THE MOSCOVITES BECOME TSARS
THE name Moscow has up to the present entered so little into the
chronicle that we must retrace our steps and briefly consider its
origin. Three successive types of rulers prepared the way for the
Romanoff dynasty: the Norsemen, the Tatars, and the Princes of Moscow,
or the Moscovites. We have now to see how the third class rose upon the
ruins of the Tatar dominion, maintained the evil machinery of subjection
which it had constructed, and brought “all the Russias” under a new
despotism.
In the year 1147 the Prince of Suzdal, George Dolgoruki, found a
village, the site of which is now covered by the opulent Kreml, on the
banks of the Moscowa, and is said to have conceived an affection for it.
His patronage cannot have extended far, since we find that it remains an
obscure village, or small town, for more than a century. It then passed,
with a few other towns, to a son of the heroic Alexander Nevski, who (by
sharp practice--a fit beginning of the fortune of the Moscovites)
enlarged his little principality and bequeathed it to an even less
scrupulous brother.
George Danielovitch (1303-25) laid claim to the principality of Tver and
took very powerful arguments to enforce his claim, in the shape of
handsome presents, to the Mongol court at Sarai. He got his title, a
sister of the Khan for wife, and a Mongol army; but he did not get the
principality, and the Khan, scenting a larger bargain, summoned both
claimants to Sarai. There George ended the argument by having his rival
assassinated. He in turn was assassinated, and a terrible feud subsisted
for half a century between Moscow and Tver. Ivan, the successor of
George, secured another Mongol army to reduce Tver, induced the Khan to
remove his rival to another world, and entered upon a series of
annexations and purchases which made Moscow the centre of a fairly large
dominion, the seat of an archbishop, and a prosperous soil for churches
and monasteries; for the piety of all these lords of Moscow was even
more conspicuous than their craft and insidious truculence.
This malodorous tradition was sustained by the later princes. There was
Simeon the Proud (1341-53) who, at the death of his father Ivan, found
the largest bribe for the Mongols and ousted his competitors. At least
he held in some check the lawlessness which was bleeding Russia, and it
is one of those painful dilemmas of the historian that the
valuable service rendered by the crafty Simeon was entirely neglected by
his pious and gentle brother and successor, Ivan II. But Dmitri
Ivanovitch, the son and successor of Ivan, returned to the sturdy lines
of princely tradition. He defied and defeated the Tatars, and in the
hour of triumph cried to Russia: “Their hour is past.” But the cry was
premature. A rival Russian prince arranged a coalition against Dmitri of
the Catholic Lithuanians, and the Mohammedan Tatars, and the great army
of Dmitri once more cut to pieces its opponents. In the meantime,
however, the famous Tatar general, Timur, had come from Asia and fallen
upon the “usurpers” of the Golden Horde. Dmitri unwisely refused the
friendship which Timur offered him, and before long the fierce Mongols
set flame to the splendid buildings of his capital and littered the
streets with the corpses of its children.
Dmitri recovered and handed down a fair principality to his son Vassili
(1389-1425), who shrewdly preserved his territory by a friendly alliance
with the Tatars on the one hand and a matrimonial alliance with the
Lithuanians on the other. His son, Vassili the Blond, was equally
submissive to the Tatars and friendly with the Lithuanians. Then, in
1462, there came to the throne Ivan III, the first of the two great
makers of imperial Russia.
At the time when Ivan III ascended the throne the principality of Moscow
was a small and feeble territory menaced by the Lithuanian empire to the
west and the Mongol empire to the east. Most of the other Russian
principalities had either won a precarious independence or were subject
to Lithuania. The republics of Novgorod and Pskoff alternately lost and
recovered their freedom, and wavered between the Lithuanian and the
Mongol alliance. Riazan and Tver remained independent and regarded with
jealous eyes the growth of Moscow. This was the Russia of the fifteenth
century, a mere fragment of the country which bears that name to-day.
