Novgorod’s location put it in a different international context from Vladimir and Moscow. A generation before the Mongol invasion, Novgorod was confronted with enemies as fierce and perhaps ultimately more dangerous than the nomads of Inner Asia, the Christian Crusaders of western Europe. They came in two groups. The larger, but perhaps the less dangerous to Novgorod, were the German crusading orders, the Teutonic Knights, and the Swordbearers. These were monastic orders of celibate warriors, formed into a community to fight against the opponents of Christianity. At the end of the twelfth century, pushed out of Palestine by the victorious Muslims, they turned their attention to the east shore of the Baltic Sea, where several of the native peoples of the area, the Old Prussians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and Finns remained pagans, untouched by Christianity in either western or eastern form. There the Teutonic Knights received land on the border of the Prussian lands from a sympathetic Polish duke and built their first castles. Systematically they subdued and exterminated the Prussians in the name of Christ, bringing German peasants to settle in their place. Within two generations Prussia, the East Prussia of twentieth century politics, was a German territory ruled by the order.
Prussia would eventually develop into a problem for Poland, but for Novgorod it was their allies that were the threat. Around 1200 German knights landed near Riga and began to subdue the lands of today’s Latvia and Estonia, turning the natives into their tenants and eventually serfs. All power rested in the hands of the archbishop of Riga and the order of the Swordbearers. The Swordbearers joined the Teutonic Knights in 1237 as the subordinate Livonian order, cementing German rule. The resultant social and ethnic hierarchy lasted through various political changes into the twentieth century.
For the moment the Novgorodians found a new and dynamic neighbor in place of the weak Estonian tribes of earlier centuries. To makes things worse, another crusade was afoot. Sweden was also moving east, gradually conquering the Finnish tribes. As they moved east along the coast of Finland, the Swedes began to threaten Novgorod’s vital trade route to the Hansa that ran through the Gulf of Finland and the Neva river. In 1240 the Swedish Earl Birger, a man more powerful than the King of Sweden himself, landed an army in Novgorod’s territory on the south bank of the Neva. The local Finnish tribe, the Ingrians, sent south to Novgorod for help, and the city’s newly elected prince, Alexander of Vladimir, came out to fight. The Swedes were driven into the sea, and Alexander for ever after was known as Alexander of the Neva, or Alexander Nevsky. Two years later he defeated the Livonian knights on the ice of Lake Chud, on the Estonian border, in a battle that was of little significance at the time, but eventually made great twentieth century cinema: Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 epic with Sergei Prokofiev’s music. The medieval Novgorodians, however, knew what was important. Prince Alexander’s epithet remained Nevsky, in memory of the truly crucial defense of Novgorod’s trade, while his defeat of the knights was relegated to a few lines in the chronicle. The Livonian knights had other concerns, which distracted their attention away from the rich and powerful Novgorod. This concern was Lithuania, the main enemy of the knights in both Prussia and Livonia.
Of the peoples of the eastern Baltic, Lithuania alone managed to retain its independence. As the Teutonic Knights moved inexorably over their new territories, the Lithuanian tribes came together under one prince. Grand Prince Gediminas (1316–1341) transformed Lithuania into a major power. He established his capital in Wilno, closer to his new territories, lands that today comprise the whole of Belarus. His even more successful son Algirdas (1341–1377) added Volhynia, Kiev, Chernigov, and parts of the Smolensk lands to his domain. Lithuania had become in extent, if not by population, the largest country in Europe. The Lithuanian princes of the house of Gediminas now ruled more than half of the former lands of Kiev Rus, excepting only Novgorod and the northeast under the Vladimir princes, and Galicia in the southwest, which the kings of Poland had recently taken.
The Lithuanian polity was an unusual amalgam of cultures, languages, and religions. The Lithuanian language had as yet no alphabet and was neither written down nor used by the new state for recordkeeping. Instead, the Lithuanian chanceries used a variant of the East Slavic language of Kiev Rus. In religion the Lithuanian rulers and people remained pagans, though the conquest of the Orthodox lands to the south introduced a new element. The Lithuanian princes placed their kinsmen and other Lithuanian nobles in charge of the new lands and many of them converted to Orthdoxy. These new Orthodox Lithuanian princelings and nobles formed a new elite on the territory of the old Kiev Rus, with the old boyars falling to the status of local squires. Yet the Grand Duke of Lithuania himself remained pagan, and as such the object of the crusading zeal of the Teutonic Knights.
