Ivan the Terrible (9 page)

As Russia extended its relations with central European powers, Muscovite bookmen joined in the European pastime of laying claim to ancient, classical descent as a means of asserting the right of precedence among the nations then beginning to take shape. The most important Russian attempt, both in literary form and in pictorial form, was the Tale
of the Princes of Vladimir.
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This literary composition dating from the early 1520s develops the legend that the grand princes of Rus' descended from Prus, the brother of the Emperor Augustus, and that the regalia for their coronation were presented by the Emperor Constantine Monomakh to his descendant the Grand Prince Vladimir Monomakh, an anachronistic and farcical claim since the Emperor Constantine died when Vladimir Monomakh was two years old. The historical element in this tale is splendidly imaginary. Alexander the Great was the son by Olympias of the Egyptian king and magician Nectanebo; after the death of her husband, Olympias returned to her father, the Tsar of Ethiopia, married a relative called Visa, and gave birth to a daughter, Antia. Visa founded ‘Tsargrad’, the city of the Tsar, and called it Vizantia after his daughter. Later, Julius, the Roman Emperor, sent his brother-in-law Antony to Egypt. Antony conquered Egypt and married its queen, Cleopatra. The Emperor Julius then sent his brother Augustus to put an end to this disorder, and Augustus killed Antony. But meanwhile Julius's generals, Brutus, Pompey and Crassus, rose against him and killed him, whereupon Augustus returned to Rome and became emperor, appointing his brother Patricius as king of Egypt and Herod as king of the Jews in Jerusalem. And ‘Pion he made ruler in the Golden Lands today called the Ungarian lands’. He appointed various other rulers, and sent his kinsman Prus to rule in the lands of the Vistula and Niemen, and in Danzig. ‘And Prus lived a very long time, until the fourth generation, and until now these lands are called the Prussian lands.’ And a certain
voevoda
of Novgorod, Gostomysl, advised his subjects on his ‘death bed to send to Prussia for a ruler, and they did so and found Riurik’. The tale now links up with the chronicle known as The Tale of Bygone Years, in which Riurik and his brothers, together with their nephew Oleg, arrive to take over the government of Rus', not from Prussia, but from Scandinavia.

At the same time a genealogy of the Lithuanian grand princes and the legendary story of the origin of the first Lithuanian Grand Prince, Gedimin, was produced. In view of the constant rivalry with Lithuania at that time for leadership over the lands of Rus', Gedimin is given a much more lowly origin. A certain princeling, Vityanets, was killed by lightning, whereupon his wife took as her second husband a servant, a groom called Gedimenik, and had seven sons. He was a brave man and brought order into the lands and became known as the Grand Prince Gedimin of Lithuania.
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In the reign of Ivan IV these fantasies were to take on real importance in negotiations with, for instance, Sweden and Poland–Lithuania, and the
Riurikovich descent from the Emperor Augustus was constantly stressed. Such genealogies served to give historical dignity to the grand princes of All Russia, to raise them in the eyes of their subjects and of other European powers, which were also busily creating mythological ancestors for themselves – drawn mainly from Greek heroes and Roman emperors.
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The concept of ‘tsar’ as meaning emperor was already beginning to glimmer on the political horizon.
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Foreigners who visited Russia, starting with Herberstein,
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were deeply impressed by the immense powers seemingly enjoyed by the Grand Prince, and there is no doubt that there were but few if any institutional barriers to his will, though there were undoubtedly intangible obstacles and an all-pervading need to solve conflicts by means of consensus and conciliation. Nevertheless, the historian should be aware that Herberstein's observation on the extent of the power of the Grand Prince, which has been reproduced by many subsequent travellers to Russia, and hence echoes down the
aulae
of history, deserves the same sort of analysis as any other historical source. What was Herberstein comparing Russia with?
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One remark by one man is not enough on which to build a whole theory of government.

