Grand Patriarch Vasilko IV Bogatyr of Ruthenia
Born: 1320
Reigned: 1340 - 1385
Vasilko IV Gavriilovich was the first Russian monarch to hold that name in over two centuries. Two of his namesakes were legendary conquerors, with their deeds echoing throughout history. Contemporary Ruthenia was indeed built on their conquests. The third, the ill-fated Vasilko the Accursed, had been a legendary failure, who abandoned the mighty city of Tsargrad, who lost the Fifth Crusade and consigned the holy city of Jerusalem to the Christians for a hundred years, and who then died of drink in the desert. [1] As the young prince Vasilko Gavriilovich grew up and demonstrated his characteristic genius, it became an article of faith that he would be a historic figure--but for good or ill, who could say?
Nobody felt the crushing weight of this historical legacy more than the young prince himself. He was given to cruelty, even sadism, and would in his lifetime commit monstrous crimes. He was also plagued by the sense that to give into such dark desires would bring Vasilko II’s curse upon him as well. He would confide to intimates later in life that he thought there was a demon inside him, who wanted to work mischief, and that it was the monarch’s life’s work to master this demon and thus abide by the example of his ancestors.
Vasilko IV was thus a man in conflict with himself, and frequently in deep psychic turmoil. It was only on the battlefield where he could work out these internal conflicts and find a unity of purpose, where his ambition and his cruelty and his idol-worship of his ancestors fused into a single desire to crush Kiev’s enemies and build a great empire on their lands. He was, perhaps not coincidentally, at war nearly all of his reign. When Gavriil died in 1340, the new monarch had even planned a brief battle-field coronation that would not interrupt the campaigning season. It was only the united opposition of his advisors that bade him to return to Kiev for the full ceremony.
Christians spoke of a secret meeting between Utman III and Vasilko IV, where the two emperors stood over a map of Europe and decided which nations would belong to whom. This was propaganda, but there was a grain of truth to it. Both men hoped to break the power of the Catholic monarchs for good. To carry out this strategic aim, Utman III would take his armies north of the Pyrenees, and into the Italian peninsula; while Vasilko IV intended to reunite the empire as it had once been under a new pan-Slavic Islamic creed. Christianity would survive the defeats of the fourteenth century, but it was now clear that the future of Europe would be an Islamic one.
The invasion of Frangistan began in earnest in 1345. [2] After patiently securing alliances among his emirs, Utman III became eager for foreign conquest, and his eye fell on the French coastal lands of Languedoc. The symbolic appeal of establishing Muslim hegemony north of the Pyrenees--long the ‘natural’ border between Christendom and Dar al-Islam--was tremendous in Cordoba. Languedoc had also served as the staging ground for the Christian invasion of Barcelona, and the lands were quite prosperous as a center for Christian trade in the Mediterrean. (As we shall see, Lubbid concerns were as much about trade as about religion.)
Utman III launched his invasion of Francia on May 6, 1345. Vasilko was in the midst of a war for Uzhorod, but there was no question that Kiev would fight alongside Cordoba. Thus in early 1346, with Uzhorod safely taken, twenty thousand Russian warriors landed in the Lubbid port of Janua [3] and marched for Languedoc. The fighting was once again savage: at Montpellier in 1348, six out of ten Russians died after being enveloped by a numerically superior French force. But the weight of numbers were on the Muslim side, and Emperor Adrien could not prevent the occupation of Aquitaine. After nearly six years of brutal fighting, Francia surrendered.
Less than six months later, Utman III was at war, again with the support of Kiev. This time the target was the duchy of Provence, which would connect Janua with the Lubbid lands in Frangistan. King Renaud of Sardinia was a shrewd commander who forced several early reversals at Castellane (May 1352) and Draguignan (October 1352), but Sardinia was outnumbered more severely than France. At the battle of Grasse (November 23), over a hundred thousand Muslim soldiers faced against a Sardinian army less than half their size. When the sun set, twenty-two thousand Catholics lay dead on the field of battle, a staggering loss from which Renaud could not recover.
Kiev would spent the next quarter-century focused on Vasilko’s own prodigious appetite for conquest, but in 1379, Utman III would again call on his old ally to cross swords with Francia. Catholic rebels with Frangistan had been a constant irritant for Cordoba in the past decade, and the great Malik al-Muazzam became convinced that Paris was responsible for supporting them. To punish Adrien, he launched a punitive war for the duchy of Viennois in northern France. The conquest took three years, but Paris could offer little serious resistance. By the end it was plain that the once great Catholic power had been broken by repeated losses to the Muslim alliance. Francia would remain independent until the fifteenth century, but it could afford no more ambitions for hegemony.
