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Never since the overthrow on the Sit had a Russian ruler been as emphatically and unquestionably Grand Prince as was Simeon Ivanovitch, yclept “the Proud.” Some of the most valuable provinces had indeed fallen away from the realm, but if the title Prince “of all the Russias,” which Simeon was the first to adopt, was little justified by the facts, at least he was, among his compeers, master of what remained. The very qualification of his powers which the over-lordship of the Khan implied, was in fact an added source of authority, for the Russian mind had come to accept the Mongol dominion with the same submissiveness, if with less enthusiasm, that it displayed towards the paternal tyranny of the Church. Supported by the double certificate of Heaven and Sarai, with the iarlikh63 of Usbek in his hands and his compliant Metropolitan at his side, the Grand Prince stood head and shoulders above his brother princes and would-be competitors. And here may be noted an advantage which the builders of the Russian Empire possessed over the continuators of the Germanic one, and indeed over most of the princes of Catholic Europe. The Church “went with” the secular authority. In western Christendom the popes, after having entreated the services of emperors and kings as their surest agency for the destruction of the heathen religions, kicked down the ladder by which they had climbed to their high position, and convulsed Europe for many centuries by a bitter strife with the temporal sovereignties; till the up-springing of a new enemy, questioning the Divine authority of tiara and crown alike, drew Pontiff, Kaiser, and absolute monarchs together, like cattle herding in a storm. In Russia no such schism endangered the sanctity of the ruling forces, possibly because no such prosperity had been attained by either. “The palace rubbed shoulders with the Church and the monastery, and was scarcely distinguishable from them.”64 The Grand Prince was holy and Orthodox, the Church was national and official. Ban and interdict, those bogies of mediæval west Europe, were here familiar sprites which worked at the bidding of the Grand Prince against his enemies. As the worship of the old Slavonic gods Peroun and Volos, Daszhbog, Stribog, etc. gave way by degrees to that of the One-in-Three and the dependent galaxy of saints, so did the old veneration for a crowd of Rurik-descended princes merge gradually into awe of one Heaven-born sovereign and a satellite-band of his officials, amongst whom were the hierarchy of the national Church. And in another respect the Russian rulers had their task simplified for them, namely, in the long-suffering docility of the bulk of their subjects. Here were no defiant goat-herds such as chased the might of the Habsburgs from the Graubunden Alps, no Bauernkriegern kindling the fires of civil war throughout an empire, no Jacquerie distracting an already distraught kingdom. The Slav peasant took all the added ills of life, droughts, famines, Polovtzi, Mongols, grasshoppers, and pestilences, tithes and taxes, with a fatalism he had brought with him from the East, a stoicism learnt possibly from the camel in his nomad days. A man who, in addition to the privations incidental to his poverty, will at the bidding of his Church fast “during the seven weeks of Lent, during two or three weeks in June, from the beginning of November till Christmas, and on all Wednesdays and Fridays during the year,”65 can have little of the bread-rioter or throne-shaker in his constitution. The very placidity, however, with which he received the dispensations of Providence in whatever shape they chose to assume, rendered his allegiance a matter of circumstance rather than principle. He would accept the mastery of the Lit’uanians, for instance, as he had accepted the Mongols, as he had accepted the Varangians; like a dog of too accommodating disposition, he wagged his tail to whichever master shouted loudest, and just now the Lit’uanian princes were shouting loud indeed. Chiefly as yet among themselves. The death of Gedimin had left his country in a position which required skilful handling, while at the same time the division of the State into eight portions precluded any one prince from having a controlling voice in the direction of affairs—an arrangement which could only lead to disaster. Fortunately for Lit’uania the political foresight and energy of her defunct Grand Duke had descended in full measure upon one at least of his sons, Olgerd of Vitebsk. He, while engaged in ravaging the Order territories in Livland, watching for an attack from across the Polish border, or casting his eyes over the tempting Russian provinces ready to fall into his clutches, saw clearly that to live and expand, to prey and not be preyed upon, Lit’uania must have a guiding hand, one head instead of many. In order to attain his eagle-soaring ambition he borrowed the habits of the cuckoo, and ousted his brothers unceremoniously from the hereditary nest. An exception was wisely made in favour of Kestout, who equalled him in energy and military achievement, and without whose help the coup d’etat could scarcely have been effected. Acting in concert, the brothers seized on the capital, Vilna, and re-established the grand-dukedom; by a happy division of labour Kestout became warden of the Polish and Order-land marches, leaving Olgerd to pursue his conquests and acquisitions in the south-east—an arrangement which enabled the Grand Duke to add Briansk, Seversk, Kiev, and the surrounding district to his possessions, and to retain Volhynia against the King of Poland.66 With the Prince of Moskva pursuing a policy of cautious inaction, the only safe course open to him under the circumstances, Olgerd was able not only to stretch his dominion from a foothold on the Baltic coast to the shores of the Black Sea, but to obtain a solid influence over the governments of Smolensk, Pskov, and Velikie Novgorod. As early as 1346 he appears to have had a hold on the councils of the latter city; the posadnik Evstaf (Eustace) had spoken unwisely and not well of the great Lit’uanian,—had in fact called him a dog. The indiscreet expression reached the ears of Olgerd, who demanded the death of the offending dignitary. The Vetché armed the city in defence of the posadnik, reconsidered the matter, and ended by sacrificing Evstaf to the resentment of the Grand Duke.67 An action so opposed to the traditional temper of the proud republic that it is only to be explained by a strong motive of political expediency. And in fact an alliance with Lit’uania was valuable to Pskov and Novgorod, both as a bulwark against German aggression and as a counterpoise to the encroaching power of Moskva. In the former relation, the resisting power of the leagued principalities of the North was severely tested by the warrior monks of the Order; able to draw unfailing supplies of men and marks from the States of the Empire, the knights had bought Estland from the King of Denmark (1347), had inflicted a severe defeat on the Lit’uanian army (1348), and later carried war and desolation into the lands of Polotzk, Pskov, and Novgorod (1367). With the help of Olgerd the Russians were able to make a diversion upon Dorpat, and peace was at length effected with the Order in 1371.68 From this it will be seen that the Grand Duke of Lit’uania was a far more prominent figure in the land than the Grand Prince “of all the Russias.” But of the policy of these two contrasted state-workers it may be said that while Olgerd built, the son of Kalita dug. Intrenching himself around the unit of Moskva, the last-named silently and persistently undermined the power of the neighbouring princes, and established his own authority on a sure foundation. Novgorod might wait; Lit’uania might wait; the Horde might wait. Thus delving and waiting ruled Simeon, so quaintly named “the Proud,” till death swept him into his cherished cathedral—a victim, possibly, to the terrible Black Pestilence which was then desolating Russia.

