Ivan the Terrible (56 page)

At the same time Ivan vented his spleen upon the hapless Sheremetev brothers. The burden of Ivan's accusations against the monks was that they had allowed Ivan Sheremetev major and a companion of his to evade the rules of monastic life, to indulge in keeping servants, having
their own kitchen and eating abundant food. The boyars who had entered the monastery had introduced into it their own worldly and luxurious ways and were corrupting the spiritual life. ‘You are not their teachers, they are yours!’ exclaimed the Tsar. He was particularly angered because a tombstone had been set up on the grave of Prince Vladimir Vorotynsky, the brother of Mikhail, but not on the grave of St Cyril. The Tsar gradually wound himself up and became more and more angry at the thought of these boyars who had not abided by monastic rules, concentrating his attack on Sheremetev. He complained that until recently the rule of the house was to observe perfect equality between boyars, bondsmen and trading peasants, a
kholop
was equal to a Bel'sky, whereas now there was no brotherhood. The letter goes on to accuse Sheremetev of being responsible for the abandonment of the practice of religious procession on the required occasions and of the general austerities of the rule, on the pretext of illness. Finally, washing his hands of the monks' neglect of decency and honour, he exclaimed contemptuously: ‘Serve Sheremetev on golden dishes and do him honour as to a Tsar – it is your affair … do as you wish, it is not my concern, draw up your rules with Sheremetev, don't bother me any more with this for I will not reply.’ Calling down the blessing of the Mother of God and of Saint Cyril on the monks, he concluded in sarcastic mode: ‘And to you, gentlemen and fathers, we bow our head to the ground.’
⁴⁸

It is in this context that one must place the final downfall of Archbishop Leonid of Novgorod, who had succeeded in reconciling the Tsar with the city after the burning of Moscow, though the sources are somewhat confused and scanty. Archbishop Leonid had of course maintained close connexions with the leaders of the
oprichnina
and to that extent was tarred with the same brush. Just as Ivan got rid of his closest followers in the
oprichnina
, so now he turned on Leonid, who was summoned to Moscow some time in August 1575 and brought before a religious council for judgment. Ivan prepared the ground by organizing at the same time an investigation into the doings of Metropolitan Antony and the Bishop of Krutitsa, who were apparently charged with drinking. Thus deprived of any support, Leonid was now accused of a whole array of crimes: treason, maintaining secret correspondence with agents of the King of Poland–Lithuania, sending treasure abroad, minting money, buggery, bestiality, sodomy and keeping witches.
⁴⁹
Leonid's enormous fortune was confiscated by Ivan, eleven of his servants hanged ‘and his women witches shamefully dismembered and burned’. Much of the evidence for the trial of Leonid is provided by Jerome Horsey, the only one to mention the fate of his
witches, and his account is confirmed by a surviving note in a
Sinodik
commemorating ‘in Novgorod 15 women said to be witches’.
⁵⁰
Leonid was sentenced to life imprisonment in a dungeon on bread and water and died in October 1575. It is his death which has given rise to many legends about bears being set on to kill condemned friars, and the even better known account of a Pskovian Chronicle of Leonid being sewn up in a bear skin and thrown to the dogs.
⁵¹

Four days after the downfall of Leonid, Protasii V. Iur'ev Zakhar'in, an
oprichnik
who had been attached for years to the
dvor
of the Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich, was executed. Having begun to harbour suspicions of his eldest son and of the relatives of the Tsaritsa Anastasia, the Tsar now turned on the Iur'ev Zakhar'in family, and even on Tsaritsa Anastasia's brother, the long lasting Nikita Romanovich whose property was ravaged. In November 1575 several prominent boyars and a number of prominent
oprichniki
were executed. One of the recently arrived envoys from the Holy Roman Emperor, Daniel Prinz von Buchau, reported that ‘Not long before our arrival, in autumn 1575, he [the Tsar] killed forty nobles who had apparently for a second time plotted against his life.’
⁵²
Probably closest to Ivan now stood Bogdan Ia. Bel'sky, the nephew of Maliuta Skuratov, of modest family, who had been a body servant of Ivan's for fifteen years and who rose steadily in his service.
⁵³
A number of younger Shuisky princes also appeared at the court of Ivan including Vasily Ivanovich, the future Tsar.

