Ivan the Terrible (60 page)

Around April 1579 Ivan, then in Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda, fell seriously ill.
¹
He summoned the senior church hierarchy and the Boyar Council to his bedside and proclaimed his son Ivan his heir. He also addressed the Boyar Council urging its members to find means of entering on peace negotiations with Stephen Bathory. He had already drafted a will, perhaps several times, but the only surviving text of any of his wills is an undated copy, made early in the nineteenth century, of an eighteenth-century copy of an earlier copy of a sixteenth-century original, and historians are not unanimous about when exactly Ivan may have dictated it, if it is in fact genuine.
²
Some believe that he wrote this will between 6 and 17 August 1572, after the victory over the Khan of Crimea, news of which reached him in Novgorod on the 6th. Another theory holds that the Tsar wrote his will earlier in the summer of 1572, when he was sunk in gloom and fear over his possible defeat by the Crimeans, and believed he might have to take refuge in some other country. Bearing in mind his morbid imagination it is not unlikely that he saw himself being borne away, loaded in chains, as a prisoner of the Khan or even of the Sultan. The dating of the will can to some extent be determined by the mention of bequests to his wife, Anna Koltovskaya, which must have been made before Ivan repudiated her and sent her to a monastery in October 1572.
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However, Anna's surname is not mentioned in the will, she is only referred to as Tsaritsa Anna, so that the legacy might well have been to her successor, Tsaritsa Anna Vasil'chikova.

The draft will gives some idea of Ivan's frame of mind whenever he dictated it, whether in 1572 or in 1579.
⁴
It was probably written by Andrei Shchelkalov and like nearly all of Ivan's writings it is extremely verbose, quoting extensively from the Old and New Testaments. In a long prologue, Ivan describes himself as the worst sinner on earth, the
most abject of mortals, ‘defiled of soul and corrupt of body’, whom even the Levite passed by. He had surpassed Cain and was like unto Esau, corrupt of reason and bestial in mind. His head was defiled by the wish and desire for improper deeds, he had discoursed on murder and fornication, wrath and indignation, he had indulged in insatiable rapine and inner murder, gluttony and drunkenness, plundering of others’ wealth. He begs Christ to bind up the sores of his spiritual and bodily wounds and have mercy on him, in a paraphrase of the Lord's Prayer.
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In language of great eloquence since it is based on the Bible, Ivan beat his breast and proclaimed his message commanding his children to love one another, to hold firmly to the Orthodox faith, to be just to their servants, ‘and upon those that are evil you should place your disfavour, not hurriedly, but after consideration, not in wrath’ – an injunction he rarely carried out himself, but which is an echo of an injunction in the Domostroi. His son Ivan Ivanovich was enjoined to protect his brother Fedor, so that he should not complain that he had not been given his own principality, and Fedor should not ask for one.

Yet, after quoting at length from St Paul on love Ivan draws attention to the apostle's words: ‘But if any provide not for his own … he hath denied the faith and is worse than an infidel.’ The copyist who produced the unsatisfactory version of the will which survives, indulges occasionally in marginal comments which have a certain flavour. When Ivan speaks of wandering about his lands in exile, the copyist notes that because of his fear of revolts the Tsar preferred to live in Staritsa or in Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda; or he notes: ‘Here he [Ivan] evinces once more his terror of being deprived of the throne.’ Evidently he was fully aware of the nature of Ivan's paranoia.

After further lengthy quotations from parables in the New Testament, Ivan gets down to the division of his kingdom, leaving the Russian regalia and the Russian kingdom to Ivan Ivanovich, as well as the city of Moscow, which he does not divide between his sons as had been usual in the past; nor does he dissipate the heritage from Vasily III and Ivan III. But he does allot a large number of estates to Fedor, creating a very substantial appanage for his younger son. The list of Ivan's lands provides interesting evidence of the extent of the confiscation of estates from a number of princes both before and after the
oprichnina
. One of the main problems in dating the will is the Tsar's bequests of lands to Prince Mikhail Vorotynsky, to replace those which he had confiscated, a bequest which would obviously be superseded by 1573, when the prince was executed.
⁶

