The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (39 page)

In the south, while Moscow was distracted by Dmitri, Cossacks pillaged unhindered. Cossacks originated as a mix of runaway Slavic peasants and Tatar renegades who formed into bandit gangs along the frontier between the European settlements and the nomadic herdsmen of the steppe. As the Time of Troubles progressed, their numbers were boosted by more and more Russian serfs running away to join the Cossacks with their free and easy lifestyle. Cossacks were hard to control in the best of times, but they were also a useful military buffer between the Christian (Polish, Russian) and Muslim (Turkish, Tatar) empires, so the European rulers allowed them a privileged autonomy. Unfortunately, their bandit nature came out during ages of chaos. We will meet them several times in this book.

In 1607, Cossacks were raiding around the lower Volga River. One of the younger Cossacks had visited Moscow once, so the other Cossacks decided that this qualified him to be tsar. They proclaimed him to be Petr, lost son of Tsar Fedor. The mere technicality that Fedor had no son, Petr or otherwise, was of no consequence. Rumor filled in the details. An army formed around him. Many Dmitrists joined to support “Petr,” but the cruelty of Petr’s Cossacks disillusioned many supporters.

Tsar Vasily Shuisky was overthrown in 1610 by a conspiracy of Russian nobles who turned Moscow over to the Poles. Vasily was forcibly tonsured and shoved into a monastery, which disqualified him from ever holding office again. Shortly after that, he was hauled off to Poland and imprisoned for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, at a new headquarters far away, Dmitri was assassinated while drinking mead on a sleigh ride. He had become increasingly bad-tempered and paranoid—scolding, beating, and killing his followers with unpredictable frequency. Finally one of his
entourage, a Tatar prince he had once flogged, shot him and took his head as a souvenir.
⁹
The Russian throne remained vacant.

The Third False Dmitri

In 1611, a new Dmitri appeared. He spurned a Swedish offer of sponsorship and hooked up with the Cossacks instead. He was captured in May 1612, shackled, and dragged back to Moscow to be hanged.

Let’s back up for a minute and trace the career of a second-tier nobleman who had drifted in and out of various court intrigues. Fedor Romanov was the nephew of Tsar Ivan the Terrible’s beloved wife Anastasia, and first cousin to the simple-minded Tsar Fedor. A victorious general who fought the Swedes on behalf of Tsar Fedor, Fedor Romanov was purged from power and exiled to a monastery as Brother Philaret when Boris Godunov got the throne. When the first false Dmitri was swept into power by popular revolution, Philaret was allowed back into the world, but, trapped by his monastic vows, he could reinsert himself into Russian politics only as a clergyman. He rose in rank with each passing pseudo-Demetrius, but when Dmitri number 2 fell in 1610, Patriarch Philaret was hauled off and imprisoned in Poland. The main reason this concerns us is because it left his teenage son, Michael, as the leader of the Romanov clan.

Russia by this time was split in three. Moscow and westward were held by the Catholic Poles. Novgorod and the north were occupied by the Protestant Swe
des. The rest belonged to anyone who had a local force powerful enough to hold against everyone who challenged them. Both the Swedish and the Polish royal families were now hoping to put their own unemployed princes on the throne of Russia. This in turn threatened to drag Russia into the religious wars of Europe; however, in 1612, a Russian militia out of the city of Nizhni Novgorod drove the Poles out of Moscow, giving the Russian people a brief window of opportunity to set their own destiny.

Boyars from all across Russia quickly gathered for a conclave in Moscow in 1613. The ambitions of the Swedes and Poles canceled each other out, and the Russians succeeded in setting a vital ground rule for the conference: the new tsar, whoever he might be, had to be an authentic Russian. They chose Michael Romanov, the sixteen-year-old son of the Patriarch Philaret, to be the new tsar, beginning a dynasty that would last until the Russian Revolution in the twentieth century. Moscow had been so ravaged by repeated conquests and riots that Tsar Michael ruled from far away, at Orthodox Christianity’s holiest monastery, the Trinity–Saint Sergius, until Moscow could be rehabilitated.

Marina Mniszech, widow of two false Dmitris, had been trying to put her baby son Ivan
*
on the throne as the true heir of Tsar Dmitri, but as Michael Romanov began to consolidate his hold over Russia, jittery locals expelled her from her haven in Astrakhan before the tsar’s armies arrived. She fled into the wilderness, toward the pro
tection of some sympathetic Cossacks; however, she was intercepted by unsympathetic Cossacks who sold her back to Moscow. The boy Ivan was executed, and Marina died in prison within a year.

So What the Hell Happened?

