Europe: A History (95 page)

By 1493, therefore, all the main elements of the ideology of the ‘Third Rome’ were in existence. There was an autonomous branch of the Orthodox Church looking for an emperor; there was a prince, related to the last Byzantine Emperor, who had already called himself Tsar; and there was a claim to the lordship of all-Rus'. All that was lacking was a suitably ingenious ideologue, who could weld these elements into the sort of mystical theory that was demanded by an intensely theocratic state. Such a man was at hand.

Philotheus of Pskov (
c
. 1450–1525) was a learned monk of Pskov’s Eleazar monastery. He was familiar with the biblical prophecies of Ezra and Daniel, with historical precedents from Serbia and the second Bulgarian Empire, with the Pseudo-Methodius and the Chronicle of Manasses, and with the Legend of the White Klobuck. Such knowledge was not unique. Philotheus was unusual only in his willingness to use these things for the benefit of the Muscovite princes. Pskov, like Novgorod, lived in fear and trembling of Moscow. Most of its monks were fiercely anti-Muscovite. When they made references in their Chronicle to Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream, or to the four beasts of Daniel’s Vision, they were apt to do so in a manner that identified Nebuchadnezzar with Moscow. For whatever reason, Philotheus was prepared to turn the material round to Moscow’s advantage. In 1493, in his early forties, he held no office of authority in the monastery where he would later rule as
hegumen
or abbot; and he had not yet written any of the public Epistles which were to make him famous. But the ferment
in the Church which was to shape his views, was already in progress. In due course he was to be the advocate of the total submission of all Christians to the Tsar, and of total opposition to the Latin Church. In his Epistle to Ivan’s successor, he enjoins the new Tsar to rule justly, because the world was now entering the terminal phase of history:

And now I say unto Thee, take care and take heed, pious Tsar: all the empires of Christendom are united in thine. For two Romes have fallen, and the Third exists; and there will not be a fourth. Thy Christian Empire, according to the great theologian, will not pass away. And, for the Church, the word of the blessed David will be fulfilled: ‘she is my place of eternal rest’…
⁵¹

Later, in his Epistle to Munexin, Philotheus would fulminate ‘Against the Astrologers and the Latins’:

And now, alone, the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of the East shines more brightly than the sun in the universe; and only the great Orthodox Tsar of Rome, like Noah saved from the flood in the ark, directs the Church …
⁵²

Here, twenty years after Ivan Ill’s death, but clearly inspired by his policies, was the definitive formulation of an ideology of Church and State that left no inch for compromise.

Later Russian tradition was to hold that Moscow had simply inherited the Byzantine mantie. In reality, whilst Byzantine forms were retained, the essence of the Byzantine ethos was lost. Muscovite ideologues had little interest in the universal and ecumenical ideals of East Roman Christianity. The most distinguished historian of these matters has described the ideology of‘Third Rome’ as ‘a meretricious substitute’. ‘The Christian universalism of Byzantium was being transformed and distorted within the more narrow framework of Muscovite nationalism.’
⁵³

Muscovite theology was disturbed in Ivan Ill’s later years by a couple of related controversies that would both be settled in favour of the most uncompromising elements. One controversy centred on the views of a sect or tendency known as the
zhidovstvuyushchie
or ‘Judaizers’. The other centred on the supposed scandal of Christian monasteries growing rich through the possession of land. Joseph, Abbot of Volokhamsk, was the organizer both of the ‘anti-Judaizers’ and of ‘the possessors’.

Landed property was inseparable from the power of the Muscovite Church. But it was opposed by a company of puritanical monks led by the ‘Elders beyond the Volga’ who cherished Orthodox monasticism’s older, eremitical tradition. Ivan III seems to have prepared a scheme for secularizing monastic wealth, but was persuaded to desist. Matters only came to a head after his death, when his former favourite Patrikeev, now turned monk, published a new edition of the
Nomocanon
the Orthodox manual of canon law. One of Patrikeev’s associates, Maxim the Greek, who offered a ‘non-possessorial’ interpretation of the Church’s landed property, was lucky to escape with his life.

