CHAPTER VI THE GROWING OF THE GERM
Never since the overthrow on the Sit had a Russian ruler been as emphatically and unquestionably Grand Prince as was Simeon Ivanovitch, yclept “the Proud.” Some of the most valuable provinces had indeed fallen away from the realm, but if the title Prince “of all the Russias,” which Simeon was the first to adopt, was little justified by the facts, at least he was, among his compeers, master of what remained. The very qualification of his powers which the over-lordship of the Khan implied, was in fact an added source of authority, for the Russian mind had come to accept the Mongol dominion with the same submissiveness, if with less enthusiasm, that it displayed towards the paternal tyranny of the Church. Supported by the double certificate of Heaven and Sarai, with the iarlikh[63] of Usbek in his hands and his compliant Metropolitan at his side, the Grand Prince stood head and shoulders above his brother princes and would-be competitors. And here may be noted an advantage which the builders of the Russian Empire possessed over the continuators of the Germanic one, and indeed over most of the princes of Catholic Europe. The Church “went with” the secular authority. In western Christendom the popes, after having entreated the services of emperors and kings as their surest agency for the destruction of the heathen religions, kicked down the ladder by which they had climbed to their high position, and convulsed Europe for many centuries by a bitter strife with the temporal sovereignties; till the up-springing of a new enemy, questioning the Divine authority of tiara and crown alike, drew Pontiff, Kaiser, and absolute monarchs together, like cattle herding in a storm. In Russia no such schism endangered the sanctity of the ruling forces, possibly because no such prosperity had been attained by either. “The palace rubbed shoulders with the Church and the monastery, and was scarcely distinguishable from them.”[64] The Grand Prince was holy and Orthodox, the Church was national and official. Ban and interdict, those bogies of mediæval west Europe, were here familiar sprites which worked at the bidding of the Grand Prince against his enemies. As the worship of the old Slavonic gods Peroun and Volos, Daszhbog, Stribog, etc. gave way by degrees to that of the One-in-Three and the dependent galaxy of saints, so did the old veneration for a crowd of Rurik-descended princes merge gradually into awe of one Heaven-born sovereign and a satellite-band of his officials, amongst whom were the hierarchy of the national Church. And in another respect the Russian rulers had their task simplified for them, namely, in the long-suffering docility of the bulk of their subjects. Here were no defiant goat-herds such as chased the might of the Habsburgs from the Graubunden Alps, no Bauernkriegern kindling the fires of civil war throughout an empire, no Jacquerie distracting an already distraught kingdom. The Slav peasant took all the added ills of life, droughts, famines, Polovtzi, Mongols, grasshoppers, and pestilences, tithes and taxes, with a fatalism he had brought with him from the East, a stoicism learnt possibly from the camel in his nomad days. A man who, in addition to the privations incidental to his poverty, will at the bidding of his Church fast “during the seven weeks of Lent, during two or three weeks in June, from the beginning of November till Christmas, and on all Wednesdays and Fridays during the year,”[65] can have little of the bread-rioter or throne-shaker in his constitution. The very placidity, however, with which he received the dispensations of Providence in whatever shape they chose to assume, rendered his allegiance a matter of circumstance rather than principle. He would accept the mastery of the Lit’uanians, for instance, as he had accepted the Mongols, as he had accepted the Varangians; like a dog of too accommodating disposition, he wagged his tail to whichever master shouted loudest, and just now the Lit’uanian princes were shouting