1492 - The Year Our World Began Part 3

Most of his pontificate was dominated by violent quarrels with the king of Naples, who scorned the papacy's historic rights to jurisdiction in his kingdom and incited rebellions in the papal states. The throne of Naples, and that of Sicily, which was tied to it, had been disputed between rival claimants from Spain, France, and England for over two hundred years-ever since Spanish conquerors installed the ruling Aragonese dynasty and displaced the French House of Anjou, whose descendants never ceased to a.s.sert their claims and who were still plotting coups and launching raids. The Angevin claim was a subject of dispute in its turn between the houses that descended from the line: those of the dukes of Lorraine, who had a strong claim but little power with which to enforce it; the kings of England, who had long abandoned interest in Sicily; and the kings of France, who-because of their growing power, if for no better reason-were increasingly realistic claimants.

Another of Savonarola's prophecies was that France would invade Italy in order to seize the Angevin inheritance. France was the sword that pierced his many visions. But you did not need to be a prophet to know that an invasion was only a matter of time. As Innocent's pontificate unfolded, everyone could see it coming.

Expectations focused on the king of France, Louis XI, who united Angevin claims to Naples and Sicily because he was the residuary legatee of the previous claimant. Louis, however, was too prudent and practical to risk launching long-range wars. Louis was not made for glory. His mind was calculating, his methods cautious, his ambition worldly. "I will not say I ever saw a better king," wrote his secretary, "for although he oppressed his subjects himself, he would not allow anyone else to do so." By a mixture of astuteness and good fortune, he had a glorious reign. His great rival, Charles the Bold of Burgundy, fell at the Battle of Nancy, in 1477, in an attempt to re-create the ancient kingdom of Lorraine. The English, who had carved an empire in France by violence early in the century, had been expelled from the mainland by 1453, their former dominions firmly attached to the crown. Louis was free to a.s.sert royal power in parts of France that had formerly been merely nominal parts of the kingdom, including Languedoc in the south and Brittany in the north. France was the fastest-expanding realm in Christendom. Success nourished ambitions, excited envy, and attracted the eyes of outsiders in need of allies.

Louis's son and heir, Charles, had an upbringing that might have been calculated to turn him away from the paths his father followed. Louis was a neglectful father, but when he did take a hand in his son's education, he was full of uncharacteristically high-minded counsel.

G.o.d our creator has given us many great favors, for it has pleased him to make us chief, governor, and prince of the most noteworthy region and nation on earth, which is the kingdom of France, whereof several of the princes and kings who preceded us were so virtuous and valiant that they gained the name of Very Christian King, by reducing many great lands and divers nations of infidels to the good Catholic faith, extirpating heresies and vices from our realm, and preserving the Holy, apostolic See and the holy Church of G.o.d in their rights, liberties, and prerogatives, as well as by doing various other good deeds worthy of perpetual memory and in such a way that a certain number of them were held to be saints living forever in the very glorious company of G.o.d in his paradise.20 This rhetoric was traditional in the French royal house, as was the doctrine that the king was the servant of the people. But like most rhetoric, it tended to get honored more in the breach than in the observance. Charles's values-his frameworks of understanding his role as a Christian king-were drawn more from stories of knights than of saints, more chivalry than clerisy. He ascended the throne as Charles VIII in 1483 at the age of thirteen, resolved to be as unlike his father as possible. Their personalities were at odds. Where Louis had been worldly, Charles was wooly; whereas the father was a realist, the son was a romantic. He spent most of his childhood in his mother's company, reading her books. He became immersed in what we would now cla.s.sify as chick-lit: romantic tales of chivalry, much the same kind of stuff that turned Columbus's head-the medieval equivalent of dime novels, in which, typically, heroes undertook perilous journeys to conquer distant kingdoms and marry exotic princesses. In the Histoire de Melusine Histoire de Melusine, Charles read of a queen's sons-young men like himself-who launched adventures of conquest in Cyprus and Ireland.

Lady, if you please, it seems the time has come for us to undertake a journey, so as to learn of foreign lands, kingdoms, and places and win honor and good renown on distant frontiers.... There we shall learn what is different about distant lands and what they have in common with our own. And then, if fortune or good luck is willing to befriend us, we would dearly like to conquer lands and realms.21 It would be hard to imagine a program that more exactly foreshadowed Charles's ambitions. Taking her leave of her adventurous sons, Melusine grants them leave to do "what you wish for and what you see as being to your profit and honor." She advises them to follow all the rules of a chivalrous life, adding counsel that seems to antic.i.p.ate Charles's methods as a conqueror: And if G.o.d gives you good fortune and you are able to conquer land, govern your own persons and those of your subjects according to each person's nature and rank. And if any rebel, be sure to humble them and make clear that you are their lords. Never lose hold of any of the rights that belong to your lordship.... Take from your subjects your rents and dues without taxing them further, save in a just cause.22 In one aspect, however, the successors of Melusine's sons failed to follow her advice. "Never," said the heroine, "tell of yourselves what is not reasonable or true." Writers of chivalry, by contrast, filled their chronicles with marvels and fables, improbable episodes, fantastic monsters, and impossible deeds. People treated them as true, much as modern TV addicts relate to their soap operas. Scenes from fictional pilgrimages adorned stained-gla.s.s windows at Sable and Chartres. Charles VIII was among the many readers chivalric tales suckered.

Even more relevant to Charles's own prospects was The Book of the Kings' Three Sons, The Book of the Kings' Three Sons, in which young heirs to the thrones of France, England, and Scotland quit their homes secretly to fight for the king of Naples and his beautiful daughter, Yolande, against the Turks. "If you undertake the journey," urged the knights who sought the princes' help, "you will learn knowledge of all the world. Everyone will be happy to be your subject. Neither Hector of Troy nor Alexander the Great ever had the renown you will gain after your death." In August 1492, when he was planning his own expedition to Naples, he read the book afresh. His moral education was largely based on a book of chivalric examples drawn from stories of the Trojan War and presented in the form of dialogues between Prince Hector and the G.o.ddess of Wisdom. in which young heirs to the thrones of France, England, and Scotland quit their homes secretly to fight for the king of Naples and his beautiful daughter, Yolande, against the Turks. "If you undertake the journey," urged the knights who sought the princes' help, "you will learn knowledge of all the world. Everyone will be happy to be your subject. Neither Hector of Troy nor Alexander the Great ever had the renown you will gain after your death." In August 1492, when he was planning his own expedition to Naples, he read the book afresh. His moral education was largely based on a book of chivalric examples drawn from stories of the Trojan War and presented in the form of dialogues between Prince Hector and the G.o.ddess of Wisdom.23 Historians have tried to discard the traditional view that tales of chivalry besotted Charles VIII and filled him with romantic notions. But none of the alternative explanations for his behavior works. There was no economic or political advantage to be gained from invading Italy, whereas the conclusion that storybook self-perceptions jostled in the king's mind seems inescapable. As heir of Rene of Anjou, he succeeded to a great romantic lost cause. Beyond Naples and Sicily lay the lure of Jerusalem, the long-lost crusader kingdom. The t.i.tle of King of Jerusalem, though disputed by other monarchs, went with the Sicilian throne. Charles's accounts show that he remained an avid collector of chivalric books throughout his life. He identified with a former conqueror of Italy, his namesake Charlemagne, whom many writers reworked as a fictional hero. He called his son Charles-Orland, after Roland, Charlemagne's companion, who, in fictions his legend sp.a.w.ned, supposedly roamed southern Italy performing deeds of love and valor and who, in an equally false and venerable fiction, died fighting Muslims. Charlemagne was more than a historical figure: legends cast him as a crusader and included a tale of a voyage to Jerusalem, which he never made in reality. He was a once and future king who, in legend, never died but went to sleep, to reawaken when the time was ripe to unify Christendom. The legend blended with prophecies of the rise of a Last World Emperor, who would conquer Jerusalem, defeat the Antichrist, and inaugurate a new age, prefatory to the Second Coming.

