The Fall of the Novgorod Republic
Novgorod was the great exception in Russia. It had escaped the Mongol sack, governed itself through a town assembly that hired and dismissed its princes, and controlled a fur-trading territory stretching to the White Sea and the Urals - the wealthiest and largest polity in the Russian world, and the least like the one Moscow was building. Its politics divided between a party for accommodation with Moscow and one, associated with the widow Marfa Boretskaya, for placing the republic under the Catholic grand duke of Lithuania. Ivan III treated that as apostasy as well as treason. He beat the Novgorod levy at the Shelon river in 1471 - a militia of townsmen against professional retainers - and imposed terms. When the city continued to negotiate with Lithuania he returned in 1478, besieged it through the winter, and abolished the republic outright. The veche bell, rung to summon the assembly and the emblem of its self-government, was taken down and carried to Moscow. The office of the elected mayor was abolished. Over the following years several thousand leading families were deported into the interior and replaced with Moscow servitors holding land on condition of service. Marfa was taken to Moscow and disappeared into a convent. What ended was not only a city's independence but the only developed alternative model of Russian political life, and no comparable one appeared for four hundred years. The republic had survived the Mongol conquest, the Teutonic Knights and three centuries of Moscow's growth, and it fell in seven years. Its assembly was not democratic in any modern sense - a few boyar families dominated it and its decisions were often settled by which faction could fill the square - but it was answerable in a way nothing in Moscow was. Ivan took the title of sovereign of all Rus in the course of the quarrel, and the demand that Novgorod address him by it was the pretext for the final campaign. The city kept its trade with the Hanseatic League for another fifteen years, until Ivan closed the Hanseatic factory too.
- Year: 1471 CE
- Category: Political
