A Short History of Russia Part 2

With the death of Yaroslaf the first and heroic period in Russia closes. Sagas and legendary poems have preserved for us its grim outlines and its heroes, of whom Vladimir, the "Beautiful Sun of Kief,"

is chief. Thus far there has been a unity in the thread of Russian history--but now came chaos. Who can relate the story of two centuries in which there have been 83 civil wars--18 foreign campaigns against one country alone, not to speak of the others--46 barbaric invasions, and in which 293 Princes are said to have disputed the throne of Kief and other domains! We repeat: Who could tell this story of chaos; and who, after it is told, would read it?

It was a vast upheaval, a process in which the eternal purposes were "writ large"--too large to be read at the time. It was not intended that only the fertile Black Lands along the Dnieper, near to the civilizing center at Constantinople, should absorb the life currents.

All of Russia was to be vitalized; the bleak North as well as the South; the zone of the forests as well as the fertile steppes. The instruments appointed to accomplish this great work were--the disorder consequent upon the reapportionment of the territory at the death of each sovereign--the fierce rivalries of ambitious Princes--and the barbaric encroachments to which the prevailing anarchy made the South the prey.

By the twelfth century the civil war had become distinctly a war between a new Russia of the forests and the old Russia of the fertile steppes. The cause of the North had a powerful leader in Andrew Bogoliubski. Andrew was the grandson of Monomakh and the son of Yuri (or George) Dolgoruki--both of whom were Grand Princes of extraordinary abilities and commanding qualities. In 1169 Andrew, who was then Prince of Suzdal, came with an immense army of followers; he marched against Kief. The "Mother of Russian Cities" was taken by a.s.sault, sacked and pillaged, and the Grand Princ.i.p.ality ceased to exist.

Russia was preparing to revolve around a new center in the Northeast; and with the new Grand Princ.i.p.ality of Suzdal, far removed from Byzantine and Western civilizations, it looked like a return toward barbarism, but was in fact the circuitous road to progress. The life of the nation needed to be drawn to its extremities, and the ambitious Andrew, who a.s.sumed the t.i.tle and authority of Grand Prince, had established a line which was destined to lead to the Czars of future Russia.

CHAPTER VI

GERMAN INVASION--MONGOL INVASION

The Princ.i.p.ality of Novgorod had from a remote antiquity been the political center of Northern, as was Kief of Southern Russia. It was the Novgorodians who invited the Norse Princes to come and rule the land; and it was the Novgorodians who were their least submissive subjects. When one of the Grand Princes proposed to send his son, whom they did not want, to be their Prince, they replied: "Send him here if he has a spare head." It was a fearless, proud republic, as patriotic and as quarrelsome as Florence, which it somewhat resembled. Their Prince was in reality a figurehead. He was considered essential to the dignity of the state, but his fortunes were in the hands of two political parties, of which he represented the party in the ascendant.

Novgorod was a commercial city--its life was in its trade with the Orient and the Greek Empire, and like the Italian cities, its politics were swayed by economic interests. Those in trade with the East through the Volga desired a Prince from one of the great families about that Oriental artery in the Southeast; while those whose fortunes depended upon the Greeks preferred one from Kief or the princ.i.p.alities on the Dnieper. When one party fell, the Prince fell with it, and as the formula expressed it, they then "made him a reverence, and showed him the way out of Novgorod"--or else held him captive until his successor arrived.

Princes might come, and Princes might go, but an irrepressible spirit of freedom "went on forever"; the reigns all too short and troubled to disturb the ancient liberties and customs of the republic. No Grand Prince was ever powerful enough to impose upon them a Prince they did not want, and no Prince strong enough to oppose the will of the people; every act of his requiring the sanction of their _posadnik_, a high official--and every decision subject to reversal by the _Vetche_, the popular a.s.sembly. The _Vetche_ was, in fact, the real sovereign of the proud republic which styled itself, "My Lord Novgorod the Great." Such was the remarkable state which played an important, and certainly the most picturesque, part in the history of Russia.

