The rarity of birch-bark texts in other towns, and their abundance in Novgorod, results not only from the fact that extensive excavations have been conducted in Novgorod from 1932 onwards. There were other reasons for the high level of literacy in Novgorod, including the peculiarities of its political system. As we have already noted, the annual re-elections to the highest offices of state created the opportunity for every boyar to be elected to these coveted posts. The economic base of the Novgorod boyars was very large- scale landownership. In the central and southern Rus' principalities, with their monarchical political systems, the boyars displayed centrifugal tendencies, aspiring to live far away from the prince on their own estates, where they themselves could behave like monarchs towards their vassals. But the Novgorod boyar was centripetal. To leave Novgorod and live on one's own estate, dozens or hundreds of kilometres away from Novgorod, meant turning into a hermit, cut off from the hotbed of political passions, and renouncing any claims to power. The fifteenth-century cadastres show that the Novgorod boyars lived in Novgorod itself, far from their landed possessions and from their peasants. But these possessions required the boyar's constant attention. He had to issue instructions to his stewards, to receive reports from them about the progress of agricultural work and the prospects for the harvest, and of course about the income from his estate. The birch-bark letters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are largely concerned with these issues. But such correspondence required literacy not only from the master, but also from the servant. And amongst the letters from this period we find a considerable number which were written by peasants, containing various complaints, including some about the activities of their master's estate stewards.
There is another important factor which helped to create the high cultural level of the citizens of Novgorod. Unlike Venice, where the senate met in an enclosed building which guaranteed the confidentiality of its sessions, the Novgorod veche, at which the top leaders of the boyar republic were elected, at first once and then twice a year, discussed their problems in the open air near the cathedral of St Nicholas, in the vicinity of the city market. The members of the veche, who had the right to vote on important decisions, were representatives of the city's elite, the owners of large city homesteads, and primarily boyars. Incidentally, a fourteenth-century German source refers to the Novgorod veche as '300 gold belts', which corresponds to the approximate number of owners of large urban homesteads. But the public had open access to the veche assembly: the Novgorod plebs who congregated in the veche square had an opportunity to influence the conduct of the assembly with cries of approval or dissent, thereby creating for themselves the illusion of participation in the political life of the city and the state. It may have been illusory, but this sense of involvement was undoubtedly an important component of the mentality of the medieval Novgorodian.
Novgorod's busy international contacts were another significant influence. A. S. Pushkin famously wrote of Peter the Great, that he 'cut a window through to Europe' by annexing the Baltic coast of the Gulf of Finland. The contemporary writer Boris Kiselev, rephrasing Pushkin, expressed the important idea that, 'Where Peter cut a window through to Europe, in medieval Novgorod the door was wide open'.
Certainly from the time ofits foundation Novgorod was very closely linked with the Baltic region. Even before the creation of the Hanseatic League Novgorod conducted active trade with the countries of northern and western Europe. At the beginning of the twelfth century on the Trading Side of the city there was built the Gothic Court, where merchants from the island of Gotland stayed. At the end of the twelfth century the German merchants, who were soon to become the leading figures in Baltic trade, built themselves a similar merchant court. After the formation of the Hanseatic League both of these foreign courts, the Gothic and the German, came under the jurisdiction of the Hanseatic merchants and formed a single Hanseatic office. In Hanseatic sources they are referred to as the Court of St Peter, after the Catholic church which stood in the German Court. In addition to Novgorod there were Hanseatic offices in three other European cities: London, Bruges and Bergen.[25]
Novgorod's contacts with Western Europe were not limited to trade. The entrance to the main Novgorod cathedral of St Sophia was adorned with wonderful bronze doors, which remain to the present day. These doors were made in Magdeburg in the twelfth century and came to Novgorod in the fourteenth century, when a Russian craftsman added some new reliefs to them and provided Russian translations of their Latin inscriptions. The chronicle states that the Novgorod archbishop's palace was built in 1433 by German craftsmen who worked alongside Novgorod craftsmen. We have already noted that Novgorod coins adopted the motif of Venetian coins, adapted to the local patron saint.
The high level of Novgorod's cultural attainment in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is indicated by the number of churches listed in an inventory which was compiled at the end of the fifteenth century, immediately after the annexation of Novgorod by Moscow. Altogether there were eighty-three operational churches in the city, almost all of which were built of stone. They included such masterpieces of the Novgorod style as the fourteenth-century churches of St Theodore Stratelates on the Brook and the Transfiguration of the Saviour on Il'in Street, both of which were decorated with frescos. The artist responsible for the Transfiguration church was the great Feofan Grek (Theophanes the Greek). In 1407 the church of Saints Peter and Paul - the high-point of medieval Novgorodian architecture - was built at Kozhevniki.
Novgorod was surrounded by a tight circle of outlying monasteries, including the fourteenth-century churches at Volotovo and Kovalevo and the church of the Nativity in the Cemetery, whose interiors retain outstanding sets of frescos of the same period. This circle of surrounding monasteries began to be built in the eleventh century. It included such outstanding twelfth-century masterpieces of art and architecture as the cathedrals of the St George and St Anthony monasteries, and of the monasteries of the Annunciation and the Saviour on the Nereditsa.
An interesting episode in the history of Novgorodian architecture was the period of activity of Archbishop Evfimii II (1428-54). A strong opponent of Moscow, he became the main ideologue of anti-Muscovite sentiments. Harking back to the twelfth century, when Novgorod had witnessed its greatest successes in its struggle against princely power and in strengthening its boyar institutions, Evfimii revived the architectural style of that period, which was markedly different from that ofthe fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. By that date the style of the single-apsed church with a slanted (lopastnyi) roof had become standard, but Evfimii II encouraged the restoration of twelfth-century churches 'on the old basis', with their characteristic three apses and roofs with arched gables. When the Muscovites established themselves in Novgorod they took these revivalist churches to be examples of the latest fashion and they based the future development of architecture in Novgorod on these models.
25
E. A. Rybina,