Lost Kingdom

by Serhii Plokhy

  Now it seemed that the vision of the true Orthodox empire was about to be realized. In Western and Central Europe, the sixteenth century would be marked by the Protestant Reformation, Catholic reform, and religious wars between Protestants and Catholics. For Muscovy, the ecclesiastical priorities were to win higher status for its Orthodox church. The first half of the seventeenth century would test established relations between the secular and spiritual authorities in Moscow as well as Muscovites’ perceptions of themselves and the world around them.

  RELATIONS BETWEEN THE MUSCOVITE CHURCH AND THE EASTERN patriarchs had broken down in the mid-fifteenth century, when Isidore, the Greek metropolitan of Rus’, was arrested and thrown into a Muscovite prison for attempting to introduce a church union with Rome.

  Isidore first came to Moscow in 1437 but then left to attend the Council of Florence, where he was one of the most ardent supporters of the church union with Rome. The schism between the Catholics and the Orthodox went back to the eleventh century, when the Latin West, represented by the pope of Rome, and the Greek East, represented by the emperors and patriarchs of Byzantium, broke their communion. The theological differences between the two branches of Christianity concerned the Holy Spirit: Did it come from God the Father alone, as the easterners claimed, or from God the Father and God the Son in equal measure, as the westerners believed? Underlying this and many other theological disputes was the question of who should wield ultimate authority in the church—the hierarchs of Rome or Constantinople. Political and cultural differences also pulled the two parts of what had once been the Roman Empire in different directions. In the East, the church was subordinate to the emperor, who exercised both secular and spiritual power. In the West, the pope had to compete with secular rulers, a situation that produced a political culture much more pluralistic than that of the East. In time, the West would come to overshadow its Eastern rival.

  The union, which placed the Orthodox Church under the tutelage of the pope, was discussed and approved by both sides at the Council of Florence in 1439. The Orthodox, who would be referred to in later texts as Uniates, accepted Catholic dogmas while maintaining their traditional Byzantine rite and the institution of the married clergy. The last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI, had accepted a union between the two branches of Christianity in the vain hope that Rome would save him and his state from the Ottomans. Isidore returned to Moscow from the council in 1441 only to be arrested by Grand Prince Vasilii II the Blind, the father of Ivan III. Isidore managed to escape, and the Muscovite prince did not pursue him. Had he been caught, ecclesiastical ordinances would have obliged Vasilii to “burn him in flames or bury him alive” for his apostasy.

  Why did Moscow reject church union in 1441? An explanation is to be found in letters signed by Grand Prince Vasilii and sent to the Byzantine emperor and the patriarch of Constantinople, citing theological differences between the Eastern and Western churches. But given that it was the grand prince, not the church hierarchs, who figured as the main actor on the Muscovite side, it may be assumed that at least part of the motivation lay in his own agenda and political aspirations. It is no accident that the rise of Muscovy as an independent state coincided with the declaration of independence of its church from Constantinople, which had been an ally of the Mongol Horde for decades, if not centuries. We know that Vasilii wanted the metropolitan of Rus’ to be his own appointee and had actually sent his candidate to Constantinople for approval, but he had been rebuffed, and the post had gone to Isidore. After Isidore’s arrest, Vasilii again asked Constantinople for the right to nominate his own candidate, but he was again refused.

  The Union of Florence offered the ambitious ruler a perfect pretext to cut ties with Constantinople and assume the right to appoint metropolitans to the Moscow seat. In 1448, a council of Orthodox bishops elected Vasilii’s candidate, Iona, to the metropolitan throne, and the Muscovite church broke all ties with Constantinople. Even before the fall of the Byzantine capital in 1453, the metropolitanate of Moscow would become autocephalous, or self-governing—an isolation from the rest of the Orthodox world that lasted almost a century and a half. But that did not prevent the Muscovite princes from claiming the legacy of Byzantium, or, indeed, from establishing advantageous relations with Rome, as Ivan’s marriage to Sophia clearly attested.

