II.
29 June 1659 – 31 January 1661
Moravia’s entry into the 1657 War of the Russias, unprecedentedly on the opposite side as Ruthenia, came as a shock to many of Moravia’s neighbours, who had all come to think of Moravia and Ruthenia as having an unbreakable friendship forged in steel. No one could have predicted that the changing of the guards in both Ruthenia and Carpathia, or the disposition of the late Empress’s will, would have set the two former friends against each other… or that Dobroslava would have been fool enough to have opened a two-front war against herself.
Mojmír 1. of Carpathia and 2. of Moravia, by the grace of God
Cár of the former realm and
Kráľ of the latter, made certain assurances that he would not be attacked from the rear during this campaign. Dobroslava may have reacted badly to Mojmír’s accession to the Carpathian throne, but so too had the
König of Österreich, Jonathan Bloch. The Austrians had never reconciled themselves to the loss of Pest, and they still looked on the whole of the Danubian Basin as very much rightly their own. They looked upon Moravia’s accession to personal union with Carpathia, therefore, as a usurpation of power at the very least, on flimsy legal reasoning at the very best. A general expulsion of Moravian merchants from Wien followed, and the tit-for-tat expulsion of Austrian merchants from Pest soon followed.
Cár Mojmír left a significant rearguard on the Thaya to forestall any attempt by Austria to join the Russian War. But Totil z Husi left for the front in the east.
So too, reluctantly, did Mnata Rychnovský. After a full week of vigils in the Church of Saint Symeon, the Sorbian
wójwoda led his contingent of 11,000 Sorbs and Saxons to assist, not Dobroslava, but Mojmír. He crossed to the north of Moravia, through the Galician towns of Belz and Rivne. (The Galicians were at present too busy fighting off the Livonians to their north to bother much with a smaller force crossing their backyard on their way to attack Great Rus’.)
The Moravians crossed the Ruthenian frontier through Carpathia, marching through Bessarabia. It was somewhat surprising that there was so little resistance to the Moravian advance in the Basarab lands, despite the long history of banditry and violent disorder in the region. Most of the peasants in the Moldovan Ukraine had no desire to fight the Moravians. As a result there was no fighting at all as the Moravians crossed the Dnestr.
It was only in their approach to the Dnepr that Totil z Husi encountered any sort of organised opposition. A couple of contingents of artillery had pulled away from the lines and met the Moravians on the banks of the Dnepr at Cherkassy. The Ruthenian guns were captured easily, with only a few minor bruises and bumps on the Moravian side. Another, similarly futile, skirmish took place in Lubny, once the Moravians had crossed over to the Dnepr’s left bank.
Knyaginya Dobroslava was furious. The Moravians were practically at Kiev’s doorstep… and the Sorbs were marching on Mozyř. Moravian intelligence reported back to General Husi that the Ruthenian queen blamed her own generals for having not taken sufficient initiative in suppressing the Moravian aggressors, for defection, sedition and disloyalty.
What was true was that Ruthenia’s generals had not been in any particular rush to obey their lady’s command to return to the west and south to attack the forces of a nation they considered an Orthodox brother… not when there was a more pressing war to fight against the Swedish Catholics to the north. Elisei Anatoľevich Gorčakov had been among the
boyary who were ordered back first, and he was one of the last to leave the Garderikean line—out of a stated desire to secure that long line of contact with Ruthenia with an adequately-layered defence. After all, Ryazan and Moskva were both border towns which stood starkly against the Garderikean border. Neither had fallen thus far, but together with their many northern Rus’ residents, their suffering would not be meagre if the Garderikeans decided to turn their attention from Livonia and invade in earnest.
In the Mozyř siege camp, Mnata lifted a shot-glass of
slivovica to the east.
‘Don’t take this wrong,’ he murmured familiarly. ‘But I
don’t wish you were here now. Next time, though. Don’t forget the
vodka.’
~~~
The Moravian Army had long been grounded on a doctrine of defence, being naturally blessed with a situation among three mountain ranges: the Ores, the Tatras and the Carpathians. What the War of the Russias had revealed to Mojmír was that, although the Ores and the Tatras were suitably watched and fortified against invasion from the west as part of
Kráľ Tomáš’s zapadnípolitika. It had generally been taken for granted that the more serious efforts at fortification would have to be made in the west; an attack from the east had seemed unlikely. Obviously that assumption had changed.
The territory of Podkarpatská suddenly took on a newfound strategic priority for
Cár and Army. The
Stavovské Zhromaždenie, for once, agreed wholeheartedly and with near-unanimity about the necessity of reinforcing the eastern border.
Cár Mojmír stopped just short of ordering that a
kasárne be built in Siget—a move that would place in on equal footing in military honour with the Karo towns and Košice. But he did step up recruitment and added both cannon and horseflesh requisitions to the traditional complement of Siget’s garrison.
The news came that another skirmish had surrounded and captured another deployment of Ruthenian artillery, and were transporting the gun pieces back behind Moravian lines. This time, it was
deep inside Ruthenian territory: at Rylsk.