1353-1359

The succeeding Grand Prince, Ivan Ivanovitch, who found favour in the sight of the new Khan Tchanibek, displayed all his brother’s patience without any of his policy. His weakly pacific reign marked a partial thaw in the iron frost of Moskovite supremacy, which had bound North-east Russia in its grip under the rule of his three immediate predecessors. Souzdal, Riazan, and Tver blossomed anew into independence, and enjoyed a S. Luke’s summer of importance and anarchy. The Novgorodians, who had exerted themselves to obtain the election of Konstantin of Souzdal to the grand princedom, only recognised Ivan on the death of the former (1354), and were little troubled by the interference of their sovereign.69 Their own domestic affairs were sufficiently exciting to absorb their attention; the election of a posadnik in the spring of 1359 gave rise to a fierce quarrel between the inhabitants of the Slavonic quarter and those of the Sofia ward, and for three days the hostile factions fought around the famous bridge, and were only separated by the intervention of their Archbishop and ex-Archbishop, whose combined exhortations at length restored peace to the agitated city.70

If Novgorod owed much to the well-directed influence of her prelates, the House of Moskva was even more indebted to the exertions and services of the Metropolitan Aleksis, who loyally supported its interests under the most discouraging circumstances. When the weary Ivan had closed his inglorious reign, when “having failed in many things,” he had “achieved to die,” the foundations painfully hewn out by his forerunners were almost swept away; a new Khan had arisen who knew not Moskva, and Dimitri Konstantinovitch of Souzdal entered Vladimir in triumph, with the iarlikh in his hand. Souzdal, Riazan, Tver, and Velikie Novgorod exulted in the downfall of their ambitious neighbour, and the work of generations seemed undone. Then was it that Vladuika Aleksis, seeing in Dimitri Ivanovitch more promising material than had existed in his father, took advantage of the chaos existing at the Horde—where Khan succeeded Khan in a whirlwind of revolutions—to obtain a counter-iarlikh for the young Prince of Moskva. Thus Dimitri was opposed by Dimitri, each boasting the favour of Sarai, but the Moskovite enjoying the support of Holy Church. New intrigues gave the Souzdal kniaz once more the countenance of the Horde, but Dimitri Ivanovitch dared to disregard the displeasure of a Khan who was here to-day and might be gone to-morrow; riding forth at the head of his boyarins and followers, long accustomed to be uppermost in the land, he drove his rival from Vladimir and carried the war into the province of Souzdal, besieging the capital. The Konstantinovitch submitted, and the grand princely dignity returned to the House of Moskva. 1362Well had Aleksis earned his subsequent canonisation.

