Chapter 29
RUSSIA:
Nancy Shields
Kollmann
‘Russia’
is the state descended from the grand principality that coalesced around Moscow in the fourteenth century and began the historical
continuum that extended to the Russian Empire (1725 – 1917), the Soviet Union
(1917–91) and modern Russia.
The fifteenth century was one of the most significant, and underappreciated, centuries
in Russian history. At the century’s beginning the grand principality of
Muscovy stretched form Mozhaisk (about 100 miles to Moscow’s
west) eastward to the Suzdal’ – Nizhnii Novgorod grand principality (subject in
part of Moscow since 1392), from Riazan’ in the
south-east to the northern forests of Beloozero, Vologda and Ustiug. But its power was more
tenuous than this geographical expanse would suggest. Moscow’s
hold in the north and in Suzdal’ was superficial; surrounding Moscow
lay myriad principalities ranging from the weak Rostov an Iaroslavl’ to the more potent grand
principalities of Riazan’ and Tver’. Powerful rivals included the city
republics of Novgorod and Pskov,
not forgetting the grand duchy of Lithuania. Yet by the end of the
century Moscow had achieved clear dominance in this area often called
north-east Rus’ (in reference to the Kiev Rus’ state that flourished from the
tenth to the twelfth centuries and bequeathed to Muscovy some important
heritages). The key to Moscow
success lay in the means, both institutional and symbolic, that it devised to
consolidate its authority and to exploit and mobilise social resources. Those
means of governance and ideological constructions endured for at last the next
two centuries, and resonated beyond.
Sources for fifteenth century Russia are by
no means abundant, but in some areas, such as politics and diplomacy, they are
remarkably rich. Chronicles flourished, with codices being compiled in the
grand duchy (Smolensk), Ukraine, Moscow,
Tver’, Rostov, Vologda,
Perm, Novgorod
and Pskov. Jan
Dlugosz’s history reflects on the grand duchy and the north east offer
interesting accounts (Gilbert de Lannoy, Josafo Barbaro, Ambrogio Contarini and
others). Treaties survive from Novgorod, Pskov, Moscow,
Tver’ and the grand duchy with neighbouring powers and appanage kinsmen. Muscovite
princely will also survive. For social and economic history, extant source are
much weaker. Secular and ecclesiastical lawcodes from the Kiev
era (the Nomocanon, or Kormchaia kniga; the Just Measure, or Meriolo
pravednoe; the charters of Vladimir and Iaroslav; the Russian law, or Russkaia
Pravda) continued to be copied, edited and applied in the grand duchy, Novgorod and the
north-east. Codifications of law and judicial procedure also appear: Pskov, 1397; the grand duchy, 1488; Moscow, 1497. The Lithuanian state
chancellery record, collected in the ‘Metrika’, are rich, while for Muscovy
only military muster rolls and some diplomatic records were produced at the
court. For north-east Rus’, there survive documents of land transfer, wills,
genealogies, some litigation over land, a few Novgorod and Tver’ cadastres and a charter of
local government (to Beloozero, 1488). Finally, saints’ lives offer details of
daily life.
The chronicle of Muscowy’s
regional expansion and geopolitical interaction displays vividly Moscow’ success. The
dynamics of geopolitics in this century were structured by Moscow’s
rivalry with the grand duchy of Lithuania.
The Kipchak khanate (or so-called Golden Horde) westernmost outpost of the
Mongol Empire, populated primarily by Tatars, - had disintegrated by the early
decades of the century and its splinter groups played only supporting roles in
the regional balance of power: the Khanate of Kazan’ existed by the 1440’s,
producing khanate in Kasimov in 1452 that generally acted as a Muscovite pawn;
the Crimean Khanate was controlled by the Girey clan by the 1443; the Great
Horde on the lower Volga coalesced in the wake of the destruction of Sarai by
Timur (Tamerlane) in the first years of the century. The arenas of geopolitics
focused on the region’s two spheres of commercial activity, the Baltic and Volga. From the mid-fifteenth century the Baltic
witnessed a trading boom that lasted until the early seventeenth. It focused on
grain exports from Polish, Ukrainian and Belarus’an hinterlands, shipped at
Stettin, Danzig, Konigsberg and Memel. Portes
and trade centres farther north – the Livonian towns of Riga,
Dorpat (Tartu) and Reval (Tallinn),
as well as Novgorod and Pskov – continued to export forest products,
primarily furs and wax. A prominent casualty of the heated competition on the
Baltic was the Hanseatic League, whose
monopoly on Baltic trade disintegrated from the pressure of various forces:
national governments anxious to capture income from the Hansa towns; the
competition of Dutch, English, South German and Swedish merchants; and a
breakdown of discipline within the League itself. By the second half of the
century Novgorod’s
economy also declined precipitously.
