Ivan the Terrible (50 page)

Viazemsky does not seem to have been executed, for his name does not figure in a
Sinodik
; he probably died in prison.
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The names of Aleksei and Fedor Basmanov also disappear about this time, but they were clearly executed for they do figure in
Sinodiki
; Fedor Basmanov was allegedly compelled to execute his own father. Ivan sent 100 rubles to the Trinity monastery for prayers for Fedor Basmanov and eventually returned some of the family's estates to his children,
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one of whom, Peter, became a strong and effective supporter of the first False Dmitri, and died for it in the Time of Troubles. He may have been cured by the fate of his father of all loyalty to the Riurikovichi. The elimination of the previously all-powerful Viazemsky and the Basmanovs is attributed by Skrynnikov to the intrigues of Maliuta Skuratov and of V.G. Griaznoi, who had once been in the service of Vladimir of Staritsa and then helped in the campaign to destroy him and rose in Ivan's confidence in consequence.
⁶⁰

The impact of these terrible days on the people of Moscow was profound. And evidently on Ivan too, for never, after the massacre on 25 July, did Ivan show the same confidence in his ‘brothers-in-arms’.
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While Ivan was conducting the fearsome purge of his armed forces and administration, the horizon on his external relations darkened. Shortly after the overthrow of Erik XIV of Sweden, and his coronation as King of Sweden, John III, in July 1569, had sent an embassy to Russia under Paul Juusten, Bishop of Åbo, to negotiate with Ivan. At first Ivan had proved conciliating, suggesting that he had only asked for John's wife, Catherine Jagiellonka, to be handed over to him because he thought John was dead (which John was unlikely to believe) and he hoped to rescue her from the prison in which presumably Erik had incarcerated her, when he had sentenced his brother to death for his rebellious behaviour.
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Juusten arrived in Novgorod on 14 September 1569, after the return to Moscow of Ivan's embassy to Sweden under the boyar V.M. Vorontsov, which had been sent in 1567 to finalize the arrangements made with Erik for the collection and delivery to Russia of Catherine. From the beginning Juusten was faced with the demand that he should negotiate with the Governor of Novgorod and not expect to deal with the Tsar himself, particularly as it could be argued, since the deposition of Erik, that John was not an hereditary king, but an elected king of an inferior kind. The Tsar had been outraged at the news of the attack on his ambassador Vorontsov by John's supporters, and insisted that the Swedish envoys should treat the Governor of Novgorod as ‘the brother of their king’ which Juusten refused to do. The Russians were then ordered by the Governor to attack the Swedish party, and robbed them of their clothes and boots. They forced them to expose themselves in the streets in their underwear, displaying their buttocks and their private parts; they rifled their belongings, ‘penned them like pigs in a sty’, and deprived them of food and drink. ‘None of us had ever before drunk water to quench his thirst save at times of dire necessity and then as little
as possible’ wrote Juusten plaintively.
²
Ivan's spokesman made it quite clear that this rough treatment was a reprisal for the Swedish attack on the Russian embassy in 1568.
³
Fortunately for them the Swedes were now dragged ‘like captured felons’ to Moscow in 1570, thus avoiding a meeting with Ivan who was approaching with the
oprichniki
to launch his assault on Novgorod. They escaped just in time.

When Ivan returned to Moscow, in May 1570, from his punitive expedition against Novgorod, he still refused to receive the Swedish envoys. What is more he soon had a free hand to bully them for he no longer feared a Commonwealth attack in the event of war with Sweden since the conclusion of the three-year truce on 20 June 1570. Yet Ivan's policy, in May and June 1570, when the Swedish envoys were finally received in Moscow by Ivan Viskovaty and Andrei Vasil'ev (both shortly to be executed) is difficult to grasp, for the Tsar now asserted that the ‘concessions’ he had previously made to Erik were conditioned by Swedish willingness to surrender John's Queen. If ‘Sweden were prepared to hand her over immediately’, the treaty signed with King Erik in 1567 could be renewed. It seemed as though the Tsar were seeking a breach with Sweden. Summoned for a second interview to the Kremlin on 6 June 1570 and under threat of exile, torture and imprisonment, the Swedish diplomatic mission agreed to negotiate in Novgorod in order to mollify Ivan, but still the Russian secretaries insisted on the surrender of Catherine Jagiellonka as a precondition to any negotiation. What her status was to be now, as before, is never made clear: wife (Ivan was at this moment a widower), mistress, or political pawn? In a later letter of 11 August 1572 to John III himself, Ivan was more open and accused Erik of having wanted to hand Catherine to him ‘by deceit’, a policy which was followed by his loss of his throne. And then, continued Ivan, ‘in autumn they told us that you had died, and in spring that you had been chased out of the land by your brother Karl … and now they say that your envoys are coming and that you are in your lordship … and that you are besieged in Stockholm and your brother Erik is advancing on you.’
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In this way the Tsar covered his past negotiations over Catherine with confusion.