Italians with their own agendas encouraged Charles's fantasies. When he entered Siena, the citizens greeted him with paired effigies of himself and Charlemagne, his supposed predecessor. In the violently divided politics of Florence, some citizens wanted him as an ally against others. Venetians and Milanese wanted him on their side in their wars against Naples and the pope. When popes had quarrels with Naples, they wanted him to fight on their behalf. When Charles was still a small boy, Sixtus IV had sent him his first sword as a Christmas gift.

If Charlemagne's road through Naples led-at least in fiction-to Jerusalem, it was conceivable at the time that Charles VIII could follow him all the way. The prospects for renewing the crusade against the Turks seemed genuinely promising. The internecine squabbles of the Ottoman dynasty had driven the pretender to the sultanate, Prince Djem or Zizim, into the arms of the Knights of Rhodes, who had sent him to France for safekeeping in 1482. The Book of the Kings' Three Sons The Book of the Kings' Three Sons featured a Turkish prince who embraced Christianity and converted his people: to Charles, it must have read like a prophetic text. The sultan of Egypt, who put politics above religion, offered a million ducats in support of a new crusade. Meanwhile, the menace of Turkish power in the Mediterranean grew as raids spread as far as Italy and a Turkish task force seized Otranto. In 1488, a Venetian publicist visited France to canvas support. "Today," he complained, "faith has fallen, zeal is dead. The Christian cause has tumbled to a point so low that it is no longer for the sake of Jerusalem, or Asia, or even Greece that the Holy See has sent us to your Majesty, but it is for Italy herself, for the very towns of the holy Roman Church, her cities and people, that we have come to beg your aid." featured a Turkish prince who embraced Christianity and converted his people: to Charles, it must have read like a prophetic text. The sultan of Egypt, who put politics above religion, offered a million ducats in support of a new crusade. Meanwhile, the menace of Turkish power in the Mediterranean grew as raids spread as far as Italy and a Turkish task force seized Otranto. In 1488, a Venetian publicist visited France to canvas support. "Today," he complained, "faith has fallen, zeal is dead. The Christian cause has tumbled to a point so low that it is no longer for the sake of Jerusalem, or Asia, or even Greece that the Holy See has sent us to your Majesty, but it is for Italy herself, for the very towns of the holy Roman Church, her cities and people, that we have come to beg your aid." 24 24 On the way to Jerusalem and the lands of the Turks, the crown of Naples and Sicily gleamed. As early as 1482, the pope-Sixtus IV at that time-trailed the possibility before the unresponsive eyes of Louis XI, suggesting explicitly that young Charles could be the beneficiary. If France wanted to conquer Naples, "now is the acceptable time.... This realm belongs by hereditary right to his royal Majesty.... The pope's will is that his Majesty or the lord dauphin be invested with this kingdom." 25 25 In the late 1480s, dissensions within the kingdom of Naples seemed to make the project increasingly practicable. In 1489, Charles received a group of dissident Neapolitan n.o.bles at his court. Their numbers grew over the next three years. During 1490, they laid out plans for the conquest at repeated meetings of Charles's council. The pope's envoys reported-with some cautious qualifications-that the French at last seemed to be steeled for the invasion. Charles prepared his route southward by alliance with Milan and covered his northern flank by marrying Anne of Brittany and attaching that dangerously independent duchy firmly, at last, to France. The news of the fall of Granada in January 1492 came like a call to compete for glory. A few weeks later, Innocent made his peace with Naples. Broadly speaking, the terms were that the pope would continue to dispense justice in Naples-but only according to the king's wishes-while Naples would support the papacy with force of arms. To seal the bargain, the Neapolitans presented the pope with their most precious relic-the tip of the lance that was supposed to have pierced Christ's side at the Crucifixion. Ironically, the settlement excited French interest as the dispute never had. French l.u.s.t for the Neapolitan crown began to increase, with consequences that would prove fatal in the future. From March to May 1492, a Milanese emba.s.sy was in Paris, enticing the king into a final decision. Their machinations infuriated Peter Martyr, who from his vantage point at the court of the King of Aragon thought it "folly to place a viper or scorpion in one's own bed in the hope that it may poison one's neighbor.... You will all see. Charles, if he has any sense, will know how to exploit his chance." 26 26 While they were at work, news of Lorenzo the Magnificent's death arrived. A major obstacle disappeared. Florence, weakened by Lorenzo's death and awestruck by Savonarola's preaching, would be unable to put up much resistance to a French advance. Meanwhile, almost as soon as Innocent fixed matters with Naples and took solemn possession of the Holy Spear, a new, protracted illness overcame him, which proved to be his last. His physicians grew desperate. One of them allegedly offered to succor his patient with his son's blood, which the pope refused to drink. By July, Innocent's stomach pains were becoming unbearable, the sores on his legs unsightly. The shadow of his impending death seemed visible. The mob grew restive. The cardinals began to maneuver in preparation for the conclave. By July 19, according to the Florentine amba.s.sador, the pope's body was effectively dead and only his soul remained to him. He yielded it up five days later. Before an invasion could begin, however, another obstacle arose. Innocent VIII had already decided to back a rival contender for the throne of Naples; but between indecision and infirmity he is unlikely to have offered serious opposition to Charles's hopes, had he lived.

