their ancient liberties, he abolished the popular assembly, removed the great bell to Novgorod, installed his own boyars in the administration, transported 300 of the leading families to other localities, replaced them by 300 families from Moscow, and left in the town a strong garrison of his own troops. Ryazan shared the same fate. In 1521 the prince, being suspected of forming an alliance with the Crimean Tatars, was summoned to Moscow and arrested. Two years later the prince of Novgorod-Seversk was accused of intriguing with the Poles and imprisoned for the rest of his life. Thus all the principalities were brought under the power of Moscow, and in that respect there remained nothing for Ivan the Terrible to do. He took precautions, however, against any of the dead or moribund principalities being resuscitated, and punished with merciless severity any attempt to resist or undermine his authority.
With the suppression and absorption of the independent principalities the problem was only half solved. The tsars of Character of the tsardom. Muscovy meant to be autocratic rulers alike in their old and in their new territories. Their forefathers had been trained in the Tatar school of politics and administration, and in their ideas of government they had come to resemble Tatar khans much more than grand-princes of the old patriarchal type. Their autocratic tendencies were fostered also by the Church. As Christianity was brought into Russia from Constantinople it was only natural that the ecclesiastics, many of whom were Greeks, should admire Byzantine ideals and recommend them as models to be imitated. For the ambitious Moscow princes many of the Byzantine ideas were very acceptable. They liked to consider themselves as the Lord's anointed, placed high above all ordinary mortals even of the most exalted rank; and when Constantinople fell into the hands of the infidel they began to imagine that, as the most powerful potentates of the Eastern Orthodox world they were the protectors of the Orthodox faith and the political heirs of the East Roman emperors. With a view to strengthen this claim Ivan III. married a niece of the emperor Constantine Palaeologus, who had fallen fighting when his capital was taken by the Turks (1453). From that moment Ivan's subjects noticed a change in his attitude towards them, and attributed it to the evil influence of the Greek princess. In the old times the grand-prince was simply primus inter pares among the minor princes, and these lived with their boyars almost on a footing of equality. Now the tsar of Muscovy and of all Russia adopted the airs and methods of a Tatar khan and surrounded himself with the pomp and splendours of a Byzantine emperor. Ivan III., notwithstanding the influence of his Greek consort, showed some respect for the ancient traditions and the susceptibilities of those around him, but his successor Basil did not follow his father's example. All through his reign he preferred to employ as officials men of humble origin, and habitually treated the boyars and great nobles very unceremoniously. For disobedience to his orders he imprisoned a boyar who was his own brother-in-law, and he caused another to be beheaded for complaining that the boyar-council was not consulted in important affairs of state. A boyar of Nizhniy-Novgorod who allowed himself to criticize the new order of things, and attributed the change to the influence of the Greek princess, had his tongue cut out. From the ecclesiastics Basil likewise insisted on unquestioning obedience, and he did not hesitate to depose by his own authority a metropolitan who was at that time the highest dignitary of the Russian Church. According to Siegmund von Herberstein (1486-1566), an Austrian envoy who visited Moscow at that period, no sovereign in Europe was obeyed like the grand-prince of Muscovy, and his court was remarkable for barbaric luxury. In his palace were numerous equerries, chamberlains and other court dignitaries, and when he went out he was attended by a guard of young nobles dressed in gaudy costumes and armed with silver halberds.[1]
Such radical changes naturally produced a great deal of dissatisfaction among men of Slavonic temperament, whose grandfathers had been independent princes, boyars or free lances, and the malcontents could not adopt the old practice of emigrating to some other principality. There was no longer within the Russian land any independent principality in which an asylum could be found, and emigration to a principality beyond the frontier, such as Lithuania, was regarded as treason, for which the property of the fugitive would be confiscated and his family might be punished. In these circumstances the only outlet for discontent was sedition, and the malcontents awaited impatiently a favourable opportunity for an attempt to curb or overthrow the autocratic power. That opportunity came when Basil died in 1533, leaving as successor a child only three years old, and the chances seemed all on the side of the nobles; but the result belied the current expectations, for the child came to be known in history as Ivan the Terrible, and died half a century later in the full enjoyment of unlimited autocratic power. The fierce struggle between autocratic tyranny and oligarchic disorder, which went on in intermittent fashion during the whole of his reign, cannot be here described in detail, but the chief incidents may be mentioned.
During Ivan's minority the country was governed, or rather misgoverned, first by his mother, and then by rival factions Ivan the Terrible, 1533-84. led by great nobles such as the princes Shuiski and Bêlski. Only once during this period did the young tsar come forward and assert his authority. Having convoked his boyars he reproached them collectively with robbing the treasury and committing acts of injustice, and he caused one of them, a Prince Shuiski who happened to be in power at the moment, to be seized by his huntsmen and torn in pieces by a pack of hounds, as a warning to others. Thus apparently he asserted his authority, but in reality, being only thirteen years old, he was a mere puppet in the hands of one of the opposition factions, who wished to oust their rivals, and for the next four years the misgovernment of the nobles went on as before. It was not till he was about seventeen that he took an active part in the administration, and one of his first acts foreshadowed his future policy: he insisted on the metropolitan crowning him, not as grand-prince of Muscovy, but as tsar of all Russia (1547). From the earliest times the term tsar—a contraction of the word Caesar—had been applied to the kings in Biblical history and the Byzantine emperors, and Ivan III. had already been described in the Church service as “the ruler and autocrat of all Russia, the new Tsar Constantine in the new city of Constantine Moscow,” but on no previous occasion had a grand-prince been crowned under that title. A few months later occurred in Moscow a great fire, which destroyed nearly the whole of the city, and a serious popular tumult, in which the tsar's uncle was murdered by the populace. Ivan regarded these events as a punishment from Heaven for the neglect of his duties, and he began to attend to public affairs under the influence of an enlightened priest called Sylvester and an official of humble origin called Adashev. With the assistance of these two counsellors he held in check the lawless, turbulent nobles, and ruled justly, to the satisfaction of the people, for fourteen years. Then suddenly, for reasons which cannot easily be explained, he inaugurated a reign of terror which lasted for twenty-four years and earned for him the epithet of “the Terrible.” Though there had been no open insurrection, he caused many boyars and humbler persons to be executed, and when some of the great nobles, fearing a similar fate, fled across the frontier and tendered their allegiance to the prince of Lithuania, his suspicion and indignation increased and he determined to adopt still more drastic measures. For this purpose he organized, outside the regular administration, a large corps of civil officials and armed retainers, whose duty it was to obey him implicitly in all things; and with this force, which rose rapidly from 1000 to 6000 men, he acted like a savage invader in a conquered country. Accompanied by these so-called Oprichniki, who have been compared to the Turkish Janissaries of the worst period, he ruthlessly devastated large districts—with no other object
- ↑ See Friedrich Adelung, Siegmund Freiherr von Herberstein, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf seine Reisen in Russland geschildert. (St Petersburg, 1818); autobiography of Herberstein in Fontes rerum Austriacarum, part i. vol. i. pp. 67-396.
