Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

of the state. Three years later he had himself crowned czar by the

metropolitan of Moscow. Then he ordered a selection of noble virgins

to be sent to him from divers parts of his realm; from them he chose

and married Anastasia Romanovna, whose family name would soon

designate a dynasty.

In 1550 he summoned the first national assembly (Zemski Sobor) of

all Russia. He confessed to it the errors of his youth, and promised a

just and merciful government. Perhaps influenced by the Reformation in

Germany and Scandinavia, the assembly considered a motion to

confiscate ecclesiastical wealth for the support of the state. The

proposal was rejected, but a related motion was passed by which all

alodial lands- those free from liens- deeded to the Church were to

be restored, all gifts made to the Church during Ivan's minority

were canceled, and monasteries were no longer to acquire certain kinds

of property without the czar's consent. The clergy were partly

appeased when Ivan took the priest Sylvester as his spiritual director

and made him and Alexis Adashef his chief ministers. Supported by

these able aides, Ivan at twenty-one was master of a realm reaching

from Smolensk to the Urals, and from the Arctic Ocean almost to the

Caspian Sea.

His first care was to strengthen the army, and to balance the forces

provided by the unfriendly nobles with two organizations responsible

directly to himself: Cossack cavalry and Strieltsi infantry armed with

harquebuses- matchlock firearms invented in the fifteenth

century. *06059 The Cossacks originated in that century as peasants

whose position in South Russia, between Moslems and Muscovites,

obliged them to be ready to fight at short notice, but gave them

irresistible opportunities to rob the caravans that carried trade

between north and south. The main Cossack "hosts"- the Don Cossacks in

southeast Russia and the Zaporogue Cossacks in the southwest- were

semi-independent republics, strangely democratic; male householders

chose a hetman (German Hauptmann, head man) as executive officer

of a popularly elected assembly. All land was owned in common, but was

leased to individual families for temporary use; and all classes

were equal before the law. `06298 Famous for their dashing courage,

the Cossack horsemen became the main support of Ivan IV at home and in

war.

His foreign policy was simple: he wanted Russia to connect the

Baltic Sea with the Caspian. The Tatars still held Kazan, Astrakhan,

and the Crimea, and still demanded tribute from Moscow, though in

vain. Ivan was sure that Russia's security and unity required its

possession of these khanates, and control of the Volga to its

outlet. In 1552 the young Czar led 150,000 men against the gates of

Kazan in a siege that lasted fifty days. The 30,000 Moslems resisted

with religious pertinacity; they sallied out in repeated sorties;

and when some of them were captured and hanged on gibbets before the

walls, the defenders shot them with arrows, saying that "it was better

for these captives to receive death from the clean hands of their

countrymen than to perish by the impure hands of Christians." `06299

When the besiegers lost heart after a month of failure, Ivan sent to

Moscow for a miraculous cross; this, displayed to them, reanimated his

men; on both sides God was conscripted into military service. A German

engineer mined the walls; they collapsed; the Russians poured into the

city, crying "God with us!"- and massacred all who could not be sold

as slaves. Ivan, we are told, wept with pity for the defeated; "they

are not Christians," he said, "but they are men." He repeopled the

ruins with Christians. Russia acclaimed him as the first Slav to

take a Tatar stronghold, and celebrated the victory as France had

hailed the check of the Moslems at Tours (732). In 1554 Ivan took

Astrakhan, and the Volga became a completely Russian stream. The

Crimea remained Moslem till 1774, but the Cossacks of the Don now

bowed to Moscow's rule.

Having cleared his frontier in the east, Ivan looked longingly

toward the west. He dreamed of Russian commerce flowing west and north

along great rivers into the Baltic. He envied the industrial and

commercial expansion of Western Europe, and looked for any opening

by which the Russian economy might attach itself to that

development. In 1553 Sir Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor were

commissioned by London merchants to find an Arctic route around

Scandinavia to China. They sailed from Harwich in three vessels; two

crews perished in a Lapland winter, but Chancellor reached the site of

Arkhangelsk- which the British so named after the archangel Michael.

Chancellor made his way through a hundred perils and hardships to

Moscow. With him, and later with Anthony Jenkinson, Ivan signed

treaties giving "The London and Muscovite Company" special trading

privileges in Russia.

