Ivan the Terrible (61 page)

Though trade continued with England in the late 1570s both through the White Sea and through Narva, in spite of the dangers from Polish and Swedish privateers, diplomatic relations, while Ivan was on campaign, were allowed to decline. Daniel Sylvester, after his last meeting with Ivan, on 29 January 1576, in which the Tsar had expressed his dissatisfaction with the tone of Elizabeth's messages, which had shown a ‘kynde of haughtynes in our systar moved tharto by th'abasynge of our selfe towards her’, had returned to England. Ivan had hinted that he might if necessary seek asylum with his good friend the Emperor Maximilian instead of in England, and that he would remove England's trade monopoly and open it to the Germans and Venetians.
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Sylvester returned to Russia but the Queen's reply which he carried never reached Ivan, for the English envoy's life was dramatically cut short in Kholmogory, where he was killed by lightning as he was trying on his new court clothes of yellow satin, and his whole house was burnt down.
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Ivan was still anxious to communicate with England, and he now approached Jerome Horsey to act as his messenger. Always game for an
adventure, Horsey embarked on what could have been a dangerous mission, travelling by land, carrying a letter from Ivan to Elizabeth hidden in a ‘wooden bottle filled with aqua-vitae to hang under my horse's mane’, clothed in his shabbiest garments and with four hundred Hungarian ducats in gold sewn into his boots. He left some time in 1580 (he does not give the date), well attended as far as the Livonian border, where his difficulties began. But his luck held: when he was arrested on the Danish-held island of Oesel, the governor spoke to him privately, and discovered that Horsey had befriended his daughter who was a captive in Russia. Thereafter Horsey was sped on his way, and finally arrived in England where ‘I opened my aqua vitae bottle and sweetened the emperor's letter as well as I could’, though the Queen remarked on the scent when she read it.

It was for him a very successful mission: the Queen gave him her picture and her hand to kiss. More important, Horsey returned with thirteen company ships loaded with copper, lead, powder, saltpetre, brimstone and other things useful for war, and paid for with nine thousand pounds in ready money, clear evidence that England was providing Ivan with military supplies, whatever Elizabeth might have said to the Emperor.
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After the loss of Polotsk, Ivan was too discouraged to undertake any military activity and it is possible that two events combined to dishearten him. It may be that sometime after the loss of Polotsk he concluded that his Dr Bomelius was a traitor and decided to execute him. There is some suggestion that Bomelius tried to persuade Ivan not to take action against the Poles. The most detailed account of his downfall is given by Horsey, but he gives no date and does not say where the events he describes took place. He links Bomelius's downfall with the disgrace of an unnamed archbishop of Novgorod, probably Leonid, which actually happened in 1575. It is more likely that Bomelius's disgrace was connected with an attempt by him to leave Russia, with his ill-gotten gains sewn into his clothes. He was caught and brought back, tortured on the rack and with wire whips, and having confessed to many crimes, and incriminated many people, the Tsar sent orders for him to be roasted on a spit and, as Horsey describes it, ‘I pressed among many others to see him; cast up his eyes naming Christ; cast into a dungeon and died there.’ Horsey regarded him as a wicked man, and a ‘practicer of much mischief, and … an enemy always to our nation’, who had ‘deluded the emperor, making him believe the queen of England was young, and it was very feasible for him to marry her’.
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Possibly Ivan's susceptibility to occult influences may in this period have been particularly stimulated by the great comet of 1577, which was
visible from Peru to China, came closest to the earth on 10 November and disappeared at the end of January 1578. One astronomer described it ‘as a huge shining spherical mass which vomited fire and ended in smoke’ with a huge long tail, curved over itself, of a burning dark reddish colour. Other astronomers forecast great changes in the weather and in politics, and many of the observations made caused an upheaval in the previous cosmology, for the new comet had evidently appeared not between the earth and the moon, where comets were supposed to travel, but beyond the moon. A second comet was visible from October 1580 to January 1581 and they were regarded as manifestations of heavenly wrath, of danger to mankind, and particularly to princes. Tycho Brahe reported that the comet of 1577 had first appeared in the astrological eighth house or house of death, and that it foretold a great mortality among mankind. Ivan must have seen the comet, and in all probability Bomelius would have interpreted its significance. According to another source, even before war broke out several wonders happened:

