Ivan, in killing the Order, had not reaped unmixed benefits from his destructive efforts; he had advanced the Russian frontier in a direction in which expansion was most needed, but he had seen a large accession of territory fall to his hereditary enemy, Poland, and his other hereditary enemy, Sweden, had obtained a foothold south of the Finnish gulf—two circumstances which did not bode peace on his north-west frontier. At Moskva meanwhile troubles were brewing. The Tzar had probably never forgotten or forgiven the part Adashev and Silvestr had played when their sovereign seemed little better than a dead dog, and his consort had since that affair nourished open enmity against the two advisers. Their opposition to the war with Livland, in place of which they would have preferred a crusade against the Krim khanate, still further nettled Ivan, and the Vremenszhiki might plainly perceive that their “season,” which had set in amid the glowing ashes of a burnt Moskva, was drawing to a close in the winter of the Tzar’s displeasure. (Aug. 1560)The death of Anastasia (who had erewhile presented her husband with another son, Thedor, and a daughter, Eudokiya) did not improve the monarch’s temper, and the fallen favourites were glad to leave the unhealthy neighbourhood of the Court. Adashev was sent in the capacity of voevoda to the newly acquired fortress of Fellin, and the man of Novgorod relapsed into the obscurity of the cloister. Their rule had been ambitious, austere, and paternal to the point of irritation, and they left behind them a circle of disparaging courtiers who helped the Tzar to remember how arrogant his disgraced counsellors had been in the past, and to realise how dangerous they might be in the future. It was darkly hinted at the Kreml that Anastasia Romanov had died in the prime of life and health, and that she had been the enemy of the Vremenszhiki. Ivan himself raked up real or imagined grievances against these restrainers of his violent youth, and before long the frown of the Tzar was followed by a stroke of his far-reaching arm. Adashev was removed to a prison at Dorpat, where he died six months later—by his own hand, said his enemies; Silvestr was sent to contemplate the abstract to the music of “the ice-fields which grind against the Solovetsky Monastery on its savage islet” in the White Sea—a favourite storing-place for inconvenient churchmen, as Bielozero was for lay offenders.
A new circle of favourites and boon companions sprang fungus-like around the stern-grown Tzar, but for the future they ceased to try and control his goings; if they could avoid being trampled on they counted themselves lucky. The Basmanovs—Thedor, the son, “with the face of an angel and the heart of a devil”—were among this sinister throng, which also included Maluta Skouratov, “readiest of all to minister to his depraved inclinations and shameful lusts.”[148] Ivan, after the punishment of Silvestr and Adashev, was seized with remorse—for wasted opportunities. He might have been so much more savagely exemplary than he had been. It was not yet too late to remedy the omission; Adashev had been disposed of, and the recluse could not well be dragged forth again and re-sentenced; but there were others. The gravest political fault that must be laid to Ivan’s account is that his cruelties were occasionally stupid. In the instance of his first experiment at a reign of terror he selected as principal victim of his unappeased wrath Daniel Adashev, brother certainly of the late minister, but one of the few reliable voevodas with the army in Livland. The exact ground on which he received the death-sentence—beyond the fundamental one of blood-relationship with a fallen idol—does not transpire, but the fault was apparently a comprehensive one, as with him perished his youthful son, his wife’s father, his brother’s wife’s brothers, and his relative Ivan Shiskin, with wife and child.[149] At the same time was put to death, on the double charge of sorcery and affection towards the Adashevs, a woman of Livland, a convert to Orthodoxy, who had come to Moskva with her family, the interesting name of Magdalin, and a reputation for piety. The first perished with her. Other victims of the Tzar’s dislike or distrust were sent either to their graves or to Bielozero, and then the “young man’s fancy” lightly turned to “thoughts of love.” Envoys were sent to the King of Poland suggesting the marriage of Ivan with one of Sigismund-August’s sisters as a basis of peace between the two countries, but the negotiations fell through. The question of Livland had added another item to the many vexed points which made a durable reconciliation impossible. Aug. 1561The offended wooer haughtily turned his back upon possible western brides and allied himself with a beautiful Tcherkess maiden, of a princely house, whom he caused to be Christianised and baptized at Moskva under the name of Mariya. Towards the close of the following year Ivan assembled an immense army with which to give practical effect to his resentment against Poland, and in January 1563 led his troops in person against Polotzk. Probably no previous Russian prince or voevoda had ever been at the head of so imposing a host; its fighting strength was computed at 280,000 men, another 80,000 accompanied the huge baggage train, and 200 cannon bumped in their sledges over the frozen snow. How such a multitude of men and horses was maintained in the frost-bound and much ravaged border province of Polotzk it is difficult to surmise. Fortunately the siege was not of long duration; the old capital of the House of Isiaslav surrendered to the mighty host which encompassed it, and Ivan was able to add the title of Grand Prince of Polotzk to his already fatiguingly imposing designations. His return journey to Moskva was a repetition of his earlier triumph after the fall of Kazan. As on that occasion, he was met with the pleasing intelligence that his consort had presented him with a son (Vasili).