Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

  Eye-witness accounts of the first shock are understandably scarce. If they survived, most city-dwellers tried to flee, dispersing through the woods to escape the hoofbeats that presaged capture or death. Some found refuge in monasteries – the conquerors respected local religion almost everywhere – but even if these people had the strength to tell their tales it would have needed a monk with an unusually cool head to find a pen and take a note. As a result, there is almost no reliable picture of conditions in the princes’ lands in the decade of the Mongol raids. The brunt of suffering, as always, was borne by the civilian poor, whose future (if they had not been slaughtered in the first terrible assault) often involved forced deportation and imprisonment as hostages or slaves. To evade that, many melted northwards to the taiga and the Arctic Sea. The rest ended up paying tribute (and providing board) to any armed stranger who hammered on their door. The nobility, however, found itself in a different kind of trap. Some, like their subjects, were killed in the bloodbaths of the first months, but the survivors became the vassals of a new empire.

  It did not matter whether or not a city had burned. Novgorod, for instance, had escaped the first round of attacks (thanks to an early spring flood that blocked the horsemen’s route), but it was ordered nevertheless to pay tribute to the conquerors, a yearly tax in silver, gold and furs, in grain, and also soldiers for the khan’s army.35 There were short-lived rebellions in several cities when the taxmen came, but these merely called down greater ruin. Fire seemed to be the princes’ destiny. In the 1250s, their cities and surviving farms faced further raids from neighbours on their other flanks, including the Teutonic knights and Swedes in the north, the Polovtsy in the south, and Lithuanian tribesmen from the west. The Rus elite also persisted in fighting each other, and few stopped short of treachery, deceit, or even the murder of brother-princes. Every city and its leaders had to calculate where to build friendships and whom to fight. But ultimate authority no longer rested in the princes’ clan. The Mongol khan came to be seen as something like an emperor (the Rus sometimes referred to their new suzerain’s power as tsarstvo, from the word tsar – or caesar), and each prince owed his sceptre, in the end, to him.

  The case for appeasement was overwhelming, but in the confusion and carnage it took an imaginative prince to strike a lasting deal. Though many of the Rus eventually negotiated with the khan’s men, the most consistent and trusted in these early years was Alexander Nevsky. His frequent visits to the khan’s headquarters suggest that he was willing to work with Mongol overlords, and even that he acted as a sort of local advisor on Rus affairs.36 The khan could count on his new vassal to suppress rebellion at home (Nevsky made short work of an uprising in Novgorod), and also to ensure that tribute from the new empire was collected and paid. Alexander’s reward was an endorsement of his title to the throne of Vladimir. In years to come, even as Vladimir itself declined, the charter to rule this crumbling city would continue to confer pre-eminence upon its holder, regardless of where he was physically based, and the quest to obtain it became the focus of complex diplomacy between the Rus world and the Mongol court. As peoples of the medieval steppe, the Mongols honoured royal blood. They did not lightly overturn the Riurikid system of governance. But since the princes were their vassals, they expected homage just as any feudal lord in Europe might, and anyone who sought advantage in their Rus empire had henceforth to negotiate with them.

  Life had never been tranquil in the northern woods, but now it was precarious for everyone. Ironically, these were exactly the conditions that would favour Moscow, not least because the place appeared remote and insignificant. In part because its forests were so uninviting, refugees from richer cities like Vladimir were drawn to look for shelter there. The township’s population soon recovered and began to grow. Ten years after Batu’s onslaught, in 1247 or 1248, the fortress even acquired a prince of its own, Mikhail the Brave, though this man’s ambitions and his (short) future turned out to lie elsewhere. In 1262, however, Moscow and its associated lands were awarded to Alexander Nevsky’s two-year-old son, Daniil, and the town’s continuous history as a princely seat – a real city – began. Once he became an adult (somewhere between the ages of nine and twelve), Daniil took up permanent residence in a wooden palace in the walled compound on the city’s main hill. A Mongol army sacked the place a decade later, but the wooden buildings were rebuilt as usual – a church could be completed in a day – and business limped back to life.

