the prestige of Kiev and of Rus’ still higher. His lawcode, the Rus’ska
Pravda, was excellent for his day. It incorporated what was best of the
Slavonic and the Scandinavian traditions. It pictures for us a great
state with its urban and rural classes, with trade and commerce, with
life good for the nobles but far less so for the lower classes and the
indebted peasants, who were burdened with many obligations which they
could scarcely meet.
Yet the difficulties which were ultimately to overwhelm the state were
already visible upon the horizon. The eleventh century was a period of
nation building in Europe. Poland, Hungary, Bohemia were already coming
into existence and aiming for expansion. The Holy Roman Empire, revived
under Charlemagne, was encouraging them to turn to the east for their
further growth. From the east there came a seemingly endless succession
of invading nomad tribes, continuing those movements which had been
sweeping over the black earth region for centuries and millennia.
The new state had no natural boundaries for defence. Only where the
country touched the Carpathian mountains was there any well defined
border. In all other directions, south, east and northwest, the land
lay open to the invaders. That situation which in times of peace had
made Kiev the centre of commerce and had brought it wealth, in time of
war was its greatest menace. It was only in the northeast, where the
great woods sheltered the primitive Finnic peoples still untouched by
culture and Christianity, that there lurked no danger. In all other
areas the princes had continually to be on their guard. The danger was
greatest to the east, for there they were confronted with the highly
mobile nomad troops who could attack with startling suddenness, ravage
the country, and if necessary disappear with the same speed.
The heart of the state was the line of the Dnyeper and so long as that
was not cut, it was possible for Kiev to exist in relative security.
Outside of that, there were scattered throughout the land various
lesser cities, such as Chernihiv and others, which served as rallying
points for the princes and their forces. If it were possible to
coordinate these into an effective system, all would be well.
Yet it was not a time for coordination. Only a leader of superior
personality and ability could hold in check the disruptive tendencies
which made their appearance in every land. There was the bad tradition
of the early feudalism, whereby the various princes and their forces
felt themselves practically independent and able to defy the will of
the central ruler. There was the equally unfortunate custom whereby
that ruler, to satisfy the members of his immediate family, apportioned
out the land into various fiefs. Both Volodymyr and Yaroslav obeyed
this tradition. Each of them had been compelled to fight against his
own brothers and relatives to secure absolute control of the whole
of Rus’ and yet each of them had in turn divided his dominions among
his own children in such a way that the task of unification had to
be recommenced with each succeeding generation. The reason for their
actions was clear. It was necessary to have in each strong post a
strong ruler. It was impossible for a leader to be everywhere at once
and, in the spirit of the day, a strong subordinate felt no scruples
about asserting his own independence and seeking to seize the supreme
power. The Church was the only force that definitely stood for a
national unity. From the Monastery of the Caves at Kiev, bishops went
out to try to maintain some semblance of unity. The Metropolitan of
Kiev had some influence and authority, but he was usually a Greek from
Constantinople and he was not always aware of the questions at issue.
When we consider the turbulence of the times and the external menace,
we can only wonder at the success achieved by some of the more able
rulers. Men like Volodymyr Monomakh, in the twelfth century, could
definitely take their stand on relatively high moral principles, and
use their influence against internal dissensions and the oppression
of their people. Yaroslav could build in Kiev the great Church of
St. Sophia, modelled on the New Church of Constantinople. The arts
flourished.
It is abundantly clear also that the princes were not absolute
sovereigns. They were compelled to pay attention to the wishes of their
higher officers and counsellors, the druzhina. They were compelled also
to give heed to the will of the people of the various cities expressed
through their public assemblies or Veches. In fact in some cities, as
in Novgorod, which really became an aristocratic republic, the Veche
became the controlling body and was able to oust the prince whenever he
displeased it. All of this points to the fact that Rus’ was really a
form of aristocratic democracy, a state in which the power of the Grand
Prince or of any of the subordinate princes was more or less closely
restricted by his ability to hold or alienate the devotion of his
people.
