Tsar Dyre II Grozny of Ruthenia
Born: 929
Reigned: 972 - 1000
I want to give a shout out to loyal blog commenter Alscon, who writes his own delightful medieval history blog The Right Hand Of The Karlings. Alscon reminded me of the classic Russian saying,
Vasil'ko stroil na krovi svoikh vragov, a Dayr stroil na krovi svoyego naroda: “Vasilko built on the blood of his enemies, while Dyre built on the blood of his own people.” I’ve always been fond of that saying. It tells you immediately why Vasilko I is remembered with pride by the Russians while Dyre II is seen as a villain. But to my mind, it also tells us something else: Dyre’s villainy didn’t come from nowhere. All of his most infamous tricks, he learned in his father’s service.
Vasilko rode with his sons to war against the Byzantines in 949, and each son was given a task in accordance with their gifts. Gallant young Matfei led the farsan into battle, while careful Sviatpolk was to administer Tsargrad after the conquest. Dyre was given an equally crucial task: it was he who led the great Russification of Frakiya through terror, subterfuge, and exemplary violence. While Vasilko rode back to Kiev in triumph bringing the spoils of an ancient capital, Dyre was marshalling his informants and leg-breakers to terrorize the Greek-speakers into leaving. Tsar Vasilko surely instructed Dyre to do as much, but the great man found it politic to pretend that he ‘disapproved’ of young Dyre’s ‘excesses.’ He never disapproved enough to order Dyre home, just enough to mollify those with weak stomachs.
Nor was that the only thing that Vasilko disapproved of. Prince Dyre was cunning, introspective and secretive, all qualities that his father found alien. Dyre did not have the charm or the gravitas that a tsar should have, nor was he beloved by the people. Tsar Vasilko would occasionally drop hints that he was thinking of naming another to serve as his heir, and Tsaritsa Duha--the senior wife--saw the opportunity to push her own son’s claim. Matfei was a leader more in the vein of Vasilko and his predecessors: a gallant warrior. Vasilko permitted this uncertainty to remain for the final two decades of his reign, leaving it to Dyre himself to defend his inheritance through guile and assassination. Or so the prince saw it.
Whether Dyre had his father murdered or not, we will never know. We do know that Dyre came to power already notorious as a savage participant in court intrigue, with an affinity for the darker arts of torture, blackmail and assassination. As the bells rang in Kiev to proclaim the death of Vasilko, Tsaritsa Duha and her immediate supporters were fleeing the city in a longship. Duha stayed for a time in Tsargrad under the protection of King Sviatpolk, but soon enough she was on the move again to the Maghreb, to the home of her father and brothers. Clearly she had realized that Ruthenia would not be safe for her.
For a time, Tsar Dyre defied expectations by aping--however awkwardly--the magnanimity of his father. He was, to all appearances, genuinely happy. He had claimed the ultimate prize that he long sought, and watched as his most determined enemies fled before him. He was also, unlikely as it may sound, in love. He had a new mistress, a common crofter’s daughter named Agafya, and could often be seen indiscreetly mooning over her. Most infamously, the high-spirited tsar pushed his sister, the Chieftess Marina, into a water trough at a wrestling match in the winter of 976. This behavior was boorish and unbecoming of a tsar, and many in the
ulema were appalled, but compared to what might have been it seemed almost innocent.
The tsar had an early diplomatic coup as well. The once-mighty Christian kingdom of Bulgaria had suffered a serious collapse of authority since their apex at the beginning of the tenth century. By the 970s, the former kingdom of Bulgaria was now in three parts, all ruled by feuding members of the Chrysos dynasty: Pannonia, Wallachia, and a rump Bulgaria. Tsar Dyre understood the dynamics of this internecine dynastic struggle as well as anyone, and in October 977 he shocked his courtiers by embracing the Christian King Gavril II in an alliance against his brother kings.
Things began to take a turn early the next year, following the untimely death of his own brother King Sviatpolk. Tsargrad was now in the hands of the bold King Pavel Sviatpolkovich, a daring young
faris with aspirations to rule as an emperor in his own right. Pavel began immediately to agitate against his uncle. In early 978, he strode into the Tsar’s court and arrogantly demanded that Dyre grant him control over Kiev itself. Dyre sat on his throne trembling in fury but dared not respond, as Pavel could command nearly as many troops as the tsar himself. Pavel’s claim went nowhere, but the young king returned to Tsargrad and began to agitate for independence.
The blatant challenge to Dyre’s authority set his mind racing. The young king would have not acted without allies. Had not his old enemy, the Tsaritsa Duha, spent a considerable amount of time ensconced at the
Svyashchennyy dvorets (Sacred Palace) of Tsargrad with young Pavel? Surely this Pavel was nothing more than her cats’ paw, and his challenge a sign that her intrigues against him had not ended. And if Pavel was her agent, who else might be? The tsaritsa had been well-liked in Kiev, once upon a time.