[150] The infant continued the parallel by dying when a few weeks old. Another death happened in the tzarskie family towards the end of the year, Urii, the weakling brother, dropping quietly out of existence at this time. Makarie, the Shouyskie-elevated Metropolitan, died on the last day of the year, “leaving behind him the blessed memory of a prudent pastor.”[151] As he had lived in peace with the various Vremenszhiki and with Ivan himself, the prudence cannot be gainsaid. 1564Athanasie, the Tzar’s confessor, was elected to the vacant post, which he probably found less onerous than that of keeper of his Majesty’s conscience.
A truce of six months had been accorded to Sigismund-August, notwithstanding which both Moskovites and Poles (the latter with the assistance of the Dniepr Kozaks) mutually harried each other’s lands. The Polish ambassadors who came to Moskva in December 1563 put forward the usual inflated demands for Pskov, Novgorod, and other integral Russian possessions; scarcely likely to be yielded to a country which had just lost a valuable province. Ivan’s diplomatists countered these extravagant proposals by equally unreasonable claims, and the futile negotiations—which more resembled a Dutch auction—were broken off in January. 1564The renewal of active hostilities brought disaster upon the Moskovite arms; in the ill-fated neighbourhood of Orsha Petr Ivanovitch Shouyskie, in command of a large Russian force, was surprised by the hetman Nikolai Radzivil and completely defeated. Among the many conflicting accounts of this battle it is impossible to estimate what was the proportionate loss of victors and vanquished, but it is fairly evident that the Moskovites abandoned their cannon and baggage train to the enemy, that they were pursued by moonlight through brakes and swamps, and that Shouyskie lost his life in the battle or the flight. According to some writers his body was found in a well. The consequences of this defeat were not weighty, but Ivan was at the same time confronted with the defection of one of his most important voevodas, Aleksandr Mikhailovitch Kourbski. This boyarin, who held command of the troops in Livland, had been a companion-in-arms of Daniel Adashev, and was well disposed towards the Vremenszhiki who had had so grim a downfall. As Moskovite generals went, he had been energetic and fairly successful, though at a battle at Nevl he had been worsted by a much inferior Polish force. The cruelty and tyranny which were making the Tzar daily more breathlessly interesting to his courtiers roused apprehensions in the mind of Kourbski, who suddenly took the resolution to transfer his services to the cause of Sigismund-August. The letter or declaration in which he informed the Tzar of the reasons which had driven him to take this step was couched in terms of Biblical reproach, and upbraided the tyrant with having shed the blood of innocent men and slain the mighty ones of Israel. Kourbski was pleased with this composition and expressed his intention of having a copy of it buried with him. Ivan, who was not so pleased with it, drove his iron-tipped staff through the foot of the messenger who had brought it, and kept it there while he read it; and it was a long letter. An extraordinary correspondence ensued; Ivan hurled at his departed boyarin reproaches, scriptural texts, sarcasms, and fragments of classical history. Why to save his miserable body had Kourbski stained his immortal soul with treachery? What, he wished to know, would happen to Kourbski’s soul “on the day of awful judgment”? How had he dared to say that the throne of God was surrounded by his (Ivan’s) victims, against the authority of the Apostle, who said that no man could see God? Heretic! “You tell me that I shall never again see your Ethiopian face. O Heaven! what misfortune for me!” And let him place his letter in his coffin, thereby proving that he was no Christian, since Christians loved to die in forgiveness and not hate. “Written in our residence of Moskva, in Great Russia, the 5th of the month of July, the year of the world 7,072.”[152]
The passing over of Kourbski infused new vigour into Sigismund-August’s war measures. Devlet-Girei, who had been on the point of concluding an alliance with Moskva, was suddenly induced by Polish gold to make an inroad upon Riazan; Kourbski and Radzivil led a large army against Polotzk, and hostilities were actively prosecuted in Livland. Nothing, however, resulted from this triple attack; Riazan was heroically defended by the Basmanovs, father and son, until reinforcements arrived to drive the Tartars back into the steppes. Polotzk equally defied the Polish arms, and the Moskovites on their part captured the Lit’uanian fortress of Ozeriszh. In Livland neither side could claim a decided advantage.
