Ivan the Terrible (57 page)

One historian again located the origin of the idea of stepping down from the throne in the oriental tale of Barlaam and Josaphat, as told in the eighth century by St John Damascene and well known in Russia.
¹²
It has also been referred to in connexion with the origins of the
oprichnina
. However, one element in this tale does reflect an Indian origin, namely the suggestion that the physician and magus Bomelius, or perhaps witches, had produced a horoscope for Ivan showing that in the years 1575/6, a Grand Prince of Russia was to die; the prophecy could be painlessly voided by ensuring that he, Ivan, was not Grand Prince in that year.
¹³
But another way of evading it was to take refuge in England, hence the renewal of discussions between Ivan and Sylvester in autumn 1575 and winter 1576 on the mutual offer of asylum by both parties.
¹⁴
Bomelius was notorious as an astrologer, and was generally regarded as an evil sorcerer who exercised a harmful influence on the Tsar. Recent heavenly manifestations – the appearance and disappearance of the new star, the supernova, in Cassiopeia in 1574, and the appearance of a blazing comet, commonly believed to herald the death of a ruler, and visible to the naked eye in 1577 might indeed frighten the credulous Ivan.
¹⁵
The setting up of a substitute Tsar may also have been a means of preparing for the government of Russia during Ivan's disappearance into English asylum. Horsey reported seeing a large number of ships built in Vologda by English craftsmen, and one Pskovian chronicle carried reports of Ivan's intention to flee to England, allegedly inspired by the evil witch Bomelius.
¹⁶

To yet others Ivan IV was moved by fears that his son and heir was plotting behind his back to overthrow him. Some chronicles suggest that Ivan promoted Simeon Bekbulatovich because he suspected the Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich of intriguing against him.
¹⁷
But as a Pskov chronicle put it, ‘It is not right, Lord, for you to appoint a man of a foreign race (
inoplemmenik
) in place of your own children to the realm (
gosudarstvo
).’
¹⁸
Yet, if his son were really plotting against him, Ivan might well consider it wise to prepare an heir to fall back on, namely a Tatar prince. On a quite different level, it has been suggested that Ivan was so disgusted with the failure of the
oprichnina
to protect him and his people against the last Crimean invasion that he deliberately chose to humiliate Russians by appointing a Tatar to rule the land. Simeon was
after all a nephew of his dead wife, Maria Temriukovna.
¹⁹
Yet Ivan's execution of a considerable number of courtiers in autumn 1575, including his favourite Tulupov, suggests that he was suffering from one of the periodic fits of panic which led to outbursts of sadism. The heads of the beheaded were thrown into the courtyards of magnates like Prince I.F Mstislavsky, Ivan Sheremetev minor and the Metropolitan Antonii.
²⁰

In his later work, the historian Zimin rejected all these theories and merely echoed the opinion of a member of the imperial embassy, Daniel Prinz, in his report to the Emperor Maximilian II, who had stated that Ivan was motivated by contempt for the baseness of his subjects,
²¹
an opinion which was confirmed by Daniel Sylvester who reported Ivan as mentioning ‘The perverse and evill dealinge of our subjects who mourmour and repine at us, for gettinge loyaull obedience they practice against our person. The which to prevent we have gyvene them ouer unto another prince to governe them but have reserved in our custodye all the treasure of the land.’
²²
Finally, the elevation of Simeon Bekbulatovich was in no way the result of an individual caprice of the Tsar; according to rigidly Marxist Soviet historians, it followed the inevitable laws of historical development (
zakonomernost
').
²³

The most far fetched interpretation of the raising of Simeon Bekbulatovich to the rank of Grand Prince of all Russia is that of Skrynnikov himself which must be touched upon. He argues that in 1565, when the people allowed Ivan to establish the
oprichnina
, they gave him full legal powers to struggle with boyar treason. By abolishing the
oprichnina
Ivan had deprived himself of these full legal powers, and would therefore be acting without the sanction of the law if he attempted to reintroduce a regime of terror, a policy which would inevitably arouse the strongest opposition in the Boyar Council and in the church hierarchy: ‘On this occasion he obtained the necessary legal authority not from the Council but from someone he had himself placed above the Council and the
zemshchina
as a whole, namely Simeon Bekbulatovich.’ Having awarded Simeon the title of ‘Grand Prince of all Russia’, Ivan ‘obtained without difficulty from Simeon his permission to introduce a regime of exception’.
²⁴
This circular argument is not at all convincing. Finally, was the abdication of Ivan and the raising of Simeon Bekbulatovich to the throne a means of restoring the
oprichinina
in a different form?

