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In December 1564, Ivan denounced the boyars as ‘traitors’ – ‘They want to devour me,’ he said – and offered to ‘give his realm to the traitors, though a time might come when he would demand it back and would take it’. Accompanied by Maria’s and Anastasia’s sons, and by Maria herself, Ivan left Moscow and sledged to a hunting lodge, Alexandrovskaia Sloboda. Muscovites begged Ivan to return, asking, ‘How can we live without a lord?’ and offering to butcher ‘evildoers named by the tsar’.

That same month, Ivan divided his kingdom into two: his oprichnina contained the best and richest lands, while leaving the rest of the land, the zemshchina, to be run by the boyars. To guard his sacred person, he formed a corps of killers, the oprichniki, led by a group of boyars, adventurers, foreigners and Tatar tsareviches including his wife’s brother, who wore black over their sumptuous clothes, rode with the head of a dog on their bridle and a brush on their whip handles and took an oath: ‘I swear to be true to the Lord Grand Prince … and not to maintain silence about any evil I may know that is being contemplated against the Tsar …’ Often accompanying and micromanaging their predatory sprees, shouting ‘Hoyda!’, a Mongol war cry, Ivan killed magnates and their children, who were beheaded, impaled and pushed under ice, an apostate’s death sending them to hell.

At Alexandrovskaia Sloboda, Ivan, coenobite and sybarite, oversaw a diabolical monastery where he and his monkish murderers rose at 4 a.m. for matins and heartily sang hymns of repentance before joining homosexual sex parties and torture sessions until bedtime at 9 p.m. Three blind old men then told stories to the insomniac tsar. Ivan was joined by a German astrologer-physician, Eliseus Bomelius, who had fallen out with Queen Elizabeth of England and now became his magus and poisoner.

In 1567, Ivan uncovered a conspiracy to enthrone his cousin Vladimir of Staritsa. Vladimir, afraid of a trap, himself revealed it to Ivan, who pounced first on a long-trusted boyar, Ivan Fyodorov. The tsar, accompanied by a terrifying new henchman, Malyuta Skuratov, imprisoned Fyodorov’s retainers in a chamber full of gunpowder which he then ignited, whooping as body parts flew into the air. Then ‘He and his children of darkness, verily like a madman surrounded by raving madmen, galloped at full rein to gaze upon the mangled corpses.’ Ivan stabbed Fyodorov, who was then gutted by Skuratov. A total of 150 boyars – and most of their households and families – were killed by the oprichniki, but the war was deteriorating along with Ivan’s mental health, possibly exacerbated by mercury prescribed for back pain. On 6 January 1569, as boyars defected to the Poles, Ivan, accompanied by his son and musketeers and oprichniki, stormed the cities of Tver and Novgorod, a secondary residence of Prince Vladimir, where the people, heirs to a republican and mercantile tradition, were weary of the war that interfered with their trade with Sweden. Thousands were killed by grilling them alive, roping them together and pushing them under the ice. In October, Ivan seized his cousin. Vladimir, his wife and nine-year-old daughter were forced to drink poison.^* Then he turned on his lover Basmanov, who was made to kill his own father before being killed himself; and then on his ministers, led by keeper of his seal Ivan Viskovaty, for whom he devised a gruesome spectacular.

On 25 July 1570, Ivan, black-clad and brandishing axe and crossbow, arrived at a Poganaia Meadow outside Moscow, accompanied by his son Ivan, now sixteen, and 1,500 mounted musketeers, to find twenty stakes hammered into the ground and linked by beams, along with cauldrons of boiling and cold water. As he watched with diplomats and the public, the oprichniki brought forward Viskovaty and 300 noblemen – most of the Muscovite government – who, after atrocious tortures, could barely walk.

‘I intend to destroy you so completely,’ Ivan told them, ‘that no memory of you will survive,’ and riding on horseback he asked the crowd to ‘come closer to witness the spectacle’.

Viskovaty, who had handled negotiations with Poles, Swedes and Ottomans, was accused of treason and strung up on the beams. Ivan ordered him to confess.

‘Go ahead and drink your fill of an innocent’s blood,’ cried Viskovaty. ‘I curse you bloodsuckers and your tsar—’ His words were cut off as Malyuta Skuratov sliced off his nose, ears and genitals, which killed him fast, infuriating Ivan who suspected that this was an act of mercy.

One boyar after another, some with their wives and children, were beheaded, boiled to death, flayed alive or, in a favourite new method, hanged by their ribs – 116 victims in total. But Ivan’s self-inflicted disasters were just starting: now a new Ottoman padishah invaded.

BLOND SULTAN, JEWISH DUKE, SERBIAN VIZIER