The extension of Muscovite patrimonial claims to the Rus’ lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was the direct outcome of a series of successful Muscovite wars against Lithuania in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. They began with border skirmishes in the 1480s. The first actual war was waged in 1492–1494, to be followed by the wars of 1500–1503, 1507–1508, 1512–1522, and 1534–1537—altogether almost half a century of warfare. For most of that period, the Muscovites were on the offensive, their advance checked for the first time in the early sixteenth century. By that time, the Grand Principality of Moscow had extended its borders deep into the territory of the Grand Duchy, capturing Chernihiv and Smolensk. As in the case of Novgorod, many inhabitants of Smolensk were forcibly resettled to the east and replaced by subjects of the Muscovite prince.
The Muscovites were gaining the upper hand thanks to the strength of Ivan III’s armies and the unwillingness of Ivan’s rival, Casimir IV of Poland and Lithuania, to attract and accommodate the descendants of the princes of Kyiv in the lands that now constitute Ukraine and Belarus. As Ivan annexed one principality after another, using his family’s Kyivan descent to legitimize the process, Casimir abolished the only principality still extant in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania—that of Kyiv. He did so in 1470, and his decision would bear directly on Lithuania’s “loss” of Novgorod to Muscovy one year later. The Kyiv principality had been ruled by the Olelkovych family, which traced its origins to one of the first Lithuanian rulers, Algirdas, and whose dynastic status was close to, if not on a par with, that of the grand dukes of Lithuania. Prince Mykhailo Olelkovych, who came to Novgorod in 1470 to help defend the republic against Muscovy, was a member of the Kyivan branch of the family. His departure from Novgorod in 1471 was motivated in part by his hope of assuming his father’s office in Kyiv. But he was in for a surprise. Not only did Casimir not allow him to become the next prince of Kyiv, but he abolished the office and the principality altogether, appointing his own representative to administer the region.
The Kyivan princes never forgave Casimir for doing away with their principality and putting an end to their dreams. In 1480, news reached Casimir that Mykhailo Olelkovych, the unsuccessful defender of Novgorod and candidate for the Kyiv principality, had entered into a conspiracy with other princes to kill him and take his place as grand duke. The conspirators were either arrested or fled to Muscovy, but the plot, together with a Crimean Tatar attack on the Grand Duchy, prevented Casimir from sending his army to help Khan Ahmed as he faced the Muscovite forces on the Ugra River. Casimir’s earlier failure to support Novgorod for fear of strengthening the Rus’ princes of the Grand Duchy was now compounded by his inability to help the Great Horde against Muscovy because of the revolt of the very same princes.
The death of Casimir in 1492 and the interregnum that followed it gave Moscow a perfect opportunity to advance Ivan III’s claims to “all Rus’” and launch a full-blown war against the Grand Duchy. The borderland princes were left to their own devices, as Lithuanian troops were either unavailable or insufficiently strong to protect the vassals of the grand duke. Under these circumstances, the princes considered themselves no longer bound by loyalty to the Grand Duchy. “Your father, Sire, kissed the cross in my presence to affirm that it was the duty of your father, our lord, to stand up for our patrimony and defend it against all; but Your Grace, Sire, did not show favor to me… and did not stand up for my patrimony,” wrote one of the “turncoats,” Prince Semen Vorotynsky, to the new grand duke of Lithuania, Alexander. The new grand duke used both force and diplomacy in his efforts to stop the Muscovite advance. He succeeded only to a degree, as he found himself obliged to recognize Ivan’s new title, which included a reference to “all Rus’,” and lost significant territories, including the Chernihiv land near Kyiv.
