Noble Blood - Ivan the Terrible and his Oldest Son

Episode Date: July 19, 2022

A living, male heir was essential to a monarch in the 16th century who wanted a secure dynasty. So why did Ivan the Terrible, the first Tsar of Russia, murder his only viable heir to the throne? The story might be more complicated than the way it's been told for centuries. Support Noble Blood: — Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon — Merch! — Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and pre-order its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong,

dance and then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild from Aaron Manke. Listener discretion advised. Hey guys, this is Dana Schwartz, the host of Noble Blood. If you want to support the show, we are on Patreon at patreon.com slash nobleblood Tales. I upload episode scripts every week. Every month I do a bonus episode where I talk to someone about a historical period piece movie. This month, July, I talk to my sister about the cough terrible movie, the other boleyn girl. And on the Patreon, every season we have a brand new exclusive sticker club. So yeah, thank you so much. Obviously, the best support for the show is just

listening. So thank you so much. Let's get into it. If you were a tourist traveling in Russia on May 25th, 2018, and you happened to be walking through Moscow's Tretchenkov Gallery, you would have heard a terrible sound. First, the tearing of a metal pole away from its security barrier. Then the shattering of glass. Guard, someone would have screamed. The smell of vodka was hovering in the air. It was 8 p.m. Outside, it was just growing dark. Amidst the chaos came the sound of a canvas being slashed once, then twice, then a third time. The ruined painting was called Ivan the Terrible and his son. Considered the Mona Lisa of the Trecchikov by its most ardent curators, the painting was painted in 1885 by

Elia Rappin, the master of late 19th century Russian realism. If the painting's title conjures images of a loving father cradling his child, think again. We're closer to Saturn devouring his son territory here. In the painting, Tsar Ivan has haunted eyes. He's cradling a man with a bleeding head wound and a limp body. Ivan is looking out over the younger man's head, wide-eyed, with a look that clearly says, Oh God, what now? That man, Ivan, is known to history as the terrible. He was the first czar of Russia, crowned in 1547. He remade Russia. He was married at least seven times.

He brutally murdered thousands. but among those countless massacres, one murder stands out as especially horrifying. The painting also has an unofficial name, Ivan the Terrible, killing his son. The philosophical image is too much horror for some to bear. The man who slashed the painting in 2018, who would confess to getting drunk on vodka in the museum cafe, and then being, quote, overwhelmed by something, was not the first to deface the painting. A century earlier, the painting was defaced for the first time,

also with three slash marks. What were the vandals responding to in this particular work of art? What did they hate so much that they had to rip paint from canvas, remove the depravity from sight? and why is it that both times these vandals guided their hands by inches, centimeters, so that they tore through the sleeve and the collar, the tip of the nose and the ear of the painting subject, but they never removed a single flake of paint from Ivan's haunted eyes. Perhaps it's because Ivan, looking wide-eyed to the future, is experiencing,

double panic, not only a phylliside of his son by the first wife, the one that he loved best, but also the horror of a succession crisis. So many rulers throughout history prayed for a male successor, divorcing or banishing or beheading their wives in order to get one, but Ivan brought his fate upon himself. Ivan the terrible, first czar of Russia, had just murdered by his own hand, his one and only competent male heir. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. 200 years before Catherine the Great and the Romanov dynasty would ascend to the Russian throne, before there were even official Russian Tsars,

a different Russian dynasty was dealing with a succession crisis. It was August 1530, and the 19th, The 17th ruler of the Rorick dynasty was waiting to find out whether the child being born to his wife was male or female. Vasily III Ivanovich was 51 years old and childless. He was Grand Prince of Moscow, the area that would later become the Tsardom of Russia, and the woman in labor was his second wife. This felt like his last chance. His first wife, Salamonia, had given him no male heirs after 20. 21 years of marriage.

So he divorced her, despite the controversy, and had her shipped off to a monastery. Coincidentally, Henry VIII in England was dealing with a similar lack of male heirs after a 20-plus-year marriage at the exact same time. But back in Russia, post-divorce Vassili remarried the much younger Elena Glenskaya, only 20 years old, less than half of her new husband's age. She had literally not yet been born when Vasili and his first wife had gotten married. And now Elena was in labor. The fate of the dynasty now rested upon the sex of the child that she would have. Young Elena breathed heavily, sweat glistening on her forehead, and she pushed for the final time.

