THE LAWGIVER OF RUSSIA.
The Russia of the year 1000 lay deep in the age of barbarism. Vladimir had made it Christian in name, but it was far from Christian in thought or deed. It was a land without fixed laws, without settled government, without schools, without civilized customs, but with abundance of ignorance, cruelty, and superstition.
It was strangely made up. In the north lay the great commercial city of Novgorod, which, though governed by princes of the house of Rurik, was a republic in form and in fact. It possessed its popular assembly, of which every citizen was a member with full right to vote, and at whose meetings the prince was not permitted to appear. The sound of a famous bell, the Vetchevoy, called the people together, to decide on questions of peace and war, or to elect magistrates, and sometimes the bishop, or even the prince. The prince had to swear to carry out the ancient laws of the republic and not attempt to lay taxes on the citizens or to interfere with their trade. They made him gifts, but paid him no taxes. They decided how many hours he should give to pleasure and how many to business; and they expelled some of their princes who thought themselves beyond the power of the laws.
It seems strange that the absolute Russia of to-day should then have possessed one of the freest of the cities of Europe. Novgorod was not only a city, it was a state. The provinces far and wide around were subject to it, and governed by its prince, who had in them an authority much greater than he possessed over the proud civic merchants and money lords.
In the south, on the contrary, lay the great imperial city of Kief, the capital of the realm, and the seat of a government as arbitrary as that of Novgorod was free. Here dwelt the grand prince as an irresponsible autocrat, making his will the law, and forcing all the provinces, even haughty Novgorod, to pay a tax which bore the slavish title of tribute. Here none could vote, no assembly of citizens ever met, and the only restraint on the prince was that of his warlike and turbulent nobles, who often forced him to yield to their wishes. The government was a drifting rather than a settled one. It had no anchors out, but was moved about at the whim of the prince and his unruly lords.
Under these two forms of government lay still a third. Rural Russia was organized on a democratic principle which still prevails throughout that broad land. This is the principle of the Mir, or village community, which most of the people of the earth once possessed, but which has everywhere passed away except in Russia and India. It is the principle of the commune, of public instead of private property. The land of a Russian village belongs to the people as a whole, not to individuals. It is divided up among them for tillage, but no man can claim the fields he tills as his own, and for thousands of years what is known as communism has prevailed on Russian soil.
The government of the village is purely democratic. All the people meet and vote for their village magistrate, who decides, with the aid of a council of the elders, all the questions which arise within its confines, one of them being the division of the land. Thus at bottom Russia is a field sown thick with little communistic republics, though at top it is a despotism. The government of Novgorod doubtless grew out of that of the village. The republican city has long since passed away, but the seed of democracy remains planted deeply in the village community.
All this is preliminary to the story of the Russian lawgiver and his laws, which we have set out to tell. This famous person was no other than that Yaroslaf, prince of Novgorod, and son of Vladimir the Great, whose refusal to pay tribute had caused his father to die of grief.
Yaroslaf was the fifth able ruler of the dynasty of Rurik. The story of his young life resembles that of his father. He found his brother strong and threatening, and designed to fly from Novgorod and join the Varangians as a viking lord, as his father had done before him. But the Novgorodians proved his friends, destroyed the ships that were to carry him away, and provided him with money to raise a new army. With this he defeated his base brother, who had already killed or driven into exile all their other brothers. The result was that Yaroslof, like his father, became sovereign of all Russia.
But though this new grand prince extended his dominions by the sword, it was not as a soldier, but as a legislator, that he won fame. His genius was not shown on the field of battle, but in the legislative council, and Russia reveres Yaroslaf the Wise as its first maker of laws.
The free institutions of Novgorod, of which we have spoken, were by him sustained and strengthened. Many new cities were founded under his beneficent rule. Schools were widely established, in one of which three hundred of the youth of Novgorod were educated. A throng of Greek priests were invited into the land, since there were none of Russian birth to whom he could confide the duty of teaching the young. He gave toleration to the idolaters who still existed, and when the people of Suzdal were about to massacre some hapless women whom they accused of having brought on a famine by sorcery, he stayed their hands and saved the poor victims from death. The Russian Church owed its first national foundation to him, for he declared that the bishops of the land should no longer depend for appointment on the Patriarch of Constantinople.
There are no startling or dramatic stories to be told about Yaroslaf. The heroes of peace are not the men who make the world's dramas. But it is pleasant, after a season spent with princes who lived for war and revenge, and who even made war to obtain baptism, to rest awhile under the green boughs and beside the pleasant waters of a reign that became famous for the triumphs of peace.
Under Yaroslaf Russia united itself by ties of blood to Western Europe. His sons married Greek, German, and English princesses; his sister became queen of Poland; his three daughters were queens of Norway, Hungary, and France. Scandinavian in origin, the dynasty of Rurik was reaching out hands of brotherhood towards its kinsmen in the West.
But it is as a law-maker that Yaroslaf is chiefly known. Before his time the empire had no fixed code of laws. To say that it was without law would not be correct. Every people, however ignorant, has its laws of custom, unwritten edicts, the birth of the ages, which have grown up stage by stage, and which are only slowly outgrown as the tribe develops into the nation.
