Ivan the Terrible (5 page)

The Russian rejection of the Union of Churches in 1439–41 deepened the cultural gulf between the Greeks and the Latins. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 was another great catastrophe and affected the relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Grand Prince. The Emperor (Mehmet II) now reigning in Constantinople was no longer a Christian, and the relationship between the Church and the secular power could no longer be envisaged as a ‘sinfonia’ between two equal powers. And if the Russian Church was now autocephalous, the Grand Duchy of Muscovy was by far the most powerful and wealthy remaining Orthodox realm, able to weigh the scales down against the Church. The patriarchate still survived in Ottoman Constantinople, but it had no power. As the only independent, sovereign, Orthodox power (except for beleaguered Moldavia), Russia was in a position to step into the gap. Inevitably, the fall of Constantinople would enormously increase the prestige of the Grand Prince of Moscow in the whole Orthodox world. The Russian Orthodox Church could find in the concept of
translatio imperii
a Byzantine authority for an autocephalous church of which the Metropolitan of Moscow was the head.

The idea of the
translatio imperii
, of the transfer to Moscow of the role of religious capital of the Orthodox world (though not of its political domination), lurks behind the titles of tsar and sovereign (
samoderzhets
) used intermittently by Ivan III. This was not an automatic transfer undertaken immediately after the fall of Constantinople – it was a gradual assertion of the new status of Russia after it had thrown off the remnants of Mongol suzerainty. It could be argued that just as Constantinople had been punished by God for veering towards the Latin Church, so Moscow had been rewarded for rejecting the Union of
Churches. Moscow had also incidentally provided some financial assistance to the Orthodox Church within the Ottoman Empire in the last decades of the fifteenth century.

The first exponent of the new theory of Moscow as the third Rome was the Metropolitan Zosima, in the prologue to the new Paskhalia or calendar of religious events for the next millennium, starting in 1492, which he had drawn up in that year. He recorded that the Emperor Constantine had founded a city named Constantine after him, which is Tsargrad, the new Rome, and today God had blessed the new Constantine (Ivan III) and the new city of Constantine, Moscow. The next stage in the evolution of the religious status of Moscow occurred in the reign of Vasily III.
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A change had also come over the relative situations of the Grand Prince and the appanage princes in the course of the second half of the fifteenth century which further elevated the former above other princes. Ivan III had gradually succeeded in incorporating into the principality of Moscow most of the remaining independent principalities whose princes still enjoyed some sovereign rights. His most remarkable achievement was the destruction of the independent republic of Lord Novgorod the Great in two successive assaults, in 1471 and 1478. With his Tatar and Tverian allies, Ivan III defeated the forces of Novgorod and executed their leaders in 1471, forcing the defeated to pay a large tribute, to accept Muscovite rule and to cease any direct relations with foreign powers, i.e. Lithuania. In 1478 Ivan III attacked again. The defeated Novgorodians gave up their right to choose their prince, accepted the suzerainty of Ivan III, lost the great bell which had been used to summon the
veche
(popular assembly), and were eventually subjected to massive confiscation of private and church lands and to huge population transfers. The Grand Prince had now acquired enormous wealth in land, some of which he proceeded to distribute to men-at-arms in service tenure (
pomest'ya
; hence landowner,
pomeshchik
). He was to absorb the principality of Tver' by force in 1485.

Tver' had been the great rival of Moscow in the early fourteenth century, and it continued throughout the fifteenth century to consider itself as a grand principality on a level with Moscow. Its spokesman was the monk Foma, who had been the delegate of Tver' to the Council of Ferrara/Florence. Its Grand Prince Boris Alexandrovich was chosen by God, according to Foma. He was the great sovereign (
samoderzhets
), crowned with the tsar's crown; his city was the new Israel, or the new
Jerusalem. It was Prince Boris Alexandrovich who used a formula to describe his power identical with that used by Ivan III and which Ivan IV was to use later: ‘I, Grand Prince Boris Alexandrovich am free to reward whomsoever I wish, and to execute whomsoever I wish.’
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The similarity leads one to suppose that this formula expressed a general conception of the rights of a sovereign lord, and did not apply only to the ruler of Moscow. This same prince, Boris Alexandrovich of Tver', Ivan III's principal rival, was also known as
Groznyi
, and the words
groznye ochi
, or terrible eyes, are used of other princes, as, for instance, in the extremely moving lament for the destruction of Russia after the death of the Grand Prince Yaroslav. This dates from the period of the Mongol conquest, and describes the beauties of the Russian land, its great cities, its monastery gardens, its temples to the Lord, its awesome princes (‘
knyazya groznye
’, the word used of Ivan IV), its honourable boyars etc. The word
groznyi
is probably one of those many words which have changed their significance over time. We do not know precisely what it signified, therefore, in the time of its most famous bearer, Ivan IV.
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But there is a nuance between dread and terrible: dread is what one is; terrible refers to what one does.
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The closest the Kievan polity could come to an exposition of the nature and rights of governments was in the Old Testament accounts of the kingdom of Israel and in the history of David and Solomon, with Vladimir as David and Yaroslav the Wise as Solomon, or in the New Testament accounts of the rule of Herod and the relation of the kingdom of the Jews to the Roman Empire. The exposition of theoretical ideas on the East Roman conception of the derivation of power from God, and its relationship with ecclesiastical authority, came later, mainly in collections of Byzantine wisdom such as
Melissa
or ‘The Bee’, which were translated into Church Slavonic from the twelfth century onwards.

