Aleksei’s family had served the father of Ivan I, so he had connections at the Grand Prince’s court and was familiar with affairs of state. Even so, his responsibilities as metropolitan were daunting. He had to start by going to Constantinople to negotiate with the Patriarch to secure his see; he had to guard it against inroads by the Lithuanians; and then he had to make his mark with the Khan (he earned a reputation as a healer in the process). Finally installed in Moscow, with an ecclesiastical jurisdiction more extensive than the Grand Prince’s political jurisdiction, 15 he had to rescue the incapable Ivan II - the weakest of ‘Money-Bag’s’ sons, but the only one to survive the plague — from the consequences of his ineptitude. Things might very easily have descended into civil war. It was thanks largely to the adroit Aleksei that they did not. He made peace between fractious princely families; calmed anti-Muscovite Tver; advised on policy towards the Tatars; and acted as mentor to Ivan’s son and successor, Dmitrii, and as regent during the boy’s minority In short, Metropolitan Aleksei held the Russian centre together and guided it through a period of crisis. He also prepared the way for a dramatic change in relations between the Russians and the Tatars, for in 1378 young Dmitrii - now of age - led a Russian army to victory over the Tatars on the river Vozha; two years later he trounced them again at the famous battle of Kulikovo.
These victories did not end Russia’s subjection, but they showed that the Tatars could be defeated, and hence that the subjection need not last. They also showed that Russian princes could sink their differences in a common front against the enemy, for warriors had come from all over northern Russia like eagles’ to Dmitrii’s aid. By the time of his death, in 1389, Dmitrii had also doubled the territory of the Grand Principality. The new circumstances also made it more probable that his descendants would succeed him. Yet a venerable monk named Sergius, who attended his funeral, was to do as much as Dmitrii to enlarge the Russian land.
The times encouraged piety of more than one kind. In 1349 a pious but feisty citizen of Novgorod made a pilgrimage to Constantinople with a group from his native city, and left a cheerful account of everything he saw. The journey took many months and required considerable resources, but pilgrim Stephen could afford the expense. The Tatars had hardly touched his home city of Novgorod. It had remained a prosperous commercial centre, with good connections with central Europe as well as with the Russian hinterland and with access, through it, to the eastern Mediterranean. In his description of Constantinople, Stephen expressed the pious conventionalities of a pilgrim, the innocent excitement of someone who took relics seriously, awe at secular as well as religious wonders long heard of and now seen, and credulity at every tale a guide told him:
I arrived at the city during Holy Week, and we went to St Sophia where stands a column of wondrous size, height and beauty; it can be seen from far away at sea, and a marvellous, lifelike Justinian the Great sits on a horse at the top … [holding] a large golden orb surmounted by a cross in one hand … [while] his right hand stretches out bravely … towards the Saracen land and Jerusalem …
He toured the Cathedral of St Sophia, with its icons, mosaics and relics; lit a candle; kissed the remains of St Arsenius and the live hand of the Patriarch; and proceded on a tour of the city’s shrines and monuments which lasted several days. He walked up the imperial road to Constantine’s purple column, which had been brought from Rome (‘Noah’s axe is there’), and to the Monastery of St George, where a set of the relics of Christ’s Passion was locked away ‘and sealed with the imperial seal’. He kissed the body of St Anne there, the head of St John Chrysostom, and the head of St Basil in another monastery, and joined a procession which was following the icon of Mary ‘the Virgin Mother of God … [painted] by St Luke … while she was still alive … ‘
‘You go from there to the Monastery … Church of the Nine [Ranks of Angels] …’he continued. The ‘“Palace of the Orthodox Emperor Constantine” is there … as large as a town … [which has] walls higher than those of the city … The Monastery of St Sergius and Bacchus … is near by’ He kissed their heads too, and went on to the Hippodrome, and to kiss the hand of St John the Baptist, the remains of Gregory the Theologian, and the tomb of the prophet Daniel and of St Romanus … So the catalogue continues, enlivened by tales of stabbed icons which bled, comments on the beauty of the marble and of the singing — even the occasional confession. On visiting the tombs of the emperors he kissed them too, ‘even though they are not saints’. His account concludes with advice that has application to the modern tourist too: visiting ‘Constantinople is like entering a great forest. It is impossible to get about without a good guide, and if you try to go around on your own you will not be able to see or kiss a single saint, unless it happens to be that saint’s day.’ 16
The happy pilgrim Stephen’s contemporary, Sergius, was moulded by quite different circumstances. He was born in a less prosperous, more troubled, part of Russia at a time when, as in many other parts of Europe, despair was widespread and social values were changing. The unpromising outlook was encouraging migration out of towns, which were targets for the tax collectors and the war bands of rival princes, as well as Tatar raiders. Visitations of the Black Plague also encouraged movement to safer settlements and into the forests. There was a parallel tendency to avoid exposure to earthly risks and invest more in the spirit. Such were the disturbed conditions that shaped the early life of St Sergius.
