The Book of Spies

AUTHOR’S NOTES

THE SEARCH for Ivan the Terrible’s lost library-occasionally called the Byzantine Libreria-in the labyrinthine tunnels under Moscow has continued for some five centuries, capturing the imaginations of emperors, potentates, and the Vatican. Joseph Stalin stopped the hunt in the 1930s because he feared that searching the tunnels would leave him vulnerable to attack from beneath, while Vladimir Putin, in a gesture signifying Russia’s new openness, allowed the quest to resume in the 1990s.

Today a host of scholars, scientists, historians, and amateurs pore over old, incomplete maps and request official permission to investigate. Joining the pursuit are vine walkers who claim to use bioenergetic powers to locate metal; psychics who act as security against “dark forces” that might be guarding the hidden tomes since past searchers have been prone to accidents, disease, blindness, or death; and the Diggers of the Underground Planet, a group of urban spelunkers with a cult following, who drop through manholes and pry open forgotten iron doors to reach the unexplored passages.

My interest in the library dates back more than twenty years. On June 28, 1989, I was reading the Los Angeles Times when “Kremlin Tunnels: The Secret of Moscow’s Underworld,” by Masha Hamilton, caught my attention.

It was a summer evening in 1933 when the two young men found what they were searching for: the entrance to a centuries-old underground tunnel within sight of the red Kremlin walls. As they crept underground toward Moscow’s seat of power, lighting their way with a lantern, the men believed they might find Ivan the Terrible’s legendary library of gold-covered books. Instead they found five skeletons, a passageway sometimes so narrow that they had to file through singly and, within a few hundred yards of the Kremlin, a rusted steel door they could not open.

I was enthralled by this “library of gold-covered books,” which immediately became in my mind the Library of Gold. Kremlin officials stopped the young pair’s exploration and swore them to secrecy with the implied threat of death, then Stalin ordered a swimming pool built over the area, putting a conclusive end to anyone’s quest.

The story of the fabled library is one of geopolitics, an arranged marriage, madness, and the enduring love of books. And it begins more than two thousand years ago in the Greco-Roman world of emperors, scholars, warriors, and the wealthy.

An intentionally chilling ancient Roman tombstone has this inscription: Sum quod eris, fui quod sis-“I am what you will be; I was what you are.” Public and private libraries were assembled by the ancients to enjoy, to educate, and to display affluence and privilege. But in the largest sense they were created to preserve knowledge. Remarkable international library centers in Alexandria, Pergamum, Antioch, Rome, and Athens thrived for centuries. Tragically all were obliterated, sometimes in war, sometimes with avarice, sometimes purposefully to destroy history and culture.

The last great repository in that long-ago Western world was the royal library in Constantinople. Founded in about 330 A.D. by Constantine the Great, the city grew up on the site of a Greek town called Byzantium. At the time, it was known as the Roman Empire, though today it is referred to as the Byzantine Empire. By 475, the royal library had 120,000 volumes, probably making it the largest in that era. Over the following centuries the library was burned several times, vaporizing multitudes of priceless works, including, some claimed, a piece by Homer lettered in gold on a twelve-foot-long snakeskin.

Still the imperial collection constantly rose from the literary ashes. In the 1400s the Spanish traveler Pero Tafur described it thus: “… a marble gallery opening on arcades with tiled marble benches all around and with similarly crafted tables placed end to end upon low columns; there are many books there, ancient texts and histories.”

The final blow came on May 29, 1453, when Mehmed the Conqueror and his Ottoman Turks brutally seized Constantinople. The English historian Edward Gibbon wrote, “One hundred twenty thousand manuscripts are said to have disappeared.”

Six years later the survivors of the Byzantine royal family escaped as the Ottoman Turks invaded Morea, the rich Greek Peloponnese peninsula ruled by the emperor’s heir and nephew, Thomas Paleologus. Accompanying Thomas on the small Venetian galley were his wife and children-two young sons and a daughter, Zoë, about twelve years old. She would play a critical role in the Library of Gold.

They made their way to Italy, where Pius II took them under the papal wing, and the Vatican provided a palace and stipend. The pope had a vital political and religious goal-to enthrone Thomas at a recaptured Constantinople. Thomas and his family were Greek Orthodox, but they had promptly converted to Roman Catholic once they reached Italy. If the pope succeeded, Thomas would rule over a Christian New Byzantium, Western in outlook, uniting Catholic and Orthodox-and under the religious control of Rome.

The Venetians, who were making fortunes in trade with the Ottoman Turks, were less than happy about it. When Pius tried twice to mount a Fifth Crusade, this time against Constantinople, the Venetians dithered. Finally they delayed their fleet so long that the last attempted attack fell apart, and the pope died.

