Ivan the Terrible (55 page)

Ivan concluded by asserting the right of the new, Russian, ruler of the Commonwealth to build orthodox churches and appoint ecclesiastics, and should he wish to retire to a monastery in his old age, then the whole land, including the Polish-Lithuanian lords, would choose a successor from among his sons. And if, said Ivan, the Grand Principality of Lithuania alone wished to elect him as ruler, this would suit him even better, Russia could be joined to Lithuania as Poland and Lithuania had been joined. The Lithuanian lands annexed to Poland in 1569 should be returned to Lithuania, except for Kiev. And if they elected him to the Grand Principality of Lithuania alone, let them not fear Poland, he would reconcile the two countries. Moreover, he himself needed to marry, and his two sons were nearly of marriageable age;
²⁹
let the Poles and Lithuanians allow their girls to be examined as possible brides, for it was the Russian custom to choose a wife among their subjects. However, Ivan had also at one stage suggested that he was getting old and would find it difficult to govern three large realms; it would be more peaceful for him if the Poles and Lithuanians elected the Archduke Ernst, and signed a perpetual peace with Russia.
³⁰

Whether Ivan really wanted the Polish-Lithuanian crown, or thought that his election was a practical possibility is open to question. His remark to Haraburda that he would prefer to be elected by the Lithuanian principality alone, without Poland, is revealing. ‘But tell the lords of the council,’ he added, ‘not to elect a Frenchman as king, for he will be more inclined to favour the Turks, than the Christians; and if you, the Lithuanians, elect a Frenchman, then I will have to think about
you.’ Subsequently two members of Ivan's
dvor
, and the two brothers Shchelkalov who headed the Office of Foreign Affairs told Haraburda that Ivan would take care of (i.e. restrain) Poland if the Lithuanians agreed to act alone.
³¹

The situation was unusually complicated owing to the number of options which seemed open to the various contendents. Ivan could manoeuvre in such a way as to be elected Grand Prince of Lithuania alone, or King of Poland as well. The Lithuanian rank-and-file nobles, of whom many were Orthodox and some were Protestant, were anxious to throw off the predominance of the Lithuanian magnates, secure in their huge estates and their oligarchic powers. They were therefore willing to consider the election of Ivan, which would enable them to draw on the larger resources of Russia in the constant struggle against the Tatars in the Ukrainian lands of the south and in the struggle to recover from Poland the Ukrainian lands which had been lost to the Polish Crown in 1569.
³²
The magnates would only elect a Russian Tsar provided his powers were limited. Fedor would not only have to convert to Catholicism, he would also have to buckle to and study Polish, German, Italian and Latin,
³³
and would receive Polotsk and a few other important forts, as Ivan ironically put it, as ‘his dowry’. The Polish rank and file nobles, who were opposed of old to Habsburg authoritarianism and less familiar with Ivan, hoped to secure from the Tsar a stronger defence against the Tatars and their supporters the Turks on their southern border. A Habsburg would be of little use to them for the Emperor was in no position to defend Poland against the Turks, and his election would immediately bring down the wrath of the Ottomans on their heads – the example of the fate of Hungary was before them. Moreover the presence in Ivan's new kingdom of large numbers of Lithuanians of the same religion and speaking more or less the same language as Russians might place the Poles in a position of inferiority.

The King of Sweden, John III, with his Polish wife, seemed to offer the Commonwealth another choice, but again, Sweden was a minor power and did not have the military strength to stand up to the Tsar. There remained yet another candidate, Prince Henri of Valois, Duke of Anjou, younger brother of King Charles IX of France, now ruling, and of the latter's devotion to the catholic religion he had given recent proofs on St Bartholomew's Eve in 1572. But Henri of Anjou could promise an alliance with the strongest power in Europe, able to protect Poland against Turkish attack by military, naval and diplomatic means.

