Ivan the Terrible (59 page)

Again, for reasons which are not at all clear, Ivan now decided to bring to an end the reign of Simeon Bekbulatovich. Quite when this happened cannot be precisely determined, though it probably occurred in the summer of 1576.
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Simeon was granted the cities of Tver' and Torzhok as his appanage and proceeded to rule there enjoying all the prerogatives of an appanage prince of old while continuing to serve in the armed forces of Ivan as one of his senior commanders.
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At the same time in order to strengthen his high command the Tsar appointed a number of new high-ranking boyars and military commanders from the
zemshchina
to his
dvor
, including Prince I.F. Mstislavsky's son, Fedor Ivanovich, who now embarked, as a boyar, on the long career which would take him right through the Time of Troubles.
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Some time, too, in the course of 1576 and 1577 Ivan's wife Anna Vasil'chikova died, though nothing is known of the circumstances.
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He had not married her in a formal church ceremony, and his wedding with his next wife, Vasilisa Melent'eva, the widow of a
d'iak
, took place merely ‘with a prayer’ and lasted only a short time for, in the expressive Russian phrase for a death from natural causes, ‘she died of her own death’.
⁵⁴
Fortunately too, his old enemy Devlet Girey died on 29 June 1577 thus relieving Ivan's anxiety about his southern frontier.

The year 1577 saw the opening of a new Russian campaign in Livonia based on Pskov. The King of Sweden sent envoys in 1576–7 to Moscow instructed to draw out the truce negotiations while Sweden re-armed, but on 13 July 1577, Ivan with 30,000 troops and the Tatar cavalry under Simeon Bekbulatovich marched out to attack not Sweden, but the lands occupied by Poland–Lithuania in southern Livonia. His substantial conquests, extending to the gulf of Riga,
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led Ivan to write one of his admonitory letters to Prince Polubensky,
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the Polish vicegerent in Polish occupied Livonia, on 9 July 1577. Polubensky was a member of a Russian family which had emigrated to the Commonwealth and he had been a successful general in the service of Sigismund Augustus. Indeed it was Polubensky who organized the raid on Izborsk when the Lithuanians were admitted to the Russian fortress, disguised as
oprichniki
.
⁵⁷

As usual with Ivan, the letter began with a long exposition of biblical history, drawing on the Apocryphal book of Enoch, and ranging from the Creation, through Adam, Abraham and Isaac, to the Tower of Babel, explaining how when mankind multiplied it turned away from God, and government was given over to the devil. Hence came torturers and rulers and tsars, like the first Nimrod, who started on the Tower of Babel and everywhere different kingdoms sprang up, leading to evil governments. Ivan continued to describe how God had protected the Israelites but again they had fallen away and asked for a king, whereupon God gave them Saul. The moral of this diatribe was that his ancestors, Augustus Caesar, who ruled the whole universe, and his brother, Prus, whose descendant in the fourteenth generation, Riurik, ruled in Russia, had persecuted the followers of Christ. But Jesus Christ did not turn a deaf ear to their prayers and fulfilled his promise: ‘I shall be with you until the end of the world’, and sent the great Constantine, from whom the sceptre passed through Vladimir to Iaroslav and to Ivan as ruler of Livonia. Alexander Nevsky is then drawn in, as well as Dmitri Donskoi, victor over the Hagarenes, and Ivan invited the Polish commander, who disposed of some four thousand troops, to arrange for the departure of his forces from the Tsar's patrimony, in which case they would not be molested.
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He hoped to achieve a peaceful withdrawal of the occupying forces, and distributed letters to the fortified castles in his way promising safe conducts to those who departed in peace. Many of the small Polish-Lithuanian garrisons in Livonian cities did in fact surrender.

