Ivan the Terrible (20 page)

The demand for land for distribution as service estates colours much of the underlying politics of sixteenth-century Russia. The need to supply the armed forces with land allegedly aroused the interest of the grand princes in confiscating the lands of the Church and the monasteries, and even that of the rich princes and boyars, and similarly created a pressure among the service gentry to acquire land and divided them politically as a result from the magnates who owned vast estates, or appanages, from which lands could also be confiscated. These various
political positions have been discussed at length by Russian historians and many different and often incompatible conclusions have been reached on an extremely slender basis of fact. The assumption that the main political divide throughout the sixteenth century was between the ‘reactionary’ or ‘conservative’ boyars, anxious to preserve the land in their hands and to prevent the ‘centralization’ of the state, which existed in a condition of blissful fragmentation, and the service gentry, who supported an absolute ruler in his progressive struggle for centralization against the boyars, has in the more recent historiography been very largely discarded. Both the boyars and the service gentry wanted land in both forms, as
votchina
(in outright ownership), by far the most valuable, and as
pomest'ia
(in service tenure), and both social groups, which overlapped to some extent, since they came from linked family clans, favoured a concentration of power in the central government. But
pomest'ia
were issued not only to descendants of noble servitors in the Tsar's court and various appanage courts, but also to court servants of no rank, to any free man, or even to bondsmen or
kholopy
, and foreigners, when the Tsar was attempting to increase the numbers of his cavalry. Ultimately the losers were the peasants.

As the manpower needs of the Russian state expanded and the armed forces settled into new patterns, the cavalry to which
pomest'ia
were granted fell into two broad categories, those who served as individuals
po otechestvu
, by hereditary social rank, and those who served
po priboru
, or collectively on lists attached to provincial centres. Was this feudalism? It is generally argued that it was not, because there was no contract binding on both sides, on lord and vassal; only the vassal was bound to serve for the upkeep he received from the land. Nevertheless, in practice as distinct from theory, in its impact on the life of an individual, the Russian cavalry levy was not so different from the levy on land held from a baron or directly from the king in early medieval England, though there was no mechanism, such as scutage in England, to enable a holder of a
pomest'ie
to commute his service duty for a money payment.

While Ivan IV was struggling in the 1550s with his first experience of ruling, he was also facing his first experience of the complexities of war and foreign policy. Russia was a landlocked power, with a toehold on the Gulf of Finland at Ivangorod, opposite Narva. To the southwest was the vast Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which had absorbed so much of the Dnieper basin and so many principalities of Kievan Rus'. It was no longer as powerful as it had been in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, since Ivan III and Vasily III, in the course of various wars, recovered some of the principalities, notably Smolensk, which had once belonged to the Grand Principality of Kiev, though they did not recover Kiev itself. To the north, access to the Baltic was almost entirely shut off by the Order of the Livonian Knights, the northern remnant of the Teutonic Knights, whose lands in East Prussia had now been secularized. To the south, Russia was hemmed in by the Khanate of Crimea, which held the northern shore of the Black Sea, and to the east, extending along the Volga, were the Khanates of Kazan' and Astrakhan' and the lands of the Tatars of Kabarda. The three Tatar Khanates were the remainder of the fearsome Mongol Golden Horde, which had finally disintegrated in 1502, leaving these three unstable Moslem principalities with indeterminate borders between themselves, with Russia and to the east.

Each separate realm had its own political aims, Poland–Lithuania, under the Jagiellonian dynasty, hoped to recover the lands lost to Ivan III and Vasily III. Russia hoped to recover even more of the heritage of Kiev,
¹
to achieve access to the Baltic Sea, which would enable her to break through the barrier presented by Poland–Lithuania and Livonia to communication with the West, and to put an end for ever to the instability on her western and southern border and to the perpetual and damaging Tatar slave-raids to which she was so vulnerable. Poland–Lithuania had for long been the strongest enemy, and both Russia and
Poland intrigued actively for the alliance of the Tatar khanates in the wars against each other. A new dimension was introduced into the shifting pattern of alliances in the south by the fall of Constantinople and the establishment of the powerful Ottoman empire, which would inevitably attract the allegiance of the Moslem enemies of Russia. The Khanate of Crimea had already become a Turkish vassal state.

