Possibly the result of the battle was not so one-sided as the glowing accounts of the Russian historians painted it, but the immediate effect gave fair hope for the future. Yagiello withdrew his forces into Lit’uania, and thither fled the traitorous Oleg of Riazan; the Mongols vanished across the Oka, and the enemies of Dimitri seemed melted like snow before the summer of his victory. The Russians dreamed that they were free. Not so lightly were they to be rid of these dusky wolf-eyed warriors, who teemed in the wide, arid plain-land of Asia like rats on an old threshing-floor. In the East had arisen a new star of battle to lead them in the footsteps of the mighty Jingis, Timur the Lame, “conqueror of the two Bokharas, of Hindostan, of Iran, and of Asia Minor.”[77] At the Golden Horde appeared one of his captains, Tokhtamitch, who routed and hunted to death the ill-starred Mamai, and seized upon his khanate. Following on this revolution came a message from the new Khan to the Russian princes, couched in friendly terms, but requiring their presence at his Court. This was too much for the Grand Prince and his proud Moskovites to stomach, and Dimitri returned an answer befitting the victor of Koulikovo. But the defiance of the capital found no echo in the other Russian lands; not a second time did they care to face in doubtful conflict foes who were so terrible in victory, so easily recruited after defeat. Too many brave boyarins and bold spearmen had perished on the field of the woodcocks, too many gaps had been made in their ranks which could not be filled at such scant notice. Dimitri of Souzdal sent his two sons to the Horde; Oleg, pardoned and restored to his province, intrigued once more with the enemies of Moskva. 1382Against that city marched the Khan with his Tartar army, guided thither by the traitorous Kniaz of Riazan, and bearing in his train the young princes of Souzdal. Dimitri took the prudent, if unheroic part of leaving his capital to defend itself, and seeking meanwhile to gather an army capable of threatening the Mongol flank. The flight of the Metropolitan, Syprien (successor of S. Aleksis), was not open to so favourable an interpretation. The Kreml, ably defended by its garrison, under the command of Ostey, called in the Chronicles a grandson of Olgerd, held the enemy at bay for three days; on the fourth the defenders weakly opened the gates to a ruse of the wily Khan, and the capital of the new Russia received a baptism of blood. When the invaders withdrew, bearing with them all that was worth removing, it was a silent city that they left behind them—a city peopled by 24,000 corpses, meet gathering ground for wehr-wolf, ghoul, and vampire, a wild Walpurgis Nacht for the Yaga-Babas of Slavonic lore. Nor was Moskva alone in her desolation; Vladimir, Zvenigorod, and other towns were sacked and burnt by detachments of the Mongol army. The defeat of one of these bands by a Russian force under Vladimir of Moskva checked the ravages of the invaders, and Tokhtamitch led his hordes back across the Oka, leaving Dimitri to repair as best he might the woes of his province, and to revenge himself on those who had betrayed or deserted him in the hour of his need. If his kingdom was in ruins, at least he was master of what remained; the Metropolitan was deposed, Oleg was forced to fly, and his fief, already ravaged by the Mongols, was harried anew by the Grand Prince’s followers. Burning with indignation against the enemy whom he had thought crushed for ever on the banks of the Don, Dimitri had yet to realise that he must return to the policy of his fathers, and wear again the yoke he had thrown so proudly off. Mikhail of Tver, who bore him an undying hatred, had shared neither in Moskva’s triumph nor in her distress, and now was plotting openly to obtain for himself the Grand Principality. With all his losses Dimitri was still the wealthiest of the Russian princes, and a timely submission enabled him to find grace in the eyes of the Khan. 1384A new impost was exacted throughout the land, and the young princes—Vasili of Moskva, Aleksandr of Tver, Vasili and Simeon of Souzdal—were held as hostages at Sarai. Russia awoke from her dream of liberty to find that her God still slept.
