Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

During the Soviet era, publications covering the religious life of medieval and early modern Rus′ tended to emphasize land issues and the condition of the peasantry. The scope of this area of scholarship has broadened considerably in recent years to encompass the cultural and spiritual aspects of Muscovite church history. This expansion has been aided significantly by the publication of documents supplementing fundamental collections of source materials created in the 20th century. Rich collections in Russian museums and art restorers’ revelations are becoming increasingly accessible through the bountiful production of high-quality albums and exhibit catalogues as well as the development of websites devoted to art and architecture. The two excellent monographs reviewed here will further expand our understanding of the formative period of the Muscovite polity because they underscore the crucial interconnections that permitted church leaders and Moscow’s princes to construct the symbiotic relationships that promoted their mutual success.

Both books reveal the importance of sainthood as the social and political “glue” holding together the rising status of rulers and church hierarchs, while simultaneously laying out the widely divergent itineraries for future [End Page 992] saints to follow during their earthly lives. The saints who figure in Élisabeth Teiro’s examination of the Russian metropolitanate during the 14th to 16th centuries are cut from very different cloth from the legendarily humble monk Sergius of Radonezh—adviser of princes, conciliator, counterpart of St. Francis in giving away worldly possessions, and source of inspiration for unity against the Tatars and rebuilding Russian spirituality. In contrast, the saintly metropolitans contribute to the building of church and state as political activists who move to Moscow and thereafter link the destiny of their church to that of the local rulers. Sergius and the metropolitans alike were then posthumously claimed as wonder-working intercessors for Moscow, an image fostered both by church hierarchs and by Moscow’s rulers.

Teiro’s study begins with Peter’s relocation of the seat of the metropolitan to Moscow, his initiation of the construction of the Dormition Cathedral, and his burial in 1326 in his unfinished church. His relatively rapid recognition as the first saint associated with the principality of Moscow was initiated by his successor, Theognost, backed by Ivan Kalita of Moscow; and the Byzantine patriarch agreed to canonization. Metropolitans before Peter had not been the focus of special veneration, but thereafter his successors came to be given serious consideration for this status. Analyzing the grounds for sainthood, Teiro concludes that after Peter “admission to the ranks of the saints” (199) rather than canonization, with its connotation of the procedure used in the Roman Catholic Church, better describes the process at work in Muscovy, especially before Metropolitan Makarii’s councils of 1547–49 made glorification a more formal process. Incorrupt relics served as an indication of worthiness for sainthood, but the indispensable requirement was that the potential saint perform miracles, in life or after death (and a candidate’s record in this regard might be “improved” to strengthen his claim). After the Russian church became autocephalous in 1448, candidates native to the Russian lands were more likely to be canonized. Like Peter, the other leading thaumaturgic saints of Moscow, Aleksii and Iona, were native Russians: Aleksii (d. 1378) had been the last Russian to hold the position before Iona, the former bishop of Riazan′, was elevated in 1448 as the first metropolitan of the autocephalous Russian church. Successive metropolitans generally played an active role in promoting the “case for canonization” of their predecessors, and they received the backing of the grand princes of Moscow in this endeavor, a campaign that contributed to the prestige of the metropolitanate while simultaneously enhancing the prestige of the principality that was steadily extending its reach over the other Russian lands. As Teiro shows, the metropolitans remained local saints until the mid 16th-century councils made them objects of “all-Russian” veneration. Therefore, they provided political and administrative service during their lives, then became intercessors on behalf of Moscow after their deaths. [End Page 993]

Focusing upon the metropolitans’ active role in politics and administration, Teiro examines the question, largely neglected until now, of the metropolitanate’s temporal goods: what material resources were at the disposal of the metropolitan and how did the head of the church administer that property? As seems to be the case generally in our field, the limited (often very sparse) available sources tend to produce more questions than answers. Teiro is cautious about drawing conclusions and often draws attention to points that continue to puzzle her, for example, the reason for the metropolitanate’s acquisition of its landholding servitors’ patrimony when the owners could have mortgaged their property, if necessary, while still safeguarding clan interests (242). Using surviving documentary materials, Teiro traces the general structure of the church organization and discusses the establishment of eparchies, rules for the appointment of hierarchs, symbols of office, and rites of consecration before and after the establishment of the autocephalous church. Her evidence indicates that the metropolitans were pragmatic administrators. Rus′ retained large eparchies, in contrast with the pattern in smaller and more thickly settled Orthodox communities such as those in the Greek lands, perhaps a response to a relative shortage of qualified candidates for high office and possibly a reflection of bishops’ efforts to retain their large holdings. The success of Ivan IV’s Volga campaigns in the 1550s and the opening of vast opportunities in the east presented new challenges for the church administration, a matter that one hopes Teiro might investigate as a future research project.

