Ivan the Terrible (7 page)

The Judaizing movement flourished against a background of religious turbulence caused by the widely held belief that the world was coming to an end in the year 1492, the end of the seventh millennium in the Orthodox calendar, calculated from the creation of the world, and by the circulation of popular millenarian texts. The apprehension caused by the continuing advance of the Ottomans, culminating in the overthrow of the last remnant of the East Roman Empire, and the loss of Constantinople, was bound to have an extremely unsettling effect on all those living within the spiritual and physical radius of these dramatic events. By some the Ottomans were identified with Antichrist, as described in Revelations, and it had now become possible to draw upon the accounts in a Slavonic Bible to express these fears. Not less unsettling was the fact that the world did not come to an end in 1492.

The collapse of the Golden Horde, the advance of the Ottomans on the Black Sea and in Europe, and the Church Councils of Basel and Ferrara/Florence led in the second half of the fifteenth century to a considerable enlargement of the range of contacts between Russia and other European countries, particularly in south-east Europe, where the two dynastic houses, the Habsburgs and the Jagiellos, were in conflict over the lands of Bohemia, Poland and Hungary, all now threatened by the Ottoman advance. This explains the initiation of diplomatic exchanges with the Holy Roman Emperors (Frederick III and Maximilian I), the Papacy, the Ottomans and the semi-independent countries in the Balkans. Both emperors approached Russia in attempts to secure an alliance with the Grand Prince against the Ottomans. But Ivan was not to be diverted from his principal foreign policy problem: relations with Poland–Lithuania over their competing claims to the lands of the Dnieper basin, and the policy of each power of calling on the help of the khans of Crimea against the other. During the reign of Ivan III, the Grand Prince had managed to maintain an alliance with Mengli-Girey, Khan of the Crimea, which safeguarded his southern frontier during intermittent warfare with Poland–Lithuania.
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The diplomatic usages and ceremonial of Moscow had developed in relations with the Tatar Moslem khanates, which perpetuated the inferior status of Moscow and which exacted the exchange of elaborate gifts. Russian envoys abroad also frequently indulged in trade in goods they had brought with them – a practice regarded as beneath their
dignity in the West. During the reign of Ivan III problems of precedence with Western countries were not frequent, though the Russian practice of conducting negotiations with Sweden and the Livonian Order through the governor in Novgorod and not in Moscow continued. Direct negotiations also occasionally took place between boyar members of the Russian Council and members of the Lithuanian Council, and negotiations with the Porte usually took place in Kaffa, not in Istanbul. By the death of Ivan III, Russia was well established on the diplomatic circuit, though its presence is largely ignored by Western historians.
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Ivan III died in 1505, and his son Vasily acceded to the throne, as the result of his victory in a struggle for the succession between 1502 and 1505. On 14 April 1502, Ivan had transferred the Grand Principalities of Vladimir and Moscow to Vasily as
samoderzhets
(sovereign), thus depriving his grandson Dmitri, who had been arrested three days earlier with his mother, Elena, of his inheritance. This was clear proof of Ivan III's earlier assertion of the underlying instability of the principle of succession in Russia: ‘Am I not free to decide between my children and my grandchildren? I will give my principality to whom I wish.’
¹
Ivan's final will had apparently been written between late 1503 and June 1504. In it he had ‘blessed his son Vasily’ with the principalities which his father had left him and which God had given him, and he had left minor appanage lands to his younger sons, enjoining them to obey their elder brother. Sofia had died on 17 April 1503, and it is very probable that Vasily now became all-powerful in a court in which his father's health was deteriorating, possibly to the extent of total incapacity.
²
Ivan III had strengthened Vasily's hold on the throne by preventing any of his own younger brothers (Vasily's uncles) from marrying and having children.
³
Sofia gave Ivan III five sons, and Vasily too, when he became Grand Prince, did not allow his younger brothers to marry until he had a son, and two of his brothers died in prison before him. The rules for the succession adopted by Ivan III clarified one issue: in order to inherit, the heir had to be the son of a Grand Prince (like Vasily).
⁴
There remains a curious doubt about the general acceptance of Vasily's legitimacy as ruler. According to Herberstein, Vasily came to the throne as regent until the death – in prison – of Dmitri in 1509, when he entered into his full inheritance, but without a coronation. Grand Prince Dmitri, who had been crowned, was still alive when Ivan III died, and his coronation evidently gave him some protection.
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One of the last concerns of Ivan III before he died was the marriage of Vasily, now in his early twenties, which was late for Russian dynastic marriages. Efforts to find a princely bride outside Russia failed, though until then grand princes had made dynastic marriages with princesses from appanage families and often from Lithuanian families in the hope of inheriting a principality, or at least making a claim to an appanage. The marriages of Ivan III's son and daughter to a Moldavian princess and a Grand Duke of Lithuania (Catholic at that) respectively were again clearly designed with foreign policy in view and to raise Russian prestige. But such marriages were now no longer possible: there were few appanages apart from those granted to immediate members of the grand princely family, which put them within the prohibited degrees, and Orthodox Europe was in Ottoman hands. It seems, therefore, that it was for Vasily that the practice was introduced of summoning a ‘bride-show’, or beauty parade of all suitable young ladies from noble families for him to choose among them. The logistics of such a beauty parade seem on the surface to make it a quite improbable performance. But Herberstein, who was in Russia twelve years after Vasily's wedding on 4 September 1505, reports that some 1,500 noble girls were brought together in the summer of 1505, and Vasily chose Solomonia Iur'evna Saburova, the daughter of a boyar from a relatively modest family. The thought of 1,500 nobly born young ladies being trundled through the muddy roads of Moscow in the huge wooden carriages without springs (
kolymaga
) used at the time makes one wonder if the numbers were not wildly exaggerated. The custom was probably recommended by Sofia as a solution to the problem of selecting a wife for a member of the grand princely family, though she died before the wedding. The marriage, alas, was not a success, for Solomonia failed to perform her principal function. She had no children.