The first thought of the new Grand Prince at Suzdal was to prevent the possible rivalry of this arrogant princ.i.p.ality in the North, by conquering it and breaking its spirit. He was also resolved to break thoroughly with the past, to destroy the system of Appanages, and had conceived the idea of the modern undivided state. He removed his capital from the old town of Suzdal, which had its _Vetche_ or popular a.s.sembly, to Vladimir, which had had none of these things, a.s.signing as his reason, not that he intended to be sole master and free from all ancient trammels--but that the Mother of G.o.d had come to him in a dream and commanded him so to do! But an end came to all his dreams and ambitions. He was a.s.sa.s.sinated in 1174 by his own _boyars_, who were exasperated by his subversive policy and suspicions of his daring reforms.

With the setting of the currents of Russian national life toward the North, there was awakened in Europe a vague sense of danger. Not far from Novgorod, on and about the sh.o.r.es of the Baltic, were various tributary Slav tribes, mingled with pagan Finns. This was the only point of actual contact, the only point without natural protection between Russia and Europe, and it must be guarded. German merchants, hand in hand with Latin missionaries, invaded a strip of disputed territory, and, under the cloak of Christianity, commenced a--_conquest_. A Latin Church became also a fortress; and the fortress soon expanded into a German town, and these crept every year farther and farther into the East. In order to quell the resistance of native Finns and Slavs, there was created, and authorized by the Pope, an order of knighthood, called the "Sword-Bearers," with the double purpose of driving back the Slavonic tide which threatened Germany and at the same time Christianizing it. These were the "Livonian Knights,"

who came from Saxony and Westphalia, armed _cap-a-pie_, with red crosses embroidered upon the shoulder of their white mantles. Then another order was created (1225), the "Teutonic Order," wearing black crosses on their shoulders, which, after fraternizing with the Livonian Knights, was going to absorb them--together with some other things--into their own more powerful organization. Russia had no armed warriors to meet these steel-clad Germans and Livonians. She had no orders of chivalry, had taken no part in the Crusades, the far-off echoes of which had fallen upon unheeding ears. The Russians could defend with desperate courage their own flimsy fortifications of wood, earth, and loose stones; but they could not pull down with ropes the solid German fortresses of stone and cement, and their spears were ineffectual upon the shining armor. Their conquest was inevitable; the conquered territory being divided between the knights and the Latin Church. So Konigsberg and many other Russian towns were captured and then Teutonized, by joining them to the cities of Lubeck, Bremen, Hamburg, etc., in the "Hanseatic League."

This conquest was of less future importance to Russia than to Western Europe. It contained the germ of much history. The territory thus wrested from Russia became the German state of Prussia; and a future master of the Teutonic order, a Hohenzollern, was in later years its first King; and this was the beginning of the great German Empire which confronts the Empire of the Czar to-day.

So the conquest by the German Orders was added to the other woes by which Russia was rent and torn after the death of her Grand Prince at Suzdal. To us it all seems like an unmeaning panorama of chaos and disorder. But to them it was only the vicissitudes naturally occurring in the life of a great nation. They were proud of their nationality, which had existed nearly as long as from Columbus to our own day. They gloried in their splendid background of great deeds and their long line of heroes reaching back to Rurik. Their Princes were proud and powerful--their followers (the _Drujiniki_)--n.o.ble and fearless--who could stand before them? They would have exchanged their glories for those of no nation upon the earth, except perhaps that waning empire of the Caesars at Constantinople!

Such was the sentiment of Russian nationality at the time when its overwhelming humiliation suddenly came, a degrading subjection to Asiatic Mongols, which lasted 250 years.

In the year 1224 there appeared in the Southeast a strange host who claimed the land of the Polovtsui, a Tatar clan which had been for centuries encamped about the Sea of Azof. The Russian chronicler naively says: "There came upon us for our sins unknown nations. G.o.d alone knew who they were, or where they came from--G.o.d, and perhaps wise men, learned in books"--which it is evident the chronicler was not! The invaders were Mongols--that branch of the human family from which had come the Tatars and the Huns, already familiar to Russia.

