Lost Kingdom

by Serhii Plokhy

  It was probably owing to Sophia’s Roman connections that Ivan brought to Moscow a group of Italian architects to build new walls for the Kremlin—the seat of the grand princes that Ivan was now turning into an imperial castle. Marco Ruffo, who arrived in Moscow in 1485, built a number of Kremlin palaces and churches. Together with another Italian architect, Pietro Antonio Solari, he constructed the Palace of Facets, the tsar’s richly decorated banqueting quarters. Solari, who came to Moscow in 1487, supervised the construction of the Kremlin towers, including the Spasskaia (Savior’s) Tower. This iconic symbol of Moscow and Russia still bears an inscription commemorating the Italian architect who built it: the text on the inner gates is in Russian, the one on the outer gates in Latin. The former reads: “In the year 6999 [1491], in July, by God’s grace, this tower was built by order of Ivan Vasilievich, sovereign and autocrat of all Rus’ and grand prince of Vladimir and Moscow and Novgorod and Pskov and Tver and Yugra and Viatka and Perm and Bulgar and others in the thirtieth year of his reign, and it was built by Pietro Antonio Solari of the city of Milan.”

  Ivan’s title listed his possessions, both old and new. While his marriage and ambitious construction project pointed to the imperial future, his title of ruler of “all Rus’” and claims to individual lands was rooted in the past—more specifically, the medieval origins of his dynasty and state. Scholars point out the dual origins of the power of the Muscovite prince, who functioned as both khan and basileus (the Byzantine emperor)—at once the secular and religious ruler of the realm. Often overlooked in this focus on dual origins is the continuing importance of the title of grand prince, which would remain central to the identity of Ivan III and his successors right up to the mid-sixteenth century. The title associated the princes of Moscow with the long-deceased rulers of Kyivan Rus’, allowing the princes to claim supremacy over the Rus’ lands—the former Kyivan possessions extending from the Black Sea in the south to the Baltic Sea in the north.

  IVAN’S RIGHT TO RULE SUCH TOWNS AS VLADIMIR AND MOSCOW, as well as Novgorod and Pskov, was based on his claim of descent from the Scandinavian Rurikid dynasty, whose origins went back to the legendary figure of the Viking king (konung) Rurik.

  The Rurikids had ruled Kyivan Rus’ as a strong state whose power had reached its peak between the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Among the most venerated princes of Kyiv was Volodymyr (Vladimir), who had ruled the realm from 980 to 1015 and brought Byzantine Christianity to the Rus’ lands, an accomplishment for which the Orthodox Church made him a saint. Another major figure was Volodymyr’s son, Yaroslav the Wise (1019–1054), the builder of St. Sophia’s Cathedral in central Kyiv. According to established tradition, he issued the first Rus’ law code and promoted chronicle writing. Finally, there was another Volodymyr, known as Monomakh because of his family connection to the Byzantine emperor Constantine IX Monomachos, who managed to restore the shaken unity of the Kyivan realm in the course of his twelve-year reign (1113–1125).

  Rurikid rule over Kyivan Rus’ came to an abrupt end in the mid-thirteenth century, when the Mongols, accompanied by Turkic steppe tribes known in Rus’ as Tatars, attacked and subjugated the Rus’ principalities. In the fall of 1237, Batu Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan and founder of the easternmost realm of the Mongol Empire, sent envoys to Prince Yurii of Vladimir in northeastern Rus’ to demand his surrender. The prince refused. Within the next few months, the Mongols besieged and devastated Riazan and a number of other Rus’ towns. The prince himself died in battle in March 1238. In the winter of 1239, the Mongols sacked the towns of Chernihiv and Pereiaslav. The next year they appeared on the approaches to Kyiv, the center of a once huge polity. Because Kyiv would not surrender, the Mongols besieged it, using heavy beams to breach the city walls.

  “Batu placed battering rams near the city by the Polish Gate,” wrote the chronicler, referring to a location that is now in downtown Kyiv, “for a dense forest came up to there. Beating the walls unceasingly, day and night, he breached them.” In early December, the Mongols rushed across a frozen creek that no longer presented a barrier and poured into the city. As the short winter day drew to a close, the Mongols took over the city walls and palisades, where they stayed overnight, waiting for dawn. That was probably the most dreadful night in the lives of the city’s defenders. Historians believe that the Rus’ warriors and the remaining inhabitants retreated to the Church of the Dormition. The first stone church in Kyiv, it became the last sanctuary for those who would not capitulate. “Meanwhile, people ran to the church and onto its roof with their possessions,” wrote the chronicler about the events of December 7, 1240, the last day of Kyiv’s defense, “[and] the walls of the church collapsed from the weight, and so the fortress was taken by the [Tatar] warriors.”

