Russia (13 page)

It had administrative implications, however. Some time after the state took possession of the land on which servitors were to be settled, a small army of officials descended upon it. In effect they mapped each area, recording its extent, its settlements, its rivers, and the quality and lie of the land in cadastral registers. And the allotments to servicemen were also recorded. Indeed a new office had to be founded in Ivan’s reign to administer the servicemen who held the land, so that they could be called upon, properly armed and equipped, when they were needed. This came to be known as the Muster Office
(Razriad),
and so vital was it to a Russian ruler that from the beginning it was run not by a boyar, however trusted a counsellor, but by experienced senior secretaries responsible directly to the ruler.

Once affairs in Novgorod were settled, a harder line was imposed on Pskov, and then on Tver, whose Grand Prince Mikhail had sworn loyalty to Casimir of Poland. In the late summer of 1485 Muscovite forces descended on Tver in strength and with a powerful artillery train directed
by an Italian in Ivan’s service, Aristotele Fioravanti. The show of overwhelming strength was sufficient to achieve Ivan’s purpose without being used. After suburbs had been set on fire, Tver capitulated. Prince Mikhail fled to Lithuania; the rest of the elite swore oaths of loyalty to Ivan. The oath-taking was not reciprocal. Allegiance to Ivan was not a matter of mutuality; furthermore, it was to extend to his heirs.
¹¹

Nevertheless, authority was imposed in ways that would not arouse more hostility than necessary, and the Grand Prince took care to show grace and favour to those on whom he most depended. As with other principalities that Moscow absorbed, steps were taken to reconcile those who mattered and put them to use, but at the same time the old elite were not neglected. The most important members, including some princes in their own right, were accorded the rank of boyar or of senior counsellor
(okolnichii)
. These were the most senior people in the Grand Prince’s entourage. Such designations carried with them great prestige and privilege. They also gave the heirs of those so honoured the expectation of a similarly high place in the pecking order for court ceremonies as well as for judicial and administrative positions, and even military campaigns. There were no more than a dozen members of this exclusive order at this juncture.
¹²
Subsequently it was to develop into a great council of state. Muscovy was already acquiring some institutions that were to facilitate the running of an empire.

While Ivan was extending and strengthening his government’s hold over territories settled by Russians and ruled by other descendants of Riurik, he was also establishing Russia’s position as a European power. The fact that he succeeded in making his mark with most other crown heads seems truly astonishing, given the obstacles. Russia, after all, was relatively isolated from the rest of Europe, which was mostly Catholic; the Orthodox Church encouraged an aversion to things foreign, including languages and learning, and there was a substantial and growing culture gap separating Russia from western Europe. True, foreign powers — including the papacy — made part of the running, trying to involve the Grand Prince in alliances and other schemes to promote their interests, but Ivan was always firmly engaged in pursuit of his own interests, which often placed him in an adversarial relationship with others. How, then, did he succeed in mediating these problems, conducting a successful foreign policy, and, in the process, creating an efficient diplomatic establishment?

The culture gap was bridged in the first place by Greek immigrants from Constantinople (some of whom had arrived in the entourage of Ivan’s new
wife) who were engaged to serve the Grand Prince. The two Trakhaniot brothers — who had served the Byzantine emperor - the Rhallis, the Angelos, the Laskaris and others were familiar with imperial protocol and institutions. They also had practical knowledge of how Europe’s rulers dealt with one another, and brought their understandings of late-Roman statecraft to Russia. Iurii Trakhaniot served as ambassador to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III and to the King of Denmark, helped organize the reception of the imperial ambassador to Moscow, and was to rise to the dignity of treasurer
(kaznachei),
the Russian official in charge of foreign relations at that time.
¹³
Other immigrants were ethnic Italians, notably Gianbattista della Volpe, who has been credited with suggesting the match between Ivan and Zoe/Sofia. He was engaged as Ivan’s master of the mint, and some of his relatives were hired too. Volpe himself eventually became an Orthodox Christian, but it is not certain if all ‘Latin’ incomers did, and the Grand Prince employed at least one German and even a Jew, a merchant called Khoja Kokos, whom he used as an intermediary in the Crimea.
¹⁴
But many more of the first Russian diplomats were home grown.

