A people accustomed to flatlands, the Russians now confronted the most mountainous and exotic region of Europe. For sixteenth-century man, mountains lacked the romantic aura they were to attract in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. They were difficult of access, and harboured dangerous peoples. Yet Russia was already becoming involved in the very centre of the Caucasus, the Kabarda. The chief lure was commerce. The Kabarda straddled the roads from the Crimea to the town of Derbent on the Caspian, and from the river Terek in the north to Georgia in the south.
Russians seeing this land for the first time were awed by the immensity of the lowering mountains — the highest in Europe — and by the precipitous valleys that harboured isolated communities that spoke a kaleidoscopic variety of languages and dialects. Some settlements grew crops or reared horses; others boasted smithies where chain mail was made and swords of wonderful workmanship and sharpness were crafted. Others again lived by trade and robbery. And all bred fighting men, skilled in ambush and raiding. In 1561 Ivan — who had lost his wife, Anastasia, a year earlier — married one of Prince Temriuk’s daughters. Two years later the leader of the Nogais, Mirza Din-Ahmed, married another of Temriuk’s daughters. This little web of dynastic marriages was to further Moscow’s ambitions in the south, and before long its advance was marked by the erections of fortresses in the Kabarda (1563) and at Terka on the river Terek (1567).
The social scene there was totally strange to Russian eyes. The Kabardinians were congeries of warlike clans, each headed by a landowning prince, each with his vassal gentry, all of them sustained by peasants and slaves. There was no overall chief, no hierarchical system of a sort familiar to Russians or Tatars. Seniority and fighting prowess earned deference, however. Raiding for slaves and trading in them was not uncommon (Istanbul provided a good market). As for religion, allegiance varied. Some of the mountain men were Christian, others were Muslim (at least nominally), a few were Jews (perhaps survivals from the Khazar Empire), and a good many were pagan animists. In fact religion was largely a political issue, a matter of alliances: of Ivan’s new in-laws, one brother became a Christian, most of the others remained Muslims, but religion and political allegiance were as yet quite independent.
And the Kabardinians were only one loose tribal grouping among many. There were also the Adyge to the west; the Darghins and Laks, the Kaytaks and Lezghins of Dagestan; and, beyond them to the south, the Tabasarans, Tsakhurs, Rutuls and Chechens — not to mention the Ingush, Ossetians and others. All were singular, all were warlike, and, like the Swiss in the time of William Tell, all were difficult (and sometimes impossible) to govern. If the Russians fully comprehended this variegated, seemingly anarchic, scene, they left little evidence of the fact at the time. 12 Wisely, they did not attempt to control it. Instead, they set out to further their interests incrementally, by agreement. But, if they found the fragmented tribal political scene difficult to fathom, they understood the broader strategic realities very clearly indeed. Behind some of the Muslim tribal groupings of the Caucasus stood the might of the Ottoman Turks, who controlled the Crimean khan, the ally of hostile Poland. Moscow needed help to counter the power of this Turkish alliance, which was blocking its lines of advance to the west as well as to the south, and help could come only from Ivan’s nominal rival, the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian II of the House of Habsburg.
The Kremlin soon decided that practical strategic considerations must outweigh Russia’s theoretical claims to imperial primacy, and so Moscow’s relations with the Habsburgs became more cordial. Sacrificing its own unpromising claims to the elective throne of Poland, in the 1570s it supported the Habsburg candidate, Ernest. At the same time Moscow’s calls for the Emperor to join Russia in an alliance against ‘the enemies of Christ’s name’, the Muslim Turks and Tatars, became insistent. 13 It was the beginning of a long-term strategy directed against the Ottoman Empire that was eventually to give rise, three centuries later, to the notorious ‘Eastern Question’.