Herberstein was partly influenced by three Russian practices that he observed and which struck him as alien. These were the use of the formula ‘I strike my forehead’ (understood: on the ground) as a means of petitioning higher authority; the use of the diminutive – Ivashka, Fedka (Johnny, Teddy) – when speaking of oneself to the grand prince; and describing oneself as the ‘slave’ (
kholop
) of the tsar. If these formulae were taken literally they implied of course the existence of an enormous distance between the ruler and the ruled, and of the sort of slavery that was regarded as typical of, for instance, the Ottoman empire. (The fact that there were still slaves in Europe is often disregarded.) Yet these phrases give a misleading impression. To beat one's head (
bit' chelom
) when making a petition might have started out as a physical act of prostration on the ground, but it had long since declined into a ceremonial formula which, in the words of a modern student of the question, served to express a ‘humble greeting’, to request or make a complaint, or as a ceremonial form of expressing deference.
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Physically it took the form of bowing low, and touching the ground with one hand. A number of modern non-Russian historians of Russia who are slow to perceive the many shades of meaning in words and actions regard the formula as expressing a real situation. But it came to be used between any two people when one was requesting a favour and on occasion it was used by Ivan IV to the Metropolitan Makarii.

The use of the word ‘
kholop
’, usually translated as ‘slave’ today, was another feature of Muscovite life which shocked some foreigners. It is unfortunate that the word slave has been generally adopted to express what was a wider and far more varied concept. ‘Slave’, today, usually means, to the ordinary Anglophone, a victim of black plantation slavery. The Russian
kholop
was more often a domestic servant who did not work the land; he belonged to one of many different orders, including élite slavery (among the literate or the military), debt slavery or voluntary enslavement, lifelong, hereditary or limited.
Kholopy
were in any case psychologically quite different from chattel slaves in the New (and Old) World since both slave and master in Russia normally spoke the same language and practised the same religion.
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Marshall Poe, in his article on the subject, makes much of the use of the word
gosudar
' (lord) as master or lord or owner of slaves in a ‘patrimonial’ regime. He seems to lose sight of the actual root of the word patrimonial, namely the Latin
pater
or father. In many contexts, particularly the context of the Christian religion, the lord was the father of the members of his household who were his children, his servants or his slaves. This does not imply that all masters behaved with Christian forbearance to those in their power, whether children or slaves, but the texture of their relationship was a domestic one.

Poe also, in accordance with current fashion, ascribes great importance to Tatar influence in establishing the Russian pattern of deference. However, he only briefly mentions the far more important current flowing from the Eastern Roman Empire, where the Greek word
doulos
had evolved away from its original meaning of ‘slave’ to signify a title applicable to someone who was acting for the emperor. The ‘prince of princes’ of Armenia, for instance, was said to be the ‘
doulos
of the emperor of the Romans’, he was someone who served without being a servant. It could in fact mean a ‘subject’ of the ruler, something for which a word did not yet exist in Russian.
Kholop
could, of course, mean a slave in the literal sense, but it could mean many other things. There are innumerable shades of meaning on the slippery slope between slave and servant.
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Turning to institutions of government, there were very few. The Russian tradition, deriving probably from the Vikings, both in the Grand Principality of Moscow and in the appanage principalities, had been to consult with senior men of military reputation, rank, wealth and standing who formed a kind of council. Vasily, who was reported to have preferred to discuss policy in small groups, had allowed the number of boyars formally appointed to the Boyar Council to drop to six in
1521. He gradually increased the number to eleven after his marriage, in what has been described as a process of ‘aristocratizing’ the Council, namely increasing the relative weight of old princely and appanage families. But members of old Moscow boyar families, including Mikhail Iur'evich Zakhar'in, the uncle of Ivan IV's future wife, also belonged to the Council.
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There were in fact not very many princely appanage families left after the havoc created by the fifteenth-century civil wars and the reigns of Vasily II and Ivan III. The most prominent princely families were now either relatives of the ruling dynasty (Andrei of Staritsa and Iuri of Dmitrov, brothers of Vasily), or of Lithuanian descent, like the Mstislavsky, Bel'sky and Glinsky families, who were given lands and
kormlenia
, like Mikhail Glinsky, but were not always appointed to the Boyar Council; or they might be Russian families who had redeserted from Lithuania to Russia with what remained to them of their own lands, or borderline families like the group of princes whose base was on the Upper Oka river – Vorotynsky, Odoevsky, Trubetskoy; or they might be Riurikids, like the princes of Suzdal', where the very numerous descendants of the founders of the city of Vladimir were concentrated and formed a solid, related group, ‘united by a consciousness of a right to participate together with the monarch in the government of the country’. Among the latter the princes of Shuia (Shuisky) regarded themselves as the senior branch, because they were descended from Andrei, a brother of Alexander Nevsky from whom the princes of Moscow descended.
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Insofar as princes and boyars participated in the government of the country as a whole, it was through the Boyar Council. This institution is often wrongly portrayed as a representative body, which it was not. It was a Privy Council, varying in size according to the wishes of the grand prince, to which appointments were made by the grand prince on the basis of the status of individuals in terms of their birth and service rank, the services performed by their ancestors, the personal regard in which the grand prince held them, and their usefulness. The system was known as
mestnichestvo
, and served to integrate men of high rank originating in different principalities into the service of Moscow. A high-ranking noble might, as a first stage, be appointed to the lower rank of
okol'nichi
, a court rank. He could then be given the title of boyar, which normally made him a member of the Council.
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The system was then extended to military appointments, where it created many problems, for senior boyars brought legal suits against appointments which did not reflect the existing status relationships, and refused to serve under a man whose family was of lower rank.