The Knights were a threat not just to Lithuania, but also to Poland, newly reunited by the efforts of Casimir the Great (1333–1370). In 1385 the Poles faced a dual dilemma: increasing pressure from the Knights and the succession to the throne. Poland’s ruler Jadwiga, styled “King” of Poland, as yet had no husband, and the nobles then chose Jogailo (Jagiełło), the Grand Duke of Lithuania to be her husband and their king. Jogailo would provide invaluable aid against the Teutonic Order, but he first had to become a Catholic Christian. The conversion and marriage, accompanied by an agreement of union in 1385–6, produced a new polity, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, that would dominate the politics of Eastern Europe until the seventeenth century. It was a personal union of the two states, each preserving its own institutions and administration under the same monarch. The more immediate impact of Jogailo’s election as king of Poland was to create a state capable of defeating the Teutonic Order. Poland and Lithuania’s victory came at the battle of Grunewald (Tannenberg) in 1410. This was the turning point in the long struggle, and by the middle of the fifteenth century the Teutonic Order was reduced to a minor vassal of the Polish crown.
Jogailo’s marriage fundamentally reordered Lithuania. A bishop was appointed to Wilno and the conversion of the Lithuanian people to Catholicism began. The vast majority of the Slavic population remained Orthodox, and Orthodox nobles and princes retained their positions for the ensuing decades. The religious division within the Lithuanian state would have far-reaching consequences in the coming centuries, but for the moment, the main result was to encourage the formation of the Belorussian and Ukrainian nationalities, like the Russians born out of the earlier Kiev Rus. With the growing strength of Lithuania, the lands around Kiev revived and once again began to form a center of Orthodox culture. The city of Kiev and the Kiev Monastery of the Caves came back to life. The Ukrainian monks of Kiev and other centers recovered their traditions by sending to Moscow and Vladimir for copies of the old Kievan texts, the Primary Chronicle, and the stories of the Cave Monastery. Thus a new religious and cultural center came into being, one that eventually would have a profound impact on Russia.
The political and military struggle with its many rivals was not the only concern of the Moscow dynasty. From 1354 to 1378 the see of the Metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus was in the hands of Saint Aleksei, born to a boyar family in Moscow as Fyodor Biakont. Aleksei’s long metropolitanate coincided with a movement of monastic revival that enjoyed his patronage as well as that of the Moscow princes.
Figure 3. Monastery of the Dormition of the Mother of God (Kirillo-Belozerskii) around 1900.
Kiev Rus had supported many monasteries, for almost every major town had several – as did some minor towns. In 1337 the monk Sergii of Radonezh decided to establish a hermitage in imitation of the desert fathers of late antiquity and the monks of Byzantine Mount Athos. He found a forest some thirty miles north of Moscow and soon other hermits joined him. Eventually they founded a monastery dedicated to the Holy Trinity with Sergii as its leader. The new monastery stressed the importance of the common life of the monks: common prayer and attendance at liturgy, common meals, and common work. All gifts to the monastery went to the community, which was supervised by a hegumen (an abbot in Wester
n terminology), who directed the community with firmness and humility. This revived form of monasticism with strong Byzantine inspiration spread rapidly throughout the northeast of Russia. By the time of Sergii’s death in 1392 he had inspired many followers, and they went on to found numerous new communities such as the monastery of Saint Kirill (Sergii’s pupil) in northern Belozero. Later in the fifteenth century Saints Zosima and Savvatii traveled all the way to the Solovki islands in the White Sea to build Russia’s third great monastery.
