Page 337 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

1638 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

History is politics projected into
the past. • M. N. Pokrovsky
(1868–1932)

Mathnawi (“couplets”), which contains roughly 25,000 sia in the wake of the Mongol conquest in 1240, to
verses of mostly didactic poetry. Translations of a major impose their authority over the successor states to Kievan
part of his oeuvre into severalWestern languages are avail- Rus. By the early fifteenth century, Mongol power had
able, and they have helped to establish his reputation as begun to decline. At this time, Moscow emerged as the
a poet and thinker for the ages: one who preached ecu- champion of Orthodox Christianity (the official religion
menism, compassion for one’s fellow being, and tolerance of Kievan Rus since 988) and outmaneuvered Catholic
in his exquisite poems. Lithuania to legitimate itself as the “gatherer of Russian
Rumi, in fact, has become the best-selling poet in con- lands.” After 1480, Grand Prince Ivan III (reigned 1462–
temporary America, and his poetry continues to inspire 1505) ceased paying tribute to the Khan and proclaimed
traditional Sufis in the Islamic heartlands and beyond, himself Sovereign of All the Russias. Ivan also seized
New Age spiritual devotees, and other mystical practi- upon the collapse of Constantinople in 1453 by marry-
tioners in the West in their devotions. The Mevlevi Sufi ing the last heiress to the Byzantine throne. His succes-
order founded by Rumi exists to this day and its adherents sors were increasingly referred to as czars (derived from
perform their popular “folk dances” all over the world. Caesar), while Moscow was proclaimed the “third Rome”
Rumi has, furthermore, become a byword in certain cir- and became the center of the Orthodox Christian world.
cles for a tolerant, compassionate Islam that serves as an Henceforth, the czar would regard himself as a univer-
urgent antidote to the more militant version that domi- sal ruler, on a par with the Ottoman Sultan or the Holy
nates the news today. Such a multifaceted legacy is a tes- Roman Emperor. After the conquest in the 1550s of
timony to humanity’s exceptional gift for addressing basic Astrakhan and Kazan—successor states to the Golden
concerns in an accessible yet eloquently profound idiom. Horde—the czars also began to claim the descent from
the Chingizid Khans. They used the popular image of
Asma Afsaruddin
Mongol rule as arbitrary and beyond divine sanction to
See also Islam great effect in the imposition of autocratic rule over the
whole of Russian society, although the roots of their des-
potism lay largely in the difficulty of extracting a sizable
Further Reading surplus,given the country’s poor soil and difficult climate.
Arberry,A. J. (1963). Tales from the Masnavi. London: George Allen and Autocracy reached an apogee with the establishment of
Unwin.
Chittick, W. C. (1983). The Sufi path of love: The spiritual teachings of the oprichnina (literally ‘setting apart’), a policy that im-
R¯um¯ı. Albany: State University of New York Press. posed the Czar’s unbridled terroristic rule over a quarter
Nicholson, R. A. (1950). R¯um¯ı, poet and mystic. London: George Allen
and Unwin. of the country and (to Ivan’s mind) constituted a model
Schimmel,A. (1978). The triumphal sun. London: East-West Publications. for the whole of Muscovy.All these factors have led many
writers to conclude that Russian rule was a classic exam-
ple of “Oriental despotism,” whose fundamental essence
would remain unchanged through the Soviet period.
Russian-Soviet
Autocracy and Isolation
Empire In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Mus-

covite realm formed, by and large, a world unto itself—
he Russian empire has its origins in the rise of the to some, a quintessentially Eurasian civilization. The
TPrincipality (kniazhestvo) of Moscow in the four- disintegration of the Mongol-dominated system of the
teenth and fifteenth centuries. The Muscovite Grand thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries resulted in a
Princes successfully exploited their position as tax col- diminution of contacts and the growth of regional par-
lectors for the Golden Horde, which ruled most of Rus- ticularisms across Eurasia. Muscovy’s frontiers were not