Vassian Rylo
Vassian Rylo told the Grand Prince of Moscow that he was behaving like a runaway, and the letter is one of the founding documents of Russian political writing. He was a monk of the Pafnutiev monastery who became abbot of the Trinity Lavra and then Archbishop of Rostov, and he was Ivan III's confessor. In the autumn of 1480 the Great Horde under Khan Akhmat came north to restore a tribute Moscow had stopped paying, and the two armies faced each other across the Ugra river for weeks without a general engagement. Ivan's position was worse than the standoff made it look. His own brothers had rebelled, the Moscow boyars were divided about whether to fight at all, Akhmat was expecting a Lithuanian army under Casimir to join him, and Ivan left the front and came back to the capital. The city read that as flight, and so did Vassian. He wrote the Epistle to the Ugra, addressed to the prince and read publicly: it accused him of cowardice, reminded him of Dmitry Donskoy at Kulikovo, told him that a shepherd who runs from wolves is no shepherd, and argued that a Christian sovereign owes no obedience to a heathen khan. Ivan went back. Casimir never came, because the Crimean khan attacked Lithuania instead, and in November Akhmat withdrew and the tribute was never paid again. The epistle matters beyond the episode because of what it asserts: that the ruler of Moscow is answerable to God rather than to the Horde, which is the argument the Russian state was built on. Vassian died the following year.
- Nationality: Russian
- Roles: religious_leader, writer
