Ivan the Terrible (10 page)

There were no counts or dukes in Russia. There was in fact no nobility, in the sense used in the Latin world, but there was an aristocracy.
⁴¹
Boyar and
sluga
(servant) were the only titles grand princes awarded. The title
sluga
was given to high-ranking princes mainly from the western borderlands, such as the Vorotynsky princes or the Bel'skys, who as vassals of the Grand Prince lost their autonomy as appanage princes; but some Riurikovichi in the eastern lands also were given the title, for instance Prince Alexander Gorbaty-Shuisky. The
sluga
ranked above boyars on the
mestnichestvo
ladder.
⁴²
Otherwise the highest social rank was enjoyed by appanage princes belonging to, or closely linked by marriage to, the ruling family, and by Riurikid princes who had not been impoverished by the continuous fragmentation of landed property and multiplication of claimants. But there were innumerable princes because of a feature of Russian social evolution which weakened the élite politically, socially and economically – this was the practice of partible inheritance.

Just as the grand princes divided their patrimony among their sons, so all the princes divided their inheritance among their sons, and all their children, male and female, inherited the princely title. There were thus as many as eighty Princes Iaroslavsky, which naturally devalued their rank.
⁴³
Boyar nobles, descendants of old Muscovite boyar families, often ranked higher than these frequently landless princelings, or than the families which came over from Lithuania with but little land and no history.
⁴⁴
Lower-ranking boyars, however, did not quarrel over precedence with service princes, i.e. princes who had no appanages, until they too began to invade the Council.

However, the aristocracy, and possibly to a greater extent the service gentry, had evolved a strategy for defending themselves against the impoverishment created by partible inheritance which has only now begun to be studied in some detail. The service gentry were protected by the entitlement of their sons to land from the Estate Office (Pomestnyi Prikaz) when they achieved majority and would be expected to serve. This helped to increase the total acreage available to a family. There was also an active market in land in which estates were exchanged or dowries sold, in order to consolidate lands for a family.
⁴⁵

Elena Glinskaia did not at once fulfil Vasily's expectations; he had to wait five years for the birth of her first son, Ivan, on 25 August 1530, during which she spent much time in religious pilgrimages, seeking divine intervention in the conception of her son.
¹
(The delay did also give rise to some suspicions that Vasily might not be the father of the child.) Ivan's birth, and that of his brother Iuri on 30 October 1532, were marked by the appearance of three comets between 1531 and 1533, terrible storms and in 1533 a frightful drought, which lasted three months, during which neither the sun nor the moon could be seen for four weeks, travellers could not see their way, nor recognize each other, and birds could not spread their wings in the heavy air.
²
There is evidence that at the age of three Ivan suffered from what has been described as scrofula, but may well have been a carbuncle. Carbuncles and boils are evidence of vitamin B deficiency, scrofula of tuberculosis. Since Ivan was hale and hearty during adolescence and young manhood, the former is the more likely.
³

Vasily III died, unexpectedly, on 4 February 1533, at the age of fifty-four, seemingly as the result of a hunting injury which became infected, leaving one son of three and a baby. Anticipating a dangerous situation for his heir he had made a new will,
⁴
setting up a Regency Council of seven members, some of whom were also members of the Boyar Council, though the two institutions were not the same. He added new members, including the boyar Mikhail Iur'evich Zakhar'in, who was close to him, and the latter's nephew, M.V. Tuchkov Morozov, and also Prince Ivan Vasil'evich Shuisky of the aristocratic Suzdal' princely clan. In addition he specifically appointed Elena's uncle Mikhail L'vovich Glinsky to the Regency Council in spite of his long period in prison, because he was of the family of the Grand Princess, had no claim to the throne and could therefore be relied on to take care of the personal safety of Elena and the
young Ivan.
⁵
(Perhaps he remembered how he had himself treated the young Grand Prince Dmitri Ivanovich?) After touching scenes with his desolate wife and his children, Vasily turned his attention to the other world and asked to be shorn as a monk before his death. This traditional ritual had not been carried out by his father, Ivan III, who had firmly declared his intention of dying as a grand prince.
⁶
But Vasily, who may well have been influenced in his spiritual life by his second cousin Vassian Patrikeev, insisted at least in being buried as a monk, in spite of the opposition of some of the boyars, who even snatched away the monk's robe from the dying man. Finally the Metropolitan intervened, and in a voice of thunder proclaimed that he would not bless those who were trying to seize Vasily's soul from him, in this century or in the next, and that ‘a silver dish was a good thing but a gilt one was better’. When Vasily was in his death throes, the Metropolitan produced the monastic garb just in time to enable the Grand Prince to be shorn as the monk Varlaam.
⁷
They say, concludes Karamzin the historian, that Vasily's face lit up at once and the terrible stench from his wound was dissipated.
⁸