But to Ivan these treaties were knotholes, not a door or window,

into the West. He tried to import German technicians; 123 were

gathered for him at Lubeck, but Charles V refused to let them go. A

great river, the Southern Dvina, flowed from the heart of Russia

into the Baltic near Riga, but through hostile Livonia. The headwaters

of the Dvina and the Volga were not far apart; the two rivers could be

connected by canals; here, by "manifest destiny," was the water

route that might atone for the disproportion of Russia's enormous land

mass to her coasts and ports; so the Baltic would mingle with the

Caspian and the Black Sea, East and West would meet, and amid the

interchange of goods and ideas the West could repay some of its

ancient cultural debt to the East.

So in 1557 Ivan invented a casus belli - usually a case of the

belly- with Livonia. He sent against it an army under Shah-Ali, lately

Tatar Khan of Kazan; it ravaged the country brutally, burning houses

and crops, enslaving men, raping women till they died. In 1558 another

Russian army captured Narva, only eight miles from the Baltic.

Desperate Livonia appealed to Poland. Denmark, Sweden, Germany, all

Central Europe trembled at the prospect of a Slav inundation

reaching westward, as in the sixth century, to the Elbe. Stephen

Bathory roused the Poles, and led them to victory over the Russians at

Polotsk (1582). Ivan, defeated, yielded Livonia to Poland.

Long before this decisive setback the failure of his campaigns had

led to revolt at home. The merchants whom Ivan had thought to enrich

with new avenues of trade lost stomach for the costly and disruptive

war. The nobles had opposed it as bound to unite the Baltic powers,

with their superior armament, against a Russia still feudal in

political and military organization. During and before the war Ivan

had suspected the boyars of conspiracies against his throne. In a

nearly fatal illness (1553) he learned that a powerful group of nobles

was planning, when he died, to repudiate his son Dmitri and crown

Prince Vladimir, whose mother was disbursing large gifts to the

army. His closest advisers, Sylvester and Adashef, were flirting

with treasonable boyars. For seven years after suspecting them Ivan

kept these officials in power; then (1560) he dismissed them, but

without violence; Sylvester died in a monastery, Adashef in one of the

Livonian campaigns. Several of the boyars deserted to Poland and

took up arms against Russia; in 1564 Ivan's bosom friend and leading

general, Prince Andrei Kurbski, joined this flight, alleging that

the Czar was planning to kill him. From Poland Kurbski sent to Ivan

what amounted to a declaration of war, denouncing him as a leprous

criminal. Tradition claims that Ivan, when this letter was read to

him, nailed a foot of the bearer to the floor with a blow of the royal

staff. But the Czar condescended to reply to Kurbski in a rebuttal

sixty-two pages long, eloquent and chaotic, passionate and Biblical,

recounting the intrigues of the boyars to depose him. Believing that

they had poisoned Anastasia, he asked, "Why did you divide me from

my wife? Had you not taken from me my young heifer, never had there

been the slayings of the boyars.... In vain I have looked for some man

to have pity on me, but I have found none." `062910 Kurbski, in the

evening of his life, wrote a relentlessly hostile History of Ivan,

which is our chief source for Ivan's terribilita.

These plots and desertions illuminate the most famous and peculiar

event of the reign. On December 13, 1564, Ivan left Moscow with his

family, his icons, his treasury, and a small force of soldiery,

withdrew to his summer home at Alexandrovsk, and sent to Moscow two

proclamations. One alleged that the boyars, the bureaucracy, and the

Church had conspired against him and the state; therefore "with

great sorrow" he now resigned his throne, and would henceforth live in

retirement. The other assured the people of Moscow that he loved them,

and that they might rest assured of his lasting good will. In fact

he had consistently favored the commons and merchants against the

aristocracy, and the present action of the middle and lower classes

attested it. They broke out in threatening cries against the

nobility and the clergy, and demanded that a deputation of bishops and

boyars should go to the Czar and beg him to resume his throne. It

was done, and Ivan agreed, to "take unto him his state anew," on

conditions that he would later specify.

He returned to Moscow (February 1565), and summoned the national

assembly of clergy and boyars. He announced that he would execute

the leaders of the opposition, and confiscate their property; he would

henceforth assume full power, without consulting the nobles or

assembly, and he would banish all who should disobey his edicts. The

assembly, fearing a revolt of the masses, yielded and dissolved.

