IN JUNE 1586, THE MUSCOVITE COURT WELCOMED AN UNUSUAL guest, Patriarch Joachim V of Antioch, who held one of the five ancient and most prestigious patriarchal seats of the Eastern Christian (Orthodox) world. Tsar Fedor, who had succeeded his father, Ivan the Terrible, as ruler of Muscovy two years earlier, met him in full regalia in the company of Muscovite aristocrats, called boyars, and scores of court officials. Rising from his throne to greet the honored guest, the tsar walked a full seven feet toward him—an ostentatious gesture of respect for the patriarch’s exalted status. After receiving Joachim’s blessings, Fedor invited him to dine at his table, another honor rarely bestowed on the tsar’s visitors.
Moscow was accustomed to receiving Eastern hierarchs requesting financial support, but never before 1586 had it received a patriarch. The status of the Orthodox Church in Muscovy was lower than that of the ancient churches of Byzantium, as it was ruled by a metropolitan as opposed to a patriarch, who, to add insult to injury, was not even recognized by the “big four”—the patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. While Joachim’s visit presented the tsar with an opportunity to enhance his status in the Orthodox world, the opportunity came with a challenge. How was he to demonstrate the superiority of the Muscovite church to those of the Eastern patriarchs? The tsar left that difficult task to his metropolitan, Dionisii. After inviting Joachim to dine, Fedor suggested that he first visit the metropolitan, who was awaiting him in the Kremlin’s Dormition Cathedral. When the patriarch entered the cathedral, the metropolitan, violating every rule of Orthodox protocol, gave him his blessing. The patriarch, taken aback, stated that it would be more appropriate for Dionisii to accept his blessing first. But victory in this first round of diplomatic relations went to the metropolitan; the rest was handled by the tsar and his advisers.
They asked Joachim to elevate the metropolitan see of Moscow to a patriarchate. Apparently surprised by this request, the patriarch decided to play for time. On the one hand, he badly needed the tsar’s alms and did not want to risk leaving Moscow empty-handed or with a nominal donation. On the other hand, the creation of a patriarchate was a matter for the Ecumenical Council, not for the patriarch’s unilateral decision. Thus, according to Muscovite sources, Joachim responded that he thought it appropriate for Muscovy to have its own patriarchate but would have to speak with the other patriarchs, who would make a decision with the Ecumenical Council. He promised to lobby for the patriarchate once he returned to his see. Tsar Fedor sent Joachim off with rich gifts for him and the patriarchs of Constantinople and Alexandria.
The vision of Muscovy as successor to Byzantium and the only remaining Orthodox empire on the face of the earth was first developed in the early sixteenth century. That vision, centered on the figure of the Muscovite tsar, was incomplete as long as the country remained without a patriarch of its own—the tsars had to keep turning for spiritual support and legitimacy to the Eastern patriarchs. Ivan the Terrible had appealed to the patriarch of Constantinople for recognition of his tsarist title. In 1581, after the death of his son and heir apparent, Tsarevich Ivan—contemporaries claimed that the father had killed the son in a fit of rage—Ivan the Terrible sent emissaries to the Orthodox East, asking the hierarchs to pray for the repose of his son’s soul.
Now it seemed that the vision of the true Orthodox empire was about to be realized. In Western and Central Europe, the sixteenth century would be marked by the Protestant Reformation, Catholic reform, and religious wars between Protestants and Catholics. For Muscovy, the ecclesiastical priorities were to win higher status for its Orthodox church. The first half of the seventeenth century would test established relations between the secular and spiritual authorities in Moscow as well as Muscovites’ perceptions of themselves and the world around them.
RELATIONS BETWEEN THE MUSCOVITE CHURCH AND THE EASTERN patriarchs had broken down in the mid-fifteenth century, when Isidore, the Greek metropolitan of Rus’, was arrested and thrown into a Muscovite prison for attempting to introduce a church union with Rome.
