Ivan the Terrible, page 60
39 See Skrynnikov, Tsarstvo terrora, pp. 247ff. for a list of the Iaroslavskys, Rostovskys, Starodubskys, Obolenskys, untitled boyars and pomeshchiki who were expelled to Kazan' in 1565.
40 It is noteworthy that Kurbsky who belonged to the Iaroslavsky princes was outraged by the confiscation of the lands of some of them. In 1603 Prince D.M. Pozharsky, the future hero of the Time of Troubles, petitioned Tsar Boris Godunov about the lands confiscated from his grandfather who had been exiled to Kazan', ibid., pp. 245 and 252.
41 Skrynnikov, Tsarstvo terrora, p. 262, note 25.
42 See above, Chapter VII, p. 113.
43 Ibid., p. 221.
44 Karamzin, Istoria, IX, ch. 3, p. 53.
45 Notably Platonov who is positively scathing about the notion. On the other hand Floria, writing in 1999, points out that according to all the evidence, Ivan ‘fell for’ Maria, Ivan Groznyi, p. 139.
46 Quoted by H. Graham, in Schlichting, ‘News from Muscovy …’ p. 263, note 175.
47 Staden, Land and Government, pp. 17–18. The social composition of the oprichiniki as given by Staden differs somewhat from that given by most Russian historians, in that he says it was drawn from the strel'tsy, who were not gently born. He also stresses the presence of foreigners.
48 See his Muscovy and the Mongols, Cross-Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier. 1304–1589, passim.
49 Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols, pp. 102–3. Ostrowski also attributes to Mongol influence the ‘introduction of the principle of collective guilt’ practised by Ivan. I regard this as much older, and derived from the principle of collective responsibility inherited from Germanic, not Mongol, law. See above, p. 171. But perhaps the Goths also derived it from the steppe?
50 See Maureen Perrie, The Image of Ivan the Terrible in Russian Folklore, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 73ff.
51 G. Vernadsky, The Mongols and Russia, pp. 28–30. The Mongol Imperial Guard bears a distinct resemblance to Peter the Great's guards regiments. But B.Vladimirtsov (Obshchestvenyi stroi Mongolov: Mongolskii kochevoi feodalizm, Leningrad, 1934) and particularly the study by A.E. Hudson of Kazak social structure in 1938 mention a social group which Hudson describes as ‘bodyguards, friends or companions, recruited from sons of high officials, known as the nokod, who were free, usually of high birth and were bound by a purely personal oath of allegiance to the khan whom they served’.
52 An alternative source has been proposed by V.I. Koretsky, the only historian ever to my knowledge to ask where the idea of the oprichnina came from. He suggests that Ivan derived it from the Buddhist Tale of Barlaam and Josaphat, eastern in origin, but respected in Russia as it was supposed to have been written by St John Chrysostom. In the story a king has a son who converts to Christianity. A wise man proposed to him to divide his kingdom with his son, and see who succeeded best, each in his own religion. The king does so, and in his cities Josaphat ‘destroyed idolatrous temples and built a temple for Christ and converted his people and his name outshone that of his father’. Whereupon the king renounced idolatry, abdicated his kingdom and made a holy end. Josaphat in turn called an assembly of the people, and now that his father was no longer there to oppose him, declared his intention to abdicate and lead a life of holiness. Ivan knew the story for he mentions it in his letter to Kurbsky, but there does not seem to be any real parallel between his oprichnina and zemshchina and Barlaam's division of his country.
CHAPTER XII War in Livonia and the Zemskii Sobor of 1566
1 R. Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change, pp.175ff.
2 The quotation is from Roberts, The Early Vasas, p. 201.
3 I have drawn extensively on Roberts, The Early Vasas in these pages.
4 Ibid., p. 201.
5 The commercial considerations involved in the Baltic wars of the 1560s ranged widely, involving the Hansa and Lübeck, Danzig, the Dutch, the Poles, Swedes and Danes and the Russians. The story is too long and complicated to retell here.
6 Negotiations took place between the Swedish envoy and the Governor of Novgorod in accordance with Ivan's refusal to recognize the King of Sweden as an equal and receive his envoy in Moscow. W. Kirchner, The Rise of the Baltic Question, Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn., 1970, p. 177, note 64.