A few years later the Black Death, brought into the district of Nijhnie-Novgorod by travelling merchants, recommenced its ravages throughout Central Russia. Its victims were counted by thousands, and though the account of its sweeping effect at Smolensk, in which city there were said to remain but five survivors,71 is probably an exaggeration, an idea can be formed of its destructive nature by the number of princes who were stricken down in a single year. 1365The Grand Prince’s brother Ivan, Konstantin of Rostov, Andrei, brother of the Prince of Souzdal, and four of the Tverskie family, were victims of the dread pestilence, more wholesale even in its work than the Mongols in the first fury of their invasion.72 In its wake sprang up a crop of quarrels, the result of such a legacy of vacant fiefs. Boris of Souzdal having seized on his deceased brother’s appanage (Nijhnie-Novgorod), to the despite of his elder, Dimitri, the latter was driven to throw himself into the hands of his namesake and rival, the Grand Prince of Moskva, who forced the supplanter to disgorge his prey. In Tver, likewise, the death of Simeon had brought his brother Ieremiya, his uncle Vasili, and his cousin Mikhail, into competition for his territorial possessions. The last-named was pursuing in Tver the same policy of aggrandisement and centralisation that had obtained such successful results for Moskva; naturally his proceedings were watched with jealous eyes by Dimitri, the Metropolitan, and the Moskovite boyarins, who took up the cause of Mikhail’s opponents and drove him more than once from his province. Mikhail invoked the aid of his wife’s father, Olgerd. 1369The great Lit’uanian, whose arms had checked the tide of Teutonic conquest and driven the Tartars from the Western steppes, who had wasted the outskirts of Revel and laid classic Kherson in ashes, marched now against the might of Moskva, his rival in the Russian lands. With him came his loyal brother Kestout, and, because he must, the Kniaz of Smolensk. The might of Moskva contracted within the high stone battlements of its Kreml, which, in the depth of winter, was too strong a hold for the Lit’uanians to attack. Olgerd contented himself with sacking the surrounding country, and carried back a spoil of cattle and church furniture as witness of his triumph. 1370The following year, however, Mikhail, again driven from his hereditary dominions, again appealed to Olgerd for assistance, and with the first November snows came the Lit’uanian-Smolenskie host against Moskva. History repeated itself; a second time the Kreml, rising fair and glittering in its sheen of white stone and silvery frost, above the blackened ruins that lay around it, defied the force that gathered against its walls. Olgerd hovered in vain around the impregnable obstacle to his crowning triumph. Russian troops, under Vladimir Andrevitch, the Grand Prince’s cousin, were gathering on his flank, those pied crows, the Knights of Mary, were croaking ominously on his northern frontier, while an early thaw threatened to impede his line of retreat through the snow-banked forests. Under these circumstances the old warrior slacked the rigour of his onslaught and made an honourable peace with the enemy whom he could not crush. 1371The indomitable Mikhail continued, nevertheless, to wage a fitful war with his hereditary foe, now invoking the support of Mamai Khan, the new master of the Golden Horde, now calling in the Lit’uanians, till at length, hotly besieged in his city of Tver, he was obliged to submit to the victorious Dimitri and recognise the supremacy of the House of Moskva. 1375Secure in his own dominions, the Grand Prince was able to turn his attention to the hostile forces which weighed on him on either side. In the West the crushing pressure of the Lettish power was for a time relaxed. 1377The Grand Duke Olgerd, “one of the greatest statesmen of the Middle Ages,”73 the clangour of whose arms had vibrated round Polish castle and Order keep, had roused the echoes of the Moskva Kreml, and startled the pirates of the Black Sea coast, was now among “the quiet people”;74 of his many sons, Yagiello succeeded him in the Grand Ducal dignity. Hampered by a large circle of brothers, half-brothers, cousins, and other inconvenient relatives, he set to work vigorously to weed out his superfluous kinsfolk; the aged Kestout, the companion-in-arms and faithful supporter of Olgerd, was one of the first victims of the son’s purging operations. Lured into his power, he was immured within the castle of Kreva, where he was found one day strangled; his son Vitovt escaped the same fate by a flight into the Order territory, while Andrei Olgerdovitch, Prince of Polotzk, sought at Moskva shelter from his half-brother’s hostility. Dimitri had the satisfaction of lending his support to this malcontent, as Olgerd had aided the Prince of Tver. But while Moskovite troops ravaged the Russian territories of Yagiello, Dimitri from his capital was watching the storm-clouds that had been slowly piling in the East. Nursed into their position of authority by the favour and support of the Horde, the Princes of Moskva had become too important and too exalted to continue their former humble attitude towards the Khans; like a wasp entangled in a spider-web, the Velikie Kniaz was over-big a captive to be held comfortably in the meshes of a degrading thraldom. Hence the altered relations between Moskva and Sarai, which had resulted in a series of desultory engagements, not openly avowed at the headquarters of either side, but tending steadily towards a more pronounced rupture. Nijhnie-Novgorod had twice suffered the fate of a border town in troublous times, and been laid in ashes by the Mongols; Riazan had experienced the like misfortune. On the other hand a more important collision had taken place on the banks of the Vodjha, where Dimitri had repulsed an army of raiders sent against Riazan by the Khan himself (1377). For three years the vengeance of Mamai had loomed, black and menacing, on the eastern horizon, like a slowly gathering storm that gains added horror from the unmeasurable approach of its outburst; at Moskva men watched for the horsemen who should one day ride out from the forest and clatter into the city with the news that the Hordes were coming. In the summer of 1380 the storm burst; Dimitri learned that the Khan was moving against them with a large army, that Yagiello, “who had small cause to love the Moskva Prince,” was in league with the Mongol, and that Oleg of Riazan was secretly preparing to throw in his lot with the invaders.75 Was this to be the end of all the delving and striving? Was Moskva to lie in ruins, like another Kiev, a victim to her own renown? At least she should fall fighting. The Velikie Kniaz gathered under his standard the princes and soldiery of such Russian lands as he could command. From Bielozero, Rostov, Mourom, Souzdal, Vladimir, and other quarters, came pouring in the fractions of the first national army that had assembled in Russia since the old wars with the Polovtzi. Beneath the towers of the stately Kreml they mustered, 150,000 strong, to hail the birth of the new Empire, or, who knew, to share its ruin. Deep-mouthed clanged the bells of Moskva over the humming city, palely burned a thousand tapers before the shrines of good S. George and Mikhail the archangel; even the holy Sergie, founder of the famed Troitza lavra,76 left his beaver-haunted solitudes to give his blessing on the high enterprise. Forth to the banks of the Don rode Dimitri Ivanovitch with his mighty army; before him went a sable banner, from whose folds gleamed the wan white Christ of Calvary; behind him came serried ranks of princes, the descendants of Rurik, save two who were the sons of dead Olgerd. On the wide plain of Koulikovo, the field “of the woodcocks,” by the blue waters of the Don, the might of Moskovite Russia crashed headlong against the strength of the Golden Horde, and fought through the red September day till wounds and weariness numbed their failing arms. Then through their ranks flashed the unpent reserves, led by young Vladimir Andreievitch, whirled the wild charge into the Mongol hosts, swept into rout the swarthy horsemen of Asia, swelled the hoarse shouts for S. George, for S. Glieb, and S. Boris, drowning the pealing war-yells for Allah; they break, they are killed, they are conquered, the God of the Christians has wakened, the Prince of the Russias has won a new title for ever, Dimitri Ivanovitch Donskoi! Dimitri of the Don.

