The Giants of Russian Literature: The Greatest Russian Novels, Stories, Plays, Folk Tales & Legends. Максим Горький
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Empire, whose luxurious capital seemed to enervate and paralyse the manhood of its rulers, the Catholic dynasty had drooped and shrivelled, and when the trade jealousies of Genoa led her to strike with the Greeks against the Latin allies of her hated rival, Venice, the end was at hand; the House of Courtenay gave way to that of Paleologus, and the formula “proceeding from the Father by the Son” re-echoed once more in the high places of S. Sofia. In Hungary died out with the century the male line of the princely House of Arpad, which had given sovereigns to that country since the first erection of the Magyar State; from this point the crown of S. Stefan became the ambition and prize of the surrounding princes, a fate similar to that which overtook the neighbouring kingdom of Bohemia a year or two later. The Livlandish debatable lands still seethed and bubbled with the wars of the rival immigrants. The gentlemen of God maintained a vigorous contest with the See of Dorpat, with the city and Archbishop of Riga, and with the Lit’uanians. In Riga the burghers burnt the church and chapel of the Order and killed sixty of the convent brothers (1297). On the other hand their Archbishop, Johann of Schwerin, was besieged in his castle of Treiden and taken prisoner by the Order, to the scandal of Pope Boniface VIII. The heathen Lit’uanians, headed by their Prince, Viten, and allied with the Church troops of Riga and Dorpat, fought against the knights “in eighteen months nine bloody battles.” In 1298 they won a decisive victory over the Landmaster Bruno, in which the latter and many of his knights lost their lives. The Komthur Berthold, with reinforcements from Prussia, wiped out this reverse by a victory at Neuermühlen, and later the new Landmaster ravaged the archiepiscopal territory. Ultimately the release and withdrawal of the militant Archbishop and the appointment of Isarnus Tacconi, the Pope’s chaplain, to the See of Riga, relieved the situation and gave some measure of peace to this over-apostleised land.55
In 1300 the Novgorodians witnessed a descent of the Swedes upon the banks of the Neva, where they built the fortress of Landskron, which position was promptly attacked and destroyed by the troops of the republic, supported by those of the Grand Prince. 1304Four years later the death of Andrei involved Northern Russia in a contest between Mikhail of Tver and Urii Danielovitch of Moskva for the vacant sovereignty. Novgorod and the greater number of the Souzdalskie boyarins declared for the former, but both candidates hastened to put their respective cases before the tribunal of the Khan, leaving their followers meanwhile to fight the matter out between themselves. A march of the Tverskie boyarins against Péréyaslavl was intercepted by Ivan, brother of the Prince of Moskva, and their voevoda Akinf (Hyacinth) perished in the battle which ensued. The decision of the Khan in favour of Mikhail did not end the contest. The town of Moskva twice repelled the attack of the Prince of Tver, who was, however, successful in establishing his authority in the remaining portions of the grand province and at Novgorod. The accession of a new Khan, by name Usbek, necessitated the departure of Mikhail to Sarai, where he remained long enough to lose the affections of the Novgorodskie, who transferred their allegiance to the Prince of Moskva, grandson of their champion Nevski. This readjustment of the political balance enabled Urii to reopen the contest with the Grand Prince; long time the struggle dragged on, indefinitely protracted by the shifting policy of the Khan. For the practice of appealing to Sarai to reverse the decisions of Souzdal had become with the Russian princes a habit, confirmed, like opium smoking, by constant indulgence. Both candidates for the Grand Principality were constantly to be found at the Court of the Khan, or devastating their opponent’s provinces with Tartar troops; Urii even contracted a matrimonial alliance with the sister of Usbek. Nor were the princes the only competitors for the Mongol favour; the Metropolitan Petr, in 1313, sought and obtained from the Khan an exemption from taxes for the priests and monks, and a confirmation of the clerical privileges,—concessions which would seem to indicate that the Mongols united with their Mohametanism the toleration which distinguished their early Shamanism—or did the wily Khan gauge the measure of Holy Church, and conciliate her on her most susceptible side? Whatever the clergy might gain by the Mongol patronage, to the princes it brought nothing but disaster. 