Byzantium and the Rise of Russia

Published by Cambridge University Press in 1981, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia: A Study of Byzantino-Russian Relations in the Fourteenth Century argues that the emergence of Moscow as the capital of the Russian lands owed a great deal to the diplomacy — predominantly ecclesiastical — of Byzantium, and that the metropolitanate of Kiev and All Russia was the instrument through which Constantinople acted. This file describes the book’s subject, sources, and argument.

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

The Subject

The fourteenth century in the Russian lands is a period of political fragmentation and reconstruction. The old Kievan center had been destroyed by the Mongol invasions of the 1230s and 1240s; the surviving principalities of the north-east paid tribute to the Golden Horde; the western and south-western Rus’ lands were being absorbed by the rising Grand Duchy of Lithuania and by the Kingdom of Poland. Out of this competition Moscow — a minor principality at the start of the century — emerged as the political and ecclesiastical center of a Russian state.

Meyendorff’s question is what part the Church played in that outcome, and his answer is: a decisive one. The metropolitanate of Kiev and All Russia was an ecclesiastical province of the Patriarchate of Constantinople; its metropolitan was normally appointed from Constantinople and was frequently a Greek; and in a fragmented political landscape the metropolitan was the one authority whose jurisdiction ran across all the Rus’ principalities regardless of which prince or which foreign power controlled them. Constantinople, in appointing and instructing him, was therefore exercising something very like foreign policy (Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia: A Study of Byzantino-Russian Relations in the Fourteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

The book describes, in the publisher’s summary of its own argument, the role of Byzantine — predominantly ecclesiastical — diplomacy in the emergence of Moscow as the capital of Russia in the fourteenth century, and the cultural, religious and political ties connecting the northern periphery of the Byzantine Orthodox “Commonwealth” with its center at Constantinople (Cambridge University Press, catalogue description of Byzantium and the Rise of Russia).

The Sources

This is a book built on documents. Its evidentiary base is the register of the Patriarchate of Constantinople — the Acta Patriarchatus Constantinopolitani — together with Russian chronicles, saints’ Lives, and the diplomatic and canonical correspondence surviving in Greek and Slavonic. Meyendorff’s philological training (see St. Sergius and the Sorbonne) is what made the book possible: the argument turns on reading Greek patriarchal acts against Slavonic chronicle narratives, and on noticing where they disagree.

The book was written with the collaboration of his wife, Marie Meyendorff, who is credited in the volume (Cambridge University Press, 1981; catalogue records list her as contributor to the apparatus).

The Argument

Several linked claims carry the book.

The metropolitanate was a Byzantine instrument, and its unity was Byzantine policy. Constantinople consistently resisted the partition of the Rus’ metropolitanate into separate Muscovite and Lithuanian jurisdictions, even under heavy political pressure from the grand dukes of Lithuania and from Poland — and even when a divided metropolitanate would have been administratively simpler. The reason, in Meyendorff’s reading, was that a single metropolitan of “Kiev and All Russia” preserved the ecclesial unity of the Rus’ lands and thereby preserved Byzantine influence over all of them (Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia, 1981).

The residence in Moscow was consequential. The metropolitans had moved their residence from ruined Kiev to Vladimir and then, in the fourteenth century, to Moscow. The presence of the head of the Russian Church in Moscow lent the Muscovite princes an authority their military and dynastic position alone would not have supplied. Meyendorff’s point is not that Byzantium chose Moscow out of preference for its princes, but that the logic of maintaining a single metropolitanate in a fragmented land, combined with the metropolitan’s residence, worked to Moscow’s advantage.

Metropolitan Alexis is the pivotal figure. Alexis (metropolitan 1354–1378) was a Muscovite boyar’s son who became metropolitan of all Russia and, during the minority of Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoy, effectively the head of the Muscovite state as well. In him the ecclesiastical and political functions fused. His career is Meyendorff’s central case of what the metropolitanate could do and what it cost — since a metropolitan who governed Moscow was, in the eyes of the Lithuanian princes, a partisan and not a father.