Teiro’s investigation of the metropolitan’s role as head of his own eparchy raises a series of questions that will offer further research possibilities to scholars who are interested in both church–state and internal church institutional relations in Muscovy. Here again, specialists working outside this area would be astonished by the great gaps in the scattered and fragmentary extant sources. For example, we still do not know where the metropolitan resided in Moscow. Teiro presents a short reconstructed list of monasteries and churches under the metropolitan’s jurisdiction; and apart from the Chudov Monastery in the Kremlin established by Metropolitan Aleksii, these institutions seem to have been modest foundations. The metropolitan’s lands in widely scattered rural areas were acquired and administered similarly to those held in secular society. The metropolitanate acquired property through donations, purchase, exchange, or as payment for debt and granted use of land to servitors on conditions similar to the secular pomest′e (service-tenure estate). The head of the church had his own boyars and lesser servitors to administer far-flung church holdings, men whom Teiro logically sees as counterparts of the dvor (court) of secular rulers. In addition to land, the metropolitan also enjoyed income acquired through extensive fiscal and judicial privileges granted by the princes, dues from dioceses, fees from the church courts and for ordination [End Page 994] and consecration services, antimenses for new altars, donations made at the shrines of saints, and gifts of money or goods—sometimes icons, richly decorated books, or silk brocade.

Unfortunately, there is no record of the total revenue available to the metropolitan. The resources of the head of the church presumably matched or surpassed those of such big monastic centers as Trinity-Sergius, Kirillov, and Volokolamsk. But one wonders how the changing circumstances of the late 15th and early 16th centuries affected the metropolitan’s income. How much of the revenue came to the central church administration from lands not directly controlled by the metropolitan? Did the flow of donations decrease as society’s preoccupation with commemoration of self and kin intensified and as the expected fees for such services became more clearly scaled? Other recent studies have examined this issue in connection with some religious centers, but we still do not know how this trend affected the metropolitan’s revenues.¹ It seems likely that the monasteries and churches under his jurisdiction may not have benefited from these sources of income to the same extent as the institutions connected with more popular saints.

Teiro points out the surprising absence of evidence of land litigation between the metropolitan or the monasteries under his jurisdiction and the great monastic centers, including the Simonov, Volokolamsk, Dormition, or Kirillov monasteries. Decisions unfavorable to the metropolitanate, she suggests, may have been purposely omitted from the archives (298). In general, we would not expect a losing litigant to possess a copy of the transcript, since the winner received the judgment charter. Of course, we cannot check such questions in the records of the secular courts that heard the cases, because the trial record remained in the possession of the judge and no official archive had yet been created to preserve judicial documents. But, perhaps significantly, a recent survey of the records in the Trinity-Sergius Monastery’s archive for the early 16th century turned up only two documents with references to metropolitans, testaments of donors to the monastery with notations that the wills had been shown to the head of the church.² Relations—including tensions—within the church organization merit further study. [End Page 995]

Examination of the metropolitan’s administration of his temporal possessions raises additional questions about his supervision of the church organization as a whole. Presumably the church faced the same challenges that confronted the princely administration in this period. As the tasks managed by the church’s administration increased, a larger administrative structure was needed. Did it grow out of the metropolitan’s “household”? How were personnel recruited from other religious institutions? What social networks were at play in this process? How did the metropolitan go about resolving disputed fiscal or other economic matters, spheres of jurisdiction, or questions of behavior or spiritual welfare? What mechanisms, short of church councils, were at his disposal? Tiero’s study thus opens up new questions regarding various aspects of the metropolitan’s role in the larger religious community. What was the protocol for handling relations with monasteries and churches not under his direct jurisdiction? How was the cursus honorum leading to higher church office, outlined here, applied in practice? Where did the metropolitan recruit his clerical and lay managers?

