Ivan the terrible, p.49
Ivan the Terrible, page 49
As in the debate with Jan Rokyta, Ivan replied that he did not want to discuss matters of faith in case he offended Possevino. But his reply to the Jesuit was very acute: ‘I do not believe in the Greeks. I believe in Christ.’ He did not consider the union of the Christian Churches to be necessary before the conclusion of an alliance between the powers against the Turks, and he would allow Catholics to enter Russia and to worship, but only in private. Tsar and ambassador were both somewhat at sea over the date of Russia's conversion. Ivan said that Russia had been converted when the Apostle Andrew passed through Russia on the way to Rome; Possevino replied that Italy had been Christian for 1,200 years before Russia ever heard the name of Christ.
Ivan admitted that the Orthodox Church recognized some of the popes, but many had led evil lives. Yet again the two differed on the succession to the Papacy, and Possevino suspected that Ivan had been briefed by an ‘Anabaptist doctor’ in English pay (almost certainly the Flemish Dr Eyloff). When he heard the Tsar exclaim: ‘The Roman Pope is no shepherd’, in a furious voice, Possevino asked why then had the Tsar asked for the Pope's help to make peace with Poland? Whereupon ‘the Prince flew into a rage and stood up from his throne’ and all expected him to strike the priest. But he calmed down, and in a clear attempt to turn the whole discussion aside he concentrated on superficial questions, derived from the information he had received from Shevrigin: Why was the Pope carried in a chair? Why did he wear a cross on his slippers? Why did he shave his beard? And why does he pretend to be God?
The questions caused uproar, but even when Possevino again tried to reply simply to them, the Tsar took up other superficial issues, notably the fact that Catholics allowed their crosses to hang down below the belt, a practice regarded as sacrilegious in Russia, or that the Pope shaved his beard (which Possevino strongly denied; he was himself bearded). Fortunately the uproar left no ill feeling, but to make sure, Possevino took the precaution of giving the sacraments to his companions, ‘and fortified them with relics of the Saints in case the Muscovites should harm them’. The Russians now laid a little trap for Possevino, intending to manoeuvre him into attending an Orthodox church service. He was able to evade it, and on his return to the council chamber, he and his fifteen associates intoned the Te Deum in thanks for their escape. But he did not depart without leaving a long written document containing a ‘brief, clear, and firm refutation of the Errors of the Greeks and the Muscovites’. It was a draw.34 But it cannot be said that any of the participants distinguished himself for real intellectual mastery of the subject. All we learn is that Ivan was willing, in principle, to allow members of other faiths to practice their religion in private, but that he might destroy their chapels if the fit took him, as in the case of the German church in the Livonian suburb in Moscow.35
The Tsar, in fact, proved responsive to all Possevino's requests for commercial concessions, but was adamant in refusing the slightest concession regarding religious toleration and the building of Catholic churches.36
On 14 March 1582, Possevino left for Rome accompanied by Iakov Mol'vianinov, envoy to the Emperor, the Pope, and Venice. The only person who benefited from this mission was probably Possevino, whose stature as a diplomat rose with every step, though he did not actually achieve any of his ultimate hopes. Fulfilling his self-appointed task of shepherding the Russian party, and aware of the existence of a substantial Greek colony in Venice, Possevino personally prevented the Russians from attending a service in San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, the church allocated by the Serenissima to the Orthodox. The visit of the Russian party to the baths in Padua left an impression of riotousness not unlike that of Peter the Great's stay in Sir John Evelyn's house in Deptford. From the beginning Possevino had been anxious to shelter the Russians from the full impact of the high Renaissance paintings which adorned churches and palaces with nude Saint Sebastians and Virgins suckling the infant Jesus, and had tried to confine the party to a secluded residence where only paintings in Fra Angelico's style were displayed. But it was not possible, and the Russians, shocked by, and contemptuous of, the licentiousness of the Catholic capital were also caught up in affrays when stones were thrown at them. At the papal reception Possevino felt himself obliged to force the Russian ambassador physically to take off his sable hat and to kneel and kiss the cross embroidered on the Pope's mule. The Russians were offended because they were not invited to a banquet by the Pope, as was the Russian practice. Ivan's mission to Rome proved a complete waste of time and money.
