THE RISE OF THE ROMANOFFS
THE second son of Ivan the Terrible, who now became the Tsar Feodor, was
a piquant contrast to his father and brother. Not wives and mistresses,
but the ornate services of the Church or long private devotions,
occupied his hours. He was as meek as his father had been truculent, and
the nobles began to raise their heads once more. His uncle, Nikita
Romanoff, brother of the first Tsarina, naturally held the first place
in his confidence and relieved him of the profane task of governing his
dominions.
But the pious Feodor had married, and his wife Irene had a masterful and
ambitious brother, Boris Godunoff. The Godunoffs are said to have
descended from a Tatar chief, who had embraced Christianity and settled
in Moscow. Irene was devoted to her brother, and she used her influence
over the feeble-minded Tsar to promote him. Before long the palace was
split into two factions, and the familiar struggle for power and wealth
set in. Nikita Romanoff was a man of ability, but he had a more astute
rival. Boris Godunoff secured two measures which greatly increased his
support in Moscow and the country.
The first measure won for him the gratitude of the clergy. The Russian
Church was still in effect the Greek Church. Its supreme head was the
Patriarch of Constantinople, who sustained his tattered dignity among
the Mohammedans. Boris induced this man to create a Patriarch of Moscow,
and he thus won the increasing favour of the clergy. His other measure
was one of great and terrible significance for the poor “Christians.”
The expansion of Russia had created large new estates, and the great
land-owners continually attracted peasants away from the smaller
estates. But the small land-owners, who formed the yeomanry or cavalry
of the Empire, were not a body to be despised, either in the interest of
the country or of an aspiring politician. It is said that in 1592 Boris
played for their support by issuing an imperial decree which forbade the
peasants to go from one estate to another. Some Russian historians deny
this. If the document is genuine, they say, it meant only that Boris
legally fixed a practice which had gradually arisen, on account of the
mischief of these peasant-migrations. However that may be, there is no
doubt that Boris Godunoff legally established serfdom in Russia at a
time when it was being abandoned elsewhere. The peasants grumbled and
suffered, but they now had upon their backs an autocracy that treated
their wishes with entire contempt.
As the reign of Feodor (1584-1598) wore on, and no son appeared, Boris
pushed his ambition to greater lengths. The heir to the throne would now
be the young Prince Dmitri, the son of Ivan the Terrible’s seventh wife.
Early in the reign of Feodor the nobles had compelled Dmitri’s ambitious
mother to take her infant son and her relatives to a remote provincial
estate, and from that exile the mother and her kin nervously studied the
failing health of Tsar Feodor and the condition of his wife. The
subjection of women in Russia does not seem to have extinguished their
ambition, and there was at the court itself the usual party, out of
power, which espoused the hope of a possible dynasty. The court seethed
once more with sordid passion.
In 1591 the Dmitri faction at court was shattered by the announcement
that the young prince was dead. Boris ordered an inquiry, and as a
result he announced that, owing to the carelessness of his mother in
supervising him, Dmitri had committed suicide. With becoming zeal the
virtual Regent forced the mother to enter a nunnery and consigned her
relatives to various prisons. Moscow at large, reflecting that the
tragedy removed an important obstacle from Boris’s path to the throne,
preferred to believe that his servants had murdered the prince. That is
the general opinion of historians, but there are some who maintain that
the child was not murdered at all, and that the adventurer who will
presently enter the story was really Dmitri.
For the present, at all events, the way was cleared, and the death of
Feodor in 1598 left the throne vacant. The nobles and people offered
their allegiance to the Tsarina, but Irene, suddenly discovering a
remarkable distrust of her powers and dislike of the world, fled to a
nunnery. Boris had, with equal modesty, retired to the same nunnery, but
his supporters worked for him, and presently the convent was sought by
an impressive procession of the clergy (headed by the obsequious
patriarchs), the boyars, and the people of Moscow, offering the crown to
Boris. He declined an invitation which seemed to him to come from too
small a section, and the general council of the Empire was then
convoked, and it repeated the offer. After a further mockery of
resistance he accepted and became Tsar Boris.