Metropolitan Cyprian and the crisis of the 1370s–1380s. The book gives extended treatment to Cyprian, a Bulgarian-born monk of hesychast formation appointed by Patriarch Philotheos Kokkinos, whose long and contested struggle to be received in Moscow forms one of the book’s chapters — the repository’s own reading list notes the chapter “Metropolitan Cyprian and Moscow’s separatism (1376–81)” among its contents (Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia, 1981, chapter 9). Cyprian eventually held the united metropolitanate until his death in 1406, and became one of the principal channels of the South Slavic and Byzantine hesychast revival into Russia (see Hesychasm and the Byzantine Commonwealth).

Patriarch Philotheos Kokkinos is the Byzantine actor. The same Philotheos who compiled the Tome of the Blachernae council of 1351 and wrote the Life of Palamas (The Councils of 1341–1351; Canonization 1368) was the patriarch who directed Byzantine policy in Russia in the 1360s and 1370s. Meyendorff’s thesis is that this is not a coincidence: the hesychast party that had won in Constantinople pursued a deliberate policy of supra-national Orthodox unity across the Byzantine sphere, and Russia was one of its fields (Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia, 1981, chapter 5, “Victory of the Hesychasts in Byzantium: ideological and political consequences”).

A reorientation after 1370. Meyendorff describes a shift in the last third of the century: the religious and monastic revival in Byzantium and the weakening of Mongol power gave the policy of the Orthodox Church in Russia a new orientation — toward supra-national unity, toward spiritual and artistic achievement, and toward political reconciliation among the principalities (Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia, 1981).

The Sequel: Isidore, Florence, and 1448

The book’s later chapters carry the story past the fourteenth century far enough to reach its consequence. Metropolitan Isidore of Kiev, a Greek appointed to Russia, signed the union of Ferrara–Florence in 1439, returned to Moscow proclaiming it, and was rejected and deposed; Moscow’s Church thereafter elected its own metropolitan, Jonah, in 1448, without reference to Constantinople — the de facto beginning of Russian autocephaly. The repository’s collection on the schism cites this book precisely for that material: “Isidore, Moscow 1441, the 1448 election” (Ferrara–Florence 1438–1439, reference gloss; see also St. Mark of Ephesus, the sole non-signer).

Meyendorff’s point in tracing this arc is that the Byzantine ecclesiastical policy which built up the Russian Church was also what destroyed Byzantine authority over it: Constantinople’s own capitulation at Florence forfeited the moral standing on which the whole structure had rested.

Reception

The book was published by Cambridge and reviewed in the mainstream journals of Slavic and church history (Church History, review of Byzantium and the Rise of Russia, 1981). It is standard on its subject and is the work by which Meyendorff is known to historians who have never read a word of his theology. Its close attention to the patriarchal register set a methodological standard for the study of Byzantine ecclesiastical diplomacy in the Slavic world.

The interpretive frame — the “Byzantine Commonwealth,” the hesychast international, the reading of monastic revival as a political factor — is more debated, and is discussed in the companion file. It should also be said, in a period when the history of Russian Church jurisdiction is politically charged, that Meyendorff’s account of the fourteenth-century metropolitanate of “Kiev and All Russia” and of Constantinople’s role in it is a piece of medieval history and not an argument about the present; readers who encounter it deployed in contemporary jurisdictional polemics should go back to the book (cf. Twentieth-Century Fragmentation for the repository’s treatment of jurisdictional questions, and METHODOLOGY §4.2 on live jurisdictional disputes).

See Also

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: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989. (The metropolitanate of Kiev and All Russia; Metropolitan Alexis; ch. 5 on the ideological and political consequences of the hesychast victory; ch. 9 on Metropolitan Cyprian and Moscow’s separatism 1376–81; Isidore, Florence, and the 1448 election.)
  • Cambridge University Press. Catalogue description of Byzantium and the Rise of Russia. (The statement of the book’s argument about Byzantine ecclesiastical diplomacy and the Commonwealth’s northern periphery.)
  • Review of Byzantium and the Rise of Russia, Church History (1981–82). (xxii + 326 pp.; Cambridge 1981.)
  • Obolensky, Dimitri. The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971.
  • St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. “Protopresbyter John Meyendorff.” svots.edu. (The publication and reprint history, and the Russian edition Vizantiia i Moskovskaia Rus’, 1990.)