Ivan the Terrible (23 page)

The circumstances were very confusing. Swearing allegiance was traditionally performed to a living grand prince, in his presence, not to a future heir, as Prince I.M. Shuisky pointed out.
⁵
A number of boyars the next day manifested reluctance to swear allegiance to a baby who might die at any time. Ivan himself seemed to be aware that the Zakhar'ins did not have enough authority and support even to provide protection for Anastasia and her son in the event of his death, and in the later interpolations in the Chronicles he is recorded as advising those boyars who had loyally sworn allegiance to his son on the first day to flee with the infant Prince to a foreign land, wherever God might send
them, for safety. Ivan in 1564 accused the boyars, led by Sylvester and Adashev, of ‘having wanted to raise Vladimir of Staritsa to the throne and, like Herod, of trying to destroy his God-given son’.
⁶

In fact Sylvester played a very modest part in these events. But Ivan later cast him, in the interpolations in the Chronicles added under his aegis, as one of the arch plotters in favour of Vladimir, and subsequent historians have accepted, on very slender evidence, the accusations that Sylvester had in the past intrigued to have Vladimir's appanage returned to him by Ivan, that he was a friend of Vladimir's mother, the Princess Evfrosin'ya, and that he was one of Vladimir's ‘party’.
⁷

Pressed to swear allegiance, Vladimir himself backed away; Ivan withdrew to his chamber, saying: ‘you know well, if you do not want to kiss the cross, on your soul be it, what happens to it will not concern me.’ At this point a number of boyars intervened and said they would not allow Vladimir of Staritsa into the chamber to see the Tsar until he took the oath, while Princess Evfrosin'ya made matters worse by complaining that an oath was not worth anything unless it was freely given. Mother and son were later charged with calling up their armed retinue and distributing money to possible supporters.
⁸
Vladimir reluctantly took the oath on 12 March (the text survives), and at this point Sylvester intervened to say to the boyars: ‘Why do you not let him [Vladimir] in to the Tsar, he wishes him well … and from then on there was enmity between Sylvester and the boyars.’
⁹
This is the only actual evidence of Sylvester's attitude to Vladimir, and to his claims to the throne; everything else that is adduced is mere assumption.

Fedor Adashev, the father of Ivan's favourite Aleksei and not yet a boyar, expressed the doubts of some of the boyars when he said to the Tsar: ‘We will kiss the cross to you, Lord, and to your son, the Tsarevich Dmitri, but we will not serve the Zakhar'ins; your son is still in swaddling clothes, and we saw many misfortunes already from the boyars before you came of age.’ This suggests not that Fedor Adashev wanted Vladimir of Staritsa to inherit, but that he hoped Ivan would appoint a regency sufficiently strong to prevent the Zakhar'ins from seizing power. Aleksei Adashev took the oath on the first day. So the question arises: was there a boyar plot to place Vladimir on the throne, according to the first account in the chronicle? Or did a plot only begin to take shape years later when Ivan arranged for the rewriting of the past?
¹⁰
And who took part in it?

What does appear evident is that Ivan's illness caused a good deal of chaos and confusion at court at the time, and many imprudent words were uttered as boyars spoke angrily and incautiously to one another,
recalling past misdeeds.
¹¹
Among these was Prince Semen Lobanov Rostovsky, whose words were repeated to Ivan by one of the major figures at court, the Master of the Horse Ivan Petrovich Fedorov Cheliadnin (of whom more will be heard).
¹²
The crisis lasted twelve days, but the boyars were all brought to swear allegiance, and just as Vladimir of Staritsa was finally induced to take this step, so, after three visits to her, was his mother, Princess Evfrosin'ya.
¹³

The historian of the career of Ivan Viskovaty casts some light on these murky events. He points out that of the twelve councillors who first took the oath, seven were closely related to the heir to the throne, and three were related to the Zakhar'ins, the family of the Tsaritsa. In his view, the behaviour of Prince I.M. Shuisky or Fedor Adashev, who hesitated, does not seem likely to have been conditioned by concealed factional ambition, but by genuine differences of political orientation.
¹⁴
It is worth noting the fate, in the immediately following years, of those alleged to have taken part in a plot against Dmitri, though of course it is quite possible that Ivan, who could be both devious and vindictive, concealed his real feelings towards all those present until the time was ripe. Fedor Adashev was raised to the rank of boyar in 1555; Aleksei Adashev, according to some accounts, a
dumnyi dvorianin
¹⁵
in 1553, was raised to the rank of
okol'nichi
, a step on the ladder to
boiarstvo
(a rank he never reached), in 1555. The twelve princes, boyars and duma
d'iaki
listed as swearing allegiance to Dmitri on the first day appear in the records as regularly in attendance on the Tsar and are therefore assumed to have belonged to a small unofficial Privy Council which advised him. In 1554 the same men are there, only one of them is missing.
¹⁶
No one has been disgraced for his behaviour during the Tsar's illness.

