Ivan the Terrible (26 page)

Ivan had also been successful in warding off an attack by Sweden. The Grand Prince of Vladimir-Moscow did not have direct diplomatic relations with the ruler of Sweden, which were carried on through the
namestnik
or governor of Novgorod. This was a tradition going back to the days of the independent city republic, when Novgorod negotiated in its own name; it now enabled Ivan to bring pressure to bear on Sweden by continuing to refuse to treat her as a sovereign state. Indeed, in the diplomatic documents exchanged in this period, Ivan is very careful to stress the difference between himself as the hereditary Tsar of his lands and the base-born, non-royal, ‘elected’ King Gustavus of Sweden.

Gustavus had attempted in 1554 to construct a coalition between Sweden, Denmark, Poland–Lithuania and Livonia against Russia and had made his plan public at the Diet of Wolmar in Livonia in 1554, using the threat that if Livonia rejected his plans he would be forced to make peace with Moscow, leaving the province to the tender mercies of the Tsar. Sweden's projected coalition was of course regarded as hostile by Russia, who in 1555–6 twice attacked and ravaged Vyborg, while the Swedes attempted to seize Oreshek at the mouth of the Neva. This was clearly not a serious campaign, and, moreover, Livonia refused to follow the Swedish initiative. Hence in the following year Gustavus backed
down and sent envoys to the then governor of Novgorod, Prince. M.V. Glinsky, to discuss peace with Russia. Ivan eventually consented to talks with the Swedish envoys in person, who were sent on to Moscow, formally received by the Tsar and treated to a proper banquet in the presence of the boyars and other members of his court.
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In March 1557 a truce, to last until 1597, was signed between the King of Sweden and the governor of Novgorod, in which Sweden had to agree not to support either Livonia or Poland–Lithuania in a war with Russia. But Ivan still refused, in very rude language, to meet Swedish envoys himself in future, and they were again relegated to the governor of Novgorod.
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Meanwhile relations with England were taking shape. The newly formed Merchant Adventurers Company landed the cargoes of three ships in 1556, in the port of St Nicholas on the White Sea. They were forwarded by river down to Vologda, then by land to Iaroslavl' and on to Moscow. On the return journey in July 1556 (only one outward and one return journey could be undertaken before the port of St Nicholas became ice-bound) four ships sailed with cargoes of wax, train oil, tallow, furs, felt, yarn and so on, some of which probably belonged to a Russian envoy, Osip Nepea, sent by Ivan to Queen Mary. The voyage was disastrous: only one ship reached Britain, the
Edward Bonaventure
, belonging to Chancellor, and it was wrecked off the coast of Scotland. Chancellor lost his life in saving Nepea, and the cargo was pillaged by ‘the rude and ravenous people of the country’. Rescued from the Scots, Nepea and the nine surviving members of his suite were given a lavish welcome in London, where Philip and Mary presented him with a lion and a lioness for Ivan. Nepea was informed that Russians would be allowed to trade freely in England, but unlike the English in Russia, they would have to pay customs dues. It was widely believed at this time that English ships were carrying arms to Russia, and the Emperor Ferdinand I interceded later with Queen Elizabeth to beg her not to supply such a dangerous monarch with weapons.
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There remained Poland–Lithuania. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth needed outlets to the Baltic Sea just as much as Russia, if not more, because her trade was more bound up with Europe than that of Russia, which also traded to the Near and Far East. Control of the river Dvina and the great port of Riga would enable the Commonwealth to break through the German encirclement which extended north along the Baltic shore to the Russian border at Narva, and south to the now secularized lands of the Teutonic Knights in East Prussia. Ever since the collapse of the central authority of the surviving Order of the Livonian Knights, the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom had been conducting secret
negotiations with the Archbishop of Riga on the future of the city, and on the choice of a successor who might be able to transform the bishopric into a lay principality on the East Prussian model, behind the back of the merchants and the city council, who supported the continuation of the rule of the Order, as it secured their monopolistic hold on Russian trade.