It is possible, however, that the surviving copy of the will is a draft
which has been returned to and altered many times and which does not in any way represent a completed document. In that case the existing copy could well be dated after 1572, particularly as it confirms Ivan's vassal, King Magnus as owner of a number of towns in Livonia which were not conquered by Russia until the campaign of 1577. Magnus was now betrothed to Vladimir of Staritsky's second daughter, Maria, after the eldest had died of the plague. He would have to repay a large advance made to him by Ivan to help him to conquer his vassal kingdom, and if he left Livonia or Russia his lands would revert to the tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich.
⁷

There is one reference to the
oprichnina
in the will: ‘And that I set up an
oprichnina
, it is now according to the will of my children Ivan and Fedor, let them do what suits them best, a model is ready for them.’ Had Ivan already abolished the
oprichnina
when this will was drafted? It refers to the
oprichnina
in the past, but it is impossible to tell. Evidently Ivan still thought that having their own appanage, with their own armed forces and guards might also be necessary for his children.
⁸

Ivan's will may coincide in time with another perplexing document attributed to him, namely the ‘Kanon to the Dread Angel, the voevoda’, attributed to Parfenii the Holy Fool, and dating from either 1572 or 1573, at any rate from a time when Ivan was seriously ill according to later reports. Or the will and the illness may belong together in 1579.
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So may the prayer, which maybe reflects Ivan's despair at the loss of Polotsk (see below). In May, Ivan had moved to the monastery of Volokolamsk, before continuing to Novgorod on 27 June 1579 and his thoughts may have turned to his fate in the next world.
¹⁰
The prayer is sad and gloomy, composed in a moment of the fear of death, and sent to all in the hour of death: ‘Use this prayer every day’, warns Parfenii the Yurodivy:

The prayer continues in this form, appealing now to the dread angel (who is never mentioned by name), now to the Holy Virgin Mother of God, and now to the King of the Heavens, to forgive the sinner. It is a moving prayer, couched in the traditional, poetic language of church devotion.

The Russian defeat at Wenden led the Tsar to consider embarking on peace negotiations by an exchange of ‘great ambassadors’, to be conducted while continuing with the war. Bathory too still continued desultory peace talks. But now that he was free from the complications of Danzig, he was determined, as part of the process of establishing his authority, and possibly his dynasty, to obtain the whole of Livonia for his new kingdom, and on 26 June 1579 he formally declared war on Ivan.
¹¹
Until then, Russia had been at war with Livonia, but Poland–Lithuania had not declared war on Russia in spite of the Russian conquest of Polotsk. At the same time, however, Bathory issued a remarkable challenge to Ivan, calling on him to settle their differences by single combat – a most unusual procedure in the annals of sixteenth-century royal behaviour, but typical perhaps of Polish or Hungarian notions of chivalry, a touch of Catholic bravado in a monarch anxious to consolidate his throne. Bathory protested against Ivan's refusal to treat him as a sovereign of equal rank, and declared his intention to seek reparation for the injury done to him by the Tsar on the Tsar's body, since he did not wish to harm the latter's subjects, as Christians, whose freedom he was anxious to preserve.
¹²

Bathory expounded his policy in an exhortation to the people of Russia, explaining that he did not want to shed their blood, that his only enemy was the Tsar, and that he wanted the latter to suffer personally for what he had inflicted on others. The gesture was not unprecedented. In 1527 and again in 1528, the Emperor Charles V issued a similar challenge to single combat to the King of France, Francis I who, in Charles's view, had failed to honour his word, given to Charles on his release from captivity in Madrid after the battle of Pavia (1525), and return to captivity in Spain. The challenge was issued in writing, and the meeting was to take place on the River Bidassoa, on the Franco-Spanish border. Francis, however, ignored the herald sent with a safe conduct for him, thus demonstrating that he was no gentleman.
¹³

Bathory's attempt to draw a distinction between the Tsar and his people, his effort to ‘bring them freedom and law’
¹⁴
provoked a response from the Tsar. The reply to Stephen Bathory's challenge, dated some time in August 1579, which Ivan planned to issue in answer to his manifesto was never delivered; however a late archive copy suggests that Ivan appealed for the support of the various ranks of the nation, starting with the church hierarchy, possibly in a
Zemskii sobor
, but modern scholarship does not support this view.
¹⁵

