The lapse of 500 years found the principles of settled hereditary government in much the same condition in Russia as they had been when the infant Sviatoslav succeeded to the throne of Kiev under the guardianship of his mother. Despite the fact that two of the late Sovereign’s brothers were yet living, Elena Glinski assumed the regency on behalf of her three-year-old son, supported by a knot of boyarin-princes, whom the circumstances of the time suddenly threw into prominence. The over-shadowing figures of the last two Moskovite monarchs had almost obliterated the fact that there were persons of importance in the land besides the members of the princely family. Now a whole crop of nobles emerges from the background, like a ready-made second chamber from the brain of an AbbÉ SieyÉs. Ivan Oblenski, an offshoot of the House of Tchernigov, the Bielskis, the Glinskis, and the Shouyskies, form the aristocratic nucleus round which revolve the intrigues and faction vicissitudes which seem the natural accompaniments of queen-mothers and minorities. Necessarily the Princess Regent had a lover, in the person of Oblenski, and equally as a matter of course, the latter had personal enemies. Of these he proceeded to dispose with all expediency; Urii Ivanovitch, uncle of the Grand Prince, suspected of plotting against the Existing Order of Things, was lodged in a state dungeon, where he died of hunger some two and a half years later.[133] A more celebrated, if less august victim was the kniaz Mikhail Glinski, who had expostulated with his niece anent her unseemly intimacy with Oblenski, and was thrown into prison, where he “died unhappily.” 1534From which it would appear that the old saying concerning the unwisdom of intervening between husband and wife might be applied with equal truth to a less recognised connection. Andrei Ivanovitch, Vasili’s remaining brother, took fright at the irreverent procedure of the Regent and her favourite (who caged Princes of the Blood as unconcernedly as though they were linnets or human beings), and stole off one day, with all his household and retainers, towards Novgorod. 1537The farther he got from Moskva the more his courage rose, and ere long he had drifted into open rebellion against the boyarin-wielded authority. Numbers of disaffected landowners sped to his support, but the gates of Novgorod remained shut and the Oblenskie were hard upon his track with the best-mounted Moskovite cavalry. Andrei surrendered without striking a blow, and was escorted back to the city of his deep dislike, leaving behind him at intervals along the Novgorodskie road the swinging corpses of thirty of his adherents. His remaining followers died by torture or in prisons, and the latter fate disposed of the last surviving son of the great Ivan.

Meanwhile the success of Elena’s regency had justified the means taken to retain it. Vasili’s death had encouraged the King of Poland to renew with threatening insistency his demands for the restitution of the territories conquered by the late Prince and his father; refusal on the part of Moskva led to hostilities in which the Lit’uanian forces were unable to obtain any advantages, and a prolongation of the truce, on the terms “as you were,” ensued (1537). A skilful balancing of the conflicting interests which agitated the Krim and Kazan Hordes maintained the Moskovite peace in those directions, and a renewal was also effected of the truces with Sweden and the Livlander knights. Nor was the inner administration of the regency wanting in beneficial activity. The Kitai-gorod of Moskva (after the Kreml the most important quarter of the city, containing the houses of the boyarins and the principal bazaars and trading stores) was surrounded by walls and towers which added greatly to the security of the capital.[134] Vladimir, Tver, Novgorod, and other provincial towns were newly fortified and in some cases rebuilt; the state coinage was also put upon a more satisfactory footing. Under these circumstances the severities and loose morals of Elena Glinski might well be overlooked by her subjects. Her greatest offence was yet to come. She died. Ap. 1538Of poison, said many-tongued rumour, on which the only rational comment must be the useful Scotch verdict, “not proven.” Her untimely death left Oblenski in precarious possession of the supreme authority, which his enemies were already preparing to wrest from him. Foremost among these was the veteran Vasili Shouyskie, nick-named “the Silent,” the head of an important Souzdalian family. For seven days lasted Oblenski’s regency, and then himself and his sister were seized and thrown into prison, where the fashionable death-by-starvation awaited them. The silent Shouyskie assumed the regency, which he held till his decease in the October of the same year, when it passed to his brother, Ivan Shouyskie, who displayed his newly-acquired power by packing the Metropolitan Daniel off to the cloister, and installing in his place Ioasaf, hegumen (abbot) of the Troitza monastery. Hard and brutal was the rule of the Shouyskies; “fierce as lions,” bemoaned the Pskovskie chronicle, “were the voevodas, and as wild beasts their people against the peasants.” The only check on the absolute supremacy of the dominant family was the ever-present apparition of the kniaz, Ivan Bielski—Ivan and Vasili were fashionable names among the Moskovite aristocracy of that period—who was a formidable competitor for the possession of the regency. Bielski justified the nervous apprehensions of the Shouyskies (who had kept him in prison for several years and only released him at the intercession of the new Metropolitan), by taking advantage of the disaffection bred by their arrogance to oust them from the head of affairs. As Regent his rule was milder and less overbearing than that of the kniaz he had supplanted, and a firmer front was shown against the Tartars of Kazan and the Krim Horde, who were continually devastating the frontiers. Possibly the increased activity was rather forced by their side, for in the year 1541 both Hordes set themselves in motion against Moskva. The Krim Tartars brought a formidable force into the field, augmented by cannon, musketeers, and some squadrons of Ottoman cavalry—the first warriors of that nation who had fought against the Russians. The double danger stifled for the moment the bickerings of the Shouyskie and Bielski factions, and the Moskovites found themselves strong enough, when thus united, to repel the incursion of both Hordes. Safa-Girei and the Kazanese were chased out of the neighbourhood of Mourom, which town they had fruitlessly attacked; Saip-Girei, confronted by a powerful army on the yonder bank of the Oka, dared not attempt to force the passage, and retired to the Don. The jealousy which existed between the leading boyarins made it impossible for the Russians to follow up their advantage by a campaign in Tartar territory, and Ivan Shouyskie turned instead to his own advantage the employment of the troops which the war had placed at his disposal. Secretly supported by many of the notables of Moskva, and openly by those of Novgorod, he resolved upon a bold bid for the recovery of his ascendency. 1542On a dark night in January Petr Ivanovitch Shouyskie rode into Moskva with a picked body of soldiers from Vladimir, and before morning the Kreml was in his hands. Bielski was seized in his bed, and the Metropolitan was disagreeably awakened by showers of stones hurtling through his windows and weapons hammering against his door. The chief of the Church barely escaped with his life to the shelter of the Troitza, an unpleasant exercise for an early morning in mid-winter. At daybreak Ivan Shouyskie entered the city and resumed his old position of authority. Bielski and the Metropolitan were sent off to safe keeping at Bielozero, the lonely stronghold on the waters of the lake of that name, where the Grand Princes’ treasures and prisoners were securely stored away.[135] This time Shouyskie took good care that his rival should not emerge from prison to trouble him, and the soul of Bielski put on immortality.[136] A new Metropolitan, the second who had been nominated by the Shouyskies, was elected to fill the place of the shifty Ioasaf, who had leisure, in the seclusion of the Kirillov monastery at Bielozero, to reflect on the unwisdom of being all things to all men in sixteenth-century Moskva. The Novgorodskie had supported the coup d’etat, and their Archbishop Makarie was rewarded with the vacant post. In the meantime, while these various Ivans were ruling the State and crushing one another in turn, how fared it with the other Ivan in the background? The much-prayed-for princeling had not, since the death of his mother, spent a very happy or altogether comfortable childhood. The chief boyarins and their followers appear to have treated their Sovereign with a curious mixture of neglect, disrespect, and superstitious awe. Surrounded exclusively by the partisans of whichever faction happened to be uppermost, the friendless orphan could only brood in silent resentment over the wrongs he sustained at the hands of his temporary masters. The rude-mannered, tyrannical, gold-greedy Ivan Shouyskie was an especial object of his dislike. A letter written by the monarch in after days to Prince Andrei Kourbski, comments bitterly on the fact that though, in the lifetime of the Princess Elena, Shouyskie had possessed only one cloak, green silk trimmed with marten fur, “and that a very old one,” during his regency he was able to have cups of gold and silver fashioned him, with his initials graved thereon.[137] The despotic jealousy of Shouyskie and of his supporters in the State Council robbed the young Ivan of friends as well as treasure. For one of their number, a boyarin named Vorontzov, the Prince had betrayed a marked partiality, a dangerous compliment, which brought down on the recipient’s person the practically-expressed dislike of his fellow-councillors. In solemn conclave, and in the presence of Prince and Metropolitan, the angry men of State fell murderously upon the courtier whom the Sovereign had delighted to honour, and Ivan’s entreaties, backed up by those of Makarie, could scarcely obtain a mitigation of his fate to one of exile and imprisonment. The amusements of the boy Prince, besides religious devotions, at which he was an adept, and the more legitimate forms of hunting, consisted in chasing dogs and cats over the battlements of the Kreml, and in wild gallops with his allotted companions through the streets of Moskva, in which the old and unwary were ruthlessly trampled underfoot.[138] The days of his repression were, however, drawing to a close. The fearsome Regent Ivan died in 1543, and left a commission of his sons and relatives to replace him. But the reign of the Shouyskies was doomed. The manly exercise of the chase is a valuable school for inculcating self-reliance and a will to overcome the obstacles of life. It was straight from a day’s sport in the woods of Vincennes that the grand young Louis, whip in hand, strode in upon the Parliament of Paris and quenched it with an epigram; it was after the autumn hunting at Voloko-Lamsk that Ivan Vasilievitch first showed his teeth and gave evidence of that cold-blooded severity which was to gain for him the distinctive adjective “Groznie” (Terrible). At Moskva, where the Court had assembled for the festival of Noel, the Prince suddenly accused the ruling boyarins of misgovernment and abuse of their powers; many had been guilty, but he would content himself with one example. Calling to his kennel-men he bade them seize Andrei Shouyskie and throw him to the dogs. Out into the street they dragged the unhappy man, and there, before the mute, disconcerted boyarins and the long-time Shouyskie-ridden citizens, the Prince’s hounds worried the offending kniaz to pieces in the reddening snow. “The little tin gods” had missed “the hour when great Jove wakes”; Andrei Shouyskie paid dearly for the oversight. The youth of Ivan still necessitated a regency, and his mother’s relatives, the Glinskies, next came into power; but from the day of the red Noel no liberties were taken with the young monarch. His new counsellors, indeed, encouraged him in his savage inclinations, and the chronicles give instances of callous brutalities inflicted upon Russian subjects by both Ivan and the Glinskies. A party of Novgorodskie arquebusers, who had interrupted one of the Prince’s hunting expeditions with importunities respecting their pay, were punished for their presumption by being tortured to death, and a similar ghastly fate awaited some petitioners from Pskov, upon whom was poured blazing spirits, which ignited their hair, beards, and clothes.[139]

