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hi everyone welcome back to the history and 20 podcast hope we're all doing okay thanks for tuning in as per so this time we are covering ivan the terrible so it's a guy i've wanted to do for a long time and i've had a few requests to mention him so two i've just got the list here to pat catherine james ian and david i think that's everyone thanks that request guys so hope you enjoy this one so we'll start off with his personal profile so he was born on the 25th of august 1530 and just as a disclaimer you're really gonna have to excuse me for any pronunciations here because he is russian so if i'm wrong apologies so it was born 25th of august 1530 and com colomenskoi in the grand duchy of moscow and he was known as ivan iv ivan the terrible which originated from his name ivan grozny which means terrible in russian and it's not terrible in the sense of bad it's terrible in the sense of like evil so uh he died on the 18th of march 1584 he was aged 53 in moscow which at this point was in the sodom of russia and we'll get to that in a minute explain what that means and stuff so he rained initially as grand prince of moscow from the 3rd of december 1533 the 16th of january 1547 and then azar of russia from the 26th of january 1547 to 1574 and then back again from 1576 to the 18th of march 1584 when he died and again i'll explain why there's a bit of a break later on so spouses as far as that goes he was married eight times but only four of whom were recognised by the church and the most famous of those includes anastasia romanovna and he had eight children not the eight different wives but he had eight children uh the two most famous of those were ivan ivanovic and theodore the first of russia and he was part of the rurik dynasty so start a little introduction so ivan the terrible is a name that many people have heard of like myself but know little about including me so when i was researching this i didn't even know what century rained in um but i've also found there to be numerous similarities between both vladimir which we covered earlier i'll link that in the comments if you've not listened to that one and ivan the terrible so if you enjoyed that one i think you'll enjoy this one too so his reign completely transformed russia obviously there was the torture the murders the gore etc but the prominent feature of ivan terrible's reign is the transformation of russia from a medieval state into an early modern empire so we'll go right back to the beginning and when he was born so he was born into royalty his father was a guy called vasily the third he was the grand prince of moscow and he ran from 1505 to 33 and his mother was called elena she was his second wife and vasili died when ivan was just three he was only three years old which left him as the grand prince of moscow so his mother ruled on his behalf as what we call a regent uh queen regent until her death in 1538 when ivan was only eight so by time he was eight he'd lost both of his parents now many historians and contemporaries alike believe that she had been poisoned and this sort of is a recurring theme that plays throughout ivan's reign as we'll see so upon his mother's death a group of reformers known as the chosen council united around ivan and they gave him a royal education bringing him up sort of ensuring that he was knowledgeable on how to rule as a king so when ivan turned 16 that was when he reached his age of majority in russia at the time this was in 1547 the chosen council declared himsar that's t-s-a-r or c-z-a-r if yeah you're american and that's derived from the latin term caesar which means emperor so he was declared saar of all russia and provo russia and with this established the sardom of russia with muscle as the predominant state now upon his coronation as are of all the russians this was partly an imitation of his grandfather ivan iii the great so we've got ivan the great and ivan the terrible he ran from 1462 to 1505 and he'd also style himself star in his private correspondences so there is some sort of influence going on there as well so just two weeks after his coronation ivan married anastasia romanovna who became the first russian sarissa and the new style new sorry title sar was more than just a fancy label it was it basically sent a message to not just russia but to the world that he was the only supreme leader of the country and as well as the fact that he had put himself on a level with those such as the mongol khans and the byzantine emperors he was determined on sort of setting the precedent as an empire rather than just a country than a king of a country king of a kingdom he wanted to be the emperor of an empire so his early reign from 1547 to 60 we'll start with so in his education as a child ivan often feared the boyars and you might recognize that term from the vlad the imperler podcast but if you're not familiar with it boyars are caught in ability they're like noblemen within the courts of these people so he he feared these because they wouldn't think twice about beating him or abusing him and things like that so upon his coronation one of his first acts was to have his most hated boyar who was a guy called prince andrea shusky seized and torn apart by a pack of hounds so no messing from the off but contrary to that initially ivan's early reign was fairly peaceful so he revised the old law chords and created the sudden of 1550 as well as found in a standing army called the strelzy and also established something called the zemsky sabor which was the first russian parliament of feudal estates and then in 1553 he ordered the establishment of the moscow print yard and the first printing press was introduced to russia which you can imagine when like gutenberg invented it in europe in the mid 15th that revolutionized the way well anything was communicating especially the reformation so introducing that into such a massive countries russia you can see the effect that would have immediately however aside from developments on home territory he also did ravage a series of conquests