A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

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 principalities, 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.

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 Western 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 ruling 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.

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.