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Polotski dedicated to her the Crown of Faith, and Medviedef his Gifts of the Holy Spirit. The terem offered the strangest contrasts. There acted they the Malade Imaginaire, and the audience was composed of the heterogeneous assembly of popes, monks, nuns, and old pensioners that formed the courts of the ancient czarinas. In this shifting crowd there were some useful instruments of intrigue.
The streets of Moscow at that period were, according to M. Zabieline, the worst school of profligacy and debauchery that can be imagined; but they were, on the whole, less bad for Peter than the palace. He met there something besides mere jesters: he encountered new elements which had as yet no place in the terem, but contained the germ of the regeneration of Russia.
The boyars of the douma deliberated on this proposal, and the greater number of the boyars were opposed to it. In Russia the absolute power had never been shared, but the orators of the terem cited many examples both from sacred and profane history: Pharaoh and Joseph, Arcadius and Honorius, Basil II and Constantine VIII; and the best of all the arguments were the pikes of the streltsi .
Boyar was the word formerly used to mean a Russian nobleman; so a boyar-house is a lord's house; boyarishnia, a lord's daughter. The terem was that part of the boyar-house in which the women's rooms were situated. In Russia there is a fatherly relation existing between the ruler and his subjects which is shown in such phrases as "the tsar father," "their father sovereign," etc.
To emancipate herself from the rigorous laws of the terem, to force the "twenty-seven locks" of the song, to raise the fata that covered her face, to appear in public and meet the looks of men, needed energy, cunning, and patience that could wait and be content to proceed by successive efforts.
It is told how Feodor preferred to die rather than see his young wife, Euphrasia, the spoil of Batu; and how, on learning his fate, she threw herself and her son from the window of the terem. Oleg the Handsome, found still alive on the battle-field, repelled the caresses, the attention, and religion of the Khan, and was cut in pieces. Riazan was immediately taken by assault, sacked, and burned.
He was reared at first in strict seclusion behind the silken curtains that guarded the windows of the Térem, where the women lived. Then rebellion broke out after his father's death; for Alexis had children by two marriages, and the offspring of his first wife, Mary Miloslavski, were jealous of the influence acquired by the relatives of Nathalie Naryshkin, Peter's mother.
But the terem, with "its twenty-seven locks," was not going to confine the sister of Peter. She met the eyes of men in public; studied them well, too; and then selected the instruments for her designs of effacing Peter and his mother, and herself becoming sovereign indeed. In the tumult which followed one of her brothers, Peter's uncle, was torn from Natalia's arms and cut to pieces.
Though Ivan continued to reign conjointly with his brother, yet Peter, who was then only seventeen, governed alone, surrounded by his mother, the Narychkines, and the Dolgoroukis . Sophia had freed herself from the seclusion of the terem, as Peter had emancipated himself from the seclusion of the palace to roam the streets and navigate rivers.
"Nowhere," says Kotoshikhin, "is there such trickery practised with reference to the brides as at Moscow." The innovations of Peter the Great broke through the oriental seclusion of the terem, as the women's apartments were called. During the minority of Ivan IV. the regency was committed to the care of his mother Elena, and was at best but a stormy period.
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