  Few of the inhabitants and defenders of Kyiv survived its fall. Batu and his armies moved westward, conquering the rest of the Rus’ lands and invading Poland and Hungary. The Mongols succeeded in part because the Rus’ lands, once united around Kyiv, no longer formed a coherent polity and were ruled by princes competing with one another for power and influence. At the time of the Mongol invasion, most of the northeastern Rus’ princes, who ruled the lands of today’s central Russia, recognized the suzerainty of the princes of Vladimir. Southwestern Rus’, including the city of Kyiv, was ruled by the Galician-Volhynian princes, while the Republic of Novgorod in northeastern Rus’ conducted its affairs quite independently of the other Rus’ lands. If anything, the Mongol invasion worsened the political fragmentation of the Kyivan Rus’ realm. Mongol rule over what are now the Ukrainian and Belarusian lands was largely indirect, lasting only a few decades. Those lands eventually found themselves under the control of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland. Farther north and east, the situation was different. The Mongols established strict control over northeastern Rus’, which in time would become a predominantly Russian land.

  Although the unity of Rus’ was very much a thing of the past, by the time of the Mongol invasion the princes throughout the Rus’ lands, from Kyiv and Pereiaslav in the south to Novgorod and Vladimir in the north and east, shared a sense of dynastic origin. They were also heirs to Kyiv’s impressive legacy in the realms of law, religion, literary language, and common Rus’ identity. Nowhere did dynastic continuity with Kyivan Rus’ play a more important role than in Muscovy, the polity that emerged in the northeastern realm of the former Kyivan Rus’ under the suzerainty of the Mongols. To rule over their Rus’ possessions, including Novgorod, the Mongols relied on subordinates holding the title of grand prince of Vladimir. A number of princely families competed with one another for the coveted title, which brought prestige, power, and income to those able to convince the khans of their loyalty and ability to do the job. The Mongol (later Kipchak) khans passed the title from one Rus’ prince to another as a carrot to encourage the princes, who were obliged to collect tribute for the khans from their Rus’ subjects.

  The khans played off one princely line against another, trying to avoid the emergence of a strong political center, but eventually proved unable to sustain that strategy. In the course of the fourteenth century, the city of Moscow emerged as an important new center of power in the lands of Mongol Rus’. A small principality at the time of the Mongol invasion of northeastern Rus’ in 1238, Moscow did not have even a princely family of its own. It acquired one only under the Mongols. The princes of Moscow belonged to a junior line of the Rurikids, but thanks to the location of their principality at the crossroads of various trade routes and to their political skills, they became the most powerful princely house in northeastern Rus’. In 1317, the prince of Moscow married a sister of the khan of the Golden Horde, thereby gaining the title of grand prince of Vladimir and the power inherent in the post of the khan’s representative in Rus’.

  The Muscovites’ main rivals for the title of grand prince were the princes of Tver, a much more powerful principality than Moscow located between Muscovy and the Republic of Novgorod. But the j
unior princes of Moscow, whose capital was closer to Vladimir, the original seat of the grand princes, and to the Mongol-controlled steppe, effectively outmaneuvered their competitors. A significant factor in the unexpected and steady rise of Moscow was the policy of the metropolitan of all Rus’, the head of the Orthodox Church, who had moved from Kyiv to Vladimir at the turn of the century. He now established himself in Moscow, making it the new capital of his vast metropolitanate, which covered all the lands of Mongol Rus’ and extended into Lithuanian Rus’ as well. The Moscow princes and the Rus’ metropolitans both professed loyalty to the Golden Horde, and their alliance helped turn Moscow into the true capital of northeastern Rus’.

  By the mid-fifteenth century, the princes of Moscow, as principal agents of the khans of the Golden Horde in the Rus’ lands, were in a position to threaten their masters’ continuing political dominance. With the Golden Horde weakened by internal rivalries and entering a period of disintegration, the Moscow princes pushed for the sovereignty of the Rus’ realm. The first to do so was Prince Vasilii II, nicknamed the Blind—his enemies had plucked out his eyes in the vain hope of disqualifying him as a ruler. But it was only during the rule of his son, Ivan III, a man of true foresight who assumed the office of grand prince in 1462 and ruled until 1505, that the goal of independence was finally achieved.