Ivan III as Grand Prince played on these different strings in his foreign policy with skill and care, and took advantage of the internal weakness of the Khanate of Kazan', which was not a homogeneous Tatar realm but a conglomeration of tribes, some Tatar, some not, and riven by dynastic conflicts. The Volga divided the land into the meadow side and the mountain side (left bank and right bank) and there were settlements of non-Tatar peoples and various Finnic tribes who were neither Christian nor Moslem and thus had no particular attachment to Kazan'. On the death of Khan Ibrahim, Ivan III was able to intervene and, acting with one of the candidates to the throne, Mehmet Emin,
²
to conquer the city in 1487. It was not a permanent conquest, but it established Ivan III for the first time in the role of an overlord who ‘invested’ the Khan of Kazan' with his throne, inverting the situation which had existed since the Mongol conquest, when it was the Tatar khans who decided which Russian prince was to rule in which Russian city. The Khanate of Kazan' was now in a situation of intermittent dependency. The players in the game included also the Khan of Astrakhan', the chiefs of the Nogai Horde and, further east, the Khanate of Sibir'. The patterns of alliance shifted between these various rulers according to commercial, and often dynastic, factors, as mortality took its toll.

The religious and political flexibility demonstrated by all the Russian grand princes in their relations with the Tatars had allowed many of the latter to settle in Russia, in groups, keeping their faith, being allotted towns and taking service with the Grand Prince, or entering Russian service as individuals, converting to Christianity and marrying Russian women. The most prominent of these Tatar appanages was the Moslem Khanate of Kasimov on the River Oka, established by Tsarevich Kasim, a son of Khan Ulug Mehmed of the Golden Horde, in mid-fifteenth century, by agreement with Grand Prince Vasily II. The Khan of Kasimov was a Genghisid, and therefore qualified to reign in the various Tatar khanates should their dynasties die out.
³
In these Tatar appanages
⁴
police, justice and administration were in the hands of the Tatar rulers, even when Russian Orthodox subjects also lived there, but their rights over the indigenous people were somewhat different; they enjoyed the same rights over the Moslem population as the appanage
princes in Russia enjoyed over the Orthodox population, but only the rights of
kormlenie
over the Orthodox.
⁵

Mehmet Emin, who had lasted many years in Kazan', most of them in alliance with Russia, died in 1518, leaving no direct descendant. Vasily III tried to impose the thirteen-year-old Shah Ali (Shigali in Russian sources) from the Khanate of Kasimov. But he was deposed by a rival khan sponsored by the Khan of Crimea, with the support of Poland–Lithuania, while the Khan of Crimea launched an offensive which reached Moscow in 1521. Peace negotiations were undertaken between the Khan of Crimea and the governor of Moscow, Vasily III's brother-in-law, the converted Genghisid Tatar prince known as Tsarevich Peter, who was married to Vasily's sister.
⁶
Vasily III realized that a military base had to be set up closer to Kazan' than Nizhnii Novgorod (at the time the nearest base on the Volga), if the Russians were ever to achieve victory, and a fort, Vasil'sursk, was eventually built at the junction of the River Sura and the Volga; this, since it was on lands belonging to Kazan', was the first actual annexation of land. Renewed conflict reversed the balance between the Crimeans and the Russians, though the throne of Kazan' remained in the hands of a khan of the Crimean dynasty during the regency of Ivan's youth.

Could this unstable situation last? Both the khans of Kazan' and the khans of Crimea were interested in extending their authority in the east, but as regards Russia, they were concerned not so much with the conquest of territory as with slave-raiding, since the trade in slaves and the ransoming of prisoners was one of their principal sources of wealth. The Russian frontier was open and extremely vulnerable to invasion by large Tatar cavalry forces, and the Crimean Khanate was no minor succession state but a powerful and well-armed nation which preserved its independence until 1783. The frequent changes of alliance between Kazan', Crimea and Poland–Lithuania subjected Russian towns and villages to constant destructive inroads.

