Before I read this book by Harold Lamb, I knew nothing of Russian history.
The subtitle of this book is "Ivan The Terrible and The Growth of The Russian Empire" but the amount of pages dedicated to Ivan The Terrible is actually not that large, making me infer the subtitle is there for impact purposes.
One thing is for sure: This book changed my perception of Russia's place in the history of Europe and the Far East. Just the simple consideration that the huge expanse of the Russian steppe (it looks larger than all of North America, but I don't know that for a fact) was settled by Russian Cossacks a mere four hundred years ago, gives you an idea of the tremendous vitality of the Russian spirit. In fact, after reading about this time in history, I thought that it is interesting how so much attention is given to the settling of North America in school history books, but nothing is there about the parallel colonization of the northern Asiatic continent by the Cossacks.
This book begins with the story of Moscow, which grew on the high slopes coasting a bend of the Moskva ("troubled waters", p. 1) river. At the time - and we are talking about the Middle Ages, around the year 1000 - Moscow was nothing but a stop-over for voyages southward to Kiev or northward to the Scandinavian Peninsula. Moscow was lost in the faraway lands of Eastern Europe and that trained its inhabitants in the strives of long journeying. That's how Harold Lamb, the author, implicitly suggests Russians got their taste for endless traveling thousands of miles west. (p. 5) Around the year 1155, legend has it, that a Yuri Dolgomky built a stockade along the steepest point of the hillock by the river, a place people began calling "Kremyl" or Kremlin or "fort".
The space known by the settlers of this frontier was covered with grassy steppe. Even an epic poem describes a battle in terms of harvesting: "... the sheaves are laid up with heads; men thresh with flails in the hedgerows; on the barn floor they spread out life; they winnow the soul from the body." (p. 6)
The land around Moscow had been inhabited first by Finnish people who lived of the products of the land. Waves of Slavs slowly opened the local breed to commerce with far away lands. The Slavs had moved from one common area in the Pripet Marshes, leaving behind the "Poliani" (Poles) or "People of The Plains". Others had moved to Morava and Czech regions, while a third group headed south (Croats and Serbs). The Slavs remained attached to their simple lives until the coming of the Rus people, Scandinavians who traveled by sea and down the rivers that dissected the steppes. The Rus were mostly Swedish people who pushed south in small groups, traveling the rivers in their red boats with carved dragon heads, porting their boats where the rivers did not allow for travel anymore. Kiev - the City of The Golden Heads - was the city the Rus people favored. (p. 16) The West knew them as Vikings, the Slavs called them Variags, they considered themselves the "sons of Rurik", a mythical hero of their past. They were relatives of the West European Normans. Initially, they were invited by the Slavs to fortify the towns of the steppe, but they eventually settled and became overlords of those lands.
The Scandinavians brought with them a strong sense of property and social rules: They established the Russkaya Pravda or Law of the Rus. But the Law of The Rus remained largely theoretical and the Variags continued to fight amongst themselves aided by the Slavs they dominated. Eventually some of them went as far South as Constantinople to offer their services to the Bizantine Emperor in fighting off continuous infiltrations from nomadic hordes. The Variags sacrificed their sense of justice for internal feuds that continuously broke apart their grip over the vast plains of Rus. Instead of creating a larger plan to control those lands, they fortified small cities and built gold-bulbed domed churches. The family feuds of the Variags remained as a distinctive inheritance of the Rus for centuries to come.
The Slavs had introduced the Vikings to Christianity, but religion did not unite the peoples of this land. In fact, while the Southern peoples of Rus embraced the Orthodox ritual, by influence of the Bizantine customs, the Northern ones found a stronger connection with the Catholic practices of their brethren from the West.
The control of Byzantium to the south soon started succumbing to successive waves of Turkish invasions, to the shrewd settlements of Venetian and Pisan merchants and mercenaries. To the north, the land of Rus was also being threatened by attempts by the Swedes to penetrate its territory, attempts forcefully pushed back by bloody battles on the Lake Peipus (of Alexander Nevsky memory) and back to the mouth of the Neva River. But where western invasions were harder to complete also on account of river and mountain borders, the eastern steppes allowed Mongol armies to override the land. The Rus could not oppose the organized hordes of horsemen coming at them with energetic fury in the winter of 1237-1238. (p. 29) Some princes of Rus resisted and met a violent death, while others bowed their heads and others fled to the west. All major cities fell to the Mongols. Only Novgorod, isolated by muddy swamps escaped the Khan's raids. This invading movement displaced thousands of people fleeing the "wrath of God". Eventually, after the first impact, the Mongols established a tribute system where people in the conquered land paid heavy "taxes". Those who did not subject to this system saw their properties devastated and were sold as slaves.
Anyone traveling east to China had to pass through the lands of the Mongols. The Venetian Marco Polo was one of them. The Mongols cut off the now leaderless Rus people from the west and for two centuries opened them to the influence of the east. The Mongols gave them a new leader in Batu Khan or Tsar Batu, as they called him, in memory of the Roman Caesars. Batu was a quite human dictator, but he did not backed down from exacting revenge from those who did not bow to his authority, annihilating them thoroughly. Even Alexander Nevski, the leader of the resistance to the northern invasions, understood this and bowed his head to the Khan.
