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The Orthodox Church
david b. miller
In 1448 Grand Prince Vasilii II of Moscow and a council of bishops of the
see of Kiev and all Rus’ within his control elevated Bishop Iona of Riazan’
to the office of metropolitan. They did so to forestall the appointment of a
metropolitan unsympathetic to Moscow and, worse, sympathetic to the union
with Rome concluded at Florence in 1438. Vasilii and the bishops expected
that an Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople would consecrate Iona, but in
1453 Constantinople fell to the Turks. By the time Iona died in 1461, Vasilii
and his bishops agreed that his elevation without the patriarch’s approval
was canonical. Moscow’s rulers and their prelates chose Feodosii (1461–4)
and Filipp (1464–73) to succeed Iona with the title ‘metropolitan of all Rus’’.
But the Rus’ they administered was commensurate with the authority of
the Muscovite state. Moscow’s metropolitans continued to claim jurisdiction
over the Lithuanian and Novgorod eparchies, but they were to administer
only those coming under Muscovite rule. Yet Muscovites interpreted Iona’s
elevation in a manner that accorded the see an exceptional destiny. In one of
many letters demanding that they accept him, Iona told the Orthodox bishops
of Lithuania that, when Constantinople accepted union with Rome,it forfeited
divine protection and fell to the Turks. Another letter said that Iona was ‘by
God’s will installed in this great office . . . by all the archbishops and bishops
of the present Orthodox great Russian autocracy of the sovereign and my son
the Grand Prince Vasilii Vasil’evich’.
1
The structure of the Church was as rudimentary when its Council of One
Hundred Chapters (Stoglav) met in 1551 as it had been in Iona’s time. Nine
bishops and archbishops were in attendance. A tenth eparchy was created
in 1552 for Kazan’. By 1589 Pskov became the eleventh. The vastness of the
metropolitanate and its eparchies, and eparchial traditions of autonomy, made
1 Russkaia Istoricheskaia Biblioteka, 39 vols.(St Petersburg:Arkheograficheskaia kommissiia,
1872–1927), vol. vi (1908), cols. 622–3, 627–32.
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supervision of the parish clergy impossible. The Church’s solution resembled
that of Moscow’s rulers. It appointed plenipotentiaries called ‘tenth men’
(desiatel’niki) to administer the ten districts of each eparchy. The ‘tenth men’
collected tithes from parishes and adjudicated cases falling under Church law.
Their courts had jurisdiction over the clergy and, in cases of heresy, witchcraft,
sexual infractions and family law, also over the laity. On Church lands they
shared jurisdiction with civilcourts in matters pertaining to Church properties
and crimes threatening public order. Like the ruler’s governors, they had
arbitrarypowersand,giventheinability of the Churchtopaythem, livedfroma
share of the tithe and from fees for court judgements. Most were laymen and
their titles – boyars, junior boyars (deti boiarskie), clerks – mimicked those of
the ruler’s officialdom. Parishioners or estate owners recruited priests who
went to bishops for ordination. Most priests married locally and lived in rural
settlements. They supported themselves by farming lands provided by the
community, from fees for administering sacraments and from modest state
subsidies. Priests viewed ‘tenth men’ as rapacious and resented being managed
by laymen.
2
Needless to say, they were ill equipped to instruct the clergy, let
alone their parishioners, in what it meant to be Christian.
In 1914 E. V. Anichkov, equating an understanding of confessional theology
with religious belief, wrote that only from the fifteenth century did the peas-
antry becomeChristian. Anichkov might haveincludedelites in hisindictment,
because most evidence of religious culture concerns princes, landowners,
prelates and monks.
3
It was a culture in which the literacy of the clerical elite,
judging by the manuscript legacy extant in Rus’, was within a narrow range
of liturgical books, collections of sermons and homilies, chronicles and lives
of saints. Until about 1500 little was translated locally and, excepting hagiogra-
phy, original works werefew. Prelates, originallyfrom monastic brotherhoods,
might obtain grounding in canon law and theology, and the aristocracy and
urban well-to-do may have had a functional literacy in the language of clerks;
but the populace, Archbishop Gennadii Gonzov of Novgorod complained to
Metropolitan Simon about 1500, was so ignorant that ‘there is no one to select
to be a priest’.
