Poland, never safe from the hostility of the Krim Tartars, and threatened with the aggression of the great Mohametan power of South-East Europe, Ivan seemed to find among his own subjects enemies more punishable than any who menaced him from without. Moskva and Aleksandrov had been the scene of many a nightmare deed of cruelty; many an action of injustice and oppression had been perpetrated by the fiend-hearted Opritchniki in the country districts; but now something on a larger scale was to be attempted. The “episode of Novgorod,” one of the most terrible events of a terrible reign, is introduced by some of the earlier historians in a somewhat fantastic manner. One Petr, a native of Volhynia, who had suffered for some offence at the hands of the Novgorodskie authorities, revenged himself by calumniating the city rulers in the too susceptible mind of the Tzar; his story was that a letter, addressed to Sigismund-August, and signed by the Archbishop (Pimen) and the leading inhabitants of the city, offering to transfer their allegiance to the Polish monarch, had been hidden behind the image of the Mother-of-God in the Sofia Cathedral at Novgorod, where it was eventually found by a confidential agent dispatched by Ivan from Moskva.
155 Why a letter intended for the King of Poland, and presumedly of some urgency, should have been placed, and left, in such a curious position, is not very apparent. That such treason was actually meditated is at least possible. Novgorod, clinging to the memory of lost liberties and departed glories, may not unnaturally have turned wistful eyes towards any protector who might save her from a dynasty which, in the person of Ivan III., had wrought her such lasting injury, and in the person of his grandson threatened her with further oppressions. The morbidly suspicious mind of the Tzar would not be without apprehension on this score, and in this case there is no reason to presuppose that evidence, real or concocted, was an essential preliminary to preventative action. In the autumn of 1569 the incriminating letter is said to have been found. In December the Tzar, with the Tzarevitch Ivan, his favourite boyarins, and an army of Opritchniki, set out on a punitive expedition against Novgorod and the neighbouring towns. Like a python encoiling its prey this strange peregrinating “bed of justice” moved towards the devoted city, leaving an ugly streak of blood and desolation in its track. Klin, a small township near Tver, was the starting-point of the red carnival. What exact offence the inhabitants had committed in the eyes of their sovereign it is impossible to say, since they could scarcely have been suspected of complicity in the alleged treasonable correspondence with Sigismund-August. The Tzar, however, let slip his “peculiars” on them, and murder and pillage became the order of the day. “Houses and streets were filled with corpses, and neither women nor children were spared.”
156 Hence onward, at Tver, Torjhok, Gorodnya, and in all the villages as far as lake Ilmen, the same scenes of blood and rapine were enacted; the roads leading to Novgorod were strewn with dead bodies.
157 It was during this grisly progress through the dark snow-swathed pine-forests, where the ravens watched over the frozen corpses, and the wolves feasted on what the Kromiesniki left behind them, that Maluta Skouratov turned aside to the Otrotch monastery and transacted his business with the ex-Metropolitan Filipp. Truly the frosts of winter seemed to have got into men’s blood and all feelings of mercy and goodwill to have evaporated at the festivals of Noel. To the Novgorodskie, awaiting the arrival of this dread visitation, tidings kept pouring in which might well have roused them to the defiance of despair, and armed them against their fate. Jan. 1570The Opritchniki had already drawn a cordon round the slobodas and outskirts of the city, and were ransacking the numerous monasteries which studded the sandy plain, putting to death such of the inmates as showed the least sign of opposition. But there was no Martha to organise resistance, no Mstislav the Brave to step in between Novgorod and her doom. When Ivan, accompanied by his son, courtiers, and a formidable body-guard of Strielitz, made his entry into the terror-stricken city, he was met on the famous Volkhov bridge by the Vladuika Pimen at the head of the clergy and principal citizens, with the cross and sacred banners displayed. The miraculous ikon, which had repelled the attack of the Souzdalskie besiegers, failed to turn the heart of the Tzar, and the Archbishop’s quavering blessing was refused. Novgorod was given over to slaughter and pillage and Pimen himself was spared only to perform antics degrading alike to his manhood and his office. For six weeks the city and its outskirts was a continued scene of confiscation and wholesale execution; numbers of the inhabitants were flung into the Volkhov, at a point near the bridge where its waters never freeze, and so many were disposed of in this way that lake Ladoga is said to have been tainted by the carrion. The total number of the victims has been variously computed, contemporary accounts fixing the death-roll from 2770, “besides women and common folk,” to the maximum and probably enormously exaggerated figure of 60,000.