Isidore first came to Moscow in 1437 but then left to attend the Council of Florence, where he was one of the most ardent supporters of the church union with Rome. The schism between the Catholics and the Orthodox went back to the eleventh century, when the Latin West, represented by the pope of Rome, and the Greek East, represented by the emperors and patriarchs of Byzantium, broke their communion. The theological differences between the two branches of Christianity concerned the Holy Spirit: Did it come from God the Father alone, as the easterners claimed, or from God the Father and God the Son in equal measure, as the westerners believed? Underlying this and many other theological disputes was the question of who should wield ultimate authority in the church—the hierarchs of Rome or Constantinople. Political and cultural differences also pulled the two parts of what had once been the Roman Empire in different directions. In the East, the church was subordinate to the emperor, who exercised both secular and spiritual power. In the West, the pope had to compete with secular rulers, a situation that produced a political culture much more pluralistic than that of the East. In time, the West would come to overshadow its Eastern rival.
The union, which placed the Orthodox Church under the tutelage of the pope, was discussed and approved by both sides at the Council of Florence in 1439. The Orthodox, who would be referred to in later texts as Uniates, accepted Catholic dogmas while maintaining their traditional Byzantine rite and the institution of the married clergy. The last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI, had accepted a union between the two branches of Christianity in the vain hope that Rome would save him and his state from the Ottomans. Isidore returned to Moscow from the council in 1441 only to be arrested by Grand Prince Vasilii II the Blind, the father of Ivan III. Isidore managed to escape, and the Muscovite prince did not pursue him. Had he been caught, ecclesiastical ordinances would have obliged Vasilii to “burn him in flames or bury him alive” for his apostasy.
Why did Moscow reject church union in 1441? An explanation is to be found in letters signed by Grand Prince Vasilii and sent to the Byzantine emperor and the patriarch of Constantinople, citing theological differences between the Eastern and Western churches. But given that it was the grand prince, not the church hierarchs, who figured as the main actor on the Muscovite side, it may be assumed that at least part of the motivation lay in his own agenda and political aspirations. It is no accident that the rise of Muscovy as an independent state coincided with the declaration of independence of its church from Constantinople, which had been an ally of the Mongol Horde for decades, if not centuries. We know that Vasilii wanted the metropolitan of Rus’ to be his own appointee and had actually sent his candidate to Constantinople for approval, but he had been rebuffed, and the post had gone to Isidore. After Isidore’s arrest, Vasilii again asked Constantinople for the right to nominate his own candidate, but he was again refused.
The Union of Florence offered the ambitious ruler a perfect pretext to cut ties with Constantinople and assume the right to appoint metropolitans to the Moscow seat. In 1448, a council of Orthodox bishops elected Vasilii’s candidate, Iona, to the metropolitan throne, and the Muscovite church broke all ties with Constantinople. Even before the fall of the Byzantine capital in 1453, the metropolitanate of Moscow would become autocephalous, or self-governing—an isolation from the rest of the Orthodox world that lasted almost a century and a half. But that did not prevent the Muscovite princes from claiming the legacy of Byzantium, or, indeed, from establishing advantageous relations with Rome, as Ivan’s marriage to Sophia clearly attested.
The years 1448, when the Muscovite church broke relations with Constantinople, and 1472, when Ivan married Sophia, belong to different epochs in Russian history. In the first case, Muscovy was beset by internal strife, struggling to establish its autonomy from the Horde. In the second, it had achieved de facto independence from the khans and taken control of their Rus’ possessions. Ivan’s marriage to Sophia helped create an unprecedented opening to the Christian world outside Muscovy: the matchmaker was the pope himself, and the bride was Uniate. To be sure, Sophia returned to Orthodoxy, and Muscovy never accepted the Union of Florence. But for a Muscovite ruler to marry a Uniate with the support of Rome was a sign of recognition of his new independent status by the political and ecclesiastical elite of Western and Central Europe.
In the early 1490s, the Russian religious elite embraced several notions: that the Muscovite tsars were heirs of the Byzantine emperors, that Moscow was the second Constantinople, and that Muscovy and the Rus’ land were successors to the Byzantine Empire. Those ideas were first fully expressed by Metropolitan Zosima of Moscow in 1492. In that year, as Christopher Columbus discovered the New World, the Orthodox believers of Moscow prepared for the world’s end. According to the Orthodox calendar, which counted years from the creation of the world, 1492 was in fact the year 7000, which would mark the end of time. The Orthodox faithful in Muscovy believed that 1492 would be the last year of their lives and of humankind in general. They thanked God that they professed the true religion and were about to be saved.
