Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin
Page 7
The team Filipp assembled was a Russian one. His builders were Ivan Krivtsov and Myshkin, whose main distinction, historically speaking, is probably the fact that we know their names at all.36 Working with them was an army of slaves, some drawn from the church’s own reserve of captive manpower (slave-labour was ubiquitous in Russia at this time) and others purchased from the Tatars of the steppe.37 Many were already skilled, and some of these looked on the work as a chance to bargain for their freedom. Because its Greek-derived design was said to have been laid down, in the earliest days of Christianity, by God himself, the pious Filipp’s principal goal was to build a cathedral in the exact style of Vladimir’s. This was a real challenge, for the great building had originally owed much to the skills of the foreign masons who had worked at Andrei Bogoliubsky’s court. Impressive enough at the time of its construction, too, the cathedral had been enlarged after a serious fire, and now boasted five breathtaking cupolas at the top of its improbably high walls.
Nothing daunted, in the winter of 1471–2, Filipp sent his master-builders to the older city to draw and measure the twelfth-century prototype, not least to ensure that Moscow’s version would be yet more splendid, more beautiful, and larger.38 As the early snow began to fall, Filipp watched as carters started unloading his fresh limestone from Moscow’s frozen wharf (transport was always easier in winter). They were still working at Christmas, and again at Epiphany, when comets of exceptional brilliance appeared above the Kremlin, surely portents of a prodigy to come.39 The following April, as the ground started to thaw, the metropolitan’s men were ready to dig foundations and to start laying the drains. To the clanging of the Kremlin bells, a thankful company of priests joined Filipp and the icons in a procession around the site, accompanied by Ivan III and his entire court.
Filipp’s new building was to stand over the outline of Ivan Kalita’s, but though the old walls had to go, there were important rituals to complete first. By this stage, the tomb of Metropolitan Peter the Wonder-Worker was not the only shrine in the Dormition Cathedral. Filipp’s builders had to down tools several times between May and early July, each time to allow prayers and processions and the discreet relocation of bones. Those of Yona, who had died in 1461, were said to smell so sweet that the whole site was perfumed by them. When Peter’s coffin was opened, a white dove flew into the air, vanishing only when the lid was resealed. Clearly, these remains were not mere corpses. Orthodoxy took things literally (it still does), which meant that the saints were truly present in their dust. Their bones were holy relics, miraculous, and a wooden chapel was constructed to protect them. For eighteen months, it was here that services continued while the old building was knocked away and the new walls went up.40
But Filipp was never to see his cathedral. In April 1473, another fire swept through the Kremlin. The shock, following months of strain, proved too much for the metropolitan, and he died of a stroke. His greatest work continued without him, and by the summer of 1474 the vaults of the enormous structure were almost complete. As promised, it was grander than its ancestor in Vladimir, and seemed set to become the citadel’s most awe-inspiring sight. The shell, as it was being built, became an attraction for the locals, who scrambled up the wooden scaffolding to marvel at the view, so it was fortunate that when the next disaster struck, in May, it was already evening. The last mason had bustled home at sunset, and even the most determined sightseers had climbed down from the rafters as the light began to fade. Only one lad remained, and he was nimble enough to escape. Some say there was another earthquake, others that the massive building was doomed from the start. Either way, that evening the north wall suddenly collapsed, crushing the wooden church inside and leaving the whole project in ruins.41
Recriminations started instantly. Ivan III consulted masters from Pskov, a city that had preserved its long-standing Baltic links and where the local stone-masons still talked occasionally with passing experts from north German towns. The Pskovians prudently refused to rebuild Filipp’s church, but suggested that the problem lay with the poor quality of the lime that had been used in the builders’ mortar. The question now was what to do about the ruin. It had been centuries since any mason in the Russian world had attempted to out-build the masters of pre-Mongol Vladimir, and some claimed that the skills had been entirely lost. But Ermolin (who acted as a consultant for Filipp’s church) and the Khovrins (the old man had a son who continued the family interest in architecture) might well have succeeded with the project once the lessons had been learned. It was not so unusual, after all, for large structures to collapse in the medieval and renaissance world. The Cathedral of St Pierre at Beauvais was so disaster-prone that at one point the only person who dared to attempt its rescue was a condemned criminal, who accepted the job in order to escape the hangman’s rope.42 The Muscovites were still a long way from desperation of that order.
