by Will Durant
He returned to Moscow (February 1565), and summoned the national assembly of clergy and boyars. He announced that he would execute the leaders of the opposition, and confiscate their property; he would henceforth assume full power, without consulting the nobles or assembly, and he would banish all who should disobey his edicts. The assembly, fearing a revolt of the masses, yielded and dissolved. Ivan decreed that in the future Russia should be divided into two parts: one, the Zemstchina or assemblage of provinces, was to remain under the government of the boyars and their duma; it was to be taxable in gross by the Czar, and be subject to him in military and foreign affairs, but would otherwise be self-governed and free; the other part, the Oprichnina, or “separate estate,” was to be ruled by him, and was to be composed of lands assigned by him to the oprichniki or separate class, chosen by the Czar to police and administer this half-realm, to guard it from sedition, and to give him personal protection and special military service. The new officials—at first a thousand, ultimately six thousand—were selected chiefly from the younger sons of the nobility, who, being landless, were ready to support Ivan in return for the estates now conferred upon them. These lands were taken partly from the possessions of the Crown, largely from the confiscated properties of rebellious boyars. By the end of the reign the Oprichnina included nearly half of Russia, much of Moscow, and the most important trade routes. The revolution was akin to that which Peter the Great attempted 150 years later—the elevation of a new class to political power, and the promotion of Russian commerce and industry. In a century when practically all the military power was held by the aristocracy, the enterprise required a wild courage in a Czar armed only with his personal soldiery and the unreliable support of the merchants and the populace. Some contemporaries assure us that in this critical period Ivan, then thirty-five, aged twenty years.11
Ivan now made Alexandrovsk his regular residence, and transformed it into a fortified citadel. The strain of his revolt against the boyars, added to the failure of the long war against Livonia, may have disordered a never quite balanced mind. He clothed his guardsmen like monks in black cassocks and skull caps, called himself their abbot, sang in their choir, attended Mass with them daily, and so fervently prostrated himself before the altar that his forehead was repeatedly bruised. This added to the awe that he inspired; Russia began to mingle reverence with the fear it felt for him; and even the armed oprichniki were so abject before him that they came to be called his dvor or court.
Ivan’s revolution, like others, had its terror. Those who opposed it and were caught were executed without mercy. A monastic chronicle, presumably hostile to him, reckoned the casualties of his wrath in those years (1560–70) at 3,470; often, it reports, the victim was executed “with his wife,” or “with his wife and children,” and, in one case, “with ten men who came to his help.”12 Prince Vladimir and his mother were put to death, but his children were spared and provided for. The Czar, we are told, asked the monks to pray for the repose of his victims’ souls. He defended the executions as the usual punishment for treason, especially in time of war; an agent of Poland conceded the argument; and an Englishman who witnessed some of the butchery prayed, “Would to God our own stiff-necked rebels could be taught their duty to their prince after the same fashion! “13
The climax of the terror came in Novgorod. Ivan had recently given its archbishop a large sum to repair churches, and thought himself popular with at least the clergy there. But he was informed that a document—not indisputably genuine—had been found behind a picture of the Virgin in a Novgorod monastery, pledging the co-operation of Novgorod and Pskov with Poland in an attempt to overthrow the Czar. On January 2, 1570, a strong military force led by oprichniki pounced upon Novgorod, sacked its monasteries, and arrested 500 monks and priests. Arriving in person on January 6, Ivan ordered those clerics who could not pay fifty rubles’ ransom to be flogged to death. The archbishop was unfrocked and jailed. According to the Third Chronicle of Novgorod a massacre of the population ensued for five weeks; sometimes 500 persons were slain in a day; the official records number 2,770 dead; Ivan Drotested they were only 1,502. Since many merchants, eager for the reopening of trade with the West, were believed to have shared in the conspiracy, the soldiers of the Czar burned all the shops in the city, and the homes of the merchants in the suburbs; even the farmhouses in the environs were destroyed. Unless unfriendly monastic chroniclers have exaggerated the carnage, we must go back to the punishment of rebellious Liège by Charles the Bold (1468), or the Sack of Rome by the troops of Charles V (1527) to find analogies for Ivan’s savage revenge. Novgorod never recovered its old prominence in the commercial life of Russia. Ivan passed on to Pskov, where he restricted his soldiers to pillage. Then he returned to Moscow and celebrated with a royal masquerade ball his escape from a dangerous conspiracy.