And then there was a sigh of relief in the room. The child was a boy to be named Ivan. The crisis was averted. The Rurik dynasty, thus far 19 generations long, male heir to male heir, remained intact. Ivan's father died when he was only three, leaving Ivan and a younger brother, Yuri, behind. In early Russia, the older son was destined to become the ruler. But there was extra pressure in Ivan's case. Not quite a typical air and despair situation, because Yuri...

might have been disabled, but he wasn't considered competent at the time to rule. Ivan was named Grand Prince of Moscow as a toddler, not exactly an age when most people generally showed an interest in taxation or international relations. His mother, Elena, ruled for him, with such power and ambition that she actually inspired a rebellion against her in 1537, and then died the following year at the age of her. 30. In what has long been speculated to have been a poisoning, some historians are almost certain of it. Others say that the background amounts of arsenic and mercury found in her exhumed corpse may just

have been the normal amount of poisons in a 16th century Muscovite bloodstream. Either way, Ivan was both the holder of the most powerful title of Russia and an orphan by the age of eight years of old. His youth meant that the ruling classes of Russia had almost 10 years to fill with their own violent power struggles before the young prince could rise to any meaningful throne. A lot of bloody and complicated political machinations followed, but the important thing to know is that they all involved a group of people called the Boyars, a ruling class of a couple hundred families. They were basically ruling Russia in this time, and they were responsible for raising the child, Ivan, and his brother. In a letter to his friend, Andrei Kierbski, a grown Ivan would look back at this time, writing that the boyars, quote,

were bent on acquiring wealth and glory and were quarreling with each other. And what have they not done? Me and my brother Yuri, of blessed memory, they brought up like vagrants and children of the poorest. what have I not suffered for want of garments and food? End quote. At the age of eight, Ivan had already lost his parents, and now he felt himself and his little brother mistreated by the grownups who were left behind. It was the start of a grudge against the boyars that he would hold for the rest of his life.

It was also, perhaps, the start of his education in the bloody mechanics of murder, warfare, and destruction. But as much as the boyars fought for positioning, back when Vasili the third had been alive, he had clearly wanted his son Ivan to be his successor. Vasili had even gotten a child-sized helmet made for his little first-born son, featuring all the adult regalia of a future ruler. So on January 16, 1547, 17-year-old Ivan was crowned not only Prince of Moscow, like his father, but Tsar of all Rus. It was the first time any Russian ruler had been called Tsar, a word derived from the Latin Caesar.

It was a reference to the titles of the Old Testament kings and Byzantine emperor, but above all, it suggested a rule ordained by God. This God-ordained teenager Ivan had, in the meantime, been spending a decent amount of his adolescence, trying to find a foreign wife and failing. I just don't trust their foreign temperaments, he would decide, only after he had almost certainly been turned down. But don't feel too bad for Ivan here.

He would make up for the romantic failures of his teenage years with a long list of wives later. The first of these, Anastasia Romanovna, he married one month after his coronation. Russian names are very serious. similar, but don't confuse this Anastasia with the much more famous Anastasia Romanov, who comes along during the Russian Revolution. We are still squarely in the 16th century here. Back to Ivan and his first wife, Anastasia, they were both 17. Anastasia was from a powerful Russian family

and had been chosen from as many as 1,500 potential wives brought to the Kremlin for the Tsar to examine. And although he'd wanted a foreign wife earlier in his life, presumably to bolster his global power, by all accounts Ivan loved Anastasia. Their marriage was happy, maybe even blissful. They had six children together. They seemed to balance each other's temperaments. Ivan was excitable, Anastasia, affable but calm, and able to pacify her husband's darkest tempers. Legends and stories and movies now view Anastasia as the one great true love of Ivan's life. But he couldn't have her forever. In 1560, an unlucky 13 years after their wedding, Anastasia died. Ivan was grief-stricken. Modern historians see his mental health faltering here.