Novgorod became embroiled in
self-destructive conflicts with Hansa; it suffered from competition in Pskov,
Smolensk, Polotsk, Moscow and Kazan’ (which was taking over the middle Volga
and Kama basin from the Volga Bulgar khanate, which had been decimated by the
collapse of the Mongol Empire at he end of the fourteenth century); Novgorod’s
trade empire proved to be inflexible, for it remained based on squirrel fur
when European demand shifted to luxury fur by mid-century.
The Baltic trade enhanced inland
routes extending from Moscow and Tver’ westward
to Novgorod and Pskov
or to centres in the grand duchy such as Velikie Luki, Toropets, Vitebsk and Polotsk (both on the western Dvina), Smolensk and Vilnius.
With trade on the Volga river eclipsed by Tatar strife, the Dnieper
returned to its Kievan-era glory. Towns of the grand duchy on the Dnieper
route, such as Chernihiv (on the Desna), Smolensk, Pereiaslav and Kiev, (all on
the Dnieper), Turov (on the Pripet) and Volodymyr on in Volhynia flourished,
while north-east Rus’ merchants developed trade routes through Kolomna and
Riazan’ (on the Oka) to the upper Oka basin and on the head-waters of Desna,
Dnieper and Don, and across the steppe to the Black Sea. The transit of goods
to and from Europe and the east – once traversing the Mongol ‘silk road’ across
the steppe trough an axis at the Caspian Sea – now pivoted around the Black Sea. Genoese colonies at Soldaia (Sudak, Sorozh)
and Kaffa not only received annual expeditions of northern merchants from towns
in the grand duchy and north-east Rus’, but sent their own merchants (Italians,
Tatars, Greeks, Armenians, Jews) in return. The Crimean’s Horde trading centres
at Ochakov and Perekop also prospered, even after Turkish conquest in 1475. It
is thus no coincidence that the principal objects of connection between the
grand duchy and Moscow lay on these routes: Novgorod, Pskov, Tver’ Smolensk and the upper Oka
basin.
The rivalry between the grand
duchy and Moscow
simmered throughout the first half of the century. In the first third of the
century the towering figure of Grand Duke Vytautas (1383 – 1430) overshadowed
the relationship. Driven by a desire to assert his control from the Vistula to
the Volga and to safeguard the integrity of the grand duchy in its dynastic
union with Poland (1385),
Vytautas was the most important political figure of his generation in Eastern Europe. Having failed in the first when defeated
by the Great Hordeat the Vorskla river in 1399, he none the less succeeded in
the second goal through Union of Horodlo (1413). By virtue of the marriage, in
1391, of his daughter, Sophia, to Grand Prince Vasilii I Dymitrievich (1389 –
1425) and Vasilii I’s naming him guardian of his underage son, Vytautas exerted
influence in Moscow.
He refrained from taking over Muscovy in 1425
when the ten-year-old Vasilii II (1425–62) inherited the throne. Instead, in
the late 1420s Vytautas acted on other fronts, pursuing campaigns against Pskov
(1426) and Novgorod (1428) and securing treaties of subordination from the
still independent princes of Pronsk, Riazan’ and Tver’. In 1429 Vytautas agreed
to accept a king’s crown from the Holu Roman Emperor, but he died in 1430 while
the crown was en route, blocking from reaching him by Vytautas’s anxious
rivals in Poland, and the Papacy and the Teutonic and Livonian Orders.
Vytautas’s death set off a succession
struggle in the grand duchy which prevented it from playing an active role in
the north-east Rus’ politics. In the 1430s and 1440s the grand principality of Moscow was similarly
embroiled, the issues being dynastic succession and regional tensions. When the
deaths of Vytautas and of Metropolitan Fotii (1431) deprived Vasilii II of
effective patronage and mediators, the young ruler’s uncle, Iurii of Galich
(with a capital at Zvenigorod), challenged him for the throne. Since early in
the fourteenth century the Daniilovich dynasti had been practising de facto
primogeniture (despite traditions of collateral succession in the Ruirikide
dynasty from which it stemmed), because heirs were few and mortality high.
Prince Iurii’s claim threatened in the main the boyar clans, who had flourished
under the predictability of linear succession; support for the young heir was
therefore strong. The dynastic struggles flared for almost twenty years, in two
phases. Prince Iurii won the Kremlin briefly in 1434, but died later that year.
