SAC to 1682

<>BC 48:44; Rome fell under the personal autocratic military dictatorship of Julius Caesar

Caesar returned with his armies from successful imperial wars of aggression against Germanic "barbarians" in north-central and western Europe
Caesar took power, but was soon assassinated
Brutal struggle among dictatorial factions followed (some of them Senatorial and elitist, some of them democratic and just plain despotic)
Cicero learned the futility of what he called contra arma verbis [words against weapons]

When Cicero criticized Marcus Antonius in the public forum, he was chased down in the woods and beheaded by three clumsy sword strokes
Antonius put Cicero's head and severed writing hand on display at the public forum where something approaching free speech reigned for centuries
Antonius thought to teach a lesson to those who would express views contrary to militarist powers, those who dared to confront contra arma verbis

The price of political "checking and thwarting" [ID] now approached its highest level
Four centuries of mixed republican life was now at an end
- No more "mutual interdependency" of major social and political factions
- No more authentic give-and-take for the public good, defined in social or civilian terms
- Politics were now blood sport or, more apropos, war
- Factions conspired with one another for complete annihilation of opponents
- These were the virtues of a highly successful new imperialistic Roman era
What followed the decline of the Roman Republic was increased levels of militaristic autocracy and Imperial dictatorship, vicious insanities and extreme depravity of governmental and public life

It continued to work for a long-long while, four centuries, and it benefited well-to-do Romans

*0365jy21:Tunisia | Roman coastal city inundated by giant tsunami | "Major Roman ruins discovered underwater in Tunisia" [E-TXT]

But it put the wider population into a bound relationship to power, and it destroyed all but the myth of Roman virtue, even as it built big cities, good roads, and sumptuous hot baths. [MAP]

Fifth century AD:The Empire in the west finally destroyed itself when Germanic peoples on the northern frontiers of the Empire -- erstwhile subjects, acolytes, trainees and servitors of Rome -- turned against their benefactors and captured the great world city Rome
The Roman Empire in the east, Byzantium [GO], survived yet a thousand more years, until 1453 when Constantinople fell to Eurasian Turkish invaders [ID]
Then came the Ottoman Turkish "time at bat", five centuries of Islamic Empire rose on these foundations [ID]
\\
*2016de02:The Washington Post| "Five myths about the decline and fall of Rome" [ E-TXT] Consider the variety of "historiographies" that the author of the E-TXT dismisses as "myths" or that he uses to expose the "myths". Take an hour to read the comments of E-TXT readers. These are frequently silly and wrong, but mixed in with the silly comments are the sophisticated comments, just about the most sophisticated of the scores of such collections of comment I read through the year or so of the 2016 presidential campaign. Notice the frequency of commentators praise for the E-TXT, mixed with critical analysis of it. Notice the search for ways to understand the distant past by means of contemporary events, but also notice the search for ways to understand contemporary events by means of the distant past.

---- WE HOP FORWARD NOW TO THE TIME OF BYZANTIUM,
BEGINNING WITH THE NICAEAN COUNCIL =

<>0325:Nicaean Council (First Ecumenical Council of the Christian Church)

This "ecumenical" or "universal" council -- inclusive of all Christian churches, then concentrated in SW-Asia ("Near-East" or "Middle-East"), north & NE-Africa, and southern Europe [MAP] -- set itself the task of defining "Christianity", building on the record of Jesus Christ's ministry and the vast administrative/spiritual accomplishments of the Apostle Paul

Christianity was at this time a hodge-podge of diverse and often contradictory movements and beliefs. Uniformity had to be imposed
This was the institutional and theological beginnings of "Christendom"
What was earlier a persecuted sect and vague cultish faith was becoming an important component of Roman Imperial rule and Roman ideology

The Nicaean Council dealt with Arianism [ID#1 | ID#2], a popular doctrine taught by Arius, a priest in Alexandria (Egypt)

Arius taught that Jesus Christ was neither God nor man but was a particular creation of God, something of a demigod
Orthodox doctrine preferred to describe Jesus as a sacred and mystical combination of God and man
Arianism was declared a heresy but lingered on, still lingers in the ranks of world-wide Christians

"The Nicaean Creed" [ID] became the official summary of what Christianity was all about

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible; and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-begotten of his Father, of the substance of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten. By whom all things were made, both which be in heaven and in earth. Who for us men and for our salvation came down and was incarnate and was made man. He suffered and the third day he rose again, and ascended into heaven. And he shall come again to judge both the quick and the dead. And [we believe] in the Holy Ghost. And whosoever shall say that there was a time when the Son of God was not, or that before he was begotten he was not, or that he was made of things that were not, or that he is of a different substance or essence [from the Father] or that he is a creature, or subject to change or conversion -- all that so say, the Catholic and Apostolic Church anathematizes them [excommunicates, curses and completely condemns them].

This council also created the first three Patriarchal Sees (central administrative "thrones" of the universal Christian church) =
1. Alexandria (near the mouth of the Nile in Egypt)
2. Antioch (in modern-day Turkey)
3. Rome
Fordham University website presents main substance of all seven of the great ecumenical councils of the expanding Christian Church
0330:Constantinople was founded and named the co-capital of the Roman Empire
The recently converted Christian Emperor Constantine named the new capital Constantinopolis, after himself, and he shifted his administration there
The Roman Empire now sported an official ideology = Christianity
Emperor Constantine was much influenced by heretical Arianism
Nonetheless, Constantine's new Roman imperial capital became an official Patriarchal See, the fourth
0398:Constantinople | John Chrysostom became Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church [Eastern Church website W#1]

Chrysostom was a brilliant orator and author of a sermon on Christ's Beatitudes [TXT] Notice the simplicity and easy colloquial eloquence
Chrysostom also led the fight against another early, popular and persistent heresy = Manichaeanism [ID] [E-TXT]
Latter-day Orthodox liturgical celebration of Chrysostom's memory (Saint's Day) [W#1 | Petr Chaikovskii's (Tchaikovsky's) classical rendition of that celebratory liturgy | Celebration of Chrysostom's Saint's Day at Valaam Monastery]

Constantinople now eclipsed Rome as the central Patriarchal See and brought the other two patriarchal thrones, Alexandria and Antioch, under its authority

0451:Jerusalem was designated the fifth Patriarchal See of the Universal Christian Church
The city Rome slumped into rustic disintegration, but the Roman Empire lived on another 1000 years, centered in the magnificent Eurasian capital city Constantinople
Christianization was a centrally important moment of "Easternization" of "The West"

The highest level institutional administrative structure of the Christian Church remained unchanged for more than a millennium, until =

1521:In central Europe, the Protestant Reformation (Revolution?)
1598:Seven centures after Russian Christianization, the Moscow Metropolitan became the Moscow Patriarch

Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD

NYR

RT World News

7-hop LOOP on "Protestant Reformation"

<>0453:988; BYZANTINE STEPPE FRONTIER

0453:Hun commander Attila died [W summarizes his remarkable semi-mythic warrior-nomad campaigns. Concentrate on "Eastern Roman Empire" and "In the West", up to his death. Contemplate Attila's wide geographical implications as shown on the two maps]
- Pontic Steppes [the vast feather-grass plains north and east of the lower Danube R. and the Black Sea] entered another in a long series of disordered epochs or simple flux, sometimes a gentle milling of peoples and sometimes forceful movement of violent nomadic warriors
- We know very little about these early epochs in the history of the Pontic Steppes and of Eurasia
- We can, however, familiarize ourselves with the geography of Eurasia [ggr | MAP]
In this extended period of wandering peoples, the western capital of the Roman Empire (Rome) fell, while Constantinople, the Eastern capital of that empire since the year 330 [ID], survived another thousand years, until 1453
The Eastern Roman Empire is known as the Byzantine Empire [W]

Contemporary aerial photo of Constantinople [called Istanbul in the Turkic epoch]
istanbul.jpg (70278 bytes)
The Blue Mosque (foreground) and St.Sophia Cathedral (background)
in contemporary Istanbul [Constantinople]
[Source: website#2 above]
St.Sophia [Hagia Sophia] Cathedral was the intellectual-cultural center of Christian life in the Constantinople epoch (now a museum)
[Read Russian Chronicle account of the powerful architectural impression made by Hagia Sophia]
Blue Mosque is the spiritual center of Islamic life in the post-1453 epoch
Pick up LOOP on Islam from the beginning

In the confused centuries up to the 800s, Slavic peoples lived originally as village-based farming folk along the Pomeranian shores of the Baltic Sea [the name "Pomerania" comes from a Slavic expression for "at the seashore", po more]
Under pressure from migrating Germanic or Gothic peoples, these Slavs shifted eastward and southward along the Eastern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains out into the cold Valdai savannahs [mixed woods and prairies where the Volga, Dnepr, western Dvina, and Volkhov rivers rise], into the woodsy farm lands of present-day northern European Russia [MAP].
Slavs and other peoples migrated in response to the pressures of something like a demographic Rubic's Cube. As one people or "tribe" moved, others moved perforce and/or were absorbed. The movements of Gothic peoples, both Visigoths [West Goths] and Ostrogoths [East Goths] were a powerful cause of demographic flux
Among these migrating peoples were the Alany [ID]
Slavs shifted eastward and southward in rhythm with the interrelated pan-European and Pontic Steppe flux, a phenomenon German antiquarians call Volkerwanderungen, the wandering of peoples

Three distinct Slavic language groups emerged from this process
MAP of three contemporary Slavic language groups

West Slavic villagers settled down in territories roughly equivalent to where modern-day Lithuanians, Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks live
East Slavs settled where today we find Belarusians, Ukrainians and Russians
South Slavic peoples, in the centuries prior to the 9th, found themselves extruded into the boiling cauldron of demographic change in the lower Danube valley, along the vital defensive frontier of Byzantium, northwest of Constantinople. These Slavs were pressured in all directions, but the most important force was the first great epoch of Turkic expansion into eastern Europe =

South Slavs drifted even further southwest, under the command of Hunnic chieftains or Bulgar boyars

Turkic military commanders/leaders came to be named with the Slavic word boyar [warrior]
In the two centuries up to about 700, the south Slavic villagers in the lower Danube valley "Slavicized" their Turkic boyars
They filled the countryside of what is modern-day Bulgaria, and founded a powerful Christian Bulgarian tsardom [W (brief popular histories)] and [MAP]

Turkic peoples under boyar leadership who did not move south and west into the Danube valley, who held to the wild eastern Steppes, were split off from the Danube Bulgars

Khazar expansion pushed these Turkic peoples northward up the Volga valley to the lands around the city Kazan [map] where they formed a significant Islamic or Muslim Bolgar khanate

NB! In SAC Bolgar is spelled with an "o" to distinguish Volga Bolgars from Danube Bulgars
Similar movements were under way in the Balkan Peninsula, "Yugoslavia" and Greece
Hundreds of years after the Bulgar/Bolgar migrations, a second epoch of Turkic expansion poured out of the Altai highlands

Eurasia in outline [MAP]
In a process of remarkable cultural syncretism, West, East and South Slavic peoples filled the countryside from the eastern Baltic to the Adriatic and Black sea coasts
These Slavic villagers were the rural platform over which generations of warrior nomadic peoples passed

These various warrior nomads sometimes recruiting Slavs into their service
In the reverse direction these various warrior nomads, these Turkic elites, were often absorbed into the cultures of the recruited Slavs

To the south of all this flux, the Byzantine Empire evolved a subtle and complex military and commercial network of "diplomatic" relations

Byzantine "foreign policy" was designed to protect it from the destructive potential of nomadic instability, and to profit from it
Byzantium was forced to play with fire
The very phrase "Byzantine diplomacy" has taken on a very unjust negative colloquial meaning = desperately complex and disgustingly "devious"
But the stakes were high, and diplomatic skill was key to Byzantine success
The diplomatic strategies of the Byzantine Empire shaped the modern world in eastern Europe

The Obolensky term for the expansive world of Eastern Orthodox Christendom is on the mark = "Byzantine Commonwealth"
\\
*--Obolensky=1-3, 42-61
*--[TXT = A summary history of Byzantium]
*--YouTube history of Byzantium
*2001:| Paul M. Barford, _The_early Slavs: Culture and society in early medieval Eastern Europe [DJK27.B365+2]
*2005:| Bryan Ward-Perkins, _The_Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization [DG311.W33]
*2005:| Julia M. H. Smith, _Europe After Rome: A New Cultural History, 500-1000 [D121.S67]

<>0494:Rome| Pope Gelasius's "Letter" on spiritual and temporal power outlined the "two-swords" concept of western Christendom [E-TXT]

"Two swords" asserted a degree of separation of church and state in the world administered by the Patriarch in Rome [the Pope]
No such separation of church and state was experienced in the world of the Byzantine Church

Eastern Orthodox Christian institutional traditions differed from those of Rome ("the western patriarchate" of the universal Christian Church) precisely in the definition of church/state relations
The Byzantine Emperor and his Eastern Orthodox Church existed in a generally tight relationship of unity or "symphony"

One of the most dramatic demonstrations of the "Western" aberration occurred in 1076

<>0540:Balkan Peninsula settled by Bulgarian Kutrigurs and Slavs

<>0550c:Byzantine Empire| Procopius of Caesarea described Slavs [VSB,1=7]
*--0550c:Gothic Jordanes "Origin and Deeds of the Goths" [E-TXT] | On Slavs [VSB,1=7-8]

<>0576:Turkomen of Central-Asia turned against Byzantium, forcing the Empire to pull back to more proximate positions in the northern Caucasus and Crimea

Byzantium regrouped to protect itself from Avars, then Khazars out on the Pontic Steppes [map]
0581:John of Ephesus described attacks by Slavs in the Balkans [Obolensky:51]
Over the next century, Avars and Slavs settled north and south of the Danube
0600c:Byzantine Empire| Basileus [Emperor] Mauricius described Slavs [VSB,1=8-9]
0626jy29:au07; Constantinople under combined Avar and Slavic siege, but the attackers failed to breach the great defensive walls around the city
The dynamic Pontic Steppe region was but one geophysical source of threat to Byzantium

<>0632:651; Turkish Bulgar khans, Kovrat and Kubrat, created independent Bulgar khanate along watersheds flowing from the north into the Danube
*--The Danube Bulgars accepted Christianity from Constantinople and thus served as a Byzantine client state, sometimes restive but clearly part of the "commonwealth"

<>0632je:Islamic Prophet Muhammad died, marking the beginning of a most dramatic cultural/political explosion, the spread of the Muslim or Islamic Arabic Empire [W]

The first epoch of Islamic Arabic expansion was called the "Umayyad Caliphate" [W-ID]
The accomplishments of this first century and a half have much the same relationship to historical Islamic identity as the great Roman Empire (west and east) has to western and eastern European historical identity -- a dream or a nightmare of original grandeur. "It's where we came from. It's our roots"
Note how this moving MAP illustrates the stunning rapid growth of the Arabic Empire, 15 expansive moments in the first two decades after Muhammad's death

YouTube

Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam

E-TXT rvw

_The_Heirs of the Prophet Muhammad: The Two Paths to Islam

LOOP on Islam

<>0674:678; Byzantine capital city Constantinople besieged by Arabs
*--At this point, however, Islamic Arab power was turned away and diverted elsewhere
\\
*--LOOP on Islam

<>0680:681; Constantinople Council (Sixth Ecumenical [universal] Council of the universal Christian Church)

Monophysite Heresy was condemned [ID]
Fordham University website presents main substance of all seven of the great ecumenical councils of the Christian Church
Three Patriarchal Sees -- Alexandria, Jerusalem and Antioch -- were now all under Moslem rule
A fourth Patriarchal See, Rome, was in the grip of barbarian rustication
For all practical purposes, the Patriarch of Constantinople was the sole independent head of the universal Christian Church located within a stable Christian polity

<>0689:Bulgar khan Asparukh [W] moved with his people over the Danube to the south
*--The Bulgars thus breached one of the most important Roman/Byzantine defensive lines against nomadic incursion from "The East"
*--Byzantine power concluded that Bulgars now had to be co-opted into further close alliance or crushed
*--But these Bulgars were strong enough to gain significant independent status and to sustain it over the next three centuries
\\
*--Obolensky=13, 63-4

<>0695:Dnepr River delta city Kherson, a key trading port in the Crimean area, was under the khagan [khan, kagan, kahan; ruling monarch] of Khazaria
*--Soon Byzantium achieved joint authority with them

<>0710:1185; Japan, Ezo [Hokkaido]| Historical sources of the Nara (710-794) and Heian (794-1185) periods describe how, over these 400 years, northern Honshu Island was still occupied by "barbarians" who once inhabited large areas of what is today called Japan
*--The Japanese people pushed the aboriginal people north
*--The Chinese characters, adopted by the Japanese as they because literate, named these northern areas and can be read as Ezo, Ebisu or Emishi
*--"Ezo" denoted proto-Caucasoid "barbarians" who, many years later, in the Meiji period (late 19th c.), were called Ainu
*--The Ainu are a people with a complex and obscure history [Wiki | KEJ,2=238]

<>0711:712; Spain conquered by Arabic forces erupting out of the global region "AfroAsia" (a neologism employed by SAC [ID] )

<>0717:718; Constantinople under siege by Arabs again but received significant support from Bulgar khan Tervel and his warriors [boyars]
*--Orthodox Christian Bulgaria became an increasingly important power west of Orthodox Byzantium, east of German Catholic power, south and east of Judaic Khazar as well as Islamic power
\\
*--Obolensky:61-68

<>0718:732; France under Arabic invasion
*--Frankish king Charles Martel stopped Arabic advance in what is today the French/Spanish border area [MAP]

<>0737:Lower Volga territories of Khazar authority [W] subject to Arabic attack, but without any long-term success

Soon Khazars held the middle-Dnepr city Kiev
Khazar khaganate became the dominant power throughout the European Steppes north of Byzantine and Arabic power
Khagan Bulan accepted Judaism
Khazars were not ethnically "Jewish", but over the next century the Old-Testament faith and ritual spread among the Khazar elite. Judaism became something like an official religion
The displacement of local shamanistic religions by one or another of the "great" religions of the book (Christianity, Islam, Judaism or Buddhism) was a standard feature of Steppe history
The "great" religions of the book contributed powerful cultural prestige to ambitious Steppe rulers
Frequently it meant a transition from oral culture to written civilization for these peoples
For the Khazars Judaism functioned as a counterpoise to Byzantine Orthodox Christianity and Arabic Islam. It gave them "distinction"

<>0750:The Muslim world split = Sunni and Shiah branches of the Islamic faith
*--Sunni khalif [Caliph or "khalif"] established in Damascus [capital of modern-day Syria] GO 763

<>0754:Constantinople| Church Council condemned the worship of images (icons) [W]
*--Attack on icons was called "iconoclasm" [TXT]
*--The Church called the last great Ecumenical Council to deal with this crisis
*--LOOP on "Church"

<>0763:Baghdad founded [capital of modern-day Iraq], "capital" of the Shiah khalif (Caliph) and his Arab Abbasid dynasty

Baghdad was a new Babylon, master of the "fertile crescent" between the two legendary rivers, Tigris and Euphrates [Mesopotamia = Greek-based expression, meaning "between the rivers"]
The strength of Abbasid armies came from the Central Asian Steppes
Afghans trained in Buddhist traditions were the core of Abbasid administration, these the folk who sponsored construction of the Bamiyan Buddha [W#1 | W#2 |W#3]
The great ruler Haroun al-Rashid was the central character in the famous stories, "The Arabian Nights"

<>0777:Iberian Peninsula [ID] holdings of Arabs attacked by Frankish King Karl without success

North of Iberia, in an area that would in modern times be called "France", Germanic king Karl consolidated his predecessor's authority over folks later called "French"
"French" is a distortion of the Germanic name "Frank" with its core meaning "free", a meaning never completely lost
Growing closeness with the western Patriarch (Pope) in Rome encouraged Frankish King Karl to think of himself as a possible new Caesar of a reviving Roman Empire
This required freeing the Iberian holdings of the old Rome [contemporary Spain, Portugal, etc.] from Islamic cultural, political, and economic control
King Karl's campaign represented an early adumbration of "Western"-sponsored, religiously intensive "crusades" of "liberation" projected outward from the metropols of Christendom against perceived threats (Arabic expansion) but also against vulnerable targets of opportunity (the Slavic peoples of NE Europe [ID])
Great epic poem commemorated tragic heroism of Frankish commander Roland against the "infidels", the expanding Arabic Muslim (Islamic) power of the Moors [W]
Eurasia [MAP]
We are seeing that, at least since 330 [ID], "Rome" and "Roman" ceased in world-historical parlance to mean simply a specific "city" on the Italian peninsula or "of or pertaining to citizens of that city"

These two expressions were blending with an expanding dream (or nightmare) of global or universal ("ecumenical") power, secular as well as religious
In the same way, "Caesar" ceased to be simply a family name and became a more generally applicable European institutional designation for absolute, autocratic, imperial power =
1. tsar in Russian
2. Kaiser in German
3. kaiser-i-rum [Roman Caesar] in Turkish (after Islamic Ottoman Turks brought down the Eastern Roman Empire in Constantinople in 1453 [ID])
\\
*--LOOP on Islam

<>0787:Nicaea| Seventh Ecumenical Council restored worship of icons, on the initiative of Byzantine Empress Irene

Imperial power in church affairs was consolidated. Thus the reciprocal role of the Church in imperial politics was also consolidated
The church/state relationship in Byzantium has been called "symphonia", and the action flowed in both directions between Church and state
Fordham University website presents main substance of all seven of the great ecumenical councils of the Christian Church
As conflict between east and west intensified, the "Patriarch of the West" [Pope in Rome] was at a distinct disadvantage
- The Pope had no emperor -- not yet, at least (see just below)
- Nor did he want his Church under the authority of an emperor like that of Byzantium
\\
*--Pavlidis,9
*--LOOP on "Church"

<>0789:Baltic Sea, southeastern Pomeranian shores | Slavs (largely what would later be known as Poles) and Esti [Estonians] subdued by Frankish King Karl

Karl's campaign was inspired by more than a little bit of the crusader or proselytizing spirit, bringing Christianity to the pagans of NE Europe
0800:814; In the direct aftermath of this original "crusade", Germanic speaking King Karl became Karlus Magnus (Charles the Great; better known later by the French translation "Charlemagne")
The Western Patriarch of the Universal Christian Church in Rome (the Pope) crowned him Emperor
The western half of the great Roman Empire was reviving itself under the leadership of the Pope and in league with the heirs of the very nomadic invaders who earlier destroyed it
Einhard's "Life of Charlemagne" [TXT]
MAP of the Frankish Empire [my thanks to Gwenael Henry, who signs her email "Gwen Free", for this map, substituted here for a faulty map that suggested incorrectly that Gwenael's proud Bretons were subdued by Charlemagne]
King Karl's achievements and ambitions, however, were followed by decline of the Frankish Empire and a setback to the dreams of "Western" restoration
Charlemagne and the Pope at first pretended to imperial authority over the whole Empire (east and west, Constantinople and Rome)
- Actuality soon prevailed =
- By 812, Emperor Constantine's nearly 500-year-old division of the old Roman Empire into east and west [ID] was once again recognized back in the now rusticated city Rome
Then more than a century later, the western imperial idea experienced a Quixotic revival as the Holy Roman Empire under German King Otto I
But from the 9th to the 16th century, Byzantium continued to be the main heir to the Roman Imperial tradition, contested in this inheritance less by Rome and "The West" than by new waves of Turkic warriors from the east [EG]
1937:As WW2 loomed, English author Rebecca West traveled through the Balkan territories of the old Byzantine Commonwealth and wrote a lengthy and still-inspiring travelogue which drew together the medieval history of the region with dark pre-WW2 20th-century events

*--Obolensky
*--Albert Brackmann, "The Beginnings of the National State in Medieval Europe and the Norman Monarchies", Medieval Germany,2=281-99 [DD126.B35] (an example of how narrow nationalist history found some compatibility with Nazism. See Gasiorowski below)
*1955:Speculum#30:550-60Z| J. Gasiorowski, "The conquest Theory of the Genesis of the Polish State". CF=Brackmann above
*2017au15: New Republic| "Racism, Medievalism, and the White Supremacists of Charlottesville [VA, USA]" | [E-TXT]

<>0803:831; Bulgar khans Krum and Omurtag ruled in an epoch of great ethnic and religious diversity in Bulgaria

<>0827:843; Sicily and southern Italy conquered by Arabic forces

<>0839:German source Annales Bertiniani [W] reported on warrior merchants who passed through German-speaking territories on their way to and from western Eurasian markets

This company called themselves collectively "Rhos"
At this time they lived in the northern regions of modern-day Russia, probably around the fortress city Novgorod
They were commanded by a "chacanus" [probably the German source's effort in Latin to capture what they heard from the boatmen =

"Chacanus" most likely was their Latin rendition of the common Pontic-Steppe Asian political term for commander/leader, "khan"]
Chacanus is not a likely Latin rendition of any Scandinavian term

These "Rhos" said they were originally, some time back, from the Baltic shores of the lower Scandinavian peninsula
But in their new homeland, these Rhos were variously called Rus' or Variagi or Dany [?Danes] [VSB,1=11]
846:Arabic source, Ibn-Khurdadhbih, described Rus' merchants and their fabulous routes [W]
- He identified these intrepid warrior merchants as "a kind of Slav", suggesting that by the middle of the 9th century these "Viking" boats contained some sort of mixture of Scandinavian/Slavic crews and possibly occasionally captains of mixed enthicity [VSB,1=9 | RRH,1=63-4]
We can reasonably assume that from their first appearance on the historical scene, these Rus' were an ethnic mix [KRR=14-21]
They have collectively come to be known as Vikings or Norsemen, but these terms may not always attach to a pure ethnic group
In other areas of Europe, other warrior merchant companies, originally from the Baltic shores of the Scandinavian peninsula and near-by islands [EG=Gotland], were beginning to make their appearance [EG]
Ironically here in the 21st century, multi-national NATO has made the island Gotland a front-edge menacing strong point against feared Russian attack on "The West" [ E-TXT]
\\
*--Viking routes [MAP] suggest that warrior merchants, not unlike the Rus' encircled all of Europe, along seacoasts in the north, west and south, and over river passages in the east
*--History of Sweden: Viking Age [E-TXT] In essence, this history of Sweden simply "shanghais" the history of Rus to serve Swedish history
*--Jones
*2017je29:BBC, "The first European settlement in the New World" [E-TXT]
*--YouTube explores reasons for 15th c. disappearance of Norsemen from Greenland

<>0852:First dated entry in Laurentian text of the Russian Chronicle (written long after this year) [CPC:58 | KRR=9-11]

CPC:59-205 covers origins of Russian history from 852 to 1116]
For account of who wrote the chronicles and when, see CPC:3-50
\\
*--Nora Chadwick, _The_Beginnings of Russian History: An Inquiry into Sources [DK70.A2c5]
*--LOOP on "Chronicle"

<>0852:Bulgarian khan Boris I [W] played Germans off against Byzantium in order to protect Bulgarian independence

<>0855c:Constantinople University the center of a Byzantine intellectual/spiritual renaissance

Patriarch Photius of Constantinople dispatched missionary/diplomatic ambassador to Arabs

For this most delicate and significant purpose, Photius chose scholar and future apostle to Slavs Constantine [Kiril or Cyril]
In these years in Baghdad the great Arabic university, The House of Wisdom, was coming into its full maturity
1258:Eventually, 400 years later, The House of Wisdom and its world's largest library was destroyed by attacking Mongols

LOOP on early history of the "university"

LOOP on Islam

<>0859:First dated entry in the Russian Nikonian Chronicle

The Nikonian Chronicle was written long after this year but with significant association of Russian history with the great contemporary golden age of Byzantium) [ZNC,1:15]
ZNC,1 covers approximately 270 years, 867-1130s
ZNC,2 covers about a century, 1132-1240 (decline of Kievan Rus')
ZNC,3 covers about 140 years, 1241-1381 (Mongol dominance)
ZNC,4 covers about 40 years 1382-1425 (Moscow consolidated power)
ZNC,5 covers about a century 1425-1520 (Muscovite grandeur, Ivan III "the Great")