There was in addition a standing cause of war between Russia and the Commonwealth in the claim, first formally put forward in diplomatic negotiations by Ivan III, and recognized by King Alexander of Poland–Lithuania in 1503, that many of the Ukrainian lands which had once formed part of Kievan Rus' belonged as of right to the house of Riurik.
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This is a claim which has been disputed by nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians who, in accordance with the dominant ideology of the times, in their approach to historiography, placed the demands of nationality before those of a dynasty. But Ivan III thought in terms of his dynastic rights, and the fact that Moscow had never ruled over Kiev was irrelevant to him, since his ancestor, Grand Prince Vladimir Monomakh of Kiev, had once ruled over what was one day to become Moscow. After all Vladimir Monomakh had been Grand Prince of both Vladimir and Kiev, and Vladimir was senior to Moscow and came before it in the Russian titulature.

Since 1552 a five-year truce between the two countries had maintained peace, but it was too unstable to last, since Poland–Lithuania firmly refused to recognize Ivan's new title as tsar and continued to address him as Grand Prince. Anxious to maintain the defence of their trade once the Order was unable to deliver, the cities of Livonia too turned towards the Commonwealth for protection, though Riga stood out for its independence. In September 1557, the Livonian Order concluded an alliance against Russia with Poland–Lithuania, the treaty of Pozvol, which placed the remnants of the Order under Polish– Lithuanian protection. The treaty clarified the situation in Livonia and was of course regarded as a
casus belli
by Ivan IV, who decided on war with Livonia before Poland–Lithuania could mobilize its forces to intervene in the province.
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War began in January 1558, when the main Russian army, together with a large contingent of Tatar cavalry led by a number of Tatar tsars,
tsarevichi
and nobles, Kabardian princes and nobles, and large numbers of Cheremis, Circassians, Bashkirs and Kazan' Tatars, invaded Livonia, under the supreme command of the one-time Khan of Kazan' who had now reverted to his previous role as Shigali (Shah Ali), Khan of Kasimov and vassal of Ivan IV. The countryside was duly plundered and ravaged,
but Ivan was more concerned with the cities; in May 1558 the port of Narva surrendered to the Russian forces. Aleksei Adashev and Ivan Viskovaty carried out negotiations with the city's representatives to determine the conditions of its transfer to Russian sovereignty,
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since Ivan hoped to open it up at once to direct European trade with Russia. The Russian conquest of Narva indeed altered the terms of trade in the eastern Baltic, freeing it from Livonian control and opening it up to Dutch and north German ports, to the extent that privateering now also became a lucrative business for the Livonian fleet in the Finnish Gulf.
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On 19 July, Dorpat fell to Ivan's Tatar allies, who seem – at any rate in the cities – to have been fairly disciplined at this stage, in order not to alienate the future subjects of the Tsar.

Ivan also left a door open for talks, ordering the commander in chief, Shigali, to proclaim the Tsar's willingness to listen to what the Livonians might submit to him, while the authorities in Dorpat set about collecting the tribute allegedly due to the Russians, and originally paid to the independent city of Pskov.
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There was a temporary respite in operations later in 1558, while Ivan switched troops under Prince I.D. Bel'sky to defend the line of the River Oka against a renewed Crimean attack. But operations in Livonia continued, for the time being, directed primarily against the port of Reval (Tallinn), which held out against a long siege. With Narva in Russian hands, however, direct Russian trade with the West had now been achieved. So dangerous was this for the other Baltic powers that an embassy sent by King Gustavus of Sweden to England in 1557 now appealed to Queen Mary to forbid her subjects to sail to the Russian port of St Nicholas in the White Sea.

