Ivan the Terrible and his Oldest Son

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 Shaw on May ten, and you happened to be walking through Moscow's Trechikov 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 eight pm 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 Trechikov by its most ardent curators. The painting was painted in eighteen eighty five by Ilya Rapine, the master

of late nineteenth century Russian realism. If the painting 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 Tsar of Russia, crowned in Fife. 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 all so has an unofficial name, Ivan the Terrible, killing his son the philocidal image is too much horror for some to bear.

The man who slashed the painting in 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 ose, 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 philicide 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. Yeah. Two hundred years before Katherine 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 fifteen thirty, and the nineteenth ruler of the Ruric dynasty was waiting to find out whether the child being born to his wife was male or female. Vasily the third Ivanovitch was fifty one years old and childless.

He was Grand Prince of Moscow, the area that would later become the Tzardom 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 twenty one years of marriage, so he divorced her despite the controversy, and had her shipped off to a monastery. Coincidentally, Henry the Eighth in England was dealing with a similar lack of male heirs after a twenty plus year marriage.

At the exact same time, but back in Russia, post divorce, Vassili remarried the much younger Elena Glinskaya, only twenty years old, less than half of her new husband's age. She had literally not yet been born when Vassili 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 Ruric dynasty, thus far nineteen 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 Uri 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 fifteen thirty seven, and then died the following year at the age of thirty and what has long been speculated to have been a poison ning. 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 sixteenth 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 old. His youth meant that the ruling classes of Russia had almost ten 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 Kurbsky, 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 grown ups 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 Vassily the third had been alive, he had clearly wanted his son Ivan

to be his successor. Vasily had even gotten a child sized helmet made for his little firstborn son featuring all the adulter galia of a future ruler. So on January six, fifteen forty seven, seventeen year old Ivan was crowned not only Prince of Moscow like his father, but Tzar of all russ It was the first time any Russian ruler had been called czar, 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 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 sixteenth century here, back to Ivan and his first wife, Anastasia.

They were both seventeen. Anastasia was from a powerful Russian family and had been chosen from as many as fifteen hundred 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 anasta Ja. 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 fifteen sixty and unlucky, thirteen 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, 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 fifteen fifty four 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 Ivanovitch to help us keep it straight. Ivan Ivanovitch'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's forbid something should happen to his older brother, it meant that the Die ynasty 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, Feodor 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 breadth 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 fifteen sixty four. In what a modern person might view as a bit of a temper tantrum, he threatened to abdicate. In fifteen sixty five, five years after Anastasia's death, he decided not to abdicate after all. Instead, he would have a bit of twisted fund. Ivan separated himself from the Day a Day Life of Russia, left Moscow and installed himself in a private court called the opreach Nina. The name can still strike fear into

a Russian heart. From his opreach Nina, Ivan could massacre whomever he wanted and who he wanted, who he had wanted ever since he was a child. Where the boyars. Ivan is said to have sent memorials of over three thousand executed boyars two 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 immoral privileged syndrome of so many young princes destined to rule from the time that they were born. We don't know. The Opportunina'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 Aprictnina

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 abridge 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 widows 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 bizareness of Ivan's political vision 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 morning widower. In fact, he got married again almost immediately after Anastasia's death, to a beautiful Churkissian princess named Maria. Ivan was thirty one at the time, but his bride was the same age as Anastasia had been at their wedding,

only seventeen. As Taylor Swift would later say, I'll get older, but your lover's stay at my age. The Zaritza Maria died eight years later in fifteen sixty nine, at age twenty five. From then on, Ivan gave his little son no dearth of stepmothers. He married five more times between fifteen seventy and fifteen eighty, 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 one, when his son raced into the room to find his father in a paroxyism of violence. Tsarevich ivan Ivanovitch was twenty seven 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 Ivanovitch, his third wife had been running ahead of him into that fateful room where her father in law was. Her name was Yelena Scheremiteva, and she was pregnant, possibly with the future heir to the throne,

the continuation of Ivan's line. Her father, the Czar had come upon her, wearing, gasp, only her underwear in the hundreds. 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 sun 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 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 air,

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 murderer had taken place. After all, Allegedly it had been so hot

that the pregnant Elena 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 bloodthirsties are 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, And 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 Ivanovitch was simply struck down by ill health, though I want to add, who's to say that the younger 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, Ivanovitch's younger brother, Fedor took over. In at forty one, Feodor died childless, ending the Ruric dynasty after twenty one generations. Fyodor's death threw Russia into the Infamous Time of Troubles, a violent power struggle that lasted fifteen years and saw a famine that killed nearly a third of population that time.

Concluded in sixteen thirteen with the instatement of the Romanov dynasty, which would go on to include Catherine the Great and continue until the Bolshevik Revolution in nineteen seventeen, when the last Romanov rulers were unseated 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.

Three hundred years after Ivan's death, in eighteen eighty five, 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 nineteen thirteen, 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 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 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

philocidal 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. Early Europeans infamous painting showed up again recently in a pretty suddenly relevant piece of pop culture, Servant of the People, a TV comedy starring Vladimir Zelenski, 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 sixteenth century garb. Zelenski's character and Ivan argue, Russia will come free you, says Ivan. Zelenski 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 played, 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 twenty three, at about the eight minute

twenty four 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, Zalinsky and Ukraine are cast as the Sun killed by the murderous leader of Russia, all the way back in seven years before the tragic current war happening today. Noble Blood is a production of I Heart

Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Mankey. Noble Blood is hosted by me Danish Sports. Additional writing and researching done by Hannah Johnston, hannah's Wick, Mirra Hayward, Courtney Sunder and Laurie Goodman. The show is produced by rema Il Kali, with supervising producer Josh Thane and executive producers Aaron Mankey, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Book