Fearful Majesty

by Benson Bobrick

  VASILY BELONGED TO the House of Rurik, an august dynasty of semilegendary origin which had monopolized the throne of Russia from her birth as a nation in the ninth century a.d. No noble house in European history, in fact, was ever to rule so long. Only the Hapsburgs of Austria could claim a comparable longevity, while relatively speaking the long train of Romanovs would make up a modest span.

  Yet few nations had endured a more turbulent medieval past.

  According to the Russian Primary Chronicle, in the year 862 clan elders of various warring Slavic tribes, exasperated at their inability to bring peace to the Russian plain, had summoned Viking chieftains from overseas “to come and rule over us and create order in the land.” A certain Rurik came, with his brothers Sineus and Truvor, in answer to their call.

  Rurik has been identified as Roric the Dane or Roric of Jutland, known in western annals as fel Christianitatis or “the gall of Christendom.” Before departing for Russia, he had raided settlements along the banks of the river Elbe, ravaged part of northern France, and with an armada of 350 boats had sacked the coast of England. The military confraternity of Norsemen to which he belonged was called the Varangians (from “vaeringr” – “associate under oath”), mercenary merchant-warriors who also by way of the Western Dvina, Dnieper, and Volga Rivers, explored routes all the way to the Black and Caspian seas. Some entered the service of the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople, where they served as shock troops or imperial guards. Rurik remained on Slav territory and (invited or not) established himself at Novgorod.

  Like the Normans in England, the Varangians soon merged with the native population. No one really knows, for example, whether the word “Russe” is Slavic or Norse.

  Rurik was succeeded by Oleg, who transferred his rule to Kiev on the Dnieper, the road to Byzantium; Oleg by Igor, Rurik’s son; and Igor by Olga, who acted as regent until her grandson, Svyatoslav, came to power in 962. Meanwhile, a century of steady expansion had transformed the “Russe” conglomeration of tribes into a regional power. Commercial competition with Constantinople made conflict inevitable, and though the Byzantines on the whole prevailed, advantageous new trade agreements were wrung from the imperial city with each armistice.

  Svyatoslav, a pagan, was a noble if savage warrior-prince. His illegitimate son and successor was a saint, Vladimir I, who converted to Christianity in 988 and compelled his subjects to follow his example, thus bringing Russia within the orbit of Greek Orthodox Christianity. The local pagan temples and idols were overthrown, and the people of Kiev baptized samoderzhets in the waters of the Dnieper, much as the Saxons had been “evangelized” by Charlemagne. Politically, Vladimir consolidated his realm from the Baltic to the Ukraine.

  Upon his death civil war ensued between his sons. One of them, Svyatopolk, assassinated his brothers Boris and Gleb in a grab for absolute power. He became the most famous villain in Russian history – Svyatopolk the Accursed. Boris and Gleb, who went to their deaths like martyrs, were canonized. Svyatopolk in turn was toppled by another brother, Yaroslav, known to history as Yaroslav the Wise, a statesman, scholar, and patron of the arts who promoted Christian culture in Kiev with libraries and schools. He beautified the capital with a palace and its own Cathedral, and drafted the Russkaya Pravda, the first Russian Law Code.

  Yaroslav married the daughter of the Byzantine emperor Constantine IX Monomachos. Their offspring was another remarkable man, Vladimir II Monomakh, who ruled from 1113 to 1125 and proved an energetic statesman, a skillful military leader, and a gifted writer. Meanwhile, the government of Kiev had evolved into a kind of limited monarchy, with a grand prince, an independent nobility, and veches or town assemblies with real influence on state and local affairs.

  In international relations, through dynastic union (the centerpiece of medieval diplomacy) and other ties, Russia fully belonged to the “extended family” of European nations. At one time or another, its rulers contracted matrimonial alliances with Hungary, Bohemia, Poland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and France. Vladimir II himself married the daughter of King Harold of England; the missal on which French kings for centuries swore their coronation oaths belonged originally to the daughter of Yaroslav the Wise who had married King Louis I.