7 Roberts, op. cit., pp. 233–5.
8 Donnert, writing in 1954, postulates a deep gulf between the treacherous boyars who opposed the war in Livonia and the military servitors loyal to Ivan, and also posits the existence of a powerful group around Metropolitan Afanasii striving for the overthrow of Ivan and his regime. Russia, in Donnert's view, was on the verge of a civil war which paralysed her military effort. Der livländische Ordensritterstaat, pp. 50ff.
9 Schlichting, ‘A Brief Account’, p. 217. Graham gives the year 1564 for this collective protest; elsewhere it is dated 1565.
10 Floria, Ivan Groznyi, pp. 205–6.
11 Skrynnikov (Tsarstvo terrora, p. 273), who also points out that the signatories of the sureties for Vorotynsky give an indication of the grouping of boyars and nobles opposed to the oprichnina.
12 Floria, Ivan Groznyi, pp. 201–2.
13 See T.S. Willan, Early History of the Russia Company, passim.
14 See Esper, ‘A Sixteenth-Century Russian Arms Embargo’, pp. 180–96, for a lucid account of the commercial problems underlying the war in the Baltic, and in particular for a refutation of the generally held idea that the embargo was instrumental in preventing Russia from importing weapons without which she would be unable to defeat her enemies in the Baltic. In the sixteenth century there was no generally agreed definition of what constituted ‘war supplies’ or contraband of war. Queen Elizabeth was accused by the Senate of Cologne in 1561 of exporting arms to Russia and denied it indignantly. In 1560 King Sigismund wrote to Elizabeth threatening to stop the trade to Narva because ‘the Muscovite was an enemy to all liberty under heavens’. Esper, p. 191. See also Willan, op. cit., p. 63: ‘The evidence [of Ivan's demand for arms] comes largely from those who opposed the sending of arms to Russia and from Elizabeth's denials.’
15 Willan, op. cit., pp. 56ff.
16 Zimin, Oprichnina, p. 153; PSRL XIII, pt 2, p. 396.
17 SIRIO, 71, p. 26. Prince M.I. Vorotynsky sat at the high table with Prince I.D. Bel'sky and Prince I.F. Mstislavsky.
18 V.M. Iur'ev Zakhar'in became a prominent member of the oprichnina.
19 S.N. Bogatyrev, ‘Blizhniaia duma v tret'ei chetverti XVI v. I, 1550s, II, 1560–1570, III, 1571–2’, Arkheograficheskii ezhegodnik za 1992, Moscow 1994, pp. 119–33; za 1993, Moscow 1995, pp. 94–112; za 1994, Moscow 1996, pp. 64–89.
20 See Floria, Ivan Groznyi, p. 203 and PSRL, XXIX, ‘Aleksandro-Nevskaia letopis’, prodolzhenie, pp. 350–1, said to reflect the views of Ivan himself.
21 This is called a komissiia by Zimin, but there is no evidence of the existence of a commission nor discussion of what a commission was in the Russian context. For a more detailed account of the negotiations see the article by A.A. Zimin, ‘Zemskii sobor 1566 g’, in Istoricheskie zapiski, no. 71, 1962, pp. 217–23.
22 One wonders whether the idea of a personal meeting, at which King Sigismund should visit and be entertained by Tsar Ivan in his camp, who would thus grant him a lower personal status than his own, was influenced in any way by recollections of the meeting of Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France on the Field of the Cloth of Gold.
23 M. N. Tikhomirov, ‘Soslovno-predstavitel'nye uchrezhdenia (zemskie sobory) v Rossii XVI veka’, Voprosy istorii, no. 5, 1958, pp. 217–35; A.A. Zimin, ‘Zemskii Sobor’, in Istoricheskie zapiski, no. 71, 1962, pp. 217–33.
24 Ibid.
25 Zimin, ‘Zemskii Sobor’, in Istoricheskie zapiski, no. 71, 1962, pp. 220–1. Ivan would receive Polotsk and sixteen towns (forts?) on the Lithuanian bank of the Dvina, fifteen forts on the Russian side of the river, Riga, four other towns in Polish hands and all Livonian territory then occupied by Russia.