Emotionally, he seemed to fall apart. He grew paranoid that the boyars, those old old hated enemies of his youth had poisoned his wife, perhaps in a misguided effort to poison him. Who knows, maybe they had had a hand in murdering his mother, too. Internally, Ivan vowed to take revenge. And what was left of his beloved wife? Of their six children, only two survived. Ivan Ivanovich, born 1554, and six years old at the time of his mother's death, and Fyodor, three years younger. Just a note for listeners that, yes, both our Ivan the Terrible and his son are named Ivan. Must have been great for the guy's ego, but I know it can be hard to keep track of.

I'll be calling Ivan the Terrible, Ivan, and his son, Ivan Ivanovich, to help us keep it straight. Ivan Ivanovich's younger brother, Fyodor, was considered slow at the time. Perhaps today we might call him developmentally disabled, but what we know is he was not considered competent to rule. And if God forbid something should happen to his older brother, it meant that the dynasty was in a precarious situation. If this family dynamic sounds familiar to you, you're right. The older Ivan and his younger brother Yuri were in a very similar position when their own mother died. As we'll see, Ivan's life would come to replicate his father's life in a lot of ways, though with more tragic ends.

In any case, Fyodor was not considered competent, and so the young Ivan Ivanovich was Big Ivan's clear hope as heir to the dynasty, his only hope, it seemed. When the young boy was just three years old, his father, Ivan, gave him a mini helmet emblazoned with double, headed eagles, just like the one Ivan's own father had given him. It was on Ivan Ivanovich the entire future of the Tsardom rested. His father, Ivan, was first Tsar of Russia, and he was going to need a second. Ivan's rule was bloody. He got that name, the Terrible from somewhere, after all. Although it is

a little bit of a misnomer to modern ears. The Terrible may have also been a signifier, more like the awesome, awe-inspiring in his great power. Terrible, let's not forget, is a hair's breath from terrific. After his wife Anastasia's death, Ivan embarked on the Livonian War, a long and losing battle for a route to the Baltic Sea. Around 1564, in what a modern person might view as a bit of a temper tantrum, he threatened to abdicate. In 1565, five years after Anastasia's death, he decided not to abdicate after all. Instead, he would have a bit of twisted fun. Ivan separated himself from the day-to-day life of Russia, left Moscow, and installed himself

in a private court called the Oprychnina. The name can still strike fear into a Russian heart. From his Oprichnina, Ivan could massacre whomever he wanted. and who he wanted, who he had wanted ever since he was a child, were the boyars. Ivan is said to have sent memorials of over 3,000 executed boyars to monasteries around the country. He directed massacres in a reign of terror that lasted seven years. Perhaps the worst was the massacre at Novgorod, in which his forces brutally murdered thousands for no obvious reason. Was Ivan acting out of grief, revenge, paranoia, pure politics,

the amoral privilege syndrome of so many young princes destined to rule from the time that they were born? We don't know. The Oppertina's official goals and dogma were never totally clear. Documents from the period were destroyed in a fire. So Ivan's motives are one of many things that we have to guess about. I do want to say this. Oprich Nina has a really weird literal translation. While a lot of sources define it as a private court,

and the Cambridge history of Russia notes that its etymology is from Oprich, separate, the historian Edward L. Keenan notes that the term actually had a specific meaning in Ivan's time. It was the legal term for the so-called widows might, that is, the widow's portion, the property left over for the widow of a deceased member of the Moscow cavalry. I can't emphasize enough what a bizarre term this is for the headquarters of a violent czar of Russia. As Keenan says, quote, Russian historians have been very reluctant to let the term mean what it means. This reluctance is the reason why we have to use the untranslated term in English, much to the chagrin of undergraduate history majors, end quote.

I think Ivan was weirdly possibly declaring himself a widow. He was taking the revenge he felt was owed him as a widow. It's a strange bit of gender bending for a guy who was so brutally using his masculine forces as head of state, but it's also an important insight possibly into his mental state. To me, it lends some credence to the story that Ivan really did love his first wife, Anastasia, and that he really was in mourning over her, to the point of madness. So was it the brutal bizarreness of Ivan's political vision that would eventually cause him to quarrel with his own son? Or was it something else?

