Ivan
1552
Very slowly. Very slowly.
The oars’ lilting refrain on the water.
Mother Volga, mighty Volga: the ships were coming from the east up the river.
High in the endless autumn sky, pale clouds passed by from time to time, as the ships, like their shadows, crossed the sullen waters, and the sun dipped slowly to the distant shore. Mother Volga, mighty Volga: the ships were coming from the steppe to the homeland.
Sometimes they hoisted sails, more often they rowed. From the bank of the huge river their oars could not be heard; only the boatmen’s faint rhythmic singing echoed plaintively across the stream.
Mother Volga. Mighty Volga.
Boris did not know how many boats there were. Only a part of the army had been left behind as a garrison in the east. The main force was returning to the frontier city of Nizhni Novgorod; and they were returning in triumph. For the Russians had just conquered the mighty Tatar city of Kazan.
Kazan: it was many days behind them now, on its high hill by the Volga where that huge stream at last turned southwards across the distant steppe and desert to the Caspian Sea. Kazan: by the lands of the ancient Volga Bulgars; gateway to the empire once ruled by mighty Genghis Khan.
Now it was Russian.
From dawn each day the boats travelled, until their shadows grew so long that they joined each vessel with the one behind so that, instead of resembling a procession of dark swans in the distance, they seemed to turn into snakes, inching forward on waters turned to fire by the western sunset ahead; while on the bank, the last red light from the huge sky eerily caught the stands of bare larch and birch so that it appeared as if whole armies with massed lances were waiting by the river bank to greet them.
Boris was sitting in a boat some way down the line. He was sixteen, of medium height with a frame that was still rather spare, a broad face with a hint of Turkish in it, dark blue eyes, dark brown hair and a wispy beard. Being a young cavalryman, he wore a quilted woollen coat, thick enough to stop most arrows. Over his shoulders he had draped a coat of fur, against the cold breeze on the river. Behind him was slung a short Turkish bow and at his feet lay an axe in a bearskin sheath.
He was of noble birth: his full name was Boris, son of David, surnamed Bobrov, and if asked where he came from he would answer that his estate lay by Russka.
No one paid any attention to him, but if they had bothered to do so, they would have observed a brooding, nervous excitement in his face, especially when he glanced at the first boat that was leading them back towards the west.
For in the first boat rode a twenty-two-year-old man: Tsar Ivan.
Ivan: Holy Tsar, Autocrat of all the Russias. No ruler before had taken such titles. And his capital was Moscow.
This was the state known to history as Muscovy, and it was already a tremendous power. One by one, in the process known as the Gathering, the mighty cities of northern Russia had fallen to Moscow and her armies. Tver, Riazan, Smolensk – even mighty Novgorod – had given up their ancient independence. And this new state was no federation: the Prince of Moscow was as great a despot as was once the Tatar Khan. Absolute obedience to the centre: this was the doctrine of the Moscow princes.
‘Only in this way,’ their supporters claimed, ‘will the state of Rus return to her ancient glory.’
There was still a long way to go. Even now, most of western Russia and the lands of ancient Kiev in the south, were still in the grip of mighty Lithuania. Further yet, across the Black Sea, a new Moslem power, the Ottoman Turks, had seized old Constantinople – henceforth called Istanbul – and their Ottoman Empire was expanding each generation. Catholics to the west, Moslems to the south. And to the east, the Tatars had regularly swept in from the steppes, over the Oka, past little Russka and even to the white walls of mighty Moscow itself.
It was not just that the Tatars looted and burned: it was the children they stole that made Boris hate them. He remembered how he himself as a boy had stood, quivering with fear and rage, inside the monastery walls as they came riding by, with huge panniers strapped to their horses, into which they tossed the wretched little boys and girls they caught. There were several lines of defence against them: the settlements of vassals – formerly hostile Tatars themselves – across the Oka; then there were little forts, wooden barriers and stout walled towns with garrisons. But no one had been able to control them.
Until this year, when they had found a master.
