Ivan the Terrible (21 page)

In the West too, in the sixteenth century, the manner of conducting relations with other powers was only just beginning to acquire consistency, to be established in the law of nations (the words ‘international law’ did not exist, though the concept was vaguely adumbrated)
¹²
and to be expounded in textbooks, the first of which seems to be that written by Bertrand du Rosier, dating from around 1500.
¹³
A common manual served for western European countries, for in theory they all belonged to the
res publica christiana
, the community of Latin Christendom. It was indeed not an inclusive Christian community, for the Orthodox Christians did not ‘belong’ to it, in practice if not in theory. They were schismatics, not ‘one of us’, and even their long obedience to the Roman Empire of the East in religious matters earned them no merit.
¹⁴
As a result the Grand Principality of
Moscow had no precise rank in the European order of precedence, and the Russians were anxious to work out where they stood. For the Russians this also implied working out which sovereign rulers were addressed by the grand prince (or tsar) as ‘brother’, and which were too low in status to merit such a distinction.
¹⁵

A Russian version of what was probably an Italian list of European states placed in order of rank, dating from the early sixteenth century, and in all likelihood originating in the Office of Foreign Affairs, has been found in Russia and gives some indication of their view; though as Russia does not figure on the list, one cannot judge of the Tsar's standing and there is no indication of where western countries placed the Grand Principality of Moscow.
¹⁶
The Holy Roman Emperor obviously came first, followed by the ‘king of the Germans’, i.e. the heir to the Holy Roman Emperor, then the kings of France, Hungary, Spain, England (‘Negliter'sky’), Portugal, Naples, Bohemia, Scotland, Denmark–Sweden, in that order, and finally Poland–Lithuania. Precisely which qualifications decided the order of precedence is hard to tell, but judging by other, later, lists it was such things as the antiquity of a crown, the date of the ruler's conversion to Christianity, when a country achieved its independence etc.
¹⁷
Where exactly the Office of Foreign Affairs thought that Russia belonged is not clear, but Ivan IV probably considered that his place was immediately after the Holy Roman Emperor, since he was descended, as everybody knew, from Augustus Caesar. (This placing was somewhat odd, because Ivan IV regarded all elective monarchies as inferior to hereditary ones. But the elective quality of the Holy Roman Empire went back to Rome ‘on the plea that to allow the throne of Caesar and the temporal lordship of the world to pass by inheritance like a farm, was unbecoming its peculiar dignity’.
¹⁸
)

Precedence was important not only in the signature of treaties, in the forms of address and ceremonial (who dismounted first and who remained on his horse, who took off his hat and who kept it on) used on public occasions between ambassadors and sovereigns, and in the nature and quality of the gifts exchanged, but also in the etiquette prescribed for the ceremonial in use at receptions according to the rank of the power concerned, the rank of the envoy and the nature of the relations between their respective governments, whether friendly or hostile at a given moment. Even the display of silver (much of which eventually was English) at Russian official banquets for foreign envoys was regulated by the status of the power concerned in the diplomatic pecking order.
¹⁹
The sort of misunderstanding that might occur is illustrated when Queen Elizabeth, on a warm summer's day, made the mistake of receiving the
Russian ambassador walking up and down in her private garden, and not in full panoply, sitting on a throne under her canopy of estate. Ivan complained at the lack of ceremony shown to his envoy and was assured in reply that the garden was the Queen's own privy garden and that vegetables like onions and garlic were not grown there.
²⁰

Traditionally, crowned heads, or kings, addressed each other as ‘brother’ (
brat
).
²¹
But some kings were more equal than others, and acknowledgement of the status of brotherhood was a bargaining counter to be used in negotiations. Essential for the acceptance of the rank and quality of a royal house was the recognition of a God-given hereditary right to reign, and an ancestral claim by descent to outright ownership of hereditary lands; thus Ivan IV regarded information about the genealogy of the Riurikovichi as a state secret, which it was treason to penetrate or disclose, and did not acknowledge elected rulers as his equals. As a result of the break-up of the Union of Kalmar between the three northern crowns in 1521, Grand Prince Vasily III had refused to recognize the new King of Denmark–Norway, Frederick II, and the new King of Sweden, Gustavus I Vasa, as his brothers. The elected king of Sweden, a minor noble, was not even a noble, according to the Russians, but a merchant and a trader, and the ruler of Denmark was a king of ‘salt and water’.
²²
In 1559, when the envoys of the new King Christian III of Denmark attempted to impose equal treatment of their king on the Tsar, the Russian boyars refused even to discuss the subject, and insisted that Christian III should address Ivan not as brother but as father. When Ivan heard that Sigismund Augustus of Poland–Lithuania had used ‘brother’ to a later king of Sweden, Erik XIV, he exclaimed contemptuously ‘he is free to call his coachman brother if he wants to’. The same problem arose in an even more acute form in relations with the Tatars and specifically the Crimeans. As descendants of the Golden Kin who continued to regard the Russians, who addressed them as ‘tsars’, as their vassals, the Crimeans made their recognition of the grand princes as brothers conditional on gifts of gerfalcons, sables and walrus tusks, or on the ransom of prominent prisoners.
²³

