Ivan the terrible, p.42
Ivan the Terrible, page 42
It is in this context that one must place the final downfall of Archbishop Leonid of Novgorod, who had succeeded in reconciling the Tsar with the city after the burning of Moscow, though the sources are somewhat confused and scanty. Archbishop Leonid had of course maintained close connexions with the leaders of the oprichnina and to that extent was tarred with the same brush. Just as Ivan got rid of his closest followers in the oprichnina, so now he turned on Leonid, who was summoned to Moscow some time in August 1575 and brought before a religious council for judgment. Ivan prepared the ground by organizing at the same time an investigation into the doings of Metropolitan Antony and the Bishop of Krutitsa, who were apparently charged with drinking. Thus deprived of any support, Leonid was now accused of a whole array of crimes: treason, maintaining secret correspondence with agents of the King of Poland–Lithuania, sending treasure abroad, minting money, buggery, bestiality, sodomy and keeping witches.49 Leonid's enormous fortune was confiscated by Ivan, eleven of his servants hanged ‘and his women witches shamefully dismembered and burned’. Much of the evidence for the trial of Leonid is provided by Jerome Horsey, the only one to mention the fate of his witches, and his account is confirmed by a surviving note in a Sinodik commemorating ‘in Novgorod 15 women said to be witches’.50 Leonid was sentenced to life imprisonment in a dungeon on bread and water and died in October 1575. It is his death which has given rise to many legends about bears being set on to kill condemned friars, and the even better known account of a Pskovian Chronicle of Leonid being sewn up in a bear skin and thrown to the dogs.51
Four days after the downfall of Leonid, Protasii V. Iur'ev Zakhar'in, an oprichnik who had been attached for years to the dvor of the Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich, was executed. Having begun to harbour suspicions of his eldest son and of the relatives of the Tsaritsa Anastasia, the Tsar now turned on the Iur'ev Zakhar'in family, and even on Tsaritsa Anastasia's brother, the long lasting Nikita Romanovich whose property was ravaged. In November 1575 several prominent boyars and a number of prominent oprichniki were executed. One of the recently arrived envoys from the Holy Roman Emperor, Daniel Prinz von Buchau, reported that ‘Not long before our arrival, in autumn 1575, he [the Tsar] killed forty nobles who had apparently for a second time plotted against his life.’52 Probably closest to Ivan now stood Bogdan Ia. Bel'sky, the nephew of Maliuta Skuratov, of modest family, who had been a body servant of Ivan's for fifteen years and who rose steadily in his service.53 A number of younger Shuisky princes also appeared at the court of Ivan including Vasily Ivanovich, the future Tsar.
War with Sweden continued and had also proved disappointing to Ivan. John III had twice detained Russian envoys and refused to negotiate with Ivan until the Bishop of Åbo and the Swedish embassy sent in 1569 were allowed to return to Sweden. Ivan continued to bombard John III with very rude letters: he accused him of writing his name before that of Ivan which was indecent because Ivan's brother was the Holy Roman Emperor, and he refused to call John ‘brother’ for in honour Sweden was inferior: ‘You say Sweden is the patrimony of your father … and whose son was he, and was your grandfather on the throne?’ Ivan then went back over the whole story of his relations with Erik XIV again and his demand for Catherine to be handed over, because he believed her husband had died, and, out of kindness, as she had no children, he had offered graciously to take care of her and allow Erik to deal directly with him and not through the governor of Novgorod. Our only intention, he continued, for the first time admitting that he proposed to regard John's wife as a hostage, was to give her back to her brother Sigismund Augustus in exchange for Livonia and there would then be no bloodshed:
They hid you [John] from us, for had we known you were alive would we have asked for your wife? … There is no need to say more, your wife is with you, nobody wants her, and what a lot of blood has been shed in vain for lack of one word from her. It is not worth talking any more about this nonsense, and if you want to talk, we won't listen to you; do you what you want with your wife, no one is making any attempt on her.54
Ivan continued in this vein for a further eighteen printed pages, going back to the days of Russian relations with King Magnus of Sweden.
