The events in the Orthodox church were as momentous as the fall of the Horde. After the death of metropolitan Aleksei, the Greek church chose the Bulgarian Kiprian to succeed him. Kiprian’s mission was to keep together under his jurisdiction the Orthodox lands of Lithuania, Moscow, and Novgorod, as they had been in Kievan times. This was not an easy task, for both Lithuania and Moscow wanted control but Kiprian was a powerful figure in the church as well as in politics, and it was a cultural force, to boot. On his death in 1406 the Greek Photios received the see and largely identified his interests with Moscow. Photios died in 1431, right at the start of Moscow’s dynastic turmoil. His death deprived Grand Prince Vasilii of a crucial ally at the worst possible moment. Unfortunately his replacement was another Greek – Isidoros – who arrived in Moscow in 1434. Exactly at that time the Byzantine Empire was in its last agony, reduced to the city of Constantinople and a few islands. In a vain effort to secure aid from Western Europe, Emperor Constantine XI agreed to discuss church union with Rome. Isidoros quickly left Moscow for Italy to join the Greek prelates in discussion. In reality, Rome proposed simple surrender, and at the council of Florence in 1439 the Greek bishops, including Isidoros, gave in under pressure from the Emperor. They accepted the supremacy of the pope and the Latin position on the filioque. Among the Greeks, the news provoked a firestorm of opposition, especially in the monasteries, since the fourteenth century renewed centers of Orthodox piety. The surrender at Florence divided and weakened Byzantium rather than strengthened it, and in any case Western aid never came in sufficient quantity. In 1453 the army of Mehmed the Conqueror breached the walls and gates of Constantinople and put an end to a millennium of Byzantine civilization. In its place the Sultans built Istanbul into the great capital of an Islamic empire. Justinian’s church of Saint Sophia became a mosque.
When the news of the fall of Constantinople reached Moscow, the affairs of the Russian church were long settled. Isidoros had traveled back to Moscow with the news of Florence, and in 1443 the Russian bishops met with him to consider the situation. They unanimously rejected subjection to Rome, deposed Isidoros, and elected in his place, Bishop Iona of Riazan at the direction of Grand Prince Vasilii. The Orthodox church in Russia was now separated from the Greeks, for it had elected a leader without reference to Constantinople, which was now in the hands of unionists. Russia’s autocephaly, as its ecclesiastical independence is called, was not planned. It was the result of necessity, the only solution to the dilemma presented by the apostasy of the Greeks at Florence. In his testament Iona specified that when Orthodoxy was restored in Constantinople, even if under the Turks, Russia would return to obedience to the Greek bishops. This was a pious hope that remained unfulfilled, for the Russian church continued to choose its own metropolitan. For the Moscow princes this was a great opportunity, as it meant that they would be the only secular rulers with a voice in the affairs of the church in Russia.
Grand Prince Vasilii II died at the age of forty-seven in 1462. He had emerged the victor in a ruthless struggle with his own uncle and cousins and maintained the hegemony of Moscow. He had encouraged the church to assert its orthodoxy and its independence from the Greeks. His eldest son Ivan was already twenty-two, old enough to rule in his own right. As the future would soon reveal, the young prince was ready to seize the opportunity that his father had left him.
3 The Emergence of Russia
At the end of the fifteenth century, Russia came into being as a state – no longer just a group of related principalities. Precisely at this time in written usage the modern term Rossia (a literary expression borrowed from Greek) began to edge out the traditional and vernacular Rus. If we must choose a moment for the birth of Russia out of the Moscow principality, it is the final annexation of Novgorod by Grand Prince Ivan III (1462–1505) of Moscow in 1478. By this act, Ivan united the two principal political and ecclesiastical centers of medieval Russia under one ruler, and in the next generation he and his son Vasilii III (1505–1533) added the remaining territories. In the west and north, the boundaries they established are roughly those of Russia today, while in the south and east the frontier for most of its length remained the ecological boundary between forest and steppe. In spite of later expansion, this territory formed the core of Russia until the middle of the eighteenth century, and it contained most of the population and the centers of state and church. The Russians were still a people scattered along the rivers between great forests.
In the south and east, mostly beyond the forests and out in the steppe, Russia’s neighbors remained the Tatar khanates that emerged in the 1430s from the breakup of the Golden Horde: Kazan, Crimea in the Crimean peninsula, and the Great Horde ruling the steppe. The Great Horde in turn broke up around 1500 to form the khanate of Astrakhan on the lower Volga and farther east the Nogai Horde. Farther east the khanate of Siberia held sway over the tiny population of the vast plain of the Ob’ and Irtysh rivers. These states were complex social organisms. Kazan’ was the only one to occupy part of the forest zone, and its people settled along the rivers and farmed the land like the Russians but with a nomadic appendage where the steppe began to the southeast. The Nogais were pure nomads. Crimea and Astrakhan’ were somewhere in between, their population made up of mostly steppe dwellers, but Astrakhan’ was a town and Crimea had towns and garden agriculture. Its location meant that it had a lively trade and close political ties with its great neighbor to the south, the Ottoman Empire.
At this moment the Ottomans were at the peak of their power, for in 1453 Mehmed the Conqueror, already master of most of Anatolia and the Balkans, took Constantinople, the ancient capital of Byzantium. In 1516 the Turks moved south, quickly capturing the Levant and Egypt, north Africa and Mesopotamia. Thus the last great empire of western Eurasia was born, and it soon turned its attention to central Europe. In 1524 the defeat of Hungary at the battle of Mohacs laid open the road into Germany and in 1529 the Ottomans laid siege to Vienna itself. For the moment, the Ottoman Turks paid little attention to Russia. Their great opponents were Iran and the Holy Roman Empire, and in any case the Crimeans, from 1475 Ottoman vassals, stood between Russia and the Turks. The Sultans in Istanbul wanted the Crimean cavalry for the Turkish wars in Hungary and Iran and did not want to waste them in raids against a minor state far in the north. At the same time the Sultans gave their Crimean vassals considerable freedom of action, and Ivan III was able to establish an understanding with the Crimeans that lasted into the sixteenth century. Russia continued to play a major role in the politics of the steppe, sending and receiving envoys back and involving itself in the endless feuds and rivalries among the ruling dynasties and clans.
To the west Russia had only one major rival, Lithuania, now united with Poland. The resultant Polish-Lithuanian state was the hegemonic power of Eastern Europe, more populous than Russia and more powerful than any of its neighbors. Poland, having vanquished the Teutonic Knights and fended off the Tatars and Turks to the south, had only Russia as a rival left. Poland’s power came not only from the weakness of most neighbors, but also from its political structure, for the growing role of the diet provided a major role for the magnates and nobility. The diet gave its elites an important stake in the prosperity of the state but a strong king still guaranteed basic order and direction. That constitution would lead to ruin later, but in 1500 it was more durable than that of its neighbors’, and Poland’s armies could dominate the field against most enemies.