Ivan the Terrible (6 page)

Finally there were the so-called
deti boyarskie
, or boyars' children, called service gentry for convenience here. These were a mixed bag, originally comprising descendants of princely or noble families who had multiplied to such an extent that they were compelled by poverty to serve for a fairly low reward; minor landowners, foreigners and immigrants from other principalities who received allotments of land for their service; as well as occasional sons of priests or even ex-slaves.
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A striking feature of Russian political structure was its lack of institutionalization. Carrying on from the early tradition of the prince consulting his war band, the grand princes' retinues had taken part in the duty of giving advice to the ruler in the commonwealth of Rus'.
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These families of princes and untitled long-serving aristocrats were called by the generic name of boyar, which gradually became identified also with membership of the Grand Prince's Council, a body which grew
out of the topmost level of the court. The practice of governing by council was traditional and still survived in some of the appanage principalities in the sixteenth century. The Grand Princess Sofia even had her own council, and so did many appanage princes in the reigning family.

The princely council is a most elusive body, which has left no record of its setting up, its functions, debates or decisions, its active membership at any time, or its constitutional status or role, if any. Its members were appointed by the grand prince and were placed in one of two ranks at its emergence in the late fifteenth century: the boyars proper, or highest rank, and the
okol'nichi
, a word which derives from
okolo
, or ‘near’, and evidently defined a man near the prince. The rank is first recorded in the thirteenth century, sometimes in conjunction with other court ranks such as cupbearer.
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There were not many of these
okol'nichi
, and according to Herberstein, they were a ‘sort of praetor or judge, placed near the lord’ and always with him.
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Ivan III made more changes to Russian titulature, which reflect the maturing of a political conception and which probably developed out of his marriage to the niece of the last Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, Constantine Paleologus. He began to use, frequently, but not always, the title Tsar (Caesar), which may have indicated an intention of claiming imperial status. Now that there was no longer an Orthodox tsar in Constantinople, he could put forward a claim to inherit the religious mantle and almost a hereditary right to the imperial title (the
translatio imperii
). He adopted, possibly in imitation of the Habsburgs, the device of the two-headed eagle (believed by some to be the coat of arms of the Paleologi), and used it on his coinage. He added to his titles the words ‘of all Russia’ (
vseia Rusi
), stressing his dynastic claim to sovereignty over all the Russian principalities, and therefore the right to reconquer those principalities of Kievan Rus' which were now in Lithuania. He was even able to force acceptance of this claim on the Grand Prince of Lithuania in a treaty of 1494.
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Ivan III also added to his title a long list of the various principalities and kingdoms over which he ruled. This is often interpreted as the self-advertisement of a parvenu among crowned European heads, but it is more likely to be an imitation of the general European practice.
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Grand Prince Ivan III firmly asserted his independence of all superior secular and ecclesiastical authority, on an occasion that has often been viewed as typical of Russian arrogance but is really perfectly understandable. When the imperial envoy Nicolas Poppel proposed in 1489 that his master the Emperor Frederick III should grant Ivan III the title
of ‘king’, as an inducement to join an alliance against the Porte, the Grand Prince replied that he and his ancestors had been lords in their lands from time immemorial, that their lands had been granted by God, and that he needed no help from the Emperor.
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Rus' had never after all been part of the Holy Roman Empire, nor even of the Eastern Roman Empire. It had now also, incidentally, ceased to be part of the Mongol Empire.

