28. F. Dvornik, Byzantine Missions among the Slavs (New Brunswick, 1970), p. 277.
29. See D. Obolensky, ‘Vladimir Monomakh’, in his Six Byzantine Portraits (Oxford, 1988), pp. 83ff.; Palsson and Edwards, Vikings in Russia, p. 32.
30. See J. Fennell, The Crisis of Medieval Russia 1200—1304 (London, 1983), p. 163, on the consequences two and a half centuries later.
31. The Laurentian Chronicle, translation adapted from Vernadsky et al., Source Book, vol. 1, p. 27.
32. Obolensky, ‘Vladimir Monomakh’, pp. 83ff.
33. Ibid.
34. See Christian, Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia, vol. 1, p. 368.
35. Fennell, The Crisis of Medieval Russia, pp. 20, 22.
36. S. Belokurov, ed., Snosheniia Rossii s Kavkazom, Moskovskogo glavnogo arkhiva Ministerstva Inostrannykh Del (now the Russian State Archive), vyp. 1 (Moscow, 1889), pp. iiiff.
37. F. Dvornik, ‘Byzantine influences in Russia’, in M. Huxley, ed., The Root of Europe (London, 1952), pp. 95-106, and his ‘Byzantine political ideas’ loc. cit.
38. Fennell, The Crisis of Medieval Russia, p. 57.
39. The Novgorod Primary Chronicle as quoted in Fennell, The Crisis of Medieval Russia, p. 74.
40. Well organized in tens, hundreds, thousands, and units of ten thousand, they were well equipped too. Every soldier had two horses and carried an axe, a bow and three quivers full of arrows. Some were more heavily armed and carried armour. They were also well trained: their bows had a range of 300 yards, and they could shoot as they rode. Their discipline was fierce but effective: a man who fled from battle was executed; if a section of ten men fled, the remaining ninety men of their hundred would be slaughtered. See Christian, Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia, vol. 1, pp. 397-415.
41. For a balanced assessment of the Mongol impact, see C. J. Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Russian History (London, 1987).
3: REINCARNATION
1. In his The Crisis of Medieval Russia, John Fennell concludes that this was not an immediate consequence of the invasion. However, by the second half of the thirteenth century Moscow had become the safest part of Rostov-Suzdal and was a magnet for the displaced and vulnerable - see M. Liubavskii, Obrazovanie osnovnoi gosudarstvennoi territorii velikomsskoi narodnosti. Zaseleniia i ob”edieniia tsentra (Moscow, 1929, repr. 1996), p. 33.
2. M. Rywkin, ‘Russian colonial expansion before Ivan the Dread: a survey of basic trends’, Russian Review, 32 (1973), 286—93; also R. Kerner, The Urge to the Sea: The Course of Russian History: The Role of Rivers, Portages, Ostrogs, Monasteries and Furs (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1942), pp. 33—5. Janet Martin’s Treasure of the Land of Darkness: The Fur Trade and its Significance for Medieval Russia (Cambridge, 1986) gives Kerner’s thesis a new twist.
3. A. N. Mouravieff, A History of the Church of Russia, trans. R. W. Blackmore (Oxford 1842), p. 47.
4. See the laudatory account in ibid., pp. 51—6.
5. See the discussion in Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde.
6. A. A. Gorskii, Russkie zemli v xiii-xiv vekakh: puti politicheskogo razvitiia (Moscow, 1996), pp. 58-62, 66-7, 56.
7. His history of Russian colonization was completed in the early 1930s, but remained unpublished till almost the end of the century — see A. la. Degtarev’s introduction to Liubavskii, Obzor istorii russkoi kolonizatsii (Moscow, 1996).
8. Liubavskii, Obzor, pp. 51-6.
9. See J. Fennell’s The Emergence of Moscow 1304-1359 (London, 1968), passim, for a repeated struggle to extract a credible explanation from the sources. Fennell’s work has contributed much to the account which follows. For a more positive if less painstaking treatment see also N. Borisov, Ivan Kalita (Moscow, 1997).