Alexander’s rule inaugurated an era in which the Lithuanian princes and Polish kings began to take the Muscovite eastern offensives more seriously than Casimir had done. Alexander had to abandon the centralizing reforms of Casimir IV and make an alliance with the princely clans of the Grand Duchy. He recognized the authority of the princely council and promised to consult with its members on all state appointments. He also established close relations with the Ruthenian (Ukrainian and Belarusian) princes. In 1514, the Muscovite troops were defeated in the Battle of Orsha by a Lithuanian-Ruthenian army led by one of those princes. The almost uninterrupted Muscovite westward march was finally checked. The war established, for the time being, the extent of the borders of “all Rus’” in the titles of the Moscow grand princes: those borders included Smolensk and Chernihiv but not Kyiv or Polatsk (in present-day Ukraine and Belarus, respectively), which remained within the borders of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Internal strife in Moscow following the death of Ivan III in 1505, and, in particular, of his son Vasilii III in 1533, halted the Muscovite westward advance, but the aspiration to extend the Muscovite “patrimony” at the expense of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was by no means abandoned.
The Muscovite wars with Lithuania, triggered by the conflict over the fate of Novgorod and continued under the banner of gathering the patrimony of the Kyivan princes, made Muscovy a major actor on the East European scene. It was no longer just a country fighting for its independence, but one expanding beyond its “natural” Mongol borders.
IN THE 1520S, MUSCOVITE INTELLECTUALS PRODUCED A NEW genealogical tract, the Tale of the Princes of Vladimir, which associated the rulers in the Kremlin, the former grand princes of Vladimir, with Emperor Augustus, the founder of the Roman Empire. The link was established though a legendary personality called Prus, allegedly the brother of Augustus. Thus the founder of the Roman Empire and the rulers of Moscow had the same forefather. But how were the grand princes of Vladimir (and later, Moscow) related to Prus? The solution proposed by the Muscovite authors was quite simple: the missing link was another legendary figure, Prince Rurik, the founder of the Kyivan ruling clan. According to the Rus’ chronicles, Rurik had come from the north, the part of the world allegedly assigned by Augustus to Prus.
Should that lineage be found wanting, the authors provided another connection to Rome with a much more solid historical foundation. It led to the eternal city through Byzantium. The princes of Vladimir and Moscow were heirs of Prince Volodymyr (Vladimir) Monomakh, the twelfth-century ruler of Kyiv who had received his name from his mother, a relative of the Byzantine emperor Constantine IX Monomachos, who in turn was related to Augustus. One way or another, all roads of the Muscovite imagination led to Rome. According to the Tale, Constantine had passed on his emperor’s regalia to Volodymyr, and they had subsequently been inherited by the princes of Moscow. Among them was Monomakh’s Cap, an Eastern equivalent of an emperor’s crown. It was in fact a fourteenth-century gold filigree skullcap from Central Asia, possibly a gift from the khan of the Golden Horde, intended to symbolize the vassal status of the Muscovite princes. The Mongol gift was now reimagined as a symbol of imperial power.
The Monomakh Cap and the Augustus–Prus–Monomakh account of the origins of the Moscow rulers’ sovereign and imperial power would have a spectacular career in Muscovite political thought. Both were included in the coronation of Ivan IV (the Terrible), the first Muscovite ruler to be installed with the title of tsar—a Slavic word derived from the Latin “Caesar,” meaning emperor, or ruler of rulers. The ceremony took place in 1547, with Monomakh’s Cap serving as Ivan’s crown. Metropolitan Makarii, who devised the formalities, conferred divine power on the new ruler, stressing the Kyivan and ultimately Roman origins of the dynasty. In the next few decades, the Augustus legend would become central to the official genealogy of the Muscovite rulers as presented in the Book of Royal Degrees, the first official history of Muscovy. It was commissioned by Ivan the Terrible in 1560 and written at the metropolitan’s court. The legend also made its way into the frescoes of Moscow palaces and cathedrals. Sigismund Herberstein, a Habsburg envoy who first visited Muscovy in 1519 and published an account of his voyag
es in 1549, during the rule of Ivan the Terrible, claimed that the Muscovites he met believed in the Roman origins of Rurik, as well as those of their current ruler.
