480

Novgorod and Pskoff.

Lithuania

[1386-1569 suppressed its veche and removed the bell (1478). He transported large masses of the citizens to distant places, and planted Muscovites in the city which he appropriated; his son pursued the same policy at Pskoff. It might be thought that the new ruler would have carefully fostered the foreign trade which had made the fortune of Novgorod; but with curious improvidence he put an end to it. He arrested the merchants (1495), and enriched his treasury for the moment with the plunder of their stores.

The occupations of Novgorod and Pskoff, beyond their importance as steps in unification, have a high significance as marking the elimination of a social element which might have modified the development of autocracy. The absence of free cities, which played so beneficent a part in the evolution of western countries, is a fact of fatal import in Russian history.

The acquisitions of Chernigoff and Smolensk have a different significance, involving the relations of Moscow to its western rival, the double State of Lithuania and Poland. The national unity of the Lithuanian tribes had been brought about in the thirteenth century, and in the fourteenth heathen Lithuania became a great political power under the able leadership of Gedimin, who not only maintained a successful struggle in the north against the German Knights of Livonia, but created an extensive State by conquering Russian territory. It extended far southward, including even Kieff; and Vilna, Gedimin's capital, was the political peer of Moscow. Western Russia was grouped round Vilna, eastern round Moscow, and the question was whether the separation would be permanent or either would annex the other. The situation was complicated by the hostility of Poland, which was endangered by the southward expansion of Lithuania; and a new turn was given to the course of events, when on the death of a king of Poland without male children (1386) the Poles terminated the strife by marrying his daughter to the Lithuanian prince Jagello. This was the origin of the Lithuanian dynasty of Poland, the line of Jagello, which was extinguished towards the close of the sixteenth century. Jagello adopted Christianity in the Roman form, and converted his heathen fellow-countrymen by compulsion; but he offended them by transferring his residence from Vilna to the Polish capital Cracow. The union was purely personal; it was very soon interrupted; and during the following century the two States were sometimes under the same rule, at others under different princes. From 1501 they were united, but the union remained personal; the Grand Principality of Lithuania was distinct from the kingdom of Poland. At last in 1569 they were more closely and permanently joined together by the Union of Lublin, of which more will be said.

To recover the Russian principalities which Lithuania had conquered was an important item in the Muscovite programme of gathering together Russian territory. Nor was any part of that programme so popular in

1484-1503]

Ivan III and Lithuania

481

Muscovy; for it appealed to religious sentiment; it meant the winning back into the sphere of the Orthodox Church regions which had fallen under the pernicious influence of a heretical State. Nowhere more conspicuously than in this field of his work did Ivan display his consummate, unscrupulous dexterity. He defeated Lithuania all along the line, and yet avoided all but a very brief war till the later years of his reign. Here his friends, the Tartars of Crimea, did him good service. They invaded Lithuania and held it in check, while Ivan was dealing with the hostile Tartars in the east ; and, when the Lithuanian war came, the friendly khan kept the hostile khans in check. On the other hand, Ivan pursued his end with eminent success by his intrigues with the vassal or "serving " princes, who under the lordship of Lithuania governed the lands which it was his object to acquire. The condition on which these princes held their possessions was that they submitted to the Great Prince in all matters of foreign policy, while in return he protected and maintained them in their principalities. If the Lithuanian Prince failed to observe his part of the obligation, the vassals considered themselves free to attach themselves to another protector. Here was the place where the diplomatist of Moscow could insert a lever. The princes were always at feud among themselves; and, by intervening at opportune moments and promising support to one or to another, Ivan succeeded in inducing prince after prince to accept his protection and in detaching district after district from the sway of Lithuania. Two stages in his westward advance may be marked. After a short war the river Desna was fixed as the boundary (1484), and peace sealed by the marriage of the Great Prince Alexander with Ivan's daughter. But the use of this alliance was in Ivan's design to supply new handles against his rival, in · the shape of complaints that, contrary to express stipulation, attempts were being made to tamper with his daughter's faith. A new war broke out; the most important of the vassals, including the Prince of Chernigoff, deserted to Ivan; and Lithuania was only rescued from hopeless defeat by the aid of the Knights of Livonia. A precarious peace was procured in 1503 which fixed the boundary at the river Sozh. The struggle continued under Ivan's successor Vasili, whose principal achievement was the capture of Smolensk where the artillery which Ivan had introduced in Russia played a decisive part. At Vasili's death the Muscovite empire reached from Chernigoff to the White Sea, from the borders of Livonia to the river Kama.

