The Icon and the Axe

scholastic Hesychasts. They brought with them a fondness for the close alliance between monks and princes which had prevailed in the Southern Slav kingdoms and a deep hatred of Roman Catholicism, which in their view had surrounded the Orthodox Slavs with hostile principalities in the Balkans and had seduced the Church of Constantinople into humiliating reunion. The Southern Slavs also brought with them Balkan traditions of compiling synthetic genealogies to support the claims of the Serbian and Bulgarian kingdoms against Byzantium, and a penchant for ornate and pompous language heavily laden with archaic Church Slavonic forms. Particularly noteworthy and influential was the Tale of the Great Princes of Vladimir of Great Russia, by a Serbian emigre who solemnly connected the Muscovite princes not only with those of Kiev and the legendary Riurik but with the even more fanciful figure of Prussus, ruler of an imaginary ancient kingdom on the Vistula and a relative of Augustus Caesar, who was in turn related through Antony and Cleopatra to the Egyptian descendants of Noah and Shem. This widely copied work also encouraged Russians to think of themselves as successors of Byzantium by advancing the extraordinary fiction that the imperial regalia had been transferred from Constantinople to Kiev by Vladimir Monomachus, who was said to be the first tsar of all Russia.22

Meanwhile, a sense of having superseded Byzantium was subtly encouraged by one of the very few ideological conditions of Tatar overlord-ship: the requirement to pray for only one tsar: the Tatar khan. Though not uniformly observed or enforced among the tribute-paying Eastern Slavs, this restriction tended to remove from view in Muscovy the names of the later Byzantine Emperors. Muscovy found it only too easy to view the collapse of this increasingly remote empire in the mid-fifteenth century as God's chastisement of an unfaithful people.

In the Muscovite view-which was developed retrospectively in the late fifteenth century-the Byzantine Church betrayed its heritage by accepting union with Rome at Lyons, at Rome, and finally at the Council of Florence in 1437-9.

Ill-equipped to evaluate the theological issues, Muscovy equated Rome with the hostile knightly orders of the eastern Baltic and the growing power of the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom. The Muscovite church refused to accept the decisions of the council, driving into exile the Russian representative who had approved them, Metropolitan Isidore. This Greek prelate became a Catholic in exile, and was replaced as metropolitan by a native Russian at the Russian Church council of 1448.23 The Turkish capture of Constantinople five years later came to be viewed as God's revenge on Byzantium and prophetic confirmation that the Russian church had acted wisely in repudiating the Florentine union. Yet the sense of Russian in-

volvement in the Byzantine tragedy was far greater than nationalistic historians have often been willing to admit. From the late fourteenth century on, Muscovy was sending financial support as well as expressions of sympathetic concern to Constantinople.24 Those fleeing the Turks brought with them the fear that the whole Orthodox world might succumb. When the Khan Akhmet attacked Moscow in 1480, a Serbian monk issued a passionate plea to the populace not to follow

the Bulgars, Serbs, Greeks . . . Albanians, Croatians and Bosnians . . . and the many other lands which did not struggle manfully, whose fatherlands perished, whose lands and governments were destroyed, and whose people scattered in foreign lands.

Then, almost in the form of a prayer:

May your eyes never see the bondage and ravaging of your holy churches and homes, the murder of your children and the defiling of your wives and daughters-sufferings such as the Turks have brought to other great and revered lands.25

In such an atmosphere, the psychological pressures were great for the comforting belief that the Christian Empire had not died with the fall of Byzantium and the other "great and revered" Orthodox kingdoms of the Balkans. The site of empire had merely moved from Constantinople to the "new Rome" of Trnovo, which became, by simple substitution, the "third Rome" of Moscow. This famous image originated with Philotheus of the Eleazer Monastery in Pskov, who probably first propounded it to Ivan III, though the earliest surviving statement is in a letter to Vasily III of 1511:

The church of ancient Rome fell because of the Apollinarian heresy, as to the second Rome-the Church of Constantinople-it has been hewn by the axes of the Hagarenes. But this third, new Rome, the Universal Apostolic Church under thy mighty rule radiates forth the Orthodox Christian faith to the ends of the earth more brightly than the sun. … In all the universe thou art the only Tsar of Christians. . . . Hear me, pious Tsar, all Christian kingdoms have converged in thine alone. Two Romes have fallen, a third stands, a fourth there shall not be. . . .2ti