It is worth mentioning the most famous conquest of the Cordoba-Kiev alliance, although it takes us a bit beyond the scope of Vasilko’s life. In retaliation for the Seventh Crusade, Utman III declared a war to subjugate the most powerful remaining potentate in Christendom: Pope Callistus III. The Hispanian invasion of Romagna is remembered for the heroism of the papal armies; fighting in defense, they frequently bested armies twice their size by using their superior knowledge of the local landscape to their advantage. Tsar Andrei, who had complacently dispatched a small retinue to support the Lubbids, was obliged to call up his boyars and dedicate time and treasure to the conquest.
In the end, however, Rome’s defenses were little match for the siege weapons of Kiev and Cordoba, and soon enough Callistus was in Muslim captivity. His Holiness was taken in chains to Cordoba, where he was forced to kneel in submission to the Malik al-Muazzam. Henceforth, the papacy--once one of the most powerful monarchies in Christendom--would rule little more than Vaticano itself. Romagna would be ruled by a Muslim sultan of Rum, who swore allegiance to Cordoba.
The humiliation of Callistus III was a moment of profound importance. For Christians it signaled the triumph of Muslim hegemony in Europe; exiles from Italy would flee to Christian courts in Trøndelag, Paris, and Dover to spread horrifying tales of Muslim rule. Among the Muslims, the victory would prove ultimately ambiguous. Already in the final years of Vasilko IV’s reign, many in Kiev would wonder if the decline of Francia made the Lubbid alliance irrelevant. The conquest of Romagna only made these voices louder: after the blood and treasure sacrificed for Rum, Kiev gained little except a powerful rival on their southwestern border. The great alliance that defined the fourteenth century was soon to fall, as younger generations saw Cordoba as a rival rather than a friend.
The great accomplishment of Vasilko’s reign was not in France, but at home. As noted, the Grand Patriarch was nearly always at war in his quest to reunite the lands of Vasilko III and Yuriy I. Early on, many of these conquests were small, against the minor lords of Liptov or Uzhorod. When the Catholic duke of Nitra fell under the sway of the Holy See, Vasilko fought a bloody war with Rome from 1354 to 1359 to regain the land.
In 1360, Vasilko launched his first war against Thessalonika. Saloniki kings had proclaimed themselves ‘protectors’ of the Slovien Muslims two centuries earlier, and on this basis had extended their rule into the former kingdom of Serbia. Tsargrad was the most powerful of the Oskyldr successor kingdoms, and perhaps for that reason, Vasilko’s prosecution of the war was particularly brutal. Twenty thousand Saloniki were slaughtered in Bithynia on May 16, 1361, and countless more died during the sack of Tsargrad in 1362. On January 27, 1363, Fedot II Ingvarovich surrendered rather than face more ruinous losses.
With Fedot’s surrender, Vasilko began to make war in Germany. He took Steyermark from Sunni Bavaria in 1365, Wolkenstein in 1366, and Meissen in 1367. Parts of Pomerania had fallen under the sway of Catholic East Francia, and so Vasilko IV pronounced jihad against the Karlings. At Naumburg in 1367, six thousand East Francians fell before the Russian sword, and at least a thousand after they had been taken prisoner. When King Hupold surrendered, Vasilko claimed the Catholic kingdom of Croatia: the slaughter at Ljubljana would put Naumburg to shame, but King Dobromir would fall to the Russians on March 25, 1369 and Vasilko would claim another great triumph for Kiev and for Islam. Then he was marching back to Germany, to claim Mecklenburg from Lotharingia.
The pace of warfare was brutal even for the victorious Ruthenian army. Peasant recruits were called up every season, and forced to march hundreds of miles. The fighting was savage but for many the atrocities that inevitably followed were worse. Average men returned to their homes having witnessed, and perhaps participated, in brutal slaughter, and believing themselves to be forever changed. For the professional imperial retinue, however, the constant stream of conquest was liberating. Many began to see themselves as a warrior elite, free of the laws of Allah or man by their holy mission of conquest.
