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.
As early as 1348 the Novgorod hierarchy haughtily referred the king of Sweden to the Byzantine emperor when the Western monarch proposed discussion of a religious rapprochement.9 Conscious of its unique role of independence from the Tatars and unbroken continuity with Kievan times, articulate and imaginative Novgorodian writers cultivated a sense of special destiny. They argued that Novgorod received Christianity not from Byzantium, but directly from the apostle Andrew; that Japheth, the third son of Noah, had founded their city; and that holy objects-the white monastic hood allegedly given by the Emperor Constantine to Pope Silvester and the Xikhvin^ icon of the Virgin-had been miraculously brought by God from sinful Byzantium to Novgorod for the uncorrupted people of 'shining Russia.'10
As political and economic pressures on Novgorod increased in the fifteenth century, the Novgorodian church frequently interpreted negotiations with the West as signs that the end of the church calendar in 1492 would bring an end to history.11 Archbishop Gennadius of Novgorod and Pskov took the initiative shortly after his installation in 1485 in imploring a still-reluctant Moscowrto prepare for this moment of destiny by cleansing its^realm of heretics just as hehad in the see of Novgorod.12 Subsequently, of course, the leaders oFtwo key monasteries within the see of Novgorod, Joseph of Volokolamsk and Philotheus of Pskov, became the architects of the Muscovite ideology. Some of its nervous, apocalyptical quality almost certainly came from the fear that secularization of both intellectual life and church property was imminent in this westerly region, and that the Tsar
himself might emulate the new state builders of the West (or indeed the iconoclastic emperors of Byzantium) by presiding over such a revolution. The holy fools, who did so much to charge the atmosphere of Muscovy with prophetic expectation, trace their Russian beginnings to the confrontation of Byzantine Christianity and Western commercialism in Novgorod. Procopius, the thirteenth-century itinerant holy man who was the first of this genre to be canonized in Russia (and whose widely read sixteenth-century biography made him the model for many others), was in fact a German who had been converted after years of residence in Novgorod.13
Both economic and ideological factors tended to check any far-reaching Westernization of NovgorodrUnlike Tver, thT^tFeininTportant westerly rival of Moscow subdued by Ivan III, Novgorod was firmly anchored against political drift toward Poland-Lithuania.14 Novgorod had its most important Western economic links with German cities far to the west of Poland, and was linked with the northern and eastern frontiers of Great Russia through a vast, independent economic empire. Psychologically, too, the 'father' of Russian cities felt a special obligation to defend the memory and honor of Rus' after the Kievan 'mother' had been defiled by the Mongols. Riurik was, after all, said to have established the ruling dynasty in Novgorod even before his heirs moved to Kiev; and the fact that Novgorod was spared the Mongol 'scourge of God' was seen by many as a sign that Novgorod enjoyed special favor and merited special authority within Orthodox Slavdom.
The political subordination of Novgorod to Moscow intensified Muscovite fanaticism while crushing ouTtrTree distinctive traditions which Nov-^i|Srod^arid Pskov Sad shared with the advanced cities of the high medieval' West:_comrn?5ciai cosmopolitanism, representative government, and philo-soj^iic_rationglism.
C°?nioj5o]u^ariism^^^and Vasily IIFs destruc-
tion ofjhe enclave_of the Hanseatic League in Novgorod, and by subsequent restrictions on the independent trade andTreaty-'relations that Novgorod arfrTPskov had enjoyed with the West sincTeven before associa- tionjyitbTjheTIarrs^r^epigsentative government was-desfroyed by ripping out the bells which had summoned the popular assembly(veche) in Nov-goro^Pskov^lnJjhe; Novgorodian dependency of Viatica to elect mag-istratesjmd concur on major policy questions. Though neither a democratic forum nor a fully representative legislature, the veche assembly did give propertied interests an effective means of checking princely authority. The Novgorod veche had gradually introduced property qualifications for participation, and had also spawned smaller, more workable models of the central assembly in its largely autonomous municipal subsections. Like the
druzhina (or consultative war band of the prince), the veche represented a survival from Kievan times that was alien to the tradition of Byzantine autocracy. The veche was a far more serious obstacle to the Josephite program for establishing pure autocracy, for it had established solid roots in the political traditions of a particular region and in the economic self-interest of a vigorous merchant class.
The activity of the critical secular intellectuals was even more feared by the monastic establishment than that of republican political leaders. For the monks were more interested in lending mythologized sanctity to a Christian emperor than in defining concrete forms of rule. Their fascination with Byzantine models'led them to conclude that ideological schisms and heresies had done far more to tear apart the empire than differences in political and administrative traditions. Accompanying the extraordinary reverence for whatgver^irwritten' within the monastic tradition was an inordinate fear of anything written outside. In the early modern period, the phrase 'he hj›s gone into books' was used to mean 'he has gone out of his mind'; and 'opinion is the mother to all suffering, opinion is the second fall' became a popular proverb.15 As Gennadius of Novgorod wrote during the ideological ferment prior to the church council of 1490:
