Ivan the Terrible (24 page)

Ivan set up a tribunal composed of members of his Privy Council
²⁸
to investigate Rostovsky's treasonable intent, and to judge him, whereupon Rostovsky – in the new version of the entry interpolated in the chronicle
– admitted that he and many others had planned to leave Russia at thetime of the Tsar's illness in 1553, when the choice seemed to have been between being ruled by the Zakhar'in relatives of Tsarevich Dmitri or by Vladimir of Staritsa. He named many of the plotters, including Vladimir himself, who had invited Rostovsky to take service with him.
²⁹
The father-in-law of Ivan's brother, Iuri, had also been approached. When the Tsar had recovered from his illness Semen Rostovsky had attempted to conceal the whole plot, but fearing to be betrayed he determined to flee to Lithuania, a proceeding which he justified by the traditional ‘right of departure’ of the boyars to seek service with another prince, a right which had been rejected by the grand princes since the days of Ivan III. Condemned to death by the Tsar and the boyars, and brought to the place of execution, Semen was reprieved on the intercession of Metropolitan Makarii and other church hierarchs and sent to the prison cells of the monastery of Beloozero.

But the evidence that there really had been a serious plot against the Tsar in 1553 left its mark on Ivan and increased his distrust of the princes and boyars who surrounded him.
³⁰
Clearly the Zakhar'ins did not have sufficient weight at court to destroy the Staritsky faction, and in 1554 Ivan quietly dropped a number of them from the Boyar Council, though they had maintained their loyalty in 1553.
³¹
What is also noticeable in the accounts of these events is a discrepancy between the more moderate early account of Ivan's illness and its consequences and the more agitated tone of the later account.
³²
And finally the presence or absence of Makarii at what might well have been a deathbed is never once mentioned.
³³
It is extremely unlikely that he was absent the whole time, since his presence would normally be required. So the failure to mention his presence must reflect some of the deliberate obfuscation which surrounds this incident in the chronicles.

The turmoil over the succession of Dmitri, followed by the child's death, left its mark on Ivan. At the time it may have led him to distrust the Zakhar'ins, who had been in too much of a hurry to presume his inevitable death and hence to exact the oath of allegiance to the baby Dmitri. But there is no agreement among historians, for sheer lack of evidence, on the new balance at court. According to one account, several members of Anastasia's family lost their posts in the mid-1550s, and a number of princes were appointed to the Boyar Council. On the other hand the crisis seems to have added weight to the position of Adashev. It is usually stated that Sylvester shared in his authority, but the only evidence dates from after the event. It is to be found in Ivan's own diatribes against the priest in his letter of 1564 to Andrei Kurbsky, and
in an interpolation in a chronicle of the late 1570s/early 1580s which states that in 1553 Sylvester was in great favour with the Tsar, that he was all-powerful, gave orders to the Metropolitan and to military commanders, and in fact governed everything. It is also found in an early seventeenth-century chronicle entry.
³⁴
Adashev was certainly active in the diplomatic discussions of these years, where his name is usually mentioned together with that of the
d'iak
, Ivan Viskovaty. The favourite is said to have been in charge of reporting to the Tsar, taking down his decisions and seeing them acted upon, and issuing occasional charters.
³⁵

