Royal Pains: A Rogues' Gallery of Brats, Brutes, and Bad Seeds

by Leslie Carroll

  As Vasily contemplated a divorce from Salomonia, he was allegedly cursed for his actions by Mark, the Patriarch of Jerusalem. Mark prophesied, “If you do this evil thing, you shall have an evil son. Your nation shall become prey to terror and tears. Rivers of blood will flow, the heads of the mighty will fall, your cities will be devoured with flames.”

  But Vasily wasn’t buying Mark’s mumbo jumbo. Instead, he ostentatiously flouted the prophecy and found himself a nubile babe who would bear him a baby. Circumventing tradition, he engendered another scandal by choosing for his second wife Elena Glinskaya, forgoing the traditional “beauty pageant” that was held when Russia’s sovereign decided to marry. Vasily had been smitten with “the beauty of her face and her young age,” and decided that she was The One without needing to hold a competition. Approximately twenty years old at the time of her wedding on January 26, 1526, Elena was beautiful, educated, cultivated—and a Catholic. In order to appear younger for his trophy wife, the forty-six-year-old Vasily had shaved off his beard, practically an act of sacrilege in his culture.

  Although they considered themselves enlightened, the bridal couple was as superstitious as all Russians of the era. The eighty black marten or sable pelts placed over their seats and at the base of the numerous candles during the three-day wedding festivities were intended to ward off evil spirits. But the sheaves of grain placed in and around the bedchamber didn’t bring the newlyweds the expected luck in the fertility department. It took more than four years for Elena to become pregnant, but finally on August 25, 1530, in the midst of a terrible thunderstorm, Ivan was born at the Kremlin. Although Vasily claimed paternity, rumors spread that Elena’s child had been fathered by her lover, the handsome Prince Telepnev-Obolensky.

  Ivan’s coming was ill-starred. After his birth, the khan of Kazan, a realm on Russia’s border, warned the Russian boyars, “A sovereign has been born to you and he already has two teeth. With one, he will devour us; but with the other, he will devour you!”

  Once again, Vasily doesn’t seem to have blinked. He raised Ivan in Moscow’s Kremlin, a walled city within a city boasting three separate palaces, as many cathedrals, five churches (plus a chapel), a treasury, government offices and council chambers, bathhouses and storehouses, prisons, and even a mill sponsored by his consort, where silk and cloth of gold were loomed. On the face of it, it’s hard to imagine a cushier life.

  In 1532, Elena bore Vasily another son, the developmentally disabled Yuri. But the following year Vasily developed a leg ulcer that turned into a hideous boil. The prince was bled and the oozing sore was treated with poultices of honey, wheat flour, and boiled onions—which only increased the pus-filled discharges. Finally the wound was doused with vodka, and Vasily was dosed with a laxative of seeds, which weakened him further. He soon developed blood poisoning, dying on December 4 at the age of fifty-four, after begging on his deathbed to be made a monk. After brazenly ignoring so many religious prophecies, in his final moments Vasily may have been hedging his bets, hoping that adopting the pure soul of a monk would speed him on the highway to heaven.

  As Vasily breathed his last, and passed his throne to his oldest son, a council of seven boyars was already in place to act as regents, guiding little Ivan’s government and military decisions until he reached the age of fifteen, when he would claim the throne on his own. But Ivan’s mother, Elena, who now openly consorted with the Grand Equerry, Prince Telepnev-Obolensky, was the real power behind the throne, setting her young son an example of how to deal with dissidents and detractors. Elena had her late husband’s two brothers, Yuri and Andrei, arrested and incarcerated. Yuri starved to death in prison, but Andrei was captured in the process of instigating a revolt, so Elena had proven herself to be more prescient and astute than paranoid.

  But she wasn’t immortal. On April 3, 1538, Elena was seized with painful convulsions and dropped dead; her demise was so sudden that many suspected poison.

  Elena’s death sparked a war between two noble families, the Belskys and the Shuiskys. The goal of each faction was to seize control of the throne, turning little Ivan into a mere figurehead or puppet prince. When Ivan was seven years old his nanny, Agrafena Cheliadnina, the sister of his mother’s lover and the only stable force in his life, was packed off to a convent; he never saw her again. According to Ivan, the Shuiskys proceeded to steal his parents’ belongings while he and his younger brother, Yuri, who was a deaf-mute, were kept in deprivation and poverty. The boys were left with nothing to wear but ratty garments, and were trotted out all dressed up only on ceremonial occasions.

