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...