Empire: World History - 73. Ivan the Terrible and the Founding of Russia

Episode Date: August 22, 2023

Subjected, downtrodden, brutalised. The principality of Muscovy had long suffered at the hands of the Mongols. But as their overlords weaken, their ruler, Ivan the Great, begins to lead the Muscovites to freedom. Come 1533, it is time for his descendant, Ivan the Terrible to rule. A man known to enjoy hanging people by their ribs, and drowning people under river ice, will his taste for torture throw everything into chaos? Or will he expel the Mongols once and for all, laying the foundations of the Russian Empire? Listen as William and Anita are joined by Simon Sebag Montefiore to discuss the early days of Russia and its empire. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport + Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. And welcome to the brand new series of Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durimple. It's very exciting. It's very, very exciting. We've been looking forward to doing this.

Look, Russia, in this particular episode, let me just give you a little menu of what's going to come up, because we're going to be talking about the founding of Russia, the first Tsars. You'll hear about Mongol hordes. And we have the very best guest to talk to today. It is a strange thing because I've always sort of in my head called him Simon, as in the great Simon Seabag Montefuri, author of The World, a family history of humanity. It's an amazing, dazzling, huge dome of a book where you'll find many. of the characters that we've discussed throughout this podcast series and so many more besides.

And the Romanovs, the Robinovs. And the Romanovs. And we'll talk about many others of his books because he's got a great back catalogue. But you prefer to be called Seabag. That's right, isn't it? Well, everyone calls me Seabag except my parents and my brothers. Yes. I remember when we first met, I called you Simon and you sort of did a little. Wintz. That's, we should fiss up that Seabag and I have known each other for, close on 35 years now, and he was always Seabag. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I actually never liked the name Simon.

But the Russian Simeon would be better, so you could try that, or Sinka for short. Yeah, not doing that. Seabag is. Let's stick to Seabag then. Seabag is, okay. Anyway, look, I want to know, because you have spent so much of your life

thinking about researching and writing about Russia, where the fascination began for you? I think it began because my mother's family were Jewish refugees from the Russian Empire, from Poland, from Lithuania, and from Odessa, various of them. When I was in my childhood, I was fascinated with these stories, and I began to study it. And I dreamed that one day I would either be in Russia or write about people like Stalin and come from the Great. And then, you know, at university, I did Catherine the Great, you know, enlightened despots.

And then when the wars started at the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, I went out there. And I was, you know, I was very lucky to witness many of the wars and to sort of to be literally lying in a ditch, seeing coups, wars, battles taking place and to know many of the presidents and warlords of that time. I remember reading your reports hugely obviously. You were right at the center of things. And it was very exciting because, I mean, I think there's a great, you know, I think there's no better training for a historian than to witness the fall of a great empire. And that was, that was what we saw. But of course, what we didn't realize was the wars that I was covering, like in Tbilisi, in Abkhazia, in Karabak, in Chechnya, in Krasny, in Krozni. I mean, they were pretty serious wars. And if you were in them, they were pretty terrifying. But they were nothing compared to what's happening in Ukraine. And of course, we thought, thought that the end of the Soviet Union had been sort of semi-bloodless with these minor wars, but now, of course, we realise it went on for another 20 years and it's still going on.

There was a nice article by Timothy Gartanash in the Financial Times this weekend that made the prediction that the continuing fall of the Soviet Union is likely to be the major political event in Europe for the next 40 years, he said. Well, it may well be. I mean, Russia is a very complicated empire. I mean, there are various interesting things. And of course, you know, the Ukraine war makes this podcast, makes our conversation terribly important and interesting and relevant. And Sergei Lavrov, when he was, when he, the foreign minister, when he was asked, who'd advise Putin to invade Ukraine, said, you know, he only had three advisors, Ivan the Terror, Paul Peter the Great and Catherine the Great.

I have to issue a correction at this point. I'm not often wrong, but I was wrong in the last episode because I was on a school trip to Russia, but not when you were lying in a ditch in 1991. got my dates and a muddle. It was 89 that I was there, which I did say the date, but I thought it was, I don't know, I got the Yeltsin on a tank thing and the, in a right old mess. And also, the shops I talked about, I said they were the GUM stores where foreigners could only go and buy nice things and everyone would want to trade with you. They weren't. They were the Berioschkas. The Gung, that's right. The Gung was the great was the department store. Departments where everyone could go to, but it was Beryska. So, yes, I got my memories in a bit

of a mess. And I was standing next to those tanks that Yeltson. When I was nowhere near them. I'd been two years before. So I think that this discussion is very important. And it is fascinating that the phenomenon that, you know, we've all been fascinated with, say, the British Empire and its achievements and crimes. And in fact, there was a just, there was a very real empire standing right there in Europe. And when I wrote at the end of the Romanovs, you know, that, you know, the empire continues. Everyone said to me, when I wrote the Romanoz, which was sort of eight years ago, lots of people said to me, you totally exaggerated that. How could you do that? You're just trying to promote your book and the importance of the Romanovs. Yeah, who's laughing now, eh, Seabag?

