The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Michael refused to consider any other candidates for four years, still dreaming of the poisoned Maria Khlopova. But in 1621 Filaret offered his son’s hand to two foreign princesses, only for the Western monarchs to rebuff these uncouth parvenus – surely to Michael’s relief because he now persuaded his father to return to the case of Maria. Filaret ordered his doctors Bills and Bathser to examine the exiled girl, now in Nizhny Novgorod, and they returned with the news that she was entirely healthy. Filaret then turned on Armsbearer Saltykov: why had he claimed that she suffered from an incurable illness?

  Filaret and Michael, sitting in judgement with Ivan Romanov, Ivan Cherkassky and Sheremetev, tried Saltykov and his brother. Sheremetev was sent to Nizhny Novgorod to interview Maria, who explained that she had vomited only once – until Saltykov had given her a tincture from the Royal Pharmacy.

  Michael was enraged. Saltykov was dismissed and banished for ‘hindering the Tsar’s pleasure and marriage treasonably. The Sovereign’s favour to you . . . was greater than you deserved, but you acted solely for own enrichment to make sure that no one but you enjoyed the Sovereign’s favour.’ Saltykov escaped with his head only because he was protected by the tsar’s mother, who ensured the Saltykovs were not destroyed – and could one day return.

  Now Michael presumed he could marry Maria Khlopova, but the Nun Martha refused to bless the match: the girl was spoilt goods. The tsar’s mother had a better candidate, her relative Princess Maria Dolgorukaya. The tsar remained close to his mother, and she presided over the brideshow in which Michael selected her choice. On 19 September 1624, he married Dolgorukaya, a triumph for his mother’s intrigues. But, four months later, the bride died.*

  There was no time to mourn: Michael had to marry again, and fast. At the brideshow viewing, Michael presented Eudoxia Streshneva, daughter of poor gentry, with the ring and kerchief. Filaret had her closely guarded in the Terem Palace during the engagement. On 5 February 1626, they were married and spent their first night with the traditional kernels of wheat between their sheets, sheaves of rye beneath the bed and the icons over it.

  Eudoxia suffered the constant interference of her mother-in-law, the Nun Martha, but even without that, the life of a tsarina was stiflingly puritanical and limited. Households were supposedly run according to the joyless Domostroi, household rules written by a sixteenth-century monk, which specified that ‘disobedient wives should be severely whipped’ while virtuous wives should be thrashed ‘from time to time but nicely in secret, avoiding blows from the fist that cause bruises’.

  Royal women were secluded in the terem, not unlike an Islamic harem. Heavily veiled, they watched church services through a grille; their carriages were hung with taffeta curtains so that they could not look out or be seen; and when they walked in church processions, they were concealed from public gaze by screens borne by servants. In the Terem Palace, they sewed all day, and would kneel before the Red Corner of icons when entering or leaving a room. They wore sarafans, long gowns with pleated sleeves, and headdresses called kokoshniks, while make-up and even mirrors were banned as demonic. The rules were more relaxed lower down the social ladder. Merchants’ wives blackened their teeth, wore white make-up, daubs of rouge, and had their eyebrows and eyelashes dyed black, ‘so they look as if someone has thrown a handful of flour at their faces and coloured their cheeks with a paintbrush’. The lower classes had more fun, bathing nude in mixed bathhouses, carousing in the streets, but it was precisely to avoid this lairy wassailing that the piety of the terem was so rigidly enforced.

  Yet Tsarina Eudoxia thrived there. The first of their ten children, Irina, was born exactly nine months after the wedding: tsarinas gave birth in the bathhouse of the Terem Palace. Each child was celebrated with a banquet in the Golden Chamber. After another daughter, an heir, Alexei, was born in 1629, followed by two more sons.17

  Filaret, the ex-prisoner of the Poles, was spoiling for a fight with Poland even though few boyars felt that Russia was ready. In April 1632, he got his chance: King Sigismund III died. The Commonwealth of Poland–Lithuania was a huge country, stretching from the Baltic to near the Black Sea, but it was an awkward union of two separate realms, a constitutional contradiction with two governments and one parliament, which was elected by the entire nobility and in which every delegate had a veto. This parliament, the Sejm, chose its kings, leaving royal elections open to foreign machinations. Poland’s idiosyncratic rules, overmighty magnates and widespread bribery often left the country languishing in anarchic limbo. After the Polish occupation of Moscow during the Troubles, Poland would remain Russia’s ancestral enemy.