Because Ivan wasn't otherwise acting like much of a mourning widower. In fact, he got married again almost immediately after Anastasia's death to a beautiful Cherkissian princess named Maria. Ivan was 31 at the time, but his bride was the same age as Anastasia had been at their wedding, only 17. As Taylor Swift would later say, I'll get older, but your lovers stay my age. The Zaretsa Maria died eight years later in 1569. at age 25. From then on, Ivan gave his little son no dearth of stepmothers. He married five more times between 1570 and 1580. His third wife, Marfa, died within days of their wedding. His fourth, fifth, and seventh wives were sent away to monasteries, just like Ivan's own father's first wife

had been. So little is known about the sixth wife that historians are not entirely in agreement that she existed at all. It was one year into Ivan's sixth or possibly seventh marriage, November 1881, when his son raced into the room to find his father in a paroxysm of violence. Sarovic Ivan Ivanovich was 27 years old at this point. Looking at his air running toward him, Ivan the terrible must have seen a chip off the old block. His son had already been married three times by this point. His first two wives had already been sent off to the monastery. Someday, like Ivan, this son would rule Russia.

But Ivan Ivanovich wasn't running for no reason. Ivan Ivanovich's third wife had been running ahead of him into that fateful room where her father-in-law was. Her name was Yelena Sheramitiva, and she was pregnant, possibly with the future heir to the throne, the continuation of Ivan's line. Her father, the Tsar, had come upon her wearing gasp, only her underwear. In the 1500s, the underwear was likely even more modest than what women wear today. But it didn't matter. Ivan had gone berserk. He lashed out at her, dealing her a blow to the stomach, such a blow that he threatened the fetus's life, the life of his own possible grandchild.

Hearing the shouts, Ivan Ivanovitch raced in to protect his pregnant wife. You thrust my first wife into a nunnery for no good reason, the young man yelled at his father. He was beside himself in a frenzy. You did the same thing to my second, and now you strike my third, causing the son in her womb to perish. Hot-headed Ivan the Terrible, unmoored by pain or grief or decades of violence or perhaps just insane, or perhaps just blindingly, thoughtlessly, idiotically angry, turned on his son. Did the boy think he was the only one who had lost a beloved wife? Did he think he was the only one who had lost children?

Ivan the Terrible couldn't control his rage. He had killed so many by this point, so thoughtlessly, so thoughtlessly, so. easily before. It wasn't any harder this time. The pointed staff was already in his hand. He lunged forward, extended the rod, and struck his son in the head. Immediately, the rage drained out of Ivan. His son, his one chosen heir, lay bleeding on the floor. What have I done, he must have been thinking? His little son, who had once been given a child-sized helmet, was now moments from death. Oh God, no. Or maybe it didn't happen that way at all. That's the story that's been told down the centuries, usually spoken with barely controlled glee at all

of the sordid details. The chivalrous son defending his wife, the near-naked pregnant daughter-in-law, the evil that Ivan had done to so many families over the years, finally arriving at his own home, by his own hand. It all feels ready-made for a legend or a soap opera, or a painting, or an episode of a podcast. But is it true? As I was writing the story, I looked back to see when in August the murder had taken place. After all, allegedly, it had been so hot

that the pregnant Yelena was lounging in her underwear. Then I remembered that this happened in November. in Russia. It would have been unusual for Ivan to rush right past his daughter-in-law's ladies in waiting in order to be able to catch her in some scandalous state in the first place. Also, by this point, Ivan was suffering from a degenerative spinal condition that, by most accounts, severely inhibited his movement. Could he have physically overpowered his much younger, able-bodied son?

Of course it's completely believable that a bloodthirsty Tsar of Russia, who had used his position to murder so many, could have conceivably murdered his own, that a man with a long history of violent instability might have been unable to restrain his temperer, that a man who had sent countless wives off to nunneries and whose other wives had died of mysterious poisonings might assault a pregnant woman.

But might the story have been something else? Was it instead a political dispute? A father-son disagreement over the best course of military action or governance? An Ivan who stood with a rod in his hand as his pompous son, a son who had always had a father, who hadn't been orphaned and hadn't been mistreated at the age of eight, dared to criticize him over losing the Livonian War, dared to say he wanted troops under his own command, as though his father didn't know what he was doing.

