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Despite his notorious name, not many people know what Ivan did to earn his nickname, nor are they sure if he was actually insane or just a terrible person. Ivan led an unusual life plagued with horror and tragedy. He was a person who was brought up in an unstable, violent situation and therefore turned out to be an unstable, violent person. The key to unlocking the motives behind Ivan's terrible crimes against humanity is to learn about the life he lived and the situations that he was faced with during his reign. Ivan's father was the Grand Prince Vasily III and his mother was the Grand Princess Elena. His father was a good man and a strong ruler, a man that ruled fairly but with a strong hand. The aristocrats of Russia, commonly known as boyars, were deceitful, cunning men always vying for power against Vasily. Ivan was born August 25, 1530, on a stormy night. This later was used as a foreshadowing symbol of the terror that Ivan brought upon his subjects. His younger brother, Yury, was born October 30, 1532. Yury was born deaf and dumb, but despite this, Ivan loved him very much and he was Ivan's only playmate in their youth. Vasily died on December 3, 1533 of an infection that stemmed from a saddle sore that he had let go untreated. His father left Russia to his son, then only three years old, who would rule until the age of fifteen under the regency of his mother and advised by the Council of Boyars. Ivan was a smart child who quickly caught on to the protocol observed within the palace. He was fascinated with Christian rituals, pilgrimages, and relics, having early on in his youth memorizing long passages of the Bible by heart. He connected himself to King David by relation to the emperors of Byzantium. Prince Mikhail Glinsky was the de facto ruler of Russia after Vasily died until Princess Elena got tired of him. She falsely accused him of wanting to rule despotically and had him put in prison from August 5, 1534 until his death in September 15, 1536. Elena then had Vasily's brother, Prince Andrey, sent to jail in 1537 after he conspired to overthrow her son. He died six months later, and Elena had the 30 nobles who had assisted Andrey hung from the gibbets along the roads of Moscow to send a message to those who tried to rebel against her son. Elena's lover, Ivan Obolansky, was now ruling for her and her young son. Elena died suddenly on April 3, 1538, and immediately Vasily Shuisky took over and sent Obolansky to jail and his sister Agrafenn, who was then Ivan's nurse, to a nunnery. Shuisky was the first of a list of regents that came along, each one being removed from their position by trickery or a twisted coup d'etat. Ivan had been exposed to violence is whole life and this warped him. He learned that the way to deal with the boyars was to use trickery and violence. When Ivan was 13, he had the Regent Andrey Shursky arrested and turned over to the keeper of the hounds, where he was clubbed to death and his body thrown into the snow. Ivan had already proven to be a sick person, sometimes venting his anger by throwing dogs from the terrace of the Kremlin Palace to the ground. By 14 years old, Ivan was riding through the squares and marketplaces with his friends, robbing merchants and flailing everyone he could reach with his whip. In 1545, when Ivan was 15, he became angry at a boyar named Afanasy Buturlin because he said "some rude words." Ivan wanted his punishment to fit the crime, so he had a stage erected in front of the prison and had Buturlin's tongue publicly cut out. Ivan felt bad about this later and invited Buturlin to the palace and appointed him to the Boyar Council. In May 1546, Ivan temporarily moves the capital to Kolomna, and was in good spirits. One day, while hunting in the forests near Kolomna, about 50 men from Novgorod came to him with a petition. A fight broke out when he refused to take the petition and several men from each side were killed. Ivan had the incident investigated, and 5 boyars came up guilty. He had two of the boyars tortured and banished, and the other three boyars were executed immediately. Ivan thought that he had divine authority to rule because his ancestry had origins in Rome and Byzantium. Even the Russian people began to think of him as a divine emperor. On January 16, 1547, Ivan was coronated as the first ever Tzar of Russia. He also claimed the right to marry anyone he wanted, and he did so by marrying Anastasia Zakharina, a Russian woman and not a foreign princess that the rulers usually married. Soon after his wedding, 70 citizens of Pskov went to Ivan to plead for the removal of their governor. He cursed them, poured hot wine over their heads, set their beards on fire, and made them strip down and lie in the snow. He would've done more to them, but he received word that Moscow was burning and rushed off to see. This fire burned his palace and shook Ivan up. He heard rumors that the serdechniki had started the fire. He then gathered a large crowd of Muscovites