loud indeed. Chiefly as yet among themselves. The death of Gedimin had left his country in a position which required skilful handling, while at the same time the division of the State into eight portions precluded any one prince from having a controlling voice in the direction of affairs—an arrangement which could only lead to disaster. Fortunately for Lit’uania the political foresight and energy of her defunct Grand Duke had descended in full measure upon one at least of his sons, Olgerd of Vitebsk. He, while engaged in ravaging the Order territories in Livland, watching for an attack from across the Polish border, or casting his eyes over the tempting Russian provinces ready to fall into his clutches, saw clearly that to live and expand, to prey and not be preyed upon, Lit’uania must have a guiding hand, one head instead of many. In order to attain his eagle-soaring ambition he borrowed the habits of the cuckoo, and ousted his brothers unceremoniously from the hereditary nest. An exception was wisely made in favour of Kestout, who equalled him in energy and military achievement, and without whose help the coup d’etat could scarcely have been effected. Acting in concert, the brothers seized on the capital, Vilna, and re-established the grand-dukedom; by a happy division of labour Kestout became warden of the Polish and Order-land marches, leaving Olgerd to pursue his conquests and acquisitions in the south-east—an arrangement which enabled the Grand Duke to add Briansk, Seversk, Kiev, and the surrounding district to his possessions, and to retain Volhynia against the King of Poland.[66] With the Prince of Moskva pursuing a policy of cautious inaction, the only safe course open to him under the circumstances, Olgerd was able not only to stretch his dominion from a foothold on the Baltic coast to the shores of the Black Sea, but to obtain a solid influence over the governments of Smolensk, Pskov, and Velikie Novgorod. As early as 1346 he appears to have had a hold on the councils of the latter city; the posadnik Evstaf (Eustace) had spoken unwisely and not well of the great Lit’uanian,—had in fact called him a dog. The indiscreet expression reached the ears of Olgerd, who demanded the death of the offending dignitary. The Vetché armed the city in defence of the posadnik, reconsidered the matter, and ended by sacrificing Evstaf to the resentment of the Grand Duke.[67] An action so opposed to the traditional temper of the proud republic that it is only to be explained by a strong motive of political expediency. And in fact an alliance with Lit’uania was valuable to Pskov and Novgorod, both as a bulwark against German aggression and as a counterpoise to the encroaching power of Moskva. In the former relation, the resisting power of the leagued principalities of the North was severely tested by the warrior monks of the Order; able to draw unfailing supplies of men and marks from the States of the Empire, the knights had bought Estland from the King of Denmark (1347), had inflicted a severe defeat on the Lit’uanian army (1348), and later carried war and desolation into the lands of Polotzk, Pskov, and Novgorod (1367). With the help of Olgerd the Russians were able to make a diversion upon Dorpat, and peace was at length effected with the Order in 1371.[68] From this it will be seen that the Grand Duke of Lit’uania was a far more prominent figure in the land than the Grand Prince “of all the Russias.” But of the policy of these two contrasted state-workers it may be said that while Olgerd built, the son of Kalita dug. Intrenching himself around the unit of Moskva, the last-named silently and persistently undermined the power of the neighbouring princes, and established his own authority on a sure foundation. Novgorod might wait; Lit’uania might wait; the Horde might wait.
Thus delving and waiting ruled Simeon, so quaintly named “the Proud,” till death swept him into his cherished cathedral—a victim, possibly, to the terrible Black Pestilence which was then desolating Russia.
