Russia

Sergius the hermit-turned-organizer became political. In 1358 he was sent to the Prince of Rostov, to the territory where his own family had hailed from, to persuade him to concede in his dispute with Moscow. Seven years later he undertook another mission as peacemaker, between two warring brothers over which of them should be prince of Nizhnii-Novgorod, which controlled an important confluence further down the Volga. He not only blessed Grand Prince Dmitrii before his victory over the Tatars at Kulikovo in 1380, he is reputed to have given him strategic advice, though he was also among those who fled Moscow at the approach of the vengeful Tatar leader Tokhtamysh, who sacked the city two years later. Sergius died in 1392. The site of his first hermit’s cell at Zagorsk, north of Moscow, had already grown to be the Trinity—St Sergius monastic centre. It was to become the administrative centre for the Patriarch of All Russia, and a patriotic symbol for all Russians.

The story of St Sergius helps to explain how Russia relocated itself further to the north in the thirteenth century. It also throws light on how it came to occupy so vast a territory. The policy of princes, particularly Moscow’s prince, of encouraging settlement on unfarmed land in strategic areas was significant in this respect, but the foundation of monasteries in ‘the wilderness’, as Sergius had done, was fundamental to the process.

The Church had become a refuge for peasants who had uprooted themselves from unsafe areas, and a major agency for their resettlement. This helps to explain the popularity of ‘wilderness’ monasteries, many of them founded in distant places where conditions were harsh but which were safe from the Tatars and other human predators. The monastic foundations kept the young men safe and productive. They seem also to have helped to increase population. Monks are, or should be, chaste, of course, but the demographic imperative was satisfied by novices who decided not to take their vows, and by peasants, artisans and service people who attached themselves to monastic communities, creating little suburbs around them.

The new monastic foundations tended to avoid land owned by princes, so people in monasteries’ dependent settlements could live more freely than elsewhere and benefit from privileges and benefits that would not otherwise have been available to them. Yet the monastic colonization movement suited the princes — especially the Prince of Moscow, who made over great swathes of undeveloped territory to the Church, knowing that if it could find peasants to settle on it and make the land productive it would ultimately yield taxes and benefit the state, albeit through the Church. This and the continuing disposition of young Russians to take up the life of pioneers was to have continuing importance for Muscovy’s development, particularly over the following two centuries. The development coincides with what Liubavskii identified as a period of sharp population growth associated with the development of colonization during the half century following the death of Ivan ‘Money-Bag’, ¹⁹ and monastic communities were founded at an increasing pace from the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with several practical, as well as spiritual, purposes in mind.

Political centres had long attracted monastic foundations. No fewer than sixteen foundations were established around Moscow in the period by grand princes, metropolitans, abbots and the disciples of monastic saints. ²⁰But most were founded further afield — to win more virgin land for the plough, to convert pagan tribespeople, to profit from commercial crossroads, to access natural resources like salt. They were founded for these and a dozen other reasons, but, above all, monasteries were the organizational heart of the ongoing colonization process, whose tempo so accelerated in the fourteenth century. And when, in the mid-1500s, a Western visitor was to marvel at the fact that monasteries owned one-third of all land in the entire country ²¹ it was largely to the legacy of St Sergius that he was pointing - a multifaceted legacy of economic and political as well as spiritual and patriotic significance. ²²