The Giants of Russian Literature: The Greatest Russian Novels, Stories, Plays, Folk Tales & Legends. Максим Горький
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the Governor, Ivan Obolenski, who had rendered himself unpopular. Scarcely had the deputed citizens arrived than they were arrested and shut up in the famous archiepiscopal palace, which, after having furnished a prison for many a subject-ridden kniaz, now became a place of detention for those who were under the sovereign’s displeasure. Without a struggle Pskov yielded to the fate of her “elder sister” Novgorod. 1510The vetché was dissolved and the city bell borne down from the Troitza tower. Vasili was faithfully moving in the path marked out by his predecessors.
The domestic affairs of the Grand Prince’s Court were tinged, as indeed was the whole Moskovite life at this period, with a strong Asiatic leaven. Already in his father’s lifetime a bride had been chosen for him by a method which recalls the wooing of a sultan or a rajah rather than that of a Christian prince; 1500 of the most eligible damsels of the realm were gathered together for inspection, and their number gradually weeded down to ten. These were medically examined, and a “selection of the fittest” was made in the person of Solomonia, daughter of a boyarin of no very high standing. By an irony of circumstance this carefully picked consort disappointed the expectations which had been formed of her, and the prophecies and flatteries which lie in wait for the birth of a royal heir were baulked of their delivery. The absence of a successor in the direct line did not ameliorate the lot of the Grand Prince’s nephew, Dimitri. Since the accession of the new monarch the seclusion of the possible rival had become a close imprisonment, and his death was not unduly postponed. In Oriental State affairs, as indeed in those of Western Europe during the Middle Ages, it is a safe axiom that the inconvenient die young. Dimitri died. Unavoidably, the chronicles of the day suggested foul play, and he would not have been the only Russian Prince of the Blood who was conducted by an expeditious “royal road” through this vale of tears.
Owing to the renewed importance of Russia in the affairs of Christendom, and the observations handed down to posterity by the ambassadors and commercial agents who penetrated into the bleak and reputedly barbarous regions of “Muscouvie,” the appearance and life of the isolated capital in this century stands out with a hitherto unwonted clearness. Hemmed in on all sides with thick forests, from whence, down the Moskva river, was floated the timber of which the houses were mostly built, the city stood in a setting of open meadows, swarming with hares and roebuck, which were reserved for the Grand Prince’s exclusive hunting. Fields and gardens and monasteries straggled so far into the outskirts (or slobodas) that it was difficult to tell exactly where the line of demarcation lay; for besides the Moskva on one side, and the ditch-like Neglina on the other, there were “no useful defences in the shape of walls, fosses, or ramparts.”115 The Kreml, or citadel, and in time the inner quarters of the town, were however strongly fortified. As is frequently the case in cities with Oriental characteristics, squalor and magnificence were strangely jumbled together. Mean huts and booths were interspersed with cupola-crowned churches and public buildings, which, designed for the most part by Byzantine and Italian artists, presented a quaint and not unpleasing confusion of eastern and western architecture. Despite the “forty times forty churches” which were springing up all over Moskva, the cleanliness which is supposed to accompany godliness was conspicuously absent. “This city” wrote the Imperial ambassador at the Court of Vasili, “is so broad and spacious, and so very dirty, that bridges have been constructed here and there in the highways and streets and in the other more distinguished parts.” Here, then, in this straggling wood-built metropolis, this germ-cell of the Russian Empire, dwelt the Grand Princes who were slowly evolving into Great White Tzars; amid a surrounding of cathedrals and mud, holy ikons and squalid hovels, dedicated gates and buildings topped with quaint bulbous domes and cupolas, gold, blue, and silver, moved the rulers of the Moskovite state. Hedged round with dreary ceremonial, waited on by courtiers and chamberlains and servants, clad in long flowing robes that smacked more of Bagdad than of Rome or Wien, the sovereigns of “all Russia” dwelt in a world apart from outside influences, and could only measure things by their own standard.