Who's laughing now? Yeah. And it's just interesting how things turn out. So empire is very relevant, and the real empire was staring us right in the face. Seabag, in our last series, we dealt very briefly with the kind of distant myths of Russian history when we were dealing with Kat Jarman talking about the Rus and the Vikings coming down on those rivers from the Baltic to the Black Sea, slaving, founding slaving settlements and slave pens in what's now Ukraine and Russia. But we've left it there. So could you open today by maybe giving us a picture of what happens next in Russian history after those slave raids in the Vikings

in the, what, eighth, ninth, tenth centuries? Yeah, our story really starts with Rurik, a character called Rurik, semi-mythic, we know virtually nothing about him, we know virtually nothing about this period, and much of it may be made up by monks writing the primary conicals, you know, 300 years after the events that take place.

But basically, Rurik is a semi-legendary, Varangian, Viking, Nordic man who comes down the rivers to trade with his with rowers with armed forces and ultimately these people these these Varangians these Vikings would merge somehow with the Slavic people who are also moving into this area and it's it's a process we don't understand we don't know all about it but we do know is it sort of slavers and enslaved coming together or is it they're trading in furs, they're trading in slaves. Slaves, I mean, the one thing when you, when you read the world of family history is that you realize that slavery is like an omnipresent part of all societies

until the mid-19th century. And so they were trading slaves. The word slave comes from Slav. And Slavic slaves, blonde slaves, were sold throughout Europe in millions. And the slave trade, which will come to later, because, you know, part of our story, in Ivan the Terrible includes one of the biggest slave trading expeditions ever in 1572, when they, when they captured 150,000 slaves, apparently. We're going to come to Ivan the Terrible, but I want to sort of start, use a pivot point in another Ivan, Ivan the Great, because he is this crossroads between the Mongols, basically, in the 13th century, coming and doing their frequent smash and grabs in territory that you've

described. And then this man comes along and says, right, like Gandalf, you will not pass. Tell us about the lesser known, Ivan. And he's already based in Moscow. Moscovy is the centre. I think just to sort of literally just to do this very, in a very short way, Rurik comes down the rivers. He settles in places like Norfgarod. In 862, you know, he found the dynasty, the Rurikid dynasty, that ruled Russia until 1598. So all the people we're going to be talking about in the first part of this are the descendants of Rurik. His family takes Kiev, and in 9-88, his descendant, Vladimir the Great,

converts to Orthodox Christianity from paganism, sponsored by Basil, the Bulgarian, the Byzantine, the Eastern Roman Emperor. From now on, these rulers and their people are Orthodox Christians, and the family rules these kingdoms united for a very short time, then they break up and different princes in the family rule different cities. You know, there's Vladimir, the vigorous, Vladimir Sousdard, there's Kiev, and of course, there's Moscow. So this is where Moscow comes in.

In 1147, Moscow is first mentioned. It's founded by one of these Rurikid princes, Yuri Dolgoruki, the Long Arm. He's an interesting character, because when they found Moscow, 1147, as the English listeners will know, it's just after 1066 in the Norman Conquest. His mother is Harold Godwinson's daughter. This is our Harold, yeah, not in Harold Hadrard. Yeah, this is our Harold who's killed at the Battle of Hastings. His daughter, Gaither, probably is the mother of the founder of Moscow, which is quite a

thought. So there's a very good English Anglo-Saxon connection there. So that's where Moscow becomes important. And one line of the family rules Moscow. the principality of Moscow. And as we go through history, Moscow becomes the most important of these principalities, not Kiev, not Novgorod, and so on. And ultimately, we then jump to 1223 when the Mongols invade Russia. They slaughter and defeat the Russian princes, the Rurikid princes in 1223, and then they come back in 1238, and they conquer all. They defeat all the Russian Rurikid

princes. And for the next 200 years, the Rurikid princes, the great princes of Moscow are literally just sort of henchmen of the Khans who rule from Karakoram out in Mongolia at first, and then the Golden Horde, the descendants of Genghis Khan, who rule from Sarai, their capital. And quite often, these Rurikid princes are invited out to Sarai and murdered there and somebody else has appointed Prince of Moscow. And the Golden Horde have converted to Islam by this stage, or are they still? Yes, they have. Over time, they start off as worshippers of the great golden sky and golden heaven, Alta, all that. And then they convert to Islam. And so by the time that Anita is talking, the time of the Ivan I'm the first, I'm the second, Ivan the third, they are Muslim.

They have themselves broken up into many smaller Khanates. the Golden Horde is the biggest, and it rules basically Russia. And so gradually, the Moscow princes become very rich as fundraisers, as tax collectors, and as general sort of thugs on behalf of the Golden Horde Khans. But also, they dream of freeing themselves from the Mongol yoke. Yeah, so, I mean, they're getting stronger and richer. And it seems to me sort of biding their time. but at the same time, are the Mongols getting weaker and weaker?

