As in the two preceding years, the month of August brought with it Batory, thundering his cannon this time against the walls of Pskov. The reputation of the great captain had drawn to him warriors from many lands, and the white-eagle standard flapped in the van of an army, 100,000 strong, mustering in its ranks Poles, Letts, Magyars, Austrians, Kourlanders, Prussians, Lubeckers, Danes, and Scots. The ancient city on the Peipus shore, which for many a stormy hundred years had been a bulwark of the Russian land against the aggressions of the west folk, opposed a heroic resistance to the mighty efforts which were made for its subjection, and the flood of Polish conquest received a timely check. The stupor of fear and helplessness which seemed to have settled down on the Tzar and his voevodas neutralised to a great extent the effect of this stubborn defence; the Swedes captured Habsal, Narva, and other places of less importance in Estland, and later, led by de la Gardie, one of those brilliant soldiers with whom France periodically fascinated the world, penetrated into Russian territory and took Ivangorod, Yam, and Kopor’e. Jan. 1582Soon after these disasters Ivan effected a ten years’ truce with Batory, a composition being brought about largely by the diplomatic efforts of Pope Gregory XIII., who was fascinated, as many an astute Pontiff had been, with the prospect of alluring Russia into the Catholic fold. The terms of the truce were ruinously disadvantageous to the gosoudarstvo, and Ivan could scarcely have been forced to sacrifice more if he had staked and lost a series of pitched battles against his foe. Velikie-Louki was restored to him, but Polotzk remained in the hands of the victors, and Livland, snatched piecemeal from the Teutonic knights and contested inch by inch for a quarter of a century, was yielded at one wrench to Poland. The patient and persistent efforts of a long reign, the dogged struggle towards the shores of the Baltic and free intercourse with Western Europe, were relinquished as the price of a temporary and uncertain peace, and the Moskovite Empire was thrown back upon itself, like a conquered Titan thrust down into his chasm. And in another direction Ivan had with his own hand fatally shattered, in a fit of unrestrained passion, the dynastic hopes and strivings which had been advanced and safeguarded with such ruthless severities. Side by side with the gloomy Tzar in his later years, partaker of his amusements and debauches, sharer of his labours of State, had grown up the young Ivan Ivanovitch, designed to carry on the holy line of Moskva when his father should be no more. And in one respect at least he had shown himself an apt pupil; he had already married three wives “without having been a widower.”[171] It was no part of the Moskovite theory of government that the Princes of the Blood should expose their sacred persons in the forefront of their country’s battles, and the young Ivan does not appear to have departed from the prevailing custom of passive aloofness; the humiliations and losses which the Russian State was suffering at the hands of Batory stung the Tzarevitch, however, into a desire to show a bolder front to the oppressor, and he requested his father to let him lead an army to the relief of Pskov, then the centre-point of the Polish attack. A natural and proper request, under the circumstances, but to the suspicion-haunted old Tzar, on that fatal November day, it was the bursting-in of the dreaded summons, “the younger generation knocking at the door.” Wildly he accused his son of desiring to supplant him, wildly struck at him with his terrible iron-tipped staff; Boris Godounov, rushing in to save the Tzarevitch, received most of the blows, but one had crashed upon the youth’s head, which would never now wear the crown of all the Russias. The heavy thuds suddenly ceased and a wail of anguish rang through the silent palace: “Unhappy me, I have killed my son!” The terrified attendants, rushing into the chamber, found the wretched father weeping over the body of the dying Tzarevitch. In one moment of blind fury the primeval ape-instinct had leaped forth and had destroyed the weaving and toiling of a lifetime of specialised effort. Ivan Ivanovitch died a few days later (19th November 1581) from the effects of the blow, and Greek monks at Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria chanted subsidised prayers for the repose of his soul. As in the preceding generation, the next heir (Thedor)[172] was a weakling, and the Tzar’s mad act had opened up the possibility of his throne passing to one of the boyarin families upon whose repression so much savage ingenuity had been expended. The dreary outlook with which the old man was confronted may have largely influenced his supine surrender to Polish demands, and the equally humiliating truce with Sweden, effected a year later, by the terms of which not only Estland, but Narva, Ivangorod, Yam, and Kopor’e were left in the possession of the victors. 