When Ivan was in his eighteenth year he celebrated with much pomp and circumstance the double event of his coronation and his marriage with Anastasia, daughter of Roman Zakharin-Koshkin, member of a family which had migrated from Prussia to Moskva in the fourteenth century.[140] Jan. 16, 1547In the hallowed Ouspienskie Cathedral the Metropolitan crowned him with the title of Tzar, which was here used for the first time at the coronation of a Russian ruler. The old style of Velikie-kniaz dies out from this moment, and as the customary chant, “In plurimos annos,” swells through those dim frescoed arches, the old order seems to pass away with the wafted incense fumes. A new figure is borne into Russian history amid the striking of bells and shouting of a myriad throated multitude. The Tzar comes!

The fact of Ivan’s coronation caused no immediate change in the government of Russia, which continued to be directed by the “Vremenszhiki,” or men-of-the-season, that is to say, by the Glinskies. That their administration was iniquitous to an insupportable degree may be gathered, not only from the possibly exaggerated accounts of the chroniclers, but from the fact that long-suffering Moskva was goaded to the brink of revolution. Ivan amused himself with his religious hobbies and other less respectable diversions, and only assumed the part of Sovereign when he wished to “make an example” of some offending subject. The purging of Moskva from the vampire brood that afflicted it, and the simultaneous “reformation” of the young Tzar, form a curious episode in the history of this time. The summer of 1547 was signalised by disastrous conflagrations in the capital, the first of which broke out on the 12th April; the last and most serious occurred in June. The flames on this occasion reduced to ashes a large portion of the Kreml, the Kitai-gorod, and the outer town, and destroyed 1700 of the adult inhabitants, besides children, “who were not counted.” Amid blazing streets and rolling smoke-clouds, falling roofs and crashing cupolas, panic and anarchy reigned supreme. The populace, rendered unreasonable by terror and hatred, loudly denounced the Glinskies as the authors of the calamity; in particular, Anna Glinski, Ivan’s maternal grandmother, was accused of sprinkling the streets of Moskva with a decoction of boiled human hearts, which apparently possessed inflammable qualities unknown to science. Urii Glinski, the Tzar’s uncle, was seized by the enemies of his party and slain in the sanctuary of a sacred building, and the infuriated townsfolk penetrated into the country palace at Vorobiev, whither Ivan had retreated, with a demand for more Glinskies. At this moment a thing happened which, in the accounts of the earlier Russian historians, recalls Edinburgh before the battle of Flodden. A “holy man of Novgorod,” one Silvestr, appeared on the scene and quietly annexed the soul of the Tzar. The people had attributed the conflagrations to the Glinskies; more critical and dispassionate examiners have been inclined to suspect the Shouyskie faction of complicity in the matter. Silvestr, however, put a different complexion on the affair and announced that the partial destruction of the town and burning of the 1700 inhabitants and unenumerated children was the work of God. As he supported this theory by producing “visions,” there could be no further doubt on the matter—none, at least, with Ivan, who saw the visions.[141] The conscience-stricken young man, convinced that the Glinski administration was as unpopular with heaven as it was with the Moskvitchi, since such heroic measures had been taken to displace it, surrendered himself, body and soul, into the hands of Silvestr, who, needless to say, made a clean sweep of the Vremenszhiki and replaced them with his own friends. Without ruthlessly disturbing the halo of romance and sanctity which has been fastened upon the man of Novgorod, it is not unreasonable to conjecture that the monk was an old acquaintance of Ivan—who was a frequent visitor to all the religious establishments within his reach—and took advantage of the popular excitement and general disorder to upset the palace intrigues of both the Glinski and Shouyskie factions. That Silvestr, and the equally nebulous layman, Adashev, whom he associated with him in the new government, exercised a restraining and beneficent influence on the young Prince may well be believed; with an opposition of watchful and resentful nobles in the background, circumspection was essential, and Ivan, who had seen a consuming fire, an angry populace, and a frowning Providence threatening him on all sides, was likely to be a docile pupil. For the time. The austere and monkish repression of the latest Vremenszhiki was the finishing touch necessary to perfect the education of the Terrible Tzar.