And that's very important, isn't it? Yes, for 100 years, the Mongols are all powerful, even when they break up into different empires. So there's the Il-Khan's ruling what is now Persia, Iraq, and there's the Golden Hall ruling Russia, for example. And there's Kubla Khan and his family ruling China. So there's this great empire still very powerful. But as time goes on, after about 100 years,

they start to fall apart and they start to weaken. and in 1380, Dimitri Donskoy, one of the princes of Moscow, actually defeats the Mongols, who are also known, just to be complicated, as the Tartas. Right. They defeat the Mongols at Kulikovo, and that is the sort of first great victory that they went. But it's 100 years before they really get rid of the Golden Horn. But what is, the reason for the Mongol decline is what exactly? They just, you know, they peter out as empires do peter out, or, you know, you have a new generation that's not interesting.

you know, the clogs to clogs theory of, you know, people forget what brought them there? What is it? Well, they last 200 years and the last of the sort of the Genghis Khan family is still ruling in Bukhara in 1922. Yeah. And an offshoot of them is Tamerlane, which, you know, who will come to in a second, whose family goes on to rule India as the Mughals, which again connects up with a wonderful podcast. Upcoming theories of Empire Pod, most definitely. Well, Tamerlane's fascinating character.

But I think we should jump ahead now. So to 1380 is the date that is the beginning of the freeing of Russia, of Moscow from the Mongol Yoke. He defeats a Mongol Khan. But within about two years, being out to you, the Mongols are back. And it's a totally exaggerated date. And, you know, Tamerlane ravages Russia in the late 1390s. And the Mongol Horde again demands the payment of tribute from the war. from Moscow. And you've got to realize, by the way, Russia doesn't exist yet. This is Moscow.

There was called the Great Princes of Moscow and Velikikiniaz Moskowski and they, that's the state that exists now. Russia is a later invention which we're going to come to. But another reason why the Mongols actually now have a sort of eclipse in Russia is the rise of another power, which is the combination of Poland and Lithuania, which is a vast state that it is, has, rules from the Baltic to the Black Sea. And that challenges them. And Moscow is somewhere in between these two very powerful states, neither of which exist anymore. So there are lots of countries we're going to talk about in this conversation that don't exist today. I want to focus in, though, on the one character, the lesser known Ivan, the great, not the terrible.

So what was he like and who was he and, you know, what made him special? He's a fascinating character. He's one of the giants of Russian history. He's an extraordinarily opportunistic, roofless, brilliant visionary. You see your face lighting up as you contemplate him. Yes, I mean, he has an incredibly tragic childhood. His father is Vasili the Second, Vasili the Blind, who faces a 25-year family feud. And in the process of this, Vasili is blinded,

a terrible thing at any time. but obviously in a time when rulers were expected to lead their armies at battle. And his son, little Ivan, is captured and is imprisoned as a boy of eight away from his parents. So he has this traumatic, a traumatic childhood for a ruler always instills a respect for power, a sense of paranoid, vigilant security and a will to control and to expand and to dominate. We see this later, don't we, with Peter the Great and so on. I mean, it's really, it's that Mark Twain quote, history doesn't repeat itself, but it all rhymes. And in Russia, there are so many, I mean, throughout history, traumatized, terrified little boys who grow up to be extraordinarily either awful or just extraordinary, well, mostly awful, you know, leaders in their own right.

Yeah, we should talk, I mean, psychologically, that's, of course, true, Anita, but also there are echoes today. And that was something we should probably fake talked about at some point and just mention is that the Russian state has no borders, has no natural borders. It's a vast Eurasian plane, which means that Russia, of course, can expand easily in all directions. But it also means it's always insecure. Its rulers always have a military duty more so than any other kingdom in Europe. And it also has two key influences. We mentioned already the Byzantine connection and Orthodox Christianity, you know, was led by the emperor and the patriarch in Byzantium in Constantinian.

noble, the Eastern Roman Empire, but in 1453, that vanishes, that falls to the Ottomans. And that's exactly the period that we're now talking about. So this is the sad demise of the Paleologus. But then Ivan sort of says, right, well, I'm the man. And he steps forward and he says, right, I'm the head now of the Orthodox. She feels that vacuum. Well, this happens with a marriage, doesn't it? Yeah. Well, the other half of this, which I think is much more important, the Russians always meant, always emphasised this Byzantine. And Ivan the Great, who we're talking about now, He emphasized it. He said, you know, the first Rome has fallen, the second Rome has fallen. Now we are the third Rome. We will be the centre of the Orthodox world. And I will be the Caesar. And he uses the word

