Ivan the Terrible (67 page)

Like so many other sixteenth-century rulers, Ivan was fascinated by alchemy, by the power to transmute base metal into gold, and by the properties of precious stones, which constituted the obverse side of Renaissance scientific rationalism. The main source of the knowledge of alchemy in sixteenth-century Russia was the
Secretum secretorum
, in its Russian version, which contained sections on the magical properties of stones and on alchemy, including a recipe on how to make gold.
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Ivan also believed profoundly in witchcraft and, to protect himself from the machinations of his courtiers and his enemies, he sent for many witches ‘out of the north, where there is a store between Kholmogory and Lapland’, as Horsey puts it. The favourite, Bogdan Bel'sky, had now, according to Horsey, turned against his master, ‘this Heliogabalus’, and was told by astrologers and witches that the stars were against the Tsar who would die by a specific date. Ivan was, however, carrying on his normal life, and had made arrangements to receive a Polish envoy in the near future. But at the beginning of March 1584 the Tsar had issued orders to a number of monasteries to pray for the restoration of his health.
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There is no doubt that the situation at the Russian court after the death of Ivan Ivanovich was such as to justify the suspicion that the Tsar's death was not natural.
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Ivan himself was terrified of death, and took the witches' forecast of its imminence seriously. Bogdan Bels'ky, considered by many to have been the Tsar's minion, was supervising the dispensing of remedies by the apothecary's pharmacy. At this time, the doctors associated with it were Eyloff, the Netherlander, said to be an Anabaptist, and the English Dr Atkins. The kind of substances dispensed in the pharmacy are mentioned in a few surviving orders which it received from Bogdan Bel'sky, dating from 1581 to 1582, and they are exclusively herbal, including seeds of the red poppy, i.e., opium.
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Could herbal concoctions have been used to poison Ivan? If so, then Bogdan Bel'sky was the best placed to procure them since he was in charge of the pharmacy and he ordered whatever remedies the doctors prescribed. According to one story, Boris Godunov had particular reason to fear Ivan's wrath, since he had been present when the Tsar had mortally wounded his son, and he had tried to defend the Tsar's daughter-in-law from physical assault by Ivan.
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The heir to the throne was now Fedor, with his ‘silly smile’, but it was
clear to all that he was too simple-minded to rule. On the other hand he was devout, kind and popular with the common people. His accession would be bound to lead to a struggle for power on any regency or boyar council, between his maternal relatives, the Iur'ev Zakhar'ins, above all his uncle, Nikita Romanovich, also popular with the people, and the relatives of Fedor's wife Irina, namely the family of Boris Godunov, a favourite of Ivan's, whose star seemed lately to have been declining.
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But there was another complicating factor: the existence of young Tsarevich Dmitri, supported by his maternal relatives in the Council of the
dvor
, the Nagoys, who might try to take advantage of the incapacity of Fedor in order to seize power on behalf of the child Prince. It is also assumed that the Nagoys and the Godunovs were alarmed at Ivan's plan to marry Lady Mary Hastings, a marriage which might lead to the birth of further heirs who could displace the Nagoys because Lady Mary was of higher rank.
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But it seems more probable that they did not regard such a marriage as likely to take place.

During the last years of Ivan's reign, the governing élite was divided between the Boyar Council, dominating the ‘land’ or the
zemshchina
, and the Tsar's Council in the court or
dvor
. The Boyar Council comprised the solid and wealthy group of boyars, Princes Mstislavsky, father and son, and Nikita Romanovich Iur'ev Zakhar'in, who were closely related by marriage, and had survived through thick and thin for over thirty years in Ivan's close entourage. There was also a number of well established boyars (Saburov, Fedor Sheremetev), and the two Shchelkalov
d'iaki
.
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The
dvor
Council included as senior boyar Prince F.M. Trubetskoy (also from the Upper Oka princes), two members of the Shuisky clan, Dmitri Godunov and his nephew Boris, two members of the Nagoy family and Bogdan Bel'sky. Several other Shuiskys and Trubetskoys also served in more junior posts. Ivan's council also comprised a larger number of representatives of the lower aristocracy, closely interrelated and coordinating their activity. The key figure was the favourite, Bogdan Bel'sky.
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Thus there were two candidates for the throne, Fedor and Dmitri, and at least three candidates for power, Nikita Romanovich, Boris Godunov and Bogdan Bel'sky. In the background were the small number of
d'iaki
, the efficient secretaries of
prikazy
, who managed the administration and organized the supply and movement of troops. Little is heard about them in foreigners' accounts, other than those who dealt with foreign affairs, such as Viskovaty until 1570 and, after him, the Shchelkalov brothers.