<>0860:Byzantium| Patriarch of Constantinople Photius now sent scholar-monk Constantine [Kiril] on mission to Khazars

<>0862:980; Beginnings of Russian history
Origins of Kievan Rus'

<>0862:Slavs and Finns by this time paid tribute to "Viking" warrior-merchants

These "Vikings" were sometimes called "Norsemen" in western Europe and "Variagi" [Varangians], "Dany" [Danes], and Rus' in eastern Europe
In this year around the fortress city Novgorod, Slavic farming people "invited" Varangian Prince Rurik to rule, described in Chronicle [TXT] [Also in CPC:59-60 | Jones:244-6 | ZNC,1=16 | KRR=11 | RRH,1=11-12]
Rurik and two brothers considered Novgorod, Beloozero and Izborsk reliable strong points along a secure "route of the Rus' " to the Bolgars on the middle Volga and beyond them to the trading centers of Arabia and Asia
Soon they found portages to the upper drainage of the Dnepr river in the Valdai Hills and moved straight south toward Constantinople, via Kiev
Viking routes [ MAP#1 | MAP#2] | How does MAP#1 compare with MAP#2? This is a "historiographical" question]
Viking ship [pix] provided swift transport and ample room for freight as these warrior-merchant Rus' plied their routes
\\
*--[Viking ship video] Pressed for time? Begin video at ca. 20th minute and run to the 27th minute
*1981:| Omeljan Pritsak, _The_Origin of Rus' [DK73.P7] This is the most hyper-scholarly exploration of the question
*--Vernadsky,2=1-18 offers a general assessment of early Russian history
*--Jones
*--Joseph L. Wieczynski, _The_Russian Frontier: The Impact of Borderlands upon the Course of Early Russian History [DK18.7.W53]
*1920: Annual Report of the American Historical Association=163-71; reprinted in HRR,1=121-7| Michael Rostovtzeff, "The Origin of the Russian State on the Dnieper"
*1922:| Michael Rostovtzeff, _Iranians and Greeks in South Russia
*1930:| S. Runciman, History of the First Bulgarian Empire
*1936:| Aleksandr A. Vasiliev, The Goths in the Crimea
*1947:RRe#7:96-110| Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, "The Norman Theory and the Origin of the Russian State"| A UO undergraduate's reworked history-department senior thesis
*1954:| Henryk Paszkiewicz, The Origin of Russia. The Polish view
*1955:Speculum#28:324-44| Alexander S. Vucinich, "The First Russian State: An Appraisal of the Soviet Theory"| A "historiographical" essay, reprinted in Black.REWRITING:123-42 [DK38.B5]
*2017se12:The Guardian, "Does New DNA Evidence Prove that there were Female Viking Warlords?" [ E-TXT]
*2018se12:The Guardian, "Viking ship burial discovered in Norway just 50cm underground" [E-TXT
*--LOOP on Islam
*--LOOP on "Chronicle"

<>0863+:Moravian (Czech) lands [W] | Prince Rastislav and other Slavic princes asked Byzantine Emperor Michael III to send "bishop and teachers" of the Christian faith, to preach in native Slavic language [Chronicle TXT]

Byzantine Patriarch Photius dispatched Cyril and his brother Methodius (Kiril i Mefodii) to the Slavic lands of Prince Rastislav [sometimes written "Rostislav"] [VSB,1=12-13]

The two missionary brothers, emissaries both of the Byzantine Orthodox Church and the Emperor, were from Salonica and native speakers of "Slavonic". They were well suited to bring the Eastern Orthodox liturgy to the Slavs
They were already experienced emissaries [EG#1 | EG#2]
Cyril devised for the Slavs an alphabet called the Glagolitic, supplanted soon by the Greek-based alphabet, named the "Cyrillic" in honor of the scholar-diplomat-monk
For examples of Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets, see Obolensky=136-53 and HML, which is a "duo-page" edition, Russian-English
Check this replica of the oldest surviving use of the Cyrillic alphabet, then hop back here

The Byzantine Emperor and Patriarch Photius had good reason to respond favorably to Rastislav's request =

First was the desire to forestall the efforts of the Western Patriarch (the Pope) to extend his church into these territories
Second was the need to restore some sort of security against growing threats from the Bulgarians and Rus'
Third was to strengthen their hand against the Khazars

The missions of Cyril combined diplomatic with religious purposes in a critical era of European history
Very soon Bulgaria and the Rus' entered into the picture of Byzantine religious or Church diplomacy
\\
*--Paragraph on Cyril and Methodius [TXT]
*--Imre Boba, _Nomads, Northmen and Slavs: Eastern Europe in the Ninth Century [DR39.B6]
*--Dimitri Obolensky, _Byzantium and the Slavs, ch.9 and/or ch.10 [df541.o25]
*--C. A. Macartney, _The_Magyars in the Ninth Century
*--LOOP on "Church"

<>0865se:Bulgarian khan Boris baptized by Byzantine missionaries, but continued to court Rome
*--Squeezed between the two remains of the great Roman Empire, West and East, Bulgaria had to be cunning. And there was yet a third force at work here =
*--Following Boris' baptism, Turkic boyars within Bulgaria itself were reluctant to give up their customary pagan beliefs. Old Bulgar military elites led a stubborn pagan reaction
\\
Obolensky:84-94

<>0866:Byzantium | Varangians or Rus' recently launched their first attack on Constantinople, led by Viking warrior-merchants Askold and Dir

1420:MAP of Constantinople
The attack was described in the Chronicle [TXT]
On the way down the Dnepr River to the Black Sea and then on to Byzantium, Askold and Dir took the vital strong-point Kiev from the Khazars
The attack on Constantinople came perilously close to success and shook the Byzantine sense of security along its northern frontiers. Patriarch Photius left a description [VSB,1=11]
Now, within five years of Askold and Dir's attack, Photius described how some of these warrior merchants, these Rus' and their Slavic crews, abandoned their pagan faith(s) and became Christian [VSB,1=11-12]
//
*--LOOP on "Chronicle"

<>0867:1056; Byzantium's 189-year "Golden Age", the "Macedonian Epoch" in the history of the Roman Empire, now centered at the margins of "Europe" and "Asia" (stretching chronologically over approximately the next six SAC screens)
\\
*--Summary [TXT]
*--Pavlidis,10

<>0867:886; Byzantine Emperor Basil I (Vasilii) the Macedonian reigned almost 20 years at opening of the "Golden Age" [ZNC,1=14,20]

<>0867:869; Rome in St.Peter's Cathedral | Byzantine scholar/diplomatic and priest, Cyril celebrated mass in Slavonic language (troubling western church officials accustomed to the mass in Latin -- GO 879)

<>0874:Byzantine treaty with Rus' in which an Orthodox archbishop was posted in Kiev

<>0879:Patriarch of Rome (Pope John VIII) issued Bull against use of Slavonic language in Christian liturgy

Catholic/German and Orthodox/Slavonic factions entered a stormy period, and Cyril served as a "lightning rod", here at the end of his historical quarter-century mission
The "oecumenical" [universal] Christian Church was in the grip of a serious crisis. Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy were splitting apart
One of the seismic historical "hotspots" in this struggle, Croatia, came under secure authority of Rome in league with medieval German "imperial" power
\\
*--LOOP on "Church"

<>0880:912; Kiev became headquarters of Varangian Prince Oleg, down from Novgorod after he defeated and killed Askold and Dir

Thus Kiev was solidly linked to the system of princely rule in Varangian city-fortresses
Oleg ruled in Kiev for 32 years [CPC:60-71 | ZNC,1=29-49]
Oleg's move down from Novgorod was an important sign that Rus' power felt increasingly secure in relationship to the unstable Pontic Steppes
Novgorod remained one of the cities in the emerging system of Kievan mestnichestvo [ID], but it became something of a backwater for almost two centuries
Kievan Rus' taking shape, moving closer to and aiding Byzantium in its efforts to "pacify" the Pontic Steppes
Kievan and Byzantine interests were mutually served in the struggle against Khazar power, and both were vexed by Pecheneg marauders
\\
*--Vernadsky,2=22-28
*1959:| Boris Grekov, _Kiev Rus [DK71.G713] (Several editions of old original Soviet history of Kievan Rus')
*1965:| Boris A. Rybakov, _Early Centuries of Russian History [DK71.R9313] One of the best Soviet historians of early Russia
*1989:| Boris A. Rybakov, _Kievan Rus [DK80.R913]
*--LOOP on "Chronicle"

??Integrate GLOS/CMH from here on in SAC

<>0895:959; For six decades, Pecheneg marauders careened out of the Pontic Steppes along the lower Danube drainages, pressuring Magyars [Hungarians] westward and northward

Magyar horsemen in their turn ravaged Bulgaria and moved northwestward into Slavic Moravian [Czech] lands, eventually clashing there with German (Catholic) power
Magyars finally settled in lands which included territory now known as Hungary
\\
*--Obolensky=153-63

<>0903:913; Ibn-Rusta on Rus' [VSB,1=9-10]

<>0911se02:Constantinople | Byzantine Empire signed Commercial treaty with Russia (after Rus' Prince Oleg's raids launched near the end of his long reign)

Chronicle TXT [Other locations = VSB,1=20-1| WAL,1=41-4 | RRH,1=15-18]
Scandinavian names were still characteristic of these warrior-merchants
Varangians and Slavs, as well as other ethnic groups were clearly working, doing business, fighting, and living (breeding) together as Rus'
In the following year, Oleg died. The Russian Chronicle perpetuated a great mythic tale about this event [TXT]
\\
*--Obolensky=184-7
*--LOOP on "Chronicle"

<>0912:945; Kievan Prince Igor's reign (33 years!) [ZNC,1=49-52]

Notice how "Ingvar" was now Igor; his wife "Helgi" now Olga
Their son was given the hyper-Slavic name Sviatoslav [suggesting something like "sacred glory"]
These erstwhile Scandinavian princes were now melted into a "Russia" best thought of as a mélange of "East Slavic" peoples (proto-Russian, proto-Ukrainian, proto-Belarussian, undifferentiated by modern "national consciousness" and probably not much different in language or culture)
Over a century, very likely, they become thoroughly intermixed with Viking warrior genes and Finnish genes of the northern hunter-gatherer folks they lived among for eons
This cultural assimilation that made up the Rus' can be compared and contrasted with the English experience under Norman rule [ID]
It was a long process, but agrarian Slavic tribal populations took to the warrior-commercial ways of Scandinavian Varangians
And those Scandinavians, for their part, were by now thoroughly absorbed into the culture of native Slavic peoples whom they originally menaced and dominated
Over the previous century or more, the Rus' had by degrees been largely "Slavicized"
In Kiev (the old Khazar stronghold) assimilation was at a rapid rate in the time of Prince Igor
913:Northwest shores of the Caspian Sea| Khazar and Bolgar forces clashed with a Russian expedition
\\
*--Vernadsky,2=28-58. Vernadsky insisted on the "Eurasian" qualities of Russia

<>0917au19:Bulgarian tsar Semeon [ID] defeated Byzantine army, built vast Bulgarian Christian tsardom
*--0927:Treaty with Byzantium ratified Bulgarian gains
Remember why we represent the descendants of these early nomadic Turks with two names, "Bulgars" and "Bolgars" [ID] =

Bulgars split from main body of Turkish nomads and went south into the Danube frontier and formed a settled Christian kingdom, Bulgaria
Bolgars split from main body of Turkish nomads and went north into the middle-Volga frontier and formed a settled Islamic kingdom =

<>0921:922 ; Bolgar chieftain Almis, whose domain spread along the left bank of the Volga River, below the confluence with the Kama River, sent a diplomatic mission to Muktadir, khalif (Islamic Caliph) in Baghdad [ID]

Muktadir responded to Almis' expressed interest in closer ties

He sent a diplomatic mission which included Ibn Fadlan [sometimes "Ibn-Fahdlan"] [W-ID]
The Arabic mission found the pagan Bolgar leader and his wife ill. They soon recovered, and they concluded that this was caused by the power of the Islamic faith
Then there followed some new victories over the Khazars, and other enticements =
- sophisticated and attractive Arabic notions of rule by khan
- including development of crafts and agricultural skills
- state revenue from a tax in horses, skins, etc.
- plus tribute of 10% of all trade carried out by Bolgar subjects
- All these things seemed to recommend Islam to the Bolgars
Bolgar khan Almis and his wife found sufficient reason to reject paganism, to accept the Islamic faith, and to go on pilgrimage to Mecca, traveling through Baghdad

The strong fortress city named Bolgar in the middle-Volga valley administered a system of fortress strong-points spreading eastward across the southwestern Siberian Steppes
Ibn Fadlan and other Arabic sources mention "Sivara" [?Siberia]
Ibn Fadlan was also on mission to Khazaria
While on this important and complex mission along the Volga River, Ibn Fadlan met and described the Rus'

The most famous paragraphs from his account deal with the funeral of a Rus' commander
FIND "chieftains die" in this E-TXT and read to the end of the translated text
Be forewarned = This is a gruesome bit of first-hand information on the ways of the Rus'
Excerpts from Ibn Fadlan [VSB,1=11 | Jones=164 and 425 | DMR2=11-16]

Many Arab sources described the pagan Rus' and Slavs
\\
*--Viking Fire Funeral (Up Helly Aa) [YouTube]
*--Ship on Fire! Viking Up Helly Aa festival heats up in Scotland [YouTube]
*--LOOP on Islam

<>0941:Constantinople attacked by Prince Igor, but Greek fire repulsed the Rus'

<>0944:Byzantium | Prince Igor's treaty w/Constantinople in the last year of his long reign [CPC:72-3 | VSB,1=21-2]

<>0945:962; Kievan Grand Princess Olga reigned (17 years) [CPC:78-84 | ZNC,1=54-63 | DMR2:30-4 | DMR3:22-5 | RRH,1=18-21 | ZMR2:54-8]

She was the wife of Prince Igor [ID] who had been treacherously slain
The Russian Chronicles reveled over the way she took her revenge [TXT]
In these years, among the Kievan elite, pagan culture and Christian civilization clashed under pressure from competing Byzantine Orthodoxy and German Catholicism
Kievan Rus' was assuming a critical role in the northern frontiers of the Byzantine "commonwealth"
*--LOOP on "Chronicle"

<>0950s:Bulgaria | Bogomil "heresy" flourished (religious views unacceptable to conventional Christian theologians)

Followers of the Slavic priest Bogomil combined Gnostic [W] concepts of salvation through knowledge [gnosis = knowledge] with Manichaean doctrines of struggle between evil and goodness
Third century Persian [Iranian] visionary Mani long ago revived traditions of Zoroastrianism [W], which continued to influence Christian churches
The Bogomils were intensely "Slavic-minded" [maybe we would say "nationalistic" in our time] and therefore both anti-Turkic and anti-Byzantine, and far from friendly to Rome
Their Bulgarian home has been the eye of a great and enduring 1000-year European historical storm between East and West
\\
*2017ap06:BBC | "The obscure religion that shaped the West (Zoroastrianism)" [E-TXT]
*--Obolensky=119-27
*--LOOP on "Church"

<>0956:Baghdad | Arabian scholar Masudi on Slavs [VSB,1=10-11]

1000:Arabic description of the city Baghdad [W]
2003mr21:A thousand years later, palatial Baghdad neighborhoods (described in the first paragraph of the document just above) were put under the spell of US "shock and awe" [pix]
Baghdad one month later = Satellite image [pix]

<>0957:Byzantium | Kievan Grand Princess Olga traveled with a large diplomatic delegation to Constantinople and Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus

Olga was baptized (probably for the second time) [Chronicle account in RRC2,1=6]
Constantine Porphyrogenitus described the Rus' in _De_administrando imperio [DF593.C6613| English translation plus original Greek| Excerpts = VSB,1=23-4 | DMR2:27-9 | DMR3=19-21 | RRH,1=64-6]
In his account, Constantine gave Slavonic and "Russian" [i.e., Scandinavian] names to the Dnepr rapids, indicating that both languages were in use among the Kievan Rus'
\\
*--Alan Kimball, "Olga and Anna and Christianization of Rus' " [TXT]
*--Obolensky=164-201, especially 181-201 (Byzantine diplomacy in the Steppes) and 189-91 (Kiev in particular)
*--LOOP on "Chronicle"

<>0961:German King Otto sent Catholic missionaries to Kievan Princess Olga

0962:973; Otto became "the Great" as he sought to restore and even expand Charlemagne's grand regime of 150 years earlier [ID]

Otto, too, associated his rule with the Patriarch of Rome (the Pope)
For the next 800 years a German dominated imperial power was sometimes a fiction or pretense but was given the flattering designation "Holy Roman Empire"
It loomed on the western borders of the Orthodox "Byzantine Commonwealth", in eastern Europe, in the Balkan Peninsula and Russia
West and South Slavs (Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, etc.) came under German Catholic rule

Kievan Princess Olga was unruffled. She played German Catholics off against Byzantine Orthodox Greeks
As a result, the pagan culture of Kievan Rus' found itself between a rock and a hard place as Ol'ga's 17-year reign entered its last year
Prince and Princess, husband and wife, Igor and Ol'ga together reigned for a half-century
\\
*2004wi:SlR#63,4:771-93| Francis Butler, "A Woman of Words: Pagan Ol'ga in the Mirror of Germanic Europe"

<>0962:972; Kievan Prince Sviatoslav [ZNC,1=57-71 | DMR2:34-8 | DMR3:26-30 | ZMR2:58-65 | ZMR1:59-65]

0966:969; Sviatoslav campaigned against and destroyed the Khazar khaganate, for over three centuries a powerful force in the Pontic Steppes
Sviatoslav's campaign possibly coordinated with Byzantine invasion of Arabic Syria, suggesting close Byzantine/Russian diplomatic relations
0967:971; Sviatoslav invaded Bolgar lands
0968:969; Kiev besieged by Pechenegs, who thus served Byzantine interests by providing counter-balance to the growing power of Byzantium's ambitious ally, Kiev
Here we see an example of what Europeans came mendaciously to call "Byzantine diplomacy"
0971:Constantinople | Sviatoslav and Byzantine Emperor Johannes Tsimiskes signed treaty

Sviatoslav traveled in "a kind of Scythian boat" to meet the Emperor
He manned an oar like the other Rus'
He was blue-eyed and wore a bushy moustache
He shaved his head, except for a lock on one side of his head, a sign of his nobility
He wore one golden ear-ring with two pearls and a ruby set between them
He, like all the Rus', wore white garments, but his were cleaner than the rest. [As described by Leo Diaconus in Jones:261-2]

0972: Pechenegs ambushed and killed Prince Sviatoslav at the Dnepr rapids, ending his 10-year reign
The Pechenegs fabricated a cup from his skull and drank from it [ZMR2:62-5 | DMR3:56-7]
\\
*1961de:SEER#40:44-57| A. D. Stokes, "The Background and Chronology of the Balkan Campaigns of Svyatoslav Igorevich"
*1962je:SEER#40:466-96| A. D. Stokes, "The Balkan Campaigns of Svyatoslav Igorevich"
*--Vernadsky,2=42-48
*--Tamara T. Rice, _The_Scythians [DK34.S4R5]

<>0980:1223;KIEVAN RUS
FROM PEAK THROUGH DECLINE

<>0976:1025; Byzantine Emperor Basil II reigned 49 years (jointly with his brother Constantine VIII)
*--1018:Byzantine Emperor Basil's successful campaigns (aided on and off by Kiev) devastated Bulgaria. Basil was dubbed "The Bulgar Slayer"

<>0980:1015; Kievan Grand Prince Vladimir reigned (35 years!)

At the beginning of his reign Prince Vladimir sponsored a vigorous pagan revival

Vladimir seemed to be reversing trends of the previous two decades =
Noble interest in Christianity grew steadily followed his grandmother Olga's conversion [ID]
Grandson Vladimir now created pagan pantheon on the great hill overlooking the Dnepr and Podol inlets near his palace
[pix showing ruins with inscription = Otsiuda poshla russkaia zemlia (From here sprang forth the land of Rus)]. Photo by Sasha Kashirin
Vladimir erected a large monument to the Slavic god of stormy heavens, Perun, the Russian version of the Scandinavian god "Thor"
Some pagan statuary from this period, thanks to Sasha Kashirin = [pix#1 | pix#2]

But Vladimir's destiny lay elsewhere =
0986:Kievan prince Vladimir received delegations representing the religions of four other powerful rulers [RRH,1=27-8] =

Bolgars and their Islamic faith
Germans and their Catholicism
Khazars and their Judaic beliefs
Byzantium and its Orthodox Christianity

Then Vladimir sent out his own emissaries to make enquiries [RRH,1=29-32]
0988:989; Kiev Prince Vladimir sent 6000 Rus' to help Byzantine Emperor Basil II and demanded in return Basil's sister Anna's hand in marriage

Basil promised because he needed Kievan help = Constantinople was threatened by rebel general Bardas Phocas from the eastern region of the Anatolian Peninsula (often called "Asia Minor" -- MAP)
Prince Vladimir captured Kherson in the Crimea, perhaps because Basil balked on his promise
Kiev was now the major power north of Constantinople
Negotiations continued, resulting in Vladimir's diplomatic decision to be baptized a Christian and to declare the Orthodox Church official in his realm

Christianization described in Excerpt from Chronicle TXT | Full TXT [Other locations = CPC=110-19 | ZNC,1=74-122 | KRR:63-71 | VSB,1=25-6 | DMR2:38-44 | DMR3:30-5 | ZMR1:65-71 | ZMR2:43-83 | WAL,1=65-71]
Vladimir, who was earlier the great champion of pagan revival among the Rus', had the great wooden statue of Perun pulled down and cast into the Dnepr River

Not so far down river Perun came ashore, exciting the religious imagination of Kievan pagans, seeing in this the return of their great god [Chronicle TXT description]
An Orthodox monastery, Vydubichi [lxt#1 | lxt#2], had to be built on this spot in order to preempt the pagan desire to make this their new holy place

Vladimir promulgated a law protecting the interests of the newly established Russian Orthodox Church and defining its independence from interference. Does this law suggest separation of church and state? [W] [VSB,1=39]
Russian/Byzantine relations were now very close, now both diplomatically and institutionally =
Kievan Rus' mirrored Byzantine "symphonia" in the relationship of Church to State
2016je07:Fontanka| В КПРФ предлагают отменить празднование Дня России 12 июня [E-TXT]
2016no03:Независимая газета| "Путин примет участие в открытии памятника князю Владимиру" [E-TXT]
2017mr19:Независимая газета| В Киеве памятник князю Владимиру облили краской [E-TXT]
\\
*--Kimball, "Olga and Anna & Christianization of Rus' " [E-TXT]
*--Vernadsky,2=56-74 on Vladimir and Christianization
*--Florovsky and Nikolai Andreev debate about paganism in TDU
*--Florovsky,5:2-9 [includes Father Georges Florovsky's critique of paganism]
*--Vernadsky,2=48-56 on Russian paganism
*2018au10: The Economist| "Neo-paganism offers something old and something new - Reviving pre-Christian religions" [E-TXT]
*2018oc30: WPo| "Russian neopagans move their faith from the fringes" [E-TXT]
*--Florovsky, "The Problem of Old Russian Culture" [TDU with full discussion=125-166]
*--Obolensky=134-153, 191-201
*----------------. "Russia's Byzantine Heritage" in RRC1:201-15 [also in CSH and HRR]
*----------------. _Byzantium and the Slavs [DK67.5.B95 O26]
*--Boris A. Rybakov, et al., _Christianity and Russia [BR932 .K4813]
*--Henrik Birnbaum, ed., CSS#12 (1984)
*--George P. Fedotov, _Russian Religious Mind (1946, reprint 1960 [BX485 .F4] )
*--Eve Levin, _Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900-1700 [HQ18 .E852 L48]
*--Konrad Alexander, _Old Russia and Byzantium: The Byzantine and Oriental Origins of Russian Culture [PG3002.K6]
*--Georg Ostrogorsky, _History of the Byzantine State [DF552.5 .o813]
*--I. Shevchenko, "Byzantine Cultural Influences". In Black.REWRITING:143-91 [DK38 .B5]
*---------------------, "Byzantine Source of Muscovite political ideas" [CSH]
*--Aleksandr A. Vasiliev, _History of the Byzantine Empire [DF552 .V3]
*--Internet slide show presents elementary and sometimes all-too-cute summary of early Russian history [W]
*--Albert Leong, ed.,_The_Millennium: Christianity and Russia (A.D. 988-1988) [BR932. M54]
*2017au29:BBC News | Paganism is 'second most popular' faith in south-west England [E-TXT]
||
*--LOOP on "Chronicle"
*--LOOP on Islam

<>0987:1697; New World, Central America, Mexico, Yucatan, for 700 years the site of a great Mayan civilization

<>0993:Bulgarian Tsar Samuel [W] had commemorative tablet inscribed to the memory of his family

This table is the earliest surviving document in the "Cyrillic" alphabet

*--1018:Byzantine Emperor Basil's successful campaigns (aided on and off by Kiev) devastated Bulgaria. Basil was dubbed "The Bulgar Slayer"
*--The first great epoch of Bulgaria was at its end
*--For the next several centuries, Bulgaria was tossed about in what we might call "the Balkan maelstrom", the result of the grinding of the two great intersecting historical-seismic fault lines, east/west and north/south

<>1015:Martyrdom of Boris and Gleb the most traumatic moment in a series of internecine struggles among Rus' princes [DMR3:47-56]

These two peaceable brothers were victims of the increasingly frequent and violent disputes that broke out over right of succession up and down the hierarchy of Kievan princely cities [CPC=126-30 | ZNC,1=123-8 | KRR:22-5 | ZMR1:87-91 | ZMR2=101-5]

The hierarchical political system, known as mestnichestvo, established the rank of ruling princes and their city-states
Mestnichestvo evolved over the 150 years since the "invitation to the Rus'" [ID]
The system was venerable but always prone to instability
Ambitious and impatient princes frequently tried to "cut into the line" ahead of turn, at a level or into a "place" [mesto] which their seniority or "mestnichestvo" rank did not qualify them

Boris and Gleb were sons of Prince Vladimir and one of his wives, maybe Byzantine Princess Anna. They occupied a position of high esteem among native Russians elevated to Christian sainthood =

Icon depicted martyred saints Boris and Gleb
Boris & Gleb.gif (71803 bytes)

\\
*--LOOP on "Church"

<>1018:Pechenegs described by German missionary among them as omnium paganorum crudelissimi

The Chronicles lamented the constant Pecheneg threat to Kiev [DMR3:56-7]
But the pagan Pechenegs were at the end of their 15 decades of fame
The Polovtsy briefly but famously replaced them as Steppe-bred menace
And then a fresh wave of warrior nomads washed over the Pontic Steppes and left an imprint on the course of history that remains strong to this day
The Turks were coming =
\\
*--Obolensky=180
*--LOOP on "Chronicle"

<>1029:Out of Turkmen/Bukhara Steppes, Seljuk Turks (a Tatar people out of the Altai region of modern-day Mongolia) irrupted into Arab/Persian [Iranian] world

This marked the end of the great four-century long Arabic era, but it marked the beginning of first Seljuk then Ottoman Turkish grandeur
These Turks adopted the Muslum faith and assured that the Arabic legacy lived on as a great Islamic world civilization, particularly after they seized hold on the administrative and physical infrastructure of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 [ID]
Thus opened the second large epoch of Turkish influence on eastern European history. [Remember the first epoch]
\\
*--Pavlidis,11 (includes account of final dynastic period of Byzantine history)
*--LOOP on Islam

<>1036:1054; Kievan Prince Yaroslav Vladimirovich, known as Yaroslav Mudryi [the Wise], reigned (18 years) [CPC=136-42 | ZNC,1=129-51 | VSB,1=26-7 | ZMR2:71-3]
\\
*--Vernadsky,2=79-83