and they claimed that Princess Anna Glinskaya, Ivan's grandmother, and her children had started the fire. He did not prosecute them, but from then on he never trusted them again. Sylvester, the new priest and an advisor of Ivan, told Ivan that the fire was a punishment from God and that he'd better start being kinder to his fellow man. Ivan's first child, a daughter Anna, was born on August 10, 1549, but she only lived less than a year. His daughter Maria was born March 17, 1551, but died soon afterward. In 1552, Ivan decided to go to war against the Crimean Tartars for "destroying the Orthodox Faith," a war which he eventually won. "Although he had taken no part in the fighting and was never in great danger, Ivan genuinely believed that Kazan had been conquered by him and that by his presence in the battlefield he had induced God to favor Russian arms"(Payne, p.133). On the way home, Ivan received news that he had a son. Dmitry was born October 1552, but he soon died in June 1553. Ivan was heartbroken at the death of his son, because he desperately wanted an heir. In 1553, Ivan caught a cold and fell terribly ill. It is believed that he has a viral form of pneumonia, which brought him very close to death. "He had always been a suspicious man, who was inclined to see people in the worst possible light, and during his illness he grew even more suspicious, more resentful, and more cunning. His illness was a nightmare from which he emerged like a man clothed in the colors of the nightmare"(Payne, p. 143). He ranted and raved throughout the entire illness, and even though it only lasted less than a week, from then on he trusted no one. On August 7, 1560, Anastasia died. Ivan was convinced that she had been poisoned, or that a spell had been placed on her, and that in some way the boyars were determined to get rid of her to punish him. He began drinking heavily and associated with the lower forms of entertainment. Ivan became convinced that Adashev and Sylvester were behind the death of his wife and had them placed in prison. In August 1561, Ivan married Princess Kocheney Temriukana, the daughter of a Circassian chieftain, Prince Temriuk. She was baptized and changed her name to Maria. Ivan soon began his spree of vicious killings. For example, Prince Dmitry Kurliatev was arrested on charges of treason. Ivan ordered him tortured and sent to a monastery with his son. His wife and two daughters were ordered to a nunnery. Later on, he had the entire family strangled because he blamed them for his daughters' deaths, even though they had no connection to them whatsoever. On January 19, 1563, Ivan got into an argument with Prince Ivan Shakhovskoy and struck him with his mace. This blow proved fatal, and this was the first person Ivan killed with his bare hands. Two deaths in the family had a tremendous impact on Ivan. On May 4, 1563, the Tzarevich Vasily died when he was just over two months old. On November 23, 1563, Ivan's brother Yury died at age 31. A boyar named Kurbsky began writing to Ivan, criticizing him, calling him a madman, and telling him that he was basically going to hell for all of the murders he had committed. This began a series of exchanges between the Tzar and Kurbsky, and surprisingly Kurbsky never was prosecuted for his criticism. Over time, Ivan began to formulate a plan to produce a separate kingdom for himself, called the Oprichnina. He had new ministers and servants, called oprichniki, who would be ferocious and obedient to his every order. They wore black gowns, rode black horses, carried around brooms to signify that they intended to "sweep away all treachery," and tied dogs' heads to their saddles or under the horses' necks to indicate their devotion to destroying their enemies. Meanwhile, Ivan had decided to make Alexandrove Sloboda his permanent residence and central location of the Oprichnina, claiming he would go wherever God wished him to go. Whole towns would be included within the Oprichnina for the upkeep of the court. The rest of Russia was called Zemshchina, and it would be ruled by the boyars in accordance with his wishes. He would rule directly and absolutely over the Oprichnina. Ivan's thirst for blood was peaking. Hundreds of people were arrested by the oprichniki and taken to prison. After dinner, he would go interrogate the victims and ordered them tortured, watching the whole time completely delighted. Sometimes he killed with his own hands, but he found it more enjoyable to watch as others did it for him. Sometimes, he read out the list of people that he wanted killed in church, as well as the method of murder he had picked out for them. "More than one of the oprichniki attested to his full-throated joy when the blood of his victims spurted on his face"(Payne, p. 237). The corpses of the victims remained unburied for several days because Ivan felt that they didn't deserve a proper Christian burial. He couldn't sleep at night, and had to be told stories to fall asleep. He took the boyars' women and had his way with them, then threw them in the river. He blew up one boyar's house with gunpowder after he made the men strip down and go inside the house. The women were stripped and hunted like game. "A woman was hanged on her own gatepost. He ordered that her husband should pass through the gate without showing any sign of emotion, otherwise he too would be hanged. A woman was hanged from the roof beam above her dining table, and her family was ordered to take their meals at the table"(Payne, p. 254). During this time, his wife Maria died, but he had grown estranged from her and didn't mind her passing. In the city of Tver, around 9,000 people died during a two-day massacre. He killed 30,000 people the winter of 1569-1570 at Novgorod, and then sacked the city that February. 