The Judaizers provoked still greater passions. They had emerged in the 1470s in Novgorod, where they were said to have formed an anti-Muscovite faction. Their views were allegedly inspired by Jews from Poland and Lithuania, and their members were said to be clandestine adherents of Judaism. Their activities do not seem to have worried the Tsar, who appointed a suspect Novgorodian to be archpriest of the Uspensky Cathedral; and they may have enjoyed the support of Elena Stepanovna. Despite a Council convened in 1490 to examine charges of anti-trinitarianism and iconoclasm, they continued to circulate in the highest circles. But Abbot Joseph did not give up. In 1497, in his
Prosvetitel'
or ‘Enlightener’, he named none other than Metropolitan Zosima as the chief ‘Judaizer and Sodomizer’, ‘a foul evil wolf’.
⁵⁴
Abbot Joseph and his partner, Archbishop Gennadius, were both admirers of the Spanish Inquisition, and their zeal was eventually rewarded by a grand
auto-da-fé
. They had succeeded in persuading their compatriots to believe what would prove a recurrent theme in Russian history—that evil came from the West. In their day, the West meant in the first instance Novgorod, and beyond Novgorod, Poland-Lithuania.

Ivan Ill’s diplomacy was taking the same direction.
⁵⁵
Diplomacy in those days moved extremely slowly. Muscovite embassies took anything between six months and four years to return and report from foreign countries; and ambassadors often found on arrival that the situation no longer matched their instructions. Even so, it was clear by the 1490s that the encirclement of Lithuania was becoming Moscow’s top priority. Ivan’s father had kept the peace with Lithuania for decades; and on his death Ivan and his mother had been entrusted to the care of ‘my Brother, the King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, Casimir’.
⁵⁶
All this was being revised.

By 1493, Ivan III was coming to the end of twenty years of intensive diplomatic activity. The common thread was to check and to encircle the Jagiellons. His treaty with Stephen IV, Hospodar of Moldavia, sealed by the marriage of his son, had tried in vain to prevent Moldavia paying homage to the Polish king. His scheme for an anti-Jagiellonian pact with Hungary was ruined by the sudden death of Matthias Corvinus, and by the subsequent election of Władysław Jagiellon as King of Hungary. He even made contact with the independent dukes of Mazovia. As from 1486, Ivan III repeatedly exchanged embassies with the Habsburgs, who until then had wrongly thought that Muscovy was a fief of Lithuania. In 1491 an Austrian envoy, Jörg von Thurn, outlined plans for a grand anti-Jagiellonian coalition made up of the Empire, the Teutonic Knights, Moldavia, and the Tartars. In January 1493 Ivan’s envoy, Yuri Trakhaniot, tracked Maximilian down to Colmar only to find that the Emperor had already made his peace with the Jagiellons and was now more interested in a Crusade. Ivan Ill’s relations with the Crimea included an important anti-Lithuanian component. His main use for them was as allies against the Golden Horde; and in June 1491 he sent three armies to help disperse the camp which the Golden Horde had established at the mouth of the Dnieper. At the same time, he could not fail to notice that the Tartars, when sweetened by Moscow, spent most of their energies raiding Poland and Lithuania.

In the winter of 1492–3 Muscovy was engaged in a desultory frontier war with Lithuania. Several of the border princelings had changed sides. The Prince of Ryazan’ was preparing to challenge a punitive incursion mounted by the Lithuanian Voivode of Smolensk. The Muscovite army, which had orders to capture the city of Vyazma on the headwaters of the Dnieper, moved off within a few days of the Muscovite peace mission to Wilno. Whether peace or war was uppermost in Ivan’s mind was anyone’s guess.

