Maria Temryukovna

Died September 1, 1569

Of Ivan the Terrible’s many wives, the one we know the most about is his first, Anastasia. Ivan himself clearly felt tenderness for his “little dove” (yes, he was apparently capable of such feelings) and rage (which came to him much more easily) toward the boyars he accused of poisoning her. Anastasia has been portrayed as a gentle soul and a calming force in the life of her savage husband: this image is reflected in Nikolai Karamzin’s History of the Russian State, on the Millennium of Russia monument erected in Novgorod in 1862, and in Eisenstein’s film, Ivan the Terrible. Furthermore, she was a Romanov, which would certainly have inclined future tsars to cast her in a positive light.

But what about his six subsequent wives?* For the most part, we know very little about them, and what we do know is pretty grim: several were dispatched to a convent, one was purportedly drowned in a pond after her sled was pushed or slid onto the ice, and others simply died young of causes natural or unnatural. We have a somewhat clearer picture of Ivan’s last wife, Maria Nagaya, the mother of Tsarevich Dmitry – the real Dmitry who had so many impostors after his death. These “False Dmitrys” were central figures in the Time of Troubles that roiled Russia starting about 14 years after Ivan’s death.

Among “the Terrible’s” unfortunate wives, Maria Temryukovna, his second, is an interesting case. Her story is peppered with unusual details, starting with the fact that Ivan, supposedly so devoted to his first wife, began to look for a replacement just eight days after her death. The primary sources tend to emphasize that he himself was in no hurry; it was the metropolitan and boyars who urged him to act quickly. This might have been more believable if an heir had been urgently needed, but of the many children born to Ivan and Anastasia, two – both boys – were still alive. The succession seemed secure. So, why the rush? Could it be that the tsar dropped hints to his inner circle that he didn’t want to remain single for long? Whatever the case may have been, a bride was urgently sought. But where was a suitable one to be found?

Royal unions have never been a simple matter. In medieval Russia, royal daughters in particular had few options. According to the customs of the time, a bride took on the status of her husband, so a tsarevna who married a boyar was taking a step down. Marrying a foreign prince was, in theory, an option, but few of them were Orthodox and it was hard to find a foreigner willing to convert.

The males of the line had it easier, since their wives would ascend to their level. The Terrible’s grandfather, Ivan III, was married twice: first to a princess from Tver, which enabled him to later lay claim to her principality’s lands, and next to Sophia Paleolog, the niece of the last Byzantine emperor – also a politically strategic marriage, one that allowed the ruler of Moscow to cast himself as carrying on the Byzantine legacy.

By the end of Ivan III’s reign, Russian lands had almost all been subjugated by Moscow, and looking to other principalities for a bride did not work out. The boyars’ daughters were all perfectly worthy candidates, but such unions gave the bride’s relatives greater influence, making them potentially dangerous rivals. Little wonder, then, that royal matchmaking was fraught with endless intrigues. Courtiers promoted their own candidates, from among whom a “short list” was arrived at and presented to the tsar to select “the winner.” Ivan chose his first wife using this smotrina system, whereby prospective tsaritsas were paraded before the tsar so that he could evaluate them (the noun smotrina shares its root with the verb “to look/watch” – smotret). Should this approach be repeated?  Should boyar maidens from across Rus be brought to Moscow to compete for the honor of tsaritsa? Ivan opted for a different approach.

The thirty-year-old tsar had come a long way from the seventeen-year-old who married Anastasia. He had military campaigns and reforms under his belt, and, more to the point, his personality was becoming increasingly dark and suspicious. Was this because of Anastasia’s death, which may have exacerbated a developing mental illness? Or had he simply concluded that it was better not to share power, even with his most trusted associates?

Indeed, this was a period when the tsar was getting rid of the very people with whom he had spent the past ten years reforming the army and government. His spiritual advisor, the priest Silvester, someone who had exerted great influence over Ivan in the past, was sent into exile, and Alexei Adashev, who had led the reforms, was arrested, likely saved from execution only by illness and a natural death. The tsar’s closest childhood friend, Prince Andrei Kurbsky, who was already under house arrest, fled to Lithuania, with which Muscovy was embroiled in a military conflict. From there, Kurbsky sent Ivan a letter accusing him of tyranny and groundless arrests.

