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World history has been sad to see unheard of atrocities and the names here are expressive, synonymous with mass crime.
Genghis Khan Y Vlad the Paloukotis they left their legacy very heavy in terms of terror and death, but none of them had received the nickname “Terrible”.
The dubious honor belongs to the medieval tsar of all Russia, Ivan IV Vasilyevich, who won with his bloody sword to go down in history as Ivan the Terrible.
And the painting by the Russian realist painter Mikhail Konstantinovich Claude (1832-1902) entitled “Ivan the Terrible and the ghosts of his victims” serves perhaps as the best introduction to who was the ruthless monarch haunted by the spirits of many. too many, their victims.
And all this from a man who didn’t start his reign as a bloodthirsty tyrant, nothing more.
But it was these “extreme outbursts of violence,” as historians brilliantly call them, that would have earned it the terrifying nickname.
Ivan could have been terrible since he was a kid
Like Ivan IV Vasilievich, he was born in 1530 in the Grand Duchy of Muscovy and was always destined to rule. He was the son of Ivan III Vasilievich, also known as “Mega”, who anointed him heir to the throne.
The Grand Duke died when Ivan He was only 3 years old, so he got the succession ring early, but had to grow up to rule. His mother served as regent, but she too died five years later, leaving several commissioners to look after the crown.
Here the historians place the greatest affliction of his life. Small and immature, he was surrounded by power-hungry boyars, who came to openly question his succession. Even without food they left him, as a possible death would unexpectedly work out well for their plans.
The boyars, the noble feudal lords of Muscovy, were so insidious and conspiratorial that the little boy grew up learning to hate them. After all, his life was in danger from his murderous plots, and court intrigues certainly played an important role in forging his at least complex personality.
When the upper-class squabbles degenerated into the once majestic reign of the young prince, he showed the first outbursts of anger. From a young age he learned to distrust everyone, living for years and years in a state of mental abuse.
Reports tell him that he tortured animals as a child and did not miss an opportunity to show the darkness of his soul, though it could well be libelous slurs from pretenders to the throne.
However, Ivan grew up hating nobles and would soon hunt them down without mercy …
Why not Ivan the Magnificent?
In 1547, closing the 17th year of his life and with the intrigues for the crown that had not borne fruit, Ivan was crowned Grand Duke of Moscovia. And the first years of his government are the least enlightened!
He marries early and shows exactly how he wants to rule his kingdom: peacefully and progressively. And in fact, the reforms he introduced were in the direction of justice and modernization of the country. Both at the central administration level and in everyday life.
His duchy acquired in 1549 a permanent body of advisers, an early and relatively representative government that is, to help you in your broad reform agenda. Which is extremely progressive by the measurements of the time.
The young governor appoints local councils in the dukedom’s provinces, restructures taxation and makes a long series of positive legislative arrangements. Now the poor peasant has the right even to abandon his feudal lord!
After limiting its power aristocracy, subjecting it to the absolute control of the crown, he even proceeded to transform the ecclesiastical function, regulating State-Church relations on another basis.
It was a fruitful and productive period of peace and more justice for all, conditions that transformed the local community. Perhaps in the end it was not so terrible, one would say. But before you say it, you have to wait …
The popular Ivan IV and the reign of terror
Before showing who he really is, Ivan managed to expand the borders of his kingdom. His foreign policy goal was twofold from the start: to resist the Mongolian Golden Horde of the Volga and their Tatar khanates, on the one hand, to gain access to the Baltic Sea, on the other.
And so, between 1552 and 1566, his troops dissolved the Kazan and Astrakhan khanas, annexing their territories to the Duchy of Muscovy. Its status now stretches from the Urals to the Caspian Sea to the south, creating an important defensive wall for the greedy appetites of Mongols.
However, his campaign in the Baltic failed and he had his commissioners to blame. His advisers betrayed him, surrendering to the enemy and defeating his forces. Ivan’s expansion stopped, but not without revenge.