Tsar. And this is where the beginning of the, this is where he's the first to really use the word, in case anyone didn't pick that up. Zah and Caesar are the same word. Yeah. Yeah. And later in German, Kaiser. But this is where he says, we are an emperor. This is an empire. And I am the Caesar, the czar. much more important influence on Russia, which is not mentioned in Russian history, it was mentioned much less, is of course that really these Tsars, these princes of Moscow are semi-Tatar's. They're semi-Mongols. Their army is a cavalry, mainly a cavalry force, with bows and arrows and crossbows exactly like Tartas. Many of their soldiers are Tata renegades. Much of their court is made up of Tata princes that they call Zareviches, which are sort of sons of

kings, sons of emperors, who are descendants of Genghis Khan, who convert to Christianity and marry into the aristocracy there. So he takes on this notion that he is the first Caesar, you know, the first Caesar, but also the inheritor of the orthodoxy, that he's going to defend it, even though he has this mixed bag of troops that are supporting him, which is, which is irony upon irony. And tell us about his wife. Tell us about Sophie Palliologus and this extraordinary princess. What he does is he marries Sophie Palliologists, Palliologa, whose real name is Zoe in the Greek, who's been brought up in Rome, and she is the niece of Constantine the 11th, Pallelogos, the last emperor of Constantinople, who dies and

vanishes, his body is never found in the ruins of Constantinople. On the walls, back into the end. They just find his shoes, isn't it? The tragic story of his shoes, the slippers turning up. Do they? I mean, they never find him. He takes off his insignia and throws himself into battle. And so she has been brought up.

She's the niece, right? She's the niece. She's been brought up in Rome. And the Pope kind of sponsors this strange marriage, because it sponsors this orthodox espousal. She comes to Moscow. And even though we don't know everything about her, and we may be exaggerating her importance,

given the fashion for exaggerating or promoting women in history, which is very important, she's clearly an incredibly able, interesting, intelligent player in the politics of this place where she's arriving from the heart of civilisation, Rome. She's going to Moscow, to Muscovy, this kind of brutal and complex world that she knows nothing about. And she makes a success of it. And she brings much with her. What exactly she does, we don't know.

but she's certainly influential in things like Ivan decides to improve the Kremlin, the sort of 69-acre kind of castle, which is the centre of Moscow, and still is, of course. And so thanks to her influence, they go to the Medici's, and they bring over a whole lot of Italian, Florentine and Roman craftsmen and architects to improve and rebuild this kind of embellish the Kremlin. So those red crenellated walls that you see now when you go to the Kremlin, that is a gift of Ivan and his missus. I mean, that's their thing. And the funny thing is we think of them now as typically Russian, those walls. But in fact, they were typically Renaissance. This is the Renaissance that comes to Moscow and they build things.

They rebuild the Dormition Cathedral where all Zahs are crowned for the rest of Russian history. And Seabag, this is to mark the defeat on the River Ugra of Ahmed Khan. the last of the Mongols to really threaten Muscovy. Well, what's interesting about it, Armid Khan is one of these Genghisid princes, as you say, one of these Genghis Khan's. He rages an army into Russia, into Muscovy, and Ivan the Great goes out with his army, and they sit at the Ugra, and they sit there, and in the end, nothing happens. So it's a battle that never takes place.

But Armacom just retreats and goes off back onto the step. and yes, and of course, this is a key moment because at last, you know, the shoe is now on the other foot, the worm has turned, and Muscovy is now a rising power under this extraordinary person. One of the fascinating things about Ivan the Great is he's also known as Grozny. Grozny is the Terrible. He is the terrible, the grim, and he looks very like his grandson, Ivan the Terrible.

They're not portrayed smiling very often in their portraits. No, and just to finish Ivan the Great, Ivan III, You know, he adds many, many of the other Rurikid cities and kingdoms to Moskawi. And it's now that Moscow becomes a huge empire, it's massive. It becomes enormous. And they add places like Yaroslav, Rostov, Vyatka, and the most importantly, the Republic of Novgorod, which is a sort of semi-democratic, oligarchical republic, and which is a sort of state that shows there could have been another destiny for Russian politics, which is very interesting. So by the time

he dies, he's added massively, and now Moscovy, Muscovy, as the British, English called it at the time, is now a massive state with all of these countries. His son adds to it, his unvaughalsy the third, adds to the empire, but dies very young. And when he dies, his son, Ivan the fourth, Ivan the Terrible is three years old and he succeeds to the throne becomes grand prince of Muscovy. Well, let's just hold that thought from one second. It's good time to take a break. Join us after the break for more with Simon Seabag Montefiore.

Welcome back. Let's talk about expansion and we're going to leap from one Ivan to the other. Ivan the Terrible. No, poor old the Great is forgotten in favour of the Terrible who's so much more memorable. Is he terrible from the start? I mean, when does he become, get that moniker? Does it come from the people? Does it come from himself?