It was after the return of this embassy to Sweden that the idea began to gain currency in that country of a possible match between the heir to King Gustavus, Prince Erik of Sweden, and the Princess – not yet queen – Elizabeth of England. Erik and his half-brother John may have been base born in Ivan's eyes (though Erik's mother was a European princess), but they were very personable, cultured and well-bred young men in the Renaissance manner, handsome, good linguists and good musicians. Elizabeth certainly might have done much worse than the future Erik XIV were it not for the fact that he went mad north-north-west about ten years later. Elizabeth refused the offer made to her on Erik's behalf by his brother John, now Duke of Finland, in spring 1560, but John succeeded in winning his father over to the idea that Erik should make an attempt in person, and the Swedish prince sailed for London to woo Elizabeth, now Queen of England, with the formal blessing of the Swedish Council of State, in June 1560.
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Meanwhile, a new Russian envoy, P. Alfer'ev, was sent by Ivan to Vilna in spring 1558 to discuss the possibility of a joint Russian and Lithuanian crusade against the enemies of Christianity. This Russian revival of the concept of an anti-Crimean, indeed anti-Turkish, alliance of Russia with Poland–Lithuania, and possibly other Catholic powers, was the consequence of Russian fear that Lithuania might participate in the Livonian war against her, at a time when the existing five-year truce between the two countries had run out. It also fell in with the anti-Moslem crusading spirit of Metropolitan Makarii. On 8 March discussions took place in Vilna, between Alfer'ev and King Sigismund Augustus, with a view to achieving a perpetual peace between the parties and keeping Poland–Lithuania out of the Livonian imbroglio. The terms offered by Ivan were surprisingly generous, so much so that one is inclined to ask how sincere he was. If a perpetual peace could be achieved he was prepared to forgo his claims to his patrimonial lands now in Lithuania, the city of Kiev and other towns, that is he would give up the traditional Riurikovich claims in order to win Livonia.
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But, one wonders, who was deceiving whom? Was Ivan really prepared to abandon all claims to his ‘hereditary lands’ in order to obtain Livonia? And did Sigismund Augustus have any intention of participating in the destruction of the Crimean Khanate, which was far too useful to him as a counterweight to the power of Russia now that the latter was no longer threatened by the Tatar kingdoms of Kazan' and Astrakhan'?

Lithuania responded promptly to the Russian initiative, sending her own envoys to Moscow for talks which lasted from 5 June to 1 July 1558 and were conducted by Aleksei Adashev and Ivan Viskovaty, who assured the Lithuanian envoy that Russia was prepared to receive a ‘grand embassy’, in accordance with Russian diplomatic practice, to finalize the negotiations. The Lithuanian envoy was even allowed by Ivan to attend the Orthodox mass in the Cathedral of the Annunciation in the Kremlin. Meanwhile, the Russian advance in Livonia continued unchecked.

Ivan submitted new peace proposals to the Livonians, and when they were rejected his forces – this time under another Tatar commander in chief, Tokhtamysh, assisted by two princes from the Horde and the Princes Cherkassky (the name by which the Caucasian princes of Kabarda were known), as well as many Tatar princes and nobles – invaded the province again in January 1559, occupying towns, burning settlements, taking many prisoners and advancing as far as Courland.
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Chaos reigned in the lands of the Order, but Ivan was now induced by the threatening moves of Denmark, Sweden and Poland–Lithuania to
order an armistice from May to November 1559. This armistice enabled Russia's rivals in the Baltic to arm and organize their campaign, and it lost Russia all that she had so far gained by war and diplomacy.

Anxious for the future of Livonia, in summer 1559 the Grand Master and the remnants of the Livonian Order surrendered their independence to Poland and concluded a treaty with the Commonwealth in which the Order agreed to military cooperation with Poland–Lithuania, the sharing of any conquests they might make, and
de facto
placed what remained of the Order under Polish–Lithuanian protection at the cost of ceding some of its lands. The treaty of Vilna, to that effect, was signed on 31 August 1559. Soon after, the old, and pro-Russian, Prince Wilhelm von Fürstenberg was replaced by Gotthard Kettler as Grand Master. Denmark now seized the island of Oesel.

Meanwhile, in March 1559 a new, ‘grand embassy’ from Sigismund Augustus had arrived in Moscow to discuss the earlier Russian proposals for an alliance against the Crimean Khanate, which the King had decided to turn down, encouraged by a Turkish decision to restrain Crimean attacks on the Commonwealth. The envoys were invited to dinner with Ivan and talks were held with Aleksei Adashev and Viskovaty, but the Polish envoys now insisted to the Russians that there could be no permanent peace with Russia until Poland–Lithuania's territorial claims against Russia were settled, such as the return of Smolensk and a number of other towns to Lithuania. They proved impervious to argument and even compared Ivan to a snake which having devoured a man's wife and children now wanted to marry him.
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When the Russians turned down their proposals, the Lithuanians suggested a prolongation of the existing truce, which Adashev rejected. A few days later the Lithuanians accused Ivan of declaring war on a Christian prince, namely the Archbishop of Riga, Christoph von Mecklemburg (who was a relative of King Sigismund's). Outraged, Ivan sent them away without any
med
(mead, the most modest of the offerings in kind made to an embassy), and Adashev withdrew (or was withdrawn) from the talks, which were handed over to the
d'iak
Viskovaty. The situation was clouding over for Ivan, for both Denmark and Sweden now began to press claims to parts of Livonia.
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