In 1556, Ivan followed up his capture of Kazan by attacking Xacitarxan – Astrakhan – the chief slave market of the Volga, storming and razing it. The fall of these khanates was the start of Russia’s rise as a Eurasian empire. He backed a family of Russian conquistadors as important to Russia as Cortés to Spain. A tough old merchant, Anikei Stroganov, aged sixty-seven, and his three fissiparous but able sons, were rich from their fur-trapping east of the Volga and from salterns around Solvychegodsk in the north. When an English merchant, Richard Chancellor, sailed northwards to reach China and ended up where Archangel was later built, Ivan controlled it personally, hoping for benefits from England. He commissioned the Stroganovs to probe across the Urals into the khanate of Sibir, controlled by Kuchum Khan, a descendant of Genghis and populated by Mongols and indigenous tribes. Ivan gave the Stroganovs lands in the Urals and Sibir, where they built fortresses, settled peasants, developed mines and salterns, traded timber and furs, purveying saltpetre and sable to Ivan, and ran their own army, a posse –
In 1558, when the old crusading order of Livonia, officially called Terra Mariana, tried to join Poland–Lithuania, Ivan attacked, initially taking Narva, but then sparking a complex conflict that embroiled Poland, Sweden, Denmark and the Crimean khanate. Ivan played this game ingeniously and won early victories, but ultimately the twenty-year war almost destroyed Muscovy – and drove Ivan mad.
In September 1559, Ivan dragged Anastasia on pilgrimage to Mozhaisk just as the war lurched into crisis, but she fell ill, wearied by her husband, weakened by her grief at losing four children and exhausted by childbirth. Ivan rushed her back to Moscow: ‘How shall I recall the merciless journey to our ruling city with our ailing Tsarina?’ In August 1560, the twenty-nine-year-old Anastasia was dying, just as many courtiers were encouraging Ivan to make peace, as fires burst out in Moscow and as Devlet Giray, the Crimean khan, raided the south, seizing thousands of slaves. Ivan was convinced she had been bewitched and poisoned. Analysis of her remains reveal 0.8 milligrams of arsenic per 100 grams of bone and 0.13 of mercury, but similar amounts were found in other royal bones, symptoms of iatrogenic quackery, not of murder.
Ivan broke down, oscillating between bouts of killing and bouts of sex while his advisers begged him to remarry – one of his sons was too sick to rule; dynasty demanded an heir – but his catalogue of marriages would make Henry VIII look like a wholesome husband. After trying to wed the heiress of Poland, Katarzyna Jagiellonka, and then a Swedish princess, he did something extraordinary: in August 1561 he married into the Genghis family and House of Islam, falling for Princess Kucheny, pretty daughter of Temriuk, khan of Kabarda, an alliance that strengthened Ivan’s position in the Caucasus. She converted to become Tsarina Maria (while her brother Salmuk was baptized as Prince Mikhail Cherkassky, thus founding one of the aristocratic families of imperial Russia). But Ivan had changed: boozing and cavorting, attended by a circus of
As more aristocrats fled to Poland, Ivan with his commander Shahghali, Muslim ex-khan of Kazan, seized Polotsk (Belarus), drowning its entire Jewish population in the Dvina. On his return, critics of his war, Tatar marriage and homosexual affair plotted to make Vladimir tsar. Ferocious vigilance was – and is – the only way to survive in the Kremlin, but Ivan went much further, beating and strangling boyars, having them sewn into bearskins and thrown to the hunting dogs, or cooked alive in burning stoves. Ivan, inspired by the image of hell in the Bible, believed it was his right and mission to scourge his kingdom, his victims bearing the guilt of the tsar just as the tsar bore the guilt of the kingdom. To the peasants, this was the behaviour expected of their ‘Little-Father-Tsar’ –
His courtier Prince Andrei Kurbsky was horrified to see his tsar and his retainers become ‘raging bloodthirsty wild beasts’ who used ‘unheard of tortures and death’. When Kurbsky learned that he was to be arrested for murdering Anastasia, he defected to Poland, leaving his wife and son whom Ivan immediately murdered. Kurbsky denounced Ivan’s ‘intolerable wrath, bitter hatred and burning stoves’.