Pierre Gonneau opens a very different perspective onto 16th-century Muscovite culture in his study of the vita of Sergius of Radonezh. Gonneau provides the first complete French translation of the vita, based on the text of the late 16th-century illuminated manuscript (Litsevoe zhitie Sergiia Radonezhskogo), now in the Russian State Library.³ To put the work into a literary context, his introduction discusses the main redactions of the vita (the version of Epifanii the Wise and subsequent reinterpretation by Pakhomii the Serb) and inventories the diplomatic and narrative sources providing information on Sergius. To give a larger sense of the cultural setting, Gonneau goes on to highlight the ties that link Sergius and the greatest of Russian icon painters, Andrei Rublev, as the seminal figures shaping Russian spiritual and artistic life at the dawn of the Muscovite period. Unlike Sergius, whose public image finds wide reflection in multiple sources, Rublev is aptly termed a “fleeting figure” (33). Although few traces remain in written records about this simple monk who was officially canonized only in 1988, he created “the medieval Russian image most widely recognized in the world” (13): the dedicatory Trinity icon for the cathedral built at Sergius’s monastery in the 1420s as a shrine honoring the remains of the monastic leader who was rapidly becoming a saint recognized throughout the Russian lands. In addition to the vita, Gonneau has included relevant selections from chronicles, letters, [End Page 996] inventories, and canonical decrees. The extensive commentaries describe the illuminated manuscript of the vita, identify sources used in its composition (biblical, liturgical, hagiographic, patristic, chronicle), and analyze the distinctive features of both the manuscript miniatures and the icons portraying Sergius “with scenes from his life” (kleima).

As Gonneau concludes (325), it is remarkable how little the view of Sergius has changed from the 14th century to the present, as each age successively reaffirms the special tie that unites Sergius to the church, the state, and Russian identity. He was a “national” saint before there was a nation, inspiring what David Miller has called a “community of venerators.”⁴ The intertwined symbolism of Sergius and the Holy Trinity continued to inspire spiritual seekers in later years. In the early 16th century, the most noted devotee of the Trinity in the Russian North, the monk Antonii, followed Sergius’s example by seeking solitude in the “desert” of the forests. According to tradition, Antonii himself painted the Trinity icon which became the dedicatory symbol of the Antoniev-Siiskii Monastery near Kholmogory. His monastery subsequently was the site of one of the leading icon workshops in Muscovy; and Siiskii himself became iconographically linked with the venerated Sergius, united by their shared reverence for the Trinity.⁵

As for the vita, much of what we would like to know about the origins of the illuminated manuscript remains a mystery. When, why, and at whose order it was made are still matters of conjecture. The manuscript has no date or signature, but on the basis of internal evidence it has been ascribed to the 1580s or early 1590s. The document was copied by two scribes, divided between the preface and first pages and folia 19–381. B. M. Kloss has linked the hand of the second copyist with one found in the Illuminated Chronicle Codex (Litsevoi letopisnyi svod ) (267) usually dated to Ivan IV’s reign. The copy is executed on paper imported from France, and the sheets used for folia 19–381 have the same watermark as the paper used for a Russian manuscript dated 1583 and for the 1594 Psalter that the boyar Dmitrii Ivanovich Godunov donated to the Ipat′ev Monastery in Kostroma (269). Like such earlier large-scale literary undertakings as the Illuminated Chronicle Codex, the Illuminated Life was costly in materials as well as in the time and craftsmanship required, which included the preparation of drafts, editing, and the selection of scenes to be included, layout, and coordination of the work of scribes and artists. Unfortunately, as is the case for many other works of the period, the identity of the author/compiler, date of composition, place [End Page 997] of copying, and the identity of the patron remain unknown.⁶ We do know that the patriarch and the tsar each sponsored artistic workshops; and objects might pass from one workshop to another, allowing craftsmen specializing in particular skills to make their individual contributions to the finished work.⁷ In addition to the heads of church and state, members of the ecclesiastical and secular elite might also commission work from these ateliers. Given the likely time of its commission, the Illuminated Life probably was produced during the cultural surge that Edward L. Keenan terms the “Godunovian Renaissance,” guided by Boris Godunov’s cousin Dmitrii Ivanovich, a generous patron of the Ipat′ev Monastery. Dmitrii and Boris sponsored the first masonry church and donated land, icons, embroideries, and illuminated manuscripts, including the 1594 Psalter copied on paper with the same watermark as the presentation copy of the Life of Sergius.⁸