To the surprise of the Muscovite churchmen, the world did not end in 1492. With the world continuing to exist, a new calendar problem emerged for the church of Rus’—how to calculate the ever-changing date of Easter. Metropolitan Zosima rose to the challenge and produced the Exposition of the Easter Cycle. For him, as for many other Muscovites, the new calendar and the new Orthodox era began with a change in the structure of the world hierarchy. At its top, the Orthodox empire of Byzantium was now replaced by Muscovy, and the Byzantine emperor was supplanted by the Muscovite tsar. According to Zosima, God had installed Ivan III as “a new Tsar Constantine for the new city of Constantine, sovereign of Moscow and the whole Rus’ land and many other lands.” Zosima presented Moscow as a new Constantinople, while referring to Constantinople as a new Rome (in some copies, a new Jerusalem).
In the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Muscovy was imagined as both a new Jerusalem and a new Rome, but it is the notion of Moscow as the Third Rome that has attracted the most attention from historians, given the metaphor’s inspiration of a new model of relations between church and sovereign. Moscow was called a Third Rome in a number of letters dating from the early sixteenth century and attributed to the monk Filofei, who resided in one of the Pskov monasteries on lands recently annexed by Moscow. Among the letters is one addressed to Grand Prince Vasilii, warning him against neglecting or even impairing the interests of the church. According to Filofei, the churches of Rome had fallen because of heresy, while those of Constantinople—the second Rome, to which imperial and spiritual power had migrated after the fall of the first Rome—had been taken over by the Muslims. Moscow was the third Rome, charged with saving the true faith. That idea was presented at the beginning of the letter attributed to Filofei and repeated at its end: “All Christian kingdoms have come together in yours alone: two Romes have fallen, the third stands, and a fourth there will never be; your Christian kingdom will not be replaced by another.”
The representation of Moscow as the Third Rome, all but forgotten by the Muscovites during the rule of Ivan the Terrible, was dramatically revived after his death, in the midst of Moscow’s efforts to elevate its metropolitanate to patriarchal status. In the summer of 1588, two years after Patriarch Joachim V of Antioch left Moscow, Tsar Fedor’s court received an indication that its lobbying of the patriarch had had its intended effect. Smolensk officials reported a meeting with a new visitor from the East, Patriarch Jeremiah II of Constantinople. The tsar sent a court official to greet him and inquire about the decision of the Ecumenical Council on the proposed Moscow patriarchate. The Moscow officials were in for a disappointment, as Patriarch Jeremiah knew nothing about their request and had brought no council decision with him. The sole purpose of Jeremiah’s mission, as it turned out, was to collect alms to improve the patriarchate’s finances and build a new headquarters and patriarchal church, as the Ottoman Turks in Istanbul, the former Constantinople, had taken over the old ones.
Although the Muscovite authorities arranged for Jeremiah’s solemn entrance into Moscow, the welcoming party did not include the metropolitan. The patriarch was not summoned to the tsar’s court until eight days had passed. He was brought there mounted on an ass, supposedly a reenactment of Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem, but the tsar walked only half the previous seven-foot distance to greet the new guest: either the Muscovites were uncertain that Jeremiah was a true patriarch, or displeased that he had brought no news about their request. The tsar did not invite Jeremiah to dine, asking instead that he meet with the court advisers, who inquired about the situation of the Orthodox Church in the Ottoman Empire. After that, Jeremiah was sent back to his quarters and told to wait.
The patriarch was now a prisoner in all but name. “In the place where they held Jeremiah, they would not let anyone from the local people come to see him, nor would they allow him to go out. Only the monks, if they so desired, would go out with the people of the tsar into the marketplace, and the Muscovites guarded the monks until they returned to their quarters,” wrote a member of Jeremiah’s party. Whereas Patriarch Joachim had spent less than two months in Moscow, Jeremiah was there for almost a year, from July 1588 until May 1589. He eventually did what the Muscovites wanted, creating a patriarchate and presiding over the consecration of the new patriarch of Moscow.