  Ivan established his control over the entire territory of Mongol Rus’. To secure his independence of the khans and rule the rebellious Rus’ lands, he employed not only the military might of his realm but also powerful legal and historical arguments. Dynasty and patrimony—two concepts that the Muscovite rulers rooted in the Kyivan past—were key ideological foundations of the tsardom. The visions of the Rus’ princely past and of an imperial future would prove mutually reinforcing in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which were crucial to the formation of Muscovite statehood and identity.

  IN 1471, ONE YEAR BEFORE HIS MARRIAGE TO SOPHIA PALAIOLOGINA, Ivan III had scored a major victory in the struggle to consolidate his power over the former Mongol Rus’. His troops had captured and subjugated the Republic of Novgorod, by far the largest and richest polity of the realm.

  Many scholars have regarded the Novgorod republic as a democratic alternative to the authoritarian trend in Russian history embodied in the Grand Duchy of Moscow, which was ruled by strong princes. Since the twelfth century, Novgorod, with possessions extending from the Baltic Sea in the west to the White and Barents Seas in the north and the Ural Mountains in the east, had been ruled by officials elected by a popular assembly. The princes of Novgorod functioned as military commanders who served at the pleasure of the citizens, or, rather, their patrician elite. The republic’s wealth came not only from landholdings but also from trade, as Novgorod was a major commercial power in the Baltic region, exporting furs and other forest products and importing textiles for itself and much of Rus’.

  In 1470, a group of Novgorod patricians led by Marfa Boretskaia, the widow of a former mayor of the city and mother of its serving mayor, came to an agreement with Casimir IV, who was both grand duke of Lithuania and king of Poland (the two states had concluded a personal and then a dynastic union in 1385). Casimir sent Prince Mykhailo Olelkovych, a son and brother of the princes of Kyiv, to help Novgorod defend itself. But little more help came from the duke, and Mykhailo Olelkovych left the city in the following year. A Muscovite army, supported by Tatar cavalry in the service of Ivan III, attacked the Novgorodians in the summer of 1471. The inhabitants learned of the approaching danger when they saw their soldiers retreating from the field to the city walls with their noses and lips cut off. As the forces of Ivan III advanced, they mutilated their captives and sent them home to terrify the rest of the defending army and the local population.

  The decisive battle, which took place on the Shelon River in July 1471, brought victory to the less numerous but more disciplined and experienced Muscovite forces. The Tatars played an important role, ambushing the Novgorodian army and helping to pursue, capture, and kill retreating troops. Muscovite and Novgorodian chroniclers disagreed on the details of the battle, but its outcome and significance were clear: Ivan III had crushed Novgorod’s efforts to maintain its autonomy. Mayor Dmitrii Boretsky was captured in battle and executed on Ivan’s orders. An estimated 12,000 Novgorodians died in battle or were killed in the course of the retreat. The Novgorodians were forced to pay a huge tribute, more than twice the amount that Muscovy had rendered to the Horde, and abandon their alliance with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The republic was on its knees.

  The strength of Ivan’s army allowed him to subjugate Novgorod and repel the Great Horde, the main successor to the Golden Horde. But the new status of the Grand Principality of Moscow and its constant acquisition of new territories required justification in the eyes of its subjects and neighbors. According to the Muscovite scribes, who conveniently produced a new rendition of the Russian chronicles in 1472, Ivan III had taken Novgorod and punished the republic for its insubordination on the basis of his patrimonial rights, which went back to Prince Volodymyr of Kyiv. “From antiquity you, the people of Novgorod, have been my patrimony,” the Muscovite envoys allegedly said on behalf of Ivan III, “from our grandfathers and our ancestors, from Grand Prince Volodymyr, the great-grandson of Rurik, the first grand prince in our land, who baptized the Rus’ land. And from that Rurik until this day, you have recognized only one ruling clan of those grand princes.… [W]e, their kin, have ruled over you, and we bestow [our mercy] upon you, and we protect you against [all adversaries], and we are free to punish you if you do not recognize us according to the old tradition.”