I have said that Boris Godunoff was as able a man to fill the autocracy
as could have been found at that time, and he endeavoured to complete
the plans of Ivan the Terrible. He kept in check Sweden and Poland,
consolidated the gains in Asia, and maintained close and profitable
relations with Queen Elizabeth. He encouraged Russian students to go to
western countries for the completion of their education. But we are
concerned with the rise of the Romanoffs and may summarise other matters.
Three years after the accession of Boris a dreadful famine spread over
the land. It lasted three years, and so great was the destitution that
in later years horrible stories were whispered of parents devouring
their own children. Streams of the suffering country-folk poured into
Moscow, and, as its own provisions were soon exhausted, the streets of
the capital were filled with pale and emaciated ghosts. It is said that
hundreds of thousands died in Moscow alone, and throughout the land the
superstitious people spoke of the sin of Boris Godunoff in murdering the
heir to the throne. The nobles themselves stirred, and Boris put into
operation the usual machinery. The Romanoff family seemed to be an
especial source of danger, and the chief representative of that family,
Feodor Romanoff, was thrust into a monastery and buried under the
monkish title of Philaret. His wife was compelled to enter a nunnery and
assume the name of Marfa.
The scattered feeling of discontent at length gathered round the person
of a singular adventurer. In the summer of 1604 the news spread through
Russia that Dmitri, the third son of Ivan the Terrible, was not dead,
but was approaching Moscow with a Polish army to oust the usurper and
put an end to their miseries. Gregory Otrepieff, who is generally
believed to have been “the false Dmitri,” had been a roving
monk who had turned brigand with a band of Cossacks. From the southern
steppes he had gone to Poland, and there, it was announced, he had,
believing himself to be at the point of death, revealed to a Jesuit
confessor the secret of his birth and shown the priest a jewelled cross
which proved his identity. The Jesuits were still in their melodramatic
phase of secret conspiracy for the Church, and may well have invented,
or embroidered, the story. They pressed Dmitri upon the Catholic king
and nobles of Poland, and in October he crossed the frontier of Russia
with an irregular force. Would the Jesuits add to their many triumphs
the submission of Russia to the Vatican after so many centuries of
resistance?
Otrepieff’s force was defeated, but there was a good deal of treachery,
and presently a large body of the Cossacks came to join the army of
their former companion. At this juncture, in 1605, Boris died, and
priests, soldiers, and people declared that they were convinced of the
genuineness of the adventurer. The late Tsar’s wife and son were
murdered with the usual barbarity. The people of Moscow lustily received
the monk-brigand, when he came for his coronation, and even the widow of
Ivan IV publicly fell upon his neck and identified him. Her relatives
were, of course, promoted to wealth and honour, and even the Romanoffs
returned from the monastic shades to the sunlight of prosperity. Monk
Philaret was made a Metropolitan, or Archbishop.
But the rise to power was not so speedy as the fall from it, and both
give us some measure of the ignorance and barbarism of the times.
Otrepieff was a clever and accomplished man, but he either lacked, or
disdained to use in so credulous a world, the art of tact. He brought a
Polish wife whose suite laughed at the uncouth ways of the Russians. He
himself too openly railed at the backwardness of the country, surrounded
himself with foreigners, and acted with scandalous independence. He was
plainly, as his adventures would indicate, a sceptic, and he snapped his
fingers at the Pope and the Jesuits the moment they had secured the
throne for him; but he was no more respectful to the clergy and
religious forms of Russia. He disdained monks and ikons, asked no
blessing on his table, and refused to follow any of the
court-traditions. And within a month of his entrance into the Kreml the
adventurer lay dead upon the stones of its courtyard. People, amazed at
their own credulity, now exclaimed that he was a sorcerer, and the spell
had to be broken by blowing the ashes of his burned corpse from the
mouth of a cannon.