What no-one in Ivan’s Moscow could do, however, was to match the skills that were now taking European courts by storm. The Russians knew how to cut stone, and the Khovrins had experience with brick, but none had mastered the new precision, the passion for exact proportion and persistent measurement. In Italy by the 1470s, however, there were builders who could manage veritable miracles. Their fame had spread so widely that even the Turkish sultan was interested. Some Russian bishops would have seen the cathedral dome in Brunelleschi’s Florence for themselves (the lantern was still under construction at the time of the ecumenical council in 1439), and there were rumours of a plan for the wholesale transformation of the Papal capital at Rome. Further east, on the Danube, the king of Hungary had employed Italians to build a range of walls that had proved so fearsome that he was already said to be after more. What finally persuaded Ivan to hire an Italian engineer, however, was probably the influence of his new wife. Misogynists in the historical profession used to claim that she nagged him twice a week.43
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The princess in this story was the niece of the last emperor of Christian Constantinople, Constantine XI Palaeologus. Her parents called her Zoe, and she spent her infancy in the Byzantine province of the Morea (today’s Peloponnese). When that fell to the Turks in 1460, seven years after the capture of Constantinople, her family fled to Italy, taking as much as they could carry from the last imperial court, including books and icons, jewels and chestfuls of holy relics. Her father used some of the treasure to secure his children’s future. In Zoe’s case, a casket containing the head of the Apostle Andrew eased the negotiations to make her a ward of the pope, Paul II. Zoe grew up at his court among the most sophisticated thinkers of the age, maturing into an accomplished, ambitious and self-confident woman. She was raised as a Catholic (naturally), but as the heir of Constantinople she was also open to more ecumenical ideas.44 When her immediate guardian, Cardinal Bessarion of Nicea, proposed a marriage to the grand prince of Orthodox Muscovy, the plan had a certain poetry.
Bessarion had already tried and failed several times to find his protégée a royal husband. Moscow was not the ideal choice – it was too far, too dangerous and too cold – but rumours of its growing wealth were beginning to spark Europe’s interest. The evidence, in the shape of magnificent diplomatic gifts of sable, was starting to spill out of packing-crates more frequently as Moscow’s isolation from the Catholic world drew to an end. The Papal court was also keen to forge a closer link with Ivan III for strategic reasons, as optimists still nursed a hope that the prince might be induced to support the European struggle against the Turks. As an incentive, Zoe’s dowry was the Morea itself, which, the negotiators promised, would be Ivan’s as soon as Mehmet II could be driven out. In the event, the Turks held on to Greece for another three hundred and fifty years.