The stalemate in the war with Sweden led Ivan to take up the idea of a truce, and he sent an envoy with a written message; but the Swedes were now cautious about receiving missives from Ivan, and John refused to read it and insisted on handing it to one of his nobles in case it was too offensive. This led to renewed quarrelling: ‘You have come to Sweden’, said the Swedish magnate to the Russian envoy, ‘and you must do what our king tells you.’ To which the Russian courier replied, ‘I have come to your land and I will obey the orders of my lord.’ When told he would receive no rations, he replied, ‘Very well, I will starve to death.’ The episode ended in a brawl, and again John refused to let the Russian envoy go until the two Swedish interpreters who were still detained in Russia were released. Ivan now found a new excuse: the interpreters were being detained to teach Russian children Swedish. John refused to send an embassy and declared that he had not sent the interpreters to Russia to teach Russian children, but to carry out his orders. In such circumstances agreement over peace terms was impossible to reach and the only thing achieved was a further truce from 20 June 1575 to 20 July 1577.55
Whether the disappearance of the supernova in Cassiopeia in November 1774, with its underlying implications of cosmic instability, affected the general state of mind in Russia is not known, but the Tsar took up again with the English envoy, this time D. Sylvester, his request for a refuge in England. He now asked for a declaration which should be countersigned by Elizabeth's whole council. Evidently he no longer believed in her power to rule alone and in her sole word.56
It may also have been the cumulative effect on his unstable temperament of these mortifications which led Ivan to the most startling and inexplicable venture in his reign. Or it may have been the fear induced by portents in the sky threatening the life of a king. His solution for his spiritual turmoil was to escape from his throne and set up a scapegoat, a substitute tsar who could take his place and become the object of divine wrath or of public hatred and suspicion, a barrier against those who attempted to oppose his will. In fact it has been suggested that his physician Bomelius had inspired the Tsar with such fear for his life, in view of the adverse astrological signs, that he installed a surrogate tsar as a lightning conductor, to receive the blows of fate in his stead.57
Whom did he choose? As Vasily III had looked around for a trusted lieutenant and possible heir among his Tatar friends, having faith in the baptized Tsarevich Peter who then died, in 1521, so did Ivan now place his faith in a baptized Tatar.58 The most prominent tsarevich at that time, Sain Bekbulatovich, had entered Russian service around 1562. He was a grandson of Akhmat, Khan of Astrakhan', and thus a Genghisid. He inherited or was granted the Tatar khanate of Kasimov which had formed part of Russia since the reign of Vasily II, and served Ivan as a military commander at a time when there were fewer Tatar tsarevichi because many of them had died. He had been a most active and successful general in the war in Livonia and with Sweden on the Finnish front, and around July 1573 he was baptized under the name of Simeon. With the death of Prince Mikhail Kaibulatovich, the Tatar tsarevich who had been the senior member of the Council in 1575, Simeon became the most prominent tsarevich in Russian service. What is more he was the nephew of Maria Temriukovna, which made him a nephew of the Tsar, and Ivan now married him to a daughter of Prince I.F. Mstislavsky, Anastasia, who was herself descended from a daughter of Tsarevich Peter and a daughter of Ivan III. Simeon Bekbulatovich was as well bred as a Tatar tsarevich could be.
Chapter XVIII
Grand Prince Simeon Bekbulatovich
According to a laconic entry in the Military Registers, the Lord Tsar and Grand Prince appointed the Grand Prince Simeon Bekbulatovich to be Grand Prince of Russia, in autumn 1575, while Ivan IV remained Prince of Moscow (Kniaz' Moskovskii).1 He also kept the titles of Tsar of all Russia, Tsar of Kazan' and Astrakhan', and the lordship of Livonia, creating immense confusion at the time and since. There is great uncertainty, because of the loss of records, about Ivan's intentions and about which powers he handed over to Simeon and which he kept, and how long this interlude lasted. As Grand Prince of Russia, Simeon was head of the zemlia, that is the government of the land. He could and did issue charters in his own name, though not many have survived so that it is difficult to know with what matters he concerned himself. The charters which have survived deal mostly with grants of land to monasteries. On the other hand Ivan continued to be in total control of relations with foreign powers.2 According to Jerome Horsey, an eyewitness of these events who, however, wrote up his recollections some time later, Simeon was crowned in the Cathedral of the Dormition in the Kremlin, but as Horsey reported, ‘with no solemnity nor consent of peers’.3
