Russia (14 page)

Even so, the rising expense of the military establishment, and of the
court (which was also the centre of governmental administration), required marked increases in taxes and duties. Although they occasioned rising discontent among those who had to pay, these impositions seem to have encouraged growth. Rising taxes are often said to be bad for the economy, yet in the Russian context of that time they actually stimulated it. Because landlords increased their demands of their serfs and tenants, the peasants had to work harder, and more land was brought under the plough. Because Ivan’s increased demands had to be paid in coin, the subject princes and their boyars had to produce a surplus for sale from their estates rather than consuming it, and deploy the labour at their command more rationally Yet the fact that the population grew at a healthy rate suggests that people as a whole were no worse fed as a result of all this.

Facing such diverse adversaries as Kazan and the Crimea, Sweden, Livonia and Poland-Lithuania, and the danger of engaging too many of them simultaneously, Ivan III needed an astute foreign policy as well as a strong and flexible army. With his good timing and readiness to break off a fight if the outcome looked unpromising, he proved equal to the challenge. He also made a shrewd choices of allies.

The break-up of the Golden Horde did not end the Tatar threat, which lasted well into the sixteenth century But it radically changed the balance of power in the south, allowing Muscovy to set the successor states to the Horde against each other and against Poland-Lithuania. Ivan played this game with great skill. He backed the claims of Muhammed-Amin to supplant his father, the Khan of Kazan. He befriended Mengli-Girei, the Crimean khan, and the Nogai Tatars, using them to counter both the Golden Horde and Poland-Lithuania. Thanks to the alliance with the Crimean Tatars, Ivan was able to take the great city of Kazan, emporium of steppe trade, for a time, and eventually to draw the sting from the Great Horde itself altogether.

As the eighteenth-century historian Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov noted, Ivan Ill’s foreign policy interacted closely with his domestic centralizing policies. The Golden Horde’s assaults on Muscovy in 1472 and 1480 were the occasions of ‘agreements’ between Ivan and his brothers Boris and Andrei which spoke of brotherly support and their common blood but which in fact destroyed their younger brothers’ capacity for independent action. Ivan was equally firm with his own sons. He deprived them of their former right to dispose
of
their apanages as if they were their personal property rather than lands allotted for their maintenance during their father’s pleasure, which had been the original purpose of the apanage. And he forbade all the princes to coin their own money.
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Ivan’s policy of subjecting apanage princes to his authority led some of them to seek the support of Poland-Lithuania, and, as we have seen, Novgorod’s attempt to do so precipitated Ivan’s campaign against the city. On the other hand, his firm centralization measures of the 1480s and ‘90s, which subjected Novgorod and other principalities of the north-west to his direct rule, were a necessary prelude to a three-year struggle against both Alexander of Poland-Lithuania and the Knights of Livonia, beginning in 1500.
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Contrasting strategic motives were involved in these wars. Ideology, as well as interest, inspired Muscovite hostility to Poland-Lithuania. Perhaps because Lithuania had been pagan until comparatively recently, the Catholic Church in Poland adopted something of a crusading attitude towards it, but its concern to convert pagans was soon transmuted into a concern to convert Orthodox Christians, of which there were considerable numbers in Lithuania. This angered Moscow, as did Poland’s attempts to separate the Orthodox hierarchy of Lithuania from the Metropolitan of Moscow. It also alienated many of Lithuania’s noble class (boyars), many of whom defected to Moscow in the 1490s, helping Muscovy seize Viazma and occupy the strategic area westward to the Berezina, and opening the road into Ukraine.

The Russians were less vigorous and adept missionaries than the Latins. Nevertheless, they had acquired a missionizing legacy from Byzantium and were encouraged to pursue it by a delegation of Orthodox notables from Constantinople, who had arrived in Moscow just before their own city fell. They had suggested that ‘the great Patriarchal rank of this imperial city will be given over … to bright Russia, for in bestowing these gifts God wants the Russian lands to fulfil the glory of the Orthodox mission’.
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When war with Poland came, it took on the character of a crusade for both sides. This made it easier to justify cruelty, although terror had had respectable credentials in war since the time of the Romans. It could induce panic among the enemy, and its devastation could be used to empty an area of people and crops, rendering it incapable of sustaining enemy forces. To that extent terror was a defensive tactic.

