Sophia Palaeologus

Princess of Russia

• Born: c. 1449
• Birthplace: Constantinople, Byzantine Empire (now Istanbul, Turkey)
• Died: April 7, 1503
• Place of death: Moscow (now in Russia)

Sophia Palaeologus’s marriage to Ivan the Great helped establish Russian princes as protectors of Orthodox Christianity in the East. The marriage also gave the princes a connection with the Byzantine Dynasty and claims to higher social status than that derived from their descent from the semilegendary Viking leader Rurik.

Early Life

Sophia Palaeologus (SOH-fee-ah pay-lee-AHL-oh-guhs) was the daughter of Thomas, despot of Morea, the younger brother of Constantine XI, the last emperor of the Byzantine Empire. When Constantine died fighting the Turks on the walls of Constantinople in 1453, Thomas and his family fled to Italy. Thomas died there, and Pope Paul II took his daughter and two sons as wards and placed them under the guardianship of Cardinal Bessarion, a Greek scholar who had converted from Greek Orthodoxy to Roman Catholicism and attained high rank in the Church.

Sophia was fourteen years old when her father died, and she remained in Rome for ten years. There is evidence, however, that these were not happy years. Although she received a good education, it was always as an act of charity. Cardinal Bessarion insisted that she and her brothers consider themselves paupers and be humbly grateful for papal generosity. This did not sit well with the scions of an ancient and noble house, but they realized that their dependence on others for bed and board kept them from refusing the cardinal’s insistence. In any case, under Cardinal Bessarion’s tutelage, Sophia became an intelligent woman, skilled in intrigue. Some writers considered her beautiful, while others described her as grotesquely obese.

Life’s Work

In 1469, Pope Paul began negotiations to marry Sophia to Ivan the Great , grand prince of Moscow. Little is known about Ivan’s personal life, since the chroniclers of the time were churchmen concerned with, primarily, the moral significance of a ruler’s actions. Some records recognize him as Ivan the Hunchbacked; this may not have indicated a true deformity but instead that he had the rounded shoulders of a scholar rather than the broad chest of a fighter.

Ivan seems to have been shrewd, reflective, and one who preferred to lay his plans within the Kremlin rather than ride forth in dramatic charges against enemy forces. At that time, Russia was still surrounded and dominated by the Tatars, and Ivan hoped that this royal match would gain him a military alliance against the Tatars along with the obvious prestige. The pope hoped to gain Russian support against the Muslims Turks, who threatened Christendom from the east, and to pave the way for a reunion of the Eastern and Western churches.

Sophia left Rome in June of 1472 and arrived in Moscow on November 12. On that day, she was received into the Orthodox church and wed Ivan. According to one story, her enormous weight broke the great bed of the grand princesses on her first night in Moscow. There was resentment of her almost from the beginning, and many Russian aristocrats considered her to be wielding a sinister influence on Ivan. Her education and worldly wisdom placed her in stark contrast to the illiterate wives of the Russian noblemen, who were kept in seclusion, an Asiatic custom. This practice of secluding high-ranking women, known as the terem, would continue until the 1700’s, when Peter the Great formally abolished it and commanded that noblewomen must appear at public functions in accordance with Western customs.

To a woman such as Sophia, a child of Constantinople brought up in ancient and cultured Rome, Moscow of the time could only appear crude and rustic. The Kremlin of that day was not yet the red brick walls and stone palaces familiar to modern minds from Cold War news clips, but instead a wooden palisade sheltering a few buildings constructed of logs. Only during Sophia’s life did the first stone building, the Uspensky Cathedral, go up within the Kremlin’s walls. During this time, Ivan steadily expanded his titles and the rituals surrounding his activities, and he began to use the title czar, the Russian version of “caesar.” Chroniclers who desired to curry the monarch’s favor began to produce various legends glorifying him, including a fabricated genealogy that traced his descent from an imagined kinsman of the emperor Augustus.