Hence also Ivan's constant insistence on being recognized as Tsar, instead of Grand Prince. The demand to be addressed as Tsar formed part of all Ivan's negotiations with Sigismund Augustus, and was met throughout with a blank refusal. Like all practitioners of international relations, Ivan was of course willing when necessary to compromise on titulature – he would not sacrifice a useful treaty for a name. But his attitude reflects the bred-in-the-bone conviction of the high standing of his dynasty in Europe.
²⁴

Recently the argument has been advanced that the Russian conquest of Kazan' was motivated by an ‘ideology of imperialism’. These arguments are not very convincing because the words ‘ideology’ and ‘imperialism’ convey concepts which were not current at the time, were indeed meaningless, in sixteenth-century Russia or Europe, and thus distort the mental cast, the
mentalité
, of the period. Such an approach is a reading back into the past of the obsessions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
²⁵
The very word ‘state’ was not yet in general use, let alone ‘nation-state’.
²⁶
Expansion at the expense of Poland–Lithuania was quite simply regarded as the achievement of legitimate dynastic claims.
²⁷
And there were also several very good reasons why Russia should attempt the conquest of Kazan' now that it was so weak: the first, and probably the most deeply felt, was the urge to turn the tables on the power to which Russia had for so long paid tribute. Equally important was the fact that Kazan' was only some two hundred miles down the Volga from Nizhnii Novgorod, and the desire to control the mouth of a river and an outlet to a sea was very powerful.

It has been argued that in the Chronicles and other writings of the time Moscow claimed that it had a legal right to Kazan' as a Russian
votchina
since earliest times (untrue) and that the Khanate was Russian by the law of conquest (as Sultan Suleiman argued that Hungary was his and as both William I and William III argued that England was theirs); that it was Russian by historical and dynastic right; that it belonged rightfully in the forward march of Christianity (the theory of Metropolitan Makarii); and that its conquest was justified by the ideology of imperialism. But can the English conquest of Wales and attempts to conquer Scotland be explained too as a consequence of an ideology of imperialism? Or is it just a natural urge to expand to the limit of one's borders? Or to control one's waterways? Kazan' had never of course been Russian, nor had Wales been English. But a glance at the map will show how dangerous to Nizhnii Novgorod was the proximity of the Khanate of Kazan'. Economic arguments, however, are not convincing except as additional factors in motivating the conquest, notably the control of the eastern trade down the Volga and through the Caspian, provided Astrakhan' was secured as well.

The word imperialism, with all the negative nuances attached to it today, simply does not apply to the idea of empire in the sixteenth century, when, as far as Europe was concerned, there had been for a long time only two supranational empires, both descended from the Roman Empire, which had been the cradle of the Christian religion: the Roman Empire of the East was the continuation of the Empire of Augustus
Caesar, and is always and misleadingly called Byzantium nowadays, though in the sixteenth century that name was only just beginning to be used;
²⁸
the Holy Roman Empire was an attempt to re-create the Roman Empire of the West, which had perished in
AD
470 under the assault of the Germanic tribes, by the descendants of those same tribes, Charlemagne and Otto I. Both these empires were imbued with the belief that they were the commonwealth of all Christian nations, and though the formula of
cujus regio ejus religio
had not yet been devised, nevertheless the massive advance of Islam into eastern Europe, the breach between the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches and the assault of the Reformation in its various guises on the older forms of the Christian religion had led to intensified religious tension and even fanaticism and hence to the attempt to impose uniformity, often in the interests of public order. In the new Protestant communities, those who held to the old Catholic religion were to be prevented by violence from practising it in the churches which had in the past always been theirs; and where Catholicism (or Orthodoxy) won the upper hand, the Protestants often went to the stake, and so did many Jews.