But these Mongols were the vanguard of a vast army which had streamed like a torrent through the heart of Asia, conquering as it came; gathering one after another the Asiatic kingdoms into an empire ruled by Genghis Khan, a sovereign who in forty years had made himself master of China and the greater part of Asia--saying: "As there is only one Sun in Heaven, so there should be only one Emperor on the Earth"; and when he died, in 1227, he left the largest empire that had ever existed, and one which he was preparing to extend into Western Europe.

It was the court of this great sovereign which, in 1275, was visited by the Venetian traveler Marco Polo. This was the far-off Cathay, descriptions of which fired the imagination of Europe, and awoke a consuming desire to get access to its fabulous riches, and which two centuries later filled the mind of Columbus with dreams of reaching that land of wonders by way of the West.

The Polovtsui appealed to the nearest princ.i.p.alities for help, offering to adopt their religion and to become their subjects, in return for aid. When several Princes came with their armies to the rescue, the Mongols sent messengers saying: "We have no quarrel with you; we have come to destroy the accursed Polovtsui." The Princes replied by promptly putting the amba.s.sadors all to death. This sealed the fate of Russia. There could be no compromise after that. Upon that first battlefield, on the steppes near the sea of Azof, there were left six Princes, seventy chief _boyars_, and all but one-tenth of the Russian army.

After this thunderbolt had fallen an ominous quiet reigned for thirteen years. Nothing more was heard of the Mongols--but a comet blazing in the sky awoke vague fears. Suddenly an army of five hundred thousand Asiatics returned, led by Batui, nephew of the Great Khan of Khans.

It was the defective political structure of Russia, its division into princ.i.p.alities, which made it an easy prey. The Mongols, moving as one man, took one princ.i.p.ality at a time, its n.o.bles and citizens alone bearing arms, the peasants, by far the greater part, being utterly defenseless. After wrecking and devastating that, they pa.s.sed on to the next, which, however desperately defended, met the same fate. The Grand Princ.i.p.ality was a ruin; its fourteen towns were burned, and when, in the absence of its Grand Prince, Vladimir the capital city fell, the Princesses and all the families of the n.o.bles took refuge in the cathedral and perished in the general conflagration (1238). Two years later Kief also fell, with its white walls and towers embellished by Byzantine art, its cupolas of gold and silver. All was laid in the dust, and only a few fragments in museums now remain to tell of its glory. The annalist describes the bellowings of the buffaloes, the cries of the camels, the neighing of the horses, and howlings of the Tatars while the ancient and beautiful city was being laid low.

Before 1240 the work was complete. There was a Mongol empire where had been a Russian. Then the tide began to set toward Western Europe.

Isolated from the other European states by her religion, Russia had suffered alone. No Europe sprang to her defense as to the defense of Spain from the Saracens. Not until Poland and Hungary were threatened and invaded did the Western Kingdoms give any sign of interest. Then the Pope, in alarm, appealed to the Christian states. Frederick II. of Germany responded, and Louis IX. of France (Saint-Louis) prepared to lead a crusade. But the storm had spent its fury upon the Slavonic people, and was content to pause upon those plains which to the Asiatic seemed not unlike his own home.

CHAPTER VII

UNDER MONGOL YOKE

Amid the wreck of princ.i.p.alities there was one state remaining erect.

Novgorod was defended by its remoteness and its uninviting climate.

The Mongols had not thought it worth while to attempt the reduction of the warlike state, so the stalwart Republic stood alone amid the general ruin. All the rest were under the Tatar yoke. Of Princes there were none. All had either been slaughtered or fled. Proud _boyars_ saw their wives and daughters the slaves of barbarians.

Delicate women who had always lived in luxury were grinding corn and preparing coa.r.s.e food for their terrible masters.

After the conquest was completed the Mongol sovereign exacted only three things from the prostrate state--homage, tribute, and a military contingent when required. They might retain their land and their customs, might worship any G.o.d in any way; their Princes might dispute for the thrones as before; but no Prince--not the Grand Prince himself--could ascend a throne until he had permission from the Great Khan, to whom also every dispute between royal claimants must be deferred. Then when finally the messenger came from the sovereign with the _yarlik_, or royal sanction, the Prince must listen kneeling, with his head in the dust. And if then he was invited (?) to the Mongol court to pay homage, he must go, even though it required (as Marco Polo tells us) four years to make the journey across the plains and the mountains and rivers and the Great Desert of Gobi!