The Time of Troubles is just one mystery after another. For starters, how did Ivan the Terrible die? Originally, he was said to have dropped dead during a chess game, but the mercury found in his system has been interpreted as the result of either assassination or accidental poisoning. It’s also possible that the mercury level, though high, was not enough to kill him, and he died of something else entirely. If his death was murder, Godunov is a favorite suspect. His motive is sometimes given as a preemptive strike against his paranoid master, although the more colorful story is that Godunov had burst in and stopped Ivan while he was raping Irina, Godunov’s sister and Fedor’s wife.

How did Tsarevich Dmitri die? There’s the official story (running with scissors, or whatever), the common rumor (murdered by Boris Godunov), and the later official story (escaped Godunov’s assassins to become Tsar Dmitri). Two other explanations sometimes surface: suicide (the church originally buried him as such) and murder, by enemies of Godunov in order to frame and discredit him (suggested by the historian Chester Dunning).
¹⁰
Let’s also consider the possibility that he was murdered for entirely nonpolitical reasons, but instead because he was turning into an extremely unpleasant “little monster” (Dunning’s words).

Who was the first false Dmitri? Many accounts of the Time of Troubles answer this question with more certainty than the evidence permits. It is common for the first pseudo-Dmitri to be positively identified as Grigory Otrepiev, a defrocked and debauched monk. The beleaguered Tsar Boris first spread this identification, based on political necessity rather than actual evidence.
Boris Godunov
, both Pushkin’s play and Mussorgsky’s opera, in which Otrepiev is a major character, popularized it. Other suggestions include the illegitimate son of a former Polish king, or a child raised by an ambitious clan of boyars to believe he really was Dmitri, a conspirator in a Polish or Jesuit plot, or the real Tsarevich Dmitri as advertised.
¹¹

When we try to identify the second false Dmitri, we can at least rule out a couple of candidates. Everyone nowadays agrees that he didn’t look like the first false Dmitri, and no modern historian has ever seriously suggested that the original Tsarevich Dmitri was still alive by this time. He was either a priest’s son or a converted Jew or someone else entirely.

We forget the certainty that the modern world has brought to our lives. Until the development of reliable biometrics, especially fingerprints, in the late nineteenth century, there was no way to positively identify a person. Without photography, only fading memories and inaccurate drawings would be available for reminding us of someone’s appearance. A person could disappear from one community and easily become someone new somewhere else. Slaves and criminals were often scarred, branded, or mutilated so they couldn’t pretend to be something else, but a free man could, with luck and the right attitude, reinvent himself without all of the bureaucratic paperwork that follows us around nowadays.

Properly identifying a cause of death is a modern phenomenon as well. Life and death have always been the great mysteries, especially how we go from one to the other. For most of history, medical science was so primitive that unless the deceased died in the middle of a battle or with his head on the chopping block, he probably had only a few vague symptoms—fever, nausea, delirium—that could point to anything. When a person simply sickened and died, there was no telling what had killed him—dangerous miasmas, planetary influences, eating too many cherries with chilled milk, or standing in the rain without a hat. Because every person worth noting in history books has had enemies who wanted him dead, poison has been suspected in virtually every nonviolent death across history.

Rather than getting bogged down in the messy details of who killed whom, it might be more useful to step back and see the Time of Troubles as a massive peasant revolt. A powerful tsar was the only counterweight capable of lifting the oppressive fist of the boyars off the Russian people. The Rurik dynasty, for all its faults, had been divinely ordained to protect Russia from her enemies, foreign and domestic. When the Ruriks went extinct, the boyars saw it merely as an opportunity to elevate their own candidates to the throne (Godunov, Shuisky). The ordinary Russians, however, could not accept that God would allow his chosen line to die out. In the end, they simply refused to believe it, and they invented the heir they needed.
¹²

THIRTY YEARS WAR

Death toll:
7.5 million

Rank:
17

Type:
religious conflict

Broad dividing line:
Protestants vs. Catholics

Time frame:
1618–48

Location:
Germany

Major state participants:
Bohemia, Brandenburg, Denmark, France, the Palatinate, Sweden, and Saxony vs. Austria, Bavaria, Spain, and Saxony, which switched sides

Quantum state participant:
Holy Roman Empire

Who usually gets the most blame:
Catholics, Calvinists, Hapsburgs, France, mercenaries

Neither Holy nor Roman nor an Empire

The Holy Roman Empire began as a medieval attempt to reunite Christendom, but by the Early Modern Era it was just a patchwork of little countries all bundled together into a nominal whole. At the start, it had encompassed diverse lands throughout central Europe that spoke Czech, Dutch, French, German, and Italian, but by the seventeenth century, it had eroded at the edges and was mostly just Germany. In theory, all of the little kings, dukes, bishops, and counts in Germany owed allegiance to the emperor, but in practice, less so.