1353-1359
The succeeding Grand Prince, Ivan Ivanovitch, who found favour in the sight of the new Khan Tchanibek, displayed all his brother’s patience without any of his policy. His weakly pacific reign marked a partial thaw in the iron frost of Moskovite supremacy, which had bound North-east Russia in its grip under the rule of his three immediate predecessors. Souzdal, Riazan, and Tver blossomed anew into independence, and enjoyed a S. Luke’s summer of importance and anarchy. The Novgorodians, who had exerted themselves to obtain the election of Konstantin of Souzdal to the grand princedom, only recognised Ivan on the death of the former (1354), and were little troubled by the interference of their sovereign.[69] Their own domestic affairs were sufficiently exciting to absorb their attention; the election of a posadnik in the spring of 1359 gave rise to a fierce quarrel between the inhabitants of the Slavonic quarter and those of the Sofia ward, and for three days the hostile factions fought around the famous bridge, and were only separated by the intervention of their Archbishop and ex-Archbishop, whose combined exhortations at length restored peace to the agitated city.[70]
If Novgorod owed much to the well-directed influence of her prelates, the House of Moskva was even more indebted to the exertions and services of the Metropolitan Aleksis, who loyally supported its interests under the most discouraging circumstances. When the weary Ivan had closed his inglorious reign, when “having failed in many things,” he had “achieved to die,” the foundations painfully hewn out by his forerunners were almost swept away; a new Khan had arisen who knew not Moskva, and Dimitri Konstantinovitch of Souzdal entered Vladimir in triumph, with the iarlikh in his hand. Souzdal, Riazan, Tver, and Velikie Novgorod exulted in the downfall of their ambitious neighbour, and the work of generations seemed undone. Then was it that Vladuika Aleksis, seeing in Dimitri Ivanovitch more promising material than had existed in his father, took advantage of the chaos existing at the Horde—where Khan succeeded Khan in a whirlwind of revolutions—to obtain a counter-iarlikh for the young Prince of Moskva. Thus Dimitri was opposed by Dimitri, each boasting the favour of Sarai, but the Moskovite enjoying the support of Holy Church. New intrigues gave the Souzdal kniaz once more the countenance of the Horde, but Dimitri Ivanovitch dared to disregard the displeasure of a Khan who was here to-day and might be gone to-morrow; riding forth at the head of his boyarins and followers, long accustomed to be uppermost in the land, he drove his rival from Vladimir and carried the war into the province of Souzdal, besieging the capital. The Konstantinovitch submitted, and the grand princely dignity returned to the House of Moskva.
1362
Well had Aleksis earned his subsequent canonisation.
A few years later the Black Death, brought into the district of Nijhnie-Novgorod by travelling merchants, recommenced its ravages throughout Central Russia. Its victims were counted by thousands, and though the account of its sweeping effect at Smolensk, in which city there were said to remain but five survivors,[71] is probably an exaggeration, an idea can be formed of its destructive nature by the number of princes who were stricken down in a single year.
1365
The Grand Prince’s brother Ivan, Konstantin of Rostov, Andrei, brother of the Prince of Souzdal, and four of the Tverskie family, were victims of the dread pestilence, more wholesale even in its work than the Mongols in the first fury of their invasion.[72] In its wake sprang up a crop of quarrels, the result of such a legacy of vacant fiefs. Boris of Souzdal having seized on his deceased brother’s appanage (Nijhnie-Novgorod), to the despite of his elder, Dimitri, the latter was driven to throw himself into the hands of his namesake and rival, the Grand Prince of Moskva, who forced the supplanter to disgorge his prey. In Tver, likewise, the death of Simeon had brought his brother Ieremiya, his uncle Vasili, and his cousin Mikhail, into competition for his territorial possessions. The last-named was pursuing in Tver the same policy of aggrandisement and centralisation that had obtained such successful results for Moskva; naturally his proceedings were watched with jealous eyes by Dimitri, the Metropolitan, and the Moskovite boyarins, who took up the cause of Mikhail’s opponents and drove him more than once from his province. Mikhail invoked the aid of his wife’s father, Olgerd.
1369
The great Lit’uanian, whose arms had checked the tide of Teutonic conquest and driven the Tartars from the Western steppes, who had wasted the outskirts of Revel and laid classic Kherson in ashes, marched now against the might of Moskva, his rival in the Russian lands. With him came his loyal brother Kestout, and, because he must, the Kniaz of Smolensk. The might of Moskva contracted within the high stone battlements of its Kreml, which, in the depth of winter, was too strong a hold for the Lit’uanians to attack. Olgerd contented himself with sacking the surrounding country, and carried back a spoil of cattle and church furniture as witness of his triumph.