Had Ivan at this crucial moment gathered together the formidable resources at his command and led his army against his old hereditary enemy, enfeebled by the rule of a weak and aristocracy-fettered king, and involved, moreover, in a quarrel with Sweden, he might have achieved a conquest more splendid and important than those of Kazan and Polotzk, and have wreaked on foreign foes his consuming lust for blood. But suspicion, the Nemesis of tyrants, had already commenced to haunt the dark mind of the Tzar, and he cared not to risk his sacred person in the hands of possibly traitorous boyarins. His warped imagination peopled Moskva with treason-mongers and conspirators, secret adherents of Kourbski and of the disgraced Vremenszhiki. Promiscuous arrests and judicial murders had not increased the gaiety of the capital, and Ivan glowered round upon gloomy and anxious faces with a sense of injured and threatened majesty. One morning in December boyarins and citizens saw with a feeling of uneasy alarm the Kreml square crowded with sledges, in which were piled crosses, ikons, church and domestic furniture, State treasures, and the various paraphernalia necessary to a peregrinating Tzar. The Terrible was about to desert his capital on the eve of the festivities of Noel. Escorted by a troop of horsemen, and accompanied by his family and favourite courtiers, Ivan Vasilievitch Groznie swept out of Moskva before the eyes of his silent and wondering subjects. This portentous Hegira halted at the Aleksandrovskie sloboda, a village some 107 verstas (86 miles) from the capital, where the Tzar set up his Court afresh. The unknown is proverbially the dreaded. All Moskva shivered at this mysterious departure. Clergy, boyarins, and townsfolk asked themselves what boded the winter flitting of their sovereign; they had not long to wait for an explanation. 1565On the 3rd January came a New Year’s message from Aleksandrov to the Metropolitan, and another to the merchants and people of Moskva. The burden of both these epistles was, that during Ivan’s minority and under the administration of Silvestr and Adashev the interests of the State had been neglected and its coffers plundered; that Moskva still swarmed with a brood of disaffected and rebellious boyarins, and that whenever the long-suffering sovereign wished to mete out justice to the guilty, the Metropolitan and clergy interfered to screen them from their well-deserved doom. Hence the sorrowing Tzar had resolved to shake the dust of an ungrateful capital off his feet, or in other words, to leave the white-built but black-hearted city to simmer in its own iniquities. The effect of this announcement was general panic and consternation, as Ivan had probably intended it should be; a deputation of clergy, boyarins, merchants, and townsfolk, headed by Pimen, Archbishop of Novgorod, waited upon the Tzar in his retreat at Aleksandrov and humbly implored him to return to his desolate capital and to deal with the evil-doers as seemed best to him. Ivan graciously relented and made a solemn entry into the city on the 2nd February. If the chronicles are to be credited, the change of air and scene had done him little good as far as bodily health was concerned, and the people were appalled to behold the ravages which two months’ absence had wrought on the person of their sovereign, who now appeared before them “a gaunt, bent man, with dull eyes, matted, unkempt hair, and a gloomy fierceness stamped upon every feature.”[153] Certainly this Tzar gave his subjects plenty of excitement. As a conqueror he had retaken possession of Moskva, and a new batch of regulations marked his return to the head of affairs; most notable of these enactments was the institution of a personal body-guard, chosen from the ranks of the courtier boyarins, and originally fixed at 1000 strong (afterwards raised to 6000), to whom was given the name of Opritchnina, or select legion. These satellites and creatures of the Tzar fulfilled the duties of guards, police, and special messengers, and became the agents for such cruelties and extortions as Ivan could not superintend in person. They carried at their saddle-bow a broom and a dog’s head, to signify that they swept treason out of the land and devoured the Tzar’s enemies; the terror they inspired among the unfortunate people upon whom they were let loose earned for them the name of “Kromieshniki,” “of the outer darkness,” or literally “outers.” Another new departure was the commencement of a palace outside