The Outsiders Of Europe

Abstract

Abstract In eastern Europe and around the coastline of the Baltic Sea were huge tracts of land containing a relatively low density of population in comparison with the states of western Europe. Here the fifteenth century had witnessed the decline of three significant medieval states. In the Baltic, the Hanseatic League of commercial cities, with Lubeck as its dominant influence, was clearly waning, opening up the possibility of a Danish (or, subsequently, a Swedish) challenge for the position of supremacy over the Baltic Sea. Given the declining power and influence of the Teutonic Knights in the eastern Baltic, Prussia and Livonia were open to annexation. A dangerous power vacuum was created which in the 1550s it seemed might be filled by Muscovy. Finally, the rule of the Khans of the Golden Horde, based on Sarai on the lower Volga, had collapsed in the fifteenth century. Lithuania had escaped the Mongol conquest; Muscovy was not so fortunate, and the victorious Mongol Khan became its first undisputed personal sovereign. The Mongols had once brought a large part of Asia and the Near East under the rule of a single dynasty, of which Muscovy was a tributary state: but subsequently, the Golden Horde broke up into three distinct Khanates of Kazan’, Astrakhan’ and the Crimea. Though these three states could still raid at will into Poland-Lithuania or Muscovy, they no longer threatened to bring down the ruling dynasties. Indeed, during the reign of Tsar Ivan III, an event traditionally dated to 1480, Moscow ceased to pay tribute to the Golden Horde or its successor states. In the 1550s, Ivan IV subdued Kazan’ and Astrakhan’ and carried the war into the Crimea, the first Tsar of Muscovy to do so, though the Crimea was to remain a tributary state of the Ottoman Turks.