Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (5 page)

Buildings, however, were not the only legacy that Andrei left. In their determination to prove the city’s special destiny, his advisors also created a new cult of the Mother of God. The festival of the Protection of the Veil, sponsored by Andrei himself, was meant to celebrate the Virgin’s special care for all Rus lands, but the prince’s men made sure that it was the new capital at Vladimir that topped the list.
³⁰
In the same spirit, Andrei’s cathedral was not named for the Holy Wisdom, but for the Dormition of the Virgin, the death and miraculous resurrection of his city’s holy protectress. The prince endowed his building with numerous icons, many of which were painted to order, but he brought its centrepiece to Vladimir from Kiev. According to legend, this likeness of the Virgin and Child had originally been painted by St Luke, though in reality Andrei’s icon was probably less than a century old.
³¹
Whatever its pre-history, however, it had a special place in the religious practice of the region, and its arrival in Vladimir marked an epoch. Even later, when it had been moved to Moscow and its story had been woven into legends like that of Ushakov’s tree, the miracle-working icon was still known as the Virgin of Vladimir.

*   *   *

In Andrei’s lifetime, Moscow did not even rate a palace, though the cruel ruler seems to have commissioned a new set of walls. The settlement remained a military outpost and a centre for collecting tithes and taxes; successive princes of Vladimir hardly wasted an hour’s prayer on it. Most Orthodox believers were more concerned about the fate of distant, iconic Constantinople, which was sacked by the pope’s own men, the soldiers of the Fourth Crusade, in 1204. Rome’s insult to the eastern faith was widely felt.
³²
But no-one could have predicted how quickly that particular drama was to be forgotten. A storm was about to break directly on the Rus. The princes were preoccupied as usual with quarrels of their own, but traders on the old silk routes knew all about the powerful new force. An enemy that Europeans had not seen before crossed the Caucasus mountains from Persia in the summer of 1223. Its forces were composed of horsemen, many of them lightly armed, and they moved rapidly, too fast for the princes’ defending armies, whom they engaged and defeated in battle on the River Kalka before vanishing almost as swiftly as they had appeared. Nervous military experts in Kiev and the border city of Ryazan attempted to dismiss the skirmish as another steppe-based tribal raid, the sort of thing their cities had endured and overcome for centuries. In fact, it was a mission of reconnaissance.

The battle on the Kalka was followed, somewhere in the heart of Asia, by a period of detailed preparation and training. For the horsemen, such drill and planning had become routine. By the early 1220s, they had already humiliated Khwarezm and sacked Merv, Bukhara and Samarkand; they had crossed the Gobi desert and defeated the hosts of the Jin; and they had ridden westward from the Oxus to the edge of the Crimean steppe. The territory they controlled was four times larger than the Roman empire at its greatest extent, and most of it had been subdued in one lifetime. For such a host, the Dnieper region would have seemed like easy meat, but their plans received a setback in 1227 with the sudden death of their revered leader, Chinghis (or Genghis) Khan. The interval was relatively brief, however. In 1234, a council of the clans of the Mongol Horde, meeting in their capital at Karakorum twelve weeks’ fast ride east of the Volga, agreed to a sustained strike deep into the European plain. As ever, the planning was thorough. The Mongol army began by neutralizing the steppe people of the east and south, removing all potential allies of the Rus. In the winter of 1237, their troops, led by Batu-khan, a grandson of Chinghis, sprang their attack on towns and villages in the Russian north-east. The first to fall was Ryazan, which was overrun after a siege in late December. Batu’s horsemen then headed for Vladimir, which surrendered after bitter fighting in February 1238. Almost in passing, they sacked and burned Moscow, killing its governor and plundering its meagre treasure.
³³
The wooden settlement and its fortress burned like a torch.

Away to the south-west, Kiev and its immediate neighbours remained untouched for two more years, but at the end of 1240 the great army returned, perhaps 140,000-strong, this time heading for the Dnieper.
³⁴
By now the Mongols’ methods were familiar. They relied on good preparation, including excellent advance intelligence, and they launched surprise attacks with overwhelming force. They were expert in field and siege tactics, consummate archers, masters of Greek fire. They also knew the value of terror; the importance of visible, disproportionate and unforgettable brutality. Kiev and nearby Pereyaslavl and Chernigov fell that same winter, and in 1241 Batu moved west to Galich and onwards into Hungary. His army seemed invincible, and might have reached the Rhine or further if the death, in Karakorum, of the Great Khan, Ugudey, the third son of Chinghis, had not summoned the commander back to settle the succession. The territories of west-central Europe were spared, but the scattered and internally divided lands of the Rus princes would spend the next two centuries in subjugation to Mongol rule.