The various options were discussed at length in a war of pamphlets in which the Tsar was accused of atrocities, of being a tyrant by nature,
incapable of guaranteeing the Polish and Lithuanian liberties of his new subjects. And the Tsar in turn feared, or said that he feared, that the Poles wanted his son Fedor only in order to seize him and hand him over to the Turks in order to achieve peace with them.
³⁴

Ultimately Ivan was not prepared to send ambassadors or envoys to canvass for him; he asserted the superiority of his rank by demanding to be invited, and refusing to mix with other candidates at the Polish
Sejm
,
³⁵
which was summoned for January 1573. On 19 April Haraburda, who had returned from Novgorod, read out the Tsar's reply to the Lithuanian proposals. They came as a surprise to the Lithuanians: the Tsar's refusal to allow the settlement of poor Polish and Lithuanian nobles along the borders of Russia, and the demand for the cession of Kiev indicated that he intended to tear up the Union of Lublin, and to secure separate election to the Lithuanian grand princely throne. Ivan thus lost all his support in the
Sejm
. So the convocation turned to France and on 11 May 1573 proclaimed Henri of Anjou King of Poland and Grand Prince of Lithuania. But the new King was forced to sign a series of conditions, the
pacta conventa
, which guaranteed all the changes introduced into the Polish-Lithuanian constitution in the last four years, the right of all the nobles to take part in the free election of the King, and the regular convocation of the
Sejm
.
³⁶
The Confederation of Warsaw imposed on Henri a settlement of the religious question almost unique at the time: ‘We promise … that all of us of differing religions will keep the peace between ourselves and shed no blood.’
³⁷

But Anjou's election suited neither Ivan nor the Emperor Maximilian II, who were both suspicious of the amicable relations existing between France and the Ottoman Empire. This brought about a common front between Ivan and Maximilian who wrote to the Tsar bemoaning that the French King had killed several thousand of his subjects.
³⁸
Ivan sent a messenger to Vienna urging Maximilian not to allow Henri of Valois to pass through imperial lands on his way to Poland. There were discussions between the two powers of a partition treaty by which Ivan would keep Lithuania and Maximilian Poland.
³⁹
Similarly Ivan urged the King of Denmark, Frederick II, to place obstacles in the way of Henri's journey to Poland.
⁴⁰
But Henri made his way to Poland in time and on 21 February 1574 he was crowned in Cracow. A few months later he had also become King of France, on the death of his brother Charles IX, and he fled in secret, on the night of 18/19 June 1574, from Cracow back to Paris. In law he was of course still the elected king of Poland. He was formally deposed only in May 1575, having failed to return within the year's grace granted to him.

Was Ivan disappointed at his failure to win the election? With his exalted view of the rights of a Tsar it is highly unlikely that he would ever have accepted the kind of limited sovereignty offered to him, and he certainly made it clear that while he would accept election for himself, on his death the crown of the Commonwealth should go to one or other of his sons by hereditary right, which spelled the end of election to the throne. Moreover there remained an enormous gap in the attitude to religion of the respective sides.

Ivan had stated his wish to be crowned by a metropolitan, not by an archbishop, and he was also prepared to embark on a discussion about the nature of the theological issues which separated Russia and the Commonwealth. He had demanded that in the event of his death in the Commonwealth his body should be returned to Russia in order to be buried according to Orthodox rites. But the extent of religious freedom he would in practice have been prepared to tolerate is not at all clear, and would have fallen well below the Polish imposition of religious toleration on Henri of Valois.

The news of Henri's flight back to Paris was formally communicated to Ivan in August 1574 by envoys from the Commonwealth who, at the same time, again procured a prolongation of the truce until 15 August 1576. But the Tsar had probably already received the news, and the talks about a successor to the Polish-Lithuanian crown seemed to pick up more or less where they had left off before the election of Henri, but with an even greater variety of candidates. They now included the Bohemian magnate Wilem Rozmberk (the patron of the English magus, John Dee), Alfonso II of Este, Duke of Ferrara, as well as some pretenders who had appeared in the first round like Ernst of Habsburg, and who might now be manoeuvred into leading a coalition of Russia, Poland and the Holy Roman Empire against the Ottomans. Though the magnates were unlikely to support Ivan there was some backing for his candidature again among lower Polish nobles who had derived little benefit from the brief reign of Anjou, and among the ‘Ruthenes’ or in modern terminology the lower rank Orthodox Belorussian and Ukrainian elements.