1583Moskovy was still further shut in from the sea, and the Peipus, which had been a Russian lake, became a natural barrier between three converging monarchies. One ray of success and aggrandisement pierced through the miasma gloom that shrouded the Moskovite land and gathered thickest around the tzarskie palace. In the last quarter of a century which had witnessed the opening up of far scarce-dreamt-of regions by daring European explorers, the century of Cortez and Pizarro, of the bold sea-captains who shed lustre on “the spacious days of great Elizabeth,” the Russian Tzarstvo was swollen by the haphazard conquest of the vast Sibirian “province;” a province which “comprises about a thirteenth part of the globe, and is almost 3,000,000 square miles larger than the whole of Russia in Europe, including both Poland and Finland.”[173] Nor was this huge region of the north, this “land of the long nights,” as the Chinese had called it in the remote past of their history, a barren and unprofitable possession; mines of salt, copper, and silver, forests stocked with valuable fur-bearing animals, and watered by navigable rivers and large fish-yielding lakes, and in some districts tracts of fertile arable land, compensate for the awful desolation which spreads over the greater part of it during the long winter. For many centuries the Russians had tapped at the outer fringe of this unexplored wilderness, and the enterprising folk of Novgorod had brought some of its produce into their markets; the later Grand Princes had put forward claims to a shadowy sovereignty over the principality or khanate of Sibir (a town on the Irtuish), and Ivan himself had kept an eye on this ultima Thule of the Moskovite forests. The Stroganovs, descendants of a merchant family of Tartar extraction who had settled in the oblast of Perm, were granted powers of administration over as much territory as they could reclaim from the tribes on their frontier, and a system of patient pioneering was carried on for some twenty years. The happy idea of utilising the restless military energies of the Don Kozaks, who were a scourge alike to their Tartar and Russian neighbours, in more thoroughly exploiting the Sibirian country, occurred to the administrators of the Moskovite outpost; an invitation was sent to a band of these freebooters, who had made their own country too hot to hold them, to turn their weapons against the “infidels” who were resisting the encroachments of the White-Russian traders. 1579The Kozaks, headed by a chief named Ermak, responded readily to an offer which promised them full indulgence of their fighting and marauding instincts, with the additional advantage of official sanction. They were outlaws most of them, and would have been put to lingering deaths if they had strayed into the clutches of Moskva, and the Tzar was highly scandalised at their employment in his service; he showed himself, however, to be of a forgiving disposition when, with a few hundred followers, the intrepid Ermak had conquered for him the vast north-eastern province. 1581The Kozak chief, still struggling to hold and extend the territories he had won, received as a mark of Ivan’s approval a cuirass which had once adorned the monarch’s person. As if symbolical of the ruin which so often attended the Tzar’s favour, the present was the contributing cause of Ermak’s destruction; plunging one night into the waters of the Irtuish, to escape from a surprise attack of his enemies, the weight of the armour bore him down, and he sank in the icy flood. Ivan’s reign had opened auspiciously with the conquest of Kazan and Astrakhan; it closed with the acquisition of Sibiria, by which Russia made her first giant stride into Asia.
Oct. 1583
Amid the state and domestic troubles which shadowed the Tzar’s old age, and while he was endeavouring to bring about a marriage between himself and one of the English aristocracy (Lady Mary Hastings), the woman who was still his wife presented him with another Dimitri—a puny princeling, born surely in an evil hour, whose ghost was to haunt the land for many a woeful year. A few months later Ivan’s health began to fail, and when, from the Red Staircase of the great palace at Moskva, he observed a comet in the winter sky “of which the tail had the form of a cross,” he beheld in it the presage of his death. Sickening rapidly, he expired somewhat abruptly, while engaged in a game of chess with one of his courtiers, on the 18th March 1584.
The great death-dealing Tzar was dead himself at last, the child that had been so fervently prayed for had gone back, in the fulness of his years, whence he had come. They tonsured the grim corpse that frightened them still, and called it Jonah, in the name of the Kirillov monastery; but they buried it as the Orthodox Tzar, Ivan Vasilievitch, in the Cathedral of Mikhail the Archangel, amid the striking of the great bells of the Kreml and the sobs and lamentations of the people.
