• GO TO most recent SAC chronology
• BC 510:BC 44; ROME, from Republic to Empire, interspersed with Classical Greek chronology
•    ---(SAC coverage of Russian and World History actually begins here = )
• 453:988; BYZANTINE STEPPE FRONTIER
• 576:966; Khazars vied for dominance in the Pontic Steppe [LOOP on "Khazar"]
• 632:1018; Beginnings of medieval Bulgarian tsardom [LOOP on "Bulgar" NB! distinction from "Bolgar"]
• 632je:1029; Beginnings of fast-expanding Islamic Arabic Empire [LOOP on "Arab" or "Islam"]
• 789: Frankish king Charlemagne launched religious/military "crusade" against NE Slavs
• 839+: Warrior merchants (popularly called "Vikings") plied the seas and rivers of Europe and western Eurasia
• 862:980; Beginnings of Russian history, establishment of Kievan Rus'
• 863: Byzantine Patriarch Photius sent out diplomatic/religious mission to West Slavs [LOOP on "Cyril"]
• 962:973; German King Otto I laid the foundations for "the Holy Roman Empire" [LOOP on "German"]
• 980:1223; KIEVAN RUS, from grandeur, through decline, to utter destruction
• 1029:Seljuk Turks irrupted into Persian and Arabic territories
• 1066:Normans conquered the English Island
• 1223:1328; THE GOLDEN HORDE (Zolotaia Orda, the regime that administered Mongol [Tatar] dominion)
• 1252:1570; NOVGOROD, THE HANSEATIC LEAGUE, and SUBORDINATION TO MOSCOW [LOOP]
• 1328:1462; MUSCOVITE RUSSIA phase #1 = Agent & Enemy of Golden Horde
• 1462:1533;         Phase #2 = Independence & Grandeur: Ivan III "the Great"
• 1533:1587;         Phase #3 = IVAN IV "THE TERRIBLE"
• 1587:1612no19; Phase #4 = TIME OF TROUBLES
• 1612no19:1652; Phase #5 = ZEMSKII SOBOR and LAW CODE
• 1652:1682;         Phase #6 = RASKOL [Schism] and NATIONAL CRISIS
• Next SAC
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<> Here is a fine effort to portray the biggest known time/space setting of earthly events = [W]
*--The link does give some experiential sense of what is really too big to be experienced
*--But doesn't it stumble in its first moments? In those first glimpses of earth as we pull back from the Himalayas, where is Lake Baikal, the largest body of fresh water on the planet?

<>BC 800,000 (approximately)| Proto-humans -- not yet properly designated "Homo sapiens" but "Homo erectus" -- had the ability to sail in open seas. Early-early humanity crossed large stretches of water (12 miles or more), probably on bamboo rafts, to reach the Indonesian island Flores. Archaeologist Mike Morwood at University of New England in Armidale, Australia, has studied and dated stone tools found on Flores. This evidence vastly expands the earlier presumptions about human culture, particularly human capabilities on the open seas. Earlier it was presumed that the first such adventures were across the waters between modern-day Indonesia and Australia, 40-60,000 years ago [1998:Nature].
*--775,000 years later (approximately) something like agricultural civilization arose, the beginning of a period for which surviving records allow something like what we conventionally call "history"
*--"European" history comes into good focus beginning with classical Greece and Rome
*--What follows here is a brief outline of that story with emphasis on the instructive fate of the Roman Republic =

<>BC 700:595; Classical Greece, Athens| Eupatrid oligarchy
<>BC 594:509; Classical Greece, Athens| Solon and tyranny
<>BC 508:491; Classical Greece, Athens| Foundation of democracy

<>BC 510:390; Roman aristocratic republic lasted 120 years

• In these early years what would eventually be known as “The Twelve Tables” served as a powerful “constitutional” foundation of Roman law
• At the end, Rome was captured and burned by Gauls. Stoic old senators were massacred as they sat in their homes

<>BC 490:479; Classical Greece, Athens| Persian Wars
<>BC 478:462; Classical Greece, Athens| Delian League and postwar building
<>BC 461:430; Classical Greece, Athens| High empire and struggle for Greek hegemony
<>BC 429:416; Classical Greece, Athens| Peloponnesian War phase #1: Stalemate
<>BC 415:404; Classical Greece, Athens| Peloponnesian War phase #2: Crisis
<>BC 403:379; Classical Greece, Athens| Post-Peloponnesian War

<> BC 390:270; Roman Republic, over the next 120 years, recovered and was transformed as it established its authority over the surrounding “frontier”

• Rome finally had administrative, military and economic control over the whole Italian peninsula, but at the same time its civilization was overwhelmed
• Roman culture was “Hellenized” from the East by Greek thinkers, artists craftsmen. Should we call this “Easternization” of Rome?

<>BC 378:355; Classical Greece, Athens| Naval Confederation and Social War, financial crisis
<>BC 354:322; Classical Greece, Athens| Confronting Macedonia, economic prosperity
<>BC 321:146; Classical Greece, Athens| Macedonian and Roman domination

<>BC 270:120; Roman republic's final grand epoch lasted 150 years

• It expanded beyond Italy to Spain, North Africa (Carthage), the Balkan Peninsula (Macedonia), and into the lands of its cultural tutors, the Greeks
• This happened in a series of three “Punic Wars” against Carthage and campaigns into regions washed by the eastern Mediterranean Sea
• Roman constitution and imperial expansion were described by Greek-born historian Polybius [ID]. He emphasized the “mixed” quality of the Roman state and extolled the positive virtues of balanced and solidly institutionalized government. Three powers “checked and thwarted one another” =
  (1) Consuls (military leaders),
  (2) Senators (civilian elites) and
  (3) Tribunes (elected representatives of the people, the Plebeians or “Plebs”)
• In Polybius' view, these three powers prevented any one faction from dominating public life in the republic. In his ideal model, the result was “mutual interdependency of all the three”. Polybius had reason to be nervous about trends that threatened "mutual interdependency" in his own time =
• Unprecedented wealth poured in as imperialist tribute and booty were collected from subdued peoples. Slavery expanded, independent small holdings (farms) declined. The power of a Senatorial oligarchy was increasingly unchecked. The force of "The Twelve Tables" faded with the decline of the republic. The tables were put aside as empire came to replace republic.
• Orator, author and Censor Cato (the Elder) resisted loss of old “Roman virtues” and objected to excessive luxuries and intensified cultural “Easternization”, but Cato ended by learning Greek himself

<>BC 133:Roman Tribune Tiberius Gracchus launched political campaign to restore balance to Roman political life

• He worked against insiders who privatized vast public lands, impoverished the masses, and threatened to dominate the republic
• A group of Senators killed Tiberius

<>BC 123: Roman Tribune Gaius Gracchus took up his brother's cause, trying to expand citizenship beyond the city Rome and broaden public participation

• Gaius stabilized grain prices and weakened Senatorial power
• Gaius' enemies attacked and massacred his supporters. He asked a faithful servant to kill him so as to avoid being taken himself
• His reforms were scuttled. Senatorial power was restored.

<>BC 102:86; Roman army, now a professional rather than a citizen's force, defeated Germanic invaders

• The army propelling their successful, ambitious and popular commander Marius onto center stage
• Equites [Equestrian order, the non-Senatorial commercial elite] grew in wealth and power, cashing in on military aggression
• Insider bankers, money-lenders, government “procurement” contractors, executives in corporations [societates] became very wealthy, while general prosperity languished
• Equites fortunes were increasingly tied to military imperialism, as was the economic misery of the wider population
• Military dictatorship replaced civilian rule at the end of this 16 year period. Marius assumed power and massacred his enemies

 <>BC 82:79; Rome soon ruled by a second military dictator, Sulla [Sylla], a bitter rival of Marius but with much the same meaning for the republic

• Sulla introduced “proscriptions” [enemy lists] and authorized anyone to kill those on the lists. The price of political “checking and thwarting” was going up
• The ethos of the battlefield was now applied to social and political life
• The Roman republic was doomed. The myth and many of the forms survived, but the spirit was near death
• Senatorial power was restored after Sulla's harsh dictatorship, while “people-power”, institutionally nested in the Tribunes, continued to be curbed
• The next phase of “Easternization” began to supplant the first phase. Sober Greek trends of thought were being replaced by astrology, magic and other Asian religious or mystery cults

<>BC 70:30; Rome gripped in ruinous 40-year civil war

• All factions were at one another's throats, seeking to destroy rather than “check and thwart” one another
• In the last century of the republic the Equites, in commercial alliance with growing ambition of the army, promoted mounting indebtedness among Romans and ruthless exploitation of the provinces
• Working together, the commercial and military elites undermined the venerable republic
• This was, however, a period of cultural brilliance, “The Age of Cicero”. Roman civilization produced Lucretius, Catullus, young Virgil and the great writer, orator and politician Cicero.

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

• Caesar had returned with his armies from successful imperial wars of aggression against Germanic “barbarians” in north-central and western Europe. Caesar 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 had 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” 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
• Military Imperial autocracy and dictatorship, vicious insanities and extreme depravity of governmental and public life followed. It continued to work for a long-long while, four centuries, and it benefited well-to-do Romans. 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]
• The Empire in the west finally destroyed itself when Germanic peoples -- erstwhile subjects, acolytes and trainees 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 invaders

---- NEARLY 4 CENTURIES SEPARATE CICERO'S MURDER & THE NICAEAN COUNCIL =

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

• This "ecumenical" or "universal" council (inclusive of all Christian churches) 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". Uniformity had to be imposed
• 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
• "The Nicaean Creed" [ID] became the official summary of what Christianity was all about
• This council also created the first three Patriarchal Sees (central administrative "thrones" of the universal church) =
   Alexandria
   Antioch (in modern-day Turkey) and
   Rome
• 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.
• Emperor Constantine was much influenced by what would soon be officially labeled a heresy = Arianism. But his new capital became an official Patriarchal See, the fourth
• The Roman Empire now sported an official ideology = Christianity
• 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]
• 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
• The highest level institutional administrative structure of the Christian Church remained unchanged for more than a millennium, until =
  The Metropolitan of Moscow became the Moscow Patriarchate in 1589

<>0453:988; BYZANTINE STEPPE FRONTIER

• 0453:Hun commander Attila died. Black Sea or Pontic Steppes [the open Steppes west, north and east of 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, but we can familiarize ourselves with the geography [ggr |  MAP]
• The famous Enlightenment historian Edward Gibbon, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, described these as eras of "obscure calamities"
• 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, 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]

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 current Istanbul epoch

• 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
• Slavs shifted eastward and southward in rhythm with the pan-European flux, a phenomenon the Germans call Volkerwanderungen, the wandering of peoples

Three distinct Slavic cultures emerged from this process =

• 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 =
• Under the command of Bulgar [Turkic] boyars [Slavic word for military commanders or leaders] or Hunnic chieftains, they drifted even further southwest, forming what was to become a great Christian tsardom "Bulgaria". In the two centuries up to about 700, the south Slavic villagers in the lower Danube valley "Slavicized" their Turkic boyars, filled the countryside of what is modern-day Bulgaria, and founded a powerful Christian Bulgarian tsardom [W#1 | W#2 (brief popular histories)] and [MAP]
• The Turkic Bulgars who did not move into the Danube valley, who held to the wild eastern Steppes, were split off from the Danube Bulgars and eventually pushed by Khazar expansion northward up the Volga valley in 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 Danube Bulgars from Volga Bolgars
• 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
They were the rural platform over which generations of warrior nomadic peoples passed
These various warrior nomads sometimes recruiting Slavs into their service, and they were often absorbed into these Slavic cultures

To the south of all this flux, the Byzantine Empire evolved a subtle and complex diplomatic, 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
\\
*--A summary history of Byzantium
*--Obolensky:42-61
*--Paul M. Barford, The early Slavs: Culture and society in early medieval Eastern Europe (2001)
*--Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (2005)
*--Julia M. H. Smith, Europe After Rome: A New Cultural History, 500-1000 (2005)

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

• "Two swords" asserted a degree of separation of church and state in the world of the Roman Church that was not 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 on Slavs [VSB,1:7]

<>0550c:Gothic Jordanes "Origin and Deeds of the Goths" [TXT] | On Slavs [VSB,1,1:7-8]

<>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 Avar and Slavic siege, but the attackers failed to breach the great defensive walls around the city
• 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 northern watersheds flowing 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 Mohammed died, marking the beginning of a most dramatic cultural/political explosion, the spread of the Muslim or Islamic Arabic Empire [W]
*--Note dominant role of Arabia in chronology that follows over the next century and a half, to 777, then follow links
\\
*--Barnaby Rogerson, The Heirs of the Prophet Muhammad: The Two Paths to Islam (2006) accounts how the Arabic empire spread rapidly. However, two of Mohammed's heirs became symbolic patrons of two warring factions that continued over the following 13 centuries to split Islam into fatally hostile camps. Mohammed's son-in-law Ali inspired the Shiah; Mohammed's wife Aisha the Sunni

<>0674:678; Byzantine capital city Constantinople besieged by Arabs, but at this point Islamic Arab power was turned away and diverted in other directions

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

• Monophysite Heresy was condemned [ID]
• 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

<>0689:Bulgar khan Asparukh [W] moved with his people over the Danube to the south, thus breaching one of the most important Roman/Byzantine defensive lines against nomadic incursion
*--The Bulgars would have to be co-opted into close alliance with Byzantium or crushed
*--But they were strong enough to gain significant independent status which they sustained over the next three centuries
\\
*--Obolensky:13, 63-4

<>0695:Dnepr River delta city Kherson, a key trading point 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 pushed them north
*--The Chinese characters that named these northern areas can be read as Ezo, Ebisu or Emishi
*--"Ezo" denoted proto-Caucasoid "barbarians" who, in the Meiji period (late 19th c.), were called Ainu, a people with a complex and obscure history [Wiki | KEJ,2:238]

<>0711:712; Spain conquered by Arabic forces

<>0717:718; ; Constantinople under siege by Arabs again but received significant support from Bulgar khan Tervel and his warriors [boyars]
*--Bulgaria an increasingly important power west of Byzantium
\\
*--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 ritural spread among the Khazar elite. It 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 Isamic faith
*--Sunni khalif [Caliph, Kalif] 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

<>0763:Baghdad founded [capital of modern-day Iraq], "capital" of the Shiah khalif 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:Spanish holdings of Arabs attacked by Frankish King Karl

• The Germanic king Karl consolidated his predecessor's authority over folks who would later be called "French"
• "French" is a distortion of the Germanic name "Frank" with its core meaning "free" 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 Spanish holdings of the old Rome from Islamic cultural, political, and economic control, an early adumbration of Western-sponsored "crusades"
• Great epic poem commemorated heroism of Frankish commander Roland [W]
• Eurasia [M[MAP]

<>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
• Church councils website presents main substance of all seven of the great ecumenical councils
• As conflict between east and west intensified, the "Patriarch of the West" [Pope in Rome] was at a distinct disadvantage: He 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

<>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; Germanic speaking King Karl became Karlus Magnus (Charles the Great; better known later by the French translation "Charlemagne")
• The Patriarch of Rome (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 [ID]
• Einhard's "Life of Charlemagne" [TXT]
• Charlemagne and the Pope at first pretended to imperial authority over the whole Empire (east and west, Constantinople and Rome), but reality 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. Byzantium remained the main heir to the Roman Imperial tradition
• 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 were followed by decline of the Frankish Empire. Then more than a century later, the western imperial idea experienced a Quixotic revival as Holy Roman Empire under German King Otto I

<>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" [an effort in Latin to capture the common Pontic-Steppe political term for commander/leader, "khan"]
• They said they were originally from the Baltic shores of the lower Scandinavian peninsula
• In their new homeland, these Rhos were variously called Rus' or Variagi or Dany [?Danes] [VSB,1:11]
• From their first appearance on the historical scene, these Rus' were an ethnic mixture
• In other areas of Europe, other warrior merchant companies, originally from the Baltic shores of the Scandinavian peninsula, were beginning to make their appearance [EG]
• They have collectively come to be known as Vikings or Norsemen

<>0846:Ibn-Khurdadhbih [W] on Rus' merchants and their fabulous routes

• He identified them as "a kind of Slav", suggesting that these boats contained some sort of mixture of Scandinavian/Slavic crews and captains [VSB,1:9 | RRH,1:63-4]
• Viking routes [MAP] suggest that warrior merchants related to the Rus' encircled all of Europe, along seacoasts in the north, west and south, and over river passages in the east

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

• 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.

<>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]

<>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 the years 867-1130s
• ZNC,2 covers 1132-1240 (decline of Kievan Rus')
• ZNC,3 covers 1241-1381 (Mongol dominance)
• ZNC,4 covers 1382-1425 (Moscow consolidated power)
• ZNC,5 covers 1425-1520 (Muscovite grandeur, Ivan III "the Great")

<>0860:Byzantine 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 [W#1 | [W#2]
• Norse Chronicles [TXT]
• Saxo Grammaticus' Danish History [TXT]
• 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]
• Viking ship [pix] provided swift transport and ample room for freight as these warrior-merchant Rus' plied their routes

<>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 of the Byzantine Church and 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 Cyrillic alphabet
• 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 the Rus' entered into the picture of Byzantine religious or Church diplomacy.