But all was not exactly peaceful around Ivan in Russia at this time. The repercussions of the watering down of the
oprichnina
and of the death of Maliuta Skuratov were still being felt. Ivan needed to restructure the
dvor
and he was evidently finding it more and more difficult to recruit people, either because he distrusted them or because they were reluctant to serve him. The new favourite at court was Prince B.D. Tulupov Starodubsky who was made an
okol'nichii
in 1573, and
brought with him a number of members of his family; several members of the Kolychev family (to which Metropolitan Filipp had belonged) were promoted.
⁴¹
Both Tulupov and V.I. Umnoi Kolychev played an active part in the negotiations over Ivan's pretensions to the Polish throne. The Godunovs had not yet reached the degree of influence which later was to be theirs. D.I. Godunov had been appointed Chamberlain (
postel'nichii
) in charge of all Ivan's domestic arrangements, but also of all the inquiries into treason against the Tsar which had previously been conducted by Maliuta Skuratov. The children of his deceased brother, Boris and Irina, were left to his care, and grew up at court together. The return of Nagoi from Crimea in 1573 had introduced a new piece into the complicated court factions: the inquiry into the alleged treasonable relations between Prince I.F. Mstislavsky and the Crimeans had been revived and a number of the Prince's bondsmen, now freed from captivity in the Crimea, were arrested, tortured and of course admitted the criminal relations of Mstislavsky with the Crimeans in 1571.
⁴²
The boyar had again been forced to give sureties for his behaviour and subjected to harassment.

No mention was made of a bride-show, but some kind of wedding ceremony took place in January 1575, without the approval of a church council, and without the crowns, between Ivan and his fifth wife, Anna Vasil'chikova, about whom very little is known.
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Soon after, his two sons were also married: Ivan Ivanovich was now twenty and married for a second time; Fedor was married to Irina Godunova. The usual tensions over precedence blew up between Umnoi Kolychev and Tulupov, and D.I. Godunov and the rising favourite, his nephew Boris Godunov.Tulupov's estate in Staritsa was confiscated and granted to Boris Godunov some time before August 1575, and Tulupov, with several members of his family and a number of other nobles, most of whom had occupied prominent positions at Ivan's wedding with Anna Vasil'chikova, were executed (Tulupov apparently impaled) on 2 August 1575, together with a relative of the previous Tsaritsa, Anna Koltovskaia.
⁴⁴
The Tulupov clan was practically exterminated.
⁴⁵

It seems as though Ivan felt just as circumscribed by boyars opposing his will in his personal
dvor
as he had felt before he instituted the
oprichnina
, and in the mid 1570s his anger turned also on the ecclesiastical hierarchy and on the monastic order. It will be remembered that in October 1572 he had issued a proclamation forbidding nobles to make any grants of land to monasteries. The question does arise: in whose interests was he acting? It has been suggested that this policy suited the boyars who would now be prevented from frittering away
their estates on the Church. Yet here too Ivan's anger now seemed to be directed against all the great monasteries which he had patronized and admired in the past.

A missive which the Tsar wrote to Abbot Koz'ma of the Beloozero monastery in 1573 is couched in his most inflammatory biblical style. It is worth quoting to illustrate the curious convolutions of his mind. He opens with the usual invocation for forgiveness for his many sins:

Quoting St Paul, Ivan then addresses the monks: ‘You believe that you can lead the blind, that you are a light to those in the darkness, that you can preach to the ignorant, teach the young … How is it then that teaching others you do not teach yourselves? How, preaching to others, do you remain unworthy?’ He advises the monks to turn to the teaching of St Cyril, the founder of the monastery. He reminds them how, some time ago, he had met with a number of monks in a cell and had explained to them his desire to withdraw from the noise of the world and be shorn a monk.
⁴⁶
‘Hearing of your godly life my despairing soul and filthy heart were filled with joy … And it seems to me, in my despair, that I am already half a monk … And I have already seen how the many ships of my soul, agitated by fierce storms, have found a safe harbour.’ Ivan continues with many quotations from fathers of the Church, and reminders of the feats of the holy martyrs
⁴⁷
culminating with the sufferings of St John Chrysostom at the hands of the Empress Eudoxia. Much of this eloquence was formulaic, but in Ivan's case a good deal of it was felt, and was a necessary part of the creation of his role as a religious guide and father of his people. Ivan pointed the moral: the monks too should suffer as Christ had done and should not be led astray after silver like Judas.