So turbulent a reign hardly favored economic progress or cultural pursuits. Commerce was favored in peace and wounded in war. In the lands allotted to the oprichniki, and then on other lands as well, the peasant was legally attached to the soil as a means of promoting continuous cultivation (1581); serfdom, rare in Russia before 1500, became by 1600 the law of the land. Taxation was predatory, inflation was precipitous. The ruble in 1500 was worth ninety-four, in 1600 twenty-four, times the ruble of 1910;14 we need not follow the decline further, except to note, as one of the lessons of history, that money is the last thing that a man should save.
The improvident fertility of families and exhaustion of soils compelled a restless migration to fresh terrain. When this passed the Urals it found a Tatar khanate established over a population of Bashkirs and Ostyaks, around a capital known by the Cossack word Sibir. In 1581 Semen Stroganov enlisted 600 Cossacks and sent them under Ermak Timofeevitch to conquer these tribes. It was done; western Siberia became part of the swelling Russian realm; and Ermak, who had been a brigand chief, was canonized by the Orthodox Church.
The Church remained the real ruler of Russia, for the fear of God was everywhere, while Ivan’s reach was limited. Strict rules of ritual, if not of morality, bound even the Czar; the priests saw to it that he washed his hands after giving audience to ambassadors from outside the Orthodox pale. No Roman Catholic worship was allowed, but Protestants were tolerated as fellow foes of the Roman pope. Ivan IV, like Henry VIII, prided himself on his knowledge of theology. He indulged in a public debate in the Kremlin with a Bohemian Lutheran divine, and it must be admitted that the most violent of the Czars conducted the discussion with more courtesy than appeared in the religious disputes of contemporary Germany.15 He did not come off so well with another theologian. At a Sunday service in the Cathedral of the Assumption (1568) Philip, Metropolitan of Moscow, conspicuously refused the blessing that Ivan solicited. Thrice the Czar asked for it in vain. When his attendants demanded reason for the refusal, Philip began to list Ivan’s crimes and debaucheries. “Hold thy peace,” cried the Czar, “and give me thy blessing!” “My silence,” answered the prelate, “lays a sin upon thy soul, and calls down thy death.” Ivan departed unblessed, and for a wondering month Philip remained unhurt. Then a servitor of the Czar entered the cathedral, seized the Metropolitan, and dragged him to a prison in Tver. His fate is debated; the account accepted by the Russian Church is that he was burned alive. In 1652 he was canonized, and his relics remained till 1917 an object of reverence in the Uspenskiy Sobor.
The Church still produced most of the literature and art of Russia. Printing arrived about 1491, but the only books printed during this reign were manuals of prayer. The leading scholar was the metropolitan Macarius; in 1529, aided by secretaries, he began to compile the surviving literature of his country in twelve huge volumes, which again were almost entirely religious, mostly monkish, chronicles. Ivan’s confessor Sylvester composed a famous Domostroi, or Household Book, as a guide to domestic economy, manners, and eternal salvation; we note in it the admonition to the husband to beat his wife lovingly, and precise instructions for spitting and for blowing the n
ose.16 Ivan himself, in his letters, was not the least vigorous writer of his time.