<>0865se:Bulgarian khan Boris baptized by Byzantine missionaries, but continued to court Rome
*--Turkic boyars were reluctant to give up their customary pagan beliefs, so pagan reaction followed Boris' baptism, led by the old Bulgar military elites
\\
Obolensky:84-94

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

• 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 these warrior merchants, these Rus' and their Slavic crews, abandoned their pagan faith(s) and became Christian [VSB,1:11-12]

<>0867:1056; Byzantium's 189-year "Golden Age", the "Macedonian Epoch" (stretching over approximately the next six SAC screens)
\\
Summary [TXT]

<>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 "hotspots" in this struggle, Croatia, came under secure authority of Rome in league with medieval German "imperial" power

<>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

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

• Magyar horsemen in their turn ravaged Bulgariaand moved northwestward into Slavic Moravian [Czech] lands, eventually clashing with German (Catholic) power there
• Magyars finally settled in lands which included territory now known as Hungary

<>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, 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 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]

<>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 holy 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), thoroughly intermixed with Finnish genes of the northern hunter-gatherer folks they had lived among for eons
• The cultural assimilation of 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 or the Rus'
• And the Rus', for their part, were by now thoroughly absorbed into the culture of native Slavic peoples whom they had originally menaced and dominated
• Over the previous century or more, the Rus' had by degrees been 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

<>0917au19:Bulgarian tsar Semeon [W] defeated Byzantine army, built vast Bulgarian Christian tsardom
*--0927:treaty with Byzantium ratified gains

<>0921:922; Bolgar chieftan 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 in Baghdad [ID]

• Muktadir responded to Almis' expressed interest in closer ties, and he responded with a diplomatic mission which included Ibn-Fahdlan [W]
• The Arabic mission found the 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 against the Khazars, plus 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
• Bolgar khan Almis and his wife were motivated to reject paganism, to accept the Islamic faith, and to go on pilgrimage to Mecca, traveling through Baghdad
• The strong fortress city named Bolgar administered a system of fortress strong-points spreading eastward across the southwestern Siberian Steppes. Ibn-Fahdlan and other Arabic sources mention "Sivara" [?Siberia]
• Remember why we represent the descendants of these early nomadic Turks with two names, "Bolgars" and "Bulgars" [ID] =
• Bulgars went south into the Danube frontier and formed a settled Christian kingdom
• Bolgars went north into the Volga frontier and formed a settled Islamic kingdom
• Ibn-Fahdlan was also on mission to Khazaria. While on this important and complex mission along the Volga River, he met and described the Rus' [VSB,1:11 | Jones:164 and 425 | DMR2:11-16]
• Many Arab sources described the Rus' and Slavs

<>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"

<>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 was the center of attention

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

• 1000:Arabic description of Baghdad [W]
• 2003mr21:Photo [pix] of palatial Baghdad neighborhoods described in the first paragraph of the document above, put under the spell of US "shock and awe"
• 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 [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'

<>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 "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

<>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
• Byzantine/Arabic relations deteriorated [W]
• 0967:971; Sviatoslav invaded Bolgar lands
• 0968:969; Kiev besieged by Pechenegs, who served Byzantine interests by providing counter-balance to the growing power of Byzantium's own ally, Kiev
• Here we see an example of what Europeans came 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]

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

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

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

• At the beginning of his reign Prince Vladimir sponsored a vigorous pagan revival, in direct opposition to about two decades of noble interest in Christianity which followed his grandmother Olga's conversion [ID]. Grandson Vladimir created pagan pantheon on hill overlooking the Dnepr and Podol inlets near his palace [pix showing ruins with inscription = Otsiuda poshla est' russkaia zemlia (From here sprang forth the land of Rus)], including monument to the Slavic god of stormy heavens, Perun, the Russian version of the Scandinavian god "Thor". Some pagan statuary from this period = [pix#1 | pix#2]
• But Vladimir's destiny lay elsewhere =
• 0986:Kievan prince Vladimir received delegations representing the religions of other powerful rulers =
  Bolgars and their Islamic faith, also the
  Germans and their Catholicism,
  Khazars and their Judaic beliefs,
  Byzantium and its Orthodox Christianity [RRH,1:27-8]
• 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 his sister Anna's hand in marriage. Basil promised because he needed Kievan help. Constantinople threatened by rebel general Bardas Phocas from Asia Minor. 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:63-7 | VSB,1:25-6 | DMR2:38-44 | DMR3:30-5 | ZMR1:65-71 | ZMR2:43-83 | WAL,1:65-71]
• Vladimir 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 statute 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

<>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

*--The first great epoch of Bulgaria was at its end

<>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, 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:22-4 | ZMR1:87-91 | ZMR2:101-5]
• The hierarchical political system established the rank of ruling princes and their city-states. It had evolved over the 150 years since the "invitation to the Rus'" [ID]. But the system was always prone to instability as 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 rank in the system "mestnichestvo" 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

<>1018:Pechenegs described by German missionary among them as omnium paganorum crudelissimi, and the Chronicles lamented their constant 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 =

<>1029:Out of Turkmen/Bukhara Steppes, Seljuk Turks 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 Islamic 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]

<>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 (headquarters of 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']

<>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"

<>1051:Kiev-Pechersk Lavra [Great Kievan Cave Monastery] founded [ZMR2:105-16]

• 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"]

<>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. Earlier a coherent hierarchical association of princely city-states, a confederation held together by what is called "mestnichestvo", functioned 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
*--Kievam Rus' at the end of Yaroslav Mudryi's reign and the beginning of disorder [MAP]

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

• European Christian civilization split into big blocs, "East" and "West"
• A serious cultural "fault line" ran through the Balkan peninsula where Slavic national groups became divided along confessional lines, as in the most consequential example of "South-Slavic" [Yugoslav] peoples, Croats and Serbs, Catholic to the west, Orthodox to the east
• 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
• The 189-year Byzantine "Macedonian Epoch", the Golden Age [ID], was coming to a close
• 1521:A half millennium later, a second great split doomed the universalist dream of "Christendom" and also severely damaged the power of the Patriarch in Rome (Pope) when the Protestant Reformation spread in north-western Europe Church

<>1063:1060; Novgorod Metropolitan [Bishop] Luka Zhidiata gave instructions to brethren [WAL,1:55-5]

• 1071:Novgorod| Pagan believers revolted against Christian authority [VSB,1:30]
• Robert Mitchell and Nevill Forbes, eds., The Novgorod Chronicle, 1016-1451 [noUO]

<>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"

<>1067: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 and contributed to the decline of Kiev
• 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

<>1071au19:Armenian frontier battle between Byzantium and Seljuk Turks at Manzikert reflected the same larger processes demographic instability suggest just above
*--Seljuk Turks led by Alp Arslan humilitated Byzantium
\\
*--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 [TXT]

<>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"
• 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
• The actions of the Crusaders eventually lost contact with both the western Catholic Church and its fledgling western Empire. Increasingly crusaders lent their sacrificial energies to causes controlled and manipulated by sordid and opportunistic "business" interests of various Italian merchant city-states
• 1146:Crusade#2
• 1189:Crusade#3
• 1200:1204; Crusade#4 (the Fourth Crusade) did nothing to liberate the Holy Land, but had especially dolorous consequences for eastern Europe when it turned its aggressive energies against Constantinople and nearly destroyed the great city. Byzantium entered into decline, never fully recovering from assaults from "The West"
• 1212:Crusade#5 (usually unnumbered but often called the "Children's Crusade") was tragic and foolish, and it marked the end of the crusades, as such [MAP]
• The crusades echoed on down the years. Toward the end of the crusading era outlined above, in the early 1200s, Teutonic Knights, a military/religious order, since the third crusade settled in the Holy Lands, began to move northward into the pagan or heathen frontiers of eastern Europe. They settled eventually in 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, they took advantage of the disordered lines of authority within that empire and soon secured a certain independence from Vienna by shifting allegiance directly back to their Church superior, the Pope
• Teutonic impact on the regional economy was mixed. Looking backwards toward 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, in a period 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
• Together, Teutonic Knights and the Livonian Order introduced a hyper-feudal/aristocratic order to eastern Europe, an order that insisted on sharp, almost "racial" distinctions between those nobles who ruled and those commoners who worked for those who ruled. In eastern Europe, titles, privileges and exemptions had not been so prominently distributed according to birth
• 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
• Now began a thousand-year era (up to the late 20th century) of European colonial and imperialist expansion in the other direction, over the whole globe
• Despite this slow east/west sea change, "The East" had still two powerful challenges for "The West" before the tables were turned altogether =
  (1) The Golden Horde and
  (2) The Seljuk and Ottoman Turks

<>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, recognizable throughout much of Christendom [Europe] was evolving among princely rulers. Various princes now acknowledged the liege lord superiority of a "grand prince", though each vassal prince retained his own subordinate udel [a portion of heritable land, wealth and authority, especially his 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 surviving legally for 500 years
• In far SW Rus' (Galich-Volyn) signs of unraveling Kievan order were clear (to those who could still see) = prince Vasilko was blinded in an internecine struggle for power  [ZMR1:73-6]. Vasilko's SW Russian domain was comprised of Halych or Galich or Galicia, plus Volyn or Volhynia, the right-bank Dnepr region of modern-day Ukraine bordering on historic frontiers with 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. This important gathering acknowledged an abiding usefulness of the unraveling old princely hierarchy [mestnichestvo]

<>1103:Kievan princes from various princely city-states yet again conferred, but this time in order to address "foreign policy", the defense of their combined borders from nomadic encroachment, particularly that of the Polovtsy
*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 [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, 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 has survived [ZMR1:43-76] First dated entry was the year 852
• Kiev was in a state of near constant military confrontation in Finnish lands of Livonia, on the middle Volga in Bolgar territories, and in left-bank Danube valleys near the Black Sea coast. Monomakh's Testament describes 83 major campaigns
• Vladimir Monomakh thought of himself in terms defined by the emerging feudal European concept of "the good prince", ruling in close harmony with the Church and promoting its Christian ideals, but at the same time actively involved in the detailed everyday life of his people. In his Testament [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

<>1136:Novgorod Veche [deliberative assembly of urban elites] elected princes [VSB,1:34-5,62-3] Expelled Prince Vsevolod from Novgorod and composed laws about merchants [VSB,1:69,74-5]

• The veche might have been the original local institution of public deliberation among Slavic tribal people before and after the invitation to the Rus' [ID]. Its derivation is from the old-Russian verb "to speak" [veshchati], much as the English word "parliament" derived from the old-French word "to speak" [parler]. The veche was called into session by the sounding of a bell on the town square. Often the term is translated as "urban assembly" in VSB, KRR and elsewhere
• However "original" the institution, there is no historical record of the veche prior to 1016 or anywhere but in Novgorod until 1068:Kiev
• 1128:1193; Chronicles described life in Novgorod, including how bishops were also elected and how 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 [ZMR2:78-83 | RRH,1:54-8] Was mestnichestvo falling apart everywhere in Kievan Rus', except in Novgorod where it was reinforced by a newly active veche? Did the veche provide something like a medieval variation on the idea of "checks and balances"?
• The importance of veche authority grew as the Kievan system of princely mestnichestvo weakened in the 11th century. In Novgorod it became an even more elaborate instrument of local deliberation and even self-regulation when it branched out into the various districts [kontsy] of the city and positioned its authority over the Church and against that of the prince
• 1136:Novgorod Cathedral of St. Sophia received charter from Novgorod prince Sviatoslav [W]
• 1156:Novgorod veche elected Archbishop [VSB,1:70] Illustrated [KRR:36]
• Several important cities in the Kievan period were governed/administered by veche. Could we say that veche election of princes in its own way undermined mestnichestvo?
• Everyday life in medieval Novgorod [DMR3:119-32]
• Women in Novgorod [KRR:54-9]
• Novgorod Birchbark charters etc [KRR:71-3 | RRH,1:54]

<>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]
• 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 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 interfacing Germanic economies to the west, and Suzdal interfacing the Bolgar economy to the east. In these years Bolgar wheat was a significant import item in Suzdal. Yurii invited Bolgars to colonize open areas of his realm, and he employed Bolgar masons and master builders to construct churches. Yurii founded several other market/fortress cities, e.g., Pereslavl-Zalesskii [W] and 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

<>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], son and political heir of Yurii Dolgorukii, led attack from this remote northern principality and sacked distant Kiev [ZNC,2:140-2]

• 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 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, his udel, not a temporary assignment to govern a certain location. 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) had been in serious disorder almost from the very beginning
• 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

*--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]

<>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
  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]

<>1187:SW Rus (Galich-Volyn 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)

• Erico 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
• 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 mercanilism [ID]
• Byzantium was weakened beyond recovery

<>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#1 | MAP#2]
• 1207:1225; Over an 18-year period, up to his last two years of life, Chinggis expanded Mongol power = MAP
• Moving MAP illustrates 88 years of Mongol expansion in Eurasia = 1206, 1219, 1223, 1227, 1237, 1259, 1279, 1294
• The city Karakorum was the administrative headquarters ("capital") of his emerging Eurasian Mongol empire
• Great Yasa [a comprehensive constitution-type guide or law code for commanders but also for administrative officials and subjects of the Golden Horde], a divine mandate with practical advice about how to rule the whole world, communicated by direct heavenly inspiration from Tengri [ID] to Chinggis-khan, who subsequently dictated it to scribes
• Here is a secondary 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 Chingis Khan's Yasa" [TXT | Excerpt = VSB,1:47-8]
• The bejeweled summary of the origin of khans (1967)
• Secret History of the Mongols: A Mongolian Epic Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century, Igor Rachewiltz, ed. (2006, 2vv) [TXT]

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

• 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 authorities in the east (China) and south (Islamic lands of Central Asia, eventually even into India) [MAP]

<>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] in Persian territories south and east of the Caspian Sea and
  (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 commanded the heartland of Eurasia (and the globe?) [MAP]
• Moving MAP illustrates 88 years of Mongol expansion in Eurasia = 1206, 1219, 1223, 1227, 1237, 1259, 1279, 1294

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

• More on the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra
• 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 northern 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 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 world [ID], and over nearly two and one half centuries Russian lands were subjected to 48 destructive invasions and 90 violent civil wars
• Moving MAP illustrates 88 years of Mongol expansion in Eurasia = 1206, 1219, 1223, 1227, 1237, 1259, 1279, 1294
• 1236:1328; Phase #1 of THE GOLDEN HORDE = Mongol [Tatar] overlordship in nearly the whole territory of old Kievan Rus' [ZNC,3]
• Most significant exception = the Novgorod north
• 1328:1462; Phase #2 of THE GOLDEN HORDE = A century and a half in which grand princes of the new-comer Russian princely city Moscow [ID] were ambitious subordinates and agents of -- and eventually competitors with -- the Golden Horde

<>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 the Near 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 want to exaggerate the looseness of regional Mongol institutional life simply in order to avoid exaggerating unity

<>1225:East Persia [Iran] wrecked by Mongol invasion
*--Mongol Ilkhanate established there
*1227:Deaths of Chinggis-khan and his oldest son Djuchi. Ugedei [Ogedei] succeeded Chinggis as great khan and Batu succeeded his father Djuchi as khan of the Golden Horde. Rivalries intensified
*--Moving MAP illustrates 88 years of Mongol expansion in Eurasia = 1206, 1219, 1223, 1227, 1237, 1259, 1279, 1294

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

• Birchbark documents illustrate everyday life [KRR:129-30]
• Novgorod elected Archbishop of Orthodox Church [VSB,1:70-1]
• 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'
• 1230:1241; Galicia [Galich, Halych], the remote "right-bank Dnepr River" region [ID], in disorder and drifting away from the Kievan world which was finally disintegrating 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'

<>1229:Roman Patriarch [aka Pope] Gregory IX launched Inquisition [ID]. 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"

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

<>1236:Volga River, below the confluence with the Kama River | Bolgar administrative capital taken by 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 had already been witnessed many times already out on the Eurasian Steppes, namely, the shift of ambitious rulers 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
• 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]

<>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 fullscale assault by the Golden Horde [MAP]
• Russian prince paid tribute [VSB,1:49-50]
• "Discourse Concerning the Ruin of Rus Land" [DMR3:97-9]
• Moving MAP illustrates 88 years of Mongol expansion in Eurasia = 1206, 1219, 1223, 1227, 1237, 1259, 1279, 1294

<>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 ceremonially subordinate Dzhuchi-ulus. Batu 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]

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

<>1246:Pope in Rome sent Ambassador Carpine [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]

<>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-Volyn area came under Mongol power and found itself isolated from old Kievan networks

<>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
*--Novgorod Chronicle account [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, pp. 60-98 on Vladimir city in the 13th century