The conclave that followed his death took place in an atmosphere redolent of corruption. Moralists loved to find fault with Rome. According to the most anticlerical and sententious of the diarists of the time, the city housed sixty-eight hundred harlots "not counting those who practiced their nefarious trade under the cloak of concubinage and those who practiced their arts in secret." The front-runner to succeed Innocent VIII seemed representative of all that was rotten in Rome. Rodrigo Borgia had been the favorite and runner-up at the last conclave, when Innocent VIII was elected, but his reputation, as a Florentine amba.s.sador recorded, was already unsavory: false and proud. People excused his notorious womanizing, and the three children he fathered, on the grounds that he was fatally attractive. The wealth he piled up by acc.u.mulating benefices and offices of profit quenched all his disadvantages. "He possesses," as a diarist who knew him observed, "immense quant.i.ties of silver plate, pearls, hangings, and vestments embroidered in gold and silk, and all of such splendid quality as would befit a king or a pope. I pa.s.s over the sumptuous adornments of his litters and trappings for his horses, and all his gold and silver and silks, together with his magnificent wardrobe and his h.o.a.rds of treasure." 27 27 To win the new election, Borgia supposedly bought Cardinal Sforza's vote with four mule loads of silver-on the pretext that they would go to his house for safekeeping. He got most of the rest of the votes he needed without compromising his own fortune-by promising to reward his supporters from the church's stock of profitable jobs. Stefano Infessura, a humanist diarist with a talent for satire, explained how on his election the new pope began his reign "by giving his goods to the poor"-by paying for the votes he had bought with promises. The cardinals elected him Pope Alexander VI on the night of August 10.

It was a scandalous choice but not-for the times-an inappropriate one. Borgia was an accomplished and indefatigable man of business. His flagrant nepotism dominates historical traditions about him. He heaped honors and t.i.tles on his children. "Ten papacies," according to the amba.s.sador of Ferrara, would not have yielded enough to satisfy all the Borgia cousins who thronged the curia. Abuses, however, did not doom the Church. The problems that proved intractable were diplomatic.

From the pope's point of view, a French invasion, which his predecessors had sought so ardently, would now be a disaster. The arrangements Innocent VIII made with Naples were perfectly satisfactory. The new heir to the Neapolitan throne bettered them and paid Alexander handsomely for his support. Charles VIII, the pope knew, would spread ruin and scatter ban. As Alexander strove to uphold the royal house of Naples, Charles took the offensive, igniting the pope's deepest fear by impugning the validity of his election. In effect, Alexander had bribed his way into the papacy, and the legitimacy of his position was questionable. Charles recalled the French cardinals and banned all payments of church dues to Rome. He bade for a higher source of legitimation than even the pope could confer. He took a crusading oath and vowed that he would not stop at Naples, but use it as a launching point for the conquest of Jerusalem.

While Charles secured his flanks and rear by treaties with his enemies the rulers of England and the Netherlands, the invasion was postponed until 1494. When the king of Naples died in January 1494, the French were almost ready to invade. On September 3, 1494, Charles left the French frontier and marched on Naples with an army of some forty thousand men. Peter Martyr, watching events unfold, raged in frustration: "What Italian can take up his pen without crying, without dying, without being consumed by pain?" The invader's progress south was like a triumph, as cities and duchies capitulated and the pope's partisans defected or fled. Along the way, Charles picked up fortunes in ransoms-the price communities paid to avoid pillage. Pope Alexander, seeming to accept the inevitable, surrendered Rome into the king's hands, counting himself lucky to escape deposition. Rome emptied of notables and valuables. "People are in terror," wrote the Milanese envoy in May 1495, "not only for their property, but for their lives also. Rome has never been so entirely cleared of silver and valuables of all sorts. Not one of the cardinals has enough plate to serve six persons. The houses are dismantled." 28 28 Refusing to anoint Charles as king of Naples, Alexander fled. Refusing to anoint Charles as king of Naples, Alexander fled.

But Charles was the victim of his own success. He occupied the kingdom of Naples with such ease that all Europe's neutrals, and even some of his former friends, became as alarmed as his enemies at the growth of his power. The pope put together a coalition of Venice, Spain, England, and the Duke of Milan, ostensibly to fight the Ottomans but really to reverse Charles's achievements. It was not, at first, militarily active, but it was effective in encouraging local opposition to Charles. When the king returned to France with his booty in July, Milanese forces ambushed him and seized almost all the treasures he had gathered. Over the next couple of years, Spanish-led forces chased out the garrisons he left behind in Naples.

"1494: Charles VIII invades Italy. Beginning of modern times." I can still recall the list of memorable dates my history teacher wrote on the blackboard when I was at my first school. The idea behind what at the time was a conventional way of dating the dawn of modernity was that until the French invasion, the Renaissance was confined to Italy. Charles unlocked it and took Italian arts and ideas back with him across the Alps, making it possible for the initiatives that made our world to spread around Europe.

No one still thinks anything of the sort. The Renaissance no longer looks like a new departure in the history of the world; rather, it was just more of the same, or an intensification of medieval traditions of humanistic learning and reverence for cla.s.sical antiquity. New ideas were not all of Italian origin, and humanism and cla.s.sicism had independent origins in other parts of Europe-especially in France, the Netherlands, and Spain. Italian learning and technical and artistic savoir-faire were already sought after in much of Europe. In Spain, the fall of Granada did most to introduce Italian taste, for the conquered city cried out for new churches and palaces in a cla.s.sicizing spirit. Charles VIII, in any case, did little to spread Italian taste even in France. The year 1492 was at least as decisive as 1494 in the history of his involvement in Italy, for it was then that he made up his mind to invade.

In combination, the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent and the invasion of Charles VIII const.i.tuted a crisis in the history of the Renaissance. Ficino thought Plato's fortunes had collapsed with Lorenzo's death.29 After the Bonfire of the Vanities, even Botticelli gave up painting erotic commissions and reverted to old-fashioned piety. The Renaissance seemed in abeyance. But the greatest age was long over. By the midfifteenth century, the generation of Brunelleschi (d. 1446), Ghiberti (d. 1455), Donatello (d. 1466), Alberti (d. 1472), and Michelozzo (d. 1472) was aging, dead, or dying. The inst.i.tutions of the republic had fallen under the control of a single dynasty. But the tradition of excellence in arts and learning lived on. The sculptor Andrea Verocchio and the incomparable painter Sandro Botticelli (14451510) lived next door to the house of the explorer Amerigo Vespucci, whose writings popularized knowledge of the continent that came to be named after him. In the church of Ognissanti, Botticelli and Ghirlandaio (144896) worked on commissions from Vespucci's family. After the Bonfire of the Vanities, even Botticelli gave up painting erotic commissions and reverted to old-fashioned piety. The Renaissance seemed in abeyance. But the greatest age was long over. By the midfifteenth century, the generation of Brunelleschi (d. 1446), Ghiberti (d. 1455), Donatello (d. 1466), Alberti (d. 1472), and Michelozzo (d. 1472) was aging, dead, or dying. The inst.i.tutions of the republic had fallen under the control of a single dynasty. But the tradition of excellence in arts and learning lived on. The sculptor Andrea Verocchio and the incomparable painter Sandro Botticelli (14451510) lived next door to the house of the explorer Amerigo Vespucci, whose writings popularized knowledge of the continent that came to be named after him. In the church of Ognissanti, Botticelli and Ghirlandaio (144896) worked on commissions from Vespucci's family.