His son, Vasilii Kosoi, continued the challenge, but was blinded in 1435,
temporary ending the hostilities. These were renewed in 1445, when the defeat
and temporary capture of Vasilii II by the Kazan’ Tatarts opened opportunity from Prince
Iurii’s second son, Dmitrii Shemiaka. Shemiaka seized the Kremlin and Vasilii
II in 1446, blinding him in retaliation for Kosoi’s mutilation. The war ended
later that year with the expulsion of Shemiaka from the Kremlin and a victory
for Vasilii II, his boyars and the principles of linear succession and central
control.
The failure of the opposition can
be attributed to its incoherence. The most consistent supporter of the Galich
princes were trading centres of the upper Volga and northern territories rich in
furs: Kostroma, Galich, Vologda, Beloozero and the city republic of Viatka
(with its capital in Khlynov). Prince Ivan of Mozhaisk, whose lands approached
the border with the grand duchy, also threw in his lot, as did Suzdal’ –
Nizhnii Novgorod. Although an in-law of Prince Iurii, the Lithuanian Grand Duke
Svitrigaila (1430-2) was too embroiled in his own struggles for the throne in
the grand duchy to help; disarray among the Tatars prevented them for playing a
consistent role. Novgorod
tried to play both sides by sheltering both Vasilii II and Prince Vasilii Kosoi
in 1434, but by the 1440s it openly supported Prince Dmitrii Shemiaka, offering
him sanctuary in 1446. He died there in 1453, poisoned perhaps on Vasilii II’s
orders. Tver initially supported the opposition, but in 1446 allied with
Vasilii II, affirming the alliance with the betrothal of the future Ivan III (
1462 – 1505) to Grand Prince Mikhail’s daughter, Mariia. Finally, in 1449 the
grand duchy agreed not to intervene, and renounce its designed to Novgorod and Tver’. Thus,
the opposition to Vasilii II was diffuse and tentative.
One loser in the dynastic war was
the Moscow Danilovich dynasty in itself, since the principal of linear
succession proved to be costly; Ivan III forbade and delayed marriages of
several of his brothers, so that Iurii and Adrei the younger died unmarried,
Andrei of Uglich was arrested in 1491 with his two sons, and died in captivity,
and Boris of Volok Lamskii lived in constant tension with Ivan III. The
majority of Vasilii II’s remaining kinsmen were persecuted after the dynastyc
war: two descendants of Dmitrii Shemiaka and Ivan of Mozhaisk, who had fled to
the grand duchy in the 1440s, were enticed back to Muscovy in 1500 and one,
Shemiaka grandson, was arrested with his son in 1523 (both died in prison). The
loyal Prince Vasilii Iaroslavich of Borovsk was also arrested with most of his
sons in 1456 and died soon thereafter. This stringent policy continued until
Ivan IV (1533–84) was left with no direct or collateral male kin and the
dynasty died out with his last son < Fedor, in 1598.
There were two clean winners in
this struggle, of which one was the Moscow
boyar elite. That body’s origin can be traced to the late fourteenth century in
a core of families that founded hereditarily privileged military clans whose
senior members had the hereditary right to serve as boyars. The dignity gave
them access to power, status, land and other largesse from the grand prince.
Surviving the dynastic war, this core retained pre-eminence into the sixteenth
century. The second victor in the dynastic war was the grand principality of Moscow itself. In the
1450’s and 1460s Moscow
consolidated its control of remaining independent north-east Rus’
principalities: Riazan’, through complex marital connections from 1456 to 1521;
Iaroslavl’, in 1463; and Rostov Velikii, in 1463 and 1474. From the 1460’s Moscow embarked on a concerted military and missionary
effort to consolidate control on lands where Muscovite authority had been
claimed since the 1360s: Vichegda Perm’ and Perm’
Velikaia on the upper Kama. By the 1489
conquest of Viatka and that of Iugra and Voguly tribes of the Urals in 1499, Moscow came to dominate
these fur-rich lands.
The defeats of Novgorod
and Tver’ constituted Moscow’s
greatest achievements in the wake of the dynastic wars. Novgorod held obstinately throughout the
fifteenth century to a myopic foreign policy, the product of its ruling boyar
oligarchy. Reforms from the first third of the fifteenth century increased the
collective mayoralty (posadnichestvo) from six to eighteen; the number
rose to twenty-four and eventually to thirty-four by the end of the century. The
council of lords (sovet gospod, composed of all current and past mayors
and thousandmen, chaired by archbishop), became larger still (fifty or sixty
members), representing almost all of the city’s boyar families. This was
decisive turn to oligarchy, marking the mayoralty’s transformation from a
political office to a corporate estate, symbolized by the use of coins of an
image modelled on the seal of oligarchic Venice.