The succession to the throne had now been interrupted, and a ruler had
to be chosen. Vassili Chuiski, a military noble of distinguished family,
a bald myopic man of little energy, secured the suffrages of Moscow and
mounted the throne. But while the sluggishness of communication enabled
Moscow thus to choose a sovereign for the entire country, it left the
provinces in such a state of confusion and unsettlement that any rebel
could find support there. Another Dmitri arose, and was accepted. People
recollected that the real Dmitri had, like a true Russian, worn a beard,
while Otrepieff had had none. The new claimant had a beard. A regiment
of nobles in one province, an army of disaffected peasants and brigands
in another, raised the standard of the new adventurer and united their
forces within sight of Moscow. There the nobles quarrelled with and
deserted their baser comrades, and the new claimant ended on a gallows.
But the name “Dmitri” was now a phrase under which any kind of rebellion
might find shelter. A number of men who claimed that they were sons or
grandsons of Ivan the Terrible appeared, and the known morals of that
monarch did not make the number implausible. A “third false Dmitri,” a
very poor type of adventurer, was fabricated, and before long the rebels
again set up within sight of Moscow the court of “the real monarch.” The
new impostor went so far as to claim that he was not merely the Prince,
but the first “false Dmitri” also, having escaped assassination, and he
sent tender messages to his “wife” Maryna (who had married
Otrepieff) and her father. In later years they maintained that the
impostor had, after killing their servants, torn them from their home
and brought them to Moscow, but such trickery was common. Maryna’s
father, still thirsting for a crown for his daughter and a share of its
magnificence for himself, brought his daughter to Moscow and bade her
open her arms to her recovered “husband.” “I would die first,” she said,
after seeing the worthless adventurer; but the father persisted, and
soon the “genuine” Tsar and Tsarina held court outside Moscow, while
Chuiski and his friends nervously kept the city.
[IMAGE: img068.jpg The Patriarch Philaret, Father of Mikhail
Romanoff, the First Tsar of the New Dynasty. Seventeenth Century]
The situation was complicated by the insidious behaviour of the king of
Poland. King Sigismund continued with a hypocritical pretence of justice
to support the claimant, while he negotiated a surer way of getting the
crown. He claimed the Russian throne for his own son Ladislas, and sent
an army against Moscow. The terrified boyars now compelled the useless
Chuiski to resign and formed a council, including one of the Romanoffs,
Ivan Nikititch, to direct the affairs of the distracted country. This
small group of boyars accepted Ladislas. But it became clear that
Sigismund and his Jesuits put forward Ladislas only as a pretext to
seize the throne, and a terrible agitation seized the people. Their
historic faith was in danger. The shadow of the Pope fell upon their
very walls. The small Polish army had to be conducted into the city
during the night. The people awoke to find Popery in their midst, and
soldiers and the nobles who supported Poland, including the Romanoffs,
had to shelter in the Kreml.
The impostor was at length driven away from Moscow, and in December the
news came that he had been slain by the Tatars. But this removal of one
element of strife now only embittered the people further against the
Poles. King Sigismund was taking Russian towns in the east: the Swedes
were busy in the north. Russia had returned to as grave and costly a
confusion as it had ever witnessed, and the long-suffering peasants
looked up with dull eyes from their plough to hear the latest news of
their masters, or fled before the unrestrained bands of brigands. In
Moscow itself a row between the people and the Polish soldiers led to
days of murder and burning of houses, and the skirmish was turned into
regular warfare by the arrival of an army of Cossacks. The Poles and a
number of Moscow nobles, including the wife and son of Archbishop
Philaret, who had gone to plead with the Polish king and been held
prisoner by him, were closely besieged in the Kreml.