4
Although they were not to ordain priests or deacons lacking
2 E. B. Emchenko, Stoglav: Issledovanie i tekst (Moscow: Indrik, 2000), p. 255; Evgenii Gol-
ubinskii, Istoriia russkoi tserkvi, 2 vols. (Moscow: Universitetskaia Tipografiia, 1900–22),
vol. ii, pt. 2,pp.7–61; Paul Bushkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992), pp. 22–3.
3 E. V. Anichkov, Iazychestvo i Drevniaia Rus’ (St Petersburg: M. M. Stasiulevich, 1914),
p. 306.
4 AI, vol. i (St. Petersburg: Arkheograficheskaia kommissiia, 1841), p. 147; Francis J. Thom-
son, ‘The Corpus of Slavonic Translations Available in Muscovy’, in Boris Gasparov and
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a proper education, prelates had little choice but to do so. Yet it would be
a mistake to view popular religiosity as other than rich, diverse and, by the
sixteenth century, distinctive.
Popular religiosity
Russian Orthodoxy added many feasts to the liturgical cycle inherited from
Constantinople. But without regular or centralised procedures of canonisa-
tion, no calendar was the same. The Stoglav warned of lay persons who were
false prophets of miracles or revelations, but central authorities, when con-
fronted with popular cults promoted by local clerics, usually capitulated.
5
Thus, in 1458 the clergy in Ustiug reported healings at the grave of the holy
fool Prokopii (d. 1303). In 1471 a church went up at his gravesite; by 1500 there
was a biography reporting miracles and powers of prophecy. Finally, in 1547 a
council designated Prokopii a local saint (8 July). Nor could authorities ignore
the Muscovite cult of the holy fool Vasilii the Blessed (d. 1552?). His ostensibly
foolish behaviour and insults – even to the ruler – followed from an ability
to see truths invisible to others. When his grave became known for healings,
Tsar Fedor I had Vasilii reburied in a chapel adjoining the church of the Inter-
cession on Red Square in 1588. So great was his following that the church to
which his chapel was attached to this day is known by his name (St Basil’s).
6
But most saints entering the calendar in the sixteenth century – sixteen of at
least twenty-one – were monastic founders whose successors exhumed their
relics and promoted their miracles. For example, Hegumen Gelasii initiated
the cult of Savva Visherskii who had founded a monastery near Novgorod
in the 1450s. It became famous because Archbishop Iona had hagiographer
Pakhomii the Serb write Savva’s biography. The Church recognised Savva a
‘national’ saint by 1550. Of fourteen ‘earlier’ saints about whom hagiographers
wrote biographies, eight were monks and one a nun.
Muscovite expansion shaped the accretion of new feasts. After its conquest
by Moscow, Novgorod prelates refused to observe feast days of Muscovite
Olga Raevsky-Hughes (eds.), Slavic Cultures in the Middle Ages (Christianity and the East-
ern Slavs, vol. i) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 179–86; Emchenko,
Stoglav,pp.285–6; Jack E. Kollmann, Jr., ‘The Stoglav Council and Parish Priests’, RH 7
(1980): 66–7, 74–6.
5 Richard D. Bosley, ‘The Changing Profile of the Liturgical Calendar in Muscovy’s For-
mative Years’, in A. M. Kleimola and G. D. Lenhoff (eds.), Culture and Identity in Muscovy,
1359–1584 (Moscow: ITZ-Garant, 1997), pp. 26–38; Emchenko, Stoglav,pp.311–12.
6 Slovar’ knizhnikov i knizhnosti Drevnei Rusi, vol. ii, ed. D. S. Likhachev (St Petersburg:
Nauka, 1988–9), pt. 1,pp.322–4; Natalie Challis and Horace W. Dewey, ‘Basil the Blessed,
Holy Fool of Moscow’, RH 14 (1987): 47–59.
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saints. Thus, hegumens of its major monasteries refused to participate when
Gennadii, the archbishop appointed by Moscow, organised a procession on 8
December1499 during whichhe conducted servicestoMoscow’s metropolitan
saints Peter and Aleksei. Gennadii thereupon compromised; in a procession a
week later the hegumens joined him in a procession that included services to
the Muscovites, but also to St Varlaam Khutynskii of Novgorod.