The unreliability of Horsey's reports is confirmed by Ivan's own language to Daniel Sylvester, previously the interpreter of the Russia Company, now its agent. Sylvester reported to London on 29 January 1576, that Ivan had told him, speaking in Russian because he was aware that Sylvester knew it well, that he still awaited a firm decision from Elizabeth on his renewed demand for asylum. He was dissatisfied with the priority she gave to merchant affairs, and offended by her refusal to place Russia and England on an equal footing by herself demanding asylum in Russia, ‘that she makyth daynty to requiar the like of us’. He reproached Elizabeth for her scruples in fulfilling his wishes, seeing that he had granted her merchants, ‘who are as free as in England’, freedom of trade throughout Russia. Unless she agreed to all his requests he would drop the whole matter, and transfer his trade to the Venetians and the Germans. And he added that
though we have told you that we seemed to have raised another to our throne and have in this way bound ourselves and others, yet this matter is not final, and we have not resigned from our realm to the extent that we would be unable when convenient to take up our rank again for it is not yet confirmed, and we shall act in this matter as God orders us because he [Simeon] is not yet confirmed by a rite of coronation or appointed by popular choice, but only by our permission. And see, seven crowns and their sceptres are still in our hands with the other tsarist ornaments belonging to the realm, and with all the treasure belonging to each crown.4
Moreover, Ivan hinted, he could now fall back on his new friend the Emperor Maximilian.5 However, what still perplexes and divides historians is where did Ivan get such a strange idea from, and to what extent did it imply a restoration of the oprichnina?
In what concerns the first question, there are authors who regarded Ivan's policy as merely ‘a political masquerade’.6 Some thought that he believed that by resigning the Russian crown he might improve his chances of obtaining the crown of Poland–Lithuania, others that he was concerned with relations with the Crimea. Other historians argue that Simeon was enthroned as Grand Prince as a result of a meeting of an ‘assembly of the land’, which allegedly took place in 1575, which was summoned with the aim of secularizing church lands and was riven by violent disagreements on policy between the aristocracy, the church hierarchy, current boyars and previous members of the oprichnina. But alas there is no evidence that a meeting of this non-existent body took place at any relevant time though there may have been a meeting of the Church Council.7 According to Giles Fletcher's later attempt to explain Ivan's policy as a financial operation,8 when Ivan placed Simeon on the throne, he instructed him to annul all the charters which he, Ivan, had issued, conceding tax exemptions, and then to return them in exchange for substantial payments. Kashtanov, a specialist in this field, argues however that there was no systematic policy during the year of Simeon's rule in relation to charters granted to monasteries. Some of them were cancelled, but other charters were granted, including charters to monasteries signed by Ivan as Grand Prince of Moscow.9 Of those signed by Simeon many were destroyed after his removal, as well as other documents emanating from him, as though they were not worthy to survive because they had not been issued by a genuine grand prince.10 It is noteworthy that in foreign relations Ivan was entitled Tsar as before.11
One historian again located the origin of the idea of stepping down from the throne in the oriental tale of Barlaam and Josaphat, as told in the eighth century by St John Damascene and well known in Russia.12 It has also been referred to in connexion with the origins of the oprichnina. However, one element in this tale does reflect an Indian origin, namely the suggestion that the physician and magus Bomelius, or perhaps witches, had produced a horoscope for Ivan showing that in the years 1575/6, a Grand Prince of Russia was to die; the prophecy could be painlessly voided by ensuring that he, Ivan, was not Grand Prince in that year.13 But another way of evading it was to take refuge in England, hence the renewal of discussions between Ivan and Sylvester in autumn 1575 and winter 1576 on the mutual offer of asylum by both parties.14 Bomelius was notorious as an astrologer, and was generally regarded as an evil sorcerer who exercised a harmful influence on the Tsar. Recent heavenly manifestations – the appearance and disappearance of the new star, the supernova, in Cassiopeia in 1574, and the appearance of a blazing comet, commonly believed to herald the death of a ruler, and visible to the naked eye in 1577 might indeed frighten the credulous Ivan.15 The setting up of a substitute Tsar may also have been a means of preparing for the government of Russia during Ivan's disappearance into English asylum. Horsey reported seeing a large number of ships built in Vologda by English craftsmen, and one Pskovian chronicle carried reports of Ivan's intention to flee to England, allegedly inspired by the evil witch Bomelius.16