I mean, from the beginning, he's an incredibly impressive character, Anita. He's tall, he's striking. He's described as very like his grandfather who we've been discussing. Can I read your description from him? Because it was like, it's almost actually, somebody would write if they had a crush on someone, forgive me. But, you know, I can't have a matter of like. Yeah. Lithe as a leopard with an aquiline nose, a sensual mouth and flashing eyes.

I'm adding this line, he's dreamy. Are there many people who comment on his beauty at the time? Is that a big deal? And yet things are about to go so horribly wrong. He's so pretty, but he's so pretty awful, yeah. So in 1533, Henry VIII is King of England. Ivan, as a little boy, succeeds to the throne,

as a boy of a tiny boy. And his mother rules, Elena Glintzkyer rules for a while, but she dies when he's. about eight. And she's probably poisoned or possibly poisoned. And they've looked at, there's a lot of poison in this story, and they've looked at her body. And there is a lot of poison in the body. Did they use arsenic, lead? I mean, what was the poison of choice? Yeah. I can't remember which the poison is, but they check the poison. Poison of choice. Poison of choice. And the doctors,

doctors sort of, you know, were basically prescribing such poisonous medicines that it's impossible to tell if she's been poisoned. But later on, in Ivan's, um, In Ivan's reign, we find people whose bodies actually said they have been poisoned. So he succeeds the throne. As a child, he feels ignored. He runs around the Kremlin with a bunch of friends. He's said to torture animals, but, you know, that people normally describe later monsters as doing that in their childhood. But what it does happen is powerful families dominate the Kremlin. He feels neglected and disrespected.

He feels that the Tsar, the great prince, is a sacred figure. And as he grows up, his mother dies, he's on his own, and he grows up, insecure, ambitious, a sense of melodrama about himself, a sense of theatricality, but also a sense that he is special, he is sacred, he is the sacred ruler destined to make the empire greater. And he grows up hating the interconnected baronial families, the boyars, as they're called, the boyar families. When he's a little old, when he comes of age, he is, he is crowned in the Dormition Cathedral, the first to be crowned as Tsar of Muscovy.

And, I mean, that is an amazing moment because this is the first sense when we, when someone is crowned, Tsar. Yeah, I just also, again, you know, this sort of is important because if you are feeling that much under threat, and if you do think that, you know, people around you are being poisoned, what you want is your own close Praetorian guard. And he does that. He has basically a bunch of thugs around him as henchmen to do, you know, the protecting. I love the fact that their insignia shows their loyalty. What was it again? It was a dog and a broom?

Is that right? Well, we're coming to that in a second because that is, yeah, that is exactly right. That's the opportunity. And that is a fascinating and important part of it. So just very, very quick, because I know we want to get to that stuff. Ivan is at first incredibly successful. He marries successfully. He loves his wife.

She's Anastasia Romanovna. And she is the first. She's the first Robinov. And he's incredibly happy with her. He has children with her. And many children die, but some sons succeed. And the eldest son, Ivan, also called little Ivan, is healthy and fit to rule. But as you can imagine, it's a hard thing to have Ivan the terrible as a father.

But we'll come to that in a second. So, you know, everything goes well. And his first job, we talked about the Mongols. We talked about how the Mongol influence on, in the, in the, The Mongol Khan ruled every bit of land in the state. And all of even the great landowners and generals were slaves. I have the terrible believes that too. And this is a part, Mongol influence on the Russian autocracy is enormous

and much greater than is normally given credit for, especially in Russian history, who want to promote the Byzantine connection. So he's growing up in this court. He's now, he's now Tsar, he's a young, man in his teens and he wants to continue the conquest that his grandfather began Ivan the Great so he raises an army

he creates the first artillery he brings in musketeers got people who use muskets in other words instead of bows and arrows which is quite early days of muskets this is cutting edge technology it is this is cutting edge technology he brings in lots of German and other

Europeans to improve his armed forces he creates an artillery and he marches down to attack two of the great carnates, the Mongol carnates of the South. And he takes Kazan in great time. Kazan and then Astrakhan. And Astrakhan. And he takes those two carnates.

He conquers them. I mean, massacres everybody down there. I mean, is that par for the course? Do you always massacre everyone you conquer? Or is this particularly? No, because many of the family, many of these Genghis'i princes, these Zarevich, as they call them, join the court. And when one looks at the court

of Ivan the Terrible, it's a semi-Mongal court. You know, I remember, Mongols are very different. They look different. They, you know, they sound different. They convert to Christianity. And they adopt names.