The consecration of a candidate elected by the local Orthodox council took place in early February 1589. To no one’s surprise, it was Metropolitan Iov of Moscow. In May of that year, Tsar Fedor let Jeremiah go with a generous reward, given his original mission of collecting alms. But the price of his release had been the unintended creation of a patriarchate in violation of all existing church ordinances. A few years later, the Eastern patriarchs, impoverished and dependent on the tsar’s alms, approved Jeremiah’s actions.
Moscow was now the seat of an Orthodox patriarchate—a junior one, to be sure, which yielded precedence to the long-established patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. In real terms, however, it was the biggest, richest, and most powerful patriarchate in the Orthodox world. Its power came from the tsar, who was its true master, along with his courtiers. The newly installed Patriarch Iov not only had taken no part in the negotiations with Jeremiah but had not even seen him before the consecration. The decree establishing the patriarchate included an explicit reference to Moscow as the Third Rome: “For the old Rome fell through the Apollinarian heresy. The second Rome, which is Constantinople, is held by the grandsons of Hagar—the godless Turks. Pious Tsar! Your great Rus’ tsardom, the third Rome, has surpassed them all in piety, and all pious people have been united as one in your tsardom. And you alone in the firmament are called Christian tsar in the whole universe among all Christians.”
In no other document did Jeremiah ever refer to Moscow as the Third Rome. There are strong indications that the decree was prepared by the Muscovite side, and Jeremiah was simply made to sign it. For the first time, a concept that had been developed much earlier in the century was being invoked to promote the goals of the Muscovite church and state. If the monk Filofei had sought to protect the church against secular encroachments, his notion of Moscow as the Third Rome was now being used to enhance the international status of the newly created Moscow Patriarchate and the tsar who ultimately controlled it. Moscow was preparing to assert its primacy in the Orthodox world.
THE KEY FIGURE BEHIND THE CREATION OF THE MOSCOW PATRIARCHATE was not Tsar Fedor but his brother-in-law and éminence grise, Boris Godunov. It was Godunov who handled the visits of both Eastern patriarchs to Moscow, Joachim of Antioch in 1586 and Jeremiah of Constantinople in 1588–1589. And Metropolitan Iov of Moscow, who was personally close to Godunov, became the first Muscovite patriarch in 1589. The son of a petty provincial noble, Godunov had risen through the ranks of Ivan the Terrible’s oprichnina servitors to become one of his closest aides.
Tsar Fedor died at the age of forty in January 1598, leaving his wife childless, the monarchy without heirs, and the country without a dynasty: Fedor’s younger half-brother, Prince Dmitrii, had died under suspicious circumstances seven years earlier, in May 1591. On the tsar’s death, power passed to Fedor’s wife, Irina, and then to her brother, the powerful courtier Boris Godunov. The Rurikid dynasty, on which Ivan the Terrible had based his belief in his German origins, and which was the foundation of the Muscovite mythology that linked Moscow with Kyiv, Constantinople, and Rome, had now become extinct. Godunov’s family legend associated him with Tatar servitors, not Kyivan rulers. But thanks to his political astuteness, the transition from one dynasty to what many believed was the beginning of a new one went rather smoothly. Godunov was elected to the tsardom by the Assembly of the Land, a consultative body made up of representatives of various strata of Muscovite society, first called into being by Ivan the Terrible.
On September 1, 1598, New Year’s Day by the Muscovite calendar (Russia would switch to January 1 only in the early eighteenth century under Peter I), the Muscovite elite gathered in the Dormition Cathedral of the Kremlin for the installation of the new tsar. Godunov appeared with an entourage of courtiers. One of the boyars carried Monomakh’s Cap, another the tsar’s scepter, and yet another the golden orb, a sphere surmounted by a cross that was referred to as an “apple” in Muscovite documents of the time. Godunov mounted the throne, and Iov, his loyal patriarch, invested him with the royal insignia. Muscovy was ending the sixteenth century with a brand-new political and ecclesiastical team as well as the prospect of a ruling dynasty. The orderly transition seemed to augur a bright future: with the tsar and the patriarch in office, the leadership of the prospective Orthodox empire was complete.
