Sailing from Byzantium (29 page)

However, before this new arrangement could be put in place, the situation in the far north once again realigned itself in another dramatic reversal. The Mongol tsar Mamai mobilized against Moscow, where Dimitri had pushed his luck too far in holding back his annual tribute, not realizing that
Mamai himself was in a shaky position and required the cash. To help him play enforcer, Mamai had enlisted the support of his ally Genoa, as well as Ryazan and, most ominously, mighty Lithuania, now under the capable rule of Olgerd's son Jagiello. At the last minute, Dimitri sent out some representatives with the overdue tribute, but they were too late. Mamai was on the march already, and they came back with the money.

The pro-Mongol, pro-Genoa appeasement policy advocated by the boyars had failed. Dimitri now perforce turned to the monastic party of Sergius and the other Russian Hesy-chasts, who since Philotheos’ day had called for opposing the Mongols and the Genoese. Receiving Sergius’ public blessing, Dimitri gathered his forces and marched out to meet the approaching armies of Mamai.

The Russian victory at Kulikovo was significant more for its symbolic value than for its practical consequences. Closely associated with that symbolic value was Dimitri's abrupt change of heart toward Cyprian after the battle. Immediately after Kulikovo, Dimitri Donskoi (as we can now call him) welcomed Cyprian in Moscow, according him full status as metropolitan. It was now Pimen's turn to be hung out to dry, and eventually, after returning to Dimitri's domains, he was imprisoned.

We don't know what caused Dimitri's sudden change in attitude toward Cyprian. We possess only a few tantalizing facts that may or may not be connected. One is that Cyprian had abruptly and mysteriously left Constantinople before Pimen's consecration, and he'd headed for Lithuania, not Moscow. Another is that although Jagiello brought his Lithuanian army to Kulikovo, as he'd agreed with Mamai, at the last minute he broke the agreement and held back from
the fighting. The Lithuanians’ nonparticipation on Mamai's side was a critical factor—perhaps
the
critical factor—in Dimitri's victory.

It's been suggested that Cyprian had received “confidential information” about Mamai's coalition, and especially about Lithuania's part in it, and that Cyprian had rushed northward in an attempt to dissuade Jagiello from honoring his agreement with Mamai. In other words, Cyprian once again put Orthodox unity above everything else, even above his own burning resentment at the treatment to which Dimitri had earlier subjected him. The result was Russia's— and Moscow's—great symbolic victory over the hated Mongols. This would certainly explain Dimitri's change of heart, as it would also explain why later sources associated Cyprian with the victory at Kulikovo.

It's possible (if less dramatic) to explain Dimitri's reversal by simply noting that he had now come under the influence of Cyprian's Hesychast friends such as Sergius. In any event, Cyprian now returned in full pomp to Moscow in the spring of 1381, where a chronicler relates that he was greeted with great rejoicing among the people. He resumed his active promotion of ecclesiastical unity, conspicuously ministering to the Orthodox in Lithuanian-controlled “Little Russia” (which included Kiev).

But he also made it clear that this unity now cohered around Moscow, exalting it as the divinely favored center of Orthodoxy in Russia. His
Life of Peter,
written at this time, pointedly celebrates his illustrious predecessor, the metropolitan who had first taken up residence in Moscow. Dimitri and his dynasty benefited immensely from such influential propaganda. The
Life of Peter
glorifies them as the legitimate heirs of Kievan rule, specially anointed to hold sway over the lands of the Orthodox Russians.

Cyprian's travails were by no means finished. The new Mongol tsar Tokhtamysh, who had overthrown Mamai after Kulikovo, sacked Moscow with a large army. Cyprian fled to Tver in mysterious circumstances—his enemies accused him of cowardice—and Dimitri reverted to his earlier hostility. Among Cyprian's greatest detractors now was the patriarch Neilos, whose nose had been put severely out of joint by the way events had voided his synodal judgment of 1380. In addition, the Genoese were back in control in Byzantium. After the sack of Moscow, with Neilos’ backing Dimitri again booted Cyprian out of the city and reinstalled Pimen as metropolitan.