It may have been the strain placed on Ivan's military resources both by the conquest of Kazan' and the subsequent pacification of the surrounding lands and by the extension of Russian ambitions to the conquest of Astrakhan' which led to further major changes in the nature of the Russian service levy which affected the form of landholding. The consolidation of the Russian hold over Kazan' and the eventual conquest of Astrakhan' made great demands on manpower. In Kazan' the Russians had to fight the local people and expel much of the native population of the city and surroundings. In 1550, while he was campaigning against Kazan', Ivan had sent a series of questions to Makarii in Moscow, many of which dealt with problems of military organization and show the way his mind worked. The questions put forward policies for discussion which were by no means all implemented. Among them was the further regulation of
mestnichestvo
, of which the inconveniences in wartime were obvious; the problem of monastic land as regulated in the
Stoglav
; and the establishment of strong frontier posts on the borders of Lithuania, ‘Germany’ (i.e. Livonia) and the Tatar khanates, to guard against fugitives, raids and forbidden goods. The efficiency with which the Russian frontier guards at this period were able to seize anyone attempting to desert, particularly to Lithuania, is striking.
³⁶
Other important topics were raised by Ivan, such as the need to keep written records (in books) of the size and quality of allodial
³⁷
lands, whether they were arable or meadow, the existence of rivers, lakes and so on. Similar records should be kept of service lands. Finally Ivan was also anxious about the fate of service lands if the
pomeshchik
should die, and proposed all sorts of alternative solutions mainly based on compelling the widow to remarry a new owner if she was young enough to have children, or compelling a sister or niece to marry the new owner if there was no widow. If she was too old, however, he suggests that the widow should be sent to a monastery, while the new holder of the estate cared for her children and family; and if she did not want to be a nun then she was to be given enough land to
feed her, and her estate would be escheated to the Tsar.
³⁸
In his final question, Ivan expresses the wish for a detailed survey of the land at his disposal and already granted, so that there should be no quarrels over lands and water in future. There is no evidence of discussions on these subjects among leading boyars, or at all; there are only the resulting edicts.

To what extent did the Tsar acquire military knowledge, and to what extent was he dependent on his commanders? It is worth asking this question, for the 1550s proved to be a period of great changes in the social organization of the Russian army, and in its technical equipment and methods of fighting. The service gentry cavalry remained an undisciplined body which fought in no particular formation, and which was badly affected by absenteeism. The troops could be ordered to dismount and fight on foot. The
strel'tsy
were uniformed, centrally armed and trained. Their service was hereditary, and they were granted plots of land to supplement their wages. In peacetime they engaged in various crafts. The
gul'iai gorod
, or mobile fortress, which could be quite sizeable, continued to be a feature of Russian assault tactics, giving protection to the harquebusiers and the artillery. The force was usually divided into five main regiments – advance, centre, left and right wings and rearguard – commanded by
voevody
in strict
mestnichestvo
rank, which created a lot of difficulties when senior commanders refused to serve under talented generals of lower rank. It became usual for the Tsar to insist on service ‘without rank’ (
bez mest
) to ensure his right to appoint men of his choice.
³⁹

The financing of the war effort was improved in 1555, by an edict which laid down that all lands and agricultural properties forcibly taken by monasteries in repayment of debt from
pomeshchiki
and peasants or by illicit expansion were to be returned to the owners; lands granted by boyars to monasteries were to be returned to the situation they were in at the death of Vasily III. This was clearly an effort to recover some lands from the monasteries, but it could scarcely be called a victory for the non-possessors. In turn, princely landowners in a certain number of principalities were not to sell or bequeathe their lands or give them to monasteries without the permission of the Tsar on pain of confiscation; and allodial estates given to monasteries were to be taken back and used as service estates. It was a policy aimed particularly at areas thick with minor princes of the ruling dynasty or at areas only fairly recently incorporated, such as Tver' and Ryazan'.

The most fundamental change, however, to the organization of military service and the status of landownership was the
ukaz
called the
Code of Service (Ulozhenie o sluzhbe) of 20 September 1555, which formed part of the
ukaz
which abolished
kormlenie
. The code laid down the service to be performed in relation to the amount of land received in a
pomest'ie
and consolidated the Russian cavalry army as a centrally recruited body paid by the state in the form of income from land, and in cash when on duty. The standard allocation was 100 quarters of land (
chetverti
, approximately half a hectare), to which every service man was entitled, the equivalent of a fully equipped horseman including armour to the value of 4.50 rubles. There were some six different levels of entitlement to land, ranging from 100 quarters to 350. Such a policy had to be based on knowledge of the extent of the land fund and a
perepis
' or land survey was set in hand to determine the quantity of free land belonging to the Tsar. Quite the most important novelty introduced by the Code of Service was the principle that ‘all land must serve’. Princes and boyars had been the outright owners of their allodial lands, the former as descendants of sovereign princes. As the Chronicle of the Beginning of the Realm now put it, the Lord (
gosudar
') ‘ordered the service laid down in the code to be performed from
votchina
and
pomest'ia
land’ (‘
s votchin i s pomest'ya ulozhennuyu sluzhbu uchini zhe
’).