Russia had, besides Novgorod, other commercial cities, with republican institutions. Kief was certainly not without law. And the many tribes of hunters, shepherds, and farmers must have had their legal customs. But with all this there was no code for the empire, no body of written laws. The first of these was prepared about 1018 by Yaroslaf, for Novgorod alone, but in time became the law of all the land. This early code of Russian law is a remarkable one, and goes farther than history at large in teaching us the degree of civilization of Russia at that date.
In connection with it the chronicles tell a curious story. In 1018, we are told, Novgorod, having grown weary of the insults and oppression of its Varangian lords and warriors, killed them all. Angry at this, Yaroslaf enticed the leading Novgorodians into his palace and slaughtered them in reprisal. But at this critical interval, when his guards were slain and his subjects in rebellion, he found himself threatened by his ambitious brother. In despair he turned to the Novgorodians and begged with tears for pardon and assistance. They forgave and aided him, and by their help made him sovereign of the empire.
How far this is true it is impossible to say, but the code of Yaroslaf was promulgated at that date, and the rights given to Novgorod showed that its people held the reins of power. It confirmed the city in the ancient liberties of which we have already spoken, giving it a freedom which no other city of its time surpassed. And it laid down a series of laws for the people at large which seem very curious in this enlightened age. It must suffice to give the leading features of this ancient code.
It began by sustaining the right of private vengeance. The law was for the weak alone, the strong being left to avenge their own wrongs. The punishment of crime was provided for by judicial combats, which the law did not even regulate. Every strong man was a law unto himself.
Where no avengers of crime appeared, murder was to be settled by fines. For the murder of a boyar eighty grivnas were to be paid, and forty for the murder of a free Russian, but only half as much if the victim was a woman. Here we have a standard of value for the women of that age.
Nothing was paid into the treasury for the murder of a slave, but his master had to be paid his value, unless he had been slain for insulting a freeman. His value was reckoned according to his occupation, and ranged from twelve to five grivnas.
If it be asked what was the value of a grivna, it may be said that at that time there was little coined money, perhaps none at all, in Russia. Gold and silver were circulated by weight, and the common currency was composed of pieces of skin, called kuni. A grivna was a certain number of kunis equal in value to half a pound of silver, but the kuni often varied in value.
All prisoners of war and all persons bought from foreigners were condemned to perpetual slavery. Others became slaves for limited periods,—freemen who married slaves, insolvent debtors, servants out of employment, and various other classes. As the legal interest of money was forty per cent., the enslavement of debtors must have been very common, and Russia was even then largely a land of slaves.
The loss of a limb was fined almost as severely as that of a life. To pluck out part of the beard cost four times as much as to cut off a finger, and insults in general were fined four times as heavily as wounds. Horse-stealing was punished by slavery. In discovering the guilty the ordeals of red-hot iron and boiling water were in use, as in the countries of the West.
There were three classes in the nation,—slaves, freemen, and boyars, or nobles, the last being probably the descendants of Rurik's warriors. The prince was the heir of all citizens who died without male children, except of boyars and the officers of his guard.
These laws, which were little more primitive than those of Western Europe at the same period, seem never to have imposed corporal punishment for crime. Injury was made good by cash, except in the case of the combat. The fines went to the lord or prince, and were one of his means of support, the other being tribute from his estates. No provision for taxation was made. The mark of dependence on the prince was military service, the lord, as in the feudal West, being obliged to provide his own arms, provisions, and mounted followers.
Judges there were, who travelled on circuits, and who impanelled twelve respectable jurors, sworn to give just verdicts. There are several laws extending protection to property, fixed and movable, which seem specially framed for the merchants of Novgorod.
Such are the leading features of the code of Yaroslaf. The franchises granted the Novgorodians, which for four centuries gave them the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," form part of it. Crude as are many of its provisions, it forms a vital starting-point, that in which Russia first came under definite in place of indefinite law. And the bringing about of this important change is the glory of Yaroslaf the Wise.
THE YOKE OF THE TARTARS.
In Asia, the greatest continent of the earth, lies its most extensive plain, the vast plateau of Mongolia, whose true boundaries are the mountains of Siberia and the Himalayan highlands, the Pacific Ocean and the hills of Eastern Europe, and of which the great plain of Russia is but an outlying section. This mighty plateau, largely a desert, is the home of the nomad shepherd and warrior, the nesting-place of the emigrant invader. From these broad levels in the past horde after horde of savage horsemen rode over Europe and Asia,—the frightful Huns, the devastating Turks, the desolating Mongols. It is with the last that we are here concerned, for Russia fell beneath their arms, and was held for two centuries as a captive realm.
The nomads are born warriors. They live on horseback; the care of their great herds teaches them military discipline; they are always in motion, have no cities to defend, no homes to abandon, no crops to harvest. Their home is a camp; when they move it moves with them; their food is on the hoof and accompanies them on the march; they can go hungry for a week and then eat like cormorants; their tools are weapons, always in hand, always ready to use; a dozen times they have burst like a devouring torrent from their desert and overwhelmed the South and West.
While the Turks were still engaged in their work of conquest, the Mongols arose, and under the formidable Genghis Khan swept over Southern Asia like a tornado, leaving death and desolation in their track. The conqueror died in 1227,—for death is a foe that vanquishes even the greatest of warriors,—and was succeeded by his son Octoi, as Great Khan of the Mongols and Tartars. In 1235, Batou, nephew of the khan, was sent with an army of half a million men to the conquest of Europe.