This must have been enough to unsettle the Tsar.
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Inevitably Ivan now turned to diplomacy, and in September 1579, in Pskov, he attempted to interest the
voevoda
of Vilna, then N. Radziwill the Red, in opening peace talks. But he accompanied this opening with a most insulting letter directed to Stephen Bathory, accusing the King of adopting Kurbsky's treasonable ways, and still ‘asserting his will to win’. Ivan declared that the Polish King's ‘Latin’ faith was only ‘half Christian’, that of his nobles Lutheran, and that now a new heresy had appeared in his country, Arianism (by which he presumably meant anti-Trinitarianism). God would not give victory to such people, who were not even Christian.

Yet again, however, this letter may not have been sent and was perhaps only a safety valve for Ivan's overwhelming rage and resentment at his powerlessness.
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Meanwhile, in summer 1580, Bathory renewed the offensive, again taking the Russians by surprise by attacking neither Pskov nor Smolensk, but Velikie Luki, a minor but strategically placed
Russian town lying between the two. Couriers travelled again between the two warring parties, but it led to nothing. The Russian loss of Velikie Luki, which fell to the Poles on 5 September 1580, and the defeat of another Russian force two weeks later by the Poles, together with a further Swedish assault in Karelia forced Ivan to think seriously of peace negotiations with the Commonwealth, but he did not wish to suffer the humiliation of being the first to open the subject formally, nor did Stephen Bathory, who categorically refused to open negotiations even for the exchange of prisoners.
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Ivan now embarked on a wide ranging diplomatic ploy, which reveals that though he may not have been a good general, he understood very well how to muddy the European diplomatic waters. He had lately showed himself more amenable to discussion, and sent proposals for the renewal of talks between Russia and the Commonwealth in November 1579 and January 1580. He called a meeting of the Boyar Council, on 25 August 1580, in Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda, to discuss the situation. The result of these consultations was the dispatch of a messenger first to Vienna, then on to Rome. Leontii Istoma Shevrigin, who left on 6 September, was a mere courier (
gonets
), belonging to the lowest diplomatic rank in the Russian service, which enabled him to travel without ostentation, and therefore with greater safety, since he was less likely to attract attention and be intercepted. He was charged with a letter from Ivan proposing to join the Emperor Rudolph II in an alliance against the Ottomans and, in order to enable him to do so, inviting the Emperor at the same time to bring pressure to bear on Bathory to make peace with Russia, on terms which would allow Ivan to keep at least four Livonian fortresses.
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But Ivan was proposing an even bolder venture. Shevrigin was to continue on to Rome and pick up the threads of earlier soundings from the Vatican, throwing out hints of a possible acceptance of the supremacy of the Pope by the Russian Orthodox Church, an aspiration which had been high on the agenda of the popes ever since the Council of Florence in the fifteenth century.
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Ivan hoped thus to win time and to encourage the Pope, then Gregory XIII, to mediate a peace or a truce between Russia and the Commonwealth, a thoroughly original proposal running counter to all previous Russian dealings with the Papacy.
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Since travel by land was too dangerous for a Russian envoy, Shevrigin travelled by sea from Pernau in Livonia to Lübeck, and collected there an Italian interpreter, Francesco Pallavicino, to add to his escort of a German interpreter, Wilhelm Popler. He arrived in Prague at the beginning of January 1581, and was lodged in the accommodation
unflatteringly allocated to ‘Turks and Muscovites’, who were evidently treated on the same footing.

The Emperor Rudolph received Shevrigin on 10 January 1581, but showed no interest at all in his proposals for an alliance against the Turks and for the improvement of trade, nor in the timber of sables offered to him as a gift. The fate of Livonia was in the hands of the Imperial Diet, Shevrigin was told, and he was treated in Prague much as the foreign envoys were treated in Moscow, left in isolation. His request for a passport to Venice was promptly granted if only to get rid of him. The Russian party arrived in the Adriatic on 13 February 1581.

