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revealing its culturally compromised status as a political device. This point

was driven home when Vasilii himself assumed the role of heir apparent in

1502 and ascended to the throne of his late father in 1505, in both instances

without the ritual of coronation.

The accession of Ivan IV in 1533, however, proved a turning point in the

conception of the Muscovite ruler. Surviving several court intrigues, Ivan

foundan ally in Makarii, archbishop of Novgorod, and from 1542, metropolitan

of Moscow. Through a number of cultural initiatives, the revision of the Great

Reading Menology and the writing of the Book of Degrees among the most

signiﬁcant, Makarii sought to elevate the position and authority of the tsar as a

messianic ﬁgure, in effect, to sacralise him and accord him special charisma.

In 1547, Makarii was prepared to declare Ivan not simply grand prince, but tsar

and autocrat, a God-chosen sovereign. Accordingly, he devised an appropriate

coronation ceremony based on the Byzantine model used for Dmitrii, a ritual

appropriate for transforming the sixteen-year-old prince into a tsar.

Ivan was ofﬁcially crowned on 16 January 1547 in the Dormition cathedral

in a ritual that had many implications for the historical and eschatological

signiﬁcance of the Muscovite ruler. The date was signiﬁcant because it fell

on the ﬁrst Sunday after the ﬁnal observance of Epiphany, which celebrates

God’s satisfaction with Christ’s baptism by John (‘the Forerunner’) in the

River Jordan. Ritually ‘anointed’, Christ begins his ministry in the Holy Land

with this event, an appropriate analogue to Ivan’s ofﬁcial beginning as tsar of

Muscovy, the New Israel.

The coronation ceremony in the Dormition cathedral combined high

solemnity with the symbolism of legend and Scripture to create an effect with

universal impact. Ordered ranks of the clergy ﬂanked chairs set up for Makarii

and Ivan on a specially built dais in the centre of the cathedral. Gold brocades

covered the space between the dais and the Royal Doors of the iconostasis,

where a stand was placed to hold the royal regalia, which the grand prince’s

confessorhad brought high on a golden plate ‘with fearand trembling’,accom-

panied by a highly placed entourage that stood guard. As bells began to ring

across Moscow some thirty minutes later, Ivan left his quarters in a solemn

procession, preceded by his confessor sprinkling holy water along the path

and followed by his brother and members of the nobility.

34 David B. Miller, ‘The Velikie minei chetii and the Stepennaia kniga of Metropolitan

Makarii and the Origins of Russian National Consciousness’, FOG 26 (1979): 264–7,

312–13, 362–8; V. M. Zhivov and B. A. Uspenskii, ‘Tsar’ i Bog: Semioticheskie aspekty

sakralizatsii monarkha v Rossii’, in Iazyki kul’tury i problemy perevodimosti (Moscow:

Nauka, 1978), pp. 56–7, 84; Possevino, Moscovia,p.47.

35 Daniel Rowland, ‘Moscow – the Third Rome or the New Israel?’, RR 55 (1996): 602–3.

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The regalia were tangible links to the Monomakh legend, overt signs of the

ruler’s Kievan and Byzantine pedigrees. Signiﬁcantly, their number changed

over the course of the sixteenth century, apparentlyto embellish the ceremony

with more visible symbols of power and authority. In Dmitrii’s coronation,

only the barmy, an elaborately embroidered and bejewelled neck-piece, and a

cap (shapka) were mentioned, the same combination found in grand-princely

testaments from the time of Ivan I Kalita (c. 1339).

In the ceremonyfor Ivan IV,

a cross made from the True Cross was included. This inventory matches three

of the ﬁve items in Monomakh’s regalia speciﬁcally enumerated in The Tale of

the Princes of Vladimir and correlated texts.

Of the remaining two, a gold chain

was added to the Extended version of Ivan’s ceremony, but the carnelian box

much enjoyed by Caesar Augustus was never incorporated into the ceremony.