The change in the status of Ivan III as Grand Duke of Vladimir Moscow in relation to the remnants of the Horde and to other foreign powers, as well as to other previously independent Russian princes, obviously affected his conception of his power. After the fall of Constantinople and the encounter on the Ugra he assumed the title of
samoderzhets
, or sovereign, which had already been used by Boris Aleksandrovich of Tver'. Today
samoderzhets
is always translated as ‘autocrat’, which is, of course, closer linguistically to the original Greek, but completely distorts the sixteenth-century Russian sense of the word, which was ‘sovereign’, an independent ruler who has no overlord.
²⁴
Yet,
although the nature of Ivan III's power in internal matters remained as yet undefined, one can trace in him a gradually more authoritarian, even arbitrary exercise of power. This gradual change was supported by the Russian Church.

For some time the Church had been serving the political ends of the principality of Moscow (which seemed the best situated to protect it) and wished to increase its authority and power by adopting East Roman models. It was concerned less with the nature of power and more with how it was exercised, its moral rather than its political dimension. This trend is associated with the writings of Iosif Volotsky, the abbot of the monastery of Volokolamsk, who is often credited with being the father of Russian absolutism. He was one of the earliest to formulate his view of the power of the grand duke and of the relationship between the ruler and the people. Yet Iosif was not an unconditional supporter of the unlimited power of the ruler. In his view, the grand duke's power came from God, and was given by God to him. But if the grand duke allowed himself to be ruled by evil passions, anger, love of money, injustice, pride, violence and lack of faith, ‘then he was not a servant of God, but of the devil, not a tsar but a torturer’ (‘
muchitel
’, which also translates the Greek word
tyrannos
). There was no need to obey such a tsar. A true tsar had to observe the interests of the ‘land’. For Iosif the power might be holy, but not the man, who could be unworthy. Moreover, power was not unlimited but had to be bound by ‘precepts and justice’ (
zapovedi i pravda
).

The concept of the king's two bodies had entered Russian religious and political thought from the Byzantine deacon Agapetus by the beginning of the twelfth century and it began to pop up in unexpected places.
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In the funeral eulogy pronounced on the death of Vasily III in 1533, the orator exclaimed:

The preacher was quoting almost word for word the saying of Agapetus.
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Iosif died in 1515, but his followers developed his ideas later into a systematic support of the absolute power of the ruler as given by God.

The growing complexity of the administration in the course of the gradual annexation of Russian lands by the Grand Prince of Moscow had led to a considerable evolution of his court whence major decisions now issued throughout the realm. The relationship between the increasingly powerful Grand Prince and the political and social élite has, however, to be reconstructed from what actually happened, from what was tolerated by the magnates around him. His court was, in the words of one of the leading Russian historians of the period, A.A. Zimin, the fundamental social force on which rested the power of the rulers of Moscow. Courts had existed before, and they continued to exist in some of the appanage principalities for some time, where princes still had their own boyars. But the Grand Prince's court produced the military leaders and the administrative personnel now required to rule the country.

It is probably around this time, with the gradual incorporation of so many appanage principalities, and the accompanying loss of sovereign powers by the previously ruling princes, that the grand princes of Vladimir and Moscow began to claim the whole land of Rus' publicly as their
votchina
, or patrimony.
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The appanage princes had owned and ruled over their appanages, exercising sovereign power in financial and judicial matters. These powers were taken over and used by the grand princes of Moscow as the appanages were absorbed. This process of integration was for some time the principal internal administrative problem which faced the grand princes of Moscow, and is usually described by Soviet and western historians as the ‘centralization of the Russian state’.
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It involved the extension of the prince's authority uniformly throughout the land in judicial, financial and military matters, at a time when most of the population was illiterate, communications were extremely slow and difficult, there was still considerable resistance to the Grand Prince's authority, and there was almost no administrative machinery. The problem was at this time (fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) common to most European polities, in many of which royal power was even less centralized than in Russia, because of constitutional structures (as in Poland–Lithuania), fragmentation (as in Germany), religious warfare (as in France and the Netherlands) or dynastic separatism and local rights (as in the Iberian peninsula). In fact the two most advanced countries in this respect were the Ottoman empire and England, in both of which power was in the hands of a new dynasty by conquest, and the power of the Crown was being extended.

The social pyramid resulting from the fusion of the principalities consisted of the appanage princes, in the north-east of Russia, who
owned land by inheritance from a previous Riurikid princely ancestor, and who still occasionally enjoyed a degree of independent and sovereign power over their lands, and might even have a claim to the grand princely throne. A similar position was held by the ‘upper’ princes on the River Oka, who served the grand princes from the west Russian lands bordering on Lithuania (at times in Lithuania), both Riurikid and Gediminovich.
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They sometimes served with their own forces, and preserved a greater degree of autonomy in their internal affairs than the Moscow princes; so did the one-time appanage princes of Suzdal' (the Shuiskys, Rostovskys, Yaroslavskys etc). In addition there were the non-titled nobles, of whom the highest in rank were the old Moscow boyars, who supplied the leading military commanders and the top governors, and as a group manoeuvred for position and precedence with untitled nobles from other principalities. The aristocracy as a whole was considerably weakened by the practice of partible inheritance, which led to the multiplication of title-holders and the division and subdivision of estates between siblings, until there was not enough left to divide. The lack of hereditary titles associated with posts, or of hereditary posts of any kind,
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also considerably weakened the aristocracy and impeded its consolidation into a political class as distinct from a series of clans. The title of boyar was not hereditary, though the family might inherit a claim to be promoted to the rank. It depended on the grant of the tsar. The title of prince could not be granted; princes were born, and all their children inherited the title. Precedence at court and in service was regulated by the practice of
mestnichestvo
, which is dealt with below.
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