Charged with Elizabeth's instructions, outlined above, Sir Jerome Bowes and Fedor Pisemsky sailed for Russia on 22 June 1583, and arrived on 23 July; Bowes was attended by ‘five English dvoriane’ and an escort of forty-one. The details of this diplomatic episode can be followed in the report on his mission by Pisemsky, and in the equally full report by Bowes, or ‘Kniaz’ Ieremei’, as he is styled in the Russian report.37 As usual in Russia, Pisemsky got off to a good start, travelling at once to Moscow, while Bowes was kept at Kholmogory for five weeks. In his report, Bowes indicates that he had discovered during this waiting time the intrigues of a number of Dutch traders, who had bribed leading Russian officials, and secured the backing of three of them, Bogdan Bel'sky, Nikita Romanovich Iur'ev Zakhar'in, and the influential d'iak, Andrei Shchelkalov, often called ‘Chancellor’ in English reports, as head of foreign affairs.38
Bowes was not given a formal audience until October, but it was then very lavish indeed, with a large armed escort, a train of nobles clad in cloth of gold, ‘rich furres, their caps embroiderd with pearle and stone’. From the very beginning one can note the tone of irritation underlying Bowes's speeches, a determination not to be pleased. He refused to allow Shchelkalov to take from him and deliver to the Tsar the letters written by Elizabeth, saying ‘that her Majesty had directed no letters to him’. When Ivan asked him what the Queen had said about the marriage with Lady Mary, Bowes replied: ‘Nothing. She waits for you to speak and give me a message for her.’ The Tsar replied, ‘We want to take her unto ourselves, but what has the Queen said about her changing her faith to mine?’ To this Bowes replied: ‘Mary is not well, she is very ill and I believe she will not change her faith, and see, she is a Christian.’ Ivan answered: ‘I do not want to talk about religion, any princess who marries me must first be baptized in our Christian faith, it is clear that you came here to refuse us and we will speak no more with you.’ And he blamed Dr ‘Roman’ (Robert) Atkins for creating confusion, for telling him about this girl, which was why he had written to the Queen. Following his instructions to discourage Ivan's marital hopes, Bowes replied that the Lady Mary was the most distant of all the Queen's nieces, she was ill, her complexion was rough, she was not handsome, she had suffered from smallpox and there were ten maidens who were more closely related to the Queen. Ivan asked to hear about them, whereupon Bowes replied that he had no instructions from the Queen and therefore could not name them.
After this unpromising beginning, the talks on an alliance proved no more satisfactory. Ivan criticized Elizabeth for refusing to support him unless an army had actually already been sent against him. He expected Elizabeth to become his ally against Poland–Lithuania and Sweden, though not Denmark, and in a fit of anger against Bowes he exclaimed to him that ‘he did not reckon the Queene of England to be his fellow’. Bowes exploded, and ‘tolde him that the Queene his Mistress was as great a prince as any was in Christendome … Yea quoth he [Ivan], how sayest thou to the French King and the king of Spaine? Mary, quoth the ambassador, I holde the Queene my Mistresse as great as any of them both' and moreover the Queen's father had had the Emperor in his pay. Ivan replied that were ‘Bowes not an ambassador he would throw him out of the doores’, whereupon the party broke up.
Yet Ivan did not hold his language against the English ambassador, indeed he seemed rather to view it as an admirable proof of his loyalty to his mistress, and supplied Bowes with a greatly increased quantity of food and drink. He still held to his determination to marry an English wife, though Maria Nagaia had given birth to a son.