Nor was this lack of unity the only reproach which we may bring against
the princes who had torn the land in their selfish struggles for
supremacy. Round the whitened monasteries and gilded shrines the feuds
of the princes had gone on without intermission for so many centuries
that the blood ran thin in the veins of Russia. It had neither the
vitality nor the organisation required to meet its external foes, and
every few years some hostile army scattered the customary desolation
over the country. On every side, also, were troops of free lances and
brigands, who constantly swooped upon the miserable peasantry. It is the
claim of the orthodox historians that the Moscovite princes we have now
to describe rescued Russia from this degradation, and we must examine
their methods, their motives, and their attainments.
Ivan III is, in the existing portraits, a lean-faced, sombre-looking
man, with large melancholy eyes and the patriarchal beard which the
Slavs still preserved. These portraits probably accentuate the
ostentatious piety of the man, and give us no idea of the cold ferocity
which could light his heavy features. It is said that women were known
to faint when they met his eye. Certain it is that Ivan united all the
craft and calculating cruelty of the degenerate Greeks with professions
of humility and peacefulness which provoke our disgust. Conspirators
against his terrible rule were burned alive in cages, and the horrible
Byzantine practice of cutting out a prisoner’s eyes was more than once
employed. Even priests, for whom he affected a humble veneration, were
brutally flogged when they departed from the customary subservience of
the clergy and took the part of the people. In war he was a coward. All
the impulsive and savage bravery of the Norseman had in him degenerated
into the mean and shifty hypocrisy of a dishonest huckster.
Ivan ascended the petty throne of Moscow in the year 1462. The city of
Moscow was at that time still little more than a large cluster of
mud-huts, with a few streets of merchants, about the princely palace and
the rich shrines. Ivan looked to his revenues and before long was
confronted with the firm refusal of the citizens of Novgorod to pay the
tribute he demanded. The Grand Prince proceeded with his habitual craft.
Instead of setting out to enforce his demands, he formulated a complaint
that the Russian people of Novgorod were oppressed by a wealthy faction,
and that this faction contemplated an alliance with the heretics of
Poland. We may assume that there was some truth in the charges.
Novgorod, still democratic and independent, still proud of the popular
parliament on its market-place, was full of factions. In such a city a
mutual hostility of rich and poor was inevitable, and Ivan’s
agents seem to have encouraged the aggrieved workers to appeal to him
against what were represented to be the oligarchs. The wealthier and
more powerful faction was led by a woman named Marfa, and may very well
have contemplated an alliance with Poland against the ambitions of
Moscow.
In 1470 Ivan sent against the city a strong Mongol and Moscovite army,
and the ruin which it spread over the lands of Novgorod, as it
approached, induced the citizens to compromise. But the Grand Prince
wanted more than tribute, and his agents continued to foster the
grievances of the popular party and encourage appeals to Moscow. When
the time was ripe Ivan wrought the republican spirit of Novgorod to a
fury by describing himself, in his official documents, as
“sovereign” of that city. The educated citizens saw in this
the doom of their liberty, and, acting in the violent mood of the time,
they put to death the supporters of Moscow. The story runs that the
clergy and boyars of Moscow now gathered round their humane and
reluctant ruler, and demanded that he should make war upon Novgorod.
Certainly Ivan III did not love the hazards of war, especially as it was
still the custom for a Russian prince to lead his troops. But we may
measure his humanity by the sequel.
The conscience of the Grand Prince was reconciled by conceiving the
campaign as a “holy war” against the allies of the Pope, and a
formidable army took the road north. The partial resistance of the
distracted republic was overcome, and Ivan set about the extirpation of
its spirit of independence. The democratic nobles were transplanted to
other soil. The commercial prosperity, which Novgorod had developed in
its relations with the cities of north Germany, was systematically
destroyed. The stores of merchandise and other treasures were
transferred to Moscow. The shadow of the popular council, the _Véché_,
remained--Ivan’s son would complete the work--but a very severe blow had
been struck by the Moscovite at what remained of Slav democracy.