After these reforms the famed town council (veche) of Novgorod became a rubber stamp.
Recognizing the rising power of Moscow, Novgorod enlisted
Lithuanian and Suzdal’ (Shuiskii) princes as defenders of the town and
developed ever stronger pro-Lithuanian parties (although some groups advocated
compromise with Moscow).
After Shemiaka’s death in 1453 in Novgorod, Moscow attacked the city
and exacted harsh retribution. By the treaty of Iazhelbitsy, Moscow ostensibly agreed to maintain
Novgorodian ‘tradition’ (starina, poshlina), but restricted political
associations, exacted a huge fine, claimed territory in Beloozero lands and,
worst of all, imposed the grand prince’s court as highest court of appeal. In
1471, still defiant, the boyars of Novgorod
agreed to accept Casimir, king of Poland
and grand duke of Lithuania,
as their sovereign. This apostasy prompted Moscow
to mount a coalition with Tver’ and Pskov
against Novgorod; falling to receive help from
Casimir, Novgorod
fell in a bloody defeat at the Shelon’ river. The treaty of Korostyn’
reaffirmed the Iazhelbitsy terms, claimed Vologda and Volok Lamskii, forbade
Novgorod to consort with the grand duchy and forced the city to issue a new
judicial charter in Ivan III’s name.
It was persuasively argued that Moscow’s goal in Novgorod
were merely to establish a loyal government; it was intransigence of the
pro-Lithuanian factions which drove Ivan III to more radical measures. In 1478,
after the abortive military campaign, Novgorod
capitulated. Ivan III took over its hinterland, dismantled the urban
government, installed Moscow vicegerents (namestniki) and, over the next
decade, exiled hundreds of Novgorod merchant, boyar and lesser landholding
families to lands in central Muscovy, confiscating all boyar-owned property,
almost all of the archbishop’s lands and about three-quarters of monastic
estates, about 80 per cent of seigniorial properties in all. On about half of
these, Moscow
introduced conditional land tenure (pomest’e). The northern Dvina lands
and most of the Obonezhskaia fifth were not distributed as pomestiia
because their land was inhospitable for farming and too sparsely settled. The
rest were reserved for the grand prince and tax-paying communes. Finally, Ivan
III summarily closed down the German Hansa neighbourhood in Novgorod
in 1494 for twenty years, giving preferential treatment to his newly founded
(1492) fortress and trade depot at Ivangorod on the Gulf
of Finland.
Clearly, both lack of military
preparedness and political mismanagement played role in Novgorod’s defeat. It had failed to make
effective alliance or to compromise with Moscow.
Its intransigence is well characterised by Archbishop Evtimii (1429–58). Under
him three major chronicle codices and five lesser redactions were compiled,
providing an alternative vision to Muscovite all-Rus’ compendia. In 1436 he
initiated cults associated with the victory of the Novgorodians against the
Suzdalians in 1169 (an allegory for Novgorod’s rivalry with Moscow), a victory
commemorated in icons and in tales and saint’s lives, the later commissioned by
Serbian writer, Pakhomii Logofet. In 1439 Evtimii also canonised nine Novgorod archbishops and
several eleventh- and twelfth-century princes, all revered for espousing
Novgorodian liberties. The most spectacular of the anti-Muscovite Novgorodian
compositions of the fifteenth century was the legendary ‘Tale of the White
Cowl’, which linked Novgorod with Byzantium and Kiev Rus’ as the recipient of
the white cowl, given by the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great to Pope
Sylvester, and miraculously transported from Rome to Constantinople and the to
Novgorod as emblem of the city’s claim to universal political authority.
Archbishop Evtimii also evoked Novgorod’s past in
architecture, rebuilding several churches according to their original designs. At
the same time, Novgorodian icon painting reached a zenith, continuing
traditions of austere composition and subject matter, bright palette and
emotional directness. Other realms of culture flourished: the Novgorodian
Archbishop Genadii (1484 – 1504) assembled translators and writers to make the
first full Slav translation of the Bible, and to compose polemics against Moscow pretensions on
Novgorodoan church property and ecclesiastical autonomy, as well as against the
Judaisers. This group of free-thinkers in Novgorod
and Moscow was
accused of Jewish practises and anti-Trinitarianism, but their full beliefs are
difficult to ascertain due to a paucity of non-tendentious sources. In the
climate of oligarchy, Archbishop Evtimii’s activities had no galvanizing effect
on the populace. Rather, they epitomised the stubborn wilfulness of Novgorod’s boyars, who
met every victorious Muscovite embassy in 1456, 1471 and 1478 with proposals
based on thirteenth-century treaties that preserved ‘tradition’ and restricted
princely authority to a minimum.