26 PSRL, XIII, pt 2, 2, Tsarstvennaia kniga, p. 402.
27 G. Fletcher, Of the Russe Commonwealth, ed. R. Pipes, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1966, p. 22.
28 Karamzin, Istoria, IX, ch. 1, pp. 73ff.
29 The official chronicle also does not mention a zemskii sobor.
30 See M. Raeff, The Decembrist Movement, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1966, and my ‘Spain and the Decembrists’, European Studies Review, III, 2, April 1973, pp. 141–56.
31 Comparative studies of the Zemskii sobor and Western assemblies of estates have been undertaken in Russia by Latkin, Chicherin, Kliuchevsky, Tikhomirov and many others.
32 Zimin, Oprichnina, pp. 162–6.
33 Skrynnikov, Tsarstvo terrora, p. 267
34 The word usually used in Russian for a fully fledged institution of a parliamentary type is the clumsy formula soslovno-predstavitel'noe, ‘representative of estates’. This is very unwieldy, both in English and in Russian. I propose shortening it to ‘representative’. I am relying in these pages partly on Kliuchevsky, Istoria soslovii v Rossii, St Petersburg, 1918; Academic International reprint 1969, M.M. Tikhomirov, ‘Soslovno-predstavitel'nie uchrezhdenia v Rossii XVI v', in Rossiiskoe gosudarstvo XV–XVII vekov, Moscow 1973, pp. 42–69, and Zimin, ‘Zemskii Sobor 1566g.’, as well as the standard histories by Kliuchevsky, Zimin, Skrynnikov and Floria. The literature on the subject of the Zemskii sobor in Russian is too vast to list.
35 Corresponding in this respect to the Elizabethan House of Commons, where according to J.E. Neale, there were no party politics, and election implied not choice of a candidate but approval. J.E. Neale, The Elizabethan House of Commons, London, 1976, pp. 65ff.
36 For a general discussion of the topic of ‘estates’ in sixteenth-century Russia see G. Stökl, ‘Gab es im Moskauer Staat Stände?’, in Der Russische Staat im Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, Franz Steiner, Wiesbaden, 1981, pp. 146–67; also Cherepnin, ‘Zemskiye sobory’ in Druzhinin, ed. Absoliutizm v Rossii, pp. 92–133.
37 This very sketchy outline is based partly on J.M. Huttle, The Service City, State and Townsmen in Russia, 1600–1899, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1979, pp. 1–21.
38 Stökl, op. cit., pp. 147 and 151.
39 The Trinity, Spaso-Iaroslavsky, Spaso-Efim'ev (Suzdal'), Nizhnii Novgorod, Pskov Pechersky monasteries.
40 Those who signed the boyar prigovor included I.D. Bel'sky, I. F. Mstislavsky, I.V. Sheremetev, major and minor, M. I. Vorotynsky, V.S. Serebrianoi, N.R.Iur'ev Zakhar'in (Anastasia's brother), I.Y Chebotov, I.M. Vorontsov, M.Y. Morozov, V.M. Iur'ev Zakhar'in, V.D. Danilov, V.Y. Maly Trakhaniot, and S.V. Iakovlev. I.P. Fedorov also signed the prigovor, though he does not figure on the list of those present. Zimin, Oprichnina, p. 196, note 4.
41 Zimin, Oprichnina, pp. 192ff.
42 See the text and variants in L.E. Berry, ed., The English Works of Giles Fletcher, the Elder, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1964.
43 The text edited by R. Pipes in 1966 is the 1591 English edition, but it refers to additions and variants in the Lloyd Berry edition.
44 In the last years of Henry VIII councillors ‘at large’ ‘were excluded from the Privy Council but were sworn councillors nonetheless’. Guy, ‘Privy Council’, in Revolution Reassessed, ed. Coleman and Starkey, pp. 59–86. Guy concludes that ‘what counted was the Crown's ability to advise those whom it preferred not to attend Parliament, Privy Council or Star Chamber to stay away’ (p. 82).