Possibly the result of the battle was not so one-sided as the glowing accounts of the Russian historians painted it, but the immediate effect gave fair hope for the future. Yagiello withdrew his forces into Lit’uania, and thither fled the traitorous Oleg of Riazan; the Mongols vanished across the Oka, and the enemies of Dimitri seemed melted like snow before the summer of his victory. The Russians dreamed that they were free. Not so lightly were they to be rid of these dusky wolf-eyed warriors, who teemed in the wide, arid plain-land of Asia like rats on an old threshing-floor. In the East had arisen a new star of battle to lead them in the footsteps of the mighty Jingis, Timur the Lame, “conqueror of the two Bokharas, of Hindostan, of Iran, and of Asia Minor.”77 At the Golden Horde appeared one of his captains, Tokhtamitch, who routed and hunted to death the ill-starred Mamai, and seized upon his khanate. Following on this revolution came a message from the new Khan to the Russian princes, couched in friendly terms, but requiring their presence at his Court. This was too much for the Grand Prince and his proud Moskovites to stomach, and Dimitri returned an answer befitting the victor of Koulikovo. But the defiance of the capital found no echo in the other Russian lands; not a second time did they care to face in doubtful conflict foes who were so terrible in victory, so easily recruited after defeat. Too many brave boyarins and bold spearmen had perished on the field of the woodcocks, too many gaps had been made in their ranks which could not be filled at such scant notice. Dimitri of Souzdal sent his two sons to the Horde; Oleg, pardoned and restored to his province, intrigued once more with the enemies of Moskva. 1382Against that city marched the Khan with his Tartar army, guided thither by the traitorous Kniaz of Riazan, and bearing in his train the young princes of Souzdal. Dimitri took the prudent, if unheroic part of leaving his capital to defend itself, and seeking meanwhile to gather an army capable of threatening the Mongol flank. The flight of the Metropolitan, Syprien (successor of S. Aleksis), was not open to so favourable an interpretation. The Kreml, ably defended by its garrison, under the command of Ostey, called in the Chronicles a grandson of Olgerd, held the enemy at bay for three days; on the fourth the defenders weakly opened the gates to a ruse of the wily Khan, and the capital of the new Russia received a baptism of blood. When the invaders withdrew, bearing with them all that was worth removing, it was a silent city that they left behind them—a city peopled by 24,000 corpses, meet gathering ground for wehr-wolf, ghoul, and vampire, a wild Walpurgis Nacht for the Yaga-Babas of Slavonic lore. Nor was Moskva alone in her desolation; Vladimir, Zvenigorod, and other towns were sacked and burnt by detachments of the Mongol army. The defeat of one of these bands by a Russian force under Vladimir of Moskva checked the ravages of the invaders, and Tokhtamitch led his hordes back across the Oka, leaving Dimitri to repair as best he might the woes of his province, and to revenge himself on those who had betrayed or deserted him in the hour of his need. If his kingdom was in ruins, at least he was master of what remained; the Metropolitan was deposed, Oleg was forced to fly, and his fief, already ravaged by the Mongols, was harried anew by the Grand Prince’s followers. Burning with indignation against the enemy whom he had thought crushed for ever on the banks of the Don, Dimitri had yet to realise that he must return to the policy of his fathers, and wear again the yoke he had thrown so proudly off. Mikhail of Tver, who bore him an undying hatred, had shared neither in Moskva’s triumph nor in her distress, and now was plotting openly to obtain for himself the Grand Principality. With all his losses Dimitri was still the wealthiest of the Russian princes, and a timely submission enabled him to find grace in the eyes of the Khan. 1384A new impost was exacted throughout the land, and the young princes—Vasili of Moskva, Aleksandr of Tver, Vasili and Simeon of Souzdal—were held as hostages at Sarai. Russia awoke from her dream of liberty to find that her God still slept.

While mourning their relapse into a state of dependence, and involved in a quarrel with the troublesome republic of the north, the Moskovites learned a disquieting piece of intelligence; Yagiello, their formidable neighbour on the west, who held more Russian lands almost than did Dimitri, had added the kingdom of Poland to his possessions. 1386 The long succession of princes of the House of Piast had come to an end, in its direct line, with Kazimir the Great, who since 1370 had lain in a side chapel of the Cathedral at Krakow, where his effigy in red brown marble yet reclines under its fretted canopy. Louis, the Angevin King of Hungary, who succeeded him on the Polish throne, had died in the year 1382, leaving a daughter, Yadviga, to uphold her right as best she could in a country already marked by the intractability of the crown vassals. Yadviga only obtained the support of the Diet (composed of the nobles and higher clergy of the realm) by leaving in its hands the selection of her husband and consort. The choice of the assembly fell upon the Grand Duke of Lit’uania, whose election would at the same time remove a possible enemy from their eastern border, and furnish them with a protector against the hated Teutonic Order on their north. For this monster of their own creation (a Polish duke had been the first to give the knights a foothold in Prussia) was gradually squeezing them out from touch with the Baltic and displacing their authority in Eastern Pomerania. One of the indispensable conditions attached to the betrothal and election of Yagiello was that he should adopt Christianity of the Roman Catholic pattern; “no cross, no crown.” The prospect of a peaceable accession to the Polish throne effected what all the endeavours, spiritual, diplomatic, and militant, of priests, popes, and grand masters had been unable to accomplish; Yagiello became the apostle prince of Lit’uania, and Catholic sovereign of Poland.78 In his new character of a zealous son of the Church, the Grand Duke set to work to bring Lit’uania within the pale of the official religion; the pagan groves were cut down, the sacred fires that burned in the castle of Vilna extinguished, the mystic serpents killed, and the people baptized by battalions. According to a Russian historian, those who already professed the Greek faith were forcibly converted, and two boyarins who clung obstinately to Orthodoxy were put to death by tortures.79

If Rome swept this valuable State into her fold, the Russian Church, despite the rather depressing circumstance of a confused succession to the Metropolitan office, was not without the triumph of extending her rites over heathen lands. A monk of Moskva carried the light of the Gospel into the lorn and benighted lands of the Permians, a Finn tribe which dwelt in the northern valley of the Kama, beneath the shadow of the Ourals. Supported by the authority of the Grand Prince, he overthrew the worship of the Old Golden Woman, a stone figure with two infants in her arms, before whose shrine reindeer were annually sacrificed; had she been more restricted in her family arrangements she might have been quietly incorporated in the new religion.

In 1389 Moskva mourned her prince, Dimitri Donskoi, who died while yet in his prime. A variant from the type of cold, stern princes who had built up the power of his house, Dimitri was a throw-back to the old light-hearted Slavonic kniaz, before the Norse blood had died out of his veins, or ever that of Turko or Mongol had crept in. And if he gained no fresh ground for Moskva, and left Tver and Souzdal and Riazan still under independent masters, at least he gave Russia a spasm of liberty and renown in an age of gloom and bondage, and obtained for his eldest son the undisputed succession to the Grand Principality.

