A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

by Bushkovitch, Paul

  The events in the Orthodox church were as momentous as the fall of the Horde. After the death of metropolitan Aleksei, the Greek church chose the Bulgarian Kiprian to succeed him. Kiprian’s mission was to keep together under his jurisdiction the Orthodox lands of Lithuania, Moscow, and Novgorod, as they had been in Kievan times. This was not an easy task, for both Lithuania and Moscow wanted control but Kiprian was a powerful figure in the church as well as in politics, and it was a cultural force, to boot. On his death in 1406 the Greek Photios received the see and largely identified his interests with Moscow. Photios died in 1431, right at the start of Moscow’s dynastic turmoil. His death deprived Grand Prince Vasilii of a crucial ally at the worst possible moment. Unfortunately his replacement was another Greek – Isidoros – who arrived in Moscow in 1434. Exactly at that time the Byzantine Empire was in its last agony, reduced to the city of Constantinople and a few islands. In a vain effort to secure aid from Western Europe, Emperor Constantine XI agreed to discuss church union with Rome. Isidoros quickly left Moscow for Italy to join the Greek prelates in discussion. In reality, Rome proposed simple surrender, and at the council of Florence in 1439 the Greek bishops, including Isidoros, gave in under pressure from the Emperor. They accepted the supremacy of the pope and the Latin position on the filioque. Among the Greeks, the news provoked a firestorm of opposition, especially in the monasteries, since the fourteenth century renewed centers of Orthodox piety. The surrender at Florence divided and weakened Byzantium rather than strengthened it, and in any case Western aid never came in sufficient quantity. In 1453 the army of Mehmed the Conqueror breached the walls and gates of Constantinople and put an end to a millennium of Byzantine civilization. In its place the Sultans built Istanbul into the great capital of an Islamic empire. Justinian’s church of Saint Sophia became a mosque.

  When the news of the fall of Constantinople reached Moscow, the affairs of the Russian church were long settled. Isidoros had traveled back to Moscow with the news of Florence, and in 1443 the Russian bishops met with him to consider the situation. They unanimously rejected subjection to Rome, deposed Isidoros, and elected in his place, Bishop Iona of Riazan at the direction of Grand Prince Vasilii. The Orthodox church in Russia was now separated from the Greeks, for it had elected a leader without reference to Constantinople, which was now in the hands of unionists. Russia’s autocephaly, as its ecclesiastical independence is called, was not planned. It was the result of necessity, the only solution to the dilemma presented by the apostasy of the Greeks at Florence. In his testament Iona specified that when Orthodoxy was restored in Constantinople, even if under the Turks, Russia would return to obedience to the Greek bishops. This was a pious hope that remained unfulfilled, for the Russian church continued to choose its own metropolitan. For the Moscow princes this was a great opportunity, as it meant that they would be the only secular rulers with a voice in the affairs of the church in Russia.

  Grand Prince Vasilii II died at the age of forty-seven in 1462. He had emerged the victor in a ruthless struggle with his own uncle and cousins and maintained the hegemony of Moscow. He had encouraged the church to assert its orthodoxy and its independence from the Greeks. His eldest son Ivan was already twenty-two, old enough to rule in his own right. As the future would soon reveal, the young prince was ready to seize the opportunity that his father had left him.

  3 The Emergence of Russia

  At the end of the fifteenth century, Russia came into being as a state – no longer just a group of related principalities. Precisely at this time in written usage the modern term Rossia (a literary expression borrowed from Greek) began to edge out the traditional and vernacular Rus. If we must choose a moment for the birth of Russia out of the Moscow principality, it is the final annexation of Novgorod by Grand Prince Ivan III (1462–1505) of Moscow in 1478. By this act, Ivan united the two principal political and ecclesiastical centers of medieval Russia under one ruler, and in the next generation he and his son Vasilii III (1505–1533) added the remaining territories. In the west and north, the boundaries they established are roughly those of Russia today, while in the south and east the frontier for most of its length remained the ecological boundary between forest and steppe. In spite of later expansion, this territory formed the core of Russia until the middle of the eighteenth century, and it contained most of the population and the centers of state and church. The Russians were still a people scattered along the rivers between great forests.