1319Mikhail himself was destroyed by the agency he had invoked, and Urii had the miserable triumph of seeing his rival stabbed to death by the officers of the Khan. Six years later Dimitri Mikhailovitch avenged his father’s death by spitting Urii on his sword in the Tartar camp, an affront which was punished by the strangulation of the offender. Aleksandr, another son of the ill-fated Mikhail, succeeded to the principality of Tver and to the dignity of Grand Prince, but a mad act of fear-impelled violence drew down on himself, his family, and province the consuming fury of the Khan. A harmless, or at any rate customary, visit from a Mongol envoy to the city of Tver, roused the apprehensions of Prince and people, who feared that an attempt was to be made to convert them forcibly to Islam. Taking courage from the fact that the stranger had but a feeble escort—a circumstance which should have confuted his suspicions—Aleksandr roused his subjects, (gathered in great numbers at Tver for the Feast of the Assumption), to fall upon and annihilate the Mongol band. 1327The Russians can scarcely be condemned for an act of treachery towards an enemy who had never shown a scrupulous regard for honour and good faith, but the deed was one of criminal folly, and even its heroic aspect is blighted by the fact that Aleksandr had remained subservient to the Khan despite the murder of his father and brother, and was only roused to rebellion by an alarm of personal danger. The vengeance of Usbek took a cynical turn; instead of sending his hordes killing and harrying into the devoted province, he entrusted the vindication of his outraged majesty to a Russian prince and Russian troops. Ivan Danielovitch of Moskva, with his own forces and those of Souzdal, reinforced by a strong detachment of Mongols, marched, nothing loth, into the domains of his rival, and scattered desolation around him with a thoroughness which left the Khan nothing to complain of. 1328The Prince of Tver did not wait to share with his people the chastisement he had drawn down upon them, and Ivan obtained permission to assume the well-earned title of Grand Prince.
So completely had the centre of Russian interests shifted eastwards towards the valley of the upper Volga, that the lands of the Dniepr basin, Kiev, Volhynia, Galitz, etc., once the heart of the confederation, were now scarcely to be ranked as outlying members of it. The influences which were responsible for this gradual alienation from the main body, and for the apathy with which the Grand Princes regarded this rounding-off of their dominions, may probably have arisen from the same cause, namely, the Mongol over-mastery. On the one hand, so bound up had the East Russian princes become with the neighbouring khanates, that intercourse with Souzdal meant intercourse with Sarai, and all its attendant humiliations; on the other, the rivalries which existed in the Grand Principality and the necessity its rulers found for frequent and prolonged visits to the Mongol Court, precluded them from giving much attention to the affairs of the western provinces. Thus it fell out that, failing the arising of an exceptionally vigorous local prince, a Roman or a Mstislav, these fertile Russian lands were at the mercy of the boldest bidder. The exceptional personality was at hand, but he was not a Russian. Gedimin, Prince of Lit’uania, whom the early historians depicted as having risen from the position of a court official to that of prince by the murder of his sovereign and master, attained that dignity by the more prosaic and respectable method of hereditary succession, being son of Lutouvier (1282-93) and brother of Viten (1293-1316).56 Under the latter the Lit’uanians had been united in large and well-disciplined armies, as the Poles and the Order knights knew well, and in the direction of both these neighbours their frontier had remained intact. This in itself was no small achievement, considering how the kindred lands of Prussia, Kourland, Livland, Estland, etc., had fallen beneath the persistent proselytising and colonising attacks of the western invaders. By Gedimin was carried into operation a policy of expansion in the detached Russian lands to the south and east,—a policy effected, like that of the Angevin kings of England in France, and of the Habsburgs in Austria, Bohemia, Karinthia, and the Tyrol, by a combination of conquest and matrimonial alliances. But it was not only by the absorption of neighbouring territory that Gedimin signalised his reign; he lifted the land which he had inherited from the position of an obscure chieftaincy to that of a formidable State. At war nearly the whole of his reign with the German knights, he nevertheless did not permit himself to be influenced by the cruelty and treachery which accompanied their religious zeal, but displayed on his part a toleration for different creeds and nationalities which might have been imitated with advantage by other European princes. From his stronghold at Vilna, where the ruins of his castle