  Daniil had been a younger son, which explained why he received this town, the meanest and least glamorous of his father’s estates. Although he built new churches and expanded the appanage lands, and though his successors, the Daniilovichi, amassed increasing wealth over the years, this sub-branch of the Riurikids had little prospect of wide influence or continental power. Moscow did not even rate its own bishop, and it remained an outpost in a diocese whose centre was two hundred miles away in Rostov.37 But Mongol rule distorted all realities. In the early fourteenth century, the princes of a better-placed and larger city, Tver, seemed destined to inherit the coveted throne of Vladimir, but their ambition made them suspect in the khans’ eyes. The Mongols needed someone more compliant, easier to push around. Because each prince was required to apply in person to the khan, too, the next act in the Muscovite foundation drama was played out far from its chill northern forests at the fabulous Mongol court.

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  Most early Russian chronicles are a little prim about their leaders’ dealings with the Horde. Their authors (usually court clerics of later times) mention that princes and leading figures in the church ‘visited the Horde’, but they tend not to spell out what that meant in practice. It is an awkward fact, the sort that does not fit the epic template, and medieval scribes must have struggled with it much as modern patriots still do. There is no consensus about the cultural impact on Russia of its Mongol centuries, which is why some prefer to focus on the icons and the purely Russian saints. In fact, however, most Rus political figures, including leaders of the church, spent substantial amounts of time at the courts of various successive khans. At first, that meant an arduous pilgrimage beyond the Ural mountains to Karakorum, a journey of such rigour that more than one exhausted rider perished on the way. But Batu, the man who had led the sack of Eastern Europe, founded a capital for his own khanate, often known as the Golden Horde, at Sarai, in splendid landscape near the mouth of the Volga, and before long this was the destination for embassies from the conquered Russian lands.

  The Golden Horde evokes a memorable set of legends. It is easy to imagine a forest of tents, rough men tearing at lumps of meat, perhaps a desiccated scalp or two. It is easy to imagine gold, too, but history has painted its barbaric owners in the guise of shiftless thieves; the oriental menace echoes still in the name of the road that leads south from the Kremlin: Bolshaya Ordinka, Great Horde Road. In fact, however, the ‘Horde’ was simply the khan’s imperial base; the Turkic word had nothing to do with its later connotations of a warlike rabble, and deserves to be translated as ‘the ruler’s pavilion’.38 In the weeks that it took to cross the steppe, petitioners would have been well advised to banish every other prejudice along these lines. As they discovered when the glint of the first roof emerged out of the khaki haze, the Mongols lived like the emperors that they had become.39 Batu’s original capital had certainly been made of tents, but his successors built on a truly luxurious scale.40

  Sarai was a real city, not a camp. The khans still used their tents for hunting expeditions – and for military campaigns – but in its heyday the capital of the Golden Horde was a permanent centre of commerce and cultural exchange. Building-labour was no problem, for the khan owned slaves from two continents, including craftsmen from the old Slav lands. Gold, gems, silver and porcelain from the entire known world were used to adorn his palaces. The result was stupendous. The city, according to an Arab visitor of 1333, was an ‘extraordinary size, filled to overflowing with people, handsome markets, and broad streets’. Slavs, Germ
ans and Hungarians rubbed shoulders in the market-place with Mongols, Chinese and Sogdian silk traders. The value of the goods in Sarai’s merchant quarter represented so vast a sum that the district had to be specially fortified.41 The khan’s pavilions themselves were topped with such a quantity of gold that even a visitor from Egypt was startled.42 The city was also rich in culture, and its leaders subtle in their management of diverse populations. By the fourteenth century, Sarai even had a bishop of its own. In all, it was remarkable for its open aspect, and that, too, was a deliberate choice. Fortifications, in Mongol tradition, were regarded as a sign of cowardice. Battles were lost and won at speed, so walls were simply barriers to be breached or burned.43 How any prince of the Russian lands, arriving at last after many weeks’ trek, and having set out from a wooden citadel, would have been struck by all of this can only be imagined.