  Ivan himself described the conditions that he and Yuri endured after their mother’s death and their treatment at the hands of the greedy and competing boyars:

  “Our subjects saw their desires fulfilled: they received an empire without a master. Paying no attention to us—their sovereigns—they rushed to conquer wealth and glory, falling upon one another in the process. . . . As for my brother Yuri and me, they treated us like foreigners or beggars . . . lacking both food and clothing! We were allowed no freedom. . . . Many were the times when I was not even served my meals at the appointed hour! And what of my father’s treasure that was mine by right? It was all looted. . . . The sons of boyars carried off that treasure, they melted it down to make vessels of gold and silver; they engraved their parents’ names on them as if they had been hereditary possessions!”

  Prince Ivan Shuisky even appropriated Vasily III’s bedroom in the Kremlin, crudely and ostentatiously resting his dirty foot on Ivan’s father’s pillow as he lectured the boy. Ivan later wrote, “He . . . adopted toward me a contemptuous attitude.” The young prince privately swore revenge.

  The religious leader of the official Church of Russia was known as the metropolitan. One night when Ivan was eleven, the current metropolitan, a priest named Josef (who was a Belsky supporter), came tearing into his bedroom, his robe ripped and spit upon, demanding Ivan’s protection from the Shuisky family members who were pursuing him. The boy was in bed and had no idea what to do when the Shuiskys burst into the room, began to beat the priest to a pulp, and then dragged him away. The only reason Ivan may not have been the Shuiskys’ next victim was that they needed him as a figurehead. He was the hereditary prince.

  Neither the Shuiskys nor the Belskys ever established a firm grip on the government. Ivan remained inside the Kremlin, sheltered, scared, and clueless about what went on outside its impenetrable walls. The council of boyars kept him surrounded by guards and servants, most of whom were spies for the two competing families. He had no friends, because any playmates might be a source of influence. “I was never free to do anything. I could never do what I wanted or what a boy should,” Ivan wrote.

  In 1542, Ivan developed a friendship with a powerful boyar named Feodor Vorontsov. Prince Andrei Shuisky, who had the upper hand at the time, grew anxious about Vorontsov’s potential influence on the youth. So Shuisky and his men pummeled Vorontsov to a bloody pulp and then sent him to prison. It was the proverbial last straw for the twelve-year-old Ivan. That Christmas he hosted a feast and invited the leading boyars. In the middle of the meal, Ivan rose and gave a speech accusing the noblemen of taking advantage of his minority. The pursuit of their own corrupt agendas, illegally appropriating lands for themselves, and imprisoning people without provocation had destroyed the country. And the worst offender was Andrei Shuisky.

  Ivan ordered Shuisky’s immediate arrest, but there would be neither prison nor deportation. Andrei was beaten to death by the palace guards and fed to the hungry hounds outside. However, the bloodbath was just beginning. Thirty boyars with close ties to Andrei Shuisky were summarily hanged. Ivan was seizing control of the country and of his destiny. And while his vengeance might seem justified, one can only pause at the viciousness of the acts ordered by a twelve-year-old boy. Ivan had metamorphosed from brat to brute with alarming velocity.

  Ivan matured quickly in more ways than one. By the time he was thirteen he already had an
imposing physical presence: six feet tall, broad shouldered, and barrel-chested. His small, piercing blue eyes missed nothing. His long hooked nose lent him an air of hawklike majesty. He had lanky brown hair and, as he went through puberty, grew a long, reddish beard. Whether it was because he had seen so much brutality in his young life or that he’d gotten a taste of it after taking care of the Shuiskyites, he developed a taste for killing things and watching them die. He’d rip the feathers from the bodies of live birds, pluck out their eyes, and slit their bellies—fascinated by their pathetic throes of agony. As an entertaining pastime, he’d toss cats and dogs off the ramparts of the Kremlin. Most of us would be tempted to describe this callous behavior with a single word: psychopath.