Although Ivan’s motives in fighting the Knights of Livonia were in part religious, they were chiefly economic and strategic. With its expanding connections with the rest of Europe, Moscow recognized the advantages that would flow from having direct access to the Baltic and through the Baltic to the West. It was also beginning to realize that there was more profit to be made from trading with the West directly rather than through intermediaries like the Hansa. Such considerations figured in Ivan’s decision in 1492 to build
a fort (which he called Ivan’s town, Ivangorod) opposite Narva, on the left bank of the river that flowed north from his loyal city of Pskov into the Baltic, and to close down the Hansa’s operation in Novgorod. Here was the genesis of both Russia’s search for ‘a window on the West’ and its struggle to come to terms with the nascent world economy.

War with the Knights continued intermittently from 1490 to 1510. It resumed after an interval in 1501 at the Knights’ initiative. They were able to field 2,000 German mercenaries — both cavalry and men-at-arms — in addition to their own numbers, and had a commitment from Alexander of Lithuania, brother of King Casimir of Poland, with whom they had signed an offensive alliance. Hostilities began with the Knights marching on Izborsk and winning a victory against such Muscovite troops as could be mustered. But then Alexander was diverted by the death of his brother, King Casimir, and the need to secure his crown. In the event, the Knights, under their Master, Walter von Plettenberg, had to fight on without him. Then a force of Russians arrived, and between them the two armies devastated the country.

Perhaps because of the crusading spirit, wars on this front had long been fought in a vicious manner. In the 1470s, for example, the Knights had burned Kobyle on the east shore of Lake Peipus, together with 3,985 people. On this occasion Moscow sent in a force of Tatars and a new terror weapon, 1,600 dogs (the memory of which may have inspired Shakespeare’s reference a century later to letting loose the dogs of war). The Knights retaliated by attacking Pskov, where both sides fought each other to a standstill. In 1502 the Livonian war was subsumed into a larger conflict between Muscovy and Poland-Lithuania, and in 1503 Ivan and von Plettenberg concluded a peace at Pskov.
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The Knights had repeatedly asked Rome to endorse their crusade against the Orthodox Russians, but the Pope was more concerned with the Turkish threat and anxious, if he could, to enlist Ivan’s support against it. But Poland-Lithuania was soon taking up the cry. By 1515 its king was assuring the Pope that the Grand Prince of Moscow was ‘a Sarmatian Asiatic-tyrant, a blasphemer and schismatic’ bent on ‘the downfall of the Roman Church’.
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Certainly the war inspired the publication of the first of a long series of German flysheets
(Flugschriften)
proclaiming anti-Russian sentiments in increasingly vitriolic terms. Cold War rhetoric was of ancient provenance, and had its beginning here, in Russia’s first imperialist push towards the west.
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Despite the Polish king’s aspersions, Muscovy no longer humbled itself before the Asiatic Tatars. Indeed, it now sought to subdue them, but its face was already turned Janus-like towards the West as well. Greeks and Germans had been recruited for Ivan’s service, and he seems to have now exploited contacts with the Byzantine emigres in Italy to bring Italians with modern skills to Moscow. They included the architect Pietro Antonio Solari of Milan, who designed the new Saviour Gate to the Kremlin and the magnificent reception hall known as the Hall of Facets, and the brilliant engineer, coiner and Renaissance jack of many trades Aristotele Fioravanti of Ferrara.

Meanwhile, although the Church had been uneasy about Ivan’s second marriage and his association with Rome, with the Latins and the ways of the Latins, the Grand Prince had had his way. But tensions had continued to simmer under the surface, and now they erupted. It was whispered that there was a conspiracy to undermine the purity of Russians’ Orthodox faith, and that several prominent figures very close to the Grand Prince were part of it. So was Metropolitan Zosimus. These were the so-called ‘Judaizers’.

There was nothing Jewish about them. ‘Judaizer’ was simply a term of ideological abuse, like ‘Trotskyist’ in the 1930s. To label one’s enemies as heretics was to establish a correct political line, and, as in the 1930s, this process was associated with purges. The nearest the Judaizers came to the heresy they were accused of was, perhaps, to borrow a form of rationalism from humanists in the West, but the controversy was strongly informed by political interest. Ivan himself seems to have been attracted by one aspect of the so-called heresy, because it opened up the possibility of secularizing church lands,
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which, as we have seen in regard to the Novgorod appropriations, he was anxious to do. Like Henry VIII of England, who presided over the dissolution of the monasteries, Ivan was anxious to place the Church’s assets at the disposal of the state.