  In the south and east, mostly beyond the forests and out in the steppe, Russia’s neighbors remained the Tatar khanates that emerged in the 1430s from the breakup of the Golden Horde: Kazan, Crimea in the Crimean peninsula, and the Great Horde ruling the steppe. The Great Horde in turn broke up around 1500 to form the khanate of Astrakhan on the lower Volga and farther east the Nogai Horde. Farther east the khanate of Siberia held sway over the tiny population of the vast plain of the Ob’ and Irtysh rivers. These states were complex social organisms. Kazan’ was the only one to occupy part of the forest zone, and its people settled along the rivers and farmed the land like the Russians but with a nomadic appendage where the steppe began to the southeast. The Nogais were pure nomads. Crimea and Astrakhan’ were somewhere in between, their population made up of mostly steppe dwellers, but Astrakhan’ was a town and Crimea had towns and garden agriculture. Its location meant that it had a lively trade and close political ties with its great neighbor to the south, the Ottoman Empire.

  At this moment the Ottomans were at the peak of their power, for in 1453 Mehmed the Conqueror, already master of most of Anatolia and the Balkans, took Constantinople, the ancient capital of Byzantium. In 1516 the Turks moved south, quickly capturing the Levant and Egypt, north Africa and Mesopotamia. Thus the last great empire of western Eurasia was born, and it soon turned its attention to central Europe. In 1524 the defeat of Hungary at the battle of Mohacs laid open the road into Germany and in 1529 the Ottomans laid siege to Vienna itself. For the moment, the Ottoman Turks paid little attention to Russia. Their great opponents were Iran and the Holy Roman Empire, and in any case the Crimeans, from 1475 Ottoman vassals, stood between Russia and the Turks. The Sultans in Istanbul wanted the Crimean cavalry for the Turkish wars in Hungary and Iran and did not want to waste them in raids against a minor state far in the north. At the same time the Sultans gave their Crimean vassals considerable freedom of action, and Ivan III was able to establish an understanding with the Crimeans that lasted into the sixteenth century. Russia continued to play a major role in the politics of the steppe, sending and receiving envoys back and involving itself in the endless feuds and rivalries among the ruling dynasties and clans.

  To the west Russia had only one major rival, Lithuania, now united with Poland. The resultant Polish-Lithuanian state was the hegemonic power of Eastern Europe, more populous than Russia and more powerful than any of its neighbors. Poland, having vanquished the Teutonic Knights and fended off the Tatars and Turks to the south, had only Russia as a rival left. Poland’s power came not only from the weakness of most neighbors, but also from its political structure, for the growing role of the diet provided a major role for the magnates and nobility. The diet gave its elites an important stake in the prosperity of the state but a strong king still guaranteed basic order and direction. That constitution would lead to ruin later, but in 1500 it was more durable than that of its neighbors’, and Poland’s armies could dominate the field against most enemies.

  Russia’s other neighbors to the west were of little account. The Livonian Order was too small and too decentralized to matter much in political affairs, and Sweden (including Finland) was part of the united kingdom of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden until 1520. The center of gravity of the three kingdoms was in Denmark, which was too far to the west to pay much attention to the remote border of Finland and Russia. Trade continued through both Livonia and Finland, and even increased in importance, but with little overall political effect.

  The situation of its neighbors allowed Ru
ssia to emerge onto the stage of European politics at an exceptionally favorable moment. The Tatar khanates were preoccupied with one another and the Ottomans, while Livonia and Sweden for very different reasons scarcely impinged on Russia’s consciousness. Russia had only one important rival, Poland-Lithuania, the primary focus of its foreign policy. That rival was powerful enough to provide a challenge to the new state of Ivan III, a challenge which he handled with great skill.