  In 1546 both the Shuiskys and the Belskys lost their bid to control the throne. Instead, the reins of power were grabbed by another rival faction—Ivan’s mother’s family, the Glinskys. As Ivan considered them allies, the Glinskys’ ascension freed him to enjoy his teenage years in an attempt to make up for all the fun he’d missed during his childhood. So, while the Glinskys ran the government, Ivan and his friends ran amok on horseback through the streets of Moscow, horsewhipping and riding roughshod over peasants and their vending stalls outside the Kremlin walls. Torturing cats and dogs had been entertaining, but trampling peasants afforded Ivan the chance to take his sadism to the next level.

  Although Ivan and his pals enjoyed behaving like thugs and vandals, he considered himself a religious man. He remained superstitious throughout his life, hiring and heeding fortune-tellers. But in an age when most men, and even some rulers, were illiterate, Ivan recognized that in order to be a proper leader, reading and writing were just the tip of the iceberg. He decided to educate himself, employing teachers and learning songs and prayers through rote memorization. He gave himself a practical education as well, learning the way of the world through eyewitness experience. According to Ivan, “I adopted the devious ways of the people around me. I learned to be crafty like them.”

  Ivan had an insatiable thirst for information, questioning everyone from artisans to ambassadors to priests to ministerial secretaries about their work. He traveled widely, ostensibly to familiarize himself with his realm, although he spent more time fighting and fornicating than sightseeing. And at every location he demanded feasts, gifts, and other tributes—largesse that the villages and towns could ill afford to sponsor.

  But Ivan’s selfishness and his monstrous sense of entitlement were the least of his sins, and perhaps the easiest for his subjects to deal with. More difficult to endure was his rage. Throughout his life, Ivan demonstrated an emotional instability and a hair-trigger temper. One never knew when he was going to lose control and summarily order the removal of a friend’s tongue or some similar act of savage butchery. He was slow to trust and quick to assume betrayal.

  In December 1546, the sixteen-year-old Ivan summoned his theology tutor, Metropolitan Makary, and announced that he had decided to marry. Makary astutely dissuaded Ivan from considering a foreign princess for his bride because he doubted that any of them would want to come to a country that had been at war for ten years with the Tartars of bordering Kazan, and which remained riddled with civil strife.

  Although it was the custom in Russia for the sovereign to hold a beauty pageant to choose his wife, Ivan’s father, Vasily, had circumvented the process when he remarried, selecting Ivan’s mother, Elena, before the thousands of eligible Russian virgins could be assembled for a lineup. Ivan would ultimately marry eight times, but the first time around he followed the traditional route. An exhaustive search was conducted throughout the realm with some candidates as young as twelve (an appropriate marriageable age for centuries; the girl was old enough to have gotten her first period, but young enough to have avoided physical temptation). The girls were made up in traditional Russian fashion, with white lead foundation and red circles of rouge on their cheeks. The cosmetics were not intended to enhance their features, but rather to conceal them from the prying eyes of lascivious men. One wonders whose idea of a “beauty contest” this actually was, with the competitors’ charms so effectively concealed.

  The initial selection of virgins was made by Ivan’s regional representatives, who had to winnow out the number of possibilities from a thousand entrants. The semifinalists were housed twelve to a room in a building adjacent to the palace, where they were routinely subjected to visits and interviews by the sovereign and were scrutinized by a group of duennas who poked and prodded and attested to their general good health and the veracity of their virginity. After the series of interviews, Ivan reduced the number of contestants to a manageable dozen or so.

  The winner of “Who Wants to Be the First Czarina?” was Anastasia Romanovna Zakharina, whose father, a boyar, gave his name to the Romanov dynasty. Instead of a crown (which she would eventually receive) and a dozen roses, she was awarded a handkerchief embroidered with gold and silver threads and embellished with pearls.

  On January 16, 1547, at Moscow’s Cathedral of the Assumption, the sixteen-year-old Ivan was crowned as grand prince of Vladimir and Moscow, czar and monarch of all the Russias, in a ceremony conducted by the new head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Makary. It was the first time the term “czar” (also spelled “tsar”), which derives from the Roman title caesar, or emperor, was used to denote sovereignty. Yet according to Ivan’s biographers Robert Payne and Nikita Romanoff, he was not formally permitted to use the title of czar until 1561—and only after he paid the Greek patriarch Iosaf of Constantinople three times the sum originally agreed upon for the privilege.

