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Chapter 5: Civil War in Muscovy
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Chapter 5 Civil War in Muscovy The victor of the Battle of Kulikovo, Grand Prince Dmitrii Donskoi, was succeeded on the throne of Muscovy by his eldest son, Vasilii Dmitrievich, Vasilii I. Before his death, however, Donskoi had taken a step which, while designed to ensure the security of his realm, was to result in disaster. In making out his will Donskoi stipulated that since Vasilii had as yet no heir, the throne should pass from him to his younger brother, Yurii Dmitrievich. When Vasilii I later fathered a son, Vasilii Vasilievich, the stage was set for a classic medieval Russian dynastic succession dispute between direct and collateral heirs. It was inevitable that upon the death of Vasilii I there would be a contest between the patrimonial claims of the direct descendent still in his minority and the “seniority” rights of the elder uncle. The result was violent civil war within the Muscovite house that lasted for most of the second quarter of the fifteenth century. Upon the death of Yurii Dmitrievich, his cause was taken up by his two sons, Dmitrii Krasnii and Dmitrii Shemiaka, whose court, the Shemiakin sud, became synonymous in Russian folklore with corrupt justice . In the brutal internecine struggle, two Riurikids had their eyes put out, many boyare were ruined, and untold damage was done to property and countryside. If the war was inevitable, so was its involvement of the Tatars, for the power to award the throne of the grand prince of Vladimir lay with the khan of the Golden Horde. The actual role of the Horde in the eventual resolution of the conflict remains unclear and is not the concern of the present work. Rather, we shall examine how the Russian chroniclers and the society they spoke for perceived the contribution, so to speak, of the Tatars to the development of the civil war in Muscovy. The chronicle entries about the war that deal with Tatar activities underwent almost no textological variation. They were either included in a chronicle or they were not, and in our present state of knowledge about the relationships among the chronicles in the second half of the fifteenth century, it is not possible to draw any obvious conclusions from which entries appear in which chronicles. It is possible, of course, that a pattern may emerge in the distribution of the entries which will allow us to 158 THE TATAR YOKE correlate particular chronicles, social groups, and points of view, and to illuminate the varieties of social response to the war. The Muscovite civil war was so confused that there is disagreement about the course of political events.1 (Each stage of the conflict was marked by the ratification of a series of treaties among the princes, but these tell us little about Russo-Tatar relations other than who, at a given moment, was permitted direct communication with the Horde.)2 In 1425, Vasilii II and his uncle and rival, Yurii Dmitrievich, agreed that the tsar´, i.e., the Mongol khan, would choose the next grand prince,3 though legally, of course, the khan’s prerogative to do this had never been abrogated. For a time, nothing further happened . Vasilii was then enjoying the powerful protection of two men, his grandfather and guardian, Grand Prince Vitovt of Lithuania, and Metropolitan Fotii. While these two lived, Yurii could not act with any expectation of success . Then, in 1432, with both Vitovt and Fotii dead, the struggle for the throne began in earnest.4 Vasilii II and Yurii Dmitrievich both travelled to the Horde, though it is not known if they went together, or, if not, which of them went first. In the chronicle, Vasilii is greeted there by Min Bulat, a supporter of his who is the ulus doroga Moskovskii (the title implies that Min Bulat had administrative responsibility for the Muscovite principality). Yurii also has an ally, Prince of the Horde Taginia of the Shirin clan, one of the most powerful Tatar clans in the Crimea. As soon as Yurii arrives at the Horde, Taginia escorts him to the 1 Of the various narratives of the Muscovite civil war, I have found most useful and followedmost often Cherepnin, Obrazovanie russkogo tsentralizovannoqo gosudarstva , pp. 748–767, 768–770, 779–784, 787–791, 801–805. For his inimitable views see I. Grekov, Ocherki po istorii mezhdunarodnykh otnoshenii Vostochnoi Evropy XIV–XVI vv., pp. 118–51. 2 Much of the pathbreaking research on the significance of these treaties for the history of...