  The new Russian state that emerged at the end of the fifteenth century was much larger and more complex than the medieval Moscow principality even in its later phases. A new state required new institutions and terminology. The Grand Prince began to style himself “Sovereign of All Rus” or even “autocrat,” the latter to signify his new independence from the Horde and any other claimants. Ivan III did not rule alone, any more than did his predecessors. Russia’s ruling elite now included princelings and boyars from the newly acquired territories, Iaroslavl’ and Rostov princes, and Lithuanian Gediminovichi – all of whom formed an expanded ruling elite around the prince of Moscow. This new elite was small for the time being, for in Ivan III’s time it comprised only eighteen or so families, growing to about forty-five by 1550. Most of the senior men from these clans made up the duma, or council of the Grand Prince, and held the rank of boyar, or that of a sort of junior boyar with the untranslatable title “okol’nichii.”1 Just barely a formal institution, the duma met with the prince in the palace and discussed the major issues of law and administration, war and peace. The men of these ruling clans attained the rank of boyar and other ranks and offices by tradition and a complex system of precedence (Russian “mestnichestvo”) that regulated their place in the court, military, and government hierarchy. The precedence system mandated that no man should serve the prince at a lesser rank and office than had his ancestors.

  The Grand Prince had some leeway with the precedence system, for it did not dictate exactly who in each clan should receive what rank. The system required only that some of the men from each of the great families should receive certain ranks, and that the greatest should sit in the duma and receive the rank of boyar. In theory the princes could appoint anyone to the duma, but in practice they chose members of the same families year after year, adding new ones only occasionally. These men were not just servants of the prince, but also immensely wealthy aristocrats with great landholdings – the pinnacle of a much larger landholding class. The Russian nobleman’s primary duty was service in the army, mainly on the frontier, for the administration of the state was in the hand of a tiny group of officials and princely servants.

  Some of these officials were great boyars, like the treasurers, usually chosen from the Greek Khovrin clan, or the major domo and the equerry, who managed the Kremlin palace and the prince’s household. To assist these aristocrats there were also secretaries, men of lesser status from the prince’s household who were sometimes of Tatar origin. Most of them served in the Treasury, where a dozen or so clerks and copyists kept the records of foreign policy and the charters and testaments of the princes, carefully preserved with the furs, jewels, tax receipts in silver, and other treasures in the basement under the palace church of the Kremlin, the Cathedral of the Annunciation. In the time of Ivan III there were only a few dozen such secretaries, and the state was still essentially the prince’s household, its offices being rooms in his palace.

  For all their dominant role in Russian politics, the Kremlin and its elite were not the whole of Russia. Several million of peasants, almost all of them still free and most of them tenants only of the crown, made up the great mass of its population. They grew the food, raised cows and chickens, and supplemented their meager fare from the berries, mushrooms, and wild game of the great forests. Their status as tenants of the crown, however, was rapidly coming to an end as the great monasteries and the boyars encroached on their lands. The Grand Princes needed to reward loyal supporters, especially in newly annexed territories, and to maintain a cavalry army as well. The army had to live off its own, from the private lands of the cavalrymen. The princes so far lacked cash to pay them, and thus it was not merely to curry favor that the princes granted lands. The only restriction that they could put on such grants was to give them with the proviso that the estate could not be sold or willed without the knowledge of the prince. This type of grant was called pomest’e, and great boyars as well as humble provincials received such lands. The landholding class of cavalrymen fell into two broad groups: the “Sovereign’s court” who served in Moscow (at least in theory) immediately below the boyars, and the “town gentry” of the provinces. The “town gentry” normally held their lands mainly in one local area and served together in the cavalry. The elite of the army was the Sovereign’s court. The growth of the state and its army meant constant tinkering with the organization of the landholding gentry, but the basic outlines that began to form late in the fifteenth century remained until the end of the sixteenth. Then the pomest’e system spread to the southern borders, considerably enlarging the landholding class at the expense of the peasant freeholders. This new situation contributed greatly to the upheavals of the ensuing decades.

