Ivan the Terrible, page 56
8 This account is put together from a number of different sources, including the interpolations in the Tsarstvennaia kniga chronicle (PSRL, XIII, 2, pt, 2), which according to some authors are by Ivan IV himself, see Skrynnikov, Velikii gosudar', I, pp.140–41; Tsarstvo terrora, p. 93 (though other authors disagree); and Ivan IV's letter to Prince A.M. Kurbsky, see Kurbsky, Correspondence, pp. 81–2.
9 D.S. Likhachev and Ya. S. Lur'e, eds, Poslania Ivana Groznogo, Moscow-Leningrad, 1951, p. 523; from Ivan's speech at the meeting of the Stoglav council in 1551.
10 Kurbsky, Correspondence, p. 81. Ivan's relations with Prince A.M. Kurbsky will be dealt with in Chapter X below.
11 Karamzin, Istoria, VIII, pt 2, pp. 63ff and nn. 177, 178, bases himself on Kurbsky's History and on Ivan's own words in the meeting of the Church Council (Stoglav) in 1551.
12 A.I. Filiushkin, Istoria odnoi mistifikatsii: Ivan Groznyi i izbrannaia rada, Moscow, 1998, suggests that this speech was probably made by Makarii, and not by Sylvester, pp. 37ff.
13 See A.A. Zimin, ‘O sostave dvortsovykh uchrezhdenii Russkogo gosudarstva kontsa XV i XVI v,’ in Istoricheskie zapiski, no. 63, Moscow, 1958, pp. 180–205. The structure and status of these appanages ruled by dvortsy can be compared to the palatinates in England.
14 Quoted from S.V. Bakhrushin, ‘Izbrannaia rada Ivana Groznogo’, Istoricheskiie zapiski, no. 15, Moscow, 1945, pp. 45ff, in A.S. Usachev, ‘Obraz tsaria v srednevekovoi Rusi’, Drevniaia Rus', Voprosy medievistiki, Moscow, 2001, vyp. 3 (5), pp. 93–103.
15 In the term preferred by Kivelson, ‘The Effects of Partible Inheritance’.
16 Skrynnikov, Tsarstvo terrora, pp. 78–9.
17 ‘frankpledge – the system by which every member of a tithing was answerable for the good conduct of, or the damage done by, anyone of the other members,’ OED.
18 In England, Henry VIII abolished the suretyships imposed by Henry VII on great nobles.
19 See the essential article by H.W. Dewey and A.M. Kleimola, ‘Suretyship and Collective Responsibility in Pre-Petrine Russia’, JGOE, 18, 1970, pp. 337–54, particularly at pp. 343ff, which follows suretyship down through various social levels.
20 H.W. Dewey, ‘Political Poruka in Muscovite Rus’, Russian Review, vol. 46, 1987, pp. 117–34, at p. 118. See also, as regards denunciation, H.W. Dewey and A.M. Kleimola, ‘From the Kinship Group to Every Man His Brother's Keeper: Collective Responsibility in Pre-Petrine Russia’, JGOE, 30, 1982, pp. 321–35. These two articles and the one by Dewey and Kleimola in n. 19 above provide in my view by far the most illuminating analyses of the early Russian relationship between state and society.
21 Not many are known to have enjoyed this title: Prince D.I. Bel'sky, a Gediminovich, who spent most of his life campaigning; Prince Alexander Borisovich Gorbaty-Shuisky, a prominent soldier; Ivan Petrovich Fedorov Cheliadnin, who was not a prince; and later Prince M.I. Vorotynsky, who was a soldier. On sluga see Schmidt, Rossiya Ivana Groznogo, p. 96.
22 Sir Francis Walsingham was described as a ‘d'iak’ in the dispatches of F. Pisemsky from London in the 1580s. See SIRIO, 38, passim. He would have been delighted! See in general Schmidt, ‘D'iachestvo v Rossii serediny XVI veka’ in Rossia Ivana Groznogo, pp. 103ff., at p. 109.