The problem of Vasily's childlessness became crucial for the Grand Prince at almost the same time as a similar problem arose many miles away, and in both cases the solution profoundly affected the relationship between the Crown and the Church. Vasily was some twelve years older than Henry VIII of England, but it was roughly at the same time, in the early 1520s, that their common problem became acute.
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However, Henry was faced with a far more complex situation, because not only was he in love with another woman, but his wife was the aunt of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Moreover, he belonged to the Catholic Church and needed to obtain the approval of its ecclesiastical head, the Pope, who lived out of his reach, for an annulment. Vasily, too, was forced to manoeuvre carefully, for the Orthodox Church did not
approve of the divorce of an innocent wife. According to one account, he sent to the Patriarch in Constantinople for consent, which was refused. The elders of Mount Athos also rejected his pleas. Thus Vasily needed to build up support in the Russian Church and to win the concurrence of the Metropolitan in office, Daniel, who would have to ensure that the Church Council summoned to pronounce the annulment would override the Patriarch of Constantinople.
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A new marriage had also to be carefully considered because it would lead to the introduction into the magic circle of the court and council of members of the family of the new wife, and upset the existing balance between families and clans.

The divergences within the Church and in society already apparent under Ivan III now began to emerge in a new and more effective form. The heresy hunt against the Judaizers of the late fifteenth century had become associated with a theoretical dispute over landownership which had been rumbling for some time and which is usually regarded as having dominated the Church Council called in 1503–5 primarily to deal with heresy. Driven forward by Abbot Iosif Volotsky, the Council launched an intensive drive against the so-called Judaizing heretics. Many were arrested and tortured, and confessed. A number were burnt in Moscow on 27 December 1504, and a second batch were burnt in Novgorod in February 1505.