45 Quoted from S.N. Bogatyrev, ‘Tsarskii sovet v sochineniakh Dzh. Fletchera i V.O. Kliuchevskogo’, in V.O. Kliuchevsky. Sbornik Materialov, vyp. 1, Penza, 1995. The author points out that Kliuchevsky had adhered to the idea of a privy council composed of duma boyars as distinct from ordinary boyars in his early work on foreigners in Russia (1866, sixteen years before his Boiarskaa Duma appeared) but subsequently revised his ideas to conform with the predominant juridical concept of history, which postulated that every boyar had a right to sit in the Duma (pp. 46–7), and that ‘By its nature the Boyar Duma was a legislative institution … a constitutional institution with broad influence but without a constitutional charter …’ (quoted by Bogatyrev, p. 235, from Boiarskaia Duma).
46 Bogatyrev, ‘Blizhniaia duma v tretei chetverti XVI v.’, part II, 1560–1570.
47 See Bogatyrev, ‘Administrativnye sistemy Tiudorov i Riurikovichei’ in Zerkalo istorii, ed. Basovskaia. Bogatyrev suggests an analogy with the Tudor Privy Council as restructured in the 1540s after the execution of Cromwell.
48 Not that the Lords were a representative body, since the peers did not represent others but attended in person.
49 See, e.g., Skrynnikov, Velikii gosudar' Ivan Vasil'evich, I, p. 411.
50 See Bogatyrev, The Sovereign and his Counsellors, p. 79. Some members of the English Privy Council could act as judges in Star Chamber. See Guy, ‘Privy Council’, and the Privy Council could act as an ultimate court of appeal, but rarely did so. See Neale, Elizabethan House of Commons, p. 9.
51 The forty-three officials are sometimes counted in with the representatives of the dvoriane, which seems logical since they came mainly from middle or lower noble families or even clerical families like Anfim, the son of the priest Sylvester, a d'iak in Smolensk. See Skrynnikov, Tsarstvo terrora, pp. 268ff; Zimin, Oprichnina, pp. 167ff.
52 Zimin, Oprichnina, pp. 172–3 provides a complete list.
53 From which he draws the conclusion that the principle of the compulsory representation of the towns did not exist.
54 M.N. Tikhomirov, Rossiiskoe gosudarstvo XV–XVII vv, Moscow, 1973, pp. 55ff.
55 J. Martin, ‘Mobility, Forced Resettlement and Regional Identity in Muscovy’, in Culture and Identity in Muscovy, 1359–1584, ed. A.M. Kleimola and G.D. Lehnhoff, UCLA Slavic Studies, New Series, Moscow,1997, pp. 431–49.
56 Zimin, Oprichnina, p. 176.
57 Tikhomirov, Rossiiskoe gosudarstvo, pp. 53–4; PSRL XXIX, Aleksandro-Nevskaya letopis', pp. 350–1.
58 Zimin, Zemskii Sobor 1566 god, p. 222.
59 Ibid., p. 351.
60 Kliuchevsky uses the bureaucratic phrase ‘po dolzhnosti’, see his Sochinenia, vol. II, kurs russkoi istorii, part 2, Lecture XL, pp. 383ff.
61 J.L.H. Keep, ‘The Decline of the Zemsky Sobor. Afterword’, in Power and the People, Essays on Russian History, Boulder Col., 1995, pp. 82 and 73ff. for a summary of the debate among several historians, and notably J. Torke, on the question of the existence of genuine representative institutions in Russia.
62 S.M. Kashtanov in ‘O tipe russkogo gosudarstva XIV–XVI vv’, in Chtenia pamiati V. B. Kobrina: Problemy otechestvennoi istorii i kul'tury perioda feodalizma, Moscow, 1992, p. 86, had put forward the view that though Russia was following the general economic path taken by other countries in Europe, it was seven to eight centuries behind, and that it was vital to take this backwardness into account in any comparative approach. Quoted in S.N. Bogatyrev, ‘“Smirennaia groza.” K probleme interpretatsii istochnikov po istorii politicheskoi kul'tury Moskovskoi Rusi’, in Istochnikovedenie i kraevedenie v kul'ture Rossii. K 50-letiu Sigurda Ottovicha Schmidta. Istorikoarkhivnomu Institutu, Moscow, 2000, pp. 79–93.