But the early seventeenth century brought innumerable difficulties for the Muscovite elite. The unexpected death of Boris Godunov in April 1605, in the midst of social turmoil, plunged Muscovy into a long and bloody political crisis, civil war, and international conflict known as the Time of Troubles. It lasted eight long years that saw a succession of rulers on the Muscovite throne. First came the defrocked monk Georgii Otrepiev, who publicly assumed the identity of the deceased youngest son of Ivan the Terrible, Dmitrii. He held the Muscovite throne for less than a year, from June 1605 to May 1606, when he was killed by the supporters of a new tsar, Vasilii Shuisky, who was actually a descendant of the Rurikids. Shuisky was deposed in July 1610 by supporters of Władysław IV, a son of the Polish king Sigismund III, who desired the crown for himself, and whose troops occupied Moscow. The Time of Troubles ended in 1613 with the expulsion of the Poles from Moscow and the election to the throne of Mikhail Romanov, the progenitor of a new dynasty, in the following year.
The Time of Troubles posed new challenges to the Muscovite historical, political, and cultural identity that had taken shape in the previous century and a half, following the end of Mongol rule. On the one hand, the crisis began the process of separating the person of the tsar from the state over which he ruled, laying the foundations for the early modern Russian nation. On the other hand, the patriotic reaction to the Polish invasion that accompanied and exacerbated the crisis closely identified loyalty to the tsar with loyalty to church and fatherland. In official Muscovite discourse of the era, disloyalty to one came to mean disloyalty to all.
If one considers the main ideological arguments used to mobilize Muscovite resistance to the foreign invasion, religion and the idea of defending the Orthodox Church emerge as by far the most important. In a country without a ruling dynasty or a legitimate secular institution to run the state, the church took on particular importance. The office of head of the church emerged from the shadow of the political sovereign, where it had been since the early days of the Tsardom of Muscovy, to claim a central place in the country’s symbolic politics. That role was played by Patriarch Hermogen, the third cleric to assume the patriarchal office and an unlikely agent of change. He became patriarch in July 1606, when he was seventy-five years old—ancient by the standards of the time.
In his pastoral letters, Hermogen presented the changing worldview of Muscovite religious and secular elites as they struggled to respond to the challenges of the Time of Troubles. Hermogen refused to treat those who rebelled against the newly installed Tsar Vasilii Shuisky as fully Christian. “I turn to you, former Orthodox Christians of every degree, age, and office,” wrote the patriarch,
but now we do not even know what to call you, for you have turned away from God, conceived hatred for the truth, fallen away from the universal and apostolic Church, turned away from Tsar Vasilii Ivanovich, who was given the wreath by God and anointed with holy oil; you have forgotten the vows of our Orthodox faith, in which we were born, baptized, raised and grew up; you have abandoned your kissing of the cross and your vow to stand to the death for the house of the Most Holy Mother of God and for the Muscovite state and have cleaved to that falsely pretending little tsar of yours.
Hermogen’s insistence that a Muscovite patriot and a true Christian must be loyal to the tsar became a staple of Muscovite literature in the first decades of the seventeenth century.
The Time of Troubles came to an end in 1613, when the Assembly of the Land elected the sixteen-year-old Mikhail Romanov to the Muscovite throne. The head of the Romanov clan was the new tsar’s father, Fedor, who had competed for the tsar’s throne after the death of the last Rurikid tsar, also named Fedor. He lost, and after Boris Godunov’s election he was tonsured as a monk and exiled to a northern monastery. As a victim of Godunov, he was later brought back to Moscow and consecrated metropolitan of Rostov under the name Filaret. He was arrested by the Poles in 1610 and spent the next eight years as a prisoner of honor in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Filaret returned to Moscow in 1619, after the signing of a Polish-Muscovite armistice and an exchange of prisoners. By that time, his son Mikhail Romanov had already been tsar of Muscovy for six years. The return of Filaret, who assumed the vacant position of patriarch of Moscow in the following year, created a unique situation in which the tsar was the son of a patriarch. Both had the designation “sovereign” in their respective titles, but it was quite apparent that the imperious patriarch dominated his meek son. The Byzantine model, in which the emperor held sway over the Orthodox patriarch, had been effectively reversed.
