Ivan the Terrible (41 page)

The leaders of the
oprichnina
were also opposed to the appointment of a critical metropolitan, and after a second session of the Church
sobor
, the choice of the Tsar and the churchmen now fell somewhat unexpectedly on the Abbot of the Solovki monastery in the White Sea, Filipp Kolychev, in an effort to conciliate the hierarchy, possibly at its insistence.
⁹
Born in 1507, Filipp had first tried service at court, but in 1537 he left, possibly for fear of implication in the turmoil following on the arrest of Prince Andrew of Staritsa, by order of the Regent Elena, and finally ended up in the monastery of Solovki. He probably attended the Church Council (
sobor
) of 1550 in Moscow, and probably also was well acquainted with the priest Sylvester.
¹⁰
Filipp was an excellent administrator and under him the monastery thrived. He belonged to a noble family, a cousin was an
okolnichi
, another cousin was a boyar member of the
Oprichnina
Council, and twelve members of his family were present among the service gentry at the Assembly of the Land. He was also closely connected by family ties with the Staritsky family and with Ivan Petrovich Fedorov, whom the Tsar had, so far, seemed to regard as one of the most able and just of his servants, and who was
de facto
head of the Boyar Council in Moscow in charge of the government in the
zemshchina
.
¹¹
He may indeed have been instrumental in Filipp's appointment. It is also not improbable that Filipp, who was regarded as a man of great integrity and courage, was not unconnected with the protest led by the boyars and the service gentry in the Assembly of the Land and equally it is not unlikely that I.P. Fedorov was behind it, so much so that this period is now viewed as the time of the ‘boyars' plot’.
¹²

Filipp, not yet appointed metropolitan, demanded, at a meeting of the Church Council that Ivan should abolish the
oprichnina
and declared that unless he did so, he would refuse to be appointed metropolitan. He asked for the prisoners arrested after the recent protest to be released. Ivan controlled his temper and insisted that Filipp should agree to occupy the see as metropolitan and refrain from interfering in anything concerning the
oprichnina
, i.e., he must not indulge in criticism of its activities or of the way in which Ivan ran his ‘household’. Filipp may have felt trapped for all we know, for he signed an undertaking in accordance with Ivan's wishes on 20 July, though the right to advise and intercede was restored to him which strengthened his position, and he was duly appointed Metropolitan on 24 July 1566 and enthroned on the following day.
¹³

But whatever Ivan may have promised Filipp, the attack by the boyars and the service gentry on the
oprichnina
started him off on a renewed bout of executions and repressions even though the bulk of those immediately arrested seem to have been freed. It is difficult to reconstruct the actual course of events since the main sources differ considerably, not so much about what was said, but about when it happened.

Unfortunately for the new Metropolitan, the Church was divided, some of the hierarchy proving to be closer to the court of Ivan and to the
oprichnina
, such as Archbishop Pimen of Novgorod, Archbishop Pafnutii of Suzdal (in the
oprichinina
), and Evstafii, the Tsar's confessor. Filipp's relations with the Tsar's confessor were particularly tense and he dealt with the problem by imposing a penance on him.
¹⁴
But his fate was now to be bound up with one of the most dangerous plots against Ivan – in Ivan's mind – and one of the most awful periods of terror the Tsarlaunched against his people.

As always in the reign of Ivan sources are scarce, confusing and contradictory, and it is difficult to determine what actually happened, in what chronological order, and how events were connected with each other in the crisis of the years 1567 to 1572. But taking everything into consideration, it is evident that the conflict between Ivan's conception of his role as Tsar and that of the majority of the court and the upper ranks of the armed forces reached its greatest intensity in this period. The open denunciation of the
oprichnina
by the bulk of the service gentry present at the July meeting in 1566 must have outraged Ivan and may have even upset his mental stability. He had never been openly challenged in such a way before by such a large contingent of his subjects. Many passages in Ivan's letter to Kurbsky, of 1564, reflect his conviction of the supremacy of his unlimited God-given power, and his right to reward and punish according to his will all those who disregarded his orders, failed in their duty to him on the battlefield, broke their oath of allegiance to him, betrayed him and the Orthodox Church and attempted to, or succeeded in, fleeing to Lithuania. It was the difference between
samoderzhavstvo
, traditional sovereignty, and
neogranichennaia vlast
', or unlimited power, which was at stake. A collective demonstration must therefore have been a severe shock to a highly strung and apprehensive character like Ivan, who lived in a fantasy political world created by himself, the world of
volia
, where there were no limitations on his will or on his actions.
¹⁵