However, in his first letter to Prince A.M. Kurbsky (5 July 1564), Ivan spewed forth all his venom against those he now suspected of having betrayed his trust. He accused them of rising up like ‘drunken men’ led by Sylvester and Adashev, of intending to destroy his son, ‘for Tsar does not bow down to Tsar, but when one dies the other rules’. Ivan had recovered, but Sylvester and Adashev continued to ‘counsel all that was evil, to persecute him, while complying with every whim of the Prince of Staritsa’.
¹⁷

Russian scholars have endlessly analysed the authorship and the date of the interpolations in the chronicles, but less attention has been devoted to the question of how true is their portrayal of the events during and after Ivan's illness. The account given by one historian, I. Gralia, in his life of the
d'iak
Viskovaty, is distinguished by its
common sense. He points out that only three of the boyars present at Ivan's bedside were reluctant to swear allegiance to Dmitri, namely Prince Ivan Pronsky Turuntai, Prince Petr Shcheniatev and Prince Semen Lobanov Rostovsky. The first was attached to the household of Vladimir of Staritsa, the second was of Lithuanian descent (a Patrikeev), the third, Rostovsky, belonged to the Suzdal' group of princes and had been made a boyar in 1553. The Suzdal' princes regarded themselves as the highest ranking among the Riurikovich clans and objected to having to serve the Zakhar'ins if the latter were appointed regents for Dmitri.
¹⁸
All these, therefore, were what one might call natural contenders with the Zakhar'ins for power and therefore reluctant supporters of the Tsar. Behind all the verbiage it seems that the discord had really centred on the age-old conflict in Russia between succession from father to son and lateral succession from elder to next brother, a conflict in which the ruler, ever since Vasily III, was more and more determined to secure hereditary succession in his own house. It is also probable that many boyars realized that hereditary succession was better for the stability of the dynasty.

Ivan eventually recovered and set off on a pilgrimage to the distant monastery of St Cyril of Beloozero to give thanks for his recovery, accompanied by the Tsaritsa, his family, Aleksei Adashev, Prince A.M. Kurbsky and other courtiers. It was also an opportunity for Ivan to withdraw from court life and unwind in the calm monastic atmosphere in which he found comfort. He visited Maksim Grek at the Trinity monastery on the way, possibly their only meeting, and Maksim warned the Tsar not to proceed to the White Lake, for fear of endangering the life of his son in the harsh travelling conditions.
¹⁹
And indeed, the gangway of a boat they were travelling in overturned and the baby was dropped by his nurse into the river and drowned. This was no doubt both a grievous personal loss to Ivan and a dynastic blow. There was now no heir to the throne, other than Vladimir of Staritsa, but Anastasia fortunately was soon pregnant again. Her second son, Ivan Ivanovich, was born in March 1554, and Tsar Ivan took advantage of the strengthening of his position to force Vladimir of Staritsa to take a fresh and far more wide-ranging oath of allegiance to his son and any other heir he might beget, and to denounce anyone he heard plotting against the Tsar, even his own mother. Vladimir was forced to undertake to live in Moscow with no more than 108 armed men in his retinue, and to refrain, with many sureties, from recruiting service gentry and
d'iaki
.
²⁰
But Ivan neither forgave nor forgot the turmoil his illness had created.

