Delivered by the fourteen years’ peace from the state of insecurity which had been almost normal with them for nearly a century, the Pskovians might possibly have looked forward to a season of tranquillity and prosperity. Tranquillity they were certainly to have, but it was to be the repose of decay, not of belaurelled affluence. The Grand Prince, also delivered from the embarrassments of a foreign war, revived the designs which had long been harboured at Moskva against the independence of Pskov. Betaking himself and his Court to Novgorod in the autumn of 1509, he summoned thither the posadniks, boyarins, and notables of the city on the Peipus to give an account of their grievances against the Governor, Ivan Obolenski, who had rendered himself unpopular. Scarcely had the deputed citizens arrived than they were arrested and shut up in the famous archiepiscopal palace, which, after having furnished a prison for many a subject-ridden kniaz, now became a place of detention for those who were under the sovereign’s displeasure. Without a struggle Pskov yielded to the fate of her “elder sister” Novgorod. 1510The vetché was dissolved and the city bell borne down from the Troitza tower. Vasili was faithfully moving in the path marked out by his predecessors.
The domestic affairs of the Grand Prince’s Court were tinged, as indeed was the whole Moskovite life at this period, with a strong Asiatic leaven. Already in his father’s lifetime a bride had been chosen for him by a method which recalls the wooing of a sultan or a rajah rather than that of a Christian prince; 1500 of the most eligible damsels of the realm were gathered together for inspection, and their number gradually weeded down to ten. These were medically examined, and a “selection of the fittest” was made in the person of Solomonia, daughter of a boyarin of no very high standing. By an irony of circumstance this carefully picked consort disappointed the expectations which had been formed of her, and the prophecies and flatteries which lie in wait for the birth of a royal heir were baulked of their delivery. The absence of a successor in the direct line did not ameliorate the lot of the Grand Prince’s nephew, Dimitri. Since the accession of the new monarch the seclusion of the possible rival had become a close imprisonment, and his death was not unduly postponed. In Oriental State affairs, as indeed in those of Western Europe during the Middle Ages, it is a safe axiom that the inconvenient die young. Dimitri died. Unavoidably, the chronicles of the day suggested foul play, and he would not have been the only Russian Prince of the Blood who was conducted by an expeditious “royal road” through this vale of tears.
Owing to the renewed importance of Russia in the affairs of Christendom, and the observations handed down to posterity by the ambassadors and commercial agents who penetrated into the bleak and reputedly barbarous regions of “Muscouvie,” the appearance and life of the isolated capital in this century stands out with a hitherto unwonted clearness. Hemmed in on all sides with thick forests, from whence, down the Moskva river, was floated the timber of which the houses were mostly built, the city stood in a setting of open meadows, swarming with hares and roebuck, which were reserved for the Grand Prince’s exclusive hunting. Fields and gardens and monasteries straggled so far into the outskirts (or slobodas) that it was difficult to tell exactly where the line of demarcation lay; for besides the Moskva on one side, and the ditch-like Neglina on the other, there were “no useful defences in the shape of walls, fosses, or ramparts.”[115] The Kreml, or citadel, and in time the inner quarters of the town, were however strongly fortified. As is frequently the case in cities with Oriental characteristics, squalor and magnificence were strangely jumbled together. Mean huts and booths were interspersed with cupola-crowned churches and public buildings, which, designed for the most part by Byzantine and Italian artists, presented a quaint and not unpleasing confusion of eastern and western architecture. Despite the “forty times forty churches” which were springing up all over Moskva, the cleanliness which is supposed to accompany godliness was conspicuously absent. “This city” wrote the Imperial ambassador at the Court of Vasili, “is so broad and spacious, and so very dirty, that bridges have been constructed here and there in the highways and streets and in the other more distinguished parts.” Here, then, in this straggling wood-built metropolis, this germ-cell of the Russian Empire, dwelt the Grand Princes who were slowly evolving into Great White Tzars; amid a surrounding of cathedrals and mud, holy ikons and squalid hovels, dedicated gates and buildings topped with quaint bulbous domes and cupolas, gold, blue, and silver, moved the rulers of the Moskovite state. Hedged round with dreary ceremonial, waited on by courtiers and chamberlains and servants, clad in long flowing robes that smacked more of Bagdad than of Rome or Wien, the sovereigns of “all Russia” dwelt in a world apart from outside influences, and could only measure things by their own standard.