Ivan decreed that in the future Russia should be divided into two

parts: one, the Zemstchina or assemblage of provinces, was to remain

under the government of the boyars and their duma; it was to be

taxable in gross by the Czar, and be subject to him in military and

foreign affairs, but would otherwise be self-governed and free; the

other part, the Oprichnina, or "separate estate," was to be ruled by

him, and was to be composed of lands assigned by him to the

oprichniki or separate class, chosen by the Czar to police and

administer this half-realm, to guard it from sedition, and to give him

personal protection and special military service. The new officials-

at first a thousand, ultimately six thousand- were selected chiefly

from the younger sons of the nobility, who, being landless, were ready

to support Ivan in return for the estates now conferred upon them.

These lands were taken partly from the possessions of the Crown,

largely from the confiscated properties of rebellious boyars. By the

end of the reign the Oprichnina included nearly half of Russia, much

of Moscow, and the most important trade routes. The revolution was

akin to that which Peter the Great attempted 150 years later- the

elevation of a new class to political power, and the promotion of

Russian commerce and industry. In a century when practically all the

military power was held by the aristocracy, the enterprise required

a wild courage in a Czar armed only with his personal soldiery and the

unreliable support of the merchants and the populace. Some

contemporaries assure us that in this critical period Ivan, then

thirty-five, aged twenty years. `062911

Ivan now made Alexandrovsk his regular residence, and transformed it

into a fortified citadel. The strain of his revolt against the boyars,

added to the failure of the long war against Livonia, may have

disordered a never quite balanced mind. He clothed his guardsmen

like monks in black cassocks and skull caps, called himself their

abbot, sang in their choir, attended Mass with them daily, and so

fervently prostrated himself before the altar that his forehead was

repeatedly bruised. This added to the awe that he inspired; Russia

began to mingle reverence with the fear it felt for him; and even

the armed oprichniki were so abject before him that they came to

be called his dvor or court.

Ivan's revolution, like others, had its terror. Those who opposed it

and were caught were executed without mercy. A monastic chronicle,

presumably hostile to him, reckoned the casualties of his wrath in

those years (1560-70) at 3,470; often, it reports, the victim was

executed "with his wife," or "with his wife and children," and, in one

case, "with ten men who came to his help." `062912 Prince Vladimir and

his mother were put to death, but his children were spared and

provided for. The Czar, we are told, asked the monks to pray for the

repose of his victims' souls. He defended the executions as the

usual punishment for treason, especially in time of war; an agent of

Poland conceded the argument; and an Englishman who witnessed some

of the butchery prayed, "Would to God our own stiff-necked rebels

could be taught their duty to their prince after the same

fashion!" `062913

The climax of the terror came in Novgorod. Ivan had recently given

its archbishop a large sum to repair churches, and thought himself

popular with at least the clergy there. But he was informed that a

document- not indisputably genuine- had been found behind a picture of

the Virgin in a Novgorod monastery, pledging the co-operation of

Novgorod and Pskov with Poland in an attempt to overthrow the Czar. On

January 2, 1570, a strong military force led by oprichniki pounced

upon Novgorod, sacked its monasteries, and arrested 500 monks and

priests. Arriving in person on January 6, Ivan ordered those clerics

who could not pay fifty rubles' ransom to be flogged to death. The

archbishop was unfrocked and jailed. According to the Third Chronicle

of Novgorod a massacre of the population ensued for five weeks;

sometimes 500 persons were slain in a day; the official records number

2,770 dead; Ivan protested they were only 1,505. Since many merchants,

eager for the reopening of trade with the West, were believed to

have shared in the conspiracy, the soldiers of the Czar burned all the

shops in the city, and the homes of the merchants in the suburbs; even

the farmhouses in the environs were destroyed. Unless unfriendly

monastic chroniclers have exaggerated the carnage, we must go back

to the punishment of rebellious Liege by Charles the Bold (1468), or

the Sack of Rome by the troops of Charles V (1527) to find analogies

for Ivan's savage revenge. Novgorod never recovered its old prominence

in the commercial life of Russia. Ivan passed on to Pskov, where he

restricted his soldiers to pillage. Then he returned to Moscow and

celebrated with a royal masquerade ball his escape from a dangerous

conspiracy.