But with the accession of a young heir in the charge of a Grand Princess in her early twenties, the direction of the central government slackened. Whether on Elena's initiative or that of the boyars, a new member was added to the Council in January 1534, Prince Ivan Telepnev Obolensky, and it was soon rumoured that he was the Grand Princess's lover. Acting together with her, Obolensky proceeded to eliminate potential dangers such as the younger brothers of Vasily III, Iuri of Dmitrov and Andrei of Staritsa (who might well become rivals of the younger Grand Prince). Iuri was a popular prince and, in circumstances that remain obscure, a plot was devised to compromise him in a conspiracy to seize the throne. Whatever the truth, by 11 December 1534 he had been arrested together with his boyars and followers and lodged in that same palace prison where Grand Prince Dmitri had died in 1509. Iuri died of hunger three years later. Other princes fled to Lithuania. The Grand Princess's uncle, Mikhail L'vovich Glinsky, condemned her policies or her private behaviour, or both. He was accused of attempting to seize the crown and sent back by his niece to the very prison where he had already spent twelve years, and where he too soon starved to death. Andrei of Staritsa was the next to be trapped in an alleged plot, arrested and placed in irons, his wife and young son imprisoned, in 1537. His boyars were particularly ruthlessly treated, tortured in spite of their princely rank, and some thirty members of his retinue of service gentry were flogged and hanged at intervals on the road to Novgorod. But both Iuri and Andrei were solemnly buried
as members of the Grand Prince's family in the Archangel Cathedral in the Kremlin. Thus potential rivals for the throne were quickly eliminated, leaving only Ivan's young cousin Vladimir Andreevich of Staritsa, at the time under arrest. The cruelty manifested by Elena's regime and the dishonour inflicted on a number of princes of noble family by public execution, without any form of trial, lowered her government in public esteem and led to an increasingly brutal treatment of the privileged élite.
⁹

How much Elena herself actually influenced the government it is impossible to say. But as a government it undertook several positive measures, such as the introduction of elected officials in the provinces to deal with brigandage (
gubnye starosty
); the building of a new defensive wall around Moscow, this time enclosing what came to be known as the Kitaigorod (middle town); attracting settlers from Lithuania; ransoming prisoners; and introducing a currency reform and a new coin, the
kopek
. Then, seemingly without warning, according to Herberstein, this healthy and relatively young woman, who spent much time visiting monasteries, died in 1538. Inevitably, the rumour spread that she had been poisoned.
¹⁰
She was buried the same day, without much ceremony, apparently unmourned, except probably by her eight-year-old son.

Deprived of his mother's protection, and by her of the protection of his maternal and paternal uncles, the young Ivan's life seems now to have entered a particularly unhappy period. Prince Vasily Vasil'evich Shuisky, one of the executors of Grand Prince Vasily's will, took control of the Council and within seven days Ivan's governess, Agrafena Chelyadnina, a sister of Telepnev Obolensky, and Obolensky himself had been seized and were in chains in spite of Ivan's wails. Agrippina was sent to a convent in Kargopol', and Obolensky himself suffered the fate he had inflicted on members of Ivan's family: he was starved to death in the prison to which he had condemned Mikhail Glinsky.
¹¹

It is at this point that one can pick up Ivan IV's own story of what happened to him in the ensuing years, as he described it many years later in his first letter to Prince A.M. Kurbsky, dated July 1564.
¹²
There is no reason to suppose that Ivan's own account is more reliable than those of the surviving Chronicles, but it gives his own special slant on events. Once Obolensky had been eliminated, Ivan felt himself quite alone and unprotected, ‘receiving no human care from any quarter’. His brother Iuri was too young to be of any help and in any case would have been unable to help him, for the child had been born deaf and dumb. It is possible that he was mentally quite normal, but at that time no one knew how to teach a deaf child how to speak. He was later to take part in
Ivan's coronation, being charged with flinging silver and gold coins in his brother's path on the way to and from the cathedrals in the Kremlin, and he sat ‘one yard away’ from Ivan when the latter received ambassadors in the Kremlin.
¹³