in the 1550s now his logic wasn't unreasonable behind this not like he was doing it for the sake of it so as a child armies of the kazan khan it repeatedly raided northeastern russia and the devastated entire communities at a time and damaged loads of farmland in the process so eventually on the 16th of june 1552 ivan led russian army towards kazan and they began siege the capital so by 2nd of october cousin had fallen and to celebrate this ivan commenced the building of several russian orthodox churches with oriental features including as you'll see on your screen now the famous saint basil's cathedral now this is like another instance where it would have been fine if he'd left it as that but instead he went one step further and you can kind of see the cracks are beginning to appear and why he gets called the terrible so allegedly he was that impressed with the sheer beauty of saint basil's cathedral in red square in moscow that he allegedly ordered for the architects who designed it to be blinded by having their eyes gouged out so that they could never create anything as beautiful or picturesque as that ever again which just seems absolutely insane but there we are then in further campaigns in 1554 and 1556 russian troops conquered the astrakhan incarnate which is on the mouth of the volga river now the annexation of these cannots meant that ivan had succeeded in the conquest of vast territories and as a result he gained access to large markets and control of the entire length of the volga river and at this point it's worth bearing in mind he was only 26 years old and he's conquered all this territory and from that perspective you kind of think yeah i i do understand like he can be good and terrible at the same time but that's just my opinion so we'll carry on so two years later ivan did launch the most famous conflict of his reign which was called the livonian war and that's a conflict that would literally plague him until his death so his initial thought for starting this war was that he could gain access to the baltic sea and other major trading routes there's even examples of correspondence with him from english ambassadors right over like this is queen elizabeth the first would have been on the throne then which is fascinating all the way from russia and stuff i thought was really interesting um so yeah you wanted to conquer the baltic seeing the major trading routes and obviously trading routes you have massive opportunities that they came with it so this war engaged many northern and eastern european powers including the kingdom of sweden the grand duchy of lithuania the polish lithuanian commonwealth and the teutonic knights of livonia and the war ultimately proved a disaster for ivan because it ended up lasting until 1583 and it just about destroyed the economy so we're going to a bit more of a negative tone now and getting to the real gory stuff so if you're into that you'll like this bit so this bit of sort of term is the paranoia and later rain from 1560 to 80 ish so on the 7th of august 1560 ivan's wife anastasia died so many contemporaries and historians alike believe that this was one of the major triggering points which both caused a decline in ivan's mental health and an increase in his paranoia so aft after 1560 his reign became one of transformation and warfare followed by rebellion discontent and famine so in the early 1560s the sardone was split in two halves the zemchnina based around moscow and the oprichnina based around the novgorod republic i'll put a map up of that on the screen so you can have a look at that might help visualize it for some people so ivan had distrusted those in the other half so the northern half which was the and he distrusted them and their boyars so at the height of his popularity on the 3rd of december 1564 he abdicated the throne now the boyars were disappointed because legally they could not govern without assad so they had no power without assad in charge of them and nobody wanted to pick a new one in case they turned out like ivan so on top of this the boyars lived in a city where the local population despised them so their position was in huge jeopardy so eventually they begged for ivan to return and he did so on one condition that he was an absolute monarch so in other words that he ruled over the boyars and the people all together now in hindsight that was a pretty silly move but hindsight's a great thing isn't it and obviously they didn't have that then so upon his return ivan founded the oppressed nikki who were a secret police now there's an estimate of around six thousand men uh and it was their job to turn in traitors and monitor the op rich nina so essentially he was putting forward a police state one of the earliest examples of a police state and he considered torture a suitable weapon of state and he even once allowed the operating to turn in his own personal physician to be put on the stretching rack and roasted alive on a spit on suspicion of treachery so his paranoia was clearly an all-time high in the 1560s so plague and famine then struck russia in the late 1560s and ivan was worried that the people of novgorod would rebel and there was no evidence that they were going to rebel but and they never actually did but ivan was so convinced that they would because of his paranoia that he thought the safest option was for him to just attack the city so the next event this leads on to is called the sack of novgorod and this is in 1570. so there was a plague in russia at this point and this had reached the operatic nina by 1570 and had further worsened conditions in novgorod so at its peak it was killing 10 000 people a day in novgorod in between 600 to 1 000 daily in moscow and it was during the epidemic the famine the ongoing livonian war that ivan grew suspicious that the noblemen of novgorod were planning to defect from russia to lithuania and this is kind of understandable in my view i think that you've got all these negative things going on the famine the plague this war and you think why would anyone want to live in this state where all this