There were also a number of
d'iaki
(derived from
diakonos
) on the Council, who might belong to modest landowning families, or sometimes to merchant or clerical families, and who carried out administrative and secretarial tasks and were literate. They were frequently heads of
prikazy
, or government administrative bureaux. But not all boyars were members of the Council, and not all members of the Council were boyars, and many boyars were literate.

The Grand Prince, however, did not have a completely free hand in appointments to the Council.
Mestnichestvo
, the system of family precedence according to rank in service had not yet fully developed, but it was already sufficiently anchored to compel the Grand Prince at least to listen to complaints, even if he overrode them and occasionally made appointments ‘without place’. In practice a system had developed whereby great families took it in turn to be appointed to vacancies in the military high command or in the Boyar Council, with strict attention to the rights of older generations. But within the actual administration based on the court, the Grand Prince had a free hand to appoint according to ability and experience. Quite how much power the Boyar Council exercised, as an institution, as distinct from the influence of individuals, is very difficult to assess. There is no record of a session of the whole Council, but then some members were often away from Moscow as
namestniki
or Lieutenants of the Grand Prince in the provinces. Laws, or edicts, according to the Chronicles, were issued by the ‘the Grand Prince and his boyars’. When Nicolas Poppel offered Ivan III a throne on the part of the Emperor Maximilian, he was received by the Grand Prince and two boyars. Vasily III was reputed not to consult the Council as an institution, but this depends on the statement of only one disgruntled noble, who was eventually executed (Bersen' Beklemishev) – perhaps one of Herberstein's informants.

Boyars were consulted about Vasily's divorce in 1523, and they took part in the Councils that convicted Maksim Grek in 1525 and Vassian Patrikeev in 1531. Boyars took an important part in judicial matters in accordance with the Code of Ivan III of 1497, but decisions which were recorded as taken by the ‘Grand Prince in conjunction with his boyars’ were in fact often taken by him together with only a few boyars, or perhaps with
okol'nichi
, and sometimes merely with
d'iaki
. Boyars sometimes acted as members of ad hoc bodies, called ‘commissions’ by Russian historians, to which the grand prince delegated the power of decision in judicial matters. They also participated in the discussion of foreign policy and in the reception of ambassadors. But not all important matters went before the Council; the Grand Prince was free to
choose his advisers and, like other rulers in other lands, he had favourites at any given time. Clearly the composition, function and powers of the Council fluctuated widely, and the Grand Prince decided whether to put matters before the Council or whether to discuss them with senior officials, or with favourites.
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