In further talks with the boyars, Bowes, striking while the iron was hot, obtained a number of favourable decisions in pending suits, such as the repayment of the taxes amounting to 1,500 rubles and compensation for a robbery.39 But no progress at all was made with the treaty, and Bowes's efforts to secure confirmation of the English trade monopoly met with considerable hostility in Russia, now that Russia had been approached by France and by traders from the Spanish Netherlands. Ivan's increasing familiarity with international diplomacy was also leading him to resist England's efforts to maintain Russian isolation. The boyars now demanded that Russian envoys to the West and European envoys to Russia should be allowed to travel freely through England and the North Sea to Russia, while England refused point-blank to allow representatives of Catholic powers to pass through her territory. Ivan agreed to the exclusion of envoys from the Papacy but not to the exclusion of envoys of other powers. As the boyars put it: ‘Faith is not an obstacle; your Lady is not of the same faith as our Lord, but our Lord wishes to be in friendship and brotherhood with her.’40
Bowes, having failed to obtain what he wanted from the boyars, now demanded, through Dr Atkins, a private interview with the Tsar. But when Ivan received him, he denied that he had made any such demand, while insisting that in all his other posts he had always spoken directly with the ruler, and not through an intermediary. Ivan replied shortly that it was not the Russian custom for the Tsar to negotiate in person with envoys (indeed it was not the custom anywhere, pace Bowes). Ivan could not get any information out of Bowes regarding the Queen's ten nieces, and the Tsar spoke to him about nothing else. Bowes even put forward a kind of bargain: let Ivan restore all their privileges to the English merchants and the Queen would join him against the Lithuanians and the Swedes; let him send ambassadors with this message and they could examine the ladies together. But the English ambassador backed down when asked to commit himself to English assistance in Ivan's recovery of Livonia. Elizabeth was pious he said, and had already refused the offer of the crowns of the Netherlands and France. Was Livonia really Ivan's ancestral land? Ivan responded angrily that he was not asking Elizabeth to be a judge between him and the King of Lithuania, as he referred to Stephen Bathory, but that she should be his ally against him. Talks between the two had reached a dead end.41
Chapter XXI
The Death of Ivan
The death of his eldest son in November 1581 finally broke Ivan's spirit. The Tsar seemed to have lost the will to control the machine of government, to discipline the boyars surrounding him, and he began to redress some at least of the injuries he had caused. He took steps in 1582 to punish false denunciations.1 He forgave some of those in disgrace, and tried to save the souls of those he had dispatched unshriven to their deaths by sending sums of money to monasteries for prayers for their souls. The Sinodiki which list his victims were begun at this time as part of his repentance: seventy-four names were included in the first list sent to the Simonov monastery in Moscow, seventy-five in the second sent to Solovki; in May 1582 the Pskov Pechersky monastery received the order to pray for seventy-five victims, which included some of the most prominent executed in the early days of the oprichnina, such as Prince Alexander Gorbaty-Shuisky and Ivan Petrovich Fedorov, executed in 1565 and 1569. The Monastery of St Cyril at Beloozero received 2,000 rubles to pray for the Tsar's son, Ivan Ivanovich, and a hail of gold descended on monasteries for prayers to be said for some three thousand victims, including the many ‘whose names were known only to God’. According to the cynics among historians, this was designed primarily to pave the way for the Church to support the unopposed ascension of Fedor Ivanovich to the throne on the death of his father.2 And Ivan's remorse for his many executions did not extend to releasing his many prisoners from their jails. It relieved the dead more than the living.
Ivan IV had suffered a serious illness, about which almost nothing is known, in the late 1570s, and it is generally assumed that ever since then, or perhaps even before, he had suffered from a spinal condition which made movement very painful, so that he had to give up riding and be carried in a litter.3 As early as 1572, when he stopped outside Novgorod to talk to the Swedish envoy, Juusten, Bishop of Åbo, whom he had so badly treated, he was in a carriage and not on horseback.4 Yet in 1578, when the Tsar and his son Ivan ravaged the Livonian colony, ‘Narva and Dorpat’ in Moscow, they were on horseback.5
There is one eyewitness account of Ivan's death, but not perhaps a very reliable one, namely Jerome Horsey's. Nevertheless, Horsey had no particular self-interest to serve in lying about the circumstances of Ivan's death, and there is therefore little reason to distrust his account of the Tsar's last day – though he does not give the date, which was 18 March 1584.
