Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (16 page)

A politics based on families is also a politics of sex and motherhood, so Kremlin women generally led secluded lives. A careless marriage could disrupt the best-laid plans, for daughters were valuable only if they could be married to high-status heirs. Each time a royal boy needed a wife, therefore, there was an ugly contest and potentially a feud. The rivalry was so divisive that Moscow’s rulers were eventually obliged to bypass the unmarried daughters of their own court clans and look beyond the capital. Ivan the Terrible, who married more wives than Henry VIII, was a case in point. By the time he was looking for his third (and in the absence of a willing European princess) the practice of sending agents to the provinces to select a collection of healthy but obscure young women had more or less become the norm. The girls were brought to the palace, where they were questioned, examined and probably frightened half to death. One by one, they were then paraded before the tsar in a so-called bride show. The point was that whichever girl the sovereign chose, there was a chance of healthy heirs, and at the same time it was unlikely that any boyar family would gain disproportionately from the marriage.
⁷⁴

The system left many noblewomen unmarried and prospectless. The tsar’s own daughters, as well as his sisters and maiden aunts, were certainly too important for any ordinary marriage-market. No clan could be allowed to monopolize them. Some opted for the convent and a relatively comfortable religious life (there were several places where such women lived in discreet luxury), but many grew old in the Kremlin’s own women’s quarters. There, behind the pierced and gilded screens, they were meant to spend their time in prayer and fancy needlework. Some mixed a toxic range of white face-creams, and others seem to have experimented with poetry and letters.
⁷⁵
Whatever their diversions, however, their spinsterhood was one convenient control on the production of possible pretenders to the throne.
⁷⁶
Another was the devotion with which successive Muscovite rulers exiled their married male relatives to the provinces, ostensibly to give them valuable tasks and lands but more practically to keep their wretched sons out of the Kremlin.

At the centre of the entire costume dance, enthroned in his new palace, sat the tsar himself. His boyars and advisors clearly had important roles in the evolving government; some even managed complex
prikazy.
But the monarchy depended on its sovereign. This truth was clear to every visitor, and by the time of Richard Chancellor’s visit it was an article of faith at court. The tsar of the 1550s was like the sun amid the circling planets. His Kremlin had been redesigned to paint him as the heir to an imperial line. But sovereignty had not been viewed like this for very long, and the message required a good deal of reinforcement. For courtiers, the pictures in the Golden Palace were one kind of text. Since few could read, the images were visible parables, filling the role that propaganda was to play in a much later age.
⁷⁷
And Metropolitan Makary did not confine his efforts on the tsar’s behalf to art. Between 1547 and 1549, he and his bishops also more than doubled the roll-call of Moscow’s saints. Their selection was guided mainly by religious considerations, but the addition of princes like Alexander Nevsky and Mikhail of Tver showed clearly that the heavens loved a pious and God-chosen prince, especially if he happened to rule the lands of Rus.
⁷⁸

For those who could read – or who listened while their priests intoned to them – the other medium for conveying the new philosophy involved a series of written texts. Makary’s most significant legacy may well have been the collection, editing and re-inscribing of the old Russian chronicles, the records of the past that had been kept and copied by armies of monks across the Russian lands for centuries. It was the Kremlin’s first systematic attempt to rewrite history, and it was a dazzling success, placing Moscow at the summit of a progression from Kievan Rus to heaven-blessed empire. Through this project, Makary also encouraged a new bias against Islam, and notably against the Mongols and their successors, the Tatars. This was a tricky stance to take, for there were Tatar princes in the tsar’s service, and the tradition of intermarriage on the steppes was so deep-rooted that few nobles could lay claim to purely Christian blood. But what Makary wanted was a new crusade – or the Orthodox equivalent of one. As Moscow learned to celebrate the Russian lands and Russian princely deeds, the leaders of its church were busily transforming the Tatars of Kazan and the Crimean steppe from cousins, neighbours and potential allies into the fatherless tribes of Hagar.