The Roman connection served Ivan well both at home, by distinguishing the ruling dynasty from the rest of the princely elite, and abroad, by putting him on a par with Western rulers. Ivan’s geopolitical objectives were significantly different from those of his father and grandfather. Unlike them, he switched the focus of his foreign policy from gathering the Rus’ lands to taking over those of the Horde. In 1552, he defeated and annexed the Khanate of Kazan. The city’s inhabitants were resettled and replaced by subjects of the tsar—the policy applied earlier in Novgorod and Smolensk. In 1556, Ivan’s troops defeated another successor to the Horde, the Khanate of Astrakhan, and Muscovy took control of the all-important Volga trade route. In ideological terms, the tsar of Muscovy had defeated two Tatar rulers to whom the Muscovite chronicles referred consistently as “tsars.” Ivan’s authority was enhanced when he added their tsardoms to his. In his diplomatic correspondence, he would count separately the years of his rule over the Muscovite, Kazan, and Astrakhan tsardoms.
If Ivan’s alleged descent from Augustus made him an equal of the Habsburgs in lineage, the conquest of the Volga khanates improved his geopolitical standing and gave substance to his claim to be an emperor. In 1557, the year after the conquest of Astrakhan, Ivan wrote to the supreme Orthodox authority, the patriarch of Constantinople, asking for recognition as tsar on the basis of his conquest of Kazan and Astrakhan. The same argument was used in dealings with Muscovy’s Western counterparts. But reaction to Ivan’s claim to the title of tsar, or Caesar, was mixed. The patriarch of Constantinople, eager to recognize a new Orthodox emperor and potential protector, assured Ivan in 1558 that “the tsar’s name is invoked in the Universal Church every Sunday, like the names of the former Byzantine tsars [emperors].” The rulers of the Holy Roman Empire were more cautious, as the Muscovite ruler’s new title undermined the universality of their authority. Thus the Holy Roman emperor Maximilian II suggested in 1576 that Ivan call himself eastern emperor—a possible reference to Byzantine tradition—or emperor of all Rus’, a variation on the grand-princely title of Ivan and his predecessors.
In 1558, with his tsar’s title recognized by the patriarch of Constantinople but not by Western rulers, Ivan turned his troops westward. The Livonian War, which would last a quarter of a century, until 1583, started with an attack on a declining regional power, the Livonian Order, a state established by Teutonic knights that encompassed parts of Estonian, Latvian, and, to a lesser extent, Lithuanian territories. The campaign began well, with victory for Ivan’s troops, but the defeat and destruction of the order alerted its neighbors to the rising Muscovite threat. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which had borne the brunt of Muscovite offensives since the late fifteenth century, leaped into battle on the side of the order only to be badly defeated. In 1563, Ivan the Terrible took Polatsk, a city and territory in present-day Belarus first claimed by the Muscovites back in 1478, immediately after their takeover of Novgorod. In 1569, in the Polish city of Lublin, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was forced to turn its previous dynastic union with the Kingdom of Poland into a permanent union of the two states, losing its independence and control over Ukrainian lands to Poland but maintaining its rule over Belarus. The combined Polish-Lithuanian troops were now able to withstand the Muscovite offensive, with additional assistance from Sweden.
The tsar of Muscovy found himself on the defensive. In 1571, taking advantage of his involvement in the west, the Crimean Tatars captured Moscow, forcing Ivan to end his illfated rule by terror known as the oprichnina, whereby he had divided his realm, cleansing part of it of aristocratic clans. But the war in the west continued to go badly. The new Polish king, Stephen Báthory, recaptured Polatsk at the head of Polish and Lithuanian armies in 1579. Two years later, the Swedes expelled Muscovite troops from Narva, an important trade center on the Baltic Sea controlled by Muscovy since 1558. In 1582, Ivan found himself obliged to make a peace treaty that ended his ambitions to acquire yet another “tsardom” on the Baltic. The tsar, regarded by some of his subjects as the protector of Orthodoxy throughout the world, was reduced to asking the pope to help negotiate peace with the Polish king. It was a most humiliating way of invoking Ivan’s alleged Roman origins.
