led to misunderstandings. Whereas Elizabeth might think that a verbal agreement was enough, Ivan needed an agreement in which the Queen committed herself by oath, swearing to every paragraph.9
With the passage of time, the war in Livonia was becoming more and more of a burden for both Denmark and Sweden and the third partner, Lübeck was also suffering from the loss of much of her trade to other Hanseatic towns. But Ivan's hopes of Danish support for King Magnus of Livonia were doomed to fail: Frederick of Denmark was not interested in conquering Livonia for Ivan's vassal, even though he was his younger brother. A peace congress, organized behind the scenes by the Emperor Maximilian II, the King of France and Sigismund Augustus negotiated a treaty of peace at Stettin on 30 November 1570,10 which brought to an end the so-called seven years, Northern War. This was, however, no help to Ivan since it freed all the other powers involved in the war in the Baltic to unite against him. Meanwhile the Russian siege of Swedish-controlled Reval, in Estonia, conducted by King Magnus, was faltering. Denmark of course refused any assistance, and Ivan was too strapped for troops to send any. He had hoped that Magnus would be successful enough to be able eventually to reinforce him against the Tatars. More serious for Ivan was the fact that after the peace of Stettin, the King of Sweden, who could count on the passive support of his brother-in-law Sigismund Augustus, stepped up the war at sea. He interfered with Russian supplies which had been landing freely at Narva, whose trade now almost rivalled that of Riga, while no longer attacking and capturing Danish ships. By the end of March 1571 Magnus gave up the struggle for Reval and abandoned the siege.11 He was now useless to Ivan. So were the Livonian nobles Taube and Kruse.
The Crimean Khan, no longer hampered by Ottoman policy, was also free to embark on a new campaign against Russia. He began by clearing one obstacle out of the way: he sent his son to attack Ivan's quondam father-in-law, Temriuk, Khan of Kabarda, who was seriously injured and two of whose sons were taken prisoner, while the Khan of the Crimea then turned to cultivate the Khan of the Nogai horde, one of the Tatar tribes of the Caucasus. The main Russian defence forces were stationed on the Oka river under two of the most prominent Russian commanders, Princes I.D. Bel'sky and I.F. Mstislavsky, but in 1570 the Crimeans indulged in only a few skirmishes.
The death of the Tsaritsa Maria in 1569 does not seem at first to have affected Mikhail Temriukovich Cherkassky's position in Russia. The fate of Maria Temriukovna's brother was probably decided early in 1571. Normally he would have been appointed to command one of the main Russian corps in a campaign against the Khan of Crimea, but he disappeared from view. There is a good deal of mystery about when and how he died, and there are stories about Ivan tying up a wild bear on either side of the gate to his house, rendering access very risky, and the odd report of the execution of his sixteen-year-old wife, and her six-month-old son, as early as 1568.12 Mikhail Cherkassky's death is attributed by two leading historians to the period around May 1571 when the Crimean army was advancing on the Oka river. According to one story, a false rumour spread in the Russian army that Maria and Mikhail's father, Temriuk, had joined Devlet Girey in the invading Crimean army. Mikhail was thereupon given a lower rank in the oprichnina army and then ‘disappeared without trace’.13 A more reliable story tells that he was sent to command the forces in Serpukhov and between 13 and 16 May 1571 he was shot down or cut to pieces by harquebusiers belonging to the oprichnina.14
