From the Horde, Vasili, by bountiful payments, procured an iarluik for seven appanages, including Murom, Suzdal, and Nijni or Lower Novgorod—all belonging to his less wealthy kinsmen, who were offered their choice of becoming his dependents, or of dying in captivity or exile. The succession of the eldest son had procured the elevation of the nobles of the grand prince to a subordinate princely rank and power. In view of this fact, perhaps, the citizens of Nijni-Novgorod voluntarily surrendered their last titular prince, Boris: for if a Muscovite boyar could become a prince, and if the Muscovite grand prince could work his will with the khan, why resist this ever growing, ever more dominant power? Accordingly, amid the clangor of the bells of these ancient, hitherto independent cities, the son of the Donskoï was proclaimed their sovereign.
Arrogant and overbearing to his kinsmen, the native princes, the sagacious Vasili maintained amicable relations with the Tatar on the east, and the Lithuanian on the west, notwithstanding that he had been hostage and prisoner at Saraï´, that he had escaped thence as a fugitive, and that his domains were twice invaded by the hordes of its peoples. Tamerlane, at this time at variance with his former general, Toktamuish, harried the dismembered empire of Kipchak and moved westward into Russian boundaries, destroying the people by the sword, and their possessions by the fire-brand. Moscow was again in peril: in its streets and its homes were revived with fearfulness and trembling tales of the destruction of 1382. The Tatars were sixty leagues away at Elets on the Don, a town which they razed. Its ancient monastery of the Trinity has four memorial chapels commemorative of the citizens that perished at the time—all the place contained, save a few fugitives.
There the wild horsemen suddenly turned southward and rode into Azof, the emporium of the wealth of merchants who had come thither from Cairo, Venice, Genoa, Catalania, and the Biscayan country. Fresh from the hoarded treasures of Bokhara and Hindustan, and having in expectancy the wealth of Constantinople and of the Nile cities, they were allured to the regions of the south in preference to the toilsome way over steppe and through forest, to the peopled country of the north.
But they remained not long absent. Vitovt, the vigorous Lithuanian chief and prince, took the opportunity to raise a crusade against the never resting, ever appearing, all-devouring Tatar. To this end he obtained an army from the King of Poland, five hundred of “the iron men,” the Sword Bearers, numbers of the Russian princes with their contingents, whose ancient kinsmen had borne the standards at Kulikovo, and not least, Toktamuish, the exiled khan, fugitive from Tamerlane; for in nearly all the wars carried on east of Hungary and Poland after the thirteenth century, the European Mongol had his place and his active part.
By the river Vorskla, a branch of the Dnieper, a hundred and eighty miles southeast of Kief, the crusade of Vitovt was brought to a disastrous closing; the Tatar general, Ediger, friend and ally of Temir Kutlu, khan of the invading host, coming to the help of his people at the crisis of battle, and inflicting an overwhelming defeat upon the hosts of the Lithuanian. The message of Temir Kutlu before the closing of the armies is suggestive of the precarious fortunes of the khans, still barbaric and quite as roving as those had been who crossed the European boundaries in 1224. He demands the rendition of “my fugitive Toktamuish. I can not rest in peace knowing that he is alive and with thee. For our life is full of change. To-day a khan, to-morrow a wanderer; to-day rich, to-morrow without an abiding place; to-day friends only, to-morrow all the world our foes.” Ediger’s opportune arrival with a strong force confirmed the resolution of the khan against yielding to the demands of Vitovt, who offered him the alternative of being a “son” or a slave. The Vorskla proved for him and his people another Kalka;[H] the Tatars followed hard after the remnant of the Lithuanian ranks, and again plundered Kief, and desecrated its sacred Monastery of the Catacombs.
Between the growing kingdom of Poland and the principality of Lithuania, on the west, and the locust-like swarms of Mongols unexpectedly appearing ever and anon from beyond the Asiatic boundaries, Moscow and the Russian States generally, were ever liable to surprise and to the danger of being crushed, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. Ediger, elated by his success over the combined forces of Vitovt, caused the report to be spread about, that he should carry the war into Lithuania: at the same time, with the secrecy and celerity characteristic of his race, he appeared at the front of his horsemen and wagons within the boundaries of the Grand Principality. Vasili withdrew to Kostroma (1408), as his father Dmitri had withdrawn on a similar emergency, and left the city to the defense of Vladimir the Brave. Again was all the surrounding country harried, the towns burned, the farms and fields destroyed, the transport of provisions stopped, and a dense population brought to the verge of starvation by the terrible Tatar. But just before the situation became one of extremity, reports of divisions and dangers at the Horde, compelled Ediger to raise the siege. He sent a haughty message to the Kremlin, demanding tribute from the citizens, which he obtained to the amount of three thousand roubles, a sum equivalent to not less than thirty thousand dollars in our day. The sentinels who looked forth from the embrasures of the citadel, were glad that at any price could be purchased the sight of the hordes darkening the horizon with their disappearing.