The transference of the centre of the Russian world to Moscow had, along with the political dependence on Asia, brought about a separation and alienation from the rest of Europe. From the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, it may be said, she had her back turned to Europe, her face to Asia, and was a terra incognita to western Europeans. Hence the foreign travellers and merchants who visited Muscovy in the sixteenth century describe it as a newly discovered land, and it is not

C. M. H. V.

31

482

Marriage of Ivan III

[1462-1505

untrue to say that one of the features of the history of Russia in that period was its rediscovery by the West. Here too Ivan's reign marks an epoch. He entered into relation with some European Courts; embassies were exchanged with Venice, the Roman Curia, Denmark, the Empire, and Hungary. He was ready in certain ways to learn something from the West and move in the direction of its progress, as for instance in the introduction of artillery. He invited Italians to his Court. The brilliant engineer and architect, Fioravanti degli Alberti (Aristotle of Bologna), busied himself at Moscow in the Great Prince's service; Pietro Antonio Solari of Milan built the palace of the Kremlin. These and a few other swallows of the Renaissance did not make a spring; their fine intelligences produced no lasting, nor perhaps any fleeting, impression on the Russian spirit; but they belong to the signs which mark the beginning of a new period, of slow, hardly perceptible advance, which is to prepare the way for Peter the Great. Foreign physicians were also attracted to Moscow; but their calling was hazardous at an ignorant and barbarous Court; a Jewish doctor was beheaded for having failed to cure Ivan's son.

The most memorable result of this monarch's relations with the outside world was his marriage with a lady of the Imperial family of the Palaiologoi. Zoe (called Sophia after her marriage) was a niece of Constantine Palaiologos, the last Roman Emperor. Her father Thomas, driven from Greece, had betaken himself to Rome where he died, and the Popes acted as guardians of his children. The idea of uniting Sophia to the Great Prince of Moscow seems to have been first suggested by Cardinal Bessarion, one of the most zealous promoters of the transitory union of the Greek and Latin Churches at the Council of Florence. It was gladly accepted by the Pope. Two objects of the papal policy, then and for long time to come, were the reunion of the Churches and the expulsion of the Turks from Europe. The suggested marriage seemed to offer the chance not only of compassing the desired reunion of the Greek Church with Rome, through a princess who at Rome had come under Latin influence, but also of stimulating the ruler of Moscow to join in a crusade against the Muslims. Ivan accepted the proposal, though without the smallest intention of gratifying the desire of Rome. For the present, an attack on Turkey lay entirely outside the range of policy of a cautious Muscovite sovereign. But a marriage with a princess of the Imperial House of Constantinople seemed calculated to augment the Great Prince's prestige. This, and this alone, was Ivan's motive; this, and this alone, was the result of the alliance.

For the greater part of what is commonly alleged as to important consequences, practical and thoretical, arising out of the marriage with Sophia (1472) is based on misconceptions. It has been asserted that her influence incited Ivan to renounce the yoke of the Tartars and

1462-1505]

Moscow and Byzantium

483

imbued him with a new ideal of Russian unity and Russian Imperial dignity. There is no evidence for this belief; emancipation from the Tartars and unification of Russia were aims which had been bequeathed from Ivan's predecessors; and it is inconsistent with all that we know of the ruler to suppose that his wife played the rôle of a political initiator. It has also been supposed that by virtue of this alliance Ivan claimed to be the heir of the Caesars, and therefore assumed the title of Tsar. It has been even held that his claim had a more formal basis, Sophia's brother Andrew Palaiologos having actually transferred to him the rights to the Imperial succession - the same rights which that prince made over to Charles VIII and bequeathed to Ferdinand of Spain. The fact that the sovereigns of Moscow never appealed to such a transference proves that no such act was ever executed. The coronation ceremony of the Great Princes does not show that they set up to be Augusti; it shows the reverse. It is distinct from the coronation ceremony of the East Roman Augustus; it resembles the coronation ceremony of the East Roman Caesar. In using the title of Tsar (Tsesar = Caesar) Ivan meant simply to declare his independence; it was not in his thoughts to usurp the title of Caesar Augustus; and, if he had contemplated such a claim, Tsar would have failed to express the idea. For Caesar was a title which the Emperors regularly conferred on barbarian princes whom they desired to honour or conciliate; and the Russians did not restrict Tsar to the designation of the Emperor, they applied it more widely, as for instance to some of the Tartar khans. And it is significant that Ivan adopted this style only in his intercourse with some foreign Courts; Tsar did not become the formal and proper title of the Great Prince till the coronation of his grandson Ivan IV.

