To the extent that the new governmental trend cut across traditional vested interests, it was unpopular; but society was tired of civil war, and Vasilii’s strict regime promised to end it. The new metropolitan, Jonah, backed these policies to the hilt. The Church felt besieged and in particular need of the Grand Prince’s support. Jonah had been installed by the Russian bishops, without reference to the Patriarch of Constantinople. This was an alarming breach of precedent, but the circumstances were extraordinary. It was generally recognized that Constantinople must soon fall to the Turks. Besides, most Russians were convinced that the senior patriarch, who had supported the Council of Ferrara/Florence had fallen from the faith. The installation of Metropolitan Jonah, therefore, signalled the independence of the Russian Church, but also isolated it. Furthermore, largely Orthodox Lithuania and Catholic Poland, united by a dynastic marriage in 1386, had begun to merge politically after the Treaty of Horodlo of 1413, and on terms which discriminated against non-Catholic nobles and gentry.
Vasilii was also helped by the break-up of the Golden Horde, creation of the Tatar khan, into the separate Tatar khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan, Siberia and the Crimea. The threat from Tatar raiders hardly diminished, but the possibilities of managing the problem by diplomatic as well as military means became greater. Now that the Tatars were in decline and the Golden Horde had split, they could no longer dictate who the grand prince was to be, and henceforth grand princes tried to assert their independence by seeking an additional, more impressive, title. They also began not only to nominate their chosen successors, but also to adopt the long-standing Byzantine practice, by which an emperor would co-opt his successor with him. In 1448 Vasilii the Blind co-opted his son, the future Ivan III, into government with him, formally investing him as co-ruler.
As well as striving to establish a legitimate succession, the grand princes had for some time been trying to bequeath incontestable title to their territories as personal property, and to eliminate the titles of lesser princes to their apanages. They went so far as to claim to have purchased lands they had in fact conquered, and willed their titles to their sons, hoping to secure the succession and inheritance of their property down the generations. Vasilii II succeeded in eliminating almost all apanages, though he also created new ones for his own offspring. The historian A. E. Presniakov argued that in the last resort Vasilii survived not because of any formal powers but thanks to the popular support he received. But Vasilii was aggressive, and the people expected him to be aggressive; the interests of the grand princes and their subjects happened to coincide. Such, implicitly, was the judgement of Liubavskii too. He attributed Moscow’s success to power rather than territory — the grand princes’ strengthening hold over the military class, their command of taxation resources and of landed assets. 29 But it was civil war which inspired the rise of Moscow and, according to some, the inception of the Russian autocracy.
Russia’s political fractiousness in the period was paralleled in many other parts of Europe. England was riven by the Wars of the Roses for longer than the Russians were by their civil wars, and the states of Italy seemed to be locked in almost perpetual struggles. Petrarch had regretted Italy’s lack of unity a century earlier, and the hard political advice that Machiavelli was to give in the century following was born of the bitter experience in the interim. Russians were exercising their minds about the problem too. Indeed, within a few decades, under Ivan III, they were to develop a more durable political entity in Moscow than the more brilliant Lorenzo de’ Medici was to build in Florence, and begin to flex their muscles in a wider world.
4The Foundation of an Empire
