Russia полностью

While Ivan was extending and strengthening his government’s hold over territories settled by Russians and ruled by other descendants of Riurik, he was also establishing Russia’s position as a European power. The fact that he succeeded in making his mark with most other crown heads seems truly astonishing, given the obstacles. Russia, after all, was relatively isolated from the rest of Europe, which was mostly Catholic; the Orthodox Church encouraged an aversion to things foreign, including languages and learning, and there was a substantial and growing culture gap separating Russia from western Europe. True, foreign powers — including the papacy — made part of the running, trying to involve the Grand Prince in alliances and other schemes to promote their interests, but Ivan was always firmly engaged in pursuit of his own interests, which often placed him in an adversarial relationship with others. How, then, did he succeed in mediating these problems, conducting a successful foreign policy, and, in the process, creating an efficient diplomatic establishment?

The culture gap was bridged in the first place by Greek immigrants from Constantinople (some of whom had arrived in the entourage of Ivan’s new wife) who were engaged to serve the Grand Prince. The two Trakhaniot brothers — who had served the Byzantine emperor - the Rhallis, the Angelos, the Laskaris and others were familiar with imperial protocol and institutions. They also had practical knowledge of how Europe’s rulers dealt with one another, and brought their understandings of late-Roman statecraft to Russia. Iurii Trakhaniot served as ambassador to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III and to the King of Denmark, helped organize the reception of the imperial ambassador to Moscow, and was to rise to the dignity of treasurer (kaznachei), the Russian official in charge of foreign relations at that time. ¹³ Other immigrants were ethnic Italians, notably Gianbattista della Volpe, who has been credited with suggesting the match between Ivan and Zoe/Sofia. He was engaged as Ivan’s master of the mint, and some of his relatives were hired too. Volpe himself eventually became an Orthodox Christian, but it is not certain if all ‘Latin’ incomers did, and the Grand Prince employed at least one German and even a Jew, a merchant called Khoja Kokos, whom he used as an intermediary in the Crimea. ¹⁴ But many more of the first Russian diplomats were home grown.

Most of these originally had other, lesser, functions at court, several of them as clerks or falconers. Falconry was an elite sport in late medieval Europe, not least in Russia, and the Grand Prince ran a large falconry establishment. Since well-trained falcons made princely gifts for foreign potentates, some of these falconers came to be used in diplomatic functions. One such was Mikhail Iaropkin, who was sent as an envoy to Poland four times. But the work was directed and processed by officials, secretaries and under-secretaries — some of them specialists like Andrei Fedorovich Maiko, who dealt chiefly with Polish-Lithuanian affairs — and there was a team of translators to handle the correspondence. By 1500 there were to be more than twenty translators, including Bakshei, who dealt with correspondence in Turkish with the khans of the Crimea, the nomadic Nogais, and with the Ottoman sultan. From 1504 there was a permanent German translator, Istoma Maloi. ¹⁵

The small but variegated cadre of officials translated documents from and into foreign languages (mainly Latin), acted as interpreters, served as envoys and messengers to foreign courts, saw to the reception of foreign emissaries in Russia, and advised the Grand Prince on the wider world. They drew up letters of credence for outgoing embassies, ensuring they presented the Grand Prince’s titles accurately and sealing them with the appropriate seal - from 1497 both the ancient symbol of the Roman Empire, the double-headed eagle, and the image of St George slaying a dragon. ¹⁶ They also established a record-filing system which was to prove essential not only for establishing protocol and precedence but as a back-file on policy and a source of knowledge on anything from philosophy to firearms. The staff resources must have been stretched as the Grand Prince’s foreign relations became more widespread and complex. In the last quarter of the fifteenth century links were established with Milan and Hungary, Kakhetia and Vienna. An alliance was formed with Denmark against Sweden, and new policies were formulated towards the Hanseatic League of north-German commercial cities and towards the Livonian Knights, as well as the successor states of the Golden Horde. ¹⁷ True, there were no permanent embassies at that time: one ruler would send a mission to another only as occasion demanded. Even so, we can infer that staffing such missions must have constituted a problem.