This flood of barbarians fell upon Russia at an unfortunate time, one of anarchy and civil war, when the whole nation was rent and torn and there were almost as many sovereigns as there were cities. The system of giving a separate dominion to every son of a grand prince had ruined Russia. These small potentates were constantly at war, confusion reigned supreme, Kief was taken and degraded and a new capital, Vladimir, established, and Moscow, which was to become the fourth capital of Russia, was founded. Such was the state of affairs when Batou, with his vast horde of savage horsemen, fell on the distracted realm.
Defence was almost hopeless. Russia had no government, no army, no imperial organization. Each city stood for itself, with great widths of open country around. Over these broad spaces the invaders swept like an avalanche, finding cultivated fields before them, leaving a desert behind. They swam the Don, the Volga, and the other great rivers on their horses, or crossed them on the ice. Leathern boats brought over their wagons and artillery. They spread from Livonia to the Black Sea, poured into the kingdoms of the West, and would have overrun all Europe but for the vigorous resistance of the knighthood of Germany.
The cities of Russia made an obstinate defence, but one after another they fell. Some saved themselves by surrender. Most of them were taken by assault and destroyed. City after city was reduced to ashes, none of the inhabitants being left to deplore their fall. The nomads had no use for cities. Walls were their enemies: pasturage was all they cared for. The conversion of a country into a desert was to them a gain rather than a loss, for grass will grow in the desert, and grass to feed their horses and herds was what they most desired.
So far as the warriors of Mongolia were concerned, their conquests left them no better off. They still had to tend and feed their herds, and they could have done that as well in their native land. But the leaders had the lust of dominion, their followers the blood-fury, and inspired by these feelings they ravaged the world.
One thing alone saved Russia from being peopled by Tartars,—its climate. This was not to their liking, and they preferred to dwell in lands better suited to their tastes and habits. The great Tartar empire of Kaptchak, or the Golden Horde, was founded on the eastern frontier; other khanates were founded in the south; but the Russian princes were left to rule in the remainder of the land, under tribute to the khans, to whom they were forced to do homage. In truth, these Tartar chiefs made themselves lords paramount of the Russian realm, and no prince, great or small, could assume the government of his state until he had journeyed to Central Mongolia to beg permission to rule from the khan of the Great Horde.
The subjection of the princes was that of slaves. A century afterward they were obliged to spread a carpet of sable fur under the hoofs of the steed of the khan's envoy, to prostrate themselves at his feet and learn his mission on their knees, and not only to present a cup of koumiss to the barbarian, but even to lick from the neck of his horse the drops of the beverage which he might let fall in drinking. More shameful subjection it would be difficult to describe.
Several princes who proved insubordinate were summoned to the camp of the Horde and there tried and executed. Rivals sought the khan, to buy power by presents. During their journeys, which occupied a year or more, the Tartar bashaks ruled their dominions. Tartar armies aided the princes in their civil wars, and helped these ambitious lords to keep their country in a state of subjection.
Fortunately for Russia, the great empire of the Mongols gradually fell to pieces of its own weight. The Kaptchak, or Golden Horde, broke loose from the Great Horde, and Russia had a smaller power to deal with. The Golden Horde itself broke into two parts. And among the many princes of Russia a grand prince was still acknowledged, with right by title to dominion over the entire realm.
One of these grand princes, Alexander by name, son of the grand prince of Vladimir, proved a great warrior and statesman and gained the power as well as the title. Prince of Novgorod by inheritance, he defeated all his enemies, drove the Germans from Russia, and recovered the Neva from the Swedes, which feat of arms gained him the title of Alexander Nevsky. The Tartars were too powerful to be attacked, so he managed to gain their good will. The khan became his friend, and when trouble arose with Kief and Vladimir their princes were dethroned and these principalities given to the shrewd grand prince.
Russia seemed to be rehabilitated. Alexander was lord of its three capitals, Novgorod, Kief, and Vladimir, and grand prince of the realm. But the Russians were not content to submit either to his authority or to the yoke of the Tartars. His whole life was spent in battle with them, or in journeys to the tent of the khan to beg forgiveness for their insults.
The climax came when the Tartar collectors of tribute were massacred in some cities and ignominiously driven out of others. When these acts became known at the Horde the angry khan sent orders for the grand prince and all other Russian princes to appear before him and to bring all their troops. He said that he was about to make a campaign, and needed the aid of the Russians.
This story Alexander did not believe. He plainly perceived that the wily Tartar wished to deprive Russia of all its armed men, that he might the more easily reduce it again to subjection. Rather than see his country ruined, the patriotic prince determined to disobey, and to offer himself as a victim by seeking alone the camp of Usbek, the great khan, a mission of infinite danger.
He hoped that his submission might save Russia from ruin, though he knew that death lay on his path. He found Usbek bitterly bent on war, and for a whole year was kept in the camp of the Horde, seeking to appease the wrath of the barbarian. In the end he succeeded, the khan promising to forgive the Russians and desist from the intended war, and in the year 1262 Alexander started for home again.
He had seemingly escaped, but not in reality. He had not journeyed far before he suddenly died. To all appearance, poison had been mingled with his food before he left the camp of the khan. Alexander had become too great and powerful at home for the designs of the conquerors. He died the victim of his love of country. His people have recognized his virtue by making him a saint. He had not labored in vain. In his hands the grand princeship had been restored, Vladimir had become supreme, and a centre had been established around which the Russians might rally. But for a century and more still they were to remain subject to the Tartar yoke.