So the Yusupov family, you know, the one who murdered Rasputin in 1916, you know, that comes from the word Yusuf. Yusuf. Oh, wow. I never connected that ever. Many of those great families are called Chukaski. That means their royalty from, you know,

from Circassia in the south. So many of his enforcers, many of his generals are in fact descended from Mongols. Anyway, he's incredibly successful. He comes back to Moscow and to celebrate he builds St Basil's glorious cathedral in Red Square. But at the same time, stuff, bad stuff, begins to happen. There are many fires in Moscow. Straight after his coronation in 1547, Henry 8th has just died, of course. There's a huge fire in Moscow. There's a riot. There's a rye There's a rebellion. And the sense of fires burning all the time is a sort of plays into his insecurities,

paranoia, his increasingly strange mentality. In 1553, he has a mysterious illness. He very nearly dies. And as he teeters on the edge of death, everyone refuses to swear allegiance to his baby son, Ivan, whose mother is the Romanov. And instead, they tend to acclaim his kind. his cousin, Prince Vadimir Osterosti, who is an adult.

And when he suddenly wakes up after this, he finds out this is the case. First of all, he's not right in the head off. He doesn't take this lying down. He doesn't take this lying down. He gets up and he basically sees this as a trial of the elite's loyalty. And from now on, he distrusts everybody. You have a very nice paragraph in your Romanov book, You outline the different ways he deals with his unfaithful boyars.

And you mentioned beating, strangling, sewing into bear skins is a good one. And throwing to starving hunting dogs or cooked alive and burning stoves. Could you, I mean, just at the risk of repelling everybody, but we'll do it anyway. What does sewing into a bear skin do to a person? It's extremely uncomfortable, first of all. But the real point is it means that dogs think you're a bear and attack you. and then you get ripped apart. He also very much favours, crazy stuff.

But let me just get, let me just, let me just jump a second. In 1558, he launches a massive war. So he succeeded in the South. He's still an amazing success. He's very young still. He's in his 20s. And he launches the Livonian War. And the idea of this is to take from Poland, Lithuania, the Baltic Sea.

Livonia is the Baltic states, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. What's the distance between there and Moscow? What kind of area are we talking of its conquest? Well, many hundred miles, many hundreds of miles away. He marches there and he starts off by having great successes. But the war expands exponentially. What he wanted as a regional war just to get Poland, to get Livonia, explodes into this huge regional war,

which takes 20 years. And though he has some successes, he also has some disasters, and it begins to go wrong. And this is when he begins to distrust everybody. Many of his boyars start to defect to the Poles. And everybody, Sweden, Lithuania, Polish Lithuania, the Teutonic Knights,

all of them join in. And this leads to a disaster. By the 1560s, a whole lot of things start to go, very, very wrong. In 1560, his beloved wife Anastasia dies. He suspects poison, of course. Probably isn't poison. It's probably that he's been dragging her around on his crazy pilgrimages as she's pregnant. And anyway, she dies. He just trusts everybody. And now he decides to launch an insane project, which is the beginning of his madness. And he said, this is what you're talking about. He decides to divide up the kingdom. He says, Moscow, I can't trust you.

He says to the boy, I'm going to divide up the kingdom. And the Zenshin, the main part of the land in Moscow will be ruled by a council that I appoint. But I'm going to go out to a regional country house, and I'm going to rule from there. And I'm going to create a state within a state. And this state is the Oprychnina. And he creates this elite group of henchmen, the Oprychnik. These are the dogs and brooms guys that I was so taken with. They wear all black.

They are heavily armed with swords and muskets. They wear black. They have a dog's head and a broom on their saddle. And they are the Avengers. And of course, your sharp historical listeners will know that this is very like the NKVD or the elite KGB or the FSB or the FSB in modern Russian history, an elite group of knights who are avengers of the state to crush all disloyalty and all traitors and to kill them all. And now he launches all his, I would say Baroque almost, a method complex. Well, you're not kidding. I mean, there's gouging.

There's roping women and children together and throwing them under ice. Yes. Inserting hooks and ribs and hanging. He's very into the rib thing. Now, this is an obsession of his. He's very into the rib thing where you hook through the ribs, a hook into the body. And then you hang people by it. But he hunts down the elites.

But of course, oftentimes he's not a complete fool, and there is method in his madness. He hunts down anyone who could have different loyalties. He wipes out whole clans who are loyal to each other, and of course can avenge each other. But of course, it also leads to more people defecting. He holds extravagant ceremonies of mass murder. You have a scene where you arrive at a field and there are kind of parts of boiling water hooks lined up and all his instruments of torture.

Yeah. In 1570 they have this kind of opportunity sort of orgy of death outside, the pagan field outside Moscow. And hundreds of gallows and vats of boiling water and boiling oil are there. And all the Moscovites come out to watch. And many of them are killed personally. and he's killing his elite, he's killing his former foreign minister. He's calling all his ministers are murdered out there

in this orgy of killing. And he also loves blowing people up. One of the things he does is gallops into someone's estate, puts them all in their house, fills it with gunpowder, and then lights the light and gallops off, and then shout, Yahoo! And Houdar,

Houdar is his great cry. As the bits of body blow up into the, the sky. Meanwhile, in his headquarters, it's a mixture between a sort of the Playboy Mansion and an extremely ascetic austere monastery. That's a complicated mixture. It's a design choice. He goes to prayers. Everyone wears, everyone shaves their heads. Everyone goes to prayers and anyone who doesn't turn up in prison is in big trouble, big trouble. But at the same time, He's having orgies with courtisans and prostitutes.