Most of these originally had other, lesser, functions at court, several of them as clerks or falconers. Falconry was an elite sport in late medieval Europe, not least in Russia, and the Grand Prince ran a large falconry establishment. Since well-trained falcons made princely gifts for foreign potentates, some of these falconers came to be used in diplomatic functions. One such was Mikhail Iaropkin, who was sent as an envoy to Poland four times. But the work was directed and processed by officials, secretaries and under-secretaries — some of them specialists like Andrei Fedorovich Maiko, who dealt chiefly with Polish-Lithuanian affairs — and there was a team of translators to handle the correspondence. By 1500 there were to be more than twenty translators, including Bakshei, who dealt with correspondence in Turkish with the khans of the Crimea, the nomadic Nogais, and with the Ottoman sultan. From 1504 there was a permanent German translator, Istoma Maloi.
¹⁵

The small but variegated cadre of officials translated documents from and into foreign languages (mainly Latin), acted as interpreters, served as envoys and messengers to foreign courts, saw to the reception of foreign emissaries in Russia, and advised the Grand Prince on the wider world. They drew up letters of credence for outgoing embassies, ensuring they presented the Grand Prince’s titles accurately and sealing them with the appropriate seal - from 1497 both the ancient symbol of the Roman Empire, the double-headed eagle, and the image of St George slaying a dragon.
¹⁶
They also established a record-filing system which was to prove
essential not only for establishing protocol and precedence but as a back-file on policy and a source of knowledge on anything from philosophy to firearms. The staff resources must have been stretched as the Grand Prince’s foreign relations became more widespread and complex. In the last quarter of the fifteenth century links were established with Milan and Hungary, Kakhetia and Vienna. An alliance was formed with Denmark against Sweden, and new policies were formulated towards the Hanseatic League of north-German commercial cities and towards the Livonian Knights, as well as the successor states of the Golden Horde.
¹⁷
True, there were no permanent embassies at that time: one ruler would send a mission to another only as occasion demanded. Even so, we can infer that staffing such missions must have constituted a problem.

Educated immigrants in Ivan’s service were relatively few, so Russians had to be sent out. However, most Russians of the time lacked not only knowledge of a foreign language but also the required degree of sophistication and self-discipline; hence rules were laid down for them to follow. The instructions to an embassy to Poland, which was headed by a senior counsellor
(okolnichii)
and included one of the above-mentioned falconers, began with exhortations to members of the embassy to respect each other. It went on to explain protocol, particularly relating to the drink with which their hosts could be expected to regale them after dinner:

‘You should drink moderately, and not to the point of drunkenness. Wherever you happen to drink you should watch yourself and drink carefully, lest your carelessness bring dishonour to Our name. Any misbehaviour on your part will dishonour both Us and yourselves, so watch yourselves in all things.’ Finally came rules regarding precedence within the embassy, and the enforcement of discipline: ‘Reprimand anyone who disobeys you, and hit him.’
¹⁸

The repetition and the violence reflect a largely oral culture and a boorish society with a tendency to anarchy. Despite this, the routines put in place for managing Ivan’s foreign relations, with their meticulous paperwork, their care for precedent, and their tendency never to take anything for granted, were to help Russia keep abreast of the European diplomatic system, which by 1500 was still in the process of formation.
¹⁹

Cynics may define a diplomat as someone who goes abroad to lie for his country, but diplomats have usually been spies too, in the sense of being used to gather intelligence. The Russians were no exception. One embassy was instructed to gather political intelligence not only on Austria and Hungary but also on France and Brittany, to establish what the Habsburg emperor Maximilian’s intentions were towards Hungary. (Maximilian had asked
Muscovy for help when Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary, captured Vienna in 1485.) But Moscow also wanted to know what the Emperor’s present marital status was, and what suitable brides for the Grand Prince’s sons might be available at his court. A mission sent to Poland in 1493 was charged in particular with finding out about Conrad of Mazovia. Was he now subservient to King Casimir, with whom he had been in conflict? What dues and services did he owe Casimir? What were his relations with Prussia? What was his position in the princely pecking order? And how populous and powerful was the principality he ruled? The list went on.
²⁰