Among Russian historians Ivan IV. has found apologists as well as writers who have held him up to execration and condemned his statecraft and his cruelties alike. Even while examining critically the evidence against him on the latter score, the result arrived at is that he was probably as “terrible” as he is painted. Chronicles and historical accounts were still largely in ecclesiastical hands, and scant justice would be done to the memory of a man who had married six or seven wives. The Church might forgive his hates, but never his loves. Nor can the evidence of Kourbski be accepted as unbiassed in the matter of Ivan’s character. Other contemporary witnesses there are, however, whose testimony points in the same direction, and who were in no way interested in libelling the Tzar. Horsey, who was on terms of good fellowship with him, wrote, “The Emperour liueth in feare, daily discouers Treasons, and spends much time in torturing and execution.” A Venetian attached to the Polish Embassy at Moskva in 1570 described the Tzar as “the greatest tyrant who has ever existed,” and mentions a delinquent voevoda being thrown to a savage bear, “kept for that purpose.” The cruelties and oppressions practised by the Russian monarch were widely commented on during both the Polish elections, and the reports largely militated against his candidature. Finally the document in the Kirillov monastery, in which the Tzar complacently prays for the souls of 3470 of his victims, would, if authentic, show that the extent at least of his executions has not been exaggerated. Nor is this gloating savagery, blended as it was with a rational and understandable policy, difficult to comprehend. Ivan the Terrible was the outcome of a long line of Moskovite princes, men who had been actuated by one ruling idea, which idea was in him so developed and specialised that he was nothing short of a monomaniac. The idea was that Moskovy, and God, and Gosoudar were scarcely distinguishable entities, bound up in indissoluble bonds. With the substitution of other countries, other sovereigns in other days have fallen into the same confusion. Jealous, awe-inspiring, pain-inflicting, terrible—such was the conception of a God among peoples in most parts of the world, such was the character which came naturally to the holy, Orthodox, Moskva-bred Tzar. The religious side of Ivan’s nature was always prominent; his prostrations in the churches, his zeal in monastic regulations, the pious reflections which formed so remarkable a part of his correspondence, the solemn forebodings over Kourbski’s soul, were all indications of a mind steeped in dogmatic belief.
Grim and dreary, mean and monstrous, as the Moskovy of this period seems, with its Aleksandrovskie sloboda, its gibbets, axes, impalements, and boiling cauldrons, its man-devouring hounds and blood-splashed bear-dens, its Kromiesniki and dumb driven population, its gutters running red and carp growing bloated on human flesh, and above all, everywhere, those glittering crosses; yet not in Eastern Europe alone could “such things be.” A brilliant writer, drawing his materials from the history of mediæval Italy both before and after the Renaissance, has “pictured the awful and beautiful forms of those whom vice and blood and weariness had made monstrous or mad: Filippo, Duke of Milan, who slew his wife, and painted her lips with a scarlet poison that her lover might suck death from the dead thing he fondled; ... Gian Maria Visconti, who used hounds to chase living men, and whose murdered body was covered with roses by a harlot who had loved him; ... Ezzelin, whose melancholy could be cured only by the spectacle of death, and who had a passion for red blood as other men have for red wine; ... Sigismondo Malatesta, ... the Lord of Rimini, whose effigy was burned at Rome as the enemy of God and man, who strangled Polyssena with a napkin, and gave poison to Ginevra d’Este in a cup of emerald;”[174] ... these examples, garnered from one corner of Western Europe, show that humanity and inhumanity are sometimes convertible terms under sunny Italian skies, as well as amid dark pine-forests and snow-piled wastes. The century which produced the Moskovy of Ivan the Terrible was not barren of sinister deeds in other parts of Christendom, and Russia was at least free, perhaps by very reason of its stifling autocracy, from the horrors which attended the great religious upheaval in the West; when Paris and the French provinces were glutted with Huguenot blood; when Alva was dealing out “confiscation, imprisonment, exile, torture, and death” to the Protestants of the Netherlands; when the Calvinists of Geneva were burning Servetus alive for “heresy” and roasting men and women to death for “witchcraft”; when Calvin himself was suggesting to the Lord Protector Somerset that both Catholics and Protestant sectaries “alike well deserve to be repressed by the sword”; and when, in Northern Germany, banishment and—in the case of the Chancellor Crell—the scaffold were being employed by the Lutherans to stamp out Calvinism.
S. Solov’ev, E. A. Solov’ev, Polevoi, Schiemann, Karamzin, Pember.