Vasili Dmitrievitch Moskovskie, to give him his distinguishing title (since 1383 there had reigned a Vasili Dmitrievitch at Souzdal), ascended the throne under more favourable circumstances than had a few years earlier seemed probable. On the west, Vitovt, son of the murdered Kestout, had placed himself at the head of the Lit’uanian malcontents in opposition to the King of Poland, who in cultivating the goodwill of his new subjects had lost that of his old ones. Thus in that direction the threateners of Moskva’s existence were at strife among themselves. In the east Tokhtamitch was contemplating a rebellion against the authority of his lord and protector, Timur, a circumstance which lifted the position of the young Prince of Moskva at the Horde from that of a humble vassal to that of a desired ally. His father would probably have taken advantage of this fact to sever once more his dependence on the Khan; Vasili turned it to a more practical use. 1391With costly presents, and probably promises of future support, the Grand Prince bought an iarlikh which gave him possession of Nijhnie-Novgorod, a fief long since granted to Boris of the House of Souzdal.80 Vasili was received with acclaim by the inhabitants, and Boris, deserted on all sides, had to bow to the decree of fate, represented in this instance by the iarlikh from Sarai. 1394On the death of the ousted prince his nephews, Vasili and Simeon of Souzdal, attempted to reunite Nijhnie-Novgorod with their hereditary appanage, with the result that Vasili of Moskva seized on both provinces and drove his cousins into exile. Many and fruitless were the efforts made by the brothers to recover their lost principalities; Vasili had developed a Habsburgian tenacity in holding to whatsoever he acquired, and the ex-princes of Souzdal had in the end to acquiesce in their spoliation. Events in the West meanwhile had taken an unforeseen and not altogether favourable turn. The Teutonic Order had been placed in an awkward position by the wholesale entrance of the Lit’uanians into the bosom of the Church, which event left the crusaders no more heathen to convert; hence the joy which they shared with the angels over the salvation of their long recalcitrant brothers was tinged with resentment towards the Poles, and especially towards Yagiello. The Grand Master sulkily refused to stand sponsor to the latter at his baptism,81 and the Order prepared, from motives of self-defence, to give active support to the pretender Vitovt, who was enabled with its assistance to continually harry the domains of his royal kinsman, till at length Yagiello, set upon by Catholics, Orthodox, and pagans alike, ceded to him the grand duchy, under the direct suzerainty of the Polish Crown (1392),82 an arrangement which did not bring repose either to the Order or to Moskovy. The Grand Duke Vitovt was another edition of his uncle and grandfather; his arms swept far beyond the ample limits of his principality, and under his vigorous rule Lit’uania attained her greatest extent, and perhaps her greatest power. Father-in-law to Vasili, he did not hesitate to continue the slow absorption of Russian territory commenced by his predecessors; Smolensk dropped from the feeble hands of its hereditary princes into the actual possession of the Grand Duke, who thus brought his dominions into contact with the principality of Tver, long the hatching-ground of disaffection to the supremacy of Moskva. Vitovt would probably have accomplished even more in the way of conquest and annexation if his ambition had not given too wide a scope to his efforts. While Vasili watched anxiously for the next move of this exciting father-in-law new troubles sprang up in the East; it seemed, indeed, as if Moskva was to reap no advantage from the dissensions of her neighbours. The vengeance of Timur the Lame had at length overtaken his o’erweening vassal, and Tokhtamitch had fled before the storm which his imprudence had raised. The conqueror did not seem disposed to confine his destroying wrath to the actual territories of the Golden Horde, but crossed the Volga and commenced to devastate the easternmost Russian lands. Moskovy quaked before the coming of another Batu; the churches were filled with wailing crowds, and the celebrated Mother-of-God of Vladimir was removed from thence to the capital. 1395By a train of reasoning not easy to follow, to this change of quarters was attributed the sudden turning aside of Timur Khan, who diverted his destructive abilities to the razing of Sarai, Astrakhan, and Azov, and left the Russian lands without further hurt. By modern historians this retreat has been set down to other causes than the translation of the Bogoroditza; “accustomed to the rich booty of Bokhara and Hindostan, and dreaming of Constantinople and Egypt, they found, no doubt, that the desert steppes and deep forests only offered a very meagre prey.”83 However, the credit of the affair remained with the Bogoroditza, and what was more to the point, this respectable and extremely valuable ikon remained at Moskva—no mean asset, for that time and place, in the political importance of a city.

The enfeeblement of the Golden Horde seemed to the Lit’uanian Grand Duke a favourable opportunity to extend his influence in the Tartar steppes and constitute himself the heir of the dying sovereignty. Concluding for the moment a perpetual peace with the Order, against whom he had scarcely ceased to fight since his accession to the Grand Duchy, he mustered a formidable army to support him in this mighty enterprise. Poles, Lit’uanians, and Russians marched under his banner against the Tartars, and Konrad von Jungingen, as a guarantee of good faith, sent five hundred of his knights to do battle against the infidels. 1399On the banks of the Vorskla (a tributary of the Dniepr), Vitovt came in contact with the lieutenant of Timur and suffered a disastrous overthrow, losing two-thirds of his army and seriously damaging his military reputation. Notwithstanding this victory the new master of the Horde, Koutluk Khan, had his power disputed by more than one competitor, and Vasili took advantage of this fact to discontinue payment of the annual tribute. 1408The temerity of his action, overlooked for many years, brought on him at last the chastisement of the Mongols, who, under the leadership of Ediger, the victor of the Vorskla, made a sudden inroad upon Russian territory. Vasili imitated the tactics of his father on a similar occasion; leaving Moskva with a strong garrison to defend the Kreml, he betook himself to the northern districts of his realm to raise what forces he might against the invaders. The assault on Moskva was weakened by the want of siege engines (cannon were just beginning to be used by the Russians and Lit’uanians), and Ivan Mikhailovitch, Prince of Tver, was summoned to support the Khan with his artillery. For once hereditary hatred gave way to patriotic instincts, and Ivan withheld the demanded assistance. The troops of Ediger ravaged and burnt far and wide over the Russian plain, and sacked many a town and village in the Grand Principality, but they could neither force Vasili into a combat nor make an impression on the walls and towers of the Kreml. A threatened revolution at the Horde made the Khan anxious to retreat, and his offer of withdrawal on receipt of a war levy was gladly accepted by the Moskovites, who were dreading a famine; 3000 roubles purchased the departure of the Mongol army, and the Velikie Kniaz was able to return to his rejoicing capital.

