In Kiev, Vladimiir’s son Iaroslav built the cathedral of the Holy Wisdom, Saint Sophia, in 1037. The dedication was in imitation of the great church of Constantinople, the sixth century cathedral of the Emperor Justinian. Later rebuilding conceals the original look of the exterior, which probably followed the Greek norms of the time. The basic plan was a nave and transept of equal length (the “Greek cross”), which gave the building a squarish look, and the roof surmounted with round drums supporting the domes. These would have been the Byzantine hemispherical domes, not the characteristic onion shape of later Russian churches. The Kievan Saint Sophia was also a much more modest creation than its grand prototype and followed middle Byzantine style in using several smaller domes instead of the enormous central dome created by Justinian’s architects.
The Kievan Saint Sophia was also connected with the prince’s palace by galleries, with a special place reserved for the prince and his family – a Byzantine touch later abandoned in Rus. The magnificent mosaics and frescoes, still extant today, also followed the Greek prototype, with inscriptions everywhere in Greek. At the top was (presumably) Christ as Pantocrator, the ruler of the universe, below him the extant images of the apostles, the Mother of God, and then the Eucharist. On the walls were the life of Christ and his Mother, prophets, and saints. This order put Christ in heaven, then symbolically depicted his movement down from the world of the spirit to the earth. The path lay through his Mother, his apostles, and the Eucharist, three ways in which the spirit of Christ reached the material world and thus to all men. The physical structure of the church signified the presence of Christ in the world in consequence of the Incarnation.
The Kievan Saint Sophia, like Greek and other Rus churches of the time, presumably had a row of icons along the altar rail. This row was not yet the high icon screen of later Russian churches, and thus the cathedral may have contained only a dozen or so images. Few icons exist today that can be surely dated to Kievan times, and none can be placed with any certitude in Kiev’s cathedral. The twelfth century is richer in surviving icons, the most famous example being the image of the Vladimir Mother of God, a Greek (probably Constantinople) icon that found its way to Vladimir in the northeast, where it rested in the Cathedral of the Dormition of the Mother of God in that city. It is a typical work of the period, with Mary in fine dress holding the infant Christ in her arms, again the visible image of the Incarnation and the presence of Christ in the world that is the center of the Orthodox understanding of his role. The physical image itself was crucial to belief in Christ’s presence. As the Byzantine monk Saint Theodore of the Studiou monastery put it: “If reverence toward the image of Christ is subverted, then Christ’s incarnation is also subverted”.
As the peasants cleared the land and tended their crops, and the princes built churches and warred on one another, a cloud was gathering on the horizon. In 1223 a new and strange people appeared on the southern steppes, and the Kipchaks hastened to assemble allies from among the Rus princes. The combined army went out to meet the newcomers and found them on the River Kalka, just north of the Sea of Azov. The strangers were the Mongols, who utterly destroyed the Kipchak/Rus army and went on to raid the area of Kiev. “They returned from the river Dniepr and we know not whence they came or whither they went. Only God knows whence they came against us for our sins,” said the Novgorod chronicler. They would come again.
2 Moscow, Novgorod, Lithuania, and the Mongols
After the gradual disintegration of Kiev Rus, the regional powers that supplanted it began to grow apart. In these centuries the territories of Novgorod and the old northeast began to form a distinct language and culture that we can call Russian. Though the older term Rus persisted until replaced by Russia (Rossiia) in the fifteenth century, for this period we may begin to call the area Russia and the people Russian. In these centuries, Russia, like the other territories of Kiev Rus that would fall to Lithuania, experienced a cataclysm in the form of the Mongol invasion, one that shaped its history for the next three centuries.
The Mongol Empire was the last and largest of the nomadic empires formed on the Eurasian steppe. It was largely the work of Temuchin, a Mongolian chieftain who united the Mongolian tribes in 1206 and took the name of Genghis Khan. In his mind, the Eternal Blue Heaven had granted him rule over all people who lived in felt tents, and he was thus the legitimate ruler of all inner Asian nomads. The steppe was not enough. In 1211 Genghis Khan moved south over the Great Wall and overran northern China. His armies then swept west, and by his death in 1227, they had added all of Inner and Central Asia to their domains.