While mourning their relapse into a state of dependence, and involved in a quarrel with the troublesome republic of the north, the Moskovites learned a disquieting piece of intelligence; Yagiello, their formidable neighbour on the west, who held more Russian lands almost than did Dimitri, had added the kingdom of Poland to his possessions. 1386 The long succession of princes of the House of Piast had come to an end, in its direct line, with Kazimir the Great, who since 1370 had lain in a side chapel of the Cathedral at Krakow, where his effigy in red brown marble yet reclines under its fretted canopy. Louis, the Angevin King of Hungary, who succeeded him on the Polish throne, had died in the year 1382, leaving a daughter, Yadviga, to uphold her right as best she could in a country already marked by the intractability of the crown vassals. Yadviga only obtained the support of the Diet (composed of the nobles and higher clergy of the realm) by leaving in its hands the selection of her husband and consort. The choice of the assembly fell upon the Grand Duke of Lit’uania, whose election would at the same time remove a possible enemy from their eastern border, and furnish them with a protector against the hated Teutonic Order on their north. For this monster of their own creation (a Polish duke had been the first to give the knights a foothold in Prussia) was gradually squeezing them out from touch with the Baltic and displacing their authority in Eastern Pomerania. One of the indispensable conditions attached to the betrothal and election of Yagiello was that he should adopt Christianity of the Roman Catholic pattern; “no cross, no crown.” The prospect of a peaceable accession to the Polish throne effected what all the endeavours, spiritual, diplomatic, and militant, of priests, popes, and grand masters had been unable to accomplish; Yagiello became the apostle prince of Lit’uania, and Catholic sovereign of Poland.[78] In his new character of a zealous son of the Church, the Grand Duke set to work to bring Lit’uania within the pale of the official religion; the pagan groves were cut down, the sacred fires that burned in the castle of Vilna extinguished, the mystic serpents killed, and the people baptized by battalions. According to a Russian historian, those who already professed the Greek faith were forcibly converted, and two boyarins who clung obstinately to Orthodoxy were put to death by tortures.[79]
If Rome swept this valuable State into her fold, the Russian Church, despite the rather depressing circumstance of a confused succession to the Metropolitan office, was not without the triumph of extending her rites over heathen lands. A monk of Moskva carried the light of the Gospel into the lorn and benighted lands of the Permians, a Finn tribe which dwelt in the northern valley of the Kama, beneath the shadow of the Ourals. Supported by the authority of the Grand Prince, he overthrew the worship of the Old Golden Woman, a stone figure with two infants in her arms, before whose shrine reindeer were annually sacrificed; had she been more restricted in her family arrangements she might have been quietly incorporated in the new religion.
In 1389 Moskva mourned her prince, Dimitri Donskoi, who died while yet in his prime. A variant from the type of cold, stern princes who had built up the power of his house, Dimitri was a throw-back to the old light-hearted Slavonic kniaz, before the Norse blood had died out of his veins, or ever that of Turko or Mongol had crept in. And if he gained no fresh ground for Moskva, and left Tver and Souzdal and Riazan still under independent masters, at least he gave Russia a spasm of liberty and renown in an age of gloom and bondage, and obtained for his eldest son the undisputed succession to the Grand Principality.
Vasili Dmitrievitch Moskovskie, to give him his distinguishing title (since 1383 there had reigned a Vasili Dmitrievitch at Souzdal), ascended the throne under more favourable circumstances than had a few years earlier seemed probable. On the west, Vitovt, son of the murdered Kestout, had placed himself at the head of the Lit’uanian malcontents in opposition to the King of Poland, who in cultivating the goodwill of his new subjects had lost that of his old ones. Thus in that direction the threateners of Moskva’s existence were at strife among themselves. In the east Tokhtamitch was contemplating a rebellion against the authority of his lord and protector, Timur, a circumstance which lifted the position of the young Prince of Moskva at the Horde from that of a humble vassal to that of a desired ally. His father would probably have taken advantage of this fact to sever once more his dependence on the Khan; Vasili turned it to a more practical use. 1391With costly presents, and probably promises of future support, the Grand Prince bought an iarlikh which gave him possession of Nijhnie-Novgorod, a fief long since granted to Boris of the House of Souzdal.[80] Vasili was received with acclaim by the inhabitants, and Boris, deserted on all sides, had to bow to the decree of fate, represented in this instance by the iarlikh from Sarai. 