It is also possible that Russia was launched on a path of conquest by a general awareness of the religious polarization in Europe brought about by the Reformation, by a new, crusading anti-Islamic fervour, evident since the fall of Constantinople and by the threatening Ottoman advance in the Balkans. Belgrade fell in 1521, Rhodes in 1522; the battle of Mohacs in August 1526 destroyed the Hungarian kingdom and killed the Jagiellonian king. In 1529 Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent laid siege fruitlessly to Vienna in a terribly destructive campaign which ended in a truce between Ferdinand of Habsburg (the brother of Charles V) and Suleiman in 1533 and which confirmed the loss of Buda to the Turks. In
1538 Peter Raresh, the
voevoda
of Moldavia, sent an envoy to negotiate – in vain – for help from Russia,
⁷
but Suleiman invaded Moldavia, dislodged the
voevoda
and replaced him with new and more subservient client rulers.

More to the point as regards Russia, the fall of Constantinople and the final elimination of the last remnants of the Roman Empire of the East left the Orthodox Church in captivity, with no other free protector but Russia. The theory of ‘Moscow the third Rome’ was in the air.
⁸
It does seem that at this time what had for years been a tolerated
modus vivendi
between many races and religions was under increasing strain, and all the powers involved were determined to reach a final solution rather than to live from truce to truce. The threat of Islam was much more immediate and visible than it had ever been – most of the lands that had once been under the sovereignty of the Christian East Roman Empire were now ruled by the Moslem Turks.

From the point of view of the other central European powers, Russia had now emerged from diplomatic obscurity and had become an unknown quantity which had to be taken into account. The Holy Roman Emperors, in the persons of Maximilian I and Charles V, dominated western European politics of the age in terms of prestige rather than power. They were viewed with constant hostility by the kings of France, who sought safety in alliance with the powers which might attack the Habsburgs from the east. The pattern of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century diplomacy could already be discerned, with France seeking friendly relations with Poland–Lithuania and alliance with the Ottoman sultans. The Jagiellos of Poland–Lithuania in turn, rivals of the Habsburgs for the thrones of Bohemia and Hungary, and for control of the Danube, were hemmed in from the east by the Grand Principality of Moscow, nibbling away at the Lithuanian lands and increasingly subject to the devastating attacks mounted by the khans of Crimea.

To the north of Russia, the crisis caused by the collapse of the Order of the Livonian Knights, under the impact of the Reformation, intensified the rivalry between its neighbours for its inheritance. The Poles and Lithuanians met with the hostility of the Habsburgs, since Livonia was a dependency of the Holy Roman Empire. They also faced the enmity of the Grand Principality of Moscow, anxious to acquire land and ports in Livonia; and of Sweden, similarly desirous of protecting the shores of Finland by occupying Livonian lands and ports. Russia was not at this stage an initiator of policy, but Ivan III and Vasily III manoeuvred quietly and skilfully between Crimea, Poland–Lithuania and the Empire – maintaining good relations with the latter – and thus increased their
diplomatic importance and widened the range of their relationships, while rejecting all attempts, by the Empire or the Papacy, to establish Moscow's rank in the pecking order of European states by the offer of papal or imperial crowns, and indeed claiming superiority of status.
⁹

Under Ivan III and his forerunners Russia had already mastered the ways of international negotiation with the East Roman Empire and the Tatar states to the east, and the Grand Prince had also learnt to conduct diplomatic relations with the neighbouring powers in western Europe. As the range of Russian contacts increased, so Ivan III and Vasily III began to develop not only a certain skill and continuity in international relations but also a staff of secretaries experienced in conducting international affairs and qualified to some degree in language and diplomatic practice – a practice which varied widely from country to country. In the build-up of the rituals of diplomacy, Russia ended up astride East and West, influenced by long experience of Mongol/Tatar manners, while learning to adapt to Western ones. For instance, the custom of exchanging gifts between rulers, between ambassador and ruler and between ambassador and local magnate was most carefully regulated to take account of all possible implications. Gifts of money, or even of gold and silver currency, were frowned upon, for, as Montaigne noted, Sultan Bajazet never accepted gifts from envoys because the giver, as a result, is always raised above the receiver. In general the Mongols and Tatars did not distinguish between gifts and tribute.
¹⁰
Gifts of furs, usually in bundles of forty skins, were common – sables were the most highly prized. Nothing was wasted. Even the skins of the sheep eaten by ambassadors on the way to the Russian border, where the foreign country would take over the supply of food, had to be returned to the tsar, as did the skins of the sheep eaten by the foreign envoys in Russia.
¹¹