The Giants of Russian Literature: The Greatest Russian Novels, Stories, Plays, Folk Tales & Legends. Максим Горький
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was not open to so favourable an interpretation. The Kreml, ably defended by its garrison, under the command of Ostey, called in the Chronicles a grandson of Olgerd, held the enemy at bay for three days; on the fourth the defenders weakly opened the gates to a ruse of the wily Khan, and the capital of the new Russia received a baptism of blood. When the invaders withdrew, bearing with them all that was worth removing, it was a silent city that they left behind them—a city peopled by 24,000 corpses, meet gathering ground for wehr-wolf, ghoul, and vampire, a wild Walpurgis Nacht for the Yaga-Babas of Slavonic lore. Nor was Moskva alone in her desolation; Vladimir, Zvenigorod, and other towns were sacked and burnt by detachments of the Mongol army. The defeat of one of these bands by a Russian force under Vladimir of Moskva checked the ravages of the invaders, and Tokhtamitch led his hordes back across the Oka, leaving Dimitri to repair as best he might the woes of his province, and to revenge himself on those who had betrayed or deserted him in the hour of his need. If his kingdom was in ruins, at least he was master of what remained; the Metropolitan was deposed, Oleg was forced to fly, and his fief, already ravaged by the Mongols, was harried anew by the Grand Prince’s followers. Burning with indignation against the enemy whom he had thought crushed for ever on the banks of the Don, Dimitri had yet to realise that he must return to the policy of his fathers, and wear again the yoke he had thrown so proudly off. Mikhail of Tver, who bore him an undying hatred, had shared neither in Moskva’s triumph nor in her distress, and now was plotting openly to obtain for himself the Grand Principality. With all his losses Dimitri was still the wealthiest of the Russian princes, and a timely submission enabled him to find grace in the eyes of the Khan. 1384A new impost was exacted throughout the land, and the young princes—Vasili of Moskva, Aleksandr of Tver, Vasili and Simeon of Souzdal—were held as hostages at Sarai. Russia awoke from her dream of liberty to find that her God still slept.
While mourning their relapse into a state of dependence, and involved in a quarrel with the troublesome republic of the north, the Moskovites learned a disquieting piece of intelligence; Yagiello, their formidable neighbour on the west, who held more Russian lands almost than did Dimitri, had added the kingdom of Poland to his possessions. 1386 The long succession of princes of the House of Piast had come to an end, in its direct line, with Kazimir the Great, who since 1370 had lain in a side chapel of the Cathedral at Krakow, where his effigy in red brown marble yet reclines under its fretted canopy. Louis, the Angevin King of Hungary, who succeeded him on the Polish throne, had died in the year 1382, leaving a daughter, Yadviga, to uphold her right as best she could in a country already marked by the intractability of the crown vassals. Yadviga only obtained the support of the Diet (composed of the nobles and higher clergy of the realm) by leaving in its hands the selection of her husband and consort. The choice of the assembly fell upon the Grand Duke of Lit’uania, whose election would at the same time remove a possible enemy from their eastern border, and furnish them with a protector against the hated Teutonic Order on their north. For this monster of their own creation (a Polish duke had been the first to give the knights a foothold in Prussia) was gradually squeezing them out from touch with the Baltic and displacing their authority in Eastern Pomerania. One of the indispensable conditions attached to the betrothal and election of Yagiello was that he should adopt Christianity of the Roman Catholic pattern; “no cross, no crown.” The prospect of a peaceable accession to the Polish throne effected what all the endeavours, spiritual, diplomatic, and militant, of priests, popes, and grand masters had been unable to accomplish; Yagiello became the apostle prince of Lit’uania, and Catholic sovereign of Poland.78 In his new character of a zealous son of the Church, the Grand Duke set to work to bring Lit’uania within the pale of the official religion; the pagan groves were cut down, the sacred fires that burned in the castle of Vilna extinguished, the mystic serpents killed, and the people baptized by battalions. According to a Russian historian, those who already professed the Greek faith were forcibly converted, and two boyarins who clung obstinately to Orthodoxy were put to death by tortures.79
If Rome swept this valuable State into her fold, the Russian Church, despite the rather depressing circumstance of a confused succession to the Metropolitan office, was not without the triumph of extending her rites over heathen lands. A monk of Moskva carried the light of the Gospel into the lorn and benighted lands of the Permians, a Finn tribe which dwelt in the northern valley of the Kama, beneath the shadow of the Ourals. Supported by the authority of the Grand Prince, he overthrew the worship of the Old Golden Woman, a stone figure with two infants in her arms, before whose shrine reindeer were annually sacrificed; had she been more restricted in her family arrangements she might have been quietly incorporated in the new religion.
