Such a fate often happens to a physically strong young man who suddenly finds himself deprived of his helpmate; and it was a wise law of the Romans, that every Governor of a province must be married; if for no other reason than that a wife would protect him from the attacks of other women who might mean him less well than she.
When he was seventeen, he had proclaimed himself “Tsar,” thus showing himself bolder than his predecessors, who had perforce to content themselves with the title of “Grand-Duke.”
Now, in his new-found glory, with his new wife by his side, he raised for himself a bodyguard of 6,000 men, whom he called the Opritschnitza. These men rode through the countryside with besoms and dogs’ skulls at their saddle-bows. The emblems were supposed to signify that they would sweep away and hunt down all enemies of the Tsar.
But the Boyars were still to be properly punished for their wickedness; there were a few left, and at least the children of the infamous brood survived and had to be brought to justice; so Ivan rode through the land from country-house to country-house at the head of his men, besoms, dogs’ skulls, and all, slaying and burning; a right merry journey. Those whom he could not kill perished in the snow, and all Russia lay in terror of Æsop’s “King Stork.” Better had it been for Russia if the people had left him in his self-imposed quarantine, to recover in peace from his skin-syphilis before it had attacked his brain. For a man suddenly driven mad by securing absolute power, and worried by fighting, revenge, and murder, to rage desperately about the country instead of treating his syphilis even by the crude methods that were in vogue in the middle of the sixteenth century, was sheer madness. To this day we find that physical and mental rest, fresh air, and mercury, are the standbys in the treatment of syphilis, and quite probably it is less deadly to-day than it was in 1550.
It was the custom in Russia for the Tsar, when he wanted a wife, to collect all the most beautiful women from whom he should make his choice; and in 1570 he, in need of another wife, collected no less than 2,000 girls; them he kept in captivity for more than a year, treating them as he would, ruthlessly and relentlessly, a symptom truly characteristic of cerebral syphilis in a man untroubled by restraints, moral or legal. From these he chose another wife for himself and one for his son, that the great name of Ivan should not perish from the earth.
The shuddering remainder he bestowed on his courtiers, or sent home.
Cerebral syphilis is an extraordinary thing. Besides causing general paralysis, which is known positively to be syphilitic, the disease acts upon the arteries of the brain, and the symptoms that it causes seem to depend upon the areas of the brain that the diseased arteries supply. If the affected area is the front of the brain in which the intellectual faculties are supposed to be, all the symptoms of violent mental irritation are caused. They may begin quite early in the disease, and may last for many years till the patient’s death; much appears to depend upon whether the patient has been able to live a decent and quiet life. That in the case of Henry VIII his disease apparently led to nothing more monstrous than cutting off two of his wives’ heads—possibly they deserved it—and to violent and murderous political activity, would rather seem to show that if he had had a chance of rest and treatment he might have been no worse a king than many others who have won fame and gratitude. At least he was a highly educated man who certainly meant well at first. Ivan from the beginning was little better than a brute, of shocking family history and evil impulses. In him it probably went far beyond the stage of mere syphilitic psychasthenia.[10]
Seven wives in all were his, so that he beat Henry’s record by one. I suppose he showed the same miserable story of domestic unhappiness, but I have not been sufficiently interested to find out. Some of his letters are still extant, and they show all the signs of insanity, in their unwieldy length, their foolish cunning, their voluble avoidance of the main point, and their inconsequence. On the evidence of these letters alone any two doctors to-day would “sign up” Ivan IV. To say that he became wildly sexual would be to understate the matter: he developed the morals of a satyr. This is all very characteristic of syphilitic insanity, whose victims often find its worst effects in an utter abandonment of sexual restraint. It is almost as if the disease, being often the result of impurity, revenges itself on the victim by accentuating the very incontinence which has caused it.
The rest of the story of Ivan the Terrible—it is strange that history has not yet called him Ivan the Great—is not very interesting, except for two shocking incidents that we shall relate in their turn. It is simply the record of a man with an Oriental mind, maddened by syphilis, abandoning himself to the most ruthless cruelty, experimenting as if to plumb the depths of human wickedness. It would be wearisome both to tell it and to read it, with all the senseless stabbings, the stamping on the feet of helpless menials, the red-hot pokers, the experiments in torture, the burnings, the infamy. Let us hold our noses and turn to historical facts of a broader interest.
A man, in order to curry favour with the Tsar, wrote a private letter to the King of Poland accusing the great city of Novgorod of conspiring against its ruler. Ivan found it by a trick, possibly with the connivance of the writer. He held his peace, just as Henry VIII had remained silent when he first heard of the sin of Anne Boleyn. But, without a word to anybody, he collected an army of 15,000 men, whom he marched towards the doomed city, around which he erected a barricade of stakes that no one might enter or leave so as to escape the just punishment of an outraged Tsar. Then, for every day throughout a period of five weeks 500 to 1,000 of the citizens were led into his presence and put to death in all sorts of amusing ways; Ivan’s cleverness in devising new ways of killing seems to have been really wonderful. So wicked was the city that neither man, woman, nor child was spared, until but a scanty few remained alive. This niggardly remainder he collected before him, and forced to pray for the beloved Tsar. Like many syphilitic lunatics he had long considered himself to be God.