Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

The warning was clear: the Muscovite Grand Prince was now responsible for Christendom as a whole. If he failed to rule righteously – for example, if he confiscated church land – the end of the world was at hand: there would be no fourth Rome.

One would have thought this grandiose, if ominous, vision should have appealed to Muscovy’s rulers. From their viewpoint, though, it had serious drawbacks. It was issued as a warning against expropriating land the Tsar needed for his military servitors. And it implied that the church was the senior partner in their common work, with the right to oversee the Prince’s moral conduct. It is significant that only on one occasion shall we find a Muscovite ruler actually citing the concept of ‘Moscow the Third Rome’. Yet the idea remained very important to Muscovy’s – and later Russia’s – Orthodox believers, an ultimate justification for the immense territories and exclusive power claimed by the Princes and Tsars. Russia was to claim the status of champion and protector of the world’s true-believing Christians.

It was on this basis that Ivan IV assumed the title of Tsar. The religious outlook underlying his claim was formulated by his leading churchman, Metropolitan Makarii, in a series of texts, excerpts from which were read out in church each Sunday. The Great Lectionary and the Book of Degrees of the Imperial Genealogy, taken together, resembled the texts compiled in Imperial China to demonstrate that the Emperor had the ‘mandate of heaven’. They included sermons, epistles, lives of the saints, and resolutions of church councils, selected and arranged to show that God intended Rus to become His chosen empire on earth. Rus was to be inheritor both of empire and Christian Church: third Rome and second Jerusalem. Each Sunday, believers heard how the Princes of Rus were descended from the Roman Emperor Augustus, and how Vladimir Monomakh had received his regalia from the Byzantine Emperor. This narrative portrayed the Princes of Kiev as intermediaries, and so Muscovy claimed their inheritance too, denying Lithuania’s equivalent claims.

When he was crowned Tsar, Ivan IV received from Metropolitan Makarii the Monomakh crown as symbol of the dual derivation of his authority from the universal Christian Church and from the Roman Empire via Byzantium and Kiev. The Patriarch of Constantinople, now subject to the Ottomans, was probably glad to be associated with an external secular ruler: he explicitly acknowledged Ivan’s imperial title and addressed him as ‘Tsar and Sovereign of Orthodox Christians of the whole Universe [and] among Tsars resembling the apostle-like and ever-glorious Constantine’.

The culmination of this vision of Muscovy came in 1589, when the Metropolitan of Moscow was elevated to the rank of Patriarch. The Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople was more ambivalent about this than about Muscovy’s imperial claims, since he was here accepting a potential rival. However, he welcomed support and financial aid from Muscovy. Referring to the fate of the previous two Romes, he declared ‘Your great Russian empire, the third Rome, has surpassed them all in piety.’ Tsar Fedor (r. 1584–98) welcomed this assertion – the only occasion on which a Russian ruler explicitly endorsed the concept of ‘Moscow the Third Rome’. In 1589, the synod in Constantinople approved the creation of a fifth Orthodox patriarchate, the first new one created for over a thousand years, and the only one independent of Islamic rule.

This was a development of immense importance. As we shall see, the Orthodox faith was a strong and sufficiently distinctive marker of Russian national identity to survive, and indeed flourish, even in the absence of a Tsar.

17th-century Muscovy

We have seen that Ivan IV almost undid his own achievements through his cruelty and his excessive demands on the people. Furthermore, he undermined the hereditary monarchy he himself had consolidated when in a fit of rage he killed his own heir, leaving only a sickly son, Fedor. Fedor’s death in 1598 meant the end of the dynasty and plunged Muscovy into chaos. Onerous service obligations which were (just about) acceptable from a ruler bearing God’s blessing proved unacceptable when imposed by a mere boyar, Boris Godunov, even one elected Tsar by a zemskii sobor. If nothing else, a boyar monarch inevitably had enemies among other boyars.

And so Muscovy descended into civil war, which has gone down to history as the Time of Troubles. Boyar clans, each with their clients, fought one another. Southern frontier servicemen rebelled against an increasingly demanding state. Cossacks added their own brand of plundering and murdering. In the later stages of the turmoil, both Sweden and Poland became involved, each with its own ambitions to dominate the now fragmented territories and loyalties of Muscovy.