The dependent republic of Pskoff submitted to Moscow, and was permitted
to retain its institutions. The principality of Viatka was next
recovered, from the Tatars, and added to the dominion of Moscow. The
victorious troops, indeed, went on to annex a large part of more
northern Russia, and the first thin slice of Asiatic territory fell
under the rule of the Slav. At a later date the principality of Tver was
drawn into the growing empire. Its prince afforded a specious pretext by
allying himself with the unholy followers of the Roman Pontiff, the
Lithuanians, and religious zeal again edged the swords of the troops.
It will be gathered that the power of the Mongols had now sunk too low
to arrest the progress of Moscow. On an earlier page we have seen how
Timur had come from Asia and chastised the Khans who had dared to set up
an independent sovereignty in Europe. For some reason Timur did not
overrun Russia as his predecessor had done. The clerical traditions of
Russia attribute the escape to one of the miracles which seem to have
been so frequent in that age, but the superior attractions of the new
Ottoman Empire in the south, which was then displacing Greece and taking
over its treasures, may be regarded as a more satisfactory explanation.
Timur had reduced the strength of the Golden Horde, and the dissensions
which followed further enfeebled it. Here was an opportunity after the
heart of Ivan III. Dispossessed Tatar princes fled to his court, and he
sent them back with their animosities inflamed, while he made the
customary presents to the ruling Khan. In 1478 either Ivan or his
advisers felt that the time had come to end the Tatar yoke, and Ivan
nervously found himself at the head of 150,000 men making for the land
of the dreaded Mongol. The issue is one of the most laughable in
history. The two large armies encamped in sight of each other for days
and dared each other to come on. Priests and officers spurred Ivan to
the attack, and his rare fits of confidence, or professions of
confidence, alternated with long periods of what we must regard as
cowardice. Possibly the intensely superstitious prince thought that one
of those miracles of which the clergy spoke so freely would spare him
the hazard of war. A miracle, indeed, appeared, and it is difficult for
the profane historian to penetrate its mysterious working. Both armies
at length, and simultaneously, struck their camps and retreated hastily
to their respective homes! The Tatar had sunk as low as the Moscovite.
[IMAGE: img044.jpg Costume of Boyars in the Seventeenth Century]
Ivan’s troops, which did not share the timidity of their high commander,
next reduced Bulgaria, and the death of his brothers enabled Ivan to add
still further, and with less title, to his dominions. His brother Andrew
was, in 1493, accused of the usual perfidy and corresponding with the
Polish-Lithuanian kingdom. He was thrown into prison, and there he
conveniently died. Ivan summoned his bishops and monks and, as the tears
trickled down his gaunt face and grey beard, confessed that he had
sinned in sanctioning the cruel treatment of his brother. But he added
Andrew’s territory, and that of two other brothers, to his large
dominion.
In the following year the lover of peace attacked the joint kingdom of
Lithuania and Poland, which had so long afflicted Russia. Ivan had
married his daughter to the Polish king, and had strictly stipulated
that she should have entire freedom to practise the true religion
amongst the adherents of the Pope. In 1494 Ivan found that this
agreement was grossly disregarded, and his beloved daughter ran some
peril of her soul. Later Russian historians have learned from the
daughter’s letters that she had no complaint except against the
interested intrigues of Ivan himself. However, a holy war was
proclaimed, and a good deal of western Russia was wrested from the Poles
and added to the Moscovite dominion.
Such were the methods by which Ivan III doubled the patrimony of his
fathers, and accumulated the wealth and power by which his more famous
grandson would create the great Russia of the Romanoffs. It remains to
see how Ivan organised his dominion, strengthened the autocracy, and
raised the culture and splendour of his capital.
Ivan was by nature autocratic. He did not make counsellors of his
boyars, as had been the custom, and they were compelled to learn the art
of silence in presence of their master. But it was Ivan’s wife who
directed this disposition and created a Court in harmony with it. The
Turks had taken Constantinople and had driven the remnants of half a
dozen rival Greek royal families, and all that remained of Greek
culture, into Italy. Amongst the fugitives was the clever and ambitious
niece of the last emperor, Sophia Palæologus. The Pope, who saw in this
heavy chastisement of the Greek schism a ray of hope of the reunion of
Christendom, fathered the homeless princess and sought for her a useful
marriage. Ivan accepted her and the Papal dowry. They were married early
in his reign (in 1472), and her forceful ambition was behind many of the
schemes of conquest we have reviewed. It was especially she and the
clergy who forced upon the prince his inglorious campaign against the
Tatars.