Ivan's first public action after the institution of Grand Duke Simeon (as far as we know for there is very little direct evidence about the timetable of events), was to send a letter to the new Grand Duke begging for his permission as his overlord to recruit a number of service gentry
from the principalities ruled over by Simeon and incorporate them into his new
udel
or appanage.
²⁵
So the division between
oprichnina
and
zemshchina
was partly recreated but it did not correspond to the old territorial and administrative division and the name
oprichnina
was dropped because of its unhappy connotation and replaced by
dvor
or court. Indeed it was forbidden on pain of death to use the old word. There were no
oprichniki
, though Ivan set up his own guard of armed pages (
ryndy
) and his own regiment, tax collecting and local judicial authorities, thus acting, as earlier, in complete disregard of the policy attributed to him of ‘centralization’. The bulk of the aristocracy remained with Tsar Simeon, while the courtiers and military in the service of Ivan were mainly of lower social origins.
²⁶
The
prikazy
, both in the
udel
of Ivan and in the
zemshchina
were staffed by
d'iaki
distributed among functional and geographic offices, assisted by some mercantile elements. The nucleus of the lands Ivan chose for himself lay in the north, around Novgorod and Pskov, and the route to the White Sea, and his favourite residence now became Staritsa, the city of his murdered cousin. This may be explained by the fact that so soon after the destruction of Moscow by the Crimean Tatars in 1571 the city still remained uninhabitable, at least by him. The population of this once thriving and busy town had been reduced to some thirty thousand according to one source.

Ivan was in fact concentrating his energies and his forces with the intention of reviving the Livonian war and bringing it to a satisfactory conclusion. Hence his choice of residence, nearer the centre of the future campaign, though he moved around a great deal. And there remained the problem of finding a king for Poland–Lithuania.

Henri of Anjou had fled but he had not abdicated. Unless he returned by May 1575 new elections would have to take place. A strong movement in favour of a Habsburg candidate now developed both among the Polish Catholic hierarchy and senators and among the Lithuanian magnates who for different reasons considered that this would benefit their orders. But there were as before profound divisions between the aims of different social groups within the Commonwealth. The arguments had all been gone over before, but they revived again, with not very many variations. The Polish
shliakhta
, or nobility, was deeply anti-Habsburg and anti-German, and more inclined to a Russian candidate, possibly even Ivan IV, whom they viewed as better able to protect Poland against Ottoman or Crimean invasions than the Habsburgs had proved. The Polish magnates, and the princes of the Church inclined more to support the Emperor Maximilian II or his son,
the Archduke Ernst, or even Maximilian's brother Ferdinand. The run-of-the-mill Lithuanian nobles also supported a Habsburg candidate. The Emperor Maximilian II was more favourably regarded than Archduke Ernst as a candidate for the throne by many in Poland–Lithuania, because as Holy Roman Emperor he would be unable to come often to the country in person, and would therefore be forced to delegate the administration to the local magnates.

The Lithuanian magnates inclined to a Russian candidate but preferred Fedor Ivanovich to his father, for they were more aware than the Poles of the peculiarities of Ivan's character. Some placed their hopes in a triple alliance between the Empire, Russia and the Commonwealth against the Ottoman Empire. The Lithuanians also protected themselves by sending Ivan copies of the
pacta conventa
signed by Henri of Anjou in 1572 as an indication of the terms he, Ivan, would have to agree to, because he was not a
dedich
of the land, i.e., not descended from native-born ancestors. These were terms quite unacceptable to Ivan, and he did not send his envoys to the
Sejm
, as a result of which he was not in fact represented at all in the discussions. He may of course have been held back by the considerable uncertainty which remained about the status of Henri of Anjou until his formal abdication.
²⁷

Unwilling to make use of established diplomatic channels, Ivan and his advisers, now Afanasii Nagoy, Andrei Shchelkalov, who had donned the mantle of Viskovaty and the
d'iak
Ersh Mikhailov, made use of a young Polish noble, Krishtof Graevsky, in Russia on a commercial mission, as an unofficial channel, in order to communicate the Russian views directly to the Poles.
²⁸
Graevsky, when the Tsar received him on 6 April 1575 (before the appointment of Simeon Bekbulatovich) in Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda, urged Ivan to cease negotiating with the Lithuanians and to negotiate with the Polish nobles; he proposed a meeting in Kiev to iron out problems, after which the Tsar could proceed through Kiev and Volhynia to his coronation in Cracow. Through the young Pole Ivan stressed his desire to be crowned by a metropolitan, not an archbishop and insisted, as before, on the granting of precedence to his title of Tsar, reigning in Kiev which should be ceded to Russia, over the title of King of Poland and Grand Prince of Lithuania, as well as on granting hereditary rights to inherit the Commonwealth crowns to the Russian dynasty – conditions which had already been communicated to the Lithuanian envoy M. Haraburda in 1573.
²⁹
This suggests that Ivan may have contemplated the removal of the Russian capital from Moscow to Kiev. The political institutions of the three crowns, namely the Senate of the Commonwealth and the Boyar Council should be
fused, and Ivan would call a special gathering to discuss religion and religious toleration. The support of the Commonwealth nobles would be sought by promising to grant them lands in the empty territories of Russia.