7
Metropolitan
Makarii vigorously promoted the nationalisation of the calendar. In 1547 a
council recognised as ‘all-Russian’ saints eighteen persons whose feasts had
been celebrated locally. Makarii gained recognition for at least fifteen more ‘all-
Russian’ saints, probably at a council in 1549. Reflecting on the canonisations
in his ‘Life of Savva Krypetskii of Pskov’ (1555), hagiographer Vasilii wrote that
the Russian land, like Constantinople, the second Rome, radiated with feasts of
many saints. ‘There’, he said, ‘Mohammedan falsehoods of the godless Turks
had destroyed Orthodoxy, while here the teachings of our holy fathers ever
more illuminate the Russian land.’
8
The councils failed to establish procedures
for canonisation and no calendar of ‘all-Russian’ saints resembled another. But
universal calendars reflecting these canonisations henceforth were celebrated
throughout Russia.
To celebrants the original meaning of numerous feasts became intertwined
or confused with traditional rites coinciding with the summer and winter sol-
stices or with periods in the agricultural cycle. On the eve of the Epiphany,
for the Orthodox a celebration of Christ’s baptism, revellers proceeded to
the river to immerse themselves symbolically in the river Jordan in a rite of
purification.
9
Passion Week, with its promise of renewal, and Trinity Saturday
(the eve of Pentecost), contained echoes of reverence for the Slavic pagan sun
god Iarilo, who in the spring was reborn to assure bountiful crops. On these
occasions celebrants commemorated ancestors with offerings and enquired
of the dead about prospects for their salvation. Peasants drove livestock to
pasture on St Gregory’s day and prayed to Elijah against drought. Russians
also prayed to icons of saints and inscribed them on amulets integrating folk-
ways – in which signs, portents and intercessions were phenomena capable of
upsetting, or setting right again, the moral order – with faith that Christian
saints possessed powers to heal, to benefit the salvation of souls or to keep
7 Novgorodskie letopisi (St Petersburg: Akademiia Nauk, 1879), pp. 59–64.
8 V. O. Kliuchevskii, Drevnerusskie zhitiia sviatykh kak istoricheskii istochnik (Moscow:
Tipografiia Gracheva, 1871), pp. 227–8; G. Z. Kuntsevich, ‘Podlinnyi spisok o novykh
chudotvortsakh, Izvestiia Otdela russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti Akademii nauk 15 (1910), bk. 1,
pp. 255–7; Bushkovitch, Religion,pp.75–89.
9 Emchenko, Stoglav,pp.313–15, 399–402; Bushkovitch, ‘The Epiphany Ceremony of the
Russian Court in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, RR 49 (1990): 12–14.
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david b. miller
families and communities in equilibrium. Mary, as Mother of God, was an
intercessor for or against just about anything. Women turned to St Paraskeva-
Piatnitsa, venerated originally as a martyr, to secure a marriage or a birth and
to guide them in domestic matters. Women prayed to Saints Gurios, Samonas
and Abibos to suppress hostile thoughts towards their husbands, to St Conon
to cure children of smallpox.
10
Muscovite liturgical practices changed constantly. In Pskov in the early
fifteenth century the priest Iov, citing Photios, the Greek metropolitan of
Rus’, contended that the triple-hallelujah was prevalent throughout Ortho-
doxy while the monk Evfrosin insisted one should chant the hallelujah twice.
But by 1510 Evfrosin was recognised locally as a saint and in 1551 the Stoglav
ruled as canonical the double-hallelujah and the related custom of crossing
oneself with two fingers instead of three. Complaints entered at the Stoglav
Council reveal other examples of how folkways permeated liturgical practices:
the ‘desecration’ of the altar with offerings of food used for banqueting, cauls
thought to be favourable omens forthe newborn, soap forwashing the sanctu-
ary and salt placed on the altar before sunrise on Holy Thursday, then used to
cureailments in persons and cattle. In dispensing holy water to parishionersfor
protections and cures, the line between priest and sorcerer blurred. To shorten
services, clergy chanted different parts of the liturgy simultaneously (mnogo-
glasie) making it incomprehensible. Believers acquiesced, revering the ‘magic’
of the service. Priests also transformed the spoken liturgy into a ‘continuous
song’ and began to walk in deasil, or with the sun, in rites and processions in
a manner informed by tradition. When Metropolitan Gerontii, citing Greek
practice, questioned the canonicity of proceeding in deasil in consecrating the
Dormition cathedral in 1479, Grand Prince Ivan III rebuked him.