In Russian historiography the existence of an acute disparity of views between two monastic groups, the so-called non-possessors (
nestiazhateli
) and the possessors (
stiazhateli
), was allegedly posited and fought out in this same Church Council of 1503. ‘Non-possessors’ is the name given after the event to an ascetic monastic trend, which was said to regard landed property owned by monasteries as only a trust to be used for the welfare and the relief of the poor, and stressed that monks should not own any personal property. This trend was identified particularly with the monk Nil of Sora (Nil Sorsky), who had spent some time on Mount Athos, and who in Russia had established his hermitage across the Volga in the north-east. He was followed and imitated by many others, who thus became known as the Trans-Volga Elders. The possessors were considered to be followers of Iosif Volotsky, who had set up his cenobitic community in Volokolamsk, in the principality of Tver', and who held that ownership of land was necessary to enable the monks to carry out a wide range of religious and social functions in a disciplined and regulated way. Historians have held in determined fashion to this bipolar view of Russian church history, identifying either boyars or nobles as allied with the non-possessors or the possessors
according to varying assessments of their economic needs, their desire for political power, their willingness to defend the absolute power of the grand prince, or their attitudes to heresy.

The traditional argument is that the Grand Princes Ivan III and Vasily III were anxious to secure more land in order to provide for the armed forces they were developing, by means of the distribution of service estates in central Russia as
pomest'ia
. Ivan III had of course already confiscated enormous quantities of ecclesiastical and secular land in the Republic of Novgorod and had used it to establish service gentry and junior members of noble families on service tenures. But Novgorod could be regarded as conquered country, and the notion of secularization as distinct from confiscation had not yet entered the thinking of Christian monarchs. (Most land confiscated from monasteries or Catholic churches during the Reformation was acquired by private owners.) But the grand princes are regarded as responding to powerful pressures from the service gentry and the lower nobility, and acting in the interests of the class of lower service men, though it is difficult to see what channels these groups could employ to make their collective views felt, nor does it seem likely that they could outweigh the opposing pressures from great landowners like the monasteries and the wealthy boyars. This interpretation is based on the concept of early sixteenth-century Russia as a horizontally organized class society, whereas a social structure based on kinship and clientele led rather to a vertically organized society.
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Since there is practically no evidence to substantiate any of these positions, it is safe to argue that at this stage, in the years 1510–50, while there may have been differences of opinion between monks on the morality of the ownership of estates, the concept of total secularization – as distinct from occasional confiscation – of church and monasticlands, as a government policy, had not yet arisen. There is evidence that Russian grand princes rarely hesitated to confiscate church or monastic land when they needed it or wanted it, but there is also evidence of the continuation of substantial gifts of land both to monasteries and to aristocrats, as and when the grand prince so wished, and all the historians who have written on the subject have stressed the paucity of the references to the subject at the time. Skrynnikov argues that no one dared mention the subject of confiscation of church properties, which is why the subject does not appear in the records of Church Councils and other works; others have argued that there was no pressure either for or against confiscation, and that the evidence of a dispute at the Church Council of 1503–4 is unreliable.

The early years of Vasily's reign seem to have been a period of some intellectual openness. Vasily was proud of his descent from an imperial family; he may have known Greek, he was literate, and he was a relatively cultured man by Russian standards, able to converse with educated monks. Notable among these was Vassian Patrikeev, disgraced by Ivan III in 1499 and forcibly shorn as a monk in the St Cyril monastery of Beloozero. Around 1510, Vassian was recalled to Moscow by the Grand Prince, who probably knew him as a young man, and the monk seems to have had considerable influence on the Grand Prince's spiritual life. Bonds of friendship may have existed between the two men, who were second cousins, and may have survived the downfall of the Patrikeevs. Vasily, for instance, appointed Vassian to be a witness to his draft will in 1523.

Another monk prominent in the circle of Vasily was Michael Trivolis, or Maksim Grek (Maxim the Greek), one of the few luminous figures in Moscow during his brief period of free intellectual activity. He came from a prominent Greek family settled in Corfu, and left to study in Italy in 1492. He was acquainted with both Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola; he lived through the ascendancy of Savonarola in Florence and in 1502 he became a Dominican monk in the monastery of San Marco. He admired the Catholic religious orders (Franciscan, Dominican and Carthusian). But in 1505 he reverted to Orthodoxy and entered Mount Athos as the monk Maksim. He was a distinguished Hellenist, and had worked on the Aldine Aristotle in Venice.