The Rise of the Russian Empire

by Saki

Another change came over the complexion of affairs. John-Albert had terminated an inglorious reign by a fit of apoplexy in the month of June, and on the 23rd October the Polish Diet elected Alexander to the vacant throne. This event did not strengthen his hands as much as might have been expected. The Polish pans and nobles were a turbulent self-seeking class, and were not likely to rush recklessly to the defence of Lit’uania while their new monarch stayed quietly at home and tampered possibly with their precious privileges. Ivan on the other hand, undeterred by the reverse near Izborsk, prosecuted the war with persistent energy. Employing the best possible method for heartening his troops against the Teutons, he sent them ravaging into Livland on the heels of the retreating army. Another victory was obtained over the Lit’uanians, while Shikh-Akhmet, who had made a diversion against Mengli on the east, was chased out of his dominions by the allied Moskovite and Krim forces. Thus darkly for Alexander closed the year 1501. Ivan had maintained his ground in every direction, and had inflicted grievous harm on the allies of Poland. His Russian and Tartar cavalry had raided unchecked round Neuhausen, Marienburg, and the cathedral lands of Dorpat, the autumn floods and consequent state of the roads preventing the heavy-armed knights and their heavier artillery from taking the field. With the first frosts the invaders withdrew across the border, followed by the indefatigable Land-Master, who at last was able to abandon his enforced inaction. His hastily gathered forces were, however, outmatched by the superior numbers of the marauders, and in an encounter at Helmet (25th November) the Germans were beaten back and 300 of the episcopal troops of Dorpat left upon the field.[110]

The war dragged on throughout the early months of the new year; a waiting game obviously suited Ivan’s plans and there was none to force his hand. The dread of Russian-Tartar raids made the Livlander prelates and burggreves chary of sending off their lanzknechts to the support of the Land-Master, and von Plettenberg was for a long time unable either to clear his borders of the freebooting bands, or to carry the hostilities into the enemy’s country. From Alexander came no help, only couriers with promises. The King was prodigal with his messengers and tireless in sketching plans of campaign for himself and his allies; the only detail which he allowed himself to neglect was the carrying out of his share of the preconcerted action. This omission placed his friends in awkward predicaments; Shikh-Akhmet was a miserable fugitive, von Plettenberg found himself facing the whole Moskovite fighting strength, except that detachment which was leisurely besieging Smolensk. Autumn witnessed a quickening of the situation. Still trusting to Alexander’s fly-blown promises, the Land-Master assumed the aggressive and trained his ponderous artillery against the walls of Pskov. The burghers saw their battlements and ramparts crumble away beneath the thundering cannonade of the mighty siege-pieces, and day by day weaker grew the defences which divided them from their bitterest enemies. But while no Polish troops put in an appearance, the hearts of the besieged were gladdened by the sight of the tossing manes of thousands of Tartar horses and the conical head-dress of thousands of Ivan’s warriors. The advancing Russian host was large enough to smother the slender following of von Plettenberg, but the iron-sheathed German knights and footmen were capable of offering a stout resistance to the arrows and even the trenchant sabres of their opponents. The Land-Master withdrew his force to the shores of the Smolina Lake, where, on the day of the Exaltation of the Cross (14th September) the Black Cross warriors commenced one of the most brilliant battles of their crowded annals. For three days they held the field against the stubborn attacks of the whirlwind-sweeping squadrons; “with blood and dust,” says an old chronicle, “both steed and rider were bedecked, so that none might tell the colour”; and when finally exhaustion and discouragement deterred the Russians from renewing the attack, the Iron men were able to claim the victory. But the willing horse had worked itself to a standstill; von Plettenberg was obliged to lead his scarred and weary followers homeward, and if the Moskovites were too crippled to re-commence their raids, at the same time the Livlanders were forced out of Russian territory.[111]