In this age of discovery, therefore, Moscow, though remote, was not totally isolated. Each of the Muscovite embassies returned with foreign engineers, architects, and gunners in tow; and German and Polish merchants came every year to buy large stocks of furs. It is true that there was no direct contact with Tudor England, with Valois France, or with the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella. The Baltic trade with the Netherlands stopped in Livonia, and the route round the North Cape had not yet been opened. Even so, Moscow had well-established lines of communication with the rest of Europe. In the north, the ‘German Road’ led through Novgorod to Reval or to Riga, and thence by sea to Lübeck. Overland, the forest trails stretched westwards to the frontier before Smolensk, and thence to Wilno and Warsaw. Ivan III had inaugurated a system of posts and post-horses, whose upkeep he commended in his will.
⁵⁷
To the south, the ancient rivers carried travellers rapidly to the Caspian or the Black Sea, and thence by ship to all points of the Mediterranean. Despite the Ottoman advance, Moscow was still in close touch with the old Byzantine world—that is, with the Balkans, with Greece, especially Athos, and via Greece with Italy.

Moscow, in any case, was making discoveries of its own. In 1466–72 a merchant of Tver, Afanasii Nikitin (d. 1472), made a six-year journey to Persia and India. He travelled out via Baku and Hormuz, and returned via Trebizond and Caifa. His adventures were written down in an early travel book,
Khozenie za tri moria
(A Journey Beyond the Three Seas). Ten years later the military expedition of Saltyk and Kurbskii crossed the Urals and reached the headwaters of the Irtysk and the Ob (a feat equivalent in scale to that of Lewis and Clark in America 300 years later). In 1491 two Hungarian prospectors had penetrated the Arctic tributaries of the Pechora, where silver and copper had been discovered. This discovery probably explains the arrival in Moscow in January 1493 of an Austrian prospector called Snups, who carried letters from the Emperor Maximilian asking him to be allowed to explore the Ob. Since Ivan’s link with the Habsburgs was no longer convenient, Snups was refused.

As for the Admiral of the Ocean, news of his exploits were brought to Moscow with a quarter of a century’s delay in the company of Maxim the Greek. Maxim Grek (Michael Trivolis,
c
.1470–1560) belonged to the dying Byzantine world whose parts still formed one cultural region. He was born at Arta in Epirus under Ottoman rule, whence his family moved to Venetian Corfu. In 1493 he was in Florence, studying with the Platonists and listening with approval to Savonarola’s sermons. After further studies at Venice and at Mirandola, where he specialized in the exegesis of Greek texts, he took the vows of the Dominican order in
Savonarola’s own monastery of San Marco. Later, as the monk Maximos, he worked for a decade as a translator in the Vatopedi monastery on Mount Athos, in a pan-Orthodox and graeco-Slav environment, where the schism between the Orthodox and Catholic traditions did not apply. He was then invited to Moscow to organize the Tsar’s collection of Greek and Byzantine manuscripts, which Muscovite scholars were no longer trained to decipher. He soon fell foul of the hard-line faction of the Muscovite Church, which accused him of sorcery, espionage, and respect for the Patriarch of Constantinople. Yet he survived his lengthy imprisonment, met Ivan IV in person, and enjoyed his patronage. He was ‘one of the last of his kind’.
⁵⁸

Maxim’s writings, which appeared in the 1550s, make mention of‘a large island called Cuba’.
⁵⁹
There is no doubt that by then he had a firm knowledge of Columbus’s landings in the Caribbean. But the chronology of his career is important. Since Maxim spent three decades incarcerated in a Muscovite gaol, it is reasonable to suppose that he brought the information with him when he first travelled to Moscow in 1518, twenty-five years after Columbus’s first voyage.

It is one of the wonderful coincidences of history that modern ‘Russia’ and modern ‘America’ both took flight in the same year of
AD
1493. Europeans learned of the ‘New World’, as they saw it, at the self-same moment that Muscovites learned that their ‘Old World’ was not yet coming to an end.

*
The arrangement stayed intact until 1623, when the Palatinate was replaced by Bavaria. In 1648 the Palatinate was reinstated alongside Bavaria, and in 1708 Hanover was raised to the ninth Electorate. Napoleon’s extensive amendments were never put into practice.

RENATIO

Renaissances and Reformations
, c.
1450–1670