The growing power and importance of the Moskovite state, emerged from its Tartar thraldom and hallowed by its connection with the dead Byzantine past, brought it more into contact with the western world from which it had drifted so far apart. Like the hero of the Dutch romance, revisiting the haunts of early life after his protracted slumber, Russia was renewing the relations she had held with Christendom before her opium-sleep in the shadow of the Khans. The wily and patient kniaz had a double purpose to serve in encouraging intercourse with the western princes: in the first place, to seek fresh allies against the arch-enemy, Poland; in the second, to procure for his beloved capital a share of the progress and civilisation which was then illuminating Europe. Embassies and presents were exchanged with the Emperor (Frederick III.) and with the young Maximilian, “King of the Romans.” The death of Matthias (1490) and the election to the Hungarian crown of Ladislas, King of Bohemia and son of Kazimir, placed Maximilian in direct opposition to the House of Yagiello, and Ivan was ready to join with the Habsburg in an attack on the common enemy. 1491The hostilities in Hungary were, however, cut short by a peace based on one of the “family compacts” so dear to the House of Austria, and Ivan, in his turn, saw the power of his foe wax stronger in spite of his diplomatic efforts. In another and more unexpected direction the Grand Prince established relations of friendship; the Ottoman power had already stretched its grasp over Kaffa and the fertile lands of the Krim peninsula, and Mengli-Girei was enrolled among the vassals of the Sultan Bayezid II. With this pacific occupant of the Throne of the Faithful Ivan exchanged courtesies—a sorry miscarriage of the hopes of the match-making Pontiffs. Doubtless the Russian Prince saw in the Sultan a possible ally against the new King of Hungary, who might one day unite on his head the crowns of Poland and Lit’uania. Not in this direction, however, were travelling the energies of the house of Yagiello. Kazimir seemed bent on providing his numerous sons with separate kingdoms and principalities; having failed in his attempt to divide the crowns of Hungary and Bohemia, he tried to secure the succession of his second son, John-Albert, to the Polish throne, and recommended another son, Alexander, to the boyarins of the grand duchy. Having thus, in marked contrast to the life-work of his great rival, done all that he could to ensure the disintegration of his sovereignty, the King comfortably sickened of a fatal disease and passed away with the famous moriendum ergo on his lips. 1492Subsequent events fell in with his testamentary wishes. The Lit’uanians elected Alexander as Grand Duke, and the Polish Diet, after many stormy sittings, recognised John-Albert as its sovereign—a recognition possibly influenced by the arrival on the scene of deliberation of 1600 armed men enlisted on that Prince’s behalf.[101]
The enfeeblement of Lit’uania by reason of its separation from Poland invited the long-nursed hostility of the Grand Prince and his faithful ally, Mengli-Girei. The latter ravaged the Lettish territories in the south, while the forces of the former harried all along the Moskovite border. Many of the boyarins and petty princes subject to Alexander passed over to the service of a monarch who was of their own nationality and religion, and the Grand Duke had to signalise his accession by buying off the hostility of Ivan with the surrender of some frontier lands. 1494On these terms an “eternal peace” was accommodated between the two countries, and the following year a matrimonial alliance was effected between Alexander and Ivan’s daughter Elena. Whatever chance might have existed of durable concord between a weak state holding conquered territory and a strong state to whom that territory has once belonged was extinguished by the irritating stipulations with which this marriage contract bristled. Uncomfortable as a neighbour, Ivan was incompatible as a father-in-law; the safeguards which had been insisted on against any tampering with the Princess’s Orthodoxy were supplemented by minute regulations with regard to her worship, her household, even her dress. She might visit a Catholic church as a curiosity—twice; she was to eschew Polish costumes, even her cooks were of Russian selection. In fact, her Court was to be an Orthodox Moskovite oasis in the Lit’uanian desert.[102] Alexander found he had sacrificed his domestic independence without obtaining any compensating security for his dominions; the restless Hospodar of Moldavia and the Krimskie Khan continued to harry the Podolian and Galician lands, and the Moskovites were openly aggressive towards the Grand Duke’s subjects. Ivan, indeed, at this period seems to have rated the power of the Yagiellos cheaply, and to have permitted himself a diversion in the affairs of North-western Europe. Whether he had secretly nursed designs against the merchants of the Hansa League, who continued to maintain a flourishing commerce at Novgorod after the civic glories had departed from her, or whether for once his coldly-measured policy was influenced by an unpent passion, the facts scarcely indicate. 1495The spark that roused, or gave plausible ground for, his sudden resentment against the unsuspecting traders was the torture of two Russian subjects at Revel—who were boiled to death for coining false money and otherwise misconducting themselves—coupled with an insult to the Grand Prince. Ivan revenged himself by swooping down on the famous Hanse factory at Novgorod, confiscating all the merchandise therein stored, and seizing the persons of forty-nine merchants of Lubeck, Hamburg, Munster, Dortmund, Revel, Dorpat, etc. By this raid he enriched himself with a sum computed at a million gulden, but the Hansa trade with Novgorod and Pskov was diverted to Revel and the Livlandish towns.[103] Skandinavian affairs next engaged the Grand Prince’s attention, and the embarrassments of Sweden offered an opportunity for wiping off old scores with that ancient enemy. Under the administration of the Regent Sture the Swedes had broken away from the Kalmar Union, and refused to acknowledge as their sovereign Johann, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, and King of Denmark and Norway; with this monarch Ivan entered into an active alliance, and the bleak uplands and marsh-choked forests of Finland became the scene of an obstinate war. Ivangorod, the newly-built Russian frontier fortress and the Swedish outpost of Viborg were in turn besieged by the belligerents, and the Finns experienced the calamities to which border peoples are particularly liable. Neither side gained any important advantage, and the war was brought to a sudden termination by the election of Johann to the crown of Sweden.