It was a butcher of Nijni-Novgorod who raised at length a national
standard and rallied the best elements of the country. His forceful and
sincere personality bound together his townsmen in a league of effort
and sacrifice, and in the late summer of 1612 a large and solemn army,
headed by the priests and monks and sacred pictures, came within sight
of the golden domes of the metropolis. The townsfolk eagerly joined
them, and the few hundred Poles who remained in the Kreml were summoned
to surrender. Worn with famine, though they had begun to eat the flesh
of their slain comrades, and had made soup of the old parchments in the
Archives, the brave troops at first stubbornly refused to yield without
an order from their king. They surrendered on October 26th, and a
company of living ghosts emerged from the sacred enclosure. Amongst them
was Ivan Nikititch, of the Romanoff family, and Philaret’s wife
Marfa; and with Marfa, his large eyes wondering at the scenes of horror,
was her son Michael who was destined to be the first Romanoff ruler.
A provisional government was formed, and a summons to a great popular
assembly was sent over the country. A number of loosely chosen
representatives--except of the peasants, who no longer counted--came to
Moscow, and the task of choosing a monarch was confronted. The nobles
were generally in favour of Ladislas of Poland, but the bitter
anti-Roman and anti-Polish feeling restrained these. They must have a
Russian monarch, and men naturally asked if they had not still amongst
them some man of royal blood. From Philaret, whose embassy had won him
some prestige, but whose clerical condition debarred him from the
throne, attention was soon drawn to his son.
The mother, Marfa, had left Moscow after issuing from the Kreml, and had
gone to a country estate at Kastroma. There were, however, other
Romanoffs in the assembly, and Philaret himself (who, however, is said
to have urged the election of a boyar) maintained contact with it from
his exile. Most zealous for the boy--for Michael was only seventeen
years old--was a crafty old fox who had married a niece of Philaret, and
might reasonably expect some reward. To the nobles he pointed out that
the youth and feebleness of Michael would leave them a larger power. To
the clergy he observed that to have the father of the Tsar a
Metropolitan of their Church held out a large prospect of power for
them. In short, the nobles were induced to realise that blood was the
thing that mattered, while the clergy and monks were guided by
supernatural visions in which the boy appeared as “God’s chosen one.”
Michael was elected on February 21st. Three weeks later a solemn
procession approached the monastery at Kastroma in which Marfa guarded
her precious son. She wept at the prospect of Michael assuming so
dangerous a dignity--tears are second only to blood in the chronicles of
Moscow--and for several days maintained a most virtuous resistance.
And on May 2nd Marfa and Michael entered the Kreml once more, the chosen
rulers of Russia.
There can be little doubt that the hesitation of the nobles, who really
had no prominent candidate before their eyes, was chiefly overborne in
favour of the Romanoffs by a consideration of the youth of Michael.
Marfa was not one of the strong women who abound in the Russian
chronicles. We shall soon see her return to the convent from which the
national agitation had drawn her. Philaret was a prisoner in the hands
of the Poles, and none could surmise when he would return. We see in the
election little of the national spirit which had cleared Moscow, yet the
country groaned for the creative genius of a statesman and the virility
of a strong soldier. The ravages of war had terribly enfeebled it; its
industrial life was in decay; its hereditary enemies threatened it on
every front.
Michael was a feeble youth whose eyes still looked dully upon the
strange scenes he had witnessed. He passed at once into the hands of his
mother and her relatives, the Saltykoffs, and the court hummed once more
with petty intrigue for money and offices. Marfa appropriated the
hereditary treasure of the Tsarina and, knowing something of the history
of Russia, formed about her a body of spies and supporters. The older
nobles resisted the upstarts, and fierce quarrels for precedence and
appointments occurred even in the presence of the Tsar. At times the
knout was laid upon too offensive shoulders, but several years passed in
these selfish recriminations.
