Dmitri recovered and handed down a fair principality to his son Vassili (1389-1425), who shrewdly preserved his territory by a friendly alliance with the Tatars on the one hand and a matrimonial alliance with the Lithuanians on the other. His son, Vassili the Blond, was equally submissive to the Tatars and friendly with the Lithuanians. Then, in 1462, there came to the throne Ivan III, the first of the two great makers of imperial Russia.
At the time when Ivan III ascended the throne the principality of Moscow was a small and feeble territory menaced by the Lithuanian empire to the west and the Mongol empire to the east. Most of the other Russian principalities had either won a precarious independence or were subject to Lithuania. The republics of Novgorod and Pskoff alternately lost and recovered their freedom, and wavered between the Lithuanian and the Mongol alliance. Riazan and Tver remained independent and regarded with jealous eyes the growth of Moscow. This was the Russia of the fifteenth century, a mere fragment of the country which bears that name to-day.
Nor was this lack of unity the only reproach which we may bring against the princes who had torn the land in their selfish struggles for supremacy. Round the whitened monasteries and gilded shrines the feuds of the princes had gone on without intermission for so many centuries that the blood ran thin in the veins of Russia. It had neither the vitality nor the organisation required to meet its external foes, and every few years some hostile army scattered the customary desolation over the country. On every side, also, were troops of free lances and brigands, who constantly swooped upon the miserable peasantry. It is the claim of the orthodox historians that the Moscovite princes we have now to describe rescued Russia from this degradation, and we must examine their methods, their motives, and their attainments.
Ivan III is, in the existing portraits, a lean-faced, sombre-looking man, with large melancholy eyes and the patriarchal beard which the Slavs still preserved. These portraits probably accentuate the ostentatious piety of the man, and give us no idea of the cold ferocity which could light his heavy features. It is said that women were known to faint when they met his eye. Certain it is that Ivan united all the craft and calculating cruelty of the degenerate Greeks with professions of humility and peacefulness which provoke our disgust. Conspirators against his terrible rule were burned alive in cages, and the horrible Byzantine practice of cutting out a prisoner’s eyes was more than once employed. Even priests, for whom he affected a humble veneration, were brutally flogged when they departed from the customary subservience of the clergy and took the part of the people. In war he was a coward. All the impulsive and savage bravery of the Norseman had in him degenerated into the mean and shifty hypocrisy of a dishonest huckster.