The Thirty Years War was not the first holy war to rip through Germany after the Reformation. In the first wave of Lutheranism, many princes of Germany had seized all of the tax-free estates that the church had accumulated during its centuries of privilege. Frequent Anabaptist peasant revolts also swept the region only to be brutally suppressed by the authorities of both religions.
*
Finally, a major war ended in 1555 with the Treaty of Augsburg, which established a new balance by allowing German princes to select any religion they wanted, as long as it was either Catholic or Lutheran.

By tradition, the Holy Roman Empire was ruled by one of the Hapsburgs, a family based in Austria that had married into a vast collection of holdings scattered all over Europe. As the old emperor tottered into the twilight of his life without a son, the Hapsburg family began to line up his replacement. Eventually, palace intrigues settled on Archduke Ferdinand of Styria as his heir. Bit by bit, Hapsburg lands were transferred to Ferdinand’s control. While the old emperor had been forced into compromises with the Protestants under his rule, Ferdinand had been raised by Jesuits and took a hard line in support of Catholicism. In Styria, his home fiefdom, he gave the residents a simple choice: be Catholic or get out. One-third of the residents fled. As he took more Hapsburg possessions under his control, he insisted on religious conformity in larger parts of the empire.
¹

The Defenestration of Prague

Although tradition gave the empire to the Hapsburgs, the law put the official choice of Holy Roman Emperor in the hands of seven electors. Three electors were archbishops who naturally supported the Catholic Hapsburgs. The remaining four votes belonged to secular rulers of small countries within the empire—Brandenburg, Saxony, the Palatinate, and Bohemia. The first three of these had converted to Protestantism and might have preferred a Protestant emperor who would protect their interests. The remaining vote belonged to the traditionally Catholic king of Bohemia, a position that had become one of the heirlooms that passed along the House of Hapsburg. As you can see, the Catholics had the election locked up with 4 votes to 3.

Although the Hapsburgs were Catholic, the general populace of Bohemia had become Calvinist. Bohemia, like the empire itself, was an elective monarchy, but when the Bohemian nobility gathered in Prague to rubber-stamp the new Hapsburg as their king, they began to wonder if maybe a fellow Protestant might be a better choice. They tried to get a renewed guarantee of religious freedom from Ferdinand, but on May 23, 1618, negotiations broke down—badly. The Bohemians tossed the Hapsburg officials out the window into a dung heap and chose Frederick, the Calvinist elector of the Palatinate, to be king. In one stroke, the House of Hapsburg had lost its only electoral vote, and Count Palatine Frederick now had two votes of his own, plus the theoretical backing of the other two Protestant electors, which made a majority.

The Bohemian and Danish Phases

In practice, the other Protestant princes of the empire were not about to risk everything in support of the Count Palatine, so they cast their votes for the Hapsburg Ferdinand and left Bohemia to its fate. A Catholic army led by the Bavarian general Johannes Tilly set out to reclaim Bohemia and punish the rebellious Protestants. A scorched-earth policy of vengeance reduced Bohemia to a smoking wasteland. Of the 35,000 villages that had existed before the war, only 6,000 remained after the destruction. The population plummeted from 2 million to 700,000 as peasants starved or fled the onslaught of armies.
²
Finally, the Battle of White Mountain in November 1620 dealt a crippling defeat to the Palatine forces. King Frederick was chased away, and Albrecht von Wallenstein was installed as the Hapsburg’s military governor of Bohemia. The ringleaders of the rebellion were executed in Prague’s town square. The devastated estates of the rebellious nobles were confiscated and allocated to Hapsburg loyalists.

Then the Catholic armies turned against the Palatinate to punish Frederick for trying to take Bohemia away. His principal city, Heidelburg, was taken and looted, while Frederick fled into e
xile in Holland. The Hapsburgs gave the Palatinate to their ally, the Catholic duke of Bavaria. This scared the other Protestant states into action. While they had been willing to sit back and let the Catholics restore the status quo in Bohemia, the erasure of the Palatinate was not part of the deal.

As Protestant fortunes ebbed, outside kingdoms were called in to support the Lutheran side. King Christian of Denmark led his army into Germany in 1625, but it was badly beaten by the Catholic army of Wallenstein, while Tilly crushed a new army assembled by the Protestant princes of Germany. The Catholics then rolled over northern Germany and peninsular Denmark. The Danes fled to their islands, saved only by the lack of any imperial fleet in the Baltic.

