Ivan the Terrible (4 page)

What, if any, influence did Mongol suzerainty have on the development of Muscovite absolutism? The idea of a universal empire instituted
by God was fundamental to the Mongol conception of the world order and there was therefore, in their view, no point in resisting the Mongol army. Once the universal Mongol empire was established everyone would be compelled to serve it. The basic principles of Mongol rule were laid down in the Great Iasa, or Code, attributed to Genghis Khan, which regulated the universal service of subjects in the army and the administration, and proclaimed their duty to care for the sick and the old, to offer hospitality, and to produce their daughters in the beauty contests in which the ‘moonlike girls’ would be selected as wives or concubines of princes.
¹¹
The code also dealt with civil, commercial and criminal law, naming as offences acts against religion, morals and established customs, and those against the life and interests of private persons. The usual penalty was death.

The practical aspects of Mongol administration and the etiquette in use at the Mongol court were familiar to the Russians who visited Saray; Russians learnt to speak Turkic, and the Mongols probably learnt some Russian. It was perhaps the arbitrary nature of Mongol decisions which most affected Russians, but it may be that this apprenticeship in subservience prepared them for the obsequiousness they are alleged to have shown to the tsars of Moscow. Moreover, Russian grand princes, and many appanage princes, learnt subordination to the Mongols the hard way: between 1308 and 1339 eight princes were executed in the Horde, including four who had become grand princes of Vladimir.
¹²

The Mongol presence was not ubiquitous in Russia, and usually consisted of a limited number of officials, tax collectors, recruiting officers and platoons of cavalry. Yet by the sixteenth century many Russian princely families were stressing their descent from Mongol
tsarevichi
(sons of khans) or other nobles. The
tsarevichi
who descended from Genghis Khan took precedence over other princes in Moscow and ranked above or immediately below Riurikovichi until the end of the dynasty in Russia. Russian aristocrats could be proud of their descent from princely Mongol families, where they would have kept silent about descent from commoners.
¹³

It is not easy to be precise about the nature of Mongol influence, for it extended over more than two centuries and the Golden Horde itself went through many changes during that period, including the vital conversion to Islam. But the Russian aristocracy did have fairly close contact with the nomads of the steppe, and by a process of osmosis may well have acquired many habits and adopted assumptions about the objects of a state, the nature of government, relations between lords and vassals, masters and servants, that are difficult to detect today. There are
two specific aspects of this contact which may have rubbed off on the Russians, namely the degree of cruelty which they actually felt and saw in the executions or in the inflicting of punishment practised in the Golden Horde, and the absence of orderly judicial procedures (they did not usually
see
Byzantine practices). Not that the Riurikid princes of Russia (or their Viking ancestors) were not capable of great barbarity, but on several occasions, recorded in the Chronicles, such barbarity is clearly regarded as wrong in a Christian country.

When they conquered Russia in the thirteenth century the Mongols were pagans, and they seem to have treated all religions with tolerance.
¹⁴
The Russian Church did not suffer under the Mongol regime, but this did not make Christians tolerate Islam after the Mongol conversion in 1340. Inevitably the Russian ecclesiastical establishment was at first almost entirely composed of Greek churchmen from the Eastern Roman Empire. It was drawn from the celibate ‘black’ clergy or monks. Marriage was compulsory for the parish priests or ‘white’ clergy. The metropolitans were chosen and consecrated by the patriarch of Constantinople, and they in turn appointed and consecrated the bishops.

The Church was maintained by fees and contributions, by the proceeds of legal fines in areas under its jurisdiction, and by the income from original grants of landed property, which increased gradually as a result of princely and boyar donations to ensure prayers for the souls of the departed, and by monastic purchases. Many churches and monasteries were founded, the most famous of which was the Monastery of the Caves in Kiev. The Trinity monastery was founded in 1337 by St Sergius of Radonezh, not far from Moscow, as an isolated hermitage ‘beyond the Volga’; it grew into the largest landowning community in Russia, with many churches and fortified walls. Another monastery founded on the same system was the Kirillo-Beloozersky (St Cyril of the White Lake), which in turn gave rise to many more such settlements in the northern lands. Further north still was Solovki, the formidable, fortified monastery in the Solovetsky islands in the White Sea which was used also as a prison, certainly by Ivan IV and equally certainly by the later tsars and by the communist regime.