Russia was now beginning to acquire its own saints, for in addition to the Saints Boris and Gleb came the holy metropolitans Peter and Aleksei, and especially Saint Sergii of Radonezh. The relics of the two metropolitans in the Kremlin’s Dormition cathedral and those of Saint Sergii in the Trinity Monastery were already the object of pilgrimage and the subjects of stories of miraculous events. Soon all three entered the liturgy as saints and Moscow now had its own saints to rival those of Kiev and Vladimir. The three saints raised Moscow’s prestige, particularly the rather political cults of the metropolitans. The sainthood of Sergii, Kirill of Belozero, and other monastic saints represented a less political piety, centered on the monasteries and the relics of their saints. The monasteries were the charismatic center of Orthodox piety and for the next two hundred years, almost all new Russian saints were holy monks or metropolitans.
The monastic ideal even permeated writings about laymen. The fifteenth century Oration on the Life and Death of Prince Dmitrii Donskoi praised him not so much for his great victory over the Tatars but for his exemplary Christian life, his abstinence from sexual intercourse after his children were born, his fasts, and his all-night vigils in church. These were monastic, not princely, virtues, and the text is a far cry from the earlier lives of saintly princes, such as Boris and Gleb, Michael of Tver, or especially Alexander Nevskii. Yet the Oration on Dmitrii was the example for all later accounts of virtuous princes to the end of the sixteenth century.
The greatest achievement of the monastic revival, and perhaps the only one to arouse enthusiasm in modern times, was the impulse it gave to architecture and icon painting. The monastery churches were at first rather modest, with a square plan and a roof supported by four interior columns. The design was ubiquitous, and it combined necessary simplicity with economy of resources. It also easily provided for the high icon screen, which came into practice at this time in Russia’s monastery churches. The high icon screen soon became universal, running up from the floor of the church nearly to the ceiling and cutting off the altar from the congregation. In the middle were doors, or “royal gates” (tsarskie vrata), through which the priest came after the consecration of the bread and wine for the Eucharist. The order of the icons was not random. On the lowest tier, at or just below eye level, were the “local” icons, to the right of the doors stood the image of the saint or feast to which the church was dedicated. Thus, a church of Saint Nicholas would have an image of that saint, and a church of the Resurrection would have a depiction of the resurrection of Christ. The next – above eye level, and thus most visible to a standing congregation – was the “deesis tier,” the centerpiece of the whole screen. In the middle over the doors, the usual image was Christ in Majesty, which depicts Christ seated on a throne surrounded by symbols of glory. By his sides were John the Baptist and Mary; the three together formed an image of the Incarnation, as well as of the ensuing intercession of Christ for sinful humanity. Mary and John slightly bow before Christ as a gesture of appeal to his mercy. On either side of this central composition were the four apostles. Above these large icons was the “festival tier,” which depicted the main festivals of the Christian year, starting with the Annunciation in March (not with Christmas, as might be expected). Above these, again, in larger format were the Old Testament prophets and patriarchs, sometimes forming two tiers. At the center was usually another icon of the Mother of God, flanked by David and Solomon, and the prophets. The basic idea of these images was the presence of Christ in the world and his incarnation to save mankind. The icon screen, like the church around it, was the meeting point of the world of the spirit and the visible world. This was not a new idea in Orthodoxy, but the monastic movement had found a way to express it with even more depth and clarity.
Thus icons became both more numerous and, if possible, more important. Theophanes the Greek came to Moscow from Novgorod in the 1390s and worked with local painters. The most important of these was the monk Andrei Rublev (circa 1370–1430), whose work hung on the icon screens of many monasteries around Moscow and eventually even in the Kremlin’s Annunciation Cathedral. Rublev’s icons display less of the hieratic stiffness of the older schools and portray a certain warmth in the face of Christ and in the faces of saints that seems to accord well with the inwardness of the newer monastic piety. Like other forms of that piety, Rublev’s icons provided an example for his pupils and imitators, and the new style spread far beyond the monasteries. The work of Rublev and his contemporaries was a new departure that laid the basis of the Russian icon of the succeeding centuries.
During the fourteenth century Moscow had established hegemony over the northeast – but only hegemony. At the death of Vasilii I (1389–1425), Tver remained a thorn in its side. Novgorod pursued its own policies and a number of the principalities of the northeast remained effectively independent. Lithuania continued to play an important role and often a hostile one, in spite of Vasilii’s marriage to a Lithuanian princess. Nevertheless, Vasilii held on to power and even expanded the territory directly subject to Moscow. The mechanism of expansion was simple: when Moscow annexed a territory the local elite, the local boyars and landholders were co-opted into Moscow’s army and administration, and their landholdings were confirmed. If resistance was unusually strong, land was confiscated or the local elite moved elsewhere and were given new land, but such extreme measures were unusual. Moscow could usually count on the loyalty of the new recruits, who exchanged local autonomy for a share in the rewards of serving a growing and successful power.