Yet the union with Sophia may be said to have a symbolical significance, in connexion with a theory which became current during the reign of Ivan's son and successor. According to this theory, formulated by Philothei, a monk of Pskoff, Russia as the protectress of Orthodoxy was the heiress of the Eastern Empire, Moscow the successor of Constantinople. For through her iniquitous compromise with the Latins at the Council of Florence, Byzantium had forfeited her claim to the headship of the Greek Church; Moscow must step into her place as the third, and the last, Rome. The Church which had looked to the Emperors to protect her against Gentiles and heretics must now look to the Great Princes. This idea was illustrated and reinforced by a legend which was officially adopted. When Vladimir the Saint was converted to Christianity and married their sister Anna (989), the Emperors Basil II and Constantine VIII sent him royal insignia, in accordance with the Byzantine custom of bestowing insignia on client princes. This fact is the historical motif of the legend that Constantine IX Monomakhos sent the emblems of sovereignty to Vladimir Monomakhos

484

Growth of Autocracy

[1462-1505 and caused him to be crowned at Kieff. The story, mentioned in the official coronation acts of Ivan IV and the subsequent Tsars, including Peter the Great, involves a double confusion of the two Vladimirs and two Constantines, evidently due to the idea of bringing into connexion the Russian and the Byzantine Monomakhos, in spite of the fact that the later Vladimir was born only three years before the later Constantine died (1054). Among the insignia of the Great Duke was a crown, still preserved, known as the "hat" of Constantine Monomakhos; but it cannot claim to be the original crown received by Vladimir the Saint, for it is not Byzantine work or of such an early period. Another legend, that a white tiara, given by Constantine the Great to Pope Silvester, had been carried for safety's sake from Rome to New Rome, and thence for the same reason to Novgorod, symbolised the idea, which events justified, that the place which had been filled by the Church-state of Byzantium, in the Orthodox world, was now to be filled by Moscow. The foundation of the Moscow Patriarchate towards the end of the sixteenth century was an expression of this idea.

The growth of autocracy was favoured by the Tartar sway, which contributed to the decline of the veche or parliament. The election of the prince was one of the chief functions of the veche, and when the Tartar overlords took the appointments into their own hands its decline began. It is significant that the States in which the veche survived, Novgorod and Pskoff, were geographically furthest removed from Tartar control. But it was more important that the princes of the new States in central Russia, like Moscow, were soon able to dispense with a parliament, because they did not need the people for military service. Territorial conquest enabled them to allot land in return for military service, and thus they had a regular army at their disposal, without calling upon the host of freemen to follow them. The Russian army consisted of cavalry, but by the middle of the sixteenth century Moscow had also a body of infantry, the strieltsy (arquebusiers).

The authority of Ivan's predecessors was thus not limited by a popular assembly, but it was checked by another institution, the Duma of boiars or nobles. The name Duma connotes thinking; it was a deliberative body, like the Greek Bulê and the German Rath, which have a similar meaning. This Council consisted of men who held high posts in the administration and the army. The boiars formed the highest order in that class of society which was designated as the "men of service," a name characteristic of the growth of despotism. In the law Code drawn up by Ivan (1497) the only class distinction recognised is between the serving and the not-serving folk. But there were conditions attached which gave the servant a real independence in regard to his employer. When he accepted a post under a prince, it was understood that he was free to leave his service whenever he chose, and enter that of some other ruler; and a written contract was usually