He's having gay affairs. At the same time? I mean, yes, it's... Almost on the same... The morning is given over to a setisism and then it's played boy after the afternoons. And of course, the more he kills, the more strangely he plays.

In a way, this adds to the mystique, his mystique. And he has a big gay love affair with Theodore Basmanov. And that's also, of course, extremely scandalous in a very, very orthodox community. And, you know, at this time, In 1567, the English have now arrived and are trading heavily with this great...

The Muscovy Company, who you've dealt with early. The Muscovy Company, which you know about. The first chartered company, the first... And at this point, he feels out Elizabeth I, to see if she'd accept him if he lost the throne. So he's constantly thinking about losing the throne. In 1570, as well as the massacre at the pagan field outside Moscow that William mentioned, he also attacks Novgorod, which is always... always had an independent espree and he attacks it. He massacres thousands of people there. He

pushes half the population under the ice, as Anita mentioned. He ties together men and women and children and pushes them under the ice. He loves drowning people under the ice. He's a psycho. He's an utter psycho. He is now, I think you can say, semi-insane, yes. Semi? A key thing happens in 1571 and 1572, which is the, that the devil at Khan, the Ghire Khan, of what I mentioned, this massive power, to give you an idea of how strong the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, they amass now an army of 150,000 horsemen. That's a big army.

So it's a, this is a, this is not a sort of, this is not a, this is not a, this is not really a middleing European power. This is a major European power. And they, they, they, they, they take advantage of the chaos that I have in the. has partly caused, and they gallop up and they actually take the capital, Moscow, in 1572, they take the capital, they burn it, and they leave with 150, they're supposed to have kill 80,000 people, and they're supposed to have left with 150,000 slaves, which they then take down, the biggest slave trade in the world at this time, the slave trade across the Atlantic is already started and is taking, you know, is a huge business. At the same time, this is

another one. This is the other great slave trade. And it's a slave trade that over time may have enslaved 10 million people. But at this point, they leave with 150,000. I think the figure they always give for the transatlantic slave trade is 12 million. Yeah, 12 million. And this is something like 10 million. And it's colossal. And what they do is these people are all sold in the Crimea, where the greater slave market in Europe takes place at Kaffa in Crimea. And that slave trade is enormous. And later the Ottomans take it over and it funds much of the expansion of Solomon, in the Magnificent and all of that, which is taking place at the same time. So the Ottomans have a share, if you like, in the empire of their, in a state of their allies, the Crimean Tartars.

So they burn Moscow, they gallop away. And Ivan the Terrible realises he's screwed up. This dividing of the thing, the war in Livonia, it's all screwed up. He comes back, takes power, kills all the operichniki, rather like Stalin was to kill his secret police chiefs, Yagoda and Yejof. And he comes back to power and he does what he can to try and improve the, you know, to try and rescue what he's lost. So he launches another reign of terror. One of the people he kills, and this later reign of terror, is a fascinating in character. Dr. Eliezer Bommelius, who is his German, well, let's say, he's a German poisoner and sort of a hierophant, who has been in, also has been in London, the London of Elizabethan

London, and he's been advising Ivan the Terrible who to kill, and giving him poisons to kill them with, because Ivan by this point has killed all his cousins, all his Rurikid cousins, the princes, Prince Vladimir of Storoste. He's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, poisoned them with cyanide and an arsenic. And so, and their bodies have been... Secretly or in a kind of showy way with like the gallows? Openly. He strangled the patriarch, the metropolitan of Moscow. And he really is terrible. He's terrible. Then in 1575, the really extraordinary thing happens. He's told by one of his wizards, one of his hierophants, that the Tsar is about to die, is going to die on the throne.

So he advocates the throne and places on it a Mongol prince. Because if someone's going to die, it's going to be him. That's his thinking. In October, 1575, he puts Simeon Bekbulatovich, who is a converted Mongol. He puts him on the throne and he rules for a year and then he takes it back again. But nothing happens to Simeon. He remains a great grand deed. Something fascinating that this is the Empire podcast.

In the 1550s, Ivan has done something which is to have an enormous. the significance. He's given the Stroganov family, a powerful family of traders. He's given them the right to expand across the Urals. Up to now, Muscovy, Russia, this early Russian version of the Russian empire, only goes up to the Urals. Now the Stroganov family start to build forts and to create their own private army and to expand into Siberia. Is this a sort of parallel to the Muscovy company and the East India Company and merchant capitalism? Yes, yes. And so merchant capitalism is not only an English thing. I mean, the Stroganovs are exactly the same thing as a sort of, they have their own army, they have their own fortresses, and they start to expand. And they are

fur trading, and they are trading in minerals, and they start to expand. And it happens, it happens incredibly quickly. Before you know it, they have, they have hired a kind of clive of India type, Yermak, the Cossack. And he has defeated, in the early 1780s, He defeats the Kuchum, the Khan of Siber, which is a country, a Khanate. And they've taken Siberia, basically. And now Russia, now Muscovy, Russia is expanding across Siberia, heading for the Pacific. So what happens to this succession? Ivan seems so very terrible.