11
By 1600 the
liturgical cycle had become ‘national’. Wedding rituals, like those described
in the manual written in the 1550s ‘On the Management of the Household’
(Domostroi), were unions of clans carried out according to ancient custom.
Their rites, such as the bride donning a matron’s headwear (kika) symbolis-
ing her transformation from maiden into married woman, were anything but
Christian. A priest sanctioned the ceremony, but a best man (druzhka) and a
10 V. G. Vlasov, ‘The Christianization of the Russian Peasants’, in Marjorie Mandelstam
Balzer (ed.), Russian Traditional Culture (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), p. 17;N.M.
Nikol’skii, Istoriia russkoi tserkvi, 4th edn. (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury,
1988),pp. 43–4, 47, 50–1; EveLevin,‘Supplicatory Prayers as a Source for PopularReligious
Culturein MuscoviteRussia’,inS.H. Baron and N.S.Kollmann (eds.), Religion and Culture
in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997),
p. 101.
11 Emchenko, Stoglav,pp.290–3, 304, 309–10, 313–15, 319; Vlasov, ‘Christianization’, pp. 24–6;
Nikol’skii, Istoriia,p.43; Slovar’, vol. ii, pt. 1,pp.262–4.
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matchmaker (svakha) presided. Church weddings became common only in the
fourteenth century, and were followed by folk rituals for bedding, announcing
a coupling and the purification of the couple. Still, by the sixteenth the binding
of unions with a sacrament performed by an authority above and outside the
clans had become customary. Rituals for commoners in the Domostroi and
accounts of imperial weddings were similar.
12
In the building boom of the sixteenth century a ‘national’ style of church
architecture emerged. One of its elements was the construction of masonry
churches with sharply vertical ‘tent’ roofs and rows of arched gables inspired
by wooden tower churches built by village craftsmen. The first (1529–32)was
the church of Ascension in Kolomenskoe built by Grand Prince Vasilii III.
Another element of the new style was the appearance of icon screens sep-
arating the nave from the chancel with rows of intercessory figures turned
towards a central icon Christ in His Powers over the holy doors to the sanctuary.
Some trace its inspiration to late Byzantine spirituality; others to the Russian
manner of decorating wooden churches. The oldest extant high iconostasis,
painted in the 1420s, is in the Trinity church of the Trinity-Sergius monastery.
New technologies of masonry construction and design also appeared. When
Metropolitan Filipp’s new cathedral church of the Dormition in the Kremlin
collapsed before it was completed in 1474, Ivan III brought in Pskov builders
and an engineer from Bologna, Aristotle Fioravanti. Fioravanti’s five-domed
church, completed in 1479, resembled Russian cross-in-square churches, while
using Italian engineering techniques and exhibiting tastes and skills of Pskov
builders in working limestone, brick and decorative tile (see Plate 15). Pskov
builders also introduced the belfry to Muscovite church complexes, the first
being that in the single tall drum on the church of the Holy Spirit (1476)atthe
Trinity-Sergius monastery. In 1505 Ivan commissioned the Venetian Alevisio
the Younger to build the cathedral of the Archangel Michael as a family burial
church. In its pilasters, cornices and scalloped gables, it resembled Venetian
churches. New cathedrals such as that in the Novodevichii convent in Moscow
(1524–5) or the Dormition cathedral in Rostov (c.1600), replicated these inno-
vations. In churches of St John the Baptist in Diakovo (c.1547), Saints Boris and
Glebin Staritsa(1558–61) and the Intercession(St Basil’s, 1555–61) on RedSquare,
builders produced a complex variant to this style. The Intercession church con-
sisted of eight chapels surrounding a central altar with a tent roof. Exaggerated
helmet cupolas, replacing traditional shallow domes, capped the heightened
12 Daniel H. Kaiser, ‘Symbol and Ritual in the Marriages of Ivan IV’, RH 14 (1987): 247–62;
Carolyn J. Pouncy (ed.), The Domostroi (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994),
pp. 204–39.