War with Sweden continued and had also proved disappointing to Ivan. John III had twice detained Russian envoys and refused to negotiate with Ivan until the Bishop of Åbo and the Swedish embassy sent in 1569 were allowed to return to Sweden. Ivan continued to bombard John III with very rude letters: he accused him of writing his name before that of Ivan which was indecent because Ivan's brother was the Holy Roman Emperor, and he refused to call John ‘brother’ for in honour Sweden was inferior: ‘You say Sweden is the patrimony of your father … and whose son was he, and was your grandfather on the throne?’ Ivan then went back over the whole story of his relations with Erik XIV again and his demand for Catherine to be handed over, because he believed her husband had died, and, out of kindness, as she had no children, he had offered graciously to take care of her and allow Erik to deal directly with him and not through the governor of Novgorod. Our only intention, he continued, for the first time admitting that he proposed to regard John's wife as a hostage, was to give her back to her brother Sigismund Augustus in exchange for Livonia and there would then be no bloodshed:

Ivan continued in this vein for a further eighteen printed pages, going back to the days of Russian relations with King Magnus of Sweden.

The stalemate in the war with Sweden led Ivan to take up the idea of a truce, and he sent an envoy with a written message; but the Swedes were now cautious about receiving missives from Ivan, and John refused to read it and insisted on handing it to one of his nobles in case it was too offensive. This led to renewed quarrelling: ‘You have come to Sweden’, said the Swedish magnate to the Russian envoy, ‘and you must do what our king tells you.’ To which the Russian courier replied, ‘I have come to your land and I will obey the orders of my lord.’ When told he would receive no rations, he replied, ‘Very well, I will starve to death.’ The episode ended in a brawl, and again John refused to let the Russian envoy go until the two Swedish interpreters who were still detained in Russia were released. Ivan now found a new excuse: the interpreters were being detained to teach Russian children Swedish. John refused to send an embassy and declared that he had not sent the interpreters to Russia to teach Russian children, but to carry out his orders. In such circumstances agreement over peace terms was impossible to reach and the only thing achieved was a further truce from 20 June 1575 to 20 July 1577.
⁵⁵

Whether the disappearance of the supernova in Cassiopeia in November 1774, with its underlying implications of cosmic instability, affected the general state of mind in Russia is not known, but the Tsar took up again with the English envoy, this time D. Sylvester, his request for a refuge in England. He now asked for a declaration which should be countersigned by Elizabeth's whole council. Evidently he no longer believed in her power to rule alone and in her sole word.
⁵⁶

It may also have been the cumulative effect on his unstable temperament of these mortifications which led Ivan to the most startling and inexplicable venture in his reign. Or it may have been the fear induced by portents in the sky threatening the life of a king. His solution for his spiritual turmoil was to escape from his throne and set up a scapegoat, a substitute tsar who could take his place and become the object of
divine wrath or of public hatred and suspicion, a barrier against those who attempted to oppose his will. In fact it has been suggested that his physician Bomelius had inspired the Tsar with such fear for his life, in view of the adverse astrological signs, that he installed a surrogate tsar as a lightning conductor, to receive the blows of fate in his stead.
⁵⁷

Whom did he choose? As Vasily III had looked around for a trusted lieutenant and possible heir among his Tatar friends, having faith in the baptized Tsarevich Peter who then died, in 1521, so did Ivan now place his faith in a baptized Tatar.
⁵⁸
The most prominent tsarevich at that time, Sain Bekbulatovich, had entered Russian service around 1562. He was a grandson of Akhmat, Khan of Astrakhan', and thus a Genghisid. He inherited or was granted the Tatar khanate of Kasimov which had formed part of Russia since the reign of Vasily II, and served Ivan as a military commander at a time when there were fewer Tatar tsarevichi because many of them had died. He had been a most active and successful general in the war in Livonia and with Sweden on the Finnish front, and around July 1573 he was baptized under the name of Simeon. With the death of Prince Mikhail Kaibulatovich, the Tatar tsarevich who had been the senior member of the Council in 1575, Simeon became the most prominent tsarevich in Russian service. What is more he was the nephew of Maria Temriukovna, which made him a nephew of the Tsar, and Ivan now married him to a daughter of Prince I.F. Mstislavsky, Anastasia, who was herself descended from a daughter of Tsarevich Peter and a daughter of Ivan III. Simeon Bekbulatovich was as well bred as a Tatar tsarevich could be.

