Ivan the Terrible

Free to Reward and Free to Punish

Charles J. Halperin

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780822987222
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Ivan the Terrible is infamous as a sadistic despot responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people, particularly during the years of the oprichnina, his state-within-a-state. Ivan was the first ruler in Russian history to use mass terror as a political instrument. However, Ivan's actions cannot be dismissed by attributing the behavior to insanity. Ivan interacted with Muscovite society as both he and Muscovy changed. This interaction needs to be understood in order properly to analyze his motives, achievements, and failures.
Ivan the Terrible: Free to Reward and Free to Punish provides an up-to-date comprehensive analysis of all aspects of Ivan's reign. It presents a new interpretation not only of Ivan's behavior and ideology, but also of Muscovite social and economic history. Charles Halperin shatters the myths surrounding Ivan and reveals a complex ruler who had much in common with his European contemporaries, including Henry the Eighth.

PART I

Muscovy in the Sixteenth Century

1

Muscovy in 1533

When his father, Grand Prince Vasilii III, died in 1533, Ivan, then three years old, became Grand Prince of Moscow and All Rus’. Muscovy’s domestic institutions and international situation determined how the Muscovite elite dealt with a minor ruler. These factors also influenced how the adult Ivan would relate to the elite, to the Muscovite governmental apparatus, and to Muscovite society. This chapter first examines the rise of Muscovy before 1533 and the uncertainties affecting dynastic succession, then it explores some of the major characteristics of the Muscovite polity and society: Muscovy’s political structure and political culture, the development of a bureaucracy and an administrative apparatus, the concept of centralization, and the reciprocal relationship between the government and society.

The Muscovite principality arose at the turn of the fourteenth century, when the Mongols still ruled the land. By the middle of the fourteenth century it had become a grand principality. As a result of continued expansion during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, by the time of Ivan’s accession it encompassed all the formerly independent Russian principalities of the northeast, including Tver and Riazan, as well as the formerly independent city-states of the northwest, Lord Novgorod the Great and Pskov. Muscovy had even conquered the city of Smolensk from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and extended Muscovite rule into the former heartland of the ancestor of all three East Slavic peoples (Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians) of Kievan (Kyivan) Rus’, the Dnieper (Dnipro) River valley, by taking the city of Chernigov (Chernihiv). Although Muscovy did not try to conquer the city of Kiev itself, the Muscovite elite remained fully conscious of Muscovy’s Kievan roots.

Muscovy had become more powerful than its long-time regional rival, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which included considerable East Slavic territories populated by Ukrainians and Belarusians. Poland also included East Slavic lands, and the elected king of Poland after 1506 automatically became Grand Duke of Lithuania. Polish and Latin sources called East Slavs living under Polish and Lithuanian rule “Ruthenians.” I refer to “Poland-Lithuania” as one country, although they were separate states with the same ruler until 1569, when they formally united in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Lithuania was not reconciled to losing East Slavic territory, such as Smolensk, to Muscovite expansion and particularly coveted Novgorod and Pskov, which it had never ruled.

The territorial boundaries of Muscovy to the west reached the state created by the crusading Livonian Knights on the Baltic Sea, called Livonia, which monopolized Muscovite-Baltic trade. Muscovy also bordered Finland, then part of Sweden; Sweden and Muscovy competed for influence over the Lapp population of the Arctic Circle. Sweden, Denmark, and Poland-Lithuania all had territorial designs on Livonia, which became especially prominent after war erupted between Muscovy and Livonia in 1558. The Livonian War lasted twenty-five years, and Muscovy lost.

The Juchid ulus, commonly and anachronistically called the Golden Horde in scholarship, the Mongol successor state of the Mongol Empire that had conquered Rus’ in the thirteenth century, had disappeared by the time Ivan came to the throne. The Juchid ulus derived its name from Juchi, Chinggis Khan’s eldest son, to whom Chinggis left the western lands conquered by the Mongols, and the Turkic word “ulus,” meaning a polity. In the middle of the sixteenth century a Muscovite writer gave the Juchid ulus the name “the Golden Horde” (Zolotaia orda).¹ However, its successor states, the khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan, Crimea, and Sibir (western Siberia), and the nomadic Nogai hordes, still threatened Muscovy’s southern and southeastern borders with slave raids. Under Ivan’s grandfather, Ivan III, Muscovy had begun encroaching down the Volga River to influence Kazan. Ivan completed the process by conquering Kazan and Astrakhan in 1552 and 1556. The Crimeans retaliated by burning Moscow in 1571. Crimea had more military resources than Kazan. Muscovy and Poland-Lithuania engaged in a bidding war to bribe the Crimeans to attack the other, and both lost. The Crimeans raided the Ukrainian and southern Polish regions as well as Muscovite territory. Therefore, the ruler of Moscow always faced the risk of a two-front war, on the south and southeast with Muslim Tatar states and on the west and northwest with Christian states.