  The reference to “old tradition” was a fairly new feature of Muscovite political culture. The Kyivan lineage of the Muscovite princely line had hardly been mentioned by chroniclers before Ivan III took Novgorod. Until then, the princes of Moscow had competed for power with those of Tver and other centers by appealing to the khans of the Horde. References to Kyiv and the Rurikid origins of the ruling dynasty had no value in the eyes of the khans, who were the heirs of Genghis Khan, the founder of the Mongol Empire. But that situation changed with the continuing disintegration of the Horde. The same year Ivan consolidated his rule over Novgorod, he also turned back the Tatar armies of Ahmed, the khan of the Great Horde. Disturbed by the growing power of Moscow, Ahmed had moved his army toward the Muscovite borders, but the Muscovites had mounted an effective defense, preventing Ahmed’s troops from crossing the Oka River. The Tatars turned back, and the Muscovites stopped paying tribute, letting their former overlords know that their dependence on the Horde was over. With Novgorod defeated and Tatar dominance thrown off, the foundations of Muscovite sovereignty had been laid.

  But that was not the end of Ivan’s troubles either with Novgorod or with the Mongols. Five years later, the scenario first played out in 1471–1472 was repeated. Once again, the three main actors were Muscovy, Novgorod, and the Horde. In October 1477, as the Novgorodians questioned the conditions of the new treaty imposed on them by Ivan III and his status as their sovereign, the grand prince besieged the city and forced a new loyalty oath on its citizens. In January 1478, Ivan III entered the city. Novgorod ceased to be a republic. The bell that had summoned citizens to council meetings—the symbol of Novgorodian democracy—was taken to Moscow. Marfa Boretskaia, the leader of republican resistance, was brought first to Moscow and then to Nizhnii Novgorod, where she was compelled to take monastic vows. The landed wealth of the metropolitan of Novgorod, of the monasteries, and of the city’s elite was confiscated. The leaders of the resistance and their families were exiled in midwinter, and many did not survive the ordeal. Their lands were given to servitors of the Muscovite prince.

  The conquest of Novgorod by Ivan III in 1478 was followed once again by a military confrontation with the Great Horde, which demanded tribute from its former Moscow subjects. This time, Khan Ahmed found an ally in Casimir IV, the king of Poland and grand duke of Lithuania, who was concerned by the f
all of Novgorod and Muscovy’s increasing power in the Lithuanian borderland. The Lithuanian army was supposed to join the Tatars in an attack on Moscow. In the fall of 1480, Ahmed showed up on the Ugra River on the borders of Muscovy, ready for battle, but the Lithuanians, who had allowed the Tatars to march through their territories, did not appear. They were prevented from doing so by an attack on their southern, largely Ukrainian lands by another heir to the Golden Horde, the Crimean Khanate. Without Lithuanian support, Ahmed would not risk crossing the Ugra and turned back. This retreat became known in Russian history as the final act in the long struggle to shake off the “Tatar yoke” and the first decisive assertion of Muscovite sovereignty. Muscovy, which got to keep Novgorod, began its history as a fully independent state by crushing a democratic rival that had sought to distance itself from the heirs of the Golden Horde.

  BY 1480, IVAN HAD SUCCESSFULLY ESTABLISHED HIS SOVEREIGNTY over the lands of Mongol Rus’, but his title, “sovereign and autocrat of all Rus’,” inscribed by Italian architects on the gates of the Kremlin tower a decade later, suggested much more than that. In 1478, the year of the final subordination of Novgorod, Muscovite diplomats began to speak of Moscow’s rights to some Lithuanian territories, including Polatsk and Smolensk. By 1490, Ivan’s chancellery had begun to use the Kyivan descent of the Muscovite princes as grounds to extend his claim from those two principalities to Kyiv itself. In a letter to the Habsburg emperor Maximilian I, Ivan III spoke of undertaking, with God’s grace, to “reconquer our patrimony, the Grand Duchy of Kyiv, which is ruled by Casimir, the Polish king, and his children.” In 1494, the Lithuanian duke was compelled to recognize the new title of the Muscovite ruler, including its reference to “all Rus’.” In 1503–1504, Muscovite envoys made their claims to the Kyivan patrimony known to their Lithuanian counterparts: “The towns and lands now in our possession are not all of our patrimony, [which extends to] the whole Rus’ land, Kyiv and Smolensk and other towns.… [B]y God’s grace, this is our patrimony from antiquity, from our forefathers.”