Ivan the Terrible died in 1584, one year after a peace with Sweden ended the Livonian War. He left his son and successor, Fedor Ivanovich, who would be the last Rurikid on the Muscovite throne, a country economically broken and devastated by war and terror but more centralized than under any previous Muscovite ruler. He also left Fedor the title of tsar, which was now recognized by foreign leaders, and Monomakh’s Cap as the crown of the Tsardom of Muscovy. The cap and the legend attached to it embodied the complex identity of the tsardom and its elites as it had evolved in the course of the sixteenth century. Featuring Central Asian gold and jewels and Muscovite furs, the cap was swathed in invisible layers of historical mythology, first Kyivan, then Byzantine, and finally Roman. Whether the Muscovites sought a Roman connection by way of the Baltics and Prussia or the Black Sea and Constantinople, all ways led through Kyiv, the seat of the first Rurikid princes, without whom there could be no claim to anything but the Mongol tradition.
It was the Kyivan myth of origins that became the cornerstone of Muscovy’s ideology as the polity evolved from a Mongol dependency to a sovereign state and then an empire. The ruling dynasty, which relied on Kyivan roots to legitimize its rule, would subsequently find it difficult, if not impossible, to divorce itself from that founding myth.
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THE THIRD ROME
IN JUNE 1586, THE MUSCOVITE COURT WELCOMED AN UNUSUAL guest, Patriarch Joachim V of Antioch, who held one of the five ancient and most prestigious patriarchal seats of the Eastern Christian (Orthodox) world. Tsar Fedor, who had succeeded his father, Ivan the Terrible, as ruler of Muscovy two years earlier, met him in full regalia in the company of Muscovite aristocrats, called boyars, and scores of court officials. Rising from his throne to greet the honored guest, the tsar walked a full seven feet toward him—an ostentatious gesture of respect for the patriarch’s exalted status. After receiving Joachim’s blessings, Fedor invited him to dine at his table, another honor rarely bestowed on the tsar’s visitors.
Moscow was accustomed to receiving Eastern hierarchs requesting financial support, but never before 1586 had it received a patriarch. The status of the Orthodox Church in Muscovy was lower than that of the ancient churches of Byzantium, as it was ruled by a metropolitan as opposed to a patriarch, who, to add insult to injury, was not even recognized by the “big four”—the patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. While Joachim’s visit presented the tsar with an opportunity to enhance his status in the Orthodox world, the opportunity came with a challenge. How was he to demonstrate the superiority of the Muscovite church to those of the Eastern patriarchs? The tsar left that difficult task to his metropolitan, Dionisii. After inviting Joachim to dine, Fedor suggested that he first visit the metropolitan, who was awaiting him in the Kremlin’s Dormition Cathedral. When the patriarch entered the cathedral, the metropolitan, violating every rule of Orthodox protocol, gave him his blessing. The patriarch, taken aback, stated that it would be more appropriate for Dionisii to accept his blessing first. But victory in this first round of diplomatic relations went to the metropolitan; the rest was handled by the tsar and his advisers.
They asked Joachim to elevate the metropolitan see of Moscow to a patriarchate. Apparently surprised by this request, the patriarch decided to play for time. On the one hand, he badly needed the tsar’s alms and did not want to risk leaving Moscow empty-handed or with a nominal donation. On the other hand, the creation of a patriarchate was a matter for the Ecumenical Council, not for the patriarch’s unilateral decision. Thus, according to Muscovite sources, Joachim responded that he thought it appropriate for Muscovy to have its own patriar
chate but would have to speak with the other patriarchs, who would make a decision with the Ecumenical Council. He promised to lobby for the patriarchate once he returned to his see. Tsar Fedor sent Joachim off with rich gifts for him and the patriarchs of Constantinople and Alexandria.
The vision of Muscovy as successor to Byzantium and the only remaining Orthodox empire on the face of the earth was first developed in the early sixteenth century. That vision, centered on the figure of the Muscovite tsar, was incomplete as long as the country remained without a patriarch of its own—the tsars had to keep turning for spiritual support and legitimacy to the Eastern patriarchs. Ivan the Terrible had appealed to the patriarch of Constantinople for recognition of his tsarist title. In 1581, after the death of his son and heir apparent, Tsarevich Ivan—contemporaries claimed that the father had killed the son in a fit of rage—Ivan the Terrible sent emissaries to the Orthodox East, asking the hierarchs to pray for the repose of his son’s soul.
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