Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

Concentrating power and gaining the consensus of the junior princes and boyars became the paramount priority for the Great Princes, especially after the mid-15th-century civil war showed how dangerous disunity was. Their success enabled Moscow to become the largest and most flourishing of the post-Kievan principalities, with the single exception of Novgorod. Between 1462 and 1533, Muscovy roughly tripled in size and population. By persuasion, marriage settlement, and the occasional threat of war, Moscow brought under its sway several principalities of the north and east. The largest prize was Novgorod itself, which was trying to form an alliance with Lithuania in order to maintain its independence and commercial links with the Baltic. In 1478, Ivan III (r. 1462–1505) marched into the city, closed the veche, and took down its summoning bell, symbol of its independence. He deported many of Novgorod’s landowners and awarded their extensive lands as pomestia (service estates) to his own followers. In the following decades, making such awards from newly acquired land enabled the Muscovite Great Prince to create his own army, with its commanders answerable to him. Junior princes had to take their place in the boyar hierarchy.

Up until the late 15th century, all the same, Moscow still had a nominal overlord, the Khan of the Great Horde, one of the remnants of the defunct Golden Horde. In practice, Ivan III, though he continued to pay tribute, ignored his theoretical obligation to seek consent for his policies from the Khan. In 1480, Khan Akhmet made one final attempt to enforce this obligation by moving his armies towards Moscow. Ivan barred his way on the River Ugra, and after a long standoff, Akhmet retreated. This was a tacit acknowledgement that Mongol suzerainty was no longer enforceable, though Moscow continued to pay tribute for a few more years.

At around the same period, the church was also emerging from under the canopy of Byzantium. As the Byzantine Empire became progressively weaker, more of its worldly responsibilities devolved upon the Patriarch, who reacted by attempting a reunion with Rome. At the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438–9), the Orthodox accepted the demands of the Vatican on all essential doctrinal matters. Metropolitan Isidor, who attended on behalf of Muscovy, signed the concluding document, and returned home a Roman cardinal. He entered the city in solemn procession holding aloft a crucifix, but to his horror was arrested and confined in a monastery for apostasy. Henceforth, the Muscovite church no longer deferred automatically to the Byzantine Patriarch. Shortly after that, in 1453, Byzantium finally fell to the Ottoman Empire – an event which appalled Moscow’s churchmen, but which also vindicated their judgement and liberated them.

By the late 15th century, then, Muscovy was incontestably the dominant power in the north and east of former Kievan Rus, and it had become independent of the Mongols. It had achieved this by integrating most of what had been a dynastic federation into a single patrimony, governed by adapting some Mongol practices.

Its church had emancipated itself from Byzantium and believed it had an ecumenical mission as the bastion of the one true Christian faith. The amalgam of radical centralization with a sense of universal religious calling was to remain the most characteristic feature of Muscovy and later of Russia.

There were at this stage, though, several possible futures before it. It could become an embryonic East Slav nation-state – but the western branches of that potential nation were already under another power. It could become a centre of the eastern Christian ecumene, taking over from Byzantium – but, as we shall see, it was to dilute that mission by assimilating many non-Orthodox, indeed non-Christian, peoples. Or it could become a north Eurasian multi-ethnic and multi-faith empire, in effect the successor to the Golden Horde – but in that case, the church, with its assertive sense of mission and its secular riches, would prove a problematic ally. How these latent conflicts were resolved we shall see in the next chapter.

Chapter 2

The formation of the Muscovite state