  They came with any tribute they were bidden to deliver, but they also carried gifts and bribes. Intricate rings, finely matched furs, hunting falcons from the steppe and jewelled drinking-cups were all welcomed by members of the khan’s extended family. The princes’ aim was to secure support in a complex struggle for supremacy at home. By the 1300s the major players on the Russian side were the principalities of Moscow and Tver. The latter city was the stronger in both military and strategic terms; it even boasted its own kremlin, a citadel with timber walls on a commanding promontory site. But Moscow’s relative weakness was no bar to its ambition, and the city sent frequent embassies south-east to Sarai. First came Daniil’s son, Yury of Moscow, who not only married the khan’s sister but engineered the murder of a fellow-prince: Mikhail of Tver was kicked to death, with the khan’s approval, in 1318. By these and other unsavoury means, including the conquest of several valuable Rus cities, Yury became the first of Moscow’s rulers to acquire the title and the rights of Grand Prince of Vladimir. But his own murder (like Mikhail’s, it took place at Sarai) brought his reign to a premature end in 1325. When it came to the turn of his younger brother, Ivan I, the groundwork was better laid. The youth had taken the road south in 1320, remaining at the Horde for eighteen months. It was a long stay, almost an apprenticeship, and Ivan used it to acquaint himself with the basic principles of Mongol law, the workings of the court, and a good deal else that influenced his later policy towards the continental superpower.

  On his brother’s death, Ivan inherited the throne of Moscow but not the honoured title of Grand Prince of Vladimir. That passed back to Tver, but only for a brief, unnerving year. In 1327, the khan, Uzbek, sent his cousin to subdue the city, whose growing power was becoming wearisome. On that occasion, Tver’s walled fortress withstood the attack so successfully that even the Mongols gave up, though both sides sustained heavy losses. Ivan set off for Sarai again within months. His mission was to promise troops and support in a fresh campaign to capture Tver, and he probably took a supply of sable-pelts to underline his point. Uzbek, predictably, was charmed. In 1328 an army that included Mongols and soldiers from Moscow sacked Tver and forced its reigning prince, Alexander, to flee. The victorious troops loaded carts and saddlebags with plunder, and Ivan’s accession to the title of Grand Prince was sealed. In 1339, after a brief trial, the deposed prince Alexander of Tver was executed at Sarai. At the same time, on Grand Prince Ivan’s orders, the city bell of Tver was brought in triumph to the Moscow Kremlin and hung in its palace cathedral of the Saviour.44

  The medieval Russian chronicles tend to give Ivan I the benefit of a rose-tinted hindsight. ‘There came a great peace for forty years,’ wrote one source on his impact as grand prince. ‘The Christians found relief and appeasement away from the great troubles, the many oppressions, and from Tatar [i.e. Mongol] violence, and there was great peace in all the land.’45 Even by medieval standards, this is largely hogwash. Ivan, after all, was the Mongols’ ally against Christian Tver; he may also have been Uzbek’s political apprentice. He was even noted for oppressions of his own, since one of his major selling-points, from the Mongol point of view, was the efficiency with which he collected the tribute that they were owed. He was, in fact, a tax-farmer, and he used force to guarantee prompt and generous payment. By squeezing silver from his fellow-princes, he made sure of Uzbek’s portion and kept the surplus to build up his army and to make his city rich. Anything that was left (and he was not the kind to tolerate a loss) was salted away for his own use, or at least that of his throne and court. It was a talent that earned him the nickname ‘Kalita’, or ‘Moneybags’, and though there have been some attempts to hint at his financial saintliness (the moneybags could, after all, have been used to distribute pennies to the poor), the title was not originally meant to flatter.

  Moscow’s prosperity was self-reinforcing. When Tver’s prince was defeated, his boyars, the nobility who served him both in battle and at court, began to gravitate to Moscow, and each defector brought a levy of valuable troops and land. The balance between Tver and Moscow shifted permanently, in turn attracting more resources to the upstart court.46 Ivan Kalita’s role as grand prince also offered far more than prestige. As the Mongols’ senior intermediary, he had a share of the profits made in Novgorod.47 This was a valuable prize, for the northern city had continued to trade with the Baltic, and its merchants were among the wealthiest in the region. Novgorod was sophisticated, proud and ancient, but it could not resist the military pressure that Ivan applied, repeatedly, under the guise of collecting Mongol tribute. The worldly prince offered it protection, in the mafia understanding of the term, against potential threats from other regional armies. His boyars profited proportionately, and Moscow turned into the kind of place where anyone who had ambition simply had to live.48