Boris smiled darkly. At his feet, with their hands manacled, lay two Tatars he had captured himself, and whom he was going to send down to his poor estate at Russka. That would teach the Tatars who was their lord.
Soon, he would get more. For this campaign was only the beginning. Kazan was the nearest of the Tatar Khanates. Far away to the south, by the Volga delta where once the Khazars ruled, lay another Tatar capital: Astrakhan. Astrakhan was weak. That would fall next.
And then would come the chief of all the western Tatars, down by the warm Black Sea – the Khan of the Crimea, at his stronghold: Bakhchisarai.
He was a terrible figure. The palace of Bakhchisarai was like the famous Topkapi Palace of the Turkish Sultan in Istanbul, and even the Ottoman ruler was glad to use the Crimean Khan as an ally. But in time he too would fall, and after that, eastwards across the Volga, the Kazaks, the Uzbeks, the Nogay horde – the fierce but fragmented tribes who dwelt in the Asian deserts – they too would fall: the power of Muscovy would crush them all.
This was the great destiny that Tsar Ivan had seen: that a Christian Russian Tsar would one day rule over the vast Eurasian empire of mighty Genghis Khan. Beside this even the largest ambitions of the western crusaders of old would look puny.
For the first time in all history, the men of the forest were going to conquer the steppe.
Indeed, even as they were leaving Kazan, Boris had heard some Tatars refer to Ivan as the White, that is western, Khan. No wonder therefore if he should gaze ahead at the young Tsar’s boat with such excitement.
Besides, he had another reason to be excited that day. That very morning, the young Tsar himself had spoken to him. Even now, Boris could hardly believe it. Tsar Ivan had not only spoken to him, but, it seemed, taken him into his confidence as well. Ever since, while those around him chatted, or gazed at the passing scenery, Boris’s mind had been full of the encounter with his hero.
And how heroic he was, this tall, dark young Tsar with his huge destiny. It had not been easy for him, Boris knew that. Yet he had overcome all obstacles. Only three years old when he inherited the crown, he had been forced to watch, humiliated, as the great princes and boyars fought to rule Russia in his place.
There were two mighty groups: the princes, descended either from the old Russian royal house or from the rulers of Lithuania; and the greatest boyar families – some thirty-five clans who made up the central core of the boyar duma.
These were the powerful schemers whom Ivan had overcome. They hated his mother because she was Polish; and they despised his wife. For when, like the ancient Khans, he had summoned fifteen hundred eligible girls to be brought before him, he had chosen this girl, from an ancient family, to be sure – but not from one of theirs. Yet Ivan had made them submit to his will. He had ruled through his own inner council of trusted, lesser men; and he had married his wife for love.
Anastasia. Boris had never seen the Tsar’s wife, yet he thought about her often. He thought about her because, when he got back to Moscow, he was due to marry himself and already, in his dreams, he had created for his wife the same role that everyone knew the lovely Anastasia played.
‘She comforts him in all his troubles. She is his rock.’ That was what they told him. ‘She is the one person in all the world he knows that he can trust.’
Her family might not be amongst the greatest magnates, but they were distinguished. Their name at that time was Zakharin. A little later they were to change it and call themselves by another: Romanov.
&nb
sp; Boris had no love for the princes and magnates. Why should he support them when they wanted to take all the great positions and leave nothing but the scraps from their table for the mere gentry like himself? Under the autocratic princes of Moscow, however, men like him could rise.
For the rule of the autocratic princes gave hope to obscure families like the Bobrovs. While the Moscow rulers had set out to break the power of the mighty clans, they had advanced men of lesser family, like the great Morozovs and Pleshcheevs, to enormous fortune. Indeed in Russia the gentry, men like Boris Bobrov, instead of opposing autocrats, as they did in much of western Europe, welcomed them as providing their way to fortune past the princes and magnates.
Two years before, Ivan had chosen a thousand best men – ‘sons of boyars’ as the gentry were called, or even humbler fellows – and ordered that they be given estates near Moscow so that they should be close at hand. Boris, to his chagrin, had been just too young to be selected, for service began when you were fifteen; but he had been glad to see that not all those chosen had actually been found estates nearby. And Russka, though a minor place, was not so very far from the centre.
The estate I have is nearer Moscow than some of the thousand, he reminded himself with satisfaction. I’ll not be left behind for long.
These were the thoughts that filled the mind of Boris Bobrov as he moved up the river, and went over, again and again, his meeting with the Tsar.
The camp had been still asleep, the boats drawn up in long lines upon the bank, shadow merging into shadow in the silence before dawn. Nothing moved upon the water; the sky was empty. Not even the few birds of the night, it seemed, chose to infringe any longer upon the vast peace of the slowly fading stars.
Boris had stood by the river bank. Before him, the nearby water seemed black although, far out into the huge river, a swathe of silvery greyness across its surface gave a hint of the pale starlight above. He gazed towards the eastern horizon scanning it for the first signs of the dawn, but as yet there was nothing to see.
He had awoken early and got up at once. It was cold and there was a slight dampness in the air. Pulling on a fur coat, he moved quietly out of his tent into the darkness and began to walk towards the river.
He nearly always had a particular sensation at this hour. First, beginning in the pit of his stomach, began a sense of melancholia. In the silence, under the unending darkness of the sky, he experienced an extraordinary feeling of desolation. It was as if he had stepped from the close womb of sleep into another womb – that of the universe itself which, perhaps, had no end: so that he was at the same time for ever trapped, yet utterly alone.
He came down to the water, to the boats by the bank, the long line of shadows. Before him lay the river, vast, soundlessly proceeding on its way.
His melancholy was bittersweet. It was like a conversation in which no words were spoken aloud. It was as if he had said: ‘Very well. I accept that I am eternally alone – I shall wander for ever on the empty roads of the night.’
And yet, even in making this sad submission to the universe, even as he moved into this region beyond tears, rather like the relief after weeping, he felt a warmth in his stomach that spread with a tingling sensation. It was a secretion, deep inside him, of tremendous joy and even of love, that made itself known to him only in these silent times before the dawn.
As he stood in the shadows, his mind had turned to his parents.
Boris could only just remember his mother – a gentle presence who had faded from his life. She had died when he was five. For him, therefore, family meant his father.
It was a year since he had died, but for as long as Boris could remember, he had been a tragic figure, disabled by terrible wounds he had received fighting the Tatars soon after Boris was born. For ten years he had been a widower. Once, one could see, he had possessed a big, burly frame, but the blue eyes in his broad, rather Turkish face were sunken, with dark hollows under them. His broad chest showed the bones, and it was only by a great effort of will that he managed to hold his ravaged body together with some semblance of dignity, until his son came of age and could fend for himself in the world.
It was this feat of endurance, this drawing upon deep reserves, that had made its deep impression upon the boy. More than any vigorous warrior, his father’s fallen figure represented to him something heroic. It was almost as if the emaciated figure who cared for him was both a living father and, at the same time, an ancestor from beyond the grave. And though he was only of medium height, and sometimes rather clumsy, broad-faced Boris grew up with a single, towering passion: to fill the heroic role his father had been denied.
‘The family is in your hands now,’ his father told him. ‘Our honour rests upon you alone.’
If he closed his eyes, he could see them, his ancestors – tall, noble figures resting in their graves, figures receding into the mists of time, warriors of forest, steppe and mountain. And if they were watching him, he vowed that they would not be disappointed. The family of Bobrov, with its ancient trident tamga, would rise again to glory.
Either that or I will die, he had promised himself.
Gazing over the river under the huge, empty sky, he wondered – could his father see him in the darkness now? Did he know that they had triumphed over Kazan?
‘You are with me,’ he whispered, with a little rush of emotion.
It must be so. God would not deny to his father the knowledge that his son was restoring the family fortunes, completing the circle that would atone for his own broken life. It must be so. If it were otherwise, then God’s universe could never be perfect.
