Ivan the Terrible (12 page)

In his first letter to Kurbsky, written in 1564, Ivan hints at unworthy pursuits, youthful vandalism, possibly chasing after women with a band of friends and failure to observe church rituals,
²⁹
and in his
History of Ivan IV
, Kurbsky accuses the Tsar of committing real acts of brigandage and other evil deeds, ‘unbefitting to relate, but shameful too’.
³⁰
There is little evidence of Ivan's misbehaviour apart from his own confessions, but there is an obscure reference to something much more serious in a group of documents which suggest that in 1546 and early 1547, when Ivan was preparing for his coronation and his marriage, he also indulged in some of the most savage persecutions of those who had been his friends.

The source is a
vypis
', or note, on the second marriage of Vasily III. Included in this document is a so-called ‘prophecy after the event’, attributed to an eastern patriarch who foretold that the son of an adulterous union, like Vasily's second marriage, would be a ‘torturer, and a pillager of other people's property’, and described the way in which a number of princes were cruelly put to death. In July 1546 Ivan was in Kolomna with his army, and executed three of his boyars in front of his soldiers, for their entertainment, including F.S. Vorontsov, whom Metropolitan Makarii had once saved by interceding for him with the
Shuiskys (see above p. 43). The patriarch's ‘prophecy’ is supported by entries in other regional chronicles to the effect that in 1547, while Ivan was inspecting the girls in his bride-show, he was also ordering the execution of Telepnev Obolensky's son, who was impaled opposite the walls of the Kremlin, and the beheading of Obolensky's nephew, ‘at the request of his [Ivan's] uncle Mikhail Vasil'evich Glinsky and his mother Anna’. A fifteen-year-old princeling was also dispatched, to the disgust of Kurbsky.
³¹

One person may have played a limited, if formative, part in the education of Ivan. This was Metropolitan Makarii. Born around 1480, Makarii, who was probably not from a military family, was created Metropolitan in 1542, when he was already over sixty. He started out in life as a monk in the Pafnut'ev-Borovskii monastery, which in the 1470s had been the centre of the school of icon-painting associated with the monk Dionisi. It is probably here that Makarii learnt icon-painting, and the monastery may have influenced his own spiritual and aesthetic conceptions. After a period in Mozhaisk, in 1526 Makarii was appointed – apparently by the wish of Vasily III – Archbishop of Novgorod, a see which had been left vacant for seventeen years. A fervent upholder of the primacy of Moscow, Makarii was a non-fanatical follower of Iosif Volotsky, who immediately introduced monastic communal living in Novgorod, and upheld the monastic right to own land. He also supported the construction of many churches in Novgorod, an activity which had seriously declined after Ivan III's last devastation of the city in 1478. As Archbishop of Novgorod, Makarii had exercised to the full the ecclesiastical privilege of interceding for prisoners, the poor and orphans, and those in disgrace with the government in Moscow, and thus won the esteem of the Novgorodians.

In his striving to raise the level of Russian culture Makarii, as he wrote himself, collected all the holy writings he could find and had them transcribed: the Holy Gospel, the Holy Apostol (Acts and Epistles of the Apostles), the three great psalters, the books of St John of the Golden Mouth (Chrysostom), and of Basil the Great and Grigorii Bogoslov, the Jewish Wars of Josephus, extracts from the works of Iosif of Volokolamsk, all the prophetic and apostolic books, the Apocrypha, the lives of saints and martyrs, the writings of the Church Fathers, and even the lives of the new saints whose canonization Makarii himself had arranged. He grouped them into twelve books of readings for the twelve months, which formed the
Great Menology (Velikii chet'i minei
). The first set of twelve books was prepared, Makarii explains, in the twelve years while he was Archbishop in Novgorod.
³²
A copy was sent to the
Grand Prince, and there is evidence that Ivan IV later in life made use of the texts included there.
³³

It is also possible that, through Makarii, Ivan may have been introduced to the
Stikhi pokaiannye
(
Poems of Repentance
), which emerged in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and became a self-contained form of literary expression: they were sung hymns to be used during the great fasts on the themes of the evanescence of life and the sinfulness of mortal man, and served to prepare the soul for the passage to the next world. They are very lovely poems, and would certainly appeal to one of Ivan's temperament, as far as we know it.

Raised to the position of Metropolitan of Russia in 1542, Makarii began to play an important part in the court of the young Ivan. It is extremely unlikely that a man of the cloth and of his scholarly temperament should have been indifferent to the welfare of the young prince, then about twelve years old, and should have failed to take steps to instruct him or have him instructed. There is no doubt that until at any rate 1560 Ivan treated Makarii with great respect and possibly even affection.
³⁵
According to Uspensky, he was probably the most influential metropolitan in Russian history, being one of the few to continue in office until his death in 1563 instead of leaving it, whether voluntarily or not.
³⁶
Once he moved to Moscow he drew upon a larger number of educated copyists and his work of scholarly diffusion went ahead.
³⁷
He was also probably responsible for the appointment of Sylvester to the Cathedral of the Annunciation in the Kremlin.