23 See I. Gralia, Ivan Mikhailov Viskovaty, Moscow, 1994, p. 462, for a list of d'iaki and clerks in the 1560s in the Office of Foreign Affairs. There were two principal d'iaki, who were members of the Council, and four ordinary d'yaki; there were thirteen clerks and eleven translators, not counting translators from Eastern languages and Polish.
24 I would argue that the English gentry provided through its younger sons, the universities, and the Inns of Court a social class similar to a noblesse de robe. However, in an unpublished article, ‘Entail and Noble Power in Early Modern Europe’, which he has kindly allowed me to refer to, Professor H.M. Scott has pointed out that entail (mayorazgo, Fideicommiss etc.) was not in the sixteenth century as yet widely or firmly established throughout Europe. The first systematic attempts occurred in Spain in the early sixteenth century.
25 There is some evidence that strategies of avoidance of the impoverishment following on the division of estates had been worked out by the lower service gentry, but the assault on the landholdings of the aristocracy was severe in the reign of Ivan IV. See V.A. Kivelson, ‘The Effects of Partible Inheritance’. See also Chapter XXI.
26 PSRL XIII, pt 2, p. 131.
27 See above, Chapter II, p. 32.
28 Skrynnikov, Tsarstvo terrora, pp. 98–9.
29 Schmidt, Rossiya Ivana Groznogo, p. 55.
30 Ibid., p. 58.
31 Ivan suggests that he had been promoted from a very lowly position. Ibid., p. 56.
32 Ibid., p. 56 and n. 6. From Russian spat', to sleep, and postel', bed.
33 See, for example, the works of D. Starkey or R.J. Knecht on the structure and influence of the court in sixteenth-century England and France. No such detailed studies have been produced in Russia. They did not fit into the Marxist paradigm.
34 Zimin, Reformy, p. 312; cf. Schmidt, ‘Pravitel'stvennaya deyatel'nost’ A.F. Adasheva' and additions by I.I. Smirnov, Ocherki politicheskoi istorii Russkogo gosudarstva 30–50kh godov XVI veka, ANSSR, Moscow-Leningrad, 1958, pp. 212–31.
35 Ivan's first letter to Kurbsky, see Kurbsky, Correspondence, pp. 13ff.
36 A.A. Zimin, I.S. Peresvetov i ego sovremenniki: Ocherki po istorii russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli serediny XVI veka, ANSSR, Moscow 1958, p. 42.
37 See her portrayal in Eisenstein's film Ivan the Terrible. But this suggestion is a late interpolation in the Tsarstvennaia kniga, itself a later chronicle. Ibid., p. 44. A comparison between what Zimin wrote in 1958 and what he wrote later is very instructive. According to Zimin in 1958, Sylvester was a supporter of Prince Vladimir of Staritsa, of the non-possessors, and was supported by boyars and supported them; he was engaged in the early 1550s in a constant ‘struggle’ with hostile forces at court, namely the possessors led by Metropolitan Makarii. The evidence for this portrayal is derived from interpolations long after the event in the Chronicles. The atmosphere in Zimin's account in I.S. Peresvetov i ego sovremenniki, pp. 46ff is redolent of the struggles of the 1950s in Moscow between different factions in the Party and the nomenklatura. The language is the same, and recalls the language of kremlinology.
38 Ivan seems to have been impressed with the wickedness of Manasseh, for he reverts to him in his first letter to Kurbsky. For the discourse see D.N. Al'shits, Nachalo samoderzhavia v Rossii: Gosudarstvo Ivana Groznogo, Leningrad, 1988, pp. 65–6. See also Floria, Ivan Groznyi, pp. 26–7.
39 I am not suggesting that corporal punishment was not extremely severe, but so it was elsewhere, at the time.
40 C.J. Pouncy, ed. and tr., The Domostroi: Rules for Russian Households in the Time of Ivan the Terrible, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1994, pp. 143–4. The tale that a Russian wife does not believe her husband loves her unless or until he beats her, as related by Herberstein, has been disputed by a later traveller, Olearius.