The early part of Ivan’s reign, and the whole of the preceding one, are characterised by the recurrence at irregular periods of a deliberate campaign against Kazan. The Russians seem to have borrowed the tactics of the wolves which inhabited their steppes and forests, and to have leisurely and persistently wearied their quarry down, without caring to rush in and dispatch it. Again and again did the Tzar summon from the far corners of his dominions an enormous army, trail forth his ponderous siege-pieces and sacred banners, take an affecting farewell of his capital, and march upon the Tartar city. The wooden walls were relentlessly battered down, the garrison reduced to the last extremity, and then the Moskovite hosts would return home in good order. The walls were easily rebuilt and the Kazanese would pursue the even tenor of their way. It would almost appear as though the Russians were loth to irrevocably destroy the only enemy against whom they warred with any comfort. A more feasible explanation is that the Kazanese supplemented their feeble defences by a judicious outlay of the metal which corrupts, and that some of the Moskovite voevodas did not return empty-handed from these abortive expeditions. In 1552 Ivan determined to set once more in motion the huge army which had been left quartered on the frontiers of Kazan, a locality which had had a demoralising effect on the troops, many of whom had shaved off their beards to please the Tartar maidens who for the time being under-studied their wives, “to prove,” remarked a scandalised messenger from the Metropolitan, “by the indecent nudity of your faces, that you have shame to be men.” Familiarity had bred contempt, and the dwellers in the city by the Volga’s shore scornfully refused to open their gates at the approach of the 150,000 footmen and the 150 cannon which the Tzar brought against them. The Moskovites prepared for a long and obstinate resistance, and by way of a beginning erected and dedicated three pavilion churches in their camp. Events justified their expectations; the Kazanese held out stoutly against both the assaults of the besiegers and the offers of the Tzar. August and September passed in continual sorties and battles without the walls, skirmishing attacks by the Kozaks in the tzarskie army, and mining operations by the German engineers. The overwhelming forces and superior artillery which Ivan was able to bring against the city at length beat down the heroic defence, and the triumphant Moskovites put their stubborn and still resisting enemies to the sword. The Tzar is said to have been moved to tears at the sight of so many Tartar corpses; “they are not Christians,” he observed, “but yet they are men.” The reduction of Kazan was an event of the first importance in Russian annals. It marked an epoch. “The victory of Ivan the Terrible is the first great revenge of the vanquished over the vanquishers ... the first stage reached by European civilisation in taking the offensive towards Asia.”[142] Prudence suggested that Ivan should remain on the scene of his conquest until his authority over the neighbouring districts was assured; a desire to return to his capital in the full flush of triumph prompted him to disregard more solid considerations. He was still very young. The newly-acquired territory was therefore left under the united protection of the Christ, the Virgin, the Russian intercessory saints, and Aleksandr Shouyskie. Ivan, on his homeward way, received the welcome intelligence that his wife had given birth to a son, the Tzarevitch Dimitri, first of a series of Ivanovitches so named. The prolonged rejoicings, banquetings, and thanksgivings which ensued at Moskva were followed by a disagreeable sequel; Kazan, despite the august protection under which it had been left, rose in revolt, and the Russian ascendency was seriously imperilled. 1553The Tzar’s health at the same time broke alarmingly down, and another long minority seemed to threaten the State. The boyarins and princes, summoned to take an oath of allegiance to the infant Dimitri, showed a strong reluctance to bind themselves down in the manner required; the succession of Ivan’s child to the Tzardom would mean a Romanov regency and a repetition of the faction intrigues which had attended the early years of the present reign. Urii, the Tzar’s brother, appears to have been a weakling in mind and body, too feeble even to decorate with the divine attributes of monarch; in Vladimir Andreievitch, the Tzar’s first cousin, however, there existed a possible candidate for the throne, and even Silvestr and Adashev hesitated between the claims of the hereditary and collateral succession. The oath, whatever its value might be, was exacted from the unwilling courtiers, but Ivan’s recovery prevented the necessity of testing it. The convalescent Tzar, in spite of the remonstrances of his advisers, set off on a course of shrine visiting, taking with him his unfortunate offspring, who was scarcely of an age to stand such energetic piety. In fact he died on the journey. The pilgrimage of Ivan was, if the chroniclers and some of the later historians are to be believed, disastrous in another fashion. Among the religious establishments visited was the Piesnoshkie monastery, wherein was caged an interesting prisoner. Vassian, Bishop of Kolumna in the reign of Vasili, had been deprived of his episcopal office during the time of the regencies on account of his evil life; now, in the decrepitude of age, he is represented as harbouring with unquenched passion the unholy frettings of a sin-warped mind. Ivan desired an interview with the hoary reprobate; perhaps after a course of devotions among a community of irreproachable saints, living and departed, he was attracted by the rare personality of a sometime bishop who was no better than he should be. The monk-with-a-past seized the grand opportunity to poison the monarch’s mind against his boyarins, his relations, and his subjects, and Ivan drank in with greedy ears the vicious counsels of the unhallowed recluse. It is a fascinating picture, the aged priest who had eaten his heart out in helpless bitterness these many years, and chafed against the restraint of his prison-cell, given at last one deadly moment of revenge in which to work a superb evil against the society that had mishandled him. And as the Tzar went out from his presence a changed man, might not the ex-prelate have flung a crowning blasphemy at his heaven and chanted exultingly nunc dimittis? Ivan, indeed, in the hands of the chroniclers, is a creature easily swayed; a monk from Novgorod tells him to be good, and he straightway abandons the wrong-headed sins of his wayward youth and becomes an exemplary monarch, till a monk of Piesnoshkie gives him dark and evil counsel, and sends him forth upon the world with a cankered, blood-lusting soul.

The Tzar’s return to health was accompanied by a return of Moskovite prosperity. Another Tzarevitch, Ivan, replaced the dead Dimitri; Kazan was gradually Kozaked into submission, and received a bishop as a mark of special favour. Another conquest equally important was achieved without bloodshed. The Astrakhanese having insulted the envoys of Moskovy, a small but well-equipped army was sent against them, with the result that this khanate, once the head-country of the redoubtable Golden Horde, acknowledged Ivan’s sovereignty and yielded equal rights in the Volga fishery to his Great Russian subjects. 1554The Nogai Tartars, occupying the intermediate steppes, submitted at the same time to the Moskovite dominion, and the Russian state, still cut off from the Black Sea, to which in the tenth century it had given its name,[143] wriggled its way down to the Kaspian.

The acquisition of the two Tartar sovereignties, while giving increased importance and security to Ivan’s dominions, and opening up a valuable trade with Persia and other eastern countries, did not tend to make Moskovy less Asiatic, or bring her closer into the European family. The Tzar’s political ambitions turned naturally towards the west. With a sagacity equal to that of his most celebrated successor, and in opposition to the advice of his counsellors, he wished to find a free outlet for communication with the great Empire-Republic (which, though decaying in organisation, was at this moment so instinct with life), and with Europe generally. The death of Sigismund of Poland (1548) and the accession of his son, Sigismund-August, had scarcely affected the grudgingly pacific relations between the two countries, though their common grievance against the Krim Tartars seemed to warrant the hope of a more cordial understanding. With Sweden the Moskovites waged one of those short inconclusive wars, in which neither party seemed to have any definite object in view, beyond the fact that they “lived unhappily” as neighbours. 1557A forty years’ truce concluded the hostilities between these ancient enemies. It was about this time that some adventurous merchant-seamen of the city of London “discovered” Moskovy, by way of the White Sea, and opened up a commercial and diplomatic intercourse between the two isolated nations who were one day to come face to face with each other on the roof of the world. The country, however, towards which Ivan’s thoughts were chiefly turned was the uniquely governed Baltic land, comprising Estland, Livland, and Kourland, and the adjacent islands of Dago and Oesel. The extinction of the Prussian section of the Order had necessarily weakened the Livlandish branch, and the spread of Lutheran ideas had further added to the confusion which reigned throughout the Baltic burghs. Nowhere, perhaps, in Europe did bishops wield such extensive temporal powers, and the fact that local opinion ran strongly in the direction of the reformed principles and of secularisation made the immediate future of these districts a very open question. Ivan had a solution of the difficulty which he was not loth to put into practice. A grievance he undoubtedly had against the Livlanders, who had hindered his intercourse with the Hansa League and prevented free immigration of artificers and craftsmen from the Empire into Russia. Consequently he suddenly bethought him of the clause in the original truce with von Plettenberg, whereby an annual tribute from the town of Dorpat had been agreed to, and promptly lost sight of. The Tzar reminded the Livlandish envoys of this unremembered pledge, and refused to renew the truce until the arrears had been paid in full. 1557The representatives of the Land-Master and the sovereign bishops argued and promised, but they did not pay, and Ivan prepared for war. Von FÜrstenberg vainly endeavoured to rouse his subordinates and coadjutors to a sense of the coming danger. The Bishop of Dorpat hastily declined the offer of a few companies of lanzknechts, whose loosely disciplined habits he well remembered; he had forgotten the Russians. 1558In January three divisions of Moskovite, Tartar, and Tcherkess troops, under the command of a Glinski, a Romanov, and an erstwhile Khan of Kazan, rode into the Order territory and wasted Livland and Estland to within four miles of Revel.[144] The outskirts of Dorpat were burnt, and the invaders returned from this preliminary winter campaign with a heavy spoil of cannons, church bells, treasure, and captives. A contemporary account accuses the Tartars of fiendish cruelties upon the hapless inhabitants who fell into their clutches; among other fantastically devised tortures, men were fastened on to the ground, holes punctured into their sides, and gunpowder poured therein, which being ignited, sent the victims into shreds.[145] Ivan’s object in sending war and desolation careering through the land was to bring the various factors which composed its government into subjection to his authority, as the Prussian State had been brought under the sovereignty of Poland. The Livlanders still imagined that peace might be bought, and at a Landtag held at Wolmar in March it was resolved to send envoys to the Tzar with an offer of 60,000 thalers. Ivan refused to receive the ambassadors, and the chances of reconciliation were still further lessened by an outbreak of hostilities between the opposing fortresses of Narva and Ivangorod, the former of which was captured by the Russians. The war recommenced with renewed vigour on the part of the invaders; the defending forces were too hopelessly disorganised to offer an effective resistance to the Moskovite attack. Churchmen and Ordermen, nobles and burghers, blamed each other mutually, and the luckless peasantry (who since their conversion to Christianity by the Sword Brethren had scarcely been surfeited with the peace and goodwill which had been officially promised them) suffered at the hands of all. Dorpat, Neuhausen, Ringen, and many other strongholds fell before the assaults of the Moskovites, and Ivan’s troops extended their ravages into Kourland. But meanwhile significant events had been taking place at the headquarters of the Order. Von FÜrstenberg had resigned his office to a younger man, Gotthard Kettler, and this new chief had inaugurated vigorous measures whereby to save, if possible, some fragment from the ruin of the rapidly dissolving anachronism which had held together for over 300 years. The Kings of Poland, Sweden, and Denmark were appealed to for assistance, and a more spirited opposition was shown to the Tzar’s voevodas. A half-hearted irruption of the Krim Khan, Devlet Girei, into Moskovite territory towards the close of the year did not materially weaken Ivan’s grip upon the struggling provinces, but in the following May, through the mediation of the new King of Denmark (Frederick II.), an armistice of six months was granted to the distressed Livlanders. 1559Kettler, the Archbishop of Riga (Wilhelm Hohenzollern), and the various representatives of the Order, the cathedral lands, and the cities sought to turn this respite to good account. Like vultures swooping down from an empty sky, the agents of the neighbouring northern powers appeared suddenly on the scene now that they understood that the Baltic Bund really meant dying. The Empire, torn and exhausted by the religious warfare which had attended the progress of the Reformation, was unable to take effective part in the obsequies of its detached colony. Other interested waiters upon Providence, however, there were in plenty. Magnus of Holstein, brother of the King of Denmark, was elected successor to Johann Munchausen, Bishop of Oesel and Wiek, who was willing, for a substantial recompense, to evacuate a bishopric which had become neither Catholic nor safe. Revel and the Estlandish barons turned their eyes Swedenward, while in September an alliance was formed between Poland and the expiring Order, which showed in which direction Kourland and Livland were likely to fall. The truce came abruptly to an end in the midst of all these schemings, and the Order knights fought their last campaign amid depressing circumstances. The strongly fortified town of Fellin, in which ex-Master von FÜrstenberg had entrenched himself, was captured—or bought—by the Moskovite voevoda Kourbski, and another disaster overtook the Cross warriors at Ermes, where a whole detachment was surrounded by an overpowering force of the enemy and all who were not slain taken as prisoners to Moskva. The Tzar who had wept over the dead Kazanese did not on this occasion permit his triumph to soften his feelings towards the wretched captives, who were flogged through the streets of the capital with whips of wire and then beheaded.[146] Hatred and fear of the Tartar-tinged and autocratic Moskovite sovereignty, heightened by acts such as this, drove the Baltic folk more speedily into the arms of the various foreign powers who were able and willing to absorb them. Oesel had already come under Danish influence; in June 1561 Erik XIV. of Sweden (who had succeeded Gustavus Vasa the preceding September) took Estland formally under his protection. Sigismund-August completed the partition by taking over from the Order Kourland and as much of Livland as was not in the hands of the Russians. Mar. 1562The former province was erected into a hereditary duchy dependent on the Polish crown, and bestowed upon the ci-devant Master, Gotthard Kettler, who was transformed into Duke of Kourland; the ecclesiastical lands of the Kourlandish bishopric of Pilten, however, “went with” the territory of Oesel, which also comprised the church-lands of Wiek in Estland. Riga remained for the present a free city, depending more or less upon Poland, and the archbishopric was extinguished on the death of its last prelate, Wilhelm Hohenzollern, in 1563.[147] Thus passed away in violent dissolution the strange anomalous time-honoured Baltic Bund, that missionary outpost of western Christianity and civilisation, which had crammed its commerce and its Christ swordwise down the throats of the Liv tribes, had led an existence of intermittent strife with its neighbours and within itself, and dying, left a legacy of two hundred years’ warfare behind it.

