Bobrick Benson - Fearful majesty: the life and reign of Ivan the Terrible

Fearful Majesty

The Life and Reign of Ivan the Terrible

Benson Bobrick

Also by Benson Bobrick:

The Caliphs Splendor: Islam and the West in the Golden Age of Baghdad

Master of War: The Life of General George H. Thomas

The Fated Sky: Astrology in History

Testament: A Soldiers Story of the Civil War

Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution it Inspired

Angel in the Whirlwind: The Triumph of the American Revolution

Knotted Tongues: Stuttering in History and the Quest for a Cure

East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia

Labyrinths of Iron: Subways in History, Myth, Art, Technology, and War

Parsons Brinckerhoff: The First Hundred Years

This edition is dedicated to:

EDWARD W. TAYLER,

Scholar, Teacher, Friend

Copyright 1987, 2014 by Benson Bobrick

Copyright to all work in this volume is governed by U.S. and international copyright laws. Work may not be reproduced in any manner without the expressed, written permission of the copyright holder. For permission to reproduce selections from this book, contact the publisher at the address below.

Cover image: The Lion of Reval Cannon, in St. Petersburgs Artillery Museum. The rear of the cannon features the only extant sculpture of Ivans face made in his lifetime and bears the inscription: The Reval magistrate named me Lion, so that I would defeat his enemies, those who do not want to live in peace with him. I was cast in 1559 by Karsten Mitteldorp and that is the truth.
Photo courtesy Daniel Belousov.
Cover design: Vanessa Maynard.

Material reprinted from The Moscovia of Antonio Possevino , S.J. , translated by Hugh F. Graham by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977 by University Center for International Studies, University of Pittsburgh.

ISBN 978-1-880100-84-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014943597

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This book has been long in the making, and I am grateful to all who helped along the way. At one time or another I received needed information or advice from my brother Peter Bobrick (on whom I could always rely for expert translations from the German); from Diana Ajjan, Hugh F. Graham, John W. Hawkins, Joe Kanon, Tim Meyer, Christine Schillig, Cecilia de Querol, Fred Sawyer, Peter von Wahlde, and Victoria Zubkina; from Victoria Edwards at Sovfoto; and from various members on staff at the New York Public Library, Butler Library at Columbia University, the Library of Congress, and the Library of the British Museum. I should also like to acknowledge here, too, those numerous yet exemplary scholars and historians whose bookish company I was privileged to keep in the quiet of my study every day. If my own book has anything new or useful to offer, it is surely because I was able to take my prospect round from atop the shoulders of their work. My extensive Bibliography represents an earnest attempt at a full and democratic roll-call of my debt.

Finally, I am especially grateful to my editor, Lee Ann Chearneyi, who gave me leave to write as I wished, but not license to be redundant or pointlessly obscure; to Marguerite Woerner for crucial technical assistance; and above all to my wife, Danielle, whose intercessory support helped prevent the sometimes tyrannical exactions of my task from inscribing my name (in a manner of speaking) as a posthumous addition to Ivans dread Synodical.

(Ancestors of IVAN IV are capitalized)

Iona (1448-61)

Feodosy (1461-64)

Philip (I) (1464-73)

Geronty (1473-89)

Zosima (1490-94)

Simeon (1495-1511)

Varlaam (1511-21)

Daniel (1522-39)

Joasaf (1539-42)

Makary (1542-63)

Afanasy (1564-66)

Gherman (1566)

Philip (II) (1566-68)

Kirill (1568-72)

Antony (1572-81)

Dionysius (1581-87)

THE FAMED TRAVEL writer Lesley Blanch once remarked that Russia is not a state but a whole world a world where everything is on another scale: where excess prevails The tempo of everyday life seems, to other less extravagant peoples, a compound of violence and inertia, both carried to extremes, in love or war, politics, human relationships, architecture, and other spheres. If so, Ivan the Terrible epitomizes something inherent in the Russian soul. Everything about him was writ large. His learning and capacities had a Renaissance range; and his tragic evolution from fearful child to fearsome man was inextricably bound up with Russias emergence as a great power. His benign domestic governance warped into police state terror; his domestic life oscillated between ascetic self-abnegation and the abandoned lusts of a libertine. Almost the whole of the sixteenth century, in its richness and diversity, archaic force and luminous, dark grandeur, are reflected in his life and rule. Any student of psychology, history, literature, theology, military science, and geopolitics cannot fail to come away from a right study of Ivan without an enlarged understanding of these fields.

When my biography was first published in 1987, it was singled out by the History Book Club as the most objective and comprehensive analysis of Ivan which has ever appeared in English. Id like to think it earned that accolade in part because Id managed to bring him alive in the full context of the period he spanned. That, in any case, is what Id hoped to do. Yet he is in no sense a quaint, or merely historic figure. Russian history may not be done with its pageant of tyrants yet; or with the curtained world imposed by their regimes. As long as autocrats exist in Russia or elsewhere Ivan will be of interest, since his reign was the very paradigm of tyrannical rule.

For all these reasons, I hope my book, reissued after twenty-seven years, will be of interest, too.

Benson Bobrick
February 8, 2014

IN 1492, THE year Columbus discovered America, most Russians expected the world to end. Like the Byzantines, they dated their calendar from the Creation, believed the world had been created in 5508 B.C., and that it would endure for 7000 years a calculation based on the idea of the Cosmic Week, as extrapolated from the week of Creation: for to God a thousand years are as one day. As 1492 approached, the apocalyptic signs were unmistakable, as long-standing prophecies appeared to be fulfilled. The greatest of these by far was the fall, after the reign and splendor of over a thousand years, of Constantinople to the Turks the Ishmaelites an event that marked the end of the Byzantine Empire and seemed to warrant comparison with the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans and Christs death upon the Cross. Such was the general foreboding, that the Russian Church actually failed to calculate the date of Easter for the following year.

The world survived, of course; the Last or Terrible Judgment (as the Eastern Orthodox called it) was delayed, and when a new Easter calendar was compiled for the eighth millennium by the Metropolitan of Moscow (the primate of the Russian Church), the grand prince was described in the prologue as the new Emperor Constantine and Moscow as the New City of Constantine thereby laying claim to the religious and political inheritance of Byzantium. In 1547, Ivan IV (the Terrible) officially ratified this claim by assuming the title of Tsar. At the same time, he married Anastasia Romanovna, a member of the family later known as Romanov, destined to supplant the House of Rurik as the ruling dynasty of the realm. His coronation was thus the seminal setting for the course Russian history would follow from that day forward until 1917.