More difficult to explore adequately is the extent of the personal influence – if any – of Zoe Paleologa, the ‘Despina’ herself.
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Many Russian historians have rejected any such influence for reasons that seem anachronistically nationalistic.
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Having lost his wife, Princess Maria Borisovna of Tver', Ivan III sought a new bride. There was some talk of a Saxon princess, but after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks, the niece, even of a dead Roman emperor, might provide an attractive proposition and would raise the position of the Grand Prince of Moscow even further above the shoulders of his kin and his rivals and strengthen his international position. Sofia, as she was called in Moscow, was the daughter of Thomas, brother and heir of Constantine Paleologus, the last East Roman Emperor, who died on the walls of Constantinople in 1453. Her father had been Despot of Morea and died in Rome in 1460, leaving also a son, Andrei. Born in 1440 or 1449, Sofia herself was brought up in Rome, and though Orthodox by birth she may have been a Catholic by upbringing. The initiative for the marriage came from Pope Paul II, through Cardinal Bessarion of Nicaea, a supporter of the Union of Churches.
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The Pope, needless to say, hoped to secure Ivan III as a powerful ally against the Turk, as well as his consent to the Union of Churches. Agreement on the marriage was soon reached and Sofia left Rome in June 1472. She travelled with a large retinue by land and sea to Pskov', where she was greeted with a banquet, and where the first signs of strain between Latins and Greeks were noted when her escort, Cardinal Antonio Bonumbre, allowed himself to be preceded by a crucifix held aloft. (The body of Christ did not appear on Russian Orthodox crosses at that time.)
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Sofia was evidently quite accustomed to public appearances and knew how to thank the Pskovites gracefully for their welcome. She arrived in Moscow on 12 November 1472, and the wedding took place the next day in order to evade the impending church fast. There was no coronation ceremony.

It took considerable courage and character for a young woman to embark on a marriage to the ruler of a country about which so little was
known, and it is fair to assume that Sofia was a woman of parts. Ivan's physical presence was overwhelming: he was tall, lean and a fine figure of a man, but women looked away from him, frightened by his eyes. He was a formidable drinker, and after the long midday meal, lay in a drunken stupor, according to Herberstein's gossip (the traditional siesta, as recommended by Grand Prince Vladimir Monomakh).
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It is also probable that Sofia evaded the complete seclusion imposed on high-born Russian women. She received foreign envoys, for instance. According to Herberstein, ‘they say that she was a very cunning woman, and the prince acted very often on her suggestions’.
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Certainly her arrival, accompanied by a number of Italians and Greeks who settled in Russia, led to a remarkable opening to the West in many fields. According to one account, she was ashamed to see her husband standing before the seated envoys of the Mongol Horde to pay the tribute, and it was she who urged him to make the final stand on the Ugra in 1480 which put an end to the official suzerainty of the Mongols over Russia.

S.M. Solov'ev puts forward the theory that the Church, anxious to assist the grand princes of Moscow in the achievement of sole power (
edinovlastie
), had for a long time been endeavouring to raise them above the other princes, but for the successful conclusion of their undertaking they had to draw on the traditions of the Roman Empire of the East. These traditions were brought to Moscow by Sofia Paleologa. ‘He [Ivan III] was the first to be called Groznyi, because he seemed to the princes and to his
druzhina
like a monarch.’
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He raised himself to an unattainable height, and compelled the descendants of Riurik and Gedimin to bow before him like the lowliest of his subjects. It was he who introduced the habit of kissing the grand duke's hand, of using the word ‘
kholop
’ (bondsman or slave) to describe oneself in relation to the grand prince, and expected reports and petitions to be signed with the demeaning diminutive, for instance Ivashka, for Ivan. Ivan's contemporaries, continues Solov'ev, believed that this was due to Sofia's influence, ‘and we have no reason to disbelieve them’.
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It seems that perhaps we may have many reasons to disbelieve them, yet Prince A.M. Kurbsky, writing in the reign of Ivan IV, lamented that the devil had sowed evil habits in the excellent clans of Russian princes, just like the kings of Israel had done, by means of their evil and sorcerous wives, particularly those whom they took in marriage from foreigners. Elsewhere Kurbsky accuses ‘the Greek’ of having been instrumental in the death of Ivan III's eldest son.
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But possibly a more perceptive critic of Sofia was Bersen' Beklemishev (of noble family but not officially a boyar), who in the reign of Vasily III allegedly said to the monk and man
of letters Michael Trivolis, known in Russia as Maksim Grek (Maxim the Greek):
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‘When the Greeks came here, our land fell into confusion. Until then our land had lived in peace and quiet. But as soon as the mother of the Grand Prince, the Grand Princess Sofia, came here with your Greeks our land fell into confusion and great disorder, like with you in Tsargrad [Constantinople].’ When Maksim objected that Sofia descended on both sides from great families, Bersen' continued: ‘Whatever she may have been she brought discord to us. A land which gives up its own customs will not stand for long, and the Grand Prince has changed the old customs here; what good can we hope for from that?’
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Ivan III's new political conceptions found visual expression in the remodelling of the city of Moscow on a far grander scale in brick and stone. He rebuilt the three cathedrals, to record births (Annunciation Cathedral), coronations (Dormition Cathedral) and death (Archangel Cathedral) within the Kremlin; he built himself a new palace fit for a tsar (the Palace of Facets); he reconstructed the walls of the Kremlin, using Russian builders as well as Italians who had come in the train of Sofia; and he drew on the best artists of the time to decorate the churches with frescoes. The new palace would also serve as the base for a new and far more elaborate and carefully regulated court, with new ranks, a far more ceremonious treatment of both Russians and foreigners and the extension and depersonalization of court service.
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Sofia almost certainly had her say in matters of the succession. She bore Ivan III five sons and three daughters, and there was doubtless some pillow talk, even if she lived in the women's quarters. We do not know where she in fact lived. She clearly helped to give external shape and form to Ivan's aspirations to sovereignty and provided him and Vasily III with information on court ceremonial in Constantinople and Rome. In the years from 1470 to the death of Vasily III in 1533 there were many foreigners in Russia, but Sofia was better placed than anyone to inform the Grand Prince and the court about the way things were done abroad.