Meanwhile in another direction had fallen a long impending blow, no further to be averted by the eloquent epistles of the Complete Letter-writer. The redoubtable Hospodar, nursing against Poland the remembrance of recent wrongs, and profiting by her present embarrassments, burst suddenly into Galicia, and gleaned where the Tartars had harvested. Several towns fell with little resistance into his hands, and were annexed to his Moldavian dominions. Not in accord with Ivan was this invasion undertaken, for the question of the succession to the Moskovite throne had caused a rupture between the two princes. Mengli-Girei was, in fact, the pivot on which the anti-Polish alliance turned; the Grand Prince was not on good terms with the Hospodar, and the latter could not be considered as otherwise than hostile to the Turkish Sultan, but Mengli was the friend and ally of all three. The winter of 1502-3 found matters in much the same state as they had been twelve months earlier. The Grand Prince’s troops had been obliged to raise the siege of Smolensk, but they still retained the lands they had seized at the commencement of the war, still held their own in the Baltic districts. A candidate for the blessings traditionally allotted to the peacemaker now appeared in the person of the Pontiff, who sought to bring about an accommodation between the contending sovereigns. The splendid profligate who occupied the throne of S. Peter was not actuated by a constitutional or professional abhorrence of bloodshed—under his pontificate the Eternal City had been a shambles rather than a sheepfold,—but for the present the smiting of the Infidel seemed to him more urgent than the harrying of the Orthodox, especially as the Orthodox seemed well able to retaliate. With an uncrushed and unappeased enemy on their flank, it was clearly impossible for the kings of Hungary and Poland and the Teutonic Order to join in the crusade by which the Borgia fondly hoped to sweep the Ottoman from Europe. Hence the apparition of this very soiled dove masquerading with an olive branch in its crimson beak.

Ivan was undoubtedly master of the situation, and was able practically to dictate his own terms, which he proceeded to do notwithstanding the clamour of the crowd of envoys and ambassadors—Papal, Hungarian, Polish, Teutonic, and Livlandish—who had gathered at Moskva. In the first place, the Grand Prince would not hear of an “eternal peace,” but limited the negotiations to the arrangement of a six-years’ truce (25th March 1503 to 25th March 1509). With some slight remissions the Moskovites retained the lands they had laid hands on during the war; Tchernigov, Starodoub, Poutivl, Novgorod-Severski, Briansk, Toropetz, and others, in all nineteen towns, seventy districts, twenty-two gorodoks (townlets), and thirteen villages, were ceded by Alexander to his uncomfortable father-in-law.[112] The Livlanders, who had played so important a part in the war, were left as much in the lurch by their graceless ally during the negotiations as they had been throughout the fighting, and the conditions they were obliged to accept to participate in the truce were far from favourable. The Russian merchants were to be liberated from their prisons at Dorpat; the bishop of that see was to resume payment of an old tribute of wax and honey to the Grand Prince, and a Greek church was to be erected in the town. The Livlander prisoners were not released by the Moskovites, and against these concessions and disadvantages could only be set a clause which restricted the fishery rights of the Pskovians in Lake Peipus to the east shore.[113]

The Khan of the Krim steppes was not directly included in the truce, though Alexander innocently supposed that Ivan’s ally was implicated in the general pacification; the Grand Prince privately took care to prevent Mengli-Girei from sharing this impression, and the Tartar hordes continued to disquiet the Lit’uanian provinces.

Short though the term of the truce was, it outlasted the two principals who within a few months of each other attained that eternal peace which in life they had been unable to compact for. Ivan, in fact, had but obtained a breathing space in which to arrange the affairs of his family and gosoudarstvo before closing his long reign of forty-three years. While the war was yet being waged he had definitely broken with the Moldavian or Dimitri party, knowing well that Stefan could neither relinquish nor Alexander forgive the loss of the towns which the former had wrested from Poland, and hence that no imprudence on his part would unite his two family connections against him. Dimitri had been stripped of his prospective title and guarded as a prisoner in his palace, while the names of himself and his mother were struck off from the prayers of the Church. This step was followed by the proclamation of Vasili as the Grand Prince’s successor. The death of Elena in 1505, and of the Hospodar a year earlier, left the youth Dimitri in a forlorn and friendless condition.

In the winter of 1505 (27th October) Ivan ended his long and remarkable reign. The sovereignty which he relinquished was scarcely to be recognised as the same which had been bequeathed to him by Vasili the Darkened. From a struggling principality it had shot up into a monarchy, struggling still, but for empire, not existence. The terrible humiliating Mongol yoke, which had been such a bitter reality when Ivan’s world was young, seemed now the almost forgotten bogey of a dimly-remembered past. A revolt of the Khan of Kazan, the last event of the old man’s reign, served only to emphasise the fact of the altered relations between Tartar and Moskovite. Perm, the regions of the Petchora, and the vast boreal territories which had belonged to the republic of Novgorod more than doubled the extent of the Grand-principality, which had been further swelled by the absorption of Tver and Viatka, and the conquest from Lit’uania of the Russian lands east of the Sojh. The standing and importance of the Moskovite State likewise had kept pace with its expansion during this long reign, and the policy of the Kreml was a matter of interest not merely to Sarai and Riazan and Vilna as heretofore, but to Buda, Constantinople, Wien, and Rome, to Krakow, Kjöbenhavn, Upsal, and Koenigsberg.

