05 — Byzantium and Russia

Meyendorff’s third great book is a work of straight political and ecclesiastical history: Byzantium and the Rise of Russia: A Study of Byzantino-Russian Relations in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1981). It argues that the emergence of Moscow as the capital of Russia cannot be understood apart from the diplomacy of the Byzantine Church, and that the hesychast victory in Constantinople had direct political and cultural consequences on the northern periphery of the Orthodox world.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration) / Orthodox Church in America

What This Section Covers

• Byzantium and the Rise of Russia — the book: its subject, its sources, its argument about the metropolitanate of Kiev and All Russia, and the figures at its center (Metropolitan Alexis, Metropolitan Cyprian, Patriarch Philotheos Kokkinos).
• Hesychasm and the Byzantine Commonwealth — the wider thesis: hesychasm as an international movement, the “Byzantine Commonwealth” frame associated with Dimitri Obolensky, and the transmission that connects Palamas’s Constantinople to St. Sergius of Radonezh’s Russia.

Publication Data

Byzantium and the Rise of Russia: A Study of Byzantino-Russian Relations in the Fourteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981; xxii + 326 pp.; reprinted Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989. The Russian version appeared as Vizantiia i Moskovskaia Rus’ (1990) (Cambridge University Press; review in Church History; St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, “Protopresbyter John Meyendorff,” svots.edu).

[Disputed: the year of first publication. The Cambridge University Press imprint and the reviews give 1981; the St. Vladimir's Seminary bibliography and OrthodoxWiki list 1980 for the Cambridge edition and 1981 for the SVS issue. The 1981 Cambridge date is used here, with 1980 noted.]

Why It Belongs in This Collection

Two reasons. First, this is the book that shows Meyendorff working as a historian without theological cover — reviewed and used by Byzantinists and Slavists, not only by theologians. Second, it is the point at which his thesis about hesychasm stops being a claim about doctrine and becomes a claim about civilization: that a monastic movement of prayer reshaped the ecclesiastical politics of half of Europe. That is a large claim, and it is treated here as his.

The book’s afterlife is unusually visible at present: the academic half of the February 2026 centenary symposium at Fordham was titled “Orthodoxy, Byzantium, and the Rise of Russia Revisited” (“Centennial of Fr. John Meyendorff marked by St. Vladimir’s Seminary and Fordham,” orthochristian.com, 2026).

See Also

• The Palamas Scholarship — the hesychast controversy at its source
• St. Sergius of Radonezh — the Russian end of the transmission
• Ferrara–Florence 1438–1439 — where the repository cites this book on Isidore, Moscow 1441, and the 1448 election

References

• Meyendorff, John. Byzantium and the Rise of Russia: A Study of Byzantino-Russian Relations in the Fourteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981; repr. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1989.
• Obolensky, Dimitri. The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453. History of Civilization. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson / New York: Praeger, 1971.
• St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. “Protopresbyter John Meyendorff.” svots.edu.