Class 7. Rise of Muscovite Power (2)

becomes Christian under the Byzantines,

whereas all the rest of it's going to be

Western Christian, right? Boring.

Whereas our part is going to be Eastern Christian.

The other thing which is special,

by the time we get to this lecture,

and this is the subject of this lecture,

is that it no longer exists.

So, England, Norway, Norway slash Denmark, Sweden,

these are all fairly durable political entities.

England is still around.

I mean, by the end of the semester let's see

but England is still around,

and Denmark, Norway, Sweden, they're also around.

Rus' is not still around, and so that's another difference,

and that's the subject that we're getting to today.

What actually happens to Rus',

and how are we best to think about that?

So I introduced a next moment of contact

in the last lecture.

The moment of contact I tried to introduce

in the last lecture was another East/West moment,

which was the Mongols coming from one side,

and the Teutonic Knights coming from the other side.

So if we're going to explain the origins of Lithuania

as we tried to do in the last lecture,

we explain the origins of Lithuania

not by saying they were always Lithuanians,

they were always wonderful pagans, they were very innocent.

You know, they did a lot of human sacrifice,

which is how you preserve innocence, as we all know.

No I mean honestly, you've had,

I mean the human sacrifice, well I mean. (sighing)

Where do I draw all the lines on the jokes

knowing that I'm filmed? (students laughing)

That's just occurred to me for the first time.

But let's face it, human sacrifice has

a kind of simplicity and clarity,

which other forms of, you know, ritual don't.

So the, where was I?

Oh, so the Lithuanians, it's not that the Lithuanians

were always there and they were pure

and they were an ethnicity and so on.

That's not the story at all, right?

The story is that the Lithuanians saw

what happened to the Prussians,

the Lithuanians gathered together some tribes,

some Pagan tribes who speak the Baltic Lithuanian language.

The Lithuanians went south and gathered up

most of the lands that had been Rus', and on that basis

were able to stand up to the Teutonic Knights.

And then because there was a rising state called Poland,

the Lithuanians married into the Polish crown,

and in alliance with Poland, and having annexed

most of what was Rus', Lithuania had,

there the Lithuanian rulers created the state

which could actually defeat the Teutonic Knights.

But all of that only makes sense, that whole rise

of Lithuania as a great state only makes sense

if you understand Teutonic Knights pushing from the West,

Mongols have come in from the East and destroyed Rus'.

If the Mongols don't destroy Rus',

Lithuania is not going to annex it.

If Teutonic Knights are not pushing in

with their program of forced Christianization,

the Lithuanians aren't going to consolidate.

So this is another one of these symphonies

where larger pressures push, particularities arise,

new states are consolidated, right?

And so we get to this, we've already gotten to this.

It's the next few verses in Chaucer, right?

So the Chaucer, "Above all nations in Pruce and Lettow,

had he reysed and in Ruce," you know what that means.

The Teutonic Knights were the (speaking in German).

Great German word, by the way.

A (speaking in German) now is just like,

"I'm gonna make, you know, making a little trip,

(speaking in German)."

But in this context, it means part of a crusade.

You're joining a crusade.

You're coming from France or England or somewhere far away,

you're going to join in a crusade.

Pruce is Prussia, which has been fully destroyed.

Lettow is Lithuania, and Ruce is of course Rus'.

So that's kind of interesting, isn't it?

I'm sure when you read this in high school,

or in your free time, or when you read it in the future,

you just skimmed right over,

"What is this Ruce place, R-U-C-E?

Probably Chaucer made it up to rhyme with Pruce," right?

But no, Ruce is actually the country R-U-S,

which we've been studying, which in the 14th century

was a completely unproblematic word, okay.

So this Lithuanian trajectory we followed,

and we're gonna keep following it.

We're gonna keep following the trajectory of what

in this lecture I'm gonna call Lithuanian Rus'.

Because if we're gonna understand the,

if we're gonna move east and understand the consequences

of the Mongol destruction of Kyiv in 1237 to 1240,

we have to then move into the question

of the successors of Rus'.

And the successors of Rus'

are going to overlap with other things.

They're going to overlap with the Mongol world,

but not only.

Very briefly, we've already done

one of the successors of Rus'.

One of the successors of Rus' is Lithuania.

The Lithuanian Grand Dukes called themselves

the rulers of Ruthenia, and Ruthenia in Latin,

of Rus' in their own language.

So one of the successors of of Rus' is Lithuanian Rus'.

A second successor of Rus', which we briefly talked about,

is Galicia and Volhynia.

So this is all, right? This is all on your sheet.

Okay? You nodding, thank you.

So Galicia and Volhynia are the two

Westernmost districts of Rus'.

These are very important places to know.

They're very interesting places.

Galicia and Volhynia are English words

which come from Latin, but the original terms

come from the old Ruthenian names for the places,

(speaking in foreign language), hence Galicia,

And then Volhynia in Latin is actually (speaking in Latin),

but (speaking in Latin), you don't have to know this,

I'm just giving you a little break.

You don't have to write it down, I'm just cruising.

So Volhynia in Latin is (speaking Latin),

is from the city of Volodymyr.

Volodymyr becomes (speaking in Latin),

and Volodymyr is course of city named after

the first baptized ruler of Russia, which is Volodymyr.

