MOSCOW'S HERITAGE
The grand principality of Moscow was one of several descendants of the Kyiv Rus' grand principality, which emerged in the 800s on the basis of international trade. Forging a north-south extension of the Silk Road, international traders who called themselves "Rus'" and eventually asserted the title of "Grand Princes of Kyiv" were Viking bands; of no single nationality, they were northern Europeans, mostly Scandinavian, but they readily assimilated others, including in this case the elites of local tribes. (Historically these lands called themselves "Rus'," which generated through Latin the English "Ruthenian" to refer to these lands, which comprise the core of modern day Ukraine.) Their goal was to collect from forest tribes in modern day Ukraine, Belarus', and central Russia natural resources in demand by Mediterranean and Middle East urban centers—furs, amber, and, above all, slaves. Thomas Noonan reminds us not to romanticize the process: "The Rus' princes and their retinues systematically stole the furs, wax and even bodies ofthe subjects they had conquered and then exchanged them in Constantinople for luxury goods otherwise unavailable in Rus'. The process... is usually referred to as trade or commerce. In fact it is nothing more than a variety of colonial exploitation." Rus' traders, in league with Slavic tribal allies, shipped their booty down the Dnieper to Byzantine trade centers in Crimea, or down the Volga to entrepots on the Caspian Sea. In return they were paid in silver coin—Arabic, Byzantine, and others—caches of which have been discovered in modern times as hordes that in their day functioned as a sort of banking system for transit traders.
Initially Rus' traders traveled an annual circuit from the Baltic to the Black Sea, returning through Europe; by the tenth century one particular group was settling into a capital at Kyiv on the Dnieper, claiming control over the various trade depots the Rus' had been frequenting in the forest, most notably Novgorod (somewhat inland with ready river access to the Baltic), Smolensk on the upper Dnieper, Rostov in the upper Volga, and others. Claiming sovereign authority, they created a typical medieval kingdom, held together loosely by kinship ties among descendants of the initial leader of the band (historians have called it Riurikovich from a semi-mythical ninth-century founder). The dynasty established a hierarchy of princely seats leading progressively to Novgorod and finally the Grand Princely title in Kyiv, and for a few generations in the eleventh century the family actually managed to rotate among them in orderly collateral succession. It broke down as the family proliferated and the various lines settled down in regional principalities, still loyal to Kyiv.
Kyiv's grand princes ruled over forests north ofthe steppe-forest line in areas that had been colonized by Slavic farming peasants—East Slavs moved in from the south and west, West Slavs along the Baltic coast. Slavic was an Indo-European language that, by these centuries, was evolving into three subgroups as the original Slavs dispersed from a heartland in modern day western Ukraine (ironically, near modern Chernobyl). West Slavs developed the languages of the Czechs, Poles, and others who moved west and northwest; South Slavs became the Serbs, Croats, and others of the Balkan peninsula; East Slavs became the Ukrainians, Belarus'ans, and Russians. That some of the Slavs in the Novgorod area when Rus' traders arrived were West Slavs is attested by traditional Novgorod dialects in Russian. In moving into northern forests from these various directions, Slavic peasants penetrated traditional lands of Finno-Ugric speakers, who were forest exploiters (hunting, fishing, gathering, bee-keeping). Slavs, by contrast, engaged in farming as well as forest exploitation, destroying Finno-Ugric habitat by clearing forest for fields. Over time farming Slavs displaced or assimilated so many of the Finno-Ugric peoples in the forests of what became known as European Russia (to the Urals) that their presence is recalled only in place names, as in the very name of the river and town of Moscow. Some Finno-Ugric tribes endured on the borderlands of East Slavic settlement and in the Urals, and are represented today by the modern Estonians, Finns, Karelians, Komi, Votiaks/Udmurts, Cheremis/Mari, Mordva, Ostiaks/Khanty, and Voguly/Mansi. East Slavic also eventually dominated over West Slavic in the north.
In a similar process, over the ninth to eleventh centuries the primarily Scandinavian Rus' traders were assimilated with the elites ofEast Slavic tribes, in a process one can trace in tenth- and eleventh-century documents. While a 907 treaty of Rus' Prince Oleg listed his emissaries as Karl, Farulf, Vermund, Hrollaf, and Steinvith, the sons of Grand Prince Vladimir (ruled 980 to 1015) had Slavic names: Sviato- polk, Iziaslav, Iaroslav, Mstislav, Boris, Gleb, Stanislav, Sudislav. As settled rulers, expropriation turned into taxation and circuits turned into landed control. Rus' grand princes awarded land and people to their retinues, starting a centuries-long development of a landed elite served by dependent peasants who were not enserfed (until Muscovite times) but owed dues and services in a traditional, pan-European agrarian economy.
Kyiv Rus' was no more cohesive than other medieval kingdoms (e.g. Charlemagne's) that dissolved after a few hundred years from many factors, including dynastic expansion. Here shifting trade routes played a role as well. By the 1100s, as Byzantium declined and trade routes shifted, the Grand Princes in Kyiv lost their ability to control collateral lines. Princely centers had been developing—Smolensk and Polotsk in modern day Belarus, Chernigov and Volhynia in modern day Ukraine, in the upper Volga Rostov, Vladimir, Tver', Suzdal, and Moscow. Princely centers at Novgorod (see Figure 2.1) and Pskov so flourished on Baltic trade that their populations threw off princely control and became self-governing urban republics in the twelfth century, while a collateral line on the booming Volga route in the Volga-Oka mesopotamia (also called Suzdalia and Vladimir-Suzdalia)
Figure 2.1 Novgorod's Sofiia Cathedral, built in 1045-50 by Greek artisans, reflects the city's status as the Kyiv Rus' state's second princely seat and major Baltic trade port; in the eleventh century Novgorod rejected princely control and became an urban republic. Photo: Jack Kollmann.
invented the title of "Grand Principality of Vladimir." In 1253 the ambitious princes of Galicia and Volhynia on trade routes to Hungary, Poland, and western Europe briefly won a king's crown from the Pope. Still, the title of "Grand Prince of Kyiv" held cachet and regional princes, often allying with steppe nomads, fought among themselves for the honor, if not the physical space. Grand Prince of Vladimir Andrei Bogoliubskii, for example, sacked Kyiv in 1169. Lacking even the loose military and political cohesion of the Kyiv Rus' grand principality at his height, the lands of Kyiv Rus' were easily overrun in Mongol conquests of 1223 and 1237-40.
Although Novgorod negotiated itself out of Mongol suzerainty, most of the East Slavic principalities came under Mongol control in the empire's western wing, popularly called the Golden Horde, more accurately the Qipchaq Khanate. Russian sources simply called it "the Horde." Located at Sarai near the foot of the Volga, the Horde tremendously drained resources in tribute, slaves, and artisans from the Rus' lands. In a region of exquisite eleventh- and twelfth-century stone cathedrals (Kyiv, Novgorod, Vladimir, Bogoliubovo, Iur'ev Polskii), building in stone ground almost to a halt in principalities subject to the Mongols for at least a century. Princes of towns including Suzdal, Riazan', Nizhnii Novgorod, Tver', and Moscow vied for the favor of the Horde, which offered the lucrative right to collect tribute, to call on Mongol military aid, and to claim the title of "Grand Prince of Vladimir." Tver' was a precocious regional leader, its success epitomized by its stone cathedral of 1285. To curb Tver's ascent the Horde awarded Moscow the privileged tax-collector position in the early fourteenth century (marked by replacing the Kremlin's wooden Dormition Cathedral with a stone edifice in the 1320s).