Gonneau concludes that the most probable date for the preparation of the Illuminated Life fell in the reign of Ivan IV’s son Fedor (1584–98), the first decade of which witnessed several great official celebrations for the Russian church in general and St. Sergius in particular. 25 July 1585 marked the completion of the silver shrine, decorated with gold leaf and precious stones that Ivan IV had ordered for Sergius’s tomb, and Fedor set out on a pilgrimage to bring it to the Trinity-Sergius Monastery. In 1589 the head of the Russian church was elevated to the rank of patriarch, and 1592 was the bicentennial of the death of Sergius. Gonneau suggests that the illuminated copy of Sergius’ life was ordered as a very special gift to be presented on one of these occasions (267) and prepared in the royal workshop.

The illustrations accompanying the translation include 17 plates with facsimile reproductions of folia from the Illuminated Life of Sergius.⁹ Their publication is especially welcome, given that access to the original manuscript [End Page 998] is extremely limited (Gonneau himself was able to leaf through it only once, for a few hours, under “draconian conditions” [16]), and the 1853 facsimile edition was until recently a bibliographical rarity (WorldCat lists five copies). Fortunately, digitalized images of the 1853 facsimile folia are now available at the Trinity-Sergius Monastery’s website.¹⁰ Even Gonneau’s small sampling of the 653 miniatures in the manuscript, however, suggests new possibilities for examining various issues of 16th–century Muscovite history through the prism of visual as well as textual images, an approach discussed recently in this journal.¹¹

Gonneau’s analysis of what these images may tell us about such varied matters as monastic life, differences between Orthodox and Latin practice, architecture, flora and fauna, work, daily life, warfare, and princely administration opens a promising line of investigation. A. V. Artsikhovskii, an early student of manuscript miniatures, concluded that those in the Illuminated Life of Sergius were the most valuable to survive, since the artist had not merely copied from traditional models but composed his scenes anew, introducing native Russian details that have frequently been attested by recent archaeological finds (Artsikhovskii devoted particularly detailed attention to weapons and axes).¹² Gonneau notes that in these images nothing clearly distinguishes Russians from Tatars (304–5)—a comment that suggests a “disconnect” between representational commonplaces of the 16th century and the texts being created under the patronage of the Muscovite elite.

Whether in icons or manuscript miniatures, Tatars generally are represented as enemies lacking any identifying visual attributes. For example, an icon of the Iaroslavl′ princes Fedor, David, and Konstantin from the 1560s shows Tatars and Russians mingling indistinguishably in the border scenes (kleima).¹³ In the Illuminated Radziwiłł Chronicle, the Illuminated Chronicle Codex, and most other early Russian miniatures, a Russian or Tatar “prince” almost invariably wears a rounded soft cap with fur edging. Although the miniatures in the Illuminated Life were produced decades later, they follow the rule: princes from Dmitrii Mikhailovich of Tver′ (alive at the time of Sergius’s birth) to Vasilii I and Iurii of Galich (present at the inventio of Sergius’s relics) wear caps.¹⁴ In addition to the cap, Moscow’s [End Page 999] princely rulers were usually shown with a nimbus,¹⁵ perhaps attesting to their status as “unofficially venerated” saints.¹⁶ “Tsars” (Tatar, Russian, or the Old Testament David) have five-pointed crowns.¹⁷ Tatar armor and helmets differed little from Russian.¹⁸

The lack of any visual markers denoting the Tatar enemy runs counter to the message of the great historical narratives composed after 1552. For the compilers of the Book of Royal Degrees, the History of Kazan (Kazanskaia istoriia) and the Illuminated Chronicle Codex, the victory over the Tatars at Kazan marked the triumph of Orthodoxy and the verification of the providential role played by the descendants of Riurik since the founding of the state of Rus′. The conquest was literally a weighty matter: the events of 1552–53 occupy the pages of an entire volume of the new edition of the Illuminated Chronicle Codex.¹⁹ Russian history was being reshaped into the form that essentially has survived to the present in many textbooks. On the whole, as Charles Halperin has pointed out, the “mid-sixteenth-century Muscovite rewriting of Russo-Tatar relations dismissed most realia of Tatar rule as obsolete ‘customs’ (obychai ) from which the new tsardom was by definition immune.”²⁰