  The years 1448, when the Muscovite church broke relations with Constantinople, and 1472, when Ivan married Sophia, belong to different epochs in Russian history. In the first case, Muscovy was beset by internal strife, struggling to establish its autonomy from the Horde. In the second, it had achieved de facto independence from the khans and taken control of their Rus’ possessions. Ivan’s marriage to Sophia helped create an unprecedented opening to the Christian world outside Muscovy: the matchmaker was the pope himself, and the bride was Uniate. To be sure, Sophia returned to Orthodoxy, and Muscovy never accepted the Union of Florence. But for a Muscovite ruler to marry a Uniate with the support of Rome was a sign of recognition of his new independent status by the political and ecclesiastical elite of Western and Central Europe.

  In the early 1490s, the Russian religious elite embraced several notions: that the Muscovite tsars were heirs of the Byzantine emperors, that Moscow was the second Constantinople, and that Muscovy and the Rus’ land were successors to the Byzantine Empire. Those ideas were first fully expressed by Metropolitan Zosima of Moscow in 1492. In that year, as Christopher Columbus discovered the New World, the Orthodox believers of Moscow prepared for the world’s end. According to the Orthodox calendar, which counted years from the creation of the world, 1492 was in fact the year 7000, which would mark the end of time. The Orthodox faithful in Muscovy believed that 1492 would be the last year of their lives and of humankind in general. They thanked God that they professed the true religion and were about to be saved.

  To the surprise of the Muscovite churchmen, the world did not end in 1492. With the world continuing to exist, a new calendar problem emerged for the church of Rus’—how to calculate the ever-changing date of Easter. Metropolitan Zosima rose to the challenge and produced the Exposition of the Easter Cycle. For him, as for many other Muscovites, the new calendar and the new Orthodox era began with a change in the structure of the world hierarchy. At its top, the Orthodox empire of Byzantium was now replaced by Muscovy, and the Byzantine emperor was supplanted by the Muscovite tsar. According to Zosima, God had installed Ivan III as “a new Tsar Constantine for the new city of Constantine, sovereign of Moscow and the whole Rus’ land and many other lands.” Zosima presented Moscow as a new Constantinople, while referring to Constantinople as a new Rome (in some copies, a new Jerusalem).

  In the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Muscovy was imagined as both a new Jerusalem and a new Rome, but it is the notion of Moscow as the Third Rome that has attracted the most attention from historians, given the metaphor’s inspiration of a new model of relations between church and sovereign. Moscow was called a Third Rome in a number of letters dating from the early sixteenth century and attributed to the monk Filofei, who resided in one of the Pskov monasteries on lands recently annexed by Moscow. Among the letters is one addressed to Grand Prince Vasilii, warning him against neglecting or even impairing the interests of the church. According to Filofei, the churches of Rome had fallen because of heresy, while those of Constantinople—the second Rome, to which imperial and spiritual power had migrated after the fall of the first Rome—had been taken over by the Muslims. Moscow was the third Rome, charged with saving the true faith. That idea was presented at the beginning of the letter attributed to Filofei and repeated at its end: “All Christian kingdoms have come together in yours alone: two Romes have fallen, the third stands, and a fourth there will never be; your Christian kingdom will not be replaced by another.”

  The representation of Moscow as the Third Rome, all but forgotten by the Muscovites during the rule of Ivan the Terrible, was dramatically revived after his death, in the midst of Moscow’s efforts to elevate its
metropolitanate to patriarchal status. In the summer of 1588, two years after Patriarch Joachim V of Antioch left Moscow, Tsar Fedor’s court received an indication that its lobbying of the patriarch had had its intended effect. Smolensk officials reported a meeting with a new visitor from the East, Patriarch Jeremiah II of Constantinople. The tsar sent a court official to greet him and inquire about the decision of the Ecumenical Council on the proposed Moscow patriarchate. The Moscow officials were in for a disappointment, as Patriarch Jeremiah knew nothing about their request and had brought no council decision with him. The sole purpose of Jeremiah’s mission, as it turned out, was to collect alms to improve the patriarchate’s finances and build a new headquarters and patriarchal church, as the Ottoman Turks in Istanbul, the former Constantinople, had taken over the old ones.

  Although the Muscovite authorities arranged for Jeremiah’s solemn entrance into Moscow, the welcoming party did not include the metropolitan. The patriarch was not summoned to the tsar’s court until eight days had passed. He was brought there mounted on an ass, supposedly a reenactment of Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem, but the tsar walked only half the previous seven-foot distance to greet the new guest: either the Muscovites were uncertain that Jeremiah was a true patriarch, or displeased that he had brought no news about their request. The tsar did not invite Jeremiah to dine, asking instead that he meet with the court advisers, who inquired about the situation of the Orthodox Church in the Ottoman Empire. After that, Jeremiah was sent back to his quarters and told to wait.

  The patriarch was now a prisoner in all but name. “In the place where they held Jeremiah, they would not let anyone from the local people come to see him, nor would they allow him to go out. Only the monks, if they so desired, would go out with the people of the tsar into the marketplace, and the Muscovites guarded the monks until they returned to their quarters,” wrote a member of Jeremiah’s party. Whereas Patriarch Joachim had spent less than two months in Moscow, Jeremiah was there for almost a year, from July 1588 until May 1589. He eventually did what the Muscovites wanted, creating a patriarchate and presiding over the consecration of the new patriarch of Moscow.

  The consecration of a candidate elected by the local Orthodox council took place in early February 1589. To no one’s surprise, it was Metropolitan Iov of Moscow. In May of that year, Tsar Fedor let Jeremiah go with a generous reward, given his original mission of collecting alms. But the price of his release had been the unintended creation of a patriarchate in violation of all existing church ordinances. A few years later, the Eastern patriarchs, impoverished and dependent on the tsar’s alms, approved Jeremiah’s actions.

  Moscow was now the seat of an Orthodox patriarchate—a junior one, to be sure, which yielded precedence to the long-established patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. In real terms, however, it was the biggest, richest, and most powerful patriarchate in the Orthodox world. Its power came from the tsar, who was its true master, along with his courtiers. The newly installed Patriarch Iov not only had taken no part in the negotiations with Jeremiah but had not even seen him before the consecration. The decree establishing the patriarchate included an explicit reference to Moscow as the Third Rome: “For the old Rome fell through the Apollinarian heresy. The second Rome, which is Constantinople, is held by the grandsons of Hagar—the godless Turks. Pious Tsar! Your great Rus’ tsardom, the third Rome, has surpassed them all in piety, and all pious people have been united as one in your tsardom. And you alone in the firmament are called Christian tsar in the whole universe among all Christians.”

  In no other document did Jeremiah ever refer to Moscow as the Third Rome. There are strong indications that the decree was prepared by the Muscovite side, and Jeremiah was simply made to sign it. For the first time, a concept that had been developed much earlier in the century was being invoked to promote the goals of the Muscovite church and state. If the monk Filofei had sought to protect the church against secular encroachments, his notion of Moscow as the Third Rome was now being used to enhance the international status of the newly created Moscow Patriarchate and the tsar who ultimately controlled it. Moscow was preparing to assert its primacy in the Orthodox world.

  THE KEY FIGURE BEHIND THE CREATION OF THE MOSCOW PATRIARCHATE was not Tsar Fedor but his brother-in-law and éminence grise, Boris Godunov. It was Godunov who handled the visits of both Eastern patriarchs to Moscow, Joachim of Antioch in 1586 and Jeremiah of Constantinople in 1588–1589. And Metropolitan Iov of Moscow, who was personally close to Godunov, became the first Muscovite patriarch in 1589. The son of a petty provincial noble, Godunov had risen through the ranks of Ivan the Terrible’s oprichnina servitors to become one of his closest aides.

  Tsar Fedor died at the age of forty in January 1598, leaving his wife childless, the monarchy without heirs, and the country without a dynasty: Fedor’s younger half-brother, Prince Dmitrii, had died under suspicious circumstances seven years earlier, in May 1591. On the tsar’s death, power passed to Fedor’s wife, Irina, and then to her brother, the powerful courtier Boris Godunov. The Rurikid dynasty, on which Ivan the Terrible had based his belief in his German origins, and which was the foundation of the Muscovite mythology that linked Moscow with Kyiv, Constantinople, and Rome, had now become extinct. Godunov’s family legend associated him with Tatar servitors, not Kyivan rulers. But thanks to his political astuteness, the transition from one dynasty to what many believed was the beginning of a new one went rather smoothly. Godunov was elected to the tsardom by the Assembly of the Land, a consultative body made up of representatives of various strata of Muscovite society, first called into being by Ivan the Terrible.