41 A.A. Zimin, ‘Sostav boyarskoy dumy v XV–XVI vekakh’, Arkheograficheskii ezhegodnik, za 1957, Moscow, 1958, pp. 41–87, at p. 63, remarks that for a long time after the disgrace of Prince S. Rostovsky there were few changes among the boyars. According to Skrynnikov, Velikii gosudar', 1, p. 207, the only magnate to have incurred disgrace in the period 1550–59 was Rostovsky, see p. 113, below.
42 See Thyret, ‘Blessed is the Tsaritsa's Womb’.
43 K.G. Holum, Theodosian Empresses: Women and Imperial Dominion in Late Antiquity, University of California Press, 1989, ch. II, ‘Aelia Eudoxia Augusta’, pp. 48–78, at pp. 70ff.
44 Kurbsky, History, pp. 19ff.
45 Quoted from the Russian historian E.A. Belov by Anthony M. Grobowski, ‘The Chosen Council’ of Ivan IV: A Reinterpretation, New York, 1969, pp. 139ff. at p. 142.
46 Quoted in Grobowski, op. cit., pp. 2ff., from V. Sergeevich, Russkie iuridicheskie drevnosti, St Petersburg, 1900, II, pp. 366–9. The names of members given include Sylvester, Adashev, Prince A.M. Kurbsky, Prince Dmitri Obolensky Kurliatev, Prince Semen Lobanov Rostovsky, Mikhail, Vladimir and Lev Morozov, Metropolitan Makarii and ‘several presbyters’.
47 Zimin, ‘ostav boyarskoi dumy v XV–XVI vekakh’, pp. 41–70.
48 Nancy Shields Kollman, Kinship, passim.
49 Grobowski, ‘The Chosen Council’, Addenda, pp. 147–55. Grobowski does not believe that the Chosen Council was the same as the Blizhniaia Duma, he simply does not believe it existed at all. He also states that the term ‘Blizhniaia Duma’ is not found in the sources until the seventeenth century.
50 Kurbsky, Correspondence, pp. 45ff.
51 Grobowski, ‘The Chosen Council’.
CHAPTER V The ‘Government of Compromise’
1 See Schmidt, ‘Pravitel'stvennaia deiatel'nost' A.F. Adasheva’, pp. 50ff.
2 See Chapter VI.
3 Zimin, Reformy, passim.
4 Karamzin, Istoria, VIII, pt 3, pp. 64–5, and p. 24 of notes, n. 182. See also S.O. Schmidt, ‘Sobory serediny XVI v.’ in Istoria SSSR, no. 4, 1960, pp. 66–92. According to L.V. Cherepnin, ‘Zemskie sobory i utverzhdenie absoliutizma v Rossii’ in Absoliutizm v Rossii XVII–XVIII vv., ed. N.M. Druzhinin, Moscow, 1964, pp. 92–133, Ivan introduced a powerful element of demagogy into proceedings in view of the acute class contradictions between various feudal classes, in order to prevent a recurrence of the riot in Moscow and to rally the forces of the ruling class.
5 Zimin, Reformy, pp. 325–6.
6 Ibid., p. 326, suggests that this was the first step in defining the privileges of the noble class (as distinct from the aristocracy).
7 A useful general survey of the development of representative institutions will be found in A.R. Myers, Parliaments and Estates in Europe to 1789, Thames and Hudson, London, 1975.
8 See A.E. Pollard, The Evolution of Parliament, London, 1964, and Myers, op. cit. The presence of Makarii on this occasion is confirmed in L.V. Cherepnin, ed., Pamiatniki Russkogo prava IV, Moscow 1956, pp. 575–6.
9 Zimin, Reformy, pp. 325–6, ‘Soslovno-predstavitel'naia monarkhia’.
10 Skrynnikov laments that ‘legislation’ in Ivan's Russia did not take legal form, but simply appeared in the form of orders. This was at times also the case in parliamentary England, where by no means all legislation came before Parliament in the sixteenth century (see J. Guy, ‘The Privy Council: Revolution or Evolution’ in C. Coleman and D. Starkey, eds, Revolution Reassessed: Revisions in the History of Tudor Government and Administration, Oxford, 1986, pp. 59–86). It was possible to issue laws by proclamation in England. S.N. Bogatyrev notes that of thirty-eight laws enacted in Russia between 1550 and 1572, sixteen were decided on ‘with the consent of the boyars’ (The Sovereign and His Counsellors, p. 79). But of course the implication is that twenty-two Acts did not need the consent of the boyars, though they might have had it.