He seems to be slaughtering everybody and anybody. I mean, is there a peaceful transition of power? What happens? No, he destroys everything he's built. His son and heir is Ivan, healthy and healthy and brave. ready to rule. But Ivan suddenly starts screaming at his daughter-in-law and saying she's not wearing the right religious clothing. She's not covering up enough as she's pregnant. And his son attacks him and criticises him, not attacks him physically. And Ivan turns on him with the

staff of Zardom, which is a pointed metal staff, and strikes him through the head and kills his air there and then. You have a nice passage, Seabag, where you write that he denounces himself. Ivan says, I am a sinner, a stinking hound, always wallowing in drunkenness, fornication, adultery, filth, murders, rape, dispelation, depoilation, and all sorts of evil-doing. It's all true. He's heartbroken, but his daughter-in-law also loses the baby now, and she miscarried. So now, in 1584,

this is not a happy story. He dies naturally and he succeeded by his weak younger son who is simple of mind, unhealthy, and he's called Fyodor the bell ringer because he's so religious. And so he ruins the kingdom, basically. Okay. Now we're going to, we're going to again do the time travel thing because we're sort of hopscotching from the people that we've found most utterly historical and also important in this foundation of Russia. You gave us a glimpse of a Romanoff with Anastasia marrying into this crazy family.

But you have Michael Romanoff to 1630 and I'd love us to go there. Yes. And here's accession to this, you know, nutty establishment of filled with blood, gore and injury. I feel that we've been outgourd and out. Oh God, totally. We are totally. All our people in Kerry Nor, we thought we're the most bloodthirsty in history. We were a children's programme compared to this.

World Wildlife Fund sort of fox savers. No, it's ridiculous. We're jumping sort of almost 20 years now, but let's do that. What happens in the interim is that the great principality of Moscow breaks up. It becomes a failed state. It's invaded by everybody. The Tartas, the Swedes, the Poles, they even take Moscow. The Russia's ruled by crazy impostors called the false Demetri's.

And there were three false Demetri's. And the third false Dmitri is the baby brigand. And he ends up, in 1613, hanged age three from the battlements of Moscow. And now everybody realizes that Russia is about to cease to exist. And they look for a pure young king to restore the kingdom. And the person that they all turn to is a boy, a teenage boy, who is the first cousin once removed. of Theodore the bell ringer, in other words, the son of Ivan the Terrible,

and who is the great nephew-in-law of Ivan the Terrible. So he's the last person with a real connection to the old dynasty. And the old dynasty is finished. After 1598, there are no more Rora kids. But there's this boy. And this boy is being hunted by Swedish and Polish assassins. And he's hiding at Kostroma, north of Moscow, with his mum.

With his mum, the nun Martha. Yes, well, yes, quite the nun, Martha, yeah. And they don't, his father, Filaret, who's also been forced to take the tonsure of monk, is in a Polish prison, and they arrive at Kastroma, and they offer him the throne. And three times, him and his mother sob and refused the throne. It's even better than that. In my head, it is, it is Monty Python. It is, he is not the Tsar.

He's a very naughty boy. Bugger off. We don't want this. I mean, that's what it feels like, to me. They're at the Ipatiaf monastery. The 13th of March 1613, they beg him to accept it. And on the third time, he goes, okay, I'll be czar. You've got to realise it's not a very attractive offer at this point.

You can say. You've made that point quite a conclusion. You might say. It's not the best kick in town. The Kremlin is literally, it's literally a charnel house. The Kremlin is ruined. There's no silver. There's no gold.

There's no palace. And there are bodies everywhere. It's been ruled by the. polls. But Michael Romanov, who's very young, agrees, they march back to Moscow and they establish a new dynasty, the Romanoff dynasty. And Michael is the first Romanoff Tsar. And that dynasty lasts right up to 1917. It lasts up until 1917. And though we think of it as a cursed dynasty, it is the most successful family of modern times. And this, as the Empire podcast, you write the most successful imperialism.

family. The most successful imperialist family, and it's an empire that we constantly underrate, we constantly neglect, we're very obsessed with our own empire, and we forget this is the real thing. Well, look, it's a great place to leave this, and we will begin our next episode of Empire with the Romanoff's. A barnstormer, seabag. A barnstormer. A barnstormer.

Okay. Join us then for the legacy of Michael the first Romanoff and what happens next. There'll be greats in there. Not so many terrible, but greats can be terrible too. But join us on Thursday. That's it from me, Anita Arnans. And me, William Drupal.