The World полностью

Moscow was eclipsed: its prince Vasili II lost control of his kingdom and family, was captured by the Mongol khan of Kazan and then blinded by a cousin. His son Ivan, aged six at the time, witnessed the blinding. But Vasili the Blind won the family war just by waiting, and his return to Moscow was marked by a savage showdown, aided by Ivan, whom he proclaimed co-ruler. Vasili had emphasized his Constantinople link – his sister was the penultimate empress. Now he and Ivan claimed leadership of the Orthodox by translatio imperii, the transfer of power from Constantinople to Muscovy – later hailed as the Third Rome – aided by his family link, and then Ivan’s marriage to Sophia.

Nicknamed Grozny – Terrible – Ivan was lean, tall, with terrifying eyes, a heavy boozer capable of showy vision and quicksilver action, conquering swathes of the territory of old rivals, Novgorod and Tver. Sophia supposedly encouraged him to stop paying Mongol tribute. Golden Khan Ahmed, taking advantage of fraternal fighting among the Muscovites, attacked with the encouragement of Poland–Lithuania. Moscow was in peril, but Ivan secured the backing of Ahmed’s rivals, the Girays of the Crimea. In October 1480, he faced the Mongols at the River Ugra, a standoff that ended when Ahmed withdrew, marking the eclipse – but not the end – of Mongol power^* and a setback for Poland–Lithuania, which temporarily divided in the 1490s.

Ivan had doubled Muscovy and his own magnificence, now calling himself Autocrat of All the Russias and, for the first time, Caesar – tsar. The Muscovites used the title for both the Mongol khan and the Roman basileus. As a vassal and later successor state to the khans, Ivan and his heirs commandeered the Mongol belief in absolute power of the sacred tsar, his holy mission to conquer, total ownership of the land and control of over all their ‘slaves’ – as all subjects, even nobles, were known. The imperial splendour and Orthodox mission of Constantinople were vital too, but it was the Mongol tradition that is probably key to understanding Russia right into the twenty-first century.

Sophia, princess of Constantinople, could have been a colourless cipher, but not only was the marriage surprisingly successful – she produced eleven children, five sons and six daughters – theirs became a remarkable partnership.

A HIT GONE WRONG: MAGNIFICO AND MICHELANGELO

Although women in Moscow resided in separate quarters, the terem, Sophia – this ‘cunning woman’ – chaired her own council and freely received envoys; moreover ‘The prince acted very often on her suggestions.’ She supervised the commissioning of Italian architects to embellish the Kremlin. Ivan and Sophia looked towards Italy and its arbiters of taste, the Medici. Yet those Florentines had just survived a terrifying assault.

On a Sunday morning in April 1478, the two Medici brothers, Lorenzo and Giuliano, rulers of Florence, accompanied a visiting cardinal, the city’s archbishop and a fellow banking heir to the cathedral. Unbeknown to the Medici, the young cardinal and the men around them were all assassins. Seven hitmen, including two priests, lurking behind the high altar, pretended to be waiting for the service to begin. At the ringing of the sacristy bell, they drew their daggers and fell upon the Medici brothers.

Dark-eyed with his black hair parted in the middle, Lorenzo de’ Medici, not yet thirty, brought up by humanists and scholars, was already celebrated for his ‘joyful nature’, his kindness to friends, his saucy poetry, his patronage of artists, the pleasure he took in singing, hunting and playing calcio, a football-like game. He was no less admired for his adroit management of Florence amid the perpetual tournament of power between the many city states and larger kingdoms that made up Italy. When his father, Piero, died, the Signoria invited Lorenzo, then just twenty, ‘to take on myself the care of the state as my father and grandfather did’. He hesitated, he said, ‘considering that the burden and danger were great’. Then: ‘I consented unwillingly.’

In 1471, Francesco della Rovere, an energetic, uncouth, toothless fisherman’s son, was elected Pope Sixtus IV and immediately reappointed Lorenzo de’ Medici as his banker. Sixtus enhanced Rome, building the first bridge across the Tiber since antiquity, established the Vatican Library and commissioned a small chapel, named Sistine after himself, inviting Ghirlandaio and Sandro Botticelli to paint its frescoes. Sixtus was an enthusiastic ‘lover of boys and sodomites’ who took his own nephews as lovers. Since priests could no longer marry, popes promoted their nephews as territorial magnates during their short reigns – hence the word nepotism. Sixtus raised six nephews to cardinal. But when he asked the Medici to lend the 60,000 ducats to buy the town of Imola for one of them, Girolamo Riario, Lorenzo refused, hoping to buy it for Florence.