158 In a curious and appallingly suggestive register, preserved at the Kirillov monastery, in which Ivan used to keep a reckoning of his victims and apparently apprise his God of their dispatch, there is the following entry: “O Lord! give peace to the souls of 1505 of Thy servants, Novgorodians.”
159 The number of unburied corpses was sufficiently great to cause a pestilence, which rounded off the Tzar’s act of vengeance. After having denuded the celebrated Cathedral of its bells, vessels, ikons and other treasures, and destroyed cattle, grain, and whatever could not be conveniently carried off, Ivan called together the wretched remnant of the citizens and graciously asked for their prayers on behalf of himself and his family.
Then, in the middle of February, he departed towards Pskov, leaving the silent city alone with its dead. A romantic, but not necessarily romancing, element runs through the account of Ivan’s dealings with Pskov. Sharing in the conjectural guilt for which Novgorod had been so mercilessly chastised, the Tzar had devised for the city on the Peipus a similar punishment. Halting at one of the monasteries without the walls, on the eve of his intended assize, he was moved by hearing the bells of all the churches and religious houses around toll at midnight, in funeral anticipation of the threatened butchery. His feelings were still further worked upon by the appearance on the scene of a local celebrity, one Nikolai, half-hermit, half-charlatan, who offered him meat, and on being indignantly rebuked—it was Lent—boldly accused the Tzar of feeding on human bodies. This stark, uncanny being, in the vigorous words of Sir Jerome Horsey, an adventurous Englishman who visited Moskovy several times in various capacities, “with bold Imprecations and Exorcismes calling him Blood-sucker and Deuourer of Christian flesh, swore by his Angell that hee should not escape death by a present Thunderbolt, if he or any of his did touch the least childs haire in that Citie.”160 It is not improbable that this madman and fanatic may have made a strong impression upon a kindred spirit, and the unusual occurrence of a thunderstorm in February, which the chronicles relate, would have added to the Tzar’s superstitious uneasiness. Of the existence of this “sorcerer” Horsey gives evidence at first hand: “I saw this Impostor, a foule creature; hee went naked Winter and Summer.... His Holinesse could not endure me,” he adds, which, as the Englishman was openly sceptical as to his supernatural powers, was not wonderful. Whatever may have influenced the Tzar to an unwonted deviation into humanity, he suddenly stayed his avenging hand and returned to Moskva with his Opritchniks, his Court, and the captive Archbishop. That he was in any way satiated with cruelty does not appear, as in the same year he treated the capital to a blood-carnival on a grander scale than any it had yet witnessed. What gave added alarm to this new reign of terror was that no one was safe from implication, for the Tzar’s own seeming favourites and the most trusted of his creatures were arrested one after the other. The Basmanovs, father and son, Viskovatui, the Treasurer Founikov, Athanasie Viazemskie, Ivan Vorontzov, and scores of other princes and boyarins were pounced upon and hurried off into safe keeping, while sinister preparations went forward in the great square of the Kitai-gorod. On the 25th July all was in readiness; eighteen gibbets and a large cauldron suspended over a glowing furnace, with other implements of punishment, met the Tzar’s eye as he rode with Maluta Skouratov and other yet surviving favourites on to the scene of execution. But one important item was lacking; where were the onlookers? The great square was deserted, for the Moskvitchi had hidden themselves away from the alarming spectacle which the Gosoudar had prepared for them; there was no knowing where the matter would stop. Ivan sent his soldiers to summon his subjects to
