How Ivan Wrote his Name in Blood
The age of Ivan the Terrible was an age of cruelty; it was the century of Henry VIII. in England, of Ferdinand and the Inquisition in Spain, of Catherine de' Medici and the great massacres in France. The influence of the Tartar slavery was seen in the severity of the new laws. For a debt a man could be tied up and beaten three hours a day; if, after a month, no one was moved to pay his debt for him, he was sold as a slave. Thieves and murderers were hanged, beheaded, broken on the wheel, drowned under the ice, or whipped with sinews which were made to give a sore lash and bite into the flesh." Sorcerers were roasted alive in cages; traitors were tortured by iron hooks which tore their sides into ten thousand pieces; false coiners had to swallow molten metal. The noble had the life and death of his peasants in his hand.
A keen observer of Ivan's time says the basest and wretchedest servant, "that stoupeth and croucheth like a dogge to the gentleman and licketh up the dust that lyeth at his feete, is an intollerable tyrant when he hath the advantage. By this means," says he, "the whole country is filled with rapine and murder. They make no account of the life of a man." The same barbarism was seen in the treatment of woman: she was shut up in the top room of the house; no eyes could look upon her face; she was considered the property of the man; her glory and honor was "to obey her husband as the slave obeys his master." Sylvester, Ivan's minister, in his famous book of instructions, warned husbands to correct their wives with loving and judicious punishment, but not to use too thick sticks or to whip them unduly before their servants.
CATHERINE DE' MEDICI
To illustrate Russian manners Herberstein tells this story: "There is at Moscow a certain German, a blacksmith named Jordan, who married a Russian woman. After she had lived some time with her husband she one day thus lovingly addressed him: 'Why is it, my dearest husband, that you do not love me?' The husband replied, 'I do love you with all my heart.' 'I have as yet seen no proofs of your love,' said she. The husband asked what proofs she wished. She replied; 'You have never beaten me.' 'Really,' said the man, 'I did not think blows were proofs of love; however, I will not fail even in this respect.' And not long after," says Herberstein, "he beat her most cruelly, and confessed to me that after that process his wife showed much greater affection for him." The Russian proverb says: "I love thee like my soul, but I beat thee like my jacket." Amid this general ignorance and barbarism it was not strange that Ivan, whose youthful brutality was applauded by his tutors, should have led his countrymen in what an Englishman called the "supersuperlatives of crueltie."
The year after the capture of Kazan he fell ill and was thought to be dying. The boyars seized the chance to rebel against him; they refused to swear allegiance to his son Dimitri; they made Ivan's cousin Vladimir the head of their plot; his mother spoke many seditious words and distributed gifts to the army. The noisy talk of the boyars came to Ivan's sick-bed: he saw the danger which threatened his wife and son. He called his faithful nobles around him and said,—
"You gave me and my son an oath to serve us, but many boyars wish not to see my son on the throne; thus, if I happen by the will of God to die, forget not, I pray you, that you have kissed the cross; give not my son to the boyars to destroy; fly with him to some foreign land, whithersoever God will lead you."
Then he turned to his wife's relatives, the Romanofs. "Why these terrors?" said he; "think you the boyars will have mercy upon you? You will be their first victims. Die then for my son and his mother; leave not my wife to the fury of the boyars."
Ivan got well, but henceforth he was a changed man. Sylvester was exiled; Adashef was sent to Dorpat. Shortly after their disgrace the wise and gentle Anastasia died suddenly. Ivan believed that she was poisoned. Even then the Tsar was not the Terrible. He sent the mutinous boyars to the monastery of St. Cyril on the White Lake; in one of his letters to the monks he complains that the prisoners reigned in their cells like the Tsar, drank as though it were a wedding or a baptism, and distributed iced fruits, cake, and sweetmeats.
"When the treason of that dog, Alexis Adashef, and his friends was discovered," says Ivan in a letter, "we let our wrath be tempered with mercy. We condemned not the guilty to death, but banished them. When they set on foot against us a perfidious plot, then only, seeing their wicked stubbornness and their undying treason, we inflicted on the guilty the penalty of their crimes."
The flight of his chief boyar, Prince Kurbski, a descendant of Rurik, was what caused the Tsar to be more severe. Prince Kurbski, as we have seen, bore a famous part against the Tartars at Tula and Kazan. Angry at the fall of Ivan's ministers, he basely allowed four thousand Poles to beat fifteen thousand Russians. Having reason to fear the Tsar's vengeance, he secretly left his camp at Vendur with one servant, and took service with the King of Poland: He sent back his servant Vaska, who delivered to the Tsar a long letter expressing in severest terms the Prince's grievances, and declaring that Sigismond August would "load him with favors and consolations for his misfortunes." Ivan, according to the tradition, took his iron-pointed staff and nailed the messenger's foot to the Red Staircase while the letter was being Read. Then he gave him over to the torturers, who worked their cruelest tortures upon him: His constancy won Ivan's praise, who wrote back to Kurbski: "Let thy servant Vaska shame thee.! He kept his truth to, thee before the Tsar and the people. Having given thee his word of faith, he kept it even before the gates of death." The correspondence of the Tsar and his exile is one of the most curious literary monuments of the sixteenth century. "They exchanged many letters, in which the one showed a great knowledge of the sacred and profane authors, close reasoning, and bitter irony the other, an indignant and tragic eloquence."
PORTRAIT OF QUEEN ELIZABETH
Ivan, whose suspicions were fully aroused by Prince Kurbski's conduct and by the plots which the friends of his exiled ministers were weaving, suddenly quitted Moscow with his servants and treasures, and retired to one of his favorite villages, whence he wrote a letter to the Metropolitan, complaining of the plots and faithlessness of the nobles and the clergy. He sent word to the people of Moscow that he had no displeasure or lack of trust in them. Great was the terror and perplexity in the capital; when the people heard the Tsar's message sobs and cries were heard; "Alas! woe! we have sinned before God and angered the Tsar. His great mercy we have changed into wrath and fury. And now to whom shall we go? Who will pardon us and free us from the attacks of our foes? How can the flock live without the shepherd? If the sheep have no shepherd the wolves ravage them." The people feared the boyars; the boyars trembled before the people, and they besought the Metropolitan, saying: "We all come to thee with our heads, begging thee to go to the Tsar and ask his grace." When the people with the clergy came in procession to ask his pardon, Ivan consented to resume the throne, but only on his own conditions. And now for seven years there was a most extraordinary system of government. Ivan came back to Moscow. He divided the villages and cities of the empire into two parts. In charge of the larger of these divisions he left the ancient council of boyars; this was called "the rule of the land." With his own creatures he formed a new court, a new council and administration, to which he gave control of the part of Moscow and the twenty towns and villages which fell to his own private share. He surrounded himself with a body-guard of a thousand men, who were distinguished by a dog's head and a broom hung from the saddle-bow. They were indeed meant to bite and to sweep away the Tsar's enemies.