exotic principles falling upon a soil already prepared for them.
After the fall of Constantinople, orthodox canonists were inclined
to regard the Muscovite grand dukes as the successors
by the Byzantine emperors. This movement coincided with a
change in the family circumstances of Ivan III. After the
death of his first consort, Maria of Tver (1467), at the suggestion
of Pope Paul II. (1469), who hoped thereby to bind Russia to the
holy see, Ivan III. wedded the Catholic Zoe Palaeologa (better
known by her orthodox name of Sophia), daughter of Thomas,
despot of the Morea, who claimed the throne of Constantinople
as the nearest relative of the last Greek emperor. The princess,
however, clave to her family traditions, and awoke imperial
ideas in the mind of her consort. It was through her influence
that the ceremonious etiquette of Constantinople (along with
the imperial double-headed eagle and all that it implied) was
adopted by the court of Moscow. The grand duke henceforth
held aloof from his boyars. The old patriarchal systems of
government vanished. The boyars were no longer consulted
on affairs of state. The sovereign became sacrosanct, while
the boyars were reduced to the level of slaves absolutely dependent
on the will of the sovereign. The boyars naturally
resented so insulting a revolution, and struggled against it, at
first with some success. But the clever Greek lady prevailed
in the end, and it was her son Vasily, not Maria of Tver’s son,
Demetrius, who was ultimately crowned co-regent with his
father (April 14, 1502). It was in the reign of Ivan III. that
the first Russian “Law Book,” or code, was compiled by the
scribe Gusev. Ivan did his utmost to promote civilization in
his realm, and with that object invited many foreign masters
and artificers to settle in Muscovy, the most noted of whom was
the Italian Ridolfo di Fioravante, nicknamed Aristotle because
of his extraordinary knowledge, who built the cathedrals of the
Assumption (Uspenski) and of Saint Michael or the Holy Archangels
in the Kreml.
See P. Pierling, Mariage d’un tsar au Vatican, Ivan III. et Sophie Paléologue (Paris, 1891); E. I. Kashprovsky, The Struggle of Ivan III. with Sigismund I. (Rus.) (Nizhni, 1899); S. M. Solov’ev, History of Russia (Rus.), vol. v. (St Petersburg, 1895).
Ivan IV., called “the Terrible” (1530–1584), tsar of Muscovy, was the son of Vasily [Basil] III. Ivanovich, grand duke of Muscovy, by his second wife, Helena Glinska. Born on the 25th of August 1530, he was proclaimed grand duke on the death of his father (1533), and took the government into his own hands in 1544, being then fourteen years old. Ivan IV. was in every respect precocious; but from the first there was what we should now call a neurotic strain in his character. His father died when he was three, his mother when he was only seven, and he grew up in a brutal and degrading environment where he learnt to hold human life and human dignity in contempt. He was maltreated by the leading boyars whom successive revolutions placed at the head of affairs, and hence he conceived an inextinguishable hatred of their whole order and a corresponding fondness for the merchant class, their natural enemies. At a very early age he entertained an exalted idea of his own divine authority, and his studies were largely devoted to searching in the Scriptures and the Slavonic chronicles for sanctions and precedents for the exercise and development of his right divine. He first asserted his power by literally throwing to the dogs the last of his boyar tyrants, and shortly afterwards announced his intention of assuming the title of tsar, a title which his father and grandfather had coveted but never dared to assume publicly. On the 16th of January 1547, he was crowned the first Russian tsar by the metropolitan of Moscow; on the 3rd of February in the same year he selected as his wife from among the virgins gathered from all parts of Russia for his inspection, Anastasia Zakharina-Koshkina, the scion of an ancient and noble family better known by its later name of Romanov.
Hitherto, by his own showing, the private life of the young tsar had been unspeakably abominable, but his sensitive conscience (he was naturally religious) induced him, in 1550, to summon a Zemsky Sobor or national assembly, the first of its kind, to which he made a curious public confession of the sins of his youth, and at the same time promised that the realm of Russia (for whose dilapidation he blamed the boyar regents) should henceforth be governed justly and mercifully. In 1551 the tsar submitted to a synod of prelates a hundred questions as to the best mode of remedying existing evils, for which reason the decrees of this synod are generally called stoglav or centuria. The decennium extending from 1550 to 1560 was the good period of Ivan IV.’s reign, when he deliberately broke away from his disreputable past and surrounded himself with good men of lowly origin. It was not only that he hated and distrusted the boyars, but he was already statesman enough to discern that they could not be fitted into the new order of things which he aimed at introducing. Ivan meditated the regeneration of Muscovy, and the only men who could assist him in his task were men who could look steadily forward to the future because they had no past to look back upon, men who would unflinchingly obey their sovereign because they owed their whole political significance to him alone. The chief of these men of good-will were Alexis Adashev and the monk Sylvester, men of so obscure an origin that almost every detail of their lives is conjectural, but both of them, morally, the best Muscovites of their day. Their influence upon the young tsar was profoundly beneficial, and the period of their administration coincides with the most glorious period of Ivan’s reign—the period of the conquest of Kazan and Astrakhan.
In the course of 1551 one of the factions of Kazan offered the whole khanate to the young tsar, and on the 20th of August 1552 he stood before its walls with an army of 150,000 men and 50 guns. The siege was long and costly; the army suffered severely; and only the tenacity of the tsar kept it in camp for six weeks. But on the 2nd of October the fortress, which had been heroically defended, was taken by assault. The conquest of Kazan was an epoch-making event in the history of eastern Europe. It was not only the first territorial conquest from the Tatars, before whom Muscovy had humbled herself for generations; at Kazan Asia, in the name of Mahomet, had fought behind its last trench against Christian Europe marshalled beneath the banner of the tsar of Muscovy. For the first time the Volga became a Russian river. Nothing could now retard the natural advance of the young Russian state towards the east and the south-east. In 1554 Astrakhan fell almost without a blow. By 1560 all the Finnic and Tatar tribes between the Oka and the Kama had become Russian subjects. Ivan was also the first tsar who dared to attack the Crimea. In 1555 he sent Ivan Sheremetev against Perekop, and Sheremetev routed the Tatars in a great two days’ battle at Sudbishenska. Some of Ivan’s advisers, including both Sylvester and Adashev, now advised him to make an end of the Crimean khanate, as he had already made an end of the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan. But Ivan, wiser in his generation, knew that the thing was impossible, in view of the immense distance to be traversed, and the predominance of the Grand Turk from whom it would have to be wrested. It was upon Livonia that his eyes were fixed, which was comparatively near at hand and promised him a seaboard and direct communication with western Europe. Ivan IV., like Peter I. after him, clearly recognized the necessity of raising Muscovy to the level of her neighbours. He proposed to do so by promoting a wholesale immigration into his tsardom of master-workmen and skilled artificers. But all his neighbours, apprehensive of the consequences of a civilized Muscovy, combined to thwart him. Charles V. even went so far as to disperse 123 skilled Germans whom Ivan’s agent had collected and brought to Lübeck for shipment to a Baltic port. After this, Ivan was obliged to help himself as best he could. His opportunity seemed to have come when, in the middle of the 16th century, the Order of the Sword broke up, and the possession of Livonia was fiercely contested between Sweden, Poland and Denmark. Ivan intervened in 1558 and quickly captured Narva, Dorpat and a dozen smaller fortresses; then, in 1560, Livonia placed herself beneath the protection of Poland, and King Sigismund II. warned Ivan off the premises.
By this time, Ivan had entered upon the second and evil portion of his reign. As early as 1553 he had ceased to trust
