"At midnight, the Muscovites were chasing." As more than 500 years ago, the Volyn prince Konstantin Ostrozky broke the ancestors of the Russians under Orsha
Then the Moscow prince Vasily III again began to take the Eastern stronghold of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL), which preceded the battle of Orsha. Video day and this is not the only episode of the then war with Muscovy, which echoes half a thousand years later in the current Russian aggression. Like the Pskov landing, and its appearance under the walls of Smolensk, only two years after Moscow absorbed the Pskov Republic.
The chronicle reported on military service on the eve of the war with Lithuania: “1000 pushers were thrown on the Pskovichi [exhibit]; And the Pskovich is so unusual, and it was very difficult for them. " Historians call a number of overwhelming people of that era war for the Rurik inheritance, which lasted for over a hundred years. Moscow has so far integrated into the state system of the Golden Horde.
From her, she inherited the despotic principle of power, in which the attitude of the princes to her people looked like a relationship of the conqueror and enslaved. This feature of the place there for centuries has been noticed by foreign diplomats and travelers. It also remained today's Russia. In this publication, HB proposes to bypass the discussion of the next time whether Konstantin Ostrozky considered himself.
He came from the same Rurik and, according to the modern Polish historian and diplomat Krzysztof Yablonka, would have been successful in the competition for ancient Russian inheritance with the Moscow half -blood. Prince Constantine was Orthodox Rusyn, by then definitions. He served well with the common political and military affairs of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania on the post of the great hetman, that is, the commander -in -chief.
And this does not lower the importance of the prince and his victories in 33 battles for the modern identity of Ukrainians. Like the victory under Orsha, he is not crossed out of the historical memory of Belarus, despite the ban on celebrating her anniversary under the modern Lukashenko regime. The researcher of the then nobility Natalia Yakovenko writes: “Konstantin Ostrozky became a person who was at the right time in the right place.
It can be said that he had a second or even the first government in the Hierarchy of the GDL. " The insatiable womb of Moscow after a sign standing in the Ugra in 1480, Prince Ivan III, the father of Vasyl III, broke out of the Horde and remembered his distant involvement in Kievan Rus. Moscow's confidence in the East Slavic lands of pre-Mongol times added the marriage of Ivan with Sophia Paleologist, the niece of the last Byzantine Emperor Konstantin IX.
According to one version of researchers, then Moscow also took over the East Roman two-headed eagle to designate its power. And for Vasyl III, the idea that his principality after the conquest of Byzantium inherited a kind of championship in the Orthodox world began to spread after Vasyl III. Because "for both rhymes fell, the third is Moscow, but not to be the fourth.
" The claims of Ivan III Polish chronicler Matsey Strykovsky wrote: "He [Ivan] tore 70 castles from the Lithuanian state, and he began to write himself the king and ruler of all Russia. " At that time, much of the lands of Kievan Rus was part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL). Unlike the neighboring authoritarian Moscow, the GDL looked like a kind of land federation, where cities, including Smolensk, had Magdeburg right. This community began to grow around the middle of the XIII century.