Russia, heir to Constantinople

Posted by Paula Stiles Jun 29, 2006

After the fall of Constantinople (the subject of this week's article) in 1453, the Byzantine story still wasn't done. Noble refugees fled north to Moscow (the capital of what is now modern Russia) seeking asylum. For centuries, Byzantine missionaries had proselytized among the northern Slavs. When Muscovite ruler Ivan III the Great (1462-1505) took the throne, he was very receptive to continuing the Byzantine imperial tradition and claimed that Moscow was now the "Third Rome".

Contact between the two cultures first occurred from Byzantine missionary efforts in the 10th century. Vladimir (980-1015), a Slavic ruler, converted c.988 to the Byzantine version of Christianity called the "Eastern Orthodox" branch and was later canonized for it. The Byzantine influence in Kiev and Novgorod grew strong and trade routes developed between the two cultures. The Russian alphabet is even a "cyrillic" one which derives from the Greek alphabet.

The Mongol invasions (1223-42) had an initially devastating effect on the region. But the heavy hand of the Mongols eventually united the squabbling northern kingdoms in hatred against them, creating the nucleus of the future Russian state. Nor did Mongol domination squelch the Slavic enthusiasm for Byzantine culture and Christianity. National hero Alexander Nevsky (1220-63) of Novgorod fought off both invading Swedes and Teutonic Knights in the 1240s while holding the Mongol Golden Horde at bay, using religion as a major unifying force.

Ivan the Great married a Byzantine princess in 1469, thus claiming direct descent from the Byzantine Emperors through her uncle, the last emperor. Ivan also ended the Mongolian occupation of Russia when he declared Muscovy's independence by refusing to pay tribute to the Golden Horde and no one showed up to crush him. His descendants were renamed "tsars" (Caesars) from the title of the Byzantine emperors and claimed to continue the Roman Empire in Ivan's capital, Moscow. The later Romanov dynasty, founded in 1613, continued this claim as they established an expanding Russian Empire that eventually threatening Istanbul at in return. They ruled until 1917 when Nicholas II and his family were executed in a cellar by the Bolsheviks.