*   *   *

Makary gave his blessing to Ivan’s first military plans. What might have been a routine Muscovite land-grab ended up being celebrated as a holy war. In 1550, the tsar created a new military force, the
streltsy,
a fledgling standing army composed of trained musketeers (who served for life). With their help, and some well-placed casks of gunpowder, his troops were able to besiege and capture the Tatar fortress of Kazan in 1552. When Ivan rode home after that triumph, Makary himself stood at the city’s boundary to greet him. The tsar dismounted in the middle of a sea of banners and walked into his Kremlin as if it were indeed Jerusalem and he an image of Christ. Four years later, the Muscovites took Astrakhan, on the Caspian Sea, giving the Kremlin control of the Volga’s entire length and raising a Christian (and Orthodox) standard over huge areas of territory that had hitherto lived under the rule of Islamic princes. In celebration, a prominent new icon, the Blessed Host of the Heavenly Tsar, was painted for the Dormition Cathedral. Though angels circle round a saintly procession, the icon may also have represented Ivan and his victorious army, their deeds reflected in a template that had been designed for heaven.
⁷⁹
Orthodox Russia had found a mission in expansion and empire. To add to the celebratory mood, Ivan’s first heir, a son, was born in 1553, and though he died in infancy, a second son, Ivan, looked set to grow up a survivor.

In the spring of 1553, Ivan unveiled the plans for a monument to his triumph at Kazan. The building, originally dedicated to the Trinity, started life as a brick church on the banks of the moat beneath the Kremlin walls. After the fall of Astrakhan, however, the prime site seemed to call for something more ambitious, and soon the Cathedral of the Intercession on the Moat was born.
⁸⁰
It was conceived as a series of individual churches gathered round a central tower, but that description hardly captures the exuberance of St Basil’s. Its architecture was another text about Ivan’s God-given destiny. Much of it recalled the specific dates of his recent victories (the Festival of the Intercession, for instance, coincided with the start of the final assault on Kazan).
⁸¹
Among the other chapels, one was dedicated to St Varlaam, whose name Ivan’s father, Vasily III, had taken when he became a monk on the eve of his death.
⁸²
The exception, the wild card, was the smallest chapel, which Muscovites themselves began to associate with a holy man called Basil the Blessed. Basil, who had died in 1552, was a Holy Fool, famous for walking Moscow’s icy streets barefoot and often naked underneath his dirt. But he was loved and revered as a truth-teller, a fool in Christ.
⁸³
When it was finished, Ivan’s fantastic cathedral was the tallest building in the city, but it was the spirit of the Holy Fool, the shaman, half in darkness, half in light, that came, eventually, to monopolize it all.

In Ivan’s time, however, a different chapel in the same building seems to have played the really colourful role. This one was dedicated to Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem. The name was a reference, not even thinly veiled, to Ivan’s own return to Moscow from Kazan, but it was also the cue for another of the court rituals that seemed designed to mystify outsiders.

‘On Palme Sunday,’ Anthony Jenkinson recalled, ‘they have a very solemne procession … First, they have a tree of good bignesse which is made fast upon two sleds, as though it were growing there, and it is hanged with apples, raisins, figs and dates, and with many other fruits abundantly.’ The sight of brightly coloured food, in the lean days of early spring, may well have been miraculous in its own right, but the procession that came next was even more remarkable. ‘First,’ Jenkinson continued, ‘there is a horse covered with white linnen cloth down to the ground, his eares being made long with the same cloth like to an asses eares. Upon this horse the Metropolitan sitteth sidelong like a woman.’ Leading the horse, in the middle of the huge procession, was the tsar himself, on foot, a palm frond in the hand that did not hold the reins. Tsar and metropolitan were preceded by a wooden cross, and youths spread cloth on the ground to make way for the ritual ‘asse’. Here was another living icon, and the route, from the Kremlin to the Chapel of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, emphasized Moscow’s status as the earthly image of God’s chosen city.