Faced with these new post-1552 textual portrayals, one might expect iconographers to respond to the changing environment by adapting their depictions of the enemy, especially given the use of icons as “open books” for the illiterate. Some limited precedents suggest possible approaches. Headgear differences in some illustrations in the Illuminated Chronicle Codex clearly denote the East–West divide. West Europeans (not only Germans, Swedes, and Italians but also Poles and Lithuanians) wear characteristic straight-cut hats rather than the soft rounded caps with slanting lines found on Russians and others from the East (Turks, Greeks, Tatars).²¹ This sort of contrast developed more fully in the 17th century, finding one of its most striking expressions in the Last Judgment icon on the west wall of the Sophia Cathedral in Vologda, where Westerners in ruffs and Pilgrim hats join turbaned Turks on the descent into Hell.²² Although this image was painted only in the late 17th [End Page 1000] century, it would have been recognized much earlier since foreign merchants (first English, then Dutch) had resided in the city since at least the 1560s.²³ Some St. George icons from the Novgorod area dating to the mid-16th century already depict Saracens in headgear resembling the keffiyeh, clearly differentiating them from the Christians in the scenes.²⁴ Thus Russian artists could develop approaches that distinguished outsiders when they chose to do so. O. I. Podobedova’s study of miniatures in Russian historical manuscripts concludes that some illustrations from the Illuminated Chronicle Codex reflect this emerging tendency. While the outward appearance of enemy forces resembled that of the Russian warriors, she detected in scenes from the later centuries covered by the chronicle, the period of the rise of Moscow, an attempt to suggest Mongolian facial features, especially in depictions of military commanders or, more often, Tatar tsarevichi. These caricaturistic details include long, thin Fu Manchu mustaches and narrow, slanting eyes.²⁵ Such elements are absent, however, in the Illuminated Life of Sergius’s depictions of the battle of Kulikovo (folia 241 ff.), where Russians and Tatars once again resemble one another, although fewer of the Tatars are bearded. While it remains easy for the viewer to identify the Forces of Right because they are led by the commander with a nimbus, they are fighting enemies who look remarkably like themselves. Is this another indication of Muscovites’ ambivalent attitudes toward Tatars?

Both Teiro’s and Gonneau’s investigations raise numerous questions about the Tatars’ changing role in Rus′ between the 14th and 16th centuries. How did Tatar administration affect church–state relations in Muscovy, and how did the growing importance of Rus′ shape the evolving portrayal of both ecclesiastical and secular authorities in written and visual texts? Teiro’s analysis of the surviving Tatar iarlyki relating to the church (85–96) points up the advantages enjoyed by the metropolitan in the first centuries of rule from Sarai. The head of the church was appointed in Byzantium, not in the Golden Horde and, unlike the princes of Rus′, could not be dismissed at the whim of the khan. Churchmen enjoyed almost total exemption from dues owed to the Tatars, control over church lands, independent administration of justice in ecclesiastical courts, and protection of their privileges from any infringement. After Kulikovo, the weakening Tatar authority and the emergence of the [End Page 1001] autocephalous Russian church in the wake of the Council of Florence and the Turkish conquest of Byzantium brought new opportunities as well as the loss of the two counterweights that had buffered secular intervention. One response to these changes is evident in the successive revisions of texts where the contributions of saintly metropolitans to the land of Rus′ and the expansion of Sergius’s role as adviser and supporter of Dmitrii Donskoi, especially with regard to Kulikovo, burnished churchmen’s reputations as partners in the fulfillment of Orthodox Rus′ Providential mission. As princely demands for dues and services increased, however, the hierarchs also simultaneously invoked the precedent of their established rights and privileges to protect church and monasterial property, citing as evidence their grants from the khans of the Golden Horde, who were not the enemy in this instance.