Monks, and monasteries, played an important cultural role in Russia. The monks acted as scribes, letter writers, copyists and illuminators of manuscripts; they collected materials for and edited many of the Chronicles; they organized scriptoria, icon and fresco painting studios, and provided what teaching there was as well as some medical care and
a refuge for the poor, sick and destitute. The Church was also present at all the main events of mortal life, birth, marriage and, above all, death. Monasteries were places of pilgrimage. Sums were deposited for monks to say prayers for the dead (though the Orthodox Church did not believe in Purgatory) and to remember the departed on his name day with services and feasting. Nunneries cared for women and girls, and maintained schools of weaving and embroidery. There were no teaching orders. Monks also built churches and oversaw their adornment with icons and frescoes, and they surrounded the monasteries with elaborate fortifications. As in western Europe, monasteries started out in poverty and austerity, and gradually they grew rich and became lax about observing the rules. They benefited from the respect shown by the Mongols for religion, they were not taxed and they prayed for their Moslem overlord.

The Church also played an important political role in Russia. It was the only pan-Russian institution, after the Mongol conquest had split Kievan Rus' in two. Indeed, the metropolitan of Kiev and All Russia (the original designation of the see) was also the ecclesiastical head of all the Orthodox population of the neighbouring Grand Principality of Lithuania for a great deal of the time, though his see had ceased to be in Kiev in 1299 and had moved to Vladimir and eventually to Moscow.

A word must be said here about the complex relations between the two grand principalities, Muscovite Russia and the Grand Principality of Lithuania. A glance at the map on pp. xii–xiii will show the extent to which Kievan Rus' lay on both banks of the Dnieper and how much territory it lost to Lithuania as a result of the Mongol invasion. The Grand Principality of Lithuania eventually comprised a nucleus of Lithuanian lands, the
voevodstva
, or provinces, of Troki and Vilna which, under a series of able rulers, extended slowly to the east and south, conquering, annexing and absorbing ex-Rus' principalities. Polotsk fell into Lithuanian hands when the Riurikid line died out in 1307, Kiev was conquered from the Mongols in 1362, and the Lithuanian advance continued under Grand Prince Vitovt (1393–1430), down the right bank of the Dniester until it reached the shores of the Black Sea and was finally stopped by the Mongols in 1399. To the east, Lithuania now had also swallowed the central basin of the Dnieper, spreading from the old Kievan principality of Smolensk to Lutsk.

All these lands were now the property of Gediminovich
¹⁵
or Riurikid princes of Lithuania, the latter sometimes holding on to their hereditary
lands, sometimes being granted new lands as patrimonies by the grand princes of Lithuania. The language of government was a form of Slavonic. As in Kievan Rus', succession from father to son was not automatic in the Grand Principality of Lithuania: a surviving brother or cousin of the reigning prince would often lay claim to the throne and factional wars were frequent and bloody. Relations with Muscovite Rus' were fairly close, though not always friendly. Novgorod often looked to Lithuania for princes; discontented Lithuanian princes would desert their grand prince and move to Russia or back to Lithuania, taking their lands with them or being granted lands there. There was in fact no reason why the unification of the Russian lands should not have taken place under Lithuanian leadership. But a decisive event, affecting the future of the whole area of Poland, Lithuania and Russia, occurred in the 1380s. A treaty of 1384 had provided for the marriage of Jagiello, the pagan Grand Prince of Lithuania, with a daughter of Dmitri Ivanovich Donskoi, Grand Prince of Vladimir Moscow. The marriage did not take place. In 1384 Jagiello turned west and was converted to Catholicism in order to marry the Catholic heiress to the crown of Poland, Jadwiga. The possibility that Russia might unite around the huge, mainly Orthodox, Lithuanian and ex-Russian lands, instead of around Moscow was lost for ever. The Lithuanian dynastic union with Poland precluded Lithuanian union with Russia, though Grand Prince Vasily I of Moscow later married Sophia, daughter of Vitovt of Lithuania. As long as Vitovt was alive (and he lived to be eighty) a certain stability prevailed, but he died in 1430, and the constant intriguing between various branches of the princely families in Lithuania, coupled with the civil war in Muscovite Russia, led many princes on either side to desert to the other, moved by religious or political reasons.

