Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [138]
And as he followed the Tsar to these fortress monasteries and powerful old cities, deep in the forest and meadowland of Russia, it seemed to Boris that he saw God’s purpose and the destiny of the young Tsar more clearly than ever before.
Truly, he thought, the endless steppe will be conquered at last by Russia’s mighty heart.
There was the lightest snow in the air that day, so thin and sparse that it hardly seemed to be falling at all, but danced in the air instead, brushing carelessly against the rooftops without settling and only dusting the ground.
The city occupied a noble setting at the meeting of the Moskva and Yausa Rivers, with the long, low line of the Sparrow Hills behind. Boris still found its size overwhelming.
Indeed, though Boris did not know it, Moscow was then one of the greatest cities in all Europe – as big as sprawling London or powerful Milan. Its suburbs stretched so far out into the surrounding villages that it was hard even to say where the city began. First one encountered great monasteries with walls like castles, then the outer suburbs with their mills, orchards and gardens. And then one came to the great earth rampart that enclosed the Earth Town, where the humble classes lived; then the masonry walls of the White Town, the middle-class quarters; and at last the kitaygorod, the rich quarter, beside the towering walls of the mighty Kremlin itself.
Already, as they moved through the outer suburbs, there were crowds by the road. Everywhere, it seemed, bells were pealing through the snow. Huge shapes – walls, towers, the golden domes of the monasteries – loomed in the middle distance out of the grey haze of the snow-dusted sky.
And then, as they finally approached the citadel – as though in welcome – the snow died away and there before them, glowing strangely under the lowering orange light of the snow clouds, lay the mighty city.
Boris caught his breath at the sight. The cavalrymen in their pointed helmets or their tall, cylindrical fur hats rode so proudly towards the city gates; on each side of them marched the Tsar’s new crack infantry corps of musketeers – the streltsy – and other halberdiers who, Boris could see, were already having trouble containing the thickening and enthusiastic crowd that was streaming out of the gates in Moscow’s mighty walls.
How splendid, and how powerful. Great towers rose at intervals along the city walls – towers with high pyramidal roofs like pointed tents. And enclosed behind them lay the great sea of wooden houses, interrupted by stone towers and domes, that was the city.
Moscow: city of the imperial Tsars. When they had crowned Ivan, they had put a cap of fur and gold upon his head and claimed it had belonged to Monomakh, greatest of princes in the days of the ancient Rus. But the autocrats of Moscow went far beyond anything that Monomakh would have dreamed of in the ancient days of Kiev. Each time a city fell, its princely family was broken and made servants of the state; and its leading boyars were resettled in other provinces. When the young Tsar’s grandfather had taken over Novgorod, he had even taken away the bell they used to summon the veche, in order to mark that the citizens’ ancient freedoms were gone for ever. The Moscow family had invented a genealogy which traced their ancestry to the great Roman emperor Augustus, at the time of Christ. In the Kremlin now, splendid cathedrals by Italian architects had appeared beside the onion domes and towers of its older churches and monasteries so that, here in the heart of this northern forest empire, one might, for an instant, think oneself before a Florentine palazzo.
Moscow: city of Church and state. In the opinion of many churchmen, the state and religious authorities should rule together in perfect sympathy. This was the Byzantine ideal of the old Roman Empire of the east. And so it was in Moscow. Had not young Ivan already set out two great programmes of reforms, one for his administration and one