He sought for refuge, and a rest from the tensions which pulled him in all directions, in the serious contemplation of retirement to a
monastery and taking the cowl. In 1567 it was the monastery of Beloozero which attracted him. It was far away in the north, safe from attack by either Lithuania or the Tatars. It was also on the road to the port of St Nicholas and safety on board an English ship. In May 1567 he went on a pilgrimage to the monastery during which he held long talks with the abbot and a number of elders, withdrawing into a cell, away from the clamour of the world. In these sessions he openly spoke of his wish to become a monk. And the monks described to him the severities of monastic life, ‘and when I heard of this godly life my vile and despairing heart was at once comforted for I had found a divine bridle for my ungoverned heart and a refuge for my salvation’
¹⁶
– words which reveal all too clearly Ivan's own awareness, in moments of lucidity, of the instability of his character. The Tsar asked the monks to prepare a cell for him and gave the abbot 200 rubles to furnish it, and in the following years he sent a number of icons for his future use.
¹⁷
He also gave the monastery a valuable economic privilege, namely the right to trade without paying customs dues throughout the territory of the
oprichnina
.
¹⁸

In the meantime he incorporated a monastic ritual into life in Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda, where he and the members of his
oprichnina
court wore a monastic garment of his own devising and lived according to a monastic rule (when he felt like it and was there), ringing the bell at 4 a.m. for matins and continuing to enforce a strict discipline and observe the hours throughout the day. Ivan acted as the abbot, Prince Afanasii Viazemsky was the cellarer, Maliuta Skuratov the sacristan. Ivan particularly liked to sing and was knowledgeable about church music. Having summoned his ‘monks’ to the refectory, he would remain standing, perhaps singing ‘songs of repentance’
¹⁹
while the others ate, and he only sat down to eat when they had finished. After he had completed his religious duties he would attend the torture chambers next door, and then went to bed about 9 p.m., where three old blind men told him stories, tales and fantasies about the past.
²⁰
The state of Ivan's mind did not of course escape the attention of the senior boyars around him, and nurtured the perhaps not unwelcome belief that he might be thinking of abdicating.

The verdict of the
Sobor
of 1566 had determined Ivan to continue with the campaign in Livonia, and he now sought to revive his alliance with the King of Sweden, Erik XIV, who was convinced that the leading Swedish families were conspiring against him. By an extraordinary quirk of fate Russia and Sweden were at this time both ruled by men of original character and extreme irascibility, suspiciousness, fearfulness
and mental instability. Erik, throughout 1566 and 1567 had alarmed his courtiers by seizing on the slightest pretext to arrest, torture and execute anyone who had seemed to mock him or had failed to serve him properly.
²¹
And indeed, in July 1566, there had been a secret meeting of indignant nobles in which Erik's youngest half-brother Karl took part.

Erik was also faced with the ongoing war against Lithuania and Denmark, and by the consequences of the treaty of Dorpat of 1564 with Russia.
²²
Some minor points of that treaty were still being negotiated when Erik heard that Ivan too wished to reopen the subject and had added a new condition. He now demanded that the King of Sweden should hand over to him the wife of his brother John, Duke of Finland, Catherine Jagiellonka of Lithuania–Poland. Quite what Ivan intended to do with the lady is not clear; the general opinion was that he intended to make her his wife or his mistress (he was after all already married to Maria Temriukovna). People about the court knew of the previous rejection by King Sigismund of Ivan's offer for his sister, and may have seen in his insistence a desire for revenge. It also showed a total disregard for the bonds of Christian matrimony scarcely likely to be endorsed by the Russian or any other Church. It has also been suggested that Ivan intended Catherine to be a hostage in his eventual negotiations with Sigismund Augustus, and that her removal to Russia would serve to create a permanent breach between Poland and Sweden, thus strengthening Ivan's position.
²³
At any rate the Swedish council, when consulted, unanimously rejected Ivan's demand to separate John's wife forcibly from him, and deliver her to Ivan.