<>1035:Kiev Cathedral of St. Sophia built

<>1037:Kiev became the Metropolitan See (throne or headquarters of the Russian Orthodox Church)

The office "Metropolitan" was the Byzantine equivalent of the "Bishop" in the Roman church
Prince Yaroslav Mudryi issued statute in support of the Kievan Orthodox Church [VSB,1=39-40 | DMR2:51-4 | DMR3:41-5]
1037:1118; Three generations of Kievan scholar-monks composed the original and most substantial primary source on early Russian history, "The Tale of Times Gone By" [Povest' vremennykh let] more often simply The Russian Primary Chronicle [Nachal'naia letopis'] [E-TXT (Thanks to Melody Charles for this URL)]
\\
*--LOOP on "Chronicle"
*--LOOP on "Church"

<>1050s:Viking saga of Harald Hardradi and Viking runes [KRR=11-13]

<>1051:Kievan Princess Mariia (Yaroslav Mudryi's daughter) married French King Henry I

The Russian princess signed the nuptial documents twice, once in Cyrillic script and once in Latin
The French monarch scrawled his illiterate "X"
\\
*1000:1100; A great epoch in the history of the Kievan City-State [KRR=30-38]
*1000:1400; Women of Novgorod [KRR=54-60]

<>1051:Kiev-Pechersk Lavra [Great Kievan Cave Monastery] founded [ZMR2=105-16 | Official Pechersk website]
Latterday celebration of Christmas liturgy at Pechersk
A concert of Pechersk Bells (tenor bell melody sounds only in last 45 seconds)
Computerized cartoon tour of monastery grounds (Russian narrative)

Ilarion [Hilarion], 1^st Russian Metropolitan (Bishop) of Orthodox Church, delivered "Sermon on Law and Grace" [ZMR1:79-81 | ZMR2:85-8]
Ilarion also delivered a "Eulogy of Prince Vladimir and Prince Yaroslav" [VSB,1=27-8 | DMR3:45-7 | WAL,1=45-8]
"Lives of the Saints" became major religious but also esthetic expressions of Kievan civilization
EG= Feodosii's life of Nestor and sermon "On Patience and Love" [FTS=11-49 | ZMR2=116-34] and
Life of Feodosii [KRR:67-71]
170 years after the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra was founded, the greatest Kievan cultural masterpiece was completed there, "The Paterik" [ID]
Even as the political system of princely cities in hierarchical relationship to Kiev deteriorated and on the very eve of Mongol invasion, the Russian Orthodox Church stood at the center of Kievan high culture ["civilization"]
\\
*--Hubert Faenson, _Early Russian Architecture [NA5681.F3313]
*2017my02: The Moscow Times | "Russia's Ancestral Architecture" [ E-TXT]
*2017my30: Novaya gazeta | In connection with the intense nationalistic crisis involving Ukraine and Russia (2013+), debates rage about what is Ukrainian and what is Russian in the medieval period and thereafter, especially in this era of high-civilization in Kiev in the time of Yaroslav Mudryi (see Princess Mariia above). One of the finer Russian newspapers, Novaia gazeta, here makes the strong and plausible argument that in these pre-modern years there was neither a "Russia" nor a "Ukraine" [E-TXT]
*--LOOP on "Church"

<>1054:1073; First Russian law code, Pravda Russkaia [E-TXT#1 | E-TXT#2]
*--Some printed excerpts = VML:26-56 | KRR:26-9 | RRC2,1=24-5 | VSB,1=35-6,36-8 | DMR2:44-50 | DMR3:36-41 | WAL,1=45-8 | RRH,1=43-6]
*--The law code of Yaroslav Mudryi [E-TXT | Excerpts = KRR:50-4]

<>1054:1237; Kievan political disorder (over 180 years!) [ZNC,1=151-255 and ZNC,2=Whole volume | KRR:24-6 | VSB,1=29-30 | DMR2:55-63]

Feudal disintegration of Kiev

A reasonably coherent hierarchical association of princely city-states
A confederation held together by what is called "mestnichestvo"
Functioning in beneficial client or vassal relationship to Byzantium

Now Kiev was becoming a fragmented network of feudal principalities
At the same time, ties with Byzantium were weakening
Kievan Rus' at the end of Yaroslav Mudryi's reign and the beginning of disorder [MAP]
\\
*--LOOP on "feudalism"

<>1054:Great Schism of Byzantine Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic churches

Christendom now clearly split into two big blocs, "East" and "West" as Rome drifted away from its Eurasian matrix
A serious cultural "fault line" ran through the Balkan peninsula

Slavic national groups became divided along confessional lines
EG= "South-Slavic" [Yugoslav] peoples =

Croats became Catholic
Serbs became Orthodox

Further north, Catholic Poles found themselves on the western edge of the fault line and Orthodox Russia on the eastern
Slavic peoples between these two (EG=Belarusians and Ukrainians) scrambled for balance between religiously-inspired clashing forces

1521:A half millennium later, a second great schism further doomed the universalist dream of ecumenical "Christendom" =

The Protestant Reformation [LOOP] spread in north-western Europe and severely damaged the power of the Patriarch in Rome (Pope)
The big gathering concept "Christendom" would now give way to the big gathering concept "Europe"
And both would be increasingly subordinated to the gathering power of multiple monarchical nation-states

In "The West", the Christian Church was slipping away from the centers of imperial or monarchical power
But the Church held on in south and eastern Europe for some time longer
Nonetheless, the 189-year Byzantine "Macedonian Epoch", the Golden Age, was coming to a close

Early English "parliament" [TXT]

<>1063: Novgorod Metropolitan [Bishop] Luka Zhidiata gave instructions to brethren [WAL,1=55-5]

1071:Novgorod| Pagan believers revolted against Christian authority [VSB,1=30]

<>1066:England taken under power of Norman King William "the Conqueror", scion of a powerful Norseman or Viking tribe [ID]

In the 900s, Normans sailed in from Scandinavian homeports and settled on the Atlantic coast of modern-day France (Normandy) [W]
They were now a long-assimilated French-speaking feudal dukedom but retained much of the Viking taste for projecting power across the waters
1061:1091; Sicily taken by Normans
In the decades after conquest of the English Island, the Frenchified Normans in turn Frenchified the vanquished Germanic Anglo-Saxon elites there and laid the foundations for the evolution of a hybrid Romance/Germanic language today called "English"
\\
*--Vikings in Normandy "Allthemeds" documentary (pt1 does the job) [YouTube]
*--YouTube history of the "English" language
*--Hugh M. Thomas, _The_English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation and Identity, 1066-c1220 [E-TXT]
*--LOOP on "feudalism"

<>1067:Kievan Rus'| Out on the Eurasian steppes, Polovtsian raids began [DMR2=64-72 | DMR3=59-64]

Polovtsy were fierce nomadic warriors. Of Turkic-Altaic origins, they were also known as Cumans, Kumany, and Kipchaki
Their appearance on the Pontic Steppes destabilized the region, reaching all the way to Novgorod, and contributed to the decline of Kiev [CrNVG:5]
Polovtsy were a continuation of the sort of Pontic disorder previously presented by Pechenegs
A larger Turkish onslaught scattered the Polovtsy before them, pushing them out of the way and northward across the Pontic Steppes
For Kiev, the Polovtsy were a premonition of the Golden Horde two centuries later
\\
*1868:Eight-hundred years after the Polovtsian era, Russian chemist, physician and composer, Aleksandr Borodin, wrote "Polovtsian Dances" for his opera PRINCE IGOR [YouTube]

<>1071au19:Armenian frontier battle between Byzantium and Seljuk Turks at Manzikert

The Manzikert battle reflected the same larger processes of demographic instability suggested just above
Alp Arslan led the Seljuk cavalry armies to easy victory. They humiliated Byzantium
Seljuk Turks were by this time confident they were the heirs of the great Arabic empire of Muhammad
Not only that. They can also be thought of as precursors to the Mongol invasions a century and a half later [ID]
Now settled on the Anatolian peninsula, they also frequently thought of themselves as inheritors of the Byzantine Empire
Seljuk Turks employed the Turkish expression "Rum" [Rome] to describe their new Anatolian possessions
\\
*--Two paragraph TXT on the significance of this

<>1076fe22:Rome | Pope Gregory VII deposed Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV [TXT]
*--This was a great symbolic moment in the history of church/state relations in regions under the authority of the Roman Church
*1087:Pope Gregory VII issued Dictatus papae [E-TXT], showing that the Patriarch of Rome was going to fight to hold his grip on power in "The West" for as long as possible
*--The chosen method was to enforce the separation of the power of the Church from the power of the Prince

<>1095no27:France, at Clermont | Pope Urban II delivered a sermon [TXT] which appealed for a western European Crusade to save the Holy Land from infidel Turks (and anyone else who got in the way or offered possibility of booty)

1095:1204; Over a century, Catholic lands launched four great crusades into eastern Mediterranean territories and even into northeastern Europe in an increasingly disfocused aggressive mission. The Crusades were epochal examples of "mission creep" [ID]
- Europe and the Mediterranean world in the time of the crusades [MAP]
- 1097:1150; Crusade#1 | Near Eastern Holy Lands occupied for a half century by west European Crusaders, aristocratic adventurers seeking plunder wherever they could find it
- Increasingly crusaders, largely recruited out of central and northern Europe, lent their sacrificial energies to causes controlled and manipulated by sordid and opportunistic "business" interests of various Italian merchant city-states
- The actions of Crusaders eventually lost contact with both the western Catholic Church and its fledgling western Empire
- 1146:Crusade#2 [ID]
- 1189:Crusade#3
- 1200:1204; Crusade#4 (the Fourth Crusade) [Wki] did nothing to liberate the Holy Land, but had especially dolorous consequences for eastern Europe =
- 1212:Crusade#5 (usually unnumbered but often called the "Children's Crusade") was tragic and foolish
- 1291: Syria finally liberated itself from Crusader occupation
- A summary account of the full series of "crusades" extends into the 1400s [Wki]
The crusades echoed on down the years beyond the 1400s =

Toward the end of the crusading era outlined above, in the early 1200s, Teutonic Knights began to move northward into the pagan or heathen frontiers of eastern Europe

Teutonic Knights were a military/religious order that had, since the third crusade, settled in the Holy Lands
Now they spread into the lands of Germanic (Prussian) and Slavic (Polish) farming people along the south-eastern Baltic coast
Beginning as allies of German-speaking Austrian Holy Roman imperial monarchy, Teutonic Knights took advantage of the disordered lines of authority within that empire and soon secured a certain independence from Vienna
They shifted allegiance directly back to their Church superior, the Pope

Teutonic impact on the regional economy was mixed

Looking backwards toward old medieval practices, they bound local villagers in an unusually harsh version of serfdom
Looking forward toward the early modern European world, they encouraged development of relatively independent market-city economies [GO Hanse]

Teutonic Knights spawned and were closely allied with a similar order =
The Livonian Order was made up of Catholic warrior monks who pushed further east of Teutonic territories [ID]

Like the Teutonic Knights, they enserfed the rural, indigenous Estonian and Latvian peoples
This was long before Russian serfdom was codified

Unlike the Teutonic Knights, the Livonian Order did not foster market-city independence in their territories

Together, Livonian and Teutonic Knights brought constant military pressure to bear on pagan Lithuanians
This was the last big moment in the nearly half millennium-long Christian/pagan confrontation among the Slavs

NB! this crusade against pagan Slavs was not a "Christian/infidel" confrontation as down south in the Holy Lands

Together, Teutonic Knights and the Livonian Order could be called militarist "Westernizers"

These invading warriors settled and introduced a hyper-feudal/aristocratic order to eastern Europe
That order insisted on sharp, almost "racial" distinctions between those nobles who ruled and those commoners who worked for those who ruled
That order hyper-inflated the importance of spurious categorical distinctions based on secondary differences such as mother tongue and tribal background
That order held that the simple fact of birth in superior families made one permanently and inalterably due certain titles, privileges and exemptions [exceptions from general rules]
In eastern Europe, titles, privileges and exemptions had not been previously so prominently distributed according to birth

For central and eastern Europe, the crusades represented a historic sea-change
1180s:Bulgaria in the time of tsar Kaloyan [ID] offers a good but little-known example of that sea-change. And the buffeting continued for Bulgaria

The crusades mark the end of a half-millennium-long era of warrior-nomadic movement from east to west, out of the Eurasia Steppes into that "peninsula of peninsulas" called Europe

The direction of aggression now began to reverse itself
Now began a thousand-year era (up to the late 20th century) of European colonial and imperialist expansion in the other direction, eventually over the whole globe

Despite this slow east/west sea-change (tide came in, tide went out), "The East" had still two powerful challenges for "The West" before the tables were turned altogether =
(1) The Golden Horde in the 13th and 14th centuries, and
(2) The Seljuk and Ottoman Turks in the 15th and 16th centuries
2013au (about 1000 years after the Crusades got underway): Newspaper account of a 13th-c crusader document reflected the tensions of early 21st-c struggle with the wide-spread Islamic terrorist Jihad aimed at "The West"

The article described how a 13th-c French Dominican priest, Humbert of Romans, composed a guide for church officials on ways to convince Christian nobles and villagers to go on crusade to fight "infidels" who had conquered remote Christian Holy Lands [E-TXT]

_The_Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades

Al Jazeera

Al Jazeera

<>1097:Kievan princes assembled to define for each his "portion" [udel] of the unraveling Kievan princely hierarchy

In Kievan Rus' a system of feudal authority was evolving among princely rulers =

Various princes now acknowledged the liege lord superiority of a "grand prince" [velikii kniaz']
Each vassal prince nonetheless retained his own subordinate udel

A udel was a portion of heritable land, wealth and authority
This implied maintenance of the vassal prince's own administrative apparatus, military and (soon, in time of Mongol overlordship) his own monetary system
This Russian variety of udel feudalism lasted 250 years in actual practice, and it survived legally for 500 years

As mestnichestvo crumbled, so did that political system that SAC calls "contract princes"
A "feudal" order evolved in Kievan Rus' which was not unlike that found in most regions of medieval Christendom [Europe]

In the late 11th-c, in far SW Rus', signs of unraveling Kievan order were clearly visible (IE=to those who could still see (this a jocular reference to the fact that Prince Vasilko was blinded in an internecine struggle for power there) [ZMR1:73-6]

Vasilko's SW Russian domain was located in the right-bank Dnepr River region of modern-day Ukraine

Vasilko's domain was comprised of Halych [Galich or Galicia], plus Volyn or Volhynia [W.ID]
On its western and southern frontiers, this domain bordered on territories of Hungarian (Magyar) and Romanian peoples

Paradzhanov's FLM portrayed customary everyday life in these eastern Slavic frontier hill settlements

1100:Kievan princes again conferred among themselves in the hopes of easing fractiousness
Kievan prince Vsevolod and his son Vladimir were active partners in the evolution of this informal inter-princely assembly
\\
*--Vernadsky,2=173-214 on Kievan administration and governance| 214-241 on federated relationship of Kievan thrones
*--LOOP on "feudalism"

<>1103:Kievan princes from various princely city-states yet again (for the third time) conferred in what seemed almost an emerging pattern, every three years

But this time Russian princes gathered in order to address "foreign policy", the defense of their combined borders from nomadic encroachment, particularly that of the Polovtsy
These important gatherings acknowledged an abiding usefulness of the unraveling old princely hierarchy [mestnichestvo]
Mestnichestvo appeared now to be reforming itself in the face of new external challenges
These efforts hinted at some sort of deliberative assembly of interested princely "stake-holders"
1111:Salnitsa| Vladimir Vsevolodovich [Vladimir son of Vsevolod] commanded a Russian victory over the Polovtsy

<>1108c:From Constantinople to the Holy Land, a pilgrimage of South Russian Abbot Daniel [E-TXT | WAL,1=56-62]

<>1113:1125; Kievan Prince Vladimir Vsevolodovich, better known as Vladimir "Monomakh", reigned 12 years [ZNC,1=235-48 | VSB,1=32-3 | DMR2:73-80]

1097:1113; As seen above, Prince Vladimir was for more than a decade an active partner on the throne beside his father, Kievan prince Vsevolod
Vladimir shaped the destiny of Kievan Rus' (as far as any prince can do such a thing) for a combined total of 27 years
Letter to Oleg Sviatoslavich [CPC:216-18]
His Prayer [CPC:218-19]
1113:1118; Kiev | Monk Nestor [ID] gave final form to his version of the Russian historical chronology

This text came to be known as the "Nestorian" Chronicle [CPC:3-23 | RRC2,1=1-11 | DMR2:3-10,17-26,etc]
No physical specimen of the Chronicle produced earlier than 1377 [ID] has survived [ZMR1:43-76]
First dated entry was the year 852 [ID]

Kiev was in a state of near constant military conflict in the time of Vladimir Monomakh

Kiev was at war on three remote fronts =

Finnish lands of Livonia
On the middle Volga in Bolgar territories
In left-bank Danube valleys near the Black Sea coast

Monomakh's Testament describes 83 major military campaigns

Vladimir Monomakh thought of himself in terms defined by the emerging feudal European concept of "the good prince" =

He sought to rule in close harmony with the Church and to promote its Christian ideals
But at the same time he involved himself in the detailed everyday life of his people

He left an interesting Testament [CPC:206-15 | ZMR2:92-100 | DMR3:65-72 | CPC:206-15 | WAL,1=50-6]

He described himself =
I fell from my horse many times, fractured my skull twice, and injured my arms and legs in my youth. I was reckless with my life and did not spare my head. Making war or on the hunt, night or day, hot or cold, I worked just as my servant worked, and gave myself no rest. Without relying on stewards and agents, I did whatever had to be done. I dealt with all problems that arose in my household. On the hunt, I posted the hunters, and I looked after the stables, the falcons, and the hawks. I did not allow the powerful lords to abuse the poor peasant or the unfortunate widow. And I myself managed ecclesiastical matters and Church service.
Did he really do all those things? We cannot be sure. But we can be sure that he thought that the good prince would do all those things

The years of Vladimir Monomakh, however, were but a momentary relief in a long period of Kievan decline, a century before the Mongol invasions
\\
*--LOOP on "feudalism"

<>1136:Novgorod Veche [deliberative assembly of urban elites] elected princes [VSB,1=34-5,62-3]

The Novgorod veche expelled Prince Vsevolod from Novgorod and composed laws about merchant enterprise [VSB,1=69,74-5]
The veche might have been the original local institution of public deliberation among Slavic tribal people, even before and certainly after the invitation to the Rus' [ID]

The veche, as institution of urban self-administration, might also derive from the old Scandinavian institution "Ting" or "Thing" [W-ID]
The word veche, however, was clearly derived from the old-Russian or east-Slavic verb "to speak" [veshchati]
Similarly the English word "parliament" derived from the old-French word "to speak" [parler]
However "original" the institution, there is no historical record of the veche prior to 1016
There is no documenary record of the institution anywhere but in Novgorod until 1068:Kiev
The veche was thereafter active in many Kievan cities in the 12th century
The veche was called into session by the sounding of a bell on the town square
Often "veche" is translated as "urban assembly" in VSB, KRR and elsewhere

1128:1193; Chronicles described life in Novgorod [ZMR2:78-83 | RRH,1=54-8]

Bishops were elected
Princes were moved around to suit desires of Novgorodians
Or in order to fill vacant positions in the hierarchy of urban thrones that made up the old Kievan system of princely mestnichestvo

Was mestnichestvo falling apart everywhere in Kievan Rus', except in Novgorod? Three questions =
1. Did the veche strengthen the original concept of "contract princes"?
2. Did a newly active Novgorod veche in one sense reinforce but in another neutralize mestnichestvo?
3. Did the veche provide something like a medieval variation on the idea of "checks and balances"?
Answers are not easy, but we can say this = Veche authority grew as the larger Kievan system of princely mestnichestvo weakened in the 11th century [EG]
In Novgorod the veche became an even more elaborate instrument of local deliberation and even self-regulation

It branched out into the various districts [kontsy] of the city
It positioned its authority over the Church
It positioned its authority against that of the prince

1136:Novgorod Cathedral of St. Sophia received charter from Novgorod prince Sviatoslav (princely power was still significant) [W]
1156:Novgorod veche elected Archbishop (significant "investiture" authority [ID] held by veche) [VSB,1=70] Illustrated [KRR:36]

The questions are difficult. What was the relationship of the veche to Church institutions and to mestnichestvo (especially its election of princes)
Everyday life in medieval Novgorod [DMR3=119-32]

Women in Novgorod [KRR:54-9]

Novgorod life documented in birchbark charters etc EG

Consider another example of very local and ancient Russian "public" deliberation = Village assembly [mirskoi skhod]

*--Mikhail N. Tikhomirov, _Drevnerusskie goroda [DK71.T52] Translated as The Towns of Ancient Rus| ((Summit| Tikhomirov wrote much on Novgorod))
*--V. Sergeevich, Veche i kniaz': Sovetniki kniazia| Vol. 2 of _Drevnosti russkogo prava
*--M. W. Thompson, ed., _Novgorod the Great: Excavations [DK651.N506T4]
*2016fe12:Независимая газета, "Археологи раскопали самую старую русскую вилку" [E-TXT]

<>1139:1169; Kiev | Over this 30-year period, seventeen different princes occupied the unstable Kievan throne [ZNC,2=11-140]

Among those who held that throne on and off was the vigorous prince Yurii Dolgorukii [Big-Reach or Longlegs]

Son of Vladimir Monomakh [ID], Yurii did not inherit the Kievan throne at the death of his father
Rather he became prince of Rostov Velikii [map] and Suzdal (1125-1157, 32 years), southeast of Novgorod and south of the Volga River basin
Three times he extended his "big-reach" to hold the Kievan throne, but his destiny was up north in those two smaller fortress cities

Yurii's main efforts were in the direction of expanding the commercial life of his northern princely territories
He had little luck extending his power in the direction of Novgorod, but he did orient his two cities in strategic directions =

Rostov Velikii interfaced Germanic economies to the west
Suzdal interfaced the Bolgar economy to the east

From the middle-Volga territories east of Suzdal in these years Bolgar wheat was a significant import item in Suzdal

Yurii invited Islamic Bolgars to colonize open areas along the eastern edge of his realm
He employed Bolgar masons and master builders to construct churches

Yurii founded several other market/fortress cities, EG=

Pereslavl-Zalesskii [W]
Moscow (first mentioned in Chronicles in 1147)

Independence of the north gave sign of the internal decay of Kievan civilization
Life was becoming unsettled in the southern Pontic Steppes, much as it was before prince Oleg [ID]
Life was quickening in the north in and around the original Russian city Novgorod
\\
*--LOOP on Islam
*--LOOP on "Chronicle"

<>1147jy24:jy28; Damascus attacked by Second Crusade, then abandoned, a debacle for Catholic Crusaders

<>1150c:Kiril of Turov "Sermon on the First Sunday after Easter" [ZMR2:90-2 | WAL,1=62-5 | ZMR1:83-6]
*--Popular apocryphal text which circulated in these years, about the Holy Virgin's descent into Hell [WAL,1=96-100]

<>1169: Vladimir-Suzdal (two linked fortress cities) | Local feudal Prince Andrei Bogoliubskii [Beloved of God] led attack from this remote northern principality and sacked distant Kiev [ZNC,2=140-2]

Bogoliubskii was the son and political heir of Yurii Dolgorukii [just above]
Now victorious, Bogoliubskii showed no interest in assuming the devalued Kievan position
He stayed in Vladimir-Suzdal

Vladimir [W] is located about 600 miles northeast of Kiev (120 miles east-northeast of modern-day Moscow)
Be alert to the fact that the city might be confused with the personal given name "Vladimir"

In the middle of the 12th century, still a half century before the Golden Horde invaded Russian lands, Bogoliubskii's disinterest in the Kievan throne was a sure sign of Kievan decline
The shift of power northward to Vladimir and Suzdal was also a sign of mounting insecurity in relationship to those Pontic Steppes that stretch away to the Kievan south and east

The stirring of Polovtsy and Seljuk Turks was a premonition of coming Mongol [Golden Horde] assaults a half century later
Kievan Rus' was nearing the end of its time as an independent system of city-states

And yet another reason the prince of Vladimir-Suzdal might wish to stay in Vladimir-Suzdal was the growing importance of ties with the Islamic Bolgar khanate on the middle Volga (Andrei's wife was a Bolgar)
And there was also the growing vitality of certain northern European German states along the Baltic coast
The old Kievan seniority system known as mestnichestvo [hierarchy of princely cities] was breaking down

Bogoliubskii's growing power north of Kiev, in Vladimir and Suzdal, signaled the rise of "votchina" [heritable] feudal lordship
The votchinnik thought of his titles and properties as settled birthrights

Bogoliubskii's udel was not a temporary assignment to govern a certain location
Bogoliubskii was no "contract prince"

As Kievan state disintegrated, a votchinnik land-owning elite of a more recognizably feudal European type replaced the coordinated military-administrative authority of Kievan princes and their hierarchical system
Local interests of local landholders displaced the regional interests of princes subordinated to Kiev
Kievan mestnichestvo (hierachy of princely thrones in designated urban or fortress centers) was in serious disorder almost from the very beginning
- Looking far ahead, by the 1600s (500 years later), the Moscow tsar was the only true votchinnik (in the feudal tradition we see emerging here in the 12th century with Andrei Bogoliubskii)
- Along with this process, a new and very different Muscovite notion of "mestnichestvo" came into usage
\\
*--LOOP on Islam
*--LOOP on "feudalism"

Visit northeastern fortress cities in the Vladimir-Suzdal area, a string of cities called "The Golden Ring"
For some excellent photos, F/Kliazma/ and F/Suzdal/ on this [W]

Suzdal, the Church of the Putting on of Vestments, 1688 [source]

<>1174:Vladimir-Suzdal Prince Bogoliubskii was assassinated [ZNC,2=157-61 | DMR3:72-5]

Vladimir city veche functioned in these years [VSB,1=43]
1175:Vladimir the site of popular disturbance [DMR3:75-6]
\\
*--LOOP on "Chronicle"

<>1185:Novgorod-severskii (NW of Kiev) Prince Igor Sviatoslavich's lamentable campaign against Polovtsy out on the increasingly disorderly Pontic Steppes [ZNC,2=186-9 | WAL,1=71-80]

A great epic poem described the tragic Polovtsian adventure of Igor = Slovo o polku Igoreve [PG3300.S6E5]
It has been translated often =
"Song of Igor's Campaign" (translated by Vladimir Nabokov)
"The Song of Prince Igor: Russia's Great Medieval Epic" (translated and edited by UO graduate Robert Mann)
"Tale of the Host of Igor" [Excerpts in DMR2:81-96 | DMR3:77-92 | RRH,1=22-23 | ZMR1=139f]
\\
*1952:Speculum#27:43-66| Roman Jacobson, "The Puzzles of Igor's Campaign on the 150th Anniversary of its First Edition"
*--Robert Mann, _Lances Sing: A Study of the Igor Tale [PG3300.S6M35]

<>1187:SW Rus (Galich-Volhynia in right-bank Dnepr River region) racked by disturbances and princely feuds [VSB,1=44]
*--Notice that this is more than 20 years before the Golden Horde came on the scene
*--Kievan Rus' was falling apart, BUT
*--Something new and strong was developing in the north =

<>1190:Novgorod treaty w/German city [VSB,1=69-70]
*1193:Novgorod elected Archbishop of its Russian Orthodox Church [VSB,1=70]

<>1204:Constantinople captured and sacked by Crusaders from western Europe (first successful attack on the city by sea)

Enrico Dandolo (1192:1205; Doge of Venice) co-opted the crusade for his own economic purposes

Whatever there might have been of religious or idealistic motive in crusader hearts, the action was in essence this-worldly and acquisitive
The crusaders became sailors and soldiers for projection of the Doge's wide-ranging ambitions [Wki]