THE VICTORY OF THE DON.
The history of Russia during the century after the Mongol conquest is one of shame and anarchy. The shame was that of slavish submission to the Tartar khan. Each prince, in succession, fell on his knees before this high dignitary of the barbarians and begged or bought his throne. The anarchy was that of the Russian princes, on which the khan looked with winking eyes, thinking that the more they weakened themselves the more they would strengthen him. The rulers of Moscow, Tver, Vladimir, and Novgorod fought almost incessantly for supremacy, crushing their people beneath the feet of their ambition, now one, now another, gaining the upper hand.
In the end the princes of Moscow became supreme. They grew rich, and were able to keep up a regular army, that chief tool of despotism. The crown lands alone gave them dominion over three hundred thousand subjects. The time was coming in which they would be the absolute rulers of all Russia. But before this could be accomplished the power of the khans must be broken, and the first step towards this was taken by the great Dmitri Donskoi, who became grand prince of Moscow in 1362.
Dmitri came to the throne at a fortunate epoch. The Golden Horde was breaking to pieces. There were several khans, at war with one another, and discord ruled among the overlords of Russia. Still greater discord reigned in Russia itself. For eighteen years Dmitri was kept busy in wars with the princes of Tver, Kief, and Lithuania. Terrible was the war with Tver. Four times he overcame Michael, its prince. Four times did Michael, aided by the prince of Lithuania, gain the victory. During this obstinate conflict Moscow was twice besieged. Only its stone walls, lately built, saved it from capture and ruin. At length Olguerd, the fiery prince of Lithuania, died, and Tver yielded. Moscow became paramount among the Russian principalities.
And now Dmitri, with all Russia as his realm, dared to defy the terrible Tartars. For more than a century no Russian prince had ventured to appear before the khan of the Golden Horde except on his knees. Dmitri had thus humbled himself only three years before. Now, inflated with his new power, he refused to pay tribute to the khan, and went so far as to put to death the Tartar envoy, who insolently demanded the accustomed payment.
Dmitri had burned his bridges behind him. He had flung down the gage of war to the Tartars, and would soon feel their hand in all its dreaded strength. The khan, on hearing of the murder of his ambassador, burst into a terrible rage. The civil wars which divided the Golden Horde had for the time ceased, and Mamai, the khan, gathered all the power of the Horde and marched on defiant Moscow, vowing to sweep that rebel city from the face of the earth.
The Russians did not wait his coming. All dissensions ceased in the face of the impending peril, all the princes sent aid, and Dmitri marched to the Don at the head of an army of two hundred thousand men. Here he found the redoubtable Mamai with three times that number of the fierce Tartar horsemen in his train.
"Yonder lies the foe," said Dmitri to his princely associates. "Here runs the Don. Shall we await him here, or cross and meet him with the river at our backs?"
"Let us cross," was the unanimous verdict. "Let us be first in the assault."
At once the order was given, and the battalions marched on board the boats and were ferried across the stream, at a short distance from the opposite bank of which the enemy lay. No sooner had they landed than Dmitri ordered all the boats to be cast adrift. It was to be victory or death; no hope of escape by flight was left; but well he knew that the men would fight with double valor under such desperate straits.
The battle began. On the serried Russian ranks the Tartars poured in that impetuous assault which had so often carried their hosts to victory. The Russians defended themselves with fiery valor, assault after assault was repulsed, and so fiercely was the field contested that multitudes of the fallen were trampled to death beneath the horses' feet. At length, however, numbers began to tell. The Russians grew weary from the closeness of the conflict. The vast host of the Tartars enabled them to replace with fresh troops all that were worn in the fight. Victory seemed about to perch upon their banners.
Dismay crept into the Russian ranks. They would have broken in flight, but no avenue of escape was left. The river ran behind them, unruffled by a boat. Flight meant death by drowning; fight meant death by the sword. Of the two the latter seemed best, for the Russians firmly believed that death at the hands of the infidels meant an immediate transport to the heavenly mansions of bliss.
At this critical moment, when the host of Dmitri was wavering between panic and courage, the men ready to drop their swords through sheer fatigue, an unlooked-for diversion inspired their shrinking souls. The grand prince had stationed a detachment of his army as a reserve, and these, as yet, had taken no part in the battle. Now, fresh and furious, they were brought up, and fell vigorously upon the rear of the Tartars, who, filled with sudden terror, thought that a new army had come to the aid of the old. A moment later they broke and fled, pursued by their triumphant foes, and falling fast as they hurried in panic fear from the encrimsoned field.
Something like amazement filled the souls of the Russians as they saw their dreaded enemies in flight. Such a consummation they had scarcely dared hope for, accustomed as they had been for a century to crouch before this dreadful foe. They had bought their victory dearly. Their dead strewed the ground by thousands. Yet to be victorious over the Tartar host seemed to them an ample recompense for an even greater loss than that sustained. Eight days were occupied by the survivors in burying the slain. As for the Tartar dead, they were left to fester on the field. Such was the great victory of the Don, from which Dmitri gained his honorable surname of Donskoi. He died nine years afterwards (1389), having won the high honor of being the first to vanquish the terrible horsemen of the Steppes, firmly founded the authority of the grand princes, and made Moscow the paramount power in Russia.
IVAN, THE FIRST OF THE CZARS.