The astonishing success of the Mongols came from their ability to balance the advantages of nomadic society with the benefits of sedentary civilizations. The basic unit of Mongol society was the clan, and in each clan the women tended to the animals and the men learned the arts of war. Genghis Khan mobilized the whole of his people for war, and the Mongols were superb horsemen, disciplined and skilled warriors, and ruthless conquerors. They could not take cities with cavalry, however, and thus the Mongols recruited men from China and Central Asia who knew how to make and use siege engines. This combination was unbeatable. Rich cities like Khwarezm in Central Asia that tried to resist were exterminated. Spreading terror before them, the Mongol armies overwhelmed Iran and Iraq and took the rest of China. A typhoon prevented them from taking Japan, but only in Viet Nam was human resistance strong enough to defeat them.
The battle on the Kalka had been part of a reconnaissance. In 1236 the full force of the Mongol army moved west under the command of the grandson of Genghis Khan, Batu, son of Jochi. With perhaps a hundred thousand warriors at his disposal, Batu first subdued Volga Bulgaria and the Kipchaks, and then during the years of 1237 through 1240, in a series of campaigns, he smashed Vladimir and the other northeastern towns. He razed Kiev to the ground, wiping out the people or selling them into slavery. The old center of Kiev Rus was gone, and would not recover for a century and a half. Batu continued on to the west, defeating a hastily gathered army in eastern Germany, and then turning south to Hungary, a suitable terrain for a nomadic host. There Batu’s army wintered over and Europe was in panic. Suddenly in the spring of 1242 the supreme Khan Ogedei died, and the army returned home to Mongolia to participate in the succession, never to return.
The great Mongol empire soon split into four large domains (or ulus): China, Central Asia, Iran with Iraq, and the western steppe. The last was the ulus of Jochi in Mongol terminology, the heritage of Jochi’s son the conqueror Batu. The Persians and later scholars would call it the Golden Horde, while the Russians just referred to it as the Horde (or Orda, a military camp, in Mongol). The Golden Horde was a nomadic state whose center lay on the lower Volga, in the city of Sarai, near the later Stalingrad. As a nomadic state, its people followed the annual migration, wintering near the mouths of the rivers and moving north with the melting snows. This had been the pattern of the Kipchaks and the Khazars before them, but the Golden Horde was on a much grander scale. It stretched from Rumania in the west to the eastern parts of Kazakstan and included Khwarezm in Central Asia, the latter a bone of contention with the Central Asian ulus of Chagatai. Like most nomadic states, the Golden Horde included agricultural lands along the borders. One of these was Khwarezm, others were the land of the Volga Bulgarians, the Crimea, and the Rus principalities, both in the southwest and the northeast. In the Rus principalities the khans experimented with their own tax collectors, but eventually they simply required the Grand Prince of Vladimir, the nominal supreme ruler of the northeast, to send the annual tribute to Sarai. The Horde demanded tribute and obedience, nothing else. The center of attention of the Khans of the Golden Horde was not on the Rus lands but on the south, and on the contested borderlands with Central Asia (Khwarezm) and Persia (Azerbaidzhan). These were rich territories that also included important trade routes. By comparison, the northern pine forests of Rus, with their sparse population, were not much of a prize.
Thus the Rus princ
ipalities, and especially those of the northeast and Novgorod, were included on the fringes of a vast Eurasian empire. Historians often speak of this period as one of “Mongol rule,” but the term is misleading, for the actual population of the Golden Horde included almost no actual Mongols outside of the khan’s household. Batu had incorporated the Kipchaks and other Turkic peoples into his army and soon all that remained of the Mongols was the name Tatar, the name of one of the leading Mongol clans. In Russian it came to signify the nomads of the Horde and the peoples who descended from them. The language of the Horde was not Mongolian but Kipchak Turkic, the lingua franca of the steppe and of the Horde’s winter capital at Sarai. Sarai was a great city, with much of it made of felt tents and considered an important waystation on the trade route from Europe to Inner Asia and China. The population of the city included all sorts of people: Tatars, Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Persians, and many of the Muslims of Central Asia. There was even an Orthodox bishop of Sarai, which became an eparchy of the metropolitanate of Kiev. The Mongols had been tolerant of various faiths, and the Horde continued this policy even after its conversion to Islam under Khan Uzbek in the 1330s.