When Yaroslaf II., third Grand Prince of Suzdal, succeeded to the Princ.i.p.ality, he was _invited_ to pay this visit. After reaching there, and after all the degrading ceremonies to which he was subjected--kissing the stirrup of his Suzerain, and licking up the drops which fell from his cup as he drank--then this Prince of the family of Rurik perished from exhaustion in the Desert of Gobi on his return journey. But this was not all. The yoke was a heavy as well as a degrading one. Each Prince with his _Drujina_ must be always ready to lead an army in defense of the Mongol cause if required; and, last of all, the poll-tax bore with intolerable weight upon everyone, rich or poor, excepting only the ecclesiastics and the property of the Greek Church, which with a singular clemency they exempted.

What sort of a despotism was it, and what sort of a being, that could wield such a power from such a distance! that, across a continent it took four years to traverse, could compel such obedience; could by a word or a nod bring proud Princes with rage and rebellion in their hearts to his court--not to be honored and enriched, but degraded and insulted; then in shame to turn back with their _boyars_ and retinues,--if indeed they were permitted to go back at all,--one-half of whom would perish from exhaustion by the way. What was the secret of such a power? Even with all the modern appliances for conveying the will of a sovereign to-day, with railroads to carry his messengers and telegraph wires to convey his will, would it be conceivable to exert such an authority?

And--listen to the language of a proud Russian Prince at the Court of the Great Khan: "Lord--all-powerful Tsar, if I have done aught against you, I come hither to receive life or death. I am ready for either.

Do with me as G.o.d inspires you." Or still another: "My Lord and master, by thy mercy hold I my princ.i.p.ality--with no t.i.tle but thy protection and invest.i.ture--thy _yarlik_; while my uncle claims it not by your favor but by right!" It was such pleading as this that succeeded; so it is easy to see how Princes at last vied with each other in being abject. In this particular case the presumptuous uncle was ordered to lead his victorious nephew's horse by the bridle, on his way to his coronation at Moscow. So the path to success was through the dust, and it was the wily Princes of Moscow that most patiently traveled that road with important results to Russia.

Novgorod, as we have said, had alone escaped from these degradations.

Her Prince Alexander was son of Yaroslaf, the Grand Prince who perished in the desert on his way home. At the time of the invasion Alexander was leading an army against the Swedes and the Livonian Knights in defense of his Baltic provinces. It was Latin Christianity _versus_ Greek, and by a great victory upon the banks of the Neva he earned undying fame and the surname of _Nevski_. Alexander Nevski is remembered as the hero of the Neva and of the North; yet even he was finally compelled to grovel at the feet of the barbarians. Novgorod alone had stood erect, had paid no tribute and offered no homage to the Khan. At last, when its destruction was at hand, thirty-six years after the invasion, Nevski had the heroism to submit to the inevitable.

He advised a surrender. It needed a soul of iron to brave the indignation of the republic. "He offers us servitude!" they cried.

The _Posadnik_ who conveyed the counsel to the _Vetche_ was murdered on the spot. But Alexander persisted, and he prevailed. His own son refused to share his father's disgrace, and left the state. Again and again the people withdrew the consent they had given. Better might Novgorod perish! But finally, when Alexander Nevski declared that he would go, that he would leave them to their fate, they yielded, and the Mongols came into a silent city, pa.s.sing from house to house making lists of the inhabitants who must pay tribute.

Then the unhappy Prince went to prostrate himself before the Khan at Sara. But his heart had broken with his spirit. He had saved his state, but the task had been too heavy for him. He died from exhaustion on his journey home (1260).

On account of internal convulsions in the Great Tatar Empire, now united by Kublai-Khan, the fourth in succession from Genghis-Khan, the Golden-Horde had separated from the parent state, and its Khan was absolute ruler of Russia. So from this time the ceremony of invest.i.ture was performed at Sara; and the humiliating pilgrimages of the Princes were made to that city.