So turbulent a reign hardly favored economic progress or cultural

pursuits. Commerce was favored in peace and wounded in war. In the

lands allotted to the oprichniki, and then on other lands as well,

the peasant was legally attached to the soil as a means of promoting

continuous cultivation (1581); serfdom, rare in Russia before 1500,

became by 1600 the law of the land. Taxation was predatory,

inflation was precipitous. The ruble in 1500 was worth ninety-four, in

1600 twenty-four, times the ruble of 1910; `062914 we need not

follow the decline further, except to note, as one of the lessons of

history, that money is the last thing that a man should save.

The improvident fertility of families and exhaustion of soils

compelled a restless migration to fresh terrain. When this passed

the Urals it found a Tatar khanate established over a population of

Bashkirs and Ostyaks, around a capital known by the Cossack word

Sibir. In 1581 Semen Stroganov enlisted 600 Cossacks and sent them

under Ermak Timofeevitch to conquer these tribes. It was done; western

Siberia became part of the swelling Russian realm; and Ermak, who

had been a brigand chief, was canonized by the Orthodox Church.

The Church remained the real ruler of Russia, for the fear of God

was everywhere, while Ivan's reach was limited. Strict rules of

ritual, if not of morality, bound even the Czar; the priests saw to it

that he washed his hands after giving audience to ambassadors from

outside the Orthodox pale. No Roman Catholic worship was allowed,

but Protestants were tolerated as fellow foes of the Roman pope.

Ivan IV, like Henry VIII, prided himself on his knowledge of theology.

He indulged in a public debate in the Kremlin with a Bohemian Lutheran

divine, and it must be admitted that the most violent of the Czars

conducted the discussion with more courtesy than appeared in the

religious disputes of contemporary Germany. `062915 He did not come

off so well with another theologian. At a Sunday service in the

Cathedral of the Assumption (1568) Philip, Metropolitan of Moscow,

conspicuously refused the blessing that Ivan solicited. Thrice the

Czar asked for it in vain. When his attendants demanded reason for the

refusal, Philip began to list Ivan's crimes and debaucheries. "Hold

thy peace," cried the Czar, "and give me thy blessing!" "My

silence," answered the prelate, "lays a sin upon thy soul, and calls

down thy death." Ivan departed unblessed, and for a wondering month

Philip remained unhurt. Then a servitor of the Czar entered the

cathedral, seized the Metropolitan, and dragged him to a prison in

Tver. His fate is debated; the account accepted by the Russian

Church is that he was burned alive. In 1652 he was canonized, and

his relics remained till 1917 an object of reverence in the

Uspenskiy Sobor.

The Church still produced most of the literature and art of

Russia. Printing arrived about 1491, but the only books printed during

this reign were manuals of prayer. The leading scholar was the

metropolitan Macarius; in 1529, aided by secretaries, he began to

compile the surviving literature of his country in twelve huge

volumes, which again were almost entirely religious, mostly monkish,

chronicles. Ivan's confessor Sylvester composed a famous

Domostroi, or Household Book, as a guide to domestic economy,

manners, and eternal salvation; we note in it the admonition to the

husband to beat his wife lovingly, and precise instructions for

spitting and for blowing the nose. `062916 Ivan himself, in his

letters, was not the least vigorous writer of his time.