Born in or around 1322, 17 the second of three brothers, he was christened Bartholomew. His parents were on their way down in the world. His father, a boyar who served the Prince of Rostov, belonged to the local elite. But Rostov was an enclave surrounded by the Principality of Moscow and being swallowed by it. In the course of his wars with Tver, Ivan had sent men to occupy parts of it and collect resources from its hapless people. But Ivan’s government was offering tax exemptions to people who would settle on wastelands north of Moscow, so the family moved there, to a place called Radonezh. 18The boy’s life there began when he was seven, but he was a child of the outdoors, physical rather than bookish. He learned to read only years later. The state of the world was soon borne in on him, however, through both hearsay and experience.
His elder brother, Stefan, a widower with two small sons, entered a nearby monastery (what happened to his little boys is not recorded). Then his parents died, at which Bartholomew settled what remained of the family’s assets on his younger brother and set out into the forest, accompanied by Stefan the monk. The hagiographer states that Bartholomew had long wanted to become a monk, but he was not tonsured immediately. Perhaps he could not afford to enter a monastery. He had no assets to bring, and his older brother’s decision to leave his monastery and go with him may also have been prompted by the family’s straitened circumstances. The brothers decided to live as hermits in the wilderness, fending for themselves. Why they did so is not entirely clear. A sense of adventure may have counted; they may have felt an urge to escape the world.
They erected a brushwood hovel to shelter in, then built a little church. But Stefan could not stand the solitude, and soon headed off to Moscow. There he entered the Monastery of the Apparition. Its abbot, Aleksei, was to become metropolitan. Stefan himself was to rise to become an abbot and chaplain to the Grand Prince. He was in the world now, if not of it. But Bartholomew remained a hermit in his wilderness, living a life of hard physical toil, prayer and meditation. He was to remain there in solitude for two years. A vision of the Devil he had about this time reflected concerns which were as much political as religious, however, for ‘the evil forces’ appeared before him ‘clothed and hatted in the Lithuanian style’- the style, that is, of the Catholic West. The future saint was a patriot.
Word of the pious hermit spread, and people came to him in the forest bringing little gifts. Three or four even came to join him. He built ‘cells’ for them. But he also began to make occasional forays into the world he had forsaken. On one he persuaded a monk, who was also a priest, to shave his head
and rechristen him a monk. His new name was Sergei, or Sergius. More and more young men came to live near Sergius as hermits, until, — reluctantly, so we are told - he agreed to the transformation of the settlement of separate hermitages into a monastery, and to his own installation as its abbot. He was to supervise the community and enforce strict discipline over the monks. The year was 1353—4 and he was thirty-one or thirty-two.
This would hardly have been done without the blessing of Metropolitan Aleksei. The Church had recognized the popularity of Sergius’s initiative, and set out to capture and direct the trend. Sergius was encouraged to organize an expansion of the movement, to found new monasteries further out into the Russian ‘wilderness’. Aside from the benefits of charity and piety that it would bring, putting the energies of so many displaced or undirected young men to productive account turned out to be of strategic economic significance too. So monks were sent out to form communities of their own, and all the time fresh recruits came in wanting the peace of mind and solace that came of prayer and physical labour. A twelve-year-old orphan of Sergius’s brother became a novice, then a monk with the name of Fedor. He was later to found a monastery in Moscow and become archbishop of Rostov. But most of the monks who went out founded monasteries in the ‘wilderness’ of the countryside, not, as convention until that time dictated, at the edge of towns.
Sergius the hermit-turned-organizer became political. In 1358 he was sent to the Prince of Rostov, to the territory where his own family had hailed from, to persuade him to concede in his dispute with Moscow. Seven years later he undertook another mission as peacemaker, between two warring brothers over which of them should be prince of Nizhnii-Novgorod, which controlled an important confluence further down the Volga. He not only blessed Grand Prince Dmitrii before his victory over the Tatars at Kulikovo in 1380, he is reputed to have given him strategic advice, though he was also among those who fled Moscow at the approach of the vengeful Tatar leader Tokhtamysh, who sacked the city two years later. Sergius died in 1392. The site of his first hermit’s cell at Zagorsk, north of Moscow, had already grown to be the Trinity—St Sergius monastic centre. It was to become the administrative centre for the Patriarch of All Russia, and a patriotic symbol for all Russians.
The story of St Sergius helps to explain how Russia relocated itself further to the north in the thirteenth century. It also throws light on how it came to occupy so vast a territory. The policy of princes, particularly Moscow’s prince, of encouraging settlement on unfarmed land in strategic areas was significant in this respect, but the foundation of monasteries in ‘the wilderness’, as Sergius had done, was fundamental to the process.
The Church had become a refuge for peasants who had uprooted themselves from unsafe areas, and a major agency for their resettlement. This helps to explain the popularity of ‘wilderness’ monasteries, many of them founded in distant places where conditions were harsh but which were safe from the Tatars and other human predators. The monastic foundations kept the young men safe and productive. They seem also to have helped to increase population. Monks are, or should be, chaste, of course, but the demographic imperative was satisfied by novices who decided not to take their vows, and by peasants, artisans and service people who attached themselves to monastic communities, creating little suburbs around them.