The victory of the Don did not free Russia from the Tartar yoke. Two years afterwards the principality of Moscow was overrun and ravaged by a lieutenant of the mighty Tamerlane, the all-conquering successor of Genghis Khan. Several times Moscow was taken and burned. Full seventy years later, at the court of the Golden Horde, two Russian princes might have been seen disputing before the great khan the possession of the grand principality and tremblingly awaiting his decision. Nevertheless, the battle of the Don had sounded the knell of the Tartar power. Anarchy continued to prevail in the Golden Horde. The power of the grand princes of Moscow steadily grew. The khans themselves played into the hands of their foes. Russia was slowly but surely casting off her fetters, and deliverance was at hand.
Ivan III., great-grandson of Dmitri Donskoi, ascended the throne in 1462, nearly two centuries and a half after the Tartar invasion. During all that period Russia had been the vassal of the khans. Only now was its freedom to come. It was by craft, more than by war, that Ivan won. In the field he was a dastard, but in subtlety and perfidy he surpassed all other men of his time, and his insidious but persistent policy ended by making him the autocrat of all the Russias.
He found powerful enemies outside his dominions,—the Tartars, the Lithuanians, and the Poles. He succeeded in defeating them all. He had powerful rivals within the domain of Russia. These also he overcame. He made Moscow all-powerful, imitated the tyranny of the Tartars, and founded the autocratic rule of the czars which has ever since prevailed.
The story of the fall of the Golden Horde may be briefly told. It was the work of the Russian army, but not of the Russian prince. In 1469, after collecting a large army, Ivan halted and began negotiating. But the army was not to be restrained. Disregarding the orders of their general, they chose another leader, and assailed and captured Kasan, the chief Tartar city. As for the army of the Golden Horde, it was twice defeated by the Russian force. In 1480 a third invasion of the Tartars took place, which resulted in the annihilation of their force.
The tale, as handed down to us, is a curious one. The army, full of martial ardor, had advanced as far as the Oka to meet the Tartars; but on the approach of the enemy Ivan, stricken with terror, deserted his troops and took refuge in far-off Moscow. He even recalled his son, but the brave boy refused to obey, saying that "he would rather die at his post than follow the example of his father."
The murmurs of the people, the supplication of the priests, the indignation of the boyars, forced him to return to the army, but he returned only to cover it with shame and himself with disgrace. For when the chill of the coming winter suddenly froze the river between the two forces, offering the foe a firm pathway to battle, Ivan, in consternation, ordered a retreat, which his haste converted into a disorderly flight. Yet the army was two hundred thousand strong and had not struck a blow.
Fortune and his allies saved the dastard monarch. For at this perilous interval the khan of the Crimea, an ally of Russia, attacked the capital of the Golden Horde and forced a hasty recall of its army; and during its disorderly homeward march a host of Cossacks fell upon it with such fury that it was totally destroyed. Russia, threatened with a new subjection to the Tartars by the cowardice of its monarch, was finally freed from these dreaded foes through the aid of her allies.
But the fruits of this harvest, sown by others, were reaped by the czar. His people, who had been disgusted with his cowardice, now gave him credit for the deepest craft and wisdom. All this had been prepared by him, they said. His flight was a ruse, his pusillanimity was prudence; he had made the Tartars their own destroyers, without risking the fate of Russia in a battle; and what had just been condemned as dastard baseness was now praised as undiluted wisdom.
Ivan would never have gained the title of Great from his deeds in war. He won it, and with some justice, from his deeds in peace. He was great in diplomacy, great in duplicity, great in that persistent pursuit of a single object through which men rise to power and fame. This object, in his case, was autocracy. It was his purpose to crush out the last shreds of freedom from Russia, establish an empire on the pernicious pattern of a Tartar khanate, which had so long been held up as an example before Russian eyes, and make the Prince of Moscow as absolute as the Emperor of China. He succeeded. During his reign freedom fled from Russia. It has never since returned.
The story of how this great aim was accomplished is too long to be told here, and the most important part of it must be left for our next tale. It will suffice, at this point, to say that by astute policy and good fortune Ivan added to his dominions nineteen thousand square miles of territory and four millions of subjects, made himself supreme autocrat and his voice the sole arbiter of fate, reduced the boyars and subordinate princes to dependence on his throne, established a new and improved system of administration in all the details of government, and by his marriage with Sophia, the last princess of the Greek imperial family,—driven by the Turks from Constantinople to Rome,—gained for his standard the two-headed eagle, the symbol of autocracy, and for himself the supreme title of czar.
THE FALL OF NOVGOROD THE GREAT.
The Czar of Russia is the one political deity in Europe, the sole absolute autocrat. More than a hundred millions of people have delivered themselves over, fettered hand and foot, almost body and soul, to the ownership of one man, without a voice in their own government, without daring to speak, hardly daring to think, otherwise than he approves. Thousands of them, millions of them, perhaps, are saying to-day, in the words of Hamlet, "It is not and it cannot come to good; but break my heart, for I must hold my tongue."
Who is this man, this god of a nation, that he should loom so high? Is he a marvel of wisdom, virtue, and nobility, made by nature to wear the purple, fashioned of porcelain clay, greater and better than all the host to whom his word is the voice of fate? By no means; thousands of his subjects tower far above him in virtue and ability, but, puppet-like, the noblest and best of them must dance as he pulls the strings, and hardly a man in Russia dares to say that his soul is his own if the czar says otherwise.