During the succeeding centuries, life continued much as before for the people of the former Kiev Rus. The princes feuded with one another over land and power, the cities slowly came back and the churches were rebuilt. The tribute to the Horde must have been a burden, but not enough to prevent the recovery of the devastated areas. In the northeast, the main prize of political contest was the Grand Principality of Vladimir, which not only gave control of that town and its lands but a theoretical overlordship of the whole area and even of Novgorod. The Grand Principality of Vladimir was now in the gift of the khan in Sarai. Thus, Alexander Nevsky, who ruled in Vladimir (1252–1263), came to the throne after more than a decade as Novgorod’s elected prince. He went to Sarai to the khan for confirmation of his title and power. From 1304, however, Vladimir ceased to be an independent center of power, and like Kiev earlier, it became the prize in the struggle for power among the northeastern princes of Tver and Moscow. Ultimately the Moscow dynasty would secure the Vladimir land and title for itself, forming in the process the Russian state. Medieval political rivalries make dull reading for the modern reader, for they were an endless chain of petty conflicts, military and diplomatic; appeals to higher authorities; and short-lived and quickly reversed alliances.
Moscow first appears in written sources in 1147 as a small fortress, but it seems to have been Daniil, Prince of Moscow (circa 1280–1303) and grandson of Alexander Nevsky who consolidated the small territory along the Moscow River. His son Iurii Danilovich expanded that territory, but his power was limited by Prince Michael of Tver’s acquisition of the Vladimir throne in 1305. From that moment Moscow and Tver were locked in a bitter struggle for that throne that included the Moscow-inspired execution of Michael of Tver in 1318. Eventually Michael became a saint, honored most of all in Moscow. The murders and denunciations to the Horde continued until Iurii’s son Ivan (“Kalita,” the Moneybag) finally secured the Vladimir throne from Khan Uzbek in 1328 and held it until his death in 1340. His success guaranteed Moscow the leading position among the northeastern princes, and with time his descendants came to be the Grand Princes of Moscow and Vladimir. The new town had eclipsed Vladimir and Ivan proceeded to fortify Moscow with the first wooden Kremlin.
It was not only the Vladimir title and suzerainty over the Russian princes of the northeast that came to rest in Moscow. The Mongol conquest and destruction of Kiev had left the Metropolitan of Kiev, the head of the church, without a home until Metropolitan Maximos, a Greek, moved his residence to Vladimir in 1299. His successor was Peter (1306–1326), not a Greek but a nobleman from southwest Rus, who identified himself with Moscow and on his death was buried in the Kremlin’s Dormition Cathedral. Ivan Kalita convinced his successor, the Greek Theognostos, to remain in Moscow as well. The Moscow princes now had at their sides the Metropolitans of Kiev and All Rus.
By the middle of the fourteenth century Moscow was in a secure enough position to dominate the politics of the area. It had incorporated a number of lesser principalities and exerted hegemony over almost all others. Only Novgorod had real freedom of action. The limit to the power of the Moscow princes came not from their neighbors but from the Khans of the Golden Horde; however, here as well the situation was changing, if only gradually, and it was changing in Moscow’s favor. Dmitrii Ivanovich, the grandson of Ivan Kalita, inherited these advantages when he came to the Moscow and Vladimir throne in 1359. His early years were spent building a new white-stone Kremlin in Moscow and on rivalries with other Rus princes and Lithuania. Then in 1378 he defeated a raiding party from the Horde. At that moment the Horde had its own internal problems – for the Emir Mamai, commander of the western wing of the Horde, had come to overshadow the khan himself. Mamai set out against Dmitrii to restore his own and the Horde’s prestige and power over their unruly vassal. Instead, the battle on Kulikovo field, near the upper Don River, in 1380 was a resounding victory for Dmitrii, who was ever after known as Dmitrii Donskoi.
