Philip, Archbishop of Moscow, was also worried about the dalliance with Rome. He wrote to remind the pro-western party that the Church of Constantinople had recently reunited with the Pope, and the city had fallen to the Muslim Turks the very next day.* “Cruel and irremediable will be the effects of these beginnings,” he warned “if you neglect the new law of piety and salvation of the Testament of the living God, and adhere to Latinism.”*
But Novgorod’s noblemen would not listen; and on learning that drought had miraculously dried up the treacherous marshland that barred his way, Ivan despatched an army northwest. On July 14th, Prince Kholmski routed the citizens of Novgorod at the River Shelon. Of King Casimir and the Lithuanians, there was no sign.
Ivan himself came in October; but after he left the following February, Novgorod’s merchants and nobles dithered and stalled until Ivan was goaded into coming back, in December 1477. “I intend to rule in Novgorod as I rule in Moscow!” he thundered, and in January the city capitulated. The ruling council was abolished, leading rebels were executed or imprisoned, and Novgorod’s great bell was taken to Moscow to ring with other bells.
* See The Fall of Constantinople, which took place in 1453. Union had been agreed at the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1431-1449), but Reunion celebrations were delayed by the threat of the Turks and by the disapproval of the wider public.
* The ‘new law’ means the New Testament, in contrast with the ‘old law’ of Moses. The Archbishop, Metropolitan Philip I, was implying that Rome had slid back into a legalistic religion in which the speculations of University professors took precedence over the unadorned gospel. See Filioque and ‘To the Heights!’.