But Pimen proved too small for the job and soon lost Dimitri's support, although Dimitri would never again accept Cyprian back in Moscow. For several turbulent years things remained unresolved, with much discreditable intrigue bubbling around the metropolitanate and much back-and-forth between Moscow and Constantinople.

During this same time, the Turks advanced inexorably into the Balkans. Constantinople itself underwent further confused regime changes, and seemed liable to capture by the Turks at any time.

Meanwhile, another momentous event occurred on the international scene with the union of Lithuania and Poland in 1386, when the Lithuanian grand prince Jagiello married the Catholic Polish princess Hedwig.
^∗
Lithuania and its rulers now turned decisively to the West and the Latin church.

Only at the end of the decade did things settle down. Neilos died in 1388, Dimitri and Pimen both died the following year, and in 1390 Cyprian—“after a stormy passage on the Black Sea in which he nearly lost his life”—was able to
reenter Moscow with the full support of both political establishments. With the death of John V Paleologos and the succession of the brilliant Manuel II the year after that, a period of relative stability began. Now the sole and unchallenged metropolitan of Kiev and All Russia, Cyprian had survived the tempest, winning his long struggle to assert the legacy of his mentor, Philotheos.

or a decade and a half Cyprian had kept the faith against the vacillations of Dimitri and the venality of Philotheos’ two successors, Macarios and Neilos. Now, for the next decade and a half—until his death in 1406—he consolidated his victory with fruitful labor. This period of intense productivity—writing, translating, teaching, organizing, administering—made Cyprian the most influential exponent of Byzantine civilization in Russia.

Behind it all, woven into all of these activities, was Cyprian's loyalty to the Hesychast policies of Cantacuzenos and Philotheos. Always Cyprian's overall aim was to strengthen the unity of the Slavic churches and bind them ever more closely to the patriarchate. The web of friendship among teachers, students, and colleagues was anchored by common adherence to Hesychast ideals and to their spiritual father in Constantinople. While political events would soon overturn the world in which these ties were formed, their cultural influence would continue to shape the Slavic world decisively and permanently.

Despite its crumbling power, Byzantium continued until the end to play a key part in Moscow's expansion. Indeed, that process would survive Constantinople's fall to culminate in Moscow's eventual emergence as the capital of imperial Orthodox Russia, the vast realm that for so long lay in thrall to the awesome power of the tsars.

Cyprian's immense stature by the time of his death amounted to a deep well of prestige from which his successors Photius and Isidore were able to draw. It also contributed to the remarkable loyalty to Byzantium that Moscow continued to show until almost the very end. In return, the church that Byzantium controlled showered Moscow's grand princes with material and other blessings.

On the material level, the establishment of fortified monasteries throughout Russia but especially around Moscow added strength and depth to the city's defenses. More importantly, through missionary activity the church took the lead in colonizing new lands in eastern Russia, and since Moscow was the seat of the church these lands also naturally came under Muscovite political control. This increased Moscow's political strength, also adding greatly to its economic might.

But the most significant contributions came, as they always had, on the symbolic level. It is through such channels that political legitimacy flows. In 1408, for example, two years after Cyprian's death, his workshop produced the
Trinity
chronicle, a compilation of local chronicles that—like Cyprian's
Life of Peter
—linked Moscow with Kiev and underscored its role as the new center of Russian Orthodox culture. And already in the fourteenth century, hints had appeared that Moscow might stand as heir to Byzantium itself, should Constantinople fall to the Turks.

This idea—summed up in the phrase
translatio imperil,
or the transference of imperial authority—would never be an exact fit, since Russia would always be a nation first and an empire second. Even at their autocratic worst, the tsars would never claim the universal rule that Byzantine theory always ascribed to the emperors of Byzantium. Yet, while never fully embraced, the idea that Moscow stood as Byzantium's heir was certainly never fully rejected, either. It found its most resonant formulation in the famous theory of Moscow as “the Third Rome.” This arose from the confluence of three events, each of radical significance to Russian history, around the middle of the fifteenth century: the Council of Florence, the fall of Constantinople, and the final overthrow of Mongol power in Russia.

