down the Volga to the Caspian Sea in the early 1550's, he granted ex
tensive extra-territorial rights and economic concessions to England in the
White Sea port of Archangel far to the north. The English became Ivan's
most eager collaborator in opening up the lucrative Volga trade route to the
Orient. The Danes simultaneously jmpplied technologists ranging from key
artilbristsTrTT?ebattle_jo^^to appear in
Muscovy (wJia_^as_iiL4act a disguised Lutheranjnissionary). The best mercenaries for Ivan's ????? expanding army came largely from the Baltic German regions that were among the first to go over to Protestantism. Other Germans gained places in the new service nobility through
membership in the oprichnina; and the entire idea of a uniformed order of warrior-monks may well have been borrowed from the Teutonic and Livonian orders with which Muscovy had such long and intimate contact. In any event, Ivan's organization of this anti-traditional order of hooded vigilantes followed his turn from east to west, and coincided with his decision to increase the intensity of the Livonian War. Baltic G_exrnans_had_ already moved in large numbers to Muscovy during the early, victorious years of the war, as prisoners or as dispossessed men in search of employment. In the 1560's and 1570's begarrthe first systematic organization four miles southeast of Moscow of the foreign quarter--then called the 'lower city ^mmuneT'but soon to be known as the 'German suburb': nemetskaia sloboda7T^TFrmriemisy, which was applied to the new influx of foreigners, had been used as early as the tenth 'century84 and carried the pejorative mein1ng~of 'duinF ones.' Although usage often varied in Muscovy, nemtsy became generally used as a blanket term for all the Germanic, Protestant peoples of Northern Europe- irishortTTor any Western European who was not a 'Latin.' Other 'German' settlements soon appeared (often complete with 'Saxon' or 'officers' ' churches) in key settlements along the fast-growing Volga trade route: Nizhny Novgorod, Vologda, and Kostroma. By the early 1590's, Western Protestants had settled as far east as Tobol'sk in Siberia, and the Orthodox Metropolitan of Kazan was complaining that Tatars as well as Russians were going over to Lutheranism.85
The pressures for conformity with local customs were, however, strong in Mus'coyy; and few enduring traces remained of these early Protestant penetrations. More important than direct conversions to foreign ways and beliefs- at the hands of assimilated Baltic and Saxon Germans was the increasing Russian dependence on the more distant 'Germans' from EngTaHfl, Denmark, Holland, and the westerly German ports of Liibeck and Hamburg. By invading Livonia and involving Russia in a protracted struggle with neighboring Poland and Sweden, Ivan IV compelled Russia to look for allies on the other side of its immediate enemies; and these industrious and enterprising Protestant powers were able to provide trained personnel and military equipment in return for raw materials and rights for transit and trade. Although Russian alliances shifted frequently in line with the complex diplomacy of the age, friendship with these vigorous Protestant principalities of Northwest Europe remame3'~relativ©ly constant from the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. This alignment was a function of the same 'law of opposite boundaries' (Gesetz der Gegengrenzlichkeit) which had earlier caused Ivan III (and Ivan IV) to look with a friendly eye at the Holy Roman Empire for support against Poland-Lithuania, and was later to transfer Russian attention from the Germans to the French in the
mid-eighteenth century, when the Germans had xeplaced the Poles and Swedes as the principal rivals toTCussia in Eastern Europe.
The mounting fury of Ivan IV's last years seems less a product of his paranoia than of a kind of schizophrenia. Ivan was, in effect, two people :* a true believer in an exclusivist, traditional ideology and a successful practitioner of experimental modern statecraft. Because the two roles were fre-queritly in 'cSffiflict,~ffir~relgn became a tissue of contradictions. His' personality was increasingly ravaged by those alternations of violent outburst and total withdrawal that occur in those who are divided against themselves.
The Livonian War provides the background of contradiction and irony. Launched for astute economic and political reasons, the war was portrayed as a Christian crusade in much the same manner that the Livonian order hadfohce spoken of its forays with Russia. To aid in fighting, this zealot of Orthodoxy participated in a mixed Lutheran-Orthodox church service, marrying his niece to a Lutheran Danish prince whom he also proclaimed king of Livonia. At the same time, Ivan made strenuous, if pathetic, efforts to arrange for himself an English marriage.86 To aid in makihgpeace, Ivan turned first to a Czech Protestant in the service of the Poles and theh to an Italian Jesuit in the service of the Pope.87 Though antagonisticJx› both, Ivan found a measure of agreement with each by joiniug in the damnation of the other. He was, characteristically, hardest on the Protestants oh whom he was most dependent-calling the Czech negotiator J^not so muclf a heretic [as] a servant of the satanic council of the Antichrists.'88
Meanwhile^this defender of total autocracy_had_become thejirst ruler in Russian^istOTj_Jo_s^mmpn_„a representative national assembly: the zemsky sobor of 1566. This was an act of pure political improvisation on the part of this avowed traditionalist. In an effort to support an extension of the war into Lithuania, Ivan sought to attracTwandering western Russian noblemen accustomed to the aristocratic assemblies (sejmiki) of Lithuania, while simultaneously enlisting the new wealth of the cities by adopting the more inclusive European system of three-estate representation.89 As constitutional seduction gave way to military assault, Lithuania hastened to consummate its hitherto Platonic political link with Poland. The purely aristocratic 'diet (sejm) that pronounced this union at Lublin in 1569 was far less broadly representative than Ivan's sobor of 1566; but it acquired, the importahTrbTe of electing the king of the new multi-national republic (Rzeczpospolitd) when the Jagellonian dynasty became extinct in 1572.
Ivan and his successors (like almost every other European house) participated vigorously in the parliamentary intrigues of this body, particu-
larly during the Polish succession crisis of 1586. Then, in 1598, when the line of succession came to an end in Russia also, they turned to the Polish procedure of electing a ruler-the ill-fated Boris Godunov-in a specially convened zemsky sobor: the first since 1566. For a quarter of a century thereafter these sobers became even more broadly representative, and were in many ways thestrpfeme political authority in the nation. Not only in 1598'' but in 1606, 1610, 1611, and 1613 roughly similar representative bodies made the crucial decisions on the choice of succession to the throne.90 / Despite many differences in composition and function, these councils aff / j shared the original aim of Ivan's council of 1566: to attract western Rus-!'-'| sians away from the Polish-Lithuanian sejm and to create a more effective I fund-raising body by imitating the multi-state assemblies of the North ^/European Protestant nations.91
Thus, ironically, this most serious of all proto-parliamentary challenges to Muscovite autocracy originated in the statecraft of its seemingly most adamant apologist. Increasingly torn by contradiction, Ivan brought the first printing press to Moscow and sponsored the first printed Russian book, The Acts of the Apostles, in 1564. Then, the following year, he let a mob burn the press and drive the printers away to Lithuania. He increased the imperial subsidies and the numbers of pilgrimages to monasteries, then sponsored irreverent parodies of Orthodox worship at the oprichnik retreat in Alexandrovsk. Unable to account for the complexities of a rapidly changing world, Ivan intensified his terror against Westernizing elements in the years just before abolishing the oprichnina in 1572. In 1570, he razed and depopulated Novgorod once again, and summarily executed Viskovaty, one of his closest and