There were, however, urgent affairs to be settled, and by raising the
taxation to one fourth of the individual’s income sufficient money was
gathered, and escaped the fingers of the nobles, to raise an army. So
great had been the disorder of the previous twenty years that Moscow
itself had lost a third of its population, and the impoverished
merchants writhed under the tax. But the Cossacks were threatening. The
romantic Maryna, who will be remembered as the wife of the first and
companion of the second false Dmitri, had given birth to a son, and she
transferred her versatile affection to the Cossack leader, Zarutski, and
relied upon him to secure the crown for her little Ivan. Zarutski swept
triumphantly from town to town, while other brigands emptied villages,
and the Swedes and Poles pursued their accustomed inroads. The new army
scattered the Cossacks, impaled their leader, and hanged the little
Ivan--an infant of three years--in order effectually to settle the brood
of pretenders. Maryna ended her curious career in prison, and southern
Russia was restored to comparative calm.
The councillors of Marfa now turned toward the Swedes and Poles. A
direct struggle with such adversaries was impossible, and Russian envoys
made the round of Europe seeking either money and men to meet them or
mediation to disarm them. At the western courts the Moscovites did not
convey a favourable impression of their country. Their gross manners and
dirty ways affronted even the English and Dutch of the early seventeenth
century, nor were the silver articles of the table or the maids on the
streets quite safe from their ready hands. But England and Holland had,
besides the moderate advantage of hating Rome, a keen desire to trade
with Russia and the East, and they endeavoured to secure peace. Poland
scornfully refused to treat with “the son of a Pope” who had usurped the
throne of their Ladislas. In 1617, however, Gastavus Adolphus, of
Sweden, was bought off by a large indemnity and a few towns, and Russia
was able to oppose a stronger defence to Poland. King Sigismund now
offered a truce, and at a conference it was arranged that he should
renounce the claim to the Russian crown, but keep Smolensk and other
cities.
The peace was followed by an exchange of prisoners, and in the summer of
1619 the Archbishop Philaret hastened to secure the power which awaited
him. It happened that the patriarchal throne of Moscow was vacant, and
Philaret occupied it. That he was a priest _malgré lui_, and enjoyed
the more luxurious and comforting tastes of a profane layman, did not
much matter in that world. Far more religious prelates than Philaret
drank heavily and habitually. The patriarchate was the highest power he
could nominally and legally hold, and he was not wanting either in
energy or ambition. For a patriarch, however, to have a wife about the
court was scarcely seemly, and he “persuaded” Marfa to return to her
convent. He felt also that it was expedient to remove some of her
friends, and in order to do this with a show of justice he reopened a
very curious case that had been settled in his absence.
In the year 1616 Michael had decided to wed a young woman of obscure
family named Maria Ivanovna Khlopoff. Her name was, in accordance with
custom, changed to Anastasia; her espousals were celebrated; the day of
the sacred ceremony which would make her Tsarina was within her
delighted view. Then the luckless Maria fell ill, which no bride of a
Tsar must dare to do. The doctors examined her and pronounced her “unfit
to serve the delight of the Tsar,” and the unhappy maiden and her
relatives were suddenly dispatched to Siberia. Philaret, who knew with
what anxiety the existing favourites at a Russian court regarded the
coming of a crowd of relatives with a Tsar’s bride, and how frequently
the chosen maid met with accidents before the wedding-day, looked into
the affair when he returned. Her confessor admitted that she was
innocent--it now transpired that a certain indiscretion in eating
fruit was the full extent of her fault--and she was recalled from
Siberia and permitted to settle, with a small pension, at
Nijni-Novgorod.
It appears that Philaret had hope of securing a more distinguished
Tsarina. During the next few years he approached the courts of Denmark
and Sweden, but without success. The king of Denmark bluntly remarked
that the air of Moscow was not good for the chosen brides of Tsars. So
Philaret returned to the affair of Maria Khlopoff, and was now convinced
that the jealous Saltykoffs (Marfa’s people) had fabricated the charge.
He fell upon them with great severity, and drove several into exile.
Marfa, however, succeeded in saving the remainder of the family, and
also in preventing the return to court of Maria. To cut the story short,
yet fitly introduce the next generation of palace-squabblers, we may say
that in 1624 Michael married Princess Maria Dolgoruki; and, as she died
soon afterwards, he married a woman of undistinguished family, Eudoxia
Strecknieff. The new Tsarina provided a son, Alexis, and the precious
dynasty of the Romanoffs was saved from a premature extinction.