The Council of Florence, which united the Catholic and Orthodox churches on terms entirely favorable to the Catholics, was the knife that finally cut Moscow's long string of loyalty to Byzantium. One of the main supporters of union (siding with Cardinal Bessarion) was Isidore, the metropolitan of Kiev and All Russia at the time, who helped his friend Bessarion draft the unionist decree. Unfortunately for Isidore, his deeply conservative Russian flock rejected the decree well before the Greeks themselves, spurning Isidore on his return from Florence and eventually taking the unprecedented step of electing their own patriarch. Never again would the Russian Orthodox Church take orders from the Greeks, although cultural ties certainly continued.

The fall of Constantinople came so soon after the Council of Florence that the connection between them was clear, at least from the Russian perspective: God had punished the Byzantines for deviating from the true faith and compromising their principles. This was also the line taken
by many Greeks, especially those of the Hesychast, anti-Catholic persuasion. The fall of Constantinople validated the Russians’ break with Byzantium that the council had caused.

The end of Russia's subjection to the Mongol yoke had no definitive date but came instead with the gradual disintegration of Mongol power after Kulikovo in 1380, and especially after the Golden Horde was shattered by the armies of Tamerlane around the turn of the fifteenth century. By 1425, Moscow had no rival capable of challenging its place as leader of the Russian principalities.

The idea of Moscow as the Third Rome was worked out during and after the reign of Dimitri Donskoi's great-grandson Ivan III in the late fifteenth century. Also called Ivan the Great, it was he who undertook the “gathering of the lands” that laid the foundations of centralized authority in Russia under Muscovite rule.

After coming to power in his early twenties, Ivan received a letter from Cardinal Bessarion, who suggested that the Russian ruler wed Bessarion's young ward, Zoe Paleologa, niece of the last Byzantine emperor. Ivan did so, and his government also began using Byzantine-style regalia to back up the obvious symbolism of the marriage. Best known is the famous double-headed eagle, long a symbol of Byzantine imperial power, which Ivan appropriated to symbolize his own autocratic rule. This would remain the tsars’ imperial emblem right down to the Russian Revolution.

It was during Ivan's reign that Dimitri Gerasimov, a wandering Russian churchman, allegedly brought back from his travels to the West a text known as
The Legend of the White Cowl.
This engagingly anachronistic tale purports to tell of a miraculous white cowl that the pope had received from Constantine the Great after his conversion. Just before the Catholics deviated from Orthodox dogma, the last good
pope sent the cowl to Philotheos and the emperor John Cantacuzenos in Byzantium. In foreknowledge of Constantinople's fall, they in turn sent it to the lands of the Rus for safekeeping. The tale's narrator explains that ancient Rome had deviated from the true faith “because of its pride and ambition,” while the new Rome of Constantinople has fallen to the Turks. “In the third Rome, which will be the lands of the Rus, the Grace of the Holy Spirit will shine forth.”

This idea was further elaborated soon after Ivan III's reign, becoming a commonplace in Russian religious literature, especially that of an eschatological bent. It was put in still more apocalyptic language by the monk Filofei (Philotheos), abbot of a monastery in Pskov around the year 1525:

The Church of old Rome fell for its heresy; the gates of the second Rome, Constantinople, were hewn down by the axes of the infidel Turks; but the Church of Moscow, the Church of the New Rome, shines brighter than the sun in the whole universe…. Two Romes are fallen, but the third stands fast; a fourth there cannot be.

While Hesychasm's political consequences were momentous, its cultural impact was just as profound and far-reaching, and by no means limited to Russia. A picture has emerged in recent scholarship that posits Hesychasm as a second stage in Byzantine cultural diffusion to the Slavic world, one that succeeded the Cyrillo-Methodian first stage and was fully its equal. Its surprisingly broad effects can be seen not just in religion but also in related areas such as art and literature. They began elsewhere in the Byzantine Commonwealth, in places
such as Bulgaria and Serbia, though Russia was to be their final destination.

In the late fourteenth century a distinctive literary movement arose in the Balkans that helped further spread Byzantine influences to northern Slavic lands such as Russia. Closely associated with Hesychasm, this international movement has been called “the second South Slavic influence,” to distinguish it from the earlier Slavonic legacy of Cyril and Methodius, which also was spread by South Slavs, largely Bulgarians but also others.