Hemmed in on east and west by two powerful and aggressive neighbours, with the slumbering volcanoes of Tver and Riazan ready to burst into activity at any moment within his own dominions, the politic Vasili could do little more than assert from time to time his authority over Novgorod. The republic, indeed, was at the height of its independence, and played its own game in the shifting balance of Order and Hansa, Grand Duchy, Grand Principality, and Golden Horde, which made up the round of its political compass. In 1392 it had closed a period of commercial strife by a treaty84 with the towns of Lubeck, Wisby, Revel, Dorpat, and Riga, compacted in the border burgh of Izborsk, where “ys gekomen her Johan Neibur van Lubeke, her Hynrik van Vlanderen unde her Godeke Cur von Godlande, van overze,85 van Rige her Tydeman van der Nienbrugge, van Darpte her Hermen Kegheller unde her Wynold Clychrode, van Revale her Gerd Witte,” and “hebben gesproken myt dem borchgreven van Nougarden,”—the posadnik of Novgorod—and so on in quaint old low-German wording that brings to the mind a glimpse of red gabled roofs, narrow streets and quays, a whiff of salted herrings, pine timbers, and pungent stoppered drams. This treaty, concluded without reference to the Grand Prince, had been a source of friction between him and the Novgorodskie, and a further grievance was that the Archbishop and clergy of the northern city chose to be a law unto themselves rather than show a proper dependence upon the Metropolitan of Moskva. Yet another matter for complaint was the depredations of bands of free-lances from Novgorod and her offshoot settlement Viatka (an independent territory lying to the north of Great Bulgaria), who, under the name of “Good Companions,” carried on a series of freebooting and piratical campaigns in the Volga valley. More than once these points of dispute led to open rupture between Vasili and his intractable subjects, but Great Novgorod was able to hold her own against the hampered efforts of the Velikie Kniaz.

Eighteen months after Ediger’s winter campaign against Moskva the eyes of all Russia were turned towards the impending struggle between the rival powers of the Baltic lands, the Order and the dual Polish-Lit’uanian State. Vitovt, recovered from his reverse at the hands of the Tartars, was moving again, and had set his lance against the black cross shield of the German knights. A dispute anent the Order province of Samogitia furnished a pretext for a recourse to arms, and both sides gathered their hosts to fight out the deadly quarrel. No hole and corner combat was to decide the mastery of the Baltic basin; 163,000 men marched in the train of Vitovt and Yagiello, 83,000 rallied round Ulrich von Jungingen. At the famous battle of Tannenberg (15th July 1410) the iron-mailed knights of Mary went down in splendid ruin before the unstayable onset of the Slavic warriors; the White Eagle of Poland and the Charging Horseman of Lit’uania gleamed on their blood-red standards over the stark and gory corpses of the Grand Master and the flower of his chivalry, 600 knights and 40,000 men-at-arms; the sun went down on the hard-fought field, where Ulrich von Jungingen and his staunch comrades held their last pale Chapter, and the might of the Black Cross Order faded into the shadows of the past. 1411The Peace of Thorn, by yielding to the conquerors all they demanded, gave a temporary respite to the Teutons, but their power was broken for evermore.86

The latter years of the reign of Vasili Dmitrievitch are distinguished by a dexterous peace with the several items which threatened at every moment to combine against and crush his struggling principality. The ambition of his father-in-law, the frowardness of Novgorod, the dissatisfaction of Tver, the exacting arrogance of the Horde, were successfully ignored or adroitly played one against the other. In like manner the Grand Prince’s brothers were studiously kept in the background, and the boyarins of Moskva and the allied fiefs were taught to look upon Vasili’s surviving son, who bore his father’s name, as future head of the State. 1425Thus scheming and contriving went the Prince of Moskva on his way, till one winter’s day the bells knelled for his passing soul, and Vasili Vasilievitch reigned in his stead.

The late prince had guided the flood of monarchical principles and hereditary right in the desired direction; his successor had to struggle for the greater part of his reign with the back-wash of reaction. Moskva had been placed by persistent effort high above the position of her neighbours, but the elements of discord and disunion lay among her own princes, and it was inevitable that the surviving sons of Dimitri should seek to annul an order of succession which passed them over in favour of a mere boy. Nor had the young Vasili the support of a strong Metropolitan to sustain him in the stormy days that were coming. The Greek Photius who held that office did not exercise in the State the same influence as his forerunners Theognost and Aleksis had done, and even in his own department his authority was not undisputed. For Grand Duke Vitovt, an amateur dabbler in religions, had established at Kiev a Metropolitan of his own, and the faithful in the Russ-Lit’uanian lands paid their homage, and what was worse, their tithes, to this unauthorised rival. Hence Vasili had to depend on the protection of the Horde and the affections of his Moskovite subjects to defend him against the ambition of his uncle Urii. 1430The death of his powerful relative, the Lit’uanian Grand Duke, removed another possible supporter, and two years later the young prince had to appeal to the decision of the Khan Makhmet against the pretensions of his rival. By a grovelling affectation of submissiveness Vasili was able to emerge triumphant from the contest, and on his return was solemnly crowned at Moskva—the first coronation of a grand prince that had taken place in that city.87

