Ivan the Terrible (29 page)

Thus far Karamzin's human and kindly portrayal of these events, but
there are other views. For a long time some historians of Russia have held that Anastasia was poisoned, and examination of her exhumed bones at various times has often confirmed scholars in their conjecture that she (and several of Ivan's relatives and nobles) suffered this fate. A recent analysis of the amounts of arsenic and mercury, the poisons surmised to have been used, found in her bones indicates the presence of 0.8 mg of arsenic per 100 g of bones, and 0.13 mg of mercury. Thiscompares with the same level of arsenic in the bones of Grand Princess Elena Glinskaia, Ivan IV's mother (d. 1538), and Tsar Fedor Ivanovich (d. 1598). But even assuming that Anastasia was poisoned, which thisevidence does not confirm, who had an interest in killing this entirely inoffensive young woman? Certainly not Adashev, already exiled to Fellin, nor Sylvester. And surely not Prince Kurbsky? The general conclusion one can draw from this evidence is that Anastasia was not poisoned, and that Ivan's later determination to believe that she was formed part of the paranoia which was gradually gathering within him and obscuring his vision.
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Only about a week after the death of Anastasia, on 14 August 1560, Metropolitan Makarii, the bishops and the boyars appeared before Ivan with a somewhat unexpected petition. They begged the Tsar to stop grieving and, placing his hopes in God, to remember that he should not put off remarrying, because he, the ruler, was still young and had not yet reached the years when he could live without a spouse. Thus he should marry soon in order not to suffer from privation. Ivan took a little time to reflect, but decided that it was better to marry than to burn, and almost at once he announced that he would take a new wife.

This decision has surprised many historians, particularly those influenced by contemporary attitudes to love, many of whom believe that Ivan's devotion to Anastasia required him to mourn her for a longer time. In particular the otherwise sober S.B. Veselovsky was outraged at the suggestion that a man who led such a dissolute life and was so selfish in the demands he made on his wife could have had any feeling for her.
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He suggests that Makarii's proposal that the Tsar should remarry was motivated by disapproval of his dissolute behaviour since his wife's death. Undoubtedly Ivan was a highly sexed man, and if Anastasia's illness had inflicted a period of compulsory chastity on a very passionate nature, he may have found relief in wandering from the marriage bed. Karamzin notes an entry in a manuscript of one of the chronicles to the effect that ‘on the death of the Tsaritsa Anastasia, the Tsar began to fly into rages and be adulterous’.
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There is every likelihood that this was true, and even that Ivan was unfaithful before Anastasia's death,
whether he loved her or not. When Kurbsky reproached him much later with what in this context they called ‘sacrifices to Cronus’, namely betraying the Tsaritsa during her lifetime, Ivan replied: ‘And if you say that I did not hold out and did not remain pure, well, we are all men.’ And he pointedly, if obscurely, inquired of Kurbsky: ‘Why did you take the soldier's wife?’
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The Chronicles too remarked on the change in Ivan's character with the death of Anastasia. He became totally uninhibited in his behaviour. Her death caused a raging turmoil in the depth of his nature, changed his sagacious character into a frenzied temper, and he began to crush many of his relatives and his counsellors.
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The intensity of the crisis following on Anastasia's death leads one to wonder whether it caused some kind of psychological breakdown in the Tsar's mind, increasing his paranoia to a degree of panic which he could master only by dissolute orgies and the widespread slaughter of his presumed enemies. He had always been cruel and sadistic, but the loss of control, the extent and precipitate nature of the operations he began now to embark on were new, and the degree of sadism unprecedented.

There were, however, other considerations which were bound to induce the Tsar to marry again. First of all, although Ivan had two sons, the younger, Fedor, was not a very promising candidate for the throne so that all hopes were concentrated on the elder son, Ivan Ivanovich, who might not live. The Tsar's brother, Iuri, was never even considered as a possible heir (Iuri's son, Vasili, born in 1560, died at the age of eleven months to Ivan's great grief),
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so that the nearest successor now was, inevitably, Vladimir Andreevich of Staritsa, who, though not a strong character, was in a good position to win over many of the appanage princes in order to forestall a minority with a regency under Anastasia's relatives, the Iur'ev Zakhar'ins. Ivan naturally enough preferred to leave his realm to a son of his own.

The second consideration concerned the balance of power between factions in Ivan's court. As long as Ivan was unmarried, the influence of the brothers of Anastasia would remain powerful, perhaps even increase. By marrying he would introduce new elements and reposition the old. Many boyars who opposed the influence of Anastasia's brothers were therefore anxious for him to marry suitably.