10. Fennell, The Emergence of Moscow, pp. 4, 90—93.
11. Ibid., p. 112.
12. Borisov, Ivan Kalita, pp. 6—7.
13. R. Howes, ed., The Testaments of the Grand Princes of Moscow (Ithaca, 1967), pp. I82ff.
14. J. Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia (Crestwood, NY, 1989), p. 185.
15. See R. Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy 1304-1613 (London, 1987), pp.
16. ‘The Wanderer of Stephen of Novgorod’, in G. Majeska, trans, and ed., Russian Travellers to Constantinople in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (Chicago, 1970), pp. xxxi, xxxiii; Liubavskii, Obzor istorii russkoi kolonizatsii, p. 39.
17. See the discussion by M. Klimensko in his introduction to The ‘Vita’ of St. Sergii of Radonezh (Boston, Mass., n.d.), pp. 15-16.
18. As well as Klimensko’s edition of The ‘Vita’, see R. G. Skrynnikov, Gosudarstvo i tserkov’ na Rusi xiv-xvi vv (Novosibirsk, 1991), pp. 43ff.
19. Liubavskii, Obzor istorii russkoi kolonizatsii, pp. 190—92, 542—44.
20. Ibid., p. 19.
21. Ibid., p. 22.
22. Liubavskii, Obrazovanie osnovnoi gosudarstvennoi territorii velikorusskoi narodnosti, pp. 42—4 et seq., and his Obzor istorii russkoi kolonizatsii, pp. 22-3.
23. E.g. the testament of Vasilii I, in Howes, ed., Testaments of the Grand Princes of Moscow, p. 219. On the apanage, see A. E. Presniakov, The Formation of the Great Russian State: A Study of Russian History in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (Chicago, 1970), pp. 392-3.
24. Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy, gives a convenient account of this.
25. For details of this unedifying period, see A. Zimin, Vitiaz’ na rasput’e:feodal’naia voina Rossii xv v (Moscow, 1991). Zimin devoted most of his career to the political history of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Russia and produced six books on it. Of the remaining five, two deal with the periods 1480-1505 (which he calls ‘the birth of Russia’) and 1505-33 (Russia’s ascent), and the remaining three with the reign of Ivan IV (see Chapter 5).
26. See G. Pickhan, ‘The incorporation of Gospodin Pskov into the Muscovite state’, in L. Hughes, ed., New Perspectives in Muscovite History (Basingstoke, 1992), pp. 51-8.
27. See A. A. Zimin, Formirovanie boiarskoi aristokratii v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine xv — pervoi treti xvi v (Moscow, 1988), p. 283.
28. A. E. Moorhouse, in his introduction to Presniakov, The Formation of the Great Russian State, pp. xxxi—xxxiii.
29. Liubavskii, Obzor istorii russkoi kolonizatsii, p. 39.
4: THE FOUNDATION OF AN EMPIRE
1. Presniakov, The Formation of the Great Russian State, pp. 381-2.
2. J. Fennell, Ivan the Great of Moscow (London, 1961), pp. 37—54; also Presniakov, The Formation of the Great Russian State, pp. 364—7, especially on the Church and the constitutional position. The parallels with Henry VII, Louis XI and others are suggested by L. Cherepnin, Obrazovanie russkogo tsentralizovannogo gosudarstva v xiv—xv vv (Moscow, 1966), p. 7; on financial policy, insofar as it has been reconstructed, see S. Kashtanov, Finansy srednevekovoi Rusi (Moscow, 1988), chs. 2-4.
3. N. Sinitsyn, Tretii Rim: istoki i evolutsiia russkoi srednevekovoi konseptsii (xv—xvii vv) (Moscow, 1998), pp. 213 - a thorough analysis of the Italian and Austrian sources for this development.
