Ivan the Terrible (62 page)

Meanwhile Possevino and the courier Shevrigin advanced on Venice, where they were received by the Doge and the Council of Ten. Possevino expanded on the papal policy of war against the Porte, which met with no response from the Venetians, who had no wish to compromise their lucrative trade with the East. Shevrigin was limited to his written instructions which dealt only with trade. After a brief stay in Prague, where the Emperor Rudolph treated the mission with complete indifference, the two diplomats parted company, Possevino proceeding to Poland and Shevrigin, again avoiding the Commonwealth, travelling home by sea through Lübeck. Shevrigin was an extremely uncongenial companion for the erudite Jesuit. He was after all an uneducated man, with a certain peasant shrewdness about money, lacking all artistic susceptibility, indifferent to the glories of Rome, and according to Possevino mainly concerned with making a good bargain in the sale of the goods he had brought with him.

Stephen Bathory accepted without demur the offer of the mediation of the Pope. He had previously been sounded by the nuncio in Poland on the creation of a vast anti-Turkish coalition and showed no enthusiasm for the present plan to include Russia in the alliance. His main aim at the time was to obtain the whole of Livonia for his new kingdom (which he hoped one day to make hereditary). He provided the necessary passports for Possevino, though he had many reservations about the sudden enthusiasm of Pope Gregory XIII for Ivan IV. By the beginning of June Possevino was in Warsaw, making contacts with the Queen of Poland, Anna Jagiellonka, with the Chancellor, Jan Zamoyski and with every influential person, and then proceeded to Vilna where Bathory had his headquarters.
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It was a time when all kinds of strange rumours about Ivan's camp were swirling around Poland, to the effect that Ivan's sons were in open disagreement on policy with their father; even Fedor Ivanovich was said to have parted company with him. A nephew of Maliuta Skuratov, Daniil Bel'sky, fled to Lithuania. Prince I.F. Mstislavsky was once again disgraced, and forced to swear publicly, with his two sons, that he would not flee to Lithuania and that he would not surrender Russian towns. It was precisely these kinds of rumours which encouraged Stephen Bathory to embark on a new campaign and to refuse any concessions to Ivan. The Tsar, meanwhile, was gradually climbing down, agreeing to hand over the whole of Livonia, if only he could keep Narva and receive back Velikie Luki and a few other towns, and trying to persuade Bathory not to carry the war deeper into Russian territory.
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The King received Possevino on 17 June in Vilna
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and, already inclined to favour the Jesuits, he was won over by the obvious openness of Possevino and, particularly, by his assurances that the Pope would always incline more to a devout Catholic than to a dissident ruler with a doubful reputation. Both parties agreed to wait for the return of the envoys whom Bathory had sent to Russia recently, with his final terms. Possevino would accompany the King to Disna, a fort on the junction of the river of the same name with the Dvina, and await Ivan's reply there. The journey took nine days, during which the King, his Chancellor, Zamoyski, and the priest confirmed the extent of their agreement on most issues, and Possevino showed the papal brief to the King. In turn Bathory, the soldier, gave some very sensible advice to Possevino to the effect that Ivan would never embark on a war against the Ottoman Turks, because the distances were too great and the terrain too difficult.
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Bathory's terms were now the cession of the whole of Livonia, a substantial monetary contribution, and the destruction of a few Russian border forts.
⁴⁵
Ivan, through his envoys, rejected them outright. When they arrived at Disna Possevino called on the Russian envoys, where they had camped outside the Polish fort with their escort of 200 men, but they only repeated that they were bound by their written instructions. Asked why they had changed their replies, they answered: ‘A new testament replaces an old one.’ To all intents and purposes the talks broke down, since the Russian envoys were not authorized to negotiate, so Possevino prepared to leave for Moscow, for which passports had already been requested.

Meanwhile the two sovereigns took the opportunity to indulge in one more ill-tempered exchange of insults and name-calling, initiated by Ivan, on 29 June 1581. Writing as a ruler by the grace of God, and not ‘elected by a noisy assembly of men’, Ivan reminded Bathory of his past concessions and contrasted them with Bathory's utter refusal to yield any ground, in fact to negotiate; he reproached him with behaving in an unchristian manner, rejecting solutions agreed upon so that Christian blood should not be shed. Asking for indemnities, declared Ivan, was a Moslem custom, not practised between equal Christian sovereigns, even Moslems did not impose them on each other. Bathory negotiated like a Moslem, leaving no time even for Russian envoys to arrive. Bathory had broken the sworn promises to previous ambassadors, which his predecessors had made (all listed by name, going back to the days of Ol'gerd and Jagiello); he had taken Russian traitors such as Kurbsky into his service; he had seized Ivan's city of Polotsk by treachery. The
Tsar accused the Commonwealth troops, with some justice, of committing atrocities on the battlefield, of disembowelling the most noble and removing their fat and bile (
zhel'ch
) like dogs, as though to use it for witchcraft. It was not for Christians to rejoice in blood and killing, and behave like barbarians.
⁴⁶