Although the revolution that was to overthrow the Medici in 1494 caused a temporary loss of opportunities for patronage, the careers of the next generation-including Michelangelo, who was Ghirlandaio's apprentice-were already under way. At the time, Machiavelli was an unknown twenty-something. Florence's fertility in the production of genius seemed inexhaustible. Leonardo da Vinci had left the city in 1481 and went to Milan, where he struggled to get paid for his paintings and worked hard glorifying the local tyrant in bronze or designing engineering works. Michelangelo was just eighteen years old when the death of Lorenzo forced him from the security of the Medici court back to his father's home. He worked hard to regain favor and in January 1494 was commissioned by the new head of the Medici family to produce a snow statue. The snow seemed hardly to have melted when political upheaval forced the Medici out. Michelangelo (among other artists) went with them and took refuge in Venice.

Nor is it fair to say that Lorenzo's death, or even the revolution that followed it, seeded Florentine talent throughout Italy. There had long been a lively market for skills in artistry and eloquence. Rome was the most important focus, for the popes had a long tradition as collectors of antiquities, patrons of art, and employers of high achievers not only in sacred learning but also in law, diplomacy, rhetoric, and the formulation of propaganda. To the frustration of believers in the exemplary value of ancient republican virtues, the rise of dictators and despots in Italian cities actually stimulated the markets in learning and art. Autocrats needed rhetoricians to advocate their merits, justify their usurpations of power, and excuse their wars. Tyrants needed sculptors and architects to design and erect their monuments and perpetuate their images. Courts needed artists to paint their personnel and design their theaters of power-the masques and jousts, the processions and parades that awed enemies and enthused followers. Because artists often doubled as engineers, and sculptors skilled in bronze casting could transfer their talents to making guns, the growing political tensions in Italy also created opportunities for artists all over the peninsula.

Even in combination with the events of 1494, those of 1492 did not stimulate the Renaissance, liberate it from the confines of Florence, or disseminate it around the world. Lorenzo the Magnificent and Charles VIII no longer look like harbingers of modernity. The mental world they shared was chivalric. They looked back for their values: Lorenzo to antiquity, Charles to a fictional version of the cla.s.sical and medieval past. Savonarola, perhaps, was a more important or representative figure for the future of the world. At first glance, he seems an even more regressive type than his chivalrically minded contemporaries, sunk in the ostentatiously austere late-medieval piety that most people nowadays find baffling or irksome. His addiction to millenarianism, his confidence in visions, his prophetic stridency, his hatred of art, and his mistrust of secular scholarship align him with aspects of the modern world most moderns reject: religious obscurantism, extreme fanaticism, irrational fundamentalism. In some ways, the conflicts he brought to a head-the confrontation of worldly and G.o.dly moralities, the uncomprehending debate between rational and subrational or suprarational mind-sets, the struggle for power in the state between the partisans of secularism and spirituality or of science and scripture-are timeless, universal features of history. Yet they are also, in their current intensity and ferocity, among the latest novelties of contemporary politics. The culture wars of our own time did not begin with Savonarola, but he embodied some of their most fearsome features.

In his prescriptions for Christendom, Savonarola was not an innovator, but he seemed "swollen with divine virtue," according to Machiavelli, who, as a youngster, heard the friar's sermons as he huffed and puffed in the pulpit. He brought unique force to the expression of some long-standing priorities of the reforming prophets of the late medieval Church: revulsion from the Church's involvement in the world and the corrupting effects of wealth and secular power; denunciation of the overweening power of the popes over clergy and the clergy over laypeople; horror at the way pharisees seemed to have taken over the Church, binding and laming the search for salvation with obedience to formulaic rules and meaningless rituals. He was convinced that Scripture contained the whole of G.o.d's message, universally accessible, and that readers of Scripture needed no other knowledge except of prayer and mortification. His condemnation of Roman excess-though perhaps not quite as colorfully insulting as Luther's, with its rich language of the lavatory and the wh.o.r.ehouse-antic.i.p.ated in tone and content the invective of the founder of Protestantism: Go to Rome and see! In the mansions of the great prelates there is no concern save for poetry and the oratorical art. Go thither and see! Thou shalt find them all with the books of the humanities in their hands, telling one another that they can guide men's souls by means of Virgil, Horace, and Cicero.... The prelates of former days had fewer gold miters and chalices, and what few they possessed were broken up and given to relieve the needs of the poor. But our prelates, for the sake of obtaining chalices, will rob the poor of their sole means of support. Dost thou not know what I would tell thee?...O Lord, arise, and come to deliver thy Church from the hands of devils, from the hands of tyrants, from the hands of iniquitous prelates.30 Savonarola prefigured Luther, too, in his insistence on the doctrine of salvation by the free grace of G.o.d, which-except in the hands of reformers who used it to denounce the Church's rules of charity and piety-was perfectly innocent, orthodox Catholicism, but which became the slogan of the Reformation: G.o.d remits the sins of men, and justifies them by his mercy. There are as many drops of compa.s.sion in heaven as there are justified men upon earth; for none are saved by their own works.... And if, in the presence of G.o.d, we could ask all these justified sinners, "Have you been saved by your own strength?" all would reply as with one voice, "Not unto us, O Lord! not unto us; but to thy name be the glory!" Therefore, O G.o.d, do I seek thy mercy, and I bring not unto thee my own righteousness; but when by thy grace thou justifiest one, then thy righteousness belongs unto me; for grace is the righteousness of G.o.d.31 An anonymous painting from 1498 shows what became of Savonarola, and how Florentines wanted the rest of us to remember his fate. Here, in place of the "vanities" the prophet had kindled in the same place a few years before, the flames consume Savonarola himself. It is a depiction of his death at the stake: the pyre is gigantic, towering, more like a ship than a scaffold, with its skyward, mastlike reach, topped with a cross. A high causeway links it to the munic.i.p.al palace, from where the preacher was led to public execution. But the man who once turned heads and sparked ardor in the hearts of the people is now strangely ignored. Children play, merchants pa.s.s through; it is business as usual in the Piazza della Signoria. Only those who carry wood to the pyre are engaged in Savonarola's reckoning. The message of the image is obvious: Florence spared no pains or expense to burn the heretic, but did not want to appear to have taken any notice of him.