The prize for which all the princes contended was Kiev. Every ambitious
ruler sought to secure the coveted capital. Their efforts exhausted the
country and seriously weakened it against outside aggression. There
were too many cases where dissatisfied and struggling princes were only
too willing to seek foreign aid and make alliances with one of the
western powers or, still worse, with the nomads of the steppes, who
always proved themselves unreliable allies and often inflicted upon
their friends as much damage as they did upon the enemies against whom
their efforts were directed. This was bad in the eleventh century, but
in the twelfth there was an almost continuous civil war and within a
century more than thirty princes had sat upon the throne at Kiev.
Under such conditions it was only natural that there should be a
division of the state. Certain rulers, wearied of the dangerous lures
of ambition, set themselves to secure their own territory safely,
even if they were forced to act as completely independent rulers and
to flout the orders of the central authority. Galicia, the westernmost
portion of the state of Rus’, was the first to assume practical
independence. After the time of Yaroslav the Wise, the princes of this
area set themselves up as provincial rulers and devoted all their
energies to strengthening their own positions at home and abroad. They
tried to keep out of the tangled intrigues for the possession of Kiev
and they worked equally to keep the other princes from interfering
with their own area, so that the province enjoyed relative peace for
some centuries. It was not until the destruction of Kiev by the Tatars
in the thirteenth century that they sought to make their authority
paramount over the entire country. The example of Galicia was followed
by the princes of Chernihiv and by many others, so that the original
unity of Rus’ vanished amid the flames of civil war or in aristocratic
anarchy.
The ruin was accelerated by the appearance of the Polovtsy, another
Turkic tribe, which was far more military and far more ably led than
had been the Pechenegs. During the whole of the twelfth century, they
ravaged the country almost at will and they were sure to find as allies
some of the warring princes who were willing to enlist their aid for
shortsighted personal advantage against other members of their own
people. The damage which the Polovtsy did was well pictured in the
_Song of the Armament of Ihor_. This is a unique work of the
twelfth century and represents the only surviving specimen of the
court poetry of the day. The unknown poet, in picturing the evils that
disorder has brought upon the state, looks back to the whole history
of Kiev and of Rus’, glorifies the princes of old and mourns the
destruction of that splendid state which had been erected by Volodymyr
and Yaroslav.
The worst menace came however from the forest lands of the northeast
which had formerly been the one safe spot on the boundaries. Various
princes, deprived of their lands in Rus’, had gone up to the area
around the headwaters of the Don and the Volga. There, amid the Finnic
population, they had carved out domains for themselves, but they
were not going to be hampered by the constitutional and democratic
traditions that had prevailed at Kiev. In their new homes, they were
able to create a thoroughly autocratic state and to destroy those
rights and privileges which the old druzhinas had been able to maintain
against the prince. They were not content with this alone. They also
were able to keep from starting in their capitals of Vladimir, of
Suzdal and later of Moscow, the various citizens’ councils which had
acquired so much power in Novgorod.
With increasing speed the culture of Moscow separated itself from
that of Kiev. Connections between Kiev and Moscow were difficult,
between Moscow and Constantinople almost impossible. On the other
hand the Volga River easily became a route of commerce and of travel
to the Caspian Sea and this brought Moscow far closer to Armenia and
Georgia, then at their political height, than to Constantinople and the
weakening Byzantine Empire. Architecture and art speedily felt the new
influences. The types of churches that had been developed at Kiev and
Novgorod under Byzantine influence gave way to new patterns borrowed
from the east, with low relief for decorations and with simpler
architectural forms.
Kiev still remained the dominant factor in Rus’. It was a name to be
conjured with, but it did not hold for these northern principalities
the sympathetic appeal that it did for all the princes in the older
part of the country. For a while they continued to yield to the
spell of the older capital and they sought to play their role in the
complicated game of politics. Yet only for a while.