Or was the death of Ivan Ivanovich a smaller and more domestic and less violent tragedy? A letter from Ivan a few weeks before said that he couldn't travel because of his son's illness. Perhaps Ivan Ivanovich was simply struck down by ill health. Though I want to add, who's to say that the younger Ivan Ivanovich? Ivan wasn't sick when his father killed him. Maybe Ivan just conveniently sped the inevitable with violence. Even the letter suggesting an illness only has one dubious source. One of the reasons Ivan's reign is so fascinating

is that most of the primary documents have been destroyed. We will never know what happened on that night between the young heir and his father. But what we do know is that Ivan Ivanovich, the only competent successor to Ivan the Terrible's enormous legacy was dead. A lot happened in Russia after the death of the air, but most important for our story, just two and a half years after the death of his son, Ivan the Terrible died too. His less competent younger son, Ivanovich's younger brother, Feodor, took over.

In 1598 at 41, Feodor died childless. ending the Roric dynasty after 21 generations. Fyodor's death threw Russia into the infamous time of troubles, a violent power struggle that lasted 15 years and saw a famine that killed nearly a third of population. That time concluded in 1613 with the instatement of the Romanov dynasty, which would go on to include Catherine the Great and continue until the Bolshevik revolution in 1917,

when the last Romanov rulers were unseeded and all of the dynasty's heirs were killed, including that young girl with the same name as Ivan the Terrible's beloved first wife, Anastasia. But Ivan's death wasn't the end of Ivan's legacy. Even the end of the Russian monarchy wasn't the end of his legacy. 300 years after Ivan's death in 1885, a Russian painting at the itinerant exhibition caused such a stir that the police needed to be called in. The painting was Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan by the contemporary master Ilya Rapine.

In 1913, the painting was vandalized for the first time, after which, legend has it, the curator, was so mad with himself for not protecting the painting that he threw himself under a train. Is the story true? Who knows? It strikes me as appealingly Russian straight out of Anna Karenina. What is true is this.

The story of Ivan and his son has become a kind of political lightning rod, a case study in controlling a narrative. It's striking that both Stalin and Putin have tried to rehabilitate Ivan's image, as if he were just a strong, masculine leader doing what needed to be done in a difficult role. Stalin even edited history books to be gentler towards Ivan.

It's striking that in 2015, a museum near the Kremlin put on a popular exhibition that basically renamed Ivan the Terrible, Ivan the Not So Bad. And it's striking that in 2018, a man came to the museum with no particular plan, but of all the paintings in the gallery, when he held the metal rod of the security pole in his hand, he chose to lunge and strike at just that one.

That's the story of the philosophical end of Ivan the Terrible's family dynasty, but stick around after a brief sponsor break to hear about one last way the famous painting has been recreated today. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Wodom. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with them one day, and I was like, and Dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come look for up and coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved.

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There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Wodam. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever.

I went and had lunch with them one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means. But I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come look for up-and-coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot.

He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, You know, the cat just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The European's infamous painting showed up again recently in a pretty suddenly relevant piece of pop culture. Servant of the People, a TV comedy starring Vladimir Zelensky, the current president of Ukraine. In the show, Zelensky played the president of Ukraine for three seasons before his actual election. But that's not where the uncanniness ends. In the season one finale, he meets a fantastical Ivan the Terrible, all dressed up in 16th century garb. Zelensky's character and Ivan argue, Russia will come free you, says Ivan. Zelensky says Ukraine doesn't need freeing by the Russians. It wants to join Europe.

Ivan gets confused, then upset, then angry. Finally, in a fit of rage, he pushes Zelensky, who falls, arms-splayed, and then, in a move right out of art history, Ivan, too, falls to his knees, gathers a limp Zelensky in his arms, opens his eyes wide, and howls. It is an unmistakable, exact replica of the famous painting. If you have Netflix, you can see it in the show Servant of the People, season one, episode 23, at about the 8-minute 24-second mark.

It's probably relevant to pause here and say that a European, although widely known as perhaps the greatest painter in the Russian National School of Art, was actually Ukrainian. And in Servant of the People's version of the painting, Zelensky and Ukraine are cast as the sun, killed by the murderous leader of Russia, all the way back in 2015, seven years before the tragic current war happening today. Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky.

Noble Blood is hosted by me, Dana Schwartz. Additional writing and researching done by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is produced by Rima Il-Kalzsche. with supervising producer Josh Thane and executive producers Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes.

You can have opinions, you can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human