Sylvester and the
d'iak
Ivan Viskovaty were involved in June 1553 in
a rather obscure dispute over the alleged heretical, possibly anti-Trinitarian, views of a noble, Matvei Bashkin, and a bondsman, Fedor Kosoi. This was linked in October with a denunciation by Viskovaty of the allegedly unorthodox, even heretical, character of some of the icons which had been restored, under the overall direction of Sylvester, in the Annunciation Cathedral after the fire of 1547. The heretical views of Bashkin, reported to his confessor Simeon, were denounced by the latter to Sylvester and by them both to the Tsar, who ordered an inquiry. A number of other priests were implicated, including Artemii, who had briefly been abbot of the Trinity monastery. Viskovaty had also criticized the repainted icons in the Golden Chamber which showed signs of ‘Latinism’, and of the influence of Western models filtering in through the use of painters from Pskov and Novgorod, patronized by Sylvester and Metropolitan Makarii, and ultimately approved by Ivan himself. God the Father had actually been portrayed in one icon, which was against the traditions of Orthodox icon-painting.
²¹
Viskovaty's censure of Sylvester's choice of themes and style was, however, not accepted by the Tsar and the
d'iak
suffered a three-year ecclesiastical penance (
epitemia
) for having taken an incautious initiative, while Sylvester was cleared of the charge of heresy.

The incident of the icons blew over, but the so-called heretics were subjected to a full-scale inquiry by a Church Council. Artemii, whose tenure as abbot of the Trinity monastery had lasted barely six months, since he proved too tolerant, was judged to have failed to condemn the heretics sufficiently harshly and sentenced to reclusion in the Solovki monastery. Not long after, he escaped, doubtless with the connivance of supporters in the monastery, and reached Lithuania, where he remained active as a faithful Orthodox follower of the tenets of the Trans-Volga elders. The more serious heretics, Bashkin and Fedor Kosoi, were sentenced to imprisonment in the monastery of Volokolamsk, where Bashkin died, while Kosoi managed to escape to Lithuania. Neither the heresy nor the prosecution was of major significance. But it was the first prosecution for heresy in which the young Tsar took a personal part, and it launched him on the path of intolerance and the development of the punitive powers of the government.
²²

Viskovaty escaped with a relatively minor penalty by Ivan's standards. But one may wonder whether the real target, both of the heresy trial and of the attack on new styles of icon-painting, was really Makarii, an attack possibly initiated by Ivan himself, sheltering behind Viskovaty. It may have been intended to reopen the debate in the Church Council on article 98 of the
Stoglav
, on the problem of the delimitation of
ecclesiastical and secular jurisdictions in new and old town suburbs (
slobody
). If founded by archbishops, they were not subject to tsarist taxation, while those belonging to priests were taxed, in order to prevent taxable people from changing their residence from one area to another to avoid taxation. The decision of the Council had been that the metropolitans and archbishops, while retaining their existing jurisdiction, would agree not to set up new settlements or allow taxable people to move into existing ecclesiastical ones in future. In fact it was a way of limiting ecclesiastical income and a tacit victory of the Tsar over the Church.
²³
There was no hope of forcing through confiscation of church estates through a Church Council, however. Nevertheless, Ivan may have been affronted by the underlying opposition of the Metropolitan on this particular issue of Church–state relations.
²⁴

Further evidence was discovered in the following year (1554) – according to a later chronicle
²⁵
– that there had been a genuine attempt to alter the succession during Ivan's illness. This was the result of the attempted flight of Prince Semen Lobanov Rostovsky to Lithuania in summer 1554. He was caught on the border in July, arrested, interrogated and tortured. Rostovsky attributed his intention to fly to his mental crassness, his meagre way of life, idly and pointlessly eating him out of his tsarist award and his inheritance. Whether he was the ringleader of a conspiracy cannot be ascertained, but like many Russian princes and boyars he was aware of the different constitutional organization prevailing in Lithuania, where men like him were entitled to take part in electing the king. His servants confirmed that he had spoken ill of the Tsar, that he had treacherously consulted the Polish-Lithuanian envoys at the time negotiating a truce in Russia and advised them not to make peace. He had informed the Lithuanians about conditions in Russia and had told them that the Tsar would be unable to keep conquered Kazan'. He had even spoken ill of the Tsaritsa, complaining that the Tsar dishonoured princely families by failing to appoint them to the highest posts and surrounding himself with young people, that he had persecuted the descendants of Riurik and had raised up a servant (
rab
) by marrying the daughter of an untitled boyar.
²⁶
‘How can we be expected to serve our sister?’ he had exclaimed. It is evident from what happened later that under torture he denounced many boyars and others for having plotted against the young Tsarevich Dmitri Ivanovich during Ivan's illness in 1553.
²⁷