Eye-witness accounts of the first shock are understandably scarce. If they survived, most city-dwellers tried to flee, dispersing through the woods to escape the hoofbeats that presaged capture or death. Some found refuge in monasteries – the conquerors respected local religion almost everywhere – but even if these people had the strength to tell their tales it would have needed a monk with an unusually cool head to find a pen and take a note. As a result, there is almost no reliable picture of conditions in the princes’ lands in the decade of the Mongol raids. The brunt of suffering, as always, was borne by the civilian poor, whose future (if they had not been slaughtered in the first terrible assault) often involved forced deportation and imprisonment as hostages or slaves. To evade that, many melted northwards to the taiga and the Arctic Sea. The rest ended up paying tribute (and providing board) to any armed stranger who hammered on their door. The nobility, however, found itself in a different kind of trap. Some, like their subjects, were killed in the bloodbaths of the first months, but the survivors became the vassals of a new empire.

It did not matter whether or not a city had burned. Novgorod, for instance, had escaped the first round of attacks (thanks to an early spring flood that blocked the horsemen’s route), but it was ordered nevertheless to pay tribute to the conquerors, a yearly tax in silver, gold and furs, in grain, and also soldiers for the khan’s army.
³⁵
There were short-lived rebellions in several cities when the taxmen came, but these merely called down greater ruin. Fire seemed to be the princes’ destiny. In the 1250s, their cities and surviving farms faced further raids from neighbours on their other flanks, including the Teutonic knights and Swedes in the north, the Polovtsy in the south, and Lithuanian tribesmen from the west. The Rus elite also persisted in fighting each other, and few stopped short of treachery, deceit, or even the murder of brother-princes. Every city and its leaders had to calculate where to build friendships and whom to fight. But ultimate authority no longer rested in the princes’ clan. The Mongol khan came to be seen as something like an emperor (the Rus sometimes referred to their new suzerain’s power as
tsarstvo,
from the word
tsar
– or caesar), and each prince owed his sceptre, in the end, to him.

The case for appeasement was overwhelming, but in the confusion and carnage it took an imaginative prince to strike a lasting deal. Though many of the Rus eventually negotiated with the khan’s men, the most consistent and trusted in these early years was Alexander Nevsky. His frequent visits to the khan’s headquarters suggest that he was willing to work with Mongol overlords, and even that he acted as a sort of local advisor on Rus affairs.
³⁶
The khan could count on his new vassal to suppress rebellion at home (Nevsky made short work of an uprising in Novgorod), and also to ensure that tribute from the new empire was collected and paid. Alexander’s reward was an endorsement of his title to the throne of Vladimir. In years to come, even as Vladimir itself declined, the charter to rule this crumbling city would continue to confer pre-eminence upon its holder, regardless of where he was physically based, and the quest to obtain it became the focus of complex diplomacy between the Rus world and the Mongol court. As peoples of the medieval steppe, the Mongols honoured royal blood. They did not lightly overturn the Riurikid system of governance. But since the princes were their vassals, they expected homage just as any feudal lord in Europe might, and anyone who sought advantage in their Rus empire had henceforth to negotiate with them.

Life had never been tranquil in the northern woods, but now it was precarious for everyone. Ironically, these were exactly the conditions that would favour Moscow, not least because the place appeared remote and insignificant. In part because its forests were so uninviting, refugees from richer cities like Vladimir were drawn to look for shelter there. The township’s population soon recovered and began to grow. Ten years after Batu’s onslaught, in 1247 or 1248, the fortress even acquired a prince of its own, Mikhail the Brave, though this man’s ambitions and his (short) future turned out to lie elsewhere. In 1262, however, Moscow and its associated lands were awarded to Alexander Nevsky’s two-year-old son, Daniil, and the town’s continuous history as a princely seat – a real city – began. Once he became an adult (somewhere between the ages of nine and twelve), Daniil took up permanent residence in a wooden palace in the walled compound on the city’s main hill. A Mongol army sacked the place a decade later, but the wooden buildings were rebuilt as usual – a church could be completed in a day – and business limped back to life.