The most brilliant product of Russian art under his rule was the Church of Basil the Blessed (Khram Vasilia Blajennoi), which still stands aloof from the Kremlin at one end of the Red Square. On returning from his triumphant campaigns against Kazan and Astrakhan (1554) Ivan began what he called Pokrovski Sobor—the Cathedral of the Intercession of the Virgin, to whom he judiciously ascribed his victories. Around this central shrine of stone there later rose seven chapels in wood, dedicated to saints on whose festivals Ivan had overcome his foes. Each chapel was crowned with a graceful painted cupola, each bulbous but varying from the others in ornament. The final chapel, raised to St. Basil in 1588, gave its name in time to the whole charming ensemble. Inevitable legend credited the architecture to an Italian, and told how Ivan had gouged out his eyes lest he should ever rival this masterpiece; but it was two Russians, Barma and Postnikov, who designed it, merely adopting some Renaissance motives in its decoration.17 Every year, on Palm Sunday, as part of the wisdom of government, the lords and clergy of Moscow walked in awesome procession to this cathedral; the metropolitan rode sideways on a horse equipped with artificial ears to simulate the ass on which Christ was described as entering Jerusalem; and the Czar, on foot, humbly led the horse by the bridle; banners, crosses, icons, and censers flourished, and children raised hosannas of praise and gratitude to inclement skies for the blessings of Russian life.
By 1580 Ivan seemed to have triumphed over all his enemies. He had survived several wives, was married to a sixth, and thought of adding another in friendly bigamy.18 He had four children: the first died in infancy, the third, Feodor, was a half-wit; the fourth, Dmitri, was alleged to have epileptic fits. One day in November 1580, the Czar, seeing the wife of his second son, Ivan, in what seemed to him immodest attire, reproved and struck her; she miscarried; the Czarevitch reproached his father; the Czar, in unpremeditated rage, struck him on the head with the imperial staff; the son died from the blow. The Czar went insane with remorse; he spent his days and nights crying aloud with grief; each morning he offered his resignation; but even the boyars now preferred him to his sons. He survived three years more. Then a strange disease attacked him, which made his body swell and emit an unbearable stench. On March 18, 1584, he died while playing chess with Boris Godunov. Gossip accused Boris of poisoning him, and the stage was set for grand opera in the history of the czars.
We must not think of Ivan IV as merely an ogre of brutality. Tall and strong, he would have been handsome but for a broad flat nose that overlay a spreading mustache and a heavy auburn beard. The appellation Groznyi is mistranslated Terrible; it meant, rather, awesome, like the Augustus that was applied to the Caesars; Ivan III had also received the name. To our minds, and even to his cruel contemporaries, he was repulsively cruel and vengeful, and he was a merciless judge. He lived in the age of the Spanish Inquisition, the burning of Servetus, the decapitating habits of Henry VIII, the Marian persecution, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; when he heard of this holocaust (which a pope welcomed with praise) he denounced the barbarism of the West.19 He had some provocations, which set on fire a readily combustible temper made violent by heredity or environment; sometimes, says a witness, a small annoyance made him “foam at the mouth like a horse.” 20 He confessed and at times exaggerated his sins and crimes, so that his enemies could only plagiarize him in their accusations. He studied zealously, and made himself the best-educated layman of his land and time. He had a sense of humor, and could roar with Jovian laughter, but a sinister cunning showed often in his smile. He paved his hell with wonderful intentions: he would protect the poor and the weak against the rich and the strong; he would favor commerce and the middle classes as checks on the feudal and quarrelsome aristocracy; he would open a door of trade in goods and ideas to the West; he would give Russia a new administrative class not bound, like the boyars, to ancient and stagnant ways; he would free Russia from the Tatars, and raise her out of chaos into unity. He was a barbarian barbarously struggling to be civilized.
He failed because he never matured to self-mastery. The reforms that he had planned were half forgotten in the excitement of revolution. He left the peasants more bitterly subject to the landlords than before; he clogged the avenues of trade with war; he drove able men into the arms of the enemy; he divided Russia into hostile halves, and guided her into anarchy. He gave his people a demoralizing example of pious cruelty and uncontrolled passion. He killed his ablest son, and bequeathed his throne to a weakling whose incapacity invited civil war. He was one of the many men of his time of whom it might be said that it would have been better for their country and humanity if they had never been born.