20,000 more people died from the famine and disease that came after the sack. Ivan was on his way to wipe out the city of Pskov, but the famous holy man by the name of Mikula predicted that the wrath of God was upon him. At that instant a great thunderstorm erupted, and Ivan began to beg for forgiveness. He then left the city before any killing ensued. On July 25, 1570, the oprichniki arrived in the Red Square and built 20 large fires with cauldrons of boiling water. Ivan then had approximately 150 prisoners publicly boiled alive. On May 24, 1571, Moscow was burned to the ground by the Tartars, and about 60,000 people (half of the population) died. Soon after this, Ivan went after his oprichniki, killing some of his most faithful followers. On October 28, 1571, Ivan married Marfa Sobakina of an ancient noble family from Tver. She died just 16 days after the marriage. A week later the Tzarevich was married to Evdokia Saburova of a well-known boyar family in Moscow. In March 1572, Ivan married yet again. This time it was to Anna Koltovskaya, but four years later he divorced her and sent her to a nunnery. In 1572, he fully abolished the Oprichnina. In 1575, he ordered the execution of 40 nobles and priests. Also in that year, he married Anna Vasilchikova. She died in 1577, and so in 1580 he married his fifth and final wife, Maria Nagaya. On the day of November 19, 1581, an event occurred that changed Ivan forever. Ivan thought that the people liked the Tzarevich more than they liked him, and that evening he and the Tzaravich got into an argument. The Tzar had also been the cause of the miscarriage of the Tzarevich's child earlier that day, when he hit the mother so hard that she fell and miscarried. The argument became very heated, and Ivan hit his son in the temple with his staff. He immediately threw himself down upon his son and screamed and cried frantically. His son died later on that week, but Ivan was never the same. He was grief-stricken for months. He became quiet, morose, and prone to outbursts of hysteria. He had frequent "fantasies" and felt like he was never alone in his room anymore. He would wander around talking to himself, and was scared of the nightfall because it brought him apocalyptic visions. He thought of himself much like God; they had both killed their own sons and distributed murder amongst the people without rhyme or reason. He made out lists called sinodiki that named the people that he had murdered and sent the lists all over Russia, asking people to pray for the souls of the lost. He took the money of all of the goods and land he had taken from others and gave that money to 200 monasteries throughout Russia. Towards the end of his life he became infatuated with an unknown English woman, believed to be a figment of his imagination. He had prophets predict his death, and they set the date at March 18, 1584. When that day came, he was extremely cheerful and playful as he awaited his death. He joked that they had gotten the date wrong, but they told him to wait. That evening, while playing chess, he dropped over dead. Ivan the Terrible did horrible things in his lifetime, but his illness was conditioned for him from birth. No one knows what illness he had, or what could have brought it about. He was obviously a sick man, but it seems as if the death of his son threw him into the depths of insanity. "He had been ill-treated and scoffed at in his youth, and all his life long he seems to have sought impossible revenges"(Waliszewski, p. 382). He thought, "everyone was guilty, except himself"(Troyat, p. 242). There are some people who believe that he never had a mental illness to begin with. He was doing what the times had conditioned him for, even if they were extreme. He might not have been mad when he had thousands of people murdered, but the symptoms that came about after the death of his son cannot be dismissed. His history, presented here, is merely a testimony for the reader to think about and make a judgement call. Bibliography: Payne, Robert and Nikita Romanoff. Ivan the Terrible.Thomas Y. Crowell: New York, 1975 Troyat, Henri. Ivan the Terrible. E.P. Dutton: New York, 1984 Waliszeski, K. Ivan the Terrible. Archon Books: Hamden, 1966 Word Count: 2715
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