Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (87 page)

14. Eastern Europe in 1300

The people of Novgorod and their neighbouring trading centre of Pskov shared the cosmopolitanism of the Hanseatic League, far more than settlements further east or south. The forest of city churches - eighty-three by 1500, a similar number to London - was enriched with art and monuments commissioned from artists living as far away as Germany or Serbia. One aspect of this contact with the west and south was that, in the fourteenth century, both Novgorod and Pskov became notably open to dissident religious movements which criticized the worldliness of the Church's leadership, a phenomenon not otherwise much known in Rus' in that era, but beginning to emerge in the Western Church.
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Novgorod thus provided one model of what an Orthodox future for northern Europe might become: very different from the autocracies which came to be the background to Russian history. Novgorod was the first city to borrow from Bulgarian T'rnovo that resonant title with a long future in Russia, the 'Third Rome', but we will discover that the description was destined to move elsewhere.
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The fact that Novgorod did not shape the destiny of Russia was ultimately thanks to the rulers of a modest settlement called Moscow, hundreds of miles to its south-east. Hitherto little noticed in the affairs of Rus', in the later thirteenth century the ambitious rulers of Moscow began to make the most of their remoteness from Tatar interest or interference. They assiduously cultivated the Kipchak Khan, regularly visiting him and leaving their sons as hostages; right into the fifteenth century they paid tribute to the khan and customarily maintained prayers for him in the Church's liturgy. Similarly in the late fourteenth century, when Moscow started minting its own coinage, many of its coins bore Arabic inscriptions dutifully praying for long life for the khan.
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Unsurprisingly, the princes of Moscow modelled many of their political institutions on those of Mongol society, but they also paraded their devotion to the Church traditions of Constantinople. By the fourteenth century, as their territories and influence expanded, the Tatars allowed them to take the title of Grand Prince, and across Europe rulers began hearing of this distant realm called Muscovy. Novgorod soon uncomfortably felt the rivalry of the Muscovite grand princes, while Muscovy among its various confrontations with neighbouring principalities, also fell into increasing tension with a growing power to the west, the grand princes of Lithuania.
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Of all the various powers in the Baltic region and the east to the Urals, an informed observer of east-central Europe in the late fourteenth century would have pointed to Lithuania as the most likely to emerge as supreme. The grand princes of Lithuania were the last major rulers in Europe to resist making a choice between the three great monotheisms, proudly keeping to their ancestral animist faith. They were vigorous and effective warlords who in the wake of the Mongol invasion preyed on the various shattered communities of the region, and over the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries they extended their power to command the eastern European plains and mountain chains, from the Baltic eventually as far as the Black Sea. They proved as tolerant of Christians in their dominions as the Kipchak Khans had been, and the nobles (boyars) of Rus' were as happy to accept their overlordship as they had been that of the animist or Islamic khans.

The Grand Prince of Lithuania was anxious to unite as many traditions as possible in his vast domains. To his Latin-speaking elites he presented himself as '
dux magnus Litvanorum Russiaeque dominus et haeres naturali
s' - Grand Prince of the Lithuanians and Lord and Natural Successor of the Rus'. Yet his bureaucrats spoke a 'Ruthenian' form of Slavonic which reflected their familiarity with the liturgy of the Orthodox Church; some of his family looked to Orthodox Christianity to sustain them, and not only many of his boyars but most of his subjects were Orthodox Christians.
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Soon it was natural for the Orthodox of the region to start looking to the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, rather than the sad remnants of past magnificence at Kiev, which the metropolitan bishop now hardly ever visited; from 1363 Kiev itself was in the hands of the Lithuanians. Yet from the late thirteenth century the metropolitan based himself either in Moscow or Vladimir-on-the-Kliazma, which was also in Muscovite territory, and it became the ambition of the Muscovites to make this arrangement permanent. Throughout the fourteenth century, a contest took place between Muscovy and Lithuania as to who would host this key figure in the Christianity of Rus' - in effect, who really would be the 'Natural Successor of the Rus". The Oecumenical Patriarch and emperor in Constantinople enjoyed the position of referees. That was a welcome boost to their fragile position, and a far cry from the condescension with which the Byzantines had greeted Vladimir of Kiev's conversion back in 988. The consequences of this century of manoeuvring are among the most important in the history of Russian Orthodoxy.