In 1169 Prince Andrey Bogolyubsky sacked the city of Kiev. It was the
most destructive of any of the attacks that had been made against the
southern capital, for this time it was an attempt at ruin and not at
control. When Prince Andrey ordered his soldiers to ravage the city, he
did it because he had no intention of remaining there and making it his
capital. The earlier princes had fought for Kiev; Prince Andrey fought
against it. There was no point in plundering ruthlessly a capital which
the conquerors desired for themselves. There was no reason for sparing
a city which the conquerors desired to ruin. Everything that was of
value, whether of ecclesiastical or civil character, was taken and
the plunder-laden hosts resumed the march to their northern citadel
of Suzdal. Even the Metropolitan of Kiev, the head of the Church,
was taken along with them and Prince Andrey Bogolyubsky could look
with satisfaction at his conquests. He could be sure that it would be
decades, if not longer, before Kiev would rise again from the ruins and
dare to threaten his hegemony.
This sack of Kiev was the most important date in the history of the
country after the introduction of Christianity, for it marked the
separation of Kiev and the northern cities, the line of demarcation
between Ukraine-Rus’ and Moscow. It is idle to speculate what was in
the minds of conquerors and conquered at the very moment of the battle.
There can be no doubt that the princes of Suzdal were the lineal
descendants of Volodymyr and Yaroslav. There can be no doubt too that
their armies were largely composed of men who had never seen and felt
the charm of Kiev, who had no appreciation for the ancient culture of
the old metropolis.
Ukrainian thought has been insistent for centuries that this was
a foreign conquest. The princes of Galicia with the downfall of
Kiev took in a few years the title of Grand Princes of Rus’. They
proudly ignored the new principalities and strove to continue the old
traditions.
To Moscow and the northern princes, this conquest meant the transfer to
them of all the primacy that had clustered around the fallen city. They
proudly called themselves and their metropolitans the rulers of Rus’,
but even so they much preferred to call themselves the Grand Princes of
Moscow. They sneered at their victims and it was many centuries before
they sought to value the city from which they secured their power.
Henceforth the two states went on their independent ways and whatever
unity still survived was to perish in the new historical developments.
While Kiev was still struggling to repair the damage of the terrible
plundering, there appeared a new invader. In 1224 there came the
first onslaught of the forces of Genghis Khan, the dread lord of the
Mongolian Empire. He defeated the combined princes at a battle on the
Kalka River and killed Mstislav of Kiev, but his forces soon withdrew.
They returned in 1240 under the Khan Batu and this time the Mongols and
Tatars came to stay. They sacked and burned Chernihiv and on December
6, 1240 they captured Kiev and ended the old mediaeval state. It was a
terrible and thorough sacking of Kiev and Rus’. When it was over, the
cities were mere shells, the princes annihilated, the land desolate.
Apparently in their misery the ordinary people rose against the princes
at the same time and sought to take vengeance upon their former lords.
At the same time the princes of Suzdal and Moscow led the procession
of nobles who were willing to accept the Mongol Tatar overlordship to
maintain their thrones. They willingly submitted and for two centuries
Moscow, for good or ill, formed part of the Mongolian Empire and later
of its westernmost section, the Golden Horde, with its capital at
Saray near Kazan on the Volga River. Moscow rapidly became Asianized,
its princes married Mongol girls, and whatever had remained of the old
traditions was swallowed up in the new order.
The hope of an independent Rus’ remained only in the West where
the princes of Halich endeavored to increase their power. It was a
truncated state that they dominated. Without the rich hinterland of
the Dnyeper basin and the regions to the east, they were isolated
among the western states which had already come into existence and
which formed part of the Western Roman Catholic world. The Orthodox
state of Rus’ was closely surrounded by Poland and Hungary which had
already succeeded in acquiring control of that section of Rus’ which
was in the Carpathian Mountains. Separately or together, Poland and
Hungary intrigued against or fought with the Princes of Halich and by
the middle of the fourteenth century Poland succeeded in acquiring the
control of Galicia.
