6 September, 10:16
In 1478 Ivan III seized and subjugated the wealthiest trading city in Eastern Europe. He did not annex it, did not inherit it, did not receive it under anyone's will. He took it by force, at the end of a bloody war.
The slaughter on the Shelon river in 1471 set the pattern. Moscow executed the captured leaders of the Novgorod militia by name: in the town of Rusa the headsman took Dmitry Boretsky, son of Marfa, and with him Vasily Selezenev, Kipriyan Arzubyev and Yeremey Sukhoshchek. The rest were distributed among Moscow's prisons or sold back for ransom. Then came the winter blockade and hunger inside the encircled city. Then the veche bell was taken down and carried away. Marfa Boretskaya herself, the woman who held the republic together, was not put to death: she was deported to Moscow and everything the Boretskys owned went into the treasury. Because the principal instrument was never the block. It was deportation, and deportation is worse in its consequences: in 1484 and 1489 merchant and boyar families were shipped out of the city into Muscovy by the thousand, and not one of them came back. Novgorod was not losing individuals. It was losing entire trading dynasties, together with their contacts, their credit and their standing across the Baltic.
Novgorod was never Russian and never Muscovite. It grew out of a pogost, a staging yard beside a marketplace, became a fortified settlement and then a city, and in its form of government it became the Venice of the North, part of the Hanseatic world. It lived under its own law, elected its own posadniks, ran its own diplomacy with Riga, Lübeck, Gotland and Stockholm, and owed Moscow precisely nothing.
Novgorod was a junction. The place where Baltic commerce met eastern commerce, where wax, furs, hides and flax moved west while cloth, salt, silver and metal moved east. Any conqueror with the faintest economic instinct protects a junction like that. You guard it, you feed it, you milk it. Moscow cut its throat.
Ivan III destroyed Novgorod. In the houses of the deported merchant families he installed Muscovite service men, professional looters who neither knew how to trade nor intended to learn. In 1494 his governors, whose competence extended to robbery and killing and no further, wiped out the Hanseatic Kontor, arrested the German merchants and confiscated their goods.
And only then, in 1495, did the Moscow prince march against Sweden, announcing that he was defending the interests of the Novgorod merchant class. The same merchant class he had already ruined and deported. Those he did not deport, he executed.
Destroying Novgorod can be filed under stupidity on a spectacular scale. I argue that it was something else: the execution of an understanding with Venice. Moscow here is not a young state clumsily colonising its neighbours. It is a hired hand, wrecking trade routes to order for competitors on the European commercial field. The contract covered two items: the Hansa, and the Volga corridor.
You identify a mercenary by his work
Let me say for my opponents what they are about to say for themselves: there is no signed contract, there are no documents, and therefore there is no proof. That is true. Nobody will find a sheet of paper in an archive stating who hired the Moscow prince, when, and for how much. No such paper should exist. The commission was too delicate for that.
We can still establish that a hire took place, on three indicators: whose interest he fought for, who stood beside him, and what he was paid in.
So who was standing beside him?
Ivan Fryazin, otherwise Gian Battista della Volpe, an Italian in Moscow service, master of the mint and the envoy sent to Rome to fetch a bride. Zoe Palaiologina did not arrive from Constantinople, which no longer existed. She arrived from Rome, where she had been raised as a political instrument. Other interests ran along the same Moscow channel. In 1472 the Venetian envoy Gian Battista Trevisan travelled through Moscow in secret, tasked with reaching the czar of the Great Horde and turning him against the Ottomans. Moscow was used as a corridor in that operation, and used blind, which is what eventually destroyed Volpe. In 1476 another Venetian ambassador, Ambrogio Contarini, came back through the same lands from Persia, by way of Derbent, Astrakhan and the Volga. Venetian diplomacy walked the exact route under discussion here on its own feet, and filed a detailed report on it.
And the payment? Technology. Aristotele Fioravanti of Bologna did not only build the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow. He ran cannon founding and went out with the armies as a military engineer, Novgorod included. Pietro Antonio Solari, Marco Ruffo and Anton Fryazin raised the Kremlin walls, and the merlons on them are Milanese to this day, cut in the swallowtail of the Italian Ghibellines. The fortress from which the destruction of Novgorod was directed was designed and built by Italians. That is not a hint or a hunch. That is a signature on the object.
Why Venice needed the Volga
To understand the commission you have to understand Venice's position in the second half of the 15th century. Constantinople fell in 1453, Tana was lost, and in 1475 the Ottomans took Caffa. The Black Sea shut completely.
Venice did not lose the Levant trade along with it. Spices continued to come through Alexandria and Aleppo, and by volume the early 16th century was a comfortable period for the Venetians, until the Portuguese sea route round Africa cut under them. What was severed was the northern arm of the eastern trade, the one that ran through Tana and Caffa to the Caspian and on into Persia. That amputated arm had to be replaced with something.