Nevertheless, the military situation of Sweden seemed in Erik's eyes so parlous that he authorized his envoy, Nils Gyllenstierna, sent to Moscow to complete the negotiations in October 1566, to agree in a treaty signed in February 1567, to hand Catherine over to Russia in exchange for a Russian cession of lands in Estonia more favourable to Sweden. Misled by Erik in this way, in May Ivan sent an impressive embassy, led by Ivan Mikhailovich Vorontsov, to Sweden to fetch Catherine, and made all the necessary arrangements for her reception in Moscow even though the treaty had not been ratified. He thus forced Erik to the wall. Erik did not want to break with Russia, but he found it impossible to carry out his undertaking to Ivan, whereas Ivan regarded the handing over of Catherine as essential to the treaty. Catherine proved loyal to her husband and shared his captivity in the castle of Gripsholm, and Ivan's demand to seize John's legal wife by force could only increase suspicion in Sweden that both Erik and Ivan were mentally deranged.

The Swedish Estates had been called to meet in May 1567 in Uppsala. Before they met a number of Swedish nobles were condemned to death on the grounds of treason. One of Erik's potential rivals, Nils Sture, now returned from Germany, where he had been on a mission for the King, and was arrested. At this point Erik's mental balance broke down completely; first he begged the forgiveness of his enemies, then the insinuations of one of his advisers made him change his mind, and marching into the cell of Nils Sture, on 27 May 1567, he personally stabbed him to death. Rushing away from the scene he ordered the execution of a number of noble prisoners, changed into peasant clothes and wandered around the forests.

For six months Erik let the government slide into the hands of a committee of nobles, who were profoundly shocked that the King himself should assassinate one of their number. Yet he was composed enough in the summer of 1567 to make a remarkable proposal to the Russian embassy which was still waiting to escort Catherine Jagiellonka to Russia. It was communicated most secretly by a Swedish emissary to the interpreter who, in Erik's name, asked the Russian envoys to take the King of Sweden back with them to Russia when they left Stockholm. When asked why Erik wanted to go to Russia he had replied that the King was now afraid of his ‘boyars’. The Russian envoys then described the scene in which the King had killed Nils Sture and the diplomatic negotiations caused by the Swedish refusal to surrender Catherine Jagiellonka, and their own anger at the endless procrastination of the Swedes.
²⁴

The two major enemies in Livonia, Russia and Lithuania, continued their secret plotting against each other, though the exact timing and what they were up to is difficult to establish. Sigismund tried to inspire the Russian aristocracy to act against Ivan while Ivan tried in turn to induce the Lithuanian magnates to help him with his secret dynastic plans. These had now become more urgent since it was becoming obvious that the death of the King, who was seriously ill, would lead to a dynastic crisis in Poland–Lithuania, for Sigismund Augustus was the last of the Jagiellos and had no male heir. Ivan had been attracted for some time by the idea of being ‘raised’ [elected] to the Lithuanian grand ducal throne, which had become
de facto
hereditary in the Jagiellonian line (the throne of Poland remained elective) and might indeed have remained so had Sigismund Augustus had children. It was his failure even to have male relatives which created the crisis, a nephew, Jan Sigismund Zapolya of Transylvania, whom he had hoped to make his heir, died in 1571. He had not even a daughter, only sisters.
²⁵

But, as the Polish diplomats had urged in February 1561, when they had turned down Ivan's first suit to Catherine, Sigismund II Augustus was an annointed ‘King’, not merely a grand prince like Ivan (Sigismund did not of course recognize Ivan's title of tsar), and Catherine was a king's daughter (Sigismund I). Nevertheless Ivan thought that he had a good chance of being accepted as ruler in Lithuania if not in Poland and no doubt this had influenced his original offer of marriage to Catherine Jagiellonka in 1559/60,
²⁶
and also his determination to acquire possession of her person. One of the arguments he put forward was that he wished to secure Catherine ‘for the sake of his honour’ and in order to stand above the King of Poland, his and the Swedish King's enemy. Had the purely dynastic question been the main issue however, Ivan could well have applied for the hand of the remaining unmarried – and older – sister of Sigismund, Anna, when his wife Anastasia died.
²⁷
This did not escape the Swedish negotiator, Peter Brag, who pointed out to the Russian envoys that if Erik could get hold of Anna, he could arrange for her to be handed over to Ivan. The Russian envoys avoided the trap by the simple argument that they had no instructions to deal with such an important matter.
²⁸