But we may see her influence especially in the growing splendour and
despotism of the Moscovite court. Bred in the sacred palace by the
Bosphorus, where there still lingered, until the Turk came, some remains
of the most imposing court of the old world, she was made impatient by
the thin coat of gilt which covered the Russian barbarism. Accustomed to
a city of marble palaces, with walls of mosaic or porphyry, with bronze
gates guarded by hundreds of silk-clad servants, and gold and silver
vessels so heavy that they had to be lifted on to the tables by
mechanical devices, she knew how to use the increasing wealth of her
husband’s kingdom. He was now the successor of Constantine and the Roman
Emperors. The two-headed eagle, which had been the blatant emblem of
Greek vanity, passed with the hand of Sophia to Moscow, and was
emblazoned on the banners and plate of the new dynasty. Ivan did not
take the title of “Tsar.” His grandson would complete his work.
Sophia invited to her court Greek scholars and Italian architects and
engineers, and the splendour of Moscow soon became so famous that its
prince corresponded with Popes and Sultans, Kings of Sweden, Denmark,
Hungary, and Austria, and even with the Grand Mogul of India. Italy was
at that time in the flush of the Renaissance, and much of its colour,
and of the less manly art of the Byzantinians, was brought to Moscow.
Whatever one may think of the religious quarrel, it can hardly be
doubted that the civilisation of Russia would have gained by submission
to Rome. The Papacy was then enjoying that period of artistic license
which provoked the Reformation, and probably Russia would have joined
the Reformers. By its severance from Rome it maintained a barrier
against the west, where civilisation was making rapid progress, and
prolonged the inferior culture and conservative influence of the late
Greek empire. The glory of the new Russia was but a coat of paint upon
barbarism.
In the court the oppressive servility and childish pageantry of the
Byzantine palace were encouraged. Golden mechanical lions barked before
a golden throne, as they had done at Constantinople, and filled the
visitor with mingled admiration and disdain. A very numerous guard of
nobles, in high white fur caps and long caftans of white satin, with
heavy silver axes on their shoulders, protected the sacred person of the
monarch, and crowds of courtiers in cloth of gold or bright silk, with
costly necklaces round their necks, vied with each other in flattery of
speech and humility of demeanour. Yet these glittering aristocrats still
carried a spoon in their jewelled girdles, for knives and forks were not
yet substituted for fingers at a Russian feast.
The wives of the boyars were not less splendid. The combined influence
of Mongol princes and Byzantinian monks had, as I said, lowered the
condition of the Slav women. The _terem_, or women’s quarters of the
house, was screened as carefully as the _gynecæum_ had been in ancient
Athens or in Constantinople. The Russians had not indeed introduced that
later Greek security for the behaviour of their women, the eunuch, and
the frailer protection of religion did not prevent disorders; but the
women were, as a rule, carefully guarded at home and abroad, while their
husbands claimed the free use of slaves and courtesans. In public the
wives of the boyars--or, as we may now call them, nobles--presented a
curious spectacle. They painted as liberally as the Greeks had done.
Thick coats of vivid red and white covered their faces, necks, and even
hands; and their eyelashes, and even teeth at times, were dyed. In
obedience to the ascetic teaching of the monks great masses of scarlet
or gold cloth, silk, satin, and velvet, concealed, or preserved for the
admiration of their husbands, the opulent lines of their figures; for
a full habit of body was religiously cultivated.
Round this glittering court, with its Gargantuan banquets and its daily
intoxication, spread the wooden city of Moscow, whose hundred thousand
inhabitants lived, for the most part, in squalor and grossness. Beyond
were the broad provinces of Russia which bore the burden of this
barbaric splendour. The mass of the people had at an earlier date, we
saw, become _moujiks_, or “mannikins.” Others called them “stinkers.”