As in a rookery at the approach of nesting-time certain early birds may be seen quietly pursuing their constructive operations amid the turmoil and racket of their less provident fellows, so all over Europe at this epoch, amid the anarchy which attended the decay of feudalism, the work of building was in full progress. The Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns in the Empire, the Valois in France, the Tudors in England, the Moskovite princes in Russia, were piecing together the foundations of what were eventually to be the five Great Powers of a transformed Europe. In the early years of the sixteenth century it seemed not improbable that the Yagiellos would create, out of the chaos of Polish, Magyar, Czech, Lettish, and West Russian lands, a personal dominion which might crystallise into an empire. But as in a rookery, to return to the simile, certain unfortunately situated nests suffer from the plundering attentions of competing builders, so the house of Yagiello was doomed to see its carefully collected materials snatched away in the predatory acquisitions of the Austrian archdukes, the Markgrafs of Brandenburg, and the Grand Princes of Moskva. And not only had the kings of Poland fallen among thieves, as it were, but their hands were more or less tied by their dependence on the most selfish of all governing classes, an anti-monarchical aristocracy.
Between Poles and Moskovites neither truce nor treaty could long be effective, and war soon broke out anew; Sigismund had at last succeeded in detaching the Krim Tartars from the Russian alliance, or, more probably, the nomads had followed their own lawless inclinations in bursting upon the rich cornlands of Riazan, “more fertile than all the other provinces of Russia.” The event served as a pretext for Vasili to march his troops into Lit’uania and besiege Smolensk. The moment was favourable for a rupture. The King of Hungary was tottering towards his grave, and two rival parties were more than anxious to constitute themselves guardians of his youthful son and his two kingdoms. In this struggle Sigismund found himself opposed to the Austrian Archduke, Maximilian, head of the Holy Roman Empire; more formidable, perhaps, in the former capacity than in the latter. Besides this embarrassment, the relations between Poland and the military Order were, to say the least, strained. The election (in 1511) of Albrecht, of the House of Brandenburg, to the office of Grand-Master, had given new vigour to the knights, who, since the disaster of Tannenberg, had been chafing against the Polish suzerainty. With the support, moral and material, of the Emperor, the Markgraf Joachim, and the Grand Prince of Moskva, it seemed possible that this over-lordship might be thrown off. Dec. 1512Under these circumstances Vasili set forth in mid-winter, attended by his brothers Urii and Dimitri, by Mikhail Glinski, and numerous boyarins, and trailing after him in sledges his unwieldy artillery, served by German gunners, to undertake the siege of Smolensk. From contemporary accounts this important border city does not appear to have been very elaborately fortified, but its defences were sufficiently strong to withstand the Grand Prince’s attack, and in March the invading army returned to Moskva to avoid the dangers and discomforts of the approaching thaw. In the summer of the same year Vasili reiterated the attempt with no better result; the Russians at this time were not particularly skilled in the arts of sieges. The question of the Hungarian regency and eventual succession still agitated the Courts of Wien and Krakow, although Ladislas had not yet joined the “quiet people,” and in February 1514 an Imperial ambassador appeared at Moskva for the purpose of clinching a treaty between Maximilian and Vasili. The reciprocal agreement which was drawn up between the two parties is important from the fact that, in the German copy, the word “Tzar” was rendered “Kaiser”—the first occasion on which the imperial title was applied to the Russian monarch.