Vitovt’s uncle, Olgerd, had been ally, by marriage and in war, with one of the Mikhails of Tver, successor of that prince whose martyrdom we have narrated.[I] Thrice during the reign of the Donskoï, had Olgerd led his brother-in-law, Mikhail, up to the walls of Moscow; but the prudence, both of the offensive and defensive leaders, withheld them from a decisive engagement that would prove certainly ruinous to the party who should suffer defeat. The same rôle was repeated between Vitovt and Vasili Dimitriévitch: this time with the result of a settlement of boundaries, in which Vitovt was careful to retain his valuable conquest, Smolensk. Before and after these conflicts, Vasili acquired certain cities from the State of Tchernigof, and large territories on the northern Dwina[J] in the territory of Novgorod, where the Good Companions, Bravs Gens, adventurous military bands, and commercial settlers, frequently came in conflict with Muscovite subjects, themselves pioneers upon the wastes and toward the ports or harbors of the far north. Vasili, pursuant to the policy of his dynasty, had recourse to undisguisedly severe methods to break the power of the free principality, and to incorporate it as much as he might, within his own. He obtained control of the Republic of Viatka, and framed treaties advantageous for Moscow with the princes of Tver and Riazan. These politic measures, with his unvarying entente cordiale with the dominant khan of the Horde, and the marriage of his daughter to the Greek Emperor, John Paleologus, strengthened his firm government, and widened the reputation of his industrious, wealthy, well-ordered state. Vitovt, whom we have named as the last of four chieftains, who secured unity to the tribes of his country, and sought to establish an independent nationality, did not lose courage nor ambition by the disaster at the Vorskla (1399). The Russian provinces of his country were under the religious direction of the metropolitan of Moscow. Vitovt procured that a learned Bulgarian monk should be installed metropolitan of Kief, in his time within Lithuanian boundaries—thus obtaining for his possessions a religious independence. He had designs also to free his country from its subordination to Poland; and by cultivating the friendship of Sigismund (1429), emperor of Germany, he obtained the favor of that monarch in helping him to become king of Lithuania. His court at Troki and Vilna was regal, in truth, in its magnificence, where the old man, an octogenarian, presided at long-continued festivals, at which seven hundred oxen, fourteen hundred sheep, and game in proportion, were consumed daily; where his grandson, Vasili Vasilèvitch, prince of Moscow, Photius, metropolitan of Moscow, the princes of Tver and Riazan, Iagello, king of Poland, the khan of the Crimea (one of the divisions of the ancient Kipchak), the hospodar of Wallachia, the grand-master of Prussia, the landmeister of Livonia, and embassadors from the Oriental empires, were entertained at his table as guests and friends. But his hopes of royalty were never realized. Even while the envoys of Sigismund were bringing him the scepter and the crown, the Pope, with whom the Poles had been conferring, compelled them to turn upon their path. The old chieftain survived this disappointment but a year; and with his life ended the attempts to create a distinct Lithuanian nationality, although for nearly a century thereafter it was governed by a prince of its own election. Early in the sixteenth century it was more definitely united with Poland, though still retaining its title of grand duchy, or principality. Its Russian provinces were Polonized; the descendants of Mindvog and Gedimin, Rurik and Iaroslaf, assumed the customs and language of the Polish nobility, and have retained them in the main, even under the repressive, reconstructive government of the tsars. Podolia, Volhynia and Kief are, in modern phrase, Ruthenian, occupied by a people homogeneous with those of Gallicia in Austria, with Southern Poland, and Northeastern Hungary.
With the increase of industries in Russia, an increase of coins became necessary. In 1420 Novgorod had its own mint, and its coins, stamped with the device of a throned prince, were twice the value of those of Moscow or of Tver. A Tatar coin, denga, from tanga, which signifies a mark, was current in the last named cities. For small transactions pieces of marten skins, squirrels’ heads, squirrels’ ears even—the latter less than a farthing in value—had been in vogue, but were gradually displaced, as was the giving of gold and silver by weight, in the larger transactions of commerce.
We have thus traced the development of the Russian state from its inception, to its compacting and centralization as the Grand Duchy, or Principality of Moscow, whose subsequent tsars brought under their sway most of the territory included within the boundaries of the modern empire. The writer of these chapters regrets that the limits of The Chautauquan prevent the presentation of the characters and careers of the two Ivans,—the Great and the Terrible—of Philarete, Peter the Great, Catherine Second, and other royal or noble personages whose genius, or whose moral force, have contributed in the later centuries to the elevation of the Russian Empire to a foremost place among the European powers. She can but entertain the hope, however, that this account of its rise and growth will awaken an inclination in the minds of those who have followed her narrative, to learn something further of a people whose aspirations for national freedom have been re-awakened and stimulated by our own history and prosperity; a nation whose tendencies and interests are largely similar, nay, are identical in the main, with those of the people of this republic.
END OF “HISTORY OF RUSSIA.”