Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

Mediterranean. He strengthened the Hapsburgs but weakened the

Empire; he lost Lorraine and surrendered Burgundy. The princes of

Germany frustrated his attempt to centralize authority there, and from

his time the Holy Roman Empire was a decaying tissue waiting for

Napoleon to pronounce it dead. He failed in his efforts to crush

Protestantism in Germany, and his method of repressing it in the

Netherlands left a tragic legacy to his son. He had found the German

cities flourishing and free; he left them ailing under a reactionary

feudalism. When he came to Germany it was alive with ideas and

energy beyond any other nation in Europe; when he abdicated it was

spiritually and intellectually exhausted, and would lie fallow for two

centuries. In Germany and Italy his policies were a minor cause of

decline, but in Spain it was chiefly his action that crushed municipal

liberty and vigor. He might have saved England for the Church by

persuading Catherine to yield to Henry's need for an heir; instead

he forced Clement into a ruinous vacillation.

And yet it is our hindsight that sees his mistakes and their

enormity; our historical sense can condone them as rooted in the

limitations of his mental environment and in the harsh delusions of

the age. He was the ablest statesman among his contemporaries, but

only in the sense that he dealt courageously with the profoundest

issues in their widest range. He was a great man dwarfed and shattered

by the problems of his time.

Two fundamental movements pervaded his long reign. The most

fundamental was the growth of nationalism under centralized

monarchies; in this he did not share. The most dramatic was a

religious revolution rising out of national and territorial

divisions and interests. Northern Germany and Scandinavia accepted

Lutheranism; southern Germany, Switzerland, and the Lowlands divided

into Protestant and Catholic sections; Scotland became Calvinist

Presbyterian, England became Anglican Catholic or Calvinist Puritan.

Ireland, France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal remained loyal to a

distant or chastened papacy. Yet amid that double fragmentation a

subtle integration grew: the proudly independent states found

themselves interdependent as never before, increasingly bound in one

economic web, and forming a vast theater of interrelated politics,

wars, law, literature, and art. The Europe that our youth knew was

taking form.

BOOK III: THE STRANGERS IN THE GATE: 1300-1566

CHAPTER XXIX: The Unification of Russia: 1300-1584

I. THE PEOPLE

-

IN 1300 Russia did not exist. The north belonged for the most part

to three self-governed city-states: Novgorod, Viatka, Pskov. The

western and southern provinces were dependencies of Lithuania. In

the east the principalities of Moscow, Ryazan, Suzday, Nijni Novgorod,

and Tver all claimed individual sovereignty, and were united only in

common subjection to the Golden Horde.

The Horde took its noun from Turkish ordu, camp, and its adjective

from the domed tent, covered with cloth of gold, that had served as

headquarters for Batu the Splendid, grandson of Ghengis Khan. Having

conquered southern Russia and western Asia, these marauding Asiatics

built their capital at Sarai on a branch of the lower Volga, and there

received annual tribute from the Russian princes. The Horde was partly

agricultural, partly nomad pastoral. The ruling families were

Mongol, the rest were mostly Turks. The name Tatar came to the Horde

from the Ta-ta tribes of the Gobi, who in the ninth century had

started the Mongol avalanche toward the West. The chief results from

the long subjection of Russia to the Horde were social: the

autocracy of the Moscow dukes, the servile loyalty of the people to

their princes, the low status of woman, the military, financial, and

judicial organization of the Muscovite government on Tatar lines.

The Tatar domination deferred for two centuries the attempt of

Russia to become a European Occidental state.