11 See Myers, op. cit., for parallel developments in Serbia and Bulgaria, where representative institutions failed to develop before the Ottomon conquest. In Latin Christendom they were widespread from the early Middle Ages. The influence of the Catholic religious orders on the development of constitutional thought and practice is analysed by Leo Moulin, ‘Policy-Making in the Religious Orders’, Government and Opposition, 1, no. 1, October, 1965, pp. 25–54.
12 C. Given-Wilson, The English Nobility in the Late Middle Ages: The Fourteenth Century Political Community, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1987, pp. 177–8. See also R.F. Treharne, ‘The Nature of Parliament in the Reign of Henry III’, English Historical Review, IXXIV, 1959.
13 But see Chester Dunning, Russia's First Civil War, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001, pp. 92ff, who downplays the importance of the election of Boris Godunov to the throne, and states that it took place after his coronation in ‘a sham zemskii sobor’.
14 G. Vernadsky, The Tsardom of Moscow, 1547–1682, V, pt 1 of A History of Russia, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1969, pp. 33–4, quoting E.F. Maksimovich in ‘Tserkovno-zemskii sobor 1549 goda’, in ZRNIB, 9, 1933, pp. 1–15. See also Bogatyrev, The Sovereign and His Counsellors, pp. 137ff for discussion of the origin and nature of the zemskii sobor and for the suggestion that Makarii introduced the notion of a church sobor (a well established institution) into the government of the state.
15 Aleksei Adashev does not figure in the list of heads of prikazy in 1549 in Filiushkin, Istoria odnoi mistifikatsii, pp. 50–51, and he appears for the first time in the list for 1550 as a kaznachei, or treasurer, which may have implied that he was in charge of the Tsar's personal effects, and papers in the bedchamber. These government offices and their locations had various names at various times: palata (chamber), dvorets (modern tr. is palace, but better ‘court’), izba (bureau), prikaz (office); there is no indication of the kinds of buildings they were housed in.
16 Schmidt, Rossia Ivana groznogo, p. 55.
17 E.g. Smirnov, in Ocherki, pp. 222ff, who also doubted that Adashev and Sylvester would actually work together in a government office.
18 Filiushkin, Istoria odnoi mistifikatsii, pp. 56ff.
19 M.V. Kukushkina points out that a copy of the 1550 code was first discovered by V.N. Tatishchev, Petrine statesman and historian, in 1734. In a note on the MS Tatishchev says that the Grand Prince, seeing the great extortion prevailing in the judicial process, had ordered the towns each to send one good man, who, together with the boyars, okol'nichie and dvoretskie, were to produce a new code. Kniga v Rossii, pp. 68–9. See also Zimin, Reformy, p. 350, n. 2.
20 Kukushkina, Kniga v Rossii, p. 109.
21 Zimin, Reformy, p. 351.
22 It has been suggested that there was an intermediate code of Vasily III's, but this has been rejected by Soviet experts. See Pamiatniki prava perioda ukreplenia Russkogo tsentralizovannogo gosudarstva, XV–XVII vv, ed. L.V. Cherepnin, Moscow, 1956, p. 231.
23 I have drawn extensively on H.W. Dewey, ‘The 1550 Sudebnik as an Instrument of Reform’, JGOE, 10, 1962, pp. 161–80. Dewey argues that the Sudebnik was not really effective, as it was overtaken by the lawlessness of the oprichnina.
24 See the interesting comparison by S.N. Bogatyrev, ‘Administrativnye sistemy Tiudorov i Riurikovichei: Sravnitel'nyi analiz’, Zerkalo istorii: Sbornik statei, ed. N.I. Basovskaia, Moscow, 1992, pp. 74–84.
