In the aftermath of the attack, Novgorod lost its status as one of Russia's leading cities, crippled by decimation of its citizenry combined with Ivan's assault on the surrounding farmlands.

Ivan's deep distrust of the boyars, a sentiment held from childhood, coupled with his paranoia and need for control, led him to create the oprichnina in 1565.

One year before the carnage, in 1569, the tsar evicted several thousand from Novgorod and the neighboring town of Pskov in an attempt to avoid a betrayal like the one in Izborsk.

He also began to execute anyone he deemed a threat; for example, in 1568, over 150 boyar council members and noblemen (along with their households in some cases) in Moscow were killed in response to real or imagined conspiracies, as well as anyone who protested against the oprichnina.

Ivan stopped just before entering the city, in the trading quarter of Gorodische, to set up his camp and royal court, issuing his initial orders from there.

On the second day (7 January), the clergy members, the father superiors and monks, who had been arrested by the advance regiment, were to be beaten to death and their bodies returned to the monasteries to be buried.

In line with tradition and ceremony, the archbishop attempted to bless the tsar, but Ivan refused, accusing Pimen (and with him, all of Novgorod) of treason and of conspiring to turn the city over to Poland–Lithuania.

Ivan's piety and the fact that he was not entirely mentally sound led him to demand that the clergy say liturgy amid the general confusion and disorder caused by the entrance of the tsar and his armed retinue.

Shortly after the meal began, Ivan shouted orders to his assembled guard to arrest Pimen and to plunder his residence, treasury, and court.

Initially, around 500 father superiors and monks from the outlying churches (the same clergymen that he would order beaten to death two days later), were rounded up, taken into Novgorod and flogged.

The priests and deacons of the churches inside the city were to be arrested and turned over to the bailiffs to be held in shackles and flogged from dawn until dusk unless or until they could pay a ransom of 20 rubles each.

When Ivan began his sweeps of the surrounding churches, about two to four weeks later, his men set out to finish the job they started before the tsar's arrival.

[11]Though Ivan believed that Pimen and the church were the primary architects of the plot for Polish defection, he took out the brunt of his sadistic anger on the population of Novgorod, namely the upper and middle classes.

The judges employed exceedingly cruel tortures to facilitate their inquiries, including burning with a "clever fire-making device" called a grill by the chronicler, roasting over fires, or being strung up by one's hands and having one's eyebrows singed off.

The court condemned approximately 200 gentry, more than 100 servants, 45 secretaries and chancery people, and a proportionate number of families to die during their occupation of the city.

[13] In addition to the tortures visited on the upper and middle classes, the peasants and paupers also were treated with disregard and disdain, albeit of a broader nature.

With little regard for the lives at stake, the tsar ordered the collected paupers and beggars expelled from the city in the middle of winter, abandoning them to die of exposure or starvation.

Ivan and the oprichniki continued to brutalize Novgorod until 12 February, when the troops withdrew leaving the destroyed city in the hands of the remaining population.

His suspicions were especially focused on several prominent members of the boyar court, Alexis Basmanov and his son, Nikita Funikov (the treasurer), Viskovaty (the keeper of the seal), Semeon Yakovlev, Vasily Stepanov (the crown secretary), Andrei Vasiliev, and Prince Afanasy Viazemsky.

Coupled with the crop failures of the years before, this would create a massive food shortage (and cause supply problems for Russia in the Livonian war).