<>1253:Sarai, in the lower Volga valley, a great "nomad" metropolis was founded by Batu-khan as administrative center and headquarters of 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, just north of modern-day Astrakhan, was moved northward, just south of modern-day Volgograd, and called Sarai-Berke
• Over the next century this tent and pavilion urban center grew in size and importance. Visitors reported that it took a half day to ride by horse from one outskirt to the other [BrE,56:399]. Sarai served as a central point for caravan routes from Africa to China, and south to Persia [Iran] and India. Sarai included several suburban neighborhoods with caravan rest points [caravan-sarai (ID)] for tradesmen whose ethnicities originated in three different continents
• 1253:1255; French King Louis IX sent Catholic Friar Willem van Ruysbroeck [Rubruck (ID)] to Karakorum and Sarai
• MAP of Rubruck's route

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

• As khan he made Islam the "official" religion of the Horde| A familiar pattern is observable here at the outer edges of Mongol power = Mongol-Turk syncretism (cultural and institutional combination, melding)
• 1258:Baghdad sacked by Golden Horde as Berke turned his swift armies against the Turks
• 1260:Damascus taken by Golden Horde, but the Mongols stopped north of Jerusalem and backed off
• Moving MAP illustrates 88 years of Mongol expansion in Eurasia = 1206, 1219, 1223, 1227, 1237, 1259, 1279, 1294
• In the more than century-long relief from Mongol power in the Anatolian near east that followed 1260, Ottoman Turkish power waxed strong

<>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, and 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] -- [KRR:84-5]
• 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

<>1267au01:Kievan Metropolitan of Orthodox Church received favorable Yarlyk from new Mengu-Temir-khan [DMR3:175-6] [VSB,1:49 dates this 1308]
*--Eurasia [MAP]

<>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 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]

<>1274:Naples [Italy] | Thomas Aquinas died, 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. He devoted himself to proving faith by reason
• 1142:Peter Abelard died. He sought to identify and address the chief logical contradictions in Christian faith
• This "Western" achievement 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 philosophy. And Muslim philosophers on their own influenced this process =
• Translations of Averroës were read widely in "The West". Two Islamic-Aristotelian principles were influential = “Averroism” preached “double truth”, allowing room for both faith and reason. Here the immortal soul and the anima mundi are the same, a principle that can undermine the notion of distinct human individuality. And what is true in the light of faith may be untrue in the eyes of reason, and vice versa, a principle that can undermine either intellectual or spiritual absolutism
• Islam presented a formidable spiritual/philosophical challenge to traditional medieval Christianity
• Struggles between faith (Duns Scotus) and reason (William of Occam [1349c:dth]) gripped the Church of Rome
• In the meanwhile, the Eastern Orthodox Church, in Russia and elsewhere, was little affected by all this

<>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 the 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" [Mongol assault as punishment for Russian sins] and "on Omens" [ZMR2:243-6| ZMR1:199-204| WAL:104-6]
*--Moving MAP illustrates 88 years of Mongol expansion in Eurasia = 1206, 1219, 1223, 1227, 1237, 1259, 1279, 1294

<>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 growing conflict with one of the more long-enduring splinter hordes, the Crimean Tatars
*1290s:Marco Polo, who claimed to travel the legendary "Silk Road" [W], 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 [MAP]
*--Moving MAP illustrates 88 years of Mongol expansion in Eurasia = 1206, 1219, 1223, 1227, 1237, 1259, 1279, 1294

<>1300:Vladimir (city) became the Metropolitan See of the Russian Church
*--GO 1313

<>1303:1325; Moscow prince Yurii III

• Yurii married Mongol bride, sister of the khan of the Golden Horde
• 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
• From the time of the founding one and a half centuries earlier [ID], Moscow had not been of much significance
• Now, after Kievan disintegration and Mongol destruction, two very different urban strongholds, representing two very different "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; Russia [MAP]

<>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, he was "on the road" in northern Africa, Egyptian territories of the Mamluk Empire, Arabia, Byzantium, the Near East, into the Mongol Empire, China and the Philippines [Excerpted TXT]

<>1313:Vladimir Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church Peter received Yarlyk from Uzbek-khan [KRR:101-2]

<>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]

<>1316:1341; Lithuanian grand prince Gedimin [Gediminas] extended his authority to the east and south into the partial vacuum created by the strategic withdrawal of the Golden Horde
*--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, pp. 98-121 on medieval city-state Tver

<>1328:1462; Phase #2 of the Golden Horde was at the same time =

• Phase #1 of MUSCOVITE RUSSIA, more than One Century, in which Moscow was both agent and enemy of the Golden Horde
• In phase #2 of the Golden Horde, Moscow princes grew in power. They exerted themselves for both independence from Mongol rule and dominance over neighboring Russian centers -- frequently with Mongol help
• Muscovites came to call this process "re-gathering the Russian lands" [ZNC,5]
• Moscow flourished, but did not altogether free itself from Mongol dominion for another century, not until the reign of Ivan III
• Medieval Moscow, the Kremlin [W]
• Moscow architectural sites [W]
• Other Medieval Russian cities, "The Golden Ring" [W]
• 1328:1341; Moscow prince Ivan Danilovich ruled 14 years as Ivan I Kalita [Moneybag], first Muscovite grand prince [velikii kniaz'] [ZNC,3:127-47 | DMR2:153-8 | DMR3:190-5]
• Golden Horde sponsored his coronation. He made nine journeys to Sarai. 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, and 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, so long as the grand prince was in no position to shed Mongol authority
• Ivan I used the power gained through closeness to the Horde to expand his authority to neighboring princely cities where he 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 to Radonezh. The Official "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]

<>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

<>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

<>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] 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 =
(1) Semyon had lost touch with Byzantium and needed a refresher course in "Roman" institutional practice to guide his own assumption of a new status, and
(2) 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]

<>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 and 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, now pushing more resolutely into SE European territories that the Mongols never managed to hold for long, or not at all (EG=Byzantium)
*--Turks crushed the medieval sovereignty and absorbed under their administration territories of modern-day Hungary, Serbia, and Bulgaria (once a great feudal state). Two paragraphs of TXT describe Ottoman Turkish expansion into south-eastern Europe.
*--Byzantium would not fall to the Ottoman Turks for one more century, but the handwriting was on the wall....

<>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]

<>1355:1389; Moscow grand prince Dmitrii Ivanovich [after 1380 dubbed Donskoi] ruled for 34 years [ZNC,3:185-305]
*--Russia in the time of Dmitrii Donskoi [MAP]
*--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]

<>1357no:Moscow | Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church Aleksei received favorable Yarlyk from Berdibek-khan of the Golden Horde [DMR3:176-7]

<>1357:1380; Twenty-three years in which 25 khans ruled in Sarai
*--Khorezm [Khwarezm-shakh] fell away
*--Poland-Lithuania moved into lower Dnepr basin

<>1359:Novgorod elected Archbishop [VSB,1:71]
*--Novgorod merchants controlled Bolgar city Zhukotin, 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:Moscow stone Kremlin began

<>1368:1372; Lithuania attacked Moscow frequently

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

<>1367:Germanic trade center Kön [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 which linked about seventy Baltic coastal cities and several inland markets
• Novgorod had become the eastern anchor of the Hanseatic League (as London became the western)
• 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]
• 1380:1500s; Economic developments in the Baltic world of the Hanseatic League paralleled those in the Mediterranean world  [ID]
• 1384:1388; (and again in 1418) All was not well, however. Popular disturbances rocked Novgorod [VSB,1:72-3]

<>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; Hypatian monastery ("Ipaty" [pix] in Kostroma, about 80 miles east-northeast of Yaroslavl [map]) edition dates from around this time, covering 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 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:Moscow burned by the warriors of Mamai's successor, Tokhtamysh-khan (1380-1395). The Golden Horde was still a force to be reckoned with [ZNC,4:2-12 | VSB,1:56-7]
• 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 [ZMR2:315-22 | DMR3:198-202]
• Four decades later, "The Life of St.Sergius" [TXT] described how exemplary monk Sergius of Radonezh inspired Moscow victory
  

<>1380:1500s; Venice [on the northwestern-most shore of the Adriatic Sea in modern-day Italy], a commercial city-state, defeated 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. For one, the Hanse was a loose federation, vulnerable to waxing centralized national monarchies
• Venice was an independent city-state, itself a center of trade and for centuries invulnerable to growing authority of European 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 adhered to its Church. He 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 ntic Steppes to the northwestern shores of the Black Sea, the Jagellon dynasty soon ruled in 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]

<>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 (in which estates were divided among all male heirs) and to establish, at least for the grand princely inheritance, a tradition of primogeniture (in which the estate went to the eldest son)
*--Notice also the presumptions here of the rights of women in such inheritances [KRR:87-90]

<>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
• Russia in the time of Vasilii I [MAP]

<>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 help us test the degree of Russian 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 ["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]
\\
*--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 [Basileus]
*--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 could take inspiration from two great imperial models
*--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, we must not forget that the question of "Russian isolation" is very much more complicated than that

<>1395:Golden Horde capital city Sarai burned to the ground when Tamerlane (Timur the Lame) defeated and seized the throne from Tokhtamysh-khan

• Over the next several years, Tamerlane turned attention from one closely related power to lands ruled by another, Ottoman Turks. These territories had been neglected by Mongol power for over a century
• Rapid Ottoman expansion was for a time checked, while northern Slavic peoples' ambitions for independence (especially those of Poland-Lithuania, Moscow, and Novgorod) gained new opportunities when Tamerlane and the Golden Horde looked southward. At the same time, conflicts arose among these northern Slavic peoples (much as we see conflict among the Turko-Tatar peoples) as ambitions and independence grew with Mongol decline
• 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

<>1395:Novgorod [?]. Death of Spiridon Stroganov, wealthy trader in the 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. There they formed a Stroganov family dynasty in close relations with the Gold Horde
• The family later reemerged in the time of Moscow ascendancy, EG=
• 1397:Moscow grand prince Vasilii I gave Charter 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: In the other direction from the remote Dvina lands -- the western edge of the Novgorod commercial empire (which was the eastern edge of Poland-Lithuania) -- the fortified trade city Pskov governed itself under a Judicial Charter [W]. 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]

<>1399:Kazan Mongols ("Kazan Tatars") sometimes fled to Russian lands for sanctuary in connection with 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. Created the Kazan khanate [tsardom] on Bolgar and Mordvin territory
• 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'
  

<>1403:Czech lands, Prague | At Karel University (Univerzita Karlova, Universitas Carolina or Charles University [W]) German professors launched attack on publications of English reforming priest John Wycliffe (1384:England, death [W])
*--Wycliffe was popular with Czech professors, especially with Jan Hus and his associates
*--Spiritual as well as political unity of the Church in "The West" was breaking up, and Slavic Czechs 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 =

1. Traitorous Mongol servitors of the Golden Horde ("children of Tokhtamysh") sought asylum in Moscow [EG]
2. Vasilii showed disrespect toward Mongol envoys and merchants sent to Moscow
3. Moscow tried to exercise its authority in certain towns under Mongol dominion
4. 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
5. 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 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, spread word over Germany about Czech heresy, elevating academic/nationalistic politics to the level of doctrinal dispute
• Hus eventually became new Czech Rector at Karel University and led struggle for radical reform of 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
• Rebellion followed in Czech lands [Dvornik:189-99] Czech Slavic consciousness, a form of "national consciousness" made its first significant appearance, after a thousand years of buffeting experience on the outer edge of the Byzantine frontier
• In the other direction, Czech religious/nationalistic rebellion was another sign of disintegration on the outer edge of German-speaking Holy Roman authority
• 1431:Council of Basel the drama of East/West unification and the Hussite movement continued to agitate European Christian Churches

<>1410:Tannenberg battle | Lithuania defeated Teutonic Knights, whose zealous and holy two-century-long military mission was now broken, though 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; 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]
• Two great figures deserve a place in general European Church history, in the history of Christendom in general =
  (1) St. Sergius [Sergii] of Radonezh and
  (2) Andrei Rublev

(1) The "Life" of St. Sergius of Radonezh [TXT] was composed by Monk Epifanii Premudryi [Epiphanius the Most Wise] and 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 illustration of the majestic Trinity-Saint Sergius Monastery where the huge monastery was displayed in all its glory [pix]. BUT =
• Notice the unobtrusive miniature of St.Sergius & fellow monks at their original, primitive hermitage on the hillside to the right and above all the majesty [detail]
• St. Sergius's "Life" described how he inspired 1380 defeat of Golden Horde; he 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]. He was a major figure in the 400-year tradition of "lives of the saints"
• Apocryphal literature was popular. EG= a legend about King Solomon [WAL:114-5]

  (2) 1430:Death of Andrei Rublev, the greatest Russian icon "writer" [painter] [W#1] [W#2] [W#3] [W#4]

• Rublev was the "author" of the most celebrated icon in the Russian Orthodox tradition, the "Holy Trinity" =

Rublev's Old Testament Trinity [Another version | And yet another]
(View detail in Olga's Gallery)

• 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]

<>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, most likely 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), and 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]

<>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 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. 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 effort to reunite Eastern and Western churches (Orthodox/Catholic churches)
• Russian Orthodox Church rejected reunion and declared itself autocephalous (independent of Constantinople and the ecumenical movement). Russian Metropolitan Isidor protested and went into exile in Rome [VSB,1:126-8 | RRH,1:99-101] Now Moscow independently elected its Metropolitan
• Reunion of a single Christian Church failed as centralized European monarchical states grew in stature and self-assurance of their sovereign power. Further disintegration followed. Hussitism was still an issue (after more than forty years of suppression), adding its weight to the centrifugal motions of the independent Conciliar Movement. The seeds were 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 paid yasak to various stronger, surrounding hordes, EG=Kazan Tatars, Sibir, and Astrakhan
• 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 ruled by its own prince

<>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 [EG]? Now the institutional legacy of Rome might be said to have lived on under the authority of non-European, non-Christian peoples. Comparison of the Holy Roman Empire [ID] with the Byzantine and Ottoman empires helps make this point
• What difference does ethnicity and religion make in the story of Rome? They spoke Latin in multi-ethnic territories under Rome, Greek in multi-ethnic territories under Constantinople, and 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 that intrusion from Constantine's intrusion into the Greek colonial city Byzantion a millennium before [ID], or the west European seizure of the city 250 years earlier [ID]? These 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 their "world-historical" role was in certain ways the same as Rome. We could use a clear and less "Eurocentric" world history of what ways the same and what ways different
• 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]
• 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" back to his point]. 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, more stable than anything Byzantium or the Golden Horde achieved
• While Ottomans wielded great power in the lives of southern Slavs, they never managed their own version of the pre-Mongol Russian/Byzantine closeness. On the contrary, long term animosity between the Ottoman Empire and Russia characterized the next four-plus centuries
• Yet Muscovite Russia was the other important power that carried on the legacy of the Roman and Mongol empires. The Eastern Orthodox Church, which had become something like the institutional guardian of imperial "ideology" in east Rome [ID], was now without its emperor. After more than a millennium, Christendom was flying apart [EG#1 | EG#2]. And Christianity no longer had a strong, independent imperial secular champion. Increasingly, Moscow saw itself in this role, the inheritor of that Byzantine imperial function. Thus the Russian Orthodox Church had strong motive to suppress the memory of the Mongol legacy and of the "khans", to emphasize the Orthodox and Imperial legacy, and to throw its support behind ambitions of Muscovite "tsars"
• 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 overlap where the two "heirs" disputed the other's claims
• So Ottoman-Russian relations were to be a history of conflict that showed no signs of abating until near the very end of both empires [ID]
• 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]
• In view of the larger macro-historical situation, the question of Russian isolation from "The West" is utterly misconceived

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

• Vasilii II defeated Novgorod and forged treaty which held till 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 patrimonial feudal possession, his otchina or votchina

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

<>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 Vasilii III

• Muscovite Russia became fully independent of the Golden Horde and in line to claim the mantle of Byzantine imperial authority
• Moscow Kremlin pix
• Terem throne [pix#1 | pix#2
• 1462:1505; Ivan III the Great, 1^st tsar (Slavic version of "Caesar" or "Kaiser"); co-ruler since 1449, meaning 56 years in power
• As a consequence of the fall of Byzantium, Muscovite grand-princely authority took on new significance
• Russia in the time of Ivan III [MAP]
• Some major features of this epoch =
• Defeat of Novgorod, the most significant moment as Moscow absorbed regional princely cities in a process called "re-gathering Russian lands" ["scattered" or "lost" when Kievan Rus fell apart and was destroyed by Mongols]
• Spread of serfdom
• Decline of patrimonial aristocracy [votchinniki] and rise of service gentry [pomeshchiki] created fully articulated two-tiered elite social formation. The medieval Russian "aristocracy" was not a uniform social class
• 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

<>1463:1468; Russian serfdom spread as some of the earliest official restrictions were placed on peasant movement [DMR2:168-9 | DMR3:221-2]

<>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 so does the website; sometimes veche is translated as "people's 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, 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; 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)]