A few years after Savonarola's immolation, Luther visited Florence. But he did not need to experience the place to adopt the martyred friar as a hero or succ.u.mb to his influence. Savonarola's popularity with his followers, and the informal power he exercised in the Florentine republic after the fall of the Medici, ensured that almost every word he uttered from the pulpit found its way into print. Luther knew his sermons well, reprinted two of them, with an admiring preface of his own, and acknowledged him as a forerunner. "The Antichrist of that time made the memory of that great man perish," he complained, "but see! He lives. And his memory is blessed." 32 32

Chapter 6.

Toward "the Land of Darkness"

Russia and the Eastern Marches of Christendom June 7: Casimir IV, king of Poland and Grand Prince of Lithuania, dies.

The messengers turned back. They were on their way from Moscow, the capital or courtly center of Muscovy-an upstart state that had become, in twenty years of aggressive dynamism, the fastest-expanding empire in Christendom. Their destination was the court of Casimir IV, king of Poland and sovereign-"Grand Prince" or "Grand Duke" in the jargon of the time-of Lithuania. Casimir was, by common a.s.sent, the greatest ruler in Christendom. His territory stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. Its eastern frontier lay deep inside Russia, along the breakwater between the Dnieper and Volga valleys. Westward, it unfolded as far as Saxony and the satellite kingdoms of Bohemia, and Hungary, which Casimir more or less controlled. On the map, it was the biggest and most formidable-looking domain in the Latin world since the fall of the Roman Empire.

The Kremlin, the "citadel of Moscow," as it appeared to an amba.s.sador from the Holy Roman Empire in 1517, with the stone structures conspicuous among the wooden houses.

S. von Herberstein, Notes Upon Russia Notes Upon Russia (London, 1852). Courtesy of The Hakluyt Society. (London, 1852). Courtesy of The Hakluyt Society.

The envoys from Moscow, however, were undaunted. They were carrying breathtakingly defiant demands for the surrender of most of Casimir's Russian dominions, which Muscovites had been infiltrating for years, into the hands of their own prince. They turned back, not because the power of Poland and Lithuania deterred them, nor because the summer roads were hot, boggy, and mosquito-ridden, but because the world had changed.

By rights, the world should have been close to ending. According to Russian reckoning, 1492 marked the close of the seventh millennium of creation, and prophets and visionaries were getting enthusiastic or apprehensive, according to taste. Calendars stopped in 1492. There were skeptics, but they were officially disavowed, even persecuted. In 1490, the patriarch of Moscow conducted an inquisition against heretics, torturing his victims until they confessed to injudicious denunciations of the doctrine of the Trinity and the sanct.i.ty of the Sabbath. Among the proscribed thoughts of which the victims were accused was doubt about whether the world was really about to end.

The news that made the Muscovite messengers backtrack reached them in the second week of June. Casimir IV had collapsed and died while hunting in Trakal, not far from Vilnius, where they had been hoping to meet for negotiations. For Russia, the prospects defied the prophecies. Casimir's death improved Muscovy's outlook. The messengers rode hard for Moscow. It was time for new instructions and even more outrageous ambitions.

Between the Carpathian Mountains and the Balkan uplands in the south and the Baltic Sea in the north, eastern Europe's geography is hostile to political continuity. Cut and crossed by invaders' corridors, it is an environment in which-with its flat, open expanses, good communications, and dispersed populations-states can form with ease, survive in struggle, and thrive only with difficulty. There are forty thousand square miles of marshland in the middle of the region, covering much of what is now Belarus, around the upper Dnieper. Around this vast bog, the steppeland curls to the south and the bleak, ridgeless North European plain-choked with dense, dark forests-stretches uninterruptedly westward from deep inside Siberia. The lay of the land favors vast and fragile empires, vulnerable to external attack and internal rebellion. Armies can shuttle back and forth easily. Rebels can hide in the forests and swamps. Volatile hegemonies have come and gone in the region with bewildering rapidity. In the fifth century the Huns extended their sway from the steppelands to the east around the marshes and into the northern plain. In the ninth century a state the Byzantines called Great Moravia reached briefly from the marshes to the Elbe. In the late tenth and eleventh centuries a native Slav state occupied most of the Volga Valley. The most spectacular empire makers to unify the region arrived sweating from the depths of Asia in the thirteenth century, driving their vast herds of horses and sheep. The Mongols burst into Western history-like a scourge, as some chroniclers said, or, said others, like a plague.

The earliest records of Mongol peoples occur in Chinese annals of the seventh century. At that time, the Mongols emerged onto the steppes of the central Asian land now called Mongolia, from the forests to the north, where they lived as hunters and small-scale pig breeders. Chinese writers used versions of the name "Mongols" for many different communities, with various religions and competing leaderships, but their defining characteristic was that they spoke languages of common origins that were different from those of the neighboring Turks. On the steppes they adopted a pastoral way of life. They became horse-borne nomads, skilled in sheep breeding, dairying, and war.

The sedentary peoples who fringed the steppelands hated and feared them. They hated them because nomadism and herding seemed savage. Mongols drank milk-which the lactose-intolerant sedentarists found disgusting. They drank blood-which seemed more disgusting still, though for nomads in need of instant nourishment it was an entirely practical taste. The sedentarists' fear was better founded: Nomads needed farmers' crops to supplement their diet. Nomad leaders needed city dwellers' wealth to fill their treasure h.o.a.rds and pay their followers. In the early twelfth century, the bands or alliances they formed got bigger, and their raids against neighboring, settled folk became more menacing. In part, this was the effect of the growing preponderance of some Mongol groups over others. In part, it was the result of slow economic change.

Contact with richer neighbors gave Mongol chiefs opportunities for enrichment as mercenaries or raiders. Economic inequalities greater than the Mongols had ever known arose in a society in which blood relationships and seniority in age had formerly settled everyone's position. Prowess in war enabled particular leaders to build up followers in parallel with-and sometimes in defiance of-the old social order. They called this process "crane catching," like caging valuable birds. The most successful leaders enticed or forced rival groups into submission. The process spread to involve peoples who were not strictly Mongols, though the same name continued to be used-we use it still-for a confederation of many peoples, including many who spoke Turkic languages, as the war bands enlarged.

The violence endemic in the steppes turned outward, with increasing confidence, increasing ambition, to challenge neighboring civilizations. Historians have been tempted to speculate about the reasons for the Mongols' expansion. One explanation is environmental. Temperatures in the steppe seem to have fallen during the relevant period. People farther west on the Russian plains complained that a cold spell in the early thirteenth century caused crops to fail. So declining pastures might have driven the Mongols to expand from the steppes. Population in the region seems to have been relatively high, and the pastoral way of life demands large amounts of grazing land to feed relatively small numbers of people. It is not a particularly energy-efficient way to provide food because it relies on animals eating plants and people eating animals, whereas farming produces humanly edible crops and cuts out animals as a wasteful intermediate stage of production. So perhaps the Mongol outthrust was a consequence of having more mouths to feed.

