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Perhaps because of the crusading spirit, wars on this front had long been fought in a vicious manner. In the 1470s, for example, the Knights had burned Kobyle on the east shore of Lake Peipus, together with 3,985 people. On this occasion Moscow sent in a force of Tatars and a new terror weapon, 1,600 dogs (the memory of which may have inspired Shakespeare’s reference a century later to letting loose the dogs of war). The Knights retaliated by attacking Pskov, where both sides fought each other to a standstill. In 1502 the Livonian war was subsumed into a larger conflict between Muscovy and Poland-Lithuania, and in 1503 Ivan and von Plettenberg concluded a peace at Pskov. ²⁹

The Knights had repeatedly asked Rome to endorse their crusade against the Orthodox Russians, but the Pope was more concerned with the Turkish threat and anxious, if he could, to enlist Ivan’s support against it. But Poland-Lithuania was soon taking up the cry. By 1515 its king was assuring the Pope that the Grand Prince of Moscow was ‘a Sarmatian Asiatic-tyrant, a blasphemer and schismatic’ bent on ‘the downfall of the Roman Church’. ³⁰ Certainly the war inspired the publication of the first of a long series of German flysheets (Flugschriften) proclaiming anti-Russian sentiments in increasingly vitriolic terms. Cold War rhetoric was of ancient provenance, and had its beginning here, in Russia’s first imperialist push towards the west. ³¹

Despite the Polish king’s aspersions, Muscovy no longer humbled itself before the Asiatic Tatars. Indeed, it now sought to subdue them, but its face was already turned Janus-like towards the West as well. Greeks and Germans had been recruited for Ivan’s service, and he seems to have now exploited contacts with the Byzantine emigres in Italy to bring Italians with modern skills to Moscow. They included the architect Pietro Antonio Solari of Milan, who designed the new Saviour Gate to the Kremlin and the magnificent reception hall known as the Hall of Facets, and the brilliant engineer, coiner and Renaissance jack of many trades Aristotele Fioravanti of Ferrara.

Meanwhile, although the Church had been uneasy about Ivan’s second marriage and his association with Rome, with the Latins and the ways of the Latins, the Grand Prince had had his way. But tensions had continued to simmer under the surface, and now they erupted. It was whispered that there was a conspiracy to undermine the purity of Russians’ Orthodox faith, and that several prominent figures very close to the Grand Prince were part of it. So was Metropolitan Zosimus. These were the so-called ‘Judaizers’.

There was nothing Jewish about them. ‘Judaizer’ was simply a term of ideological abuse, like ‘Trotskyist’ in the 1930s. To label one’s enemies as heretics was to establish a correct political line, and, as in the 1930s, this process was associated with purges. The nearest the Judaizers came to the heresy they were accused of was, perhaps, to borrow a form of rationalism from humanists in the West, but the controversy was strongly informed by political interest. Ivan himself seems to have been attracted by one aspect of the so-called heresy, because it opened up the possibility of secularizing church lands, ³² which, as we have seen in regard to the Novgorod appropriations, he was anxious to do. Like Henry VIII of England, who presided over the dissolution of the monasteries, Ivan was anxious to place the Church’s assets at the disposal of the state.

The purgers’ first target, however, was Metropolitan Zosimus. Zosimus’s public reference to Ivan as ‘the new Emperor Constantine of the new Constantinople — Moscow’ had justified the confidence which had Ivan to appoint him. ³³ Yet such was the current extent of feeling against Zosimus that the Grand Prince, ever the sensitive politician, allowed him to be sacrificed. Zosimus was ousted in 1496, and was subsequently relegated in official church history to the status of ‘a wicked heretic’ for his alleged ‘Judaizing’. ³⁴ But that was not the end of it. Fingers pointed to several other important figures close to the Grand Prince — to Fedor Kuritsyn, one of Ivan’s leading diplomats and foreign-policy advisers; to the Greek Trakhaniot brothers; even to the Grand Princess Sofia. She had, after all, been a Uniate and a ward of the Pope. Ivan protected them, at least for a time.