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Vasilii II was only ten when, in 1425, he acceded to his father’s throne. Provision had been made for his minority: a council of regents was to govern till he came of age. His mother and her father, Grand Duke Vitovt of Lithuania, were among its members. So were his uncles Andrei and Petr, his future father-in-law Prince Iaroslav of Sepukhov, and his brother Semen, both of them great-grandsons of Ivan ‘Money-Bag’. The regency was knitted together by close kinship and political interest. But someone of account had been excluded: the boy-prince’s eldest uncle, lurii, whose power base included the profitable salt-producing region around Galich and Chukhloma and also Zvenigorod only a few miles to the west of Moscow. lurii immediately claimed the throne on the ground of traditional, lateral succession in the House of Riurik. Moral pressure from the Patriarch Photius persuaded him to drop his claim — but not for long. When Photius and Grand Duke Vitovt died, he reasserted it and was soon in command at Moscow. Vasilii was forced to swear homage to his uncle and content himself with the Principality of Kolomna as his inheritance. The year was 1433; Vasilii was eighteen.

Many Muscovite notables would not accept lurii as grand prince, however, and the upshot was civil war. An army of Vasilii’s supporters sacked Iurii’s base at Galich, but the following year lurii counter-attacked and Vasilii himself was defeated and taken to Moscow, this time as his uncle’s prisoner. Fortunately for him, lurii died suddenly; but then his sons took up their father’s claim. In 1436 Vasilii captured the elder of them, his cousin Vasilii Kosoi, and blinded him. But he was not secure as grand prince, and for the next several years he was absorbed in trying to exert an effective grip on his domains, keeping the Tatars out, and reacting to a crisis in the Church. ²⁵

The throne of the metropolitan had remained empty since Photii’s death. It was eventually filled by Isidore, a Greek from Constantinople. But Isidore soon accepted an invitation to attend a Church council in Italy sponsored by the Pope. The papacy had long wanted to unite the Eastern and Western Churches on his own terms. With the Ottoman Turks pressing in on Constantinople from every side, the Emperor was desperate for aid and all for compromise. So was Russia’s Greek patriarch. But most Russians found the idea appalling. For them the only true Christian faith was their faith. The ‘Latins’, such as the crusaders from north-west Europe, who had exhibited such greed, depravity and lack of sexual restraint when they had sacked Constantinople in 1204, no longer observed the practices, still less the morality, of the Orthodox Christian faith. And so, when Isidore returned to Russia from Ferrara in 1441, having agreed to acknowledge the Pope, Vasilii ordered his arrest. A more reliable Russian bishop eventually took his place, but not for seven years. For that period the cruel, unfortunate, Vasilii lacked the support his predecessors had come to rely on in difficult times. And before the situation was resolved his former enemies returned to haunt him.

A substantial fraction of what remained of the Golden Horde, led by Ulug-Mehmet, had taken to regularly pillaging Muscovite territory. Vasilii had tried to counter its raids without much success, and when, in 1445, he was confronted by it before all his forces could be mustered he suffered a disastrous defeat and was taken prisoner. Ulug-Mehmet thought of replacing Vasilii with Dmitrii Shemiaka, Vasilii’s cousin, but eventually he sent 500 warriors to escort the Grand Prince back to Moscow. Vasilii returned in shame to a capital which had suffered a disastrous fire in his absence. Worse, Dmitrii now managed to raised support from among the Muscovite elite, and when the Grand Prince left town on a pilgrimage to the Holy Trinity Church and the shrine of St Sergius at Zagorsk, Dmitrii and his friends took possession of Moscow.