Until 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Ottomans, the Patriarch of Constantinople appointed the Metropolitan of All Rus’, the head of the Rus’ Orthodox Church, usually a Greek, originally one metropolitan in Kiev. In the fourteenth century the metropolitan moved to Moscow. In 1453 the Muscovite Church became autocephalous, although after 1458 a rival Metropolitan of All Rus’ was established in Halych for East Slavs under Polish and Lithuanian sovereignty. We are interested only in the metropolitan in Moscow. Historians disagree as to how much control the grand prince of Moscow exercised over the autocephalous Russian Church and the selection of its metropolitan. The Russian church continued to show due respect to the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople, who was also the recipient of royal philanthropy. Some historians assert that it was the triangular relationship among the grand prince of Moscow, the Metropolitan of Moscow, and the Patriarch of Constantinople, and not just relations between the grand prince and the metropolitan, that created political tensions in Moscow.

Both the Habsburg Holy Roman emperor and the pope knew about Muscovy. Imperial envoys had visited Muscovy during the reign of Ivan III, in part because Muscovy and the empire had a common enemy in Poland-Lithuania and in part because the emperors, like the popes, never ceased hoping for Muscovite aid against the Ottomans. Indeed, the Ottoman threat played a role in the papacy’s intervention as matchmaker in arranging Ivan III’s marriage to Sophia Palaiologa, the niece of the last Byzantine emperor. The pope wanted Muscovy to expel the Turks from Constantinople. Muscovite rulers knew that Muscovy lacked the military capacity to accomplish such a goal. Moscow assiduously courted the sultan’s approval, in part because of the profitable oriental trade and in part in hopes, no more fulfilled than those of the Holy Roman emperor or pope for a Muscovite crusade, that the sultan would restrain the ruler he treated as his vassal, the Crimean khan, from raiding Muscovite territory.

Therefore, Muscovite expansion before Ivan’s accession left in its wake potential problems in dealing with Moscow’s neighbors, the Tatars, Livonians, and Lithuanians.

DYNASTIC SUCCESSION

At home, in the middle of the fifteenth century, Muscovy endured a long dynastic war over succession. Vasilii II claimed the throne by direct succession from his father, Vasilii I. Vasilii I’s brothers and nephews asserted a counterclaim by collateral succession, from brother to brother. Vasilii II won. Brothers and nephews of the grand prince of Moscow became holders of appanages, hereditary semiautonomous domains with their own institutions. In the absence of a direct heir, an appanage prince could still claim the throne. Before Vasilii III had an heir, his eldest brother, Prince Iurii Ivanovich, had been heir apparent, and his younger brother, Prince Andrei Ivanovich, next in line. When Ivan ascended the throne as a minor, his appanage princely uncles became a problem. Muscovy lacked a fixed law of succession, so the ambiguity of direct or collateral succession could only be resolved by politics, a very problematic process sometimes, as the crisis of 1553, when it was expected that Ivan was fatally ill, demonstrated all too clearly.

MUSCOVY’S POLITICAL STRUCTURE AND POLITICAL CULTURE

In the absence of a mentally and physically competent adult male grand prince after Ivan’s accession as a boy, someone else had to fill the vacuum at the center of political authority. Muscovy’s political structure and culture determined how the elite would respond to this situation.

Muscovy’s political culture rested upon tradition (starina) and custom (obychai), not codified laws. No fundamental law regulated dynastic succession or political decision making. Muscovy lacked Renaissance abstract political theory, however marginal such theorizing was to political reality in contemporary states.² The absence of constitutional legislation gave the Muscovite political elite a certain degree of flexibility in adapting to changing circumstances. Nothing prevented Muscovites from declaring innovations in administration to be the restoration of tradition, which they did. Failure to deal with political problems cannot be blamed on the customary nature of the Muscovite government.

The Royal Council (Duma) stood at the apex of the administrative structure. It was more than an ad hoc meeting of whichever councillors the ruler (or whoever acted in his name) decided to summon at the moment; it was an institution. Muscovite diplomatic sources beginning in 1536 referred to gentry who lived “in the Royal Council.” (In the sixteenth century the word “dvoriane” referred to members of the royal court or household [dvor], literally “courtiers,” who included boyars, gentry, and others; it was only in the seventeenth century that it acquired the meaning of “gentry.” In this study I translate deti boiarskie / deti boiarstvo as “gentry” and dvoriane, except when dealing with conciliar gentry, as “courtiers” or “members of the court.”) Beginning in 1555, the sources referred to the Privy Council (Blizhnaia duma), not just to “privy councillors.”³ While the relationship of the Privy Council to the Royal Council remains obscure, nevertheless these references demonstrate that the Muscovite political structure recognized the existence of functioning permanent political bodies. At Ivan’s ascension only boyars and associate boyars (okol’nichie) belonged to the Royal Council. The boyars, from approximately twenty to forty families, constituted the upper elite (gentry and some bureaucrats formed the lower elite). They filled the major civilian and military leadership posts. Judging by boyar testaments, land purchases and donations, and cadastres, they owned large amounts of land, the major form of wealth in Muscovy, as patrimonies (votchiny). However, the Royal Council was a state, not a class, organ. Modern historians invented the term “Boyar Council” (Boiarskaia duma).