  Russia’s political maturation was accompanied by a flourishing and diversified economy, with agriculture, trade, and industry. But forces presaging disunity and chaos were churning about the borders of the land. The shores of the Black Sea and the Don and Volga river basins to the east were the domain of roving tribesmen of Turkic and Mongol origin. A war without end developed against these nomads of the steppes – the Khazars, the Pechenegs, and the Polovtsy – who repeatedly advanced in human-wave assaults against the fledgling civilization. Gradually, the suburbs of the capital were turned into a wasteland. The nomads occupied the mouth of the Dnieper, severed Russian trade with Constantinople, and drove the population west into Galicia and Volynia, and northeast toward Suzdal on the upper Volga. Kiev’s mercantile economy (the most advanced in Europe) was destroyed and replaced by an agricultural society to the north. This retrograde development in Russian economic history was paralleled by political dissolution.

  “The grass bends in sorrow,” wrote the poet of The Lay of the Host of Igor, the greatest of early Russian epics, “and the tree is bowed down to earth by woe.... Victory over the infidels is gone, for now brother said to brother: ‘This is mine, and that is mine also,’ and the princes began to say of little things, ‘Lo! this is a great matter,’ and to forge discord against themselves. And on all sides the infidels were victorious.”

  A grim struggle for power ensued among various members of the ruling family, who in administering their scattered appanage domains had divergent regional goals. The absence of the concept of primogeniture contributed to the disarray, through a continuing subdivision of property among princely offspring. Among the rival principalities, Vladimir-Suzdal in the north emerged as the most powerful, and in 1169 its capital became the seat of the grand prince.

  Après cela, le déluge. In 1223, the Mongol cavalry of Genghis Khan charged across the Caucasus and conquered the entire region between the Don and Volga rivers. His grandson, Batu, pushing farther west, captured Vladimir, Pereslavl, and Chernigov in 1238 and Kiev in 1240. The carnage was dreadful. A papal legate who crossed southern Russia in 1245 wrote: “We found lying in the field countless skulls and bones. Kiev, which had been extremely large and prosperous, has been reduced to nothing.”1 Though Novgorod was spared destruction, its valiant duke Alexander Nevsky, who had recently defeated two invasions from the West – the Swedes on the banks of the Neva River in 1240, and the Teutonic Knights on the ice of Lake Peipus in 1242 – chose to submit rather than subject his people to inevitable massacre. Batu established his headquarters at Sarai on the lower Volga, and the Golden Horde, as it was called, became the Eastern European branch of the Great Horde of the Mongol Empire.

  Mongol* (or Tatar) domination of Russia was destined to last two and a half centuries.

  But “though an empire can be won on horseback, it cannot be ruled from the saddle,”2 and the Mongols (whom Pushkin called “Arabs without Aristotle or Algebra”) needed proxies to administer their conquered domains. In Russia they enlisted – and handsomely rewarded – compliant princes willing to enforce their cruel and benighted rule.

  Such was the background for the rise of Moscow.

  THE CITY OF Moscow had begun as a tiny hamlet on a bend of the Moscow River. To this day no one knows where the name comes from, though to the Muscovite of the sixteenth century (for whom Biblical and Russian history were intertwined) it was somehow connected to “our forefather Mosokh, son of Japheth, grandson of Noah.”3 Archaeological excavations reveal that some sort of settlement existed on the site as early as Neolithic times, but Moscow itself is not mentioned in the chronicles until 1147, when it enters recorded history as a frontier habitation between Suzdal and Ryazan. In 1156, the Suzdal prince, Yury Dolgoruky, seduced a local princess who, though m
arried, passionately returned his attentions because “he did everything according to her desire.”4 When her husband protested, Yury killed him and confiscated his estate. In the following year he surrounded the property with a wooden palisade.

  General extent of Mongol domination over Western Eurasia from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Muscovy and Novgorod endured two centuries as vassal states of the Mongol Empire.

  Thus began the Kremlin, situated on a bluff above the Moscow River, as a modest triangular fort. Before long it became the “kreml” or central citadel of a town, and the town, like the fortress, grew. Located near the headwaters of four major rivers (the Oka, the Volga, the Dnieper, and the Don), with their numerous tributaries linked variously to each other and to lesser rivers and streams, Moscow lay at the crossroads of that remarkable network of water highways which bind European Russia together as though by deliberate plan.