Such a state of affairs is an anachronism in the nineteenth century, a hideous relic of the barbarism and anarchy of mediæval times. In America, where every man is a czar, so far as the disposal of himself is concerned, the enslavement of the Russians seems a frightful disregard of the rights of man, the nation a giant Gulliver bound down to the earth by chains of creed and custom, of bureaucracy and perverted public opinion. Like Gulliver, it was bound when asleep, and it must continue fettered while its intellect remains torpid. Some day it will awake, stretch its mighty limbs, burst its feeble bonds, and hurl in disarray to the earth the whole host of liliputian officials and dignitaries who are strutting in the pride of ownership on its great body, the czar tumbling first from his great estate.
This does not seem a proper beginning to a story from Russian history, but, to quote from Shakespeare again, "Thereby hangs a tale." The history of Russia has, in fact, been a strange one; it began as a republic, it has ended as a despotism; and we cannot go on with our work without attempting to show how this came about.
It was the Mongol invasion that enslaved Russia. Helped by the khans, Moscow gradually rose to supremacy over all the other principalities, trod them one by one under her feet, gained power by the aid of Tartar swords and spears or through sheer dread of the Tartar name, and when the Golden Horde was at length overthrown the Grand Prince took the place of the Great Khan and ruled with the same absolute sway. It was the absolutism of Asia imported into Europe. Step by step the princes of Moscow had copied the system of the khan. This work was finished by Ivan the Great, at once the deliverer and the enslaver of Russia, who freed that country from the yoke of the khan, but laid upon it a heavier burden of servility and shame.
Under the khan there had been insurrection. Under the czar there was subjection. The latter state was worse than the former. The subjection continues still, but the spirit of insurrection is again rising. The time is coming in which the rule of that successor of the Tartar khan, miscalled the czar, will end, and the people take into their own hands the control of their bodies and souls.
There were republics in Russia even in Ivan's day, free cities which, though governed by princes, maintained the republican institutions of the past. Chief among these was Novgorod, that Novgorod the Great which invited Rurik into Russia and under him became the germ of the vast Russian empire. A free city then, a free city it continued. Rurik and his descendants ruled by sufferance. Yaroslaf confirmed the free institutions which Rurik had respected. For centuries this great commercial city continued prosperous and free, becoming in time a member of the powerful Hanseatic League. Only for the invasion of the Mongols, Novgorod instead of Moscow might have become the prototype of modern Russia, and a republic instead of a despotism have been established in that mighty land. The sword of the Tartar cast into the scales overweighted the balance. It gave Moscow the supremacy, and liberty fell.
Ivan the Great, in his determined effort to subject all Russia to his autocratic sway, saw before him three republican communities, the free cities of Novgorod, Viatka, and Pskof, and took steps to sweep these last remnants of ancient freedom from his path. Novgorod, as much the most important of these, especially demands our attention. With its fall Russian liberty fell to the earth.
At that time Novgorod was one of the richest and most powerful cities of the earth. It was an ally rather than a subject of Moscow, and all the north of Russia was under its sway and contributed to its wealth. But luxury had sapped its strength, and it held its liberties more by purchase than by courage. Some of these liberties had already been lost, seized by the grand prince. The proud burghers chafed under this invasion of their time-honored privileges, and in 1471, inspired by the seeming timidity of Ivan, they determined to regain them.
It was a woman that brought about the revolt. Marfa, a rich and influential widow of the city, had fallen in love with a Lithuanian, and, inspired at once by the passions of love and ambition, sought to attach her country to that of her lover. She opened her palace to the citizens and lavished on them her treasures, seeking to inspire them with her own views. Her efforts were successful: the officers of the grand prince were driven out, and his domains seized; and when he threatened reprisal they broke into open revolt, and bound themselves by treaty to Casimir, prince of Lithuania.
But events were to prove that the turbulent citizens were no match for the crafty Ivan, who moved slowly but ever steadily to his goal, and made secure each footstep before taking a step in advance. His insidious policy roused three separate hostilities against Novgorod. The pride of the nobles was stirred up against its democracy; the greed of the princes made them eager to seize its wealth; the fanatical people were taught that this great city was an apostate to the faith.
These hostile forces proved too much for the city against which they were directed. Novgorod was taken and plundered, though Ivan did not yet deprive it of its liberties. He had powerful princes to deal with, and did not dare to seize so rich a prey without letting them share the spoil. But he ruined the city by devastation and plunder, deprived it of its tributaries, the city and territory of Perm, and turned from Novgorod to Moscow the rich commerce of this section. Taking advantage of some doubtful words in the treaty of submission, he held himself to be legislator and supreme judge of the captive city. Such was the first result of the advice of an ambitious woman.
The next step of the autocrat added to his influence. Novgorod being threatened with an attack from Livonia, he sent thither troops and envoys to fight and negotiate in his name, thus taking from the city, whose resources he had already drained, its old right of making peace and war.
The ill feeling between the rich and the poor of Novgorod was fomented by his agents; all complaints were required to be made to him; he still further impoverished the rich by the presents and magnificent receptions which his presence among them demanded, and dazzled the eyes of the people by the Oriental state and splendor which had been adopted by the court of Moscow, and which he displayed in their midst.
