Against this background of social change and economic evolution the rulers of Russia and their court did not remain idle. For the whole of his life Ivan III conducted a relentless struggle to expand the power and territory of the grand princes of Moscow. The annexation of Novgorod was his greatest victory, but not the only one. He exploited the dissatisfaction of the regional princelings of Lithuania along his western border so as to encourage several of them to accept his sovereignty, and he rounded out and confirmed these acquisitions by war. He absorbed Moscow’s ancient rival Tver’ in 1485 and established his influence over the last two independent territories of Riazan’ and Pskov so that his son could later annex them without effort. Equally important, he put an end to the two and a half centuries of Russian dependency on the Tatar Hordes. In 1480 the Khan of the Great Horde sent its army north toward Moscow. Ivan and many of his boyars hesitated, unsure whether they should meet the Tatars or just flee north. With some encouragement from the church, he went out to meet them at the Ugra river, a small tributary of the upper Don. After a few days of watching one another, the two armies departed for home. This event, the “standing on the Ugra,” was ever after seen in Russia as the end of Tatar overlordship. Ivan moved aggressively into the space left by the fragmentation of the Horde, involving himself in Kazan’s dynastic politics. With time, Ivan’s intrigues with the Tatars would have great consequences.
Ivan III of Moscow began to call himself the ruler of “All Rus,” but his new larger state demanded a better defended and more adequate capital. For this Ivan turned to Italy, the center of European architecture as well as engineering and fortification. He had already been in contact with Italy from the time of his marriage in 1473 to Zoe Paleologue, the daughter of the last Byzantine ruler of the Peloponnesus, for Zoe had taken refuge from the Turks at the papal court. There were other Greeks in Moscow as well, who had extensive contacts with their compatriots and relatives in Italy, and through them Ivan sent for architects and engineers to rebuild the Moscow Kremlin and its churches. The result was that the Kremlin, the quintessentially Russian place to the modern eye, with its ancient churches and pointed towers in dark red brick, was not the work of Russians at all, but with few exceptions the product of Italian masters.
Figure 4. The Moscow Kremlin in a Seventeenth Century Atlas. The drawing shows the towers with low roofs after the example of the Sforza Castle. The high-pointed roofs on the towers that are so familiar today were added in the 1670s.
The earlier Kremlin of the fourteenth century had had white stone walls in the usual native style of Russian fortresses, and within the walls were wooden dwellings for princes and boyars as well as stone churches. Ivan did not want to modify the basic form of the churches. That form had a spiritual meaning that a Western plan could not have. Aristotele Fioravanti of Bologna solved the problem by building a new and larger Dormition Cathedral in the Kremlin with Italian technique but Russian form. Then he and others, Marco Ruffo and Pietro Antonio Solari from Milan, Aloisio da Caresano, and others went to work on the walls. One of the builders wrote back to a brother in Milan that the prince of Moscow wanted a castle “like that of Milan” (referring to the Sforza castle), and that is more or less what the prince got. They also began a new palace in the north Italian style, parts of which still survive. Only the churches were built in the traditional Russian style, albeit by Italian builders, with the sole exception of the Annunciation Cathedral, the palace chapel. Today the Italian work is visible only in the walls and the “House of Facets,” one of the main audience chambers. The other fragments of the old palace and the Renaissance elements in the churches were heavily “russified” by later repairs. The seventeenth-century addition of pointed roofs to the towers along the wall effectively concealed the Milanese model, but in 1520 the palace and the walls must have looked very Italian indeed.
The new Russia with its Italianate Kremlin may have taken its architecture, if only for a generation, from Italy, but it remained Orthodox in religion and its culture remained firmly religious. The context of Orthodoxy, however, had altered, for the emergence of the new state had come rapidly on the heels of a major change in the status of the Orthodox church, the establishment of autocephaly in 1448. The new situation of the church and of Russia required a new conception of Russia’s place in the divine plan of salvation, and as early as Ivan III’s “standing on the Ugra” of 1480 the church found the answer. Russia was to be understood as a “new Israel,” and the Russians were a new chosen people with their capital in Moscow, the new Jerusalem. Like the ancient Israelites, the Russians were the one people on earth chosen by God to receive the correct faith. Like ancient Israel, Russia was beset on all sides by unbelieving enemies, the Catholic Swedes and Poles to the west and the Muslim Tatars to the south and east. Critical to their survival, as for ancient Israel, were firm adherence to the correct faith in God and punctilious obedience to God’s commandments. Such faith and behavior would guarantee survival, for God would deliver their enemies into their hand, as he had done for King David. If they could remain faithful, they would avoid the fate of ancient Israel until Christ came again to earth.
Holding to the correct faith in last years of the reign of Ivan III had become, however, a serious problem. For the first time since the conversion of Saint Vladimir in 988, the Russian church found itself confronting opponents from within and was beset by internal disputes over the system of belief. In Novgorod a small group of clergy began to question the Orthodox formulation of the notion of the divinity of Christ, the common forms of devotion involving icons, and monasticism as well. As they seem to have questioned the Christian notions of the Trinity, their opponents, mainly Saint Joseph of Volokolamsk, labeled them Judaizers, exaggerating their dissent and slandering them as enemies of Christianity. The group acquired some followers in Moscow, even among the officials of the Kremlin offices, before it was suppressed in 1503, and the leaders were burnt as heretics. These were the first such executions for heresy in Russian history. The church could find no defense of such actions in its traditions, and had to turn to the West, to a description of the Spanish inquisition taken from the words of the Imperial ambassador, to justify the executions.
More widespread was the controversy over monastic life that arose at the same time and lasted for a generation. This dispute was far from an arcane debate among monks, for monasticism was still central to Orthodoxy as it emerged from the medieval period. The Kremlin itself included the monastery of the Miracle of Saint Michael the Archangel and the Convent of the Ascension, the activities of both of which formed integral parts of the life of the court. The city of Moscow had dozens of small monasteries within its walls, and several great ones just beyond them. Only a day’s journey north, Saint Sergii’s Trinity Monastery was the annual site of the pilgrimage of the whole court for the saint’s festival in September. Every Russian town of any consequence boasted one or two monasteries in or around it. For much of the first half of the sixteenth century Russian monks discussed the proper type of monastic life, some stressing individual asceticism and common life. Both styles were part of Orthodox tradition, exemplified in the work and teaching of Saint Joseph of Volokolamsk and Nil Sorskii. Eventually some of Nil’s posthumous followers came to question the very idea of monastic landholding as an obstacle to a holy life.