the walls of the Kreml; an unaccountable whim, unless Ivan feared to be shut up like a rat in a trap among a people whose patience might one day give out, and who might hunt for a Vasilievitch as on a memorable occasion they had hunted for Glinskies. For the present the Moskvitchi were huddled like sheep in the corner of a pen, watching with nervous interest the movements of the personage who might be said to embrace the double part of shepherd and wolf. No time was lost in getting to business; in the month of February a batch of victims was selected to inaugurate the new days of personal rule—a dark festival, in sombre, gloomy, and terrible setting, and not as yet common enough to have lost the thrill of expectancy. A list of names stalk spectre-wise across this ugly page of Moskva’s history, as the bearers of them walked to their doom under the gaze of a blood-frozen multitude. Aleksandr Gorbati, who at least had fought for the Tzar “from Kazan to the field of Arske,” and his son Petr, who at the age of seventeen could not have been steeped very deeply in treason, died together under the executioner’s axe. Four other enemies of the Tzar’s repose suffered by the block; for a fifth was reserved a more ghastly punishment. Kniaz Dimitri Shaferov expiated his real or imputed crimes by a slow death by impalement. All day long, it was said, he lingered, bearing his pain heroically; and Church and Tzar looked on impassively at a deed more meanly cruel than that monk-taught tragedy, the memory of which they bewailed every Good Friday. To the credit of the Metropolitan, be it said, that having not the courage to thwart his sovereign’s sacrificial bent, he retired from an office whose merciful functions he might no longer wield, and withdrew into the Novo Spasskie monastery. Germanus, Archbishop of Kazan, was pitched upon to fill the vacant post, but Ivan quarrelled with him before the ceremony of consecration had time to take place, and the old man escaped thankfully back to his former diocese. The Tzar then nominated Filipp, hegumen of the Solovetski Lavra, who unwillingly assumed an office which could not fail to bring him into disastrous contact with the Terrible and his unbearable Opritchniki.
Ivan divided his time between the capital and the Aleksandrovskie sloboda, which latter place he transformed into a peculiar hybrid settlement, half fortress, half monastery, in which he led an equally peculiar life. A whim or a superstitious fancy caused him to garb himself and his boon companions with the titles and even the robes of monks, but the religious routine of this strange establishment was no make-believe. Matins and masses and vigils were here observed, perhaps more regularly than in most Russian monasteries of that day, and by none more punctiliously than by the Tzar-abbot; a fearful and wonderful being, if contemporary reports have not grossly lied, grovelling in abject fervent worship before the chapel altar at one moment, and gliding out to superintend the fiendish torture of some wretched captive at another, returning “radiant” and comforted—grotesque and scarcely credible, yet supported by the facts that are available. While the baboon-hearted sovereign passed his days in a blended medley of piety and savagery, buffoonery and State affairs, his familiar sprites, the Six Thousand, infested Moskva and a large portion of the country districts like a devouring pest or an army of occupation. Princes, boyarins, burghers, all who were not connected with the Elect Legion, were liable at any moment to be insulted, plundered, or maltreated by the light-hearted and light-fingered Opritchniki, and redress from the Tzar there was none. Houses and lands were ruthlessly filched from unoffending subjects in order to provide for the wants and luxuries of the favoured legionaries.[154]
The new Metropolitan, a man of firmer fibre than his immediate predecessors, inevitably clashed against the drifting forces of oppression and State anarchy which bore athwart him, and incurred the disfavour alike of Tzar and Opritchniki. Previous to his consecration he had made a half-hearted attempt to procure the suppression of the latter, and in return they hated him with a thoroughness which boded his ultimate destruction. Throughout his ministrations in the gloomy and splendid temples of Moskva the grinning dog’s head must have been ever before his eyes, and the renewed cruelties and executions with which the Tzar terrorised the capital made a rupture daily more imminent.