The next pope, Paul II, feinted. He looked east again, but this time his target was the widowed Ivan III, the Grand Prince of Moscow, soon to be called Ivan the Great. The Russian Orthodox Church had long flourished in Moscow. Hoping to acquire Ivan as a military ally against the Turks, as well as his consent for the Union of Churches, the pope offered Zoë’s hand in marriage in 1472. She was now about twenty years old.

Moscow was the strongest of the Russian states and the fastest growing power of the times, although it was still under the Muslim yoke. Ivan accepted the proposal, and the royal pair married in Moscow before the year was out. Zoë took the name Sophia.

We know Sophia traveled with a large retinue by land and sea to Moscow. Her arrival was accompanied by Italians and Greeks, who settled there, too, and became influential, even rebuilding the Kremlin in a Russian-Italianate style. This is the point where the legend begins.

According to several commentators, Sophia brought with her to Moscow priceless illuminated manuscripts from the Byzantine imperial collection. “The chronicles mention 100 carts loaded with 300 boxes with rare books arriving in Moscow,” according to Alexandra Vinogradskaya, writing in The Russian Culture Navigator. Another version is this: “The princess arrived in Moscow with a dowry of 70 carts, carrying hundreds of trunks, which contained the heritage of early cultures-the library collected by the Byzantine emperors,” explains Nikolay Khinsky on WhereRussia.com, the Russian National Tourist site for International Travelers.

What is undisputed is that Sophia did bring the Ivory Throne of the Byzantine emperors on which Russian monarchs were crowned ever after, as well as the double-headed eagle, the imperial symbol of the Byzantine Empire for a thousand years, which became the Kremlin’s for nearly another five hundred years. She introduced the grand court traditions of Byzantium, too, including ceremonial etiquette and costume. Even before the wedding, Ivan had assumed the title of czar-Caesar-and then added grozny, “formidable,” a reverential adjective common in Byzantine autocracy, since the sovereign was considered the earthly image of God and empowered with all His sacred and judicial powers.

Since Sophia carried so much of Byzantium with her, it is very possible illuminated manuscripts were among her gifts. As Deb Brown, bibliographer and research services librarian for Byzantine studies at Dumbarton Oaks, wrote me: “There seems to be nothing in the (published) contemporary sources that testifies to books in Zoë/Sophia’s possession, but I’m not convinced that she did not carry books with her. The silence of sources has to be weighed against the nature of the sources, which are few and concerned with matters of state and monies, not much else. There are plenty of indications that she was literate and well-educated.”

Ultimately the Vatican’s geopolitical gamesmanship partially succeeded. Sophia was the one who persuaded Ivan III in 1478 to challenge the Golden Horde. “When the customary messengers came from the Tatar Khan demanding the usual tribute, Ivan threw the edict on the ground, stamped and spat on it, and killed all the ambassadors save one, whom he sent back to his master,” according to Gilbert Grosvenor in National Geographic magazine. Over time his armies beat back Khan Ahmed’s soldiers, and Moscow was never seriously threatened by them again. One of the longest-reigning Russian rulers, Ivan tripled his territory and laid the foundations of state, based largely on the autocratic rule of Byzantium.

Where the Vatican failed was that the Chair of Peter was not unified with the throne of Constantine-upon her arrival in Moscow, Sophia had promptly endorsed Orthodoxy again.

The Library of Gold would have passed from Sophia and Ivan to their son Vasily III, and from him to his son Ivan IV. In 1547 at the young age of seventeen, Ivan IV outwitted Kremlin plots and crowned himself “Czar of All Russia.” Eventually he, too, became known as Grozny-Ivan the Terrible-infamous ever since for his cruelty, slaughters of entire cities, and pleasure in torture. At the same time, a hundred years before Peter the Great was credited with doing so, Ivan opened Russia to the West. He frequently corresponded with European monarchs, including Elizabeth I of England, exchanged diplomats, and nurtured international trade. He not only extended Russia to the Pacific Ocean, but he also introduced the printing press to Russia.

“How many Oriental manuscripts does the monarch have?” asks Khinsky, referring to testimony describing Ivan the Terrible’s library. “Up to 800. Some he has bought, some he has received as gifts. Most of the manuscripts are Greek, but many are Latin. The Latin I’ve seen include histories by Livius, De Republica by Cicero, stories about emperors by Suetonius. These manuscripts are written on thin parchment and bound in gold.”

From his letters we know Ivan was familiar with the Bible, the Apocrypha, the Chronographs, which dealt with world history, and tales from The Iliad. He received books as presents from foreign envoys and visitors, had books written, and ordered others to be copied into Russian for his use.