• This is the final station on the 6-century long LOOP devoted to the Russian Primary Chronicle
• 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. It severed ties with Lithuania and recognized Novgorod as otchina [heritable patrimonial possession, votchina] 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 the eastward tending trade initiative from Novgorod and thus positioned itself to inherit the Golden Horde's Asian sphere of influence

<>1472:Muscovite tsar Ivan III married Zoe Paleologus, niece of the last Byzantine Emperor 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]
• 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]
• 1474:1478; 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
• 1474:1507; Moscow treaties with Crimean Tatars demonstrated that Moscow need no longer acknowledge a unified Golden Horde

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

• The fall of Byzantium and the establishment of vigorous Ottoman Turkish authority throughout the eastern Mediterranean world cut Venice off from the source of its prosperity and power
• On his way home from Persia [Iran], Contarini circled through Moscow where he met with Ivan III and discussed their shared 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 daily life in Moscow and travel on sani [enclosed sleds] in winter [DMR2:184-90 | DMR3:237-43]
• Victories of the Ottoman Empire inspired Russian ambition, but they brought an end to the nearly 300-year epoch of Venetian city-state political and economic power
• Like all waxing European monarchical powers, Russia poised herself to play the role of great imperial nation
• Russia had become a flourishing European culture and a thriving Eurasian power

<>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. But the 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
• This sort of tsarist power was one of the important Muscovite Russian inheritances from the era of the Tatar Yoke
• 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., nobles with heritable possessions (landed estates), privileges, exemptions and presumed duties, and
  (2) Pomeshchiki, i.e., nobles with assigned possessions (landed estates), privileges, exemptions and very explicit duties
• The votchinnik was a noble by birthright. His titles and possessions were a direct inheritance from a father or, rarely, some other close family member, traditionally unmediated by any official appointment or approval. In contrast, the pomeshchik depended for his titles, properties, privileges, exemptions, etc., on the good will and continued support of his princely master
• The pomeshchik on an assigned pomest'e [landed estate, held on condition of service to the tsarist state] 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
• The 1649 Law Code described pomeshchik [TXT] and votchinnik [TXT], and in that order
• 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
• 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. It eased them 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
• 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
• Among the European monarchies, Russia was the first and the most irreversibly successful centralized "national" monarchy in its efforts to neutralize its independent aristocracy
• In reaction to this, many Russian votchinniki left Russian service to enter service in other "nations", most notably in Lithuania and Poland [EG]

<>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", 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 three-way (or perhaps four-way) contest for ascendancy evolved in the old Pontic Steppes, involving
(1) Catholic Poland-Lithuania
(2) Crimean Tatars, acting as ally of the Islamic Ottoman Empire, and
(3a) Orthodox Moscow, in uneasy association with
(3b) emerging Cossack communities along the Dnepr and Don river drainages

<>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

<>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", down the Volga watershed past the Kazan Tatars and toward the heart of the old Golden Horde's territories
*--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. Scan the next 30 years =

<>1492:Spanish-sponsored explorer, "Columbus sailed the ocean blue", making landing on Caribbean Sea islands of the New World
*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)
*--Beginnings of European exploration and expansion (projection of military, administrative and economic power) over the face of the whole globe = [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 "Gosudar vseia Rusi" [Lord of all the Russias] and his ambitions looked south as well as west
• In the midst of this complex foreign entanglement, 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
• Villagers who went south and east acquired a name from Steppe nomads, the Kazakhi, whom they met there. They slightly mispronounced the local name as kazaki, which we further distort in English as "Cossacks"
• These novel, Orthodox, farming and fighting communities of Cossacks grew strong in the wild Steppes all along the drainage of the Don, the lower Dnepr and middle Volga
• They were becoming a thorn in everyone's side, whether Moscow, Poland, Lithuania, or Crimean Tatars
• Moscow, from which these peasants fled, still had one advantage in dealing with Cossacks for whom religion was the central self-identification =
• Moscow was Orthodox, Poland-Lithuania was Catholic, and the Crimean Tatars were Islamic
• In Muscovy, domestic and "international" issues braided together

<>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) ofthe Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (1975)
• "Kormlenie" charter ["tax farming" license] (example) [VSB,1:119-20]
• Other Muscovite charters [KRR:114-7]
• Ivan III handed down a decree which expanded his 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

<>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 and concentrated its power in urban centers = Riga, Tallinn, and Tartu [the modern-date 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. Now 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 "nation-states", from west to east, from England to Russia
• A new and very "modern" janus-faced notion of political "sovereignty" [ID] played a key role in this process. New nation-states looked outward for sovereign independence in their international relations and inward for the same independence in domestic politics =

  INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL SOVEREIGNTY looked outward at international political, social and economic arrangements. These new centralized monarchical nation-states rejected larger "trans-national" political arrangements and limitations. 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 control 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
  
  DOMESTIC POLITICAL SOVEREIGNTY looked inward at domestic political, social and economic arrangements. 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

• Much was old and familiar = Traditional feudal hierarchies, from princes and priests down to villagers. The great monarchies still draped themselves in the robes of "divine right"
• But much was new = Service and landowning nobility. as well as laboring commoners, were falling increasingly under close monarchical authority. Mercantilist centralization of national economies expanded
• National economies were increasingly both "globalized" in the age of exploration, discovery and colonization but increasingly also "localized" in the hands of small oligarchies of insider elites, concentrated in royal metropols
• The centralized national monarchical phase of history was approaching its apex, most sharply in Russia but in other areas of Europe as well
• In Russia, this process had 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)
• Russia developed its particular variation on the general European pattern of centralized "national" monarchy, and it did so ahead of all other European monarchies
• 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 come to terms with a seemingly contradictory fact about Russia, this most centralized of all the centralizing European "national" monarchies. Russia was in an unusually favorable position among late medieval European states to entertain vastly inspiring notions of trans-national 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 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 LOOP, SAC puts the term "national" 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 "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 =
  
  (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. One might be thought "better" or "more progressive" or "more beneficent" than the other, but that is not the question. They are structurally and behaviorally different -- more on this point

<>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 great Golden Horde would soon be but a legacy to which significantly less powerful Tatar khanates aspired

<>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"] over followers of Nil Sorskii [The Trans-Volga Elders, called in this controversy the "Non-possessors"] [FTS:85-133]

• The statist-oriented Josephites did not operate in Russian isolation from general European trends. Like other European monarchists of the day [EG], they 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]
• All Novogord Church property was by this time confiscated by tsar Ivan III and distributed to his pomeshchik army officers

<>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 into Muscovite sphere

<>1514:Smolensk annexed by Moscow [VSB,1:131]
*--In that same year, feeling pressure from Moscow, Poland-Lithuania allowed Kiev to govern itself by the Magdeburg Law [W]
*--Moscow, as it "re-gathered Russian lands", 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). The world gained a new genre and a new word, utopia

• Thomas More was a powerful official and prolific writer in a most troubled time in which the English monarchy expanded its authority over British life like never before [JANUS]
• 1535:He was beheaded on a charge of treason after he refused to follow his King Henry VIII away from the Roman Church in directions defined in the Act of Supremacy which put the monarch in charge of the English Church, making it now a national rather than a universal ("catholic") church
• More was later knighted by the English monarchy and sainted by the Catholic Church

<>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)

<>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
*--These were years of great cultural flourish, but also of significant enhancement of Ottoman power to the east, against Persia [Iran], also the shores of the eastern Mediterranean, and 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)

<>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". He 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]

• This doctrine cannot be considered an expression of Russian isolation from "The West". On the contrary, Filofei's central concern was that west Europe had isolated itself, from its own millennial traditions. He was concerned about the collapse of ancient 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 because "re-gathering Russian lands" had now approached its plausible limit, and Russian power now reached further than it had ever before reached
• Actual (rather than idealized) "Christian civilization", east and west, projected new 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 [ID] in the region of the old Silk Road trade routes
  (3) the Muscovy Company [an English imperialist adventure]
• Centralized national monarchies, like England and other Atlantic states with their their mercantilist corporations moved overseas
• Russia moved across the sea-like southern and eastern Steppes
• This was the beginning of the era of European frontier and imperialist expansion [MAP]
• The question of Russian isolation, rooted in the experience of Mongol dominance, need no longer engage us

<>1521:German priest Martin Luther was excommunicated for his anti-Rome preachings

• Protestant Reformation intensified, this the second profound doctrinal split in European civilization [GO 1054]
• The Christian Church continuing to disintegrate. The second profound split might crudely be thought of as between the "North" and the "South" of western Europe, leaving Ireland and Poland the hot spots of religious contention, just as the earlier split between East and West left the area of "Yugoslavia" a hot spot
• Now Catholic Poland and Lithuania assumed a position of doubled doctrinal conflict, between "East" and "West" (vis-a-vis Orthodox Russia), as well as between "North" and "South" (vis-a-vis increasingly powerful Protestant states of Sweden and Prussia)
• The only partially "integrated" Germanic Holy Roman Empire was "disintegrating" along religious lines

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

<>1525:Moscow | Russian Orthodox Church Council declared Maksim Grek [Maximus the Greek] 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 years of 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. They 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 center
*--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" [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 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", though he saw a role 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 also unsettling
• But he needs also to be acknowledged as a liberator of humanity from abstract valorization of power or the elevation of politics into various super celestial realms. He brought it all down into the give-and-take of actual human 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 the anarchists and of others who presume that politics can only corrupt
• In his view, politics make humanity, and that is a good thing. For better and for worse, politics force all humans to shape their experience as best they can and 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", almost always carries negative implication and 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 also earned wide influence and 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 of political power also) must always be aware of that. That awareness is essential to 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 public life
• Machiavelli did not earn his reputation because he was tough and extreme, he earned it because he was complex and inescapable

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

<>1529se:Vienna, the very capital of "The Holy Roman Empire", was for the first time put under Ottoman Turkish siege

<>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 =

(1) First Zemskii sobor [For comparison and contrast, the English Parliament (ID)]
(2) Stoglav Assembly
(3) Final defeat of Kazan Tatars
(4) Relations with England
(5) Livonian Wars
(6) Oprichnina and struggle with Russian boyar elites
(7) Novgorod crushed
(8) Ivan killed his son & heir...
(9) ...which contributed to "dynastic crisis"

\\
*--Isabel de Madariaga, Ivan the Terrible. 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"
*1968je:SlR#27,2:195-211| Michael Cherniavsky on "Northern Renaissance" and Ivan IV as native-born "student" of Machiavelli
*--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 [See HRR,1:188-94]
*--Ruslan G. Skrynnikov, Ivan the Terrible
*--Alexander Yanov, The Origins of Autocracy: Ivan the Terrible in Russian History (A fascinating journalistic exploration of the relationship of Ivan IV to Soviet authoritarianism)

<>1534:1564; Moscow | Russian Orthodox Church ruled for thirty years by Metropolitan Makarii, who resisted old boyars, supported absolutist throne, and protected Church interests -- both doctrines and, of course, 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]
*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 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 [TXT]. 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 tragedy of global significance befell the New World
\\
*1886:Boston|_Narrative and Critical History of America| Edited by Justin Winsor [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". He moved from family home on Dvina, further north and east. Expanded beyond salt. Sent sons out on mission. Collected information and trade. He bought, and he sold: fish, reindeer skins, feathers, down, wax, furs. The legend of his power spread

<>1542:Japan | Portuguese castaways came ashore. Japan's first serious contact with "The West"

<>1545:1563; Council of Trent put the Catholic Church on the path of "Counter-Reformation", mobilizing itself against the spread of various Protestant movements, especially in northern and western Europe

<>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 [Library link and 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 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], mixing them 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 create a distinct "representative" institution, and 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 help, but he did not wish to elevate those gatherings he summoned for that purpose. He had encouragement in this direction =

• 1549:Ivan Peresvetov submitted extensive written recommendations to Ivan IV [VSB,1:162-4]. Peresvetov was fluent in native Russian but was born in Belarus territories. He was much experienced in military service to Polish, Hungarian and other Balkan princes in their struggle with Ottomon Turkish power
• 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 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 to cut into aristocratic privilege and promote regime-wide uniformity of relationship to the central state
• Ottoman Turkish defeat of Byzantium, in Peresvetov's view, demonstrated the need for powerful, absolute and sovereign tsarist state free from aristocratic, grandee [vel'mozh] corruption and graft
• He lamented Polish/Lithuanian aristocratic restraint on monarchical power there. Aristocratic independence threatened the military survival of that great dual monarchy
• Russian destiny required that Moscow develop a powerful and resolute 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

<>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, so named by Andrei Kurbskii, using the unusual word "rada", probably originating from the Germanic "Rat" (counsel)]. Members 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 distrusted the 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 himself set. The agenda can be summarized =
1) 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"
2) Secular bureaucratic interference in the institutional life of the Church, especially Church courts
3) Unrestrained monastic abuses, especially mismanagement of monastic wealth
4) 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
5) 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]
• Etiger, Sibir Tatar Sultan, 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., in this way 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 anwsered: NO!
• Stroganov family found themselves squeezed between tsar Ivan and Kuchum-khan

<>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

<>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 and being taken up by old boyar families who were jealous of their historical privileges and fearful of Ivan's threat to them

• Ivan created a personal palace guard, the "Strel'tsy" [musketeers], made up of elite units who owed all to the tsar and little to the medieval social system of sosloviia [ID]

<>1553:1564; Moscow tsar Ivan IV ordered construction of 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
• 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

<>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"

• Ivan IV granted them extensive privileges [DMR3:294--8]
• Europe entered its first great "imperialist" phase of overseas world expansion, global trade and mercantilist competition, frequently via such overseas corporations as this
• 1557:Muscovy Co. voyager sailing in a northern arch over the Scandinavian peninsula in North Sea waters mentioned 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, 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
• Genoa, Lisbon, Amsterdam and Bristol had sent the dream of China out into the world. Sebastian Cabot in London 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 Muscovy Co. sought to control the Eurasian land route through Russian territories. England joined Moscow and the Ottoman Empire in the rush to replace the Golden Horde astride the great silk road
• In the same way, Stroganovs 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]

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

• Like the Golden Horde before, the Moscow tsar collected yasak from those he subordinated
  
• Astrakhan Tatars defeated as 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

<>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]

<>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 all uncultivated land on the tributaries of the Kama River [map], for 20 yrs

• 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, thus effecting an end run around Mediterranean access to the markets of the East [BMM:194]
• Stroganovs were thus useful counterpoise to recent appearance of the English on Russian shores and a powerful tool in aid of Ivan's own frontier and imperialist expansion

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

• Among other things, he warned England about what it would mean if black gun powder were allowed to spread to Russia (i.e., the equivalent of what in the 21st century has come to be called "weapons of mass destruction")
• Consider how arrogant it might seem for one people to presume that only they can safely possess such weapons (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, it 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. The meaning of oprichnina is "separate, aside, apart". The word at first referred to the land Ivan now claimed as a 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 Oprichnina was a sign of the decline of the Boyar Duma and of the old patrimonial aristocratic boyar families that held hierarchical positions within it (according to traditions of Muscovite "mestnichestvo", which would be abolished one century later [ID])
• Ivan puposefully appointed lesser gentry and junior-grade aristocrats [deti boyarskie ("boyar infants")] to membership in the Boyar Duma, personally chaired its infrequent meetings and guided its agenda, and more often than not, simply ignored it
• The title "oprichnina" also was applied to Ivan IV's dreaded Retinue, about 1000-6000 loyal servitors who 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

<>1564:Kurbskii-Ivan IV correspondence began and stretched through the whole period of the Oprichnina [above] =
The Correspondence between Prince A. M. Kurbsky and Tsar Ivan IV of Russia, 1564-1579 (a "duo-page" edition with Russian original on right hand and English translation on left) [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]

• Andrei Kurbskii represented the discontent of the old non-royal but nonetheless princely votchinniki, jealous of their noble dignity
• Votchinniki rejected the tsar's notion of himself as the sole votchinnik [patrimonial aristocrat] in Russia
• Votchinniki resisted the tsar's efforts to force all aristocrats into a state-service position, as represented by the service nobility, the pomeshchiki [service aristocracy]
• 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, 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 status of votchinnik aristocrats in Russia
• An ironic parallel unites the motives of votchinniki like Kurbskii, who were often forced to serve the tsar, and peasant villagers, now forced to serve pomeshchik or votchinnik landholders. Peasants were increasingly forbidden the right to "free departure" to be free or to serve whom they willed. Vothiniki defended their freedom, but were greedy for the benefits of dominion over bound peasants
• 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 to its north [ID], west [ID] and south [ID]
• Domestic opponents did not buy into the "national security" argument, especially in the face of the oprichnina
• See also "Prince A. M. Kurbsky's History of Ivan IV

<>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 they 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 it 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 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 TXT] [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 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 the proper role and status of aristocrats and was in sharp contrast to the social condition of the Russian gentry [pomeshchiki (ID)]
• The looseness of the 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
• The Union flourished for a while [EG]. 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 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 linking the Mediterranean world with the Caspian Sea and Persia [Iran]. (Russia took up that project over a century later)