The most senior and authoritative boyar, Prince Vasily Vasil'evich Shuisky, and his brother Ivan Vasil'evich, dominated the Council and together with their cronies seized and distributed posts and riches without any reference to the Council, let alone the youthful heir. In an effort to consolidate his relationship with the Grand Prince's family, at the age of fifty-four, Vasily Shuisky married the young Anastasia, daughter of the converted Tatar Tsarevich Peter, Vasily III's brother-in-law and one of the latter's most trustworthy and trusted friends. Vasily Shuisky moved into the palace of Prince Andrei Ivanovich of Staritsa (killed as mentioned above by order of Elena Glinskaia and Telepnev Obolensky) and behaved ‘as in a Jewish synagogue’;
¹⁴
one of the leading
d'iaki
, or officials, who was a member of the Regency Council appointed by Grand Prince Vasily, was executed in a humiliating and cruel manner without any trial; and Prince Ivan Fedorovich Bel'sky was released from the prison in which he had been thrown by the Regent Elena, but the Shuiskys locked him up again. Fortunately, Vasily Shuisky died suddenly at the peak of his power, leaving the senior position in the Council to his brother, Ivan Vasil'evich. The next victim was the Metropolitan Daniil, who was deposed without any consultation with a Church Council or the boyars, and who was replaced by Metropolitan Joseph. These court conflicts were not over policies or principles, but entirely concerned with power and the distribution of lands and riches.

Ivan describes the ill-treatment he and his brother Iuri suffered at this time, in possibly exaggerated terms, because the alleged lack of respect and the informality of the Shuiskys brothers' behaviour deeply offended his dignity as Grand Prince. According to his later recollections, Ivan and Iuri were ill-fed and hungry, and nothing was done as Ivan wished. He wrote: ‘I … recall one thing: whilst we were playing childish games in our infancy Prince Vasily Vasil'evich Shuisky was sitting on a bench, leaning with his elbows on our father's bed, and with his leg upon a chair.’ Shuisky treated the young Grand Prince rudely, he did not bow his head to him either in a fatherly manner or as a master or as a servant: ‘And who can endure such arrogance,’ exclaims the young Ivan. He describes how Ivan Shuisky, in the struggle to control the Boyar Council, arrested Grand Prince Ivan's own followers, such as Prince Ivan Fedorovich Bel'sky, exiled and even murdered them, drove out the Metropolitan Daniil, invaded his, Ivan's, dining-chamber and seized his
favourite, the boyar F.S. Vorontsov, ‘and having put him to shame, wanted to kill him’. Ironically enough, it was thanks to the intercession of the newly appointed Metropolitan Makarii that Vorontsov's life was saved, only for him to be executed at Ivan's orders not much later. ‘Is it right’, exclaims Ivan, ‘for a servant to have intercourse with us, his lord, or for a lord to beg favours from a servant?’
¹⁵
In May 1542 Ivan Vasil'evich Shuisky died, last of the members of the Regency Council appointed by Vasily III. The only remaining Shuisky Prince Andrei Mikhailovich was unable to command the support of members of the Council and was beaten to death by the personal order of the thirteen-year-old Grand Prince in 1543.

Nothing is known of the education of Ivan except by inference. From a young age he was present with his mother when foreign envoys were received, and on one occasion he spoke to them in Tatar. Whether this was a phrase learnt by heart for the occasion, or whether he actually spoke the language as a child is not known. After the death of his mother and her lover (if he was her lover) there was no one man whose duty it was to educate the Prince for his role as a ruler, no male role model, to use modern jargon. It is not impossible that the children of the Tatar Tsarevich Peter at court were his playmates, and they would perhaps speak Tatar together. He almost certainly knew the language later in life because of the large number of Tatars at his court and in his service in the armed forces. It is also possible that the young Vladimir Andreevich of Staritsa, once he was released, was another playmate, as for many years the cousins were friends. Later, Ivan would often leave Vladimir in charge in Moscow when he left the capital for any reason, and Vladimir's mother, the formidable Princess Evfrosin'ya, may have had a role at court when she and her son were finally allowed back. The boy Grand Prince presumably had the usual cohort of dwarfs and fools and
skomorokhi
(minstrels, clowns, buffoons, etc.) to laugh at. Less agreeable, indeed ominous, was the boy's pleasure in throwing animals down from high towers to be smashed to pieces on the ground.