In the contest of Lithuania and Muscovy, the referees in Byzantium weighed the growing power of Lithuania against the fact that, by contrast with the ostentatious Orthodox piety of the grand princes in Moscow, the Lithuanian ruler was a non-Christian. The rhetorical advantage was with the Muscovites, and they exploited it fully. Metropolitan Peter of Kiev and all Rus' died in 1326 soon after taking up residence in Moscow. A cult of the 'miracle worker' rapidly grew up around him and he was declared a saint. This was a useful asset for Grand Prince Ivan Kalita when he persuaded Metropolitan Feognost, Peter's successor, likewise to settle in Moscow rather than in Vladimir-on-the-Kliazma. It did not do Moscow any harm that Metropolitan Peter had been treated badly in the Principality of Tver, a further rival to Muscovy, before his gratifyingly warm reception in Moscow, a point which Muscovite chroniclers laboured in their hagiography.
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When the dome of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople partially collapsed in 1346, Grand Prince Semen (Simon) of Muscovy was quick to send money for the restoration fund to demonstrate his international position within the Orthodox world; likewise money flowed from the Grand Prince's dominions towards the monasteries of Mount Athos.
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In 1371 Grand Prince Dmitrii Donskoi gave one of his sons the Christian name which the converted Vladimir of Kiev had taken at his baptism in 988, and in 1389 this boy became the first grand prince to bear the name Basil or Vasilii.

By contrast, Grand Prince Olgerd of Lithuania did not help his case when, in the late 1340s, he executed three Lithuanian Christians in Vilnius for refusing to eat meat during a period of Christian fasting. In outrage, Constantinople made sure that the dead men became the focus of a cult, since they were obvious modern martyrs for the faith in a manner more familiar in the early days of the Roman Empire, and the Oecumenical Patriarch secured their remains for his Great Church of Hagia Sophia. The Vilnius martyrs were not forgotten, and by the early fifteenth century they became a sign of the Christian unity of Constantinople and Muscovy. When in 1411 Emperor John VIII Palaeologos married a daughter of Vasilii II, Grand Prince of Muscovy, he sent Moscow a splendid specimen of the liturgical vestment known as a
sakkos
as a gift for Metropolitan Photios. It still exists, and it pointedly bears images of the Lithuanian martyrs alongside those of the Emperor and the Grand Prince.
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By that time, the design was a symbol of how the conflict between Muscovy and Lithuania had eventually been resolved.

The course of the contest between Lithuania and Muscovy long swayed unpredictably. In 1352, with the outrage of the three martyrs still fresh in his mind, the Oecumenical Patriarch rejected Grand Prince Olgerd of Lithuania's nominee for metropolitan, and instead he chose a Muscovite closely related to the princely house. Diplomatic pressure on the Byzantine emperor from Lithuania's ally the Republic of Genoa (by now a major force sustaining Constantinople's fragile prosperity) then secured Olgerd a consolation prize in the shape of a metropolitan bishopric specifically consecrated for Lithuania alone. This was a controversial move which did not endure, but within a few years the undoubted fact that the metropolitan based in Moscow never took any personal interest in the western territories of the former Rus' led to Constantinople making a different appointment: a separate metropolitan for the region of Galicia, a former province of Kievan Rus' which had been annexed by the kingdom of Poland in 1349. From 1375 to 1378 there were even two rival Metropolitan Bishops of Kiev, both appointed by the Oecumenical Patriarch, but at the solicitation of Muscovy and Lithuania respectively: a strange if temporary anticipation of the Great Schism of Popes which was about to erupt in the Latin Church of the West (see p. 560).
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The Orthodoxy of western Kievan Rus' was steadily diverging in character from that of Muscovy and the east, to the extent that it should be given a distinctive name as the Ruthenian Church.