According to a laconic entry in the Military Registers, the Lord Tsar and Grand Prince appointed the Grand Prince Simeon Bekbulatovich to be Grand Prince of Russia, in autumn 1575, while Ivan IV remained Prince of Moscow (Kniaz' Moskovskii).
¹
He also kept the titles of Tsar of all Russia, Tsar of Kazan' and Astrakhan', and the lordship of Livonia, creating immense confusion at the time and since. There is great uncertainty, because of the loss of records, about Ivan's intentions and about which powers he handed over to Simeon and which he kept, and how long this interlude lasted. As Grand Prince of Russia, Simeon was head of the
zemlia
, that is the government of the land. He could and did issue charters in his own name, though not many have survived so that it is difficult to know with what matters he concerned himself. The charters which have survived deal mostly with grants of land to monasteries. On the other hand Ivan continued to be in total control of relations with foreign powers.
²
According to Jerome Horsey, an eyewitness of these events who, however, wrote up his recollections some time later, Simeon was crowned in the Cathedral of the Dormition in the Kremlin, but as Horsey reported, ‘with no solemnity nor consent of peers’.
³

The unreliability of Horsey's reports is confirmed by Ivan's own language to Daniel Sylvester, previously the interpreter of the Russia Company, now its agent. Sylvester reported to London on 29 January 1576, that Ivan had told him, speaking in Russian because he was aware that Sylvester knew it well, that he still awaited a firm decision from Elizabeth on his renewed demand for asylum. He was dissatisfied with the priority she gave to merchant affairs, and offended by her refusal to place Russia and England on an equal footing by herself demanding asylum in Russia, ‘that she makyth daynty to requiar the like of us’. He reproached Elizabeth for her scruples in fulfilling his wishes, seeing that
he had granted her merchants, ‘who are as free as in England’, freedom of trade throughout Russia. Unless she agreed to all his requests he would drop the whole matter, and transfer his trade to the Venetians and the Germans. And he added that

Moreover, Ivan hinted, he could now fall back on his new friend the Emperor Maximilian.
⁵
However, what still perplexes and divides historians is where did Ivan get such a strange idea from, and to what extent did it imply a restoration of the
oprichnina
?

In what concerns the first question, there are authors who regarded Ivan's policy as merely ‘a political masquerade’.
⁶
Some thought that he believed that by resigning the Russian crown he might improve his chances of obtaining the crown of Poland–Lithuania, others that he was concerned with relations with the Crimea. Other historians argue that Simeon was enthroned as Grand Prince as a result of a meeting of an ‘assembly of the land’, which allegedly took place in 1575, which was summoned with the aim of secularizing church lands and was riven by violent disagreements on policy between the aristocracy, the church hierarchy, current boyars and previous members of the
oprichnina
. But alas there is no evidence that a meeting of this non-existent body took place at any relevant time though there may have been a meeting of the Church Council.
⁷
According to Giles Fletcher's later attempt to explain Ivan's policy as a financial operation,
⁸
when Ivan placed Simeon on the throne, he instructed him to annul all the charters which he, Ivan, had issued, conceding tax exemptions, and then to return them in exchange for substantial payments. Kashtanov, a specialist in this field, argues however that there was no systematic policy during the year of Simeon's rule in relation to charters granted to monasteries. Some of them were cancelled, but other charters were granted, including charters to monasteries signed by Ivan as Grand Prince of Moscow.
⁹
Of those
signed by Simeon many were destroyed after his removal, as well as other documents emanating from him, as though they were not worthy to survive because they had not been issued by a genuine grand prince.
¹⁰
It is noteworthy that in foreign relations Ivan was entitled Tsar as before.
¹¹