Dyre’s paranoia perversely made it easier for him to accept the weakness of his position vis-a-vis his vassal king in Tsargrad. If Pavel had fallen under the sway of a sinister woman, then it was easier to justify, at least psychologically, responding to his effrontery with a campaign of flattery. The young Pavel was to be wooed away from Duha’s imagined influence, and after a time he would even be married to one of the tsar’s own daughters to secure an alliance. However, even as Dyre was making peace with his nephew he was planning a purge of Duha’s agents--real or imagined--in Kiev itself.
The first victims of Dyre’s internal purges were lowborn, servants who worked for the tsaritsa or who were believed to be sympathetic to her. Dyre would quietly determine who should be seized, but his mistress Agafya would see to the rest. She received the reports and marshalled the leg-breakers and assassins on her lover’s behalf. A servant would simply, without warning, be dragged down to a dank cell and Agafya would inform the tsar that they awaited the torturer’s blade. Dyre would attend to such things personally: he got no pleasure from inflicting pain, but he put great stock in his own ability to discern truth from falsehood.
Of course, the primary function of torture is to tell the torturer what they want to hear, and indeed in these long grueling sessions Dyre learned (or rather, ‘learned’) that these minor servants were simply the cat’s paw of far more powerful figures. First, suspicion fell on Chieftess Marina, she of the water trough. Dyre’s victims told him that she was gathering an army of Khazar riders, or that she had paid assassins to kill Sviatpolk in service to the Basileus, or perhaps that she had been in the pay of Pope Callistus. Each story was more unlikely than the last, but they sufficed to convince Dyre that his sister needed to go.
Agafya hired a team of highwaymen to waylay the Chieftess on a ride outside of Kiev. Marina and her party were attacked as they were setting up camp for the evening, and a pitched battle soon ensued between the bandits and Marina’s guards. In the fracas, Marina was killed by a stray arrow--or so her guards believed. Tsar Dyre led the court in a thin facsimile of mourning for his hated sister, but his mind was elsewhere. By then Agafya had learned of a more urgent matter.
The Tsaritsa Darya Esfandyardukht of House Tahirid had traveled to Kiev from Transoxiana when she was but sixteen, to marry the prince of Ruthenia and cement the great alliance that secured the conquest of Tsargrad. Only after her wedding had she learned, to her horror, what kind of man she had married. Dyre was cold and forbidding in her presence, repeatedly humiliating her and the other wives while lavishing attention on a series of mistresses, of which Agafya was only the last. His cruelties in the torture chamber were nearly matched in the marital bed, and soon Darya began to fear for her life.
In self-defense, Tsaritsa Darya sought the protection of certain conservative members of the
ulema, who disdained this tsar who flouted the laws of Allah. They soon decided that there would be no safety or justice until Dyre was dead, and began to plot the murder of the tsar. The Scholars’ Plot, as it would later be called, stood little chance of success. Darya lacked her husband’s cunning, and the clerics had little experience in palace intrigue. In January, 983, Agafya discovered the plot and Dyre was immediately informed.
As fate would have it, the Tsaritsa Darya had recently become with child. Dyre, uncharacteristically, was slow to act on his wife’s treachery, and as he pondered what to do next the tsaritsa became more and more infirm by the latest in a series of difficult pregnancies. As she was forced to take to her bed, the tsar found it easy to deny her access to her favored scholars (who would themselves being to disappear one by one). On July 6, Darya went into labor. The tsar abruptly appeared by her birthing bed, which was not his practice, with a pair of women that he described as midwives. Shortly thereafter, Tsar Dyre emerged cradling his infant daughter Praxida in his arms; he announced grimly that the tsaritsa had died in childbirth.
While court intrigue had taken a grim turn in Kiev, to the outside world Dyre was very much his father’s son. With the Bulgarian kings in disarray, Dyre launched a series of wars aimed at uniting his holdings in Russia and Thessalonica. First, he claimed Moldavian lands that had fallen to the Bulgars a century before: the mountain province of Suceava and the coastal duchy of Bugeac. On May 9, 985, however, he launched a war against his father’s great rival the Byzantines, hoping to claim their Bulgarian holdings in Phillipopolis. The treacherous Gavril II rode forth with the Ruthenians against his fellow Christians.
Byzantium was by 985 a pale shadow of what it had been. Shorn of its richest lands, the empire could command perhaps six thousand men to Dyre’s ten thousand. The remaining territory was split into three parts: the Bulgarian holdings in Phillipopolis, where Basileus Isaias held his capital at Rhodopes; the lands of Hellas and Epirus on the Adriatic, and the remaining lands in Anatolia. This compounded Dyre’s numerical advantage.