Such was the inheritance which Vasili III. Ivanovitch received from the cold hands of his father; from his mother (who had died in 1503) he derived the reflected glory which centred in the last of the Paleologi. Embarrassments too were not wanting to disquiet the opening days of the new reign. Besides the revolt of Kazan, the suspended hostilities with Poland and Livland threatened the future repose of the State. The alert and provident von Plettenberg was husbanding his resources against a renewal of the war, and was, moreover, receiving considerable Teutonic and Catholic support. A loan had been subscribed on his behalf by the cities of Lubeck and Rostock, and the Pope had diverted to his use a share of the receipts accruing from the sale of indulgences—an ingenious device which at the same time equipped the gentlemen of God against the heretics, admitted more souls to swell the triumph-song of Heaven, and, incidentally, enriched the coffers of Holy Church. Financial aid was also forthcoming from Maximilian, who granted to the Land-Master a three years’ privilege to exact tolls from all ships entering Livlandish harbours (1505).[114] The policy of the Emperor at this moment halted between an angry suspicion of the house of Yagiello, which drew him towards a good understanding with Moskva, and a jealous solicitude for the German colony on the Baltic, which pulled him in the opposite direction. Alexander, relieved of the nightmare incubus of his terrible father-in-law, lost no time in resuming his plaints and proposals to the new sovereign. Would Vasili restore the filched territories to Lit’uania and peace to the two countries? To which the Grand Prince replied that he was willing to conclude peace on the condition that Kiev and Smolensk were ceded to him. Clearly the time was not yet ripe for negotiation.

In August of 1506 the King of Poland followed his great rival to the grave, cheered on his death-bed by the rare news of a victory over the Krim Tartars. Sigismund, another son of Kazimir, obtained the double election to the Polish-Lit’uanian throne.

Meanwhile Vasili was engaged in dealing with the defiant Kazanese, not with conspicuous success. The Moskovite army, led by the Grand Prince’s brother Dimitri, after having in turn been repulsed by the enemy and victorious in a second attack, was finally taken by surprise and irremediably routed, abandoning in its flight several cannon. Preparations for another expedition were countermanded owing to the submission of the Khan. This pacification was of timely service to Moskva, for relations with Poland became suddenly strained and the truce ceased to be effective. The firefly who led both parties into the uncertain issue of open hostility was a Polish pan, Mikhail Glinski, celebrated for his recent victory over the Krim horde. Of Tartar extraction and German education, this restless spirit had attached himself to the Lit’uanian Court, where his success, or the ambition ensuing therefrom, gained him many enemies. The accession of the new king brought matters to a head, and Glinski demanded justice between himself and his detractors. Sigismund procrastinated, and the aggrieved noble went over, with all his followers, to the service of Moskva, plundering and slaying as he went. Vasili took the interesting waif under his protection, and the border regions were soon well alight with the fires of war. Russian and Tartar troops followed the beck of the stark strife-kindling free-lance, who had the satisfaction of surprising in his palace near Grodno the pan Jabrzczinski, the foremost among his calumniators. “Have I found thee, O mine enemy?” With savage glee he inflicted the death penalty on his foe, and went on his way exulting. 1508In the month of June Sigismund appeared on the scene with a formidable army and chased the invaders out of his territory. The result, however, of the whole affair was favourable to Moskva; a peace was effected between the two countries which confirmed Vasili in the possession of his father’s conquests and recognised Glinski and other disaffected Lit’uanians as Moskovite subjects. The Order, as usual, was left to take care of itself, and von Plettenberg saw himself with some alarm standing single-handed against Moskva, with only a few more months of the truce to run. Vasili, however, raised no difficulty in the way of a good understanding with the Germanic knights and Livlandish prelates, whom it was to his interest to detach from the Polish alliance, and a fourteen years’ peace was concluded on mutually satisfactory grounds. 1509Thus the Grand Prince obtained a respite from the exhausting neighbour-war, which gave him the opportunity to resume the great work of consolidation within his own frontiers.