The new monastic foundations tended to avoid land owned by princes, so people in monasteries’ dependent settlements could live more freely than elsewhere and benefit from privileges and benefits that would not otherwise have been available to them. Yet the monastic colonization movement suited the princes — especially the Prince of Moscow, who made over great swathes of undeveloped territory to the Church, knowing that if it could find peasants to settle on it and make the land productive it would ultimately yield taxes and benefit the state, albeit through the Church. This and the continuing disposition of young Russians to take up the life of pioneers was to have continuing importance for Muscovy’s development, particularly over the following two centuries. The development coincides with what Liubavskii identified as a period of sharp population growth associated with the development of colonization during the half century following the death of Ivan ‘Money-Bag’, 19 and monastic communities were founded at an increasing pace from the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with several practical, as well as spiritual, purposes in mind.
Political centres had long attracted monastic foundations. No fewer than sixteen foundations were established around Moscow in the period by grand princes, metropolitans, abbots and the disciples of monastic saints. 20But most were founded further afield — to win more virgin land for the plough, to convert pagan tribespeople, to profit from commercial crossroads, to access natural resources like salt. They were founded for these and a dozen other reasons, but, above all, monasteries were the organizational heart of the ongoing colonization process, whose tempo so accelerated in the fourteenth century. And when, in the mid-1500s, a Western visitor was to marvel at the fact that monasteries owned one-third of all land in the entire country 21 it was largely to the legacy of St Sergius that he was pointing - a multifaceted legacy of economic and political as well as spiritual and patriotic significance. 22
Despite all this building, striving and achievement, in 1400 there was no obvious prospect that the Grand Principality of Moscow-Vladimir would develop into a great European power. It controlled only a fraction of the territory inhabited by Russians. Most of what it did control was within 50 to 350 miles of Moscow, though some of this territory was interspersed with the apanages of other princes. True, the Grand Prince took precedence over all other princes, but his titles did not imply authority. Although the apanage (udel’) had originally been a temporary allocation of property from a prince’s inheritance for the upkeep of a family member, since about 1350 apanages had been granted to subordinate princes in perpetuity. Every prince guarded his apanage, his inheritance, and proud, prosperous city states like Pskov, Novgorod and Smolensk only took orders from the Grand Prince if it were in their interest to do so, or unless he compelled them. The Metropolitan, who still had spiritual authority over the Orthodox of Lithuania, had more communicants than the Grand Prince had subjects. Furthermore, the grand princes themselves were less than confident in the future they were trying to build, and were by no means certain that their descendants would inherit their property. A phrase recurring in their wills makes that much plain: ‘if God brings about a change concerning the Tatars’. 23
On the other hand metropolitans provided grand princes with substantial political support. The Orthodox Church believed that it should always work ‘in symphony’ with the legitimate, God-given, ruler. But circumstances made it particularly anxious to do so. Since the Great Schism in the Church, the Latin West, led by the Pope, had been trying to encroach on the ecclesiastical territory of the Orthodox Church, and — especially now that the struggle for the spiritual destiny of Lithuania loomed so large — the Church needed the Grand Prince’s support. Even so, the Grand Principality of Moscow itself was in a difficult strategic position, repeatedly in danger, placed as it was between the pincers of two dangerous enemies: the Tatars to the east and the Lithuanians to the west.
Besieged by Lithuanian armies in 1368 and again in 1370, it was captured and laid waste by Tatars in 1382, and besieged again in 1408 by the Tatar Yedigei, who extracted a large ransom for it. A Tatar army reached Moscow again in 1439, though by then its walls were built of stone and brick rather than of earth and timber. And the Tatars would still return thereafter, even though the city was no longer easy prey. Abandoning Moscow and fleeing with one’s treasure at the approach of an enemy was to become an almost routine practice for Moscow’s rulers. Yet somehow they survived the repeated assaults of external enemies. But then civil war erupted.
Grand Prince Dmitrii was to be succeeded by his eldest son, Vasilii I, and his grandson, Vasilii II. But, though their combined reigns lasted almost three-quarters of a century - from 1389 to 1462 - they were to be
less fortunate than Dmitrii. From the beginning of his reign Vasilii I was overshadowed by the high-riding Grand Duke of Lithuania. Nevertheless, he seized opportunities when he could. When the Tatars were diverted by their enemies in the east, he annexed the strategic principality of Nizhnii-Novgorod further down the Volga, though he failed to impose effective rule over all of it. In 1398 he tried to seize another strategic asset, (this time from Novgorod the Great): the valley of the Northern Dvina. He was repulsed. He tried again, without success, in 1401.
While Moscow struggled against its neighbours to the east and west, restive subordinate principalities tried to wriggle their way towards greater autonomy. The dreaded Khan Tamerlane created panic by leading his army towards Moscow. Then he swung away towards the east and the panic subsided. Moscow was at war with Lithuania from 1406 until 1408, and that same year Yedigei’s Tatar army returned to pillage Vladimir. Russian renegades as well as Tatars took part in that operation. At the same time Vasilii was faced with a determined Lithuanian attempt to supplant Moscow as centre of the Orthodox Church. Vasilii I was a successful ruler only in the sense that, though he suffered many reverses, he managed to avoid disaster. His son Vasilii II did not fare so well. 24
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