Surprisingly little attention was paid by the aristocracy at the time and has since been paid by Soviet and Russian historians to this fundamental change in the status of allodial land and to the relationship of the boyars to the Crown brought about by it. Until the early fifteenth century boyars had theoretically been entitled to leave the service of the Russian grand prince, taking their lands with them, even if of late they only dared to do so in very few cases. This right implied that the grand prince had no property rights in their land. It must be noted that the Russian grand princes similarly insisted on the right of Lithuanian princes to leave Lithuanian for Russian service bringing their lands with them. This was a somewhat unusual situation in Europe, where kings mostly endeavoured to assert a residuary right of ownership of land, and often succeeded, as in the case of England since William the Conqueror, where all land belonged to the king and was distributed by him to a small number of tenants in chief. Muscovite Russia had been unified bit by bit, and the right of departure could now be claimed only in the case of princes who were likely to be supported by those whose service they entered, notably the Russian princes who left Russian service for that of Lithuania. Yet in 1555 the princes seem to have given up the right to own land unencumbered by service without a murmur, though it was precisely this unencumbered land which might have given them the
power to resist the demands of the Tsar. Now, since all land must serve, all landowners must serve too, and were thus bound to service.
⁴⁰
Now, not only service land could be confiscated for failure to perform the service due, so could allodial land. For those like the political philosophers of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England who saw such a close link between property and freedom, the failure of the Russian aristocracy to detect the fatal weakening of their position which they had allowed to happen with such facility argues a superficial understanding of the realities of power. But was the failure to establish hereditary posts not even more debilitating?

Important as this enactment was, it was not embodied in any specific law and was simply introduced as the Tsar's decision (
prigovor
) on
kormlenie
and service, and is believed to have been drafted by Adashev and written up by him in the chronicles. This refutes the frequent attempt by Russian historians to assert that laws had to be approved and issued by the Boyar Council as a legislative institution. The larger-scale
kormlenie
had already been abolished in the earlier 1550s; the extension of its abolition was introduced by a simple verbal order from the Tsar and not by a law approved by the boyars. It was replaced by the election of local officials, mainly in northern Russia at this time. Moreover
kormlenie
was not done away with everywhere and all at once.
⁴¹
In the opinion of Skrynnikov the policy at this time did not favour either the boyars or the service gentry. The whole landowning class benefited, but inevitably the more powerful boyars and princes in the
dvor
benefited most, because they were closer to the Tsar.

War had undoubtedly exercised its fascination over Ivan, and his personal experience of campaigning may have been responsible for the intensive programme of military reforms of the mid-1550s. The sources give some clues as to who, among Ivan's close advisers, was primarily responsible for devising them, or even implementing them. Aleksei Adashev is of course frequently mentioned in the chronicles (which he may have been responsible for overseeing) as carrying out commissions for the Tsar. Inevitably, it took some time for new structures to be put in place, and again we do not know who was responsible for doing so or exactly when. One of the most recent students of the period has outlined a change in the personal composition of the court which reflects a new set of influences. The Iur'ev Zakhkar'ins, Anastasia's relatives, lost ground and they and the territorial
dvortsy
, or government agencies, in charge of regions like Tver' or Nizhnii Novgorod were replaced by the
d'iaki
, or non-boyar secretaries. Nine new boyars were appointed and several new
okol'nichi
. The new central functional bureaux (
izba
) were
founded or expanded in these years:
Razboinaia
(brigandage),
Pomestnaia
(service estates), and the Razryad or Military Register, which brought together the calling up, inspection, and deployment of the service cavalry. This signified the gradual transfer from the territorial to the functional principle in the developing bureaucracy. Metropolitan Makarii, too, ceased to have such a dominant position, while the role of Aleksei Adashev became ever more prominent, coinciding in the years 1555–8 with the apogee of the reforming activity of the Boyar Council. Moreover, the late 1550s were a crucial moment in Ivan's personal development, since there was clearly a divergence of opinion in the Russian court about the direction Russia's next campaign of conquest should take.