In the meanwhile there had come the rise of Lithuania in the north. A
series of able princes pushed their way south through White Ruthenian
territory and later acquired control of Volynia and Podolia. The
rulers of Lithuania were either pagan or Orthodox. The White Ruthenian
Church Slavonic became their court language and the language of
official business. All this won for them a sympathetic hearing from
the dismembered principalities of Rus’, especially as the rule of the
Lithuanians was little harsher than had been the rule of their own
princes in the later days.
By the end of the fourteenth century, the old state of Rus’ had lost
all its independence. It was formally divided between Poland, Lithuania
and Hungary, and the rulers of these countries fought over its
possessions. Only in Lithuania was there a semblance of the old rule,
for it was only there that any of the princes were able to maintain
their prestige and some shreds of their power. Everywhere else, a new
order had been introduced and the princes had been compelled to submit
or vanish into obscurity.
It was a sad time for the people. The glories of the past were gone
and they scarcely lived on, even in the memories of the people. No one
could have recognized in the wretched, depopulated country the once
proud state of Kievan Rus’, which had been acknowledged two centuries
before as an equal of all of the countries of Europe.
CHAPTER FOUR
_THE CULTURAL REVIVAL_
The fifteenth century opened on a ruined state of Rus’-Ukraine. There
was nothing left of the old authority of the state. Its independence
and its wealth were gone and its people had only to remain quiet and
to follow as mute observers the changing pattern of history, for
the fifteenth century saw the beginnings of modern Europe; it saw
the discovery of America, the enormous expansion of Poland and the
independence of Moscow from the Tatar yoke. Mediaeval Europe was
passing into the modern era and Rus’-Ukraine, gone from the map, could
only look on without comprehension.
Everything seemed against the unfortunate people, for the two great
events of the period worked to the disadvantage of the enslaved
Ukrainians.
First came the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. The
collapse of the Byzantine Empire had been gradual. Step by step the
Turks had pushed nearer to the great capital. They had conquered one
province after another, until only the city itself was left upon the
Golden Horn in a splendid isolation. It was in vain that the Emperors
had appealed to the West for military assistance to ward off the final
doom. They secured no answer. At the Council of Florence in 1439, they
had made their submission to the Pope but even this brought them no
practical benefit, for the age of the Crusades had passed. No one of
the secular rulers who were busy carving out states for themselves was
willing to hear the appeal of Rome to divert even a small part of their
energies and resources to the saving of what had been the great centre
of Christianity.
Almost simultaneously with this, Ivan III of Moscow threw off the yoke
of the Golden Horde and Moscow became a free state for the first time
in two centuries. By his marriage with a member of the Paleolog dynasty
of Constantinople, Ivan secured a shadowy claim to the double headed
eagles of Byzantium. He and his followers became enthused with the idea
that they were the lineal descendants of the Empire and that Moscow
was now the Christian capital of the world, the Third Rome, entitled
to recover its ancestral heritage and to shine forth in new glory. It
was a proud ambition for the isolated state which had been orientalized
by submission to the Mongols and Tatars and had sunk in all cultural
matters far below its original source.
In the meanwhile Poland, with its alliance with Lithuania, was rising
to new heights. Proud of its western traditions, the reborn state
wanted to know nothing of the culture of those peoples who had entered
into it. It valued its contacts with Italy and the West. It sought to
wipe out every trace of its connections with the east and the nobles
and peasants of Rus’-Ukraine, with their Orthodox faith, seemed to them
a reflection on the western character of Poland.
Rus’-Ukraine was abandoned by all of its friends at the very moment
when the Spanish traders and merchants were seeking a road to the
riches of the Orient, when the new spirit and the teachers from the
ruined Constantinople were leavening the whole of Europe, when in
England the Wars of the Roses were wiping out the old feudal nobility
and when everywhere new currents of life and of thought were changing
the old system of society. None of these new and healthy currents could
exert any appreciable influence upon the unfortunate state which five
centuries earlier had been the cultural offshoot of the great Byzantine
Empire.