Yet the Mongols were doing what steppelanders had always sought to do: dominate and exploit surrounding sedentary peoples. The difference was that they did it with greater ambition and greater efficiency than any of their predecessors. In the late twelfth or early thirteenth century a new ideology animated Mongol conquests, linked to the cult of the sky, which was probably a traditional part of Mongol ideology but which leaders encouraged in pursuit of programs of political unification of the Mongol world. Earth should imitate the universal reach of the sky. Mongol leaders' proclamations and letters to foreign rulers are explicit and unambiguous in their claims: the Mongols' destiny was to unify the world by conquest.

Wherever the Mongol armies went, their reputation preceded them. Armenian sources warned Westerners of the approach of "precursors of the Antichrist...of hideous aspect and without pity in their bowels,...who rush with joy to carnage as if to a wedding feast or orgy." Rumors piled up in Germany, France, Burgundy, Hungary, and even in Spain and England, where Mongols had never been heard of before. The invaders looked like monkeys, it was said, barked like dogs, ate raw flesh, drank their horses' urine, knew no laws, and showed no mercy. Matthew Paris, the thirteenth-century English monk who, in his day, probably knew as much about the rest of the world as any of his countrymen, summed up the Mongols' image: "They are inhuman and beastly, rather monsters than men, thirsting for and drinking blood, tearing and devouring the flesh of dogs and men.... And so they come, with the swiftness of lightning to the confines of Christendom, ravaging and slaughtering, striking everyone with terror and with incomparable horror." 1 1 When the Mongols struck Russia in 1223, the blow was entirely unexpected: "No man knew from whence they came or whither they departed." 2 2 Annalists treated them as if they were a natural phenomenon, like a briefly destructive bout of freak weather or a flood or a visitation of pestilence. Some Russian rulers even rejoiced at the greater destruction the Mongols visited on hated neighbors. But the first Mongol invasion was no more than a reconnaissance. When the nomads returned in earnest in 1237, their campaign lasted for three years. They devastated and depopulated much of the land of southern and northeastern Russia and ransomed or looted the towns. Annalists treated them as if they were a natural phenomenon, like a briefly destructive bout of freak weather or a flood or a visitation of pestilence. Some Russian rulers even rejoiced at the greater destruction the Mongols visited on hated neighbors. But the first Mongol invasion was no more than a reconnaissance. When the nomads returned in earnest in 1237, their campaign lasted for three years. They devastated and depopulated much of the land of southern and northeastern Russia and ransomed or looted the towns.

The Mongols' vocation for world rule, however, was theoretical. They demanded submission and tribute from their victims, but they were not necessarily interested in exercising direct rule everywhere. They had no wish to adapt to an unfamiliar ecosystem, no interest in occupying lands beyond the steppe, and no need to replace existing elites in Russia. They left the Christian Russian princ.i.p.alities and city-states to run their own affairs. But Russian rulers received charters from the khan's court at Saray on the lower Volga, where they had to make regular appearances, loaded with tribute and subject to ritual humiliations, kissing the khan's stirrup, serving at his table. The population had to pay taxes directly to Mongol-appointed tax gatherers-though as time went on, the Mongols a.s.signed the tax gathering to native Russian princes and civic authorities. They pa.s.sed their gleanings on to the state, centered at Saray, where the Mongols came to be known as the Golden Horde, perhaps after the treasure they acc.u.mulated.

The Russians tolerated this situation, partly because the Mongols intimidated them by selective acts of terror. When the invaders took the great city of Kiev in 1240, it was said, they left only two hundred houses standing and strewed the fields "with countless heads and bones of the dead." 3 3 Partly, however, the Russians were responding to a milder Mongol policy. In most of Russia, the invaders came to exploit rather than to destroy. According to one chronicler, the Mongols spared Russia's peasants to ensure that farming would continue. Ryazan, a Russian princ.i.p.ality on the Volga, south of Moscow, seems to have borne the brunt of the Mongol invasion. Yet there, if the local chronicle can be believed, Partly, however, the Russians were responding to a milder Mongol policy. In most of Russia, the invaders came to exploit rather than to destroy. According to one chronicler, the Mongols spared Russia's peasants to ensure that farming would continue. Ryazan, a Russian princ.i.p.ality on the Volga, south of Moscow, seems to have borne the brunt of the Mongol invasion. Yet there, if the local chronicle can be believed, the pious Grand Prince Ingvary Ingvarevitch sat on his father's throne and renewed the land and built churches and monasteries and consoled newcomers and gathered together the people. And there was joy among the Christians whom G.o.d had saved from the G.o.dless and impious khan.4 Many cities escaped lightly by capitulating at once. Novgorod, that famously commercial city, which the Mongols might have coveted, they bypa.s.sed altogether.

Moreover, the Russian princes were even more fearful of enemies to the west, where the Swedes, Poles, and Lithuanians had constructed strong, unitary monarchies capable of sweeping the princes away if they ever succeed in expanding into Russian territory. Equally menacing were groups of mainly German adventurers, organized into crusading "orders" of warriors, such as the Teutonic Knights and the Brothers of the Sword, who took monastic-style vows but dedicated themselves to waging holy war against pagans and heretics. In practice, these orders were self-enriching companies of professional fighters, who built up territorial domains along the Baltic coast by conquest. In campaigns between 1242 and 1245, Russian coalitions fought off invaders on the western front, but they could not sustain war on two fronts. The experience made them submissive to the Mongols.

Muscovy hardly seemed destined to dominate the region. The princ.i.p.ality owed its existence to the Golden Horde. Muscovite princes proved that they could manipulate Mongol hegemony to their own advantage, but they remained the Mongols' creatures. Indeed, it was hard to imagine Muscovy unless backed by Mongol power. In the midthirteenth century, Alexander Nevsky, prince of Novgorod, showed the way to make use of the Mongols. He created the basis of his own myth as a Russian national hero by submitting to the Golden Horde and turning west to confront Swedish and German aggressors. His dynasty levered Muscovy to prominence by stages. His son Daniel (12761303), who became ruler of Moscow, proclaimed the city's independence from other Russian princ.i.p.alities and ceased payment of tribute, except to the Mongols. Daniel's grandson became known as Ivan the Moneybag (132953) from the wealth he acc.u.mulated as a farmer of Mongol taxes. He called himself "Grand Prince" and raised the see of Moscow from a bishopric to an archbishopric.

Muscovy still depended on the Mongols. The princ.i.p.ality's first challenge to Mongol supremacy, in 137882, proved premature. The Muscovites tried to exploit divisions within the Golden Horde in order to avoid handing over taxes. They even beat off a punitive expedition. But once the Mongols had reestablished their unity, Muscovy had to resume payment, yield hostages, and stamp coins with the name of the khan and the prayer "Long may he live." In 1399 the Mongols fought off a Lithuanian challenge to their control of Russia. Over the next few years they a.s.serted their hegemony in a series of raids on Russian cities, including Moscow, extorting promises of tribute in perpetuity. Thereafter, the Muscovites remained meekly deferential, more or less continuously, while they built up their own strength.

