ABSTRACT

In the autumn of 1569 Tsar Ivan heard about a plot against him by the Novgorodians. It supposedly involved the entire social élite of the city – the head of the Church and his court, the chancellery administration of the city, and the upper classes (the nobles and merchants). The accusations against the Novgorodians were contradictory: on the one hand, that they wanted to place Prince Vladimir Staritskii on the throne and, on the other, that they planned to surrender Novgorod to the Polish king. The sources do not enable us to say with any degree of certainty whether there was any real foundation to the accusations. Nor is it easy to determine just where the boundary lay between ‘treason’ and the tsar’s suspicious nature. All we know is that Ivan took the affair seriously, fully believed the report of the plot and began to prepare to ruthlessly punish the Novgorod ‘traitors’.