Cár Mojmír directed Totil z Husi to begin putting out diplomatic feelers. Hopefully a parley could set this whole mess straight without much further bloodshed.
‘
Prekrasno,’ breathed
Boyar Elisei as he dismissed the envoy from the Moravian Army from his tent. The Moravians were offering Ruthenia a peace on terms that Elisei himself considered to be not only fair, but magnanimous. No territory would change hands. No war reparations would be demanded. No stain would be visited upon Ruthenia’s honour (at Moravia’s hands, anyway). He would send out a messenger to the
Knyaginya post-haste with this offer.
As he was about to leave his tent, though, he was approached by two members of the Kievan guard, along with a messenger. The guardsmen laid hands on
Boyar Elisei and pinioned him. He went between them into the centre of the camp. The messenger read aloud:
‘It is the judgement of the
Knyaginya herself, and thus also of God, that you, Elisei Anatoľevič Gorčakov, are guilty of the high crimes against the Crown of dereliction of duty, of cowardice, and of treasonous sedition against her orders. She has decreed that you are to be executed by firing squad, sentence to be carried out at once upon receipt of this message. Let the camp watchman assemble the necessary detail.’
‘This is absurd!’ Elisei barked. Not in fright—he was not afraid of death—but out of a sense of aggrieved justice. ‘I have been nothing but loyal to the
Knyaginya.’
‘Yet you have been in communication with the enemy, even now,’ the messenger replied haughtily. ‘You have shared drinks with the
Wójwoda of Drježdźany, who has Cain-like raised up arms against his own flesh and blood! Who knows if you did not
entice him to thus betray her!’
‘A
peace envoy,’ Elisei breathed in outrage. Yet he could tell from the messenger’s demeanour that he was likely to receive no hearing of reason from him. And he knew the
Knyaginya better than to expect any more from Dobroslava herself. All further thought of resistance flooded out of him.
He refused to be dragged to the execution-ground under guard. He strode there under his own power and turned his face to his own men, raising the barrels at him.
‘Final words?’ asked the messenger.
‘May Christ God forgive me, and forgive our
Knyaginya,’ Elisei prayed.
There was a crack and a plume of smoke. The
boyar of Ryazan fell to the earth.
~~~
The other
boyary, when they heard similar envoys to them, gathered their armies and marched—not to Olomouc, but to Kiev. Once there, they entered the palace together with the Moravian envoys, and made the
Knyaginya sign the offered peace. Dobroslava Rychnovská did so most ungraciously.
But the peace was made, and the
status quo ante was restored. Even the old alliance between Ruthenia and Moravia was revivified. However, by signing the peace, Dobroslava well understood that any claim she made now on the Empire of Carpathia would be considered unlawful… and the restoration of Rychnovský glory thus that much harder to accomplish.
It took longer for the news of
Boyar Elisei’s summary execution to reach the capital, but when it did, its effects would be no less profound.
In Moravia, the ‘bloodless’ solution to their part in the War of the Russias had been hailed as a great triumph… even though Moravia had nothing tangible to show for it other than the safety of Mojmír’s new title of
Cár. That glory reflected not only on Totil z Husi, but on the Moravian fighting forces and the nobility in general. The old Moravian landowning families were fêted with great enthusiasm in the return from Ruthenia.
Mojmír 2. now had two realms to govern. Both the Kingdom of Moravia and the Empire of Carpathia were large, multiethnic, multilingual states; however, their political systems, their histories and their internal customs were very, very different. That was not to mention their relative degrees of economic development and religious piety.
The Kingdom of Moravia was the direct heir to the
state of Veľká Morava which existed in the 800s under the original Mojmírovci: Mojmír, St. Rastislav and Bratromila. Indeed, the Kingdom of Moravia which emerged victorious from the
Partition of 911-924 always retained the name of
Veľká Morava for itself, although it was known in Western Europe for political reasons as
Mähren rather than
Großmähren. (As far as Catholic Europe was historically concerned, Bratromila was the last legitimate queen of the latter, whilst the Eastern Orthodox kings who sprang forth from the loins of Bohodar
slovoľubec and Mechthild of Stuttgart were rightfully only the ‘dukes of Moravia’.)
But Moravia had long been a multiethnic and multilingual state. In January of the year 888, Bohodar
slovoľubec, having contracted a troop of Bošnjak
Krstjani hired blades, led an
invasion of Bohemia that resulted in the Christianisation and incorporation of that people into the Moravian kingdom. The native Přemyslovci quickly acclimated themselves to the new administration, which they served with unswerving loyalty. Bohodar
mladší defeated the Silesians in battle at Dvůr-Chvojno in 940, after which the Silesians agreed to convert to Orthodoxy
en masse. In a series of campaigns between the years of 948 and 954, the ambitious
Kráľ Pravoslav
conquered and baptised the Wends—that is to say the Sorbian people. The Sorbs did not remain a permanent part of the Moravian state, but they retained long and significant historical and religious ties that connected them to Moravia. The ‘White Croats’ had been part of Moravian public life since
the dynastic flight of the Bijelahrvatskići into Moravia from the invading Magyars in the early 900s, but it took the better part of a century for them
to be incorporated fully into Moravia in 977. The Nitrans held out longer before
rejoining Moravia in 988 under Radomír the Terrible. And the last of the traditional nations of Great Moravia, the Uhro-Rusins, were incorporated into Great Moravia
by force under Eustach the Church-Builder in 1033.
