A TARTAR COURT.
In that gorgeous chamber of the Kremlin known as the treasury of
Moscow, stands an armed and mounted figure, richly dight, and called a
boyar of the times of Ivan the Fourth. Arms, dress, accoutrements, are
those of a mirza, a Tartar noble; and an inscription on the drawn
Damascus blade informs the pious Russian that there is but One God,
and that Mohammed is the prophet of God! Yet the figure is really that
of a boyar of the times of Ivan the Fourth.
No prince in the line of Russian rulers is so great a puzzle as this
Ivan the Fourth. In spite of his many atrocious deeds, he is still
regarded by many of his critics as an able reformer and a patriotic
prince. Much, indeed, must be said in his favor by all fair writers.
To him the Moscovites owe their deliverance from the Tartar yoke. For
them he conquered the kingdom of Kazan, the empire of Siberia, the
khanate of Astrakhan. On all their frontiers he subdued the crescent
to the cross. With Swedes and Poles he waged an equal, sometimes a
glorious war. He opened his country to foreign trade; he built ports
on the Baltic, on the Caspian, on the Frozen Seas. The glories of his
reign were of many kinds. He brought printers from the Rhine, and
published the Acts of the Apostles in his native tongue. He sent to
Frankfort for skillful physicians, to London for artificers in wood
and brass. Collecting shipwrights at his river-town of Vologda, he
caused them to build for him a fleet of rafts and boats, on which he
could descend with his treasures to the sea. He called a parliament of
his estates to consult on the public weal. He reduced the unwritten
laws of his country to a code. He put down mendicancy in his empire;
laid his reforming hand on the clergy; and published a uniform
confession of faith.
Ivan was a savage; though he was a popular savage. Terrible he was;
but terrible to the rich and great. In fact, he was a reforming Tartar
khan. If he taxed the merchants, he built hamlets for peasants at his
private cost. If he crushed the free cities, he settled thousands of
poor on the public lands. If he destroyed the princes and boyars as a
ruling caste, he put into their places the official _chins_. If he
ruled by the club, he also tried to rule by the printing-press. If he
sacked Novgorod and Pskoff, he built a vast number of churches,
villages, and shrines. A builder by policy, as well as by nature, he
found an empire of logs, which he hoped to bequeath to his son as an
empire of stone. Forty stone churches, sixty stone monasteries, owe
their foundation to his care. He raised the quaint edifice of St.
Vassili, near the Kremlin wall, which he called after his father's
patron saint. He is said to have built a hundred and fifty castles,
and more than three hundred communes.
Wishing to settle and civilize his people, the reformer sought his
models in those Tartar provinces which he had recently subdued. Kazan
and Bakchi Serai were nobler cities than Vladimir and Moscow; while
the poorest mirza of the Great Cham's court was far more splendid in
arms and dress than any boyar in Ivan's court.
Ivan began to tartarize his kingdom by dividing it into two
parts--personal and provincial; the first of which he ruled in person;
the second by deputies wielding the power of Tartar begs. He raised a
regular army--then the only one in Europe--which he armed and mounted
in the Tartar style. He raised a body-guard to whom he gave the Tartar
tafia; a cap that no Christian in his duchy was allowed to wear. Like
the Great Cham, he set apart rooms in his palace for a harem; shut up
his wives and daughters from the public eye; and changed the new
fashion of excluding women from his court into a binding rule. His
dukes and boyars followed him, until every house had a harem, and the
seclusion of females was as strict in Moscow as in Bokhara and Bagdad.
These customs kept their ground until the times of Peter the Great.
The land was governed by provincial begs, called boyars and voyevods;
the army was drilled and dressed like Turkish troops; and the women
were kept in harems like the Sultan's odalisques. Breaking through the
customs introduced by Ivan, Peter opened the imperial harem; showed
his wife in public; and invited ladies to appear at court. Yet
something of this Turkish fashion may still be traced in Russian
family life, especially in the country towns. As every great house had
its harem--a woman's quarter, into which no stranger was allowed to
set his foot--so every great family had a separate cemetery for the
female sex. A few of these old cemeteries still remain as convents;
for example, the Novo-Devictchie, Maidens' Convent, in the suburbs of
Moscow; and the Convent of the Ascension, in the Kremlin, near the
Holy Gate; the burial-place of all the Tsarinas, from the time of Ivan
the Terrible down to that of Peter the Great.
By subtle tricks and surprises, Ivan set his dukes and boyars
quarrelling with each other, and when they were hot with speech he
would get them to accuse each other, and so despoil them both. In time
he procured the surrender to him of nearly all their historical rights
and titles; when, like a sultan, he forced them to receive his gifts
and graces, under their hands, _as slaves_. He introduced the Oriental
practice of sending men, under forms of honor, into distant parts;
inventing the political Siberia. His dukes were reduced in power, his
boyars plundered of their wealth. The princes were too numerous to be
touched, for in Ivan's time every third man in Moscow was a prince;
and an English trader used to hire such a man to groom his horse or
clean his boots. Not many of the ancient dukes survived this reign;
but the Narichkins, the Dolgoroukis, the Golitsin, and four or five
others, escaped; and these historical families look with patronizing
airs on the imperial race. The Narichkins have married with Romanofs.
One of this house was offered the title of imperial highness, and
declined it, saying proudly to his sovereign, "No, sir, I am
Narichkin." In the same spirit, Peter Dolgorouki, when he heard that
the Emperor had taken away his title of prince, wrote to his majesty,
"How can _you_ pretend to degrade _me_? Can you rob me of my
ancestors, who were grand dukes in Russia when yours were not yet
counts of Holstein Gottorp?"
Moscow was governed like a Tartar camp. Ivan's bodyguards
(opritchniki), roved about the streets in their Tartar caps, abusing
the people of every grade, boyar and burgher, mujik and peasant, as
though they had been men of a different race and faith; robbing
houses, carrying off women, murdering men; so that a stranger who met
a company of these fellows in the Chinese town or under the Kremlin
wall, imagined that the city had been given up to the soldiery for
spoil.
This effort to settle the country on Tartar principles turned the
Church against the Tsar, and led to the retirement of Athanasius, the
dismissal of German, and the murder of Philip. St. Philip was the
martyr of Russia--slain for defending his country and his Church
against this tartarizing Tsar.
Walk into the great Cathedral of the Ascension any hour of the day in
any season of the year, and--on the right wing of the altar--you will
find a crowd of men and women prostrate before one silver shrine. It
is the tomb of St. Philip, martyr and saint. Every one comes to him,
every one kisses his temples and his feet. The murder of this saint is
one of those national offenses which a thousand years of penitence
will not cleanse away. The penitent prays in his name; fasts in his
name; burns candles in his name; and groans in spirit before the tomb,
as though he were seeking forgiveness for some personal crime.
The tale of Philip's conflict with Ivan--a conflict of the Christian
Church against the Tartar court--may be briefly told.