There has been long debate over the nature of policies for dealing with the conquered khanates (encouraging carrots, punishing sticks, or both), and Janet Martin’s recent research on the status of Tatar servitors within Muscovy suggests that the situation was even more complex than hitherto appreciated. After the conquest of Kazan, she finds, Tatars serving in Muscovy included both those who converted and those who did not. Members of both groups held pomest′e estates and lived among Russians far from the southern frontier. Furthermore, even converts were not thoroughly assimilated: changing one’s faith was not enough to eradicate the Tatars’ “distinctive ethnic identity which appears to have inhibited full assimilation.”²⁶

Careful study of Muscovite manuscript miniatures, paired with examination of icons, especially the kleima, offers an opportunity to explore new approaches to many old questions. Fortunately for those interested in Muscovite culture, recent and ongoing publication of printed and digital images is making these visual sources accessible to the larger scholarly community. Facsimile copies of illuminated manuscripts have appeared, notably, of the Radziwiłł Chronicle²⁷ and the Kiev Psalter.²⁸ Most remarkably, the ongoing publication of the facsimile edition of the Illuminated Chronicle Codex is making the majority of these miniatures available for the first time. These volumes and others are expensive, however, and will be readily available in many cases only to those with access to major library collections. In contrast, the publication of an increasing body of images in digital form promises to bring these materials to anyone with a computer connection. In the case of the Illuminated Life of Sergius, the digitalized images available at [End Page 1002] the Trinity-Sergius Monastery’s website pair well with Gonneau’s translation of the vita, as he kindly provides in brackets a description of each scene at the corresponding point in the text. We should also note that digitalized images of the Radziwiłł Chronicle folia from the early 20th-century facsimile edition,²⁹ complete with miniatures, are currently under development.³⁰

It is to be hoped that this wealth of new material will offer scholars new perspectives on the questions raised by both Teiro and Gonneau, allowing them to continue to excavate more deeply beneath the surfaces of scenes painted so successfully in both text and image in the 16th century. Both Teiro and Gonneau conclude their studies in the late 16th century, a time of prosperity for the secular and ecclesiastical elite alike, despite the underlying economic difficulties that caused widespread depopulation of formerly prosperous villages and led to the introduction of such policies as the “forbidden years” in an attempt to stabilize the peasant labor force. It is significant that Ivan IV did not reduce the privileges of the metropolitanate even during the oprichnina and his conflict with Metropolitan Filipp. Although the metropolitan’s lands lacked sufficient manpower and adequate management to make full use of the available resources, the head of the church continued to control a significant amount of national wealth. Trinity Monastery was prosperous too, suggesting that both the metropolitans and the abbots fit the model of “shrewd entrepreneurs,” a title recently applied by Isolde Thyrêt to monastic leaders who built successful spiritual houses through aggressive management of their property and careful promotion of their saints.³¹ The rulers of Moscow, for their part, associated themselves with Sergius and Moscow’s wonderworking saints, offering various forms of support to the religious community and benefiting, in turn, from the church’s organization and the veneration of “national” saints, which helped unite the “gathered” lands of Rus′ and build a sense of Russian identity. As Jukka Korpela so succinctly summed up this symbiosis, “saints made the history of Russia holy, but they also distributed the holy message of the legitimate status of the Muscovite state throughout society and areas.”³²

Beyond even sainthood or the unfolding of Providential history, however, the Muscovite symbiosis of church and state made possible the [End Page 1003] preservation of the overarching achievement of Muscovite culture, the art of Rublev. Gonneau reminds us of its significance. But it is another artist, the contemporary restoration specialist S. V. Iamshchikov, who perhaps best grasps early icon painters’ contributions to Russian identity: “The artists of early Rus′ did not know any subjects other than what came from Scripture. Secular art simply did not yet exist. But the striving to express in paint, in—drawing, the entire world of their emotions and ideasthis striving was alive in man and demanded to be set free.” This explains Iamshchikov’s emotional response to Rublev’s saints: “Their eyes and hands, everything in their appearance, reveal[s] more to me about the past of our entire people than whole collections of historical works.” It was no accident, he continues, that historians were the first to take up serious study of Old Russian art, whose icons and frescoes are a “document no less precise than any chronicle.”³³ [End Page 1004]