Now, by one of the most curious freaks of Russian development, they were
known as “the Christians”; as if the quintessence of the Christian
doctrine, as it was expounded by the Russian priests, was obedience to a
lord and master. Their women had the hardest lot; the priests were
content to urge the peasant or artisan, who, like his betters, drank
heavily, not to beat his wife with a staff shod with iron or one of a
dangerous weight. Drink was one of the few luxuries left, for the
priests and monks gave fiery warnings against the song and dance and
games that had formerly lightened the life of the people. Drinking
heavily themselves, they could not, as a rule, rigorously forbid
intoxication.
Such was the Russia created by Ivan and his Greek wife, with the aid of
the Greek-minded clergy, and bequeathed to their second son Vassili.
That prince, zealously educated by his mother, sustained the policy of
enlarging and coercing his dominions. The republic of Pskoff had, we
saw, retained its democratic forms. Vassili held a court at Novgorod,
and thither he summoned the chief men of the neighbouring republic to do
homage. Too weak to rebel, yet aware that the monarch sought to swallow
the last remnant of the primitive democracy, the citizens appealed
eloquently to the sense of honour which the Moscovite might be assumed
to have. It was useless, and the republic was dismantled. Amidst the
tears of the citizens and the laments of the patriotic poets Vassili
removed the great bell to Novgorod and suppressed the _Véché_ or
democratic council. The commercial life of Pskoff was ruined, and three
hundred docile families from Moscow were substituted for threes hundred
who had clung to independence and were now sent into exile.
Riazan was the next victim. The familiar crime of corresponding with
heretics--with the Khan of the Crimea--was charged against its
prince, and the fertile province was added to the Moscow principality.
Vassili recovered territory also from the Tatars and the Lithuanians.
Russia expanded rapidly, and the splendour and autocracy of the court
proportionately increased. There was now only one court for the
innumerable descendants of the earlier princes and boyars, and the
sternness of the competition for rewards made the nobles more and more
sycophantic. Even less than his father did Vassili ask the counsel of
his boyars.
The death of Vassili in 1533 led to a romantic and important interlude.
Vassili’s first wife had been thrust into a convent on the ground that
she could not furnish an heir to the brilliant throne. Whether or no it
is true that she disturbed the solitude of the cloister with the pangs
of motherhood, it seems clear that the chief motive for the divorce was
that Vassili had fallen in love with the very pretty and capable
daughter of a Lithuanian refugee, Helena Glinski. Helena gave birth to
two sons, but the eldest was only three years old at the time of his
father’s death. The mother vigorously grasped the regency and held power
from the furious boyars. Only the Master of Horse, Prince Telepnieff,
was allowed to share her despotism, as he shared her affection. The
nobles split into factions, and they presently found that the easy-going
princess could use the most truculent machinery of despotism. When the
heads of a few of them had fallen, they poisoned Helena and her lover,
and there followed a sordid scramble for power and plunder.
Now of the two children of Helena one was the boy who would live, even
in the history of Russia, as “Ivan the Terrible.” Ingenious historians
have found a milder meaning for this epithet, or discovered that Ivan
underwent some strange degeneration in his later years. But the boy who
was brought up amidst dogs and grooms, who for sheer pleasure cast his
dogs from the walls of his palace and watched them writhe, who stabbed
his favourite jester for the most trifling fault, is the same Ivan who
in later years soaked petitioners in brandy and set fire to them. His
impulses were barbaric, and the unhappy features of his education had
stimulated rather than curbed them. He was eight years old at the time
his mother was murdered, but he was clever, observant, and
self-conscious. He saw the boyars plunder the palace, which was now his,
and fleece the long-suffering country. He noticed that any servant to
whom he became attached was removed or murdered. He read much, and he
grew up rapidly in his solitary world.
And during the Christmas festivities of 1543 Ivan, then thirteen years
old, summoned his boyars before him and let loose upon them an
unexpected storm of reproach. Andrew Chiuski, the most powerful
of them, he handed over at once to his groom-attendants--one wonders how
far they had inspired this precocious display--and the great noble was
soon dispatched. One account runs that by Ivan’s orders he was torn to
pieces by the hounds: others say that the grooms acted without orders.