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david b. miller
drums over each altar. Ideological schemes and Western models inspired
its layout, and a Pskov builder oversaw its construction. By 1600 churches
with multiple altars, tent roofs and helmet cupolas went up everywhere.
13
They blended forms, materials and techniques developed in many places, ele-
ments of popular religiosity and Renaissance innovations in engineering and
design.
The huge quantity, variety and opulence of reliquaries, icons and other
religious objects that laity donated to monasteries belie the view that its reli-
giosity was a formality. Chronicle entries, such as that recording the appear-
ance of an image of the Mother of God in 1383 over the River Tikhvinka in
the Obonezhskaia territory of Novgorod, tell the same story. Its purported
miracles attracted pilgrims. A century later bookmen entered new miracle
tales into the Novgorod chronicle and Archbishop Serapion (1504–9) built a
brick church to house the icon. In Moscow the cult entered the liturgical
calendar and in 1524 Metropolitan Daniil wrote it into his ‘history of Russia’
known as the Nikon Chronicle. Complaints about the ubiquity of uncanonical
or blasphemous icons reflected the Church’s ambivalence about such ‘appear-
ances’. Even the court was complicit. Ivan Viskovatyi, Ivan IV’s Keeper of
the Seal, complained about icons with unprecedented imagery with which
painters from Pskov and Novgorod redecorated Ivan IV’s family church of the
Annunciation after the fire of 1547.
14
Reports of fires provide evidence that towns were filled with churches in
whichordinarypeoplesharedliturgicalexperiences.Thefrequencyofreligious
processions was another form of popular religiosity. They might be provincial
celebrations like that in Ustiug in 1557 when its inhabitants proceeded with a
cross to honour the raising of the church of St. Nicholas Velikoretskii. Or they
could be great affairs like Metropolitan Filipp’s processions on 30 April and
23 May, 1472, to inaugurate construction of the Dormition cathedral and to
translate there the relics of metropolitans Photios, Kipriian and Iona.
15
No later
than 1548 Metropolitan Makarii fashioned a court procession to celebrate Palm
Sunday. Based upon a ritual he had observed in Novgorod, it re-enacted Jesus’s
13 William Craft Brumfield, A History of Russian Architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1993), pp. 89–140, 501–15; cf. A. M. Lidov (ed.), Ikonostas (Moscow: Progress-
Traditsiia, 2000); and George Majeska, ‘Ikonostas’, unpublished paper presented May
2003 at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC.
14 Slovar’, vol. ii, pt. 2,pp.365–7; Emchenko, Stoglav,p.376; David B. Miller, ‘The Viskovatyi
Affair of 1553–54’, RH 8 (1981): 293–332.
15 K. N. Serbina (ed.), Ustiuzhskii letopisnyi svod (Moscow and Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1950),
p. 109; Ioasafovskaia letopis’, ed. A. A. Zimin (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1957), pp. 76–7.
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entry into Jerusalem by having the tsar, afoot, lead the metropolitan, mounted
ona horseand followedby noblesand clerics, to the Intercessionchurch on Red
Square. For the Epiphany Feast of 1558, Ivan IV led the hierarchy and the court
onto the Moscow River to a hole in the ice where Makarii blessed the water
with a cross. After that he splashed Ivan’s son and the nobility, commoners filed
by to fill pots, children and the ill were immersed, some Tatars baptised and
Ivan’s horse brought to drink. The baptism on the symbolic River Jordan, the
animals and the healings were elements of popular feasts.
16
Although many
rural settlements lacked churches, peasants also primarily and most deeply
expressed their religiosity in communal celebrations. When they could not,
they resented it. In a petition to the archbishop of Novgorod in 1582 peasants
and deti boiarskie in a remote parish requested they be allowed to attend a
neighbouring church. The petitioners said their priest could not communicate
with them because his church was far away and required a boat to get there; as
a result their ill died without confessing, there were no prayers when mothers
gave birth and the young were not baptised.