Ivan came of age in 1545, when he was fifteen, but he did not yet rule. His grandmother, Princess Anna Glinskaia, and her two surviving sons,
Mikhail and Iuri, now dominated the court and proceeded to clear out Ivan's existing senior courtiers, his
dvoretskii
or majordomo, his
koniushii
or Master of the Horse, whose places they coveted, and others of his attendants, who were executed. The Glinskys also sought to avenge the death of their great-uncle Mikhail L'vovich.

Ivan's coming of age precipitated a meeting of the Boyar Council, the Church Council and the Grand Prince on 13 December 1546, to discuss his coronation, and in particular his title, and also his marriage. At the previous coronation, that of Grand Prince Dmitri in 1498, the young man had been crowned Grand Prince, Caesar to his grandfather's Augustus, and the crown had been placed on his head by Ivan III. The first and most significant departure was Ivan IV's coronation as ‘Tsar’, instead of Grand Prince, in a ceremony even more clearly based on East Roman practice than previously. On whose initiative this step was taken – on that of Ivan himself, deeply conscious of the need to assert his supremacy over his family and his boyars, by all valid means, or on that of Metropolitan Makarii, anxious to emphasize the role of Russia by giving religious sanction to a title hitherto used only intermittently, or even on that of the Glinskys, anxious to shore up his authority – is not known. It is not unlikely that the idea was sparked off by the desire to balance the Holy Roman Emperor as the secular head of the Christian world in the West by appearing as the secular head of the Christian world in the East, in a tenuous and unsystematic way for the time being, but nevertheless with a view to the future status of Russia in Europe.

A brief digression is necessary here on the problems created for the historian by the absence of exact translations for many Russian words descriptive of political concepts or institutions, and by the way in which Russian words can have many distinct meanings and uses in different places and times. One of the most elusive of these words is precisely the word
tsar
'. It derives from
tsesar
' or ‘caesar’, the title originally given to the Roman emperors after Augustus Caesar.
³⁸
With the passage of time, the use of ‘Augustus’ was reserved for the senior emperor in Constantinople, and ‘Caesar’ could be used of the junior emperor when there were two. But in Russian the term
tsar'
was applied to the senior emperor, who lived in the imperial city, Tsar'grad, and also eventually to the ruler of the Golden Horde, to kings in the Old Testament, to the books of Kings in the Bible and to oriental potentates. (The Holy Roman Emperor of the West was called
tsesar
'.) Other European rulers were called
knyaz'
, usually translated as prince, but derived from Germanic
*Kuningaz
, ‘king’; or
korol'
, king, derived from Karl (Charlemagne). The primary meaning of
tsar
' was thus an independent ruler, with no
overlord, who could be either a king of one particular nation or people, as in the Bible, or an ‘emperor’ ruling over several nations, such as the East Roman Emperor, a title pervaded by the charisma which emanated from a ruler chosen, crowned and anointed by God.
³⁹
It was this kind of ruler who was ‘
imperator in regno suo
’, the formula used by Philippe le Bel of France, and by Henry VIII.
⁴⁰

The fall of the East Roman Empire to the Ottomans had opened the way for the Russian Grand Prince, as the only independent Orthodox ruler, to contemplate calling himself tsar, and both Ivan III and Vasily III used the title occasionally, mainly in relations with minor powers such as Livonia. Vasily III did not use the title in his dealings with the Holy Roman Emperor, but once, in 1514, the Emperor Maximilian I was careless enough to address Vasily III as ‘Kaiser’, a precedent of which the Grand Prince duly took note.
⁴¹
Yet although the disappearance of the Empire of the East undoubtedly opened the way for the only remaining free Orthodox power to claim the title of emperor, and be recognized as such both in the East and in the West, such a step had to be carefully prepared since it would certainly be contested by other European powers. The growing assurance of the grand princely family, and the fact that many outside Russia failed to realize what the word
tsar
' meant, that it derived from ‘Caesar’ and was not some mysterious oriental term, coupled with the increasing spiritual ambition and political confidence of the Russian hierarchy, served to lead Metropolitan Makarii to propose or to agree to such a step.

