Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (8 page)

For a time, however, the one prize that eluded Moscow was the ancient northern city, Novgorod. Although the net was sweeping close, the old trading capital seemed to thrive despite the pressure from its upstart neighbour to the south. It paid tribute to Moscow (and through it, for decades, to the Golden Horde), but Novgorod preserved a distinctive culture and a most unautocratic pattern of civic government. The city had a cosmopolitan air. Wealthy, proud and free to build links of its own with foreigners, Novgorod took an active part in northern Europe’s Hanseatic League.
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With such connections, it was hardly surprising that a faction among its ruling class resented the Muscovite grand princes’ endless financial demands. It did not help, either, that businesses were suffering from Muscovite competition on fur-trading routes that Novgorod regarded as its own. This city would not buckle easily. When Vasily II and two of his younger sons paid a visit in 1460, there were rumours of a plot to murder all of them. Some members of Novgorod’s ruling council even advocated an alliance with Lithuania, hoping to find a diplomatic (or even a military) route out of their subjection to Moscow.
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In 1470, when Ivan III learned that Novgorod’s dissidents had made a fresh approach to Vilno, he seized the excuse to raise an army and ride north.

Novgorod could field more men, but Ivan’s troops were better led, and on 14 July 1471 the defenders were routed. The battle was one of the most decisive of Ivan’s career, and Novgorod’s absorption into Muscovy began. Like a python with an antelope, the smaller state set about consuming its enormous prize, but (just as in the python’s case) the process took considerable time. First, Novgorod was forced to sever diplomatic ties with Lithuania; in future the city would follow Moscow’s line in international affairs. Its leaders also paid a hefty fine, although at this stage they could still afford the 15,000 rubles that Ivan required. What seemed a fair and even magnanimous treaty in other ways, however, in fact allowed Ivan to regroup for the next round. In 1477 the Muscovite army mobilized for a second time, again on the pretext of treachery in Novgorod, and in December of that year the city was forced to accept far more humiliating terms. Its independent council was dissolved. The bell that had been used to summon it, the symbol of established civic pride, was taken down and carried off to Moscow, where it took its place among the others in Ivan’s Kremlin. More carts – three hundred of them – trundled south with Novgorod’s treasury of pearls, gold, silver and gems, adding enormously to the wealth that blazed round Ivan’s throne.
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And finally, the authoritarian political style of Moscow’s court was forced upon the older city. ‘We shall prosecute our sovereign rule,’ Ivan decreed, ‘as in the lower lands.’
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Disgrace was followed by dismemberment. In 1478, Ivan seized about a million hectares (roughly 3,860 square miles) of territory from the city-state. To make sure there would be no revolt, he deported the residents on a mass scale, and redistributed their land to his own retainers. Novgorod itself faced new restrictions. In 1493, the offices of the Hanseatic trading league in the city were closed on Ivan’s orders, cutting off Novgorod’s European links and forcing it more closely into Moscow’s orbit. Meanwhile, Novgorod’s archbishop, Feofil, who spoke against Ivan’s tyranny, was arrested and imprisoned in the Kremlin’s Chudov Monastery.
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Two decades after the first fatal blow, the python had finished with its most spectacular prey. The victory brought Ivan’s Moscow unprecedented riches. By issuing the northern land grants on a loan-for-service basis, the grand prince also laid the foundations for an expanded army that was almost self-financing, for in return for their estates, the settlers (
pomeshchiki
) were required to serve as cavalrymen and even to provide their own equipment, including their horses and attendants. By the end of the fifteenth century, the army at Ivan’s disposal was roughly four times the size of anything that Moscow had ever fielded before.
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The old Rus south-west, Galicia and what is now western Ukraine, remained in Lithuanian control, but Ivan could now call himself the sovereign and protector of the wealthy Russian north.

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That wealth was not the only source of Moscow’s lustre, however, and military force was not the only glue that held its far-flung territories together. Religious institutions were as crucial in the age of Moscow’s expansion as they had been to Ivan Kalita. The relationship was one of mutual benefit. The Kremlin’s charisma derived at least as much from the metropolitan’s presence as from the prince and his throne room. The two, in fact, were parts of the same whole, and in the reigns of Vasily II and Ivan III their relationship was reinforced by events beyond Moscow’s borders. For centuries, the Russian church had existed on the remote margins of the dazzling and sophisticated Byzantine commonwealth. Its spiritual capital had been Constantinople, and its metropolitans had owed their jobs to politicians and religious leaders there. Though their subjection to the Mongols had long masked the fact, this adherence to Constantinople was a major obstacle to any close alliance between Moscow and Europe’s numerous Catholic states. In the 1450s, however, a series of crises around the Mediterranean tested the strength of many ancient religious loyalties. Moscow resisted the temptations of Rome, and the Kremlin was launched on its path to leadership in the Orthodox world.