As in a rookery at the approach of nesting-time certain early birds may be seen quietly pursuing their constructive operations amid the turmoil and racket of their less provident fellows, so all over Europe at this epoch, amid the anarchy which attended the decay of feudalism, the work of building was in full progress. The Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns in the Empire, the Valois in France, the Tudors in England, the Moskovite princes in Russia, were piecing together the foundations of what were eventually to be the five Great Powers of a transformed Europe. In the early years of the sixteenth century it seemed not improbable that the Yagiellos would create, out of the chaos of Polish, Magyar, Czech, Lettish, and West Russian lands, a personal dominion which might crystallise into an empire. But as in a rookery, to return to the simile, certain unfortunately situated nests suffer from the plundering attentions of competing builders, so the house of Yagiello was doomed to see its carefully collected materials snatched away in the predatory acquisitions of the Austrian archdukes, the Markgrafs of Brandenburg, and the Grand Princes of Moskva. And not only had the kings of Poland fallen among thieves, as it were, but their hands were more or less tied by their dependence on the most selfish of all governing classes, an anti-monarchical aristocracy.
Between Poles and Moskovites neither truce nor treaty could long be effective, and war soon broke out anew; Sigismund had at last succeeded in detaching the Krim Tartars from the Russian alliance, or, more probably, the nomads had followed their own lawless inclinations in bursting upon the rich cornlands of Riazan, “more fertile than all the other provinces of Russia.” The event served as a pretext for Vasili to march his troops into Lit’uania and besiege Smolensk. The moment was favourable for a rupture. The King of Hungary was tottering towards his grave, and two rival parties were more than anxious to constitute themselves guardians of his youthful son and his two kingdoms. In this struggle Sigismund found himself opposed to the Austrian Archduke, Maximilian, head of the Holy Roman Empire; more formidable, perhaps, in the former capacity than in the latter. Besides this embarrassment, the relations between Poland and the military Order were, to say the least, strained. The election (in 1511) of Albrecht, of the House of Brandenburg, to the office of Grand-Master, had given new vigour to the knights, who, since the disaster of Tannenberg, had been chafing against the Polish suzerainty. With the support, moral and material, of the Emperor, the Markgraf Joachim, and the Grand Prince of Moskva, it seemed possible that this over-lordship might be thrown off. Dec. 1512Under these circumstances Vasili set forth in mid-winter, attended by his brothers Urii and Dimitri, by Mikhail Glinski, and numerous boyarins, and trailing after him in sledges his unwieldy artillery, served by German gunners, to undertake the siege of Smolensk. From contemporary accounts this important border city does not appear to have been very elaborately fortified, but its defences were sufficiently strong to withstand the Grand Prince’s attack, and in March the invading army returned to Moskva to avoid the dangers and discomforts of the approaching thaw. In the summer of the same year Vasili reiterated the attempt with no better result; the Russians at this time were not particularly skilled in the arts of sieges. The question of the Hungarian regency and eventual succession still agitated the Courts of Wien and Krakow, although Ladislas had not yet joined the “quiet people,” and in February 1514 an Imperial ambassador appeared at Moskva for the purpose of clinching a treaty between Maximilian and Vasili. The reciprocal agreement which was drawn up between the two parties is important from the fact that, in the German copy, the word “Tzar” was rendered “Kaiser”—the first occasion on which the imperial title was applied to the Russian monarch.116 1514Three months later Vasili’s lieutenants at Novgorod concluded a treaty with the Hanseatic League, by which commercial relations were restored to their old footing. In June of the same year the importunate Grand Prince resumed his attack upon Smolensk, and reaped the reward of perseverance. The King of Poland, who had made no effort to succour the beleaguered city, attributed its loss to treachery, and vented his chagrin on the governor, a Bohemian named Solohoub, whom he put to death. The Russian accounts give the credit of the victory to the Moskovite artillery—which ought certainly to have got its range by that time—and to the pacific overtures of the citizens, headed by their Bishop Varsonof.117
The loss of this important place roused Sigismund to a more aggressive