Europe: A History (94 page)

That year, the Christmas celebrations in Moscow were coloured by very special emotions. Learned monks had been predicting for some time that no one would live to see the year completed. According to Orthodox calculations, August 1492—the month when Columbus had set sail on his outward voyage—marked the end of the seventh millennium since the Creation; and it had been widely foretold to be the End of the World. Indeed, no steps had been taken to calculate the Church calendar for the following years. Although the Orthodox used the same Julian calendar that was current in the Latin Church, they had a different system for counting the
anni mundi
, the years of creation. Also, as in Byzantium, it was their custom to start the ecclesiastical year on 1 September. So, given their belief that the ‘seven days’ of creation were a metaphor for seven millennia, and their dating of the Creation to 5509
BC, AD
1492 was reckoned equivalent to 7000
AM,
and the likeliest date for Judgement Day. 31 August was the critical date. Failing that, the crack of doom might be delayed until 31 December, the last day of the secular year—and the midpoint of the season of Nativity. When Epiphany was reached without incident, Moscow breathed a sigh of relief.
⁴³

Moscow, in fact, stood on the brink of a new career. Its Grand Duke, Ivan III, had
not
been counting on the Day of Judgement. He was nearing completion of grandiose plans to remodel the
Kreml
or ‘fortified city’ of his capital. By symbolic and ideological means, he was preparing to launch the powerful Russian myth which was to be a fitting partner for Moscow’s growing political might.

Most of the cities of Rus’ had their kremlins. But the Kremlin of Moscow, as redesigned by Ivan III, outshone anything that existed elsewhere. In January 1493 the vast enclosure of its red-brick walls and tall round towers had been completed only a few months earlier. It covered an irregular triangle round a perimeter of 2.5 km, enough to envelop half the City of London. At its heart was the airy expanse of an open square, round which were ranged four cathedrals and the grand ducal residence. The Cathedral of the Annunciation was in pristine state, having received its finishing touches only three years earlier. Its neighbour, the
Uspensky Sobor
, the Cathedral of the Dormition, the seat of the Metropolitan, was now thirteen years old. It had been built by the Bolognese architect Aristotle Firavanti, whose brief was to adapt the ancient Vladimir style to modern uses. It became a standard for Muscovite church architecture. Its interior provided a large open space, without galleries, under matching domed and vaulted compartments. Its frescos were still being painted in the inimitable bright colours and elongated
figures of Dionysius the Greek. On the other side the Church of the
Razpolozhenie
, ‘of the Deposition of the Robe’, was seven years old. The
Archangelsky Sobor
, with its Renaissance façade, was still on the drawing board. The
Granovitaya Palata
or ‘Palace of the Facets’ by Marco Rulto and Pietro Solano—so called from the diamond-cut stones of its facade—had just been occupied by Ivan’s household. They moved in after several years sharing the house of his favourite minister. It replaced the former wooden hall which had served Ivan’s predecessors for centuries. Few capitals in Christendom short of Rome or Constantinople could compare with such splendour.

Within the Palace of Facets, Ivan’s household was riven by the rivalry of two powerful women—Zoe Palaeologos, his second wife, and Elena Stepanovna, his daughter-in-law. Zoe, the niece of the last Byzantine Emperor, had married Ivan after the death of his first wife, Maria of Tver. Her preoccupation was to protect the interests of her seven children, headed by the thirteen-year-old Vasily. Elena was the daughter of Stephen IV, Hospodar of Moldavia, and widow of Ivan’s first heir and successor, Ivan the Younger, who had recently died. Her concern was to preserve the interests of her nine-year-old son, Dmitri. In 1493 Ivan III had not yet decided whether he should name his son Vasily or his grandson Dmitri to succeed him: he was to favour each by turns. The tension beneath the surface in the Kremlin must have been electric.
⁴⁴