The concept of the
translatio imperii
moved in tandem with that of ‘Moscow the Third Rome’. The adoption of the title of ‘Tsar’ followed on the disappearance of the East Roman Empire, but Russia never put forward any claim to suzerainty over previously imperial lands (Bulgaria, the Balkans). Similarly, the concept of ‘Moscow the Third Rome’ seems to have been confined to ecclesiastical matters, and even there it was used very cautiously by Ivan.
²⁹

There were of course other uses for the name empire. In its Russian form ‘
tsarstvo
’ it was used for the words ‘realm’, ‘kingdom’ or ‘empire’ in Western languages or Latin. ‘Tsar’ was the recognized Russian appellation of the Tatar khans and Ottoman sultans as well as of the emperors in Constantinople and the kings in the Bible and in the Middle East. Holy Roman emperors were known as ‘
tsesar
’ (caesar). Western European rulers were usually known as ‘
korol'
’ or king, and their domain as ‘
korolevstvo
’. The lack of precision in the use of these terms, both in the West and in the East, is nowhere clearer than in the well-known phrase, ‘Rex est imperator in regno suo’, used by Philippe le Bel and Henry VIII and even in Russia.
³⁰

The one argument which seems to convey most clearly the essence of the Russian determination to conquer Kazan' was the deeply felt desire to be free from the humiliating vassalage that had been endured for more than 250 years, and to turn the tables on those who had once been the Russians' masters. This argument can be found in the Chronicles. It was
not, as far as one can determine, racist, as modern colonialism became later, but political, and intensely religious.
³¹

Modern Western historians of Mongol influence on Russia
³²
have carefully analysed the Chronicles in order to pinpoint the dates of the interpolations in them which might support the view that anti-Islamic remarks were inserted after the events rather than before, notably in the
Kazanskaia istoria
,
³³
which is regarded as a chapter in the Chronicle of the Beginning of Tsardom, dating from after the conquest. They thus suggest that religious fanaticism did not naturally inspire the crusade against Kazan', but that it was deliberately cultivated by the spokesmen of the Church, regardless of the fact that the Church had been quite exceptionally well treated by the Mongol overlords. However, it seems rather too rigid to expect perfect consistency of outlook in an age of violent religious controversy raging over the whole of Europe and the Middle East. Human beings have often been able to think one thing and feel another, or to keep two opposing ideas going in their minds, and to cohabit peacefully with a much hated religion seems to have been more easily achieved at that time in the very multiracial East than in the more racially uniform West. However, the Patriarch of Constantinople, Gennadios, appointed by Mehmed the Conqueror, though duly grateful for the Sultan's favour, spoke in private of the Turks as ‘the bloody dogs of Hagar’, just as Makarii, Ivan IV and for that matter Prince Kurbsky spoke of them as ‘the Hagarenes’.
³⁴
The driving force behind the campaign against Kazan' was undoubtedly Metropolitan Makarii, as is evident from his writings, though Maksim Grek also was a strong advocate. But Ivan seems to have been a convinced supporter of the policy, and it was popular with the boyars and the service gentry who could hope to acquire land.

In 1549 the Khan of Kazan', of the Genghisid Crimean dynasty, died, leaving a two-year-old infant as heir. The opportunity for intervention was too good to miss. The first of Ivan IV's campaigns against Kazan' took place in that year, but it became bogged down owing to an unseasonable thaw which prevented Ivan's forces from crossing the Volga.
³⁵
Ivan himself did not take part in the campaign of 1549 and was very cast down at its failure, but he embarked on a further campaign in 1550 which was equally indecisive owing to an unexpected thaw. It was then decided to follow the example of Vasily III and build a fort which would dominate the river above the city, at Sviiazhsk. Many of the non-Tatar peoples of Kazan' deserted to Moscow, where Ivan received them well, rewarded them with furs, horses and money and promised them his favour. The garrison of Kazan' numbered only some twenty thousand,
and Suiunbek, the mother of the baby Khan, could not control the government. Hoping to avoid war, the people of Kazan' agreed to the restoration of a previous Russian nominee, Shigali, Khan of Kasimov as their tsar; but there was a dispute over the terms of the truce negotiated by Aleksei Adashev. Suiunbek and her son were sent to Moscow, and part of the land of Kazan' was assigned to Russia. The weeping ‘Khansha’ departed on a boat on the Volga, escorted by all the people and lamenting her sad fate. Meanwhile, Shigali procured the release of up to sixty thousand Russian prisoners, who were repatriated to Russia ‘like a new Exodus’, according to the chroniclers. But having heard of treasonable talk against him, Shigali invited the supposed traitors to a banquet and had their throats cut – seventy in all. The murders were carried out by Shigali's own men and by
strel'tsy
from Moscow. Ivan sent Aleksei Adashev twice to renew negotiations and to remove Shigali, and by 1552 the latter had abdicated, refusing to act as Ivan's Trojan Horse within the city. The people of Kazan' no longer believed in Russian assurances, and war became inevitable.