1370
The following year, however, Mikhail, again driven from his hereditary dominions, again appealed to Olgerd for assistance, and with the first November snows came the Lit’uanian-Smolenskie host against Moskva. History repeated itself; a second time the Kreml, rising fair and glittering in its sheen of white stone and silvery frost, above the blackened ruins that lay around it, defied the force that gathered against its walls. Olgerd hovered in vain around the impregnable obstacle to his crowning triumph. Russian troops, under Vladimir Andrevitch, the Grand Prince’s cousin, were gathering on his flank, those pied crows, the Knights of Mary, were croaking ominously on his northern frontier, while an early thaw threatened to impede his line of retreat through the snow-banked forests.
Under these circumstances the old warrior slacked the rigour of his onslaught and made an honourable peace with the enemy whom he could not crush.
1371
The indomitable Mikhail continued, nevertheless, to wage a fitful war with his hereditary foe, now invoking the support of Mamai Khan, the new master of the Golden Horde, now calling in the Lit’uanians, till at length, hotly besieged in his city of Tver, he was obliged to submit to the victorious Dimitri and recognise the supremacy of the House of Moskva.
1375
Secure in his own dominions, the Grand Prince was able to turn his attention to the hostile forces which weighed on him on either side. In the West the crushing pressure of the Lettish power was for a time relaxed.
1377
The Grand Duke Olgerd, “one of the greatest statesmen of the Middle Ages,”[73] the clangour of whose arms had vibrated round Polish castle and Order keep, had roused the echoes of the Moskva Kreml, and startled the pirates of the Black Sea coast, was now among “the quiet people”;[74] of his many sons, Yagiello succeeded him in the Grand Ducal dignity. Hampered by a large circle of brothers, half-brothers, cousins, and other inconvenient relatives, he set to work vigorously to weed out his superfluous kinsfolk; the aged Kestout, the companion-in-arms and faithful supporter of Olgerd, was one of the first victims of the son’s purging operations. Lured into his power, he was immured within the castle of Kreva, where he was found one day strangled; his son Vitovt escaped the same fate by a flight into the Order territory, while Andrei Olgerdovitch, Prince of Polotzk, sought at Moskva shelter from his half-brother’s hostility. Dimitri had the satisfaction of lending his support to this malcontent, as Olgerd had aided the Prince of Tver. But while Moskovite troops ravaged the Russian territories of Yagiello, Dimitri from his capital was watching the storm-clouds that had been slowly piling in the East. Nursed into their position of authority by the favour and support of the Horde, the Princes of Moskva had become too important and too exalted to continue their former humble attitude towards the Khans; like a wasp entangled in a spider-web, the Velikie Kniaz was over-big a captive to be held comfortably in the meshes of a degrading thraldom. Hence the altered relations between Moskva and Sarai, which had resulted in a series of desultory engagements, not openly avowed at the headquarters of either side, but tending steadily towards a more pronounced rupture. Nijhnie-Novgorod had twice suffered the fate of a border town in troublous times, and been laid in ashes by the Mongols; Riazan had experienced the like misfortune. On the other hand a more important collision had taken place on the banks of the Vodjha, where Dimitri had repulsed an army of raiders sent against Riazan by the Khan himself (1377). For three years the vengeance of Mamai had loomed, black and menacing, on the eastern horizon, like a slowly gathering storm that gains added horror from the unmeasurable approach of its outburst; at Moskva men watched for the horsemen who should one day ride out from the forest and clatter into the city with the news that the Hordes were coming. In the summer of 1380 the storm burst; Dimitri learned that the Khan was moving against them with a large army, that Yagiello, “who had small cause to love the Moskva Prince,” was in league with the Mongol, and that Oleg of Riazan was secretly preparing to throw in his lot with the invaders.