  Filaret’s war began in farce and ended in tragedy. He amassed an impressive 60,000 men but this antiquarian Muscovite army led by bickering boyars was obsolete. Only his 8,000 mercenaries under the Scotsman Colonel Leslie and the Englishman Colonel Sanderson could compare to the modern armies in the Thirty Years War.* When he sent two boyars to take Smolensk, they argued over precedence and had to be dismissed.

  The new commanders, the boyar Mikhail Shein, who had shared Filaret’s Polish imprisonment, and the lord-in-waiting Artemii Izmailov, started to besiege Smolensk in August 1633, but the fortress was reinforced by Władysław IV, the newly elected Polish king who still claimed the Russian throne. By October, the Russians had lost 2,000 men in one skirmish and were facing food shortages. Shein was a blowhard who on his departure had boasted to the tsar that ‘when most of the boyars were sitting by their firesides’ he alone was fighting – ‘no one was equal to him’. But he was soon in a panic. Michael tried to calm Shein with the pious reflection that ‘many things happen in war and still God’s mercy exists’, but the situation in the camp deteriorated.

  Leslie and Sanderson hated each other so bitterly that the Scotsman accused the Englishman of treason. As they brawled in front of the army, Leslie shot Sanderson dead. Shein started negotiating with the Poles and on 19 February 1634 he surrendered, marching out past King Władysław who finally saw his chance to take Moscow. As the Poles advanced, Shein and Izmailov were arrested, tried for treason and for kissing the Catholic cross, and beheaded. But the Polish advance was abruptly stopped by news that Murad IV, the Ottoman sultan,* was invading Poland. On 17 May, Poland and Russia signed the Perpetual Peace. Władysław kept Smolensk – but finally recognized Michael as tsar.18

  In October 1633, at the height of the crisis, Filaret died aged eighty, followed by Martha. Michael, thirty-five, ruled through his relatives Cherkassky and Sheremetev, while his heir, Alexei, as exuberant as his father was docile, was growing up in the cosy gloom of the Terem Palace.

  When Alexei was five, Michael appointed a well-born if penurious nobleman, Boris Morozov, as his tutor. Traditionally princes were given only an elementary education, but Morozov taught him about the technology of the West, introduced him to Latin, Greek and Polish and helped him build up a library. His father, who loved gardens and gadgets, gave him a market garden and showed him his latest toy, a gilded organ with mechanical cuckoos and nightingales. Father and son also shared a taste for entertainments, employing sixteen dwarfs dressed in red and yellow outfits.

  Morozov was an excellent choice and unusually for princes growing up in the fissiparous Kremlin, Alexei had a happy childhood. Morozov arranged that Alexei should be taught with twenty other boys, and when he was nine he was joined by a boy four years older named Arteem Matveev. As Michael himself reflected later, Morozov – who spent thirteen years ‘living constantly with us’ – had almost become one of the family.19

  Then, in 1639, two of Michael’s sons died almost simultaneously, one aged five, the other just after being born. The family tragedies took their toll on the tsar. In April 1645 he fell ill with scurvy, dropsy and probably depression. Three doctors analysed the tsar’s urine. He wept so much that the doctors seriously diagnosed a deluge of tears in his stomach, liver and spleen, which deprived his organs of natural warmth and chilled his blood. They prescribed Rhenish wine laced with herbs
and a purgative, with no supper. On 14 May they ordered another purgative. On the 26th they found the royal urine to be colourless because his stomach and liver were not working ‘due to too much sitting, cold drinks and melancholy caused by grief’, the seventeenth-century diagnosis of depression. But he didn’t improve. Sheremetev, who had offered him the throne thirty years earlier, personally nursed Michael but to no avail.

  On 12 July, he fainted in church. ‘My insides’, he groaned, ‘are being torn apart.’ His belly was massaged with balsam as his court realized that the tsar, forty-nine years old, was dying. Amid a stench of sweat and urine, the chanting of priests, the flickering of candles and the swinging of censers, royal deathbeds were theatres of dignity and sanctity – he who had lived like a king was expected to know how to die like one. Monarchs do not die like the rest of us: the tsar passed away but the power was passed on very much alive. Their deathbeds were public and practical transactions. Courtiers mourned a beloved master, but they also participated in the end of one reign and beginning of another. The transfer of power is always the ultimate test of a regime’s stability – but until 1796 there was no law of succession in Russia so deathbeds were dangerous political crises which often deteriorated into lethal tournaments. Whispered last words were regarded as sacred, but a moment after the last breath only the whims of the new tsar really mattered. Such fraught setpieces were simultaneously family occasions and state ceremonies. Last-minute death-chamber intrigues could change everything.