How could the tsar choose a bride among boyar daughters when he imagined treachery and betrayal all around and suspected the boyars of undermining his military campaign, to say nothing of his belief that they had poisoned his first wife? He felt he had no choice but to marry a foreigner and started with the surprising move of playing suitor to Katerina Jagiellon (Katarzyna Jagiellonka), sister of Sigismund II Augustus, King of Poland.

Katerina was Catholic and unlikely to convert; furthermore, relations between Muscovy and Poland were extremely strained. Poland took Lithuania’s side against Russia in the Livonian War (a few years later, in 1569, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland would come together as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth). What geopolitical considerations were driving Ivan in his attempt to forge family ties with the rulers of Poland? In Poland, kings were elected, and perhaps being related to the current ruler would help him in the future: not long after, Ivan had the audacity to offer himself as a candidate for the Polish throne.

Whatever his intentions may have been, the answer was “no,” and Katerina wound up marrying the future king of Sweden.

At that point, Moscow’s envoys were sent in another direction, to the Caucasus, to the Kabardin Prince Temryuk, who for several years had been allied with the Muscovite tsar. Being at odds with the Crimean khan, he needed Ivan’s help. Temryuk was happy to send his daughter to Moscow to be baptized and become Princess Maria Temryukovna (she was also known as Maria Cherkasskaya). Her brothers did indeed gain influence at court, but their clout was still incomparable with the status a boyar clan would have achieved if one of their own had married the tsar.

What do we know about Maria Temryukovna? We know that she was beautiful, or at least that was how she was described. We also know that she did not give the tsar an heir, and that her only child (that we know of), a son, died after just two months. Historians all seem to agree that she was inclined toward cruelty. It has even been suggested that she was the motivating force behind Ivan’s descent into terror and brutality. There is no evidence to support this. The division of Ivan’s tsardom into two parts – the oprichnina, to which Ivan retreated from Moscow, and the zemshchina, the territory outside of Ivan’s oprichnina – and his creation of the savage oprichniki force did indeed coincide with his marriage to Maria, but that does not prove a causal relationship.

It seems unlikely that the ensuing reign of terror was the brainchild of a scheming tsaritsa. Such an interpretation would imply that she had incredible influence over the tsar – a notion absent from histories of the period. Furthermore, there is some puzzling evidence that, during the 1560s (Maria’s marriage to Ivan extended from 1561 to 1569), Ivan continued to take an interest in Katerina, who by then was Duchess of Finland. Sweden’s King Erik, half-brother to her husband Johan, had taken Katerina and Johan prisoner. Ivan apparently asked Erik to divorce Katerina from Johan and send her to Moscow to be his wife. How did he plan to pull this off when he already had a wife? In any event, this hazy incident does nothing to suggest that Maria held sway over her husband, and the introduction of the oprichnina is entirely consistent with Ivan’s mood and behavior in the early 1560s: his paranoia, his accusations against the boyars, his desire to rule autocratically and independently – all of this emerged before his Kabardian wife entered the scene.

Could it be that Maria Temryukovna’s reputation as vindictive, found in both contemporaneous and later sources, as well as in folklore, stems from the unfriendly reception she received at court, as a foreigner whose appearance and behavior were unfamiliar, so different from Anastasia’s? Even if she did advise the tsar to create a personal guard out of loyal supporters, it was surely his own fevered brain that came up with the idea of dressing his oprichniki in black, with dogs’ heads and brooms affixed to their saddles to symbolize their mission of sniffing out and sweeping away sedition.

Little else is known about Maria Temryukovna. In September 1569 she died, and the tsar was soon seeking a new bride. Having by then crushed many of the most prominent families, he could now afford to marry a Russian. There are rumors that Maria was poisoned on Ivan’s orders, but also that he was planning to send her, or maybe even did send her, to a convent.

The tragic fate of this young woman, suddenly transported to Moscow at one of its bloodiest moments in history, remains hidden from view.