4. See plates f. iv and f. 31r between pp. 416 and 417 in N. Borisov, Ivan III (Moscow, 2000).
5. Sinitsyn, Tretii Rim, p. 116.
6. The account of events which follows is based chiefly on Fennell, Ivan the Great of Moscow, pp. 37-54.
7. Translated passage from the Nikon Chronicle, Kaiser and Marker, eds., Reinterpreting Russian History, p. 91.
8. On the subjection of Pskov, see Pickhan, ‘The incorporation of Gospodin Pskov’; on Ivan’s reception in Moscow, Iu. G. Alekseiev, Gosudar’ vseia Rusi (Novosibirsk, 1991), p. 85. The term ‘boyar’ has often been misunderstood. It originally denoted a member of a prince’s war band, but under Ivan it came to refer to a handful of close advisers to the Grand Prince - in effect a ministerial elite. (See V. Kliuchevskii, Boiarskaia duma drevnei Rusi (Moscow, 1909), and in particular Zimin, Formirovanie boiarskoii aristokratii.)
9. Aside from Fennell, Ivan the Great of Moscow, se
e H. Birnbaum, ‘Did the 1478 annexation of Novgorod by Muscovy fundamentally change the course of Russian History?’, in Hughes, ed., New Perspectives in Muscovite History, pp. 37-50.
10. On the institution of pronoia in the Byzantine Empire, see Ostrogorskii, History of the Byzantine State, pp. 330-31.
11. See Presniakov, The Formation of the Great Russian State, pp. 376—7; Fennell, Ivan the Great of Moscow, pp. 64—6.
12. Zimin, Formirovanie boiarskoii aristokratii, pp. 283ff.
13. See R. M. Crosskey, Muscovite Diplomatic Practice in the Reign of Ivan III (New York, 1987), app. J, p. 84.
14. Ibid., pp. 238-42, 43.
15. Ibid., pp. 84, 98-9. On the first Russian embassy to the Ottoman Turks, led by Pleshcheev, see A. V. Nekliudov, ed., Nachalo snoshenii Rossii s Turtsiei (Moscow, 1883).
16. Magdolna Agoston on Ivan Ill’s wax seal of 1497 in Gy Szvak, ed., Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Russia organized by the University of Budapest (Budapest, forthcoming).
17. Fennell, Ivan the Great of Moscow, pp. 37—84; Presniakov, The Formation of the Great Russian State, pp. 364-7.
18. Adapted from Crosskey’s translation of the instruction of 17 May 1503, in Crosskey, Muscovite Diplomatic Practice, pp. 292-3.
19. See G. Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (Harmondsworth, 1965). For Russia’s early relations with Poland, the Balkan principalities and Turkey, see V. Ulianitskii, ed., Materialy 0 Rossii, Pol’shi, Moldavii, Vlachi v 14—16 st, Chteniia v obshchestve istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh, vol. 3 (Moscow, 1887), pp. 1—24.
20. Fennell, Ivan the Great of Moscow, pp. 129, 117; instruction dated May 1493 in Crosskey, Muscovite Diplomatic Practice, p. 294.
21. N. N. Bantysh-Kamenskii, Obzor vneshnykh snoshenii Rossii (po 1800), Pt 1 (Moscow 1894), PP. 1-2; also Sinitsyn, Tretii Rim, p. 118, quoting Ivan’s instructions to his own envoy and Habsburg ambassador Herberstein’s report.
22. Fennell, Ivan the Great of Moscow, pp. 117-18.
23. Trakhaniot’s account in the Milan State Archive, see Crosskey, Muscovite Diplomatic Practice, p. 64 and n. 23 on that page.
24. P. P. Epifanov, ‘Voiska i voennaia organizatsiia’, in A. V Artsikhovskii et al., Ocherki russkoi kul’tury xvi v, vyp. 1 (Moscow, 1976), p. 344.
25. Ibid., pp. 354-5-
26. M. Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire 1500—1800 (Bloomington, 2002), pp. 74—8; B. Nolde, La Formation de l’Empire Russe (2 vols., Paris, 1952—3), vol. 2, p. 16.
27. K. V. Bazilevich, Vneshnaia politika russkogo tsentralizovannogo Gosudarstvva, vtoraia polovina xv veka (Moscow, 1952), pp. 16, 29—30.
28. The words of Dmitrii Gerasimov, interpreter to the mission, in A. V. Kartashev, Ocherkipo istorii russkoi tserkvi (2 vols., Moscow, 1992), vol. 2, p. 7.
29. On the burning of Kobyle, Fennell, Ivan the Great of Moscow, p. 70; on the war of 1501, see E. Christiansen, The Northern Crusades (London, 1997), pp. 255-7.