Although Sophia had formally embraced Orthodoxy upon her marriage, returning to the faith of her Byzantine childhood after years as a convert to Catholicism, she was continually suspected of adhering to Roman ways. She also was the subject of intense jealousy by Ivan Molodoi (molodoi means “the younger”), the son of Ivan the Great by his previous marriage. Ivan Molodoi feared that Sophia’s children might supplant him and his heirs, not an unreasonable concern in a time and place in which inheritance laws were fluid. Her first two children were daughters, who posed no dynastic threat, but in 1479, she gave birth to a son, Vasily (the future Grand Prince Vasily III ), whom she clearly hoped to make Ivan’s heir in place of Ivan Molodoi.

In 1483, Ivan Molodoi fathered a son of his own, Dmitry, by his wife, Yelena Stepanova of Moldavia. As a result, his concern about his half brother’s possible ambitions toward the throne grew steadily stronger, and he sought his father’s assurances that he and his descendants would indeed inherit the throne of Muscovy. In 1490, Ivan Molodoi died, leaving his young son vulnerable to Sophia’s intrigues. These came to a head in 1497 with a plot to have Dmitry murdered, apparently by poison. Ivan discovered the scheme just in time to foil it, and although he did not punish Sophia or her son Vasily, he executed a number of Sophia’s supporters. Among them were several women accused of being poisoners, whom he had thrown into the river Muskva in view of the Kremlin.

On February 4, 1498, Ivan formally blessed Dmitry as his heir. In the absence of a clear law of primogeniture to make the inheritance right of the eldest son’s line automatic, such promises, however, remained mutable. With Sophia’s aid, Vasily continued to intrigue for his father’s favor, and in April of 1502, Ivan reversed his earlier decision. Dmitry was disgraced and sent into exile, along with his mother Yelena. Vasily was formally proclaimed heir.

In the following year, Sophia died, but she had secured the right of her son to inherit the throne. Ivan the Great died in 1505 and was succeeded by Vasily. Dmitry remained in exile on an estate well away from Moscow, and he died there three years later without once trying to wrest the throne from his uncle. Vasily’s son, Ivan the Terrible , grandson of Sophia Palaeologus, was the first Muscovite grand prince to incorporate the title czar into his coronation rituals, and as such he is often reckoned to have been the first true czar of Russia. He earned the sobriquet grozny, the terrible, as a result of his harsh and often brutal rule.

Significance

The marriage of Sophia Palaeologus to Ivan the Great permanently secured Moscow’s ascendancy as the primary principality of Russia. By providing a blood tie, however tenuous, with the emperors of Byzantium, the marriage enabled the grand princes of Moscow to style themselves as czars of Russia, using a Russified form of the Italian word caesar, which had come to be synonymous with the term emperor.

This dynastic link also led to the tradition of Moscow as the Third Rome, replacing Constantinople as the seat of Eastern Christendom. According to this tradition, Constantinople had become the Second Rome after Rome proper fell to the barbarians in the late fifth and early sixth centuries and was deemed by the Eastern Church to no longer maintain headship over the Church.

Although the Rurikid Dynasty to which Ivan belonged came to an end with his grandson Ivan the Terrible, the use of the title czar and the Byzantine double-headed eagle persisted and were adopted by the Romanovs, the second and last great dynasty of Russian monarchs. With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the abolition of Soviet symbols such as the red star and the hammer and sickle, the double-headed eagle has returned as the emblem of the Russian Federation, although without dynastic significance in a republican government.

Bibliography

Nicol, Donald M. The Immortal Emperor: The Life and Legend of Constantine Palaiologus, Last Emperor of the Romans. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Background information on Sophia’s childhood and escape to Rome.

Payne, Robert, and Nikita Romanoff. Ivan the Terrible. Lanham, Md.: Cooper Square Press, 2002. Includes background information on Ivan’s ancestors, including Sophia and Ivan the Great.

Warnes, David. Chronicle of the Russian Tsars: The Reign-by-Reign Record of the Rulers of Imperial Russia. London: Thames and Hudson, 1999. Good overview of each czar’s reign, from Ivan the Great to Nicholas II.