• Ottomans hoped to put themselves astride and in control a great international trade route, the great "Silk Road" that linked the markets of Europe, the "Near East" and SE Asia
• Turkish failure at this early date was "...the great unknown event of history" [BMM:113] and marked the end (until our own time) of the ancient "Silk Road" from China to the Mediterranean world. Oversea routes supplanted the central Asian land routes connecting world markets
• 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 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, 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 there were larger and perfectly domestic historical forces 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. For peasants who remained, conditions worsened dramatically as landlords sought increased labor [barshchina] and obrok [quit-rent] payments from them to compensate for the loss of those who fled

  Rural labor shortage, wherever or whenever in the world it might happen, was the demographic foundation on which both slavery and serfdom arose [Kolchin,7]

<>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…" [BR&B:262-369]
• Yurii Tolstoi, ed., The First Forty Years of Intercourse between England and Russia, 1553-1593
• 1570:1589; Two decades of intensified hostility between two of the great European overseas powers, England and 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. Over the next years he commanded British naval forces against Catholic Irish insurgents who struggled to free themselves from English occupation and rule
• 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 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 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"
• 1589:Drake was an admiral of the English navy at the time of the titanic sea battle with the Spanish Armada

<>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
• 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]

• The Oprichnina (as retinue) was disbanded after six years of extreme action against Ivan's perceived enemies
• Oprichnina (as a geographic division of Russia) lasted three more years
• 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 inteface with Asia
• He also bequeathed the territories of the Bashkirs in the southern Urals region. They were allowed to rule themselves under Moscow lordship so long as they paid yasak. Eventually, for some Bashkirs, military service replaced yasak
• Ivan III had cleared the way for Moscow to claim its dual imperial legacies [ID], and he had 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]
• Action in the east intensified =

<>1574:tsar Ivan IV granted a 4th charter to the Stroganov family, seeking to employ the Stroganovs against Kuchum-khan and Sibir Tatar power in Bashkir territories. Tsar Ivan IV granted to the Stroganov family a 20-year lease on Siberia

<>1580:Lithuania controlled the town Ostrog where Prince Konstantin Ostrozhskii created a printing press with the exiled Russian printer Fedorov

• They published the remarkable "Ostrozhskuyu bibliyu" (The Ostrozhskii Bible, the 1^st full text of the Bible in Russo-Slavic language)
• The printing and wide publication of Bibles in the vernacular tongue was everywhere in Europe an affront to traditional church authorities
• Soon the first Russian printer, Fedorov, died in abject poverty, after 27 years of pioneer endeavor in this new technology
• The era of the printing press, however, was upon Russia

<>1581ja15:Moscow decree on Church estates [VSB,1:174-5]

<>1581se08:5pm! Hungarian King Stephen Bathory, who was King of Poland and Lithuania, besieged Pskov

• Heroic defense celebrated in epic tale of early-modern urban warfare [ZMR2:354-65 | ZMR1:277-88]
• Pskov was now securely within Muscovite sphere of authority after more than 200 years of medieval semi-independent closeness to Novgorod and openness to Lithuania
• 1581:1582; Jesuit Papal ambassador Antonio Possevino helped mediate Moscow international relations w/Poland-Lithuania to end Livonian wars. He wrote impressions of this process [DMR3:325-32]

<>1581no16:Ivan killed his son =
*1885:Il'ya Repin's historical portrait [W pix]

<>1581:Siberia | Yermak [sometimes Ermak], a Cossack explorer, crossed Urals eastward into Siberia, the realm of Kuchum-khan

• Yermak was hired and equipped by the Stroganov family. He was soon reinforced with troops sent by Ivan IV [VSB,1:152-3]
• Sibir Tatars, on horses but without firearms, led by Kuchum-khan, blocked the road with a force larger than Yermak's. Yermak successful because of strategy, policy and weaponry
• Folk song about Yermak [WAL:172-4]
• 1582su:1585au06; Siberia | Yermak launched successful Cossack expedition against Cheremis, Voguly, Votiaki, Ostiaki, and Nogai. The Stroganov family equipped Yermak primarily for a trade expedition at a cost of 20,000r, a sum that Ivan IV himself might not have been able to gather
• Stroganovs were, however, losing their 200-year old independence as they were drawn into the circle of the tsar's power. Ivan IV quickly sent troops to reinforce (and redefine) Yermak's mission
• The epoch of Stroganov independent was over, but the Stroganov's continued to be a powerful force within the walls of tsarist authority
• 1582no16:tsar Ivan IV sent an angry letter to Yermak, blaming him for causing trouble with Sibir Tatars. Ivan thought unrest along the Volga River threatened recent gains there, but he came to see things differently when he understood the riches of Siberia
• Yermak's letter in reply to Ivan IV asked forgiveness. Cossacks were shifting from private brigandage to state service. The fate of these Cossacks was not unlike that of the Stroganovs =
• Cossack communities had been forming up along the southern and eastern frontiers of Muscovite power for over a century. Acceptance of service under Muscovite authority was the beginning of the end of Cossack independence
  *--Yermak became a legend, but his death opened an era far more regimented and disciplined than the early era of Cossack adventures. Now came the officially dispatched Voevoda [Lensen,Eastward:21-2]
• Siberian fur trade became mercantilist project. "The Moscow government was the chief fur trader"
• 1586:Siberia, Tiumen founded, the 1st Russian fortress in Siberia, under the command of Voevoda Danila Chulkov
• 1587:Tobolsk founded [map]
• Voevoda Chulkov defeated Kuchum, ending three decades of conflict between Kuchum and Moscow. Chulkov sent prisoners and reported to Moscow
• Moscow thanked Chulkov for the pleasant news and gave him the task of delivering back to Moscow every year 200K sables, 10K black foxes and 500K squirrels every year [Kerner,Urge:84; economic statistics and illustrations:84-6]. For many years to come, fur was the single most important item of Russian domestic and foreign trade
• Siberia as far as the Ob [map] and Irtysh [map] rivers, with all its princes, sultans and chieftains, was now under Russian power
• Basil Dmytryshyn, et al., eds. Russia's Conquest of Siberia, 1558-1700:A Documentary Record (1985). This is volume one of To Siberia and Russian America…
• 1582:1619; Thirty-seven years, from the Urals [map] to the Yenesei River [map], 2109 miles
• 1582:1637; Fifty-five years, from the Urals to Yakut [Sakha] [map] territories, 4000 total miles
• Eurasia [MAP]
• Expansion into Siberia meant that Russian frontier or imperialist expansion was now fully under way

<>1584:Moscow tsar Ivan IV, the Terrible, died after 51 years at the center of Muscovite political life

• 1584:1598; His feeble and distracted son Fedor ruled 14 years, but after the first year or two the actual reins of power fell into the hands of "Lord Protector" Boris Godunov
• Fittingly, this tragic son of Ivan IV was the last udel prince, so acknowledged. The udel system was nearly a half-millennium old. But the rise of Muscovite "tsarist" authority (as in the rest of Europe, a centralized "national" monarchical authority) had already in fact brought an end (de facto) to feudal udel plurality in Russia 250 years earlier. And now the old feudal system was dead de jure. From the 16th century onward, only the tsar, as tsar -- not as udel prince -- could claim udel prerogatives

<>1587:1612no19; MUSCOVITE RUSSIA, phase #4 -- The Time of Troubles = Twenty-five years of profound crisis in the life of the Russian nation
\\
*--Sergei Platonov, Time of Troubles
*--Dunning
*--Kliuchevskii,3 chs 2-3

The crisis had four main components =

1. A near fatal dynastic crisis (who is the legitimate ruler of Russia?). Heir to throne was dysfunctional. Ivan IV's other son died mysteriously. Godunov had no blood claim to the throne -- What was needed to make Godunov "legitimate" and to restore dynastic stability?
2. An explosion of social tensions within the ranks of the two-tiered medieval elite social structure, service nobles [pomeshchiki] and patrimonial nobles [votchinniki and boyary]
3. Tensions among social elites often burst out in much broader social upheaval, and then
4. Polish invasion and occupation [first] [second]

The crisis may be divided into five phases =

1. 1584:1598; Fedor was tsar (de jure), but Boris Godunov soon became ruler (de facto) until Fedor's death, and then =
   *1598:1605; Boris Godunov reigned as tsar "elected" by Zemskii sobor. These were 17 productive years| EG=
   The Russian Metropolitan was elevated to the post of Patriarch
   But these first years were "sicklied over" by dynastic uncertainty
   Questions about monarchical legitimacy dominated a troubled period when dynastic security was needed to bring Russia out of the "Terrible" slump and to face a mounting Polish threat
2. 1604:The first "Pseudo-Dmitrii" invaded Russia with Polish troops. Soon Godunov died and few were ready to accept his son as heir to the throne. The years of greatest "troubles" followed =
3. 1606:1610; The rule of "Boyar-tsar" Vasilii Shuiskii, the "boyar's last fling"
4. 1608:1611; Second Polish invasion, with a second "Pseudo-Dmitrii"
5. 1611:1612; Russian national recovery

<>1587:1598: Boris Godunov "Lord Protector" for one decade, until the death of tsar Fedor
\\
*--Sergei F. Platonov, Boris Godunov, tsar of Russia
*--Ruslan G. Skrynnikov, Boris Godunov

<>1588su:English ambassador Giles Fletcher in Moscow. He left less than one year later, yet wrote one of the most comprehensive analyses of Russia = Of the Russe Commonwealth (1591) [excerpts: BR&B:87-246 | VSB,1:177-80 | DMR2:239-55 | DMR3:309-]

<>1588jy21:jy29; England defeated the Spanish Armada
*--Two decades of "unofficial" English incursions on Spanish and Portuguese overseas possessions and enterprises now gave way to open  hostilities
*--This was the beginning of the end of Spanish imperialist/colonial power

<>1589:Moscow Metropolitan See elevated or "upgraded" to lofty institutional office of Patriarchate, suggesting that Moscow had achieved hierarchical ranking among main Christian Church administrative centers: Constantinople [Istanbul], Rome, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria [VSB,1:175-7]
*--Of these, only Moscow Patriarchal See was currently located in a capital ruled by a Christian monarch. Tsar Fedor guided by the ambitious "Lord Protector" Boris Godunov had reason to presume central significance for themselves in the world of Christendom. This new status of the Patriarch suggested a sort of superiority of Moscow over the historical Patriarchies now under infidel rule or isolated from secular power (or reigning over disintegrating churches, as in the case of Rome under Protestant assault)
*1600c:Map of European "confessional regions" [MAP], illustrating second great disintegration of "Christendom" as modern world was born [First split | Second split]

<>1590mr21:Istanbul | Turkish-Persian [Iranian] treaty brought end to 14-year war and recognized Turkish rule in Baku on the western Caspian Sea coast
*--Yet Ottoman Turkish ambitions in the north-eastern Pontic Steppes were stymied

<>1591:Dmitrii Ivanovich (Ivan's son; Fedor's brother) died mysteriously. Rumor spread widely = Boris Godunov killed the only surviving representative of the "house of Rurick", the only legitimate heir to the throne

<>1592:After years of tightened restrictions on peasant "right of free departure" on  St. George's Day, a decree now terminated departure at any time throughout the Muscovite lands. Officials began to gather censuses [cadastral surveys] of peasant populations so as better to bind and enforce bondage on villagers. Now serfdom was permanent

<>1595je25:Ukrainian territories, mainly Dnepr River "West Bank" Ukraine | The "Brest Union" created the Uniate Church [VSB,1:285-91] Pope had "administrative" authority over Orthodox congregations who continued to celebrate the Eastern Orthodox mass. Organizationally they were "Catholic"; liturgically they were "Orthodox". Thus Poland had greater prestige in Uniate territories
\\
*--Florovsky,5:52-63

<>1596:Ufa, at the southern edge of the Ural Mts., was founded by Voevoda Ivan Nagoi. Samara founded also, a fortress against the Nogai Tatars
*--Underneath all the Voevoda officialdom, a spontaneous colonization began. Russian peasants fled serfdom, taxation, and military service, but also sometimes representatives of elite classes broke away, responding to the allure of the East. And these refugees were not just Russians but also Tatars, Meshcheriaks, Cheremis, etc
*--From the south, Muslim Ottoman Turkish power noticed this movement of peoples and worked to sharpen the Islamic-mindedness of the indigenous Bashkir people as a defense against Christian Moscow power. Turkish attention was centered on the Astrakhan and Caspian region [map] which they sought to gain for themselves and their Islamic faith
*1598:1800; Russian expansion into northern Asia (aka Siberia) [MAP]
*--Russian imperialist expansion since Ivan IV had been largely to the south and east, but that expansion slackened as Ivan bogged down in the Livonian Wars and, now, an aggressive threat appeared from "The West", from Poland [MAP]
*1598:1725; Russia [MAP]

<>1597no24:Russian law against fugitive peasants, signaled spread of serfdom and rural efforts at escape via migration [VSB,1:180]
*--Economic charts and sales of slaves in Russia [KRR:165,173-6]. Russian slavery was in process of transformation into "limited service contract slavery". In many regards, Russian slaves [kholopy] were becoming something like "indentured servants", except that what was de jure temporary became for the most part de facto permanent

<>1598:1605; Zemskii Sobor [Assembly of the Land] summoned by Patriarch to elect Boris Godunov tsar. Boris reigned as independent tsar for seven years, and each year seemed to slope downward into a deeper "Time of Troubles" [VSB,1:153-4]

<>1599:[Japan] Ezo [now named Hokkaido, the northern-most Japanese island] Matsumae district [now named Oshima district] | Kakizaki family swore an oath to warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu (1603:he became Shogun) and changed their family name to Matsumae. Southern Ezo was then re-named after that family. Ezo was originally named after the native Ainu people driven to this northern extreme of the Japanese islands by expanding Japanese power
*--Since about 1450, the Matsumae family in Oshima district set the northern limit of Japan. Everything above this was frontier. Relations to the north were regulated by treaty. Matsumae family extended its "rule" to the whole of Hokkaido and further north to the southern part of Sakhalin Island, and southern Kuril Islands [KEJ,2:238]
*--Thus centralized Japanese authority can be seen expanding into its far northern frontier, into a region also explored in these decades by Russian agents and adventurers. Russian-Japanese relations start in these years, first as informal, largely clandestine contacts between Japanese (e.g., Matsumae clan) and Russians. These Japanese and Russians on the frontier did not care to involve superiors back in Tokyo or Moscow
\\
*--Alan Kimball, "Russia and Japan Expand to Their Pacific Frontiers..." [TXT part one]
*--John Armstrong Harrison, Japan's northern frontier: A Preliminary Study in Colonization and Expansion with Special Reference to the Relations of Japan and Russia

<>1600:Japan. Dutch ship Liefde with Englishman Will Adams arrived in Japan

<>1604:1613; Russia's most intense Time of Troubles
*--German merchant Konrad Bussow, Moscow Chronicle, described 1601-1604 famine [DMR2:256-8 | DMR3:355-7]
*--prince Ivan Katyrev-Rostovskii, Book of Annals [ZMR2:388-90| ZMR1:309-11]
*--Isaac Massa, A Short History of the Beginnings and Origins of These Present Wars in Moscow under the Reign of Various Sovereigns down to the Year 1610 [Excerpts DMR3:359-72]
*--Jacques Margeret, The Russian Empire and Grand Duchy of Muscovy… [Excerpts: DMR3:378-98]
*--Avraam Palitsyn, "Tale" [ZMR2:378-87| ZMR1:301-9| VSB,1:189-92]
*--Ivan Funikov letter reflected style of the Russian jester [skomorokh] [ZMR2:487-9]
*--A tale of social mores in the Time of Troubles offered recognizably modern and secular judgments about how things happen in everyday life, "The Tale of Savva Grudtsyn" [ZMR2:452-74]
\\
*--Sergei F. Platonov, The Time of Troubles: A Historical Study of the Internal Crisis and Social Struggle…
*--Ruslan G. Skrynnikov, The Time of Troubles…1604-1613

<>1604oc:Out of Polish territories and accompanied by Polish military forces (some of them under command of Polish version of the Voevoda), a motley crew of ca. 3,500 troops invaded Russia. They sought to place an imposter, claiming to be the legitimate heir to the Muscovite throne, and thus known by Russians as "the Pseudo-Dmitrii", on the Russian throne
*--False Dmitrii letter to tsar Boris Godunov [DMR2:258-60 | DMR3:357-9]; more on Dmitrii [VSB,1:184-6]
*--This marked a second phase of the Time of Troubles and the beginning of intense period of military hostility between Russia and Poland, a central component of the "Time of Troubles". CF. 1604:1613
\\
*--Julicher: chapter 2
*--Website on rule of the Polish Województwo wendeńskie [voevodstvo in "Wendish" territories of modern-day Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania]

<>1605ap:Russian tsar Boris Godunov died after over 20 years at the center of Muscovite power. His son Fedor ruled only briefly, abandoned by the grandee-families = Mstislavskies, Golitsyns, and Shuiskies. Mob rule in Moscow