Other nobles were banished. The short golden age of the boyars was over.
The shadow of a sterner autocracy than ever began to creep over the
court.
Ivan had himself crowned in January, 1547, and he chose the title, which
now first appears, of “Tsar of all the Russias.” Shortly afterwards he
announced that he would marry, and his servants arranged the kind of
matrimonial parade which had been customary at Constantinople when a
prince was to wed. A preliminary survey was made of the daughters of all
the nobles of the kingdom, and fifteen hundred of the most healthy and
beautiful of them were brought to Moscow and crowded into the palace. A
medical examination ensured that they were virtuous enough to wed a
prince who was already expert in every variety of vice, and Ivan made
the round of the trembling maids. He chose the lovely daughter of a
small noble named Roman, a man of either Prussian (Slav--as the old
Prussians were) or Lithuanian extraction. Anastasia Romanovna became the
first Tsarina and the founder of the fortune of the Romanoff family. It
was in the same year that Ivan had some deputies, who came from Pskoff
to set out the grievances of the town, soaked in brandy and set afire.
The boyars were still powerful. In the same year, 1547, a fire destroyed
a great part of Moscow, and the nobles charged it to the account of the
Tsar’s maternal relatives. The homeless people heard with horror that
the Glinskis had stewed human hearts and watered the streets with the
magic brew, and they fell upon the Glinski palaces. Even the young Tsar
wavered for a moment, and the boyars gained ground. Three years later,
however, he summoned a great assembly of all orders of the
people--except “the Christians,” who counted no longer--in the Red
Square in front of the Kreml and impeached the boyars. Reforms were
introduced in the holding of land and the administration of justice, and
an arrangement was made for the presentation of complaints.
Ivan was still young, and the insolence of the boyars continued. In 1553
he was dangerously ill, and he was aware that they plotted to put a
cousin of his upon the throne instead of reserving it for his infant
son. Ivan was, like his grandfather, not a man of much personal courage,
and he continued nervously to tolerate the opposition and corruption of
the nobles. In 1560 he impeached and disgraced their leaders, Sylvester
and Adacheff. His wife Anastasia had died, and he suspected poison. A
state of intolerable friction and danger now set in, and in the middle
of the winter of 1564 all Moscow was alarmed to see a great imperial
cortège leave the palace and retire to the country. Ivan had packed on
waggons his plate and treasures, his furniture and sacred ikons; and his
court and followers went with him on his strange adventure. The
correspondence which followed ended in a curious compromise. Ivan
virtually divided Russia into two parts. The greater part of it was to
be ruled by the boyars, the remainder by himself and his court.
But the young Tsar had reserved the right to punish treason, and on his
return to Moscow he created the machinery by which he could do so. He
formed a special guard of a thousand picked boyars and sons of boyars,
and the dog’s head which he gave them as emblem indicated his
disposition. A reign of terror followed. Thousands of nobles and their
followers were slain with every circumstance of brutality. Such legends
grew out of the red terror that we handle them with some reserve, but we
have a document in which Ivan coldly commends to the prayers of the
Church 3,470 victims--nobles and priests, men, women, and children--of
his new policy. Prince Vladimir (the cousin whom the nobles would have
substituted for his son) and his mother were killed; and there is no
grave reason to doubt the story that they were murdered in Ivan’s
presence, and that he then had their maids stripped, whipped through the
streets, and shot or cut down as they ran. Naked exposure and scourging
were common incidents of the terror.
In 1570 a man reported that Novgorod contemplated going over to Poland.
A letter to that effect would, he said, be found hidden behind a picture
in a certain monastery. Ivan’s servants found the letter where the man
had put it, and the Tsar and his troops moved grimly to Novgorod.
Priests and monks were brutally flogged, so that many of them died, and
then the citizens were brought, in batches of a hundred, before the
Tsar. Some were roasted over slow fires in the great square, where once
the _Véché_ had been held: others were driven in sledges, the children
tied to their mothers, down an incline into the icy river, where
soldiers with pikes saw that none escaped death. The horror lasted five
weeks, and so vaguely terrible was the city’s recollection of it that
the number of victims is variously stated as 500, 3,000, 60,000, and
even 700,000. The Archbishop of the city is said to have been sewn in a
bear-skin and flung to the dogs, but many of the stories of the time--of
Ivan stabbing babes and raping mothers, of his soldiers using white-hot
lances, and so on--may be figments of the horrified imagination.