Although only a loose dynastic union at first, the Lithuanian union with Catholic Poland exacerbated religious differences within the Grand Principality which became more acute with the coming of the Reformation. To a great extent the conflict between the Gediminovichi, the Lithuanian Riurikid and the Muscovite Riurikid princes
¹⁶
reproduced for years features of the strife over the succession within the Riurikid dynasty itself, and all sides sought the assistance of outsiders like the Livonian Order
¹⁷
or, even more frequently, the Mongol khans and the khans of the Crimea, one of the successor states of the Golden Horde, who naturally enough pursued their own aims. What, by the sixteenth century, may have attracted the Lithuanian princes to Russia was a latent anti-Catholicism and anti-Polonism (fostered by the
Reformation); what may have attracted the Russian princes to Lithuania was the increasing power of the magnates as expressed in the Sejm and the
sejmiki
,
¹⁸
at the expense of the king. What attracted the grand princes of Vladimir Moscow (the official title of the principality) was the possibility of dynastic union with the Grand Principality of Lithuania, leading to a recovery of the Kievan lands in the south, something which Ivan III did not forget when he gave his daughter Elena in marriage to Alexander, Grand Prince of Lithuania, in 1495; nor did Vasily III forget it when on the death of Alexander in 1506 he took advantage of the elective nature of the Polish-Lithuanian throne to put forward his candidacy as prince at any rate of Lithuania.
¹⁹

The grand princes of Lithuania attempted at intervals to obtain the consent of the Patriarch in Constantinople to the establishment of a separate metropolitanate for Kiev and Lithuania, or Kiev and Little Russia (the name given to the southern borderlands), in order to withdraw their Orthodox, mainly Russian, subjects from Muscovite religious control, but they achieved only short-lived successes. Several of the really powerful and forceful Russian metropolitans also threw their political weight, and sometimes even their spiritual authority, behind the policy of supporting the grand princes of Moscow at Saray in their pursuit of supremacy over the remaining free principalities of Rus'.

The Ottoman onslaught on Anatolia and the Balkans encouraged the rump of the Eastern Roman Empire to seek alliances in the West by pursuing the union of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, which had been estranged since 1054. Union had already been discussed in a Church Council in Basel in 1433, and discussions were resumed in 1438 in Ferrara. The Metropolitan of All Russia, a Greek named Isidor, was appointed by the Patriarch of Constantinople, but he had not been the choice of the Russian bishops, who had proposed a certain Iona. Isidor proved to be willing to bow to the arguments of the Latins over the
filioque
clause – the clause in the creed which proclaimed the descent of the Holy Ghost from both the Father and the Son, in the Catholic version, as distinct from the Father only, in the Orthodox version – and to accept the Union of the Eastern and Western Churches. The Council moved to Florence in 1439, to avoid the plague, and the Act of Union with Rome was signed there in July of that year. The Union was unpopular, both in Constantinople and in Russia, and it did not help the Eastern Emperor to secure military assistance against the Turks (though Metropolitan Isidor was given a cardinal's hat). Isidor arrived back in
Moscow in 1441, but both the Union and the new cardinal were eventually rejected by Grand Prince Vasily II, and Isidor escaped through Lithuania back to Rome. Both imperial and ecclesiastical governments in Constantinople were in disarray, and in Moscow, Grand Prince Vasily sought to have Iona, the Russian bishop originally chosen, appointed metropolitan. But Vasily was caught up in the disasters of the Russian civil war with his cousin, and blinded, and he was only restored to his throne in 1447. Finally, in December 1448 Iona was appointed Metropolitan of Kiev and All Russia, including Lithuania and Little Russia, on the authority of four Russian bishops and the Grand Prince of Vladimir Moscow, without any reference to the Patriarch in Constantinople. The Russian Orthodox Church had now shaken off the authority of Constantinople and had become autocephalous, with fateful consequences in the long run.