Moscow’s success and the loyalty of its boyar elite were tested to the limits in the stormy and bloody events of the reign of Vasilii II (1425–1462). Vasilii II was only ten years old at the time of his father’s death and his right to rule was immediately challenged by his uncle Iurii in northern Galich. Iurii’s challenge set off a civil war that quickly brought him victory and rule in Moscow. The victorious Iurii ordered the young Vasilii exiled to Kostroma on the Volga river. Then the Moscow boyars showed their hand. Many moved to Kostroma with their retinues, while others just abandoned Iurii. Isolated in the Kremlin, Iurii fled back north and died in 1434. His eldest son Vasilii Iur’evich “the Squint-eyed” took up the cause, proclaiming himself the rightful heir to the throne. After much marching and counter marching, Grand Prince Vasilii defeated his cousin Vasilii Iur’evich in 1436 and had him blinded as well. This act of cruelty was not the end, for Iurii’s second son, Dmitrii Shemiaka, replaced his brother as leader of the rebels. An unexpected defeat of Grand Prince Vasilii at the hands of a Tatar raiding party in 1445 gave Shemiaka a chance, and he took Moscow and blinded Vasiliii in revenge for his brother. Again the Moscow boyars, initially friendly, switched their allegiance back to Vasilii and Shemiaka fled north. He made a last stand in 1450, lost again, and then fled to Novgorod. There he died in 1453, according to the chronicle story, from a poisoned chicken fed to him by an agent of the Grand Prince.
These dark and confused struggles could take place in comparative isolation because great changes were taking place in the Horde. Fatally weakened by Tamerlane’s campaigns, the Horde began to disintegrate. In 1430 Crimea broke off and in 1436 Kazan’ formed an independent khanate on the middle Volga. Like the earlier Volga Bulgaria, it was an agricultural society with a nomadic fringe on the south and a Muslim culture with religious ties to Central Asia. Of the Golden Horde remained only the “Great Horde,” a small group of nomadic tribes that raided Russian and Lithuanian territory, but was no longer capable of rulin
g Moscow. Vasilii II even established his own dependent khanate at Kasimov on the Oka river southeast of Moscow, whose Tatar warriors served the Moscow dynasty for the next two hundred years.
The rule of the Mongols, or more properly the Golden Horde, over Russia had lasted a little over two centuries. Initially the conquest had been extremely destructive, but its later economic effects were largely confined to the payment of tribute. The inclusion of Russia in the Horde’s domain may have even strengthened Russia’s trade with the east, judging from archeological evidence, the coins and pottery of the Horde and its eastern and southern neighbors found in Russian towns. The Mongol episode also provided material for endless speculation in modern times on the imagined effect of the “Mongols” on Russia. For racial theorists in Germany and elsewhere it made Russia “Asiatic.” In fact, the Horde had little traceable effect on Russian society. Religion provided a cultural barrier on both sides, and the two societies were incompatible: Russia a rather simple sedentary society and the Horde a state with relatively complex institutions specific to nomadic society. In China, Central Asia, and Persia, the Mongols moved in among the sedentary peoples and were assimilated into them, but not in Russia. Russia’s geography prevented that outcome. Some modern historians have made much of the “oriental” character of the Russian state, again an alleged legacy of the Mongols. The problem with such theories is that they lack empirical foundation. The words and institutions that may have entered Russian from Mongolian via Turkic (such as tamga, for a sort of sales tax and yam, for the messenger system that relied on villages with special status to provide the riders and their horses) were marginal institutions. These were only extra bits in a state formed by the prince’s household ruling an agricultural society. Finally, the notion of Mongol influence at the basis relies on the notion of innate Asiatic slavishness and despotism, and it is neither an accurate description of the Mongol polity nor, as we shall see, of the Russian state that emerged after 1480.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 5