Grand Duke Dmitri of Moscow loosened the grip of the Tartar Horde on the people of Russia, but treachery robbed him of triumph.
The tale of St Dmitri of the Don is a tale of the quest to free a people from foreign domination, of hard-fought victory and of wholly avoidable defeat. In 1380, Grand Duke Dmitri I of Moscow, aged just twenty-nine, freed the city from generations of vassalage to the Tartar Golden Horde, only for treachery to bring all that he had achieved to nothing in the very hour of triumph.
It is one of the world’s most recognisable works of art, and a symbol of God’s blessing on all Christian Rus’.
The Theotokos of Vladimir is an icon of Mary embracing her child Jesus, which came to Kiev from Constantinople in the 1130s. Not only has it become one of the world’s most recognisable works of sacred art, but on several occasions it has been credited with delivering the Christians of Rus’ from seemingly inevitable disaster.
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The Foreign Office had a long tradition of regarding a strong Russian Empire as ‘not in the British interest,’ but John Bright saw only mutual benefit in it.
In January 1878, John Bright MP addressed a meeting in Birmingham on the subject of Russia. Russia and Turkey were at war over Turkey’s treatment of Christians in the Balkans, and there were those in Parliament who said it was ‘in the British interest’ to support Turkey and clip Russia’s wings; but Bright thought that Russian aggression was a Foreign Office myth.
In 1941, with much of the West subdued, Adolf Hitler bent the full force of his hatred on Moscow.
The British Empire held out against the Nazis almost alone for two years. The arrival of the Americans in 1942 was a blessed relief, but it was the Russians (also somewhat late to the party) who bore the brunt of the Nazis’ hatred, and whose sacrifices and determination finally broke the vast German military machine.
Ivan the Terrible offered free trade to English merchants throughout his dominions.
In 1553, Edward VI gave letters into the hand of Richard Chancellor, to present to the ruler of Moscow should the Englishman’s dangerous voyage of exploration through the icy waters of the northeast passage succeed. Despite grave hardships the English won through, and following year Tsar Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’) wrote a reply — unaware that Edward was dead, and Queen Mary would be reading it.
Flemish merchants hoping to prosper in Russia’s commercial capital received a nasty shock.
In 1553, Richard Chancellor led an expedition to see whether the Northeast passage might be used to reach Russia, bypassing the jealous states of the Hanseatic League along the Baltic shore. The gamble paid off, and before long the English were rewarded by the chance to visit Great Novgorod, the founding city of Russia and the country’s commercial capital.
Timur, Muslim lord of Samarkand, threw his weight behind the Golden Horde’s subjugation of Christian Russia, with unexpected results.
Timur, who succeeded his father as Lord of Samarkand in 1369, traced his ancestry back to Genghis Khan, founder of the Mongol Empire in 1206. By the time of his death in 1405, he had humbled kings and kingdoms from Russia to Iran, India and Egypt, and changed the course of history more than once — though not always as he intended.
Richard Cobden questioned both the wisdom and the motives of politicians who intervene on foreign soil.
At the Vienna Congress in 1815, Napoleon’s former empire was shared out by Britain and other European Powers. A semi-autonomous Kingdom of Poland was allotted to Russia, which Russian troops occupied in response to the November Uprising of 1830-31. Calls grew loud for the British and Turkish Empires to restore ‘the balance of power’, but Richard Cobden heard only arrogant self-preservation.
Boris Godunov was crowned Tsar of All Russia in 1598 in the belief that Tsar Ivan’s son Dmitry was dead — but was he?
In 1604, Tsar Boris of Russia faced almost exactly the same scenario that had confronted Henry VII of England in the 1490s: a young man claiming to be a prince everyone thought had died years before, marching on the capital with an army of rebellion. The chief difference was that in Russia’s agonised Time of Troubles, the impostor actually got to play King.