Later writers greatly inflated the significance of this battle, for it did not liberate Russia from the Horde, even if it was the first important victory over the Tatars since 1240. Mamai’s defeat led to his elimination from the politics of the Horde, and in 1382 the new Khan Tokhtamysh led a massive army toward the north. This time Dmitrii chose to retreat, and Tokhtamysh took Moscow and burned it to the ground. Dmitrii did not live long enough to see the outcome, for he died in 1389. Two years later the great conqueror Tamerlane, already master of Central Asia, turned against the Golden Horde and defeated Tokhtamysh. This was a mortal blow, coming at a time of increasing dissension among the various chiefs and tribal groupings within the Horde. Raids and even major campaigns by the Tatars continued, but without great success. In the 1430s the Horde began to break up, although the theoretical supremacy of the senior khanate over Russia lasted until 1480.
The principalities of northeastern Rus which ultimately came under the rule of the Moscow princes were not the only components that formed the Russian state. The other was Novgorod, which had already begun to form its own style of government in the twelfth century. Its distinctive economy, founded on the forests of the north and the commercial tie to the German Hansa, gave it a wealth that its neighbors must have envied. In addition, its location meant that subordination to the Golden Horde remained very theoretical. During most of the thirteenth century the Novgorodians chose to recognize the sovereignty of the Grand Prince of Vladimir, who sent a viceroy to lead the city-state’s army, but they now made a formal treaty with their sovereign. In the 1290s Novgorod’s people further altered the balance of power. From then on they elected their posadnik, their mayor, for a term of one year from the “Council of Lords,” which was formed of representatives of each of the five “ends” of the town. As the same man could be reelected, the new system made the city’s government even more oligarchic but also more independent of the prince or his deputies.
The political history of Novgorod is recorded in its chronicles and those of its neighbors, but the daily life of the city is also known to us as that of no other medieval Russian town. Starting in the 1930s Soviet archeologists made it into one of the most extensive medieval sites ever excavated, unintentionally aided by the German Wehrmacht, which destroyed most of the modern city in World War II. Dozens of medieval houses and workshops, barns, and midden heaps have given a remarkable picture of the life of medieval Novgorod. The water-logged soil of the site preserves organic material, including the log-paved roads that crisscrossed the town. Leather shoes, wooden vessels and tools, as well as objects of stone, glass, and metal have come to light. The log roads also provide the archeologist with an invaluable tool: a sequence of logs that form a database for dendrochronology (dating by tree-rings). As such, finds can be dated in Novgorod with a great degree of accuracy. Perhaps the most remarkable and wholly unexpected find came in 1951, when a
student working on the site found a round cylinder of birchbark encased in mud. Her presence of mind led to the discovery that the bark, when unrolled, had writing on it, which was incised with a sharp pointed stylus. This was the first of the birch bark letters, of which thousands now exist from Novgorod and hundreds from other medieval Russian sites. These were not literary compositions but simply letters, orders to servants, reminders from wives to their husbands, labels for baskets (such as “rye” or “barley”), and records of debts.
Figure 2. A Child’s Writing Exercise from Medieval Novgorod (Birch Bark Document 210).
All of these finds show us a thickly populated town. Houses were built in yards enclosed by wooden fences with a larger house for the master and often several smaller huts of servants or artisans. Each house had barns and storage sheds for animals, fodder, and the tools of the household. Houses of great boyars and their dependents were jumbled together with humble homesteads with a workshop to sustain a smith or carpenter. Children’s toys and the ever-present spindles record the occupations of children and the spinning and weaving of the households’ women. Some of the birch bark documents are more exotic, depicting the exercises of children learning to write and occasional prayers and letters between nuns. They reveal a society with a certain basic literacy, where men and women could write simple letters, even if most could not copy or read complex religious texts in Church Slavic.
Novgorod was a major cultural center, and the considerable manuscript production of its cathedral clergy and monasteries remain to this day as testimony of their activity. Church building reflected Novgorod’s wealth as did its patronage of icon painters from faraway Byzantium, like Theophanes the Greek (circa 1350–1410). Theophanes is responsible for some of the more remarkable frescoes from medieval Novgorod, as far as we can judge from what has escaped the ravages of time, warfare, and politics. His images create a sense of mystic light around his subjects, perhaps the influence of the mystical teaching among Byzantine monks known as hesychasm.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 4