[75] Was this to be the end of all the delving and striving? Was Moskva to lie in ruins, like another Kiev, a victim to her own renown? At least she should fall fighting. The Velikie Kniaz gathered under his standard the princes and soldiery of such Russian lands as he could command. From Bielozero, Rostov, Mourom, Souzdal, Vladimir, and other quarters, came pouring in the fractions of the first national army that had assembled in Russia since the old wars with the Polovtzi. Beneath the towers of the stately Kreml they mustered, 150,000 strong, to hail the birth of the new Empire, or, who knew, to share its ruin. Deep-mouthed clanged the bells of Moskva over the humming city, palely burned a thousand tapers before the shrines of good S. George and Mikhail the archangel; even the holy Sergie, founder of the famed Troitza lavra,[76] left his beaver-haunted solitudes to give his blessing on the high enterprise. Forth to the banks of the Don rode Dimitri Ivanovitch with his mighty army; before him went a sable banner, from whose folds gleamed the wan white Christ of Calvary; behind him came serried ranks of princes, the descendants of Rurik, save two who were the sons of dead Olgerd. On the wide plain of Koulikovo, the field “of the woodcocks,” by the blue waters of the Don, the might of Moskovite Russia crashed headlong against the strength of the Golden Horde, and fought through the red September day till wounds and weariness numbed their failing arms. Then through their ranks flashed the unpent reserves, led by young Vladimir Andreievitch, whirled the wild charge into the Mongol hosts, swept into rout the swarthy horsemen of Asia, swelled the hoarse shouts for S. George, for S. Glieb, and S. Boris, drowning the pealing war-yells for Allah; they break, they are killed, they are conquered, the God of the Christians has wakened, the Prince of the Russias has won a new title for ever, Dimitri Ivanovitch Donskoi! Dimitri of the Don.
Possibly the result of the battle was not so one-sided as the glowing accounts of the Russian historians painted it, but the immediate effect gave fair hope for the future. Yagiello withdrew his forces into Lit’uania, and thither fled the traitorous Oleg of Riazan; the Mongols vanished across the Oka, and the enemies of Dimitri seemed melted like snow before the summer of his victory. The Russians dreamed that they were free. Not so lightly were they to be rid of these dusky wolf-eyed warriors, who teemed in the wide, arid plain-land of Asia like rats on an old threshing-floor. In the East had arisen a new star of battle to lead them in the footsteps of the mighty Jingis, Timur the Lame, “conqueror of the two Bokharas, of Hindostan, of Iran, and of Asia Minor.”[77] At the Golden Horde appeared one of his captains, Tokhtamitch, who routed and hunted to death the ill-starred Mamai, and seized upon his khanate. Following on this revolution came a message from the new Khan to the Russian princes, couched in friendly terms, but requiring their presence at his Court. This was too much for the Grand Prince and his proud Moskovites to stomach, and Dimitri returned an answer befitting the victor of Koulikovo. But the defiance of the capital found no echo in the other Russian lands; not a second time did they care to face in doubtful conflict foes who were so terrible in victory, so easily recruited after defeat. Too many brave boyarins and bold spearmen had perished on the field of the woodcocks, too many gaps had been made in their ranks which could not be filled at such scant notice. Dimitri of Souzdal sent his two sons to the Horde; Oleg, pardoned and restored to his province, intrigued once more with the enemies of Moskva.
