The Icon and the Axe

Nevej^ielejs1jthergjEas_a decisive cultural_and political break between Latin^Europe_and the Orthodox Eastern Slavs in the thirteenth and fpur-teenth_c_ejitori£s._Catholic^Europe concentrated jts interest on the Western SlavSj^and^splayed more interest in the Mongol and Chinese empires to the ejis^jthjinjn^Great Russia. Muscovy, in turn, became preoccupied with the geopolitics of the Eurasian steppe, and lost sight of the Latin West except as a harassing force that had occupied Constantinople and encouraged Teutonic forays against Russia.

Great Novgorod," as it was called, was the "father," just as Kiev was the "mother," of Russian cities.3 The peaceful coexistence of Eastern and Western culture within this proud and wealthy metropolis is dramatized by one of its most famous and imposing landmarks: the twelfth-century bronze doors of the Santa Sophia cathedral. One door came from Byzantium, the other from Magdeburg; one from the seat of Eastern empire, the other from the North German city that had received the model charter of urban self-government from the Western Empire.4 Novgorod had older traditions of independence and more extensive economic holdings than Magdeburg or any other Baltic German city. But Novgorod faced in the rising grand dukes of Muscovy a far more ambitious central power than the Holy Roman Emperors had become by the fifteenth century.

The cultural split betweenjvloscow andJ4oygorod was far more formidable than the geographical divide which the wooded Valdai Hills defined between the upper tributaries of the Volga and the river-lake approaches to the Baltic. Novgorod Had completely escaped the Muscovite subjection to the Mongols, and had developed extensive independent links with the Hanseatic League. Novgorodian chronicles reflected the commercial preoccupations of the city by including far more precise factual information on municipal building and socioeconomic activity than those of any other region.5 WhejLMoscow launched its military assault against Novgorod in the 1470's, it was still paying tribute to the Tatafs^andTising Mongol terms in finance and administration, whereas Novgorod was trading oh favorable terms with a hostof Western powers and using a German monetary system.6 Literacy was, moreover, almost certainly decreasing" m"T3bicowT)ecause of the increasingly, ornate language and script of its^redomiriately ^monastic culture;whereasliteracy had risen steadily in Novgorod to perhaps 8 Q per centJ3f^elandhoMmgIcksses..thrcjigh the increasing use of birch-bark cornpesciaLreeords.7

– "" The^lusc^te^as^ult on-Jfevgorod -«(as, thus, in many_ ways, Jhe first internal conflict between Eastward- and. Westward-looking Russia- foresbadOTvmgJhat_wffich was later to develop between Moscow and St. Pe1,ej5burg. In subjugating~Novgorod; the Moscow of Ivan III was aided not just by superiority of numbers but also by a split between East and West within Novgorod itself. This split became a built-in feature of Westward-looking Russian gateways to the Baltic. Sometimes the split was clear-cut, as between the purely Swedish town of Narva and the Russian fortress of Ivangorod, built by Ivan III across the river on the Baltic coast. The split ran directly through the great port of Riga, when Russia took it over and surrounded a picturesque Hanseatic port with a Russian provincial city. One Riga centered on a towering late Gothic cathedral containing the

largest organ in the world; the other Riga was dominated by a xenophobic Old Believer community that forbade any use of musical instruments. The. split became more subtle and psychological in St. Petersburg, where completely Western externals conflicted with the apocalyptical feare of a superstitious populace.

The~split in Novgorod was all of these things. There was, to begin with, a 'cleafdivisionInarked by the Volkhov River between the merchant quarteTon the right and the ecclesiastical-administrative section on the left. There~was an architectural contrast between the utilitarian, wooden structures of the formerAndjfc-mareperrnanent and stately Byzantine structures of the latter. Most important and subtle, however, was the ideological split between jrepublican^ and autocratic, cosmopolitan and xenophobic tendencies. By the fourteenth~century, Novgorod had both the purest republican government and the wealthiest ecclesiastical establishment in Eastern Slavdom.8 The latter acted, for the most part, as a kind of ideological fifth column for Moscow: exalting the messianic-imperial claims of its grand prince in order to check the Westward drift of the city.