They could, however, dream of preeminence, under the Mongols, over other Christian states in Russia. Muscovy's great advantage was its central location, astride the upper Volga, controlling the course of the river as far as the confluence of the Vetluga and the Sura. The Volga was a sea-wide river, navigable almost all along its great, slow length. Picture Europe as a rough triangle, with its apex at the Pillars of Hercules. The corridor that links the Atlantic, the North Sea, and the Baltic forms one side; the linked waters of the Mediterranean and Black Sea form another. The Volga serves almost as a third sea, overlooking the steppes and forests of the Eurasian borderlands, linking the Caspian Road and the Silk Roads to the fur-rich Arctic forests and the fringes of the Baltic world. The Volga's trade and tolls helped fill Ivan's money bags and elevate Muscovy over its neighbors.

Rulership was ferociously contested, because the rewards made the risks seem worthwhile. In consequence, political instability racked the state and checked its ascent. For nearly forty years, from the mid-1420s, rival members of the dynasty fought each other. Vasily II, who became ruling prince at the age of ten in 1425, repeatedly renounced and recovered the throne, enduring spells of exile and imprisonment. He blinded his rival and cousin and suffered blinding in his turn when his enemies captured him: as a way of disqualifying a pretender or keeping a deposed monarch down, blinding was a traditional, supposedly civilized alternative to murder. When Vasily died in 1462, his son, Ivan III, inherited a realm that war had rid of internal rivals. Civil wars seem destructive and debilitating. But they often precede spells of violent expansion. They militarize societies, train men in warfare, nurture arms industries, and, by disrupting economies, force peoples into predation.

Thanks to the long civil wars, Ivan had the most efficient and ruthless war machine of any Russian state. The wars had ruined aristocrats already impoverished by the system of inheritance, which divided the patrimony of every family with every pa.s.sing generation. The n.o.bles were forced to serve the prince or collaborate with him. Wars of expansion represented the best means of building up resources and acc.u.mulating lands, revenues, and tribute for the prince to distribute. For successful warriors, promotions and honors beckoned, including an enduring innovation: gold medals for valor. n.o.bles moved to Moscow as offices of profit at court came to outshine provincial opportunities of exploiting peasants and managing estates. Adventurers and mercenaries-including many Mongols-joined them. By the end of Ivan's reign, an aristocracy of service over a thousand strong surrounded him.

A permanent force of royal guards formed a professional kernel around which provincial levies grouped. Peasants were armed to guard the frontiers. Ivan III set up a munitions factory in Moscow and hired Italian engineers to improve what one might call the military infrastructure of the realm-forts, which slowed adversaries, and bridges, which sped mobilization. He abjured the traditional ruler's role of leading his armies on campaign. To run a vast and growing empire, ready to fight on more than one front, he stayed at the nerve center of command and created a system of rapid posts to keep in touch with events in the field. None of his other innovations seemed as important, to him, as improved internal communications. At his death, he left few commands to his heirs about the care of the empire, except for instructions about the division of the patrimony and the allocation of tribute; but the maintenance of the post system was uppermost in his mind: "My son Vasily shall maintain, in his Grand Princedom, post stations and post carts with horses on the roads at those places where there were post stations and post carts with horses on the roads under me." His brothers were to do the same in the lands they inherited.5 Backed by his new bureaucracy and new army, Ivan could take the step so many of his predecessors had longed for. He could abjure Mongol suzerainty. In the event, it was easy, not only because of the strength Ivan ama.s.sed but also because internecine hatreds shattered the Mongols' unity. In 1430, a group of recalcitrants split off and founded a state of their own in the Crimea, to the west of the Golden Horde's heartland. Other factions usurped territory to the east and south in Kazan and Astrakhan. Russian princ.i.p.alities began to see the possibilities of independence. Formerly, once the shock of invasion and conquest was over, their chroniclers had accepted the Mongols, with various degrees of resignation, as a scourge from G.o.d or as useful and legitimate arbitrators, or even as benevolent exemplars of virtuous paganism whom Christians should imitate. Now, from the midfifteenth century, they recast them as villains, incarnations of evil, and destroyers of Christianity. Interpolators rewrote old chronicles in an attempt to turn Alexander Nevsky, who had been a quisling and collaborator on the Mongols' behalf, into a heroic adversary of the khans.6

The expansion of Muscovy under Ivan III.

Ivan allied with the secessionist Mongol states against the Golden Horde. He then stopped paying tribute. The khan demanded compliance. Ivan refused. The horde invaded, but withdrew when menaced with battle-a fatal display of weakness. Neighboring states scented blood and tore at the horde's territory like sharks at bloodied prey. The ruler of the breakaway Mongol state in the Crimea dispersed the horde's remaining forces and burned Saray in 1502. Russia, the chroniclers declared, had been delivered from the Mongol yoke, as G.o.d had freed Israel from Egypt. The remaining Mongol bands in Crimea and Astrakhan became Ivan's pensioners, for whom he a.s.signed one thousand gold rubles at his death.

The Mongols' decline liberated Ivan to make conquests for Muscovy on other fronts. From his father, Vasily II, he inherited the ambition, proclaimed in the inscriptions on Vasily's coins, to be "sovereign of all Russia." His conquests reflect, fairly consistently, a special appet.i.te to rule people of Russian tongue and Orthodox faith. His campaigns against Mongol states were defensive or punitive, and his forays into the pagan north, beyond the colonial empire of Novgorod, were raids. But the chief enemy he seems always to have had in his sights was Casimir IV, who ruled more Russians than any other foreigner. How far Ivan followed a systematic grand strategy of Russian unification is, however, a matter of doubt. No doc.u.ment declares such a policy. At most, it can be inferred from his actions. He may equally well have been responding pragmatically to the opportunities that cropped up. But medieval rulers rarely planned for the short term-especially not when they thought the world was about to end. Typically, they worked to re-create a golden past or embody a mythic ideal.

To understand what was in Ivan's mind, one has to think back to what the world was like before Machiavelli. The modern calculus of profit and loss probably meant nothing to Ivan. He never thought about realpolitik. His concerns were with tradition and posterity, history and fame, apocalypse and eternity. If he targeted Muscovy's western frontier for special attention, it was probably because he had the image and reputation of Alexander Nevsky before his eyes, refracted in the work of chroniclers who turned back to rewrite their accounts of the past, to burnish Alexander's image, after a spell of neglect, and reidealized him as "the Russian prince" and the perfect ruler. Ivan did not initiate this rebranding, but he paid for chroniclers to continue it in his own reign.