Both sides now prepared for war. Collecting his army proved difficult for Ivan because again many refused to respond to his appeal but he was
able to gather a force estimated at between 30,000 and 40,000, including some 6,000 Tatar cavalry, and in June he moved from Novgorod to Pskov which was to be his headquarters. Meanwhile Bathory had also been planning his campaign. He collected an army of some 40,000 men, drawing troops from both Lithuania and Poland and recruiting mercenaries from Germany and Transylvania. Instead of advancing into exhausted and ravaged Livonia, or on Pskov, which would leave his rear unguarded, the King planned to advance first on Polotsk which lay on the River Dvina and would guarantee both supplies and communications. Ivan had expected Bathory to attack Livonia, since the war was about Livonia, and not about Russian-occupied Lithuania, and was taken by surprise when the King appeared before Polotsk in August 1579. Polotsk was on the road to central Russia and, though well garrisoned, was not strongly fortified, since its walls were of wood. Neither Ivan, nor his generals, F.I. Sheremetev and Prince F.I. Mstislavsky (son of Ivan Fedorovich), reached Polotsk in time to relieve it. The fighting was extremely fierce but the besieged city finally surrendered and on 1 September 1579 Bathory entered it. To him it was a recaptured Lithuanian city: the great church of St Sophia was preserved for the Orthodox, and land was set aside for a new and imposing Catholic church.
¹⁶

The loss of Polotsk was a profound psychological shock for Ivan. Its conquest had been a landmark on the road to the realization of the idea of Moscow as the heir of Kiev, and had been accompanied by religious rhetoric and widely accessible religious symbolism. It was the Tsar's
votchina
and after its conquest it was included in his title; it was after all Riurikovich land.
¹⁷
Prince I.F. Mstislavsky's proposals to recover Polotsk, with the help of Ivan's two sons, were waved away with contumely by the Tsar who beat Mstislavsky with his staff and called him an old dog, full of Lithuanian spirit, who wanted to place his sons in danger.
¹⁸

Karamzin accused Ivan of cowardice, or refusing to give battle. Zimin and Skrynnikov think he was suffering from shock.
¹⁹
More modern authors have stressed that he did not have sufficient knowledge of strategy and tactics to plan a campaign and simply no longer had the means to assemble an army. Already in 1579 many of the service gentry had refused to attend the Tsar's summons to war; and supplies of all kinds were lacking after the fierce fighting and the depopulation due to plague and starvation which had afflicted northern Russia and Livonia. Moreover Ivan had found himself forced to fight a war on two fronts, against the Commonwealth to the south west, and against the Swedes in Estonia to the north, where a Tatar-led assault on Narva had failed.

In fact the loss of Polotsk, after sixteen years in Russian hands, seems to have broken Ivan's spirit. He believed that his military failures were the punishment of God, and Russian prisoners in summer 1580 reported that he had summoned the Metropolitan and the bishops and had asked their forgiveness for his sins (including his many marriages?), and humbled himself before God.
²⁰
Indeed it was probably not military factors alone which led to Ivan's failure in the field.

There was a good deal of military innovation in eastern Europe in the sixteenth century. But military change was related to climate and geography. The horse was still essential for steppe warfare, but both Polish and Russian armed forces increased their commitment to infantry and gunpowder in this period. Ski-troops were known both in Sweden and in Russia. Bathory had introduced in the Commonwealth a medium-weight cavalry force, which could manoeuvre more easily than the Western heavily armoured cavalry, but the Russian cavalryman remained the light-weight horseman suitable for fighting against the Tatars. The Russians were superior to the Poles in artillery and both sides used infantry extensively, relying on firepower.
²¹
The Commonwealth superiority in the campaigns of 1579 to 1580 lay in its cavalry, but probably also in the generalship of its commanders and the better training of its forces. The Russians did not dispose of sufficient infantry to maintain garrisons in conquered towns and castles. They were unable to consolidate their victories.
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