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.

Russia it has well been said is the country of contrasts, and the reign of Ivan furnishes some curious anomalies of administration. Of all the strange fruit to be borne under the circumstances of time and place—in the Moskovy of the sixteenth century—a States-General was about the last to be looked for. And yet this was indeed the apparition which the violent control-impatient Tzar called up to advise him on the purely administrative question of continuation or termination of the Polish war. In the summer of 1566 came to Moskva an unwonted assemblage of boyarins, higher clergy, small proprietors, merchants, and townsfolk, 339 in all, to deliberate on the matter which had been submitted to their decision. Sigismund-August had abandoned his demands for the restitution of Smolensk and Polotzk, and was willing to unite with Ivan in a scheme for driving the Swedes out of Estland and partitioning that province and Livland amicably between the two Slav powers. The East-Russian monarch did not jump at these favourable proposals, but insisted that Riga, Wenden, Wolmar, Ronneburg, and Kokenhausen should be added to his share of Livland. Possibly his object was to harass Lit’uania by a prolongation of the war, in the hope that, on the death of Sigismund-August, the electors of the grand duchy might be driven to put a term to their country’s sufferings by bestowing their suffrages on their most formidable neighbour; as the Poles had done in the case of Yagiello. The King refused to make the required concessions, hence the deadlock which the Russian Diet was called together to discuss. The assembly unanimously concurred in refusing to abate the Tzar’s demands upon Livland, which appeared to them extremely reasonable. Thus the old Slavonic custom of violently disposing of a minority was not called into requisition; had the unanimity been the wrong way Ivan would probably not have shrunk from a heroic treatment of the case. Whatever hopes the Tzar may have entertained of detaching Lit’uania from the Polish crown were dispelled by the political stroke which Sigismund-August effected a few years later; by the Union of Lublin, signed, after many a stormy sitting, on the 1st July 1569, Poland and Lit’uania were definitely bound together in a dual but indivisible realm. The question of the succession to the double throne still remained open, but it was scarcely likely that the turbulent and almost independent nobles of the Polish provinces would turn their thoughts towards the grim despot of Moskva, charm he never so wisely. Ivan, however, in obstinately refusing to conclude peace on any but the most exorbitant terms, and confining his military operations for the most part to unimportant border skirmishes, was pursuing the time-honoured Moskovite wolf-borrowed policy of wearing down an adversary by persistent untiring attack. Even more hoary and respectable with the sanction of age, dating indeed from the days of Sviatoslav Igorovitch, was the happy-go-lucky neglect of the southern and eastern possessions of the gosoudarstvo, which were generally left with no better protection than those with which nature had surrounded them. South of Moskva nothing matters, might have expressed the indifference with which the Russian statecraft permitted its outlying districts in this direction to be continually overrun by marauding armies. 1569In the year of the Lublinskie Union a Turko-Tartar invasion, having for its nucleus 17,000 troops under the command of an Ottoman pasha, entered the steppe-lands of the Azov basin to prosecute what might be considered a holy war against the Infidel conquerors of Kazan and Astrakhan. With the idea of bringing the Mussulman lands watered by the Volga into closer touch with Azov, and thereby with the water-way to Constantinople, the Turkish plan of campaign included the gigantic project of uniting that river with the Don by means of a canal. Neither this undertaking nor the meditated swoop upon Astrakhan was seriously prosecuted, and the invaders seem to have gathered alarm from the awful stillness of the solitudes into which they had penetrated, and to have seen Moskovite armies stealing upon them where only the foxes and the steppe-eagles sought their prey amid the waving grasses. The Tartar auxiliaries gradually dispersed and the famine-wasted troops of the Sultan re-embarked at Azov without having encountered human enemies other than the skirmishing bands of Tcherkess warriors who had harassed their retreat.