The nobles who had formerly been his enemies now became his victims. He had induced the people to denounce them, and at once seized them and sent them in chains to Moscow. The people, blinded by this seeming attention to their complaints, remained heedless of the violation of the ancient law of their republic, "that none of its citizens should ever be tried or punished out of the limits of its own territory."
Thus tyranny made its slow way. The citizens, once governed and judged by their own peers, now made their appeals to the grand prince and were summoned to appear before his tribunal. "Never since Rurik," say the annals, "had such an event happened; never had the grand princes of Kief and Vladimir seen the Novgorodians come and submit to them as their judges. Ivan alone could reduce Novgorod to that degree of humiliation."
This work was done with the deliberation of a settled policy. Ivan did not molest Marfa, who had instigated the revolt; his sentences were just and equitable; men were blinded by his seeming moderation; and for full seven years he pursued his insidious way, gradually weaning the people from their ancient customs, and taking advantage of every imprudence and thoughtless concession on their part to ground on it a claim to increased authority.
It was the glove of silk he had thus far extended to them. Within it lay concealed the hand of iron. The grasp of the iron hand was made when, during an audience, the envoy of the republic, through treason or thoughtlessness, addressed him by the name of sovereign (Gosudar, "liege lord," instead of Gospodin, "master," the usual title).
Ivan, taking advantage of this, at once claimed all the absolute rights which custom had attached to that title. He demanded that the republic should take an oath to him as its judge and legislator, receive his boyars as their rulers, and yield to them the ancient palace of Yaroslaf, the sacred temple of their liberties, in which for more than five centuries their assemblies had been held.
This demand roused the Novgorodians to their danger. They saw how blindly they had yielded to tyranny. A transport of indignation inspired them. For the last time the great bell of liberty sent forth its peal of alarm. Gathering tumultuously at the palace from which they were threatened with expulsion, they vigorously resolved,—
"Ivan is in fact our lord, but he shall never be our sovereign; the tribunal of his deputies may sit at Goroditch, but never at Novgorod: Novgorod is, and always shall be, its own judge."
In their rage they murdered several of the nobles whom they suspected of being friends of the tyrant. The envoy who had uttered the imprudent word was torn to pieces by their furious hands. They ended by again invoking the aid of Lithuania.
On hearing of this outbreak the despot feigned surprise. Groans broke from his lips, as if he felt that he had been basely used. His complaints were loud, and the calling in of a foreign power was brought against Novgorod as a frightful aggravation of its crime. Under cover of these groans and complaints an army was gathered to which all the provinces of the empire were forced to send contingents.
These warlike preparations alarmed the citizens. All Russia seemed arrayed against them, and they tremblingly asked for conditions of peace in accordance with their ancient honor. "I will reign at Novgorod as I do at Moscow," replied the imperious despot. "I must have domains on your territory. You must give up your Posadnick, and the bell which summons you to the national council." Yet this threat of enslavement was craftily coupled with a promise to respect their liberty.
This declaration, the most terrible that free citizens could have heard, threw them into a state of violent agitation. Now in defiant fury they seized their arms, now in helpless despondency let them fall. For a whole month their crafty adversary permitted them to exhibit their rage, not caring to use the great army with which he had encircled the city when assured that the terror of his presence would soon bring him victory.
They yielded: they could do nothing but yield. No blood was shed. Ivan had gained his end, and was not given to useless cruelty. Marfa and seven of the principal citizens were sent prisoners to Moscow and their property was confiscated. No others were molested. But on the 15th of January, 1478, the national assemblies ceased, and the citizens took the oath of subjection. The great republic, which had existed from prehistoric times, was at an end, and despotism ruled supreme.
On the 18th the boyars of Novgorod entered the service of Ivan, and the possessions of the clergy were added to the domain of the prince, giving him as vassals three hundred thousand boyar-followers, on whom he depended to hold Novgorod in a state of submission. A great part of the territories belonging to the city became the victor's prize, and it is said that, as a share of his spoil, he sent to Moscow three hundred cart-loads of gold, silver, and precious stones, besides vast quantities of furs, cloths, and other goods of value.
Pskov, another of the Russian republics, had been already subdued. In 1479, Viatka, a colony of Novgorod, was reduced to like slavery. The end had come. Republicanism in Russia was extinguished, and gradually the republican population was removed to the soil of Moscow and replaced by Muscovites, born to the yoke.
The liberties of Novgorod were gone. It had been robbed of its wealth. Its commerce remained, which in time would have restored its prosperity. But this too Ivan destroyed, not intentionally, but effectually. A burst of despotic anger completed the work of ruin. The tyrant, having been insulted by a Hanseatic city, ordered all the merchants of the Hansa then in Novgorod to be put in chains and their property confiscated. As a result, that confidence under which alone commerce can flourish vanished, the North sought new channels for its trade, and Novgorod the Great, once peopled by four hundred thousand souls, declined until only an insignificant borough marks the spot where once it stood.
It is an interesting fact that this final blow to Russian republicanism was dealt in 1492, the very year in which Columbus discovered a new world beyond the seas, within which the greatest republic the world has ever known was destined to arise.
IVAN THE TERRIBLE.
In seeking examples of the excesses to which absolute power may lead, we usually name the wicked emperors of Rome, among whom Nero stands most notorious as a monster of cruelty. Modern history has but one Nero in its long lines of kings and emperors, and him we find in Ivan IV. of Russia, surnamed the Terrible.