Sometime in mid-June 1570 Ivan banished the Swedish delegation to Murom,
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where they were kept under house arrest in very cramped quarters until November 1571,
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forced to buy their own food with their depleted supplies of money, and make their own clothes. It seemed that Ivan was determined to secure an acknowledgement of Russian suzerainty over Sweden, by means of the claim that Sweden could only negotiate with the Governor of Novgorod and not with the Tsar, as had
been usual in the past, when Novgorod was an independent republic. He argued that Sweden was not in fact a kingdom of equal rank with Russia, but a province,
⁷
whose status was similar to that of Magnus's kingdom of Livonia, now a vassal of Ivan's.

By the summer Savin arrived in Moscow with Queen Elizabeth's reply to the offer of alliance. Whatever she may have meant, Ivan was obviously so agitated by the terms of her letter that he replied in language such had probably never been used to Elizabeth before. He sent a letter through the interpreter Sylvester on 24 October 1570 in which he recapitulated the whole history of Anglo-Russian relations, accusing the English merchants of dishonesty and complaining that none of the letters he had received from England had been properly sealed with the same seal, but always with a different seal, a method which commanded no confidence between states. He complained that he never received any news of ‘Anthonie’ or ‘Onton’ (Jenkinson), who did not accompany Randolph when he had been sent as English ambassador, and that Randolph spoke only of merchants’ and boorish affairs, and refused to speak of ‘princelie affaires’. Ivan stressed that the reason why he insisted on Jenkinson's return was that he wanted to know if he had spoken to the Queen about the secret matters, i.e. the asylum to be offered to Ivan. In a final rhetorical accusation Ivan declared:

Whereupon the irate Tsar withdrew all the trading privileges which he had granted to the Russia Company.
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The Tsar had not so far connected the negotiations for an alliance with English trade privileges. He was now ready to do so and to exercise pressure on England. There were still moreover differences of style which led to misunderstandings. Whereas Elizabeth might think that a verbal agreement was enough, Ivan needed an agreement in which the Queen committed herself by oath, swearing to every paragraph.
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With the passage of time, the war in Livonia was becoming more and more of a burden for both Denmark and Sweden and the third partner, Lübeck was also suffering from the loss of much of her trade to other Hanseatic towns. But Ivan's hopes of Danish support for King Magnus of Livonia were doomed to fail: Frederick of Denmark was not
interested in conquering Livonia for Ivan's vassal, even though he was his younger brother. A peace congress, organized behind the scenes by the Emperor Maximilian II, the King of France and Sigismund Augustus negotiated a treaty of peace at Stettin on 30 November 1570,
¹⁰
which brought to an end the so-called seven years, Northern War. This was, however, no help to Ivan since it freed all the other powers involved in the war in the Baltic to unite against him. Meanwhile the Russian siege of Swedish-controlled Reval, in Estonia, conducted by King Magnus, was faltering. Denmark of course refused any assistance, and Ivan was too strapped for troops to send any. He had hoped that Magnus would be successful enough to be able eventually to reinforce him against the Tatars. More serious for Ivan was the fact that after the peace of Stettin, the King of Sweden, who could count on the passive support of his brother-in-law Sigismund Augustus, stepped up the war at sea. He interfered with Russian supplies which had been landing freely at Narva, whose trade now almost rivalled that of Riga, while no longer attacking and capturing Danish ships. By the end of March 1571 Magnus gave up the struggle for Reval and abandoned the siege.
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He was now useless to Ivan. So were the Livonian nobles Taube and Kruse.