Perhaps its exclusion was an explicit sign that as relevant as Roman genealogy

might be for foreign recognition of the title ‘tsar’, only ‘Byzantine’ artefacts

were deemed suitable for the spiritual conﬁrmation of the Muscovite ruler.

Ordered ranks of the clergy and the nobility lined Ivan’s way to the dais. All

were commanded to stand silent and not dare transgress the ruler’s path. The

bells stopped on his arrival. After introductory prayers, Metropolitan Makarii

lifted the cross from the golden plate, placed it on Ivan’s neck, and addressed

the God of Revelation. He associated the anointing of David by Samuel as

king over Israel with the anointing of Grand Prince Ivan Vasil’evich as tsar of

all Rus’. He wished the grand prince a long life, his reign now legitimised by

the Byzantine regalia. Makarii invested Ivan with the barmy, and the cap of

Monomakh, and after a blessing of the tsar, admonished him on the duties of an

Orthodox Christian ruler, the text based largely on Pseudo-Basil’s Instruction

to his son Leo.

The liturgy ended with communion before the iconostasis.

Ivan left the Dormition through the south portal and stood at the exit

while a shower of gold and silver coins was poured over his head three times.

He then processed over a path strewn with velvet and damask cloth to the

Archangel Michael cathedral to hear a litany and pray before the graves of

his royal predecessors. Leaving that cathedral through the western door, he

36 Dukhovnye i dogovornye gramoty velikikh i udel’nykh kniazei XIV–XVI vv., ed. L. V. Cherepnin

(Moscow and Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1950), p. 8.

37 R. P. Dmitrieva, Skazanie o kniaz’iakh vladimirskikh (Moscow and Leningrad: AN SSSR,

1955), pp. 164, 177, 190.

38 In general, the importance of the notion Moscow – Third Rome is grossly exaggerated

in the historiography of sixteenth-century Muscovy; see Ostrowski, Muscovy and the

Mongols,pp.219–43.

39 Ihor

Sev

cenko, ‘A Neglected Byzantine Source of Muscovite Political Ideology’, in his

Byzantium and the Slavs in Letters and Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Ukrainian

Research Institute, 1991), p. 72.

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michael s. flier

was again showered three times with gold and silver coins. He processed over

a cloth-strewn path to the Annunciation cathedral, where he heard a litany.

Descending the stairs onto the square again, he walked to the central staircase

leading up to the Golden Hall and was showered once again with gold and

silver coins three times before leaving for his own quarters in the palace.

hosted a magniﬁcent banquet for the high clergy and nobility in the Faceted

Hall. Meanwhile those remaining behind in the Dormition were permitted to

break up the specially built dais and take away material keepsakes sanctiﬁed

by the ritual itself.

An additional ceremony, the anointing of the new tsar, was apparently

introduced only in 1584 for the coronation of Fedor Ivanovich, as represented

in the Extended version of the ritual. Performed beforecommunion, it was not

equivalent to the Byzantine anointing of the forehead with sacred myrrh, but

rather identical with the sacrament of chrismation, as performed at baptisms,

with anointing of the head, the eyes, the ears, the chest and both sides of the

hands (see Plate 17).

This additional act not only likened the Muscovite tsars

to the Byzantine emperors and the Old Testament kings they were emulating,

but to Christ himself at his baptism, a further sacralisation of the Muscovite

ruler.

The act of showering the tsar with coins provided a visible connection

between locale and function. He acted as Christ’s representative on earth at

the Dormition, heir of a noble dynasty at the Archangel Michael and ruler

of the realm at the Annunciation, with the symbolic values of fecundity and

longevity signiﬁed by the showering of coins at each station. Ironically, the

inclusion of this ritual act is based on error contained in a pilgrim’s description

of the 1392 Byzantine coronation ceremony, apparently used as a source in

composing the Muscovite ritual. Either Ignatii of Smolensk misinterpreted

the Byzantine custom of showering coins on the milling crowd out of imperial

largesse, or a later scribe misread his copy of Ignatii’s text, mistaking a particle

for an object pronoun, thereby showering him (the emperor) with the coins.

