Free Russia by Philip Longworth Page A

Church had become a refuge for peasants who had uprooted themselves from unsafe areas, and a major agency for their resettlement. This helps to explain the popularity of ‘wilderness’ monasteries, many of them founded in distant places where conditions were harsh but which were safe from the Tatars and other human predators. The monastic foundations kept the young men safe and productive. They seem also to have helped to increase population. Monks are, or should be, chaste,
of
course, but the demographic imperative was satisfied by novices who decided not to take their vows, and by peasants, artisans and service people who attached themselves to monastic communities, creating little suburbs around them.

    The new monastic foundations tended to avoid land owned by princes, so people in monasteries’ dependent settlements could live more freely than elsewhere and benefit from privileges and benefits that would not otherwise have been available to them. Yet the monastic colonization movement suited the princes — especially the Prince of Moscow, who made over great swathes of undeveloped territory to the Church, knowing that if it could find peasants to settle on it and make the land productive it would ultimately yield taxes and benefit the state, albeit through the Church. This and the continuing disposition of young Russians to take up the life of pioneers was to have continuing importance for Muscovy’s development, particularly over the following two centuries. The development coincides with what Liubavskii identified as a period of sharp population growth associated with the development of colonization during the half century following the death of Ivan ‘Money-Bag’, 19 and monastic communities were founded at an increasing pace from the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with several practical, as well as spiritual, purposes in mind.
    Political centres had long attracted monastic foundations. No fewer than sixteen foundations were established around Moscow in the period by grand princes, metropolitans, abbots and the disciples of monastic saints. 20 But most were founded further afield — to win more virgin land for the plough, to convert pagan tribespeople, to profit from commercial crossroads, to access natural resources like salt. They were founded for these and a dozen other reasons, but, above all, monasteries were the organizational heart of the ongoing colonization process, whose tempo so accelerated in the fourteenth century. And when, in the mid-1500s, a Western visitor was to marvel at the fact that monasteries owned one-third of all land in the entire country 21 it was largely to the legacy of St Sergius that he was pointing - a multifaceted legacy of economic and political as well as spiritual and patriotic significance. 22
    Despite all this building, striving and achievement, in 1400 there was no obvious prospect that the Grand Principality of Moscow-Vladimir would develop into a great European power. It controlled only a fraction of the territory inhabited by Russians. Most of what it did control was within 50 to 350 miles of Moscow, though some of this territory was interspersed with the apanages of other princes. True, the Grand Prince took precedence over all other princes, but his titles did not imply authority. Although the apanage
(udel’)
had originally been a temporary allocation of property from a prince’s inheritance for the upkeep of a family member,since about 1350 apanages had been granted to subordinate princes in perpetuity. Every prince guarded his apanage, his inheritance, and proud, prosperous city states like Pskov, Novgorod and Smolensk only took orders from the Grand Prince if it were in their interest to do so, or unless he compelled them. The Metropolitan, who still had spiritual authority over the Orthodox of Lithuania, had more communicants than the Grand Prince had subjects. Furthermore, the grand princes themselves were less than confident in the future they