is going we'll move to the other side where we're going to get treated better but again ivan's paranoia multiply that to the power of 10 and there we are so in 1570 i even ordered the operatic nikki to raid novgorod and they burned and pillaged the city and the surrounding villages now ivan himself was also present and it culminated in the slaughter of sixty thousand men women and children and to this day the city of novgorod has never regained its former prominence at all so that's the huge devastating effect that that the sack of novgorod had on the city itself so despite how often that ivan actually utilized the services of the operating he was never totally enamored by them so during the russo crimean war which was from 1571 to 72 the operatic nikki failed to prove themselves according to ivan's standards against a regular army and ivan totally desponded them in 1572 and he also disbanded the idea of the operation nina by this point as well so fast forward a couple of years to 1575 sorry excuse me and ivan once again pretended to resign this time he proclaimed a personal friend of his a guy called simeon beck bulatovic as the new tsar now the following year i haven't decided he was ready to come back and despite the lands which simeon had seized from the church and ivan promised to return on coming back to the throne he still kept hold of them and resumed his position as uh so then the next major event uh is in 1581 so we're going forward a few more years but it's the next kind of major key event that i thought anyway so ivan ivanovic was ivan's eldest son and he had a difficult relationship with his father as you'd expect so ivan the terrible often used to abuse his son and his daughter-in-law his son's wife uh and this eventually culminated in the death of his son on the 19th of november 1581. now ivan started beating up his son's wife for allegedly dressing immodestly and he beat her so badly that she had a miscarriage because the extent of the abuse and wounds that she'd suffered so upon hearing this news ivan ivanovich got into a huge argument and fight with his father as you'd expect but ivan the terror will beat him to death with an iron-tipped rod and you can see the painting on your screen now that's a contemporary picture of ivan having killed his son so that again like he goes from literally from bad to worse so the next step is the death surviving the terrible so eventually his excessive lifestyle did catch up with him so during his last days his body became swollen and wracked with pain so his physicians failed to find a cure so he turned to astrologists and clairvoyants who no surprise they were equally as unsuccessful so then he invited the english ambassador to his palace just days before his death and he showed him some precious gems and he stated look how they lose their colour they proclaim my end i have been poisoned and then on the 18th of march 1584 aged 53 ivan died and he died when he was playing a game of chess against himself because who would date i think they could beat the tsar of russia at chess it'd be unfathomable to think that and uh he was buried in the cathedral of saint michael in the kremlin but the cause of ivan's death had been the subject of debate over the years and it had been attributed to a number of conditions ranging from cancer to syphilis to dysentery but over 400 years after his death his tomb was eventually open for tests on his corpse and they found that his body actually contained toxic levels of both mercury and arsenic suggesting that he had died at the hands of a poisoner proving the old adage that even a paranoid person can have real enemies so we said he thought his mother was poisoned anastasia might have been poisoned and then turns out ivan himself was poisoned so was he right to be paranoid about that let you make that decision so what sort of legacy did ivan leave behind well his next eldest son succeeded him as failed or the first but he was a weak-minded ruler and he died childless in 1598 and that ushered in a period in russian history called the time of troubles and this period only came to an end in thanks the accession of michael the first of the house of romanov and they were the royal house who would rule russia until the russian revolution and thus the abolition of the monarchy in 1917 so for almost 300 years the romanov family ruled and the romanovs were descended from ivan's first wife anastasia so ivan's life was one of the most remarkable of the 16th century and in fact one of the most remarkable of all time and there are elements which do fit in with other completely insane rulers like vlad the imperler or i was thinking maybe the roman emperors caligula and nero you can get some sort of similarities with that with just the sheer eccentricity and brutal bloodiness i suppose um but there are other elements where he can be seen as a true reformer like changing the law codes and things like that and regardless of anyone's opinion on him it is true that he did transform russia and for the most part for the better so russia changed from medieval backwater in the frigid northeast fringes of europe and became more than just a frozen landmass sitting atop the asian step it became literally a global superpower and it's never looked back and it was only with the death death of sar nicholas ii in 1917 that russia eventually lost its sardom and nicholas was descended from the romanov family so like we said he's thanks to his marriage to anastasia and becoming the first tsar of russia this essentially led um a dynasty really that lasted for the good best part 300 years so the impact that he had on history undoubtedly makes him one of the most interesting characters to study and there's a great historian guy called norman dave he's now think he sums up ivan's life and death pretty well he says after such comprehensive socio-political transplants and amputations it's not surprising that the patient fell sick and i think that's the best way of summing him up so thanks for tuning in hope you enjoyed this one and i'll catch you at the next one see you then