The Icon and the Axe

In all of his activities, Ivan conceived of himself as head of a monolithic religious civilization, never simply as a military or political leader. His campaign against the Tatars at Kazan in 1552 was a kind of religious procession, a storming of Jericho. The great Kazan Cathedral was built in Red Square, and came to be named for the holy fool, Vasily the Blessed, to whom the victory was credited. Its nine asymmetrical tent roofs, exotically gilded and capped by onion cupolas, represent in many ways the climax of Muscovite architecture, and form a striking contrast with the balanced Italo-Byzantine cathedrals built in the Kremlin under Ivan

III. Many other churches arose in this high Muscovite style, and more than ten were named for holy fools under Ivan.69

Ivan's legislative council of 1549-50-which provided some precedent for later parliamentary "councils of the land" (zemskie sobory)-was conceived as a religious gathering.60 The Church code enacted in 1551 known as the hundred chapters was designed only to "confirm former tradition," and prescribed rales for everything from icon painting to shaving and drinking. Every day of the calendar was covered and almost every saint depicted in the 27,000 large pages of the encyclopedia of holy readings, Cheti Mnei.el Every aspect of domestic activity was ritualized with semi-monastic rules of conduct in the "Household Book" (Domostroy). Even the oprich-nina was bound together with the vows, rules, and dress of a monastic order.

The consequence of this radical monasticization of society was the virtual elimination of secular culture in the course of the sixteenth century. Whereas Russia had previously reproduced a substantial number of secular tales and fables-drawn both from Byzantium and the West through the Southern and Western Slavs respectively-"there did not appear in Russian literature of the sixteenth century a single work of belles lettres similar to those already known in the fifteenth. . . . There cannot be found in Russian manuscripts of the sixteenth even those literary works which were known in fifteenth century Russia and were subsequently widely disseminated in the seventeenth."62 The chronicles and the newly embellished genealogies, hagiographies, military tales, and polemics of the age were purged of "useless stories." Nil Sorsky, no less than Joseph of Volokolamsk, favored this form of censorship; and the "hundred chapters" of 1551 extended these prohibitions on secular culture to music and art as well. By the time of Ivan the Terrible, Muscovy had set itself off even from other Orthodox Slavs by the totality of its historical pretensions and the religious character of its entire culture.

The peculiarities of Muscovite civilization as it took finished shape under Ivan IV invite comparisons not only with Eastern despots and Western state builders but also with two seemingly remote civilizations: imperial Spain and ancient Israel.

Like Spain, Muscovy absorbed for Christendom the shock of alien invaders and found its national identity in the fight to expel them. As with Spain, the military cause became a religious one for Russia. Political and religious authority were intertwined; and the resultant fanaticism led both countries to become particularly intense spokesmen for their respective divisions of Christianity. The introduction into the creed of the phrase "and from the Son," which first split East and West, took place at a council

in Toledo, and nowhere was it more bitterly opposed than in Russia. The Russian and Spanish hierarchies were the most adamant within the Eastern and Western churches respectively in opposing the reconciliation of the churches at Florence in 1437-9. The leading Spanish spokesman at Florence was, in fact, a relative of the famed inquisitor, Torquemada.