Russia under the Old regime

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Its inherent conservatism causes Orthodoxy to want strong secular authority at its side. The land must be pure and 'holy', unpolluted by false faiths. No deviation from tradition can be tolerated. As the Byzantine Patriarch Photius put it, 'Even the smallest neglect of tradition leads to complete contempt of dogma'; in other words, every slip is the beginning of apostasy. This and much else connected with the strict interpretation of the revealed truth impelled Orthodox religion towards theocracy, which, given the historic circumstances under which it had evolved, in practice signified heavy reliance on secular authority. The Golden Age of the Orthodox Church in Russia coincided with Mongol domination. The Mongols exempted all the clergy living under their rule from the burdens which they imposed on the rest of the subjugated population. The Great Iasa, a charter issued by Genghis Khan, granted the Orthodox church protection and exemption from tribute and taxes in return for the pledge to pray for the khan and his family. The privilege was an immense boon to the church at a time when the rest of Russia suffered from heavy exactions and violence, and its wealth grew by leaps and bounds. The main beneficiaries of Mongol favour were the monasteries. In the fourteenth century, Russian monks undertook vigorous colonization, and before it was over built as many new abbeys as had been established since the country's conversion four hundred years ealier. Around 1550, there were in Russia some two hundred monasteries, some of immense size, among them the St Sergius Monastery of the Trinity, the Beloozero Monastery of St Cyril, and the Solovetskii Monastery. Much of the monastic land came from the princes of Moscow in gratitude for the numerous services which the church performed on its behalf, especially by backing its claim to monocratic and autocratic power. Additional land came from boyars who customarily made provisions for monasteries in their wills. That which the clergy got it kept because, unlike secular landholders, it enjoyed institutional continuity, and, of course, did not practice subdivision.

As their holdings grew, the monks no longer were able to till their land and had to resort to tenant labour. Monasteries were among the first landlords to petition the crown for charters fixing peasants to the soil. The larger abbeys grew into vast business enterprises quite indistinguishable from boyar votchiny. At its height, the St Sergius Monastery of the Trinity had 100,000 peasant 'souls' cultivating its estates scattered in fifteen provinces. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the properties attached to the office of the patriarch alone had some 35,000 serfs. Foreign travellers of the sixteenth century are in agreement that the Russian clergy owned a third of the land, and this estimate, even if somewhat suspect because of its unanimity, is generally accepted by modern historians. It must be emphasized, however, that because of the decentralized structure of Orthodox Christianity, this wealth did not belong to the 'church' as a whole. Like boyar land, ecclesiastical properties were subdivided into many votchiny, large, medium and small, and widely dispersed. The actual holders were the patriarch, bishops, churches, abbeys and parishes. (Although it is true that the patriarchal office collected taxes from all these holdings.) In many instances, properties nominally belonging to a monastery were held by individual monks, who went about their business as would any other landlord or merchant. The great disparity in wealth between the few rich and the rest, which has been noted in the case of secular landholders and the merchant class, held also true of church wealth in Russia. At one end of the spectrum stood the great abbeys (lavry) whose combined holdings equalled those of the most affluent boyars; at the other, parish churches whose priests supported themselves by tilling their plots just as did the peasants to whom they ministered. Clerical holdings had to be reconfirmed by every new khan or (later) Great Prince, exactly as was the case with lay properties. Its wealth placed the Russian church in an ambivalent situation vis-a-vis secular authority, because while the priests and monks in their clerical capacity were subject to archbishops, initheir capacity as landlords they were subject to the jurisdiction of the local prince. In sum, clerical land in Russia was every bit as decentralized and dependent on secular authority as was lay landholding, and therefore politically just as impotent.

Care of its properties absorbed most of the time of the monastic or 'black' clergy. It was even more worldly than the monastic clergy of late medieval western Europe. In a typical Russian abbey of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the monks lived not within their walls but in the towns and villages belonging to them, where they supervised the agricultural and commercial activities and the promysly of their chapters. The majority of Russian monks were not even ordained as priests.

The worldly corruption of the Russian clergy was furthered by its ignorance. The church language in Russia was old Slavonic, a bookish language created in the ninth century by the missionaries Cyril and Methodius on the basis of the Slavic spoken in their native Macedonia. While not identical with Russian, it was close enough to it to be mastered with a minimum of education. Neither Greek nor Latin was taught at the Russian monasteries, and little literary work was carried out except for some rudimentary chronicle-writing and hagiography. The Russian clergy was unbelievably ignorant. Unless we assume that all foreign visitors to Muscovy conspired to tell lies, the picture which emerges from their accounts of religious life there is appalling: