Happy Families: the Tsars

Today, in 1801, Tsar Paul I of Russia died. Poor Paul did not have a very good life at all. I mean, don't get me wrong, he was the most powerful man in Russia for a time, so clearly he wasn't, you know, the most hard done by person on the planet. But he didn't have the easiest time of it, either.

He was the son of Catherine the Great and Grand Duke Peter. Except, he wasn't. Maybe In her memoirs, his mother strongly implied that he was the product of a relationship with one of her lovers. But his mother hated him, and wanted to cast doubt on his claim to the throne, so this, combined with his physical resemblance to his father, suggest that he actually was Peter's son. Regardless of which claim is true, the fact that this was discussed around him from an early age can't have done him much good really.

In 1764, when he was a mere 10 years old, Lord Buckingham, who was the British Ambassador at the Russian court, suggested that his mother would have had him killed if she wasn't afraid of the social consequences of being implicated in a murder. Again, the story has no clear basis in fact, but the rumors circulated wildly, and it is likely that Paul at least heard of them, even if he did not believe them.

Catherine's actions - whether true or not - do seem to have had some effect on him. When he was 16, he started suspecting that his mother was trying to kill him, and once openly accused her of filling his food with broken glass. Once he was old enough, Catherine ensured that he was married off and sent to live in various parts of the realm far away from her. She openly insulted him in front of her favourites when he was at court, and encouraged them to do the same, as well as lavishing luxurious gifts on them whilst ignoring her own son. 

Once his wife had given birth to a son - later to become Alexander I - Catherine was determined to exclude Paul from the line of succession. For this reason, when she eventually did die in 1796, Paul immediately seized control and demanded that any documents which stated that he was to be cut out of the line to the throne be destroyed.

Years of living in his mother's shadow had not prepared him well for rule, and he proved an inadequate monarch over his short five year reign. He was far too concerned with the possibility of his own assassination, and, whilst most people wrote off his crazy conspiracy theories as just that, he did at least have the satisfaction of eventually proving them wrong.

Or he would have, had he lived. Which, after being attacked with a sword, then strangled, then finally trampled to death in his bedroom, he did not. Poor Paul.   

15 Reasons Why Wars Are Utterly Stupid & Daft:

15 Reasons Why Wars Are Utterly Stupid & Daft:

A list which came about because I am in the middle of revising for my final exam on the history of warfare, a topic I loathe, and the only interesting facts I manage to find about the battles are ones that are far to trivial to write about in an essay

and

because I like lists a lot. 

1) Shoes are important:

The Battle of Gettysburg, in 1863, remains the largest battle ever to have been fought on American soil. Ever. And do you know why it came about? Confederate General Robert E. Lee's army had no shoes, and when they found themselves outside the small Pennsylvanian town of Gettysburg, they thought to themselves, 'Oh hey guys, these Northerners have lots of shoes! Let's go raid the town for them!'. So they did. Where they happened to bump into the massive Union army, and realized that they'd better start fighting. The Confederates lost the battle, sadly, so I don't think they got any shoes at the end of it all. Sadface.

2) No really, they are: 

My friend Phil told me this story: during the Crimean War, the British were hopelessly disorganised, and decided to send all the left boots down to the Crimea on one ship, and all the right ones on another. And one of the ships sank. You couldn't make it up...

3) Actually, the whole of the Crimean War was a bit of a farce: 

I feel a bit bad making fun of the Charge of the Light Brigade, because so many people died, which is obviously a horrible thing, and would've been devastating for their families and everything, but the whole thing was completely preventable. British cavalry were given the order to charge up the 'Valley of Death', waving their swords about, whilst the Russians blasted them to pieces with cannons on all sides, thinking the British must be drunk.

4) To be honest, most nineteenth century wars were totally ridiculous:

Take the Franco-Austrian War of 1859, for example. It's a fairly insignificant one, in the grand scheme of things, but one thing it is famous for is the fact that the French had the bright idea to utilize the new railways to get their troops to the battlefield fresh and ready to fight, whereas the Austrians went on a two week march to get there. Anyway, the Austrians eventually cottoned on to this train business, and sent their reserve force to the next battle this way. Except they got off at the wrong station and completely missed the battle. Really.

5) And if they weren't missing battles, they were being inadequately prepared:

So a few years later, in 1870, the French were fighting the Prussians, and they had this amazing new weapon, called the matrielleuse. It was a forerunner to the machine gun, so if you were into slaughtering innocent soldiers, it should totally have been your weapon of choice. The Prussians should have been completely wiped out, but they weren't, because the French soldiers hadn't been trained in how to use their new gun, so it was effectively completely pointless.

 

6) Still, at least the French actually had an army:

After Charles II was restored to the throne, Parliament wanted to control his actions as they were afraid he'd do what his father had done, and plunge the country into Civil War again. Their solution, therefore, was to pay for and control the Navy, whilst allowing Charles an army only if he promised to pay for it himself. (Which, y'know, doesn't seem like the brightest move ever - 'Of course you can have an army! Just as long as you're in total control of it, not us! That'll ensure you won't try to attack us or anything...') In the end, Charles didn't attack the MPs (he was too busy partying and being a closet Catholic, two things which totally go together...) but for many years, the English army wasn't officially recognised as such, and the country at least technically had no army. 

7) However rubbish and unofficial the English army was, at least it wasn't full of sheep:

So the Civil Wars themselves were very complex, and their origins even more so, but one of the reasons they occurred was because Charles I needed money from Parliament for a war he was fighting in Scotland - the Bishops' War. In this war, England and Scotland were fighting over Bibles (as you do...), but the English army was much larger than the Scottish one, so the Scottish generals found themselves in a bit of a quandary. They decided that if they could trick the English into thinking their army was much larger than it was, they might be unwilling to fight them - and this plan turned out to be a good one. They did indeed manage to trick the English, by padding out their ranks with sheep, whom the English thought were...particularly woolly soldiers? God knows how this one worked...

8) Mind you, at least they weren't being paid in wool:
During the 100 Years' War, coinage was in short supply, so the English soldiers were paid in sacks of wool. Because all a fighting bloke really wants to do is learn to knit...

9) And about that '100' Years' War business:
Yeah, it actually lasted 116 years. But looking on the bright side, standards in numeracy had improved immeasurably by the time the Seven Years' War rolled round, and that ended bang on time, in 1763.

10) Also, at least numeric names make sense:
100 Years' War, 30 Years' War, Seven Years' War - they're all fairly logical, no? War of 1812 - that's another fairly self-explanatory one. The War of Jenkins' Ear...yeah, perhaps not. Though thinking about it, it started because Captain Jenkins had his Ear cut off by Spanish coast guards, so the name isn't that daft, even if the war itself was...

11) If you thought the names of wars were daft, wait until you hear what's going on on the battlefield:
So there's a very famous miscommunication about the First World War, where some field commander or another sent a message via telegram saying, "We're going to war, send reinforcements" but this got mistranslated and ended up as "We're going to a ball, send three and fourpence", and I can kind of see how this happened but honestly, didn't anyone think to check if this was the right message, coming from, y'know, a battlefield. War does this to people...  

12) Sometimes, people switch sides in the middle of conflicts:
Have you ever watched a children's cartoon and seen one of those montages where the good guys chase the monster through a door, then you see them turning around with the monster chasing them, then next thing you know, they're chasing the monster again, and no one knows what's going on? You have? Good. Visualize that happening in real life, 'cause it did: in 1460, the Earl of Warwick invaded (I'm assuming from some far distant land, and not, y'know, the well known island of Warwickshire...) captured Henry VI and installed Edward IV on the throne. Ten years later, in 1470, Warwick invaded again (oh who knows, maybe the Midlands were suffering from a lot of flooding around that time...), this time reinstalling Henry VI. You couldn't make it up...


13) We didn't get much better in World War Two either:
So Dunkirk was this terribly disorganised thing, where a load of British soldiers were trapped on a beach in Normandy with German soldiers advancing towards them and readying their planes to fly over and drop bombs on them, so the government requisitioned every ship on the south coast, even little two or three man fisher-boats to go out and rescue them, and they managed it, securing the rescue of the soldiers trapped on the beaches. In fact, everyone was so elated by the events that Winston Churchill had to make a special radio broadcast reminding the country that this wasn't actually a victory - in fact, it was a pretty awful defeat.


14)Anyway, sometimes you don't even need to fight, you can just employ a terrible euphemism plonk your warship in someone else's harbour:
As the British did when the Portuguese threatened to renege on their promise to grant independence to Brazil. No shots were fired and no fighting happened, but a stern warning was issued, and the best ship in the Navy set sail for Lisbon just to reinforce the point.

15) And sometimes, you just need to sound convincing:
In 1823, President James Monroe issued the Monroe Doctrine to the rest of the world, which basically said "Hey you guys? Yeah, don't attack us, 'cause we'll so get you back worse". Well, I'm not sure he said it quite like that, but that was definitely the general gist of things. Anyway, Spain and Portugal, who had both been planning to continue or restart old wars, backed down completely upon hearing this. Even though, at the time, the US had no navy and a very poxy little army. So really, all you need to do is sound threatening enough!

Oh my God. Am I condoning bullying?! Oh dear...         

A Tax on your Strangeness

So on New Year's Eve, 1695, a window tax was introduced in England. This was, literally, a tax on windows (but not, as I first misread, widows...). In honour of the fact that this was not nearly the weirdest thing to have been taxed, here is a list of 10 very odd taxes.

1) Window Tax:

Now, I am quite a fan of windows. They allow me to, y'know, see stuff that's outside without actually having to go into the outside, which is quite nice, especially when it is snowing or raining. They also are a very good means of keeping bugs and other unwanted objects away from my personage. Of course, being a modern, twenty-first century type, you know this already, and I am sure you are a fan of windows too. In 1695, many of the rich men and women of England also were fans of windows. 

 

However, when their King, William III decided that, under the Act of Making Good the Deficiency of the Clipped Money (yeah...that...uh...), windows should be taxed, the elite of England decided to brick up their windows so they wouldn't have to pay the tax, which is, I suppose, one way of getting around the problem. The tax itself had been introduced because the government was in need of money, but unable to pass a law which allowed them to collect a simple Income Tax, as  it was believed by many that disclosing your personal income to the government was an act of unacceptable intrusiveness into your personal liberties (an excuse I fear wouldn't go down too well today with HM Revenue and Customs).

The rate of tax was 2 shillings per house, with houses with more than ten windows incurring a variable rate of tax, and wasn't repealed until 1851, when 'House Duty' was introduced. 

2) Beard Tax:
In England, in 1535, King Henry VIII introduced a tax on beards. This was actually quite a clever idea to raise money - obviously the King and his government needed money, but it was often hard for them to raise it. However, anything that the King was seen to do or wear suddenly became highly fashionable, as people were keen to show the ruler what an excellent idea His Majesty had had in choosing to play bowls/wear clogs/learn the lute and so on. So naturally, when Henry grew a beard, those of his courtiers who were able to immediately followed suit (imitation is, after all, the sincerest form of flattery). Henry then introduced the tax, knowing that no one would dare shave off their beards in case they were seen as being against something the King believed in - which was a pretty clever way of thinking, actually.

The tax was variable, and those with more income paid more, rather that those with larger beards paying more. However, when Elizabeth I reintroduced the tax a few years down the line, she taxed every beard of more than two week growth, which must have been very hard to measure, though I'd imagine that 18 year old weedy boys managed to get away with not paying it for several years...

3) Beard Tax, the sequel:
The beard tax was introduced again in 1705, but this time by Peter the Great of Russia. All men with beards were required to pay a tax, and carry around a token which stated that they had indeed paid their tax. The token was inscribed with two phrases - "the beard tax has been taken" (fairly self explanatory), and "the beard is a superfluous burden". The tax had been designed to encourage Russian men to get rid of their beards, as Peter believed that their hirsuteness meant that they weren't as forward-thinking as other Western European countries, and Russia could only become truly modern when the men were clean shaven like their clean-shaven fellow Europeans, which is a real shame.

4) Cooking Oil Tax:
Now, anyone who has seen the pyramids or Tutankhamen's death mask knows how much the Pharaohs liked their extravagances, but even though they were considered literal Gods on the Earth, they still had to find the money to pay for all the jewelery, fancy palaces and eyeliner. Possibly the strangest way they thought would allow them to collect this money from their subjects was to tax cooking oil - or rather, force their citizens to buy cooking oil only from the Pharaohs themselves. The scribes (Ancient Egyptian taxmen) would go round to all houses to ensure they were using enough oil and, in possibly the oddest twist, refuse to allow them to recycle the used oil, instead binning it and forcing the people to buy new, Pharaoh-approved oil.

5) Hat Tax:
By 1784, it had become apparent that the Window Tax in Britain was not enough to keep the country afloat, and so new methods of taxation were introduced. The government, led by William Pitt the Younger, once again tried to introduce an Income Tax, but were once again prevented from doing so by a public who believed that this was an outrageous infringement on their right to privacy, and so decided to introduce a tax on hats.

This isn't actually as absurd as is sounds. The theory was that, the richer you were the more hats you would own, and the better quality these hats would be. Whereas a poor person might have just the one hat, which wasn't of a very good quality (and so wouldn't have to pay very much tax at all), a member of the aristocracy would have a lot of very expensive hats, and so would have to pay a lot of tax. The problem with this, though, was that it was very unpopular, and apparently led to people insisting that what they were wearing on their head wasn't actually a hat at all, so they wouldn't have to pay the tax ("Oh, this? It's not a hat, no not at all...it's er...a kilt! Yes, a kilt. I'm embracing my Scottish heritage! Och aye, and all..."). 

6) The 'anything-but-Income-Tax' Tax:
As people were so very unwilling to admit their income to the taxman, the government of the eighteenth century introduced many taxes on various household items, in an attempt to raise revenue this way. Some of the items they taxed included taxes on building materials such as wallpaper and bricks; taxes on leisure items, including dice and almanacs and taxes on clothing and make-up, such as glove tax, perfume tax and hair-powder tax (though the Royal Family and their servants, and clergymen were exempt from paying this particular tax). The British people responded to this by not purchasing any more hair-powder, and walking around with very greasy hair for a good number of years, until someone worked out how to invent shampoo.

7) Urine Tax:
Not a tax on those who produced it, but on those who sold it on (er, of course...). In ancient Rome, it became very easy for the owners of public toilets to sell on the urine they collected to tanners and cleaners, who used the ammonia in it (yum...). Officials noticed how rich the toilet owners were becoming, and, on discovering why, introduced a tax on urine.  

8) Salt Tax:
As salt has so many uses in our lives, it has always been taxed, in India as much as anywhere. However, when the British took over India as part of their Empire they raised the tax extortionately. From 1858, the Indian people were forced to pay an incredibly high rate of tax on their salt - something which continued for another 80 years. During March 1930, Gandhi led the first Salt March to Dandi. This was his very first non-violent protest against British rule of India, and though it didn't actually do anything about the Salt Tax, it did help to increase the levels of awareness of the Indians' plight, and gave them international support for their campaign for independence.


9) Artistic Exemption:
This, in fact, is the opposite of tax - in 1969, Ireland brought in a rule which stated that income derived from the sale of art (books, music, paintings, sculpture, film and so on) was exempt from taxation, allowing us to perpetuate the image of a starving artist. The act was introduced to allow artists who had fallen on hard times to recover more easily, but ended up being a bit of a problem when it became apparent in the mid 2000s that Irish rock group U2 were paying no tax on their millions. The law was modified so that only those artists with an income of less than 250,000 euros were exempt, and Bono and co. moved their savings to the Netherlands, so they ensure that they still didn't have to pay tax. Huh. 

10) Poll Tax:
A Poll Tax is very popular with governments because it can be implemented at any time, very easily, and is very unpopular with the public because it can be implemented at any time, very easily. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher tried to introduce the tax, but was thwarted by the rioting and protesting of the public who were outraged at it's unfairness. (Anyone who doesn't think it's fair should imagine that I have 100 gold coins and am asked to pay just 1 in tax; whereas you, who have only 2 gold coins, are also asked to pay 1 in tax, and then consider its fairness...) Though they may have gotten their History a little bit confused ("Yeah! We're rioting in the spirit of the revolting peasants of thirteen-something who didn't want a Poll Tax either so they forced Queen Victoria to sign the Magna Carta and that's why Henry VIII broke with Rome!") but I can't fault them for their passion, and they did help strongly contribute to the ousting of Thatcher as PM, so it definitely wasn't a bad thing.                     

A Brief History of Latvia

 Christmas in Riga

Let's go to Latvia. Because it has a fascinating History and some of the world's loveliest looking Christmas markets and because why not. History in British schools is focused far too much on England (and, under the new government's plans, will be even more so, which is just what we need, especially as children will be growing up thinking the Empire was A Good Thing. Don't get me wrong, there weren't some benefits from it. For example...um...we ensured introduced our language to the whole world, thus ensuring that school children no longer have to worry about being able to talk about their Aunt's pen when they go to France, as who even speaks French anyway? As for all those other languages...well isn't it enough that we just know their names? We don't have to bother talking in them - everyone can address us in English, and we can just shout louder until they understand us. We're so damn cultured.) so I have very little idea about what went on in Latvia, or indeed most other Eastern European countries. After a bit of reading, though, I feel I'm ready to take you on a whistle-stop tour of the country, though I apologize in advance if I have anything wrong.

We'll base ourselves in Riga, which is the capital city of Latvia. There had been a few ancient settlements on the site of what is now Riga, but the city really took off in the twelfth century, when some German mercenaries established it as an outpost for trading with the Baltic people. Everything was going swimmingly, until Albert, Bishop of Livonia arrived in the city in 1201 armed with 23 ships and 1,500 crusaders. Despite being a Bishop, Albert clearly didn't know his Bible too well as he proceeded to forcibly take the city as his. He established the Order of Livonian Brothers of the Sword (because he wasn't very good at catchy names) and converted the people of Riga to Christianity (one hopes he wasn't leading by example).

For the next few centuries, everything went as swimmingly as it could in medieval Europe. There were, of course, outbreaks of plague and other such things, but the country wasn't really much different to Britain, or Spain, or any other country really. Riga - indeed, Latvia as a whole - was part of the Holy Roman Empire, which, despite the somewhat misleading name, meant it was actually a part of the German Empire, so the largest ethnic group in the city were German, rather than Latvian. The city was mainly used as a gateway to trade with the Russians and other Baltic peoples so the city was remarkably cosmopolitan, with influences from Prussia, Russia, Poland, Lithuania and of course Latvia itself.
 

The country converted to Protestantism with the rest of the Lutheran countries in the mid-sixteenth century, which meant that when the Thirty Years' War occurred (this is one of the hardest wars to summarize in one sentence, but here goes: a series of incredibly destructive  conflicts involving most of mainland Europe, with the two great powers of the time, the French monarchy and the Hapsburg monarchy - the rulers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire - ostensibly about religion - the whole Catholicism vs. Protestantism thing - but which ended up being about power and money and who controlled what) the King of Sweden gained control of the city (supposedly to help support the largely Protestant population but mostly because of the trading, and therefore economic, benefits). 

The city remained under Swedish rule until 1710, when Peter the Great invaded and bought the city under Russian control. Despite the implementation of Russian as the country's official language, the demographic make-up of Riga was slowly changing and by the mid nineteenth century, Latvians were the majority ethnic group in the city. This coincided with the rise of the middle class in the country, who were very patriotic. In 1873, the first Latvian Song Festival was organised (a celebration of folk songs and traditional dancing) which still takes place in the city, every five years - the next concert being in 2013. 

All this was soon to change however, with the twentieth century being one of the most turbulent centuries in Latvia's History. The Russian Revolution of 1917 meant that it was quite easy for the German Army to march into the country and take over in 1918, but under the terms of the armistice, they were forced to grant Latvia freedom. It was the first time the country had been independent in its whole history. Riga, the capital city, prospered, as did the whole country. A democratic Parliament was implemented. Latvian was reinstated as the country's national language. The people flourished.

Then World War Two happened.

Stalin made a deal with Hitler in which Hitler allowed the Soviet Union to annex the country in 1940, but then the promise was reneged on in 1941 and the Germans ruled there until October 13th, 1944 when the Red Army came marching back in to take over once more. The war had decimated the country. Latvia had lost one third of its population, and its independence. The Jewish population had all but vanished under the Nazi regime; so called "Nazi collaborators" (mostly those of Latvian origin) were deported to Siberia and many thousands of Russians and other Soviet peoples were emigrated to Latvia to help suppress the native population. By 1975, less than 40% of Riga's inhabitants were ethnically Latvian.

Fortunately the Soviet Union was beginning to crumble by the late '80s, and on 21st August, 1991, the country was declared independent once again. Today it is as democratic and diverse as any other European country; a member of the European Union and a country which celebrates all of its diverse heritage. In 2001, the city of Latvia celebrated it's 800th birthday and it continues to thrive as a country to this day.

This post would not have been possible without my dear friend Charlotte and her extensive knowledge of and love for Latvian born opera singers.

That other lady with the lamp

Have you ever seen the film Carry On Up The Khyber? I'd recommend it, if you wanted to get an accurate historical view of what life was like for the military top brass in any British occupied country in Victorian times. Except really...

We're not very good at wars, I don't think. We like to see ourselves as the peacemakers, or the people who are fighting "for the greater good" against "the bad guys". We're the paternal influence; the father who threatens his children mainly with words, unless they do something really bad and we have to step in and give them a brief, but painful thrashing with the back of our hand. Or I think that's how those Tories think, anyway. Fortunately for me, I will never be in a position to check if that's true, unless something truly awful happens to me and/or I meet Doctor Who and he takes me back in his TARDIS to the Tory heyday of the mid-Victorian Empire.

[Note that what I said above pertains only to actual wars and fighting, not how we treated the people in the Empire. They were not looked upon paternally; they were treated as the scum of the earth instead. Stupid, stupid Empire builders.]

Anyway, during the first half of the nineteenth century, Britain - or, indeed, Europe as a whole - didn't really have much military experience. Of course, there were the Napoleonic conflicts, earlier on, but the were all over by 1815 when the Duke of Wellington won the Eurovision Song Contest with 'Waterloo' defeated Napoleon in battle. After this point, there weren't really any major wars or conflicts which the European nations were overly concerned with - until the Crimean War of 1854-56.

The seige of Sebastopol began today in 1854, making up part of the war. I don't want to go into too much detail about the war itself, because it made up a slightly yawn enduing part of my A Level course, but I would like to say this: if you discount all the people being killed in the battles (I am terribly sorry for the callousness of that phrase), this war was pretty much the biggest farce ever. 

Many, many men were killed in the war, on both sides (Russia, fighting the British, French, Turkish and Austrian alliance), but barely any were killed on the battlefield - most died because of the unsanitary conditions they were living in, or the cold. The Charge of the Light Brigade left so many men dead because their commanders weren't quite sure which instructions to follow, and sent them down the wrong valley, where they were shot to pieces by the Russians. The most use the (newly invented) telegraph was put to, was when The Times' correspondent used it to send back newspaper reports to the people at home. In short, the war was as big of a farce as Carry On Up The Khyber is. 

Something else despicable about the Empire is the way the British people used to treat people of any race and/or colour other than their own. An example of this can be found here - Florence Nightingale, the Lady with the Lamp, went out to nurse and generally Do Good, and schoolkids all over the land learn about her in their History lessons in primary school. How lovely. And I guess it is, but this sadly means that Mary Seacole is overlooked. Seacole did exactly the same thing as Nightingale, but had to pay her own way over there due to not having as privileged a background, where she could rely on her parents to pay her way in life. The only reason she is not taught in schools to the extent Nightingale is, though, is because she's black.

And there was me hoping we might have moved on from that way of thinking... Mary Seacole can have pride of place as the illustration of the day, though, so here she is: 

A Tsar is Born

2nd October 1552 - conquest of Kazan by Ivan the Terrible

Ivan the Terrible, 25.08.1530 - 28.03.1584

So, Ivan the Terrible did some pretty terrible things, clearly. (It was after the victory in Kazan on this day in 1552 that he was given the name 'Grozny', or 'the Terrible'.) He was a Bad Person. The conquest of Kazan, which involved amongst other things, decimating the Muslim population and laying siege to the city for five months, took place in what is commonly known as his 'Good Reign'. At the age of 13, he had someone who had annoyed him thrown to a pit of ravenous hunting dogs. There wasn't much left of him, at the end of that debacle... As they say (probably. I've never actually heard anyone say this) "he's not the sort of man you'd want to meet down a dark alley in the dodgy part of town".

But that's not what I want to get into today. Today, I want to talk some more about this whole good versus evil thing that I touched on yesterday. Again, as with Hitler, I'm not going to try and excuse the bad things that Mr. Terrible (and I do hope someone called him that...) did. I would instead like to explore why he did those things, and show that things aren't always as straightforward as they first seem in History, as with everything else in life.

Ivan didn't exactly have what you'd call an easy childhood. By the age of seven, he and his deaf-mute brother were orphaned, and the nature of their parents' deaths had been suspicious to say the least. After their mother died, they were placed in the care of regents - the Russian Boyars, or rich, land-owning nobles. Though these men (of course, this was the sixteenth century. They were all men.) treated the princes with respect in public, in private they were treated horrifically, often roaming through the palace with no shoes or clothes, and had to beg for food. Frequent displays of power by the Boyars meant Ivan would have thought nothing of armed men bursting into his chambers in the night and removing whatever they could of value. Aged 13, one of his closest confidants was skinned alive and his remains left for public viewing in a Moscow square. 

Ivan wasn't perfect, by any means. This incident lead to the perpetrators being thrown to the dogs, as mentioned above, and Ivan had already started taking his frustrations out on animals. Still, he wasn't all bad. Aged 17, he was crowned Grand Prince of Russia, though he insisted upon taking the title of Tsar (Russian for Caesar) and thus became the first in a long line of rulers of the same name. The Russia he inherited was a messy, desolate place, with no roads, no banks and no infrastructure, and he set about introducing reforms where he could to try to make it a better place. 

He selected a bride from an untitled Boyar family - Anastasia Romanovna. By almost all accounts, theirs was a very happy, if somewhat short-lived marriage. It was Anastasia's death that brought upon the 'Bad Reign'. She had had a long, painful illness which lasted a good few years before she died, which according to most accounts, devastated Ivan. He believed that she, like his mother, had been poisoned by the noblemen at court. Interestingly, a twentieth century excavation by scientists showed that the bodies of both Ivan's wife and mother contained ten times the normal amount of mercury, even after allowing for the popular mercury based foundations worn by noblewomen (I'm not sure if you'd call the British Elizabethan's lead based products better or worse...).

Is it such a surprise that, with such a turbulent, dangerous and, to be frank, upsetting early life, Ivan did the terrible things that earned him his infamous nickname? Well, maybe, maybe not - these things are always subjective, after all. But it remains true that, early on in his reign, Ivan set in place a lot of reforms to make Russia a better place, even though many of his loved ones were killed by noblemen seeking to further their own ambitions. And okay, he did start sieges and wars which killed a lot of people. But this doesn't necessarily make him different from most sixteenth century rulers, most of whom don't have 'the Terrible' or a similar moniker attached to their name. Sometimes, History is unfair on you, and it's only those who look further who find out the whole story.

Oh, and here's something I came across which you might find useful in a pub quiz one day: Ivan's wife was called Anastasia Romanovna. Her family eventually became known as the Romanovs, and this dynasty ruled Russia in their own right as Tsars for many, many years - in fact, the last Tsar, Nicolas II, was a Romanov. So in that way, the first Tsar of Russia and the last Tsar of Russia were related to each other! Cool, no? No? Well, maybe it's just me then...