The coronation, the most important of the contingent rituals for conveying

the sacred foundation of the ofﬁce of tsar, occurred only once for each reign.

40 PSRL, vol. xiii,pp.150–1, 451–3.

41 E.V. Barsov, Drevne-russkie pamiatniki sviashchennogo venchaniiatsareina tsarstvo (Moscow:

Universitetskaia tipograﬁia, 1883), pp. 66, 90; PSRL, vol. xiii,p.150.

42 Barsov, Drevne-russkie pamiatniki,pp.61–4; Uspenskii, Tsar’ i Patriarkh,pp.14–29, 111–12.

43 Uspenskii, Tsar’ i Patriarkh,p.20.

44 GeorgeP. Majeska, ‘The MoscowCoronation of 1498 Reconsidered’,JGO 26 (1978): 356–7,

and his Russian Travelers to Constantinople in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,Dum-

barton Oaks Studies, no. 19 (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and

Collection, 1984), pp. 112–13, 435–6; Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols,p.186 (n. 104).

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It was the royal rituals performed at regular intervals that helped promulgate

for the secular and spiritual elite the myth of the Muscovite ruler, especially

through reference to artefacts and sites associated with his transformation.

Cyclical rituals

The Church calendar dominated life throughout Muscovy. Apart from the

numerous Church services that the tsar and the nobility regularly attended,

there were ﬁve rituals of especial importance. These demarcated major junc-

tures in the annual cycle and expressed the fundamental values of the Mus-

covite myth in highly marked settings. Two were non-narrative – the New

Year’s ritual and the Last Judgement ritual; three contained dramatised narra-

tive – the Fiery Furnace ritual, the Epiphany ritual and the Palm Sunday ritual.

All ﬁve entailed the presence of the heads of Church and state in Moscow

and underscored various perspectives on the relationship between the God-

ordained ruler, the Church and the ruler’s spiritual and secular advisers. Each

of the ﬁve rituals highlighted particular portions of the semiotically sacred

space demarcated by the Kremlin and its immediate environs, and each was

marked by a special tolling of bells that resonated across the Kremlin.

New Year’s ritual

The celebration of the Valediction of the Year (Letoprovozhdenie) took place on

the morning of 1 September.

The metropolitan preceded two deacons, each

carrying a Gospel lectionary, and the remaining clergy in a cross procession

from the Dormition to the space between the Annunciation and the Archangel

Michael cathedrals, where two chairs had been placed for the metropolitan

and the tsar. In an apparent sign of humility, the tsar without the royal regalia

proceeded from the porch of the Annunciation to the centre space. The cer-

emony represented a farewell to the old year and a greeting to the new, a

transition symbolised by antiphonal choirs and two Gospel lectionaries. The

books were placed on separate lecterns, ﬂanking an icon of St Simeon the

Stylite, whose feast is celebrated on 1 September.

45 The discussion of these rituals in Moscow is based on information from foreigners,

Russian chronicles, published archival documents, and seventeenth-century ceremonial

books from Moscow’s Dormition cathedral, which reﬂect directly or indirectly practices

from the preceding century (Aleksandr Golubtsov, ‘Chinovniki Moskovskogo Uspen-

skogo sobora’, ChOIDR, 1907, bk. IV, pt. I).

46 Golubtsov, ‘Chinovniki’, 1–4, 147–50, 214, 279; Konstantin Nikol’skii, O sluzhbakh Russkoi

tserkvi byvshikh v prezhnikh pechatnykh bogosluzhebnykhknigakh (St Petersburg:Tipograﬁia

Tovarishchestva ‘Obshchestvennaia pol’za’, 1885), pp. 98–158.