63 The word ‘state’ (gosudarstvo in modern Russian) is often used interchangeably with ‘empire’ (tsarstvo) or realm.
64 See Inge Auerbach's illuminating analysis of Kurbsky's political conceptions, which were probably typical of a Russian aristocrat, in ‘Die politische Vorstellungen …’, JGOE, 117, 1969, pp. 177–83.
65 I am paraphrasing here the very perceptive article by S.N. Bogatyrev, cited in n. 15, at p. 80.
66 See Neale, Elizabethan House of Commons, p. 417 for a list of Elizabeth's Parliaments. In the course of a reign lasting forty-seven years there were thirteen sessions of Parliament. The rest of the time Elizabeth managed without.
67 Fletcher, Of the Russe Commonwealth, p. 23. His use of the word Parliament has misled many a Russian. In general the mixture of Herberstein and Horsey on which his work is based leads to odd remarks.
CHAPTER XIII The Boyar Plot: 1) the Letters to King Sigismund
1 Schlichting, ‘A Brief Account’, CASS, IX, 2, p. 248. And note 140.
2 Piskarevsky Chronicle, PSRL, XXXIV p. 190: Zimin, Oprichnina, p. 203: ‘o oprichnine, chto ne dostoit semu byti’.
3 There is very little evidence of what they did indeed think, but Skrynnikov quotes a letter of 20 December 1566 from a German trader in Nuremberg, quoted by Karamzin, which referred to the discontent of the nobles. Tsarstvo terrora, pp. 288–9 and note 63.
4 Skrynnikov, Tsarstvo, p. 298 suggests that the demonstration took place while the Lithuanian embassy was still in Moscow and that Ivan hastened their departure so that he could deal with it.
5 The functions of the koniushii are stated to be head of the prikaz concerned with horses according to the dictionary of the Russian language of the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries. It would be, as in other countries, an extremely important function in a society in which the horse was the only means of transportation and locomotion.
6 See Skrynnikov, Tsarstvo terrora, pp. 294–5, drawing on Schlichting for details and some of the names of the condemned; far smaller figures (fifty dvoriane) are given in Skrynnikov's earlier Sviatiteli i vlasti, 1990; Schlichting, ‘A Brief Account’, pp. 248–9. Taube and Kruze, ‘Poslanie Ioganna …’, pp. 42–3. Kurbsky also gave the figure of 200.
7 E.D. Morgan and C.H. Coote, eds, Early Voyages and Travels in Russia and Persia by Anthony Jenkinson and Other Englishmen, Hakluyt Society, London 1886, vol. I, pp. 186ff. Jenkinson is probably referring to the same incident quoted above, p. 207. He adds that Ivan also arrested all the families of the victims, made a hole in the river and drowned them all. This adds to the confusion since it is not easy to make a hole in a river in June. However there is considerable doubt about the date of this letter for, though Jenkinson does end it with the words: ‘from Kholmogory this 26 of June 1566’, in a later report he states that he embarked on 4 May for St Nicholas and arrived on 11 July, and in Moscow on 23 August. The editor has added a footnote to the effect that Jenkinson evidently wrote July for June by mistake in this second letter, whereas from the context it is much more likely that the editor's dating is wrong and that the date 26 June, added by him, should be corrected to 26 July 1566. This makes it possible for Jenkinson to be referring to the repression after the sobor. See Morgan and Coote, op. cit., vol. II, pp. 186 and 189. Anthony Jenkinson says that these events were also witnessed by his servant Edward Webbe, aged twelve. Webbe wrote a brief account of his many adventures which included his capture by the Crimeans during the fire in Moscow in 1571, and a period as a slave in Kaffa, from which he was ransomed, and later as a galley slave in Turkey. See E. Webbe His Travails, London, 1590, pp. 3ff.; Webbe says that some eighty-three Danish prisoners taken aboard a ‘freebooter’ (privateer) at Narva in 1570 had been impaled, ‘spitted upon powles as a man would put a Pig unpon a Spitte and so vij score were handled in that manner’ (p. 19). He adds that Ivan also arrested all the families of the victims, made a hole in the river and drowned them all.