The tsar’s role in the tableau remains a puzzle. Some experts take the scene at face value, and argue that it shows Ivan deferring to his spiritual leader in an act of ritual submission.
⁸⁴
Like some views of the dominant role of the boyars, this one runs counter to the popular image of the Russian ruler as an autocrat, and so it fascinates historians of Ivan’s court. The mystery is never likely to be solved, but what is clear is that submission – in this world, at least – was never Ivan’s strongest suit. By 1558, when Jenkinson observed him, the tsar was already earning a name for cruelty, and in later years his deference to metropolitans did not prevent him from having one of Makary’s successors murdered. An alternative explanation for the ritual sees the scene as another assertion of Ivan’s Christ-like role, and this seems more convincing in terms of iconography and even general context.
⁸⁵
Like the ceremony on the ice each January, the Palm Sunday parade quickly became a favourite with Muscovites. In that respect, it was also a useful tool in the church’s continuing battle against paganism and natural magic. As he approached middle age, that struggle made such a deep impression on Ivan himself that he seemed almost to embody it.

*   *   *

The tsar’s long reign had been inaugurated with church bells, but by the 1560s there were rumours, fostered by his enemies, that Ivan’s court was promiscuous, drunk and bawdy, his palace filled with louts and jesters, its candles burning late into the night as the shadows of minstrels and drunks capered and loomed. The persistent fable that there were two Ivans, a benevolent, reforming youth and an ailing, vindictive old man, is unconvincing, but there is evidence that the tsar’s mental health, always fragile, began to collapse as he aged, and he certainly suffered from a painful, and occasionally excruciating, spinal deformity.
⁸⁶
He was also beset by growing fears about the succession, for though he now had two male heirs, Ivan and Fedor, the boys were young, and in 1560 their mother, Tsaritsa Anastasia, had died. As he considered his children’s futures, gruesome memories of his own childhood made Ivan suspicious of the clans who continued to figure so centrally at court. His faith in these was further tested by their resistance to his plan for an extended war against Moscow’s neighbours on the Baltic coast.
⁸⁷
Ivan became more and more volatile, and by the time of Makary’s death in 1563, his conduct bore little evidence of the respectful piety that his mentor had marked out for him.

The most portentous change came in December 1564. The feast of St Nicholas fell on 6 December, and Ivan intended to celebrate it with his family in the fortress city of Kolomna, seventy miles south-east of Moscow. Such journeys, often involving a large part of the court, were common everywhere in Europe at the time; an annual round of pilgrimages and even hunting expeditions gave sovereigns an opportunity to assert their rule over the provinces directly, and afforded far-flung subjects a much-valued chance to glimpse a splendid prince with their own eyes. This time, however, Ivan packed to leave the Kremlin as if escaping from a threatened siege. He gathered up a huge weight of gold and jewels, and he also requisitioned icons, crosses, gold and sacred treasures from churches and monasteries beyond the Kremlin walls.
⁸⁸
The line of sledges stretched over the snow like a small army on campaign, and like an army it eventually made camp. Ivan led the royal progress from Kolomna to the Trinity-St Sergius Monastery, and finally established himself some miles deeper still into the hills to the north-east, at his late father’s fortified country estate of Alexandrovskaya sloboda. Again, such pilgrimages were not rare – the death of his beloved Anastasia was probably hastened by the incessant travelling on which Ivan insisted – but this time the tsar’s journey was unscheduled. More puzzling still was Ivan’s curt summons to a picked list of boyars, demanding that they leave Moscow and join him at the palace in the fields.

The land of Russia had been orphaned. No prayers and no appeals to the memory of Moscow’s holy saints looked likely to bring Ivan back. And a court without a prince, as Muscovites were cruelly aware, was rudderless. In January 1565, nobles and church leaders struggled with the prospect of chaos. What they learned, through a series of terrifying embassies between the tsar’s fortress and the metropolitan’s residence in the Kremlin, was that Ivan was threatening to abdicate. The idea was unthinkable – it was a blasphemy, a betrayal, it would have made the country ungovernable – so Moscow’s lords, chaired by the new metropolitan (Afanasy) and backed by a chorus of citizens, begged Ivan to resume his crown at any price.
⁸⁹
The message given to the snow-bound palace was that his people would endow their tsar with any kind of power, pass any law, confess to every treachery. No-one dared call Ivan’s apparent bluff, for he was neither mad nor dying. In effect, he was testing loyalties and making sure of personal support, but it was the strangest, and most chilling, atmosphere in which to shape his new programme for sovereignty.