If Ivan died by the hand of man, then it was not, as far as one can tell, by traceable poisoning but by suffocation or strangulation without
leaving any evidence. Moreover, though many may, at that particular time, have wanted to murder Ivan, this does not mean that he was murdered. He was more than ever hedged by the divinity which protects a king, and it is very unlikely that the boyars surrounding him would break through such a spiritual barrier, since they had not done so before. The ‘sacralization’ of the Russian monarchy implicit in the assumption of the title of anointed Tsar was already powerful enough to influence both rulers and ruled against an attack on a tradition in the making.
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The balance of the evidence is that the Tsar died by choking, or of a sudden heart attack after some months of illness.

The question of how the Tsar died leads back to the question of how he lived. Was Ivan unbalanced? Was he mad? Did he indulge in Heliogabalian orgies? Are the tales true that he deflowered hundreds of maidens, forced noble ladies to get out of their carriages and lift up their skirts while he and his men-at-arms rode jeeringly by? Did he really carry fifty ladies about with him to satisfy his needs on his travels? Did he really have fat priests sewn up in bearskins and thrown to the dogs?
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What are the sources for these stories? And how do they fit in with the stories of sadistic massacres?

It is necessary to distinguish between different types of atrocities. There is the slaughter of men, women and children which forms part of war. Most of these massacres were written about by Ivan's enemies, the Livonians and the Lithuanians, and were blamed not only on the Tsar but on Russians (and Tatars) in general. They were described in horrible detail in flyleafs and illustrated books printed in Germany. But there was little difference in the degree of horror between the atrocities perpetrated by Russians, Germans, Lithuanians, Poles, Tatars or Turks, or indeed in warfare anywhere at that time. Of a different nature are the barbarities of Ivan's raids on his own people, the devastation of Novgorod, Tver', and many other towns carried out by the
oprichnina
which are well attested by both Russian and foreign sources. And of still a different nature are the torture and execution of Ivan's personal enemies, those whom he regarded as traitors. Here, too, there are Russian sources like some of the chronicles, and many foreign sources, though evidently foreigners who wrote after having lived in Russia and served the Tsar are more likely to be well-informed.

Most of the stories about dishonouring women, even anonymous ladies of high rank, come from foreign sources, Taube and Kruse, Schlichting, Staden, Horsey, Oderborn and the Livonian authors who wrote in German. The many illustrations are all in books printed in Germany and the Netherlands, and are therefore propaganda.
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This
does not mean that all that is alleged is quite untrue, but that only the naive or the wishful thinker will accept that all these stories are true. So many belong in the world of a sick imagination like the lucubrations of the Marquis de Sade, or in that of turning a quick pfennig. The reality of war in Livonia and Russia, of Crimean raids, and of the ravages carried out by the
oprichniki
on the Russian population, was bad enough without being inflated by the gruesome fancies of disordered minds.

An interesting example of the kind of distortion which occurs as a result of the formulaic exaggeration of atrocities is provided by one specific incident of which four different foreign descriptions exist, two by Protestants, one by a Catholic. This is the raid inflicted by the Tsar and his son Ivan on the German (Livonian) Suburb in Moscow in 1578. Johann Boch, the author of one of these accounts, was a Catholic from Antwerp, travelling on some kind of roving mission, probably from the Governor of the Spanish Netherlands, with a safe conduct from Ivan. Suffering from serious frostbite he was cared for in the suburb by the Tsar's surgeon, possibly Bomelius at that date.