[116] 1514Three months later Vasili’s lieutenants at Novgorod concluded a treaty with the Hanseatic League, by which commercial relations were restored to their old footing. In June of the same year the importunate Grand Prince resumed his attack upon Smolensk, and reaped the reward of perseverance. The King of Poland, who had made no effort to succour the beleaguered city, attributed its loss to treachery, and vented his chagrin on the governor, a Bohemian named Solohoub, whom he put to death. The Russian accounts give the credit of the victory to the Moskovite artillery—which ought certainly to have got its range by that time—and to the pacific overtures of the citizens, headed by their Bishop Varsonof.[117]
The loss of this important place roused Sigismund to a more aggressive line of action than he had hitherto taken. Konstantin Ostrojhski was despatched against the enemy with a force of 30,000 men; a force which, though numerically far weaker than that at the disposal of Vasili, was better equipped, better provided with artillery, and, above all, better generalled. In the latter department the Moskovites sustained a severe loss by the defection of the unstable Glinski, who, disappointed in his expectation of obtaining the government of Smolensk in return for services rendered, made arrangements for deserting to the cause of his former sovereign. Sigismund was not loth to receive the strayed lamb back to his fold, but a misfortune, in the shape of a well-mounted band of the Grand Prince’s troops, overtook the transient pan before he had reached the Polish lines. Vasili rewarded his treason with rigorous imprisonment, deeming, perhaps, that he would be more valuable as a hostage than as a corpse. The two armies now faced each other from either bank of the Dniepr; the Russians were about 80,000 strong, and had, in addition to superiority of numbers, the further advantage of being on the defensive. This advantage, however, was thrown away by the inaction of the Moskovite voevodas, who stood helplessly looking on while Ostrojhski threw a bridge across the river and safely brought over his heavy artillery. 1514On the 8th September[118] at Orsha, on the left bank of the Dniepr, was fought a terrific battle, in which the hordes of Moskovy went down in hopeless rout before the well-armed knights and well-served artillery of the Polish-Lit’uanian army. Allowing for exaggeration, the losses on the side of the vanquished were enormous. Sigismund, in the exultant letters he despatched to Pope, Cardinals, and the Doge of Venice, announcing the victory, estimates the Moskovite slain at 30,000, and particularises a large number of distinguished prisoners.[119] The disaster to the Moskovite arms roused the spirit of the Polish faction within the walls of Smolensk. The time-serving Bishop, who had been largely instrumental in the surrender of the town to Vasili, flattered himself that he might again dispose of its destinies, and, with the connivance of several boyarins, sent an invitation to the Polish general to come and possess himself of the place. The Moskovite voevoda, a member of the princely family of Shouyskie, was not, however, a quantité négligeable in the city, and the wily ecclesiastic’s schemes were sharply checkmated. When Ostrojhski came before the gates of Smolensk he might mark a grisly row of corpses strung up on the battlements, the centre of interest for flapping bands of crows and daws; these were the bodies of his luckless co-operators, who had been seized and executed by order of the governor, with the exception of Varsonof, whose equally guilty but more holy person was secured in a prison. The Polish hetman, thwarted in his hopes of peaceable possession, was likewise unsuccessful in an attempt to carry the city by assault, and the brilliant victory of Orsha had no more substantial result than the re-occupation of a few border posts.