1382
Against that city marched the Khan with his Tartar army, guided thither by the traitorous Kniaz of Riazan, and bearing in his train the young princes of Souzdal. Dimitri took the prudent, if unheroic part of leaving his capital to defend itself, and seeking meanwhile to gather an army capable of threatening the Mongol flank. The flight of the Metropolitan, Syprien (successor of S. Aleksis), was not open to so favourable an interpretation. The Kreml, ably defended by its garrison, under the command of Ostey, called in the Chronicles a grandson of Olgerd, held the enemy at bay for three days; on the fourth the defenders weakly opened the gates to a ruse of the wily Khan, and the capital of the new Russia received a baptism of blood. When the invaders withdrew, bearing with them all that was worth removing, it was a silent city that they left behind them—a city peopled by 24,000 corpses, meet gathering ground for wehr-wolf, ghoul, and vampire, a wild Walpurgis Nacht for the Yaga-Babas of Slavonic lore. Nor was Moskva alone in her desolation; Vladimir, Zvenigorod, and other towns were sacked and burnt by detachments of the Mongol army. The defeat of one of these bands by a Russian force under Vladimir of Moskva checked the ravages of the invaders, and Tokhtamitch led his hordes back across the Oka, leaving Dimitri to repair as best he might the woes of his province, and to revenge himself on those who had betrayed or deserted him in the hour of his need. If his kingdom was in ruins, at least he was master of what remained; the Metropolitan was deposed, Oleg was forced to fly, and his fief, already ravaged by the Mongols, was harried anew by the Grand Prince’s followers. Burning with indignation against the enemy whom he had thought crushed for ever on the banks of the Don, Dimitri had yet to realise that he must return to the policy of his fathers, and wear again the yoke he had thrown so proudly off. Mikhail of Tver, who bore him an undying hatred, had shared neither in Moskva’s triumph nor in her distress, and now was plotting openly to obtain for himself the Grand Principality. With all his losses Dimitri was still the wealthiest of the Russian princes, and a timely submission enabled him to find grace in the eyes of the Khan.
1384
A new impost was exacted throughout the land, and the young princes—Vasili of Moskva, Aleksandr of Tver, Vasili and Simeon of Souzdal—were held as hostages at Sarai. Russia awoke from her dream of liberty to find that her God still slept.
While mourning their relapse into a state of dependence, and involved in a quarrel with the troublesome republic of the north, the Moskovites learned a disquieting piece of intelligence; Yagiello, their formidable neighbour on the west, who held more Russian lands almost than did Dimitri, had added the kingdom of Poland to his possessions.
1386
The long succession of princes of the House of Piast had come to an end, in its direct line, with Kazimir the Great, who since 1370 had lain in a side chapel of the Cathedral at Krakow, where his effigy in red brown marble yet reclines under its fretted canopy. Louis, the Angevin King of Hungary, who succeeded him on the Polish throne, had died in the year 1382, leaving a daughter, Yadviga, to uphold her right as best she could in a country already marked by the intractability of the crown vassals. Yadviga only obtained the support of the Diet (composed of the nobles and higher clergy of the realm) by leaving in its hands the selection of her husband and consort. The choice of the assembly fell upon the Grand Duke of Lit’uania, whose election would at the same time remove a possible enemy from their eastern border, and furnish them with a protector against the hated Teutonic Order on their north. For this monster of their own creation (a Polish duke had been the first to give the knights a foothold in Prussia) was gradually squeezing them out from touch with the Baltic and displacing their authority in Eastern Pomerania. One of the indispensable conditions attached to the betrothal and election of Yagiello was that he should adopt Christianity of the Roman Catholic pattern; “no cross, no crown.” The prospect of a peaceable accession to the Polish throne effected what all the endeavours, spiritual, diplomatic, and militant, of priests, popes, and grand masters had been unable to accomplish; Yagiello became the apostle prince of Lit’uania, and Catholic sovereign of Poland.[78] In his new character of a zealous son of the Church, the Grand Duke set to work to bring Lit’uania within the pale of the official religion; the pagan groves were cut down, the sacred fires that burned in the castle of Vilna extinguished, the mystic serpents killed, and the people baptized by battalions. According to a Russian historian, those who already professed the Greek faith were forcibly converted, and two boyarins who clung obstinately to Orthodoxy were put to death by tortures.[79]
If Rome swept this valuable State into her fold, the Russian Church, despite the rather depressing circumstance of a confused succession to the Metropolitan office, was not without the triumph of extending her rites over heathen lands. A monk of Moskva carried the light of the Gospel into the lorn and benighted lands of the Permians, a Finn tribe which dwelt in the northern valley of the Kama, beneath the shadow of the Ourals. Supported by the authority of the Grand Prince, he overthrew the worship of the Old Golden Woman, a stone figure with two infants in her arms, before whose shrine reindeer were annually sacrificed; had she been more restricted in her family arrangements she might have been quietly incorporated in the new religion.