1113:The crusades had become simple acts of western aggression against eastern rivals, national armies enlisted in the "market-economic" interests of the Doge and his close associates
The Doge was then a pioneer both in the evolution of market economics and statist mercantilism [ID]

We should bear in mind that the full history of "capitalism" generally combines these two trends, despite the little blink of historical time and in that globally limited place where Adam Smith's ideas [ID] prevailed

Byzantium was weakened beyond recovery
\\
*--Four paragraph TXT summarizes impact of crusades on Byzantium
*--Fascinating computer science analysis of the way the Doge of Venice was elected [E-TXT]

<>1206:Altai plateau, near Lake Baikal | Mongol tribesmen gathered in kurultai [assembly] to "elect" Chinggis [Genghis] as khan

1200c:Eurasian continent on the eve of Chinggis [MAP]
1207:1225; Over an 18-year period, up to his last two years of life, Chinggis expanded Mongol power = MAP
In a sequence of eight moments, this moving MAP more or less accurately illustrates the first 88 years of Mongol expansion throughout Eurasia =
*--Moment #1 = 1206: Origins
Read through the next few SAC entries for the Mongol story through 1228-1230 (moments #1 through #5 on the moving MAP abv)
*--Moment #2 = 1219:Moves eastward and conquers China
*--Moment #3 = 1223:Moves southwestward and establishes "Golden Horde"
*--Moment #4 = 1227:Moves against Persian Empire
*--Moment #5 = 1237: Moves with new decisiveness against Kievan Rus'
*--Moment #6 = 1259: Moves against Baghdad and Damascas
*--Moment #7 = 1279: Kublai-khan
*--Moment #8 = 1294: Disintegration
The city Karakorum was the dynastic and administrative headquarters ("capital" or metropol) of Chinggis' emerging Eurasian Mongol empire
Chinggis dictated the Great Yasa a comprehensive constitution-type guide or law code for commanders but also for administrative officials and subjects of his empire
The Yasa served as a divine mandate with practical advice about how to rule the whole world
The Yasa was communicated by direct heavenly inspiration from Tengri [ID] to Chinggis-khan
Here is a source on the Yasa with extensive translation of text =
*1938de:Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies #3:337-60| George Vernadsky, "The Scope and Content of Chinggis Khan's Yasa" [E-TXT | Excerpt = VSB,1=47-8]
Another primary source = _The_bejeweled summary of the origin of khans (1967)
And another = Secret History of the Mongols: A Mongolian Epic Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century, Igor Rachewiltz, ed. (2006, 2vv) [E-TXT]

Narrative extension of SAC chronology on Golden Horde

TXT

Yasa

parliament

*--Per Inge Oestmoen's curious contemporary website, with his description and conspectus of the Great Yasa [E-TXT], based largely on George Vernadsky (abv)
*--Vernadsky,3
*--Ruth Dunnell, Chinggis Khan: World Conqueror
*--May.MONGOL
*--Stanley Stewart wrote very fine modern-day travel accounts which describe these times and this place [EG]

LOOP on "Chronicle"

<>1211:1216; Mongols invaded China, expanding their power eastward

This was moment #2 of 8 on the Moving MAP of Mongol expansion in Eurasia [ID]
Over the next century or so, Chinggis-khan and his heirs projected their unstoppable cavalry armies, developed sophisticated urban siege technologies, and established their remarkably stable tribute-gathering political authority in the east (China) and south (Islamic lands of Central-Asia, eventually even into India) [MAP]

<>1215:Runnymede, England | Rebel barons forced King John to accept the Magna Carta as law of the land
*--Perhaps, in the world-historical setting, the critical generalizable "chapter" is #39 [E-TXT, with extensive commentary]
*--The full significance of ch#39 was not fully realized until the middle of the 17h-century [CF=habeas corpus ad subjiciendum]

<>1220:Bukhara [modern-day Uzbekistan] fell to Mongols under Chinggis-khan as he moved westward

Two centers of Mongol power formed out of this process =
1. Ilkhanate [Khorezm or Khwarezm] in Persian territories [Iran] south and east of the Caspian Sea [W-ID with satellite image of depleted Aral Sea]
2. The Golden Horde out on the Pontic Steppes, the vast prairies north and east of the Black Sea, Caspian Sea and Aral Sea coasts
The Mongols now commanded China and the heartland of Eurasia (and the globe?) [MAP]
Creation of these two new western centers of Mongol power was moment #3 of 8 on the Moving MAP of Mongol expansion in Eurasia [ID]
\\
*--On the origins of the Uzbek and Kazakh peoples [W]
*--LOOP on Islam

<>1220c:Kiev-Pechersk Lavra| _The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery [BX596.K513 | A 1989 translation of Kievo-Pecherskii paterik] Covers the years 1073 to 1156 (summary of text = xviii-xx) | Excerpt ZMR1:92f | ZMR2=134f]

On the eve of its destruction at the hands of the Mongols, Kievan Russia was in one sense already in decline, as a result of internal developments, but it was still capable of great cultural achievements, such as the epic poem "Slovo o polku Igoreve" [ID] and the Paterik
1220c:A subject's plea to Prince Yaroslav Vsevolodovich revealed much about high secular culture in these years of Kievan decline [DMR3:93-7]
For nearly four centuries, the city Kiev held a strong position on the northwestern edge of the Pontic Steppes

Russian power was dominant throughout the region and, for the first time, the challenge of stability out on the Pontic Steppes was successfully met
In the late 10th and 11th centuries, Kiev was one of the greatest cultural and political centers of Christendom, that huge and complex geo-cultural space which has been called "Europe" in later and more secular times

But now the 350-year epoch known as Kievan Rus' was over, and the relative stability of the Pontic Steppes was fully and violently overturned

<>1223:1462; Kievan Rus' was put to rest in the 240-year-long Era of Mongol dominion|

Mongol power exploded suddenly on the Eurasian world [ID]
Over nearly two and one half centuries Russian lands were subjected to 48 destructive Mongol invasions and 90 violent civil wars
This was a continuation of moment #3 of 8 on the Moving MAP of Mongol expansion throughout Eurasia [ID], and it constitutes Phase #1 of Mongol dominion over the Russian periphery (the Golden Horde ruling out of their metropol Sarai) =

1236:1328; Phase #1 of THE GOLDEN HORDE in Russia = Mongol [Tatar] overlordship in nearly the whole territory of old Kievan Rus' [ZNC,3]

The most significant exception = the Novgorod north

1328:1462; Phase #2 of THE GOLDEN HORDE in Russia = A century and a half in which grand princes of the new-comer Russian princely city Moscow [ID] were ambitious subordinates and agents of -- but eventually competitors with -- the Golden Horde
Phase #2 of THE GOLDEN HORDE in Russia thus can divided into two different periods

Through moments #3 to #8 in the larger story of Mongol expansion in Eurasia [ID], the princely city Moscow arose on the historical scene and played the part of subordinate and agent
Then, over a century of decline of the Golden Horde, Moscow played the role of competitor

CHR

<>1223:Kalka River | Mongols defeated Russian forces in first probing attack, then backed away, only to return in even greater force 13 years later, in 1236

Beginnings of the dominance of the Golden Horde ("Mongol Yoke", "Tatar" rule) [ZNC,2=285-90 | VSB,1=45-6 | ZMR2=193-211 | RRH,1=75-80]
This invasion also brought an end to the century and a half of the Polovtsy as an independent force on the Pontic Steppes [MAP]
The term "Golden Horde" [Zlataia or Zolotaia Orda] came into wide usage from the Russian description of the Mongol khanate that destroyed Kievan Rus'. SAC follows Russian usage, though it must be recognized that this usage exaggerates the organizational unity of Mongol power as it projected itself into European Russia and throughout the "Middle-East"
The Golden Horde could also be called the Kipchak khanate or Djuchi-ulus (the patrimony of Djuchi [Jochi], oldest of four sons of Chinggis-khan, each of whom received in inheritance a patrimonial portion (an ulus) of Chinggis's "empire")

The many greater and lesser khanates that multiplied after Chinggis' death were vulnerable to factional splits from the very beginning
With time Mongol power was subject to disintegration rather than unification

The late 20th and early 21st centuries used the expression "war lords" to describe these sorts of militarized institutional networks
But we do not need to exaggerate the looseness of regional Mongol institutional life simply in order to avoid exaggerating unity
\\
*--John Fennell, _The Crisis of Medieval Russia, 1200-1304 [DK90.F44]
*--Vernadsky,3 | Also see Vernadsky on the impact of the Mongols on Russian history, in RRC1,1(14) and RRC2,1(15)
*--Soviet era historian's review of Vernadsky = E-TXT
*--Charles J. Halperin, _Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History [DK90.H28], NB! Halperin's concept of historical "silence" [KRR:104-7]
*--Donald Ostrowski, _Muscovy and the Mongols...[DK90.O86], pp. 36-63 on significant institutional influences; pp. 85-107 refutes "Oriental" interpretation
*--Aleksandr Presniakov, _The_Formation of the Great Russian State [DK90.P713], pp. 1-29
*--Leo de Hartog, _Russia and the Mongol Yoke [DK90.H35]
*--Charles J. Halperin, The Tatar Yoke (1986) [DK90.H29]
*--Dmitrii Pokotilov, _History of the Eastern Mongols [DS793.M7 p5713]
*--Valentin Riasanovskii, _Fundamental Principles of Mongol Law [K.R481]
*--Paul Steeves summarizes the main historiographical approaches to the question of the Mongols and Russia = E-TXT
\\
*--LOOP on "Chronicle"

<>1225:East Persia Khorezm [Iran] wrecked by Mongol invasion

Mongol Ilkhanate established in its place. This was Chinggis khan's last great achievement
*1227:Deaths of Chinggis-khan and his oldest son Djuchi

Ugedei [Ogedei] succeeded Chinggis as Great Khan in Karakorum
Batu succeeded his father Djuchi as khan of the Golden Horde
Rivalries among the successors to Chinggis-khan intensified

This was moment #4 of 8 on the Moving MAP of Mongol expansion throughout Eurasia [ID]

LOOP on "Church" and early history of the university

<>1228:1230; Novgorod city disturbance [ZNC,2=290-1 | VSB,1=71]

The Golden Horde devoured prominent southern cities of once-grand Kievan Rus'
But Novgorod in its remote northern region went about its business

Not counting the consolidation in eastern Europe of Mongol power itself, the rise of medieval Novgorod can be called
the first great geo-political result of Mongol rule in Old Rus' [KRR=99-101 (from the NVG.Xrn)]
Novgorod everyday life documented in birchbark documents [KRR=71-2 and 129-30 | RRH,1=54]

Russian-language website devoted to birchbark texts
University of Chicago website collection of birchbark documents
2014oc:New birchbark discoveries [ E-TXT]

Novgorod elected Archbishop of Orthodox Church [VSB,1=70-1]

1230:1241; Galicia [Galich, Halych], the remote "right-bank Dnepr River" region [ID], in disorder
MAP of area around Galich, including Kievan RUS in this era [MAP]

Galicia drifted away from the Kievan world which finally disintegrated under Mongol invasion [DMR3=105-114 | KRR:85-7]
Developments in Galician territories of SW Rus' can be called
the second great geo-political result of Mongol rule in Old Rus'

LOOP on "Novgorod"

<>1229:Roman Patriarch [aka Pope] Gregory IX launched Inquisition [ID]
\\
*--James Reston,Jr., review of 2012 effort to link history of Inquisition with the contemporary world [TXT]

The Papal Inquisition expanded on growing trend of formal assault on dissent in "The West"
1209:1229; Languedoc (southwestern France) for 20 years was riven by the "Albigensian Crusade" [ID]
Now it was time for the Catholic Church to launch a legal and theological "clean up" (purge)
\\
*--LOOP on Church

<>1231:1243; Azerbaijan and Armenia fell to Golden Horde

<>1236:Volga River, below the confluence with the Kama River | Bolgar administrative capital taken by Mongol chieftain Chinggis-khan's great general Subutai at the head of the new Golden Horde [ZNC,2=307-8]

The Horde was under the supreme command of Batu who sent Subutai northward from SW Rus' and Bulgarian [ID] territories
Volga Bolgars were absorbed into Batu's Golden Horde, but Bolgar urban government and social structure survived
Bolgar Muslim culture influenced pagan Mongols who were increasingly inclined to accept the Islamic faith

This process of absorption and assimilation had already been witnessed many times out on the Eurasian Steppes
Ambitious rulers shifted from local paganism to one or another of the "religions of the book" (Islam, Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Buddhism, Confucianism, Judaism...)
This can technically be described as a perceived status upgrade from provincial culture to universal civilization
The reach of culture had to be made as vast as the reach of military/political power
Just as with Chinggis-khan's "decimal" organization of his armies, so also with acceptance of a "religion of the book", empires require "de-tribalization" of many diverse peoples, joining them together in new non-natal sodalities

In the Kazan region, the Bolgar prince got Yarlyk [charter from the Golden Horde, a "license" to exercise designated authority subordinate to the Mongol khan]
Bolgar prince functioned more nearly as an agent of Mongol power than would the Moscow princes later [ID]
\\
*--LOOP on Islam

<>1237:Russian city Riazan destroyed by Batu's Horde [ZNC,2=308-17 | DMR2=107-13 | DMR3=146-9 | KRR:99-101 | VSB,1=44-5 | ZMR1=176-85]

Kievan Rus' under full-scale assault by the Golden Horde [MAP]
Russian prince paid tribute to Mongol masters [VSB,1=49-50]
"Discourse Concerning the Ruin of Rus Land" [DMR3:97-9]
This was moment #5 of 8 on the Moving MAP of Mongol expansion throughout Eurasia [ID]

<>1240:1255; Golden Horde was under the command of Batu, now elected khan

The grandson of the great Chinggis-khan was now his successor, but only in the Dzhuchi-ulus (commonly called the "Golden Horde")
Batu in the Dzhuchi-ulus was nominally subordinate to Moengke-khan and two subsequent great khans in Karakorum [ZNC,2=319-23]

<>1240de:Kiev captured by Golden Horde [DMR3:151-2]

<>1240:1243; Aleksandr Nevskii defeated Swedes in a series of battles
*--"A Biography of prince Alexander Nevskii" [ZNC,3=1-39 | ZMR2:224-42 | DMR3:99-105]
\\
*--LOOP on "Chronicle"

<>1243je26:Central Anatolia [central Turkey today] | Seljuk Turks defeated by Golden Horde

<>1246:Pope in Rome sent Ambassador Carpini [ID] to the Mongolian Great Khan in Karakorum

<>1247:Vladimir (city) grand prince Yaroslav Vsevolodovich died
*--A letter of appeal to him from Daniel, a member of his druzhina [closest military servitors, retinue] [DMR3:93-7 | WAL=100-4]

<>1240s:Sarai, in the lower Volga valley| A great "nomad" metropolis was founded by Batu-khan as administrative center and headquarters of the Golden Horde

Some argue that Mongol color symbolism took yellow or gold to mean "the center", and that was what created the term "Golden Horde"
The original Sarai-Batu was on the right bank of the Volga River just north of modern-day Astrakhan
In the later 13th c., Sarai-Batu was moved -- as only a nomad metropol might be -- northward to just downstream from modern-day Volgograd and called Sarai-Berke [W-ID with MAP]

This tent and pavilion urban center grew in size and importance
Sarai-Berke included more permanent stone structures, EG=several suburban neighborhoods with caravan rest points [caravan-sarai (ID)]
Visitors reported that it took a half day to ride by horse from one outskirt to the other [BrE,56:399]
Tradesmen whose ethnicities originated in three different continents sojourned in Sarai

Sarai served as a central point for caravan routes along the fabled "Silk Road", from Africa to China, northward to the Mongol metropol Karakorum, and southward to Persia [Iran] and India [W-ID and MAP, 7 paragraphs]
500 years after the Arabic invasions [ID], Sarai became a linchpin in the evolution of AFroAsia

1253:1255; French King Louis IX sent Catholic Friar Willem van Ruysbroeck [Rubruck (ID)] to Karakorum and Sarai
MAP of Rubruck's route

*--Thomas T. Allsen, _Mongol Imperialism: The Policies of the Grand Qun Möngke in China, Russia, and the Islamic Lands [DS22.3.A45]
*--Thomas T. Allsen, _Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia

<>1250:SW Rus' | Galician prince Daniel and his brother had to learn to deal with the Golden Horde [VSB,1=51-2 | DMR3=171-4]
*--After a century and a half of growing internal disorder in SW Rus', Galich-Volhyn area came under Mongol power and found itself isolated from old Kievan networks and vulnerable to influence of German Holy Roman Empire

<>1252:1263; Novgorod and Vladimir [city] prince Aleksandr Nevskii reigned 11 vital years in the early phase of Mongol dominance over the territories of old Rus' south of Novgorod
*--The_Chronicle of Novgorod, 1016-1471 [E-TXT (Thanks to Melody Charles for this URL) | Excerpts = VSB,1=64-5 | DMR2=137-50 | ZMR1=162f | RRH,1=88-90]
\\
*1938:Historial film directed by Sergei Eisenstein, ALEKSANDR NEVSKII
*--Aleksandr Presniakov, _The_Formation of the Great Russian State [DK90.P713], pp. 60-98 on Vladimir city in the 13th century
\\
*--LOOP on "Novgorod" and on "Chronicle"

<>1257:1266; Golden Horde | Berke-khan [Berkh-khan] issued an early decree on free trade [VSB,1=48-9]

Berke-khan made Islam the "official" religion of the Horde
- A familiar pattern is observable here at the outer NW edges of Mongol power -- the move from local spiritualism into one of the "religions of the book"
- Mongol-Turk syncretism (cultural and institutional combination, melding together of diverse cultural strains)
1258:Baghdad sacked by Golden Horde as Berke turned his swift armies southward against the Turks
1260:Damascus taken by Golden Horde, but the Mongols stopped north of Jerusalem and backed off
This was moment #6 of 8 on the Moving MAP of Mongol expansion throughout Eurasia [ID]
1260c:1360c; For about a century, Anatolian Near-East ["Asia Minor"] experienced a significant easing of Mongol power
- But that brought no long-term relief for the Byzantine Empire
- Ottoman Turkish power filled the vacuum when Mongols turned away
- Ottoman Turks picked up the legacy of the now defeated Seljuk Turks who irrupted onto the disordered Pontic steppes two centuries earlier
\\
*--Pavlidis,13
*--LOOP on Islam

<>1261:Russian Chronicles mention Sarai, headquarters of the Golden Horde, for the first time in connection with the establishment there of a Russian Orthodox diocese, following agreements reached between Novgorod prince Aleksandr Nevskii and Berke-khan

Novgorod flourishing as Mongol dominance destroyed old Kievan hierarchy of cities
This was probably the most important legacy of Novgorod prince Aleksandr Nevskii's 22-year career
1264 or 1265: Novgorod treaty with Tver helped consolidate regional power in relative independence from the dominance of the Golden Horde [W#1 | KRR:84-5]
\\
*--LOOP on "Novgorod"

<>1267au01:Kievan Metropolitan of Orthodox Church received favorable Yarlyk from new Mengu-Temir-khan [DMR3=175-6] [VSB,1=49 dates this 1308]
*--Russia drifted out of its Byzantine orbit as the Golden Horde consolidated its grip on the Eurasian Steppe and as Novgorod developed ties with the newly independent commercial city-states of the Baltic and North-Sea regions =
*--LOOP on "Chronicle"
*--LOOP on "Church"

<>1270:Novgorod treaty with Hanse (pronounced and sometimes spelled "Hansa"; later formally the Hanseatic League) [DMR2=132-7 | DMR3=114-19]

Some moments and documents (with MAP) in the history of the Hanseatic League [TXT]
Novgorod also maintained treaty relationship w/ its prince [ZNC,3:46-9 | VSB,1=65-6]
Novgorod Charter described aspects of its urban independence from traditional Kievan ways in the years after the Mongol invasion [RRH,1=47-54]
Eurasia [MAP]
\\
*--LOOP on "Novgorod"
*--LOOP on "Chronicle"

<>1274:Naples [Italy] | Thomas Aquinas died [ID], having brought the new "Western" Christian philosophy and theology -- called "scholasticism" -- to its highest perfection. The Catholic Church later sainted him. He capped a marvelous century of theological speculation =

1109:Anselm, "the father of scholasticism", died [ID]. He devoted himself to proving faith by reason, by employing the powerful rationalist or logical tools of inquiry
1142:Peter Abelard died [ID]. He sought to identify and address the chief logical contradictions in Christian faith
These "Western" achievements would not have been possible if it were not for a serious dose of "Easternization"
- Arabic scholars provided the Western Church Aristotelian texts, preserved until this time only in the Islamic world
- New translations and new discoveries of Aristotle's writings ushered in a new era of Catholic religious philosophical speculation
- Old, settled Ecumenical decisions came under wide-ranging and speculative contemplation, discussion and debate
- And Muslim philosophers on their own influenced this process =
100 years after Averroës, in the realm of the Papal authority, struggles between faith and reason gripped theologians

Duns Scotus (1265c-1308) stood for faith [ID]
William of Occam (1287-1349c) stood for reason [ID]

"Eastern" Islamic civilization presented a formidable spiritual/philosophical challenge to traditional "Western" medieval Christianity

For its part, the Eastern Orthodox Church, in Russia and elsewhere, reacted negatively to scholasticism and was little affected by it

We need always to remind ourselves that Christianization of Europe, when it got into high gear 1000 years before this time [EG], was itself a massively significant instance of "Easternization" of "The West"
\\
*2018ap12: The New Republic | "How Islam Shaped the Enlightenment" [E-TXT]
*--A harsh-minded mid-twentieth-century "modern" source [CDE(1940):1586] had this to say = "The 15^th-century scholasticism was at best a sorry thing, and it produced in its contemporaries, especially in Italy and France, a great detestation for the whole system...". CDE continued in re. Francis Bacon= His "ignorance of scholasticism almost surpassed his dislike for it"
*--LOOP on "Church"
*--LOOP on Islam

<>1274 and 1281:Mongols under Kublai-khan twice failed in effort to invade Japan
*--Heavy storms at sea contributed to the rescue of Japan from the overwhelming Mongol power
*--These came to be called "divine winds" [kamikaze]
*--The implausibility of success in such a venture, plus Japanese preparedness, were perhaps more decisive factors

<>1275:Lithuania the target of attack by allied Russian and Mongol forces, but the Golden Horde backed away from their furthest incursions into the Baltic river drainages

Growth of Lithuanian power and eventual union with Poland can be designated the third great geo-political result of Mongol rule in Old Rus'
1275:Vladimir (city) | Death of Abbot Serapion, author of sermons "on the Merciless Heathens" [which interpreted the Mongol assault as punishment for Russian sins] and "on Omens"[ZMR2:243-6| ZMR1=199-204| WAL=104-6]
This was moment #7 of 8 on the Moving MAP of Mongol expansion throughout Eurasia [ID]

<>1290:1312; Golden Horde| Tokhta-khan ruled in a time of renewed invasion of Russian lands

But this was also a time of serious disintegration of the Golden Horde
And it was also a time of growing conflict with one of the more long-enduring splinter hordes, the Crimean Tatars
1290s:Marco Polo, who claimed to travel to China along the legendary "Silk Road" [W-ID], reported on Russia (cold and much drinking) [VSB,1=52]
Silk Road in the era of Marco Polo [W] and the great empire of the Golden Horde and the perhaps even greater empire of China under Mongol rule (Yuan Dynasty) [MAP]
This was the final moment #8 of 8 on the Moving MAP of Mongol expansion throughout Eurasia [ID]
\\
*--Wki on Marco Polo controversy = Did he really go to the Mongol capital of China, and were his descriptions really based on first-hand observations?

<>1300:Vladimir (city) became the Metropolitan See of the Russian Church
*--Kiev was essentially cut loose and declined
\\
*--LOOP on "Church"

<>1303:1325; Moscow prince Yurii III

Orthodox Christian Yurii married Islamic Mongol bride, sister of the khan of the Golden Horde
Nuptial diplomacy as an element of power politics need not get "hung up" on religious differences. Yurii's Mongol bride, of course, became Christian
Unlike the Bolgars under Mongol domination [ID], the Moscow Yarlyk retained for them the right to strike their own coins
Mongols never considered Moscow a part of their Dzhuchi-ulus. Moscow was a tribute-paying satellite power
Moscow had not been of much significance from the time of the founding one and a half centuries earlier [ID] until now
Now, after Kievan disintegration and Mongol destruction, two very different urban strongholds, representing two very different medieval "Russias", rose in power and prominence = First Novgorod and then Moscow
The rise of Moscow can be called the fourth great geo-political result of Mongol rule in Old Rus'
1300:1553; Over two centuries of Muscovite Russian expansion [MAP]
\\
*--LOOP on "Novgorod"
*2017au16: RT News | "Russian medieval history may ‘influence’ new book – Game of Thrones author George RR Martin" [E-TXT]

<>1312:1357; Forty-five years, the last successful efforts to restore disintegrating Golden Horde

Uzbek-khan (-1342), followed by Djanibek-khan (-1357) restored power of Djuchi-ulus and expanded territory of control
1325:1349; Tangier-born North African Ibn-Battuta [ID] left fabulous dictated memoirs of his extensive travels throughout the Islamic world

For nearly three decades, Battuta was "on the road" in northern Africa, Egyptian territories of the Mamluk Empire, Arabia, Byzantium, the "Middle-East", into the Mongol Empire, China and the Philippines
He wrote at length about his travels [E-TXT | Excerpted TXT]

<>1313:Vladimir Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church Peter received Yarlyk from Uzbek-khan [KRR=101-2]
\\
*--LOOP on "Church"

<>1313:1326; Uzbek-khan spread Islamic faith, which the Golden Horde first encountered in a serious way years earlier among the Bolgar people of the middle-Volga [ID]
*--LOOP on Islam

<>1316:1341; Lithuanian grand prince Gedimin [Gediminas] extended his authority east and south into the partial vacuum created by the strategic withdrawal of the Golden Horde
*--Lithuanian grand prince Gedimin took the old city Kiev

<>1320s:Central America, Mexico, north of the Mayan city-states | Nomadic Aztecs settled and began to build great new urban center, their "capital", Tenochtitlan [site of Mexico City]
*--The second great New World civilization grew, but no wheel, no iron, and a famously ferocious religion

<>1327:Tver rebelled against Golden Horde [ZNC,3=124-6 | DMR2=151-2 | DMR3=179-82]
\\
*--Aleksandr Presniakov, _The_Formation of the Great Russian State [DK90.P713], pp. 98-121 on medieval city-state Tver

<>1328:1462; Phase#2 of the Golden Horde
This was also Phase#1 of MUSCOVITE RUSSIA =

Moscow princes grew in power. Like Tver (above) Moscow too grew in ambition
For more than one century, Moscow was both enemy and agent of the Golden Horde

Now Moscow exerted itself for independence from Mongol rule
Moscow also extended its dominance over neighboring Russian centers -- still frequently with Mongol help

Muscovites came to call this process "re-gathering the Russian lands" [ZNC,5]
1328:1341; Moscow prince Ivan Danilovich ruled 14 years as Ivan I Kalita [Ivan the First, aka Ivan Moneybag]

Ivan Kalita was the first Muscovite prince to be called "grand prince" [velikii kniaz'] [ZNC,3=127-47 | DMR2=153-8 | DMR3=190-5]
The Golden Horde sponsored the coronation of Ivan I
Ivan Kalita ruled in a time of transformation in the relationship of the Golden Horde to Russian lands

No longer would special administrative envoys of the khan [baskaki] rule in Russia
Now the khan allowed princes like Ivan Kalita to function as ally or agent of the khan
The khan sent advisory envoys [posoly] to his agents out there in the provinces
He bound these agents into close personal contact, as demonstrated by Ivan's nine journeys to Sarai
Also, Russian princely sons were frequently confined to Sarai as something like hostages or insurance against malpractice among provincial princely agents

In this new role, the Muscovite grand prince and the khan of the Golden Horde thrived together
And they thrived only so long as the grand prince was not yet in position to shed Mongol authority