The new patriarch was not well disposed to all Orthodox outside the tsardom. During his Polish captivity, Filaret had become convinced that the Orthodox of Ukraine and Belarus were spiritually corrupt, as they were subject to a Catholic monarch and obliged to deal constantly with the non-Orthodox. There was also the grave issue of the church union concluded in the Commonwealth between the Catholic Church and part of the Orthodox Church. The new Uniate Church, created at the Council of Brest in 1596, recognized the supremacy of the pope and accepted Catholic dogma while maintaining its traditional Byzantine rite. Filaret accused the Uniates of “walking two paths” simultaneously and considered not only them but also the Orthodox of the Commonwealth as less than fully Orthodox and Christian, even if they rejected the union.
Under Patriarch Filaret, who was the de facto ruler of Muscovy from 1619 until his death in 1633, the Orthodox Church and the state itself fused into something of a last bastion of “true Orthodoxy.” But while questioning the credentials of every Christian outside Muscovy, Filaret was eager to make political alliances with non-Orthodox rulers in order to defeat the hated Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and retake the lands lost to it during the Time of Troubles. He died in the midst of another war with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which brought new defeats to Muscovy. Orphaned by the death of his domineering father, Mikhail Romanov was now the sole ruler of Muscovy. But the tradition of treating the patriarch as a sovereign and the chronic tension between the secular and spiritual authorities in Muscovy did not disappear overnight. It would not be fully resolved in favor of the tsar for another three decades.
WITH EUROPE EMBROILED IN THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR (1618–1648), which pitted Catholic countries against Protestant ones, Muscovy was eager to make alliances with the Protestant powers against the Catholic Poles, but was constrained by the refusal of its church to treat the rest of the Christian world as fully legitimate. That limitation became embarrassingly apparent in 1644, when the Muscovite elite welcomed Prince Valdemar of Denmark, who had come to marry Tsar Mikhail’s daughter, Irina. The wedding was meant to set the seal on the alliance between Muscovy and Denmark, which was long in the making—Valdemar and Irina had been engaged since 1640. But the long-awaited wedding fell through. Under the influence of church hierarchs, the tsar insisted that Valdemar, who had no plans to stay in Muscovy or claim its throne, convert to Orthodoxy before marrying his daughter. The prince refused. The tsar, for his part, would not let him go. Valdemar was detained and allowed to leave the country only after the death of Tsar Mikhail and the coronation of his son, Aleksei Mikhailovich, in 1645.
The disrupted marriage of Irina, who was very close to Aleksei, indicated to the new tsar and his advisers that the Orthodox Church was becoming a political hindrance. Further evidence of this was the failure of Muscovite Orthodox theologians to hold their own against Valdemar’s Lutheran preachers on issues of Christian dogma and marriage. But there was a reform movement growing within the church that aspired to raise the educational level of the clergy and eradicate corruption. The Zealots of Piety, as they came to be known, included Archimandrite Nikon, who became patriarch of Moscow in 1652 and, with the tsar’s consent, included the word “sovereign” in his title. Nikon initiated an ambitious reform of the church, remodeling it along lines established not long before by the Orthodox metropolitan Peter Mohyla, who had reformed the Kyiv metropolitanate in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in response to challenges presented by the Protestant Reformation and Catholic reform.
Peter Mohyla, a son of the Moldavian ruler, became the metropolitan of Kyiv in 1633 and worked hard to reform Ukrainian and Belarusian Orthodoxy. He began with the education of the clergy. In 1632, he merged two existing schools for Orthodox youth, establishing a Kyivan college—the first Western-type educational institution in Ukraine, modeled in structure and curriculum on the Jesuit colleges of the era. The Catholic reform, launched by Rome at the Council of Trent (1545–1563), became the inspiration and model for Mohyla’s reform of the Orthodox Church of the Commonwealth.
Catholic influences were apparent in the new metropolitan’s liturgical innovations and in his Confession of Faith—an Eastern Christian catechism that the Orthodox had lacked. An Orthodox catechism was compiled in the 1640s by a circle of intellectuals working under Mohyla’s supervision and approved by the Kyivan church council. In 1643, it was approved by the Eastern patriarchs. The confession that Mohyla and his learned circle composed became an official exposition of the dogmas and articles of the Orthodox faith throughout the Orthodox world, with the notable exception of Muscovy.
