The meagre sources recording Russian trade with countries to the south allow only the most general picture to be presented.[107] Down to 1530 or so the Ottoman Empire seems to have been the main trading partner and Russian merchants regularly travelled to Kaffa in Crimea either via the Don or another route. Later, routes through Poland and Moldavia to the Ottomans seem to have been favoured. But trade with the Ottomans appears to have declined from 1580 or so whilst that with Persia via the Volga and Astrakhan' flourished. Persian silks and other textiles were in demand by the Russians whilst Russian leather and furs travelled towards Persia. Many of the Volga towns and also Moscow itself benefited from this trade.
Conclusion
Sixteenth-century Russia and its towns underwent many vicissitudes. From apparent buoyancy in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the towns, and commercial life in general, seem to have entered a more problematic phase after about 1560. Yet Russia continuedto expand territorially and this expansion was accompanied by the spread of urbanism and commercial activity into new regions. Unfortunately the nature of the source material is such as to make the detailed study ofsuch apparently contradictory processes extremely difficult. What can be said is that the growing network of towns was of central importance for the whole process of Russian state-building. Whilst the towns may not have compared with those of Western Europe in their commercial dynamism and civic development, their overall significance for Russia's quest to build a strong and expansive empire is clear.
The non-Christian peoples on the Muscovite frontiers
MICHAEL KHODARKOYSKY
When Ivan III was crowned as grand prince of Moscow in 1462, he became the ruler of a small but ambitious principality. First among equals, the grand prince ofMoscowwas one among several Russian Orthodox princes who ruled over the East Slavic lands. By the time of his death in 1505, Ivan III was the ruler of a sovereign Muscovite state which now subsumed most of the other Russian Orthodox principalities, and was an heir to the Byzantine emperors. The long reign of Ivan III marked two important phases in Muscovite history: political unification of the Russian Orthodox Christian lands under a single sovereign, and territorial expansion into the neighbouring lands populated by non-Christians.
The conquest in the north and north-east
The rise of Moscow had always been closely connected with its expansion in the north and north-east. There, the dense woods and numerous lakes and rivers of the north offered abundant supplies of precious furs and the primitive hunters of the region could be easily compelled to pay such tribute. From the late fourteenth century, Moscow was attempting to establish its control around the Dvina River in the north and in the Perm' region in the north-east. Moscow fought several wars with Novgorod over control of the northern region and its inhabitants who had already been paying tribute to Novgorod. Throughout the fifteenth century, Novgorod was forced to cede more and more of its northern colonies to Moscow until Novgorod's final defeat by Moscow in 1478 brought the region under Moscow's sway.[108]
The newly risen Orthodox Muscovy stood alone against Roman Catholic Sweden in the north-west and Lithuania in the west, the Islamic Golden Horde and its successor khanates of the Crimea and Astrakhan' in the south and Kazan' in the east. Except for the western borderlands which were overwhelmingly populated by the Christian communities, Moscow was surrounded by a vast non-Christian world. It is here, on its non-Christian frontiers, that Moscow enjoyed its major military successes, acquired new confidence, crystallised its own identity, and built its first empire.
Before the ultimate collapse of the Golden Horde in the early sixteenth century allowed for Moscow's expansion south and east, the natural direction of Muscovite expansion was the north-east. Moscow's increasing appetite for furs, salt and metals led to Muscovite penetration ofthe distant lands populated by various animist peoples.
In contrast to Novgorod, which was solely interested in exacting tribute from the native population of the north, the Muscovites undertook a full-scale colonisation of the region. The traditional landscape of the northern region, previously dominated by primordial wilderness and the hunting and fishing societies of the aboriginal population, was undergoing a thorough transformation. New villages, forts, towns and monasteries emerged with the arrival of Russian peasants, soldiers, townsmen, traders and bureaucrats who were to settle and colonise the lands, and clergy seeking to convert the pagan population. North of the Urals, the construction of Pustozersk allowed Moscow to set foot in the arctic tundra populated by the Nenets (Samoed), while the Muscovite towns of Ust'-Vym, Cherdyn' and Solikamsk had firmly put the Great Perm' region populated by Komi (Zyrians) under Moscow's control. Previously sporadic missionary activity of the Russian Orthodox Church received a new impetus with the foundation in 1462 of the first large monastery in the Urals, the Ioanna-Bogoslovskii monastery in Cherdyn'.[109]
In the 1550s, the title ofthe recently crowned tsar of all Russia, Ivan IV began to include the territories east of the Urals, 'Obdor, Konda and all Siberian lands'. More often than not, such claims over new lands and peoples were premature, and Moscow's limited influence in the region continued to rely on exchange treaties with the natives. The Muscovites would have to wait until the 1590s, when the construction of the forts and towns of Berezov, Obdorsk and Verkhotur'e did indeed give Moscow greater control over lands east of the Urals mostly populated by the Khanty (Ostiaks) and Mansi (Voguls).[110]
By the middle of the sixteenth century the Muscovite expansion in the northeast was encroaching on the various peoples in the Volga-Kama Mesopotamia. These were the northern boundaries of the magnificent Muslim khanate of Kazan'. At the same time Moscow's expansion brought it directly to the gates of the city of Kazan', which remained the main barrier preventing Moscow's expansion east into Siberia and south towards the Caucasus.
The conquest of Kazan' and Astrakhan'
The conquest and annexation of the Kazan' khanate was one of the critical watersheds in Russian history. It set the stage for Moscow's relentless territorial aggrandisement throughout the following centuries. The upstart Muscovite state was rapidly turning into an empire, whose ruler claimed to be a Universal Emperor destined to rule over the diverse multitudes of pagan and Muslim peoples.
The long-term strategic and economic importance of the conquest of Kazan' was obvious: to control the riches of the mid-Volga area, to gain access to the wealth of Siberia and to dominate the commercial routes to Central Asia and China as well as Iran and the Caucasus. In other words, Kazan' was Moscow's window on the East.
But even greater was its immediate symbolic significance. Kazan' was one of the successor states of the Golden Horde and its rulers were the Chingisids, the direct descendants of Chingis khan. Given the centuries of humiliation and the grand princes' subservience to the khans of the Golden Horde, Moscow undoubtedly saw the conquest of Kazan' as an ultimate testimony to its newly won sovereignty, the superiority of its arms and, most importantly, a Divine Indication that Moscow had become the centre of Christendom.
Ofcourse, Ivan IV was not the only one claiming to be a Universal Christian ruler, and his Habsburg contemporaries, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, and his son Philip II, king of Spain, had laid similar claims prior to Ivan IV Is it possible that Ivan IV was, in fact, inspired by the Spanish feats which followed in short succession: the Reconquista of the Iberian peninsula from the Muslims, the swift conquest of America and its animist population and finally Charles V's conquest of Tunis in 1535, celebrated as a crusading triumph against the World of Islam?
107
VE. Syroechkovskii,
108
Janet Martin, 'Russian Expansion in the Far North', in
110
James Forsyth,