Philaret had ability, and we need not quarrel with the way in which he
took the power from the hands of his feeble and incompetent son. That he
was a Wolsey or a Richelieu, as some historians conceive him, is far too
flattering an exaggeration. The Cossacks, the Poles, and the Swedes were
disarmed while he was still absent, and when the Poles renewed the war
in 1632 Philaret’s army was badly beaten, and he could think of
nothing better than to have its generals executed. He had friendly
relations with France and England, because both wanted to enter, through
Russia, into a profitable commerce with Persia; which was refused. The
Turks, of course, barred the Mediterranean route to the east. The Sultan
offered Philaret an alliance against the Poles, but he was at that time
unprepared for a big war. On the whole it was a balance of interests
rather than statesmanship which gave Russia some years of peace.
Internally Philaret did more active service. The question had already
arisen whether Russia should be Europeanised. The colony of foreign
merchants which now grew just outside the walls of Moscow exhibited a
higher culture. The western armies were constantly superior to the
Russian in equipment. The envoys to France, England, and Holland spoke
of refinements which made the luxury of Moscow seem tawdry. On the other
hand were the inevitable croakers who protested that Russian trade,
Russian religion, or even the Russian State, would not survive an
invasion of western ideas. Philaret boldly adopted the progressive view
and summoned foreign teachers to Moscow. Astronomers brought their
marvellous instruments to astonish or scare the populace; mathematicians
and literary men opened schools in the metropolis. Against one western
discovery, tobacco, the Russians remained obdurate; while the man who
was caught surreptitiously taking snuff, as the westerners did, had his
nose cut off.
The religious controversy also contributed to the sharpening of the wits
of the nation. The Jesuits still lingered heroically on the fringe of
the Empire and sought to bring it under the rule of the Papacy. Even a
new pretender was tried--a son of Maryna who had escaped murder, they
said--but the man, a commonplace peasant, was not chosen with their
usual skill, and little harm was done. In the Russian provinces which
were subject to Poland, however, they worked with such effect that the
Church was rent by a great schism. Some of the Russian prelates were for
union with Rome. The struggle had an echo in Russia, and some education
for controversial purposes was inaugurated. We must, however, not
exaggerate the effect on the Russian mind of this controversy. It is
estimated by Russian historians that at that time not one person in a
thousand, at the most, could read, and even in the city-circles in which
the points at issue were debated the clash of ideas must have been of
the crudest conceivable nature.
Philaret, who sincerely endeavoured to introduce some western culture
into this dense jungle of ignorance and superstition, died in 1633.
Michael continued for twelve years to sustain feebly the plans of his
father, and the period may be described as one of slow recovery. An
amusing episode of Michael’s last year will give some idea of the
condition even of the court.
In 1641 Prince Valdemar of Denmark came to Russia on behalf of his
father. The court decided that it would like him to wed the Princess
Irene, and, when Valdemar was deaf to hints and returned to Copenhagen,
a deputation was sent to consult with his father. King Christian
favoured the proposal, but Valdemar had seen Moscow and was not
attracted. When one of the envoys fervently pledged his head as a
guarantee that all would be well, the young prince asked: “What should I
do with your head?” At the beginning of 1645, however, he submitted so
far to the pressure as to go to Moscow, and a quaint struggle followed.
For five months the prince fought against the marriage. In vain were the
person and virtues of Irene impressed upon him. He was assured that she
never got drunk, as other Russian ladies did, and her personal
attractions, which seem to have been feeble, were eloquently
exaggerated. Valdemar found the pretext that his evangelical faith was
in grave danger if he joined the Russian court, and he proposed to
return to Denmark. He was virtually a prisoner in the Kreml, and on one
occasion he created a scandal by drawing the sword and threatening to
cut his way out. In July Michael died, and his successor allowed the
Danish prince to return home.