On 16 January 1547, the coronation of Ivan took place in the Cathedral of the Dormition, the church of the Metropolitan, when he was sixteen. The rites were clearly modelled on the East Roman example, of which several texts had been translated from the Greek and had circulated in Russian monastic circles. A Russian deacon, Ignati, at that time in Constantinople, had written a description of the coronation of the Emperor Manuel Paleologus and his consort in 1392, and there was the precedent of the coronation of the Grand Prince Dmitri Ivanovich in 1498. Several versions of the rite of coronation of Ivan IV exist, written after the event, probably by Makarii, who devised the final form.
⁴²
On the day of the coronation those with a role to play in the ceremony donned ceremonial robes and the regalia were carried into the cathedral, where Makarii blessed them and they were placed on a table on a dais twelve steps up from the floor, where there were also two thrones, one for the Grand Prince, one for the Metropolitan. Ivan was followed into the cathedral by his brother and family to the sounds of a sung
mnogoletie
(‘many years’) – no musical instruments were used in
Orthodox services. Makarii sat down on his throne, while Ivan stood before him. It is noteworthy that scholars always speak of the coronation of Ivan as Tsar of Moscow, but in fact when he stood before the Metropolitan he demanded to be crowned, as all his ancestors had been, as Grand Duke of Vladimir, Novgorod and Moscow and Tsar of All Russia, thus emphasizing the continuing dynastic claims of the Riurikids and the primacy of the city of Vladimir over all other Russian cities. He next announced that he wished to be ‘anointed and crowned Tsar according to our ancient custom’. Makarii duly did so, proclaiming him ‘crowned and anointed and titled Grand Prince Ivan Vasil'evich, God crowned Tsar and sovereign [
samoderzhets
] of all Great Russia’.
⁴³

Central to the Russian coronation were the regalia said to have been presented by the Emperor Constantine Monomakh to his grandson, the Grand Prince Vladimir Monomakh of Kiev. This included the cap of Monomakh (a kind of Mongolian jewelled and furred cap used as a crown), a sceptre, a cornelian cup, splinters from the True Cross, and the
barmy
, or shoulder capes. A few years after the coronation the ‘throne of Monomakh’, generally known as ‘the Tsar's place’, was erected in the Cathedral of the Dormition. It was a large carved wooden structure, raised on four lions, with bas-reliefs setting out the story of the envoys sent by the Emperor Constantine Monomakh to the Grand Prince Vladimir to ask for peace, and describing the gifts that he sent.
⁴⁴

After placing the cap of Monomakh on Ivan's head and handing him the remaining regalia, Makarii delivered a long lecture on the duties of a tsar, and expounded the basic theory of how the Russian Church now thought the powers of a tsar should be exercised. Makarii's ‘precept’ drew on a number of Biblical, Greek, and Russian sources and emphasized the co-equal powers of the Church and the Tsar: the crown came from God through the offices of the Metropolitan, confirming the Tsar's ancestral rights. There was no distinction for Makarii between a Tsar's obligations to the commonwealth and to the Church. He must rule his realm according to God's law, and use justice towards all from the highest to the lowest, rewarding and punishing in accordance with the laws of God. Makarii quoted from Agapetus's missive to Justinian, and from other Greek texts all designed to stress the divinity of the tsar as long as he ruled justly and mercifully and according to law, as well as his responsibility for defending the Orthodox religion and extirpating heresy.
⁴⁵
Agapetus taught that the emperor received his power from God; he had been given the sceptre of the kingdom of this world and in the same way that of the kingdom of heaven. ‘His mortal body was like that of any man but in terms of his power he was like God.’ He must
therefore be worthy of his power. The sins of the emperor harm not only himself but his whole realm; he must therefore struggle against his baser tendencies. ‘God’, says Agapetus, ‘gave the emperor power in order to teach people to preserve justice, thus he must build his own rule on righteousness.’ The whole point of supreme power was that it should educate subjects in the idea of law. To teach it, the emperor must himself be imbued with it, with both divine and earthly law. The tsar's power was indeed unlimited, since no one could compel him to observe the law. But he himself had to bow to the law in order to demand obedience to the law from others. There was, of course, no reference whatsoever to institutional limitations on the Tsar's power, but the Tsar must practise self-limitation.
⁴⁶
In one respect, Makarii issued a specific injunction: the tsar should reward and protect his boyars and magnates (
vel'mozhi
) according to their lineage and be accessible and gracious and cordial, in accordance with his tsarist rank and status, to princes and service princes and service gentry, and to all Christ-loving men under arms.
⁴⁷
Ivan certainly fulfilled these expectations as regards his family: his grandmother, the Princess Anna Glinskaia, was granted extensive lands as an appanage, his uncle Mikhail Vasil'evich was appointed Master of the Horse, and his uncle Iuri was made a boyar.
⁴⁸