This controversy was purely Russian, but the church was not entirely isolated from the world. Orthodox brethren still made up most of the population of the Balkans under Turkish rule, and the great monasteries on Mount Athos provided spiritual leadership. The most prolific writer on religious topics in early sixteenth-century Russia was actually a Greek named Michael Trivolis (1470–1556), in monastic life he took the name Maximos. Maksim the Greek, as he was known in Russia, had spent his youth in Venice and Florence, but ultimately came to reject the Renaissance secular culture for Orthodox monasticism. In this decision he imitated Savonarola, with whose teaching he was acquainted. In Russia he provided an encyclopedic collection of tracts and essays on topics from the errors of Islam to the correct stance on monastic landholding. His mild critique of that practice and other deviations from the then dominant notions among the higher clergy led to his condemnation and exile in the 1530s, but even in exile he remained a major figure in the church and ultimately the young Ivan IV ordered him released. His writings were widely copied and remained authoritative on many subjects for the ensuing century.
Ivan III’s successor, Vasilii III (1505–1533), came to the throne not as the eldest son but as the result of Ivan’s decision to give it to him. He was the son of Ivan’s second wife, the Greek Sophia Paleologue, and Ivan chose him, after some hesitation, over his grandson by his first wife (his son by the first wife had died). Much of Vasilii’s effort was to go to maintaining and expanding Russia’s position in the world. The territorial rivalry with Poland-Lithuania ended in a war that was successful for Russia with the capture of Smolensk in 1514. Smolensk was the last ethnographically Russian land outside the rule of Moscow, and in addition its conquest provided the state with a major fortress far to the west of Moscow. Though the war ended only in a truce, it fixed the Russo-Polish boundary for a century. Relations with the Tatar khanates, in contrast, involved a bewildering chain of intrigue and counter-intrigue as well as endless Tatar raids for slaves and booty on the southern frontier. About this time Vasilii adopted the practice of mobilizing the army on that southern frontier every summer, whether a formal state of war existed or not, for there was no other way to prevent the annual raids that formed an important part of the nomadic economy.
Vasilii’s greatest challenge, however, came not from the Tatars or Poland but from his own dynastic problems. For his first wife he had taken Solomoniia Saburova, not a foreign princess like his mother but the daughter of a prominent boyar. The marriage was successful in all but one crucial respect: no children were born. After much controversy and consultation with the church, he pressured Solomoniia into entering a convent and finally dissolved the marriage in 1525. Vasilii then married princess Elena Glinskaia, the daughter of a Lithuanian prince whose clan had taken refuge in Moscow after it had failed to successfully challenge its own soverereign. The Glinskiis had remained a powerful family in Russian exile, and claimed descent from the Tatar emir Yedigei, a great warrior who had fought Tamerlane himself in the early fifteenth century. In 1530 Elena gave birth to a son Ivan, who would be known to history as Ivan the Terrible.
IVAN THE TERRIBLE
Like so many such epithets “Terrible (grozny)” was a product of later romanticism, not of the sixteenth century. Even Ivan’s most determined Russian opponents never used it, and indeed in the language of the time the Russian word grozny would have meant “awe-inspiring” (the English is a traditional mistranslation) and so it had mildly positive connotations. Be that as it may, Vasilii’s untimely death in 1533 put the child Ivan on the throne of the Grand Prince of Moscow and all Rus, a situation that required a regency consisting of his mother and several prominent boyars to run the country. The great boyar clans, the Glinskiis and Shuiskiis, Bel’skiis and Obolenskiis, competed for power at the court and did not hesitate to exile and execute the losers. The death of Ivan’s mother in 1538 spurred on the intrigues, and only the marriage and majority of the young prince imposed a certain calm on the political waters.
Shortly after his marriage to Anastasiia, the daughter of the boyar Iurii Romanov-Koshkin, Ivan was crowned by Makarii, the head of the church as Metropolitan of Moscow, in 1547 in the Kremlin’s Dormition cathedral. Makarii crowned him not just Grand Prince, like his father, but also Tsar, a title derived ultimately from the name of Caesar. Tsar was the popular name among the Slavs for the Roman and Byzantine emperors, and thus conveyed a proclamation of equality in rank with those rulers as well as the Holy Roman Emperor in the West. Tsar was also the Russian word for title of the Khan of the Golden Horde and his successors in Kazan’ and Crimea as well as of the Ottoman Sultan. Most important, it was the title of David and Solomon in the Slavic Old Testament. In case anyone missed the point, Ivan had the walls of the audience chambers of the Kremlin palace decorated with Old Testament scenes. There the Old Testament kings (“tsars” to the Russians) surrounded Joshua’s conquest of the land of Canaan. Henceforth Russia’s rulers were tsars, the equals of the Western Emperor, the Sultan, and the Old Testament kings.
Thus began a reign of unprecedented activity that lasted thirty-five years, full of drama and victory, bloodshed, and defeat. Untiring in pursuit of his goals, Ivan left his mark on generations to come. Within a short time of his coronation, he set out on the first of his great enterprises. In the years of the regency, Moscow’s influence in Kazan’ had slipped, permitting Kazan’ once again to fall to hostile khans. Ivan set off to end the threat by installing a pro-Moscow khan, but after repeated failures to take the city, he simply annexed it when it fell to the Russian army in 1552. Ivan was only twenty-two years old, and he did not stop there. His armies went on down the Volga to Astrakhan’ and seized it and its territory as well. These conquests presented the Russians with a new situation, for never before had any substantial non-Christian population existed within their borders. On the capture of Kazan, Ivan ordered the Tatars remaining in the city to move out beyond the fortress walls, subsequently building a cathedral and settling Russians in their place in the city. Some of the Tatar elite entered Russian service, most of whom eventually converted to Orthodoxy, but many more fled to Crimea. The tsar enrolled thousands of Tatars in his army with the status of military servants. Other lesser landholders, townspeople, and peasants as well as the other nationalities of the khanate, the Chuvash, Mari, and Udmurt peasants, now acquired a special status. In place of the usual Russian taxes they paid yasak, a sort of tribute, to the tsar. Beyond these measures, the Russians did nothing to further subjugate the Tatars and other Volga peoples. There was no attempt at mass conversion. Virtually all Tatars and Bashkirs remained Muslims, visiting their mosques for Friday prayers, sending young men to Samarkand and other Central Asian towns to acquire the knowledge to become imams, and reading the Koran and other religious literature as before. There was no equivalent to the expulsion of the Moors from Spain after the end of the Reconquista.