The Renaissance: Political Renewal and Intellectual Change 243two successive campaigns, was able to annex much of
Beloruss and the Ukraine.
Ivan was not a great field general. His son-in-law
claimed rather sourly that “he increased his dominions
while sitting at home and sleeping.” But Ivan built an ef-
fective army and introduced the first usable artillery to
eastern Europe. As most of his troops were cavalry, and
therefore expensive to maintain, either he or his state
secretary introduced the “service land” or pomest’esys-
tem, which granted land directly to cavalrymen instead
of paying them in cash. It was an ideal way of supporting
troops in a land that was still underpopulated and
cash-poor. Pomest’eoffered other dividends as well. It
created an armed class that owed its prosperity directly
to the tsar and permitted him to destroy local alle-
giances through the massive resettlement of popula-
tions. The annexation of Novgorod, for example, was
followed by the removal of more than seven thousand
citizens who were located elsewhere in Russia and re-
placed by Muscovites, many of whom were members
of this service class.
The new service class cavalry were drawn primarily
from the middle ranks of society and depended for
their economic survival on peasant cultivators who
worked their land. To ensure the stability of the labor
force, they secured an edict in 1497 that restricted
peasant movement. Thereafter, peasants were allowed
to change employers only during a brief period cen-
tered on the feast of St. George (April 23). It was the
first step toward serfdom. True serfdom on the Hungar-
ian or Polish model did not become general until the
end of the sixteenth century.
The Russia of Ivan III had little in common with
western states or with its immediate neighbors. The tsar
was an autocrat who ruled with little regard for repre-
sentative institutions. The Orthodox church was im-
placably hostile to Latin christendom. The pomest’e
system, like many other Russian institutions, derived
from Turkish, Persian, and Byzantine precedents, and
even daily life had an oriental flavor. Men wore beards
and skirtlike garments that touched the ground while
women were secluded and often veiled.
In the reign of Ivan’s grandson, Ivan IV “the Terri-
ble” (1530–84), the Russian state expanded eastward,
adding Kazan and Astrakhan to its dominions. An ef-
fort to annex the areas now known as Latvia and Esto-
nia was unsuccessful. Ivan attributed this failure to
dissatisfaction among the boyars,or great nobles, and
pretended to abdicate, returning only on the condition
that he be allowed to establish an oprichnina.A bizarre
state within a state, the oprichninawas regarded as the
tsar’s private property. Land and even certain streets in
Moscow were assigned to it, and the original owners
were settled elsewhere. The purpose was to dismantle
boyarestates as well as to provide income for Ivan’s
court and for a praetorian guard of six thousand men.
Dressed in black and mounted upon black horses, these
oprichnikicarried a broom and the severed head of a
dog as symbols of their primary mission: to root out
“treason” and terrorize the enemies of the tsar. They
succeeded admirably. Though disbanded in 1572,
the oprichnikirepresented an institutionalization of
autocracy and state terror that was unique in Europe.
Russia’s size and military strength made it a great
power, but its autocratic system of government ensured
that political effectiveness would inevitably depend
upon the personal qualities of the tsar. After Ivan IV,
ability was conspicuously lacking. Russia turned inward
for more than a hundred years, to emerge once again
under the not-too-gentle guidance of Peter the Great at
the beginning of the eighteenth century.The New Learning: Learned Culture
in the Late Medieval Italian City-State
The social and political transformations of the late
Middle Ages were accompanied, as great changes often
are, by the development of new intellectual interests.
The most important of these was the Renaissance, or, as
it was sometimes called, the New Learning. The word
renaissancemeans rebirth in French. It is often applied to
the entire age that marked the end of the Middle Ages
and the beginning of modern times, but its original
meaning was more restricted. Beginning in the four-
teenth century, a number of scholars became interested
in the Greco-Roman past. They sought to recover the
glories of classical literature because the learning of
their own day seemed to them stagnant and largely ir-
relevant to their needs. A later generation saw the “re-
naissance” of classical antiquity that they created as the
birth of modern times; more recent scholarship has em-
phasized its continuity with the medieval past. In its
original form, the Renaissance was a direct outgrowth
of life in the medieval Italian city-state, and its first pro-
ponents were Italian.
The status of medieval town dwellers was unclear.
Even the richest were, by feudal standards, of humble
origin, yet their wealth and literacy set them apart from