The influence of Byzantine ideas which had permeated the Moskovite Court showed itself in a series of sinister developments, which closely reproduced the palace intrigues for which the Greek capital had been infamous. (1490)By the death of the young Ivan, son of the Grand Prince by his first wife, the heirship in the direct line had devolved upon the former’s infant son, Dimitri; a formidable competitor existed, however, in Vasili, eldest son of Ivan by his second marriage, and herein lay the constituents of a pretty succession dispute, in which of course the two mothers, Elena of Moldavia and Sophie Paleologus, urged with inconvenient insistency the claims of their respective sons. The law of hereditary succession was an exotic plant on Russian soil, and men’s ideas were not yet sufficiently fixed to remove all question of doubt on the subject. For a comparatively newly established Court matters were carried through with remarkable correctness of detail. Plots were discovered—or imagined, tortures extracted confessions, guilty boyarins yielded up their lives on the banks of the river Moskva, Sophie and her son were disgraced, and the child Dimitri solemnly crowned as Ivan’s successor. The latter decision may have been influenced by a desire to “keep in” with the Hospodar Stefan, rather than by any scrupulous regard for hereditary rights, but at least it shows how little the heirship-of-the-Cæsars idea had taken hold of Moskovite minds. 1499Renewed intrigues brought about a reaction, Sophie and her son were restored to the light of the Grand Prince’s countenance, and another batch of executions and imprisonments, among the Dimitri party this time, restored peace and happiness to the domestic circle. Vasili was decorated with the title of Prince of Novgorod and Pskov, and the succession remained for the present a reopened question.
Meanwhile the eternal peace was showing signs of the decay to which such institutions are liable. In August 1499 appeared at Moskva the ambassador of Lit’uania, one Stanislav Gliebovitch, big with grievances against the Grand Prince. Stefan of Moldavia was threatened by the all-devouring Turk; would Ivan unite with the sovereigns of Lit’uania, Poland, and Hungary on his behalf? Why had Ivan, notwithstanding the peace, incited Mengli-Girei to raid the Grand Duke’s territories? And if Alexander conceded to Ivan the title “Sovereign of all Russia,” would the latter promise to renounce all claim on Kiev for himself and his heirs? To the last of these propositions Ivan returned a scornful negative. With regard to the suggested crusade he was ready to give assistance to Stefan when the latter should personally ask for it. The charge concerning Mengli, which could not be denied, was met by counter-recriminations respecting Alexander’s intrigues with the Golden Horde. The irritation felt at Vilna at the uncompromising attitude of the Grand Prince towards the proposals put forward by this mission was not allowed to calm down. Ivan presented on his part a batch of complaints concerning the non-fulfilment of various items in the Princess Elena’s marriage agreement, and the alleged forced conversion of the Grand Duke’s Russian subjects to the Latin faith. The amenities of religion gave the finishing touch to an already overstrained situation. Lit’uania and the Russian provinces included within its political bounds swarmed with an aristocratic population of boyarin-princes, some offshoots of the prolific stock of Rurik, others descendants of Gedimin. The Russian and Orthodox among them naturally inclined towards the rising power of Moskva, while among the Letts were many who bore no affection to the Yagiellos and were disposed rather to cast in their lot with the all-conquering Grand Prince. Even the grandsons of Shemiaka were drawn back to the allegiance which their forbears had deserted; in short, all along the border there was an uprising of princes and voevodas on behalf of the Prince of Moskva.
With the melting of the winter snows both sides prepared to take the field. The Tartars of the Krim steppes turned the noses of their wiry little horses towards the west; those of Kazan pushed along the wooded valley of the Upper Volga to swell the war-bands gathering at Moskva; the Grand Prince’s own horse-carls (with their quaint equipment of sabre, bow and arrows, mace, kisten,[104] and whip, and their heavy quilted jerkins) clambered on to their sturdy shaggy-heeled steeds and marshalled themselves under their respective boyarins and captains; the bulbous domes and campaniles of the magnificent-grown city re-echoed the pealing war-notes, and in wood and wold howled S. George’s dogs[105] in chorus, in anticipation of the good times coming.