Ivan I used the power gained through closeness to the Horde to expand his authority over neighboring Russian princely cities

Ivan I stripped local elites of their positions and power, and substituted his own servitors

For example, in Dolgorukii's [ID] old power base, Rostov Velikii [MAP], a prominent boyar family (one young member of which was the future St. Sergius) was forced to flee from Radonezh to escape expanding Muscovite power
The Official church hagiography, "Life of St. Sergius", tells this story in unexpected and explicit detail [TXT]

Moscow began the process of "re-gathering Russian lands" in earnest
Russia in the time of Ivan I Kalita [MAP]

Moscow flourished, but did not altogether free itself from Mongol dominion for another century, not until the reign of Ivan III
Whatever else the era of Mongol dominance meant for Russia, it was essentially this = The Kievan trend toward recognizable medieval feudal princely power and possession was brought to an end

Illustrations of medieval Moscow, the Kremlin [W]
Moscow architectural sites [W]
Other Medieval Russian cities, "The Golden Ring" [W]

*--Aleksandr Presniakov, _The_Formation of the Great Russian State [DK90.P713], pp. 121-138 on Moscow in the time of Ivan I Kalita
*2016:MVA|>Gorskii,A.A.|Москва и орда
*--LOOP on "Chronicle"
*--LOOP on "feudalism"

<>1328:Moscow became Metropolitan See of Orthodox Church, relocated from Vladimir (city)

This event can be said to mark the end of Vladimir (city) feudal grandeur (since 1169)
and the rise of Moscow from among the Russian cities under the direct dominion of the Golden Horde
Moscow worked to protect itself from, but also to benefit from, the Golden Horde and the Byzantine Empire
\\
*--John Meyendorff, _Byzantium and the Rise of Russia [DK67.5.B95 m4]
*--LOOP on "feudalism"

<>1337:Trinity-Saint Sergius Monastery [Troitse-Sergieva Lavra] founded
*--This great fortress monastery became a central institution of the Muscovite Orthodox Church
\\
*--St. Sergius-Trinity Lavra [VIDEOTAPE+05219]
*--LOOP on "Church"

<>1339c:Moscow | Testament of Ivan I [HTP=182-7 | VSB,1=53-4 | DMR3=195-8]

<>1341:1353; Moscow grand prince Semyon Ivanovich Gordyi [the proud] ruled after his father's death and was confirmed by the Golden Horde

Semyon sojourned with family five times in Sarai
1347:Byzantine Emperor Kantakouzenos replied to an inquiry from Semyon Gordyi about the nature of the institution "emperor" [basileus], indicating two possible meanings =

Semyon lost touch with Byzantium and needed a refresher course in "Roman" institutional practice to guide his own assumption of a new status, and
the Mongol khan of the Golden Horde had for decades been the only model for the new status assumed by the grand princes of Moscow

<>1347:Novgorod granted independence to commercial/fortress city Pskov, though Pskov church remained subordinate to Novgorod
*1342:1359; Novgorod city disturbances [VSB,1=72]
\\
*--LOOP on "Novgorod"

<>1353:Moscow grand prince Semyon's Testament [HTP=189-92] Semyon was taken by the black death
*1348:1350; The Black Death spread westward through the Mediterranean Sea coastal ports, northward to England and the lowlands, then in a big circle back eastward through the Baltic Sea along Hanseatic League trade routes to Novgorod and then to Moscow under the Golden Horde

<>1353:1359; Moscow grand prince Ivan II the Meek or Krasnyi [Red]
*--His Testament [HTP=195-202]

<>1354:Ottoman Turkish power crossed the straits just south of the Byzantine imperial capital city Constantinople

Ottoman forces entered Europe for the first time, moving westward over the next few years all the way to Kosovo (in "Yugoslavia")
In many ways, Ottoman power was an evolved Mongol power

Ottoman Turks pushed resolutely into certain SE European territories that the Mongols never managed to hold for long
Ottomans absorbed under their administration significant territories that the Mongols did not hold at all
Ottoman power crushed the medieval sovereignty of territories today called Hungary, Serbia, and the once great feudal state Bulgaria

Byzantium would not fall to the Ottoman Turks for one more century, but the handwriting was on the wall....
\\
Two paragraphs of TXT describe Ottoman Turkish expansion into south-eastern Europe
*--LOOP on "feudalism"

<>1354:1368; Moscow | Russian Orthodox Church Metropolitan Aleksei was a powerful supporter of Muscovite throne and the actual ruler in Dmitrii's youth [See below]
\\
*--LOOP on "Church"

<>1355:1389; Moscow grand prince Dmitrii Ivanovich [after 1380 dubbed Donskoi] ruled for 34 years [ZNC,3=185-305]

The dramatic developments in Dmitrii's time =
- Rise of Novgorod and Hanseatic League | Historians could call this whole epoch "Novgorodian Russia" rather than "Muscovite Russia"
- Expansion of Italian city-states in Mediterranean markets
- Slippage of Mongol power
- Lithuanian aggression and consolidation of a huge Lithuanian-Polish unified monarchy
- Consider the broad European setting [MAP]
Russia in the time of Dmitrii Donskoi [MAP]

CHR

LOOP on "Chronicle"

<>1357no:Moscow | Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church, Aleksei. received favorable Yarlyk from Berdibek-khan of the Golden Horde [DMR3=176-7]
\\
*--CHR.1:338-59
*--LOOP on "Moscow"
+--LOOP on "Church"

<>1357:1380; Twenty-three years in which 25 khans ruled in Sarai
*--Khorezm [Khwarezm-shakh, Khiva; centered on modern-Day Iran and Uzbekistan (W-ID) ] splintered and fell away from control by Sarai [YouTube#1 music & architectural sites | YouTube#2 (in Russian and directed at potential tourists) ]
*--Poland-Lithuania projected its increasingly vigorous metropol powers into western territories of Sarai, the lower Dnepr basin periphery

<>1359:Novgorod elected Archbishop [VSB,1=71]

These years witnessed increasing projection of waxing metropol power -- Poland, Novgorod and Moscow -- moving into newly vulnerable peripheries caused by weakened Mongol power (see year 1357 above) =

Novgorod merchants consolidated their control over the Bolgar city Zhukotin
This was a sign of eastward expansion of Novgorod's commercial empire and of constant interchange with Golden Horde

1361:Bolgar territories spawned Mongol pretenders to the throne of the Golden Horde
After a series of executions, Khidei became khan. Bulaktemir briefly ruled Bolgar land

<>1367:Germanic trade center Köln [Cologne] hosted Confederation of the Hanseatic League

1370:Denmark. Stralsund Treaty with King Waldemar IV opened great century in the life of the Hanseatic League

About seventy Baltic coastal cities and several inland markets were linking themselves into some sort of regional market
The Hanse represented a trade "institution" very much out of line with old imperial or newer medieval institutions

Novgorod was now the eastern anchor of the Hanseatic League (as London was the western)

There on that eastern edge of the League, Novgorod opened to the great Asian markets along the Silk Road

Novgorod entered its most glorious "Era of Gosudar Novgorod velikii" [Lord Novgorod the Great] [W]

1371:Novgorod settled a treaty with its prince [VSB,1=66-7]
Delicate diplomatic relations with the Horde, the hallmark of Aleksandr Nevskii's reign, had now become tense competition
Russian power now sometimes challenged the Golden Horde
1374:1375; Novgorodians plundered the great tent-city on the lower Volga, Sarai, capital of the Golden Horde [BrE,56:399]
1384:1388; (and again in 1418) All was not well, however. Popular disturbances rocked Novgorod [VSB,1=72-3]

1380:1500s; Economic developments in the Baltic world of the Hanseatic League paralleled those somehow more famous developments in the Mediterranean world [ID]
\\
*--Charles Halperin on Novgorod [E-TXT]
*--Henrik Birnbaum, _Lord Novgorod the Great: Essays in the History and Culture of a Medieval City-State [DK651.N506 b5], pp. 40-54 covers the political history of this remarkable city-state; pp. 82-100 covers the institutions of city-state rule
*--Henrik Birnbaum, _Novgorod in Focus, pp. 153-166 deal with Novgorod & the Hanse

<>1367:Moscow stone Kremlin began

<>1368:1372; Lithuania attacked Moscow frequently

<>1368:Moscow treaty w/Tver [VSB,1=54-5]

<>1375:Moscow | First testament of Dmitrii Donskoi [HTP:204-6]

<>1377:Lithuanian grand prince Wladislaw Jagiello [Jagellon] created a great Polish/Lithuanian dynasty

<>1377:Suzdal | Lavrentian edition of the Chronicles
*--The Hypatian monastery ("Ipaty" [pix] in Kostroma, about 80 miles east-northeast of Yaroslavl [map]) issued its edition of the Chronicles around this time
*--The Hypatian edition of the Chronicles covered Russian history from the year 852

<>1380se08:Kulikovo battle, south of Moscow near the Don River, prince Dmitrii ("Donskoi") defeated Mamai-khan of the Golden Horde [ZNC,3:264-305 | VSB,1=55-6 | DMR2=165-8]

The Kulikovo victory was unusual and was taken as a sign of a new Russian independence from the Golden Horde, BUT =
- That same year, Tokhtamysh defeated Mamai-khan on the Kalka River banks, THEN =
- 1382:The warriors of Mamai's successor, Tokhtamysh-khan (1380-1395) burned Moscow [ZNC,4:2-12 | VSB,1=56-7]
- The Golden Horde was still a force to be reckoned with
Nonetheless, an epic poem commemorated the great Kulikovo battle, "Zadonshchina" by Sofony of Riazan [ZMR2:211-23 | ZMR1=186f | DMR3:202-9 | WAL=106-11]
"Hagiographic" biography of prince Dmitrii appeared [ZMR2:315-22 | DMR3=198-202]
Four decades later, "The Life of St.Sergius" described how exemplary monk Sergius of Radonezh inspired Moscow victory [TXT]
\\
*--LOOP on "Chronicle"

<>1380:1500s; Venice [on the northwestern-most shore of the Adriatic Sea in modern-day Italy], a commercial city-state, defeated its arch-rival, the city-state Genoa, and assumed dominance over Mediterranean trade

The power of Venice was rooted in the successful exploitation of European crusader zeal a century and a half earlier
Now, defeat of Genoa marked the beginning of a commercial transformation that signaled the rise of market economics at odds with medieval tradition
Along Mediterranean shores a cultural transformation, traditionally labeled "Renaissance", accompanied economic transformation
Mediterranean developments have always drawn more attention than similar developments up north in the Baltic/North-Sea Europe = The rise of the Hanseatic League
There are important differences =
- Venice was an independent city-state, itself a center of trade and for centuries invulnerable to growing authority of European centralized national monarchies
- The Hanse was a loose federation port towns, vulnerable to the expanding claims of waxing centralized national monarchies
- The fate of Novgorod illustrates the vulnerability of Hanse cities

<>1385:Poland-Lithuania in Krewo Union

This was a personal union based on the fact that Lithuanian grand prince Jagellon accepted Catholic Christianity and pledged to adhere to its Church
Jagellon married the Polish Queen Jadwiga, and thus became also King of Poland [background, see VSB,1=89-96]
The West Slavic peoples along SE Baltic shores [po more], after nearly a thousand years subordinated to various outside authorities, now become a great independent medieval monarchical state, united under the authority of the Catholic King of Poland
Reaching south into the Pontic Steppes to the northwestern shores of the Black Sea, the Jagellon dynasty soon ruled in Romanian-speaking Moldavia, Wallachia, and Bessarabia
Poland and Lithuania [together or independently, they are now joined in one SAC LOOP] made strenuous effort to consolidate their united authority in vulnerable, remote and newly acquired territories via significant charters to regional and urban centers [EG]
Urban charters in Poland-Lithuania granted limited but, in these times and places, unusual powers of self-regulation [VSB,1=89-110]
\\
*--A brief online history of Poland [E-TXT]
*--Oswald Backus, "Problem of Unity..." in TDU:275-95, with discussion:296-319
*--LOOP on "Church"

<>1386:Moscow prince Dmitrii Donskoi's second testament [HTP:208-17 | VSB,1=57-8]
*--Compare with simple freeholder's last will [KRR=130-1]

<>1389:Dmitrii Donskoi's last will and testament illustrated effort of Moscow prince to escape the tradition of "partible inheritance" among Russian landowning nobles

Partible inheritance was a system in which estates were divided among all male heirs, thus fragmenting and depleating them
Dmitrii Donskoi established, at least for the grand princely inheritance, a tradition of primogeniture (in which the estate went intact to the eldest son)
Notice also the presumptions here of the rights of women in such inheritances [KRR:87-90]
Russian history, like many other "national" histories, was on occasion shaped by grand and powerful women [EG= Olga (ID), Anna (ID), and Marfa Posadnitsa (ID)]
Dmitrii Donskoi's will opens a window into the everyday life of women in medieval Rus'

<>1389:1425; Moscow grand prince Vasilii I reigned for 36 years

Tokhtamysh-khan put Vasilii I on the throne. Elites in Suzdal [W] and in Bolgar opposed this action, but without success
Russia in the time of Vasilii I [MAP]
The Golden Horde in the time of Vasilii I [MAP]
\\
*2007:Astrakhan| N.E. Vedeneeva, Vasilii I Dmitrievich - Velikii kniaz` Moskovskii (1389 - 1425): Monografiia

<>1389:Moscow to Constantinople | Metropolitan Pimin's journey [DMR2=158-62 | DMR3:209-13]
*--First-hand accounts written by _Russian Travelers to Constantinople in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries [DR729.M34] help us test the degree of Muscovite isolation from its Byzantine roots in the era of the Golden Horde (CF=1393)

<>1392:1430; Poland-Lithuania ruled for 38 years by Witowt in the years of greatest Polish-Lithuanian power and extent

<>1393:Moscow grand prince Vasilii I reflected how far Russia had drifted out from under authority of Constantinople when he ordered Russian churches not to bother saying prayers for the Byzantine emperor ["basileus" in Greek; "tsar" in Russian] (CF=1389 above)

Getting wind of this, the Patriarch in Constantinople wrote to Vasilii = "It is inconceivable for a Christian to have a church and not have the tsar, for the state and the church are closely united, and it would be impossible to separate them one from the other" [Miliukov, Religion and the Church in Russia=18]
Evidence suggests that the Russian Orthodox Church on certain occasions offered prayers for the khan of the Golden Horde

Yes, the khan was an Islamic "infidel", but his power still was "tsar-like" and had its source, like all looming monarchical authority, in the mysterious ways of God
Thus Mongol khans were worthy of the sorts of prayers reserved in earlier times for Byzantine emperors
Moscow took inspiration from two great imperial models, Roman and Mongol

Historians often claim that Russian drift from Byzantium, from its European roots, from "The West", was another of the significant consequences of Mongol rule
However, the question of "Russian isolation" is very much more complicated than that
\\
*--Historian Michael Cherniavsky, "Khan or Basileus" [CSH, esp. pp.68-9] suggests that Russian Church observances had for many years substituted the khan of the Golden Horde for the Byzantine Emperor in its prayers for the protection of power [Basileus]
*--LOOP on Islam
*--LOOP on "Church"

<>1395:Golden Horde capital city Sarai burned to the ground when Tamerlane (Timur the Lame) defeated and seized the throne from Tokhtamysh-khan
*1389:The Golden Horde in Sarai in the years before Tamerlane's devastating attack [Wki]

Over the next several years, Tamerlane turned attention away from Kievan Rus' and other northern regions where the Golden Horde ruled
Tamerlane turned southward toward distant lands ruled by Ottoman Turks, another warrior folk who had recently come aflooding down from the Altai highlands
For over a century Mongol power had neglected these southerly territories under Ottoman authority, but not now =

1400oc:Tamerlane-khan sacked Aleppo
1401:1402; Tamerlane began an eventually successful siege of Jerusalem as he moved into lands ruled by Ottoman Turks
1401fe:mr; Tamerlane sacked Damascus
1401se:Tamerlane sacked Baghdad. The first 700 years in the history of this great city foretold the next 700
1402jy20:At Ankara, Tamerlane defeated and briefly stymied the expansive Ottoman Turks

Tamerlane for a time checked rapid Ottoman Turkish expansion in the south, but not without cost to his position in the north =

Northern Slavic peoples' sought independence (especially in Poland-Lithuania, Moscow, and Novgorod)
At the same time, conflicts arose among these northern Slavic peoples (much as we see conflict among the Turko-Tatar peoples)

Back up north, ambitions and independence as well as disorder grew with Mongol neglect when Tamerlane and the Golden Horde looked southward

<>1395:Novgorod [?]. Death of Spiridon Stroganov, wealthy trader, grower, and miner in the most distant north-eastern Novgorod markets of the Hanseatic League

The Stroganov family became especially rooted in the region of Arkhangel'sk and the Northern Dvina River in the White Sea drainage

In that remote region, they operated in relative independence from Novgorod authority
They formed a Stroganov family dynasty in close relationship to the Golden Horde and Bolgar authorities
As the family drifted away from Novgorod, it fell into the orbit of expanding Muscovite power, EG=
1397:Moscow grand prince Vasilii I gave Charter (exercising a Mongol-like power to issue yarlyks) to those very same Northern Dvina lands at the extreme northeastern edge of the Novgorod commercial empire where the Stroganovs made their fortune [VML:57-60]

1396 or 1397: Way back in the other direction from the remote eastern Dvina lands -- the western edge of the Novgorod commercial empire (which was the eastern edge of Poland-Lithuania) -- the fortified trade city Pskov, which was a close ally of Novgorod, governed itself under a Judicial Charter [E-TXT]

See sections 3 & 4 of the Charter to learn something of the workings of the veche
The text that survives is a 1467 revision of the Pskov Judicial Charter

Compare veche administration in Novgorod with 1338:German city administration [TXT]
\\
*--LOOP on "Novgorod"

<>1399:Kazan Mongols ("Kazan Tatars") sometimes fled to Russian lands for sanctuary as they sought to escape internecine struggles within the splintering Golden Horde

Still, the Golden Horde could inflict defeats on its competitors, EG=Lithuania
Over the next few years, Mongol Makhmet-khan and his brother Kichim-khan founded the Kazan Tatar fortress

They invited those disaffected with the Golden Horde, Astrakhan Tatars, Azov Tatars, and Crimean Tatars to join them
They created the Kazan khanate [tsardom] on territories of the Bolgars and Mordvins [ID]

The new Kazan khanate [ID] was not like the Golden Horde because the Kazan khan was restrained in power by an aristocracy [BrE,26:907]

Heritable titles were biki and murz
A tsar ruled at top, surrounded by guards, ulany, the servitor element in the Kazan state
The bikim and murz elected the tsar and restrained him
They received salary from the state
The clergy or holy men were very significant = seid was head of the Muslim clergy and had political administrative significance, extending even to diplomacy

The growing power of the Islamic Kazan khanate brought it into conflict with Moscow Prince Vasilii I who sent his military against Kichim-khan but was defeated
With Tamerlane's attentions turned southward, the empire of the Golden Horde frayed at the edges
The disintegration of the Golden Horde into several widely scattered and independent khanates, such as the Kazan Tatar khanate, can be considered the fifth and final great geo-political result of Mongol rule in Old Rus'
\\
*--LOOP on Islam

<>1403:Czech lands, Prague | At Karel University (Univerzita Karlova, Universitas Carolina or Charles University [W]) German professors launched attack on publications of English reforming Oxford University priest John Wycliffe (1384:England, death [W])

Professor Wycliffe was popular with Czech professors, especially with Jan Hus and his associates
It is of some significance and interest to notice the rising competition and conflict between two institutional worlds = Papal throne and university [CF=hst.txn II.A]
Spiritual as well as political unity of the Church in "The West" was breaking up, and Slavic Czechs, led by Jan Hus and his associates, kept up the pressure

<>1406:Moscow grand prince Vasilii I''s first testament [HTP:219-24]

<>1409:Prince Edigei of the Golden Horde dispatched letter to Vasilii I advised him strongly to consult "the old men" about how Moscow should behave in relationship to the Horde =

It would be well for you ... to observe the ancient customs, and then you will live safely and rule in your domain. Whenever you suffer any harm, either from Russian princes or from Lithuania, each year you send complaints to us against them, and you ask us for charters of protection from them, and you give us no respite on this account....

In other words, Moscow relied on the Golden Horde as an ally against its enemies, but it failed to live up to its end of the bargain
Edigei complained about the following perceived abuses =

Traitorous Mongol servitors of the Golden Horde ("children of Tokhtamysh") sought asylum in Moscow [EG]
Vasilii showed disrespect toward Mongol envoys and merchants sent to Moscow
Moscow tried to exercise its authority in certain towns under Mongol dominion
Vasilii's failed to visit Sarai (to see the khan "with your own eyes") or send boyars or sons to pay homage to the khan, and
Vasilii failed to pay yasak [tribute, a primitive form of taxation exacted by Golden Horde. The yasak was the standard source of revenue collected from subordinate peoples, usually those with whom a license agreement (Yarlyk) was arranged. The Yarlyk was the main non-military, non-punitive instrument of control, a licensing authority exercised by the Golden Horde over Russian administrative affairs since the early years of the conquest

Edigei explained that these failures of Vasilii I justified him in his decision to attack Moscow [VSB,1=113 | DMR3=182-3]
So we see that the question of Russian isolation is not simply one of drift away from "The West". We also see drift from Byzantium and the Golden Horde

<>1409ja18:Czech lands, Prague | Karel (Charles) University's "four nations" structure overturned by King Václav IV [a clumsy western European version of this name is often met = "Wenceslas", as in a popular Christmas carol]

The "four nations" structure gave German professors three votes and Czech professors only one vote in academic affairs. Now Czechs were three, Germans one

So the German professors and students all returned to German lands and founded Leipzig University
From their new base of operations, these vengeful exiled professors spread word over Germany about Czech heresy
Thus they elevated academic/nationalistic politics to the level of religious doctrinal dispute

Jan Hus eventually became new Czech Rector at Karel University and led the expanding struggle for radical reform of the Catholic Church
Lured to Germany under false promise of immunity from western European Church officials, Hus was arrested, jailed and tortured
1414:1417; Council of Constance declared Hussite movement heretical
1415jy06:Jan Hus was burned at the stake [W#1 | W-lxt]
Rebellion followed in Czech lands [Dvornik=189-99]

Czech Slavic consciousness, a transnational form of "national consciousness", made its first significant appearance, after a thousand years of buffeting experience on the outer frontier of the Byzantine commonwealth
In the other direction, westward, Czech religious/nationalistic rebellion was another sign of disintegration on the outer frontier of German-speaking Holy Roman authority

1431:Council of Basel (an important act in the ongoing drama of efforts at East/West unification) and the continuing Hussite movement agitated European Christian Churches
\\
*--LOOP on "Church"
*--LOOP on early history of universities

<>1410:Tannenberg battle | Lithuania defeated Teutonic Knights
*--The zealous and holy two-century-long Teutonic military mission was now broken
*--But these German-speaking elites continued to have powerful influence on southeast Baltic (northwest Russian) culture and civilization
*--Over the next century, Poland-Lithuania acquired Belarus, much of what is today called Ukraine, and certain Russian cities and lands
*--Poland-Lithuania was becoming one of the vastest European monarchies of all times

<>1417:Moscow grand prince Vasilii I's second testament [HTP :226-34]

<>1417:1418; Trinity-Saint Sergius Monastery flourished at the height of Vasilii I's reign [pix | 1965:pix of pilgrims] [W]

An increasingly independent and vigorous Russian Orthodox Church evolved [VSB,1=121-5]
The evolution of a distinct Russian civilization and culture received encouragement from three different sources =
1. Disorder in the western European Church [EG]
2. Decline of Byzantine power and authority [EG]
3. Weakening of Mongol dominance [EG]
YouTube "slide show" = Mature Russian Orthodox church architecture and iconography with Orthodox liturgy as sound track
2012ja06:Moscow Cathedral of Christ the Savior | Celebration of Christmas Liturgy [YouTube]

Two great figures deserve a place in general European Church history,
in the history of Christendom in general =

(1) The "Life of St. Sergius of Radonezh" [TXT],
composed by Monk Epifanii Premudryi [Epiphanius the Most Wise],
became one of the most popular "lives of the saints" in the Russian tradition [ZMR2:262-90]

The uncomplex spirituality of St. Sergius was not lost in a peasant wood-cut chapbook [liubok] illustration of the majestic Trinity-Saint Sergius Monastery =
- At first glance, the huge monastery was displayed in all its glory [pix]
- But notice the unobtrusive miniature of Sergii [Sergius] & fellow monks at their original, primitive hermitage on the hillside to the right and above all the majesty [detail]]
Sergii's "Life" described how he inspired 1380 defeat of Golden Horde [ID]
Sergii died in 1392 (2-plus decades before Epifanii composed his "Life")
Epifanii wrote other "Lives" [FTS:50-84 | RRC2,1=119-27 | ZMR1:206-36]
Sergii was a major figure in the 400-year tradition of "lives of the saints"
Apocryphal literature was also popular. EG= a legend about King Solomon [WAL=114-5]

(2) 1430:Death of Andrei Rublev, the greatest Russian icon "writer" [painter]
Rublev's Old Testament Trinity =
(View detaeil in Olga's Gallery)
rublev1.jpg (186831 bytes)

Icons in a Russian Orthodox Church are arrayed in regular patterns on a tall partition called "iconostasis", located behind the altar, with the "golden gate" at its center. Priests pass through the gate at the center of the iconostasis to perform the most sacred and mysterious elements of the liturgy [pix | pix | pix | pix]
Icons were arrayed on all walls -- floor to high vaults, from the altar at the front to choir at the back of the nave -- and around all columns [pix | pix]
\\
*--Essays on Muscovite culture in the era of the Golden Horde [E-TXT]
*--Vasilii Kliuchevskii, "St. Sergius", in HRR,1
*--Nicholas Zernov, _Russians and Their Church [281.947+Z54 -- old Dewey Decimal call-number]
*----------, St. Sergius, Builder of Russia [NoUO]
*--Kimball essay on select scenes in the great Tarkovskii movie ANDREI RUBLEV
*--Viktor Lazarev, ed., _Early Russian Icons [N7956.U5]
*--Arthur Voyce, _The_Art and Architecture of Medieval Russia [N6983.V6]
*--Moscow | Tretiakov Gallery, which holds the Rublev "Trinity" [W]
*--LOOP on "Church"

<>1423:Moscow grand prince Vasilii I's third testament [HTP:236-40]
*--Vasilii I's long reign ended two years later

<>1425:1462; Moscow grand prince Vasilii II Temnyi [Basil the Blind] reigned on and off for 37 years

The Golden Horde was fragmenting through these years. New "Tatar" khanates appeared | EG=

1425+:Siberian Tatar khanates [Sibirskie tatary]
1438+: Nogai Tatar and Kazan Tatar khanates
1443:Crimean Tatar khanate
1460s:Kazakh Tatar, Uzbek Tatar, and Astrakhan Tatar khanates

Yet Vasilii II was defeated, captured and held by the Golden Horde who extracted secret promises from him
These promises most likely were in connection with the Horde's need of Vasilii's help against the splintering factions
In return, the Horde helped destroy Vasilii's relatives who competed for the Moscow throne (it was in that violent competition that Vasilii was blinded)
The Horde protected him as grand prince. Vasilii II had great success against rival Russian princes and their domains
Luka Stroganov ransomed, or helped ransom, Vasilii from captivity by the Golden Horde
Stroganovs fell into Moscow orbit as Novgorod came increasingly under pressure from Moscow
Russia in the time of Vasilii II [MAP]
\\
*--Alan Kimball, portion of essay on Stroganov family dealing with their "frontier" phase [TXT]
*--LOOP on "Novgorod"

<>1431:Moscow had great military success against Bolgars. Earlier independent, then under Mongol rule, the Bolgars now were brought fully under Russian rule

<>1431jy25:1445; [Switzerland] Council of Basel [W] worked for fourteen years without success to pull the disintegrated European Christian Church together, to pull western European factions together and to reunite Eastern and Western Churches

Serious splits in the Catholic Church revealed themselves
At the same time an independent Conciliar Movement [ID] gained in strength, challenging the unprecedented authority claimed by the Patriarch in Rome (The Pope)

This movement, asserted the superior authority of the whole church assembled in general council of high officials
The Council, rather than a single Pope, should rule the Church

1439:1446; most intense seven years of renewed effort to reunite Eastern and Western churches (Orthodox/Catholic churches)
Russian Orthodox Church rejected reunion and declared itself autocephalous (independent of Constantinople and the general east/west ecumenical movement)

Russian Metropolitan Isidor protested the position against union taken by his Russian Orthodox superiors
Isidor went into exile in Rome [VSB,1=126-8 | RRH,1=99-101]
Back home in Moscow, Russian Orthodox church authorities independently elected their Metropolitan with no participation of wider Orthodox church officials

Reunion of a single, universal Christian Church failed
- Main reason = Centralized European monarchical states grew in stature and self-assurance of their sovereign power
- These waxing political metropols resisted external authority and domestic independence
- Nation-state sovereignty prevailed over "Christendom" as earlier administered by an "ecumenical" Church [ID]
Further disintegration followed =
Hussitism was still an issue (after more than forty years of suppression), adding its radically independent weight to the centrifugal motions of the moderately independent Conciliar Movement
The seeds were being sown for the Protestant Reformation in the next century

<>1436jy16:Novgorod treaty w/ Hanseatic League [VSB,1=76-7]

<>1438:Moscow the target of a siege mounted by Kazan "tsar" Ulumakhmet | MAP of Kazan Khanate and surrounding lands

1440s:Golden Horde continued to splinter. Crimean Tatar and Kazan Tatar hordes more often acted independently
1445je06:Suzdal was the target of Kazan "tsar" Mamotyak attack
1452:Moscow grand prince Vasilii II refused to pay further tribute to the Golden Horde
Bashkirs out on the windy steppes paid yasak to various stronger, surrounding hordes, EG=Kazan Tatars, Sibir, and Astrakhan
Other Bashkirs who lived in the highlands of the Urals remained more independent of Tatar power
Novgorod conducted a lively trade with the Bashkirs, and thus it was increasingly a rival to Tatar power in this Steppe frontier
Belaia River was a good route to Asia and Central-Asia, but Kama River was a frontier
Mordvin territories were ruled by their own prince
\\
*--LOOP on "Novgorod"

<>1447:1492; Lithuania under Polish King Kazimierz [Casimir] IV [VSB,1=96-9]

<>1453my29:Constantinople fell to Mehmet II's cannons. Ottoman Turks victorious [TXT]

After more than 1000 years meeting the challenge of the great Steppe frontier, the Byzantine Empire was overwhelmed
A Slavic convert to Islam and participant in the Turkish capture of Constantinople, Nestor-Iskandr, described the event [DMR3:214-20]
Ottoman Turkish power established itself in Constantinople [which the Turks pronounced Istanbul], converted many features of the old Byzantine imperial power to its own purposes, and became the dominant center, the "metropol", of south-eastern European and near-eastern (Central Asian) life for the next four-plus centuries, until 1919
In one sense the fall of Constantinople can be taken as the utter end of the great "Roman Empire"

A millennium earlier, Rome was dismembered of its original western region and re-centered itself in Constantinople
Now it was gone altogether
Or was it?