The most brilliant product of Russian art under his rule was the

Church of Basil the Blessed (Khram Vasilia Blajennoi), which still

stands aloof from the Kremlin at one end of the Red Square. On

returning from his triumphant campaigns against Kazan and Astrakhan

(1554) Ivan began what he called Pokrovski Sobor- the Cathedral of the

Intercession of the Virgin, to whom he judiciously ascribed his

victories. Around this central shrine of stone there later rose

seven chapels in wood, dedicated to saints on whose festivals Ivan had

overcome his foes. Each chapel was crowned with a graceful painted

cupola, each bulbous but varying from the others in ornament. The

final chapel, raised to St. Basil in 1588, gave its name in time to

the whole charming ensemble. Inevitable legend credited the

architecture to an Italian, and told how Ivan had gouged out his

eyes lest he should ever rival this masterpiece; but it was two

Russians, Barma and Postnikov, who designed it, merely adopting some

Renaissance motives in its decoration. `062917 Every year, on Palm

Sunday, as part of the wisdom of government, the lords and clergy of

Moscow walked in awesome procession to this cathedral; the

metropolitan rode sideways on a horse equipped with artificial ears to

simulate the ass on which Christ was described as entering

Jerusalem; and the Czar, on foot, humbly led the horse by the

bridle; banners, crosses, icons, and censers flourished, and

children raised hosannas of praise and gratitude to inclement skies

for the blessings of Russian life.

By 1580 Ivan seemed to have triumphed over all his enemies. He had

survived several wives, was married to a sixth, and thought of

adding another in friendly bigamy. `062918 He had four children: the

first died in infancy, the third, Feodor, was a half-wit; the

fourth, Dmitri, was alleged to have epileptic fits. One day in

November 1580, the Czar, seeing the wife of his second son, Ivan, in

what seemed to him immodest attire, reproved and struck her; she

miscarried; the Czarevitch reproached his father; the Czar, in

unpremeditated rage, struck him on the head with the imperial staff;

the son died from the blow. The Czar went insane with remorse; he

spent his days and nights crying aloud with grief; each morning he

offered his resignation; but even the boyars now preferred him to

his sons. He survived three years more. Then a strange disease

attacked him, which made his body swell and emit an unbearable stench.

On March 18, 1584, he died while playing chess with Boris Godunov.

Gossip accused Boris of poisoning him, and the stage was set for grand

opera in the history of the czars.

We must not think of Ivan IV as merely an ogre of brutality. Tall

and strong, he would have been handsome but for a broad flat nose that

overlay a spreading mustache and a heavy auburn beard. The appellation

Groznyi is mistranslated Terrible; it meant, rather, awesome, like

the Augustus that was applied to the Caesars; Ivan III had also

received the name. To our minds, and even to his cruel contemporaries,

he was repulsively cruel and vengeful, and he was a merciless judge.

He lived in the age of the Spanish Inquisition, the burning of

Servetus, the decapitating habits of Henry VIII, the Marian

persecution, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; when he heard of this

holocaust (which a pope welcomed with praise) he denounced the

barbarism of the West. `062919 He had some provocations, which set

on fire a readily combustible temper made violent by heredity or

environment; sometimes, says a witness, a small annoyance made him

"foam at the mouth like a horse." `062920 He confessed and at times

exaggerated his sins and crimes, so that his enemies could only

plagiarize him in their accusations. He studied zealously, and made

himself the best-educated layman of his land and time. He had a

sense of humor, and could roar with Jovian laughter, but a sinister

cunning showed often in his smile. He paved his hell with wonderful

intentions: he would protect the poor and the weak against the rich

and the strong; he would favor commerce and the middle classes as

checks on the feudal and quarrelsome aristocracy; he would open a door

of trade in goods and ideas to the West; he would give Russia a new

administrative class not bound, like the boyars, to ancient and

stagnant ways; he would free Russia from the Tatars, and raise her out

of chaos into unity. He was a barbarian barbarously struggling to be

civilized.

He failed because he never matured to self-mastery. The reforms that

he had planned were half forgotten in the excitement of revolution. He

left the peasants more bitterly subject to the landlords than

before; he clogged the avenues of trade with war; he drove able men

into the arms of the enemy; he divided Russia into hostile halves, and

guided her into anarchy. He gave his people a demoralizing example

of pious cruelty and uncontrolled passion. He killed his ablest son,

and bequeathed his throne to a weakling whose incapacity invited civil

war. He was one of the many men of his time of whom it might be said

that it would have been better for their country and humanity if

they had never been born.

CHAPTER XXX: The Genius of Islam: 1258-1520

-

THE Moslem world had sustained, from 1095 to 1291, a series of

assaults as violent and religious as those by which it later subdued

the Balkans and changed a thousand churches into mosques. Eight

Crusades, inspired by a dozen popes, had hurled the royalty, chivalry,

and rabble of Europe against Mohammedan citadels in Asia Minor, Syria,

Palestine, Egypt, and Tunisia; and though these attacks had finally

Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

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