As Muscovy subjugated Novgorod, tensions continued between the grand duchy and Moscow. King/Grand Duke
Casimir allied with the Great Horde in late 1460s; in consequence Moscow turned to the
Crimean Khanate, an alliance that endured until 1512. Expecting Lithuanian aid
that never came, the Great Horde mounted a major campaign against Moscow in 1480, but was easily pushed back, presaging its
final conquest by Moscow
in 1502. The ‘stand on the Ugra river’ was immortalised beyond all real
significance by Bishop Vassian Rylo of Rostov Velikii in the late fifteenth
century and has come to signify the ’throwing of the Mongol Yoke’, although
effective authority of the Kipchak khanate over north-east Rus’ had already
disintegrated in the first half of the century.
…
Chapter 30
BYZANTIUM: THE ROMAN ORTODOX WORLD,
1393 – 1492: Anthony Bryer
CHRONOLOGY AND DEFINITION
Byzantines were perhaps more concerned than
most medieval people with the insecure business of measuring time and defining
authority. There was not much they could do about either, but naming is a
taming of forces of nature and anarchy, and placed the humblest in relation to
the stability of God. Byzantines called the order “taxis”. They craved taxis
all the more in the fifteenth century Anno Domini, because for Ortodox
Christians, who counted by the Anno Mundi, it was, quite simply, the end
of the secular world. For subjects of either, or both, emperor and patriarch of
Constantinople the New Rome, the world was
created of 1 September 5508 BC. Gennadios II Scholarios, Sultan Mehemmed II’s
first patriarch after the fall of the Constantinople
to the Ottoman Turks on 19 May 1453, put matters in cosmic proportion by
foretelling the doomsday on 1 September 1492, the end of the seventh millennium
AM. In 1393, the first year of the last century of the world, Patriarch
Antonios IV (1389–97) had put matter in taxis. Grand Prince Vasilii I of
Moscow (1389 – 1425) had complained that while
there was Church, there did not seem to be a credible emperor in Constantinople, to which the patriarch replied that ‘it
is not possible to have a Church without an emperor. Yea, even if, by the
permission of God, the nations [i.e. the Turks] now encircle the government and
residence of the emperor… he is still an emperor and autocrat of the Romans –
that is to say of all Christians.’
The truth was that in 1393 the Ottoman Sultan
Bayazid I, who had in 1389 won his throne and the vassalage of Serbia on the
battlefield of Kosovo, annexed Bulgaria and was preparing to encircle the
government and the residence of the emperor Manuel II Palaiologos (1391 – 1425)
in Constantinople, a blockade which was only broken when the sultan was
captured by Timur at Ankara in 1402. The Mongols, however, soon left Anatolia,
but not before reviving the nexus of emirates from which the Ottomans had
sprung in what is now Turkey.
Thrown into civil war until the emergence of Mehemmed I (1413–21), the Ottomans
regrouped in their most recent Balkan conquest, giving Byzantium a half-century’s respite. By 1453
the city was far from being a bulwark of the west against the hordes of Asia: indeed, the reverse. In secular terms the Ottoman
state already ruled farm more Orthodox Christians than dis the Byzantine
emperor. It was a European ruler, based in Balkans, that Sultan Mehemmed II
(1444–6, 1451–81) finally took Constantinople as a preliminary to his conquest
and reconquest of Anatolia, which occupied the rest of his reign.
The Ottomans were not people but a dynasty; nor
did their Muslim subjects then call themselves ‘Turks’. Patriarch Antonios used
the term ‘nation’ (Greek ethnos, Latin natio) pejoratively to
describe such barbarians – but he did not call himself ‘Greek’ either, let
alone ‘Helene’, which meant ancient pagan. He signed himself, in Greek, as ‘Our
Moderation, Antonios, elect of God, archbishop of Constantinople
the New Rome, and ecumenical patriarch’. Today we call his flock ‘Byzantines’.
But this is as helpful as calling the French ‘Lutetians’, after the classical
name of their capital in Paris.
So far as Antonios was concerned, he and his flock were Christian subjects of
the first Constanine’s New Rome. Hence use is made of their own self-denominator
of ‘Roman Orthodox’ to describe them in this chapter.
