| |
Personality and
Policy:
Ivan was born on 25 August 1530 to Vasilii III
and Yelena Glinskaya. He was three years old when his father died. His mother
was regent until she was poisoned in 1537. Her favorite, Ivan F. Ovchina, died in prison soon after. Then various boyars
were in control (or in a sense, out of control). Naturally the period included
incessant struggle, murder, executions, and nest feathering by rival boyar
families. Ivan witnessed all this and never forgot. He led a continual process
of reducing the power of the princes and boyars and raising that of the middle
service class military servitors who were beholden to the Tsar. He struck first
in 1543, before being crowned Tsar, by ordering the execution of Prince
AndreiShuiskii, one of the principal boyar
leaders. Upon his coronation in 1547 Ivan set upon his program to strengthen
both the absolute power of the Tsar in Moscow and the power of Moscow over all
the Russian lands. The first ten or more years were spent in major
transformation of the state internal administrative and religious bureaucracy.
Ivan married in 1547 with Anastasia, daughter of the boyar Roman Yur'yevich
Zakhar'in-Koshkin. She died in 1560. He then married in 1561 with Maria,
daughter of Temruk, prince of Kavardia. She died in 1569. He then married in
1571 with Marfa, (1552-1571) daughter of Vasilii Stepanovich Sobakin, a
Novgorod merchant, but she died almost immediately. He then about 1572 married
with Anna, daughter of court official Aleksei Andryeyevich Kolotovskii. He
divorced her and she died in 1626. He then about 1575 married with Anna,
daughter of Grigorii Borisovich Vasil'chikov. He divorced her also and she died
about 1626. Ivan then married his sixth wife, Vasilisa Melent'yevna. (Her dates
are not known). Then about 1580 he married with Maria, daughter of the
okol'nichnik, Fedor Fedorovich Nagoi. She died about in 1610. His sons from the
first marriage were Dmitrii, who died at age 1 in 1553;
Ivan, and Fedor I. His
daughters were Anna, Maria and Yevdokia. From the second marriage the son was
Vasilii, who died less than one year old in 1563. From the seventh marriage the
son was Dmitrii, prince of Uglich, born in 1582 and died under controversial
circumstances in 1591.. The family is shown on this
chart.
From the early times the conception of the ruling princes in Rus was that they
were owners of all their domain including the population living on it, rather
than simply rulers over other owners of property. For centuries the princes
administered their territories as if they were domestic households and
proprietary industrial establishments. With the dramatic increase in territory
to the vast expanses obtained by Moscow, such essentially domestic
administrative procedures became impossible. Ivan IV created both greatly
strengthened central functional departments and local elected governmental
officials. The officials, although elected locally, were responsible to the
central government. He also reduced without eliminating the power of the
princes and boyars by creating councils in which the membership also included
service gentry and others. Above all, he brought the concept that everyone was
ultimately the slave (possession) of the Tsar into practical effect. In the
first centuries of Kievan and medieval Russia the prince's military personnel
had received their economic support from the prince in return for their
service. Granted that in those times the servicemen easily switched employment
to other princes, nevertheless there was a connection between their successful
service and their payment. Over the intervening centuries this connection was
broken in practice when the senior personnel (boyars) received hereditary land
as estates and came more and more to consider themselves independent as far as
rendering military service went in fact if not in theory. Ivan III had made wide scale use of distribution of land
strictly on the basis of military service, but he was not able to abolish the
boyars' hereditary right to land.
In 1581 Ivan in a rage accidentally killed his son, Ivan (1554-1581), who had been a military commander
and executor of his father's policies. Ivan Ivanovich might have carried on his
father's program with some success. The other two surviving sons were weak and
young.
Thus, when Ivan IV died in 1584 the state was likely to be thrown into the
same kind of turmoil as it experienced during the first 15 years of his life.
In fact the turmoil was much worse. Not only did the boyar families fight it
out and resort to all sorts of evils in their efforts to seize the throne, but
also a social war led by the cossacks and lower classes took as much revenge as
possible on the upper classes in general, and hated foreigners from Poland,
Sweden, Crimea, and elsewhere occupied Moscow, seized border territories, and
plundered what they could. The most striking phenomena in this Time of Troubles
was that for all the murderous fighting still there was no conception advanced
or supported for the idea that Russia would not remain totally united or that
its capital would be anywhere but Moscow.
Summary of Reign:
Ivan IV was crowned Tsar in 1547 and immediately began political reforms
with the convocation of an assembly (Zemskii sobor) representing not only the
boyars but also the service military class. Among the political innovations
were improved central administration and local self government. Both were
necessary to shift power from the personal governing hands of the former
princes and boyars (who no longer owned principalities) into an appointed
bureaucratic structure serving only the Tsar. The boyars still managed to
retain considerable power through their near-monopoly of appointments to the
upper bureaucratic positions. Military service became mandatory and regular
according to the size of the land holding.