How quickly Muscovy learned the language of diplomacy and how to seize advantage and avoid the pitfalls of the diplomatic game is illustrated by the handling of a seemingly flattering overture from the Holy Roman Emperor. In 1489 an emissary called Nicholas Poppel arrived with a letter of credence from the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III. He proceeded to outline a proposal for a dynastic marriage between Ivan’s daughter and one of three candidates: Duke Albrecht of Padua, Count John of Saxony, and Sigismund, margrave of Baden. He also asked if Ivan would accept the title ‘king’ from the Emperor. The proposal might seem flattering, but the next day Poppel was told that Ivan would send his reply to the marriage proposal to the Emperor with his own emissary. As for the offer of a royal crown, Ivan affected outrage at the implication that he was not the Emperor’s equal: ‘By the grace of God we have always been sovereign in our territories, since the first of our ancestors.’ He did not hold his titles thanks to anyone else, nor had he purchased them: ‘We can be regarded as no one’s subject by any authority. We hold our title only from Christ. We reject rights deriving from others.’
²¹

Clearly the Emperor was underinformed about the Grand Prince. Indeed, Poppel’s instructions had included a charge to find out whether Ivan was a vassal of the Polish king, and Ivan’s men had to explain to Poppel that, so far from being his vassal, Ivan was both richer and more powerful than Casimir.
²²
The response to Frederick’s marriage proposal was delivered by an embassy headed by Iurii Trakhaniot. It explained that Russia’s rulers had long had relations of ‘love and alliance’ with the Roman emperors, ‘who had given Rome to the Pope and themselves ruled from Byzantium even until the time of my own father-in-law John Palaeologue’. It was therefore inappropriate for Ivan’s daughter to marry princes of such low rank as had been proposed, although a match with Frederick’s son, the recently widowered Archduke Maximilian, might be possible.

Although Muscovy’s department of foreign affairs, the Ambassadorial Office, was not formally established until the 1500s, the late 1400s saw the foundation, of Muscovy’s foreign service and intelligence-gathering
system. It was to develop into an essential and most effective instrument in the building of Russian empires.

Military development was also proceeding apace. Indeed Ivan’s envoy to the Duke of Milan in 1486 took care to make it clear that Muscovy boasted a well-armed and well-organized army. The cavalry were plentifully supplied with horses from Tatary as well as Russia. They carried scimitars as well as lances, and wore light body armour like that of the Ottoman sultan’s Mamelukes. The infantry, by contrast, were equipped with the latest Western technology, including the latest type of crossbow out of Germany and firearms. Indeed the Grand Prince’s servicemen had ‘grown accustomed’ to using firearms identified as matchlock arquebuses.
²³
By the beginning of the sixteenth century as many as a thousand of these could be deployed in an operation, and soon they were being distributed among units at commanders’ discretion to provide firepower where needed. They were used to defend Pskov against attacks by the Livonian order of the Knights of the Sword, and on the southern frontier against incursions by Crimean Tatars.
²⁴
Ivan also invited German gunsmiths to Moscow to establish firearms manufacture and save the cost
of
importation.

Moscow had been casting cannon since the 1300s, and the size and effectiveness of its artillery had grown incrementally thereafter.
²⁵
Cannon had pounded the walls of Novgorod in the 1470s, helping to reduce the city to submission, but their deployment in battle and at sieges required effective logistical support. Guns were transported on rafts along river routes, but were also hauled overland by teams of men and animals; lines of supply were guarded by manned posts. All this required a considerable organizational effort, and the mobilization of the necessary manpower and equipment along the lines of march.

At the same time, the nature of warfare against Tatars in areas where the Russian population was relatively thin on the ground and the enemy highly mobile required a constant state of high alert and led to a less conventional military response. It was in the 1400s that the government began to retain the services of independent or renegade Tatar groups like those
of
Riazan to give early warning of a raiding party’s approach and to slow down their advance. This was the origin of the Cossack hosts, which were to play so significant a role in Russia’s imperial advance later. The cost was relatively modest, and it helped to extend the area safe for agriculture, so indirectly it brought an economic benefit too.