The iarlikh of the Khan possessed, however, none of its old finality, and Vasili had to sustain a civil war against his uncle, and after his death (1434) with his sons, Vasili the Squinting, Dimitri Shemiaka, and Dimitri the Red. Although, apparently, not wanting in courage or energy (both of which deficiencies have been freely attributed to him), he possessed little skill in utilising his resources, and again and again suffered defeat, deposition, and imprisonment. The loyalty of Moskva brought him through many vicissitudes, and the tables were turned more than once upon his hostile relatives. 1436Repulsing an attack made upon the capital by Vasili the Squinting, the Grand Prince secured the person of that rebel, and supplemented the defect bestowed by nature by blinding the eyes of his hapless prisoner. The leadership of the disaffected party devolved henceforth upon Shemiaka, who became the implacable enemy of the Grand Prince, and roused for many a long year the fires of discord in the land. Meanwhile the bosom of the Church was heaving with agitation as profound as that which disturbed the State. 1437The new Metropolitan, Isidor of Salonika, had scarcely entered into his new duties when he was obliged to set off, by way of Novgorod, Riga, Lubeck, Braunschweig, Nurnberg, and the Tyrol, to attend the great Council which was to be held at Ferrara—subsequently at Florence—to unite the two Christian Churches in one communion. The immediate cause of this drawing together of the Latin and Greek rivals was the danger which was threatening the headquarters of the latter sect at the hands of the Infidel Turk. The Ottoman dynasty, rising upon the ruins of the Seljuk Empire, had slowly but steadily engorged the provinces which made up the dominion of the eastern Cæsars. Asia Minor, Bulgaria, Thessaly, Thrace, had been assimilated one by one, and now there remained but Constantinople, “a head without a body,” to resist the hitherto irresistible invader. Without substantial and speedy aid from Catholic Europe there was little probability that the city could long maintain its defence against the Ottoman armies, and Catholic Europe could not be expected to interest itself in the fate of a community which differed from itself in so many vital points of doctrine. The sole hope for Constantinople lay in the possibility of a reunion with the dominant factor of Christendom. 1438This was the motive power which had drawn to the Italian town men from Moskva, Trebizond, and the isles of the Adriatic, to discuss the vexed question of the genesis of the Holy Ghost, the exact degree of bliss and torment allotted to the souls of the departed, whether it was permissible to use leavened bread in the sacrament, and whether Pope or Patriarch should occupy the chiefest seat at feasts. These were the main points which separated the Churches, and on each of them the Greek prelates (Mark of Ephesos excepted) gave way—not that the arguments of the Latins had become suddenly convincing, but the looming vision of the Turk inclined the minds of the Orthodox to surrender. “Ils ne croyaient pas, mais ils craignaient.”

Foremost among the complaisant Greeks was the Metropolitan Isidor; already, before leaving Russia, he had shown a “scandalous predilection for the Latin faith”—had he not at Dorpat kissed the Catholic cross before saluting the Greek ikons? 1440Hence on his return to Moskva prince and prelates assembled in gloomy suspicion to receive him in the Church of the Virgin, and hear the result of the council’s deliberations. The Roman cross demurely preceding the Metropolitan, and the Pope’s name cropping up in the prayers, prepared them for the surrender set forth in the Act of Council. When Isidor had finished reading the unpalatable document there was an ominous silence, amid which Vasili rose to his feet and commenced to hurl invectives at the disconcerted Vladuika. Heretic, false shepherd, corrupter of souls, the mercenary of Rome, were among the epithets applied to the would-be reformer, who was promptly bundled off to a monastery, from which he was glad to escape back to Rome. John Paleologus might, for pressing reasons of his own, tolerate this accursed change of dogmas, but the Velikie Kniaz of Moskva would have none of it, and hastened, after the example of Vitovt, to consecrate a Metropolitan on his own responsibility, without reference to the tainted source of Constantinople. Jonas, Bishop of Riazan, was chosen for the post, but was not formally consecrated till 1448.88

The energy and reckless daring of the Prince’s character showed itself soon after in a struggle with a new enemy. On the ruins of the Great Bulgarian State had sprung up the Tartar khanate of Kazan, independent of the Golden Horde, and a source of uneasiness for Eastern Russia. In an attempt to repel an invasion of the province of Souzdal by the forces of this upstart power, Vasili, deserted by his cousin Shemiaka, could only muster 1500 men, a shadow of the mighty hosts that had followed the banner of Moskva aforetime. With this handful, however, he joined battle with the Kazanese, and fell, covered with wounds, into their hands. At the news of this disaster the enemies of the Grand Prince raised their heads throughout the land; Boris of Tver raided the possessions of the Moskovite merchants at Torjhok, Shemiaka stretched out his hand for the vacant princedom. The sudden release of Vasili by the Khan Makhmet sorely embarrassed the position of the would-be supplanter, and Shemiaka was driven to make a bold bid for the mastery. 1446A sudden move put the Kreml in his hands, and the hapless Grand Prince, while returning thanks in the Troitza monastery for his deliverance from the hands of the Infidels, experienced the worse fate of falling into the clutches of his Christian cousin, who put his eyes out. Thus after ten years came home to roost the wrong inflicted on Vasili the Squinting, and the Grand Prince was thenceforth Vasili the Blind. This barbarous requital of an “unhappy far-off” deed was perpetrated in the names of Shemiaka, Ivan Aleksandreivitch, and Boris of Tver, and in their hands remained the person of Vasili and the possessions of the Grand Principality. The first-named usurped the Moskovite throne and enjoyed for a space the power of Grand Prince without being able to gain the affections of the people. 1447In the darkness which had descended on Vasili Vasilievitch the loyalty of boyarins, town-folk, and clergy still burned bravely for the captive prince; the popular clamour and the representations of the Metropolitan forced Shemiaka to restore him to liberty and bestow on him the town of Vologda as a residence, and not many months had passed ere the exile came marching back in triumph to his beloved and faithful Moskva—whose dazzling walls, indeed, he might never again behold, but whose pealing bells and hoarse-shouting populace spoke music to his darkened soul. Scarred and mutilated in the long struggle, in which he had tasted the bitterness of defeats, imprisonment, banishment, blinding, the Grand Prince had triumphed over all his misfortunes, had wearied down all opponents, had won. A final victory dispelled the power of Shemiaka (1450), and three years later he died at Novgorod, not without suspicion of poisoning. From this turning-point Vasili the Darkened reigned peaceably and prosperously on the throne he had laboured so hard to retain.

As the Moskovites settled down to their long-estranged placidity, rumours reached them of the terrible thing which had befallen the city of the Caesars; rumours which soon grew into creditable news and made them doubt but that the bottom of their world had fallen out.