1394On the death of the ousted prince his nephews, Vasili and Simeon of Souzdal, attempted to reunite Nijhnie-Novgorod with their hereditary appanage, with the result that Vasili of Moskva seized on both provinces and drove his cousins into exile. Many and fruitless were the efforts made by the brothers to recover their lost principalities; Vasili had developed a Habsburgian tenacity in holding to whatsoever he acquired, and the ex-princes of Souzdal had in the end to acquiesce in their spoliation. Events in the West meanwhile had taken an unforeseen and not altogether favourable turn. The Teutonic Order had been placed in an awkward position by the wholesale entrance of the Lit’uanians into the bosom of the Church, which event left the crusaders no more heathen to convert; hence the joy which they shared with the angels over the salvation of their long recalcitrant brothers was tinged with resentment towards the Poles, and especially towards Yagiello. The Grand Master sulkily refused to stand sponsor to the latter at his baptism,[81] and the Order prepared, from motives of self-defence, to give active support to the pretender Vitovt, who was enabled with its assistance to continually harry the domains of his royal kinsman, till at length Yagiello, set upon by Catholics, Orthodox, and pagans alike, ceded to him the grand duchy, under the direct suzerainty of the Polish Crown (1392),[82] an arrangement which did not bring repose either to the Order or to Moskovy. The Grand Duke Vitovt was another edition of his uncle and grandfather; his arms swept far beyond the ample limits of his principality, and under his vigorous rule Lit’uania attained her greatest extent, and perhaps her greatest power. Father-in-law to Vasili, he did not hesitate to continue the slow absorption of Russian territory commenced by his predecessors; Smolensk dropped from the feeble hands of its hereditary princes into the actual possession of the Grand Duke, who thus brought his dominions into contact with the principality of Tver, long the hatching-ground of disaffection to the supremacy of Moskva. Vitovt would probably have accomplished even more in the way of conquest and annexation if his ambition had not given too wide a scope to his efforts. While Vasili watched anxiously for the next move of this exciting father-in-law new troubles sprang up in the East; it seemed, indeed, as if Moskva was to reap no advantage from the dissensions of her neighbours. The vengeance of Timur the Lame had at length overtaken his o’erweening vassal, and Tokhtamitch had fled before the storm which his imprudence had raised. The conqueror did not seem disposed to confine his destroying wrath to the actual territories of the Golden Horde, but crossed the Volga and commenced to devastate the easternmost Russian lands. Moskovy quaked before the coming of another Batu; the churches were filled with wailing crowds, and the celebrated Mother-of-God of Vladimir was removed from thence to the capital. 1395By a train of reasoning not easy to follow, to this change of quarters was attributed the sudden turning aside of Timur Khan, who diverted his destructive abilities to the razing of Sarai, Astrakhan, and Azov, and left the Russian lands without further hurt. By modern historians this retreat has been set down to other causes than the translation of the Bogoroditza; “accustomed to the rich booty of Bokhara and Hindostan, and dreaming of Constantinople and Egypt, they found, no doubt, that the desert steppes and deep forests only offered a very meagre prey.”[83] However, the credit of the affair remained with the Bogoroditza, and what was more to the point, this respectable and extremely valuable ikon remained at Moskva—no mean asset, for that time and place, in the political importance of a city.
The enfeeblement of the Golden Horde seemed to the Lit’uanian Grand Duke a favourable opportunity to extend his influence in the Tartar steppes and constitute himself the heir of the dying sovereignty. Concluding for the moment a perpetual peace with the Order, against whom he had scarcely ceased to fight since his accession to the Grand Duchy, he mustered a formidable army to support him in this mighty enterprise. Poles, Lit’uanians, and Russians marched under his banner against the Tartars, and Konrad von Jungingen, as a guarantee of good faith, sent five hundred of his knights to do battle against the infidels. 1399On the banks of the Vorskla (a tributary of the Dniepr), Vitovt came in contact with the lieutenant of Timur and suffered a disastrous overthrow, losing two-thirds of his army and seriously damaging his military reputation. Notwithstanding this victory the new master of the Horde, Koutluk Khan, had his power disputed by more than one competitor, and Vasili took advantage of this fact to discontinue payment of the annual tribute. 1408The temerity of his action, overlooked for many years, brought on him at last the chastisement of the Mongols, who, under the leadership of Ediger, the victor of the Vorskla, made a sudden inroad upon Russian territory. Vasili imitated the tactics of his father on a similar occasion; leaving Moskva with a strong garrison to defend the Kreml, he betook himself to the northern districts of his realm to raise what forces he might against the invaders. The assault on Moskva was weakened by the want of siege engines (cannon were just beginning to be used by the Russians and Lit’uanians), and Ivan Mikhailovitch, Prince of Tver, was summoned to support the Khan with his artillery. For once hereditary hatred gave way to patriotic instincts, and Ivan withheld the demanded assistance. The troops of Ediger ravaged and burnt far and wide over the Russian plain, and sacked many a town and village in the Grand Principality, but they could neither force Vasili into a combat nor make an impression on the walls and towers of the Kreml. A threatened revolution at the Horde made the Khan anxious to retreat, and his offer of withdrawal on receipt of a war levy was gladly accepted by the Moskovites, who were dreading a famine; 3000 roubles purchased the departure of the Mongol army, and the Velikie Kniaz was able to return to his rejoicing capital.