Therefore, when Ivan began turning his wealth into conquests, he first tackled the task of reunifying the patrimony of Alexander Nevsky. Ivan devoted the early years of the reign to suborning or forcing Tver and Ryazan, the neighboring princ.i.p.alities to Muscovy's west, into subordination or submission, and incorporating the lands of all the surviving heirs of Alexander Nevsky into the Muscovite state. But thoughts of Novgorod, where Alexander's career had begun, were never far from his mind. Novgorod was an even bigger prize. The city lay to the north, contending against a hostile climate, staring from huge walls over the grain lands on which the citizens relied for sustenance. Famine besieged them more often than human enemies did. Yet control of the trade routes to the river Volga made Novgorod cash rich. It never had more than a few thousand inhabitants, yet its monuments record its progress: its kremlin, or citadel, and five-domed cathedral in the 1040s; in the early twelfth century, a series of buildings that the ruler paid for; and, in 1207, the merchants' church of St. Paraskeva in the marketplace.

From 1136, communal government prevailed in Novgorod. The revolt of that year marks the creation of a city-state on an ancient model-a republican commune like those of Italy. The prince was deposed for reasons the rebels' surviving proclamations specify: "Why did he not care for the common people? Why did he want to wage war? Why did he not fight bravely? And why did he prefer games and entertainments rather than state affairs? Why did he have so many gyrfalcons and dogs?" Thereafter, the citizens' principle was: "If the prince is no good, throw him into the mud!" 7 7 To the west, Novgorod bordered the small territorial domain of Russia's only other city-republic, Pskov. There were others again in Germany and on the Baltic coast, but Novgorod was unique in eastern Europe in being a city-republic with an extensive empire of its own. Even in the West, only Genoa and Venice resembled it in this respect. Novgorod ruled or took tribute from subject or victim peoples in the boreal forests and tundra that fringed the White Sea and stretched toward the Arctic. Novgorodians had even begun to build a modest maritime empire, colonizing islands in the White Sea. The evidence is painted onto the surface of an icon, now in an art gallery in Moscow but once treasured in a monastery on an island in the White Sea. It shows monks adoring the virgin on an island adorned with a golden monastery with tapering domes, a golden sanctuary, and turrets like lighted candles. The glamour of the scene must be the product of pious imaginations, for the island in reality is bare and impoverished and surrounded, for much of the year, with ice.

Pictures of episodes from the monastery's foundation legend of the 1430s, about a century before the icon was made, frame the painter's vision of the Virgin receiving adoration. The first monks row to the island. Young, radiant figures expel the indigenous fisherfolk with angelic whips. When the abbot, Savaatii, hears of it he gives thanks to G.o.d. Merchants visit. When they drop the sacred host that the holy monk Zosima gives them, flames leap to protect it. When the monks rescue shipwreck victims, who are dying in a cave on a nearby island, Zosima and Savaatii appear miraculously, teetering on icebergs, to drive back the pack ice. Zosima experiences a vision of a "floating church," which the building of an island monastery fulfils. In defiance of the barren environment, angels supply the community with bread, oil, and salt.

Whereas Zosima's predecessors as abbots left because they could not endure harsh conditions, Zosima calmly drove out the devils who tempted him. All the ingredients of a typical story of European imperialism are here: the more than worldly inspiration; the heroic voyage into a perilous environment; the ruthless treatment of the natives; the struggle to adapt and found a viable economy; the quick input of commercial interests; the achievement of viability by perseverance.8 Outreach in the White Sea could not grasp much or get far. Novgorod was, however, the metropolis of a precocious colonial enterprise by land among the herders and hunters of the Arctic region, along and across the rivers that flow into the White Sea, as far east as the Pechora. Russian travelers' tales reflected typical colonial values. They cla.s.sed the native Finns and Samoyeds of the region with the beast men, the similitudines hominis, similitudines hominis, of medieval legend. The "wild men" of the north spent summers in the sea lest their skin split. They died every winter, when water came out of their noses and froze them to the ground. They ate each other and cooked their children to serve to guests. They had mouths on top of their heads and ate by placing food under their hats; they had dogs' heads or heads that grew beneath their shoulders; they lived underground and drank human blood. of medieval legend. The "wild men" of the north spent summers in the sea lest their skin split. They died every winter, when water came out of their noses and froze them to the ground. They ate each other and cooked their children to serve to guests. They had mouths on top of their heads and ate by placing food under their hats; they had dogs' heads or heads that grew beneath their shoulders; they lived underground and drank human blood.9 They were exploitable for reindeer products and fruits of the hunt-whale blubber, walrus ivory, the pelts of the arctic squirrel and fox-that arrived in Novgorod as tribute from the region and were vital to the economy. They were exploitable for reindeer products and fruits of the hunt-whale blubber, walrus ivory, the pelts of the arctic squirrel and fox-that arrived in Novgorod as tribute from the region and were vital to the economy.

Ivan coveted this wealth, and even sent an expedition to the Arctic in 1465 in an attempt to grab a share of the fur trade. But in the 1470s an opportunity arose to seize Novgorod itself. A dispute over the election of a new bishop rent the city. Partisans on both sides looked for protectors or arbitrators in neighboring realms. Should Novgorod submit to Ivan's overlordship by sending the bishop-elect to Moscow for consecration? Or should the city try to perpetuate its independence by sending to Kiev, which was safely distant, in the realm of Casimir of Lithuania? For the city's inc.u.mbent elite, Casimir was the less risky bet. He could be invoked in Novgorod's defense, as a deterrent against a Muscovite attack. But he was so busy on other fronts that he was most unlikely ever to interfere with Novgorod's autonomy. The city fathers voted to make Casimir their "sovereign and master" and send their bishop to Kiev.

Ivan called their bluff and prepared to attack. He justified war by sanctifying it. The people of Novgorod were, he claimed, guilty of punishable impiety-abandoning Orthodoxy and bowing to Rome. The accusation was false. While encouraging Catholicism, Casimir tolerated other creeds among his subjects, and a bishop consecrated in Kiev would not necessarily be compromised in his Orthodoxy. Ivan, however, claimed to see Novgorod's bid for independence as a kind of apostasy, whoring after false G.o.ds-like the Jews, he said, breaking their divine covenant to adore a golden calf. By conquering them he would save them.10 Ivan's propaganda also besmirched Novgorod with denunciations, on more secular grounds, as a nest of habitual recalcitrants. "The habit" of the citizens, a chronicler in Ivan's pay complained, was to disagree with a great prince and dispute with him. They will not pay respect to him, but instead they are taciturn, obstinate, and stubborn, and do not adhere to the principles of law and order.... Who among the princes would not become angry with them...? For even the great Alexander [Nevsky] did not tolerate such behavior.11 Ivan's enemies in the Novgorod elite appealed to Casimir IV to rescue them. But they sought to put intolerable restrictions on him, demanding of the Catholic prince that he build no Roman churches, appoint on