  The tsarina and heir were summoned along with Morozov and the patriarch. Michael said goodbye to his wife, blessed the heir with the kingdom and told Morozov: ‘To my boyar I entrust my son and implore you, even as you’ve served us joyfully, living with us for thirteen years, so keep serving him now!’

  At 2 a.m. he took confession. Alexei noticed that his father’s belly ‘stirred and rumbled’, the rattle of death. As Michael died, Nikita Romanov, son of Ivan and therefore Alexei’s second cousin, emerged into the antechamber to be the first to take the oath of loyalty to the new tsar, repeating that no foreigners be recognized as tsar and that every citizen was obliged to report any ‘evil designs’ – while a single bell tolled and the widow and daughters howled in grief. There would be no Assembly to confirm the succession. The Romanovs no longer needed one. Alexei was tsar by God’s will and none other.20

  * The double-headed eagle was probably adopted as the grand princes aspired to the status of the Habsburg dynasty. It was probably later that monks claimed that the double-headed eagle represented Rome and Constantinople, capital of the eastern Roman or Byzantine empire – with Moscow as the Third Rome.

  * Boyars were the top echelon of the nobility and were appointed by the tsar. This had nothing to do with the hereditary title of prince, which the tsar by tradition could not grant. Princes were descendants of the rulers of the cities that Moscow had conquered, often the obscure scions of the uncountable lineage of Rurik, grand prince of Kiev, or of Gedimin, founding grand duke of Lithuania, or of Tatar khans. Some princes were super-rich magnates who owned over 100,000 acres; but many princes were neither rich nor boyars. Titles did not always matter: the Romanovs had been boyars but they were never princes.

  † The Crimean khanate, ruled by the Giray family, descendants of Genghis Khan, was for three centuries a middling European power, extending from southern Ukraine to northern Caucasus and based at Baktiserai in Crimea. Its army of 50,000 mounted archers was so formidable that for a long time the tsars paid it tribute. Its khans were closely allied with the Ottoman sultans whom they helped to control the Black Sea.

  * When her body was analysed in the twentieth century, it was found to contain dangerous levels of mercury – but then so were other sixteenth-century bodies tested at the same time. Mercury was often used as a medicine.

  * In 1856, their descendant Emperor Alexander II bought the building on this site from its neighbouring monastery to celebrate his coronation. Most of it dates from much later, but its foundations are fifteenth century. It is likely that Michael Romanov was brought up here.

  * The Cossacks, their name derived from the Turkish and Arabic word Kazak for adventurer or freebooter, were originally Tatar warriors, but by the sixteenth century they were mainly Slavic communities that settled in the borderlands of Muscovy, Tatary and Poland living by hunting, fishing and banditry. The wars between the Tatars, Russians and Poles gave them plenty of opportunity to fight as mercenaries and independent raiders (initially infantrymen, then fighting on fleets of chaika – seagull – boats, later they became cavalry). In the Time of Troubles, the Cossacks, some fighting for the Poles, others for the different sides in the civil war, became arbiters of power. Indeed they were instrumental in electing Michael Romanov. The increasing oppression of peasants, forced by tsars and landowners into the slavery known as serfdom, drove thousands to flee to Cossack communities, brotherhoods of proud freemen, ‘hosts’, which elected leaders, known as hetman (Ukrainian) or ataman (Russian).

  * Two of the most obvious candidates were absent: Michael’s father, Filaret Romanov, and Prince Vasily Golitsyn were both prisoners in Poland. Filaret was ruled out because he was a priest, but Golitsyn’s credentials – royal descent from Gedemin, the founding grand duke of Lithuania, boyar rank, stupendous wealth and personal prestige – were impeccable. Had he been present, this might be a history of the Golitsyn dynasty – except that such a paragon of breeding might not have appealed to the Cossacks who dominated the voting.