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Theprescribedpsalms concerned the redemptionand destiny ofthe Chosen

People (Ps. 73 [74] and 2) and the covenant between the Chosen People and

God (Ps. 64 [65]), the last including the proclamation ‘Thou crownest the year

with thy goodness’. The reading from Isaiah 61: 1–9 includes his declaration

‘The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me

to bring good tidings to the afﬂicted ...toproclaim the year of the Lord’s

favour.’ Prayers and thanksgiving for kings (1 Tim. 2: 1–7) were followed by a

Gospel reading, in which Christ refers to Isaiah’s declaration (Luke 4: 16–22).

The passages were read twice, line for line, ﬁrst by the metropolitan from one

lectionary, then by the archdeacon from the other. Theritual doubling appears

to emphasise the union of beginning and ending, the year to come, as the year

of the Lord’s favour. Immersing the cross in holy water, the metropolitan

initiated the new year by signing to the four corners of the earth, and, after

wishing the tsar many long years, he sprinkled him with holy water, and then

the nobility by rank, and ﬁnally all others gathered. The tsar returned to the

Annunciation to celebrate the Eucharist.

The transition to a new age, the blessings conferred on the ruler and the

Chosen People, the anointing of Christ as emblematic of the year of the Lord’s

favour were all positive signs that expressed the relationship between ruler

and ruled under the benevolent protection of God. It is noteworthy that two

of the three major inscriptions surrounding the enormous image of Christ

Emmanuel as Final Judge on the ceiling of the Golden Hall throne room

were taken from the New Year service.

This connection between ritual and

throne room reinforced the perception of the reign of Ivan IV as a new age in

Muscovite Rus’.

The Last Judgement ritual

Meatfare Sunday, the day before Shrovetide (Maslenitsa), is devoted to the

most fateful event awaiting all Christians, the Last Judgement.

In a cer-

emony reminiscent of the New Year ritual, the heads of Church and state

walked in cross processions from their respective churches, the Annunciation

and Dormition, to the north-eastern part of Cathedral Square behind the Dor-

mition apses, where chairs for each were set up alongside lecterns that held

two Gospel lectionaries ﬂanking an icon of the Last Judgement. Following

hymns devoted to the Last Judgement, the archdeacon read Old Testament

47 Frank K

ampfer, ‘ “Rußland an der Schwelle zur Neuzeit”: Kunst, Ideologie und his-

torisches Bewußtsein unter Ivan Groznyj’, JGO 23 (1975): 509.

48 Golubtsov, ‘Chinovniki’, 82–5, 242; Nikol’skii, O sluzhbakh,pp.214–36.

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excerpts, warning of the impending days of destruction and despair but hold-

ing out salvation for God’s Chosen People (Joel 2: 1–27 and 3: 1–5, Isa. 13:

6) and describing the terrifying vision of the Ancient of Days and the Last

Judgement (Dan. 7: 1–14). For the Gospel readings, the metropolitan faced

east, the direction of the resurrection, and read about the fates of the righ-

teous and the sinful at the Last Judgement (Matt. 25: 31–46). The archdeacon

standing opposite him read the same passage facing west, the direction associ-

ated with the Last Judgement.

The doubled reading, analogous to that per-

formed in the New Year ritual, underscored the transformative juncture of the

Apocalypse.

The tsar was singled out as the primary representative whose good health

and blessings would redound to the Chosen People as a whole, and especially

to the nobility, who followed him in receiving a sprinkling of holy water

before dismissal. The ritual was performed beneath the east-facing outside

murals of the Dormition with the central image of the New Testament Trinity,

iconography closely associated with the Last Judgement.

Through annual

ritual,thedestinyof Moscowanditsrulerwereconﬁrmed beforethe beginning

of the Great Fast leading up to Easter.