  On September 1, 1598, New Year’s Day by the Muscovite calendar (Russia would switch to January 1 only in the early eighteenth century under Peter I), the Muscovite elite gathered in the Dormition Cathedral of the Kremlin for the installation of the new tsar. Godunov appeared with an entourage of courtiers. One of the boyars carried Monomakh’s Cap, another the tsar’s scepter, and yet another the golden orb, a sphere surmounted by a cross that was referred to as an “apple” in Muscovite documents of the time. Godunov mounted the throne, and Iov, his loyal patriarch, invested him with the royal insignia. Muscovy was ending the sixteenth century with a brand-new political and ecclesiastical team as well as the prospect of a ruling dynasty. The orderly transition seemed to augur a bright future: with the tsar and the patriarch in office, the leadership of the prospective Orthodox empire was complete.

  But the early seventeenth century brought innumerable difficulties for the Muscovite elite. The unexpected death of Boris Godunov in April 1605, in the midst of social turmoil, plunged Muscovy into a long and bloody political crisis, civil war, and international conflict known as the Time of Troubles. It lasted eight long years that saw a succession of rulers on the Muscovite throne. First came the defrocked monk Georgii Otrepiev, who publicly assumed the identity of the deceased youngest son of Ivan the Terrible, Dmitrii. He held the Muscovite throne for less than a year, from June 1605 to May 1606, when he was killed by the supporters of a new tsar, Vasilii Shuisky, who was actually a descendant of the Rurikids. Shuisky was deposed in July 1610 by supporters of Władysław IV, a son of the Polish king Sigismund III, who desired the crown for himself, and whose troops occupied Moscow. The Time of Troubles ended in 1613 with the expulsion of the Poles from Moscow and the election to the throne of Mikhail Romanov, the progenitor of a new dynasty, in the following year.

  The Time of Troubles posed new challenges to the Muscovite historical, political, and cultural identity that had taken shape in the previous century and a half, following the end of Mongol rule. On the one hand, the crisis began the process of separating the person of the tsar from the state over which he ruled, laying the foundations for the early modern Russian nation. On the other hand, the patriotic reaction to the Polish invasion that accompanied and exacerbated the crisis closely identified loyalty to the tsar with loyalty to church and fatherland. In official
Muscovite discourse of the era, disloyalty to one came to mean disloyalty to all.

  If one considers the main ideological arguments used to mobilize Muscovite resistance to the foreign invasion, religion and the idea of defending the Orthodox Church emerge as by far the most important. In a country without a ruling dynasty or a legitimate secular institution to run the state, the church took on particular importance. The office of head of the church emerged from the shadow of the political sovereign, where it had been since the early days of the Tsardom of Muscovy, to claim a central place in the country’s symbolic politics. That role was played by Patriarch Hermogen, the third cleric to assume the patriarchal office and an unlikely agent of change. He became patriarch in July 1606, when he was seventy-five years old—ancient by the standards of the time.

  In his pastoral letters, Hermogen presented the changing worldview of Muscovite religious and secular elites as they struggled to respond to the challenges of the Time of Troubles. Hermogen refused to treat those who rebelled against the newly installed Tsar Vasilii Shuisky as fully Christian. “I turn to you, former Orthodox Christians of every degree, age, and office,” wrote the patriarch,

  but now we do not even know what to call you, for you have turned away from God, conceived hatred for the truth, fallen away from the universal and apostolic Church, turned away from Tsar Vasilii Ivanovich, who was given the wreath by God and anointed with holy oil; you have forgotten the vows of our Orthodox faith, in which we were born, baptized, raised and grew up; you have abandoned your kissing of the cross and your vow to stand to the death for the house of the Most Holy Mother of God and for the Muscovite state and have cleaved to that falsely pretending little tsar of yours.

  Hermogen’s insistence that a Muscovite patriot and a true Christian must be loyal to the tsar became a staple of Muscovite literature in the first decades of the seventeenth century.