In the fifteenth century, ‘Byzantines’ still
called themselves ‘Romans’ (Greek Romaioi), synonymous with
‘Christians’; in Greek their Church was Catholic, or ecumenical. But Emperor
John VIII Palaiologos (1425–48) had to appeal for support to an older Rome and another catholic
Church against the encircling Ottomans. John would have been surprised to find
himself described in the Latin version of the subsequent decree of the Union of
the Churches as ‘emperor of the Greeks’, for he had actually subscribed to it
in purple in Florence on 6 July 1439 as ‘in Christ God faithful emperor and
autocrat of the Romans’ – his sprawling signature is in Greek. But the emperor
was emphatically Roman and his people soon confirmed their Orthodox identity
too – by generally rejecting the Council of Florence.
This discussion of time and title may sound
antiquarian today, but it is vital to an understanding of the identity of the
Roman Orthodox in the fifteenth century. It coincided roughly with the ninth
century of the Muslim era, when it was the Ottomans who first named Byzantines
for what they were: subjects of a Church which had survived an empire, called
‘Rum’, or Romans. The definition holds to this day, mostly vividly when a
villager in north-eastern Turkey
explains that ‘This was Roman country; they spoke Christian here’.
If this chapter were limited to the Byzantine
Empire in the fifteenth century, it would be halved by the fall of Constantinople in 1453 which indeed resounded in the
west, where historians have made that date one to remember, without quite
explaining why. In truth, the change of municipal government in Constantinople was important, not so much in the west as
to those whom it principally involved: the Roman Orthodox. The arrangements
made between sultan and patriarch in 1454 may have been shadowy, but they
introduced a new order, or taxis, which ensured the future of Roman
Orthodox incorporated in later conquest of Morea and the Pontos. Their internal
politics still depended on who said what at Florence in 1439, but Roman
Orthodox bonds which survived the conquest were older and simpler: those of
patronage and patris – homeland.
This chapter therefore concentrates on the
Roman Orthodox in the last century of their world: AM 6901 – 7000, or AD 1393 –
1492. It concentrates on four homelands, based on Salonica, Mistra,
Constantinople and Trebizond. It must exclude
other Orthodox, Greek-speaking or not, under Venetian, Hospitaller or local
‘Latin’ or ‘Frankish’ (mostly what would now be termed Italian) rule along
Adriatic coast, in the Aegean and (until 1523) the Dodecanese, or (until 1571)
Cyprus. It excludes Albania
(conquered from 1397 to 1497), Bulgaria
(1393) and Herzegovina and
southern Bosnia
(1463–5). It excludes the lands north of the Danube which emerged from the
fourteenth century as posthumous Byzantine states (and were to adopt the very
name of ‘Romania’), being Wallachia (eventually incorporated as tributary from 1462
to 1512). It must even exclude the peoples of Crimea, whom Mehemmed II made
tributary in 1475, turning the Black sea into
Ottoman lake: Khazars, Armenians and Karaite Jews ruled by Crim-Tatar khans,
Roman Orthodox princes of Gotthia and Genoese consuls of Kaffa.
By the end of the century only two eastern
Christian rulers survived wholly independent of the Ottoman
Empire. Ethiopia
had subscribed to the Union of Florence, but its Solomonic king, the negus
Na’od (1478 – 1508) had an Orthodoxy of his own. Moscow
had rejected Florence, so was Orthodox enough;
Grand Prince Ivan III (1462 – 1505) had even married the niece of Constantine
XI Palaiologos, last emperor in Constantinople
(1449–53). But New Rome did not grant Russia
its patriarchate until 1589, on the grounds that Old Rome forfeited the title,
and Moscow
could never enter the bottom of the list as Third Rome.
At the end of the seventh millennium in Constantinople, Patriarch Maximos IV (1491–7) was spared
the embarrassment which faces all who foretell a Day of Judgement which comes
and goes without incident, for by AM 7000 most Roman Orthodox had adopted the
western computation of AD 1492. Instead, he could say with more conviction than
had his predecessor, Antonios, a century before, that while since 1453 it was
demonstrably possible to have a Church without an emperor, it was now possible
to have a Church with a sultan – indeed for Orthodox a sultan was preferable to
a doge or a pope. Patriarch Maximos urged the Republic
of Venice to grant rights and freedom
of worship to Roman Orthodox in the Ionian Islands which they enjoyed in the
Ottoman Empire, while the Roman Orthodox Church in Cyprus had to wait until 1571 for
the Ottoman conquest of the island to restore its autonomy. Under Sultan
Bayazid II in 1492, the identity, survival or even prosperity of the Roman
Orthodox were more assured that they had seemed to be in 1393, when Bayazid I
had threatened an emperor in Constantinople.