Ivan, we must remember, was not a burly monster, cruel from his own
indifference to suffering. He was rather a nervous, calculating man,
shrinking behind soldiers chosen for their brutality, coldly following a
policy of terror. When he had sacked the shops and palaces, and ravaged
the whole territory of Novgorod, he turned upon Pskoff. It is recorded
to his credit that he murdered none in that innocent city, but he
relieved it of its wealth and banished many of the leading citizens. He
entered Moscow with all the pomp of a great Roman conqueror, and soon
set up his bloody tribunal in the capital. Hundreds were executed, and
the most barbarous torture was inflicted even upon women.
That was in 1570, and from that time onward Ivan ruled his empire by the
knout and the knife. His end was as inglorious as his reign. Anastasia
had given him two sons, Ivan and Feodor. The three legitimate wives and
various illegitimate partners whom he took after Anastasia’s death do
not seem to have much enlarged his family, and Prince Ivan grew up in
confident expectation of the throne. He was on such good terms with his
father that one tradition speaks of them as exchanging mistresses. In
1581, however, the Tsar was annoyed with his son’s wife, and, with his
customary lack of restraint, he struck her with the iron-shod staff
which he usually carried. She was pregnant, and the blow was fatal. His
son expostulated, and the Tsar again used his staff, or spear, and
inflicted a fatal wound. For a time he professed acute remorse. He shed
floods of tears and declared that he was unworthy of the throne. His
supporters, lay and clerical, did not share his momentary estimate of
himself, and he then, it seems, entered upon a period of worse debauch
than ever. We cannot very confidently pierce the darkness which falls
over the palace after 1581, but it seems to have rivalled in vice the
Golden House of Nero. In 1584 Ivan died.
Russian historians are apt to claim that Ivan was a great man marred by
a cruel disposition and an environment which fostered it. No one will
doubt either the savagery of his disposition or the barbarity and
peculiar pressure of his environment, but his constructive work hardly
entitles him to be called great. His domestic reforms seem to have been
made out of antipathy to the boyars, and we should probably not be far
wrong in attributing his other services to Russia mainly to a selfish
motive. He broke the remaining power of the Finns and Mongols, slew or
sold into slavery whole tribes of them, and made Russian provinces of
their territory. He conquered Astrakhan and its territory, and extended
the rule of Russia in the direction of Persia. He, after a long
struggle, beat the Livonian Knights, and secured respectful peace from
Poland and Sweden.
The greatest part of his policy was his endeavour to bring Russia into
contact with the west. From Livonia to Hungary a line of fanatical
Catholic powers shut out Russia from intercourse with the advancing
civilisation of the west. Ivan could hardly realise the historical law
that isolation means stagnation, but he did see clearly that everything
new and valuable--such as muskets and cannon--came from the
west. Early in his reign, in 1553, some English merchants sailed round
by the Protestant north to Russia, and Ivan became passionately eager
for an alliance with England. There is good ground to believe that his
envoys begged for him the hand of Queen Elizabeth herself! Her
contemptuous refusal, softened by diplomacy, angered him for a time, but
in later life he asked at least the hand of her cousin, Mary Hastings.
He had just taken on his sixth consort, and neither Mary nor Elizabeth
liked the prospect. The English court, which wanted the profit of trade
with Russia, was embarrassed, but as it was in the same year that the
Tsar killed his son and entered upon his last sombre phase the
difficulty did not remain long.
We have now seen how the Moscovites had made the new Russia--the
autocratic and imperial Russia which succeeded the democratic and
smaller country of the Slavs. How much “the genius of the Slav people”
had to do with the creation of that autocracy the reader will now
understand. We have also seen the children of a certain Roman, the
Romanoffs, enter the chronicle, and we have next to see how they mount
the imperial throne and found a lengthy dynasty.