Like its Gedyminide rivals, Moscow assembled territory with economic and politically strategic goals in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century vacuum of power. To its northwest Novgorod was an obstacle and target (see Figure 2.2). Founded in the 800s, Novgorod had been the second city in the Kyiv Rus' state. Its merchant elite had wrested control ofthe city from the Rus' princes already in the mid-twelfth century and developed an urban republican government, based on communal assemblies at the neighborhood and municipal level. Over time the elite dominated elected office such that many have called Novgorod more an oligarchy than republic. The city flourished on export fur trade, particularly in the 1300s, becoming a member of the German Hansa network of trading ports. Novgorod
Figure 2.2 Novgorod's Church of the Transfiguration (1374) on Il'in Street epitomizes the graceful, single-dome style favored by wealthy merchant patrons across town. This church's interior featured ephemeral frescos by Theophanes the Greek in the spirit of hesychast contemplation. Photo: Jack Kollmann.
expanded eastward across a great rural hinterland extending to the Urals; it was farmed in the city's immediate environs, but primarily served as a resource of squirrel pelts for European export.
In the late fourteenth century Moscow began to impinge on Novgorod's fur trade. It edged into lands of Finno-Ugric tribes to its northeast who were at that time tributaries of Novgorod or Sarai. In 1328, Moscow won control over the important city of Ustiug on the Sukhona-Northern Dvina trade route and later in the century Moscow extended claims eastward from Ustiug up the Vym and Vychegda rivers into Komi and Perm lands. Missionary efforts led by Stefan of Perm, later canonized, resulted in a bishopric there in the 1380s, marking the real start of Muscovite control over the Vychegda Perm tribes. As Sarai's power waned, Moscow merchants and envoys claimed tribute in the form of furs and forest goods and shipped them south on the Volga to exchange for salt, silk, spices, gems, and silver. But a direct connection to Baltic trade eluded Moscow.
In the first half of the fifteenth century, both Moscow and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania suffered internal succession struggles, but by 1450 both had stabilized. The Grand Duchy's territory was immense and its power growing as it tightened its union with the kingdom of Poland. Although Muscovy was comparatively small, its internal power was secure, cemented by a dynastic war (1430s-40s) that pitted adherents of grand princely succession by primogeniture against those for collateral succession. Collateral succession was the traditional practice in princely and elite families throughout the Rus' lands. Moscow's rulers had enjoyed de facto primogeniture since the mid-fourteenth century simply because of the accidents of birth and epidemic, but when they won the dynastic war, they gained affirmation of a practice that had helped them create stable central leadership. Collateral succession would have entailed constant rotation of elites as brothers took over from brothers as grand princes; with father to son succession, the same elite families flourished over generations. By 1450, Moscow turned to face its remaining East Slavic rivals (principally Tver' and Novgorod) while pursuing trade advantage in the Baltic and Volga spheres.
MUSCOVY'S EXPANSION 1450- 1580s: WEST TO THE BALTIC
Around 1450, the ambitious Moscow dynasty (historians named it Daniilovichi after an early founder, Prince Daniil Aleksandrovich, d. 1303) was on the threshold of regional power. Like the Osman dynasty of Anatolia, they had built their position as a warrior band seeking wealth and power and at mid-fifteenth century each of these ambitious dynasties had elevated their claims to sovereign status. For the Osmans, the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 provided inspiration for claims of imperial sovereignty; they cast themselves as "new Constantines" as well as righteous warriors for Islam. For the Daniilovichi, a variety of events in addition to the successful dynastic war supported higher aspirations. They included the rejection by Russia's Orthodox hierarchs of the union with the Vatican (agreed at the Florence-Ferrara Council of 1438-45) and their declaration of independence from Constantinople (autocephaly), which cast the Moscow princes as international leaders of Orthodoxy. Furthermore, Grand Prince Ivan III elevated his international visibility in 1472 by marrying the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, Sofiia Paleologa, who had been brought up in the Vatican.
Historians often treat Muscovy's expansion against neighboring East Slavic principalities not as empire-building but as a benign "gathering of the lands," dating "empire" to the conquests of non-Slavic, non-Orthodox Kazan and Astrakhan in the 1550s (Map 2). In so doing, they reflect Russian nationalist historiography based on sixteenth-century claims that the Moscow grand princes were merely recovering the "patrimony" of their dynastic line. Such an expedient interpretation postulates a direct historical continuity in dynasty and sovereignty from Kyiv Rus' to Moscow, ignoring the fact that Kyiv Rus' provided elites, princely dynasties, religion, culture and foundations of national myth not only to the people who
Map 2. European Russia c. 1750. Modeled on maps from Allen F. Chew, An Atlas of Russian History: Eleven Centuries of Changing Borders, rev. edn. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), maps 13, 15, and 19.
became the Russians, but also to Ukrainians and Belarus'ans. As a political entity, Russian history begins with the rise of Moscow, and Moscow's acquisitions of East Slavic territories from the 1300s into the sixteenth century were not a "gathering" but a sustained effort at conquest and territorial expansion.
In the second half of the fifteenth century Vasilii II (1425-62) and his son Ivan III (1462-1505) doggedly, and with great success, improved Russia's position on international trade routes linking the Baltic and Volga. In the way stood several principalities descended from Kyiv Rus' that had long been small regional centers. Several were seats of bishoprics with thriving chronicle-writing traditions (Riazan', Tver', Rostov) preserving their own historical memory; their princes enjoyed sovereign powers and fielded small armies of cavalry retinues. Moscow used multiple strategies, including marital connections, purchase, intimidation, and conquest, to subordinate them: Riazan' (1456-1521), Iaroslavl' (1463), Rostov (1463, 1474), and in particular Tver' (1485).
Intent on the Baltic, Moscow persistently aimed at Novgorod, which in turn sought support from the Grand Duchy. In 1453 in retribution for Novgorod's alliance against Moscow during the dynastic wars, Moscow seized Beloozero, a crucial Novgorodian trading center directly north of Moscow. In the face of Novgorod's continued dalliance with the Grand Duchy, in 1471 Moscow subjugated the city but did not physically seize it; it extended control over Novgorod's trade depots ofVologda (on the route north to Beloozero) and Volok Lamskii (west ofMoscow). Novgorod in 1478 mobilized against Moscow again. This time Russia seized the city and its entire hinterland, dismantled its republican government, and installed a governor. To stabilize the territory Moscow forcibly moved populations, exiling hundreds of Novgorod merchant, elite, and lesser landholding families to central Muscovy, confiscating most elite property and much of the property of the Archbishopric of Novgorod and major monasteries. Using this new land fund, it moved servitors from the center and recruited locals into an expanded gentry cavalry army supported by grants of these lands in conditional tenure (pomest'e).