17
Popular religiosity is incomprehensible apart from monasteries. No one
knows how many existed at one time, but E. I. Kolycheva estimates that 486
monasteries were founded between 1448 and 1600. Typically, they began as
hermitages or sketes. As they grew, metropolitans encouraged them to organ-
ise with rules of communal living. Monasteries were subordinate to a bishop
or were patrimonial (ktitorskie) houses like the Kirillo-Belozerskii monastery,
initially supported by Princes Andrei (d. 1432) of Mozhaisk and his son Mikhail
(d. 1486) of Vereia.
18
Great houses maintained donation books recording gifts,
copybooks with records of land grants and feast books that recorded names of
benefactors. The names of provincial landowners predominate, but benefac-
tors came from everycategory of freepeople. Donorsmade grants in return for
prayers for their souls and those of family members and ancestors. Although
the Orthodox never formulated a doctrine of purgatory, death rituals provided
for memorial prayers for forty days. About 1400 believers began to think this
inadequate to assure the salvation of kin, whether they had died recently or
16 Bushkovitch, ‘Epiphany’, pp. 1–14; Michael S. Flier, ‘Breaking the Code: The Image of
the Tsar in the Muscovite Palm Sunday Ritual’, in Michael S. Flier and Daniel Rowland
(eds.), Medieval Russian Culture, vol. ii (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994),
pp. 214–32.
17 P. S. Stefanovich, Prikhod i prikhodskoe dukhovenstvo v Rossii v XVI–XVII vekakh (Moscow:
Indrik, 2002), pp. 250–1.
18 E.I.Kolycheva,‘Pravoslavnye monastyri vtoroi polovinyXV–XVIveka’,inN.V.Sinitsyna
(ed.), Monashestvo i monastyri v Rossii, XI–XX veka (Moscow: Nauka, 2002), pp. 82–9.
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long before. Their solution was to request commemorations at monasteries
containing relics of intercessors and which could perform prayer rituals pre-
sumably in perpetuity. In exchange they gave monasteries gifts.
19
By 1500 the
culture of commemoration became institutionalised in sinodiki, recording the
names of those for whom donations were made. Iosif Volotskii founded a
monastery in 1479 with a system in which a small sum bought a place in an
‘eternal’ (vechnyi) sinodik, a list read independently of the liturgical cycle. Fifty
roubles purchased entry in a ‘daily’ (posiavdnevnyi) sinodik, a shorter list read at
places in the liturgy for commemorations. Anniversary feasts cost 100 roubles.
Other houses maintained analogous systems. The rich arranged commemora-
tions at several houses. Requests for tonsure and burial near a miracle worker
began in the late fifteenth century.
20
Moscow’srulers made pilgrimages to monasteries to pray, underwrite feasts
and give presents. Ivan IV often went on extended pilgrimages. Thus, on 21
May 1545 he visited the Trinity-Sergius monastery, houses in Pereiaslavl’, Ros-
tov and Iaroslavl’, the Kirill and Ferapont monasteries near Beloozero, and the
Dmitrii-Prilutskii monastery and three other houses near Vologda. Spouses of
Muscovite rulers created a gendered cult of St Sergius. In 1499 Sophia Palae-
ologa, Ivan III’s second wife, donated an icon cloth to the Trinity-Sergius
monastery giving credence to a story that Sergius’s intercession allowed her
to give Ivan an heir, Vasilii III. Sixteenth-century ideologues wrote that the
miracle resulted from a pilgrimage. Tsaritsa Anastasiia went on foot to Trinity
in 1547 to pray for an heir, as did Tsaritsa Irina in 1585.
21
Elites, who sched-
uled memorial feasts and made tonsure and burial at monasteries part of their
death rituals, sought by public displays to reinforce family and social iden-
tities. But it is useless to distinguish between popular and noble religiosity.
Peasant visits are attested in miracle tales and in charters that show monaster-
ies dispensed beer to ordinary folk at feasts by which they celebrated transition
rites and commemorated ancestors. Laity constantly visited cenobite houses;
19 Daniel H. Kaiser, ‘Death and Dying in Early Modern Russia’, in Nancy Shields Kollmann
(ed.), Major Problems in Early Modern Russian History (NewYork: Garland, 1992), pp.217–57;
Ludwig Steindorff, ‘Kl
¨
oster als Zentren der T
¨
otensorge in Altrussland’, FOG 50 (1995):
337–53.
