BASIL II  ., called TEMNY (" the BLIND ") (1415-1462), son of the preceding, succeeded his father as grand-duke of Moscow in 1425 . He was a man of small ability and unusual timidity, though not without tenacity of purpose . Nevertheless, during his reign Moscow steadily increased in power, as if to show that the personality of the grand-dukes had become quite a subordinate factor in its development . In 1430 Basil was seized by his uncle, George of Halicz, and sent a prisoner to Kostroma; but the nation, dissatisfied with George, released Basil and in 1433 he returned in triumph to Moscow . ' George, however, took the field against him and Basil fled to Novgorod . On the death of George, Basil was at constant variance with George's children, one of whom, Basil, he had blinded; but in 1445 the grand-duke fell into the hands of blind Basil's brother, Shemyak, and was himself deprived of his sight and banished to Uglich (1445) . The clergy and people, however, being devoted to the grand-duke, assisted him not only to recover his throne a second time, but to put Shemyak to flight, and to seize Halicz, his patrimony . During the remainder of Basil II.'s reign he slowly and unobtrusively added district after district to the grand-duchy of Muscovy, so that, in fine, only the republics of Novgorod and Pskov and the principalities of Tver and Vereya remained independent of Moscow . Yet all this time the realm was overrun continually by the Tatars and Lithuanians, and suffered severely from their depredations . Basil's reign saw the foundation of the Solovetsk monastery and the rise of the khanate of the Crimea . In 1448 the north Russian Church became virtually independent of the patriarchal see of Constantinople by adopting the practice of selecting its metropolitan from among native priests and prelates exclusively . See S .

M . Solovev,

History of Russia (Russ.), (Petersburg, 1895) .