Daniil had been a younger son, which explained why he received this town, the meanest and least glamorous of his father’s estates. Although he built new churches and expanded the appanage lands, and though his successors, the Daniilovichi, amassed increasing wealth over the years, this sub-branch of the Riurikids had little prospect of wide influence or continental power. Moscow did not even rate its own bishop, and it remained an outpost in a diocese whose centre was two hundred miles away in Rostov.
³⁷
But Mongol rule distorted all realities. In the early fourteenth century, the princes of a better-placed and larger city, Tver, seemed destined to inherit the coveted throne of Vladimir, but their ambition made them suspect in the khans’ eyes. The Mongols needed someone more compliant, easier to push around. Because each prince was required to apply in person to the khan, too, the next act in the Muscovite foundation drama was played out far from its chill northern forests at the fabulous Mongol court.

*   *   *

Most early Russian chronicles are a little prim about their leaders’ dealings with the Horde. Their authors (usually court clerics of later times) mention that princes and leading figures in the church ‘visited the Horde’, but they tend not to spell out what that meant in practice. It is an awkward fact, the sort that does not fit the epic template, and medieval scribes must have struggled with it much as modern patriots still do. There is no consensus about the cultural impact on Russia of its Mongol centuries, which is why some prefer to focus on the icons and the purely Russian saints. In fact, however, most Rus political figures, including leaders of the church, spent substantial amounts of time at the courts of various successive khans. At first, that meant an arduous pilgrimage beyond the Ural mountains to Karakorum, a journey of such rigour that more than one exhausted rider perished on the way. But Batu, the man who had led the sack of Eastern Europe, founded a capital for his own khanate, often known as the Golden Horde, at Sarai, in splendid landscape near the mouth of the Volga, and before long this was the destination for embassies from the conquered Russian lands.

The Golden Horde evokes a memorable set of legends. It is easy to imagine a forest of tents, rough men tearing at lumps of meat, perhaps a desiccated scalp or two. It is easy to imagine gold, too, but history has painted its barbaric owners in the guise of shiftless thieves; the oriental menace echoes still in the name of the road that leads south from the Kremlin: Bolshaya Ordinka, Great Horde Road. In fact, however, the ‘Horde’ was simply the khan’s imperial base; the Turkic word had nothing to do with its later connotations of a warlike rabble, and deserves to be translated as ‘the ruler’s pavilion’.
³⁸
In the weeks that it took to cross the steppe, petitioners would have been well advised to banish every other prejudice along these lines. As they discovered when the glint of the first roof emerged out of the khaki haze, the Mongols lived like the emperors that they had become.
³⁹
Batu’s original capital had certainly been made of tents, but his successors built on a truly luxurious scale.
⁴⁰

Sarai was a real city, not a camp. The khans still used their tents for hunting expeditions – and for military campaigns – but in its heyday the capital of the Golden Horde was a permanent centre of commerce and cultural exchange. Building-labour was no problem, for the khan owned slaves from two continents, including craftsmen from the old Slav lands. Gold, gems, silver and porcelain from the entire known world were used to adorn his palaces. The result was stupendous. The city, according to an Arab visitor of 1333, was an ‘extraordinary size, filled to overflowing with people, handsome markets, and broad streets’. Slavs, Germans and Hungarians rubbed shoulders in the market-place with Mongols, Chinese and Sogdian silk traders. The value of the goods in Sarai’s merchant quarter represented so vast a sum that the district had to be specially fortified.
⁴¹
The khan’s pavilions themselves were topped with such a quantity of gold that even a visitor from Egypt was startled.
⁴²
The city was also rich in culture, and its leaders subtle in their management of diverse populations. By the fourteenth century, Sarai even had a bishop of its own. In all, it was remarkable for its open aspect, and that, too, was a deliberate choice. Fortifications, in Mongol tradition, were regarded as a sign of cowardice. Battles were lost and won at speed, so walls were simply barriers to be breached or burned.
⁴³
How any prince of the Russian lands, arriving at last after many weeks’ trek, and having set out from a wooden citadel, would have been struck by all of this can only be imagined.