294 SERENISSIMA
entertained first by the killing of a boyar who had dared to precede him up the
stairs of the antechamber, and then by the suicide of another boyar who as proof
of his loyalty was asked by the Tsar to jump through the window.^6 The plea of
Zygmunt III to Queen Elizabeth I of England to desist from sending arms to
'these barbarians', 'because we know what they are like,' was based on hard
experience.^7 For one thing, they were excessively suspicious, especially of their
own people. In 1635, Alexis Jaroslavsky, Governor of Suzdal, caused an uproar
in Warsaw by demanding the surrender of those members of his embassy who
had defected; and in 1646 a scandal arose when the Queen's Confessor,
Monsigneur de Fleury, was unceremoniously frisked during a fur-buying spree
at the Muscovite embassy. They were also excessively sensitive of criticism. In
1650, Gregory Gavrilovitch Pushkin, Governor of Nizhny Novgorod, arriving
to congratulate Jan Kazimierz on his election, demanded the execution of all
those Polish authors whose books contained uncomplimentary comments about
the Tsar. After much remonstration, he finally settled for a private bonfire of a
selection of the offending volumes arranged in the courtyard of his residence by
the Crown Marshal. Finally, they were famed for their drunkenness. At all
official banquets they insisted on total inebriation as a mark of appreciation to
the hosts, and special requests were made to the diplomatic corps not to take
advantage of their Russian colleagues when they had fallen beneath the table.
Yet it was in matters of titulation that the Muscovites really excelled. As
Grand Dukes of Moscow, Ivan IV and his successors had no acknowledged
right to the battery of titles which they habitually professed. In the accepted
European order of seniority, they were placed among the Italian princes, below
the Electors of the Empire but above the dependent dukes and republics. 'Tsar'
(Caesar), 'Samodzierzhava' (Autocrat), and even 'Rossiya' (Russia) itself were
all terms which they had invented for themselves, and no one in Europe for long
took them seriously. For the Poles their pretensions were particularly galling,
since a large part of the territorial dignities of the Tsar actually belonged to the
Republic and had never belonged to Muscovy. The claim that the Tsar was
ruler of 'all the Russias' was quaint indeed when 'White Russia' and 'Black
Russia' were in Lithuania, 'Red Russia' was in Poland, and 'Great Russia' alone
was in Muscovy. Such is the stuff of which empires are made. Muscovite
ambassadors, living under the threat of their sovereign's wrath, habitually
recited the Tsar's titles aloud and in full as a prelude to every public occasion,
and regularly protested whenever they caught wind of ancient Polish titles, such
as that of 'Dux Russiae', of which they disapproved. In 1635, Jaroslavsky
staged a notable demonstration by attending his audience with Wladyslaw IV
wearing two hats - one to be raised in greeting as required by protocol, the.
other to be kept on his head as the Tsar had commanded. In the eighteenth cen-
tury, Peter I instructed his ambassadors that his new style of 'Emperor-Autocrat
of All-the-Russias' entitled them, as servants of 'the New Rome', to take prece-
dence over the Holy Roman Empire. For many years, the Republic resisted
these pretensions without admitting them to documents or treaties. But the first