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.
40
He
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.
41
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).
42
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.
43
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.
44
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).
400
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