In 1389 Moskva mourned her prince, Dimitri Donskoi, who died while yet in his prime. A variant from the type of cold, stern princes who had built up the power of his house, Dimitri was a throw-back to the old light-hearted Slavonic kniaz, before the Norse blood had died out of his veins, or ever that of Turko or Mongol had crept in. And if he gained no fresh ground for Moskva, and left Tver and Souzdal and Riazan still under independent masters, at least he gave Russia a spasm of liberty and renown in an age of gloom and bondage, and obtained for his eldest son the undisputed succession to the Grand Principality.
Vasili Dmitrievitch Moskovskie, to give him his distinguishing title (since 1383 there had reigned a Vasili Dmitrievitch at Souzdal), ascended the throne under more favourable circumstances than had a few years earlier seemed probable. On the west, Vitovt, son of the murdered Kestout, had placed himself at the head of the Lit’uanian malcontents in opposition to the King of Poland, who in cultivating the goodwill of his new subjects had lost that of his old ones. Thus in that direction the threateners of Moskva’s existence were at strife among themselves. In the east Tokhtamitch was contemplating a rebellion against the authority of his lord and protector, Timur, a circumstance which lifted the position of the young Prince of Moskva at the Horde from that of a humble vassal to that of a desired ally. His father would probably have taken advantage of this fact to sever once more his dependence on the Khan; Vasili turned it to a more practical use.
1391
With costly presents, and probably promises of future support, the Grand Prince bought an iarlikh which gave him possession of Nijhnie-Novgorod, a fief long since granted to Boris of the House of Souzdal.[80] Vasili was received with acclaim by the inhabitants, and Boris, deserted on all sides, had to bow to the decree of fate, represented in this instance by the iarlikh from Sarai.
1394
On the death of the ousted prince his nephews, Vasili and Simeon of Souzdal, attempted to reunite Nijhnie-Novgorod with their hereditary appanage, with the result that Vasili of Moskva seized on both provinces and drove his cousins into exile. Many and fruitless were the efforts made by the brothers to recover their lost principalities; Vasili had developed a Habsburgian tenacity in holding to whatsoever he acquired, and the ex-princes of Souzdal had in the end to acquiesce in their spoliation. Events in the West meanwhile had taken an unforeseen and not altogether favourable turn. The Teutonic Order had been placed in an awkward position by the wholesale entrance of the Lit’uanians into the bosom of the Church, which event left the crusaders no more heathen to convert; hence the joy which they shared with the angels over the salvation of their long recalcitrant brothers was tinged with resentment towards the Poles, and especially towards Yagiello. The Grand Master sulkily refused to stand sponsor to the latter at his baptism,[81] and the Order prepared, from motives of self-defence, to give active support to the pretender Vitovt, who was enabled with its assistance to continually harry the domains of his royal kinsman, till at length Yagiello, set upon by Catholics, Orthodox, and pagans alike, ceded to him the grand duchy, under the direct suzerainty of the Polish Crown (1392),[82] an arrangement which did not bring repose either to the Order or to Moskovy. The Grand Duke Vitovt was another edition of his uncle and grandfather; his arms swept far beyond the ample limits of his principality, and under his vigorous rule Lit’uania attained her greatest extent, and perhaps her greatest power. Father-in-law to Vasili, he did not hesitate to continue the slow absorption of Russian territory commenced by his predecessors; Smolensk dropped from the feeble hands of its hereditary princes into the actual posses sion of the Grand Duke, who thus brought his dominions into contact with the principality of Tver, long the hatching-ground of disaffection to the supremacy of Moskva. Vitovt would probably have accomplished even more in the way of conquest and annexation if his ambition had not given too wide a scope to his efforts. While Vasili watched anxiously for the next move of this exciting father-in-law new troubles sprang up in the East; it se