Ivan III is popularly remembered in Russia as the Tsar who threw off the Tartar yoke. He might be better considered as an exponent of Tartar financial, military, and political methods, who used the shifting alliances of khans and princes to replace the Tartar yoke with a Muscovite one. In his struggle with the Golden Horde, whose hegemony he definitively rejected after 1480, his closest ally was the Khan of the Crimea, who helped him to attack the autonomy of his fellow Christian principalities to a degree that the Tartars had never attempted. From the Muscovite point of view, which later enjoyed a monopoly, ‘Ivan the Great’ was the restorer of ‘Russian’ hegemony. From the viewpoint of the Novgorodians or the Pskovians he was the Antichrist, the destroyer of Russia’s best traditions.
When he came to write his will, he described himself, as his father had done, as ‘the much-sinning slave of God’.
⁴⁵

Ivan III had first called himself
Tsar
or ‘Caesar’ twenty years before. He did so in a treaty with the republic of Pskov, presumably to laud his superiority over other local princes; and he repeated the exercise on several occasions in the 1480s. But Tsar, though a cut above Grand Duke, was not the equivalent of the Byzantine title of Basileus. It could not be construed as a full imperial dignity unless accompanied by all the other trappings of Empire. Caesar, after all, was the term that had been used to designate the co-emperors and deputy emperors of the supreme Augustus.

In 1489 Ivan III had considered another proposition. In his dealings with the Habsburgs, he was told that a royal crown could be procured for him from the Pope. His standing in the West would certainly have been enhanced by regal status. But the title of
rex
or
koro
had connotations that offended Muscovite pride.
[
KRAL
]
To accept would be to repeat the alleged treason to the True Faith which the Greeks had committed at Florence. So Ivan refused. ‘My ancestors’, he explained, ‘were friendly with the Emperors who had once given Rome to the Pope.’
⁴⁶
What he did do, though, was to borrow the Habsburgs’ imperial emblem. As from the 1490s, the double-headed eagle began to appear as the symbol of state in Moscow as in Vienna, as indeed in Constantinople,
[AQUILA]

Apart from its fears about the end of the world, the Muscovite Church was enduring a period of great uncertainty. It had broken with the Patriarch of Constantinople (see pp. 446–7) without yet finding a fully independent role. Unlike the Metropolitan of Kiev, who was a resident of Lithuania, the Moscow Metropolitan was elected by his bishops, and headed an ecclesiastical organization which admitted no superior. For forty years it had been impossible to reconcile this state of affairs with the absence of an emperor, and hence with the Byzantine tradition that Church and State were indivisible. Just as there could be no emperor without the true faith, there could be no true faith without an Emperor. Some had pinned their hopes on the reconquest of Constantinople for an Orthodox Christian emperor—the so-called ‘Great Idea’. Others hoped that some arrangement might be reached with the German Emperor of the Latins. But that was rejected. The one remaining alternative was for Moscow to do what both Serbia and Bulgaria had done in the past—to find an Emperor of their own.

The immediate problem, however, was to draw up a new paschal canon, with its calculations of the Easters for the eighth millennium. This is the task to which Metropolitan Zosimus had been putting his mind in the autumn of 1492. ‘We await the Advent of our Lord,’ he wrote in the Preface, ‘but the hour of his coming cannot be established.’ He then appended a brief historical summary. Constantine had founded the New Rome, and St Vladimir had baptized Rus’. Now Ivan III was to be ‘the new Emperor Constantine of the new Constantinople—Moscow’.
⁴⁷
This was the first indirect mention of the pedigree with which Moscow would now be clothed.