But Ivan did not intend to marry into a Russian family this time, a policy which would surround him again with relatives of his bride. Moreover, in the past Russian grand princes had married into foreign ruling houses, and it befitted him to do the same. Thus he sought for a consort in a foreign royal family. There was to be no bride-show. Marriage was to form part of foreign policy. But Ivan exacted a certain
degree of choice. He ordered his envoys to inspect possible Swedish and Polish girls, but Tatar girls were to be brought to Moscow for him to choose among them.
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Ivan turned first to Poland–Lithuania, in spite of the tense relations between the two countries. War had not yet in fact broken out between Poland–Lithuania and Russia; Russian forces were advancing from Dorpat in Livonia, and Sweden was besieging Reval, but Sigismund Augustus was still negotiating with the new Grand Master of the Order over the division of the spoils when the Order should finally collapse.

Sigismund Augustus had two sisters, both marriageable, Anna (the elder) and Catherine, and Metropolitan Makarii assured Ivan that they were not within the prohibited degrees.
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The negotiations were carried on with the Lithuanian half of the Commonwealth and on 18 August a Russian embassy departed for Vilna to propose a treaty of peace between the two countries guaranteed by the hand of the Princess Catherine. The Tsar did not yet know how old she was, but he had decided on the younger sister, probably as the most likely to bear a child. Ivan made it a condition that Catherine should convert to the Orthodox faith, and ordered the envoys to speak privately to the Lithuanian nobles to ensure that the treaty should be drawn up in its final form in Moscow, and modelled on the treaty of marriage between the Grand Princess Sofia Vitovtovna of Lithuania and Grand Prince Vasily I in 1390. Already at this early date, Ivan's instructions laid down where the Polish princess was to be met and escorted to Moscow and where she was to be lodged in the Tsar's private apartments in his palace. It seems as though it did not cross Ivan's mind that he might be refused. But if the Lithuanians insisted on her keeping her religion then the marriage was off.
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In the long instruction to his envoys Ivan was delightfully open about his reasons for seeking a perpetual peace with Sigismund: ‘by the will of God and for our sins, our lord Tsar and Grand Prince has lost his Tsaritsa, and he is not yet of an age to be able to live without a wife.’ The envoys then asked to see the lady's ‘eyes’. The Lithuanian spokesmen naturally insisted that Catherine should be allowed to keep her religion and that negotiations for the treaty should take place in Vilna. They declared that it was not customary for rulers to show their daughters or sisters to envoys, though they might allow them to catch a glimpse of the Princess in church. The well-coached Russians then pointed out that in all previous marriages between the two houses the actual marriage treaty had been concluded in Moscow, thus maintaining the primacy of Moscow over Lithuania. They asked for details about the age and health of the sisters of Sigismund and that a
parsuna
or portrait
should be provided. Envoys travelled back and forth between Moscow and Vilna, but Sigismund was clearly placing obstacles in the way of an agreement. He was in fact aware that it would not serve his purpose, that it might lose him Livonia, which he was just as keen to acquire as Ivan. He now raised the question of the withdrawal of Russian troops from Livonia as a necessary precondition.

Ivan was of course seeking more than a wife. A marriage with a sister of Sigismund would strengthen the Russian position in Livonian diplomacy, notably against Sweden, and would also enable him to cultivate his own party in Poland and isolate the more bellicose Lithuanian nobles from the more indifferent Poles. Sigismund in the meantime continued reluctant to strengthen Russia's position. He still refused to use the title of Tsar, though he did agree to call Ivan ‘brother’. He put forward objections such as the need to consult the Sejm, the Holy Roman Empire and his brother-in-law the Duke of Brunswick and stressed that in previous marriages Lithuania had been a grand principality, while it was now a kingdom and should be treated accordingly. In fact Sigismund was convinced that he would not be able to acquire his share of Livonia without war with Russia. Ivan, as always when he met with obstacles, became more contumacious, repeating his claims to the ex-Kievan lands and to Livonia as his
votchina
or ancestral land, and proclaiming that the Holy Roman Emperor alone among rulers was his equal in status.

The Lithuanian envoys in turn were concerned with the rank of any children of a marriage between Ivan and Anna or Catherine Jagiellonka, in view of the precedence demanded by the Russian negotiators for the children of Ivan's first marriage. Relations between the two rulers were not improved when Ivan was able to confront Sigismund with the dispatches captured by Daniil Adashev, showing that the Polish King had been attempting to persuade the Crimeans to declare war on Russia.
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The talks went on until 16 February 1561, when Ivan dismissed the Lithuanian envoys and abandoned the idea of the marriage, though he never forgot the insult.

Talks about a future truce which both sides needed continued,
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during which the Lithuanian envoys even attempted to use Makarii as an intermediary. But the wily Metropolitan was not to be drawn, though he did remind the envoys of the Commonwealth that even Lithuania belonged to Ivan as his ‘ancestral land’. Equally extravagant claims were put forward by Sigismund to Novgorod, Pskov and, of course, Smolensk.