Bulgaria once again took the lead in this new wave of cultural dissemination, which was originated and overseen by the Bulgarian patriarch Euthymius of Turnovo, the old friend whom Cyprian visited after being robbed on the Danube. Euthymius began the movement in the period when Cyprian was struggling to assert himself as metropolitan, the 1370s. When Cyprian finally claimed victory in 1390, the decade and a half of his greatest productivity that followed was squarely within the context of his old friend's “second South Slavic” movement. The movement continued into the same time that Salutati, Chrysoloras, Bruni, and the other early humanists were doing their work in Italy, that is, the early fifteenth century. As an exercise in linguistic recovery, it offers some interesting parallels and contrasts.

The movement blended the two Orthodox traditions of Cyril and Methodius on one hand and Hesychasm on the other. As a young man Euthymius had studied at Kilifarevo, just south of Turnovo, where a disciple of Gregory of Sinai named Theodosius of Turnovo had founded a Hesychast monastery. Euthymius became a staunch Hesychast, Theodosius’ leading disciple, going to spend nearly a decade in Constantinople and then at Mt. Athos, meditating and copying Slavonic manuscripts. It was there, most likely, that he
met Cyprian, if not before. Returning to Bulgaria, Euthymius was elected patriarch in 1371, a position he held until 1393, when Turnovo's capture by the Turks ended the independent Bulgarian patriarchate.

Euthymius’ great ability, like that of Cyril before him, was as a scholar, and it was as a scholar that he conceived and undertook a concerted effort to improve the standards of Slavonic translations from Greek, which he held to have slipped below acceptable norms. Over time the original Slavic dialects, once mutually intelligible to all, had evolved into various national languages, essentially rendering Old Church Slavonic a dead language.

Euthymius’ attempt at reform was first and foremost a conservative effort, an attempt to recover the linguistic purity of the older Slavonic translations. It was also an attempt to evoke a golden age when the Byzantine Commonwealth was vibrant and expansive, not cowering before the Turkish advance. In making his reforms Euthymius also injected a strong Hesychast element into the mix of texts that were being translated, focusing on writers who were favorites of the Hesychasts: John of the Ladder, Symeon the New Theologian, Gregory of Sinai, and Gregory Palamas, among others.

The scholars of this literary movement were the peripatetic foot soldiers of the Hesychast International: Bulgarians, Serbs, Russians, Byzantines, Romanians, and others. These young men worked in Hesychast monasteries in Constantinople, at Mt. Athos, in Thessalonica, at Paroria, at Kilifarevo. They came and copied their manuscripts, laboring side by side with others before scattering back to their homelands, bringing their precious books, their precious knowledge, and their precious new contacts with them. In imitation of their work, they also inspired the creation of original literary works by other writers in the Slavic lands,
thus giving rise to local outbursts of Hesychast-flavored native literature in Slavonic, from Serbia to Romania and on up into Russia.

In all of these lands, the second South Slavic influence spread from the realm of religious literature into other areas of culture, but nowhere was this ferment more productive than in Russia. The primary agents, of course, were the monks.

The reviver of Russian monasticism after the Mongol invasion was St. Sergius of Radonezh, Cyprian's close friend and colleague. What we know about him comes from two
vi-tae
written by his disciples Epifan Premudry (Epiphanius the Wise), a Russian, and Pachomius, a Serb. Both of these famous monks exemplified the second South Slavic influence, Epifan by his ornate literary style, known as “word weaving,” and Pachomius by his emphasis on Hesychast principles such as the divine light.

Sergius, a big, strong man who loved physical labor and solitude, went out into the forests north of Moscow to be alone in the “desert” (in Russian monastic literature, forest equals desert). Soon, however, urged by his many followers who would not leave him alone, he founded the monastery of the Holy Trinity there. He was offered the metropolitanate on Alexis’ death, but he turned it down, perhaps out of deference to Cyprian. Sergius and his many disciples are associated above all with the foundation of a huge number of monasteries, perhaps as many as 150 in just a few decades. Sergius, who was involved in some questionable political adventures, stayed in close contact with both the Muscovite
leadership and with Hesychast leaders such as Philotheos and metropolitan Cyprian.