Neither prince commanded his army in person; each in fact was employed in weaving alliances against the other. The main body of the Moskovite troops was under the direction of the voevoda Yakov Zakharievitch; the Letts were generalled by the hetman Konstantin Ostrojhskie. All the advantage of preparedness lay with the Moskovites, who in fact had taken possession of several Lit’uanian places while the Grand Duke was still in the negotiating stage. Alexander awoke from his chafing and peeving and yielding to find that his parent terrible was ensconced on the wrong side of the border, and the detestable Mengli-Girei, who hunted in couple with the Grand Prince, was careering unchecked through Podolia and Galicia; also the interesting champion of Christendom, who loved the Poles no better than he loved the Turks, was preparing to make a hostile incursion upon the same provinces. The Grand Duke on his part made overtures to the Order and dispatched couriers to Shikh-Akhmat, Khan of Astrakhan, and mortal enemy of Mengli.
July 1500
The superiority in warfare which had distinguished the Letts under their early princes seemed to have been lost at this juncture, and the first collision between the opposing forces—on the plain of Mit’kov, by the banks of the Vedrosh—resulted in a complete victory for the Moskovites.[106] The hetman and many Lit’uanian pans were taken prisoners, and there was joy in the bulb-topped city. The position of the long-time enemies was exactly reversed; the Moskovite and Tartar armies swept all before them in the open country, but the fortified citadels of Polotzk, Smolensk, Vitebsk, and other border strongholds resisted the attacks of the invaders, as the Kreml had defied those of Olgerd and Vitovt in bygone days. In the south-west the Krim hordes, led by Mengli-Girei’s son, burnt Kremenetz, Lublin, and many other towns and gorodoks. Unable to make a respectable resistance to his enemies on either side, Alexander engaged himself in a feverish activity of negotiation. In January 1501 ambassadors from Ladislav of Hungary-Bohemia and Albert of Poland journeyed to Moskva on a fruitless errand of mediation. Urgent remonstrances were dispatched from Vilna to Moldavia, begging the Athlete du Christ to be athletic in any other direction than that of the grand duchy, while anxious endeavours were made to enlist the aid of the German Order against the victorious Moskovite. The office of Land-Master of Livland was filled at this moment by the able warrior Walter von Plettenberg, and though crippled in power and dominion since the disastrous field of Tannenberg, the knights were still a formidable fighting force. Little reason had they to love the Yagiellos, but at this moment Teutonic feeling was more inflamed against the phœnix-growth of the new Russian power that had arisen from the ashes of Mongol devastation. The Order saw the hand that armed Pskov and Izborsk against its territories; the Hansa merchants thought of the violence done to their trading rights at Novgorod; and the empire felt jealous of the rival sovereignty, owning neither Pope nor Kaiser, which threatened to make the late Emperor’s fatuous monogram more illusory than ever.[107] Taking advantage of this latent hostility, Alexander was able to bring about an offensive alliance between himself and the Order, into which also entered the sovereign ecclesiastics of Riga, Revel, Dorpat, Oesel, and Pilten. This new phase of the struggle was heralded by the arrest of 200 Russian merchants at Dorpat, a belated reprisal for the affair of Novgorod. Ivan dispatched towards the Livlandish border an army of Moskovites and Pskovians, computed to have been 40,000 strong. Against this array von Plettenberg could only bring into action, at a locality 10 verstas from Izborsk, a force of 4000 knights and some irregulars. The Germans, however, were well supplied with artillery, and the noise, perhaps more than the execution, of their fire-belching implements of war caused a panic among the Russians, who fled in confusion. And here it may be remarked that the Russian warriors of that period were somewhat liable to these sudden stampedes; as a contemporary observer neatly remarks, “They make the first charge on the enemy with great impetuosity, but their valour does not seem to hold out very long, for they seem as if they would give a hint to the enemy, as much as to say, ‘if you do not flee, we must.’”[108] Without straining a point it may be assumed that this liability to panic was in some measure due to the superstitious coddling of their religion, which depicted angels and saints and Bogoroditzas as ready, on suitable occasions, to interfere with effect on their behalf; consequently if the enemy stood his ground for any length of time the disheartened warriors experienced an uneasy lama sabacthani feeling that all was not well with them in the desired quarter, and demoralisation ensued. The stubbornly contested field of Koulikovo scarcely furnishes the exception which “proves the rule,” as on that occasion the Metropolitan had announced that victory would only be attained after much fighting.[109]
This ignominious collapse left Pskov to receive the full fury of von Plettenberg’s attack, and the citizens in desperation prepared to make a more creditable stand behind their walls than they had done in the field. But the threatened blow did not fall; a pestilence of some severity broke out among the “iron men,” and the army of the Order was obliged to return to quarters.