Lucy Cazalet née Hopper was born in Moscow in 1870. Together with her husband Frederick, also Moscow-born, she managed the historic [getpostlink:muir-and-mirrielees] department store on Theatre Square, now known as TsUM, and was something of an authority on pewter and porcelain. After the Revolution of 1917, the couple and their children escaped to England, where Lucy died in 1956. Her book, published in 1915, is testimony to the desire to improve relations between Imperial Russia and the British Empire in the Edwardian age.
Ivan III, Grand Prince of Moscow, finally stood up to the Great Horde and their opportunistic Western allies.
Back in 1238-1240, Batu Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, had swept across Rus’ with his Tartar ‘Golden Horde’, laying waste to Kiev and forcing other cities to pay tribute. For years the extortion went on, while neighbouring Poland and Lithuania either sided with the Horde or threatened a conquest of their own. In 1480 Ivan III, Grand Prince of Moscow, decided enough was enough.
The city of Great Novgorod in Russia was a mediaeval pioneer of a decidedly rumbustious kind of parliamentary democracy.
In the thirteenth century, England was the westernmost partner of the Hanseatic League, a German-dominated European trade bloc. At the eastern end, in Kievan Rus’, was Novgorod, which shared with London a Viking past and a rebellious public. But even the barons who made John sign Magna Carta (1215) and Henry III the Provisions of Oxford (1258) dreamt of nothing like democracy in Novgorod.
Grand Duke Dmitri of Moscow loosened the grip of the Tartar Horde on the people of Russia, but treachery robbed him of triumph.
The tale of St Dmitri of the Don is a tale of the quest to free a people from foreign domination, of hard-fought victory and of wholly avoidable defeat. In 1380, Grand Duke Dmitri I of Moscow, aged just twenty-nine, freed the city from generations of vassalage to the Tartar Golden Horde, only for treachery to bring all that he had achieved to nothing in the very hour of triumph.
Lucy Cazalet gives an overview of the remarkable Russian ruler, who showed the courage of a prince and the humility of a saint.
Alexander Nevsky (1221-1263), Prince of Novgorod, is a saint of the Russian Church, and one of the country’s greatest heroes. As Lucy Cazalet explains here, Alexander showed humility to keep peace with the Tartars, who were content with Russia’s money, but grew tigerish when more actively threatened by the West, who wanted Russia’s soul.