20 LudwigSteindorff, ‘Sravnenieistochnikovob organizatsii pominaniia usopshikh v Iosifo-
Volokolamskom i Troitse-Sergievom monastyriakh v XVI veke’, Arkheograficheskii Ezhe-
godnik za 1996 g. (Moscow: Nauka, 1998), pp. 65–78.
21 Nancy S. Kollmann, ‘Pilgrimage, Procession and Symbolic Space in Sixteenth-Century
Russian Politics’, in Michael S. Flier and Daniel Rowland (eds.), Medieval Russian Culture,
vol. ii (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 163–81; Isolde Thyr
ˆ
et, Between
God and Tsar: Religious Symbolism and the Royal Women of Muscovite Russia (DeKalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), pp. 21–39ff.
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their faith blended folkways and Christian practice in a harmonious culture of
commemoration.
22
As much for economic and political reasons as out of piety, princes granted
monasteries immunities from taxes and tariffs on their commerce, salt works,
agriculture and fisheries. Ivan III halted the practice and even confiscated
monastic lands in Novgorod. Thenceforth he and his successors controlled the
appointment of hegumensto big houses and periodically inventoried monastic
charters,causing some to be revoked.Paradoxically, VasiliiIII gave monasteries
generousgiftsand IvanIVlavishones.During the prosperous 1530s–1550s and in
the aftermath of the oprichnina, there were no restraints on the accumulation
of property and the wealth of the great houses skyrocketed. By 1600 the
Simonovskii monastery near Moscow owned over fifty villages in nineteen
uezdy and the Trinity-Sergius monastery owned an estimated 118,000 hectares
in forty uezdy and commercial and industrial holdings in over fifteen towns.
Monasteries held at least 20 per cent of all arable land.
23
All this wealth and the presence of monks from aristocratic families could
not but undermine rules of communal property, equality of status and a simple
life. Iosif Volotskii accorded the Simonovskii and Kirillo-Belozerskii monas-
teries a reputation for austerity, one he initially emulated at his monastery.
Monks wore simple attire, ate and prayed as one and had no personal prop-
erty. Unable to maintain this order, Iosif, or during the illness that killed him
in 1515 co-hegumen Daniil, wrote a new rule. It provided for three classes
of monks with graded privileges for food, dress and personal effects, and a
more relaxed regime. At most monasteries monks from landowning families
constituted a large component and most of the officers. Those who made
donations in return for tonsure enjoyed incomes from donated property until
they died; those without property were artisans, low-level managers or did
menial tasks.
24
The career and writings of Nil Sorskii (d. 1508) explain why
Iosif singled out the Kirillo-Belozerskii monastery for austerity. Nil was ton-
sured there and before 1489 travelled to centres of Orthodox spirituality on
22 Emchenko, Stoglav,pp.330–5, 339–43; Vlasov, ‘Christianization’, pp. 20–1; Eve Levin,
‘Dvoeverie and Popular Religion’, in Stephen K. Batalden (ed.), Seeking God: The Recovery
of Religious Identity in Orthodox Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois
University Press, 1993), pp. 45–6.
23 Kolycheva, ‘Monastyri’, pp. 99–109.
24 A. A. Zimin and Ia. S. Lur’e (eds.), Poslaniia Iosifa Volotskogo (Moscow and Leningrad:
AN SSSR, 1959), pp. 296–319; K. I. Nevostruev (ed.), ‘Zhitie prepodobnogo Iosifa Voloko-
lamskogo, sostavlennoe Savvoiu, episkopom krutitskim’, Chteniia Obshchestva Liubitelei
drevnei pis’mennosti 2 (1865): 15–18, 24–31, 49–53, 61–5; and K. I. Nevostruev (ed.), ‘Zhitie
prepodobnogo Iosifa Volokolamskogo, sostavlennoe neizvestnym’, ibid., 88–108;Koly-
cheva, ‘Monastyri’, pp. 89–95.
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