Ivan's hopes for a Swedish marriage fell through completely because
of the death of King Gustavus Vasa in September 1560. This forced Prince Erik to curtail his courtship of Queen Elizabeth and return to his country. But the third Russian embassy sent abroad to find a bride for the Tsar was more successful. Envoys were sent to the Khan of Kabarda, Temriuk, who had already declared himself a vassal of Ivan's and who had been conducting military expeditions against the Crimea together with Ivan's forces. Temriuk had sent his son Salmuk to Moscow in 1558, as a youth, and Ivan had taken a liking to him.
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He was eventually baptized and took the name of Mikhail with the surname Cherkassky (Circassian), and Ivan ordered him to be taught his letters. The Cherkassky, as a large clan of Kabardian origin, survived the reign of Ivan – though Mikhail Temriukovich did not – and became one of the wealthiest princely and boyar families in seventeenth-century Russia.

The Russian envoys looked at Temriuk's daughters, and they returned with one, thus allowing the Tsar no choice. She was the Princess Kucheney, aged about fifteen, to whom Ivan fortunately took a fancy. She was converted by the persuasions of Metropolitan Makarii and took the name Maria before her marriage on 21 August 1561.
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It is possible that there was considerable opposition to this marriage at court. Not long before it took place, prince Vasily Mikhailovich Glinsky, Ivan's first cousin on his mother's side, appealed to Ivan for leniency for some unknown offence, through Metropolitan Makarii and the whole ecclesiastical council, and was forced to sign a surety bond guaranteeing that he would not flee to Lithuania, nor carry out any independent negotiations with the King of Poland.
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But we know very little about this marriage except for what the agent of the Muscovy Company Sir Jerome Horsey wrote later, doubtless repeating gossip he had picked up in Moscow: ‘The manner and solemnity of this marriage was so strange and heathenly as credit will hardly be given to the truth thereof.’
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Most historians reject the idea that Tsaritsa Maria ever exercised any influence over Ivan – indeed many also reject the idea that Anastasia had any influence at all, or that Grand Princess Sofia had ever influenced Ivan III. Whether this is the result of an innate Russian hostility to women ordisbelief in their capacity, or whether it arises from the materialistic interpretation of history is hard to tell. A year after his marriage to Maria, Ivan sent a gift of 1,000 rubles in August 1562 to the Trinity monastery for prayers to be said for Anastasia; however, when Maria died, in 1569, he sent 1,500 rubles and a golden dish. To the historian Floria the discrepancy in the amount shows that he was more attached to Maria than to Anastasia.
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But maybe Ivan felt that Maria might be
in more need of prayers. ‘It is hard to understand what he [Ivan] could gain from an alliance with a savage,’ wrote Solov'ev,
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and according to contemporary opinion Maria was wild and cruel by nature, encouraging Ivan in his evil inclinations but unable to keep his love.
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Indeed the mores of the Russian court had changed considerably since the death of Anastasia. Almost at once Ivan had given way to wild bouts of dissipation, drunkenness, fornication and sodomy, which horrified the straitlaced Kurbsky who reported them. In his first letter to Ivan of 1564, Kurbsky castigates the Tsar's evil advisers and warns ‘against a destroyer conceived in fornication, the Antichrist’, referring to one of Ivan's advisers as having been ‘born in adultery’ (possibly A.D. Basmanov).
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And he concludes: ‘It is not befitting O tsar to show indulgence to such men! In the first law of the Lord it is written: A Moabite and an Ammonite and a bastard to the tenth generation shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord.’
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In his
History
, written in the 1570s, Kurbsky refers to the ‘flatterers and evil destroyers’, who ‘began with frequent feasts and much drunkenness from which all kinds of impurities sprang’. Great beakers pledged to the devil, filled with extremely heady drink, were pressed on the Tsar until he drank himself into a stupor. Those who refused to take part in these drunken orgies were secretly denounced as foes of the Tsar. ‘O new idolatry, in truth a pledge and an offering not to the statue of Apollo and others but to Satan himself and his devils.’ Kurbsky continues with a litany of the disasters brought on Ivan because he had substituted for his chaste and holy life impurities filled with all kinds of filth; instead of displaying his strength and royal justice his flatterers had urged him on to acts of ferocity and inhumanity, to idleness, and to long sleeping and yawning after sleep. Ivan was also accused of cowardice in fleeing from battle with the Moslems. ‘Was it not time to come to your senses’, wrote Kurbsky, ‘and to repent before God like Manasseh, and turn according to your natural free will to your Creator…’
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