By August the Russian forces had captured the port of Pernau, and reached the Dvina and the outskirts of Riga. Dünaburg capitulated on 9 August and the Russians, meeting with resistance, stormed the town of Chistvin; the garrison and the townspeople were savagely exterminated. Ivan may have felt himself so near to total victory that he no longer needed to conciliate the Livonians. It was the greatest advance he had ever achieved. He took the opportunity to send a letter to the town council of Riga, informing its citizens that he had sheathed his sword, and awaited their submission.
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However, Ivan's puppet king, Magnus of Denmark proved both a selfish and a broken reed; he now claimed some eighteen captured towns for his kingdom, including many which had surrendered to Ivan, thus driving the Tsar into an absolute fury. He sent a detachment to Kockenhausen
⁶⁰
which had surrendered to Magnus, the town was destroyed and the garrison killed. Magnus was now playing his own hand. He declared that he was acting with the approval of both the Emperor (Rudolph) and the Tsar, which outraged Ivan, for Magnus was
taking the credit for the conquest of the towns captured by Ivan and assuming that they were going to be his share of the booty. Magnus also occupied Wolmar where the Polish commander Polubensky was taken prisoner, but he was dislodged by Ivan's troops on 1 September and the garrison massacred. Magnus was shut up with his followers for five days in an old roofless barn, sleeping on straw and then told to take himself off to his island of Oesel. The Livonians who had sworn allegiance to Magnus were executed, and the citizens of the towns sold off to the Tatar troops.
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It was the end of Magnus's dream of a Livonian kingdom though not yet of his career.

It was from Wolmar that Ivan, in 1577, addressed the second of the letters he composed to Prince Andrei Kurbsky, doubtless remembering that it was from there that Kurbsky had addressed his first bitter accusations against the Tsar in 1565.
⁶²
From Wolmar Ivan also addressed a number of letters to Bathory and Jan Chodkewicz, the Polish commandant in Livonia (who had allegedly been playing a double game with Ivan all this time) inviting them to leave Livonia without a battle. ‘There is not a place’ wrote the Tsar, in our Livonian land, ‘where not only the hooves of our horses, but our own feet have not stood, not a river nor a lake from which we have not drunk.’
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The letters are less insulting then his previous productions, there is a sense that the Tsar is writing more in sorrow than in anger, perhaps encouraged by his victories to be magnanimous to sinners, though he is one himself.
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Accordingly, Ivan proposed peace to Bathory on condition that he cede the whole of Livonia to Russia, including the unconquered city and port of Riga. This implied that Ivan was giving priority to Riga over Reval, for, from every point of view – climatic, commercial, military and naval, Riga was clearly preferable, though also liable to be ice-bound for at least three months of the year. Ivan's peace terms and other letters which he now drafted, for instance to the town council of Riga, were handed to Polubensky to deliver to Stephen Bathory, after the Lithuanians who had surrendered to Ivan himself had been entertained and showered with gifts at a great feast on 10 September 1577. To Bathory Ivan expressed himself brusquely, but he set out to charm Chodkewicz, addressing him as ‘brave and wise and stately’, and referring to his previous feats of arms. His attitude has been interpreted as arising from the belief that Bathory was but a lowly plaything in the hands of the Lithuanian magnates, who would do what he was told by them. Hence it was more important to woo Chodkewicz than the new King,
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in order to persuade the Commonwealth troops to withdraw from Livonia.

At the end of summer 1577 Ivan had achieved most of the objectives of his present campaign. Of all the major Livonian towns in the Eastern Baltic only Reval and Riga were not his. But his success was too good to last. By the end of 1577 Bathory was freed from anxiety over Danzig, and could concentrate on war with Russia, and he was an authoritative military leader commanding a better army than Ivan. An armistice was concluded between the Emperor Rudolph and the Porte, and Ivan appeared to agree on a three-year armistice with Poland, though since the texts signed by the two parties were entirely different (Livonia and Courland were both attributed to Russia in the copy signed by Ivan) in fact the armistice did not take place.
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Ivan now became diplomatically increasingly isolated.

In the autumn of 1577 Ivan had ordered an assault on the Polish held Livonian town of Wenden (Kes') but, ominously, the levy of service gentry did not turn up, there were many
netchiki
. The Russian troops under the command of Prince I.F. Mstislavsky conducted a four-week siege in early 1578 which proved unsuccessful and the arrival of Russian reinforcements in May achieved no result. A second attack on Wenden was launched by a substantial Russian force in September 1578, but it was driven off by a much smaller combined force of Poles, Swedes and Germans. Many prominent Russian generals were killed or taken prisoner, and there were heavy Russian losses both in men and armaments.
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It was a serious setback for Ivan, among other reasons because it was the result of a joint action between Swedish and Polish-Lithuanian forces, which had not cooperated hitherto.