Ivan's initial foreign policy was to eliminate the Khanate of Kazan, which he
did by 1552. He then continued Russian expansion to the east as far as its
power would carry it. This meant almost clear across northern Siberia where
resistance was light, but only as far to the southeast as Astrakhan, because
behind that town roamed the still very powerful Nogai Tatars. Many advisors and
service people favored expansion due south against the Crimean Tatars, both
because Tatar raids from that quarter were still a major danger and because the
southern territories were a potential area for lucrative pomestie estates. Yet
the reality of Muscovite military strength and weakness argued against this
course. Instead, Ivan chose to regain Russian outlet to the Baltic lost in the
previous centuries to the Swedes and Livonians and gather in the Russian lands
to the west that had been lost to the Lithuanians. Execution of this program
proved to be much more difficult than anticipated. Although Ivan's armies were
initially successful against Livonia, the German knights managed to salvage
their control by giving the southern half of their territories to Lithuania and
letting Sweden take the northern half. This faced Ivan with a much more
formidable set of foes. He went on the offensive against Lithuania again in
1562 and was making some progress when the Polish king, Sigismund II Augustus,
died and was replaced (after four years) by the formidable Hungarian military
commander, Stephan Bathory. As King of Poland Bathory brought Hungarian
mercenaries and other troops trained in the latest western infantry and
artillery tactics. Ivan's army was still essentially a cavalry one and rightly
so as the devastating Tatar raid of 1570 showed. The ultimate result of Ivan's
aggression in the west was the loss of even that sliver of territory Russia had
held on the Baltic and a setback to western expansion that was not made good
until the time of Peter the Great.
Ivan IV's aggressive programs of internal change and foreign wars brought forth
strenuous opposition from the upper levels of nobility for whom both programs
meant only major loss of political power and economic well being (not to
mention the likelihood of death in combat). Ivan became ill in 1553. He found
to his dismay that the boyars would not swear allegiance to his infant son,
Dmitrii, but were plotting to give the throne to Ivan's cousin, Vladimir
Staritskii. Then in 1560 his wife, Anastasia, died. Ivan believed this was due
to poison. Meanwhile many boyars and some formerly independent princes were
either plotting or considering doing so. Ivan's suspicions were heightened by a
subversive campaign mounted by King Sigismund II, who both managed to entice
some nobles to defect to Lithuania and planted erroneous incriminating evidence
about others who did not. He realized that drastic measures were needed to
solidify the institutional power of the monarch. He decided that he was unable
in practice to administer the entire realm as a private estate so long as the
administrators themselves subverted his will. He had plenty of loyal supporters
in the lower military service class, but lacked the financial means in cash to
pay them as a standing army. Therefore he established a private domain over as
much of the territory as he could manage with the loyal servants available,
taking care to select strategicly critical areas, and from this half of the
Tsardom he would then wage war on the recalcitrant boyars and princes.
The result was Ivan's decision in 1564 to force the issue by moving out of
Moscow to the fortified town, Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda, and by announcing his
abdication. He soon was entreated to return to rule and did so, but only on his
terms, which included the division of the state into two separate
administrative entities. Half the country was left to the normal governmental
administrative organs in which he would continue to rule as Tsar with the Boyar
Duma and all the legal restraints of the customary law, but the other half was
removed from all such restraints and bureaucratic interference and administered
by Ivan's specially chosen Oprichnina. The territories assigned to this half of
the government were carefully chosen and served as the economic support for the
loyal troops he based on them and used to conduct his reign of terror against
the nobility. The nobility was not alone in feeling Ivan's rage. In 1569 he was
led to believe by false documents that Novgorod was about to defect to
Lithuania. The result was the most savage assault by the Oprichnina troops on
Novgorod, personally led by Ivan himself, concluding with mass executions and
the deportation of the entire remaining population followed by a somewhat less
brutal repression in Pskov and further executions of government officials in
Moscow. The Oprichnina did not neglect to sack and loot the entire countryside
around Novgorod and Pskov either. All this created disastrous economic
conditions throughout the land and disrupted the normal conduct of governmental
business. The Crimean Tatars were not slow to take advantage of Moscow's
disarray. In 1571 they mounted the most successful raid ever, burning almost
the entire city and carrying off a hundred thousand prisoners to slavery. At
this Ivan apparently had enough. With the Oprichnina implicated in the
malfeasance that enabled the Tatar success he disbanded it the very next year.
The military change was immediate and remarkable. When the Tatars returned in
1572 they were handed such a devastating defeat that they stayed clear of
Moscow for some time.
Chronology:
Since this is a very large file we provide a link rather than slow down the
download of the main article. These articles were written over 20 years ago as
part of a military history of Russia. We hope eventually to have the entire
text at this web site. Meanwhile here is the chronology.
|
|