SALONICA AND ITS BISHOPS
The city of Salonica has many names: Greek Thessalonike,
Roman Thessalonika, Slav Solun, Venetian Salonicchio, Turkish Selanic, and
Hebrew Slonki. For all these peoples it appeared to be the strategic or
commercial key to the Balkans. The city stands close to where the Axios river
(Vardar) is crossed by the Via Egnatia before it debouches into the Aegean Sea. The river, which rises deep in the Balkans,
brought Slav traders to the annual fair of St Demetrios, patron of Salonica and
(through their Salonican evangelists Sts Cyril and Methodios) of all Slavs,
each 26 October. The Egnatian highway runs from Adriatic coast to Constantinople, so linking Old and New Rome at Salonica.
The Slavs found Salonica was a key which they
could not turn. Even the most aggressive of Serbian tsars, Stefan Urosh IV,
surnamed Dushan (1331–55), was unable to take the long-desired city of St Demetrios. By contrast
its shallow harbor and October fair were not particular attractive to Italian
traders even when they were actually offered its key in 1423. By the Salonica
had developed another reputation. As the second city of the Byzantine and
(eventually) Ottoman Empire, its relationship with the capital in Constantinople was always uneasy. Even when ruled by a
secondary member of the imperial family, it gained a local identity a sort of a
city-state of its own, with a recognizable if inchoate local leadership, often
headed by its archbishop.
The fourteenth-century urban and peasant
uprising of western Europe were paralleled in Byzantium. In western terms, revolutionary
Salonica become a ‘commune’ from 1342 to 1350. In truth, its urban and
artisanal mass was only just critical enough to claim local self-determination
behind the great walls of the city, with a still shadowy political ideology
called ‘Zealot’. But Salonica did not forget those heady days. Its ‘commune’
was a hardly surprising response to outside pressures: civil war in Byzantium (1341-7), the Ottoman entry into Europe (1345–54) and the death of Dushan (1345), all
compounded by the Black Death (1347-8). Yet in Salonica these years are marked
by some of the finest surviving late Byzantine decorated churches and by career
of the last great Father of the Roman Orthodox Church: St Gregory Palamas.
Palamas was archbishop of Salonica from 1347 to 1359. His doctrines were
confirmed by the Roman Orthodox Church in the next century and remain vital
spiritual ideology of the Slav Orthodox in particular. The essentially mystical
theology of Palamas maintained that the unknowable essence of God could be
approached by revelation rather than reason, and hence was in direct opposition
to the Aristotelian scholasticism of the western Church. On the nearby monastic
commune of Mount Athos, Palamism was given expression by Hesychasts – best
described as ‘Quietists’ – whose spiritual connections with the political ‘Zealots’
were both obvious and obscure.
The Ottomans first besieged Salonica from 1383
to 1387. Local leadership was divided between its governor, the future emperor
Manuel II Palaiologos, and its archbishop, Isidore Glabas (1380-4, 1389–96).
Manuel told his subjects to defy Turkish ultimatum. On St Demetrios Day 1383
Glabas warned his flock to mend their ways, just as St Paul had twice written to the
Thessalonians on hope, discipline and premature thoughts of the end of the
world. Salonica dully fell in 1387. In 1393 archbishop ventured back to his
see. He found that the world there had not ended. Indeed, Ottoman occupation
was more tolerable than Manuel had threatened. Sultan Bayazid had granted the
citizens special favuors and had left the infrastructure of Byzantine local
government and its officers largely at place.
The facts were that that Ottomans could do no
other. Vastly outnumbered by the people they conquered, their problem was
manpower: there were too few Muslims to go round, and of those, too few Turks.
The solution was obvious. While the conversion of an Orthodox Christians to
Islam could be swift and relatively painless, it takes longer to turn Roman
into a Turk, which is a theme of this chapter. Yet there were short-cuts. In a
sermon delivered in occupied Salonica in 1395 Archbishop Glabas was early to
report on an expedient which may date from the first substantial Ottoman
establishment in Europe, at Gallipoli in the Dardanelles
in 1354. It is called devshirme (‘recruitment’) in Turkish and paidomazoma
(‘harvest of children’) in Greek. This ‘child levy’ took Christians for
training in the Ottoman administration and, especially, in the ‘new army’
(Turkish yeni cheri; English janissary). Girsl could aspire to the
Harem. It was such converts who were the most eager for further conquest. Their
advancement, especially after the battle of Ankara in 1402, led to tension with old
Anatolian Turkish leadership, which was to come to a head in 1453.