Permanently at war with Poland, never safe from the hostility of the Krim Tartars, and threatened with the aggression of the great Mohametan power of South-East Europe, Ivan seemed to find among his own subjects enemies more punishable than any who menaced him from without. Moskva and Aleksandrov had been the scene of many a nightmare deed of cruelty; many an action of injustice and oppression had been perpetrated by the fiend-hearted Opritchniki in the country districts; but now something on a larger scale was to be attempted. The “episode of Novgorod,” one of the most terrible events of a terrible reign, is introduced by some of the earlier historians in a somewhat fantastic manner. One Petr, a native of Volhynia, who had suffered for some offence at the hands of the Novgorodskie authorities, revenged himself by calumniating the city rulers in the too susceptible mind of the Tzar; his story was that a letter, addressed to Sigismund-August, and signed by the Archbishop (Pimen) and the leading inhabitants of the city, offering to transfer their allegiance to the Polish monarch, had been hidden behind the image of the Mother-of-God in the Sofia Cathedral at Novgorod, where it was eventually found by a confidential agent dispatched by Ivan from Moskva.[155] Why a letter intended for the King of Poland, and presumedly of some urgency, should have been placed, and left, in such a curious position, is not very apparent. That such treason was actually meditated is at least possible. Novgorod, clinging to the memory of lost liberties and departed glories, may not unnaturally have turned wistful eyes towards any protector who might save her from a dynasty which, in the person of Ivan III., had wrought her such lasting injury, and in the person of his grandson threatened her with further oppressions. The morbidly suspicious mind of the Tzar would not be without apprehension on this score, and in this case there is no reason to presuppose that evidence, real or concocted, was an essential preliminary to preventative action. In the autumn of 1569 the incriminating letter is said to have been found. In December the Tzar, with the Tzarevitch Ivan, his favourite boyarins, and an army of Opritchniki, set out on a punitive expedition against Novgorod and the neighbouring towns. Like a python encoiling its prey this strange peregrinating “bed of justice” moved towards the devoted city, leaving an ugly streak of blood and desolation in its track. Klin, a small township near Tver, was the starting-point of the red carnival. What exact offence the inhabitants had committed in the eyes of their sovereign it is impossible to say, since they could scarcely have been suspected of complicity in the alleged treasonable correspondence with Sigismund-August. The Tzar, however, let slip his “peculiars” on them, and murder and pillage became the order of the day. “Houses and streets were filled with corpses, and neither women nor children were spared.”[156] Hence onward, at Tver, Torjhok, Gorodnya, and in all the villages as far as lake Ilmen, the same scenes of blood and rapine were enacted; the roads leading to Novgorod were strewn with dead bodies.[157] It was during this grisly progress through the dark snow-swathed pine-forests, where the ravens watched over the frozen corpses, and the wolves feasted on what the Kromiesniki left behind them, that Maluta Skouratov turned aside to the Otrotch monastery and transacted his business with the ex-Metropolitan Filipp. Truly the frosts of winter seemed to have got into men’s blood and all feelings of mercy and goodwill to have evaporated at the festivals of Noel. To the Novgorodskie, awaiting the arrival of this dread visitation, tidings kept pouring in which might well have roused them to the defiance of despair, and armed them against their fate. Jan. 1570The Opritchniki had already drawn a cordon round the slobodas and outskirts of the city, and were ransacking the numerous monasteries which studded the sandy plain, putting to death such of the inmates as showed the least sign of opposition. But there was no Martha to organise resistance, no Mstislav the Brave to step in between Novgorod and her doom. When Ivan, accompanied by his son, courtiers, and a formidable body-guard of Strielitz, made his entry into the terror-stricken city, he was met on the famous Volkhov bridge by the Vladuika Pimen at the head of the clergy and principal citizens, with the cross and sacred banners displayed. The miraculous ikon, which had repelled the attack of the Souzdalskie besiegers, failed to turn the heart of the Tzar, and the Archbishop’s quavering blessing was refused. Novgorod was given over to slaughter and pillage and Pimen himself was spared only to perform antics degrading alike to his manhood and his office. For six weeks the city and its outskirts was a continued scene of confiscation and wholesale execution; numbers of the inhabitants were flung into the Volkhov, at a point near the bridge where its waters never freeze, and so many were disposed of in this way that lake Ladoga is said to have been tainted by the carrion. The total number of the victims has been variously computed, contemporary accounts fixing the death-roll from 2770, “besides women and common folk,” to the maximum and probably enormously exaggerated figure of 60,000.[158] In a curious and appallingly suggestive register, preserved at the Kirillov monastery, in which Ivan used to keep a reckoning of his victims and apparently apprise his God of their dispatch, there is the following entry: “O Lord! give peace to the souls of 1505 of Thy servants, Novgorodians.”[159] The number of unburied corpses was sufficiently great to cause a pestilence, which rounded off the Tzar’s act of vengeance. After having denuded the celebrated Cathedral of its bells, vessels, ikons and other treasures, and destroyed cattle, grain, and whatever could not be conveniently carried off, Ivan called together the wretched remnant of the citizens and graciously asked for their prayers on behalf of himself and his family.

Then, in the middle of February, he departed towards Pskov, leaving the silent city alone with its dead. A romantic, but not necessarily romancing, element runs through the account of Ivan’s dealings with Pskov. Sharing in the conjectural guilt for which Novgorod had been so mercilessly chastised, the Tzar had devised for the city on the Peipus a similar punishment. Halting at one of the monasteries without the walls, on the eve of his intended assize, he was moved by hearing the bells of all the churches and religious houses around toll at midnight, in funeral anticipation of the threatened butchery. His feelings were still further worked upon by the appearance on the scene of a local celebrity, one Nikolai, half-hermit, half-charlatan, who offered him meat, and on being indignantly rebuked—it was Lent—boldly accused the Tzar of feeding on human bodies. This stark, uncanny being, in the vigorous words of Sir Jerome Horsey, an adventurous Englishman who visited Moskovy several times in various capacities, “with bold Imprecations and Exorcismes calling him Blood-sucker and Deuourer of Christian flesh, swore by his Angell that hee should not escape death by a present Thunderbolt, if he or any of his did touch the least childs haire in that Citie.”[160] It is not improbable that this madman and fanatic may have made a strong impression upon a kindred spirit, and the unusual occurrence of a thunderstorm in February, which the chronicles relate, would have added to the Tzar’s superstitious uneasiness. Of the existence of this “sorcerer” Horsey gives evidence at first hand: “I saw this Impostor, a foule creature; hee went naked Winter and Summer.... His Holinesse could not endure me,” he adds, which, as the Englishman was openly sceptical as to his supernatural powers, was not wonderful. Whatever may have influenced the Tzar to an unwonted deviation into humanity, he suddenly stayed his avenging hand and returned to Moskva with his Opritchniks, his Court, and the captive Archbishop. That he was in any way satiated with cruelty does not appear, as in the same year he treated the capital to a blood-carnival on a grander scale than any it had yet witnessed. What gave added alarm to this new reign of terror was that no one was safe from implication, for the Tzar’s own seeming favourites and the most trusted of his creatures were arrested one after the other. The Basmanovs, father and son, Viskovatui, the Treasurer Founikov, Athanasie Viazemskie, Ivan Vorontzov, and scores of other princes and boyarins were pounced upon and hurried off into safe keeping, while sinister preparations went forward in the great square of the Kitai-gorod. On the 25th July all was in readiness; eighteen gibbets and a large cauldron suspended over a glowing furnace, with other implements of punishment, met the Tzar’s eye as he rode with Maluta Skouratov and other yet surviving favourites on to the scene of execution. But one important item was lacking; where were the onlookers? The great square was deserted, for the Moskvitchi had hidden themselves away from the alarming spectacle which the Gosoudar had prepared for them; there was no knowing where the matter would stop. Ivan sent his soldiers to summon his subjects to the show, and even went in person to beat up the skulking citizens, who flocked with quaking hearts to the various coigns of vantage round the Red Place. The audience having been secured, the prisoners were marched out in a long file to the scene of their punishment. The crowd, scanning the wan faces of the victims, missed that of Viazemskie, who had died under torture, and the Basmanovs were also absent. A crowning horror was reserved for them. But see, the Tzar speaks. Raising his voice that all might hear, he demanded of the people of Moskva if the tortures and executions they were about to witness seemed to them just? They did, they did. No shred of hope could the doomed men grasp from that hoarse murmur of servile approbation. Like beaten gladiators, reading their fate in the upturned thumbs and hard faces of the onlookers, they stood unfriended before that vast multitude. I.H.S. has taken the place of the S.P.Q.R., but fifteen hundred years have not materially removed Christian Moskva from the ethic-level of pagan Rome. Up to the mounted monarch was led the first victim, Viskovatui, whom Ivan accused of treasonable correspondence with the King of Poland, with the Sultan, and with the Krim Khan, emphasising his accusations by slashing the boyarin’s face with his whip. Bound, gagged, and hung by the feet, he was forthwith hacked to pieces; Maluta Skouratov, descending from his horse, sliced off an ear by way of a beginning. Founikov was dispatched by alternate drenching with boiling and iced water, and “expired in horrible torments.” Others, to the number of about 200, were put to death in various manners, the Tzar himself having the credit of impaling one old man on his lance.[161] On what evidence, if any, these men were found guilty of treason and disloyalty it is impossible to know, but this at least may be remarked, that, enjoying as they did the Tzar’s favour and patronage, they had scarcely a motive for wishing to overturn or undermine his authority. The executions on the Red Place, renewed after an interval of a few days, were not the only outlet for the monarch’s anger or blood-thirst; other evil deeds are related of this reign of terror, this running amok of a human being among his unresisting fellows. It was said that Ivan forced Thedor Basmanov, the “angel-faced,” to kill his own father: a ghastly deed which did not save the perpetrator from a death by torture, and which at least need not be unreservedly believed in. Torture was also meted out to the widows of some of the most distinguished of the victims of the Red Place, and eighty were said to have been flung into the Moskva river. Such a glut of corpses defied expeditious or thorough burial, and for many days and nights the inhabitants of that horror-haunted city witnessed packs of dogs crunching and tearing human bones and flesh in the dry ditches beneath the Kreml walls and in the open spaces of the Kitai-gorod. Some of the bodies appear to have found their way into the tzarskie fish-ponds, and carp and pike grew bloated on the rich banquet.[162] And amid the gloom and stifled wailing the dread author of it all, the man of terror and blood and punishments, prostrates himself daily in the holy places, bumping his forehead on the pavement before the sacred ikons. Splendid triumph of the Nazarene! Oh glorious irony! The great Orthodox Tzar, conqueror of Kazan and Astrakhan and Polotzk, master of the lives and liberties of his trembling subjects, bows in abject worship before the picture of a woman and a little child.