Fiery Furnace ritual

December 17 is a feast day that celebrates the three Hebrew youths Hananiah,

Mishael and Azariah (Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego). Refusing to bow to

the golden idol of King Nebuchadnezzar, they were cast into a ﬁery furnace

on orders of the ruler, spurred on by his evil advisers, the Chaldeans. Visited

by an angel, the youths remained unharmed, but the Chaldean jailers who

had cast them in were themselves destroyed by the ﬂames. Astonished at the

youths’ deliverance, Nebuchadnezzar ordered their release and praised God,

recognising his superiority (Daniel 3).

The Fiery Furnace ritual was performed in the presence of the tsar on

the ﬁrst or second Sunday before Christmas during matins and included the

seventh and eighth canticles, which refer to the three youths. A raised dais

(peshch’ ‘furnace’) was placed in front of the Royal Gates of the Dormition

iconostasis. In the sanctuary, a deacon used a long cloth to bind the necks

of the three boys performing the roles of the three youths and led them

49 In Eastern Orthodox church decoration, the Last Judgement depicted on the western

wall is typically the ﬁnal image encountered by the faithful as they leave the nave.

50 V. G. Briusova, ‘Kompozitsiia “Novozavetnoi Troitsy” v stenopisi Uspenskogo sobora’,

in E. S. Smirnova (ed.), Uspenskii sobor Moskovskogo Kremlia (Moscow: Nauka, 1985),

pp. 88–97.

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through the north doors and into the custody of the waiting Chaldeans. After

they were taken into the centre of the furnace, ‘The Song of the Three Holy

Children’ (Dan. 3) was sung. When the archdeacon uttered the words ‘the

angel of the Lord came down into the oven’, the image of an angel painted on

parchment was lowered from above into the furnace to the accompaniment

of loud noise simulating thunder. After bowing to the angel, the three youths

traced the inner circumference of the furnace three times, singing the ‘Prayer

of Azariah’. The Chaldeans bowed to the spared youths and led them out of

the furnace. The youths approached the metropolitan and wished him and

the royal family many long years of life. Then, in order, the ofﬁciating clergy

and then the boyars sang ‘many long years’ to the tsar.

The narrative itself served as an allegory of the relationship between the

ruler, his advisers, and God’s chosen. The transformation of the ruler from evil

to good is carried out in the face of the destruction of the Chaldean advisers

by ﬁre and the salvation of the youths. In its allusion to the evil potential of

bad advisers on the ruler, the Fiery Furnace ritual can be grouped with other

Muscovite cultural artefacts that underscore the ruler’s duty before God and

his people, for example, the Golden Hall vestibule murals and the Monomakh

Throne.

Epiphany ritual

The Christmas season ended with a major ritual celebrating the baptism of

Christ in the River Jordan. The Blessing of the Waters was the climax of

a solemn ceremony on the morning of 6 January that began with a cross

procession as muchas a mile in length, involving the heads of Church and state,

moving from the Moscow Dormition, through the then passable Tainik tower

out of the Kremlin, and onto the ice of the Moscow River.

A hole some 18

feet square had been made in the ice to reveal the river beneath, ceremonially

renamed the ‘Jordan’ (Iordan’). The clergy arranged themselves around the

hole with a platform set up on one side to hold the metropolitan’s throne.

The tsar stood bare-headed on the ice. After the ‘Jordan’ was hallowed, the

metropolitan took up some water in his hands and cast it ﬁrst on the tsar,

then in similar fashion on the other nobles in order. Once the tsar and his

entourage had departed, the crowds of onlookers rushed to partake of the

newly sanctiﬁed water. The English merchant Anthony Jenkinson describes

their joyful plunge in 1558: ‘but y preasse that there was about the water when

51 Golubtsov,‘Chinovniki’,35–7,176,218, 294–5; Nikol’skii, Osluzhbakh,pp.287–96; Fletcher,

‘Russe Commonwealth’, p. 233.

