Brief history of Russia (Part 2)
of Vladimir by the khanate as well as the right to collect tribute for the Mongols from neighboring principalities. His grandson DIMITRY DONSKOI won the first major Russian victory over the Mongols at Kulikovo (1380). Finally, after victory in a fierce civil war, the elimination of a main rival at Tver (1485), and the winning over of most small independent princes, IVAN III, grand duke of Moscow (r. 1462-1505), emerged as the sole ruler in central Russia. The Golden Horde had regained control after Kulikovo, but a century later it was seriously weakened by internal strife. In 1480, therefore, Ivan III successfully challenged Mongol overlordship by refusing the tribute.
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.
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