Polish arrogance seemed particularly to have outraged Ivan, and he continued to inveigh against Bathory for thirty-two printed pages.
⁴⁷
The most interesting aspect of this particular missive is that Ivan is already refuting the arguments that might be put to him on the Union of Churches, as though afraid of what the mediation of the Pope might produce. He states that ‘the popes and all Romans and Latins declare that the Latin and Greek faiths are the same’ as has been enacted at the Council of Florence, when Isidore was there as Metropolitan. If the Pope agrees, then there is no need for conflict between us – and presumably no need for papal supremacy, which was the sticking point.
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Bathory's reply, written by his Chancellor and confidant, Jan Zamoyski, was the most insulting letter the Tsar ever received. Zamoyski spent a week on it, and arranged to distribute it widely in Europe.
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He answered Ivan's letter point by point, mocking his so-called descent from Roman emperors from east or west, and proclaimed it useless to argue with ‘someone who did not know the laws of Christian countries, only his own wild and savage ones’. Ivan was, if anything, descended from the Greek tyrant ‘
Fiest
’ (Thyestes who was served his own roasted children by his brother Atreus at a banquet); Ivan had destroyed not just two children but a whole city, Novgorod, and could be compared with Cain, Pharaoh and Herod. Not only was he cruel, he was a coward, and concluded Zamoyski, ‘The poor hen, faced with the falcon and the eagle covers her chick with her wings, while you, two-headed eagle, hide yourself.’ He looked on the Tsar as Satan, the Prince of Darkness.
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And how dared he reproach Bathory with being a Turkish vassal, he who had ‘mixed his blood with that of Islam [a reference to the Tsar's wife, Maria Temriukovna], whose ancestors had licked mare's milk on the manes’ of Tatar horses, and served as mounting blocks for the khans of Crimea when they bestrode their horses!’ And Bathory repeated his dramatic call to decide the issue by single combat between himself and the Tsar. ‘If you refuse, you will prove that there is no truth in you, no royal, no manly dignity, not even that of a woman.’
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More and more convinced of Russian weakness, Stephen Bathory launched his third campaign against Russia on 20 June 1581, from Vilna, at a time when Ivan had to divert troops to defend himself against a Nogay attack. The Polish King's target now was the important and
extremely well fortified city of Pskov, described admiringly by the King's secretary as: ‘A big city, it is like Paris.’
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He had an army of some 47,000 including German and Hungarian mercenaries, while the garrison of Pskov consisted of some 6,000 harquebusiers and 3,000 cavalry, and its walls extended for nine kilometers with forty towers. It was defended by Prince I.P. Shuisky, whose father, Prince P.I. Shuisky, a distinguished general, had been killed in action in 1564 at the battle of the River Ula.

Meanwhile on 21 July 1581, Possevino and his party of twelve left the Polish camp and started out on the difficult journey to Staritsa where Ivan was residing, passing through Smolensk, where Possevino had to avoid being manoeuvred into attending an Orthodox church service, though he was allowed to visit churches and monasteries.
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He was met in Staritsa with the usual ceremony and the gift of a splendid black horse, and his audience was fixed for 20 August. Escorted by service gentry in cloth of gold, courtiers and large numbers of troops, Possevino was received by Ivan sitting on a throne two feet above the ground, wearing a gold tunic artistically interwoven with jewels, rings, a silver sceptre, necklaces, one with a cross two-foot-long. On his head was a glittering jewelled tiara, somewhat larger than the one worn by the Pope. The papal gifts were then produced. They were in good taste, including a rock-crystal cross inlaid with gold and containing a splinter of the True Cross – but less apposite was a beautifully bound volume of the decisions of the Council of Florence in Greek, which Possevino thought no one at the court could read. There was also a gift for the Tsaritsa Anastasia Romanovna, since no one in Rome knew she had died long ago, and that Ivan was now on his seventh wife.

The first negotiations took place before the banquet, with two councillors, and the
d'iak
, Andrei Shchelkalov, and a few others. Progress was slowed down by the Russian practice by which the boyars referred back to the Tsar whenever a hitch occurred, and then returned with long scrolls, from which they read aloud, reciting all the Tsar's titles on every occasion.
⁵⁴
The usual banquet followed, with the usual display of silver on a buffet, which Possevino regarded with the contempt of a good Jesuit, after which he and the priests with him withdrew, refusing to join in a drinking bout.