The Russian people faced the most arduous conditions with silent

stoicism, except that amid their tribulations they found the courage

to sing. Their enemies called them coarse, cruel, dishonest,

cunning, and violent; `06291 doubtless toil and trouble and a trying

climate toughened them; but their patience, good humor,

friendliness, and hospitality redeemed them- so much so that they were

inclined to believe themselves, more humano, the salt of the

earth. They were beaten into civilization by barbarous laws and

frightful penalties; so, we are told, a wife who murdered her

husband was buried alive up to the neck, sorcerers were burned alive

in an iron cage, and counterfeiters had liquid metal poured down their

throats. `06292 Like any people fighting cold, the Russians drank

alcohol abundantly, sometimes to drunken stupor; even their food was

seasoned to warm them. They enjoyed hot baths, and bathed more

frequently than most Europeans. Religion bade women hide their

tempting forms and hair, and branded them as Satan's chosen

instrument; yet they were equal with men before the law, and often

joined in public pastimes or the dance- which was forbidden as a

sin. The Russian Church preached a strict morality, and prohibited

conjugal relations during Lent; presumably the severity of the code

was a counterpoise to the tendency of the people to indulge

excessively in almost the only pleasure left to them. Marriages were

arranged by the parents, and came early; girls of twelve, boys of

fourteen, were considered nubile. Wedding ceremonies were complex,

with ancient symbolism and festivities; through all these the bride

was required to keep a modest silence; her revenge was deferred. On

the morrow she was expected to show to her husband's mother the

evidence that he had married a virgin. Usually the women of the

household remained in an upper apartment or terem, away from the

men; and the authority of the father was as absolute in the family

as that of the czar in the state.

Piety sublimated poverty into a preparation for paradise. Every

house of any size had a room decorated with icons as a place of

frequent prayer. A proper visitor, before saluting his hosts,

saluted the icons first. Good women carried rosaries wherever they

went. Prayers were recited as magic incantations; so, said the

Domostroi - a famous manual of the sixteenth century- a certain

prayer repeated 600 times a day for three years would cause the

incarnation, in the re-petitioner, of the Father, the Son, and the

Holy Ghost. `06293 But there were many beautiful features in this

superstitious religion. On Easter morning people greeted one another

with the joyful words, "Christ is risen." In this hope death was in

some measure eased; facing it, a decent man would pay his debts,

relieve his debtors, free one or more of his bondmen, leave alms to

the poor and the Church, and breathe his last in confident expectation

of eternal life.

The Russian Church stimulated this piety with architecture,

murals, icons, powerful sermons, hypnotic ceremonies, and massive

choral song that seemed to rise from the most mystical depths of the

soul or the stomach. The Church was a vital organ of the state, and

her services in teaching letters and morality, disciplining character,

and buttressing social order were lavishly rewarded. Monasteries

were numerous and immense. The Troitsa-Sergievskaya Lavra- the

Monastery of the Trinity founded by St. Sergius in 1335- had amassed

by 1600 such extensive lands that over 100,000 peasants were needed

for their cultivation. In return the monasteries distributed charity

on a Russian scale; some fed 400 people daily; in a famine year the

monastery at Volokolamsk fed 7,000 in one day. Monks took a vow of

chastity, but priests were obliged to marry. These "papas" were mostly

illiterate, but that was not held against them by the people. The

metropolitans of Moscow were in many cases the ablest, as well as

the most learned, men of their generation, risking their silver to

preserve the state, and guiding the princes toward national unity. St.

Alexis was the virtual ruler of Russia during his tenure of the

Muscovite see (1354-70). With all her faults- which may have been

dictated by her tasks- the Russian Church in this formative age served

as the supreme civilizing agent among a people brutalized by the

hardships of life and the predatory nature of man.

In 1448 the Russian Church, repudiating the merger of Greek with

Roman Christianity at the Council of Florence, declared her

independence of the Byzantine patriarch; and when, five years later,

Constantinople fell to the Turks, Moscow became the metropolis of

the Orthodox faith. "Know now," wrote a fervent monk to a Grand Prince

of Moscow about 1505, "that the sovereignty of all Christendom has

been united in thine own. For the two Romes have fallen, but the third

doth endure. A fourth there shall never be, for thy Christian empire

shall last forever." `06294

The Church was almost the sole patron of letters and the arts, and

therefore their dictator. The best literature was unwritten. The songs

of the people, passing from mouth to mouth, from generation to

generation, celebrated their loves, weddings, sorrows, seasons,

holydays, or deaths; and there were popular lays of cherished

saints, ancient heroes, and legendary exploits, like those of Sadko

the merchant of Novgorod. Blind men or cripples went from village to

village singing such songs and lays and sacred chants. Written

literature was nearly all monastic, and served religion.

It was the monks who now brought icon painting to a finished art.