The rise of Kyiv as a center of Orthodox learning took place at a time when Muscovy and its church were in almost complete isolation, oblivious to the challenges that faced their fellow Orthodox abroad. But the desire of the young Tsar Aleksei to reform his church changed the attitude of the Muscovite state to Kyiv and its teachings. Nowhere was this more evident than in the sphere of publishing. In 1649, Moscow printers published a Brief Compendium of Teachings on the Articles of Faith, based on Peter Mohyla’s Orthodox Confession of Faith. Muscovite Orthodoxy was rejoining the rest of the Orthodox world, now defined by the theological teachings of Kyiv.
There was a certain irony in that development. The Muscovites had sought to remedy problems arising from the self-imposed isolation of their church by returning to the basics of their faith as presented in the uncorrupted texts of the Eastern church fathers. But that required checking the old Muscovite translations of the Greek texts and, if necessary, producing revised ones. Since there were no qualified translators in Moscow, they were summoned from Kyiv, bringing along Kyiv’s understanding of the Greek texts and of Orthodox Christianity in general. The conflict between the Kyivan vision of church reform and the traditionalist Muscovite view would bring about a profound schism (Raskol) in the Muscovite church and society.
The turn of the Muscovite clerics toward Kyiv, which seemed almost an accidental detour on their way to the Orthodox East, coincided with the emergence of a new force in Ukraine that was interested in close ties with Muscovy, not only in religion but also in politics. That force was Cossackdom and the state that it created—the Hetmanate. In the spring of 1648, Ukraine was shaken by a new Cossack uprising, the seventh since the end of the sixteenth century. The Cossacks, who had begun as trappers and brigands in the fifteenth century, were now emerging as a major fighting force and demanding special rights and privileges from the Commonwealth government. By 1648, they wanted a polity of their own.
In December 1648, the leader of the uprising, the veteran Cossack officer Bohdan Khmelnytsky, solemnly entered the city of Kyiv. He was hailed by the professors and students of the Kyivan College as the Moses of the Rus’ people and their liberator from the Polish yoke. The Orthodox metropolitan of Kyiv also welcomed Khmelnytsky. More important, the metropolitan was accompanied by no less a hierarch than Patriarch Paisios of Jerusalem. The patriarch had been on his way to Moscow, where he had intended to ask the tsar for alms, when he was intercepted by the rebel Cossacks and brought to Kyiv on Khmelnytsky’s orders in anticipation of his grand entrance into the ancient capital of the Rus’ princes and Rus’ Orthodoxy.
Paisios did not mind. He referred to Khmelnytsky as an illustrious princeps (prince), thereby granting his ecclesiastical blessing to the new ruler, and engaged him in a discussion about creating a world alliance of Orthodox powers, starting with Muscovy and Ukraine. Khmelnytsky needed little encouragement. When he wrote his first letter to the Muscovite tsar in June 1648, he presented the Cossack revolt as a struggle against the oppression of the “ancient Greek faith” and stated: “We would wish for ourselves such an autocratic ruler in our land as Your Tsarist Majesty, the Orthodox Christian Tsar.” Khmelnytsky wanted direct Muscovite military intervention in support of the Cossacks. He asked Patriarch Paisios, who was leaving Kyiv for Moscow, to intervene with the tsar on his behalf. Paisios, wishing to promote a new Orthodox alliance, obliged. He asked the tsar to “take the Cossacks under his high hand” and provide them with military assistance, all in the name of the Orthodox religion.
Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich was cautious. It was explained to the confessionally minded patriarch that the tsar could not do as Khmelnytsky requested because, as a Christian ruler, he was bound by the peace treaty concluded with the Commonwealth in 1634. He could take the Cossacks under his protection only if they secured their own liberation. Otherwise, he could allow them to resettle to Muscovy if they were persecuted by the Poles because of their Orthodox faith. The tsar seemed to be caught in a religious dilemma—whether to violate the oath he had given to a fellow Christian—but not Orthodox—ruler, or to protect his fellow Orthodox Christians. For the next four years, he would stay out of the Ukrainian conflict. Muscovy was not prepared to make war on a country that had defeated it more than once in recent decades and had even managed to place a garrison in Moscow itself.