<>1605je20:Moscow taken by the Pseudo-Dmitrii with Polish troops
\\
*--Philip L. Barbour, Dimitry, Called the Pretender: Tsar and Great Prince of All Russia, 1605-1606

<>1606my:Pseudo-Dmitrii killed, ending second phase of "Time of Troubles" and the first phase of hostility between Russia and Poland [DMR3:359-72]

<>1606my:1610su; Moscow tsar Vasilii Shuiskii ruled four years, the first two years of which represent the disorderly third phase of the "Time of Troubles"
*--Shuiskii was known as the "Old Boyar tsar" because he represented the most reactionary elements of the old patrimonial princely faction [votchinniki], and he provoked stiff resistance from the "new servitor aristocrats" [pomeshchiki] =

<>1606:1607fa; Rural Russia | Bolotnikov Rebellion spread across lower Volga region and threatened Moscow [VSB,1:187-8]
*--Ivan Bolotnikov united "an unlikely coalition" of groups opposed to Shuiskii's rule. "Bolotnikov himself was a former slave -- probably of elite military status -- who had run away, joined the Cossacks, and endured capture by Crimean Tatars and bondage to a succession of Tatar, Turkish, and German masters before escaping in Venice [Italy!] and making his way back to Russia. Behind him rallied an assorted collection of the disaffected: slaves, cossacks, fugitives, peasants, brigands, poor townsmen ..."
*--Shuiskii represented the old votchina aristocracy, therefore many pomeshchik aristocrats sympathized with the need for decisive action. This two-tiered elite social formation was the source of much disorder
*--Bolotnikov failed, but, five years later, the National Host arose, as a similar but more disciplined and focused mobilization
\\
*--Kolchin:37 & 366 compares the Bolotnikov Rebellion with the USA Bacon's rebellion 70 years later

<>1606je21:Tobolsk, on eastern watershed of Ural Mts | Voevoda reported on indigenous unrest in western Siberia [DMR3:343-4]

<>1607:[USA] English colony Jamestown founded in the New World

<>1607mr09:Rural Russia | Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii issued decree on runaway serfs [DMR2:260-3 | DMR3:372-5]
*--Related acts, VSB,1:184-7
*--Evaluation of Old Boyar tsar Shuiskii [VSB,1:188]

<>1608sp:Second Polish invasion ushered in fourth phase of "Time of Troubles". A second pseudo-Dmitrii, dubbed by Russians "the Brigand", settled in Tushino outside Moscow with Polish army

<>1610fe04:Polish and Lithuanian King Sigismund III set conditions for his son Wladislaw to rule in Moscow, in negotiations at Tushino with Mikhail Saltykov and a delegation of Russian boyars. Boyars were ready to accept a Pole as tsar under conditions which would have limited his tsarist authority and forced him to seek the "advice of the whole land" [i.e., Zemskii Sobor] before he passed any new or altered old laws [VSB,1:193 | DMR2:263-6 | DMR3:375-8]
*--Polish power was on the verge of imposing something like an early-modern form of parliamentary rule in Russia. When Polish commander Stanislas Zolkiewski appeared with troops before Moscow, the Boyar Duma was forced to accept the Tushino agreement. However, it was never put in place
\\
*--Kliuchevskii,3:59-63 (excellent summary of forces at work in these negotiations, with excerpt from the agreement)

<>1610su:1612oc; Boyar-tsar Shuiskii overthrown; Poland occupied Moscow [VSB,1:194-209]

<>1611je30:Liapunov and 1st Narodnoe opolchenie [National Host] proclamation or Prigovor [VSB,1:198-9]. The fifth and final phase of the "Time of Troubles" was a time of national mobilization to liberate Russia from foreign rule and to re-establish political legitimacy

<>1611jy22:Cossacks murdered Liapunov

<>1611oc06:Trinity-Saint Sergius Monastery (which was founded in 1337) sent Church appeal to the Russian nation to resist Catholic Poles [VSB,1:204-5]

<>1612ap07:Russian prince Dmitrii Pozharskii mobilized a 2nd National Host and also appealed widely to Russians to come to the defense of their "fatherland". They solicited fighters and money from the Russian people. They also asked that each region elect two or three persons to form up a new Zemskii Sobor which would serve as a government, side-by-side with the military which was then forming-up as the second National Host [ID first] [VSB,1:205-7]

<>1612oc:Moscow liberated by Pozharskii and 2^nd National Host
*--Maksim Stroganov granted 842,000 rubles to bail out the financially ruined Russian nation
*--Poland driven from Muscovite lands, marking the end of the twenty-five year "Time of Troubles"

<>1612no19:1652; MUSCOVITE RUSSIA, phase #5
*--Forty years of recovery from the depths of the "Time of Troubles"
*--The new Romanaov dynasty was elected to the tsarist throne by a great ZEMSKII SOBOR
*--Competition with northwestern European mercantilist nation-states intensified
*--While Russian overland expansion into the Siberian frontier quickened
*--Then came the remarkable reign of tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich
\\
*--Kliuchevskii,3  chs. 1, 4 & 5=survey whole period
*--Dunning deals with tsar Mikhail and the troubled legacy of the Time of Troubles (424-481)

<>1612no19:The great Zemskii Sobor [Assembly of the Land] convocation [VSB,1:208-9]
<>1613fe: Zemskii Sobor elected tsar Mikhail Romanov [VSB,1:209-11]
*--This Sobor continued in session for two years, working with the teenage tsar to address the great problems caused by the Time of Troubles = (1) state revenue (taxes), (2) economic relations, (3) military disorganization, (4) domestic order and security
\\
*--Dunning:424-81 describes the troubled legacy of tsar Mikhail

<>1613fe:1645; tsar Mikhail Romanov
*--Russia in time of tsar Mikhail [MAP]
\\
*--Robert Crummey, Aristocrats and Servitors: The Boyar Elite in Russia, 1613-1689
*--Dukes, Making, pp.1-29 (ch1)
*--Kliuchevskii,3  chs. 1, 4 & 5=survey whole period

<>1615:1618; Another Zemskii Sobor convened

<>1615:England | Thomas Mun (1571:1641;) became director of English East India Co. ("British East India Co." 1600-1858). He wrote Discourse on England's Treasure by Forraign Trade (1664). This work emphasized the importance of favorable trade balance to insure positive cash flow into the nation as a result of state "protection" of certain industries that work to these ends. Mun argued for restrictions on importation of manufactured goods and official promotion of English trade companies and other forms of monopoly, in connection with the development of a great ocean navy and establishment of colonies to support his great mercantilist corporation. Tax policies should promote these goals [Rimlinger:14-18]
*--The deep historical roots of this sort of corporation may be thought to stretch back to Roman days
*--An early harbinger of the English East India Co. had appeared in Russia in 1553
*--The English East India Co. eventually defeated the French East India Co., but it was not so successful against the other great northwestern European trans-oceanic mercantilist corporation of the era, the Dutch East India Co. These great overseas corporations often seemed to have their own foreign policies and in general to act independently of the "mother country", seeking corporate advantage while forgetting obligations to the sponsoring mercantilist state
*1613:1614; English-Russia diplomatic relations are described in England and the North: The Russian Embassy of 1613-1614. After a century of growing contact with expansionist western European states, mercantilist competition intensified [GO 1617au16]

<>1616:Kiev Pechersk Lavra installed Church printing press

<>1617ja18 [28 NS]:Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus spoke to Riksdag about national goals [Kerner,Urge:47-9]
*1617au16 [26 NS]:Sweden, Stockholm. King Gustavus Adolphus spoke about the Stolbovo Treaty with Russia, explaining its geographical and economic (mercantilist) significance [Kerner,Urge:49-52] =

• build fortresses to protect against claims of Russians who once held much of the SE Baltic shores and lands washed by the Gulf of Finland and now in Swedish hands
• control economic development there
• invite noble Swedish subjects to colonize these Slavic lands [thus securing them for Sweden, or should we say for the Swedish crown]

<>1618:Siberia | Russian explorers and trappers reached upper Yenisei valley in central Siberia [map]

<>1618:1648; Central Europe | Thirty Years War devastated German-speaking world and intensified alienation of northern Protestant German territories from Catholic Austria. The German-speaking center of authority within a "Holy Roman Empire" was shattered again [map]. The population of the northern German-speaking world, the center of Protestantism, was reduced by 30% on average, and in Brandenburg it was 50%. In some areas where mercenary armies savaged and stripped the countryside of all valuables in order to finance themselves, up to two thirds of the population died. The Czech population declined by a third. Swedish armies alone destroyed 2,000 castles, 18,000 villages and 1,500 towns in Germany, one-third of all German towns. Monasteries, churches and other religious institutions suffered terrible destruction
*--The dream of Germanic imperial power over the whole "West" seemed more like a nightmare. The long effort to reconstitute the great Roman Empire was in dissolution again, as it had been eight centuries earlier in the years after Charlemagne
*--England and eastern Europe were not so deeply involved in the disastrous and brutish extremes of the Thirty Years War
*1648:Treaty of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War. Westphalia can be thought of as the first great international -- or at least west and central European-wide -- peace conference
*--Just as much later in the next two great moments of this sort -- the Congress of Vienna [ID] and the Paris Peace Conference [ID] -- "internationalism" described the method of deliberations but not the goal of these deliberations. The motivation or goal was "nation-statism" rather than internationalism [map]
*--As of 1648, "nation-statism" meant "national" monarchical centralization in opposition to all forms of imperial intrusion or papal interference. The very modern concept of "territorial sovereignty" guided these "international" deliberations. The concept of "nation-statism" was a perfect fit with growing centralized monarchical power in Europe, and the most advanced of the flourishing west European centralized monarchies, the French, benefited disproportionally from this settlement. The doctrine of noninterference by outsiders in the affairs of sovereign powers became the guiding principle of international relations among European nation-states from this point forward, surviving even through the great challenges that were to arise with liberal-democratic and "internationalist" movements from the 19th century forward.
*--Among the several provisions designed to weaken the Holy Roman Empire and limit the wide powers of the Pope in Rome, the treaty reaffirmed the principle of cuius regio, eius religio (whose realm, his religion; the ruler determines the religion of his realm) and extended it to include not just Catholic and Lutheran but also Calvinist realms. Out of the negotiations, Catholic power gained some concessions from this treaty. Signators agreed that henceforward any church or state authority that shifted away from Catholicism had to forfeit all properties to the Catholic church. And a general concession was made in the direction of religious tolerance. Believers in any one of these now major European denominations who lived in territories where their faith was not the official faith were granted the freedom of private worship and were allowed open church services in certain designated time periods
*--Against these powerful trends of European life, Vienna maintained the pretentions of Austrian imperial grandeur for another century and a half
*--The northern Germanic state "Deutschland" ["Germany"] evolved in the 19th and into the 20th centuries much agitated by two contradictory dreams or nightmares = (1) sovereignty of the nation-state and (2) restoration of the great empire [ID]
*--The rise of European centralized "national" monarchies was very uneven
\\
*--Thirty Years War Museum [W]

<>1619:[USA] First significant use of black slaves in agricultural labor in the New World
\\
*--Kolchin:12

<>1619:1620; Moscow | Englishman Richard James assembled first collection of Russian folk songs (about Tatars, the daughter of Boris Godunov, and Filaret) [ZMR2:501-10| WAL:130-4]

<>1619jy05:Zemskii Sobor convoked [VSB,1:217-18]

<>1619:1633; Patriarch Filaret (tsar Mikhail's father) ruled Russian Church and by extension much more than that
*1620:No Zemskii Sobor met in this first year of Filaret's Patriarchate, even though there had been near constant meetings of one or another Sobor for eight years, since 1612. An inconsequential Sobor was assembled in Moscow, 1621:1622, but the Zemskii Sobor declined seriously in the time of Patriarch Filaret
\\
*--John L. H. Keep, "The Decline of the Zemsky Sobor", Power and the People: Collected Articles and Essays on Russian History (also reprinted in HRR,1:195-211)
*-------. "The Regime of Filaret, 1619-1633", in Power (above)

<>1620:English philosopher Francis Bacon published Novum Organum which laid out his principles of good thinking, certain of his guides to proper understanding of the world. Bacon rejected traditional European medieval Christian philosophical norms. He foreshadowed the rise of "scientific" ways of understanding reality, or should we say "actuality" [TXT]
*--He listed and defined the several "idols" that have so often distorted human understanding [TXT]
*1626:Bacon published The New Atlantis [TXT], a vision of a world perfected by reason and empiricism, a thoroughly modern "utopia"
*1623:Italian monk Tommaso Campanella published Civitas solis [City of the Sun] which described a communitarian utopia [JANUS]
*--A representative of late renaissance culture, Campanella reflected some of the influences that shaped his contemporary, Francis Bacon, but was a very different sort of person. Campanella criticized the Catholic Church, and was persecuted for that (more than a quarter century in prison), but he never left the Church. He insisted that perception and experience were the bases of scientific knowledge, but he kept a place for faith in human knowledge. He could not break loose from the ultra-rationalist habits inculcated by scholasticism. He was much under the influence of a Platonic epistemology (Plato's "idealistic" way of knowing what's really real [as distinct from what is merely "actual"] )
*--Bacon abhorred the Platonic as well as the neo-Platonic epistemological traditions. Bacon was an avowed enemy of scholasticism
\\
*--Alan Kimball, "Two Perspectives on Begriffsgeschichte [History of Meaning]: Francis Bacon and Reinhart Koselleck" [TXT]

<>1620:[USA] Plymouth colony in New World

<>1620s:Kallistrat Druzhina-Osoryin, Life of Yulianiia Lazarevskaia illustrates aspects of everyday life [ZMR2:391-9| KRR:194-7| ZMR1:312-20]

<>1625:Siberia | Suleshev reform tried to control state servitors involved in the fur trade, but failed
*--Similarly, private traders [promyshlenniki, cossacks in many cases] often acted as volunteer state servitors [okhotniki]
*--Voevody had something like "roving commissions" to collect yasak, to conquer, to conduct foreign relations, etc. [Lensen,Eastward:36-7 quotes Fisher, Russian Fur]
*--The interests of the crown and the interests of various freebooters often did not coincide with one another in Siberia

<>1625:1649; Polish-held territories attacked by increasingly anti-Catholic and independence-minded Cossacks

<>1630:Siberia, Tobolsk, on the eastern watershed of the Ural Mts | 150 Russian women colonists arrived
*1662:Moscow Patriarch Nikon complained of abuse of indigenous women, including selling and exchanging [Lensen,Eastward:25]

<>1630:Nova Zembla whaling fishery map [Dow,Whale:59] Greenland shores = western half of map, and, by implication, Novaia Zemlia the eastern extreme
*--The Dutch dominated these fisheries, as show in this old lithograph [pix]. A few Russian companies worked in conjunction with Dutch whalers, but no concerted or independent whaling ventures sailed forth from Russia
*--As the Russian name would suggest, Novaia Zemlia [New land] was “discovered” and named by Russians at a very early time, possibly in the 15^th century. These Russians might have been Novgorod adventurers in the late Hanseatic period of that city's existence, or agents working for Stroganov enterprises. In years to come, Russians showed very little interest in these icy seas and these cold dark lands until the 20^th century. Russians rarely involved themselves in whaling as they came into possession of Siberian lands

<>1630s:Inner Mongolia fell under Chinese dominion
*--Russia, Mongolia, China; being some record of the relations between them from the beginning of the XVIIth century to the death of the Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, A.D. 1602-1676; rendered mainly in the form of narratives dictated or written by the envoys sent by the Russian tsars, or their Voevody [military administrators] in Siberia, to the Kalmuk and Mongol khans and princes, and to the emperors of China...
*--Russian expansion east across Siberia was moving toward a clash with or "bump" against a powerful Chinese expansion north

<>1632:Kievan Academy founded for the study of Greek, Slavonic and Latin language "free sciences" [liberal arts and sciences, understood from a distinctly theological point of view]. It was more widely known as the Mohyla Academy, after its founder Kiev Metropolitan Peter Mohyla [thus in Ukrainian; "Mogila" in Russian]
*--Mohyla's "Orthodox Confession of Faith" [TXT]
*--The Academy found a home in the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra [Great Monastery], crowning a 600-year history of Russian/Ukrainian monastic culture. On monasteries of Orthodox Church, see HML:index
*--Orthodox Church in Polish Catholic-controlled Kiev was much enlivened, "spiritually re-armed" in a contentious period of European-wide religious and geo-political struggle. This was a renaissance of scholarly traditionalism among these learned monks. The traditions of medieval Christendom were threatened from all sides, and they sought to restore the sacred ways of the original church fathers. In this year, wars erupted again between Moscow and Poland
*--This was an era of religiously saturated international military conflict and of domestic conflict between reforming clerical elites and their "simple" congregations. One brilliant scholar/monk at the Mohyla Academy, Nikon, was later invited to assume the Patriarchal See in Moscow and to implement dramatic church reforms (provoking a disastrous Raskol [Schism] among Russian Orthodox believers, alienating a vast population of Russian "Old-Ritualists")
\\
*--Florovsky,5:64-85