Then came Ivan's raid on the suburb, in which Boch was stripped, beaten and forced to flee, until he was rescued and taken to the home of the then apothecary. In the course of the raid, the inhabitants of the suburb were beaten up and stripped of their clothes and possessions, according to Boch's account, in spite of the Tsar's proclaimed edict: ‘Plunder but do not kill.’ The second account, by Pastor Oderborn, a Protestant, who was not an eyewitness, describes how the Tsar mocked the unfortunate people of the suburb (who, he said, were mostly women and children) and then ‘the tyrant, blind with rage, driven by barbaric savagery and maddened with hatred for the German race’ moved among them, and when the young maidens protested at being raped, Ivan ordered them to be beaten, have their nails pulled out, tore out their tongues, then ‘ran them through with glowing stakes’. All this while the young women invoked the name of Jesus. Horsey (another Protestant) says that Ivan set a thousand gunners on the young women to strip them naked, deflower and rape them or kidnap them. Then as usual, Horsey acted the knight errant and rescued and clothed a few of the young women who got away to the English house. Margeret was a French mercenary in the Time of Troubles, who wrote much later, from hearsay. He concentrates more on the causes of the raid and merely states that the inhabitants were driven out, naked as babes, and their homes pillaged. His religion is not known.
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It is possible to study the various accounts of Ivan's cruelty, discard
some of the most extravagant tales, and concentrate on the evidence of events for which several different sources exist. There are several Russian sources for the introduction of the
oprichnina
; there are records of the transfer of
pomeshchiki
from one area to another; the persecution of the aristocracy is described in the correspondence between Ivan IV and Kurbsky which conveys very vividly the human qualities of the participants in the Russian drama,
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and the religious and moral values of Russian society even if all the events described are not to be implicitly believed in. And some of the events described by Kurbsky are confirmed elsewhere. The assault on Novgorod is attested to in many sources. The executions in July 1570 in Moscow also.

Most important of all, how did these dreadful events fit into Ivan's own life? What do we really know about him? It is generally assumed that he had an unhappy childhood, losing his father at the age of three and his mother at the age of eight, and being left to the tender mercies of uncaring boyars. But the only evidence for the casual carelessness with which he was treated comes from Ivan himself, in his first letter to Prince Kurbsky in 1564, which is already deeply coloured by his sense of umbrage at the failure of those around him to treat him with sufficient deference, and which was in any case written when he was well over thirty years old. All that we know, from Russian sources, of his early life, is that he was a rackety young man, and that there are tales of an early taste for torturing birds and animals and a tendency to abuse his power in dealing with adults.

The impact of the fall of Constantinople on Russian culture is often mentioned, but the impact of the advance of Ottoman power in southeast Europe is but rarely touched on, because it had little effect on western European culture. Yet this was extremely unsettling for Russia which might well be next on the list, and was now completely cut off from the cultural contact with Greece and central Europe which had existed until the Ottoman conquests of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Travelling to and from the great Orthodox centre on Mount Athos had become dangerous and expensive. Transit for Russian embassies to the Holy Roman Empire, to Vienna or Rome, depended on the fluctuating suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire, which was exercised with a certain flexibility over the intervening powers, until the final assault under Suleiman the Magnificent.

Ivan's childhood was not normal by the standards of the child-centred education of the twenty-first century, but it was not so different from that of other young princes. He lacked a male role model, maybe, yet so little is known of his childhood that who knows what influences were
brought to bear on him? There must have been some tension between his status as a grand prince by the grace of God, already from the age of three, and his status as a minor, subject to rule by graceless boyars. It was also a solitary childhood, particularly after the death of his mother in 1538, but there may have been a gleam of affection and warmth in his relations with his brother. Iuri Vasil'evich is usually described as deaf and dumb, and almost always as feeble-minded. The latter may not have been true. Ivan's constant and apparently affectionate care for his brother makes one wonder whether there was some form of communication between them. Iuri was always treated with consideration as befitted his status; he was even at times left in charge in Moscow while Ivan was away (though no doubt someone else carried out any public duties).