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the Emperour was gone, was wonderful to behold, for there came about 5000.

pots to be ﬁlled of that water: for that Muscovite which hath no part of that

water, thinks himselfe unhappy.’

The Epiphany ritual impressed all foreigners who witnessed it.

Like the

New Year ritual, it marked a major transformation, a puriﬁcation and regener-

ation. But with the procession extending beyond the walls of the Kremlin, the

ritual invited all Muscovites, regardless of station, to participate. The regen-

erative blessing of the holy water cast ﬁrst upon the tsar and then his elites

accrued symbolically to the people of Muscovy as well, inviting their clamour

to immerse themselves, their loved ones, and even their valued animals in the

newly sanctiﬁed water.

Jenkinson misread the symbolism of the ritual when he concluded that the

tsar’s baring of his head and standing while the metropolitan and the clergy

sat must signal a lesser dignity on the part of the ruler.

He was unaware that

liturgically, the clergy were required to sit during the Old Testament readings

and stand for the NewTestament lections.Furthermorehe failed to realise that

the ritual gave overt expression to one of the chief characteristics contained in

the image of the tsar as representative of Christ on earth, namely, his humility,

a virtue lauded by contemporary writers.

The iconography of the baptism

itself shows Christ standing in the River Jordan with John’s right hand blessing

his bare head. Just as Christ humbled himself in that ritual, so too did the tsar

humble himself in the course of universal spiritual renewal.

Palm Sunday ritual

The Palm Sunday ritual was the most impressive of all the royal rituals in

Moscow (see Plate 18).

We have no Muscovite account of it prior to the

seventeenth century, but members of the Russia Company described it in

their ethnographic reports. In 1558, one of Anthony Jenkinson’s entourage

wrote:

52 Richard Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation,

2 vols., ed. David Beers Quinn and Raleigh Ashlin Skelton (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1965), vol. i,p.341; Fletcher, ‘Russe Commonwealth’, pp. 233–4.

53 Poe (People,p.48,n.41) provides a complete list of foreign references for the Epiphany

and Palm Sunday rituals.

54 Fletcher, ‘Russe Commonwealth’, pp. 233–4.

55 Hakluyt, Principall Navigations, vol. i,pp.343–4. Cf. Paul A. Bushkovitch, ‘The Epiphany

Ceremony of the Russian Court in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, RR 49

(1990): 1–4.

56 Rowland, ‘Limits’, 135.

57 Golubtsov, ‘Chinovniki’, 103–8, 250–3; Nikol’skii, O sluzhbakh,pp.45–97; Michael S. Flier,

‘Breaking the Code: The Image of the Tsar in the Muscovite Palm Sunday Ritual’, in

Flier and Rowland (eds.), Medieval Russian Culture, vol. ii,pp.213–18, 227–32.

405

michael s. flier

– First, they have a tree of a good bignesse which is made fast upon two sleds,

as though it were growing there, and it is hanged with apples, raisins, ﬁgs

and dates and with many fruits abundantly. In the midst of ye same tree stand

5 boyes in white vestures, which sing in the tree before the procession.

Theﬂoat was followedin turn by a long cross procession of acolytes,numerous

richly attired prelates, and half of the Muscovite nobility. The central focus of

the procession was a re-enactment of Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem

on Palm Sunday.

– First, there is a horse covered with white linnen cloth down to ye ground,

his eares being made long with the same cloth like to an asses ears. Upon

this horse the Metropolitane sitteth sidelong like a woman: in his lappe lieth

a faire booke [the Gospels], with a cruciﬁx of Goldsmiths worke upon the

cover, which he holdest fast with his left hand, and in his right hand he hath

a crosse of gold, with which crosse he ceaseth not to blesse the people as he

rideth.

Some thirty sons of priests spread large pieces of cloth in the path of the

approaching Christ, picking them up as soon as the horse passed over them

and running ahead to spread them out again.