The Moravian state’s ruthless tenth-century expansion bound together five Orthodox Slavic nations—Moravians, Bohemians, Nitrans, Silesians and Rusins—like the fingers on one hand. At least, that was official state doctrine since Bohodar 3.
letopisár’s
Jihlava decrees. In functional terms, the literary Old Moravian language, situated midway between Old Bohemian on the one hand, and Old Russian on the other, served as a valuable
lingua franca among the peoples of the realm. Noble conflicts, rebellions and so forth did visit Moravia more than occasionally, but with rare exceptions (such as
the secession of the Sorbs that accompanied the rebellion of 1121), the nobles were able to understand each other and their people such that the realm’s stability was very rarely thrown into serious doubt.
The same could not be said of Carpathia. Carpathia itself was the melding together of three kingdoms: Hungary, Wallachia and Moldavia. Carpathia too was made up of a
mélange of languages and ethnicities. There was still a small but stable core of Magyar speakers—descendants of the old Árpád dynasty and their retainers—located mostly in Békés. Magyar had been, and remained,
a prestige language among the Carpathian nobility. But the common peoples spoke a number of different languages. The Carpathian Slavs were divided between southern (Bulgarian and Serbian) and western (Pannonian) branches. In addition, there were pockets of Greek and Romance (Vlach) culture and speech in the east. Religiously, the region was largely Orthodox now, though Catholicism was still followed in Pest and Torontál. But its religious past was considerably more colourful—
Adamitism had flourished in the western regions of Hungary for many decades (and had influenced
one Moravian king).
Carpathia’s expansion has been the work, not of a long succession of kings as Moravia’s had been, but of one notorious and all-conquering hero—out of the mould of a steppe-riding
khaghan of Magyar or Turkic antiquity. Marko
Sărcerazbivačnik, an Árpád of the Detvanský branch, succeeded to the Moldavian throne in 1405 and managed to take both Wallachia and Hungary by the sword within the following five years. He then consolidated all three kingdoms
into a single empire by 1410. After his death, the realm had been given to spasms of general upheaval that were spontaneous, incessant and sanguine. Most Carpathians were far from demanding constitutional privileges and traditional guarantees from the government; they were happy simply that there
was a government. If said government was reasonably orderly and relatively clean, that was gratefully to be considered a bonus.
Carpathia’s relative novelty as a united realm, relative breadth of ethnolinguistic and religious diversity, relative liability to explode in conflagrations of rebellion, relative tolerance for despotism in peacetime, and relative economic poverty did not bode well for its stability under a single crown with Moravia. But for the present, most Carpathians were simply content that the crown had passed in relative peace (domestically, anyway) from one monarch to another, and that the succession crisis was over. Mojmír found that he had far more to worry about in the Moravian realm, as foresters and bowers were quickly finding themselves on opposite sides of legal and parliamentary disputes over land clearance.
In Ruthenia, there may have been a peace signed with Moravia, but that was only the tempest’s eye. When the news of
Boyar Elisei’s execution at the hands of the
Knyaginya’s guards, openly under her orders, was made known, it was simply too much for the Ruthenian nobility to bear. Dobroslava Rychnovská had an open rebellion on her hands.
What was worse: the forces of the Court, those most loyal to the Grand Princess, were also spread the furthest afield—these were the ones that she had trusted to win her the war against Moravia. The country
boyary in uprising—Rodislav Bogolyubov, Lev Voronoy, Vsevolod and Stepan Nikitič, Valery Golitzin, Onesim Menšikov—were much closer to Kiev. They gathered to the north and marched in column right to the city walls.
Dobroslava herself rushed up to the top of the Golden Gate, and stood before the angry mass of
boyary and their troops, and unleashed against them a furious harangue. She charged them as reprobates against God’s anointed, upbraided their cowardice in the face of the Moravian threat, and called down every manner of brimstone and hellfire upon their heads on account of their treason. She puffed out her chest and paused, as though drawing breath to loose more of her tirade upon their heads. But then she pitched forward from the Gate and plummeted to her death.
It was a matter of great disagreement afterward, whether she had fallen by accident, or whether she had hurled herself off the gate in despair. The Church was willing, for the sake of her family’s memory and honour, to give her the benefit of the doubt. The Metropolitan of Kiev ruled that her death had been one of accident rather than one of purpose, which entitled her to a Church burial. But now Ruthenia was without a monarch, and there was no eligible heir.