The first of these crises was triggered by the rapid expansion of the Ottoman Turkish empire in the 1400s. Though Constantinople had been in decline for some time, the rise of a well-organized Turkish military force on the Mediterranean coast marked its ultimate death knell. By the early fifteenth century, the spiritual capital of the Orthodox faith was no more than a fortified island in a Muslim landscape that stretched from Eastern Anatolia to the Aegean and northwards round the Black Sea into present-day Bulgaria. The trap was closing, too, and its desperate need for armed support led Constantinople’s rulers to consider a theological rapprochement with Rome. But there were so many hatchets to be buried first that the Bosphorus itself might have flowed red with rust. The desecrations wrought during the Fourth Crusade in 1204 were just the start; the leaders of the Eastern Church also had a vast stock of theological grievances against the schismatics in Rome. Many church leaders in the eastern world believed that any compromise with the Papists, however small, would lead them all to damnation and hell.

In the short term, however, some Orthodox clerics took a more diplomatic view, and a few even believed in Christian unity for its own sake. This was a prospect welcomed by some parties on the other side – Europe itself had troubled borders with the Turk, and the embattled pope of the time, Eugene IV, may also have hoped that unity with the old east would heal his own flock’s bitter internal feuds – so ecumenical talks were organized. These opened in 1438 as the Council of Ferrara. The discussions were intense and prolonged. In 1439, the entire meeting moved to Florence to escape an outbreak of plague, whereupon the arguments resumed, sticking (as always) on such thorny issues as the nature of the Trinity, the wording of the Creed, and the inclusion of yeast in the Communion bread, to say nothing of the overall spiritual primacy of the pope. The metropolitan that Constantinople had recently appointed to take care of the Russian lands, a Greek called Isidor, argued consistently for Christian reconciliation.
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At one point, thanks to his enthusiasm, the Russian church was even poised to recognize the existence of Purgatory (another stubborn sticking-point). To their surprise, almost every Orthodox delegate at the Council also accepted the overall authority of the Latin Pope. Isidor himself left Florence with the new title of cardinal.
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But what had been agreed under the friendly Tuscan sun looked scandalous to many who had not attended the meeting for themselves. Back in Anatolia, the archbishop of Ephesus was so horrified by the alien advances of the Catholics that he refused to sign the Council’s final papers. Even further to the east, in Moscow, the treachery at ‘Frolents’ was the pretext for a coup.

Vasily and the Russian church refused to recognize Isidor. On his arrival in Moscow, the cardinal-metropolitan was thrown into a cell in the Kremlin’s Chudov Monastery. The charge was heresy, and the penalty (on this occasion, just for once, Moscow’s authorities did not carry it out) could have been public burning. Clearly, Isidor had no chance at the Kremlin court, and it also turned out that while he had been at Florence, the prince had found a candidate of his own, a Russian called Yona, for the metropolitan’s seat. This step was a veritable declaration of spiritual independence, though a flurry of correspondence between the Kremlin and Patriarch Mitrofan of Constantinople attempted to cloak the decision in the language of grievance. In 1441, rejecting Isidor decisively, Vasily’s priests requested Mitrofan to send a replacement metropolitan of his own choice. The Orthodox Church in Russia was neither Roman nor Jewish, they wrote. Instead, it was the disciple of the blessed Constantine, the faithful child of Kiev’s St Vladimir, and after generations of such piety, its servants should not be forced into Latin heresies.
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Moscow’s appeal for a substitute metropolitan was unsuccessful, and in 1448, its prince finally informed the patriarch that he had acted unilaterally, replacing Isidor with Yona for himself.
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The new man, as Vasily stressed, would serve as metropolitan of Kiev and all Rus. For centuries, after all, that had been the title that had been conferred, more or less without controversy, on each of his predecessors. But in 1448, the move was doubly inflammatory, for Vasily was not merely wresting control of the metropolitanate from Constantinople’s hands; he was also laying claim (on behalf of the Kremlin’s religious candidate) to primacy in the Lithuanian-controlled cities of the Dnieper, including Kiev. The coup caused indignation in a range of foreign courts.
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For nervous observers beyond his borders, Vasily’s letter hinted that Moscow’s political reach might one day extend into what is now Ukraine.