1515
The death of Mengli-Girei and the accession of his son Makhmet to the Krim khanate, scarcely affected the relations between Moskva and the Horde, for the new Khan’s influence had for some time been dominant. Neither Vasili nor Sigismund could count on the support or even the neutrality of the Tartar chief, who took advantage of the hostility between Lit’uania and Moskva to ravage the lands of each with perfect impartiality. Another shift in the political balance deprived the Grand Prince of a more exalted though equally unreliable ally; a new family compact had been patched up between the Kaiser and the Kings of Hungary and Poland, and Maximilian was now as anxious to compose the quarrel in the east as he previously had been to inflame it. The continued successes of the Turks could not fail to inspire uneasiness in a prince who was scheming to acquire a preponderance in the lands of south-east Europe, and the Emperor wished to engineer a powerful alliance, German, Italian, Hungarian, and Polish, against this undesirable neighbour. The idea was obviously unworkable as long as Moskva hung threateningly on the Polish flank, hence the solicitude which the Habsburg felt to bring about a peace between the two Slav powers. For this end an Imperial ambassador, one Sigismund, Baron von Herberstein, left Germany at the end of 1516 on a mission of mediation to the Moskovite Court, where he arrived in April the following year, after a heroic journey over innumerable lakes and marshes “slippery with snow and ice,” over frozen rivers, and, towards the end, across ice rendered rotten by melting snow-water; much of the “way” lying too through a country desolated by skirmishing bands of Poles and Russians. 1517The chances of successful negotiation were not improved by an autumn campaign which Ostrojhski carried on, with disastrous result, in the district of Pskov; the small burg of Opotchka, valiantly defended by Vasili Saltikov, held out for fifteen days against the vigorous assaults of Polish, Lit’uanian, and Bohemian troops, and was eventually relieved, on the 18th October, by two converging Moskovite forces which drove Ostrojhski off the field. Notwithstanding this side-play the Polish envoys had joined Herberstein at Moskva, and were seeking to arrange a peaceable understanding between the Grand Prince and their master. Each side put forward absurdly unwarranted claims—Vasili, for instance, stipulated for the cession to Moskovy of Kiev and Polotzk, among other places, while the Poles demanded, in addition to Smolensk, a half-share of Novgorod, Pskov, and Tver. The real bone of contention was Smolensk, and as neither party would bate their pretension to the possession of that city, the negotiations came to an abortive end in November.
If Herberstein’s efforts for the termination of the war were not crowned with success, his long and arduous journey was in other respects by no means barren of result. It is mainly owing to observations made on this, and on a subsequent embassy, that a picture has been preserved of the life at that gloomy Court, which was partly Asiatic, partly Archaic European.[120] In the Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii, Maximilian’s ambassador set forth to the western world his experiences in the remote and desolate region beginning to be known as Muscouvie, much as an explorer in a more travelled age would retail the account of his wanderings in Central Africa. The Moskva of Vasili Ivanovitch was a curious compound of primitive Russian squalor, Byzantine splendour, the rude hospitality of feudal Christendom, and the dark and tortuous restraint of an Oriental capital. The state banquets, or rather the solemn and awful occasions when the Grand Prince invited the foreign ambassadors to dine with him and his dvoryanins (courtiers), are good examples of the conglomerate of ceremonial, simplicity, and patriarchal domesticity which obtained at the Moskovite Court. The Grand Prince and his brothers with the highest boyarins sat together at one table; at another, opposite, sat the distinguished guests of the evening, while round the hall were ranged tables for the remainder of the company. Bread was solemnly served out from the Prince’s table to such as he wished to compliment, and the feast invariably opened with the consumption of brandy and roast swans. The dishes were borne in and out by servants sumptuously attired, and in addition to brandy, mead, beer, and Greek wines were served in goblets which, like all the other appointments, were of pure gold. In such ponderous dissipations, in occasional coursing matches in his hare preserves round Moskva, in watching his foreign gunners exercise their skill with the heavy uncouth field-pieces at stated periods, and of course in elaborate religious ceremonies, did the Gosoudar of all Russia fill up the round of his private existence. The coursing seems to have been as cautious and “safe” as the Moskovite state-policy. “When the hare shows herself, three, four, five, or more dogs are slipped, and set after her on all sides; and when she is taken, there is loud hallooing, as if they had taken a large wild beast.” “Moreover, about an hundred men stood in long array, one half of whom were dressed in black, and the other in yellow; not far from them stood all the other horsemen, to prevent the hares from running through and escaping.”[121]