– One of the Emperores noble men leadeth the horse by the head, but the

Emperour himselfe going on foote leadeth the horse by the ende of the reine

of his bridle with one of his hands, and in the other of his hands he had a

branch of a Palme tree: after this followed the rest of the Emperours Noble

men and Gentlemen, with a great number of other people.

Beginning at the Dormition, the procession apparently moved to a chapel

dedicated to the Entry into Jerusalem within the Kremlin (Annunciation

cathedral?),

before returning to the Dormition for dismissal, whereupon the

ceremonial tree was broken apart and distributed to the assembled throng.

The tsar was given 200 roubles by the metropolitan, which some foreigners

interpreted as payment for service rendered.

The lower position of the tsar

vis-

a-vis the metropolitan was taken by many foreign observers as yet another

sign of the ruler’s lesser status, without considering the tsar’s identiﬁcation

with Christ through humility, as seen in the Epiphany ritual.

58 Hakluyt, Principall Navigations, vol. i,pp.341–2.

59 Ibid., p. 342.

60 Fletcher, ‘Russe Commonwealth’, p. 234.

61 Hakluyt, Principall Navigations, vol. i,pp.343–4. Cf. Robert O. Crummey, ‘Court Spec-

tacles in Seventeenth-Century Russia: Illusion and Reality’, in Daniel C. Waugh (ed.),

Essays in Honor of A.A. Zimin (Columbus, Oh.: Slavica Publishers, 1985), p. 134.

406

Political ideas and rituals

Sometime after completion of the church of the Intercession on the Moat in

1561, the procession extended out of the Kremlin onto Beautiful (Red) Square

and in view of the people. The tsar and metropolitan participated in a short

ceremony in the Intercession’s Chapel of the Entry into Jerusalem before

returning to the Dormition. This re-enactment of Christ’s adventus near the

microcosm of Jerusalem outside the walls of the Kremlin encouraged those in

attendance, participants and observers, to see the city re-entered as Moscow

transformed, the New Jerusalem. The emotional and spiritual power of the

ceremony was amply demonstrated in 1611, when the Polish forces occupying

Moscow cancelled the Palm Sunday ritual: they were obliged to reinstate it to

avoid a riot.

Typological characteristics

These ﬁve rituals presented distinct aspects of the political ideas that made up

the myth of the Muscovite ruler. All required the presence of the ruler, but

one, the Fiery Furnace ritual, was performed as a liturgical drama and afforded

him a passive, observer’s role. It was also the only one of the ﬁve performed

completely inside the Dormition and the only one that alluded to a distinction

between good and evil emperors, and good and evil advisers, elements of a

typology realised in contemporary literature.

Two of the rituals were limited

to the outside spaces within the Kremlin(New Year and Last Judgement rituals

in Cathedral Square) and featured the contemplation of crossing temporal

boundaries, from the year ending to the ‘year of the Lord’s favour’, and from

history to eternity, respectively. Both alluded to Kremlin iconography, in the

Golden Hall and outside the Dormition cathedral, respectively.

The two most signiﬁcant and solemn of the royal rituals were much more

complex in nature, revealing not only protocols of performance but semiotic

representation on the iconographic, historical and eschatological levels. The

EpiphanyritualandtherevisedPalmSundayritualutilisedspaceinsideandout-

side the Kremlin, emblematic of their more extensive, universal signiﬁcance.

Both used performance to re-enact events in the life of Christ, thereby intro-

ducing immediate association with the Holy Land: the Moscow River with

the River Jordan, and the city of Moscow with the New Jerusalem. Both were

inﬂuenced by the iconography of the Baptism and the Entry into Jerusalem.

And both recalled pivotal historical events: the baptism of Vladimir, which

62 Konrad Bussov, Moskovskaia khronika, 1584–1613, ed. I. I. Smirnov, trans. S. A. Akuliants

(Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1961), pp. 185, 320–1.

63 Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols,pp.203–10.

407