  In the vicinity of Moscow there were few elevations to impede the town’s expansion except for the high southwestern bank of the Moscow River, known as the Sparrow Hills. By the fourteenth century it had become the capital of a dynamic principality, and under Ivan I (“Moneybags”) Kalita, a thrifty and industrious prince, achieved preeminence in the northeast. Because Moscow princes were exceptionally willing to act as Mongol surrogates – collecting taxes, helping to suppress revolts, and even betraying rivals to the foe – they were repeatedly invested by their overlords with the title of “grand prince,” even though they belonged to a junior branch of the House of Rurik. After the metropolitan or chief hierarch of the Church transferred his see to Moscow in 1325, which enormously enhanced the city’s prestige, the ecclesiastical establishment pursued a similar policy, obliging the Russian congregation to pray for the khan in church in return for substantial tax immunities and other privileges. Finally, the principle of primogeniture, established for the House of Moscow by Dmitry Donskoy, prince from 1359 to 1389, greatly assisted in the increase of its power.

  This shrewd maneuvering paid off, as Moscow eventually achieved sufficient strength to turn on its benefactors and emerge as the national champions against Mongol tyranny. On September 8, 1380, “in a clean field beyond the Don, on the birthday of the Mother of God,”5 Donskoy met and defeated Khan Mamay of the Golden Horde in the Battle of Kulikovo Field. Though in the following year the Tatars would avenge their humiliation, Donskoy had destroyed the myth of Mongol invincibility. The Russian declaration of independence had been signed in blood.

  Renovations of the Kremlin reflected the growth in Moscow’s might. Under Ivan Kalita the original palisade had been reinforced by earthen ramparts; in 1367, Donskoy doubled the area of enclosure and replaced the old fortifications with a white-stone wall. From this time onward Moscow began its subjugation of neighboring principalities, in a progressive effort to make itself the capital of a great northern Russian state.

  A 1556 engraving of Moscow with Kremlin, by Sigismund von Herberstein, believed to be the oldest cartographic representation of the city.

  Ivan III (André Thévet, 1575).

  Sophia Paleologa, in a 1994 facial reconstruction by Sergei Nikitin.

  Meanwhile the old Russia of Kiev had long since disappeared. The Poles had conquered Galicia, and one by one the Lithuanians (driven southward by a war of extermination waged against them by the Teutonic Knights) succeeded in subjugating the principalities of Volynia, Polotsk, Smolensk, Kiev, and Chernigov. When Poland and Lithuania were joined by dynastic union in 1386 all this territory (sometimes called Western Russia) appeared to pass forever into alien hands.

  Concurrently, the Mongol Empire had begun to break up, with the Golden Horde resolving into lesser succession states founded as khanates: in the Crimea (1430), Kazan (1436) and Astrakhan (1466). In 1452 Moscow established a small Tatar khanate of its own called Kasimov, centered on the Oka River town of Gorodets, as a haven for Tatar renegades, which later proved a reliable source of auxiliary troops for the army and of officials to staff pro-Muscovite Tatar regimes.

  The way had also been prepared for the establishment of a true national church, following the “apostasy” of the Greeks in courting union with Rome at Florence in 1439, and the subsequent fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453.

  All these developments set the stage for the triumphant reign of Ivan III “the Great,” who ascended the Moscow throne in 1462. A tall, slightly hunchbacked, patient but determined monarch, he made it his task by cunning, force, and persuasion to annex numerous surrounding principalities to his expanding state – including Yaroslavl in 1463, Perm in 1472, Rostov in 1474, Novgorod (a democratic republic) and its vast northern possessions by 1478, Tver and Vyatka in 1485, and Vyazma and Chernigov by 1498. In 1500, one of his brothers bequeathed him half of Ryazan. Meanwhile he had married Sophia Paleologa, the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, began to adopt Byzantine court ceremonial, titles, and heraldry, including the Byzantine two-headed eagle as his insignia of sovereignty, and in 1480, in a great, bloodless victory that marked the end of the Tatar yoke, faced down the remnant of the Golden Horde at the Ugra River. Soon thereafter he assumed the title of samoderzhets, the Slavic equivalent of the Byzantine autokrator, or autocrat, and in the manner of the Byzantine emperors of old affirmed that he had received his investiture from God.

  The changing status of the Muscovite grand prince encouraged cautious but persistent efforts by the Kremlin to re-enter the international political community. Envoys were dispatched to Denmark, Vienna, Hungary, Venice, and Constantinople, while diplomats arrived from abroad to discuss everything from a crusade against the Turks to the procurement of falcons for the German imperial court. Less peaceably, Moscow’s expansion – by incorporating territory that had once insulated her from foreign powers – brought her face to face with Swedish Finland, German Livonia, and Lithuania along a long and irregular western frontier. In the south and east she also now faced the Tatar khanates of Crimea and Kazan. Every one of these states was fundamentally hostile to her growth.