In another sense, Ottoman victory can well be considered a further evolution of that great Roman Empire

Wasn't it Arabic-Islamic high culture, rather than medieval European culture, that preserved for the world the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome [EG]?
Now the institutional legacy of Rome might be said to be sustained best under the authority of non-European, non-Christian peoples
Comparison of the west European Holy Roman Empire [ID] with the Byzantine and Ottoman empires is relevant to this point
What difference does ethnicity and religion make in the story of "Rome"?

They spoke Latin in multi-ethnic territories under Rome
They spoke Greek in multi-ethnic territories under Constantinople. Elites there called themselves "Romaion" (Greek for "Roman")
They spoke Turkish (written in Arabic alphabet) in the multi-ethnic territories under Istanbul (as Constantinople was officially renamed after WW1)
In the greatest era of Byzantine power, Macedonian Emperors ruled [ID]

Byzantine territories were now ruled by invading outsiders

But how different was Turkish intrusion from Constantine's own earlier intrusion into the Greek colonial city Byzantion a millennium before [ID]
How different was Turkish intrusion from the west European seizure of the city 250 years earlier [ID]?

These victorious Turks adhered to the doctrines of yet another world religion, Islam

And they placed no particular value on the roots of that empire in the actual city Rome
But we might forget that the Roman empire centered in Rome was aggressively anti-Christian until the Eastern branch of the Empire in the year 330 adopted Christianity as a sort of official ideology [ID]

The "world-historical" role of the Ottoman Empire was to be in certain ways the same as Rome

Just as Obolensky described the Byzantine Commonwealth [ID], a future historian might compose a study of the "Ottoman Commonwealth"
[*2012:In our time, Hungarian right-wing political activists harkened back to the "Turkish" roots of Hungarian identity]
Much like the earlier "Roman Empire", Ottoman Turkish power became a decisive presence in the "Mediterranean World" (defined by Fernand Braudel to include the Black Sea and all appurtenant shores and passages along the western and central stretches of the Silk Road) and a powerful influence on the evolution of modern European history, east and west [BMM=110]
More on the underlying AfroAsian geography of these questions [TXT]
We could use a clear and less "Eurocentric" and more globally oriented exploration of the ways the Turkish "world-historical" role was the same as, and the ways it was different from, the Roman/Byzantine role

It is in this way that Ottomans can be said to partake of two great imperial legacies = Rome and the Golden Horde
*--LOOP on "Turk" from 1243 back to this 1453 entry
Wiki on Turkish and Mongol "origins myth"]

The Ottoman Empire did take up as its own a large part of the Byzantine institutional and geopolitical heritage
And it did this on the basis of successes in SE Europe which were more enduring, even more stable, than anything Byzantium or the Golden Horde ever achieved
Of course, such successes are never permanent
Nor are such successes absolute
Don't ignore the significance of the 1492 expulsion of Islamic "Moors" from what we call Spain only a few decades after Ottoman victory at Constantinople [ID]

Another point to ponder = While Ottomans wielded great power in the lives of southern Slavs, they never managed to do so in the life of Russia
Ottoman power, as inheritor of Byzantine power, never managed their own version of that pre-Mongol Russian/Byzantine closeness
On the contrary, long term animosity between the Ottoman Empire and Russia largely shaped world history over the next four-plus centuries, and may reverberate in our own time
In the contest with Ottoman power, Muscovite Russia also carried on the legacies of both Roman and Mongol empires
- The Eastern Orthodox Church had since the year 330 become something like the institutional guardian of imperial "ideology" in east Rome [ID]
- But the Byzantine Church was now without its emperor
- Furthermore, after more than a millennium, Christendom was flying apart [EG#1 | EG#2]
Increasingly, Moscow saw itself in the role of holy and secular defense of universal Christendom and its empire, the inheritor of that Byzantine patriarchal/imperial function
Thus the Russian Orthodox Church now had strong motive to suppress the memory of the Mongol legacy and of the "khans", to exalt the memory of the Orthodox and Imperial past, and to throw its support behind the ambitions of the Muscovite "tsar" [Slavic form of the expression "Caesar"]
Ottoman Turks clearly inherited some part of the Byzantine and Mongol legacy and mixed them in their own way, while Muscovite Russians inherited and mixed them in different ways
Between Ottoman and Russian claims to the Mongol and Byzantine inheritance there was a large area of territorial overlap where the two "heirs" disputed the other's claims
So Ottoman-Russian relations were therefore to be a history of conflict that showed only brief signs of abating in the 19th-c [EG]

These were two Eurasian heirs to an awesome Eurasian dual legacy. Their wax and wane were closely linked over the next four-plus centuries
So also was linked their nearly simultaneous destruction in the early 20th century [ID]
But that's far down the line

Growing Russian power and the Ottoman Turk Empire had yet nearly five centuries to go before they failed

In the unfolding of the Russian/Ottoman contest, a third inheritor of the Roman legacy, the so-called Holy Roman Empire, played a tertiary role

In view of the larger macro-historical situation, the question of Russian isolation from "The West" is utterly misconceived
\\
*--The Rise of the Turks and the Ottoman Empire [W]
*--LOOP on Islam

<>1456:Moscow drove wedge between Novgorod upper class (who leaned toward Lithuania) and lower class (who leaned toward Moscow)

Vasilii II defeated Novgorod and forged treaty which held until 1471au11
The treaty restricted authority of the veche
Now the signature of the Moscow grand prince was required on all Novgorod charters
This treaty later allowed Ivan III to claim Novgorod as part of his personal patrimonial feudal possession, his personal udel, otchina or votchina
\\
*--Vernadsky,4
*--LOOP on "feudalism"

<>1458c:Novgorod. St. Michael, Fool in Christ, died [ZMR1:247-57]
\\
*--LOOP on "Novgorod"

<>1461:Moscow grand prince Vasilii II's testament [HTP:242-66]
*--His 37-year reign was nearing its end
*--The 300-year rise of grand-princely city-state Moscow now culminated in the emergence of tsarist Muscovite Russia, a national monarchy =

<>1462:1533; MUSCOVITE RUSSIA, phase #2 -- The 7-decade era of Ivan III "the Great" and his son Vasilii III
*--Ivan was co-ruler since 1449, meaning 56 years in power)

Muscovite Russia became fully independent of the Golden Horde and in line to claim the mantle of Byzantine imperial authority, though Ivan's power did not stretch beyond RUS'
Moscow Kremlin pix | Terem throne [pix#1 | pix#2
1462:1505; Ivan III the Great, 1^st tsar (remember, tsar = Slavic version of "Caesar" or "Kaiser")
As a consequence of the fall of Byzantium, Muscovite grand-princely authority took on new significance
Some major features of this epoch =

Defeat of Novgorod
- This is a most significant moment as Moscow absorbed regional princely cities in a process called "re-gathering Russian lands"
- Moscow thought of these princely cities as "scattered" or "lost" when Kievan Rus fell apart and then was destroyed by Mongols
Spread of serfdom
Decline of patrimonial aristocracy [votchinniki] and rise of service gentry [pomeshchiki]
- votchinnik and pomeshchik nobles = fully articulated two-tiered elite social formation
- The medieval Russian "aristocracy" was not a uniform social class. Tensions among them abounded
Mongol authority renounced
New law codes strengthened central authority
Important victories over the Livonian Order on Baltic and Finnish Gulf shores
"Josephites" defeated "non-possessors" and consolidated Church power and wealth

Russia in the time of Ivan III [MAP]
\\
*--Vernadsky,4 deals with the crucial epoch of Ivan III and Vasilii III
*--Crummey
*--Aleksandr Presniakov, _Tsardom of Muscovy [DK100.P7413]
*--Gustave Alef, _Origins of Muscovite Autocracy [DK102.A43]
*------. _Rulers and Nobles in 15^th-century Muscovy [DK601.2.A68]
*--Nikolai Andreev, _Studies in Muscovy [DK100.A7]
*--Samuel H. Baron, _Muscovite Russia: Collected Essays [DK70.A2 b35]
*--John Fennell, _Ivan the Great of Moscow [DK106.F4]
*--Nancy Kollman, _Kinship and Politics [DK62.K57]
*--Henryk Paszkiewicz, _The Rise of Moscow's Power [DK90.P37]
*2017je15: Независимая газета | "В скиту Свято-Тихоновой пустыни установлен первый в России памятник Иоанну III" [E-TXT#1 | E-TXT#2]

<>1463:1468; Russian serfdom spread as some of the earliest official restrictions were placed on peasant movement [DMR2=168-9 | DMR3:221-2]
*--Ivan III handed down a decree which expanded earlier decrees limiting peasant movement from one landlord to another
*--Now villagers could move only after harvest, in a two week period surrounding St. George's Day (no26) [VSB,1=123-4]
*--Peasants continued, however, to flee the evolving system of serfdom

<>1466:1474; Russia to India, and back | Russian merchant-trader Afanasii Nikitin described his enterprise abroad [ZMR2:333-53 | WAL=111-13]

<>1467:Pskov reissued its earlier Judicial Charter [W] which revealed some workings of the veche [VSB,1=83-4 | VML:61-82 | VML=18-20 describes the veche | Vernadsky translates "veche" as "city assembly", and sometimes veche is translated as "people's assembly" or "urban assembly"]

<>1468:Belaya River | Tsar Ivan III attacked Bashkirs, an episodic event = Nothing like this again for almost a century

<>1470:Novgorod treaty w/Polish King Kazimierz [Casimir] IV
*--Novgorod sought to counter-balance the power of Moscow [VSB,1=77-8]
*--Novgorod minstrel's immunity charter gives some insight into everyday life [KRR=131-3. On everyday life throughout post-Mongol Russia:127-45; illustrated]

<>1471:1474; Moscow defeated Novgorod and its remarkable female mayor, Marfa Posadnitsa [Novgorod Chronicle in RRC2,1=44-6 | KRR:91-9 | VSB,1=78-81 | DMR2=170-84 | DMR3:222-36 (with MAP)]
*--Hypertext LOOP on "Chronicle" ends here | Hop to first of this 6-century long LOOP, but you might find later chronicle entries of interest or use

1471:Novgorod city charters [KRR=109-14 | RRC2,1=29-46 | VML:83-92 | VSB,1=67-8]
1471au11:Novgorod-Moscow treaty [VSB,1=80] repeated most of the terms of the 1456 treaty

This treaty severed ties with Lithuania
It recognized Novgorod as otchina [or votchina, heritable patrimonial possession] of the Moscow grand prince

The commercial city-state with its governing veche was no match for the centralized princely tsardom of Moscow
Moscow absorbed Novgorod, something the Golden Horde never managed to do
This was thus a major moment in the "re-gathering of Russian lands". But it was more =
- Moscow seized from Novgorod the eastward tending trade initiative and thus =
- Moscow positioned itself to inherit the Golden Horde's Asian sphere of influence
\\
*--Henrik Birnbaum, _Novgorod in Focus [DK651.N506B573], pp. 166-181 deal with the meaning of Novgorod's defeat
*--Vernadsky,4:27-67
*--LOOP on "Novgorod"

<>1472:Muscovite tsar Ivan III married Zoe Paleologus, niece of the last Byzantine Emperor, now living in Italian exile

In the tradition of "nuptial diplomacy", Russia's claim to the Byzantine inheritance was strengthened
Also Zoe solidified Russian ties with Renaissance Italy [GO 1476fa]
- 1474:1478; Italian architect Aristotle Fioravanti was commissioned by Ivan III to design and build the first great cathedral in the Moscow Kremlin, Uspenskii sobor [Cathedral of the Assumption (or Dormition)]
- Fioravanti carefully studied Russian architectural traditions in Novgorod, Vladimir and Pskov
- Uspenskii sobor [pix] became the primary tsarist church, the site of coronations, victory services, weddings and funerals of Russian monarchs until Peter I moved the capital to St.Petersburg
1472:Sarai| Russian warriors from Viatka looted the capital of the Golden Horde during the absence of the khan
1474:Golden Horde sent hundreds of merchants and diplomats on mission to Moscow [Halperin:81]
1474:1507; Moscow treaties with Crimean Tatars demonstrated that Moscow need no longer acknowledge a unified Golden Horde
How confused is the issue of Russian isolation!

<>1476fa:Venice ambassador Ambrosio Contarini was sent to Persia in an unsuccessful effort to rally support against Ottoman Turks

Contarini acted on the perception that Ottoman Turkey and Persia were natural competitors, even though both were Islamic in their imperial doctrine

Contarini's premonition about this, however, was premature by a quarter of a century =
1501:Persia made a shocking break with Sunni Islam and shifted to Shia Islamic faith

But, in any event, Contarini's main concern was that the fall of Byzantium and the establishment of the vigorous Sunni Ottoman Turkish authority throughout the eastern Mediterranean world cut Venice off from the source of its prosperity and power. He sought allies to this cause wherever he could find them
On his way home from Persia [Iran], Contarini circled through Moscow where he met with Ivan III

They discussed the shared Russian and Venetian interest in thwarting Ottoman power
Ivan's wife [above] had been brought up in Italy
Italian-Russian relations were especially close in these years
Contarini left an interesting account of wintertime travel in sani [enclosed sleds] and of daily life in Moscow [DMR2=184-90 | DMR3:237-43]

Victories of the Ottoman Empire brought an end to the nearly 300-year epoch of Venetian city-state political and economic power, but they gave rise to ambitions and fears among neighboring states
Like all waxing European monarchical powers, Russia poised herself to play the role of great imperial nation
Contarini thought it might be possible for the waning city Venice to provoke the waxing national monarchy "Muscovy" to do its bidding
- Russia had become a flourishing European culture and a thriving Eurasian power
- The days of powerful and independent city-states were over
- This was the beginning of the monarchical nation-state era, and in this regard Russia was way out front of most European kingdoms
\\
*--Pavlidis,14

<>1478:Novgorod veche bell was cut down and shipped to Moscow, later to be melted down and caste into a cannon

With the abolition of the Novgorod veche, the long history of early Russian urban self-government or self-administration was at its end
Novgorod defeat at the hands of tsar Ivan III of Moscow not only had profound implications for Russian institutional history but for social history as well =

Over the next six years (especially 1480:1484), 150 Novgorod boyars were executed and their property confiscated
Independent churchmen were arrested
The top layer of Novgorod society was skimmed off =
- 8000 prominent families were deported
- They were offered land in the Moscow area if they agreed to serve the Moscow tsar
In their places back in Novgorod, Ivan III settled his own servitor gentry, a pomeshchik aristocracy [officially designated place-holding service nobles, officially rewarded with titles and properties]
The 300-year era of patrimonial (heritable) votchinnik aristocracy was coming to an end

But fundamental social transformations take time

In truth, the rule of the Golden Horde long ago undermined votchinnik independence
Mongol insistence on complete subordination of all to the khan had its effect on old aristocratic social norms
This sort of tsarist power was one of the important Muscovite Russian inheritances from the era of the Tatar Yoke
But votchinniki survived
Now this recognizable European-style elite feudal social formation (aristocracy or nobility) entered a long epoch of terminal decline
And the agent of this decline would be the power of the Muscovite tsar

Over the next two centuries, the medieval Russian secular elite was split into two tiers, the first under constant pressure and the second expanding =
1. Votchinniki, i.e., "patrimonial nobles" with heritable possessions (landed estates), privileges, exemptions and presumed duties
  - Votchinniki were a noble by birthright
  - Their titles and possessions were a direct inheritance from a father or, rarely, some other close family member
  - Their titles and possessions were traditionally unmediated by any official appointment or approval
2. Pomeshchiki, i.e., "servitor nobles" with assigned possessions (landed estates), privileges, exemptions and very explicit duties
  - Pomeshchiki depended for their titles, properties, privileges, exemptions, etc., on the good will and continued support of their princely masters
  - They were assigned pomest'e [landed estate, held on condition of service to the tsarist state]
  - This was a social innovation, not new to Ivan III's time, but brought to first full fruition under his authority
  - The servitor gentry [pomeshchik] was very different from the old patrimonial aristocrat [votchinnik]
  - It must also be noted that the pomeshchik had to earn this distinction in the eyes of the princely master, and held it only so long as his service satisfied the princely master
In the 15th century, the power and independence of the old votchinniki elite (for that matter of the whole social structure) was a natural target for the increasingly centralized tsarist authority
- The 1649 Law Code described pomeshchik [TXT] and votchinnik [TXT], and in that order
- Muscovite grand-princely power applied constant pressure to shift votchina aristocracy into a service-bound pomest'e [territorially assigned] aristocracy, and to blur the distinctions in the ranks of this two-tiered feudal elite
In reaction to this, many Russian votchinniki left Russian service to enter service in other "nations", most notably in Lithuania and Poland [EG]
It seems a bit odd that the institution of "Boyar Duma" achieved something like solid institutional expression at this time and under these conditions

Russian aristocratic elites grasped onto this institution to protect their interests in the face of tsarist inroads
The tsar, in his turn, was not yet in a position to rule in total independence from the old families
He met irregularly with the Boyar Duma for advice and support of his policies
The tsar convened the Boyar Duma; it did not convene itself
Its members were divided into several different categories = boyars, okol'nich'i, duma gentry, and duma d'iaki
The Boyar Duma represented a certain institutional compensation to the old votchina elites of Moscow
Boyar Duma eased votchinniki through a time in which they were losing authentic political and social independence and power

It would be still two centuries before authentic votchina independence was fully undermined
Nonetheless, Russia was the first and the most irreversibly successful among emerging European centralized "national" monarchies to neutralize independent aristocracies
\\
*--LOOP on "Novgorod" but only after giving some interpretive thought to the historical relationship between the geo-political fate of Novgorod and the political-social fate of votchina aristocrats
*--RRC1(6) or RRC2(6) (George Vernadsky and L.V. Cherepnin debate issue of whether there was a "Russian Feudalism")
*--Nancy Kollmann, _Kinship and Politics: The Making of the Muscovite Political System, 1345-1547 [DK62.K57]
*--LOOP on "feudalism"

<>1480:Russian tsar in Moscow, Ivan III, renounced authority of Golden Horde when he rejected Akhmat-khan's effort to extract further tribute [VSB,1=113-16 | DMR2=191-3 | DMR3=184-6]
*--Moscow had grown strong, yes, but the Golden Horde had also grown weak
*--Sarai, the encampment of the Golden Horde that served as something like a "capital" or "metropol", was taken and plundered by Voevoda [Muscovite frontier military governor] Nozdrevatyi
*--This was the utter end of nearly two and one half centuries of Golden Horde dominion over Russia

<>1482:Crimean Tatars, one of the offshoots from the earlier united Golden Horde, sacked Kiev, harassed Poland-Lithuania
*--Over the next two centuries, a four-way contest for ascendancy evolved in the old Pontic Steppes, involving

Catholic Poland-Lithuania
Crimean Tatars, acting as ally of the Islamic Ottoman Empire
Orthodox Moscow, in uneasy association with emerging
Cossack communities along the Dnepr and Don river drainages
\\
*--LOOP on Islam

<>1485:Tver prince Michael went over to Lithuania [VSB,1=116] as Moscow seized the city-state and continued the "re-gathering of Russian lands"
\\
*--Oswald P. Backus, Motives of West Russian Nobles in Deserting Lithuania for Moscow, 1377-1514 [noUO]

<>1487:1489; Novgorod's 50 richest merchants were deported
*--Eventually 10 thousand middle class burghers were moved from Novgorod to Moscow lands
*--In these years Ivan III approved a Novgorod Judicial Charter [W]. Compare this urban charter with the earlier Pskov Judicial Charter
*--LOOP on Novgorod

<>1487my18:Moscow defeated Kazan Tatars. Mohamed-Amin became vassal khan
*--Russian frontier or imperialist expansion to the south and east now picked up momentum

<>1488:Beloozero city charter [VSB,1=116-8]

<>1489au16:Viatka taken by Moscow and all prominent figures sent under guard to Moscow
*--Tsar Ivan III granted to some of these prominent Viatka figures pomest'ia [landed estates held by pomeshchiki nobles] so long as they rendered state service to the Moscow tsar
*--Others were executed

<>1490au: Nogai Horde murzy [princes] sent embassy to Moscow offering tsar Ivan III alliance in a struggle against "Ahmad's sons", i.e., the remains of the Golden Horde

Russian frontier or imperialist ambition now looked beyond "re-gathering Russian lands"
Russians gazed down the Volga watershed past the Kazan Tatars and toward the heart of the old Golden Horde's territories on the shores of the Caspian Sea
At the same time western European monarchies (most notably those of Spain, Portugal and England) "discovered" great overseas opportunities
Overseas opportunities eventually devalued control over the old overland Silk Road, but that trade route remained still important
Scan the next 30 years to get a sense of what it meant when trans-oceanic projection of power became a human possibility =

<>1492:Spanish-sponsored explorer Columbus "sailed the ocean blue", making landing on Caribbean Sea islands of the New World [MAP]

1493:1527; Peru, Cuzco | Far inland and high in the Andes mountains, the third great indigenous New World civilization, the Incas [Emperor's], reached its apex under Emperor Huayna [sometimes Huayra] Capac
Back in the "old world", Spain drove out Jews and the Islamic Moors (left over from days of Arabic greatness [ID] )
Beginnings of European trans-oceanic exploration and expansion (projection of military, administrative and economic power) over the face of the whole globe = [Moving MAP]

<>1492:Polish King Kazimierz died. His two sons ruled Poland-Lithuania

When tsar Ivan III's daughter, Elena, married Lithuanian prince Aleksandr, Ivan began to call himself "tsar i Gosudar vseia Rusi" [tsar and Lord of all the Russias] and his ambitions looked south as well as west
Flexing his autocratic powers as conflict with Poland intensified, Ivan III squeezed elite aristocrats and lowly village laborers =
- In the midst of this complex foreign entanglement and domestic squeeze, Russian votchinniki [patrimonial aristocrats] fled from Muscovite tsarist power to Poland-Lithuania
- At the other end of the social and economic spectrum, peasant villagers, increasingly pressured into condition of serfdom, fled to freedom in the south and east
Some villagers who fled south and east in the lower Dnepr, Don and Volga watersheds acquired the name "Cossack"
- Cossacks picked up their name from Steppe nomads, the Kazakhi, whom they met out on the vast Eurasian prairie
- Fleeing Russian peasant villagers slightly mispronounced the local name kazakhi as kazaki
- We further distort the name in English as "Cossacks"
- These novel, Orthodox, warrior-farmer Cossack communities grew strong in the wild Steppes
- They were becoming a thorn in everyone's side, whether Moscow, Poland, Lithuania, or Crimean Tatars
- These folks fled from Moscow, but Moscow still had one advantage in dealing with Cossacks =
- For Cossacks, Orthodox Christianity was the central element of self-identification
In Muscovy, domestic and "international" as well as political and religious issues braided together
\\
*--Vernadsky,4:220-33 and 249-69
*--Robert M. Croskey, _Muscovite Diplomatic Practice in the Reign of Ivan III [DK102.C76]
*2016:MVA|>Akunin,Boria|Между Азией и Европой : история Российского государства : от Ивана III до Бориса Годунова
*--LOOP on Islam

<>1494:Novgorod ties w/Hanse ended. Moscow authorities seized some Hanse merchants

<>1497:Moscow | Sudebnik [Law Code] of tsar Ivan III [Horace W. Dewey, ed., _Muscovite Judicial Texts, 1488-1556:9-21| Excerpts = VSB,1=118-9 | DMR3:243-58| HRR,1]

1957:Speculum#32| Dewey, ed. "The White Lake Charter: A Medieval Russian Administrative Statute"
Ann M. Kleimola, _Justice in Medieval Russia: Muscovite Charters (pravye gramoty) of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries [KM.K63j1975]
"Kormlenie" charter ["tax farming" license] (example) [VSB,1=119-20]
Other Muscovite charters [KRR=114-7]
\\
*--Daniel Kaiser, Growth of the Law in Medieval Russia
*--J. M. Feldbrugge, Law in Medieval Russia [E-TXT]

<>1500:1503; Moscow defeated Livonian Order, though the Order lingered on for a half-century

Over the previous three centuries, the original crusading Livonian Order settled down in Slavic lands

The Livonian Order concentrated its power in urban centers = Riga, Tallinn, and Tartu [the modern-day Latvian name of a town originally founded by Russians as Yur'ev, later called by a German name Dorpat or Derpt]
The Livonian Order smothered the urban commercialism fostered earlier by the Hanseatic League
It imposed harsh forms of feudal baronial authority over the full agricultural and commercial life of these regions