For the present, however, the real revolution was that Moscow had acted without the sanction of Constantinople. For the first time, a new metropolitan owed his job directly to Moscow’s grand prince, and not surprisingly the Russian church became an even closer ally of the Kremlin. The asset it brought to the partnership was its theocratic ideology. For years to come, while princes did the fighting and sat on their golden thrones, it was the church that crafted the rituals, edited the hagiographical chronicle-histories, and designed the iconography of charismatic government. It also offered commentaries on the events of the day. When the city of Constantinople finally fell to the Ottomans in 1453, the Russian church was ready with context. The catastrophe, as it explained, was a judgement for the heresy of Florence. Vasily’s unilateral move, in appointing Yona in place of a doomed apostate, turned out to have been doubly blessed, and so was the grand prince himself.

But close associations have a price, and in this case the princes paid with scrupulous public piety. They were not free to test the waters of ecumenism. Their priests, too, often blocked the path to cultural diplomacy in the form of overtures to Europe. When Ivan III agreed to betroth his daughter, Elena, to the Catholic prince Alexander of Lithuania in 1494, he made it a condition that she had to retain her Orthodox faith. There were political reasons for this (the marriage was a power game on Ivan’s part), but an Orthodox priest from Moscow called Foma took the letter of religion to an unacceptable extreme. He nearly wrecked the wedding ceremony in Vilno by intoning his own prayers above the Catholic service, and at one point, when the bride and groom had just shared a ritual cup of wine, he grabbed the vessel from their hands and smashed it on the church flagstones.
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The marriage was never a happy one.

The princes themselves were not exempt from the church’s wrath. The notion of Moscow as the Third Rome, which emerged in the 1520s, began life as a warning to the government. Rather than praising Moscow, it was intended to remind its rulers what could happen when a great empire deserted the paths of virtue. Sinful leaders, the church scribes pointed out, had proved the ruin of Rome and Constantinople, both of which had once appeared so blessed. If Moscow – the Third Rome – should also stray as they had done, its doom was sealed.
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The range of errors that provoked that warning in the years to come was comprehensive, but none was more serious than the thought that any prince might build too close a link with the perfidious Catholics.

More usually, however, the church reserved the torments of hell for those who had displeased the Kremlin. In that respect, it proved to be a resolute supporter of Muscovite government. The religious leaders at Ivan III’s court were happy to accuse Novgorod’s Bishop Feofil of flirtation with the Latin Poles, for instance, and they also attacked the citizens of Pskov, whose independent culture bordered, for a time, on heresy.
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The Grand Prince of Moscow was now defender of the Russian faith in all but name.
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If any city disobeyed him, its punishment was certain. Ivan Kalita had depended on the khan – and on his genes – for sovereignty. By the reign of Ivan III, the prince’s right to rule was beginning to look as if it came – with conditions – from heaven.

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The Kremlin’s enhanced religious status was also a spur to rebuilding, and in particular to efforts by the new metropolitan, Yona. At the time of his appointment in 1448, the Kremlin was not in the greatest of repair. It had been sacked several times during the recent civil war, it had suffered what chroniclers insisted was an earthquake, and much of it had burned in the great fire of 1445.
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It is hard to imagine how the buildings looked, or how the overall landscape, which must have been littered with builders’ clutter, related to the art and treasure that both church and palace had begun to gather. It was no accident that many churches and monastic buildings doubled as strongrooms.
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Their limestone crypts were used to hide the city’s valuables; in times of danger everyone tried to move their treasure to the safety of the Kremlin walls. But some things were harder to carry than others. The Kremlin Cathedral of the Annunciation, built some time in the 1360s, was adorned with an iconostasis created by the master-artists Theophanes the Greek and Andrei Rublev.
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There were beautiful wall-paintings and more icons in the Archangel Cathedral and the Church of the Nativity of the Virgin. Among the other wonders was a gilded clock, the work of an early fifteenth-century Serb master, which struck the hours in a way that locals regarded as miraculous.
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Some of the icons have survived, but that clock, and much of the great art of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, was destroyed within decades of its creation. Vasily II was prince over a timber-yard.