  * The truth of the Ivan Susanin story is attested by Tsar Michael’s rescript just six years later. This was the beginning of an official Romanov myth. Nicholas I took a special role in its embellishment. When the composer Glinka created his opera Ivan Susanin, Nicholas I changed its title to A Life for the Tsar, which made its significance very clear and turned it into the semi-official Romanov anthem. (The opera became one of Stalin’s favourites.) The descendants of the heroically loyal peasant were invited to all Romanov coronations right up until that of Nicholas II in 1896, and they were specially honoured at the tercentenary of the dynasty in 1913.

  * Ten or so boyars were appointed by the tsar to sit on his Council. He raised a few to the rank of privy boyar. However rich and grand boyars were, they wrote to the tsar signing off with childish diminutives like ‘Your submissive slaves Mitka and Sashka’. Beneath them were the lords-in-waiting, okolnichii, then council nobles, dumnyi dvorianie. Low-born clerks, dyaki, actually ran the departments of state and the most important of these became dumnyi dyaki, council secretaries. These top four layers sat in the Council and from them were chosen ministers and courtiers. The chairmen of the fifty or so offices, prikazi, the government departments, ran the court and the country – some political like the Foreign Office or Great Treasury, some regional like the Kazan Office, others personal, the Great Court Office. In a court where poisoning was a frequent occurence, the Royal Pharmacy, in charge of the tsar’s own medicines, was so important that it was virtually always controlled by the chief minister. But the tsar’s life was run by courtiers such as the keeper of the seal, master of the horse and most intimately, the postelnichi, gentlemen of the bedchamber. Pozharsky, the warlord who had actually established the Romanovs, was promoted to boyar and showered with lands yet the absurdity of precedence made him the constant object of violent complaints by boyars of more senior families.

  * Filaret hired a Scottish architect, Christopher Galloway, to refashion the Kremlin’s Saviour Tower, adding a clock which delighted father and son. He relished the theatricality of this super-patriarchate: every Palm Sunday, Michael re-enacted Christ’s entry into Jerusalem – but it was the patriarch not he who rode the ass. Wearing Monomakh’s Crown and full royal robes, the tsar prayed with the boyars in the Kremlin then walked out with the patriarch, followed by the entire court. At the platform in Red Square, which served as Golgotha, the tsar held the horse (picturesquely dressed up as a donkey with false ears) as the patriarch mounted it and then processed back into
the Kremlin to the Dormition Cathedral. Afterwards the patriarch thanked the tsar for this service with a payment of 200 roubles.

  * The Dolgorukys claimed descent from Yuri Long-Arm (Dolgo-ruky), grand prince of Kiev, who founded Moscow in 1156. But this was mythical. They were actually descended much later from the fifteenth-century ruler of Obolensk, Prince Ivan Obolensky the Long-Arm. This was not the last Romanov marriage to a Dolgorukaya, though it was said any Romanov marriage to a Dolgorukaya was cursed. The Dolgorukys were one of the families, like the Sheremetevs, Saltykovs and Golitsyns, who helped govern up to 1917. Nicholas II’s last prime minister was a Golitsyn, and he went into Siberian exile with a Dolgoruky.

  * Traditional Muscovite armies were raised by noble servitors, the pomestchiki, who in return for pomestia, grants of land from the tsar, supplied soldiers. In this way, Filaret raised 26,000 men, but many of them were armed with bows and arrows. He recruited 11,000 undisciplined Cossack cavalry and 18,000 Tatars and Chuvash horsemen armed with crossbows. The 20,000 musketeers were more impressive.

  * Murad IV combined the military gifts of Caesar with the demented sadism of Caligula but he was the last great Ottoman sultan, succeeded by his brother Ibrahim the Mad, who was an erotomaniac obsessed with furs, scent and enormously fat women. Ruling from Constantinople, the Ottoman sultan-caliphs had conquered a colossal empire that stretched from the borders of Iraq to the Aegean, including the Balkans (present-day Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and former Yugoslavia), north Africa, present-day Turkey and the entire Middle East, including Jerusalem and Mecca. Their European subjects were mainly Orthodox Christian Slavs who, bought as slaves and converted to Islam as children, provided their finest generals, officials and concubines. They had reached their height a century earlier under Suleiman the Magnificent but until the end of the eighteenth century, they remained a formidable empire of vast military resources. In 1637, independent Cossacks stormed the Ottoman fortress of Azov and offered it to Michael but, after consulting an Assembly, he conceded he was not yet strong enough to challenge the Ottomans.