And the truth is that his rage spread against the just and the unjust. Enlightened despotism is an old story. Now he grabs the tsifliki from the nobles and distributes them to the thugs. Now he is creating a secret, black-clad police force that is not here to maintain order, but to hunt down those it considers an internal enemy.
After dissolving his government, he becomes a true tyrant. Break its state in two. One is governed as before, but in the other he is the absolute boss, inaugurating a domain of terror that has rarely been recorded in history.
The boyars, whom he hated so much from a young age, will not escape his rage. And the more he felt he was losing his popular support, the more eccentric his behavior would become. “She was strangled Russia“, or the Muscovite State of Russia, as it was known then, in the blood”, observes a Russian historian …
Ivan the Terrible or better Ivan the Evil
Neither the nobles nor the clergy escaped his rage, especially the high ecclesiastical ranks. At the same time, he turned against ordinary people. Where there was a sense of disorder or revolutionary tendencies, it burned entire cities and killed thousands of their inhabitants.
Bestiality has become commonplace. Countless were thrown into the dungeons, and indeed they were the lucky ones. Most were executed, often in retaliation. Neither the women nor the children escaped his rage.
In fact, from the moment he lost his first tsar in 1560, things got even worse for his people. THE czar Now there were frequent and completely paranoid outbursts and in each one of them the country mourned the victims with the sack.
This is how the next 24 years would pass, full of deportations, looting of property and bloody events that we now call ethnic cleansing. His empire was in chaos and bloodshed, and the only certainty was that no one was safe.
If the tsar’s appetites changed, you were an enemy. They accused you of treason, disobedience or anything else and with the Tsarist firmament in hand they led you to the detachment. Thousands of citizens of the Kingdom of Russia were massacred, displaced and massacred, with economic catastrophe looming year after year.
Is Ivan the madman?
While the secret police intensified the scourge they had inflicted within their kingdom, outside they now counted defeats and defeats again. Because yes, it has reached the coveted SiberiaIts westward expansion was considered super successful, but the old enemies did what they wanted in their territories.
The Tartar tribes even sacked Moscow (1579) and their other notorious enemies, Poles, Lithuanians, Danes and Swedes, razed cities and annexed their territories in each of their invasions.
The once powerful Kingdom of Russia was stopped from its complete collapse, but it had more to deal with. Your family now!
His violent outbursts were no longer like them, now they were even directed against his own family. Ivan had at least six wives and some of them were mysteriously poisoned or sent to live in monasteries.
One of them even savagely beat her while she was pregnant, causing a miscarriage, while a second drowned her the day after her wedding.
It was his son’s turn, whom he killed in one of his infamous manic events. If he was really insane, as some historians believe today, we don’t know, but we do know that he had paranoid tendencies and delusions of grandeur. As in the infamous incident with him St. Basil’s Cathedral, the very symbol of Moscow today.
The temple was built in its day to celebrate their victory over the Kazan Khanate. And he was so excited about the elaborate and colorful building that, as legend has it, he blinded the architect so that he couldn’t do anything so brilliant since then.
Today we know that this is not true, Postnik Yakovlev gave other architectures later, but the story could well be true. Ivan had no such doubts, he saw betrayal and backstabbing everywhere and put things in their place.
The last decade of his reign was characterized by even more savage barbarism. And the slightest suspicion of someone now, even a wrong word, could bring you horrible torture and martyrdom.
When he died in 1584, they found high concentrations of mercury in his body. Perhaps he was seriously ill and seeking treatment. Perhaps it was true again that he was participating in alchemy ceremonies and was poisoned. By mistake or on purpose, who says that?
By then his clarity had slipped into charade and Ivan the Terrible was only a shadow of himself. He was possessed by the obsession of death, calling spiritual and witches from the depths of the bass empire and save it from its impending doom.
The deep scars left by the bloodstained rule of the first tsar of the Russian Pasha would not heal until a century later. As for “Terrible”, no one called him that while he lived.
It is not known when the nickname was assigned to him, but it certainly came after his death. And it came to stay, describing a time when the terror that reigned was truly terrible.
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