If the apprentice inquisitors of Muscovy can be said to have borrowed from the Latin West, the same is even more clear in the case of their victims. "The trouble began when Kuritsyn [the diplomat and adviser of Ivan III] arrived from Hungarian lands," Gennadius wrote.26 The rationalistic heresy which he sponsored and protected in Moscow was only part of a many-sided importation of ideas and habits from the secular culture of the high Renaissance. Indeed, the Josephites-like Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor-conceived of their mission as a service to the people. Ljke_Jhe_. original mquisitorsjof_flie_mediexaLWest, the Russian clergy was faced with appalling ignorance and debauchery in the society they were attempting to hold togetheETTf the ignorance was part of the Russian heritage, the de-
bauchery was at least partly Western in origin. For vodka and venereal disease, two of the major curses of Russia in the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth century, appear as part of the ambiguous legacy of the Italian Renaissance to early modern Russia.
Venereal _disease first came to Moscow along the trade routes froir, Italy, apparently by way of Cracow in the 1490% and a second wave 0{ infection was to come in the mid-seventeenth century (along with the blac]^ plague) by way of mercenaries from the Thirty Years' War.27 The designa^ tion of the disease as "the Latin sickness" is one of the first signs of growing anti-Latin sentiment.28 x
Vodka came to Russia about a century earlier, and its history illus-. trates several key features of the Renaissance impact on Muscovy. This clea* but powerful national drink was one of several direct descendants of aqu^ vitae, a liquid apparently first distilled for medicinal purposes in Wester^ Europe at the end of the thirteenth century. It appears to have reaches Russia by way of a Genoese settlement on the Black Sea, whence it was brought north a century later by refugees fleeing the Mongol conquest of the Crimea.29
It was fateful for Russian morals that this deceptively innocuous, looking beverage gradually replaced the crude forms of mead and beer which had previously been the principal alcoholic fare of Muscovy. The ta^ fifn vodka became a major source of princely income and gave the civjj ^m^prjJyliTvested interest in the intoxication of its citizens. It is both sa^ and comical to find the transposed English phrase Girni drenki okovite^ ("Give me drink aqua vitae": that is, vodka) in one of the early ????. script dictionaries of Russian. A Dutch traveler at the beginning of the seventeenth century saw in the Muscovite penchant for drunkenness an‹j debauchery proof that Russians "better support slavery than freedom, for in freedom they would give themselves over to license, whereas in slavery they spend their time in work and labor."30
The factjthat vodka apparently came into Russia by way of the medical profession points to the importance of Western-educated court doctors as channels for the early influx of Western ideas and techniques.4 The fact that vodka was popularly believed to be a kind of elixir of life wit^ occult healing qualities provides a pathetic early illustration of the way in which tbe_Ru_ssian_muz/uA: was to gild his addictions and idealize his boncL age. This naive belief also indicates that the initial appeal of Wester^ thought to the primitive Muscovite mind lay in the belief that it offered some simple key to understanding the universe and curing its ills. If one were to resist the overwhelmingly traditionalist Muscovite ideology it could best bg
in the name of another way to truth outside of tradition: some panacea or "philosopher's stone."
Together with the works of Galen and Hippocrates, which began to appear in Russian translation in the fifteenth century, doctors in Muscovy- and throughout Eastern Europe-began to incorporate into their compendia of herbs and cures extracts from the Secreta Secretorum. This work purported to Jje the secret revelation of Aristotle to Alexander the Great about the true nature of the world, contending that biology was the key to all the arts'aHd sciences, and that this "science of life" was ruled by the harmonies and confluences of occult forces within the body.32 This book held a key place among the works translated by the Judaizers and was destroyed during the Josephite persecution of heretics in the early sixteenth century, alongjsdjh_tiieJewjsh doctors who presumably either translated or possessed the work.
The interest in alchemistic texts continued, however, and became a major preoccupation of the translators in the foreign office, who soon replaced the doctors as the major conveyor of Western ideas. Fedor Kuritsyn, the first man effectively to fill the role of foreign minister in Russia, was accused of bringing back the Judaizing heresy from the West. One of the earliest surviving documents from the foreign office was a memorandum written by a Dutch translator at the beginning of the seventeenth century, "On the Higher Philosophical Alchemy."33 Later in the century Raymond Lully's 350-year-old effort to find a "universal science," his Ars magna generalis et ultima, was translated and made the basis of an influential alchemistic compilation by a western Russian translator in the same office.34
Hardly less remarkable was the Russian interest in astrology. Almost every writer of the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth century was taken at one time or another with "delight in the laws of the stars" (zvezdoza-konnaia pretest'). Archbishop Gennadius was himself fascinated with the astrology he felt called on to destroy;35 and after his death, Nicholas of Liibeck, his original protege, became an active propagandist for astrological lore in Muscovy. Known as a "professor of medicine and astrology," he had come to Moscow by way of Rome to help draw up the new church calendar. He stayed on as a physician, translating for the imperial court in 1534 a treatise written in Liibeck on herbs and medicine, The Pleasant Garden of Health, and campaigning actively for unification of the Catholic and Orthodox churches. He produced astrological computations which lent urgency to his pleas for reunion by purporting to show that the end of the world had been merely postponed from 1492 to I524.36 Maxim the Greek devoted
most of his early writings to a refutation of Nicholas' arguments but revealed in the process that he too had been fascinated by astrology while in Italy. Maxim's follower, the urbane diplomat Fedor Karpov, confessed that he found •astrology "necessary and useful to Christians,'' calling it "the art of arts."37 The first Russians sent to study in England at the turn of the sixteenth century were particularly interested in the famous Cambridge stud*ent of astrology, magic, and spiritism, John Dee.38 The rapid spread of fortune-telling, divination, and even gambling in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reveals in part a popularization of astrological ideas current throughout Renaissance Europe.39 /*" Thus, during this early period of Western contact, Russians were fate-\ fully conditioned folook to the West noffor piecemeal ideas and techniques ft but for a ?????? ???? inner secrets of the universe. Early diplomats were / intergstedjnot in thejetails of economic and political developments abroad U bu^ m^asteolegic^l^angLalc^emistic^y^tems. These Renaissance sciences held out the promise of finding either the celestial patterns controlling the movements of history or the philosopher's stone that would turn the dross of the northern forests into gold. Thus, secular science in Russia tended to be Gnostic rather than agnostic. THere is, indeed, a kind of continuity of tradition in the all-encompassing metaphysical systems from the West that fascinated successive generations of Russian thinkers: from the early alchemists_andastrologers to Boehme's occult theosophy (literally, "divine knowledge") and the sweeping totalistic philosophies of Schelling, Hegel, and Marx.40