30. J. Tazbir, Poland as the Rampart of Christian Europe (Warsaw, n.d.), p. 32.
31. See M. Poe, Foreign Descriptions of Muscovy: An Analytic Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources (Columbus, Ohio, 1995), p. 11.
32. Fennell, Ivan the Great of Moscow, pp. 325—6.
33. Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy, pp. 134-5.
34. Mouravieff, The Church of Russia.
35. On the Kuritsyns’ careers, S. B. Veselovskii, D’iaki i pod’iachie xv-xvii vv (Moscow, 1975), pp. 278-80.
36. Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy, p. 87 and the maps in Bazilevich, Vneshnaia politika russkogo tsentralizovannogo Gosudarstvva, vtoraia polovina xv veka; on Dolmatov, Veselovskii, D’iaki i pod’iachie xv-xvii vv, pp. 155—6.
37. Pickhan, ‘The incorporation of Gospodin Pskov’.
38. Sinitsyn, Tretii Rim, pp. 215-20.
39. M. Rywkin, ed., Russian Colonial Expansion to 1917 (London, 1988).
40. Skrynnikov, Gosudarstvo i tserkov’ na Rusi xiv-xvi vv, p. 362.
41. S. von Herberstein, Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii (Vienna, 1549). On the significance of Russians shaving off their beards, see Cornelia Soldat’s and others’ contributions of 2 February 2003 to Sergei Bogatyrev’s e-mail site [email protected].
5: IVAN IV AND THE FIRST IMPERIAL EXPANSION
1. See the account in the Nikon Chronicle as translated by Vernadsky et al., Source Book, vol. 1, pp. 133-4. Ivan’s legitimacy was to be reinforced by a charter issued by the Patriarch of Constantinople in 1561, which traced Ivan’s descent through Monomakh’s sister Anna to Constantine the Great, asserting his legitimacy by ‘lineage and blood’. The genetic association was, however, a political fiction. See ibid., p. 171.
2. See Poe, Foreign Descriptions of Muscovy, pp. 12-13; R- Frost, The Northern Wars 1558-1721 (London, 2000), pp. 78-80, 91; P. Longworth, ‘Russia and the Antemurale Christianitads’, in Gy. Szvak, ed., The Place of Russia in Europe (Budapest, 1999). See also a paper warning of the danger to central Europe if Russia should become strongly entrenched along the southern shoreline of the Baltic: G. V. Forsten, Akty i pis’’ma k istorii Baltiiskogo voprosa v xvi i xvii stoletiakh (St Petersburg, 1889), pp. 14-28.
3. See the contrasting views of R. Hellie, ‘What happened? How did he get away with it? Ivan Groznyi’s paranoia and the problem of institutional restraints’, Russian History, 14 (1987), 199-224; A. A. Zimin, Reformy Ivana Groznogo (Moscow, i960), R. Skrynnikov, Ivan Groznyi (Moscow, 1980), and A. Dvorkin, Ivan the Terrible as a Religious Type (Erlangen, 1992).
4. Nikon Chronicle excerpted in Vernadsky et al., Source Book, vol. 1, p. 133.
5. See B. Floria, Ivan Groznyi (Moscow, 1999), p. 17. Tales about the infant Ivan pulling the wings off a butterfly resemble (and are probably of the same German provenance) as the tales of Dracula - see M. Cazacu, L’Histoire du Prince Dracula en Europe Centrale et Orientale (Geneva, 1998).
6. For Moscow’s dealings with the various Mongol factions see Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier, pp. 106-11. For the implications for further southward expansion see C. Lemercier-Quelquejoy, ‘Co-optation of the elites of Kabarda and Daghestan in the sixteenth century’, in M. Bennigsen Broxup, ed., The North Caucasus Barrier: The Russian Advance towards the Muslim World (London, 1992), pp. 18-42.
7. Communication from Jukka Korpela posted on M. Poe site, 29 March 2000.
8. R. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (12 vols., Glasgow, 1908), vol. 3, p. 384.
9. Nolde, La Formation de l’Empire Russe, vol. 1, pp. 77-8.
10. J. Martin, ‘Peculiarities of the pomest’e system’, in Gy Szvak, ed., Muscovy: Peculiarities of its Development (Budapest, 2003), pp. 76—87.