During these inward developments of Ivan’s reign a curious languor had crept into the foreign relations of the country. It seemed as if the three north-eastern powers were gorged and torpid after having assimilated within their maws the decayed carcase of the Baltic Bund. The Swedish raven and the Slav eagles sat inertly blinking at each other, or indulged in desultory sparring over the remains of their banquet. Perennial embassades, solemnly and sumptuously upholstered, trailed to and fro between Moskva and the Lit’uanian capital, and concurrently Kozaks and razboyniks (moss-troopers) kept alive the smouldering embers of war. As a matter of fact neither of the three neighbour nations was in a position to engage in a vigorous foreign campaign. In Sweden Erik, second monarch of the House of Vasa, was undoing the good work of his father and sowing the whirlwind which was shortly to sweep him from his throne. In Poland the line of Yagiello seemed likely to come to an end with the childless Sigismund-August, and men looked anxiously or selfishly forward to the prospective troubles of an open succession; for the most part selfishly. In Russia Ivan, who might have reaped splendid profit from the embarrassments of his rivals, seemed bent rather on warring upon his own subjects. His hatred of the boyarins may legitimately be explained by the recollections of his dreary and friendless youth, and of the torturing anxiety of his sick-bed, when loyalty ran cold and men turned their backs upon the seemingly setting sun. And yet the prime mover in that incipient treason appeared for long to have escaped the jealous fury that bore so strong a sway in the Tzar’s breast. Vladimir Andreivitch, who had put himself forward as his cousin’s under-study, was for many years the object of caresses rather than openly shown resentment. Fiefs, palaces, commands, and other compliments were showered upon him, as though to remove the possibility of further disaffection. But there are more ways of killing a cat than by choking it with cream. Ivan one day summoned his relative to visit him at Aleksandrovskie, and rode forth to meet him with a band of ever-useful Opritchniki—and some poison. 1569Vladimir, accompanied by his wife and two children, was intercepted at a little village on the road, where all four were forced to drink of the Tzar’s hospitality—a beverage which needed no digestion.
Whatever object Ivan may have had in selecting a man of Filipp’s disposition for the office of Metropolitan, he soon laboured to displace him therefrom; “there is no law to say such things as may disgust the ear of kings,” and Filipp had been, for a Russian churchman, tolerably outspoken. (1568)The uncompromising Vladuika was arrested, arraigned on some raked-up charge relating to his monastic life, deposed from his office, and immured in a cell of the Otrotch monastery near Tver. Here in the following year Maluta Skouratov helped him to die; Ivan has the credit of having added a martyr to the Orthodox calendar. Kirill, hegumen of the Novinski monastery (Moskva) replaced Filipp in the Russian primacy.
Despite the passive and unresisting temper with which the Moskovites seem to have endured the tyranny of their sovereign and his satellites, Ivan was never free from apprehension on the score of treason. The carefully-guarded seclusion of his life both at Aleksandrov and at the capital betray his nervous fears in this respect, and even more unmistakable is the drift of the correspondence he had with Elizabeth of England on the subject of a possible asylum in that country. In the last years of Edward VI. the English navigator Richard Chancellor, of “the Mystery Companie and Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers for the Discoverie of unknown lands,” had stumbled upon Moskovy while searching for a northern passage to India and China, and diplomatic and commercial relations had been opened up between the two countries. The Queen responded graciously to “the deare most mightie and puissant Prince, our brother, great lord Emperor and greate Duke Ivan Basily of all Russia,” promising a sanctuary for “the free and quiet leeding of your highnes lief ... and that it maie be laufull for you to use your Christian relligion in such sorte, as it shall be best like you.” Besides, the letter went on, a place should be appointed for the prospective fugitive and his Court “as long as you shall like to remaine with us,” adding, however, “upon your owen charge.” The Tudors were not given to quixotic extravagance.