  At his 1547 coronation Ivan wore a centuries-old conical fur-trimmed crown known as the Cap of Monomakh (meaning “one who likes to fight in single combat”), and was given a few splinters of wood said to have belonged to the true cross on which Jesus Christ was crucified.

  Ivan wed Anastasia in the cathedral on February 3, 1547, less than three weeks after his coronation. They stood side by side before the altar on a carpet of red damask bordered by black sable pelts. At the end of the ceremony the bridal couple participated in a ritual familiar to many Jews; they each took a sip of wine from a glass that Ivan then crushed under his heel.

  The royals’ bedchamber was stuffed to the gills with fertility symbols, including sheaves of wheat. The bed itself had been sprinkled with handfuls of loose grain. Ivan’s marriage was consummated as one of the bride’s brothers, Nikita Zakharin, slept beside the bed of state. Just outside, Ivan’s uncle, the Master of the Horse Mikhail Glinsky, rode about the courtyard below the bedroom with an upraised sword in his fist: phallic symbolism meets bodyguard.

  On the following morning, Anastasia and Ivan visited their respective bathhouses for a ritual cleansing. Nikita Zakharin and Ivan threw pails filled with cold water on each other. One assumes that some honored female relation did the same for Anastasia. Then the newlyweds sat down to a hearty breakfast of kasha.

  The English explorer Richard Chancellor, who first visited the Russian court in December 1553, wrote that Anastasia ruled her “young and riotous” husband “with [gentleness] and wisdom.” Ivan evidently adored her and nicknamed her his “little heifer.” It soon became common knowledge that Anastasia was the only person in Russia capable of taming the imperial mood swings. Chancellor remained in Russia for some time, and is a reliable eyewitness. (He eventually brokered a trade agreement with Russia on England’s behalf; and after Elizabeth I became queen in 1558, Ivan entered into a lengthy correspondence with the English monarch.)

  Among his other unpleasant traits, Ivan was a paranoid ruler. One can only suppose that he’d witnessed so many horribly violent political incidents during his childhood that it might have been difficult for him to maintain any psychological equanimity. On the other hand, there were those small birds he liked to torture as a teen and the cats and dogs he’d lobbed from the Kremlin’s ramparts. In any case, early in Ivan’s reign he summarily ordered the beheading of the leaders of fifty arquebusie
rs, or musketeers, who had brought him a petition protesting his oppressive measures. Ivan later claimed he’d mistaken the armed men for an assassination squad.

  One of the victims was his former boyhood buddy, Feodor Vorontsov. Vorontsov’s demise set a dangerous precedent. Throughout his reign, Ivan thought nothing of executing his favorite courtiers and advisers (and in the most brutal manner he could devise) when he perceived they had turned against or in some way betrayed him. Ivan believed that he ruled by divine right and was therefore closer to God than other men, which both justified and excused all of his excesses: alcoholism, rape, torture, and murder.

  And yet, as certain as he was that God was in his corner, Ivan had such a superstitious nature that sometimes a perceived “omen” could save his potential victims. In 1547, a group of citizens from Pskov came to Moscow to protest Ivan’s rule and were literally saved by the bell. As a punishment for their criticizing the way he ran the country, Ivan ordered his guards to douse them with alcohol and light the men’s beards on fire. No sooner had the orders been given than a messenger galloped up to the czar to announce that the enormous bell in the Kremlin had suddenly fallen. Ivan saw the event as a divine sign and released his prisoners.

  While his first wife, Anastasia, was alive to manage and mollify his temper, Ivan actually demonstrated some excellent leadership skills, especially for one so young and with so many millions of subjects under his rule. He organized workers and tradesmen into guilds and implemented tax reform, curbing some of the excessive power wielded by the wealthy boyars who owned the lion’s share of Russia’s real estate. Lest these acts be mistaken for beneficence, it soon became all too apparent that Ivan’s objective was to consolidate power under the aegis of the crown.