In 1389 Moskva mourned her prince, Dimitri Donskoi, who died while yet in his prime. A variant from the type of cold, stern princes who had built up the power of his house, Dimitri was a throw-back to the old light-hearted Slavonic kniaz, before the Norse blood had died out of his veins, or ever that of Turko or Mongol had crept in. And if he gained no fresh ground for Moskva, and left Tver and Souzdal and Riazan still under independent masters, at least he gave Russia a spasm of liberty and renown in an age of gloom and bondage, and obtained for his eldest son the undisputed succession to the Grand Principality.
Vasili Dmitrievitch Moskovskie, to give him his distinguishing title (since 1383 there had reigned a Vasili Dmitrievitch at Souzdal), ascended the throne under more favourable circumstances than had a few years earlier seemed probable. On the west, Vitovt, son of the murdered Kestout, had placed himself at the head of the Lit’uanian malcontents in opposition to the King of Poland, who in cultivating the goodwill of his new subjects had lost that of his old ones. Thus in that direction the threateners of Moskva’s existence were at strife among themselves. In the east Tokhtamitch was contemplating a rebellion against the authority of his lord and protector, Timur, a circumstance which lifted the position of the young Prince of Moskva at the Horde from that of a humble vassal to that of a desired ally. His father would probably have taken advantage of this fact to sever once more his dependence on the Khan; Vasili turned it to a more practical use. 1391With costly presents, and probably promises of future support, the Grand Prince bought an iarlikh which gave him possession of Nijhnie-Novgorod, a fief long since granted to Boris of the House of Souzdal.80 Vasili was received with acclaim by the inhabitants, and Boris, deserted on all sides, had to bow to the decree of fate, represented in this instance by the iarlikh from Sarai. 1394On the death of the ousted prince his nephews, Vasili and Simeon of Souzdal, attempted to reunite Nijhnie-Novgorod with their hereditary appanage, with the result that Vasili of Moskva seized on both provinces and drove his cousins into exile. Many and fruitless were the efforts made by the brothers to recover their lost principalities; Vasili had developed a Habsburgian tenacity in holding to whatsoever he acquired, and the ex-princes of Souzdal had in the end to acquiesce in their spoliation. Events in the West meanwhile had taken an unforeseen and not altogether favourable turn. The Teutonic Order had been placed in an awkward position by the wholesale entrance of the Lit’uanians into the bosom of the Church, which event left the crusaders no more heathen to convert; hence the joy which they shared with the angels over the salvation of their long recalcitrant brothers was tinged with resentment towards the Poles, and especially towards Yagiello. The Grand Master sulkily refused to stand sponsor to the latter at his baptism,81 and the Order prepared, from motives of self-defence, to give active support to the pretender Vitovt, who was enabled with its assistance to continually harry the domains of his royal kinsman, till at length Yagiello, set upon by Catholics, Orthodox, and pagans alike, ceded to him the grand duchy, under the direct suzerainty of the Polish Crown (1392),82 an arrangement which did not bring repose either to the Order or to Moskovy. The Grand Duke Vitovt was another edition of his uncle and grandfather; his arms swept far beyond the ample limits of his principality, and under his vigorous rule Lit’uania attained her greatest extent, and perhaps her greatest power. Father-in-law to Vasili, he did not hesitate to continue the slow absorption of Russian territory commenced by his predecessors; Smolensk dropped from the feeble hands of its hereditary princes into the actual possession of the Grand Duke, who thus brought his dominions into contact with