“Historians know about the existence of the library because Ivan the Terrible instructed scribes to translate the books into Russian,” says an article in The Times of London. “According to legend, the library once filled three halls and was so valued by Ivan the Terrible that he built a vault to protect [the books] from the fires that regularly swept Moscow.” But the vault, allegedly hidden under the Kremlin, might also have been the result of Ivan’s mental instability and growing paranoia.

News of the library spread across Europe. “The Germans, English, and Italians made many attempts to persuade the Russian czar to sell the treasure,” writes Vinogradskaya. “But a man of considerable literary talent himself, Ivan the Terrible was an eager collector of rare books and fully aware of the high value of his collection. He refused to sell anything.”

Ivan was also fascinated by spies and assassins, and used them frequently. His top spy and security chief had instant access to his bedchambers through one of the tunnels under the Kremlin. And Ivan created the feared Oprichniki, his clandestine personal armed force, who conducted espionage and assassinations. Chillingly, they dressed completely in black and rode black horses.

Begun in the 1100s and added to over the centuries, the tangled, endless underground tunnels were originally intended as escape routes, to give access to water if the Kremlin was besieged, and to move comfortably from one building to another during the harsh Russian winter. Reaching depths of twelve stories, the tunnels contain streams, dungeons, and secret chambers.

“Legend has it that all his [Ivan’s] gold was hidden in one tunnel,” writes Khinsky, “paintings and icons in another, and manuscripts from the Byzantine library in another. All the hiding places were carefully bricked up.” Salt is a good preservative, and apparently natural salt basements have been found in Moscow’s netherworld.

After reading his will in the morning and calling for his chess set in the afternoon, Ivan died in 1584. The will, which might have listed his library, mysteriously vanished. When his body was exhumed in 1963, traces of both mercury and arsenic were discovered, but not at high enough levels for the cause of death to have been poisoning, although it’s a popular belief he was indeed poisoned.

According to Khinsky, sixteen years after the monarch’s death, a Vatican envoy arrived to find out what had happened to the library. Old archives and book depositories were searched, and exploration parties sent out to dig. “The existence of the library is first mentioned in documents from the period of Peter the Great’s rule, which began in 1682,” according to Hamilton of the Los Angeles Times.

Ivan was the last known owner of the Library of Gold. “Historians, archaeologists, Peter the Great, and even the Vatican have searched fruitlessly for the missing library for hundreds of years,” says The Times of London. In the seventeenth century most of the oldest tunnels were already out of use and forgotten, and the passage of time has made the hunt increasingly difficult because of weakened fortifications, landslides, flooding, and incomplete maps.

“The Kremlin is the dwelling of phantoms,” wrote the Marquis de Custine, who visited Russia in the early nineteenth century. “It feels as though the underground sounds born there were coming from the grave.”

It’s not surprising that this vital collection of books, perhaps the most important to survive in history, remains the subject of gripping interest. In the course of various explorations, the sprawling mass of subterranean tunnels has yielded very old treasures, including a hidden arsenal of Ivan the Terrible’s weapons, the czarina’s chambers where Peter the Great spent his childhood, the city’s largest silver coin hoard, gold jewelry, documents, and precious tableware and dishes, many of which have been put on public display. The Archaeology Museum is the site of some of these unique finds.

“Fear me, Giant Sewer Rodents, for I Am Vadim, Lord of the Underground!” is the title of an article written by Erin Arvedlund in Outside magazine about Vadim Mikhailov and his eager band of subterranean explorers-the Diggers of the Underground Planet. Their dream is to find the Library of Gold. Instead they have turned up skeletons, mutant fish, fugitives, clouds of noxious gas, ugly grass, albino cockroaches, and an underground pond once used as a site of mass suicides. On a more helpful note, they also discovered 250 kilograms of radioactive material under Moscow State University, which perhaps explains the long anecdotal history of illness, hair loss, and infertility among its students and faculty. The government removed the material.

An eighty-seven-year-old Moscow pensioner, Apollos Ivanov, who had been an engineer in the Kremlin and studied the underground structures of Moscow, believed the Library of Gold was in one of the branches that stood above an extensive catacomb network, which he had seen. He revealed his secret to the mayor in 1997, who quickly authorized the hunt. Many were convinced the missing collection would be unearthed at last. Ivanov had gone blind, and according to legend, anyone coming close to discovering the library lost his sight. But Ivanov was wrong, and the library remains missing.

The pursuit continues enthusiastically today, with new searchers bringing increasingly modern equipment. After all, the magnificent royal library of the Byzantine Empire was the last hope of the long-ago Western world, rich with the wisdom and lost knowledge of the ancients, and unrivaled today even by the Vatican Library. To think the Library of Gold, the crème de la literary crème, may lie sleeping quietly in Moscow’s mysterious underworld is irresistible.