The purgers’ first target, however, was Metropolitan Zosimus. Zosimus’s public reference to Ivan as ‘the new Emperor Constantine of the new Constantinople — Moscow’ had justified the confidence which had Ivan to appoint him.
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Yet such was the current extent of feeling against Zosimus that the Grand Prince, ever the sensitive politician, allowed him to be sacrificed. Zosimus was ousted in 1496, and was subsequently relegated in official church history to the status of ‘a wicked heretic’ for his alleged ‘Judaizing’.
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But that was not the end of it. Fingers pointed to several other important figures close to the Grand Prince — to Fedor Kuritsyn, one of Ivan’s leading diplomats and foreign-policy advisers; to the Greek Trakhaniot brothers; even to the Grand Princess Sofia.
She had, after all, been a Uniate and a ward of the Pope. Ivan protected them, at least for a time.

In 1497 Ivan presided over a council of bishops and officials which issued a law book
(Sudebnik)
, but this civil triumph was soon overshadowed by palace conspiracies. In a dramatic turn of events, the Grand Prince’s eldest surviving son, Prince Vasilii, was disgraced and disinherited. The following year Ivan invested his grandson Dmitrii, who was only a few years younger than the disinherited Vasilii, as his co-ruler and heir. Vasilii’s supporters tried to organize a
coup d’état,
but were discovered and executed. At issue was more than the question of which of the Grand Princes progeny should succeed him when he died; related developments suggest that policy was also at stake. The Trakhaniots fell out of favour and Sofia herself, who was implicated in the coup, fell under a cloud. So did Ivan’s personal secretary, Ivan Volk Kuritsyn, whose brother Fedor may have served the opposition as a surrogate and scapegoat for the Grand Prince himself.

Kuritsyn was a nickname, meaning ‘hen’, perhaps because the family’s heraldic sign was a cockerel. The Kuritsyns had aristocratic connections, and formed a veritable dynasty of top officials. Ivan Volk had led a 1492 embassy to the West, which had provided a mass of invaluable information on European affairs; he was associated with the Grand Prince’s centralizing policies, and had served as the senior civil official on the Novgorod campaign of 1495. Clearly he had a great many enemies. He was hated by those who had lost hereditary family privileges and property through the Grand Prince’s policies, by the losers in the succession crises of the 1490s, and by those who were disturbed by the importation of foreigners and foreign things.

In 1499 the disinherited Vasilii was suddenly back in favour, though not reinstated as co-ruler, but the Kremlin remained in the grip of intrigue. In 1500 Vasilii raised an armed rebellion against his father, but then came to some accommodation with him and submitted. In 1502 Ivan had Vasilii’s rival, Dmitrii, arrested and accused of impertinence. Disobedience and even disappointment received short shrift at the hands of an old and probably ailing ruler determined to keep control. But Ivan had to contend with fierce resentment on the part of the disinherited, and from conservatives who feared the modernization implied by the dawning age of absolutism. Ivan’s secretary, Ivan Volk Kuritsyn, became a lightning rod for all their hatred and resentment. Even the Grand Prince, by then well into his last illness, could not save him, and so, in 1504, Ivan Volk was burned alive in a cage as a Judaizer.
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The Grand Prince himself, whom his secretary had served so well, died a year later. Their work,
however, was preserved. Ivan III had presided over a revolution of a kind, and every revolution has its victims.

Vasilii III succeeded as Grand Prince, and ruled for twenty-eight years. Despite his conflicts with his father, he continued Ivan’s policies, exhibiting the same principles of statecraft. How much these principles were due to the rulers themselves and how much to advisers such as Vasilii Dolmatov -diplomat, registrar, oath-giver and personal secretary to (and, according to Habsburg ambassador Sigismund von Herberstein, favourite of) the Grand Prince - is impossible to determine. But certainly caution prevailed. Whenever possible, objectives, were achieved incrementally rather than all at once, and by negotiation and conciliation rather than confrontation. Battle was offered only if the Muscovites had clear superiority. Both Ivan and Vasilii took care to reward their servitors and show their subjects a pious, kindly and pleasant face - yet were sudden and ruthless in punishing those who fell out of line. Together they tripled Muscovy’s territorial extent.
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