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  At last Moscow began to shed its backwoods feel. It was still a small place, no more than a mile across at its widest. Trees grew everywhere, despite the recent building-boom, and there was uncleared forest stretching off to both the west and south. A thriving trading district nestled to the south of the Kremlin hill, on the opposite bank of the river, and there were artisans’ quarters to the north and east, but the most striking civic landmarks were the massive walls, patched, pitted and scarred from successive fires, that defined Ivan’s fortress on the central hill. Since almost everything was made of timber (including Ivan’s palace), those fires were probably the city’s greatest enemy. The wooden fortress walls were smeared with clay, which reduced the risk of combustion, but other parts of Moscow burned repeatedly. Chronicles of the period (which are incomplete) record four major fires in fifteen years, including the catastrophes of 1337 (‘eighteen churches burned’), and 1343 (‘twenty-eight churches burned’).

  The word ‘Kremlin’, which first appeared in Moscow at about this time, was not the city’s monopoly. It may have been coined for the stronghold of Novgorod’s vulnerable neighbour, Pskov, and it came to Moscow (and its rival, Tver) when craftsmen with experience from older towns were hired to build the fourteenth-century princes’ wooden walls.49 Russian fortresses were nothing like the castles of the European west, let alone the familiar (usually gloomy-looking) Norman keep.50 A fourteenth-century Austrian castle typically occupied 1,800 square yards; the Moscow Kremlin of Ivan Kalita’s time, which covered about 47 acres, was more than a hundred times larger.51 The design followed the natural contours of the land, taking advantage of the river and the steepest banks, but a compound of this size was difficult to maintain. Almost invariably there was a corner somewhere that looked derelict, a gate that opened through a sea of mud. It was a measure of Ivan Kalita’s good relationship with Uzbek that he was able to secure permission to repair (and in effect, to replace) the ruins of the Kremlin walls in 1339. The defences that he ordered, twenty-foot beams of incorruptible new oak, were not quite the token barrier that the Mongols had originally envisaged.

  The gates – also of oak – were equally imposing, and the fortress projected a regal atmosphere from a distance. But anyone who managed to enter it would have noticed a bucolic informality around the timber p
alaces inside. The Moscow Kremlin was laid out like a small town; in Ivan Kalita’s time it was usually known simply as the ‘city’ (grad). Apart from the prince and his family, its most important residents were the boyars, whose rank was second only to the prince, and their extended families, whose pedigree often reached back as far as Ivan’s own.52 A few wealthier merchants also had their homes inside the walls – there were already more than twenty principal houses on the hill – but though the compound was beginning to feel crowded by the expansive standards of the age, each wooden mansion stood in separate substantial grounds, allowing space for kitchens, store-rooms, stables, vegetable gardens, orchards and small livestock in their pens.53 In later iconography, the Kremlin was imagined as an ante-room of heaven, but in Ivan Kalita’s day it would have reeked of mildewed fur and mould and long-fermented sweat.

  But there must have been at least some trace of resinous incense, for the Kremlin was Moscow’s central religious site. It was already established as a focus of pilgrimage in 1262, when it was granted to Prince Daniil. The first recorded Kremlin monastery, dedicated to the Saviour, was located near the spot that the prince eventually chose for his palace, and an early church (probably attached to it) became the burial-place of Moscow’s original Daniilovich rulers.54 Daniil himself may well have added the even more prestigious one that stood, at the beginning of Ivan Kalita’s reign, on the slightly higher ground beyond. This building seems to have been made of stone, and Ivan would have had to demolish it in 1326 to make way for his new cathedral.55 The purpose of such projects was not merely to engage in a display of wealth. The fear of judgement and damnation was pervasive; it was already common, if death did not strike him too suddenly, for a prince to prepare for the next world by having himself tonsured under a new name, thereby distancing himself from any sin that he had perpetrated under the old one. The merit gained by founding any sacred building was incalculable. The time has come to introduce the final actor in this early drama, and he is a monk.