Little fruit had been born of the vaunted Council of Florence; the Churches were as far apart as ever. In vain might the Byzantine Emperor and the Greek hierarchy conform with the decisions of the act of union; the lower clergy and the bulk of the populace would have no dealings with the unholy ordinance. “Better Turkish than Papish,” the motto of the Water-Beggars in a later age, would fitly have described the sentiments of the people of Constantinople at this period. Thus they fought and squabbled over their beloved dogmas, while the enemy was slowly gathering his toils around the doomed city. The Pope, mortified at the miscarriage of his plans, sent no legions rolling across Europe to the assistance of the last of the Constantines; his legate, indeed, was on the scene, arguing and expostulating, with the rhetoric which gained him applause in the council-chamber at Florence, but failed him in the cold, grim Church of the Virgin in the Kreml—for this plausible Roman cardinal is no other than Isidor, sometime Metropolitan of Moskva. But while the Pope hesitates the Sultan acts. On every side the city is beset by an army that blackens the face of the earth. Cannon and ram and scaling-ladder are plied against the massive walls and heavy gates. Day after day the assault is urged; the city is bravely defended, for the most part by foreigners—for the greater proportion of the citizens are in the churches praying for deliverance from the unbelievers. 1453But the wonder-working Virgin, weary of well-doing, or recognising the superior insistency of the attackers, makes no move to save the holy city; the faltering wail of “kyrie eleison” is drowned by the fierce roar of “Il Allah illah Allah,” the scarlet banner of the Yeni-Tscheri89 waves in the breach at the Gate of Romanos, the young Sultan Mahomet II. bursts in upon his prey, and Constantine Paleologus, wounded and trampled on in the rush of the victors, dies amid the ruin of his empire. The purple and gold of old Byzantium are lost in the pall of night, and the rising moon salutes another crescent that gleams forth upon the dome of S. Sophia. The cry of the muezzins peals through the startled city; the eternal speculations upon the economy of self-begetting Trinities dies away before the new dogma, “There is one God and Mahomet is His prophet.” This is the end of the Crusades; this is the fall of the Tzargrad.90

After the first feeling of stupefaction and regret produced by these doleful tidings had passed away, the Moskovites might gather some little satisfaction from the overthrow of their spiritual headquarters, their one link with southern Europe. More than ever isolated, the Russian principality gained in importance by becoming the sole resting-place of the official Greek religion and of Greek ideas. Not at once did Moskva realise, or invent, the pleasing idea that she had succeeded to the heritage of the Caesars; yet to her, still struggling with the competition of other cities, with Tver, and Vladimir, even with faded Kiev, it was no small gain to have her churches and high places adorned by the art and sanctified by the presence of the Greek monks and artists, sages and artificers, who sought refuge within her gates. And the last years of her Prince, the evening of his stormy day, were ones of great progress for the white city, and for the monarchy which was rising around this corner-stone. The forces of reaction seemed for the moment to have spent their fury on the person of Vasili, and his unbroken spirit might now pursue its way unquestioned. 1456Novgorod, long the resort and refuge of his enemies, had at last to reckon with the armed expression of his resentment; its messengers were refused hearing, its army of 5000 mail-clad knights was routed near Rousa, its posadnik was a captive in the Grand Prince’s hands, his forces occupied Torjhok. Peace had to be bought by the disbursement of 8500 roubles, by submission to a princely levy, and by other sacrifices of pride and pelf. The same year died Ivan Thedorovitch of Riazan, leaving his infant son Vasili to the guardianship of the Grand Prince, who took good care of the orphan—and of his province. Viatka, that turbulent colony, which outdid its parent Novgorod in rebellion and disorder, was forced to pay a tribute to the Prince of Moskva and to respect his arms. 1459Pskov, long time but a Lit’uanian outpost, received his second son Urii as governor. Thus the grand principality, at peace once more within itself, was beginning to quicken its dormant authority in the farthest limits of its extent. 1460In the year 1460 Vasili paid a long and gracious visit to Velikie Novgorod, to set the seal of his sovereignty on his northernmost city and dazzle the proud republicans with his imposing retinue. Much might they marvel at this grim groping figure, who had buffeted his way through so many storms, who had wrested victory from defeat, had thwarted the designs of Pope and Council, had taught the bells of S. Sofia Novgorodskie to jangle in his honour, had made Moskva mistress over long-resisting provinces. Scarred and worn with the traces of his life-struggle, Vasili the Darkened was a meet type of the Russia he ruled over, but just beginning to grope its way into the paths of unity and dominion. When in 1462 he went to his well-earned rest, he left his son Ivan in assured possession of the sovereignty in which he had been already for some time associated. The old mad folly of dividing the hardly-cemented territories between the dead Prince’s sons was still persisted in—Vasili’s eyes had not been opened even by being put out—but Ivan was emphatically Grand Prince of Moskva.

63 The firman issued by the Khans to the prince of their selection.

64 K. Waliszewski: Peter the Great.

65 M’Kenzie Wallace: Russia.

66 V. B. Antonovitch.

67 N. Kostomarov, Sieverno Rousskiya Narodopravstva. S. Solov’ev.

68 Geschichte der Ostseeprovinzen.

69 S. Solov’ev. N. Kostomarov.

70 S. Solov’ev.

71 Karamzin.

72 S. Solov’ev.

73 Th. Schiemann.

74 A Russian expression for the dead.

75 S. Solov’ev.

76 Monastery of the Trinity near Moskva.

77 A. Rambaud, History of Russia.

78 Schiemann.

79 Karamzin.

80 S. Solov’ev.

81 Histoire de l’Ordre Teutonique.

82 S. Solov’ev; Th. Schiemann; Geschichte der Ostseeprovinzen.

83 Rambaud.

84 Reproduced by Schiemann from copy in Rath archives of Revel.

85 “From over the sea.”

86 Schiemann; S. Solov’ev; Geschichte der Ostseeprovinzen; Histoire de l’Ordre Teutonique; L. Ranke, Preussische Geschichte.

87 Rambaud, S. Solov’ev.

88 Karamzin.

89 New guard, corrupted into Janissaries.

90 Von Hammer-Purgstall, Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman. J. W. Zinkeisen, Geschichte des osmanischen Reich in Europa. E. A. Freeman, Ottoman Power in Europe.