Amid the seemingly indiscriminating severities with which Ivan cowed the inhabitants of his principal cities, his mind was engaged in the conduct of a dexterous and well-thought-out foreign policy. The same year that witnessed the episode of Novgorod and the butchery in the Kitai-gorod was signalised by a long-laboured truce (to run for three years) between Moskovy and Poland. 1570The growing expectancy of a vacancy of the Polish-Lit’uanian throne had no doubt something to do with this reconciliation. That Ivan seriously put himself forward as a candidate for that extremely limited and curtailed monarchy seems to be the case, judging from the significant instructions which his ambassadors received, to keep strict silence, when in Poland, on the subject of the Tzar’s domestic tyrannies.[163] Equally surprising, but nevertheless credit-worthy, the Tzar was not without a party among the liberty and license-loving Polish nobles, many of whom, particularly at Warszawa, were said to be adopting Moskovite costume in view of a coming dynastic displacement. His adherents were chiefly among the szlachta, or small nobility, who numbered in their ranks many of the Reformed persuasion. At this period Protestants and Orthodox were lumped together in Poland, under the common designation of Dissidents, and suffered equally at the hands of the dominant Catholics. Hence many members of the Diet were more alarmed at the prospect of an Austrian, or other Jesuit-ridden king, than at the possible unmanageability of the Moskovite Tzar. While awaiting the drift of events in Poland, Ivan set in motion a course of action by which he hoped to drive the Swedes out of the Baltic provinces. His idea was to enlist the sympathy and support of the long-suffering Livlanders and Estlanders by setting up a puppet king who should govern the old lands of the Bund, under the suzerainty of Moskva. The title of King of Livland, offered, according to contemporary report, successively to ex-Master von FÜrstenberg and the Duke of Kourland (by both of whom it was declined), was eventually accepted by the ambitious but effete Magnus of Holstein, Duke of Oesel and Wiek. (1570)Magnus paid a visit to Moskva—in some trepidation, for the city was getting an unhealthy reputation—and returned with the Tzar’s proclamation of his new dignity, backed up by five-and-twenty thousand Russian troops. With this force and his own German guards, the Holsteiner advanced upon Revel, which, however, held out against both his wiles and his assaults; the latter he discontinued after a siege of thirty weeks’ duration (16th March 1571), burning his camp-works and withdrawing his army into quarters. This rebuff settled the fate of the vassal “kingdom.” In another direction Ivan’s foreign policy had been equally unsuccessful—in an attempt, namely, to cultivate friendly relations with the Ottoman power. The embassy which he sent in 1570 to Constantinople, to congratulate Sultan Selim on his accession, was coldly received, and a demand put forward for the relinquishing of the Russian sovereignty over Kazan and Astrakhan. The uneasiness which the Tzar felt with regard to the possibility of a forward Mussulman movement was increased by news which was brought to Moskva in the spring of 1571 of a warlike activity among the Krimskie Tartars. Whether instigated by Turkish influences, or by the anti-Moskovite party in Poland, or whether acting on his own initiative, Devlet-Girei was certainly preparing for an inroad upon Russian territory, and Ivan hastily assembled an army of 50,000 men, which he posted, under the leadership of several voevodas, along the banks of the Oka, where the enemy was expected to pass. The invading force, said to be 120,000 strong, eluded this first line of defence and bore straight upon Moskva. The Tzar, who might with the forces at his disposal have held the Tartars in check till the army of the Oka came up on their flank, fled, as his father Vasili had done, as most of the Grand Princes of Moskva had from time to time done under similar circumstances, and sheltered himself at Rostov, leaving the capital to its fate. Weakened and dispirited by this desertion, the force which had raced back from the Oka and arrived at much the same time as the Krimskies made no attempt to defend the slobodas and outlying quarters of the city, which were set on fire by the Khan’s orders. Ignorant, probably, of the strength of the Russian garrison, and fearing to be taken unawares by a reinforcement from the north, the Tartars made no further move upon the city, and indeed the rapid spread of the flames made pillage impossible. With the exception of the stone-built Kreml, nearly the whole town was destroyed, and the loss of life, though probably enormously exaggerated by contemporary writers, was undoubtedly very great. “Then might you haue seene a lametable spectacle,” writes an English traveller twenty years later, “... the people burning in their houses and streates, but most of all such as laboured to passe out of the gates farthest from the enemie, where meeting together in a mighty throng, and so pressing euery man to preuent another, wedged themselves so fast within the gate, and streates neare vnto it, as that three ranks walked one vpon the others head, the vppermost treading downe those that were lower: so that there perished at that time (as was sayd) by the fire and the presse, the number of 800,000 people, or more.”[164] Or less. Another Englishman, Sir Jerome Horsey, bears witness to the fact that numbers of the inhabitants, plunging, with all their removable valuables, into the river, to escape from the flames and the Tartars, sank beneath its waters, and that long after the bodies had been disposed of, it was a fashionable amusement to drag the river bed for submerged treasure, adding significantly, “I my selfe was somewhat the better for that fishing.” Satisfied with the striking and easily-accomplished chastisement which he had inflicted upon the half-dreaded, half-despised enemy, the Khan withdrew his Hordes, carrying with him immense numbers of captured Moskovites, and pursued at a safe distance by the tzarskie voevodas. Ivan, returning to his desolated capital and dreading a renewal of the struggle with an antagonist, formidable in himself and possibly a forerunner of Turkish hostility, began to reckon on the necessity of purchasing peace by the surrender of Astrakhan. While, however, the victorious Tartar was plaguing him with taunting messages and importunate demands, the Tzar diverted his mind to the consideration of a more pleasing matter. His second wife Mariya had died in 1569, and he had for some time contemplated a renewal of the marriage state. The present seemed to him a good opportunity for carrying out his project, and the usual preliminaries were set in motion. The selection of a mate for the Russian Gosoudars was conducted on a thoroughly democratic principle, and any young woman of healthy and pleasing appearance might aspire to the honour of becoming Tzaritza. On this occasion over 2000 of the likeliest maidens of Moskovy were brought to the Aleksandrovskie Sloboda, and the Court doctors and midwives helped the monarch to make his choice, which fell upon a young girl of Novgorod, Martha Sobakin. Either the work of selection was badly done, or the Tzar was particularly unfortunate, or the bride met with foul play, for she died before the marriage ceremonies were well through. Needless to state the thwarted widower inclined to the last alternative, and several persons were put to death on suspicion. The proverb “one funeral makes many” certainly applies to the decease of a Tzaritza in sixteenth-century Moskva. A batch of boyarins and voevodas were ordered to execution the same winter (1571), on the charge of having been in league with the Tartars, and doubtless some such suspicion was a deciding factor in Ivan’s supine flight before the invaders. Some were impaled, others knouted to death, others poisoned.[165]

Whether this sanguinary example had the effect of encouraging “les autres,” or whether the damage sustained by Moskva from the Tartar brands stung the Russians to exceptional effort, a renewal of the invasion by the Khan met with a determined and successful opposition. Aug. 1572An enormous army of Krim and Nogai Tartars, reinforced by troops of Yeni-Tscheri and other Turkish soldiers, pushed across the Oka, but was encountered and decisively defeated by a Moskovite force of inferior numbers, under the command of Kniaz Vorotinski and Ivan Sheremetiev. The slaughter was heavy and the issue of the day swept away all question of withdrawal from Astrakhan, and gave Moskovy a long immunity from trouble with the steppe-folk. Ivan, who, while the attack threatened, had been seized with a desire to visit the northern districts of his dominions, returned from Novgorod to share in the general rejoicing. In the early part of the year he had scandalised and embarrassed the heads of the Church by taking unto himself a fourth wife, Anna Koltovskoi; after having accomplished this breach of the Church’s law he still further disturbed the spiritual fathers by announcing his sin to the Synod then sitting for the election of a Metropolitan in the place of Kirill, deceased, and demanding absolution. The Vladuikas, torn between love for their precious dogmas and a natural and earnest desire to fall in with the Tzar’s wishes, yielded finally to the stronger sentiment and hallowed the union. In order to prevent other less privileged persons from imitating the Tzar’s example, they hastened to “menace with a fulminating anathema those who should dare to enter into a fourth marriage.” Antonie, Archbishop of Polotzk, was elected Metropolitan.

