they captured some twenty Livonian strongholds, including the greatest of them, the town of Dorpat, originally built by Iaroslav the Wise and named Iuriev. In 1561 the Livonian Order was disbanded, its territories were secularized, and its last master, Gotthard Kettler, became the hereditary Duke of Courland and a vassal of the Polish king. Yet the resulting Polish-Lithuanian offensive failed, and the Russian forces seized Polotsk from Lithuania in 1563.
Ivan IV and his assistants had many interests in the outside world other than war. As early as 1547 the Muscovite government sent an agent, the Saxon Slitte, to western Europe to invite specialists to serve the tsar. Eventually over one hundred and twenty doctors, teachers, artists, and different technicians and craftsmen from Germany accepted the Russian invitation. But when they reached Lubeck, authorities of the Hanseatic League and of the Livonian Order refused to let them through, with the result that only a few of their number ultimately came to Russia on their own. In 1553 an English captain, Richard Chancellor, in search of a new route to the East through the Arctic Ocean, reached the Russian White Sea shore near the mouth of the Northern Dvina. He went on to visit Moscow and establish direct relations between England and Russia. The agreement of 1555 gave the English great commercial advantages in the Muscovite state, for they were to pay no dues and could maintain a separate organization under the jurisdiction of their own chief factor. Arkhangelsk - Archangel in English - on the Northern Dvina became their port of entry. Ivan IV valued his English connection highly. Characteristically, the first Russian mission to England returned with some specialists in medicine and mining.
The Second Part of Ivan the Terrible's Rule
However, in spite of improvements at home and successes abroad, the "good" period of Ivan the Terrible's rule came gradually to its end. The change in the Muscovite government involved the tsar's break with the Chosen Council and his violent turning against many of his advisers and their associates and afterwards, as his suspicion and rage expanded, against the boyars as a whole. His personal despotism became extreme. Furthermore, Ivan the Terrible's assault on the boyars, bringing with it changes in the administrative mechanism of the state and a reign of terror, came to dominate, and to a considerable extent shatter, Russian political life, society, and economy.
In a sense, a conflict between the tsar and the boyars followed logically from preceding history. As Muscovite absolutism rose to its heights with Ivan the Terrible, the boyar class, constantly growing with the expansion of Moscow, represented one of the few possible checks on the sovereign's
power. Furthermore, the boyars remained partly linked to the old appanage order, which the Muscovite rulers had striven hard and successfully to destroy. The size and composition of the Muscovite boyardom reflected the rapid growth of the state. While in the first half of the fifteenth century some forty boyar families served the Muscovite ruler, in the first half of the sixteenth the number of the families had increased to over two hundred. The Muscovite boyars included descendants of former Russian or Lithuanian grand princes, descendants of former appanage princes, members of old Muscovite boyar families, and, finally, members of boyar families from other parts of Russia who had transferred their service to Moscow. The first two groups, the so-called service princes, possessed the greatest influence and prestige and also the strongest links with the past: they remained at least to some extent rulers in their own localities even after they became servitors in Moscow. The power of the Muscovite boyars, however, should not be overestimated. They showed little initiative and lacked solidarity and organization. In fact, they constantly engaged in petty squabbles and intrigues against one another, a deplorable situation well illustrated during the early years of Ivan the Terrible's reign. The Muscovite system of appointments, the notorious mestnichestvo, based on a hierarchical ranking of boyar families, as well as of the individual members within a given family, added to the boyar disunity.
Ivan the Terrible's attitude toward his advisers and the boyars as a whole changed over a period of years under the strong impact, it would seem, of certain events. In 1553 the tsar fell gravely ill and believed himself to be on his deathbed. He asked the boyars to swear allegiance to his infant son Dmitrii, but met opposition even from some of his closest associates, such as Sylvester, not to mention a considerable number of boyars: they apparently resented the merely boyar, not princely, family of Ivan the Terrible's wife, were afraid of more misfortunes for the Muscovite state during another reign of a minor, and favored Ivan the Terrible's cousin, Prince Vladimir of Staritsa, as tsar. Although the oath to Dmitrii was finally sworn, Ivan the Terrible never forgot this troubling experience. Shortly afterwards some boyars were caught planning to escape to Lithuania. New tensions resulted from the Livonian War. In fact it led to the break between the tsar and his advisers, Sylvester and Adashev, who disapproved of the proposed offensive in the Baltic area, preferring an assault against the Crimean Tartars.
In 1560 Ivan the Terrible's young and beloved wife Anastasia died suddenly. Convinced that Sylvester and Adashev had participated in a plot to poison her, the tsar had them condemned in extraordinary judicial proceedings, in the course of which they were not allowed to appear to state their case. The priest was apparently exiled to a distant monastery; the layman thrown into jail where he died. Before long Ivan the Terrible's wrath de-
scended upon everyone connected with the Chosen Council. Adashev's and Sylvester's relatives, associates, and friends perished without trial. Two princes lost their lives merely because they expressed disapproval of the tsar's behavior. At this turn of events, a number of boyars fled to Lithuania. The escapees included a famous commander and associate of the tsar, Prince Andrew Kurbsky, who spent the rest of his life organizing forces and coalitions against his former sovereign. Kurbsky is best known, however, for the remarkable letters which he exchanged with Ivan the Terrible in 1564-79 and which will demand our attention when we deal with the political thought of Muscovite Russia.
In late 1564 Ivan IV suddenly abandoned Moscow for the small town of Aleksandrov some sixty miles away. A month later two letters, addressed to the metropolitan, arrived from the tsar. In them Ivan IV expressed his desire to retire from the throne and denounced the boyars and the clergy. Yet, in the letter to be read to the masses, he emphasized that he had no complaints against the common people. In confusion and consternation, the boyars and the people of Moscow begged the tsar to return and rule over them. Ivan the Terrible did return in February 1565, after his two conditions had been accepted: the creation of a special institution and subdivision in the Muscovite state, known as the oprichnina - from the word oprich, that is, apart, beside - to be managed entirely at the tsar's own discretion; and an endorsement of the tsar's right to punish evil-doers and traitors as he would see fit, executing them when necessary and confiscating their possessions. After the tsar returned to Moscow, it became apparent to those who knew him that he had experienced another shattering psychological crisis, for his eyes were dim and his hair and beard almost gone.
The oprichnina acquired more than one meaning. It came to stand for a separate jurisdiction within Russia which consisted originally of some twenty towns with their countryside, several special sections scattered throughout the state, and a part of Moscow where Ivan the Terrible built a new palace. Eventually it extended to well over a third of the Muscovite realm. The tsar set up a separate state administration for the oprichnina, paralleling the one in existence which was retained for the rest of the country, now known as the zemshchina. Much later there was even established a new and nominal ruler, a baptized Tartar prince Simeon, to whom Ivan the Terrible pretended to render homage. Our knowledge of the structure and functioning of the oprichnina administration remains fairly limited. Platonov suggested that after the reform of 1564 the state had actually one set of institutions, but two sets of officials. In any case, new men under the direct control of Ivan the Terrible ran the oprichnina, whereas the zemshchina stayed within the purview of the boyar duma and old officialdom. In fact, many landlords in the territory of the oprichnina were transferred else-