The fall of Constantinople deprived the people of Ukraine of their
cultural and religious support. The patriarchs were so occupied with
the heavy problems of personal survival that they had little or no time
to think of the far distant Ukraine. There were few or no scholars to
send there to carry on schools and to defend the faith. The people
were left to themselves to supply their own cultural needs as best
they could, for Moscow, even though it was the self-styled defender
of Orthodoxy and the Third Rome, was not interested in any cultural
development outside of its own restricted sphere and could listen
gravely to an argument that it was a sin to write or think or add any
knowledge to the world after the Seventh Oecumenical Council.
This left Ukraine at the mercy of Poland and Lithuania. Galling as it
was to be under the control of Lithuania, which had formerly ranked so
low in comparison with Kiev, there were still compensations. Part of
Lithuania was pagan but many of the lords were Orthodox, and Church
Slavonic, especially in its White Ruthenian form, was really the
language of the government records. No matter what was to come, it was
possible, especially for the nobles and the educated, to be sure of a
hearing and of their position in the ruling circles.
It was far different in Poland. From its very beginning Poland had
adopted the Roman Catholic faith and felt itself definitely part of
the West. As such it had inherited the contempt for Orthodoxy that
had been widely spread since the Fourth Crusade. Its kings and rulers
were constantly seeking to eliminate from their body politic and their
ruling class all those people who would not conform, and there was a
steady pressure on the leading families and the leading ecclesiastics
to enter the Roman Catholic Church.
In 1386, Yagello of Lithuania married Queen Jadwiga of Poland and was
baptized in the Roman Catholic Church. Almost at once the spirit of
Lithuanian rule began to change as men trained in the Roman Catholic
faith came to high positions in the state. The result was shown in the
lessening of Orthodox influence. As the decades passed, the influence
of Poland grew and finally the Ukrainian provinces of Lithuania were
definitely brought under Poland and the central Polish system.
This brought with it an increase of Polish and Latin schools. Many
of the leading nobles adapted themselves to the new regime, and
since religion was the chief distinguishing criterion, most of them
definitely became Roman Catholic, and commenced to speak Polish, to
live in the Polish way and to adopt the manners of their social equals
in Poland. All this could not fail to react badly upon the Ukrainian
population, which was still devoutly Orthodox but which was rapidly
being stripped of its nobility and its educated class.
Thus the sixteenth century bade fair to see the definite extinction
of Ukrainian hopes and aspirations and even existence. The Ukrainian
population was rapidly being reduced to an inchoate mass of illiterate
peasants and townspeople without an intelligentsia and even without
any educated clergy. Yet these expectations were not fulfilled. In the
same century there came a revival, at first small in scope and often
deficient in method, but yet vitally important to the preservation of
the national and cultural identity.
This revival concerned itself with education. There spread through
the Ukrainian lands a desire to create schools for the people to
counter-balance the Polish schools. Since there was already pressure
for a union of the Churches, which had won the support of several of
the leading bishops, the new schools adopted a severely Orthodox point
of view. Their leaders were convinced that a knowledge of the new
learning could not fail to weaken the position of the Church. They did
not realize that much of the new learning was itself the result of the
contact between the scholars who had fled to the West after the fall of
Constantinople and the traditional wisdom of the West. The education
became purely religious with very little regard for secular subjects.
At the same time, insofar as it was possible, the leaders sought to
spread a knowledge of the older forms of the Church Slavonic and gave
little heed to the attempts that were being made to adapt this language
to the living speech of the people.
Such a reform was naturally successful in reviving the national
consciousness of the Ukrainians but it could not check the tendency
of many of the more progressive and prominent families to send their
children to the more fashionable Polish schools and thus the leakage of
part of the educated class continued with little abatement. Its success
would have been far greater, had the Patriarch of Constantinople
been able to send a considerable number of scholars to assist in the
organization of the new Greek-Slavonic schools, but unfortunately there
was not the available personnel.