Ivan the Terrible
Ivan IV Vassilievich (in Russian Иван Васильевич), known as Ivan the Terrible (Иван Грозный), born August 25, 1530 in Kolomenskoye, died March 18, 1584 in Moscow, Grand Prince of Vladimir and Moscow from 1533 to 1584, first Tsar of Russia from 1547 to 1584.
Son of Vassili III (1479-1533) and his second wife, Héléna Glinska (?-1538), he succeeded his father on the latter's death on December 4, 1533. Too young to reign, power was subject to to a council of regency led by his mother, Elena, and by twenty boyars. She died on April 3, 1538, probably poisoned, and power was then shared between different factions of boyar families (Chouïski, Glinski, Bielski).
It was in this atmosphere of hatred and death that Ivan spent his childhood, in perpetual fear of being murdered. His hobbies are divided between torturing animals, hunting, mistreating the surrounding villages.
Self-taught, he is nevertheless interested in the Holy Scriptures and by prostrating himself in front of the icons, his forehead bears the trace of a callus. At 16, he joined the army in Kolomna, where it had just led an action against the Tatars, there he had 50 arquebusiers from Novgorod executed, carrying a petition about the vexations they suffered.
He was crowned Tsar in Moscow on January 16, 1547 at the Cathedral of the Assumption. He is the first reigning tsar. More than a title in his eyes, he believes he is invested with a divine mission, and his investiture was not consecrated until 1561 by the Greek patriarch Iosaphe of Constantinople.
He married on February 3, 1547 in the Cathedral of the Assumption with Anastasia Romanovna Zakharine (1520-1560) who gave him five children:Anna Ivanovna (1548-1550), Maria Ivanovna (1551-?), Dimitri Ivanovitch (1552- 1553) 1st Tsarevich, Ivan Ivanovitch (1554-1581) 2nd Tsarevich (who married Eudoxia Saburova, Praskova Solova, Elena Sheremetyeva), Fedor I (1557-1598) 3rd Tsarevich who married Irene Godunova.
In 1561, Ivan IV married Maria Kabardie-Temriouk (?-1569) daughter of the Circassian prince Temriouk who gave him a son:Vassili Ivanovitch (1563-1563). He remarried in 1571 with Martha Sobakin (?-1571), in 1572 with Anna Koltovskaïa (?-1626) divorced in 1575, in 1575 with Anna Vassiltchikova (?-?) divorced in 1576, in 1576 with Vassilissa Melentieva (?- ?) divorced in 1577, in 1580 with Maria Fédorovna Nagoï (?-1612) who gave him a son:Dimitri Ivanovitch (18 October 1583-15 May 1591). Following the Moscow fires of 1547 which caused thousands of deaths, Ivan, believing himself to be abandoned by God, decided to summon representatives from all regions of Russia. This assembly took place in 1550 and Ivan promised to defend the people against oppression and injustice. But this assembly also allowed him to impose his tsarian code (tsarsky soudiebnik) to replace that of his grandfather Ivan III which dated from 1497.
The first years of his reign are devoted to a modernization of Russia. He also placed in the key positions of the empire small people who were won over to him, rather than the vain boyars. He established a code of laws in 1550, reorganized the clergy in 1551, submitting it to the state, and created the corps of Streltsy, an infantry corps constituting the personal guard of the tsar. In 1549, he also held the first meeting of the zemsky sobor (земский собор, “land assembly”, the first Russian parliament of the type of feudal state), a council of nobles consulted during major decisions. A new code of laws (sudiebnik) and royal diplomas (ustavnye, otkupnye gramoty) broaden the participation of elected peasant representatives in the judicial process and local management. The first printing press was introduced during his reign.
From 1560, however, the regime hardened. The first laws restricting the freedom of the peasants are taken, which then lead to serfdom. Ivan IV embarks on a regime of terror against the boyars he has hated since his youth. In 1564, it constituted the oprichnina, the royal domain, owned personally by the Tsar. It is administered by its special police, the opritchiniki, who quickly become local despots, terrorizing the population and the nobles, imposing forced conscription for the Livonian front (see below).
Outside, Ivan IV ensures the extension of the empire. The Swedes, the Poles and the Tatars irritated him to the highest point and it was against them that he led his first military campaigns. He annexed the Kazan and Astrakhan khanates in 1552 and 1556, which put an end to the devastating incursions of Kazan fighters into the northeastern regions of Russia, embarrassed the migration of aggressive nomadic hordes from Asia to Europe and gives the empire access to the Volga. After two failures in 1547 and 1549, Ivan left Moscow on June 16, 1552 at the head of an army of 100,000 men, it is said. These, made up of heterogeneous elements, such as the strelitzes, infantrymen armed with firearms or troops (Possokha) neither hardened nor disciplined provided by the cities and the countryside were for the first time commanded by officers appointed on merit and not by birth. On October 2, 1552, Kazan, capital of the Tatars, became Russian after bitter fighting. To celebrate this victory, Ivan had Saint Basil's Cathedral built in Moscow. The construction of this lasted 6 years and according to legend, the eyes of its architect, Barma Iakovlev, would have been gouged out so that he could not rebuild another as beautiful.
He repels the Tatars and opens the White Sea and the port of Arkhangelsk to the English. In 1558, he engaged in the Russo-Livonian war, a long war which, after having ensured him an outlet on the Baltic Sea, ended in 1583 with a defeat against a coalition bringing together Poland, Sweden, Lithuania and the Teutonic Knights of Livonia.
1567, 1568, 1569 are the years of the bad harvest and the plague epidemic, which cause the immense mortality of the population.
The Crimean Khanate constantly ruined the borderlands of Russia during the reign of Ivan IV (see also Crimean Tatar invasions in Russia). In 1571 the khan of Crimea burned Moscow, but the following year the Crimean Tatars were defeated not far from Moscow (the Battle of Molodi).
In 1570 the Polish and Swedish detachments ruined the northern and western territories of Russia, the army of the Polish king Stefan Batory suppressed the garrisons and the population of some Russian cities.
At the end of the reign of Ivan IV, Russia finds itself bled by a 25-year war. In 1581 he killed his eldest son, probably in a fit of anger. On his death in 1584, he left two sons, Fedor I and Dimitri V, to whom he bequeathed a Russia in crisis, both economically, socially and politically, a crisis which only ended with the accession to the throne of the first of the Romanovs in 1613.