<>1633:1643; Moscow | German scholar and traveler, Adam Olearius, visited Russia twice and wrote account, "The Travels of Olearius in 17^th Century Russia" [excerpts: VSB,1:248-51 | DMR2:267-93 | DMR3:399-425] On eating habits and other aspects of everyday life [KRR:216-7]

<>1634ja:Zemskii Sobor had to be called into session for 2 months in order deal with the crisis caused by renewed hostilities with Poland [VSB,1:217-18]
*1637: Another Zemskii Sobor called to bolster efforts against Ottoman Turkey

<>1637:Siberia. Siberian Prikaz [ID] established to tighten central governmental control over the Siberian frontier, but regional commanders [Voevody] still strong
*--Lena River, middle course (Sakha territory [map]) | Yakutsk ostrog founded. An ostrog was a stockade designed to serve as frontier town, housing and protecting military administration of a defined territory, security troops, and fiscal or tax gathering authorities. Typically indigenous and other non-official peoples settled around the walls of the ostrog [Kerner,Urge:87; illustration of Siberian ostrog, showing indigenous encampments around (much as at Fort Dodge over 200 years later) 85=illustration of ostrog receiving yasak payments, showing treasury]

<>1639:Siberian merchant protested state regulation of fur trade [DMR3:344-5]
*--More on commerce and everyday life [VSB,1:246-7] GO 1648
\\
*--Janet Martin, Treasure of the Land of Darkness: The Fur Trade and Its Significance for Medieval Russia (1986)

<>1639:Siberian East Coast | A Russian expedition laid their eyes on the shores of the Okhotsk Sea [map]. The world's sea lanes seemed within reach
*1641:Inland from there, in territories south and east of the great Lake Baikal [map] bordering on Mongolia and the northwestern edges of the Chinese Empire, two Russian military expeditions decimated native Buriats
*--Siberia fell under Russian control as Russian imperial expansion seemed unstoppable

<>1640:1660; English Puritan Revolution lasted two decades. The very name exaggerates the role of violent struggle between and within two large religions communities =
 (1) Establishment (Catholic and Anglican)
 (2) Radical Protestantism (Puritanism) and other dissident religious factions
Political, social and economic conflicts, however, were at the center of events =
*1629:1640; King Charles I and his royal favorites attempted to rule (and collect revenue) without Parliament in session
*1640:The "Long Parliament" assembled and abolished monarchical absolutism (without abolishing monarchy, but with serious assault against insider royal elites)
Some simplify the revolutionary epoch as a 2-sided contest, commoners ("Round Heads") vs. high aristocracy ("Cavaliers") [W re. Pym's Junto]
*1649ja30(NS):King Charles I was executed after trial
*1649:1660; Parliament was in turn soon replaced by the dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, leader of the New Model Army
*1649:1660; Gerrard Winstanley published New Law of Righteousness, followed in 1651 by Law of Freedom [JANUS]
He was the most influential leader of radical Puritan agrarian folk called "The Diggers", and important in the larger social movement of the time, "The Levelers". Their essential principle was extreme democracy. All Christian souls were equal. All Christian persons were equal. All Christians had egalitarian rights, if not to all material things, at least to common lands. "Diggers" and "Levelers" were too extreme, even for Cromwell
*1660my25(NS):Catholic King Charles II landed at Dover from France and was restored to his throne
*--The first modern democratic revolution was over, for the time being

<>1642:Zemskii Sobor convened to deal with Crimean Tatars, Cossacks and the port city Azov [VSB,1:218-21]

<>1644:1912; China ruled for 268 years by Manchu dynasty

<>1645:Bashkir territories | Menzelinsk Ostrozhek [minor ostrog] founded

<>1645:1676; tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich ruled for 31 years
*--Englishman Samuel Collins, for nine years court physician, described the tsar [TXT] [DMR3:470-9]
*--Aleksei Mikhailovich was the first serious "modernizing" tsar (we avoid the anachronistic adjective "Westernizing") =
*1649:Law Code
*1654:+; Russian Orthodox Church liturgical reforms and subsequent tragic "schism" among Russian believers
*1654:+; Reconciliation and alliance with Cossacks of the Ukraine
*1656:Tsar Aleksei was an avid hunter with falcons. He composed rules for falconry [1924mr:Slavonic Review #2:63-4| ZMR2:520-22]
*1667:Established security along the Russian/Polish border or frontier; ended the Polish threat to Russia
*--Russia in the time of Aleksei Mikhailovich [MAP]
\\
*--Dukes, Making, pp. 27-59
*--Kliuchevskii,3 chs.13-14 on Russia and west European culture

<>1646:Siberia | Yakutsk [map] became a Russian strongpoint. Further extension and consolidation of Russian power in Siberia and the Far East. Vaska Pushkin, Kirilko Suponev, and Petrushka Stenchin reported to tsar Aleksei about how many servitors were required at Yakutsk to collect Sable yasak. In the great Steppe and Siberian expanses, yasak was the traditional form of "tribute" or taxation collected by dominant powers over subordinate peoples, at least since the time of the Golden Horde
*--Russians feared that numerous local indigenous tribes (Tungus and Yakuts) might overpower the ill-provisioned Siberian fortress at Yakutsk [Lensen,Eastward:28]

<>1647:Siberian Okhotsk Sea coast reached by Ivan Afanas'ev, with 54 cossacks from Yakutsk (about a 600 mile trip). They fought the indigenous Tungus tribes in a bloody battle
*1649:Port city Okhotsk founded and soon was most important Russian "Pacific" port
*1649:Anadyrsk ostrog founded by Senka Dezhnev, who also sighted what would later be named "Bering" Strait [map]. Dezhnev was looking at the crossing from the eastern to the western hemispheres. But Russia would not "discover" the New World for almost one century
*--Re. Siberia, see VSB,1:264-74
*--In 1902, George Frederick Wright wrote about the Russian and American confrontation with indigenous peoples, "The result is the same whether in the wilds of Siberia or America: the pioneers who are far beyond the reach of the central government become a law unto themselves, and in dealing with the aborigines descend to their methods and manners. The story of the Cossacks in their dealing with the native races of Siberia can be easily enough equaled in that of the frontiersmen of the United States, who have by similar means gradually wrested the continent of America from the improvident hands of the Red Indian" [Lensen,Eastward:27. My italics highlight the 1902 USA view on Native Americans]
*--The comparative histories of frontier and imperialist expansion show as many similarities as differences
\\
*--Clair Huffaker, The Cowboy and the Cossack

<>1648:1649; Russian merchants submitted petitions against foreign traders [RRC2,1:163-72]
*--Simeon Polotskii, arguably the first court poet of Russia, wrote celebrations of the birth of an heir, Peter Alekseevich (future Peter I) and also a satire on the merchant soslovie [social estate] [ZMR2:517-19]
*--Descriptions of everyday life show a surprising degree of popular secularization in sentiment and outlook, for example, "Story of the Merchant Karp Sutulov" [DMR3:497-503]
*1648:Moscow city disturbance [DMR2:310-16 | DMR3:433-9]; era of popular resentments [VSB,1:221-3]
*--A popular secular tale satirized corrupt Russian legal practices: "Shemiaka's Judgment" [ZMR2:449-52| ZMR1:371-4]

<>1649:Siberia,Yakutsk | Voevoda gave instructions to Erofei Khabarov about his expedition into SE Siberia, into the Amur River region [DMR3:346-50]
*--Khabarov's own personal expedition [as in "roving commission"] set out for the Amur River basin [map]
*1650:Amur River battle defeated Dauri
*--Russian movement eastward across Siberia slackened. Russia entered an epoch of wandering or misdirection. Why? =

• the power of China would soon check Russian expansion in the Amur River basin
• the lure of the Ottoman Turkish frontier to the south distracted Russia from the far east, and
• aggressive Swedish expansion from NW Europe, culminating in the Great Northern War, forced a fundamental defensive reorientation of Russian  frontier and imperialist expansion

<>1649:Moscow | Sobornoe Ulozhenie [Law Code of the Assembly of the Land (Zemskii sobor)]
*--Historical illustration of a Zemskii sobor gathering inside the Kremlin [pix]
*--Muscovite Law Code [HML] is a duo-page, English/Russian edition of the Laws. See HML:1-3 [Excerpts =  VSB,1:223-8 | DMR2:293-300 | DMR3:425-32]
*--SAC TXT, based on now-defunct English-language website TXT at lamar.colostate.edu, coordinated with Russian-language website TXT
*--The Preamble to the Ulozhenie described how it was compiled [TXT] The Ulozhenie was promulgated by tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, but with the clearly acknowledged participation of at least 315 state and church officials, plus delegates to the Zemskii sobor, signers of the original edition. This marks one of the finest accomplishments of the Moscow-era Zemskii sobor, but it may be taken also to mark the end of the one-century-long rise and fall of the Zemskii sobor in the life of Russian government and administration
*--In rural Russia, serfdom became law of the land. Read in the Ulozhenie about the legal bindings on peasants, especially chapter 11, articles 1-3, article 20, article 31, and articles 33-34 [HML:85-94| RRC2,1:154-61| VSB,1:241-5,291-2,295]
*--Agricultural life illustrated [KRR:40-43]
*--Social impact and other aspects of everyday life; meaning for women [KRR:180-92]
*--Law recognized distant Bashkir lands and forbid colonization there
*--The Ulozhenie completed the long evolution of medieval Russian law codes and remained the fundamental law code for nearly 200 years, until the more modern codification of 1832
\\
*--Kliuchevskii,3, especially ch7-8=1649:Ulozhenie| ch9=Serfdom| ch10=ZmS| ch11=Economy(& taxation)
*--Jerome Blum, "The Rise of Serfdom in Eastern Europe", 1957:AHR#62:807-36
*--Richard Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (1971)
*--R.E.F. Smith, The Enserfment of the Russian Peasantry (1968)
*--R.E.F. Smith, Peasant Farming in Muscovy (1977)
*--A. Man'kov, Ulozhenie 1649 goda: Kodeks feodalnogo prava Rossii (2003)

<>1648:1660s; Moscow tsar Aleksei devoted a dozen years to the reform, rationalization and centralization of governing institutions, the prikazy . EG=

• Monastery Prikaz
• Little-Russian [Malorossisskii or Ukrainian] Prikaz
• Cavalry Prikaz (i.e., elite military)
• Lithuanian Prikaz
• Siberian Prikaz
• Prikaz for [government] Financial Accounting [P. schetnykh del]
• Prikaz for Privy Affairs [P. tainikh del]
• Grain Prikaz

\\
*--[W]

<>1651:English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes published The Leviathan, his most influential work [Hobbes at UO]
*--Hobbes was at the end of an eleven-year period as a political émigré in France, where he had fled from the English Puritan Revolution [ID]. His very this-wordly approach to politics was a challenge to the many different spiritually inspired factions in his time. He insisted that humans were organisms who were mechanically inclined always to seek selfish advantages in their relationship with other human animals. Humans in a primitive "state of nature" were in constant  warfare with one another. Life of mankind in nature was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". This natural anarchistic chaos was brought under control only when humans realized the need to sacrifice some of their natural freedoms in order to create a state of relative peace under the authority of government. This agreement came to be known as "the social contract". Humans agreed to submit to a government which, in turn, was obligated to maintain the peace among them. Humans could fail even under the restraint of the state. They were then punished. The state could also fail to meet the obligations of its compact with its subjects. Such a state then could be overthrown. The social contract obligated all parties. This simple final point required that all contemporary notions about "divine right" of the monarchical state had to be tossed out

<>1651je02:Amur River | Voevoda Khabarov opened his second military expedition
*1651se29:Khabarov marched as far as the site of the modern-day city Khabarovsk [map]. A cruel campaign, forcing Achani and Ducheri tribes to appeal to Manchurian Chinese authorities. Khabarov's Cossacks defeated Chinese forces this time and plunged the region into brigandage. Thereafter, the rapacious Khabarov faded from the scene
*1651:Irkutsk [W] ostrog founded [map]
*--Now Siberia  was under Russian imperialist dominion, with the exception of the following four regions =

• In the southeast, the Amur River valley [map]
• In the far northeast, the Kamchatka Penninsula [map]
• In the south, the Kazakh-Kirghiz Steppes [map]
• On the far northern banks of the Yenisei River [map]

<>1652:1682; MUSCOVITE RUSSIA, phase #6
--CRISIS OF MUSCOVITE RUSSIA
Forty years of recovery (1612-1652) were followed by thirty years of crisis in domestic and international politics and culture
*--First, church reforms caused massive disruption, the great RASKOL [Schism] among Orthodox "Old-Ritualists" [more commonly called "Old-Believers"]
*--Second, discontent over the intensification and spread of serfdom among village laborers (peasants)
*--Third, growing independence and unrest along the southern Steppe frontiers of Russian authority in UKRAINE, involving independent Slavic communities (mostly Orthodox, but some Catholic and within the Polish cultural sphere) and Ottoman Turkish power
*--Here is an analysis of the east slavic name "Ukraina". U (pronounced as long U, "oo" = "at") and KRAINA (pronounced "Krah-EEN-ah = "the periphery"). The whole name is therefore pronounced "oo-krah-EEN-ah". English speakers say "you-Crane" (and seek to avoid the expression "The Ukraine")
*--Fourth, rising threat from mercantilist expansion of increasingly powerful & centralized west European imperialist monarchies (mainly ENGLAND)

<>1654:1656; Russian Orthodox Church council decided on massive reforms in the liturgy, the forms, procedures and rituals of the holy mass and Orthodox practices (as distinct from the theology, which was hardly touched by these reform measures).  The Russian Church set out to cleanse itself of national deviations and to claim the universal authority of the old Byzantine Imperial Church, not coincidentally also to enhance the authority of the Muscovite tsar
*1652:1666; Patriarch Nikon was at the center of these events for 18 years, pushing hard for church reform. About the patriarch, see HML: index
*--These were the immediate beginnings of the tragic Russian Raskol [Schism]
\\
*--Kliuchevskii,3 ch15

<>1654mr31:Ukraine Cossacks petitioned tsar Aleksei on conditions of union [DMR2:301-10 | DMR3:442-8]
*--Cossacks were motivated by a growing need to deal with mounting hostility in three directions =
 North=Russians
 South=Turks and allied Crimean Tatars
 West=Poles
*1654ap06:Ukraine [map] Zaporozhian Cossacks rec'd grant from tsar Aleksei [DMR3:448-50]
*--Pereiaslavl Treaty signed between Moscow and Cossack Ataman Bogdan Khmelnitskii | Resistance to Polish rule in the western regions of old Russia was becoming more organized. At the same time Cossacks were more resolved to struggle against Crimean Tatar and Ottoman Turkish power in the Pontic Steppes (Northern shores of Black Sea) [map]
*--Re. Cossacks see VSB,1:274-9; 292-304
*--Could this moment be the formal beginning of Ukraine?
*--Could this moment be the beginning of the end of medieval Poland?
*--The Pereiaslavl Treaty marked a Russian shift of emphasis from Siberia to southern and western frontiers, and it also illustrated the close link between southern and western directions of Russian imperialist expansion. In both directions, Cossacks played an important role
\\
*--C. Bickford O'Brien, Muscovy and the Ukraine: From the Pereiaslavl Agreement to the Truce of Andrusovo, 1654-1667
*--Kliuchevskii,3 ch6

<>1659:1664; Siberian Yakut natives protested to tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich about ruinous yasak obligations imposed on them [DMR3:350-2]
*--More on late 17th-c imperialist administration of Yakut territories [DMR3:352-5]

<>1659:1683; Croatian Catholic priest Yurii Krizhanich [Juraj Križanić (ID)] came to Moscow on a visionary personal mission. He was arrested and punished by exile to Siberia
*--He devised a "pan-Slavic" language to write Politika , with an all-Eastern Slavic and all-Southern Slavic audience in mind (translated as Russian Statecraft: The Politika of Iurii Krizhanich) [Excerpts: VSB,1:251-3 | DMR3:461-69 | WAL:134-6 | Russian-language scholarly edition]
*--Krizhanich tried to transcend or escape Christian confessional divisions (especially Catholic vs. Orthodox, but also Protestant vs. Catholic) in the name of linguistic and related cultural unities. He knew the bloody carnage of the Thirty Years War [ID], which had been inspired in large measure by religious conflict. He was also mindful of the expanding struggle of a fractured Christianity with a unified Islam under Ottoman power. Islam arose 1000 years earlier and continued to compete with Christian Europe. Russia was on the front lines of this "clash of civilizations"
*--Krizhanich perhaps also sensed and sought political ways to avoid the awful internal conflicts that were about to arise among Russian Orthodox believers. In this way Krizhanich reminds us of the international dimensions of the internal conflict called the Russian Raskol [Schism]
\\
*--Kliuchevskii,3 pp. 280-91