Upon a small panel of wood, sometimes covered with cloth, they applied

a glutinous coat; on this they drew their design; within this they

laid their colors in tempera; they covered the painting with

varnish, and enclosed it in a metal frame. The subjects were

determined by ecclesiastical authority; the figures and features

were derived from Byzantine models, and went back in continuous

evolution through the mosaics of Constantinople to the paintings of

Hellenistic Alexandria. The best icons from this age are the anonymous

Christ Enthroned in the Cathedral of the Assumption in Moscow; the

Entry of Christ into Jerusalem, from the school of Novgorod; and

The Holy Trinity of the monk Andrei Rubliov in the Monastery of

the Trinity. Rubliov and his teacher, Theophanes the Greek, painted

frescoes, half Byzantine and half Byzantine El Greco, in Vladimir,

Moscow, and Novgorod, but time has had its way with them.

Every ruler signalized his splendor, and eased his conscience, by

building or endowing a church or a monastery. Forms and motives from

Armenia, Persia, India, Tibet, Mongolia, Italy, and Scandinavia joined

with the predominant Byzantine heritage to mold Russian church

architecture, with its picturesque multiplicity of units, its

central gilded dome, its bulbous cupolas admirably designed to shed

rain and snow. After the fall of Constantinople and the expulsion of

the Tatars the dependence of Russia upon Byzantine and Oriental art

subsided, and influences from the West entered to modify the Slavic

style. In 1472 Ivan III, hoping thereby to inherit the rights and

titles of the Byzantine emperors, married Zoe Palaeologus, niece of

the last ruler of the Eastern Empire. She had been brought up in Rome,

and had imbibed something of the early Renaissance. She brought

Greek scholars with her, and acquainted Ivan with Italian art. It

may have been at her suggestion that he sent the first Russian mission

to the West (1474), with instructions to secure Italian artists for

Moscow. Ridolfo Fieravante of Bologna, called Aristotle because of the

range of his abilities, accepted the invitation; and further Russian

forays netted Pietro Solario, Alevisio Novi, and several other

artists. It was these Italians who, with Russian aides and labor,

rebuilt the Kremlin.

Yuri Dolgoruki had founded Moscow (1156) by raising a wall around

his villa, which was strategically situated at the confluence of two

rivers; this fortress ( kreml ) was the first form of the Kremlin.

In time the enclosure was enlarged, and churches and palaces rose

within a massive wall of oak. Ivan III set himself to transform the

entire ensemble. It was apparently Fieravante who (1475-79)

reconstructed, in the Kremlin, the old Cathedral of the Assumption

(Uspenskiy Sobor), where future czars were to be crowned; the design

remained Byzantine, with Italian decoration. Architects from Pskov

added, in the enclosure, the little Cathedral of the Annunciation

(Blagovyeschenskiy Sobor, 1484-89); and, again in the Kremlin,

Alevisio raised the Cathedral of the Archangel (1505-09). Solario

and others rewalled the circuit in pink brick (1485-1508), in the

style of the Castello Sforzesco at Milan. `06295 It was from this

many-templed center of Russia, this overpowering union and

concentration of secular and ecclesiastical authority, that the

grand princes and the metropolitans of Moscow spread their rule over

nobles, merchants, and peasants, and laid in blood and bones and piety

the foundations of one of the mightiest empires in history.

II. THE PRINCES OF MOSCOW

-

Moscow remained an obscure village until Daniel Alexandrovitch,

toward the end of the thirteenth century, extended its hinterland

and made it a minor principality. Historical hindsight `06296

attributes Moscow's growth to its position on the navigable Moscow

River, which was connected by short overland portage with the Volga on

the east and the Oka, Don, and Dnieper on the south and west. Yuri

Danielovitch- son of Daniel- Prince of Moscow, coveted the neighboring

principality of Suzdal, with its relatively rich capital, Vladimir;

Michael, Prince of Tver, coveted the same; Moscow and Tver fought

for the prize; Moscow won; Michael was killed and canonized; Moscow

grew. Yuri's brother and successor, Ivan I, took the double title of

Grand Prince of Moscow and Grand Duke of Vladimir.

