The Icon and the Axe

1438 in the Cathedral of §an Marco21-contact withItaly increased there-afterT Gian-Battista delfa Volpe was put in charge of coinage in Muscovy. Through his intermediacy, the Italian influx reached a climax in the i47o's, with the arrival of a large number of Venetian and Florentine craftsmen in the retinue of Sophia Paleologus, Ivan Ill's second wife. These Italians rebuilt the fortifications of the Moscow Kremlin and constructed the oldest and most beautiful of the churches still to be found there and in the monastery of St. Sergius.22

Sophia came to jluisia^ after „long residence in Italy as the personal, ward of the Roman pontiff and a vehicle for bringing the "widowed" Russian Church into communion with Rome. The persecution of the Judaizers was a cooperative effort on the part of Sophia (and the court supporters of hex sonVasily's J?!aim to the succession)23 and the leaders of the Novgorod hierarchy. Both parties were acquainted with the stern methods of dealing with heretics that had been adopted by the Latin Church in the high Middle Ages. Joseph of Volokolamsk, whose grandfather was a Lithuanian, leaned heavily on the writings of a Croatian Dominican living in Novgorod to defend his position on monastic landhold-ing, just as Gennadius of Novgorod had set up a kind of Latin academy in Novgorod to combat the heretics. Gennadius' leading consultants were two Latin-educated figures whom he brought to Russia for what proved to be long and influential years of service at the imperial court: Nicholas of Liibeck and Dmitry Gerasimov. Gennadius' entourage produced the first Russian translations of a number of books from the Old Testament and Apocrypha; and the model for. the "Bible of Gennadius," which later became the first printed bible in Russia, was, significantly, the Latin Vulgate.24 In the early sixteenth century, moreover, the Josephites supported ecclesiastical claims" to'vast temporal wealth with the spurious document that had long been used by "Western apologists for papal power: the Donation of Constantine.25

If the apprentice inquisitors of Muscovy can be said to have borrowed from the Latin West, the same is even more clear in the case of their victims. "The trouble began when Kuritsyn [the diplomat and adviser of Ivan III] arrived from Hungarian lands," Gennadius wrote.26 The rationalistic heresy which he sponsored and protected in Moscow was only part of a many-sided importation of ideas and habits from the secular culture of the high Renaissance. Indeed, the Josephites-like Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor-conceived of their mission as a service to the people. Ljke_Jhe_. original mquisitorsjof_flie_mediexaLWest, the Russian clergy was faced with appalling ignorance and debauchery in the society they were attempting to hold togetheETTf the ignorance was part of the Russian heritage, the de-

bauchery was at least partly Western in origin. For vodka and venereal disease, two of the major curses of Russia in the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth century, appear as part of the ambiguous legacy of the Italian Renaissance to early modern Russia.

Venereal _disease first came to Moscow along the trade routes froir, Italy, apparently by way of Cracow in the 1490% and a second wave 0{ infection was to come in the mid-seventeenth century (along with the blac]^ plague) by way of mercenaries from the Thirty Years' War.27 The designa^ tion of the disease as "the Latin sickness" is one of the first signs of growing anti-Latin sentiment.28 x

Vodka came to Russia about a century earlier, and its history illus-. trates several key features of the Renaissance impact on Muscovy. This clea* but powerful national drink was one of several direct descendants of aqu^ vitae, a liquid apparently first distilled for medicinal purposes in Wester^ Europe at the end of the thirteenth century. It appears to have reaches Russia by way of a Genoese settlement on the Black Sea, whence it was brought north a century later by refugees fleeing the Mongol conquest of the Crimea.29

It was fateful for Russian morals that this deceptively innocuous, looking beverage gradually replaced the crude forms of mead and beer which had previously been the principal alcoholic fare of Muscovy. The ta^ fifn vodka became a major source of princely income and gave the civjj ^m^prjJyliTvested interest in the intoxication of its citizens. It is both sa^ and comical to find the transposed English phrase Girni drenki okovite^ ("Give me drink aqua vitae": that is, vodka) in one of the early ????. script dictionaries of Russian. A Dutch traveler at the beginning of the seventeenth century saw in the Muscovite penchant for drunkenness an‹j debauchery proof that Russians "better support slavery than freedom, for in freedom they would give themselves over to license, whereas in slavery they spend their time in work and labor."30