Hence the search for a northern detour. Persia, the Caspian, Astrakhan, the Volga, Moscow, and onward to the Baltic. That is the road Contarini took, and the road the Tver merchant Afanasy Nikitin had taken a few years earlier, which is no private eccentricity but evidence that the route was being probed from both ends.
The detour had one defect, at the far end. The Baltic exit was held by the Hansa, and the Hansa was not a partner. It was a cartel that set prices itself, decided itself who could trade in what, and kept the Novgorodians in a deliberately unequal position. Remove the Hanseatic Kontor from Novgorod, and the northern flow has nowhere to go except through whoever holds Moscow and Kazan.
Now look at Ivan III's moves in sequence rather than in isolation.
1487: Kazan is taken and a client khan, Mohammed-Amin, is installed on the throne. The eastern end of the route is under control.
1492: Ivangorod is built opposite Livonian Narva. Moscow's own gate on the Baltic.
1494: the Hanseatic Kontor in Novgorod is closed, its merchants arrested, its goods seized. The competitor's junction is destroyed.
1495: the campaign against Vyborg. An attempt to take the exit into the gulf.
Five years, four moves, one logic. You may explain it as a chain of accidental border grievances, but then you have to believe that accidents know how to line themselves up in the right order.
The war Moscow lost
On 5 September 1495 another Russo-Swedish war began. Only this time it was not a quarrel between Novgorod and Stockholm. It was an invasion of the kingdom's territory by a Muscovite army. Having conquered and liquidated the veche republic, Ivan III decided to take the western part of the Karelian isthmus and the fortress of Vyborg.
The stated pretext was a violation of the borders set by the Treaty of Orekhovets. This is worth pausing on, because it is the most eloquent detail in the whole story. The 1323 treaty was concluded by Novgorod as a sovereign republic with Sweden. Moscow had no relation to that document whatsoever. Yet Moscow pulled the Novgorod parchment out of the archive and presented it as its own. The institution is destroyed and its rights are appropriated. That is the signature Muscovite operation, and it will be repeated later with the name of Rus, with the Kyivan inheritance, and with anything else that comes to hand.
Ivan III, by then convinced of his own generalship, arrived in Novgorod to command in person. Three large armies moved on Vyborg under princes Daniil Shchenya, Yakov Koshkin-Zakharyin and Vasily Shuisky. The siege dragged on for three months and ended on 30 November 1495 in catastrophe: an explosion in one of the towers, remembered in Swedish tradition as the Vyborg Bang, enormous losses, and retreat.
It got worse. The following year the Swedes landed unexpectedly at Ivangorod and took the brand new fortress with ease. The garrison was wiped out, the works demolished. Ivangorod, built as Moscow's gate to the Baltic, lasted four years.
In 1497, having achieved nothing at all, the Muscovites had to sign a truce with Sweden. The main outcome of the war was the devastation of Ingria, the Izhora land. Muscovy's troops behaved, logically enough, as colonisers and invaders, which is why the passage of the princely armies through the country around the Neva became a catastrophe for the people who lived there.
By any military measure this is a defeat for Moscow. Vyborg not taken, Ivangorod lost, the land burned, the treaty worth nothing. But a commission is judged by its result, not by the elegance of its execution. And the result was this: the Hanseatic Kontor in Novgorod did not reopen. Not in a year, not in five, not in ten. Formally it would be restored in the following century, but what came back was not the same thing. The network was torn, the capital had gone, the reputation of the place was dead, and the merchant families who had run that trade for generations had been deported. The Hansa lost one of its four pillars, and lost it permanently.
Venice may not have captured a new trade route. It did eliminate a competitor.
Who ended up with the route
After that everything ran to schedule, though more slowly than the client would have liked. Moscow finished the Volga under Ivan's grandson: Kazan in 1552, Astrakhan in 1556, and the whole road from the Caspian to the headwaters in a single pair of hands. The northern corridor into Persia opened for business. It opened for the benefit of the next rising hegemon, England.
By then Venice had effectively left the stage. Its century was closing, the centre of accumulation was shifting to Antwerp and onward to Amsterdam and London, and when the English came round the northern sea to the mouth of the Dvina in 1553, it was the English who used the corridor to Persia. Muscovy received exactly what it had been steered towards: the right to levy a toll on somebody else's flow. Not to produce, not to build a fleet, not to raise a merchant class of its own, but to stand on the pipe and charge for passage.
That is a mercenary's pay when he outlives his employer. The house has burned, the contract has rotted, and the contractor is still standing in the ashes holding the key to somebody else's door, and to this day he regards that key as his principal asset.
One more thing that hardly ever gets said about this story. Ingria, laid waste by Shchenya's and Shuisky's armies in 1495, did not go anywhere. Two hundred years later, on that same land, taken by force from the same Swedes a second time, a new capital would be founded and proclaimed a window on Europe. The window was cut in a place where the door had been burned down first.
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