It turned out that the bait that really worked with Ivan was the promise of European prestige. It was Zoe’s name, and not her charm (or the Morea), that counted at the diplomatic stage. The Italians provided a portrait for Ivan’s approval, but negotiators back in Moscow were so unaccustomed to drawings from life th
at they mistook the picture for an icon (it has since been lost). Zoe’s Catholic religion was a problem, too, since Moscow had become the stronghold of the very Orthodoxy that her family had failed to protect. Ivan’s marriage plans stalled for some months while the theological dangers were debated; Metropolitan Filipp, predictably, was the most sceptical of all. It was only in January 1472 that Ivan’s envoy (and sometime mint-master), Gian-Battista della Volpe, finally embarked on the five-month journey back to Rome. By the time he got there at the end of May, Paul II had died. Nimbly, Volpe altered the pope’s name on the documents he was carrying and created a cheerful gloss for the withering commentary on Catholicism that Filipp had inserted into the contract. On 1 June 1472, Zoe, now named Sofiya in honour of her new allegiance to Moscow, was symbolically married to an absent Ivan III. The Italian poet Luigi Pulci left a description of the princess at the time of her wedding. ‘A mountain of fat,’ he pronounced after an evening audience. ‘All I could dream about all night were mountains of butter and grease…’45 It was not the kindest of assessments, but Sofiya’s future husband, as she may have known, was in turn reputed to be so terrifying that his glance alone made women faint.46
Three weeks after the ceremony, and following a farewell interview with the new pope, Sixtus IV (of Sistine Chapel fame), Sofiya set out for Moscow. Her caravan included a handful of homeward-bound Russians as well as a selection of fellow-Greeks, among whom was a close associate of her father’s, Yury Trakhaniot, soon to become one of Ivan III’s most effective diplomats. Sixtus insisted that the delegation should be greeted everywhere as if the pope himself were at its head. He even sent a special representative, Cardinal Bonumbre of Ajaccio, to lead the company, which must have made a most impressive sight. At least a hundred horses were needed to carry the people and their ziggurats of freight, which included Sofiya’s belongings (and her person), gifts, and a selection of treasures from Rome and Constantinople. Relays of servants laboured with the baggage as the troupe progressed from city to city, for every stop seemed to involve more wedding gifts and more exchanges of jewels and relics. There was a lot of feasting, too.
But the journey also provided the princess and her entourage with a tour of Europe’s finest buildings and most gracious courts. From Rome they travelled to Siena (a city to which Sofiya’s father, the dispenser of sacred body parts, had once presented the embalmed hand of John the Baptist), where a reception costing 200 lire (five times the sum recently allocated for a dinner in honour of Lorenzo di Medici) was held for her in the famous black-and-white cathedral. Sofiya continued through Florence and Bologna (where people ‘fought to have the honour of leading her horse’), to Vicenza (della Volpe’s own home city) and the outskirts of Venice. Her party crossed the Alps via Innsbruck and Augsburg and arrived in Nuremberg – one of the finest walled cities in Europe – in early August. The sun on her back would still have been warm as she headed north, more or less in a straight line, via Greussen, Nordhausen, Braunschweig, Celle, Lüneburg and Mölln to the Baltic port of Lübeck, jewel of the north, where she arrived on 1 September.
The contrast between the prosperous charms of northern Europe and the grey world to the east must have been chilling. By the time Sofiya’s party reached Kolyvan (Tallinn), they had endured a stormy eleven-day voyage across the Baltic. Ahead lay two more months of wearying travel, much of it through dense autumnal forest. The crowds now seemed more alien, their curiosity less kind. In Pskov, observers stared at the Italians as if they were some species of fiend. Even the educated ones took exception to the scarlet-clad cardinal, Bonumbre, whose interpretation of his role as papal representative included an undiplomatic devotion to the Catholic cross and a socially disastrous contempt for icons.47 Sofiya was getting a pungent taste of Russian cultural difference. As her retinue finally entered Moscow on 12 November, the light and warmth of Italy must have seemed very far away. As usual, too, it was snowing.48
What must have struck Sofiya most, when she had toured the Kremlin palaces at last, was the gap between what she could see and the splendour that her new husband so clearly thought to be his due. Even if it had been finished, Filipp’s vaunted and expensive building was clearly no match for the Florentine dome. Her own quarters were somewhere in the jumble of wooden buildings below its building-site, and the view was sepia and grey. Ivan was not a great one for apologies, and he would never openly accept that anything he had commissioned was effectively a compromise. In terms of what Russians could do, his builders were already working at full stretch, and the size of his labour-force dwarfed anything that an Italian could raise. In the weeks to come, however, while the delegation wintered in Moscow, the conversation must have turned to what might really be achieved. Sofiya, as a student of Bessarion, was committed to the idea that Moscow could be Europe’s valued ally in the struggle to regain Constantinople. There may have been discussions, too, about the nature of statehood; by 1472, Italy was experimenting with the proposition that government involved far more than feasting, churches and coercive force. The large pool of interpreters worked hard: Filipp, apparently, spent almost every waking hour in theological debate with Bonumbre.49 But the conversation certainly turned to buildings, and from them to Europe’s miraculous new architects. Whatever else, the arrival in the Kremlin of a well-placed and well-educated group from Italy’s most wealthy courts would have dispelled any lingering fear that hiring builders from outside might be a leap into the unknown.