So Galicia and Volhynia are what we call

these Western districts, they're very important

because they hold out as rulers of Rus'

for an extra century or so.

They, the leaders of Galicia and Volhynia,

claimed also to be the rulers of Kyiv.

They very often actually had their person ruling Kyiv.

After the Mongol onslaught, they managed to hold their own

in Galicia and Volhynia.

After 1240 they were the only princes of Rus'

who actually engaged the Mongols on the battlefield

with anything other than complete failure.

So, and they managed to hold Kyiv, actually, but of course.

But they managed to hold their own lands,

and consolidate the rule over their own lands in the 1240s.

After the end of Kyiv, after the destruction of Kyiv,

they refer to themselves as Princes of Rus'

and Princes of all of Rus'.

In case I don't get to it later, this is a theme.

If you're gonna call yourself the Prince of Rus',

just go ahead and call yourself the Prince of all of Rus',

and you will eventually figure out in practice

how much all of Rus' turns out to be.

That is the answer to the question of what all of Rus' is.

All of these people called themselves

the Prince of all of Rus', okay?

Nobody said, "I'm the Prince of Some of Rus',

and maybe somebody else is," no.

They all when they, as soon as they thought of it,

they all said, "I'm the Prince of all of Rus'."

And the question of what all of Rus' is,

is determined by practice, how far you can actually get,

and then you will call that Rus',

whether it was historically Rus' or not.

So in 2022 we're in a war where Russia is fighting Ukraine

in territories on the basis of the idea

that these territories are formerly Rus', but they're not.

The lands in the south of Ukraine

are territories of the Crimean Khanate.

They were never part of Rus', and but never,

so, and this is a traditional theme.

When Moscow, and I'm gonna get to this,

when Moscow takes over Novgorod,

Novgorod suddenly becomes Rus',

but Novgorod didn't itself think that it was Rus'.

It only becomes Rus' after it was conquered,

and so on and so forth.

So the whole idea of controlling all of Rus'

is essentially a pragmatic idea, right?

After the destruction of Rus', okay.

So the point about Galicia-Volhynia

is that it's gonna have a bright future.

Galicia and Volhynia are very important to the future,

to the history of Ukraine.

But also they maintained some kind

of Rusyn Ruthenian statehood for,

basically a bonus century into the 1320s, 1330s,

when they fall to Lithuania and to Poland.

So about 1320, the Lithuanians have gotten to Kyiv,

and Volhynia becomes part of Lithuania, okay?

Volhynia becomes part of Lithuania.

Galicia, Halychyna, becomes part of Poland as of as of 1339.

Okay, so that's, so now we have two successors of Rus'.

We have the Lithuanian Rus',

and we have the Galicia and Volhynia Rus', that's two.

The third one, the one that we're gonna

focus on today is Mongol Rus'.

So the part of Rus' which falls durably under Mongol control

from circa 1240 deep into the 15th century.

So a different story, a story of multiple centuries,

multiple generations.

Time matters a lot.

So this is just a basic historian's point.

It matters a lot whether regime governs a territory

for 50 years, a hundred years, or 300 years, right?

That's just a very, it's a very basic point.

And so when we're starting to think about

what's different between Galicia-Volhynia

and the Northeastern territories that become Mongol Rus',

durability of Mongol rule.

Galicia-Volhynia encountered the Mongols.

They only very briefly paid tribute.

The territories of Mongol Rus',

hint, Mongol Rus' is what's gonna become Moscow

and the Russian Empire and all the rest of it, okay?

So the territories that become Mongol Rus',

that are Mongol Rus',

are under Mongol control for centuries.

That's a basic fundamental difference.

So Mongol Rus', here's another way to think about it.

It is one of the successors of Rus' for sure,

and we're gonna see the connections

between Mongol Rus' and Kyivan Rus'.

But it is also one of the many Mongol or post Mongol states

all across Asia and eastern Europe.

So the Mongols, after they come and destroy,

which admittedly is like, that's their famous moment.

1240, 1241, they arrive, they destroy,

they conquer everyone.

They have to go back for a funeral, as happens,

changes all of history, right?

The Batu Khan arrives, he destroys, no one can resist him.

Gets a phone call, didn't get a phone call.

He gets notice that he has to go back to Mongolia

basically, for what? For a succession crisis.

A funeral is the polite way of saying it,

but a succession struggle.

When someone dies, there's a succession struggle, right?

Those of you who have families that don't write wills,

you know what I'm talking about.

So the, uneasy class-based laughter, okay?

(students laughing)

So I have to say that because apparently they can't hear

when you laugh on the video.

That's been reported to me, like they can hear the jokes

but like, then there's silence.

(students laughing)

Which from my point of view is a little bit awkward, right?

It's like, "He's telling jokes all semester,

and the Yale students are just a looking at him."

Okay, so 1240, so 1237 to 1241,

that's the period that you all remember.

The Batu Khan comes, he conquers, no one's resistant,

so he goes back.

But after this, there is the Mongol state,

which is remembered under the name

of the Golden Horde, okay?

And then, but the Golden Horde over time,

itself falls apart into various entities.

And these entities don't,

they're often very fuzzy in European history.

They kind of just show up on the margins