With the defeat of the Livonian Order, Russia came into this inheritance

For example, Riga, still the major Latvian city, had been a significant member of the Hanseatic League
But everywhere these independent commercial cities were in decline as centralized monarchies extended their power
In this regard, Muscovite tsardom moved in harmony with general European trends, only it moved far more vigorously =

Increasingly in the 15th and 16th centuries, centralized monarchical power was in the process of forming European "nation-states", from west to east, from England to Russia
A new and very "modern" janus-faced notion of political "sovereignty" [W-ID] played a key role in this process

New territorial nation-states looked outward for sovereign independence in their international relations and inward, within "borders", for the same independence in domestic politics
1516: The oldest continuously observed national "border" was marked [ID])

LOOKING OUTWARD = INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL SOVEREIGNTY. These new centralized monarchical nation-states rejected the idea that their increasingly vigorous national sovereignty could be properly checked by any other sovereign nation-state. Reaching even further, these new nation-states rejected larger "transnational" political arrangements and limitations. World-wide, different varieties of Christian churches and increasingly splintering denominations flourished with a new and disorderly abundance [EG#1 | EG#2]. But the old ecumenical dream of Christian universalism, the very concept of "Christendom", was in all practical actuality dead in "The West". Church independence and regional autonomy within feudal territories came under criticism and control. The loosely constituted Holy Roman Empire under the rule of German-speaking peoples unraveled even further. As one wag put it, the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor Empire. The larger drift of history doomed the dream of a unified Europe-wide Christendom on the institutional model of the old empire

LOOKING INWARD = DOMESTIC POLITICAL SOVEREIGNTY. These new nation-states did not tolerate independent provincial aristocracies, or any form of feudal regionalism or even semi-independence from the throne. The domestic "periphery" was being made dependent on the national monarchical "metropol". The new monarchies worked against free and wide-ranging regional association of cities outside the limits of monarchical practice and authority. Centralizing monarchical nation-states struggled on all fronts against clerical, patrimonial aristocratic and urban independence from "national authority". Urban commercial culture, for the moment, declined. Nationalistic monarchial social orders and economies formed up. For these reasons, the two-century history of the Hanseatic League was coming to an end

The two faces of emerging "sovereignty", in a sense, marked the end both of the classical Greco-Roman and the medieval phases of west European history
West Europeans were at the dawn of the modern era, but much was old and familiar =

Traditional feudal hierarchies lingered, from princes and priests down to villagers
The great monarchies still draped themselves in the robes of "divine right"

But much was new. Two significant examples =

Service and landowning nobility, as well as laboring commoners, were falling increasingly under close monarchical authority
In this age of European exploration, discovery and colonization, national economies were increasingly both "globalized" in the wider world and "localized" in the hands of small mercantilist oligarchies of insider elites concentrated in "national" capitals, in royal metropols [ID]

Thus we see the central contradiction built into the new European concepts of sovereignty = Outward projection of "nation-state sovereignty" meant imperialist encroachment on "sovereignty" in targeted regions at the peripheries

And, looking far ahead in time, we can see more clearly the vital significance of the emerging modern political idea of federalism

Federalism can be thought of as "distributive sovereignty" [EG (one paragraph)] =
In relationship to strengthening central authority, populations and regions established for themselves, or pulled back toward themselves, certain elements of sovereignty commandeered or threatened by centralized monarchical authority

In the in the 16th-c, centralized national monarchical phase of history approached its apex, most sharply in Russia but in other areas of Europe as well

In Russia, this process long ago expressed itself in the rise of bound aristocratic servitors [ID] and very belatedly in the rise of bound village laborers (serfs)
Serfdom in Russia expanded on practices found among Germanic landowning nobilities (the infamous "Baltic Barons") who dominated this region since the arrival of Livonian and Teutonic crusading orders in the 13th century
The spread of serfdom to Russia from the territories of the holy Germanic knights might be called a form of "Westernization" of Russia (if that term were ever allowed to have a negative connotation)

Ironically, serfdom in central and west European domestic agricultural/administrative life was coming to an end as Russian serfdom flourished in the 16th century. Europe shifted its attentions to the profits available out in the increasingly "globalized" slave-worked plantations of the several "new worlds"

Russia developed its particular variation on the general European pattern of centralized "national" monarchy, and it did so ahead of all other European monarchies

In the interest of interpretive consistency on this sort of comparative analysis, we might be tempted to label Russia "advanced" and western Europe "backward"
How silly such a comparative perspective seems when applied to trends we do not like

The views and actions of Russian tsarist advisers (largely clerical scribes and Church officials) cast further doubt on the notion of "Russian isolation"
Still we have to acknowledge and come to terms with a seemingly contradictory fact about Russia =

This most centralized of all the centralizing European "national" monarchies was in an unusually favorable position among late medieval European states to entertain vastly inspiring notions of transnational imperial power
In just these years, Russia came alive with its own version of the oldest pan-European imperial dream = the universal Christian Empire [ID]

On the whole, nonetheless, the next century and a half in Russia and the rest of Europe, north and south, east and west, was less "imperial" than it was "nation-statist"
As we enter this era, we must develop an alert sensitivity to the confusions associated with two sets of words =
(1) "Nation" and "national". The original Latin connotation of these words was cultural, signifying something like "those born together, within a shared ethnic environment". Language ("mother tongue") was a powerful sign of "national" identity and unity. What we see emerging in the 16th century was a new political-institutional connotation of these words, signifying something like "those ruled or governed or administered within a defined sovereign territorial state".
In this SAC LOOP on "national", the term "national" often appears in quotation marks in order to emphasize this important shift from ethnic, cultural and shared-language connotations to centralized political connotations. Dominant ruling elites might share common ethnic, cultural and language traditions, but increasingly many under the authority of territorial "nation"-states did not. This was the beginning of the great era of centralized "national" monarchies but also of outwardly projected and expansive nation-state power beyond the limits of "national" cultural uniformity. So the second set of words that require alert sensitivity are the following =
(2) "Empire" and "imperialism". The old Roman or Mongol empires, and their two most important heirs, the more recent Ottoman and the rising Russian empires, were at base very different from this newly-rising imperialism of certain sovereign European nation-states. The new imperialism might be thought "better" or "more progressive" or "more beneficent" than the old imperialism, but that is doubtful. More important = That is not the question. The important historical point is this = They are structurally and behaviorally different [ID some features of this difference]
\\
*2012:Tulsa Law Review#48,2 [E-TXT =] |>Ackerman,John Wolfe| "Why Political Theology Again? Reviewing Paul W. Kahn, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty and Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty" [E-TXT of Kahn's book]
*--LOOP on "feudalism"

<>1502:Crimean Tatars defeated the Golden Horde and finally destroyed Sarai
*--The powerful influence of nomadic Mongol warriors on world history had still one more great moment, but the powerful Golden Horde would soon be but a legacy to which significantly less powerful Tatar khanates aspired. But also Ottoman Turks and tsarist Russians

<>1502:Central America [Honduras] the site of Columbus' first mainland disembarkation in the New World

<>1503:Moscow | Russian Orthodox Church Council declared victory of Josephites [followers of Joseph of Volokolamsk and called "Possessors"], a victory over followers of Nil Sorskii [The Trans-Volga Elders, called in this controversy the "Non-possessors"] [FTS:85-133]

Like other European monarchists of the day [EG], Josephites were concerned about the need to unite and strengthen Church and state in Russia for the challenges and opportunities that lay ahead
And also as everywhere in the Christian world, there were those, not unlike the Trans-Volga Elders, who were ready to protest the expansively wealthy and managerial Church
Judaizers [zhidovstvuiushchie] were declared to be heretics at this time [VSB,1=154-5]
- BSE3 says this = The late 15th century witnessed a fresh upsurge of the [?"the"?] heresy movement in Russia
- It was centered, as before, in Novgorod [NB! possible ties between theological and geo-political competition]
- losif Volotskii identified the founder of this form of heresy as a certain "Jew Skharia" [W-ID] who arrived in Novgorod in 1471 from Lithuania [IE= Iosif identified Skharia and his religious trend as an alien outsider force]
- Volotskii called the heretics themselves by the mouth-full expression zhivodomudrstvuiushchie ("Judaic-philosophizers")
  - Without foundation, he imputed to them adherence to Judaism
  - Prerevolutionary historical literature employed the somewhat simplified designation zhidovstvuiushchie ("Judaizers") to describe the Novgorod and Moscow heretics of the late 15th and early 16th century
- This designation was rejected by Soviet historians in favor of the following home-baked interpretation=
  - The main contingent of these heretics was comprised of Novgorodian townspeople under the leadership of local Orthodox clergymen of lower rank. The movement's ideologists were the priests Denis and Aleksei
  - Just like the strigol'niki ["shearers", those who sought to sever the growing wealth of the Church from what they took to be the central mission of the Church = celebration of the liturgy], the Novgorod heretics [those deceptively labeled "Judaizers"] disavowed the hierarchy and rites of the [official statist] Church
  - Iconoclastic sentiments [ID] were in evidence, and some held anti-Trinitarian views, subjecting the fundamental Orthodox [?fundamental Christian?] tenet of the Trinity to criticism based on rationalist premises [More on "rationalist" trends in late medieval European Christianity]
By the early 1500s, all Novogord Church property was confiscated by Moscow tsar Ivan III
- Now we are down to the nitty-gritty of this conflict
- Tsar Ivan distributed this valuable commodity to his pomeshchik army officers
- The Josephites approved of their powerful tsar, but they wanted to prevent such confiscations taking place in territories of Muscovite Church authority
The statist-oriented Josephites did not operate in Russian isolation from general European trends toward national-monarchical dominance
\\
*--Florovsky,5:9-26
*--CHR.1:351-3

<>1504:Moscow tsar Ivan III wrote his testament [HTP:268-98 | VSB,1=120-1]

<>1505:1533; Moscow tsar Vasilii III inherited from his father, Ivan III [ID], a domain of ca. 55,000 sq. miles [the state of Oregon equals 97,000 sq. miles]
*--Vasilii's father had himself inherited ca. 15,000 sq. miles, thus Russia had grown four-fold by the end of Ivan III's reign [MAP]
*--And it continued to expand =

<>1510:Pskov taken by Moscow [VSB,1=84-5] Over next years, Pskov brought thoroughly into Muscovite sphere of control

<>1514:Smolensk annexed by Moscow [VSB,1=131]
*--In that same year, feeling pressure from Moscow as it seized these western Russian towns, Poland-Lithuania granted Kiev the right to govern itself by the Magdeburg Law [W]
*--Moscow, as it "re-gathered Russian lands", was increasingly successful against Poland-Lithuania

<>1516:English statesman and thinker, Thomas More, published a Latin-language description of an imaginary ideal state, Utopia (1551:English version published)

Utopia [Nowhere] = the world gained a new literary genre and a new word
Thomas More was a powerful official and prolific writer in a most troubled time =
- The English monarchy expanded its authority over British life like never before
- More refused to follow his King Henry VIII away from the Roman Church in directions defined in the Act of Supremacy
- The Act of Supremacy seized the English Catholic Church
- It "nationalized" the Church, removing it from the authority of the Pope in Rome and Catholic clerical administrators in England
- With the monarch in charge, the English Church now became an "Anglican" rather than an ecumenical or universal ("catholic") church
1535:Thomas More was beheaded on a charge of treason
He was later sainted by the Catholic Church but also knighted by the English monarchy

<>1517:and again in 1526:Holy Roman Empire ambassador Sigismund von Herberstein resided in Moscow
*1557:Herberstein wrote _Description of Moscow and Muscovy [Excerpts: VSB,1=156-8 | DMR2=194-208 | DMR3:261-75]

<>1517:Ottoman Empire, Istanbul | Selim I took title khalif (Caliph)
*1512:1574; Ottoman Turks were entering their golden age
\\
*--Summary of a great Ottoman epoch [W]
*--On Selim the Grim [W]
*--The wonders of the Ottoman capital city (metropol) Istanbul from the time of Sultan Selim I to early years of architect Sinan [W-ID]
*--Pavlidis,15

<>1519:Central America, Mexico | Hernán Cortéz conquered indigenous New World territories for Spain, destroying Aztec civilization

<>1520,1566; Ottoman Turkish Sultan Suleiman I ("the Magnificent") ruled forty-four years [W-ID]

These were years of great Ottoman Turkish cultural flourish
These were also years of significant enhancement of Ottoman power
- To the east, against Persia [Iran]
- To the shores of the eastern Mediterranean
- 1540s and 1550s:Close Ottoman diplomatic alliance with France against the Holy Roman Empire
- Into the territories of modern-day Hungary
- And generally along the eastern marches of Austrian imperial authority (accented by an Ottoman Turkish siege of Vienna)
[MAP]
\\
*--The Caucasus -- lands of Georgians, Armenians and Azery -- were a constant temptation for Turks and Persians [W]
*--Morgan on Persian Shah Ismail [W]

<>1520s:Russian Orthodox Church leader, the influential monk Filofei, wrote letter to tsar Vasilii III which offered a doctrinal historical analysis that amounted to a recommended state "ideology"

Filofei described Moscow as "Third Rome" = "Two Romes have fallen. The third still stands. There will be no fourth." [VSB,1=155-6 | DMR3:259-60 | ZMR1:265-74 | BL&T=171 | RRH,1=103]

The doctrine of "Third Rome" cannot be considered an expression of Russian isolation from western Europe (reified so often as "The West" [LOOP])
On the contrary, Filofei's central concern was that west Europe had isolated itself, from its own millennial traditions
Filofei was concerned about the collapse of ancient ecumenical or universal Christendom
Part naive, part cunning, he believed Russia was called to set all this right

See also the Novgorod "Tale of White Cowl" [ZMR2:323-32]
Russian power needed a supplementary doctrine to guide its foreign relations

The earlier Muscovite doctrine of "re-gathering Russian lands" was too limited and had by now approached its plausible limit
Russian power now reached further than it had ever before reached =
Actual (rather than idealized) "Christian civilization", east and west, projected a new vision of power and economic ambition

Russia in particular faced new challenges in view of the rise of vibrant mercantilist competitors in expanding regional and world markets [ID] =
1. Venice [ID]
2. Ottoman Turks in the region of the old Silk Road trade routes
3. the Muscovy Company [an English imperialist adventure]
Centralized national monarchies, such as England and other Atlantic seaboard monarchies, moved overseas with their mercantilist corporations
Russia moved across the sea-like southern and eastern Steppes
This was the beginning of the era of eruptive European frontier and imperialist expansion [MAP]
The misconceived question of Russian isolation, rooted in the experience of Mongol dominance, need engage us only one more time

*1953:Speculum#28:84-101 (reprint in CSH) | D. Stremooukhoff, "Moscow the Third Rome: Sources of the Doctrine"
*2016:MVA|>Abramov,Dmitrii, and Kliment'ev,Dementii| Новый и Третий Рим : византийские мотивы России
*--W. K. Medlin, Moscow and East Rome [noUO]

<>1521:German priest Martin Luther was excommunicated for his anti-Rome preaching and activism

Over one century earlier Czech spiritual leader, Jan Hus, and the Hussite movement clearly adumbrated the Protestant Reformation [LOOP]
As the Protestant Reformation intensified, it provoked the second profound doctrinal split in European civilization

The first split in that vast 700-year-old Eurasian world of "Christendom" might crudely be thought of as between "East" and "West"
The first split left the area of "Yugoslavia" a hot spot, squeezed between powerful contending parties in western Europe on one side and eastern Europe on the other

In the time of Luther, this second profound split might crudely be thought of as between the "North" and the "South" of western Europe

Ireland and Poland now joined Yugoslavia as European spots of hot religious contention

The two splits worked together to place Catholic Poland and Lithuania in a position of doubled doctrinal conflict =

"West" (Catholic powers) vs. "East" (Orthodox Russia)
"South" (Catholic powers, especially the "Holy Roman Empire") vs. "North" Protestant states Sweden and Prussia)

The only partially "integrated" Germanic Holy Roman Empire was "disintegrating" along religious lines
More broadly, the Universal Christian Church and the larger concept of "Christendom" was disintegrating in actual fact
Only a dwindling number of still ambitious and optimistic ecumenical-minded Christian Church activist-officials had their hands on -- or were close to -- state power [EG]
But all around, Christianity as trans-national state ideology was splitting into "nationalized" units

1525:Yet a third sort of split became evident in northern German-speaking areas gripped by the trauma of Reformation = peasants (villagers) vs. their feudal lords

Protestant villagers were known to affirm, "No priest, no prince"
Thomas Müntzer [W-ID] became the central figure in this futile effort to extend religious/institutional Reformation [txn level II.a] into broader political, social and economic Reformation [txn level II.B, III and IV]

New Republic

LOOP on Protestant Reformation

YouTube

Blickle.REV

LOOP on "feudalism"

<>1523:Moscow tsar Vasilii III's testamentary writ [HTP:300-303]

<>1525:Moscow | Russian Orthodox Church Council declared Maksim Grek [Maximus the Greek (ID)] a heretic

Trained in Italy and dedicated to the revival of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Maksim deplored the Russian drift from Greek Patriarchal control
He was appalled by the errors that had come into the Russian liturgy in the many years of Muscovite isolation under Mongol dominion
But the Russian Josephites, after a quarter-century struggle with their monastic opponents, were in a position to silence criticism such as that from Maksim the Greek
Josephites were ready now to defend their comfortable national traditions and new-found favor in the tsarist court

<>1525:New World, Central America | Spanish conquistador Cortéz established Captain-generalcy of Guatemala

<>1526:India fell under Mongol rule
*--Babei founded the Mogul dynasty in Hindustan. Delhi became the center or metropol
*--This was the last great accomplishment of the three-century-long Mongol dominion over Eurasia

<>1527:1535; New World, Central America, Mexico, Yucatan | Mayan civilization the target of Spanish conquistador Francisco de Montejo the elder
*--He failed in two military campaigns
*--Twentieth-century experience in this area

<>1527:Italian City-state Florence | Ambassador and political theorist, Niccolo Machiavelli died

Machiavelli was the author of an epochal study in political power, "The Prince" [E-TXT], and other seminal works
He has been called the creator of "political science". He was the first influential popularizer of the modern concept of politics. He is the stormy petrel of "modernism"

He was unflinching in his emphasis on the immediate and practical side of political life
He explicitly refused to subordinate politics to any traditional moral or religious dicta
He insisted that politics is an independent science, with its own "laws"

He seemed cynical about "value politics"
He did, however, concede a place for decorous or we might say opportunistic and mendacious observation of conventional moral and religious views

He is too frequently associated only with these cynical possibilities

His affection for princely authority, for tough-guy leadership, is unsettling
But he needs also to be acknowledged as a liberator of humanity from =
- Abstract valorization of power or
- Elevation of politics beyond everyday actualities and into various abstract or super celestial realms
He brought it all down into the give-and-take of actual human exchange and interaction in the public sphere
He wanted us all to understand the deepest and troubling implications of the old Aristotelian assertion that "humans are political animals"

Without politics, humans are just animals
In this sense, Machiavelli was the utter opposite of anarchists and of others who presume that politics can only corrupt
In his view, politics make humanity what it is, and it is a good thing that it does so
For better and for worse, politics force all humans to shape their experience as best they can

Politics are evil but they are necessary, even unavoidable, in human communities
Politics force individuals to acknowledge those inevitable moments when other humans ("leaders") shape the experience of large populations

All this made Machiavelli a favorite target of scorn

The adjective, "Machiavellian", in casual conversation, almost always carries negative implication
It almost always implies manipulative and centralized "princely" political rule over subjects
However, look at J.G.A. Pocock's book listed below for a very important corrective to these standard views

We need to know that Machiavelli exerted wide influence and frequently won at least secret admiration

Humans have a hard time believing that they are in essence political animals
But humans also find it nearly impossible to deny it in the heat of practical everyday life

Someone once asked and answered, "What is the first thing all true Machiavellian politicians will do? They will deny that they are Machiavellian politicians"

Machiavelli observed that a cloak of righteousness is frequently draped over human action
But righteousness is seldom the central motive of human action
Political leaders (and citizens or subjects under the power or authority of political leaders) must always be aware of that
That awareness is the essential first step toward mature political life
Machiavelli felt that open recognition of that seemingly depressing fact was the first step toward protecting a place for authentic ethical behavior in actual adult public life

At a deeper and even more "seditious" level, Machiavelli dislodged a widely shared philosophical axiom = The presumption that all genuine values are compatible with one another

1971no07:NYR| English historian of thought Isaiah Berlin explained the novelty of Machiavelli this way =
He presumed "that ends equally ultimate, equally sacred, may contradict each other"
"[E]ntire systems of value may come into collision without possibility of rational arbitration"
And all this is so "not merely in exceptional circumstances ... but (this was surely new) as part of the normal human situation" [SAC editor's boldface]

Over the years Machiavelli has not earned his reputation because he is tough and extreme, he earned it because he is complex and inescapable
\\
*--J. G. A. Pocock, _The_Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition [E-TXT = 1st 80 pp.]
*1981mr:JMH#53,1| J.G.A. Pocock, "The Machiavellian Moment Revisited" [E-TXT]
*2016no30:TLS| William J. Connell, "Machiavelli’s Utopia" [E-TXT] (("The solid discoveries here are that Machiavelli was not the lonely writer he is so often imagined as being; that he belonged to a network of writers who were contributing to a shared discussion of princes and statecraft; and that Erasmus and More, in the years before the Lutheran break, were being read in ways that were more radical than is generally thought – and than they themselves would wish to be thought after the Reformation took off"))

<>1528:Spanish Imperial explorer and administrator, Cabeza de Vaca, published an amazing account of his near decade lost on expedition through New World territories now named Florida. Texas. New Mexico, and, probably, Arizona [E-TXT]

<>1529:Lithuania law [VSB,1=98-100 | City law=100-110]

<>1529se:Vienna, the very capital of "The Holy Roman Empire", was for the first time put under Ottoman Turkish siege
*1547:Holy Roman Empire conceded Hungary to Suleiman the Magnificent

<>1533:1587; MUSCOVITE RUSSIA, phase #3 -- The era of IVAN IV "THE TERRIBLE"

1300:1533; Russia [MAP]
1533:1598; Russia [MAP]
1533:1584; Ivan IV Groznyi [Awesome, Terrible] (born 1530; actual reign at age 17, from 1547)
1533:1547; Boyar [heads of old noble families, court advisers] contested with one another and with the royal family for ascendancy in Muscovy [VSB,1=132-3]
1538: Ivan's mother Elena died and seven years of fierce internecine struggle followed. Ivan himself related the torment of these insecure years of struggle [Fennell,Correspondence:69-81. Fennell's footnotes help explain the fault-lines between old-boyar patrimonial princes and the new "service people" created around the tsarist throne]
Ivan later described his impression of these terrible early years [DMR3:276-85]
The great moments in Ivan's reign can be summarized =
\\
*--Isabel de Madariaga, Ivan the Terrible [DK106.D4]. Madariaga claims to look at Ivan "in Moscow and looking out over the walls of the Kremlin towards the rest of Europe, and not looking in -- and down -- into Russia, over its Western border, from outside"
*--Robert Crummey on Ivan IV as reformer or tyrant [KRR:158-63, and on the 16th-c Boyars:183-7
*1968je:SlR#27,2=195-211| Michael Cherniavsky on "Northern Renaissance" and Ivan IV as native-born "student" of Machiavelli
*2011:Kevin Platt, Terror and Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths
*2016oc15:Novaia gazeta| "Мемориализация ужаса ( statue commemorating Ivan IV in Orel) [E-TXT]
*2016oc18:Novaia gazeta| Опричное богословие [E-TXT]
*2016oc24:Независимая газета| "В Красноярском крае художник установил памятник Ивану Грозному в виде окровавленного кола" [E-TXT]
*2017jy26: Novaia gazeta | "В центре Москвы установили памятник Ивану Грозному. Фотография (article with photo of a new statue in Moscow commemorating Ivan the Terrible) [ E-TXT]
*--Maureen Perrie, _The_Image of Ivan the Terrible in Russian Folklore
*1986:RRe#45:115-81| Edward Keenan, "Muscovite Political Folkways"
*--Andrei Pavlov, _Ivan the Terrible
*--Sergei F. Platonov, _Ivan the Terrible [DK106.P5513| See HRR,1=188-94 and KRR:103-4 (Platonov on rise of Muscovite autocracy)]
*--Ruslan G. Skrynnikov, _Ivan the Terrible [DK106.S4513]
*--Alexander Yanov, _The_Origins of Autocracy: Ivan the Terrible in Russian History (DK106.Y36| A fascinating, if not altogether scholarly, journalistic exploration of the relationship of Ivan IV to Russian and Soviet authoritarianism)
*2017je08:Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty | "The New Oprichniki" (another effort to link Ivan IV with contemporary police-state authoritarianism, this time with Vladimir Putin) [E-TXT
*2018my26:RT World News| "Vodka rage vs. Ivan the Terrible: Man mauls iconic Russian painting after taking a shot at museum" [E-TXT]

1534:1564; Moscow | Russian Orthodox Church ruled for thirty years by Metropolitan Makarii
*--Makarii resisted old-boyars, supported absolutist throne, and protected Church interests -- both Church doctrines and, of course, Church possessions
*--These early years on the throne were agony for Ivan IV, and he later described them | DMR3:276-85]

<>1540:Spanish soldier Ignatius Loyola, now a worldly and militant monk, founded the Society of Jesus [Jesuit Order]
*--Loyola dedicated his life to struggle against Protestant rebellion, especially in northern and western Europe, a struggle which often bears the title "Counter-Reformation"
*1545:1563; Council of Trent put the Catholic Church on a resolute path of Counter-Reformation, mobilizing itself against the spread of various Protestant movements
\\
*--LOOP on Protestant Reformation

<>1542:Spanish authorities called the Council of Valedolid to address problems arising from the evident abuses and excesses connected with the exploitation of conquered territories in the New World

Crusading Spanish cleric Bartolome de las Casas wrote many critical accounts of Spanish behavior in the New World
EG= A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies [E-TXT]
Casas described how over less than a half century since Columbus, ca. 500,000 indigenous folk, the Taino-Arawak native Americans on Haiti's northern coast (then called Hispaniola or "Little Spain"), had died performing slave labor in "Spanish" gold mines
Pre-Columbian culture of the New World was nearly eradicated
Casas was less sympathetic than disdainful of the native Americans
In a sense Cases blamed the Taino-Arawak for their own demise =
- They were "constitutionally unsuited" for physical labor
- Casas therefore recommended importing African slaves to do the masters' chores
Even as some measures were taken to control the situation, de las Casas wrote that the Spaniards
are still acting like ravening beasts, killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples, doing all this with the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty, never seen or heard of before
A human and cultural tragedy of world historical significance befell the New World as the Old World projected its power abroad here at the beginning of "globalization"
\\
1886:Boston|_Narrative and Critical History of America| Edited by Justin Winsor [E-TXT]. At top, see de las Casas

<>1540s:Arkhangel'sk region [map] | Anika Stroganov began at age 17 to consolidate family fortunes, largely in salt
*--How could such a young man do that? Semyonov,Siberia:26 says "Perhaps [...] it is an example of inherited knowledge: the newly-hatched duck makes for the water, the young spider sets about catching flies"
*--Anika moved from his family home on the (northern) Dvina River, further north and east
*--He expanded beyond salt
*--He sent sons out on mission
*--He collected information and expanded trade relations
*--He bought, and he sold: fish, reindeer skins, feathers, down, wax, furs
*--The legend of Stroganov power spread

<>1542:Japan | Portuguese castaways came ashore in frontier territories. This was Japan's first serious contact with Europeans

<>1547ja16:Moscow tsar Ivan IV's elaborate coronation [VSB,1=133-4]
*--Now the 17-year-old tsar was in a position to move Boyars and Church officials a notch or two away from the levers of power
\\
*--Sergei Eisenstein's great movie portrayed Ivan's coronation [FLM]
*--Vernadsky,5 (two parts)

<>1547c:Rural Russian pomeshchik [landowning gentry, state servitor] [VSB,1=163]