These conditions implied a rejection of those subscribed to by Henri of Anjou. The Tsar insisted on maintaining a hereditary right to the Polish-Lithuanian crown, and refused to recognize its elective quality, except within his own dynasty; he refused to swear to observe the conditions laid down by both Catholics and Protestants in Poland–Lithuania as Henri of Anjou had been compelled to do, in the famous formula put to him in Paris:
si non jurabis aut non regnabis
. But the Poles, particularly the leaders of the Protestants, clung to their right to worship as they chose as ‘free citizens of a free republic’.
³⁰
This gave Ivan an opening to claim the same freedom for himself and to reject the condition that he must convert to Catholicism, unless he were convinced, in an open debate, of its superior merits as a faith. As a result confusion reigned in the
Sejm
and the supporters of a Russian candidature remained divided between Ivan and his son Fedor. Graevsky himself was unable to report on his talks with Ivan, for he was arrested on his passage through Lithuania by the magnates opposed to a Polish-sponsored Russian candidature. While in captivity in Lithuania Graevsky modified his account, emphasizing the concessions made by Ivan, and notably the intention he allegedly harboured to unite Russia with Poland as Jagiello had united Lithuania with Poland, which he then transmitted through his brother Peter.
³¹

Ivan it seems was always fearful of a snub, and thus he sent no ‘great ambassadors’ to Warsaw, though he sent a ‘minor’ envoy in November 1575 who appeared before the
Sejm
and reiterated Ivan's reluctance to change his terms.
³²
His delaying tactics led some of his supporters in Poland to think that he did not really want the Polish-Lithuanian crown, or that he wished to postpone a decision until the Poles and the Lithuanians appealed to him and accepted his terms. For the time being the only remaining serious candidates were the Archduke Ernst, and the Emperor Maximilian himself.

Relations between the Emperor and the Tsar had become cooler since the Russian invasion of Livonia. Remnants of the Livonian Order had appealed in the past to the emperors for help against the invaders from Poland–Lithuania, Russia and Sweden, help which had not been forthcoming. Nevertheless Livonian deputies appeared regularly at meetings of the imperial Diet, and though the Emperors (Ferdinand I and Maximilian II) could do little to assist them, they nevertheless
attempted to give the province at least moral support. The interregna in Poland opened up fresh diplomatic perspectives to both powers though it must be stressed that the information on which their policies were based was very deficient, and their envoys were at times unreliable or misleading.

There had been a renewal of some complex negotiations between the Tsar and the Emperor even before the election of Henri of Anjou to the throne of the Commonwealth. A certain Magnus Pauli,
³³
a merchant resident in Brandenburg, who may have been an agent of King Magnus of Livonia, had devised a scheme the purpose of which remains unclear. He embarked on a journey to Russia in November 1572, ostensibly as an envoy from the Emperor, bearing a letter from him dated 20 November 1572 and was detained in Riga by the Lithuanian magnate Jan Chodkewicz, then commandant in Polish Livonia, in an effort to foil an understanding between Russia and the Holy Roman Empire. By the time Pauli was freed from arrest, and went on to Novgorod, arriving on 11 July 1573, Henri of Anjou had already been elected to the crown of the Commonwealth, so that it only remained for Pauli to convey what he alleged was imperial policy to the Tsar. Pauli saw Andrei Shchelkalov, and Ivan now expressed the hope of seeing the Archduke Ernst on the throne of Poland, for when all was said and done, the Habsburgs were more likely than a French prince to oppose the Tsar's ultimate enemy, the Ottoman Sultan. Pauli in turn outlined a policy which was only to be implemented two hundred years later: he proposed in Maximilian's name and without any authority from the Emperor
³⁴
the partition of the Commonwealth, the crown of Poland going to the Emperor and the Grand Principality of Lithuania to the Tsar, while the two powers would be united in a common front against the Ottoman Empire.
³⁵