Riding the high tide of victory, Austria set out to undo the Reformation. Their 1629 Edict of Restitution ordered that all of the property seized by Protestant princes from the Roman Catholic Church in the pas
t seventy-seven years had to be returned to the church. Calvinism was outlawed throughout the empire.

Swedish Phase

With imperial armies marching and camping along the Baltic Sea, the Hapsburgs were now encroaching on Swedish turf. First Sweden boosted its army threefold thanks to subsidies from the French, who did not want to see a Holy Roman Empire that actually functioned as an empire. Then the Swedes crossed the Baltic and took to the field in July 1630.

Students of military history know this phase of the war as the era of Gustavus Adolphus, energetic king of Sweden and leg
endary military genius. Having already proved his mettle in a string of wars against Denmark, Russia, and Poland, he was turning into one of those legendary warlords like Frederick the Great and Napoleon who fought battles like a chess master.

In the spring of 1631, a Cat
holic army under Tilly tried to crack the Protestant fortress city of Magdeburg, which guarded the crossing of the Elbe River. After a lengthy siege, the city was taken and utterly destroyed. Of the 30,000 inhabitants, no more than 5,000 survived the sack, mostly women who were dragged away by the soldiers for later use. The city burned for three days, leaving a nightmare scene of carnage: “The living crawling from under the dead, children wandering about with heart-rending cries, calling for their parents; and infants still sucking the breasts of their lifeless mothers.”
³
Six thousand bodies were dumped into the river as part of the cleanup for Tilly’s triumphal entrance.
⁴

In September 1631, Gustavus Adolphus inflicted a major defeat on the Catholics at Breitenfeld, pushing the war away from the Protestant north
into the Catholic south. The Swedish victory put the Protestants back in the game and kept peace from breaking out eighteen years too early. In the spring, the Swedes beat the imperial army again, killing Tilly in the process. Finally, in November 1632, Gustavus scored his greatest triumph against Wallenstein in the Battle of Lutzen, but he was killed while scouting too far ahead of his line. The Catholics got a chance to catch their breath.

The death of Gustavus Adolphus stalled the renewed Protestant momentum, but Wallenstein held back from taking advantage of this change in fortunes. Instead, he began to play his own game, opening tentative negotiations with the en
emy and fighting them only when they proved reluctant to take his offers seriously. He was clearly angling to bypass the Hapsburgs and put himself in charge of Germany. The emperor got wind of this and enlisted a couple of Wallenstein’s senior officers to assassinate him.

Style of War

The backbone of an army during the Thirty Years War was an integrated block of musketeers and pikemen. The pikemen used long spears to hold the enemy at a safe distance while the musketeers killed them. To break a block of infantry, squads of horsemen in steel armor would ride up, fire pistols into the mob, then wheel about and trot out of range to reload. These tedious assaults were repeated over and over, usually without much impact.
Artillery at the time was large and cumbersome, and cannoneers might still be arriving and setting up by the time the battle ended.
⁵

Gustavus Adolphus changed all that. He reduced the size of field cannon and made them light enough to be deployed more quickly in b
attle and to break apart the big blocks of infantry. He also trained his cavalry to attack at a gallop with lances and sabers; he stretched his infantry into a line instead of a block to make it less susceptible to bombardment from cannon, and used his pikemen offensively. The Battle of Breitenfeld was the first victory for these new-style formations, which would dominate the battlefield for the next two centuries.
⁶

Uniforms were uncommon in armies of the Early Modern Era, and most soldiers dressed like ordinary tradesmen in sturdy, comfortable work clothes, supplemented by whatever armor, kit, or ornamentation they could scrounge. The only way to tell friend from foe was by the giant battle flags each unit carried. Every army was trailed by a mob of women to cook, launder, and nurse. Gustavus Adolphus and many Calvinist generals insisted that these women be exclusively the wives of soldiers. Camp followers have since earned a reputation as nothing but prostitutes, but they were much more, and no army could survive without them.

Armies on independent operations numbered maybe 10,000 to 20,000, although they would sometime coalesce into forces two or three times that size for big battles. They were generally assembled from mercenary units that were hired and discharged as a group. The individual soldiers owed their primary allegiance to their captain, not to whichever prince had hired them, and they might freely switch sides if the pay was better or if they were taken prisoner. The only military personnel that most nations had on full-time salary were the palace guards and a few staff officers who knew where to hire mercenaries in a hurry—usually Scotland, Italy, and Switzerland. Unemployed mercenary units tended to stick around and live off the land while waiting for another government to hire them.