While Moskva was yet quaking in anticipation of another visit from Devlet-Girei, an anxiously awaited event had taken place in the grand-duchy of Lit’uania. 1570At Knyszyn, near Grodno, on the 7th July, had passed away the amiable Sigismund-August, “last of the Yagiellos.” Instantly the states composing the Polish kingdom were plunged into the modified anarchy of an interregnum, and various aspirants to the kingly title, starting suddenly into the foreground, added to the general confusion. The internal differences which complicated the election of a successor to the defunct monarch were succinctly stated in the correspondence of a French diplomat, who informed his Court “there are four sorts of discords and different principles which greatly retard the election, which are: of the Lit’uanians with the Poles, of Great Poland with Little Poland, of the barons with the rest of the nobility, and of the Catholics with the Protestants.”[166] The faction of the Szlachta, or small landowners, was more or less identical with the Great-Poland party, while Little Poland was the stronghold of the higher magnates; this line of demarcation was further accentuated by the personal rivalry of Uchanski, Archbishop of Gniezno, who led the former party, and Firley, Grand Marshal of the realm, who headed the other. Add to this the fact that the Protestants were divided into more or less hostile camps of Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anabaptists, and a fair idea will be gathered of the field wherein the agents of the several candidates were to ply their arts. Of the princes who placed themselves, or were placed, in competition for the throne of the Yagiellos, the one whose claims stood forth most prominently was the Austrian Archduke Ernst, second son of the Emperor (Maximilian II.). The Habsburgs, who had already absorbed Bohemia and were almost as firmly established in that part of Hungary which was not occupied by the Turks, had on every possible occasion contracted matrimonial alliances with the Polish royal House, and hoped to add the Lekh kingdom to their family dominions. The candidature of the Archduke was backed by the imperial influence and had, moreover, the support of the Papacy, whose agent, Cardinal Commendone, was working to secure his election. On the other hand there were considerations which made his success by no means a foregone conclusion; the great body of the Protestants would unite in objecting to a monarch whose family traditions were bound up with Roman Catholic supremacy, and many of the Poles were apprehensive that an Austrian connection would involve them in a war with Turkey, a thing they were particularly anxious to avoid. Above all, he personified German intrusion, an element naturally distasteful to the Polish national spirit. The same dread of a foreign war which weakened the chances of the Archduke was the strongest factor, especially with the Lit’uanians, in advancing the Moskovite candidature. The term of truce had nearly run out and Ivan had clearly let it be understood that an unfriendly election would mean renewal of war. That the Tzar, as sovereign, might be a worse affliction than as a hostile neighbour was a contingency partly provided for by the jealous restrictions of the Pacta conventa, which he would be required to sign preliminary to his coronation. The idea of the Moskovite party in Lit’uania was, however, to elect the weak and more easily handled Thedor, Ivan’s second son, rather than the father. None of the Protestant princes who put themselves forward—John, King of Sweden (brother-in-law of the late Sigismund-August), Stefan Batory, Voevoda of Transylvania, and the young Duke Albrecht-Freidrich of Prussia—were strong enough to command the confidence even of their co-religionists. A further candidate there was, however, from an unexpected quarter. Henri de Valois, Duke of Anjou, brother to his Most Christian Majesty of France, and favourite son of Catherine de Medici, was a young gentleman who was casting about in various directions for an opening suitable for the development of his ambitions, and whose relations and acquaintances were exceedingly desirous to see him settled. Charles IX. was anxious to have this too brilliant brother removed to any sphere other than the kingdom of France, already in a sufficiently electric condition, a wish which was shared by Coligny and the Huguenots; while Catherine nursed the proud hope of seeing all her sons decorated with the kingly title. Monsieur himself was least enamoured of the project. From the Polish point of view he made an ideal candidate; belonging to a powerful House, which was neither German nor Moskovite, he was strong without being dangerous, and the good understanding which existed between the Louvre and the Porte would be an excellent guarantee for immunity from Turkish aggression. Nor was the Catholic bias of the Valois an insuperable obstacle to his election. The Prince who hunted Huguenots with such apparent zeal had in his boyhood dallied with the principles of the Reformation, and in later life seriously considered the project of placing himself at the head of the Protestants of the Low Countries.[167] He was in fact a thorough opportunist, and would probably hold, like his namesake of Navarre, in similar though reversed circumstances, that a kingdom outweighed the significance of a mass. His interests were actively pushed by the ambassador dispatched from France for that purpose, Jean de Montluc, Bishop of Valence, and the hesitancy of the Emperor and uncompromising attitude of the Tzar smoothed the way for his election. The news of the “happy and holy enterprise,” which had been carried to a successful conclusion in the streets of Paris in the small hours of the 24th August, was not received in Poland with the same complacency with which it was hailed at Rome, and the French candidature received a severe check. For months the name of the Duke of Anjou was in evil odour among the electors, and the sleepless efforts of Montluc were directed to the task of whitewashing his employer from the red stain of S. Bartholomew. The long-drawn-out proceedings which delayed the Diet of election, and which gave Poland an entirely new constitution, altering the whole course of her history, also gave time for the feeling against the Valois to die down; the French agents made good use of the respite and the Anjou cause steadily gained fresh adherents, till on the eve of the election scarcely any other candidate was seriously considered. 1573Thus it came to pass that, by an irony of fate, the stormy sittings of the Diet of Warszawa, which lasted for the greater part of April and May, resulted in bestowing the Polish crown on the prince who, of all the competitors, least coveted it. And in fact the hotly-contested prize, as it came out of the long interregnum, was scarcely a brilliant possession; “it was not the heritage of the Yagellos intact that the Bishop of Valence would have to take back to the brother of Charles IX., but a crown despoiled of a part of its privileges, and, under the title of king, nothing in truth more than the life-presidency of a republic.”[168] The terms of the celebrated Pacta conventa, to which every succeeding king would be required to give his adhesion, were, among others, that the king should have no voice in the election of a successor; must respect the religious liberty of the Dissidents; must neither undertake a war nor impose taxes without consent of Diet; nor marry nor divorce a wife without the same sanction; and that no foreigners should hold any public office.