CHAPTER XXX
The Genius of Islam
1258–1520
THE Moslem world had sustained, from 1095 to 1291, a series of assaults as violent and religious as those by which it later subdued the Balkans and changed a thousand churches into mosques. Eight Crusades, inspired by a dozen popes, had hurled the royalty, chivalry, and rabble of Europe against Mohammedan citadels in Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Tunisia; and though these attacks had finally failed, they had gravely weakened the order and resources of the Moslem states. In Spain the Crusades had succeeded; there Islam had been beaten back while its survivors were crowded into a Granada whose doom was leisurely delayed. Sicily had been taken from Islam by the virile Normans. But what were these wounds and amputations compared with the wild and ruinous descent of the Mongols (1219–58) into Transoxiana, Persia, and Iraq? City after city that had been a haven of Moslem civilization was subjected to pillage, massacre, and fire—Bokhara, Samarkand, Balkh, Merv, Nishapur, Rayy, Herat, Baghdad.... . Provincial and municipal governments were shattered; canals, neglected, succumbed to the swirling sand; commerce was put to flight; schools and libraries were destroyed; scholars and scientists were scattered, slaughtered, or enslaved. The spirit of Islam was broken for almost a century. It slowly revived; and then Timur’s Tatars swept across western Asia in a fresh desolation, and the Ottoman Turks cut their way through Asia Minor to the Bosporus. No other civilization in history has known disasters so numerous, so widespread, and so complete.
And yet the Mongols, Tatars, and Turks brought their new blood to replace the human rivers they had shed. Islam had grown luxurious and supine; Baghdad, like Constantinople, had lost the will to live by its own arms; men there were so in love with easeful life that they half invited death; that picturesque civilization, too, as well as the Byzantine, was ripe to die. But so rich had it been that—like ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy—it was able, by its salvaged fragments and memories, to civilize its conquerors. Persia under the Mongol Il-Khans developed an enlightened government, produced good literature and majestic art, and graced history with a noble scholar, Rashidu’d-Din. In Transoxiana Timur built almost as impressively as he had destroyed; and amid his ravages he paused to honor Hafiz. In Anatolia the Turks were already civilized, and poets among them were as plentiful as concubines. In Egypt the Mamluks continued to build like giants; and in West Africa Islam fathered a philosopher-historian beside whom the greatest pundits of contemporary Christendom were midges snared and starved in the cobwebs of Scholasticism. And meanwhile Islam was spreading through India to the farthest reaches of the East.
I. THE IL-KHANS OF PERSIA: 1265—1337
When Marco Polo set out across Persia (1271) to see the China of Kublai Khan, he found himself within the Mongol Empire almost all the way. History had never before recorded so vast a realm. On the west it touched the Dnieper in Russia; in the south it included the Crimea, Iraq, Persia, Tibet, and India to the Ganges; in the east it embraced Indochina, China, and Korea; in the north lay its original home, Mongolia. Throughout these states the Mongol rulers maintained roads, promoted commerce, protected travelers, and permitted freedom of worship to diverse faiths.
Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan, after destroying Baghdad (1258), establis
hed a new capital at Maragha in northwest Persia. When he died (1265) his son Abaqa became khan or prince of Persia, loosely subject to the distant Kublai Khan; so began the Il-Khan dynasty that ruled Persia and Iraq till 1337. Greatest of the line was Ghazan Khan. He was almost the shortest man among his troops, but his will was stronger than their arms. He broke off allegiance to the Great Khan in Mongolia or China, and made his state an independent kingdom, with its capital at Tabriz. Envoys came to him from China, India, Egypt, England, Spain.... . He reformed administration, stabilized the currency, protected the peasants from landlords and robbers, and promoted such prosperity as recalled Baghdad in its proudest days. At Tabriz he built a mosque, two colleges, a philosophical academy, an observatory, a library, a hospital. He set aside the revenues of certain lands in perpetuity to support these institutions, and secured for them the leading scholars, physicians, and scientists of the age. He was himself a man of wide culture and many languages, apparently including Latin.1 For himself he raised a mausoleum so majestic and immense that his death (1304) seemed a triumphal entry into a nobler home.