To yet others Ivan IV was moved by fears that his son and heir was plotting behind his back to overthrow him. Some chronicles suggest that Ivan promoted Simeon Bekbulatovich because he suspected the Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich of intriguing against him.17 But as a Pskov chronicle put it, ‘It is not right, Lord, for you to appoint a man of a foreign race (inoplemmenik) in place of your own children to the realm (gosudarstvo).’18 Yet, if his son were really plotting against him, Ivan might well consider it wise to prepare an heir to fall back on, namely a Tatar prince. On a quite different level, it has been suggested that Ivan was so disgusted with the failure of the oprichnina to protect him and his people against the last Crimean invasion that he deliberately chose to humiliate Russians by appointing a Tatar to rule the land. Simeon was after all a nephew of his dead wife, Maria Temriukovna.19 Yet Ivan's execution of a considerable number of courtiers in autumn 1575, including his favourite Tulupov, suggests that he was suffering from one of the periodic fits of panic which led to outbursts of sadism. The heads of the beheaded were thrown into the courtyards of magnates like Prince I.F Mstislavsky, Ivan Sheremetev minor and the Metropolitan Antonii.20
In his later work, the historian Zimin rejected all these theories and merely echoed the opinion of a member of the imperial embassy, Daniel Prinz, in his report to the Emperor Maximilian II, who had stated that Ivan was motivated by contempt for the baseness of his subjects,21 an opinion which was confirmed by Daniel Sylvester who reported Ivan as mentioning ‘The perverse and evill dealinge of our subjects who mourmour and repine at us, for gettinge loyaull obedience they practice against our person. The which to prevent we have gyvene them ouer unto another prince to governe them but have reserved in our custodye all the treasure of the land.’22 Finally, the elevation of Simeon Bekbulatovich was in no way the result of an individual caprice of the Tsar; according to rigidly Marxist Soviet historians, it followed the inevitable laws of historical development (zakonomernost').23
The most far fetched interpretation of the raising of Simeon Bekbulatovich to the rank of Grand Prince of all Russia is that of Skrynnikov himself which must be touched upon. He argues that in 1565, when the people allowed Ivan to establish the oprichnina, they gave him full legal powers to struggle with boyar treason. By abolishing the oprichnina Ivan had deprived himself of these full legal powers, and would therefore be acting without the sanction of the law if he attempted to reintroduce a regime of terror, a policy which would inevitably arouse the strongest opposition in the Boyar Council and in the church hierarchy: ‘On this occasion he obtained the necessary legal authority not from the Council but from someone he had himself placed above the Council and the zemshchina as a whole, namely Simeon Bekbulatovich.’ Having awarded Simeon the title of ‘Grand Prince of all Russia’, Ivan ‘obtained without difficulty from Simeon his permission to introduce a regime of exception’.24 This circular argument is not at all convincing. Finally, was the abdication of Ivan and the raising of Simeon Bekbulatovich to the throne a means of restoring the oprichinina in a different form?
Ivan's first public action after the institution of Grand Duke Simeon (as far as we know for there is very little direct evidence about the timetable of events), was to send a letter to the new Grand Duke begging for his permission as his overlord to recruit a number of service gentry from the principalities ruled over by Simeon and incorporate them into his new udel or appanage.25 So the division between oprichnina and zemshchina was partly recreated but it did not correspond to the old territorial and administrative division and the name oprichnina was dropped because of its unhappy connotation and replaced by dvor or court. Indeed it was forbidden on pain of death to use the old word. There were no oprichniki, though Ivan set up his own guard of armed pages (ryndy) and his own regiment, tax collecting and local judicial authorities, thus acting, as earlier, in complete disregard of the policy attributed to him of ‘centralization’. The bulk of the aristocracy remained with Tsar Simeon, while the courtiers and military in the service of Ivan were mainly of lower social origins.26 The prikazy, both in the udel of Ivan and in the zemshchina were staffed by d'iaki distributed among functional and geographic offices, assisted by some mercantile elements. The nucleus of the lands Ivan chose for himself lay in the north, around Novgorod and Pskov, and the route to the White Sea, and his favourite residence now became Staritsa, the city of his murdered cousin. This may be explained by the fact that so soon after the destruction of Moscow by the Crimean Tatars in 1571 the city still remained uninhabitable, at least by him. The population of this once thriving and busy town had been reduced to some thirty thousand according to one source.