Talks began at once, lasting over six sessions, and concentrated around three issues, which implied concessions on both sides: Bathory's insistence on acquiring the whole of Livonia, including Reval (then in Swedish hands) and Narva (then in Russian hands); Ivan's insistence on keeping Narva and recovering Russian towns conquered by Bathory;
and Possevino's
basso continuo
on the subject of the Union of Churches and the eventual alliance against the Ottoman Turks which, if victorious, could lead to an eastern Christian empire for Ivan.
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The religious question was, however, firmly kept out of bounds by the Tsar. But unfortunately for Ivan, who hoped to keep Sweden out of the mediation at that time (and for Bathory, who did not want to share Livonia with Sweden), John III of Sweden was encouraged by the Commonwealth's assault on Pskov to launch a lightning attack against Narva, which fell on 4 September 1581, with an appalling massacre, followed by assaults on Ivangorod, Yam and Kopor'e, the last of which fell on 14 October.
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This was a real blow to Ivan for it meant the end of the hope of commercial expansion in the Finnish Gulf and direct access to the Baltic Sea and it also made diplomatic bargaining much more difficult for him.

Possevino offered to return to Stephen Bathory's camp to re-open discussions with the King, an offer which Ivan accepted with alacrity after the loss of Narva. But he did not reduce his terms for peace, though he agreed to allow the subjects of the Papacy and Venice to trade through Russia with Persia, and even to bring a Catholic priest with them; however the request to build a Catholic church was too much and was turned down flat. On 9 September Bathory's reply to Ivan's long letter arrived, longer and more discourteous than any Ivan had written.
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But Bathory was held back by the failure of his forces to make any headway against the indomitable defenders of Pskov, where women as well as men (and the icon of St Dmitri) manned the walls in a defence of their city which has become legendary in Russia. Bathory who had hoped Pskov would fall easily was not even able to conquer the great Pskov Pechersky monastery, and by 1 December, the King left the siege to be conducted by Jan Zamoyski and returned to Vilna. His failure before Pskov rendered him more willing to discuss peace just as it stiffened Ivan's resolution not to abandon Russian towns and persuaded him to demand the cession of more towns in Livonia, and to threaten not to send any more envoys to talks with Bathory. But he climbed down, proposed a truce of seven years to Possevino, and agreed to call Bathory ‘brother’ in the interests of the cessation of bloodshed between Christian peoples, though in his usual sardonic way, he explained that he did not know who this brother was, where he came from, and how he came to be King of Poland.
⁵⁸

The renewed intensity of the fighting between the Commonwealth and Russia led also to a renewal of the correspondence between Ivan and Prince Kurbsky. The Prince had sent a brief reply to Ivan's ‘bombastic
and long-winded’ letter of 5 July 1564. He was particularly scathing about Ivan's obscure references to ‘beds and body-warmers … and other old wives tales’ which would arouse astonishment and laughter. ‘I do not understand what you want from us,’ he exclaims, ‘having killed so many people already.’ He introduces a new concept into the discussion, suggesting that it was not befitting chivalrous men (
muzhem rytserskim
) to belch forth unclean and biting words. The use of the word ‘chivalrous’ may reflect the expansion of Kurbsky's acquaintanceship with western noble culture.
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There was no reply from Ivan to Kurbsky until the letter he wrote in July 1577 from Wolmar, through Prince Alexander Polubensky. Though at this time Ivan's hopes of victory were riding high, his language is less aggressive than in many of his other letters. As usual he dwells on his sinfulness, and his trust in the mercy of God. He reverts to the ambitions of Sylvester and Adashev, and of course Kurbsky, to ‘see all the Russian land under your feet’ and urges that it was not he who was corrupted, but those who sought to evade his power, and took all power and lordship from him, so that in fact he ruled nothing. He goes over a number of very personal past incidents, and accuses Kurbsky of having wanted to give power to Vladimir of Staritsa. The key to his thought is a quotation from the book of Job: ‘I have gone to and fro in the earth and walked up and down on that which is below the heaven and that which is below the heaven have I brought beneath my feet.’ He accuses Kurbsky of thinking that he would have the whole of Russia beneath his feet. But he himself had now ridden over all the roads, to and from Lithuania, and the hooves of his horses had been everywhere. Even in Wolmar, whence Kurbsky had written to him, Ivan had now caught up with him. ‘And we have written all this to you, neither boasting nor puffing ourselves up – God knows; but we wrote to remind you to mend your ways, that you might think of the salvation of your soul.’
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