Also in 1492, and also for the first time, the ‘new Constantinople—Moscow’
may have been given its more familiar label of ‘the Third Rome’. In that year Archbishop Gennadius of Novgorod supposedly received a translation of the Roman Legend of the White Klobuck, and with it a preface explaining how a manuscript of the legend had been found in Rome. Scholars disagree about the age of this text, parts of which may have been interpolated at a later date. But it is not irrelevant that the Preface contains a clear reference to Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’. The author of the Preface is sometimes equated with a known translator who was working on the Apocalypse of Ezra. This work was part of Archbishop Gennadius’ project to endow the Muscovite Church with a complete version of the Bible equivalent to the Latin Vulgate.
⁴⁸

Once the Russian principalities were brought to heel, Moscow’s imperial ambitions would obviously be directed against the Grand Duchy of Lithuania— Muscovy’s western neighbour. Lithuania had benefited from the Mongol invasions, using its base on the northern periphery to expand its annexations among the fragments of the former Rus’, just as Moscow had done. By the end of the fifteenth century Lithuania, like Muscovy, controlled a huge swathe of territory— essentially the Dnieper basin—which stretched from the shore of the Baltic to the confines of the Black Sea.

Unlike Muscovy, however, Lithuania was open to Western influences. For more than a century the Grand Duchy had flourished under the personal union with Poland (see pp. 429–30). By the 1490s the Lithuanian court at Wilno and the Catholic ruling élite were to a large extent polonized in language and political culture. The Lithuanian dynasty was in possession not only of Poland and Lithuania but of Bohemia and Hungary as well. Unlike Muscovy, Lithuania permitted a wide measure of religious diversity. The Roman Catholic establishment did not impede either the numerical predominance of Orthodox Christianity or the steady influx of a strong Jewish element. Unlike Muscovy, the Orthodox Church in Lithuania had not broken with Constantinople nor with its ancient Byzantine loyalties. The Metropolitan of Kiev had every reason to resist Moscow’s separatist line, which was dividing Slavic Orthodoxy and moving inexorably towards the formation of a breakaway Russian Orthodox Church.

In January 1493 Moscow’s relations with Lithuania were about to take a new turn. Six months earlier Casimir Jagiellonczyk, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, had died, dividing his realm between his second and third sons. The Polish kingdom passed to Jan Olbracht, Lithuania to the unmarried Alexander. (The eldest son was already King of Bohemia and Hungary.) Ivan III had seen the possibilities. On the one hand, he was preparing an embassy which would travel to Wilno, and would launch negotiations leading to a political marriage between Grand Duke Alexander and Ivan’s daughter Elena. At the same time, he was setting conditions which would undermine the previous
modus vivendi
of the two states. For the first time in Moscow’s history, he armed his ambassador with instructions demanding recognition of the hitherto unknown title of
gosudar’ vseya Rust
—‘lord of all-Rus'’.
⁴⁹
It was a classic diplomatic double hold—one part apparently friendly, the other potentially hostile. Ivan was deliberately pulling
Lithuania into an engagement that called into question the future of all the eastern Slavs.

To make his point, Ivan staged a sensational demonstration. Some time before Christmas he had arrested two Lithuanians employed in the Moscow Kremlin. He charged them with plotting to poison him. The accusations against Jan Lukhomski and Maciej the Pole did not sound very credible; but their guilt or innocence was hardly relevant. They were held in an open cage on the frozen Moskva River for all the world to see; and on the eve of the departure of Ivan’s envoy to Lithuania, they were burned alive in their cage.
⁵⁰
As the ice melted under the fierce heat of the fire and the heavy iron cage sank beneath the water, taking its carbonized occupants down in a great hiss of steam, one could have well imagined that something was being said about Lithuania’s political future.

The title ‘Lord of All-Rus'’ did not possess much basis either in history or in current reality. It came into the same category as that whereby the kings of England laid claim to France. In the 1490s, two-and-a-half centuries after all traces of a united Kievan Rus' had been destroyed, it had the same degree of credibility that the king of France might have enjoyed if, in his struggle with the German Empire, he had proclaimed himself ‘Lord of all the Franks’. By that time, it conflicted with the separate identity that the ‘Ruthenes’ of Lithuania had assumed from the ‘Russians’ of Moscow. Indeed, it all seemed sufficiently unreal for the Lithuanians to accept it as a small price to pay for Ivan’s good humour. They were not to know it, but they were conceding the ideological cornerstone of territorial ambitions that would be pursued for 500 years.