The religion of the Mongols at the time of the invasion was a paganism founded upon sorcery and magic; but they soon thereafter adopted Islamism, and became ardent followers of the Prophet (1272). Although they never attempted to Tatarize Russia, 250 years of occupation could not fail to leave indelible traces upon a civilization which was even more than before Orientalized. The dress of the upper cla.s.ses became more Eastern--the flowing caftan replaced the tunic, the blood of the races mingled to some extent; even the Princes and _boyars_ contracting marriages with Mongol women, so that in some of the future sovereigns the blood of the Tatar was to be mingled with that of Rurik.

A weaker nation would have been crushed and disheartened by such calamities as have been described. But Russia was not weak. She had a tremendous store of vigor for good or for evil. Life had always been a terrible conflict, with nature and with man, and when there had been no other barbarians to fight, they had fought each other. Every muscle and every sinew had always been in the highest state of activity, and was toughened and strong, with an inextinguishable vitality. Such nations do not waste time in sentimental regrets. Their wounds, like those of animals, heal quickly, and they are urged on by a sort of instinct to wear out the chains they cannot break. By the time Novgorod came under the Tatar yoke the entire state had adjusted itself to its condition of servitude. Its internal economy was re-established, the peasants, in their _Mirs_ or communes, sowed and reaped, and the people bought and sold, only a little more patient and submissive than before. The burden had grown heavier, but it must be borne and the tribute paid. The Princes, with wits sharpened by conflict, fought as they always had, with uncles, cousins, and brothers for the thrones; and then governed with a severity as nearly as possible like the one imposed upon themselves by their own master--the Great Khan.

The germ of future Russia was there; a strong, patient, toiling people firmly held by a despotic power which they did not comprehend, and uncomplainingly and as a matter of course giving nearly one-half of the fruit of their toil for the privilege of living in their own land!

When her sovereigns had Tatar blood in their veins and Tatar ideals in their hearts, Russia was on the road to absolutism. All things were tending toward a centralized unity of an iron and inexorable type--a type entirely foreign to the natural free instincts of the Slavonic people themselves.

CHAPTER VIII

RUSSIA BECOMES MUSCOVITE

The tumultuous forces in Russia, never at rest, were preparing to revolve about a new center. Whether this would be in the East or West was long in doubt, and only decided after a prolonged struggle.

Western Russia grouped itself about the state of the Lithuanians on the Baltic, and Eastern Russia about that of Muscovy.

The Lithuanians had never been Christianized; they still adored Perun and their pagan deities; and the only bond uniting them with Russia was the tribute they had for years reluctantly paid. They were ripe for rebellion; and when after long years of conflict with the Livonian and Teutonic Orders, Latin Christianity obtained some foothold in their land, they began to gravitate toward Catholic Poland instead of Greek Russia; and when a marriage was suggested which should unite Poland and Lithuania under their Prince Iagello, who should reign over both at Cracow, and at the same time give them their own Grand Prince, they consented. The forces instigating this movement had their source at Rome, where the Pope was unceasingly striving, through Germany and Poland, to carry the Latin cross into Russia. Again and again had the Greek Church repulsed the offers of reconciliation and union made by Rome. So, much was hoped from the proselyting of the German Orders, and of Catholic Poland, and from the union effected by the marriage of the Lithuanian Prince Iagello with the Polish Queen Hedwig.

The threads composing this network of policies in the West were altogether ecclesiastical, until Lithuania began to feel strong enough to wash off her Christian baptism and to indulge in ambitious designs of her own: to struggle away from Poland, and to commence an independent and aggressive movement against Russia.

There was an immense vigor in this movement. The power in the West, sometimes Catholic and at heart always pagan, absorbed first towns and cities and then princ.i.p.alities. It began to be a Lithuanian conquest, and overshadowed even Mongol oppression. The Mongol wanted tribute; while Lithuania wanted Russia! But one of the gravest dangers brought by this war between the East and the West was the standing opportunity it offered to conspirators. An army of disaffected uncles and nephews and brothers, with their followers, could always find a refuge, and were always plotting and intriguing and negotiating with Lithuania and Poland, ready even to compromise their faith, if only they might ruin the existing powers.

Such, in brief, was the great conflict between the East and West, during which Moscow came into being as the supreme head, the living center and germ of Russian autocracy.