25 But see above, n. 10.
26 That the code was regarded as an essentially practical document is confirmed by the fact that some fifty MS copies have survived, whereas only one copy of the code of 1497 still exists. Kukushkina, Kniga v Rossii, p. 73.
27 See ‘Stoglav’, n. 33 below.
28 Ivan attempted to send delegates to the Council of Trent, but the Polish-Lithuanian government did not allow them free passage through the Commonwealth.
29 Skrynnikov, Sviatiteli i vlasti, p.173, suggests that the questions were drafted by Sylvester and Aleksei Adashev; the evidence of Sylvester's participation is all internal, but it is not improbable that he was involved.
30 Skrynnikov, op. cit., pp. 172ff; Skrynnikov states that copies of speeches by Ivan have been preserved among the papers of the Sobor, the main burden of which is criticism of the dereliction of duty by the boyar government.
31 I am drawing, among other sources, on P. Bushkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 1992.
32 Ivanov, Literaturnoe nasledie Maksima Greka, pp. 170–71 mentions that Maksim Grek thanks Makarii for sending him money, complains of the persecution he has suffered by the deprivation of his books and personal comforts and is sending some writings on church teachings.
33 See ‘Stoglav’ in A.D. Gorsky, ed., Rossiskoe zakonodatel'stvo X–XX vekov, 10 vols, Moscow, 1985, II, zakonodatel'stvo perioda obrazovania i ukreplenia Russkogo tsentralizovannogo gosudarstva, n. 242ff. and N.V. Sinitsyna, Maksim Grek v Rossii, Moscow, 1977, pp. 155–8.
34 Gorsky, Zakonodatel'stvo, Stoglav, p. 267. It is worth noting that Ivan finished his appeal to those present with the words: ‘I ia vam ottsem svoim i s brateiu i s svoimi boyary chelom b'iu’, i.e. he ‘beats his forehead’ to his ‘father’ with his brothers and boyars.
35 See Jack Kollman, ‘The Stoglav and Parish Priests’, Russian History, 7, 1980, pp. 65–91, and Gorsky, Zakonodatel'stvo, Stoglav, pp. 269 and 438.
36 Gorsky, op. cit., pp. 290–91.
37 It was de rigueur for donors of sums of money for prayers for the dead to donate sufficiently to provide for a feast on the name day of the person concerned. See seminar paper by L. Steindorff, in Professor Hughes's seminar series, at SSEES in the Centre for Russian Studies on ‘Death and Immortality in Russian Cultural History’, 2001–2002 in 2002, on the very large number of feast days entered in Sinodiki for the commemoration of the dead. The monks must have been feasting every second day throughout the year.
38 Gorsky, op. cit., p. 210, and see for a second example, p. 420, a miniature of the Church Sobor of 1555.
39 It should be noted that wearing beards was normal throughout Europe at this time.
40 Gorsky, op. cit., p. 426, pp. 440–41. These replies are usually attributed to Sylvester.
41 Ibid., p. 426. But see Zimin, Reformy, p. 474, miniature of Ivan IV from the Kazan' Chronicle, mounted, crowned and beardless, but with a faint moustache, rather like the young Peter I.
42 Gorsky, op. cit., pp. 437–8. The editor of the Stoglav comments that this was regarded as necessary because the common people often married six or seven times. So, of course, did Ivan IV eventually.
43 Ibid., p. 333, ch. 60; see also pp. 338ff, chs 60, 64, 65, 66. On the Donation of Constantine see below.
44 See Horst Jablonowski, Westrussland zwischen Wilna und Moskau, E.J. Brill, Leiden, 1961; V.O. Kliuchevsky, Istoria soslovii v Rossi, repr. by Academic International, p. 133; and S.B. Veselovsky, ‘Poslednye udely v severovostochnoi Rusi’, Istoricheskie Zapiski, no. 22, 1947, pp. 101–31 at pp. 113ff. According to Zimin, Formirovanie, p. 143, these princes were known as service princes as distinct from appanage princes, and they had no claim to the grand princely throne.