In contrast with his reception in Prague, the Venetian regents received the Russian courier with great pomp and ceremony, and showed him everything, including their formidable naval armament. But alas they did not know that Shevrigin's letter of credentials to them from the Tsar, solemnly read aloud, was a forgery. Since he had no credentials to present to the Serenissima, Shevrigin, with admirable presence of mind, had composed a message from the Tsar in his own hand, and added the seal taken off a letter to the Elector of Saxony to make it convincing. In the letter, he had called himself ‘ambassador’ not courier, hence the ceremonial treatment he received in Venice (and later in Rome) as distinct from Prague. The episode is explained by the fact that Ivan at this time had no idea that Venice was an independent republic, and believed that the Serenissima was a mere province belonging to the popes, while the Office of Foreign Affairs in Moscow had no idea of the correct form of address to use to the Doge.
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Shevrigin, having dropped a few hints about how welcome trade with Venice would be in Moscow, now made tracks for Rome where he arrived on 24 February 1581. Here too he was received with great public ceremony and escorted to the Palazzo Colonna, where he was to reside, and lavishly entertained. Presumably because of the difficulty over religion, the Pope granted the envoy only a private audience, on 26 February, when Shevrigin kissed the Pope's slipper, and on his knees read out the letter from Ivan. This was couched in Ivan's usual terms, in which he described Bathory as no better than a Moslem and the creature of the Sultan. The Pope set up a commission to study Shevrigin's letter which conveyed the Russian perspective on the military situation in the east, and by implication, the Russian need for peace, and requested the Pope to send an ambassador to Moscow to discuss military operations against the Ottoman Empire and a truce between the Commonwealth and Russia. Needless to say, the Poles used their influence in Rome to counter the Russian proposals. But the Pope decided to allow discussion
with Ivan on matters of religion and only afterwards to discuss possible military cooperation against the Turks.
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The Pope appointed Antonio Possevino as his ambassador.
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Possevino was a highly regarded Jesuit, experienced in international negotiations, notably in Sweden, where he had succeeded in converting John III to Catholicism. He was an able champion of the Counter Reformation, and before his departure for Russia he immediately embarked on a thorough study of all the known literature on Muscovy, notably Herberstein, Giovio, Cobenzl, whom Possevino met later in Graz and questioned about Russia; perhaps also Prinz von Buchau, and also perhaps Schlichting, a copy of whose
Brief Account
was now available in the Vatican in Latin.
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In the instruction prepared for Possevino, the Pope offered to negotiate a peace between Ivan and Stephen Bathory which would lead on to the alliance against the Ottomans Ivan was so keen on. But for it to be solid, it had to be agreed upon within the bounds of the Church, which alone held the key to union, the Roman Catholic Church. Let the Tsar read the decrees of the council of Florence, let him send new ambassadors to the Pope. Shevrigin could also give a positive papal reply to the Russian proposals for commercial relations between Venice and Moscow, but the ultimate aim was a crusade against the Turks and the Union of the Churches. On 27 March 1581, Shevrigin left Rome on his return journey to Russia, accompanied by Possevino.

In the interval Ivan had not only been engaged with public concerns. In the course of 1576/7, his tsaritsa, Anna Vasil'chikova, had died, and in 1578/9, he had embarked on his sixth ‘marriage’, this time with a reputedly very handsome widow of modest rank, Vasilisa Melent'eva, possibly the widow of a
d'iak
who had served in Livonia.
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One authority, R.G. Skrynnikov, has stated categorically that Ivan never chose a bride because he was attracted to her but that his marriages were all negotiated by powerful boyar interests at court. The one exception he admits is Vasilisa, who was reputed to be very presentable and handsome,
uriadna
and
krasna
, ‘such as you do not find among the girls, brought in for the Tsar to look at’. The marriage did not last long, for Vasilisa died the following year ‘of her own death’.
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But it coincided with the period of Ivan's greatest military successes. As usual, without mourning Vasilisa for long, the Tsar ‘married’ as his seventh wife, on 6 September 1580, Maria Fedorovna Nagaia, the niece of Afanasii Fedorovich Nagoi, who had played a prominent part in Ivan’ s counsels ever since his return from the Crimea. By this match Nagoi increased still more his weight in the boyar councils within Ivan's court. In the same
year, Ivan Ivanovich, who had already been compelled to divorce two wives, chose and married a third, Elena Federovna Sheremeteva.
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