This cruel czar succeeded to the throne when but three years of age. In his early years he lived in a state of terror, being insulted and despised by the powerful nobles who controlled the power of the throne. At fourteen years of age his enemies were driven out and his kinsmen came into power. They, caring only for blood and plunder, prompted the boy to cruelty, teaching him to rob, to torture, to massacre. They applauded him when he amused himself by tormenting animals; and when, riding furiously through the streets of Moscow, he dashed all before him to the ground and trampled women and children under his horses' feet, they praised him for spirit and energy.
This was an education fitted to make a Nero. But, happily for Russia, for thirteen years the tiger was chained. Ivan was seventeen years of age when a frightful conflagration which broke out in Moscow gave rise to a revolt against the Glinski, his wicked kinsmen. They were torn to pieces by the furious multitude, while terror rent his youthful soul. Amid the horror of flames, cries of vengeance, and groans of the dying, a monk appeared before the trembling boy, and with menacing looks and upraised hand bade him shrink from the wrath of Heaven, which his cruelty had aroused.
Certain appearances which appeared supernatural aided the effect of these words, the nature of Ivan seemed changed as by a miracle, dread of Heaven's vengeance controlled his nature, and he yielded himself to the influence of the wise and good. Pious priests and prudent boyars became his advisers, Anastasia, his young and virtuous bride, gained an influence over him, and Russia enjoyed justice and felicity.
During the succeeding thirteen years the country was ably and wisely governed, order was everywhere established, the army was strengthened, fortresses were built, enemies were defeated, the morals of the clergy were improved, a new code of laws was formed, arts were introduced from Europe, a printing-office was opened, the city of Archangel was built, and the north of the empire was thrown open to commerce.
All this was the work of Adashef, Ivan's wise prime minister, aided by the influence of the noble-hearted Anastasia. In 1560, at the end of this period of mild and able administration, a sudden change took place and the tiger was set free. Anastasia died. A disease seized Ivan which seemed to affect his brain. The remainder of his life was marked by paroxysms of frightful barbarity.
A new terror seized him, that of a vast conspiracy of the nobles against his power, and for safety he retired to Alexandrovsky, a fortress in the midst of a gloomy forest. Here he assumed the monkish dress with three hundred of his minions, abandoning to the boyars the government of the empire, but keeping the military power in his own hands.
On all sides Russia now suffered from its enemies. Moscow, with several hundred thousand Muscovites, was burned by the Tartars in 1571. Disaster followed disaster, which Ivan was too cowardly and weak to avert. Trusting to incompetent generals abroad, he surrounded himself at home with a guard of six thousand chosen men, who were hired to play the part of spies and assassins. They carried as emblems of office a dog's head and a broom, the first to indicate that they worried the enemies of the czar, the second that they swept them from the face of the earth. They were chosen from the lowest class of the people, and to them was given the property of their victims, that they might murder without mercy.
The excesses of Ivan are almost too horrible to tell. He began by putting to death several great boyars of the family of Rurik, while their wives and children were driven naked into the forests, where they died under the scourge. Novgorod had been ruined by his grandfather. He marched against it, in a freak of madness, gathered a throng of the helpless people within a great enclosure, and butchered them with his own hand. When worn out with these labors of death, he turned on them his guard, his slaves, and his dogs, while for a month afterwards hundreds of them were flung daily into the waters of the river, through the broken ice. What little vitality Ivan III. had left in the republican city was stamped out under the feet of this insensate brute.
Tver and Pskov, two others of the free cities of the empire, suffered from his frightful presence. Then returning to Moscow, he filled the public square with red-hot brasiers, great brass caldrons, and eighty gibbets, and here five hundred of the leading nobles were slain by his orders, after being subjected to terrible tortures.
Women were treated as barbarously as men. Ivan, with a cruelty never before matched, ordered many of them to be hanged at their own doors, and forced the husbands to go in and out under the swinging and festering corpses of those they had loved and cherished. In other cases husbands or children were fastened, dead, in their seats at table, and the family forced to sit at meals, for days, opposite these terrifying objects.
Seeking daily for new conceits of cruelty, he forced one lord to kill his father and another his brother, while it was his delight to let loose his dogs and bears upon the people in the public square, the animals being left to devour the mutilated bodies of those they killed. Eight hundred women were drowned in one frightful mass, and their relatives were forced under torture to point out where their wealth lay hidden.
It is said that sixty thousand people were slain by Ivan's orders in Novgorod alone; how many perished in the whole realm history does not relate. His only warlike campaign was against the Livonians. These he failed to conquer, but held their resistance as a rebellion, and ordered his prisoners to be thrown into boiling caldrons, spitted on lances, or roasted at fires which he stirred up with his own hands.
This monster of iniquity married in all seven wives. He sought for an eighth from the court of Queen Elizabeth of England, and the daughter of the Earl of Huntington was offered him as a victim,—a willing one, it seems, influenced by the glamour which power exerts over the mind; but before the match was concluded the intended bride took fright, and begged to be spared the terrible honor of wedding the Russian czar.
Yet all the excesses of Ivan did not turn the people against him. He assumed the manner of one inspired, claiming divine powers, and all the injuries and degradation which he inflicted upon the people were accepted not only with resignation but with adoration. The Russians of that age of ignorance seem to have looked upon God and the czar as one, and submitted to blows, wounds, and insults with a blind servility to which only abject superstition could have led.