As collector of Russian tribute for the Tatar khan, Ivan I exacted

more than he remitted, and prospered wickedly. His rapacity won him

the nickname Kalita, Moneybag, but he gave the principalities thirteen

years' respite from Tatar raids. He died as a tonsured monk,

censered with the odor of sanctity (1341). His son Simeon the Proud

inherited his flair for taxgathering. Claiming authority over every

province, he called himself Grand Prince of All the Russias, which did

not prevent his dying of the plague (1353). Ivan II was a gentle and

peaceable ruler, under whom Russia fell into fratricidal war. His

son Dmitri had all requisite martial qualities; he defeated every

rival, and defied the khan. In 1380 Khan Mamai assembled a horde of

Tatars, Genoese mercenaries, and other flotsam, and advanced toward

Moscow. Dmitri and his Russian allies met the horde at Kulikovo,

near the Don, defeated it (1380), and won the cognomen Donskoi. Two

years later the Tatars attacked again, with 100,000 men. The Russians,

deceived and exhausted by victory, failed to raise a comparable force;

the Tatars captured Moscow, massacred 24,000 of the population, and

burned the city to the ground. Dmitri's son Vasili I made peace with

the Tatars, annexed Nijni Novgorod, and compelled Novgorod and

Viatka to accept him as their overlord.

The Grand Princes of Moscow adopted the Tatar technique of

despotism, perhaps as the alternative to an illiterate chaos. Under an

autocracy of violence and craft a bureaucracy on Byzantine lines

administered the government, subject to a Council of Boyars advising

and serving the prince. The boyars were at once the leaders of the

army, the governing lords of their localities, the organizers,

protectors, and exploiters of the semifree peasants who tilled the

land. Adventurous colonists migrated to unsettled regions, drained the

swamps, fertilized the soil by burning the woods and brush,

exhausted it with improvident tillage, and moved on again, until

they reached the White Sea and the Urals, and seeped into Siberia.

In the endless plains towns were many but small; houses were of wood

and mud, calculated to burn down within twenty years at most. Roads

were unpaved, and were least agonizing in winter, when they were

covered with snow packed by sleds and patient boots. Merchants

preferred rivers to roads, and by water or ice carried on a plodding

trade between north and south, with Byzantium, Islam, and the Hanse.

Probably it was this spreading commerce that overcame the

individualism of the princes and compelled the unification of

Russia. Vasili II (1425-62), called Temny, the Blind, because his foes

gouged out his eyes (1446), brought all rebels to obedience with

torture, mutilation, and the knout, and left to his son a Russia

sufficiently strong to end the ignominy of Tatar rule.

Ivan III became "the Great" because he accomplished this task, and

made Russia one. He was built to need: unscrupulous, subtle,

calculating, tenacious, cruel, guiding his armies to distant victories

from his seat in the Kremlin; punishing disobedience or incompetence

savagely, whipping, torturing, mutilating even the boyars, beheading a

doctor for failing to cure his son, and so sternly dominating his

entourage that women fainted at his glance. Russia called him the

Terrible until it met his grandson.

The easiest of his conquests was Novgorod. He looked with hungry

anticipation upon that thriving taxable mart, and the merchants of

Moscow urged him to destroy their competitors in the north. `06297 The

Grand Prince controlled the plains between Moscow and Novgorod;

there the mercantile republic bought its food and sold its goods; Ivan

had only to close that granary and market to Novgorod's trade, and the

city-state must go bankrupt or yield. After eight years of alternating

war and truce, the republic surrendered its autonomy (1478). Seven

thousand of its leading inhabitants were transplanted to Suzdal, the

Hanse was expelled, the merchants of Moscow inherited the markets,

their Prince the revenues, of Novgorod.

Absorbing the colonies of the dead republic, Ivan extended his

rule to Finland, the Arctic, and the Urals. Pskov submitted in time to

preserve its republican forms under the sovereignty of the Grand

Prince. Tver sought preservation by allying itself with Lithuania;

Ivan marched in person against the city, and took it without a blow.

Rostov and Iaroslavl followed. When Ivan's brothers died he refused to

let their appanages descend to their heirs; he added their territories

to his own. One brother, Andrei, flirted with Lithuania; Ivan captured

and imprisoned him; Andrei died in jail; Ivan wept, but confiscated

Andrei's lands. La politique n'a pas d'entrailles.