On the day of his death, Ivan was carried as usual in his chair to his treasury chamber, called for precious stones and jewels to be brought, and proceeded to lecture those about him on their properties and virtues. Taking coral and turquoise stones on his hand and arm, Ivan declared, according to Horsey: ‘I am poisoned with disease; you see they show their virtue by the change of their pure colour into pall; declares my death.’6 (Turquoises were supposed to change colour in the presence of poison.) In the afternoon Ivan looked over his will (no text survives, but he is said to have left the crown to his son Fedor and the appanage of Uglich to his son Dmitri), ordered his physician and his apothecary to attend him to the bath, and then sent for a report from his witches, because the day foretold for his death was coming to an end. But he was warned that there was still time, for the day only ended when the sun went down. In the afternoon he went to the bath, ‘solaced himself and made merry with pleasant songs as he useth to do’. He then went to bed, well refreshed, in his loose gown, shirt and linen hose, and sent for a chess board. Bogdan Bel'sky and Boris Godunov stood by the bed. Suddenly Ivan fainted and fell back. The apothecary sent for marigold and rose-water, for the physicians, and for Ivan's confessor. ‘In the mean he was strangled and stark dead’ (sic), writes Horsey, and added that an attempt to save him was made, to still the outcry. But it was too late. Horsey does not mention any effort to tonsure Ivan as a monk at the time, and he died without the last rites. But his confessor did hurry in to clothe him afterwards in the ‘angel's form’ as a monk, under the name Iona.7
There are many other versions of Ivan's death, most of which assume that he did not die naturally. Pastor Oderborn's Life of the Grand Prince of Moscow, published in Latin in 1585, very soon after Ivan's death, reports that the Tsar had been seriously ill for a long period, during which he could neither speak, eat nor drink, and his body was covered with maggots. He called out for his son Ivan, who was of course already dead. But Oderborn tends to exaggerate wildly, he was not present, and his account does not correspond with Horsey's who on this occasion seems more reliable.
Was Ivan murdered? Did Horsey's account imply that Bel'sky and Godunov had hastened his end? It is not clear from his words.8 If the Tsar was ‘strangled’ or suffocated, the two men would have had to act together, for to act alone would have been impossible without being detected. The crux of the issue is what did Horsey mean by ‘he was strangled’? Did he mean stifled or suffocated, or actually throttled by some outside agency, or did he mean that Ivan choked, on food perhaps, or as a result of poison taken in the bath, a perfectly possible cause of death?
There are many descriptions of the Tsar by foreign visitors to Russia, and they coincide on a number of physical and psychological traits. An autopsy was carried out on his bones, which were exhumed in the year 1963, together with those of many other members of the tsarist family, from sarcophagi in the Archangel Cathedral. The exhumation of his body, moreover, provided an opportunity for the pioneer Russian expert in facial reconstruction, M.M. Gerasimov, to produce a ‘virtually real’ bust of Ivan which does suggest the real man, with the eagle nose of the Paleologues, the high brow, sensual mouth and dominating countenance which one would expect. His eyes have been described both as small, and as large; they were light-coloured, bright, and flickered rapidly from place to place. The imperial envoy, Prinz von Buchau, describes Ivan in 1575 as very tall, strong and full-bodied. His hair and beard were long and thick, and rusty black; like most Russians, Prinz added, he shaved his head. He was so given to anger that he would foam at the mouth like a horse, and seem beside himself.9 Horsey, who had seen him often, wrote that he was a ‘goodly man of person and presence, well-favoured, high forehead, shrill voice; a right Scythian, full of ready wisdom, cruel, bloody, merciless; his own experience managed by direction both his state and commonwealth affairs’ (though Horsey did think Russia was too large for ‘one regiment’). Others spoke of his looking like an ‘angry warrior’. It was also frequently remarked that he had an excellent memory and a quick, sardonic, wit. He certainly enjoyed dramatizing his clashes with his boyars, and with foreign envoys.10 Did he smoke? In 1575 Prinz von Buchau presented Ivan, as a gift from the Emperor Maximilian II, with a pipe for smoking the herb hitherto unknown in Russia, namely tobacco, procured for him by his Spanish cousins.11
Very little, if anything, is known about Ivan's medical history. As a small child he seems to have suffered briefly from a boil, or possibly a carbuncle, on the back of his neck, if one accepts the simplest explanation – from scrofula, if one accepts the most far-fetched portrayal of the physical and mental constitution of the Russian ruling house.12