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There really was only one place to go in fifteenth-century Europe if you were after an impressive master-builder. You did not have to be a Muscovite with a new and determined wife. When any prince wanted something gracious, something prestigious, and something that could be expected to stay up, he imported an expert from Italy.50 Filipp might have resisted foreign (Catholic) help, but by the time his great project collapsed he was already dead. The next round was the grand prince’s affair. Just three years after Ivan and Sofiya’s wedding, in 1475, Aristotele Fioravanti, native of Bologna, arrived in Moscow at Ivan’s invitation to offer his services as architect, mint-master, military engineer, deviser of instruments and all-purpose magician. 51 The choice suited everyone. Sofiya’s guardian, Bessarion, had known Fioravanti personally for years. When Ivan’s agent, Semen Tolbuzin, travelled to Venice in 1474 to hire a master-builder for the Russian court, he was already primed to recognize the name. Fioravanti’s work was widely celebrated, too, though Tolbuzin’s assumption that he had built the Cathedral of St Mark was overcredulous. His real forte was rescuing monuments and city walls; he had also moved an entire building, the eighty-two-foot tower of Santa Maria Maggiore in Bologna, without damage to the structure. An early commission in Rome had won him the approval of Pope Paul II, and his international fame increased still further in 1467, when he had carried out a project to strengthen Europe’s defences against the Turk on behalf of Hungary’s Italian-educated ruler, Matthias Corvinus.
In 1473, he was invited back to Rome, this time by Sixtus IV, but he was obliged to flee soon after in fear of his life, for he had been accused of forging money, the penalty for which would have involved swallowing molten lead.52 Ivan’s Moscow may well have seemed a better prospect, although the master-builder’s ultimate insurance-policy was an invitation to build a seraglio for the Turkish sultan, Mehmet II. He did not really need to travel far, however. Bologna, or even Venice, would have sheltered him, for engineers of his ability were rare, and the Venetians made sure that Tolbuzin appreciated that as he prepared to lure this one from his homeland. The building task that Tolbuzin outlined must have fascinated the Bolognese master, and the promise of a salary of ten rubles a month was exceptionally generous. As an extra privilege, and a rare one, the architect’s household was offered lodgings in the Kremlin itself.53
Fioravanti was probably about sixty years old when he set off for Moscow with ‘his son, named Andrey, and a boy called Petrushka’.54 Unlike Sofiya, he took the shortest route, a three-month dash across the plains, s
kirting the frozen Pripet marshes and catching his first glimpse of Ivan’s chilly capital in late March 1475. It was the sort of journey that a man might make in pursuit of a last fast buck, a final commission before retirement. Fioravanti, after all, had come to repair and complete Filipp’s cathedral. He planned to go home a rich man. Instead, when he attempted to leave Russia several years later, he found himself facing a new threat of imprisonment or death. His skills as builder, cannon-founder and military advisor belonged to Moscow for the rest of his life.
That first spring, however, was brisk and professional. Fioravanti inspected the wreck of Filipp’s church and confirmed the Pskov masons’ diagnosis about the mortar. He also insisted, with a healthy Bolognese disdain for Russian workmanship, that the ambitious project could not be achieved unless the soft local limestone were supplemented by copious quantities of brick. By this time, almost everyone in Moscow was observing him, and when he declared that Filipp’s ruined structure would have to go completely, large crowds gathered to watch. Such jobs usually dragged on through a whole season, for Russian builders worked by hand, but the Italian had a machine, a metal-capped oak ram of his own design. The effect could only be compared to Joshua at Jericho. ‘It was miraculous to see’, the chronicle recorded, ‘how it was that something that took three years to build could be entirely demolished by him in a single week, or even less.’ The walls came down so fast that the labourers who had to load the rubble on to clumsy horse-drawn carts scarcely had time to scratch their fleas.55