Liberation from the Tatars seemed impossible and proved easy. The

remnants of the Mongol-Turkish invaders had settled down in three

rival groups centering at Sarai, Kazan, and in the Crimea. Ivan played

one against another until he was assured that they would not unite

against him. In 1480 he refused tribute. Khan Akhmet led a great

army up the Volga to the banks of the Oka and Ugra south of Moscow;

Ivan led 150,000 men to the opposite banks. For months the hostile

hosts faced each other without giving battle; Ivan hesitated to risk

his throne and life on one throw, the Tatars feared his improved

artillery. When the rivers froze and no longer protected the armies

from each other, Ivan ordered a retreat. Instead of pursuing, the

Tatars too retreated, all the way to Sarai (1480). It was an immense

and ridiculous victory. From that time no tribute was paid by Moscow

to the Horde; the Grand Prince called himself autocrat (Samoderzhets),

meaning that he paid tribute to none. The rival khans were

maneuvered into mutual war; Akhmet was defeated and slain; the

Golden Horde of Sarai melted away.

Lithuania remained. Neither the Grand Prince nor the metropolitan of

Moscow could suffer peace so long as the Ukraine and Kiev and

western Russia were under a power perpetually threatening Moscow,

and inviting Orthodox Christians into Latin Christianity. An alleged

Polish plot to assassinate Ivan gave him a casus belli and let loose

a holy war for the redemption of the seduced provinces (1492). Many

Lithuanian princes, uneasy under the Polish-Roman-Catholic union,

opened their gates to Ivan's troops. Alexander, Great Prince of

Lithuania, made a stand at Vedrosha, and lost (1500). Pope Alexander

VI arranged a six-year truce; meanwhile Moscow kept the region it

had won- west to the river Sozh, including Chernigov and reaching

almost to Smolensk. Ivan III, now sixty-three, left the redemption

of the remainder to his heirs.

His reign of forty-three years was as important as any in the

history of Russia before the twentieth century. Whether inspired by

lust for wealth and power, or by a conviction that the security and

prosperity of the Russians required the unification of Russia, Ivan

III achieved for his country what Louis XI was doing for France, Henry

VII for England, Ferdinand and Isabella for Spain, Alexander VI for

the Papal States; the simultaneity of these events revealed the

progress of nationalism and monarchy, dooming the supernational

power of the papacy. The boyars lost their independence, the

principalities sent tribute to Moscow, Ivan took the title

"Sovereign of All the Russias." Possibly at the behest of his Greek

wife he assumed also the Roman-Greek title of czar (Caesar), adopted

the Imperial double eagle as the national emblem, and claimed

inheritance to all the political and religious authority of defunct

Byzantium. Byzantine theories and ceremonies of government, and of the

Church as an organ of the state, followed Byzantine Christianity,

the Byzantine Greek alphabet, and Byzantine art forms, into Russia;

and so far as Byzantium had been Orientalized by its proximity to

Asia, so Russia, already oriented by Tatar rule, became in many ways

an Oriental monarchy, alien and unintelligible to the West.

III. IVAN THE TERRIBLE: 1533-84

-

Vasili III Ivanovitch (1505-33) continued the integration of Russia.

He brought Smolensk within his realm, and compelled the principalities

of Ryazan and Novgorod-Severski to acknowledge his sovereignty.

"Only the infants at the breast," said a Russian annalist, "could

refrain from tears" when the once proud republic of Pskov submitted to

Vasili's rule (1510). Russia was now a major European power; Vasili

corresponded on equal terms with Maximilian I, Charles V, Suleiman the

Magnificent, and Leo X. When some boyars tried to limit his

autocracy he checked them with a contemptuous word- "Peasants!"- and

had one noble head cut off. Getting no children from his wife, he

divorced her and married the accomplished and masterful Helena

Glinski. After his death she took the regency for her three-year-old

son Ivan IV Vasilievitch. The boyars resumed their turbulence when she

died; their rival factions controlled the government in turn; they

disordered the cities with their violence, and spilled the blood of

their helpless muzhiks in civil war.

Amid these struggles the young Sovereign of All the Russias was

almost ignored, even at times left destitute. Seeing brutality

everywhere around him, he took it as an accepted mode of behavior,

adopted the most cruel sports, and grew into a moody and suspicious

youth. Suddenly, while still a boy of thirteen (1544), he threw to his

dogs Andrei Shuiski, leader of a boyar faction, and seized command

Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

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