  They had much to fear. In 1493, Ivan III claimed as his patrimony all lands held by Lithuania that had once formed part of the Russia of Kiev, and in 1500 scored considerable gains near Polotsk, Smolensk, and Chernigov-Seversk.

  His son Vasily III, crowned in 1505, not only completed his father’s northern objectives by annexing the principality of Pskov in 1510 (the last stronghold of democratic traditions in Russia) and the remainder of Ryazan in 1517, but in 1514, after three bloody campaigns, detached Smolensk from Lithuania despite a grave defeat on the Orsha River in which tens of thousands died.

  Thus, by 1533, all Russians were called Muscovites, and Russia Muscovy, because Moscow had the power.

  Vasily III (André Thévet, 1584).

  That power was stern, as perhaps it had to be, to overthrow the Tatar yoke; but it also brought a new oppression. On the one hand Vasily reigned at a time when throughout Europe old aristocratic and feudal societies were completing their transformation into centralized monarchical states. Muscovy, the most Western of Asiatic, most Eastern of European states, decidedly belonged to this overall pattern of development. But the style of Muscovite governance (Byzantine kingship cast in a Mongol mold), as well as the economic and social configuration of its expanding kingdom, differed markedly from its Western counterparts. Muscovy remained an agricultural society fundamentally supported by the toil of its peasantry, with a merchant class but no social equivalent to the independent merchant guilds of the more industrialized West. There was a gentry, but its hallmark as a rising middle class was not entrepreneurship but state service. State service in fact was what Muscovy was all about. The grand prince enjoyed an authority over his individual subjects that was tyrannical, with some institutional but no real constitutional restraints. The Russian people were encouraged to regard their sovereign as omniscient, omnipresent, and semidivine; they called him God’s key-bearer or chamberlain, and believed him to be God’s agent on earth. In the words of Sigismund von Herberstein, twice German am
bassador to Russia during the reign of Vasily III:

  In the power which he exercises over his subjects he easily outstrips the rulers of the whole world. He makes use of his authority in spiritual as well as temporal affairs; he freely and of his own will decides concerning the lives and property of everybody; of the councilors whom he has, none is of such authority that he dares to disagree or in any way to resist. They say publicly that the will of the prince is the will of God.6

  Under Vasily, all subjects, lowborn or high, began to refer to themselves as “slaves” when addressing the grand prince. The conception of the sovereign as “the living law,”7 and of his sovereignty as the earthly reflection of divine wisdom and power, was thoroughly Byzantine, as was his duty as viceregent of God to act as Defender of the Faith – “the orthodox and pious ruler in spiritual union with his flock.” But the Mongol Khan, the other great exemplar to which the Muscovites looked for their understanding of imperial rule, had stood for arbitrary despotism, a ruler separated from his subjects and responsible to none. These two forms of absolutism were entwined – or twisted – together so that the Muscovite sovereign emerged as a kind of khan in Byzantine garb.

  VASILY WAS PREPARED to go to any lengths to see that his line did not demise, and his uncanonical divorce (like that of England’s Henry VIII) was arguably the crucial event of his reign. Though his first wife, Solomonia Saburova, had been selected according to royal custom from a bride-show of 1500 virgins summoned to the capital, Vasily had chosen badly, and after twenty years of childless and disagreeable wedlock – yet barred from divorce because lack of issue was not recognized as adequate grounds – began to despair. According to the chroniclers, he bitterly apostrophized birds’ nests, flourishing gardens, rivers rich in fish, and other examples of fecund nature from which he felt estranged, even as Solomonia, quite as dismayed, resorted to exorcists and witches “to make the Grand Prince love her and enable her to conceive.”8 One advised her to moisten her white garments with water; another, to rub herself all over with honey and oil. Such measures failed to arouse him, however, and in the fall of 1525 he reportedly met with his boyars, wept, and said: “Who will rule the Russian land when I am gone? My brothers? They cannot even manage their own appanage estates.”9 The boyars replied: “Sovereign, when a fig tree is barren it is cut down and removed from the vineyard.”10 This was just what he wanted to hear, and on November 28, over the objections of the Eastern patriarchs and many holy monks on Mt. Athos to whom he appealed – but with the approval of his own submissive Metropolitan, Daniel – Vasily obtained an annulment and thrust Solomonia into a convent in the principality of Suzdal.