A throne pent in with such conditions would scarcely be attractive in the eyes of the tyrant of Moskva, and Ivan seems to have used his influence less to promote the candidature of himself or his son than to secure the election of the Austrian Archduke. That he should be anxious to have the Empire for a near neighbour might appear strange; his real concern was lest a good understanding between a Franco-Polish King and the Sultan should lead to his own undoing. It was perhaps, however, an indirect effect of the influences of the free election on the banks of the Vistula that led the Tzar to disband his feared and hated Opritchniks (1572). While the Poles were yet in the throes of settling the procedure of their Congress, Ivan took advantage of the settled state of affairs in his own dominions and the embarrassed condition of his neighbours to make a further attack on the Swedish garrisons in Estland. With an army of 80,000 men he burst into a land whose inhabitants were complacently engaged in celebrating the festival of Christmas week, and changed the scenes of carol and carousal into those of litany and desolation. Wittenstein was captured after a brief resistance, during which the Tzar’s abiding favourite, Maluta Skouratov, lost his life. His fall was avenged, according to the Livlandish chronicles, by a holocaust of the prisoners, Swedes and Germans, who were burned alive on a pile of faggots.[169] A fit and seemly deed, if true, for the man who had exchanged with the Emperor Maximilian sentiments of pious horror at the affair of S. Bartholomew. Further Moskovite successes, and one of those wordy correspondences in which the Tzar revelled, were followed by a curious truce with Sweden, to run for two years (July 1575 to July 1577), and limited in scope as well as in duration, since it was only to effect a suspension of arms between the neighbouring provinces of Novgorod and Finland. Estland was still to be disputed at the sword’s point. For mysterious reasons of his own—possibly to lull German and Danish susceptibilities—Ivan continued to place Magnus of Holstein, his vassal “King,” in the forefront of his Baltic policy, and the unwilling Princeling was carried off to Moskva to be solemnly wedded to Mariya, daughter of Vladimir Andreivitch. Having made her an orphan the Tzar might well think it incumbent on him to provide her with a husband, but Magnus was scarcely overjoyed with a dowry of some inconsiderable presents and the government of the township of Karkus—to which dimensions his kingdom had shrunk. 1575-6The campaign in the Baltic debatable lands resulted in a further strengthening of the Russian foothold in that quarter; Pernau was stormed and taken with a loss of 7000 men; Helmet, Ermes, and other places in Livland surrendered to Ivan’s voevodas, and the stronghold of Habsal, in Estland, fell into their hands. From his western neighbours the Tzar had met with no opposition in his sea-ward course; the Poles, after the prolonged and elaborate labours of their king-choosing, had been again confronted, under extraordinary circumstances, with the dangers and difficulties of an interregnum. Never more than half reconciled to the eastern exile which his restricted Polish sovereignty entailed, Henri de Valois no sooner heard that he had succeeded to the crown of S. Louis (his brother had died on the 30th May 1574) than he fled precipitately from the kingdom over which he had reigned for barely seven months. Once more the shadow of the Habsburg loomed over the land, and there seemed indeed no suitable candidate with which to oppose the Austrian nomination. The Papal, Imperial, and Moskovite influence, as well as that of the Archbishop of Gniezno and the principal senators, pointed in the same direction; the Szlachta alone held out against the Archduke and his father. The Habsburg hopes were destined, however, to be again falsified, and a new rival sprang up against them in Stefan Batory, Voevoda of Transylvania. This vigorous prince, whose high qualities had secured him his sovereignty on the death of the last of the Zapolya dynasty, speedily became the favoured choice of the Szlachta and Dissident party, and, as a vassal of the Ottoman Empire, his election would guarantee the Poles from Turkish hostility. On the other hand they were threatened with the Tzar’s displeasure if they did not elect either Maximilian or his son, the Archduke. To the Poles, if not to the Lit’uanians, the Moskovite was a lesser bugbear than the Turk, and the popular vote was for Batory. The Archbishop and the Senate adhered to the Austrian cause, and the Diet (held at Warszawa, December 1575) resulted in a double election. The battle was not necessarily to the strong, but the race was undoubtedly to the swift; in April of the following year the dilatory Habsburg wrote to inform his brother of Moskva that “we, in December last, with great glory and honour, were elected to the kingdom of Poland and grand duchy of Lit’uania.” Ivan replied to Maximilian that he congratulated him on his election, but had since learned that Stefan Batory was at Krakow, crowned, and married to the Princess Anne Yagiello (sister of Sigismund-August). Stefan had shown as much hurry to arrive in his kingdom as Henri had displayed in escaping from it, and his accession was an accomplished fact; the death of the Emperor in the ensuing October removed the chance of a civil contest. 1576The new King, though brought up under Catholic influences, was supposed at the time of his candidature to be of the Protestant communion; he adapted his religion, however, to harmonise with that of the majority of his subjects, and of the wife whom it was politically expedient he should marry, and during his reign was the protector of the Jesuit party in Poland.[170] To Ivan and to Russia his elevation boded trouble, and the Tzar appears to have realised the danger and to have taken a bold but well-considered step to meet it. While Stefan was engaged in breaking down the armed resistance of the burghers of Dantzig, who would have none of him, the forces of Moskovy were sent in overwhelming strength into the Baltic provinces, and stronghold after stronghold wrested from Swede and Pole alike. Even the Holsteiner and German troops were treated as enemies—Duke Magnus was in temporary disgrace—and the country-folk were in some instances punished with brutal severity, flogged, burned alive, and in other ways made to suffer for the obstinate resistance of a foreign garrison. As a display of armed strength and resolution the campaign would have been valuable had it been followed up by a demand for a definite peace with Poland, coupled with a threat of immediate invasion of that country. Ivan had sufficient troops at his disposal to have overrun Kourland and parts of Lit’uania and to have forced peace or an unseasonable war upon Stefan. Instead of which, after having roused against himself the enmity of all the interests involved in the mastership of the disputed provinces—Swede, Pole, Dane, and German—he suspended hostilities and returned to Moskva, there to renew the bloody process by which he periodically thinned out his circle of boyarins and courtiers. 1577Mikhail Vorotinski, the conqueror of Devlet-Girei, and one of the most illustrious of the Russian voevodas, was tortured nigh unto death on a charge of sorcery, and died while being conveyed to Bielozero. Leonidas, successor to Pimen in the archiepiscopate of Novgorod, was sewn up in a bear-skin and worried to death by hounds. Other noted Moskovites were executed in various manners at the same period. While the Tzar’s seemingly blind rage was striking down some of his most capable voevodas, his adversary was straining every nerve to ensure success in the coming struggle. Drawing as exhaustively as was prudent on the resources of his kingdom and grand duchy, Stefan at the same time applied for external support in many directions; from Transylvania came troops, from Brandenburg cannon, from Sweden active co-operation, while the Pope and Sultan individually blessed the enterprise. In August 1579 the storm burst; the King, having formally declared war on Ivan, marched upon Polotzk, and the decisive moment had arrived when it would be seen whether the new-grown Russian gosoudarstvo would be able to maintain its high-water mark of western expansion, or whether all it had gained during the embarrassments and weakness of its neighbours would be lost at the first recoil. The composite army of Stefan probably consisted of better fighting material than any the Tzar could send against him, but the advantage of numbers and resources lay overwhelmingly with the Moskovite. Allowing for the large detachment which it was necessary to keep in the neighbourhood of the Oka to guard the capital from a possible Tartar attack, Ivan had still sufficient forces wherewith to have returned again and again to the relief of Polotzk, and to have extended the war at the same time into undefended parts of Lit’uania and Polish Livland. This plan was indeed partially put into operation; 20,000 Asiatic horsemen were dispatched into Kourland, and reinforcements were sent to the Russian garrisons in Livland and Ingermanland (which was threatened by the Swedes). But the scheme of campaign stopped short at this point; the constitutional timidity of Moskovite war policy asserted itself, and Ivan remained with the bulk of his army in deplorable inactivity at Pskov, while Polotzk and the neighbouring stronghold of Sokol, bravely defended but perseveringly attacked, fell into the hands of the invader. The harrying of the provinces of Sieversk and Smolensk wound up the Polish campaign for the year. Accustomed to winter warfare, the light troops of Moskovy might have taken advantage of the cold season to have inflicted retributive damage on their enemies, but the Tzar, thoroughly alarmed at the military vigour of this upstart opponent, wasted his opportunity in fruitless negotiations and in soft answers which failed to turn away wrath. Stefan, having allayed the grumblings of his barely tractable subjects, marched in the ensuing summer against Velikie-Louki, which, after a spirited defence, was carried on the 5th September. 1580Throughout the winter the war continued in the Baltic lands, where Poles, Swedes, and Danes—Magnus had early thrown off his allegiance to Moskva—captured several places from the Russians. Ivan, who had retired to the gloomy sanctuary of his beloved Aleksandrov, continued his proposals for peace in a correspondence with Stefan, which gradually assumed an angrier tone. “Man of blood!” breaks forth this astonishing letter-writer, “remember that there is a God.”

Amid the troubles pressing upon him from without, the sovereign still found time for marrying and giving in marriage. (1575)The bride for whose espousal he had obtained the dispensation of the Church had proved sterile, at least she had not increased his family, and she was, like his father’s first wife, dispatched to a convent, while another Anna replaced her; on this occasion the episcopal blessing was not asked for. 1580Now, while the flames of disastrous war were blazing over the lands which a century of patient effort had reclaimed from the west, Ivan celebrated at Aleksandrov his nuptials with Mariya, daughter of the boyarin Thedor Nagoi, and those of his second son, Thedor, with Irena, sister of the voevoda Boris Godounov.

The insatiate Stefan continued to employ both pen and sword against his hard-pressed adversary. In a letter rejecting Ivan’s renewed offers of peace, with which he prefaced a new campaign, he taunted the Tzar with his ill-sitting correctitude; “You reproach me with having mutilated the dead; it is false, but certain is it that you torture the living.” Entering thoroughly into the style and spirit of Ivan’s controversial essays, he further recommended him to re-read the fiftieth Psalm in order to acquaint himself with the duty of a Christian. The Tzar had found his match.

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.

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.