At Thasos on October 14, 985, a Byzantine army of some six thousand was defeated soundly by a Russian force nearly twice its size. One in three Greeks soldiers perished on the battlefield, and Basilesus Isaias fled in terror back to Rhodopes. There his cowardice and failure on the battlefield prompted a palace coup, leading to the ascension of Basileus Leon VII from the family of Makedon. Leon was a man of scholarly bent and unimpeachable rectitude, but he had no skill for battle and suffered much as his predecessor had. Leon’s army would lose twice more to the Russians, at Kavurskoto Kale and Ustra, while Rhodopes fell to Gavril’s Pannonians. On November 8, 989, the Basileus was forced to surrender.
On June 5, 990, it was time for Gavril II to call in the debt that he believed Dyre had incurred. Pannona was facing an invasion by the notorious Slovenian warlord, Vyšebor the Flayer of the tribal kingdom of Balaton. Gavril sent his son to request Ruthenian aid in defense of their homeland. The young Bulgar prince was invited to make his case before the tsar, and made a passionate speech about the bravery of his father’s knights and the peril that they faced. Tsar Dyre is said to have shrugged and said that he did not get involved in disputes between Christians. The alliance with Pannonia was over, its purpose served.
Dyre was, in any case, facing a bigger threat: Pope Callistus had proclaimed, in 988, the Third Crusade, this time for the Kingdom of Syria. Caliph Al-Mutawakkil dispatched emissaries to Kiev at once, intending to revive the alliance of Caliph and Tsar that had defended Dar al-Islam so successfully twice before. Dyre cared little for the sanctity of the holy land, but he saw an opportunity and took it. He asked King Pavel Sviatpolkovich to lead the Ruthenian forces in Syria, filling the young king’s head with tales of bold
farsan who had heroically led the caliphate army from the front and dived headlong into battle. Pavel was not immune to such heroic fantasies, and at the great battle of Tyre, he took a grievous head wound from a crusader’s lance. The king was carried off the battlefield and died in his tent several days later. The malleable child Sviatpolk II Pavelovich took the throne at Tsargrad.
With victory in the Third Crusade assured by the end of 991, Dyre launched his great military triumph: the lightning invasion of Bulgaria proper. The conquest would be over in all of six months, when a smashing victory at Vratsa led to the capture of King Bozidar himself. Dyre reorganized his Bulgar holdings into a vassal kingdom, and named his son Iziaslav Dyrovich King of Sunni Bulgaria. Then the triumphant king returned to Kiev.
While Dyre would never surpass his father’s accomplishments, he had attained a creditable number of conquests and victories, and an esteem among Muslims abroad that he had never achieved at home. And yet the aging tsar was falling into a deep melancholy. In his mind, none of his victories had truly mattered because he still discovered internal enemies sprouting up like weeds, and wearied of perpetually being on his guard.
The great drama of his final years, like that of his father’s, revolved around the succession. Prince Alexei had once been one of his father’s loyal enforcers. His application of the torturer’s arts were so lusty that prisoners often died too soon, before they could affirm the tsar’s latest notions. Soon enough he was sidelined, and so the prince applied his arts to others that had not attracted his father’s attention: peasants, or beggars, or traveling bards. The sheer glee that the prince displayed was enough to concern the court that he might be even worse than his father. And this was before Alexei began to opine that Dyre had been on the throne too long, and might best serve Ruthenia via a quiet retirement.
Alexei’s subsequent death is often attributed to Dyre as well. The father was on a hunt with his retainers and loyal allies shortly before the prince’s body was discovered along with the body of a local farmer. It appeared that Alexei had struck and killed the farmer, for reasons unknown, and then was struck in turn by an unknown assailant. If it was the tsar, one can only guess at his thought process. Had he a sense that Alexei was a monster of his own creation? Was he disgusted at his son’s sadistic indulgence? Was he simply acting out of self-preservation, believing that Alexei was a rabid dog that would turn on his master? We will never know.
Whatever his reasons, the murder of Alexei seems to have taken something out of Dyre. In the final years of his life he settled into a sour and defeated mood, convinced that his reign had been for naught and his best efforts wasted. He retreated to his private quarters and would see only Agafya. When fever caught him in late November, 1000, the tsar slipped quickly and almost gratefully to his end. On December 1, 1000, Tsar Dyre II Vaslikovich, called
Grozny, breathed his last.
Dyre’s savage reputation at court and his many excesses had prompted a moral crisis in Kiev, convincing many in the ulema that Russian culture was tainted and corrupt and must be purified by true religion. They looked to Dyre’s successor, his soft-spoken and pious grandson Tsar Ivan Daryovich, to lead the great cleansing of Ruthenia. So, indeed, he would--and in doing so, he would divide Dar al-Islam in two.