Later in Ivan’s reign, without impugning boyar preeminence, Ivan appointed members of two additional classes to the Royal Council: conciliar gentry (dumnye dvoriane, the only case during the sixteenth century in which dvoriane meant “gentry”) and conciliar state secretaries (dumnye d’iaki). “State secretaries” refers to clerks who worked for the central government, as opposed to those who worked for individuals, other institutions, or freelanced. The highest level of state secretary was conciliar state secretary. The gentry had begun assuming more prominence in Muscovite service after the Muscovite annexation of Novgorod, when Ivan III initiated a program of assigning conditional land grants (pomest’ia) to gentry military servitors as a reward for service. (Boyars accepted conditional land grants as well.) By Ivan IV’s reign, gentry who held conditional land grants and did not serve could forfeit those grants. Gentry cavalry archers constituted the core of the Muscovite army and occupied lower administrative offices than did boyars. Although state secretaries and almost all treasurers (kaznachei) were nonaristocratic bureaucrats, the office of majordomo (dvoretskoi), an official in charge of the ruler’s personal properties, could be a boyar or an associate boyar. Only one treasurer ever rose to boyar rank. The majordomos and treasurers of boyar rank who helped set policy acted not as boyars or members of the Royal Council but as officials. The state secretaries were the highest-ranking professional bureaucrats in Muscovy. They headed the most important administrative bureaus. State secretaries served on “boyar” diplomatic negotiating teams.⁴ Historians have paid much attention to how the boyars reacted to the promotion of gentry and state secretaries to positions of influence in the Muscovite governmental apparatus because much of traditional historiography assumes that rulers sought to offset aristocratic influence by relying upon gentry and non-noble bureaucrats. In this study “nobles” or “the nobility” refers to the Muscovite boyars (aristocracy) and gentry combined.⁵

Officially, the ruler decided who acquired the status of boyar. He did so primarily but not exclusively on the basis of genealogical seniority within the clans customarily entitled to supply members.⁶ The word “boyars” often encompassed associate boyars as well. Unofficial texts also employed the word “magnates” (vel’mozhi).⁷ The ruler could not dispense with the leadership of the boyars, who commanded his armies, administered the most important provinces and cities, advised him in council, and who alone had the experience to perform these services.

Why the Royal Council could not prevent Ivan from committing atrocities is a question that has dominated modern historiography.⁸ Legal historians in particular have blamed this failure on the absence of boyar constitutional and political rights that would have enabled them to stand up to Ivan the way the English barons stood up to King John, producing the Magna Carta in 1215. (Such historians would do well to remember that later King John in effect tore up the charter.) Such a rigid approach to political history underestimates the Muscovite ability to manipulate their customary institutions.⁹ No law regulated the competence of the Royal Council or how the ruler selected its members. Legislation could become law without its approval, as was also true of the English Parliament.¹⁰ In all likelihood the boyars arrived at decisions by consensus, not voting, but because no minutes of the council’s proceedings survive, this inference cannot be tested. In any event the Royal Council presented all its decisions as unanimous. It is likely that all boyars belonged to the Royal Council but unlikely that all boyars actually attended any given session, because some were always out of town with field armies, in various cities as governors, on leave, sick, or in disgrace (“disgrace” officially deprived a courtier out of favor of the tsar’s physical presence; the nature and duration of the punishment depended entirely upon the ruler’s discretion).¹¹

Muscovy lacked any concept that the Royal Council should oppose the ruler. No law defined the rights of the Royal Council, but no law defined the rights of the ruler either. Custom dictated that no member of the Royal Council could be punished without trial by the grand prince or the boyars, but political reality permitted exceptions.¹² Tradition expected the ruler and his boyars to cooperate, rendering the distinction between the Royal Council’s legislative and consultative authority moot. The ruler should consult his subjects, especially his elite; if he did not, he was a bad ruler. Literary texts, icons and frescoes, palace and church architecture, and ritual and ceremony—in a word, image and performance—articulated this same harmonious conception of politics. A grand prince without a royal council would have been as unthinkable as a royal council without a grand prince.¹³ Muscovite political culture did not share the assumption of many historians that conflict should and did govern the relationship between the ruler and the boyars.

Boyar dominance of Muscovite politics depended in part upon the boyars’ relationship to members of other social groups active in administration. Unfortunately, we know only enough about patronage-client relationships among the elite to conclude that they existed.¹⁴ Theoretically, boyars could patronize other boyars, gentry, or officials. In addition, non-boyar members of the elite such as appanage and serving princes (southwest border p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Muscovy in the Sixteenth Century
• Part II. Ivan’s Life from His Accession to the Oprichnina
• Part III. Muscovy from Ivan’s Accession to the Oprichnina
• Part IV. Ivan and Muscovy during and after the Oprichnina
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Notes
• Index