In the aftermath of Timur’s victory at Ankara, Salonica reverted to Byzantium in 1403. Once again its archbishop
provided characteristic leadership. Archbishop Symeon of Salonica (1416/17 –
29), urged his flock to keep firmly Roman and Orthodox. An ardent Hesychast, he
sought to restore the identity of the city in the face of Venetian and Ottoman
pressure. It was difficult to know who constituted the greater threat: the
Turks, converts from Orthodoxy included, who were sent to chastise the
Salonicans for their sins, or the Venetians who were to infect them with the
plague of heresy. From St Sophia, Constantinople, Symeon reintroduced public
liturgy to his own cathedral of St Sophia in Salonica, and, as in Constantinople, regulated a twice-daily street procession
of the protecting icon of the Mother of God called Hodegetria. But in
Constantinople Manuel II Palaiologos (1391 – 1425), by then aged seventy-three,
was now more cautious. In 1423, unable to defend Salonica against the Ottomans,
the emperor invited the Republic
of Venice to do it for
him. Archbishop Symeon tried to rally his Roman Orthodox by chastising them in
the name of St Demetrios, on whose miraculous defense of the city in the past
he wrote a great discourse in Venetian occupied Salonica in 1427/8. Actually,
the Venetians were initially welcomed as no great friends of the pope in Rome, but found the place
expensive to defend and the Salonicans doing deals with Turks. The end rally
came with Archbishop Symeon’s death late in 1429, which meant that the Ottomans
finally took a demoralized city on 29 March 1430. The Venetian captains had
slipped away; the icon of Hodgetria was smashed; and 7000 Salonicans were taken
captive.
What happened next is partly revealed in
Ottoman tahrir defters, tax and census registers. Short of manpower, the
Ottomans correctly targeted cities such as Salonica, first to Islamicise, and
then Turkicise. Outside the walls the overwhelmingly peasant population could
await assimilation. Sultan Mehemed II had a declared policy of demographic
manipulation, today called ‘ethnic cleansing’, which has good Byzantine
precedent. The Ottoman term was surgun (forcible deportation an
resettlement), which, along with devshirme, noted by Glabas, and natural
erosion by conversion, should soon have made Salonica the second Ottoman city
of the Empire. But this did not happen. The place recovered slowly after 1430,
within walls enclosing about 285 hectares, which in medieval Mediterranean
terms could encompass a population of 30.000 or more.
In fact, Salonica had an adult population of
about 10,414 by 1478, which doubled to 20,331 in c. 1500 and only
tripled to reach 29,220 by 1519. The precision of Ottoman registers is spurious
(for it omits tax-evaders and tax-exempt), but the scale is reliable enough.
Clearly, resettlement and conversion were belated. In 1478 the city had a
Muslim population of 4,320 but its Christian (Roman Orthodox) element, with
6,094 souls was still in absolute majority with 59 per cent of households. By c.
1500 the Christian population had grown to 7,986 but, with 8,575 the Muslim
population had doubled to reach, for the first time, a simple majority of 42
percent of the inhabitants of Salonica. But about 1500 a third category was
introduced, if incompletely recorded: 3,770 Jews. By 1519, 15,715 Jews were
registered: 54 per cent of the population of Salonica, an absolute majority
which they maintained until the semi-conversion of many to Islam with that of
their false Messiah, Sabbatai Zavi (1625–76) after 1666.
The conversion of the major city of the
Balkans, from the staunchly Roman Orthodox see of Archbishops Palamas, Glabas
and Symeon, first into a Muslim stronghold and then into the largest Jew city
in the world, all within space of four decades, needs explanation. In the past,
Byzantine emperors had in turn invited western Christian powers and Ottoman
Turks to fight their wars with against Orthodox Serbs and Bulgars for them, and
regretted the expedient. Now the Ottoman state was faced with a grater,
demographic war. If Salonica could not be turned Turk, a third urban element
could be introduced. Before 1430 there is evidence for a few Greeks-peaking and
Karaite Jews in the city, not even registered in 1478. But after their conquest
of Granada in
1492, the Catholic sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabel, expelled their Spanish
(Sephardic) Jews, who spoke Ladino (or ‘Latin’). Bayazid II welcomed them
through Constantinople, largely to settle in
Salonica. It was the greatest surgun of all. Ottoman demographic
strategy, if such it was, meant that Salonica did not have a Roman Orthodox
majority again until after 1912, when it fell to Greece, once more to become second
city.
THE MOREA, THE COUNCIL OF FLORENCE AND PLETHON
…
(“THE NEW CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY” Volume
VII c. 1415 – 1500 edited by Christopher Allmand, Professor of Medieval
History in the University of Liverpool; Cambridge University press, first
published 1998, reprinted 2006)