11. See Floria, Ivan Groznyi. Also Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier, pp. 102-45.
12. Nolde, La Formation de l’Empire Russe, vol. 2, pp. 303-5.
13. Bantysh-Kamenskii, Obzor vneshnykh snoshenii Rossii (po 1800), Pt 1, vol. 1, pp. 9-7.
14. A. Kappeler, Russland als Vielvölkerreich (Munich, 1992), p. 43; and see ch. 8 below.
15. Vernadsky et al., Source Book, vol. 1, 1972, p. 142; B. Rudakov, Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, vol. 3 (St Petersburg, 1900), pp. 803-5; Nolde, La Formation de l’Empire Russe, vol. 1, pp. 132-3.
16. For translations of the basic Russian account, see T. Armstrong, ed., Yermak’s Campaign in Siberia (London, 1975), and W. Coxe, Account of the Russian Discoveries between Asia and America (4th edn, London, 1803), pp. 418ff.
17. E. Winter, Russland und das Papstum (Berlin, 1960), p. 179; Longworth, ‘Russia and the Antemurale Christianitatis’; on England, see S. Baron, Muscovite Russia (London, 1980), Essay III, pp. 42-63; also M. Anderson, Britain’s Discovery of Russia (London, 1958).
18. See Frost, The Northern Wars, pp. 24 and 77. Russia’s administrative policy in Livonia has been examined by N. Angermann, Studien zur Livlandpolitik Ivan Groznyjs (Marburg, 1972); see particularly pp. 25ff.
19.
The Russian Invasion of Poland in 1563 — a translation by J. C. H[otten] of Memorabilis et perinde stupenda de crudeli Moscovitarum Expeditione narratio (Douai, n.d.).
20. Among the most useful contributions to the huge literature on the oprichnina are S. B. Veselovskii, Isledovaniia po istorii oprichniny (Moscow, 1963), esp. here pp. 133ff., and Zimin, Reformy Ivana Groznogo. My account also draws on Fiona’s Ivan Groznyi. It is worth noting that Vipper, the leading apologist for Ivan, was an anti-Bolshevik who fled Russia at the Revolution and consented to return only at the approach of war in 1941.
21. See I. Pryzhkov, Istoriia kabakov v Rossii (Moscow, 1991). On the origins of the commune, see R. E. F. Smith, Peasant Farming in Muscovy (Cambridge, 1977).
22. Floria, Ivan Groznyi, pp. 172f, 168ff.
23. Ibid., p. 179.
24. This is argued by Janet Martin in her Medieval Russia 980—1584 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 347-8.
25. That the Duma (the Russian word for ‘council’) was a formalized institution at this stage is a construct of historians who assume too much.
26. Floria, Ivan Groznyi, p. 393.
27. Adapted from J. L. I. Fennell’s translation of Ivan’s letter of 1564 in his The Correspondence between Prince A. M. Kurbsky and Tsar Ivan IV of Russia 1564-1579 (Cambridge, 1955).
28. Floria, Ivan Groznyi, pp. 393—4.
29. S. B. Veselovskii, Trudy po istochnikovedenii i istorii Rossii v periode feodalzma (Moscow, 1978), p. 153.
30. See Dvorkin, Ivan the Terrible as a Religious Type, p. 105. Chapter 8 of this work, which draws on recent as well as older scholarship, is helpful on the oprichnina.
31. Floria, Ivan Groznyi, pp. 233—43.
32. E. Chistiakova, ed., N. Rogozhin, compiler, et al., (Oko vsei velikoi Rossii’: ob istorii rossiiskoi diplomaticheskoi sluzhby xvi—xvii vekov (Moscow, 1989), pp. 54ff.
33. See the contributions of D. Kayser, J. Kollman and others to the Marshall Poe web site www.people.fas.harvard.edu for June 2001, etc.
34. A. A. Zimin, V kanun groznykh potriasenii: predposylki pervoi krest’ianskoi voiny v Rossii (Moscow, 1986), p. 5.
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