  The gentry resided mainly in the towns, most of which were small, and the boyars lived in Moscow. A few centers, Moscow, Novgorod, and Pskov were real cities that supported merchants who traded with Western Europe or the Near East. Though a largely agrarian economy, Russia was not bereft of crafts or commerce, nor was it a land of subsistence peasants cut off from any markets. The sheer size of the country and the sparse population dictated exchange among regions: almost all salt, for example, came from saline springs in the northern taiga belt until late in the seventeenth century. The men who boiled down the water to make salt and ship it south made great fortunes. Most notable were the Stroganovs, who amassed a fortune large enough to finance the first steps in the conquest of Siberia. Novgorod and its neighbor Pskov remained important centers of trade with northern Europe through the Baltic Sea, but their capacity was limited by the small rivers and absence of large harbors at the east end of the Gulf of Finland. Then in 1553 the English sea captain and explorer Richard Chancellor made his way around Norway into the White Sea, landing at the mouth of the Northern Dvina River. With this voyage a direct path for large ships opened to Western Europe, and Tsar Ivan the Terrible encouraged the English Muscovy Company to bring their ships every summer to the northern port. The Dvina and other rivers made possible the long journey from Moscow to the new port of Archangel, and the English were soon joined by the even more enterprising Dutch. Moscow itself was the hub of all Russian trade, and the city grew rapidly throughout the 1500s. Commerce with Russia was not minor for the Dutch and English, for by 1600 the Dutchmen engaged in the Archangel trade had made so much money that they could form a new company, the Dutch East India Company, which then set out to conquer what is today Indonesia. The Russian trade partly financed Holland’s greatest commercial adventure.

  Against this background of social change and economic evolution the rulers of Russia and their court did not remain idle. For the whole of his life Ivan III conducted a relentless struggle to expand the power and territory of the grand princes of Moscow. The annexation of Novgorod was his greatest victory, but not the only one. He exploited the dissatisfaction of the regional princelings of Lithuania along his western border so as to encourage several of them to accept his sovereignty, and he rounded out and confirmed these acquisitions by war. He absorbed Moscow’s ancient rival Tver’ in 1485 and established his influence over the last two independent territories of Riazan’ and Pskov so that his son could later annex them without effort. Equally important, he put an end to the two and a half centuries of Russian dependency on the Tatar Hordes. In 1480 the Khan of the Great Horde sent its army north toward Moscow. Ivan and many of his boyars hesitated, unsure whether they should meet the Tatars or just flee north. With some encouragement from the church, he went out to meet them at the Ugra river, a small tributary of the upper Don. After a few days of
watching one another, the two armies departed for home. This event, the “standing on the Ugra,” was ever after seen in Russia as the end of Tatar overlordship. Ivan moved aggressively into the space left by the fragmentation of the Horde, involving himself in Kazan’s dynastic politics. With time, Ivan’s intrigues with the Tatars would have great consequences.

  Ivan III of Moscow began to call himself the ruler of “All Rus,” but his new larger state demanded a better defended and more adequate capital. For this Ivan turned to Italy, the center of European architecture as well as engineering and fortification. He had already been in contact with Italy from the time of his marriage in 1473 to Zoe Paleologue, the daughter of the last Byzantine ruler of the Peloponnesus, for Zoe had taken refuge from the Turks at the papal court. There were other Greeks in Moscow as well, who had extensive contacts with their compatriots and relatives in Italy, and through them Ivan sent for architects and engineers to rebuild the Moscow Kremlin and its churches. The result was that the Kremlin, the quintessentially Russian place to the modern eye, with its ancient churches and pointed towers in dark red brick, was not the work of Russians at all, but with few exceptions the product of Italian masters.