<>1547+: 1st compilation of the _Domostroi [Household management, or "economy" in the original Greek meaning], a guidebook for everyday life
*--Carolyn Pouncy has translated and annotated the text [Excerpted TXT]
*--More excerpts = VSB,1=164-5 | BL&T:34f,86f | DMR3:285-9 | WRH | WAL=126-30
*--Consider the legacy of Classical Greek economic thought [EG]
\\
*--Carolyn Pouncy on the political/social system in the time of Ivan IV [TXT]
*--Eve Levin, _Sex and Society [Excerpts = KRR:218-22]

<>1549:Japan | Spanish Francis Xavier arrived

<>1549:English villagers rose up in what came to be known as Kett's Rebellion against inclosures of common lands and transfer of "ownership" to aristocratic lords

<>1549:Russian tsar Ivan IV summoned 1^st Zemskii Sobor [Assembly of the Land]

The Sobor combined (and thus diluted the power of) Boyar Duma members and high-ranking Church officials in their Osviashchennyi sobor [Holy Assembly]
The Sobor further mixed Boyar Duma and Church sobor institutions with a small smattering of other medieval social groups (merchants and other prominent urbanites [posadniki], but no peasants)
It was not Ivan's intention to make the Zemskii sobor a distinct and independent "representative" institution, not an authentic parliament

In fact, it is hard to make a clear distinction between Zemskii sobor, per se, and other forms of sobor-style consultative gatherings in these years
Ivan needed to mobilize help from among his prominent subjects, but he did not wish to elevate those gatherings into any position of real power
He summoned them for consultation, not for any sort of "legislation" or "administration"

He had encouragement in this direction =
- 1549:Ivan Peresvetov submitted extensive written recommendations to Ivan IV [VSB,1=162-4]
- Peresvetov urged Ivan IV to create a strong centralized "national" monarchical authority and national military power. This was a direct critique of
  1. Russian boyar aristocratic independence from state authority
  2. Old-boyar feudal armies raised at whim of votchinnik military commanders, and
  3. Boyar judicial exemptions
- Peresvetov urged creation of state-funded (salaried) national army and judiciary
- His purpose in this was to cut into aristocratic privilege and promote regime-wide uniformity of relationship to the central state
  - He lamented Polish/Lithuanian aristocratic restraint on monarchical power in their land
  - Aristocratic independence threatened the military survival of that great dual monarchy
  - Ottoman Turkish defeat of Byzantium, in Peresvetov's view, demonstrated the need for powerful and absolute tsarist state free from aristocratic, grandee [vel'mozh] corruption and graft
- Russian destiny required that Moscow develop a powerful, resolute and sovereign central authority
Whether Ivan was influenced by Peresvetov is not clear, but Peresvetov and Ivan both expressed political views consistent with the 16th-century "Machiavellian" spirit
\\
*--LOOP on "feudalism"

<>1550:Moscow | Sudebnik [Law Code] [VSB,1=134-7| etc=137-42,160-2]

About this time Ivan created something like a Chosen Council [Izbrannaia rada]
Andrei Kurbskii named the institution "rada", a word unusual to Moscow but then current in Polish and Lithuanian politics & probably derived from the Germanic "Rat" (counsel)
Members of the Moscow Chosen Council included Orthodox Church Metropolitan Makarii and his faithful associate, the Priest Sylvester
A capable state servitor of lower aristocratic origin, Aleksei Adashev, filled out the Council
Ivan's promotion of Adashev reflected his distrust of traditional old-boyar advisers

<>1551:Moscow | Stoglav Assembly [Hundred Chapters Orthodox Church Assembly], so named because the conclusions of the assembly were arranged into 100 chapters [VSB,1=165-6| BL&T:75f,105,140f]
*--This was not simply a church assembly. Tsar Ivan IV himself called the assembly together, bringing clerical and secular leaders together to ponder an agenda which he set
Ivan's agenda targeted the following problems =

Disorder in the liturgical affairs of the Orthodox Church. Most significant was the fact that the Assembly affirmed the holy precedence of earlier Russian Church assemblies. The Assembly minimized the authority of original Greek practice, laying the foundation for later resistance to liturgical reforms on the part of "Old-Ritualists"
Secular bureaucratic interference in the institutional life of the Church, especially Church courts
Unrestrained monastic abuses, especially mismanagement of monastic wealth
Unacceptable behavior among the Orthodox Russian people. Measures were taken to suppress sorcery, witchcraft, buffoonery, pagan entertainments among the people, games in the wheat fields, and the shaving of beards in connection with sodomite practices
Disorder throughout the Russian land and other purely political issues were addressed side by side with Church issues
\\
*--Florovsky,5:26-32

<>1552:Kazan khanate [map] | [W] | Russian cannons brought down fortress walls, thus terminating independent Kazan Tatar power

Ivan IV's most trusted commander and adviser Andrei Kurbskii described the victory [WAL=116-18]
Tatar Sultan Etiger began to court tsar Ivan who granted him certain privileges and imposed certain obligations
Etiger was pressured from SE by powerful Kuchum-khan and his still powerful remnant of old Golden Horde located between the Caspian and Aral seas
Kuchum claimed a long tradition of sovereignty = Chinggis-khan, Batu-khan, Manga Timur-khan, Hadsim Mahomet-khan, etc. Thus power had descended to Kuchum
Later Kuchum subdued Etiger and claimed also to be the Sibir Tatar tsar
Ivan IV slyly agreed with this and claimed that Kuchum thus inherited Etiger's obligations to Moscow
Kuchum answered: NO!
Stroganov family found themselves squeezed between tsar Ivan and Kuchum-khan
\\
*--Jaroslaw Pelenski, _Russia and Kazan: Conquest and Imperial Ideology (1438-1560s) [DK100.P44]

<>1552:1740; Western Siberian plains stretched eastward from the left bank of the middle Volga River to the ancestral home of the Mongols = the Altai highlands [map]

These were the Bashkir Steppes, and for the next two centuries they were a frontier of Russian expansion
The geographic designation came from the characteristic nomadic peoples who roamed these vast territories, the Bashkirs [ID w/MAP]
1553:Bashkir peoples were squeezed between tsar Ivan IV and the Kirghiz-Kaisak [Kazakh] peoples to their south
Bashkirs appealed to tsar Ivan IV and received, at a price, his protection =
1557:Bashkir nomads paid yasak to tsar Ivan IV
\\
*--Michael Khodarkovsky, _Russia's Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800 [DK43.K485]
*--Alton Donnelly, _The_Russian Conquest of Bashkiria: A Case Study in Imperialism, 1552-1740 [DK511.B33D6]
*--Mikhail Alexandrov, Russian Migration to Kazakhstan [E-TXT]

<>1553:Peru, Cuzco | Inca Empire crushed by Spanish Conquistador Francisco Pizarro
*--The Central American New World civilizations were by now either crushed or were disintegrating for internal reasons

<>1553:Russian tsar Ivan IV fell ill and sensed his power slipping away into the hands of old-boyar families
*--The old-boyars were jealous of their historical privileges and fearful of Ivan's threat to them
*--Ivan created a personal palace guard, the "Strel'tsy" [musketeers]
*--The strel'tsy were made up of elite units who owed nearly everything to the tsar and nearly nothing to the medieval social system of sosloviia [ID]

<>1553:1564; Moscow tsar Ivan IV ordered construction of a special building to house 1st Russian printing presses
*--Primitive publications of religious texts followed [VSB,1=171-2]
\\
*--Florovsky,5:33-52 helps explain the cultural challenge posed by printing
*--BrE,24:769-70

<>1553:White Sea coast [map] | English merchant-adventurer Richard Chancellor visited Russia and wrote his impressions
[BR&B:3-41 | VSB,1=166-9 | DMR2:219-28 | DMR3:289-94 | RRH,1=113-17]

Anthony Jenkinson's account [BR&B:43-58]
More travelers' accounts [VSB,1=169-70], and yet more in _Hakluyt's Voyages [E127.P752]
These visitors were sniffing out routes to the lucrative China trade
The Muscovy Company was forming up (an English company with headquarters in London)
Within two years (GO 1555) an English colony established itself in Arkhangel'sk on the White Sea coast
Yurii Tolstoi, ed., _The_First Forty Years of Intercourse between England and Russia, 1553-1593 [DK106.T64]
\\
*--Thomas Stuart Willan, _The_Early History of the Russian Company, 1553-1603 [HF486.B92 W5]

<>1554:tsar Ivan IV letter to King Edward VI of England [VSB,1=150-1]

<>1555:England, London | English "Merchant Adventurers" re-christened themselves "Muscovy Company"

Russian tsar Ivan IV (the ruler of "Muscovy") granted extensive privileges to English merchants [DMR3:294--8]
Europe entered its first great "imperialist" phase characterized by
- Overseas world expansion
- Global trade
- Mercantilist competition, frequently via such overseas corporations as Muscovy Company
1557:An English Muscovy Co. voyager sailed in a northern arch over the Scandinavian peninsula in North Sea waters and saw many great whales near "Island of Zenam" [?Novaia Zemlia]

Muscovy Co. became England's "first corporate effort to enter the whaling industry"
They called themselves "The Russian Company"
The Dutch [Netherlands], however, came to dominate these seas

For one thing, the English had little time for whaling
Their attention in this area was mainly fixed on overland imperialist expansion, with the Russian shores of the White sea as their departure point =

By this time, Genoa, Lisbon, Amsterdam and Bristol had broadcast the dream of China to the European world

In London, Sebastian Cabot [Wki] pondered the route to China
Tsar Ivan IV in Moscow also
English imperialist expansion was not yet sure of the sea route to the Indies, so the English Muscovy Co. sought at first to control the Eurasian land route through White-Sea and Ural (Russian) territories
England joined Moscow and the Ottoman Empire in an accelerating rush to replace the Golden Horde astride the great Silk Road to China

Here is the "Golden Horde" ID which links with a multi-hop SAC LOOP on "Golden Horde" and with a NARRATIVE EXTENSION for the stout-hearted

In the same way, the Stroganov family perceived China as the main chance of the 16th c. world

But Anika Stroganov's route was nearer and more concrete than the routes available to the others
The Stroganov route was in its first stretches the route to Siberia, to Mangaseya
And Mangaseya was Stroganov land [Semenov,SBR:53]

_Follow the Whales

<>1556:Astrakhan [map] fell to tsar Ivan IV

Astrakhan Tatars were defeated as the Muscovite counter-attack intensified against the remains of the now scattered great Golden Horde which had 300 years earlier established itself as the dominant power in all of Eurasia
Like the Golden Horde collected yasak from Russia before, so now the Moscow tsar collected yasak from Astrakhan Tatars and others subordinated in this new counter-attack

<>1557:Arkhangel'sk region [map] | Anika Stroganov feared tsar Ivan IV might be jealous. Visited Ivan with sons, bowed respectfully, gave bribes

At home his clerks groaned under his rod, and his second wife bore him one child after another. Ten great salt-works worked day and night for him. Carts laden with goods of every kind creaked over the rough roads, heavily loaded ships sat deep in the water. At that time he had over six hundred workmen and clerks [Semenov,SBR:31]

Anika Stroganov wanted to control Perm because he needed wheat, iron for his salt works, and waterways to Moscow so that salt did not have to be unloaded and reloaded, from boats to carts, causing lost time and product, causing dampening. Trans-loading made goods more expensive in the Moscow market
*--Stroganovs worked to protect their regional entrepreneurial independence, but fell increasingly into orbit with Muscovite mercantilist ambition

<>1558:1583; Moscow fought Livonian wars for 25 years, at first against the last remains of the Livonian Order and eventually against Poland-Lithuania as well

1558:1581; Russia took and held the port city Narva [map]
In self-defense, the Order dissolved itself into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This move was a last-ditch and ultimately successful effort to preserve as much as possible of the wealth, power and position of elite members of the Order. The remains of the old Order lived on in the form of the infamous Germanic "Baltic Barons". They were powerful earlier as an independent Order, now they could be powerful under Polish authority. When Russia took their territories from Poland, they remained powerful under Russian authority
The 300-year old Livonian Order was gone, but its legacy lived on
The Livonian wars were the final phase of Russia's costly and enfeebling wars against Poland-Lithuania
Moscow's effort to "re-gather Russian lands" was temporarily bogged down in the remote Baltic territories of old Kievan Rus

<>1558ap04:Arkhangel'sk region | Tsar Ivan IV gave Stroganov family a Charter, granting them for 20 years all uncultivated land on the tributaries of the Kama River [map]

Charter allowed Stroganovs to take fugitive serfs, thieves or vagabonds who had fled military service, or boyar sons who had fled from state service
The charter freed the Stroganovs from all control by local authorities. THEY WERE SUBJECT ONLY TO THE TSAR'S COURT IN Moscow
The Stroganov family became like a client state on Moscow's NE frontier [VSB,1=142]
Defeat of Kazan Tatars was a clear geo-political victory for Muscovy
But Muscovy was only slowly coming to understand the international trade implications of the whole trans-Ural eastern frontier

Ottoman Turkish Sultan Suleiman wrote to Ivan requesting that Turkish merchants be granted access to Moscow markets
1561:1575; As Russia was tied up in the Livonian wars, the English "Muscovy Co." successfully extended its operations from the White Sea St. Nicholas Harbor, near Arkhangel'sk, to the Caspian Sea

The English Muscovy Co. was trying an end run around the standard Mediterranean access to the markets of the East [BMM=194]
Stroganovs were thus useful to Ivan IV as a counterpoise to recent appearance of the English on Russian shores

Stroganovs were a powerful tool in aid of Moscow's own maturing frontier and imperialist expansion

<>1559:Polish King Sigismund dispatched letter to Elizabeth I of England [DMR2:229-31 | DMR3:299-301]

Among other things, King Sigismund warned England about what it would mean if black gun powder were allowed to spread to Russia

His concerns were a crude equivalent of 21st century concerns about the spread of "weapons of mass destruction"

Consider how arrogant it might seem for one people to presume that only they can safely possess such weapons
This even though they have used them to destructive purpose themselves
The presumption appears to be that lesser peoples, who happen to be competitors, certainly would "mishandle" advanced weaponry

In any event, Sigismund's warning was too late =

Ivan IV was well under way with the conversion of the Muscovite army with black-powder artillery and other weaponry

<>1560:Ivan IV's beloved wife, Anastasiia, died. Ivan suspected she was poisoned by old-boyar who constantly conspired against him. Ivan's personality darkened

<>1563:Moscow printing press opened with Ivan Fedorov and Petr Mstislavtsev in charge

<>1564:1572; Oprichnina was created, adding intense domestic misery to growing military/diplomatic misery arising from six years of costly and inconclusive Livonian Wars

Tsar Ivan "abandoned Russia" for his very own village Aleksandrov, his "oprichnina"
- The meaning of oprichnina is "separate, aside, apart" and first referred to the land Ivan now claimed as his own birthright
- Ivan might be thought of as the last patrimonial prince [votchinnik; his land was his votchina, his personal udel]
- Ivan claimed personal "ownership" of about 1/3 of Muscovite Russia
- The rest he left to what he thought of as a hostile and thankless "zemshchina" [the land]
The title "Oprichnina" also was applied to Ivan IV's dreaded Retinue of loyal and murderous servitors
- The Retinue was made up of about 1000-6000 widely empowered enforcers of tsarist authority
- They dressed in black outfits, carried symbolic brooms (devises to cleanse the land) and sometimes rode around the country terrorizing and punishing Ivan's supposed enemies [VSB,1=142-6]
- For example, they imprisoned Metropolitan Filipp and killed him
The whole Oprichnina episode was a sign of the decline of the Boyar Duma and of the old patrimonial aristocratic boyar families who held hierarchical positions within it
- Hierarchy within the Boyar Duma was called "mestnichestvo"
- The whole traditional system of mestnichestvo would be abolished over the following century [ID]
- Ivan purposefully appointed junior-grade aristocrats and lesser gentry [deti boyarskie ("boyar infants")] to membership in the Boyar Duma
- He personally chaired its infrequent meetings and guided its agenda
- More often than not, tsar Ivan simply ignored the Boyar Duma
\\
*--Ernst Kantorowicz explored an early-modern English political concept that dealt with king as person and king as institution = the "King's Two Bodies" [TXT]
*--Does Kantorowicz's TXT have anything to say of use to the historian who would compare and contrast Ivan IV's expanding autocratic power claims with those of contemporary English monarchs?

<>1564:Correspondence between prince Andrei Kurbskii and tsar Ivan IV began with the Oprichnina [above] and stretched through the whole period =
*--_The_Correspondence between Prince A. M. Kurbsky and Tsar Ivan IV of Russia, 1564-1579 [DK106.A25] A "duo-page" edition with Russian original on right hand and English translation on left [E-TXT] excerpts]
[Printed excerpts in GPR:601-15 | RRC2,1=86-97 | VSB,1=172-4 | DMR2:209-18 | ZMR2:366-76 | ZMR1:289-99 | WAL=118-26 | RRH,1=109-12]

See also "_Prince A.M. Kurbsky's History of Ivan IV [DK107.K8 a3]
Andrei Kurbskii represented the discontent of the old non-royal but nonetheless princely votchinniki
- Votchinniki were patrimonial princes, aristocratic elites by birth alone, independent of tsarist authority
- Princely votchinniki were jealous of their noble dignity and had witnessed its erosion over recent years
- Aristocratic votchinniki rejected the tsar's notion of himself as the sole votchinnik in Russia
- Aristocratic votchinniki resisted the tsar's efforts to force all aristocrats into a state-service position, equivalent to what was called pomeshchiki
- The tsar injured the votchinniki when he blended and blurred the distinctions implied in the two-tiered structure of elite aristocratic social status
- Kurbskii defended his votchina right to serve the liege lord of his own choosing
- He presumed his right to "free departure" [svobodnyi vykhod] from service to Ivan IV to service under the Lithuanian monarch
- The status of the Polish-Lithuanian aristocracy at this point [ID] provided a troubling contrast with the declining status of votchinnik aristocrats in Russia
An ironic parallel unites the motives of votchinniki like Kurbskii with motives of increasingly restless Russian villagers in this epoch of transition =
- Votchinniki were being forced to serve the tsar along with the tsarist appointees, the pomeshchik service nobles
- Peasants were being forced to serve noble pomeshchik or votchinnik landholders
- Peasants were increasingly forbidden the right of "free departure", their freedom to step away from bound labor or to serve whom they willed
- Votchinniki defended their declining freedom, but were greedy for the benefits of expanding dominion over what are called in English "serfs"
The parallel might be ironic, but it was rational =

A hierarchy of service obligations reinforced one another. Serfs worked for noble elites so that noble elites could work for the tsar

High aristocrats and "lowly" peasant serfs, all chafed under conditions of expanding service bondage to a monarch facing intense pressure to mobilize all resources in order to protect and enhance the security of tsarist Moscow as it faced off against powerful competitors on all frontiers, north [ID], west [ID] and south [ID]
Here we find replicated a timeless social/political tension between security and freedom. It has always proven difficult to be both free and safe
Ivan's domestic opponents did not buy into the "national security" argument, especially in the face of Oprichnina terrorism
\\
*--Julicher: chapter one
*--Florovsky,5:38-42 illuminates the religious and political significance of the Kurbskii-Ivan conflict

<>1564ja02:tsar Ivan IV granted 2nd charter to Stroganov family

<>1565:Moscow | Fedorov and Mstislavtsev published Chasovnik [Book of Hours]

Next year they published "Apostol", provoking discontent of scribes (those whose professional life depended on there being a need for hand-copied documents)
Church officials were not happy to see this powerful communication tool outside their monopoly control
The two original Russian publishers were forced to flee to Lithuania where Hetman Khotkevich welcomed them and created a printing press on his estates "Zabludov"

<>1565:[USA FL] Spanish colony, St. Augustine, was founded

A new and different civilization arrived from across the Atlantic Ocean and began to colonize what these sea-going Westermers thought of as a New World
But the New World was an old world for some. It had known its own indigenous civilizations for at least 500 years

<>1566je:Moscow Zemskii Sobor [Assembly of the Land] summoned for a second time, this time to consider a significant foreign policy issue, a Polish peace proposal, which Moscow rejected [VSB,1=146-7]

The first Zemskii Sobor [ID] was but a warm-up for this more serious gathering. Nearly 400 delegates represented, as before, members of the Boyar Duma and high Church officials, but now many more aristocrat-servitors (nearly half of the participants were pomeshchiki) and 75 merchants participated
This Zemskii Sobor also took significant initiative on its own to end the Oprichnina, but the Sobor failed

<>1566:1576; Heinrich von Staden traveled to Moscow and wrote lurid tails of Russia in the grip of Ivan IV's Oprichnina = "The Land and Government of Muscovy . . ." [Excerpted E-TXT | Print excerpts: VSB,1=147-9]

<>1567:1569; the most intense three years of Oprichnina violence

Fear of Polish and Lithuanian plots meshed with suspicions of native-born boyars
Many leading Russian aristocratic families were decimated at the hands of oprichnina enforcers

<>1568mr25:tsar Ivan IV granted 3rd charter to Stroganov family

<>1569:Poland-Lithuania joined in Union of Lublin and formed Rzeczpospolita [Polish for the Latin phrase Res publica; republic or commonwealth]

Sigismund II Augustus of Poland became the common sovereign of the two federated states

Each of the now-joined states retained its own national laws, administrations, treasuries and even separate militaries
But the combined states created a common parliament (Sejm) within which the Szlachta [landowning aristocracy] exercised "liberum veto", a right held by every member of the Sejm, even alone, to veto the actions and decrees of monarchical authority

The public and political position of the Polish-Lithuanian Szlachta was very compatible with Russian votchinniki notions of their own proper role and status as aristocrats and was in sharp contrast to the social condition of the Russian gentry [pomeshchiki (ID)]

The looseness of the Polish-Lithuanian Union, plus parliamentary liberum veto, introduced a degree of chaos or disorder into state policy at just a moment in east European history when decisive and centralized mobilization of forces, rather than federalism, seemed the secret to national survival
But the Union flourished for a while and, in the early 17c, nearly destroyed Muscovy [ID]

Poland held to the vast territories it recently seized to the south in Ukrainian-, Belarussian- and Russian-speaking territories [VSB,1=283-5]

However, Poland experienced rapid decline in the later 17th-century and was wiped off the map in a series of 18th-century partitions [ID]

<>1569:1570; the eastern Pontic Steppes, in the Don and Volga River basin, were the site of an unsuccessful Ottoman Turkish attempt to construct a great Don-Volga canal which would have linked the Mediterranean world with the Caspian Sea and Persia [Iran] for sea-going transport

Ottomans hoped to put themselves more solidly astride and in control of a great international trade route, the great "Silk Road" that linked the markets of Europe, the "Near-East" and SE-Asia
Russia took up that project over a century later [ID])
Turkish failure to put itself in charge of the "Silk Road" at this early date was "...the great unknown event of history" [BMM=113] and marked the end (until our own time) of the ancient overland "Silk Road" from China to the Mediterranean world

Oversea routes supplanted the central Asian land routes connecting world markets
Since the time of the Mongols three centuries earlier, control of the "Silk Road" was tantamount to "ruling the world"
The Silk Road was significant long before the Mongols, and even after trans-oceanic transport came to dominate global trade and power-projection, even up to contemporary times, those routes from China to the Mediterranean Sea and back were a vital avenue of world commerce

1576:1577; Persian political collapse reoriented Ottoman imperialist ambitions eastward in a desultory 14-year war against Persia [Iran] [BMM=1166-67]
1582:Ottoman Turks campaigned in the Caspian Sea coast region, around Baku
In these years Crimean Tatars, armed and supported by the Turks, emerged as an active buffer between Russian and Ottoman domains

1591:Gionanni Botero, in his account of Jesuit missionary activity around the world, Universal Relations [CF=JC158.B812], attributed the depopulation of Russian lands to the actions of Crimean Tatars in the increasingly lucrative global slave-trade, which delivered captive Russians and Poles into Ottoman Turkish bondage
But larger and perfectly domestic historical forces were at work, contributing to the depopulation of Muscovite agricultural lands =
Documents from the 1570s and 1580s reveal an extraordinary depopulation of central Russia. In the Moscow district 84 percent of the land lay fallow in the 1580s, and farther north the figure approached 90 percent. Conditions worsened dramatically as landlords sought increased labor [barshchina] and obrok [quit-rent money payments] from peasants who remained in order to make up for the losses caused by those who fled [Kolchin,7 (the quote is slightly altered)]
Rural labor shortage, wherever or whenever in the world it might happen, was the demographic foundation on which both slavery and serfdom arose

<>1570oc24:Moscow tsar Ivan IV dispatched letter to Elizabeth I of England [VSB,1=151 | DMR2:231-5 | DMR3:301-4]

Other English correspondence [VSB,1=151-2 | RRH,1=117-19]
1573:1591; Englishman Jerome Horsey in Moscow, wrote fascinating first-hand account, "Travels . . ." [G161.H2+no.20 | Excerpts BR&B:262-369]
Yurii Tolstoi, ed., _The_First Forty Years of Intercourse between England and Russia, 1553-1593 [DK106.T64]

1570:1589; Two decades of intensified hostility between two of the great European overseas powers, newly-Protestant England and Catholic Spain. Religion played its role in this matter

1572:English captain Francis Drake set out on a series of marauding raids on Spanish and Portuguese imperialist and colonial possessions
- Born a commoner, Drake had risen in the ranks as a successful naval commander in England's expanding role in the global overseas slave trade
- Now his raids in the New World brought back great treasure, including 30 tons of Spanish silver, mined in the New World by slaves
1577de:1580se26; With license and financing from Queen Elizabeth, Drake set out on a round-the-world expedition aboard his flagship Golden Hind. The expedition was designed to pester rival imperialist powers on the Pacific shores of the New World and to gather as much booty as possible [MAP]
This voyage brought him along the shores of what would later be called Oregon Territory. It appears he visited what we now call San Francisco Bay. He named the northern California territory "New Albion" and claimed it in the name of Queen Elizabeth (though the Spanish, moving by land up from Mexico, eventually took and held possession of these New World lands). He crossed the Pacific and harassed various imperialist possessions in the Philippines
When he returned to the English port of Plymouth, his ships bore treasure equal to more than $1 billion (current values). Drake became "Sir Francis"
Over the next years Drake commanded British naval forces against Catholic Irish insurgents who struggled to free themselves from English occupation, exploitation and rule [ID]
1589:Drake was an admiral of the English navy by the time of the titanic sea battle with the Spanish Armada [ID]

<>1570:Novgorod crushed by Ivan IV [VSB,1=149-50 | DMR2:235-9 | DMR3:305-8]

The fate of Novgorod had profound significance for the further history of Russia =

Seven-hundred years earlier, Novgorod was the original Russian city (fortress)
Later it escaped destruction and dominance by the Golden Horde [ID]
It became a thriving independent commercial city-state and an important link in the chain of trade cities that made up the Hanseatic League ID

Now it and its vast territories to the east and south were brought increasingly under thoroughgoing Muscovite dominance =

<>1572:Ivan IV's testament [HTP:307-60]

Ivan bequeathed to his son the territories of the Kazan Tatars, who had been for a century and a half an independent force on the territories of middle Volga but were henceforward an eastern fortress of Russian interface with Asia
He also bequeathed the territories of the Bashkirs in the southern Urals region

Bashkirs were allowed to rule themselves under Moscow lordship so long as they paid yasak

Eventually, for some Bashkirs, Muscovite military service replaced yasak

At this time, the Oprichnina (as retinue) was disbanded after six years of extreme action against Ivan's perceived enemies [ID]
Oprichnina (as a geographic division of Russia) lasted three more years

By the time of Ivan IV's testament, Ivan III had already cleared the way for Moscow to claim its DUAL IMPERIAL LEGACIES [ID]

He had already explicitly laid claim to its first, the Byzantine heritage [ID]
Now Ivan IV, in action if not explicitly, took the first big steps toward claiming its second legacy, the Mongol heritage [ID]

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