Hemmed in on east and west by two powerful and aggressive neighbours, with the slumbering volcanoes of Tver and Riazan ready to burst into activity at any moment within his own dominions, the politic Vasili could do little more than assert from time to time his authority over Novgorod. The republic, indeed, was at the height of its independence, and played its own game in the shifting balance of Order and Hansa, Grand Duchy, Grand Principality, and Golden Horde, which made up the round of its political compass. In 1392 it had closed a period of commercial strife by a treaty[84] with the towns of Lubeck, Wisby, Revel, Dorpat, and Riga, compacted in the border burgh of Izborsk, where “ys gekomen her Johan Neibur van Lubeke, her Hynrik van Vlanderen unde her Godeke Cur von Godlande, van overze,[85] van Rige her Tydeman van der Nienbrugge, van Darpte her Hermen Kegheller unde her Wynold Clychrode, van Revale her Gerd Witte,” and “hebben gesproken myt dem borchgreven van Nougarden,”—the posadnik of Novgorod—and so on in quaint old low-German wording that brings to the mind a glimpse of red gabled roofs, narrow streets and quays, a whiff of salted herrings, pine timbers, and pungent stoppered drams. This treaty, concluded without reference to the Grand Prince, had been a source of friction between him and the Novgorodskie, and a further grievance was that the Archbishop and clergy of the northern city chose to be a law unto themselves rather than show a proper dependence upon the Metropolitan of Moskva. Yet another matter for complaint was the depredations of bands of free-lances from Novgorod and her offshoot settlement Viatka (an independent territory lying to the north of Great Bulgaria), who, under the name of “Good Companions,” carried on a series of freebooting and piratical campaigns in the Volga valley. More than once these points of dispute led to open rupture between Vasili and his intractable subjects, but Great Novgorod was able to hold her own against the hampered efforts of the Velikie Kniaz.
Eighteen months after Ediger’s winter campaign against Moskva the eyes of all Russia were turned towards the impending struggle between the rival powers of the Baltic lands, the Order and the dual Polish-Lit’uanian State. Vitovt, recovered from his reverse at the hands of the Tartars, was moving again, and had set his lance against the black cross shield of the German knights. A dispute anent the Order province of Samogitia furnished a pretext for a recourse to arms, and both sides gathered their hosts to fight out the deadly quarrel. No hole and corner combat was to decide the mastery of the Baltic basin; 163,000 men marched in the train of Vitovt and Yagiello, 83,000 rallied round Ulrich von Jungingen. At the famous battle of Tannenberg (15th July 1410) the iron-mailed knights of Mary went down in splendid ruin before the unstayable onset of the Slavic warriors; the White Eagle of Poland and the Charging Horseman of Lit’uania gleamed on their blood-red standards over the stark and gory corpses of the Grand Master and the flower of his chivalry, 600 knights and 40,000 men-at-arms; the sun went down on the hard-fought field, where Ulrich von Jungingen and his staunch comrades held their last pale Chapter, and the might of the Black Cross Order faded into the shadows of the past. 1411The Peace of Thorn, by yielding to the conquerors all they demanded, gave a temporary respite to the Teutons, but their power was broken for evermore.[86]