<>1661:Decree on runaway serfs [DMR2:320-1 | DMR3:460-1]

<>1661:1715; France | Louis XIV "the Sun King" reigned for 54 years as divine-right absolute monarch. He is quoted as saying, "I am the state" [L'état c'est moi]. He brought the French nobility into a position of dependence on monarchical support and authority. Thus he extended central power of the monarchical state into the provinces and restructured the administration along rational bureaucratic lines, thoroughly under his control and largely independent of traditional feudal social exemptions and privileges
*--1661au:André Le Nôtre began work as the king's "landscape architect" to create the greatest gardens the European world had ever seen = Versailles. Le Nôtre worked at first with the plants and other appurtenances confiscated from the gardens of the French Controller general of finances, Nicolas Fouquet. Louis XIV was jealous of Fouquet's lavish estate and his high life-style, so he dismissed and arrested him, ordering the gardens pulled up and transplanted to his own royal properties at Versailles. That was the beginning. Over the next years Louis' gardens expanded to 37,000 acres laced by canals, punctuated by 2400 fountains. Water pressure and supply presented a huge engineering challenge. Fourteen large waterwheels pumped seven miles from the River Seine into the network of canals and fountains. The French army was mobilized to build yet more waterways, one of which would have fed Versailles canal from as far away as 70 miles, had it not failed
*--But, as one historian put it, "It is hard to applaud such gross expenditure while peasants starve, or admire the sparkling fountains while children sicken for lack of pure water. Hundreds, if not thousands, of men were killed and maimed in the creation of Versailles -- crushed under landslides while creating the great terraces, broken by falls from the aqueducts or succumbing to disease in the marshes. The gardens represent not only the Apollonian vision of the Sun King, but his monstrous egotism and ruthless absolutism. Versailles was ravishing but deadly" [2007my11:TLS:32]
*--France entered one of its grandest historical periods

<>1662:Lena River, Yakutsk [Sakha] | Russian Cossack-born (but now settled in far NE Siberia) Senka Dezhnev [pronounced DezhnYAWf] sent appeal to tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich in Moscow, listing accomplishments in tsarist service in Anadyr, all out of his own pocket. He got only partial repayment or salary from the tsar, though Sables, Walrus tusks, etc. from Siberia continued to pour into the tsarist treasury [Lensen,Eastward:29-30]

<>1663:English mercantilist corporation in London which was in charge of the New World colonies of Carolina accepted a new "proprietor", Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first Earl of Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury was inspired by the thought that this overseas corporation in the New World might be an opportunity, not just for incredible profit, but also a new era, a new beginning for humanity. Over the next twenty years, he became the center of the anti-Catholic, anti-absolutist faction of English politics. After 1666, his doctor, John Locke, became an inseparable political associate. Shaftesbury was briefly Lord Chancellor and a central figure in the councils of the English Parliament
*--Shaftesbury rose to prominence earlier as a young general in the era of English civil war. He first supported the monarchists against Parliament, then shifted to the side of Parliament. After 1654 he turned against Cromwell and the Protectorate. The only consistency in his seeming fickle politics was a growing aversion to all forms of autocratic rule, whether cavalier or roundhead, whether secular or religious
*1678:1681; Shaftesbury was a leader in the extreme, even murderous and often opportunistic, resistance to the Catholic James who was in line to succeed his brother Charles II on the English throne
*--In these years John Locke was the key member of Shaftesbury's "brain-trust". At this time Locke composed Two Treatises of Government [TXT] in defense of the Whig party line. He supported a powerful set of new principles to guide government, especially in its relationship to "civil society", or "the people". These ideas inspired a new European radicalism. "Liberals" launched revolutionary conspiracies against the remains of the medieval world, the priestly, absolutist and feudal traditions of western Europe. Within the next century or so, the book was translated and published in French, Italian, Spanish, German and Swedish. A Russian translation appeared on the eve of the 1905 Revolution
*1683jy21:Oxford University, near the great Bodleian Library, England experienced its last great book burning. The Whigs were temporarily defeated, and John Locke went into exile in the Netherlands. He could not return until the "Glorious Revolution" of 1689, which consolidated the dominant role of Parliament in English politics

<>1665:France | Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683) became Controller general of finances under King Louis XIV. Colbert soon set about building the French navy and revising the civil service codes to make state power more bureaucratically efficient. French centralized monarchical power elevated itself above the grasp of the traditional secular medieval social elite, the aristocracy. The Treaty of Westphalia [ID] had already weakened the trans-national power of the higher clergy in France. Colbert strengthened the monarchy and built a far-reaching bureaucratic apparatus. This is why the era of Colbert is thought of as a culminating moment in the one hundred fifty year rise of west European centralized "national" monarchical power
*--Colbert's achievements also represented the apex of European mercantilist policy. Colbert especially saw to the establishment of governmental power in the activities of the French economy by encouraging establishment of colonies and direct state involvement in new industrial enterprises, in the form of "crown manufacturers", a domestic version of the new overseas corporations of this era [SIE,9:369-72]

<>1666:1667; Russian Orthodox Church Council carried out reforms [VSB,1:257-9]. Some make a lot of the mystical numerological significance of "666"
*--The Old-Ritualist (or Old-Believer) movement got under way in opposition to these official reforms and in defense of deviations from "universal" Orthodox liturgical practices that had evolved over years of Muscovite isolation from the "mother church". These novel deviations were thought to be the "old rituals"
*--On religious affairs, see VSB,1:253-62
*--"Misery-Luckless-Plight" [ZMR2:489-501| ZMR1:409-22| WAL:152-60]
*--The curtain was rising on a cultural and social tragedy of vast historical dimensions, the Russian Raskol [schism]
\\
*1966mr:SlR#25 (reprint in CSH:140-188)| Michael Cherniavsky, "Old Believers and the New Religion"
*--Robert Crummey, The Old Believers and the World of Antichrist: The Vyg Community and the Russian State, 1694-1855
*--Florovsky,5:86-113
*--N. Lupinin, Religious Revolt in the XVIIth Century: The Schism of the Russian Church
*--Mathiew Spinka, "Patriarch Nikon and the Subjection of the Russian Church to the State", reprint= HRR,1:229-244
*--S. Zenkovsky, "The Russian Church Schism: Its Background and Repercussions" in RRC2,1:141-53

<>1666de12:Russian Patriarch Nikon deposed by Church. The Church assembly taking this action was chaired by the patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch [VSB,1:257-8]

<>1667:Russian city Pskov | Voevoda Afanasii Lavrent'evich Ordin-Nashchokin signed Andrusovo Treaty which brought peace between Poland and Russia. Settled Moscow-Polish wars in Moscow's favor [VSB,1:304] The three-century-long "re-gathering of Russian lands" was essentially complete
*--Ordin-Nashchokin became head of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich's Foreign prikaz [ID] (Foreign Office). He directed the drafting of a national mercantilist trade policy [Novotorgovyi ustav] This policy sought to regulate foreign merchants, their prices, times and places where market activities could take place, taxes, tariffs, foreign traders, prices, times (at designated markets) [SIE,10:292-3]
*--After a century and a half of slow development, but still a generation before Peter I assumed full tsarist authority, Russia now committed itself to mercantilist modernization and the building of empire
*--The nearly three-century era of medieval Polish power was at its end. A century after this Andrusovo treaty, the three Partitions of Poland got under way, bringing an end to Poland as a sovereign state, not to re-emerge as such until after World War One in 1918
*--As Polish power waned, Russian authority grew in the south, and ambition for imperialist expansion focused on the Pontic Steppe frontier with Ottoman Turkish power

<>1667:Sweden | Exiled tsarist state servitor Grigorii Kotoshikhin died. He fled from Russia in 1664 and wrote an important but sensationalized exposé "On Russia in the Reign of Alexis Mikhailovich" [Excerpts: WAL:136-49 | KRR:176-80 | VSB,1:228-32 | DMR3:451-9 | BL&T:36f] Russian text = [W]
\\
*--Kliuchevskii,3 pp. 178-80

<>1668:1676; White Sea coastal region | The Solovetskii monastery resisted Church reform in a nine-year armed struggle of militant monastic Old-Ritualists [DMR2:316-9 | DMR3:439-41]

<>1669:Moscow failed to return Kiev to Poland, as promised. Ordin-Nashchokin resigned

<>1670:SE Russia | Rebellion of Stenka Razin and followers, including many Don Cossacks [VSB,1:233-6]. Razin was an experienced diplomatic and military leader among the Don cossacks. His wide travels, including a pilgrimage to the Old-Ritualist Solovetskii monastery [ID] and a sojourn in Moscow, alerted  him to the plight of serfs, petty townsmen and others on the tsarist periphery whose outlook was offended and whose efforts were exploited by Muscovite authority. The rebellion reached the proportions of a "peasant war". Razin proved to be a talented military leader, but he was captured and executed by quartering (cutting him to pieces, beginning at the extremities so as to prolong life to the final chop)
*--The Russian Raskol demonstrated that Russians were not immune to the religiously inspired brutality that swept over Europe in this century [EG]

<>1670:England, London | Prince Rupert of the Palatine founded a great overseas corporation, the Hudson's Bay Co. Now beaver, sable and fox opened up for humanity the whole North of the New World, as well as the Old. England tightened its grip on North America
*--Here we again see clearly where frontier and imperialist expansion overlap

<>1671:1673; New World tour of English spiritualist and religious leader, George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends. Many religious communities in the English colonies formed Societies of Friends. These societies observed a simple, personal religion and sought escape from the entanglements of complex creeds and elaborate formal liturgies. They were thus at odds with both established churches and radical dissenting creeds (e.g., Puritans), though they still thought of themselves as Christians. Still they were widely persecuted, particularly in colonial New England and Virginia. Rhode Island protected them
*--They required no theologically trained priests or preachers and no rituals to mediate between believer and god. Instead, these communities were guided by an "inward light" which a holy spirit infused into the individual believer's heart and into the hearts of such individuals gathered in a "society of friends". These congregations were often called "Quakers", a term originally coined by a judge at one of George Fox's trials. The term was eventually used widely by all. In everyday life, the Quaker faith caused great consternation because their faith did not allow them to take oaths nor to bear arms or serve in the military, and their profound instinct for democratic equality forbid them to remove hats or perform other ritual forms of subordination to "superiors" and forced them to the forefront in the struggle against slavery
*--New World Quaker societies flourished in NY NJ and MD. Philadelphia PA and Nantucket Island were significant New World Quaker centers

<>1672:England | Royal African Company, another of the growing number of overseas corporations, made England the number one slave trader in the world
*--The Russian economy, in contrast, was stagnating with the spread of serfdom
*--Over the final two preceding centuries of Muscovite Russian history, serfdom, i.e., the bondage of village labor to the domains managed or ruled by tsarist and church authority, as well as by "private" noble landowners -- votchinniki and pomeshchiki -- had evolved to its full maturity. ["Serfdom" is a gentle English translation of the harsher Russian word for bondage, krepostnichestvo.]  For serfs and slaves, the worst was yet to come
*--European exploration and expansion (projection of military, administrative and economic power) over the face of the whole globe = [MAP]
*--Global market coming into existence as a result of imperialist expansion into New World agro-businesses: tobacco, tea and slaves
*1672:Russia "discovered" the northeastern Pacific Coast and the Kamchatka peninsula [map]
*--Russia would not experience anything like the economic expansion of the great mercantilist overseas corporations, but Russian overland imperialist expansion was successful until she came against China in SE Siberia
\\
*--John Keay, The Spice Route (2005)

<>1672no02:Russian resistance to the reformed official Church was epitomized by Boyarynya Feodosiia Morozova's death in prison [Boyarynya = wife of Boyar] [DMR3:489-97]
*--Old-Ritualists or Schismatics [Staro-obriadtsy or Raskolniki, often called "Old Believers" in English] were strong in the north. Visit this [W] devoted to scenes around Kizhi in the lake district north east of St.Petersburg. Try this stunning photo of the fabulous, nail-less wooden church on Kizhi Island, Transfiguration [pix]

1887:Detail from Vasilii Surikov's painting of
Boyarynya Feodosiia Morozova on her way to prison
The full canvas reminds us of the broad social participation in
Old-Ritualist resistance during the Raskol,
from boyars to beggars.
View full canvas in Olga's Gallery

<>1674:England | Death of great poet John Milton, author of A Brief History of Moscovia… (1682)

<>1675ja:1676au; [USA] New World, Southern territories of "New England" | King Philip's War raged for 14 months between Native American Wampanoag tribe, led by tribal leader "King Philip", and the Plymouth Colony settlers. Some call this war "The Puritan Conquest" and others "Metacom's Rebellion" (using "Philip's" authentic Algonquian name). Measured in terms of population, this was the bloodiest war ever in USA history. Thousands of natives and colonists died. More than half of the English settlements were destroyed and colonial occupation of these territories was pushed back temporarily to the coastline. The Native Americans, however, took the greatest losses, not only in disease and death at war but, afterwards, when thousands were sold into slavery in the West Indies. Even the neutral or pro-Plymouth Christian settlements of the Native Americans (called "praying towns") were devastated as their populations were removed and resettled in barren islands where many perished of cold and hunger. Wampanoag peoples were destroyed and scattered in one of the first modern instances of population removal and concentration
*--More on Native Americans
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*1998ap09:NYR:41-4| Gordon S. Wood

<>1675fa:Lower drainage of the Dnepr River [map] | Zaporozhian Cossack leader Ivan Sirko wrote letter to Ottoman Turkish sultan Mohammed IV =

Il'ya Repin historical portrait of the Cossack letter to the Sultan

(View this painting in Olga's Gallery)

The letter reads, "Zaporozhian Cossacks, to the sultan of Turkey: You Turkish Satan, brother and comrade of the accursed Devil, and Secretary to Lucifer himself, what the hell kind of noble knight are you? The Devil craps [??vikidae] and your army eats it up [pozhirae]. You will never be fit to rule over Christian sons. We do not fear your army. On land or sea, we will fight you. You scullion of Babylon, you wheelwright of Macedonia, you beer-brewer of Jerusalem, you goat-flayer of Alexandria, you swineherd of Egypt, both the Greater and the Lesser, you sow of Armenia, you goat of Tatary, you depredator of Kamenets, you evildoer of Podoliansk, you grandson of Beelzebub himself, you great silly oaf of all the world and of the netherworld and, before our God, a blockhead, a swine's snout, a mare's a-s [sic!], a butcher's cur, an unbaptized brow, May the Devil take you! That is what the Cossacks have to say to you, you slimy rascal! You are unfit to rule over true Christians! We do not know the date, because we don't have a calendar. The moon is in the sky, the year is in the book, the day is the same for us here as for you over there, and you can kiss us right back there! [signed] Koshevoi Hetman Ivan Sirko with the whole Zaporozhian assembly [Translated from D. I. Yavornits'kii, Istoriia zaporaz'kikh kozakiv,2 (1990):392, with a nod of appreciation for the help found in GPR:616]
*--After a thousand years embedded in the general mix of those East Slavic folk who experienced the tumultuous history of the Pontic Steppes, the outline of what is now called "Ukraine" showed itself. Cossack self-consciousness and high diplomatic recognition by Moscow might mark the beginning of a distinct Cossack or "Ukrainian" history
*--Russia was at the beginning of a serious "imperialistic" challenge across these southern territories and into Crimean Tatar and Ottoman Turkic spheres of authority. A six-century epoch of nearly unstoppable Turkish challenge to Russia and eastern Europe was coming to an end. Now Russian-Turkish relations began to shift in Russia's favor in a new era of frontier and imperialist expansion

<>1676:1682ap27; tsar Fedor II [VSB,1:236-8]

<>1676:USA VA | Bacon's Rebellion, an early example of labor unrest in the New World

• Nathaniel Bacon led a "giddy multitude" in rebellion against English colonial Governor William Berkeley. Bacon was himself an English aristocrat by birth, and a relative of the famous philosopher and visionary Francis Bacon, yet he became a champion of the yeoman laborer in the New World
• Kolchin:33 and 37 compares Bacon's Rebellion with the Bolotnikov Rebellion in Russia 70 years earlier, especially in view of how Bacon managed to unify a diverse but powerful force composed of

  slaves, indentured servants, debtors, ex-servants, frontiersmen chafing under Berkeley's restrained Indian policy, and political enemies of the governor. That such an alliance was possible and that the governor's supporters did not make an issue of the participation of blacks on the side of the rebels indicate how little slavery had yet shaped class attitudes.

  The rebels were not only unified against Berkeley, but also with respect to the need to make more room for Euro-Americans by pushing Native Americans out of colonial territories
• The rebellion chased governor Berkeley out of his Jamestown headquarters more than once, but when Bacon died, the rebellion withered. Nonethless, Berkeley was dismissed from his post
• Still, the New World institution of slavery expanded

<>1680c:Russian secular tale of ribald misbehavior and mischief, "Frol Skobeev, the Rogue" [ZMR2:474-86| ZMR1:397-409]

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