With Mecklenburg taken from Lotharingia, Vasilko declared his second war against Thessalonika. The battles were dreadful affairs; only three Saloniki survived in Tsargrad on April 21, only two at Nikomedia the following month. All told, thirty-four thousand Saloniki soldiers died in the year of 1372, not including those who died in the second sacking of their capital. Fedot II surrendered (again) in the winter of 1374/5, and spent the rest of his days in his palace a broken man. Vasilko scarcely noticed; he was already planning his next campaign for Nordmark in Lotharingia.
With the seizure of Nordmark in 1378, Vasilko IV finally paused the pace of warfare to return to Kiev. In a lavish ceremony in Kiev, he marked the successful retaking of Vasilko III’s empire by declaring himself father to all Slavic peoples [4]. He crowned himself Tsar Vasilko I of the Empire of Slavia, which spanned from Berlin to the Urals and commanded nearly two hundred fifty thousand warriors. By then, the common folk had begun to call him Vasilko
Bogatyr. The bogatyrs were figured from Rus’ legend, heroes of great renown and battle prowess, who fought dragons, trolls, and Christians with courage. To them, Vasilko had achieved the greatness that he had sought his entire life.
There were many in Ruthenia who could not see heroism in Vasilko. Many peasant soldiers returned home to their farms plagued by invisible wounds from the atrocities committed during his wars of conquests. The courtiers knew him to be erratic and paranoid, driven by conflicting urges: expelling all from his court one day and welcoming them back on another. He had a popular young noblewoman, Tatyana Vysheslavich, executed on charges of cannibalism, which outraged the court. In 1371, his daughter Liubava died under mysterious circumstances; while her husband Abdul-Lateef was accused of the crime, many scholars now believe that Vasilko himself was responsible as part of a failed blackmail scheme.
The establishment of Slavia would not quell Vasilko’s troubled mind. He was still plagued by doubts about the demon that he believed lived inside of him; even when he was--by far--the most powerful ruler in the known world, the Grand Patriarch was convinced that greatness was just out of reach. He would spend the final years of his life in intense physical pain, plagued by the cancer that--he was convinced--had been a punishment for his many sins.
On November 15, 1385, Vasilko IV finally succumbed to the cancer. He had entered the pantheon of great conquerors. The empire of Slavia that he as much as anybody had forged would be a formidable force throughout the early modern era. He is ever-controversial (among Muslim scholars, that is; Christian writers are quite clear on how they feel about him), but the Bogatyr is remembered fondly by everyday Russians even now.
Challenges for Slavia lay ahead. The unity of Dar al-Islam would not survive the fifteenth century. With the Christians in decline, Sunnis in Cordoba, Kiev, and Quhariyah were finding that seemingly minor doctrinal differences loomed larger than they had in the past. In 1462, Kiev would celebrate the fall of the Lubbid empire, which was by then a hated rival; little did they expect that the taifas on the Atlantic coast would be even more powerful, drawing on the riches of a continent halfway across the world.
Slavia would make its own efforts at colonization, expanding inexorably past the Urals and into the steppes beyond. Kiev would sponsor these efforts, but the colonists were largely Polish-speakers from Mordvinia and Odessa. The steppe-Polish would be Stefan Godziemba’s most enduring legacy, and the dream of an eastern steppe empire would endure among the colonists. The split between a multilingual cosmopolitan west and a conservative, Polish-speaking east grew more profound every year, as the united Slavic people proved not so united after all.
Every year, I have students who knew the Slavic Empire as the ‘sick man of Europe.’ They see every rebellion or civil war as the mark of an irreversible decline. (One popular history book traces the decline of Kiev as far back as the revolt of the
farsan in the twelfth century!) Hopefully I’ve successfully challenged that viewpoint. The story of Kiev has always been of triumph and tragedy, of great achievement and human suffering. Nothing is inevitable, everything is contested.
[1] As we have seen, this assessment is unfair to Vasilko II; and yet it was how learned fourteenth century Russians saw him.
[2] While Frangistan had once served as a word for European Christian nations as a whole, over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth century it increasingly became the name for Muslim-ruled lands in the ‘land of the Franks’, i.e., medieval Francia.
[3] Formerly Genoa.
[4] The Saloniki spoke a language that was descended from Russian, although it included many Greek loan words; but they were considered, by Russians and themselves, to be a hybrid culture, as Greek as they were Slavic.