Surely the universe was perfect. Surely one day, whatever trials God made him undergo, he would be granted success, respite from his loneliness and – ah, the thought of what was soon to happen! – with his wife he would find the love and friendship he had dreamed about but never known. He would find it: perfect love.
It would be so. He smiled, and drank in the cold air before dawn.
A footfall, quite soft, came from somewhere behind him. He turned. At first he could not see anyone, but then he heard a faint rustle and saw another tall shadow move out from the line of boats.
He frowned, wondering who it could be. The shadow came forward slowly, but not until it was only three paces away could he clearly see this figure’s face; and when he did, he had gasped with astonishment, then bowed low, as he saw it was Tsar Ivan.
He was alone. Without speaking a word, he had advanced to the river bank and stood beside Boris for a minute or so before asking him his name.
How softly he spoke. Yet Boris thrilled to hear his voice. He asked the youth where he came from, who his family were and, though he did not comment, seemed satisfied, perhaps even pleased, with Boris’s answers. Having ascertained these facts, Ivan said no more but continued to stand silently by the young warrior staring at the broad expanse of water that stretched away, a pale glimmer, into the blackness.
What should he say? Boris wondered. Nothing perhaps, yet it seemed madness to lose this extraordinary chance to impress the Tsar. After a little time, therefore, Boris ventured to murmur: ‘Thanks to you, my sovereign, Russia is breaking free.’
Had it pleased him? Boris hardly dared to look, but when he stole a glance at the Tsar’s tall figure, he could see on his long, aquiline face only a faint frown as he continued to stare at the water. Not daring to say more, Boris waited in silence. The moving river, huge though it was, went by soundlessly.
It was some time before Ivan spoke, but when he did, it was in a deep, quiet murmur that was only just distinct enough for Boris to hear.
‘Russia is a prison, my friend, and I am Russia. Do you know why that is?’ Boris waited respectfully. ‘Russia is like a bear kept in a cage for men to mock at. Russia is trapped by her enemies – she cannot reach her own natural borders.’ He paused. ‘Yet it was not always so. In the days of Monomakh it was not so.’ He turned to address Boris directly. ‘In the days of golden Kiev, tell me, how
did the men of Rus trade?’
‘From the Baltic to the Black Sea shore,’ Boris answered. ‘From Novgorod to Constantinople.’
‘Yet now the Turks occupy the second Rome; a Tatar Khan controls the Black Sea ports. And in the north,’ he sighed, ‘my grandfather Ivan the Great broke the Hansa merchants in Novgorod, yet still those German dogs control our northern coasts.’
Boris knew how Ivan the Great had ended the near cartel of the Hansa merchants in Novgorod. But alas, rich though Novgorod was, it still had to trade with the west through the Baltic ports which were mostly in the hands of the old German knightly orders or of German merchants. The only ports belonging to Russia herself were too far north, iced up for half the year.
‘Russia is landlocked,’ Ivan said bitterly. ‘That is why she is not free.’
How it touched Boris to hear these words. It was not just what the young Tsar said, but the pain that Boris heard in his voice that stirred him. This mighty sovereign, whom he already revered, suffered pain just as he did. He, too, felt a sense of indignity – in his case for Muscovy itself – just as poor young Boris suffered all the pangs of impotent fury when he considered his pitiful little inheritance at Russka. Truly, the Tsar in his noble and bitter rage was a man like himself and forgetting, for an instant, his own lowly position, he turned and whispered urgently: ‘But it is our destiny to be free, to be great. God has chosen Moscow as His third Rome. You will lead us!’
He meant it, passionately, every word.
Ivan turned and Boris felt his piercing eyes upon him, yet he was not afraid.
‘You truly believe what you have said?’
How could he not?
‘Yes, lord.’
‘That is good.’ Ivan nodded thoughtfully. ‘God led us to Kazan and gave it into our hands. He answered the prayers of His servant.’