The political crisis of the last decade of Ivan III's reign is shrouded in mystery and was played out against the background of a religious crisis which saw the appearance of the first translation of the Bible as a whole into the Church Slavonic language, and the first executions for heresy in Russia. Briefly summed up, in 1497 the Grand Prince, having lost his son and heir, Ivan, by his first wife, appointed his grandson, Dmitri Ivanovich, by his daughter-in-law the Princess Elena of Moldavia,
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as
his heir and had him crowned as co-ruler. Two years later the most prominent boyars at the Grand Prince's court, Ivan III's uncle by marriage, the ex-Lithuanian Gediminovich Prince Iuri Patrikeevich, and his son Vasily, were arrested. Others arrested at the same time were executed, but the Patrikeevs were spared though forced to take the cowl, Vasily under the name of Vassian. The arrests seem to have been connected with tension between the supporters of the young Dmitri, Ivan III's grandson, and Vasily, the eldest of his sons by Sofia, as heirs to the throne. The mother of Dmitri, Princess Elena, was in addition closely linked to a group of so-called ‘Judaizers’, heretics of a sort difficult to define. Russian scholars have argued endlessly about the interpretation of these events without reaching any satisfactory conclusion.
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The ‘Judaizing’ heresy, about which very little is known, was first detected in Novgorod, where according to the story a number of local people had been converted to Judaism by an alleged Jew, Zechariah, brought in the train of a Lithuanian prince, Mikhail Olel'kovich.
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No one knows what the tenets of the Judaizers actually were, but it is very possible that they were influenced by latent anti-clericalism, rationalism and iconoclasm, a desire for simplification, and ultimately anti-Trinitarianism or even Arianism. There may have been some reflection of Hussite ideas. On the other hand there may also have been elements of Jewish mysticism, possibly even Kabbalistic studies or some acquaintance with the substantial quantity of translations from the Hebrew available in the Grand Principality of Lithuania.
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Identifiable members of the heresy are very few, but it is known that there were converts at the court of Ivan III, where his daughter-in-law Elena of Moldavia seems to have been one of the most prominent, and where Fedor Kuritsyn, a leading diplomat, the man who is said to have transmitted the Tales of Vlad the Impaler to Russia, and even Ivan III himself were said to be sympathizers.

The apparent flourishing of heresy led the Archbishop of Novgorod, Gennadi, a man of considerable intellectual calibre, to pursue heretics with their own weapons and to set up a centre for the study of ‘Latin’, i.e. Catholic, culture while at the same time driving forwards thepreparation of what he regarded as the main weapon against heretics, namely the translation of the complete Bible into Church Slavonic.
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(His hope that Ivan III would introduce an institution on the lines of the Spanish Inquisition was disappointed.) Some, but not all, of the books of the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha were available in the form of separate manuscripts or collections of different and often incomplete books; among those that were not available were the
Chronicles (Paralipomenon) the first, second and third books of Esdras, parts of Ezekiel and other apocryphal books.
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