According to some historians Ivan took his revenge on the Livonians, and on the other Germans dwelling in Moscow in the quarter generally known as ‘Narva and Dorpat’, where the original Livonian inhabitants of these two cities had been allowed to settle when they were expelled from their homes in Livonia at the Russian conquest some eighteen years before. They had also been allowed to establish one (two, according to some sources) Lutheran churches. (This was the origin of the later ‘German quarter’.) The Tsar, his son, and a detachment of troops, all dressed in black, unexpectedly arrived, some time in winter 1578, and, with the order ‘plunder but do not kill’, they set about looting and destroying the property of the inhabitants, leaving many stripped naked in the cold weather, as a result of which many lives were lost.
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A number of Scots who had been taken prisoner when acting as mercenaries in the forces of John III of Sweden were also in the settlement and Horsey did his best to rescue them, and indeed convinced Ivan to take many of them into his service.
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At a
Sejm
held in February 1578 in Warsaw the decision had been taken by the Commonwealth, and its new King, to proceed against Russia itself rather than against the Crimeans, since the reward for the former was Livonia, but what could be obtained from the Crimeans? Taxes had been voted accordingly, and during the interval while both sides prepared for future military operations, exchanges of envoys took place marked again by fierce disputes over precedence which prevented all formal discussions.
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In the relief of Wenden, the collaboration between Sweden and the Commonwealth opened up a new horizon, though no active alliance emerged between them for the conduct of the war against Ivan in Livonia.
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Meanwhile, on 5 November 1578 the Porte made peace with the Commonwealth in order to concentrate on war with Persia, and used its good offices to arrange an armistice between the Khanate of Crimea and the Polish Lithuanian kingdom in September 1579, thus freeing the Khan to assist the Porte in the war with Persia but also freeing the Commonwealth from fear for its southern border.

The correspondence between Ivan and Bathory was reminiscent of the language used between John III and Ivan, which was still conducted at low levels unknown between crowned heads. ‘You have sent your missive to us … full of the barking of dogs’ wrote Ivan in 1573 to King John, who refused to be treated as a vassal, or to negotiate with Ivan only through the Governor of Novgorod.

Similarly, Bathory refused to use the title of ‘Tsar’ in addressing Ivan, and mocked his pretensions to descend from the Roman emperor Augustus, which outraged the Russian boyars. ‘We have cleared our Livonian patrimony and it is improper for you to invade it, for they have plucked you from your principality to reign in Poland and Lithuania but not in Livonia’ declared the Tsar to King Stephen. To Commonwealth envoys who arrived in January 1579 Ivan demanded the cession of Livonia, Courland and Polotsk as well as Kiev and many other towns.
He now claimed them on genealogical grounds, because the princes of Lithuania were descended from the Rogvolodovichi of Polotsk, i.e. they were Riurikovichi, ‘brothers’ of Ivan, and therefore the Polish crown and the grand principality of Lithuania, on the death of the last descendant of Jagiello, were now his patrimony. The princes of Galicia (Russian princes in south-west Russia of old) and the kings of Poland were equal, ‘while no one had ever heard of the principality of Transylvania!’
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The offended Commonwealth envoys pointed out that King David of Judea had been of lowly origin, but Ivan ordered his officials to reply that ‘David was chosen by God, not by man; listen to Solomon speaking as the Holy Spirit: woe to the house where a woman reigns, and woe to the city where many reign’.
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Ivan reproached the envoys for having elected a lowly prince, unworthy of being treated fraternally. In many of Ivan's written and verbal communications at this time a triumphal tone underlies his assurance that at last Russia has achieved her aims and has conquered Livonia and access to the sea. But the Russian defeat at Wenden in February 1578 led the Tsar to consider embarking on peace negotiations by an exchange of ‘great ambassadors’, to be conducted while continuing with the war. There remained the problem of relations with Sweden. John III continued grimly to hold on to Reval, and to the hope of conquering Narva.