The decisive factor in the contest came from the west. In his international diplomacy, the Grand Prince of Lithuania naturally had to consider Latin Christendom as well as the Orthodox world, far more than was necessary for the Grand Prince of Muscovy. Amid the steady expansion of Lithuanian frontiers, the Latin Christian Teutonic Knights were a continuing source of annoyance and harassment to the Lithuanians, continually crusading against the godless grand prince, and in the process helping themselves to a number of attractive territories and towns along the Baltic (see p. 387). By the second half of the fourteenth century, the strategic advantages of embracing one or other form of Christianity were becoming obvious to the rulers of Lithuania, but which Christianity should they choose? Grand Prince Jogaila for some time favoured the Orthodox option, which would after all unite him with most of his subjects. In the early 1380s he haggled for a marriage with the daughter of the principal Orthodox ruler in the north, the Prince of Muscovy, Dmitrii Donskoi. But the problem with taking that course was that it would do nothing to lessen Lithuania's confrontation with the Teutonic Knights, who regarded Orthodox Christians as enemies to the Holy Father in Rome and little better than Lithuanian pagans. In any case, Jogaila was wary of giving too much power to the Orthodox nobility within his territories.

Much more promising for the Lithuanian prince was an alliance with Poland. The Poles were fellow victims of the Knights, but they were also uncompromisingly Catholic. Therefore they had as ready access as the Teutonic Order to the central institutions of the Roman Church and might offset the power of the Knights. They also had a dynastic problem: their ruler was not merely female but also a young girl. A deal with Jogaila was obvious, delivering Poland from the prospect of dynastic unions with a number of undesirably acquisitive royal suitors in central or western Europe. Accordingly, without much consultation with the eleven-year-old Queen Jadwiga, the Polish nobility agreed on her marriage to Jogaila (then approaching forty), and in 1386 they elected him king of Poland, after he had been baptized a Catholic Christian as Wladyslaw Jagiello. The union was purely personal through the Jagiellonian royal house, who doubled as Polish kings and Lithuanian grand princes, and it remained so into the late sixteenth century (see pp. 532-3). Nevertheless it committed the dynasty to the Catholic fold, despite the fact that, in the Grand Principality of Lithuania, Catholics were in a distinct minority.

This was a significant turning point for Orthodoxy and for the future of Rus'. The claim of the Lithuanian grand princes to be natural successors to the princes of Rus' now looked much less convincing even to their Ruthenian Orthodox subjects, let alone to anyone Orthodox further east, and the way was open for the prince of Muscovy to take on that role. There was now no question that the metropolitan bishop should make his principal residence anywhere other than Moscow, and in fact Cyprian, the Metropolitan of Kiev whom originally Jogaila had nominated, did take up residence there. His time in office, though interrupted, lasted till 1406, and he proved a notable champion of Orthodox tradition, encouraging the growth of monastic communities, giving his blessing to the spread of the Hesychast movement in them, and personally translating into Russian key works of monastic guidance such as the
Ladder
of John Climacus.
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While Lithuania promoted the cause of Rome and looked with enthusiasm on the efforts of the Council of Florence to reunite Eastern and Western Christians under the pope, Cyprian's successors in Moscow set their face against any such move, even if it meant opposing the emperor in Constantinople.

In 1438-9 Metropolitan Izydor, who had left Moscow to attend the Council of Florence soon after his appointment in 1436, loyally accepted the reunion deal hammered out at the council by Emperor John VIII Palaeologos (see pp. 492-3). When he arrived back in Moscow in 1441, the Grand Prince Vasilii II summarily declared him deposed and had him imprisoned; he proved to be the last Metropolitan of Kiev resident in Moscow appointed by the Oecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople.
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Seven years later, Grand Prince Vasilii headed a Church council which chose Iona as a replacement metropolitan, without any reference to Constantinople. Just at the moment of this assertion of Vasilii II's power in the Church in the late 1440s, his coins began bearing a new title, 'Sovereign of all Rus" or 'Sovereign of the whole Russian land'. The coins of his father Vasilii I (1389-1425) had used the phrase 'Grand Prince of all Rus", in a clear imitation of the title of the Metropolitans of Kiev and all Rus'; now the new and unprecedented usage trumped the metropolitan's title in a fashion which some might style imperial. It was half a century before the grand princes dared to use the same title in documents which other rulers might see. Vasilii II had many other conflicts to deal with in his dominions at this time, one of which resulted in his being blinded by a relative, but the new title on the coinage seems rather more than coincidence, at the moment that Muscovy had broken with the ancient power of Constantinople in the name of preserving Orthodoxy.
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The fall of 'The City' in 1453 only consolidated that break.