The Mongols settled in their tent city in Sarai, on the banks of the Volga River. Another Sarai, bigger and more opulent was built by Birkai, Batu's successor. In fact, Sarai quickly became a cosmopolitan encampment with representatives from all corners of the east and west. Some Mongols even converted to Catholicism. (p. 43) The great Arab traveler, Ibn Batuta, described it so large that it took a half a day of horseback riding to come full circle around it. Merchants and visitors had walled parts of the city to themselves to guard the goods they traded. Many Mongolian and Turkish words crept into the world of commerce: Bazaar for market, tovar for goods, and puto for copper money. The Mongols in fact minted coins with which the people of Rus had to pay tribute. The coins still had on them the name of the distant Kha Khan of the Mongols, who in theory still ruled over Rus through his subordinate Khan of the Golden Horde. All of Eurasia was still subject to Karakorum (Black Sands) the city bordering the Gobi Desert where the Khan lived.
Slowly, even the yoke of the Golden Horde broke down and the Tartars moved south closer to the Italian trading posts of Sudak and Kaffa, and to Ukraine (or Borderland). (p. 52) Cities like Moscow suddenly found themselves without protection. It was around this time that the Battle of Kulikovo took place, where a Muscovite coalition with other northern cities handed a painful defeat to the Tartars angry that the Muscovites refused to pay their taxes. Reaction was prompt though, and Moscow was razed to the ground. Slowly, those who had run away returned and rebuilt the city, and Moscow slowly became the beacon the people of the Russian steppe looked at to contrast the Tartars.
Moscow became the seat of the Russian Princes. The old nobility of the Russian court, the boyars, provided a sort of council which ruled with the tzar over their people. The boyars were in constant disputes amongst themselves though, and did not provide a unified front to face the continuous threats from outside. A very interesting description of Russian society and the court came from the testimony of Sigismund von Herberstein (p. 86), a diplomat sent to Moscow twice to negotiate peace between Russia and Lithuania-Poland. He describes all the glory, quirkiness and the ethnic mixture of court of the Great Prince at length. One particular narrative really caught my attention, and it exemplifies the perception women had of themselves and the power men had over women in Russia (and I am sure elsewhere):
"There is at Moscow a certain German metal-worker named Jordan, who married a Russian woman. After she had lived with him some time, she thus lovingly addressed him: 'Why is it, my dearest husband, that you do not love me?' The husband replied: 'I do love you, passionately.' 'You have given me no proof of that, yet.' The husband asked what proof she wanted. 'You have never beaten me,' she explained.
"The husband asnwered that he did not know that love had to be proved by blows, but if so he would not fail her. So not long after that he beat her cruelly, and confessed to me that afterwards his wife grew much more affectionate. So he repeated the exercise often; and finally, while I was still in Moscow, cut off her head and her legs." (p. 101)
Under the third Ivan (The Great), Moscow subjected Novgorod. Ivan married an heir to the Bizantine Empire, Sophia Paleologus. The Italian Ambassador to Persia, Ambrogio Contarini, arrived in Russia in 1475 and describes at length the conniving schemes of the Russian Court. Ivan hired another Italian, Fioraventi, to build the defenses around the Kremlin. Ivan worked hard to create an army to defend his dominion against the Tartar incursions. But the only example the Russians had in creating an organized army was the Tartar cavalry itself, whereas it soon became obvious the best weapon the Russians had were its foot soldiers, used to move on all terrains, in all kinds of weather. Under Vasily's princedom, Moscow had become the biggest city in all of Russia.
His son, Ivan the IV, orphaned at a young age, was to be called The Terrible. Ivan and his brother grew up basically ignored by the noble boyar princes who were fighting amongst themselves over a successor to the throne. As a ruler, Ivan presided over the siege of Kazan, the last Tartar city still able to threat the land of Rus. For that - even though he really was not responsible for the success as were his generals who faced the heroic resistance of the Tartars on the field, while he prayed - Ivan was hailed as a hero and thus began an expansion campaign in all directions. In the north, it was an all out battle with the Germans, the Lithuanians and the Swedes; to the east it was the relentless incursions of Cossacks that expanded Russia's foothold in Asia.
Ivan began an internal reign of terror, for which he was labeled "Terrible". He decimated the boyars who had sided against him. Ivan formed a new entourage, the oprichniki ("the surrounders") a select army of black garbed men who were famous for their atrocities. Jerome Horsey, an Englishman, left a narrative of such cruelties he gathered from other foreigners who lived through them.
But his attention to the north, where he had amassed most of his military power, left the city of Moscow open to one last incursion from the south. In 1571, Moscow was taken by surprise by the Krim Khan and burned to the ground. (p. 145)
In the 1570s, another important event under Ivan The Terrible was the growing interest Englishmen had to reach "Cathay" (China) over land, from the east. One English emissary, Anthony Jenkinson, obtained permission from Ivan to travel east to search for such passage. Ivan had lost the northern ports to the Swedes, so he was more and more interested in Artic routes of commerce.
Ivan died at 54, and no sooner had he died that another mythical figure emerged in the popular imagination: Irmak Timofeivich, son of a Danish woman enslaved by the Tatars, and grown on the River Don. (p. 178) Irmak had formed bands of Cossack renegades who would harass the Tartars all along the river routes. Eventually, the Tatars exacted revenge by killing Irmak, but he inspired the push east to open the Siberian way. Moscow understood the importance of expanding east, and began providing armed protection and infrastructure for those who settled east. With the active logistical support from Moscow, adventurers and settlers could now better endure any contrasting force against their expansion. It is interesting to note that one of the reasons for the Russian move east in the 1600 was the same that drove French trappers west to the Americas: fur. (p. 189)
Interesting in this process of settlement is also the slow assimilation of Cossacks and Russians with the local people of the north, the Tungusi and the Chukchi. (p. 216) |
My wife gave me this book by Marina Fiorato for my birthday. I once told her I wanted to learn glassblowing, and part of my family has roots in Venice. 
You Can't Loose What You Never Had (489)
