Brief history of Russia (Part 2)

Moscow's triumph was not complete, however, because another putative heir to Kiev remained--the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, to whose rule many of the independent princes of the southwest and the large boyar retainers of Belorussia had gravitated. To the south and east the Muslim successors of the Golden Horde, the khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan, and the Crimea, were serious threats to Muscovy's security.

Although Moscow's annexation of Novgorod (1478) and Pskov (1510) gave it access to the profitable Baltic trade and control over the far-flung colonial lands of the northeast, it also opened the gates to religious and cultural challenges to the spiritual and artistic self-sufficiency and provincialism of central Russia. A conflict arose between church and state as well as between cultural nativism and innovation; it ended, in the second quarter of the 16th century, in a compromise that reaffirmed and strengthened the political values of Moscow (autocracy) while respecting the economic power and position of the church and liberalizing its cultural life to admit the influences from the Balkans and western Europe. Yet the strain between those who wanted a spiritualistic church, divested of worldly wealth (the nonpossessors, or Volga Elders), and the possessors, followers of Joseph of Volokolamsk (d. 1515), who wished to retain the church's wealth and institutional power, continued to affect Muscovite cultural life.

In the shadow of Mongol overlordship and in the harsh environment of central Russia, to which the population had fled from the south, the society and polity of MOSCOW, or Muscovy, developed. Members of the ruling family of Kievan Rus' had seized free lands in the northeast and colonized them with peasants to whom they offered protection in return for payments in money and kind. Each one of these princes was full master of his domain, which he administered and defended with the help of his retainers (BOYARS). A semblance of family unity was maintained by the claim of common descent from Rurik and of a "national" consciousness based on the Kievan cultural heritage.

Taking advantage of genealogy, Mongol favor, church support, geographic situation, and wealth, some of the local princes--for example, those of VLADIMIR, YAROSLAVL, Moscow, Suzdal, and Tver--became dominant in their region and gradually forced the weaker rulers (along with their boyars) into their own service. Of these principalities Moscow gradually emerged as the most powerful. Its ruler Ivan I (Ivan Kalita; r. 1328-41) was granted the title grand duke of

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