The Giants of Russian Literature: The Greatest Russian Novels, Stories, Plays, Folk Tales & Legends. Максим Горький
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majority were in favour of “shutting their eyes” when the objectionable emblem should make its appearance on the scene, but this ostrich-like expedient did not recommend itself to the Metropolitan Filipp, who declared that if it came in at one gate he should go out at another. Happily the Cardinal showed a more accommodating spirit, and, when the situation had been explained to him by the Prince’s messengers, consented to have the Cross smuggled through in a sledge. This concession smoothed over the difficulty, and the catastrophe of the whole bridal train being kept waiting for days in the snow outside Moskva till one or other of the churchmen gave way, was happily averted.96 1472From the moment that Sophie Paleologus became mated with Ivan comparatively little is heard of her; her personality is swallowed up in that of the Grand Prince. But the influence of the Greek Princess can be traced in many of the important developments of this reign. Born amid the extravagant ceremonial of the Byzantine Court, and treasuring the memory of those splendid myths and vanities, the more perhaps because they were wholly lost, the exile transplanted to the rugged soil of Moskovy the ideals that had waxed to fantastic growth on the humid shores of the Bosphorus. The Velikie-kniaz of yore, moving freely among his boyarins and subjects, develops gradually into the heaven-born Sovereign, a being removed from contact with the ordinary sons of earth, withdrawn from profane touch into a Holy of Holies of pomp and ceremony. Here again Ivan was manifestly fitted to assist in working out this evolution. His cold-blooded, calculated policy, his pitiless, passionless judgment, his baleful glance, which is said to have caused women to faint, were meet attributes of a majesty that was accounted something more than human.
Under the influence of the new Byzantine and Italian ideas which the Grand Prince imbibed from the inspiration of his consort and her Court followers, Moskva received new buildings and adornments, a new Cathedral of the Assumption (Ouspienskie Sobor), a new Kreml, new ordnance, new coinage. Received also new laws, new punishments; the old repugnance against taking life, expressed in the testament of Monomachus, gave way to artistically conceived executions and tortures. Heretics were put to death in a manner that the Inquisitors of Western Europe might have been proud to own—roasted gently in a cage, for example, or, if allowed to live, deprived of their unruly tongues. Knout and axe made their appearance in the penal code, flesh and blood cheapened in the market of civil life. Such were the results of the union of the last of the Caesars with the first of the Tzars. The outward expression of this alliance was the adoption on the Prince’s seals of the double-headed eagle, the arms of the defunct eastern empire; a cognisance which had, since the days of Karl the Great, been also the distinguishing device of the western empire.97
In his capacity of appeal judge of Novgorodian suits, Ivan found his influence over the affairs of the city daily growing stronger; an accident furnished him with the pretext for bringing the republic wholly under his authority. By a clerical error in a petition his style was written Sovereign (Gosoudar), instead of Lord (Gospodin). A nod is as good as a wink to an Argus-eyed prince. Ivan thanked the citizens for their voluntary submission and assumed the new title. Novgorod rose in angry rebellion against this last blow at her independence; the faction of Martha lifted its head anew, and the eyes of all men turned towards the King of Poland. But from that quarter came no help. Kazimir was engaged in a struggle with Matthias of Hungary on the one hand and the Teutonic Order on the other, and had, moreover, to maintain his son Vladislas on the throne of Bohemia; hence he was not in a position to court the hostility of the Prince of Moskva. Novgorod had to front alone the overwhelming forces which Ivan led against her. The Archbishop Theofil flitted backwards and forwards between the city and the Prince’s camp, but saw never a sign of yielding on that impassive countenance; saw only fresh troops arriving to swell the monarch’s array. The unequal struggle could have but one end. “Who can resist God and Great Novgorod?” The proud sphinx-riddle had at last been answered, and the republic perished, strangled in the toils of autocracy. 1477As Gosoudar Ivan entered the humbled city the sovereign functions of vetché and posadnik were abolished, and the whole province of Novgorod was added to the domain of Moskva. Loaded with an enormous booty, wrenched by way of fine from the citizens, the Grand Prince returned to his capital, bearing with him as prisoners many of the merchants and boyarins of the disaffected party, and the bereaved Martha, the Helen of this smitten Troy. Bearing also a yet more notable captive, the great bell of Yaroslav, which for many a hundred year had hung like a watchful sprite in its beetling belfry, had clanged, boomed, and sobbed its summonses to council, strife, or revelry, had roused the sleepy monks in many a marsh-girt monastery, and witched with muffled echoes the seals of Lake Ilmen—this voice of Novgorod’s liberty was borne away in the conqueror’s train, to be hung in the new Ouspienskie Cathedral at Moskva, and eat out its life in droning solemn flatteries on Moskovite high-days. Perchance as they lifted it down from its long-accustomed tower it clashed forth one last discordant knell, a passing-bell for the soul of the great republic.
Whatever hopes the Roman Pontiffs had built on the marriage they had negotiated, they were doomed to be disappointed. Sophie Paleologus, so far from converting her husband to the Latin faith, had adopted the Orthodox religion almost as soon as she entered Russia,98 and the decrees of the Council of Florence were worse than abortive as far as Moskva was concerned. Nor was it likely that Ivan, saddled with his own subjection to the sword of the Prophet, was going crusading against the Ottoman power in South Europe. Popular tradition, indeed, gave his wife credit for turning his energies towards the off-throwing of this same Mongol yoke, which was incompatible with the new ideas of princely dignity. The initiative, however, appears to have come from the other side. Akhmet, Khan of Astrakhan, either sensible of the growing independence of Moskva, or acting at the instance of the King of Poland, seized upon a moment when Ivan was embroiled in a quarrel with his brothers (Boris and Andrei the elder) to march against this too-uplifted vassal. 1452Kazimir having, by the Peace of Olmutz (1479), closed the war with Hungary, was in a position to second Akhmet’s attack. The political genius of Ivan was equal to the emergency. By wise concessions he dispelled his brothers’ resentment and presented a united front to the invaders, while his friendship with Mengli-Girei, the Khan of the Krim Tartars, enabled him to send the Krimskie horsemen raiding into Lit’uania—an effective counter-stroke to Kazimir’s intrigues with the eastern khanate. Face to face in equal struggle with the enemy, the Grand Prince showed none of the impatient war-horse-snorting ardour which was expected of him; showed rather a spirit of misgiving and vacillation, which had to be goaded by women and ecclesiastics before it could be wound up to the necessary pitch. This unwillingness to fight need not be set down unhesitatingly to want of courage. Erst wäge, dann wage, the motto of a world-wise man of a later day, was the life-motive of this wary yet strenuous kniaz, and he had good reason to pause before staking the existence of his monarchy on a pitched battle with Akhmet. The disaster which befell Vitovt, and the equally unprofitable sequel to the victory of Dimitri Donskoi, warned Ivan of the risk he ran in courting a like experience. With a little patience, a little more feigned submission, Moskva would see the power of the Horde crumble away of its own corrosive action; on the other hand, the defeat of the Grand Prince’s army would place his territories at the mercy of the real enemy, and the aggrandisement of the Polish-Lit’uanian crown would be a death-blow to Moskovy. For months the two armies faced each other on opposite banks of the Ougr, Ivan urged by his soldiers and by the fiery Vassian, Archbishop of Rostov, to strike a blow against the impious enemy of God, and the impious one waiting for Lit’uanian succours before attacking Ivan. At length the approach of winter froze the dividing river and left no further obstacle to defer the contest. But the final snapping of the Mongol yoke was to be effected in a manner which partook of the ridiculous rather than the heroic. Ivan gave orders to his boyarins to withdraw the army to a position more favourable for receiving the attack; the backward movement engendered a panic among the Russians, and the retreat was changed into a flight. On the other bank of the Ougr the Mongols were alarmed to find that the foe whom they had been watching so closely for months had suddenly vanished; a flank attack, a rear attack, some unseen horror, was evidently creeping upon them, and the hosts of Akhmet raced away from Moskovite soil as though all the saints of the Orthodox calendar had been mobilised against them. Ivan, like many another frozen-blooded strategist, had won by waiting, and might now turn his undivided and untrammelled