17b: Gathering the Lands

The face of Eastern Europe began to change in the 1300s AD. In the first place, the Mongol Empire and its spinoff, the Golden Horde, were starting to fall apart. The Golden Horde had watched happily as the major principalities of Rus were shattered by the practice of appanage. Now, in the fourteenth century, they depended on the Russians themselves to collect tribute - and help them defend against invasions from the West. We've already mentioned the invasions of the Swedish and Teutonic Knights, both stopped by Prince Alexander Nevsky in the 1240s. More dangerous yet was the pagan principality of Lithuania, recently converted back from Christianity. Under Gediminas Algirdas (1345-1377), Lithuania built a huge empire reaching from the Baltic Sea south to the Black Sea. In 1386, Lithuania entered into a personal union with the kingdom of Poland, and reconverted yet again to Catholicism. The Lithuanians and their Polish allies were a constant threat to Rus and the Mongols alike. To add insult to injury, the joint Lithuanian-Polish empire also now controlled Kiev and its area - the heartland of the Rus culture.

Moscow was founded as a trading post on the river of the same name in 1147. The Golden Horde had sacked Moscow in 1238, but could exert little influence there due to Moscow's remote location. This helped. It also helped that Moscow's princes did not tend to go appanage crazy, thereby keeping Muscovy in one piece. Another Muscovite strong point was the innate sneakiness of the local princes. When Prince Ivan I "Moneybags" (1325-1341) became the Golden Horde's tax collector by receiving the yarlyk, he added to his income by overtaxing his neighbors, especially those neighbors whose land he wanted. He also enticed the Russian Orthodox Church to establish its headquarters in Moscow, lending his principality even more prestige. Ivan Moneybags's grandson Dmitri (1359-1389) rebuilt Moscow's fortified city center, or "Kremlin," in stone, just in time to fight off two separate Lithuanian invasions in 1368 and 1370.  Impressed with his own success, Dmitri stopped paying the Mongols tribute (although he probably still collected it himself). In turn, the Mongol general Mamai invaded Muscovy in 1380. A smashing victory over the Mongols earned him the nickname Dmitri Donskoi - Dmitri of the Don. It also earned Moscow a return visit from the Mongols in 1382, this time under a more capable general named Toktamysh. Dmitri wisely made peace with Toktamysh, and in return was reinstated as Grand Prince of Vladimir, complete with the yarlyk. But upon Dmitri's death in 1389, his son Vasily I was crowned Grand Prince without consulting the Golden Horde. Vasily's coronation marked the beginning of Muscovy's rise, and for the Golden Horde, the beginning of the end. Vasily I ruled Muscovy until 1425, keeping up the family tradition of gathering the lands of others whenever possible. Meanwhile, in southern Russia, the Golden Horde was all but polished off by the Mongol conqueror Timurlane.

Yet the Muscovites were not immune from vicious civil wars. Vasily I was succeeded in 1425 by his 10 year old son Vasily II, who was forced into a long and nasty civil war by his uncle and cousins. It took young Vasily II twenty-five years to achieve sole power; in the meantime, he had been captured once by the Mongols and blinded by one of his cousins. In 1453, the Byzantine empire fell and the Patriarch of Constantinople gave his blessing to Metropolitan Jonah of Moscow, acknowledging that the Russian Orthodox Church was now completely independed. The fall of Constantinople also created the notion that Moscow was to be the Third Rome, after Rome herself and Constantinople. In 1462, Vasily II's son Ivan III came to the throne, planning to expand on what his father had left him. His brothers tried to claim a part of the heritage, but Ivan III had learned from his father's adventures and suppressed his brothers ruthlessly. In 1471 he fought a war with the Republic of Great Novgorod because they had allied with the heathen (that is, Roman Catholic Poles); he fought another war with Great Novgorod in 1477 which allowed him to annex the hated city once and for all. He exiled many of Great Novgorod's leading families, starting up a practice of ethnic cleansing which would continue for centuries and nipping in the bud the fragile flame of Russian democracy.

The most important political event of Ivan III's reign was his formal refusal in 1480 to pay further tribute to the Golden Horde, which was by now a loose alliance of smaller khanates. The Horde's last Khan, Ahmed, made a token attempt to make Ivan III comply, but the two armies just camped opposite each other until winter came and both sides went home. Although Ivan III's glorious defeat of the Golden Horde was duly commemorated with suitable paintings, sculptures, and medals, the Mongol occupation ended not with a bang, but with a barely audible whimper.

On the other hand, Ivan III's changes to the Russian state were drastic.  He was ably assisted by his second wife, the Byzantine princess Zoe Palaeologa, who took the Orthodox name of Sophia. Their marriage in 1469 marked the conversion of the Grand Duchy of Moscow into the Russian Empire. Under Sophia's influence, Ivan III imported Byzantine artists and architects to make his capital a worthy Third Rome by building such masterpeces as Assumption Cathedral. He also adopted elements of Byzantine iconography such as the double-headed eagle, along with Byzantine rituals dating back to the old Roman Emperor Diocletian. Finally, Ivan III occasionally referred to himself  as Tsar - that is, Caesar: a term Russians had previously reserved for the Byzantine emperor or the Khan of the Golden Horde.  Accordingly, Ivan II ruled in a strictly autocratic fashion. He refused to take counsel from his boyars (that is, the most important nobles). On the other hand, he was very concerned with the rule of law. As the Byzantines had based their egal code upon the collected laws of ancient Rome, so Ivan III collected ancient Rus laws into a document he called the Sudebnik.The Sudebnik expanded on Yaroslav's old Russkaya Pravda by spelleng out exact legal procedures to be used throughout the Muscovite state. Although this fostered the rule of law, the law was based upon the will of Tsar Ivan III. To avoid the old problem of division by appanage, in 1502 he took as co-regent his son by Sophia, Vasily III. Ivan III's success in making Moscow the center of the Russian world and a worthy successor to Constantinople, earned him the title  "the Great."

Succeeding as Grand Prince in 1505, Vasily III inherited the family program of extending Muscovy's boundaries by the gathering of others' lands. For the most part he succeeded, but he had less luck fending off the pressures of powerful boyar families such as the Shuiskys. Vasily III sent the boyars into exile, and then sent into exile potential supporters of the boyars, echoing the autocratic approach instituted by his father Ivan III. Although he ruled for twenty-eight years, his sole heir was a three-year-old son who became famous as Ivan the Terrible.