The Crimean Khan, no longer hampered by Ottoman policy, was also free to embark on a new campaign against Russia. He began by clearing one obstacle out of the way: he sent his son to attack Ivan's quondam father-in-law, Temriuk, Khan of Kabarda, who was seriously injured and two of whose sons were taken prisoner, while the Khan of the Crimea then turned to cultivate the Khan of the Nogai horde, one of the Tatar tribes of the Caucasus. The main Russian defence forces were stationed on the Oka river under two of the most prominent Russian commanders, Princes I.D. Bel'sky and I.F. Mstislavsky, but in 1570 the Crimeans indulged in only a few skirmishes.

The death of the Tsaritsa Maria in 1569 does not seem at first to have affected Mikhail Temriukovich Cherkassky's position in Russia. The fate of Maria Temriukovna's brother was probably decided early in 1571. Normally he would have been appointed to command one of the main Russian corps in a campaign against the Khan of Crimea, but he disappeared from view. There is a good deal of mystery about when and how he died, and there are stories about Ivan tying up a wild bear on either side of the gate to his house, rendering access very risky, and the odd report of the execution of his sixteen-year-old wife, and her six-month-old son, as early as 1568.
¹²
Mikhail Cherkassky's death is attributed by two leading historians to the period around May 1571
when the Crimean army was advancing on the Oka river. According to one story, a false rumour spread in the Russian army that Maria and Mikhail's father, Temriuk, had joined Devlet Girey in the invading Crimean army. Mikhail was thereupon given a lower rank in the
oprichnina
army and then ‘disappeared without trace’.
¹³
A more reliable story tells that he was sent to command the forces in Serpukhov and between 13 and 16 May 1571 he was shot down or cut to pieces by harquebusiers belonging to the
oprichnina
.
¹⁴

In 1571 the Russian troops were reinforced by a corps of
oprichniki
commanded by the Tsar himself, which started out for the Oka front on 15 May 1571. Ivan now reaped some of what he had sown: large numbers of Russians deserted to join Devlet Girey's army. They reported that many people had died of the plague in Moscow of late, and that the Tsar had executed large numbers of his people; and that moreover he had few soldiers with him because the bulk of his army was still fighting in Livonia. Meanwhile the Tatar army, numbering variously 40,000 or 200,000 continued its advance on Moscow.
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One deserter offered to guide the Tatars to a ford which would enable them to evade the watching Russian forces on the Oka, and led them to where only the Tsar with a small
oprichnina
force stood before them. Whereupon Ivan withdrew without fighting, taking refuge in Rostov, whence it was easy to move to Vologda and safety at sea. Or according to Taube and Kruse he ran away without stopping until he reached Yaroslavl’.
¹⁶
The entries in the military registers describing this event are very restrained but do not conceal the surprise of their authors at the cowardice of the Tsar.

On 23 May the Crimean army advanced unexpectedly on a Moscow denuded of forces. The Khan stayed in Ivan's palace of Kolomenskoe, on the outskirts, while the main Russian army under Prince I.D. Bel'sky, M.Ia. Morozov, Prince I.F. Mstislavsky and Prince M.I. Vorotynsky was disposed throughout the city, with the
oprichnina
corps in the rear under Prince V.I. Temkin Rostovsky. But there was no defence against the weapon used by Devlet Girey: on 24 May he set fire to the suburbs, a sudden gale blew up and wooden Moscow went up in flames. The intense fire raged for three to four hours and consumed most of the wooden buildings and fortifications, and many of the brick and stone ones. The church bells rang the tocsin all over the town, but one by one they fell silent, indeed fell down. Powder magazines blew up. Thousands of people died suffocated by smoke, including Prince I.D. Bel'sky (who had been wounded in the fighting) and his family, and Ivan's physician Dr Arnold, Schlichting's patron. Horses and livestock, even the lions given to Ivan by Mary and Philip and hundreds of buildings including
the new
oprichnina
palace, which had only been erected a few years before, all perished, together with huge supplies of food, fodder and arms. The Tsar ordered the dead or dying to be thrown into the river, but it proved impossible, the river overflowed, creating floods, and all the drinking water was polluted. There were so many bodies that ‘the Moscow river could not bear the dead’. The only survivors were in the regiment commanded by Prince M.I. Vorotynsky, safe from the wind on the outskirts of Moscow and defending the city as well as he could from the pillaging Tatars. It took more than a year to clear the bodies according to Horsey.
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