Moscow Becomes the Horde’s Tax Collector
The Horde did not govern Russia; it taxed it, and it delegated the collecting. The grand princely patent - the yarlyk - was issued at Sarai to whichever prince the khan preferred, and it carried the right to gather the tribute from every other principality and remit it. The margin stayed with the collector. In 1327 the people of Tver, then the strongest of the northern principalities, killed a Mongol envoy and his retinue. Ivan of Moscow travelled to Sarai, returned at the head of a Mongol punitive army, and destroyed his principal rival on the khan's behalf. He received the patent, and Moscow held it almost continuously thereafter. What he did with it compounds rather than dazzles: he bought villages and whole districts outright, lent to weaker princes against their land, took over the collection in territories that fell behind, and kept his own lands free of raids - the chronicles note forty years of quiet, which drew settlers, artisans and taxpayers out of principalities that had none. He also persuaded Metropolitan Peter to reside in Moscow rather than Vladimir, and built the stone cathedral to hold him, which gave a trading town the one thing money could not buy. His nickname, Kalita, means moneybag, and it was not affectionate. The result was that the instrument of subjection became the instrument of unification: the machinery for extracting tribute for a foreign power was the machinery that assembled the Russian state, and it was already in Moscow's hands when the Horde began to weaken.
- Year: 1327 CE
- Category: Political