Muscovy began preparing for war with the Commonwealth in the spring of 1651, when the tsar realized that the Commonwealth was too weak to effectively suppress the Cossack uprising. It was then that Muscovite diplomats began preparing the ground for a breach with the Commonwealth, casting themselves as protectors of the Polish king’s Orthodox subjects. They claimed that Khmelnytsky had risen in protest against religious persecution, as the Poles had forced the Cossacks to “accept their Roman faith, sealed godly churches, and imposed the Union on the Orthodox churches, and oppressed them in every way.” The final decision to go to war with the king was made in the Assembly of the Land, which met in Moscow in a number of sessions between June and October 1653. The delegates concluded that the tsar was free to take the Cossacks and their lands under his high hand (protection) for the sake of “the Orthodox Christian Faith and the holy Churches of God.”
An embassy was sent to Khmelnytsky to break the news: Muscovy was entering the war on the side of the Cossacks. The embassy’s path through Ukrainian territory was marked by religious processions and church services celebrating the newfound unity of the two Orthodox peoples. At a Cossack officers’ council convened by Khmelnytsky in the town of Pereiaslav southeast of Kyiv, the hetman presented three alternatives: go back under the rule of the Catholic king; recognize the suzerainty of the Muslim sultan, who ruled over the Crimea and was interested in extending his authority northward; or accept the protectorate of the Orthodox tsar. He called on his officers to accept protection from a ruler “of the same worship of the Greek rite, of the same faith.” The gathering supported the hetman, shouting that they wanted the “eastern Orthodox tsar.”
The Orthodox alliance had been born. But whereas the wars of religion in Western and Central Europe had ended with the conclusion of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, those between Orthodox and Catholics in Eastern Europe were expanding in scope. The Muscovites and the Cossacks disagreed on important elements of their alliance at the Pereiaslav negotiations, including the obligations of the tsar and the duties of his new subjects. There was a minor crisis when the Muscovite envoys refused to swear an oath on behalf of the tsar to ratify the conditions, but it was soon resolved, as Khmelnytsky did not want to jeopardize the alliance. The differences in the two parties’ geopolitical agendas and political culture (the Cossacks were accustomed to Polish officials swearing an oath on behalf of the king, who was then obliged to keep his end of the bargain) were papered over by the rhetoric of Orthodox brotherhood.
THE METAPHOR OF THE THIRD ROME, WHICH FIRST ENTERED official Muscovite discourse with the elevation of the metropolitanate of Moscow to a patriarchate, was elastic enough to accommodate major changes in Muscovites’ thinking about themselves and the world during the first half of the seventeenth century. At its core was the notion of the tsar’s status as the only remaining Orthodox emperor after the fall of Byzantium. That trope could be used to declare Muscovy a fortress under siege, as the monk Filofei did in the early sixteenth century, or to insist on the special status or even primacy of the Muscovite church over any other Orthodox church. “The only pious tsar under the sun was in Constantinople,” said a learned Muscovite monk to Patriarch Paisios in 1650, “… and now, in place of that tsar, we have a pious sovereign tsar in Moscow, the only pious tsar under the sun.” A broader audience was reminded of Moscow’s special role in the Orthodox world by the Kormchaia kniga of 1653 (a collection of ecclesiastical and civil laws), which included a reference to the Third Rome in Patriarch Jeremiah’s address to the tsar on the creation of the Moscow patriarchate.
By the mid-seventeenth century, Muscovy had overcome the shock of the Time of Troubles. It returned to the international arena with new confidence in its mission in the Orthodox world. The “rehabilitation” of Orthodox Ukrainians and Belarusians as legitimate Orthodox faithful for whose sake Muscovy was making war on Poland-Lithuania indicated a major change in the country’s dealings with the outside world. That change was in keeping with the demands of the new age of religious wars and confessionalization of international politics brought on by the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Reform. Moscow as the Third Rome was switching from a defensive to an offensive strategy, of which there would be a great deal more in the decades and centuries to come.