01 — Foundations

The historical and biographical ground on which the career of St. Joseph of Volotsk (Iosif Volotsky / Joseph of Volokolamsk, 1439/40–1515) stands: the consolidating Muscovite state under Ivan III that freed itself from the Horde, gathered the Russian lands, and began to covet the wealth of the church; and Joseph’s own formation under St. Pafnuty of Borovsk, his stormy brief abbacy there, and the break that drove him to found his own house at Volokolamsk in 1479. These two files set the stage — political, economic, and personal — for everything the rest of the collection treats.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (cenobitic founder; “Possessors”)

Joseph of Volotsk cannot be understood apart from the world that made him. He was born into the service gentry of a small frontier town in the reign of Ivan III, the grand prince who threw off the Mongol-Tatar overlordship at the 1480 Stand on the Ugra, annexed Novgorod, married a niece of the last Byzantine emperor, and built the centralized autocracy whose fiscal appetite for land would soon turn on the monasteries. Joseph was formed in the strict cenobitic tradition descending from St. Sergius of Radonezh through his master St. Pafnuty of Borovsk; when his attempt to impose that strict common life on the Borovsk community after Pafnuty’s death failed — against the resistance of the brethren and, it seems, the interference of the grand prince — he left, toured the great northern monasteries, and in 1479 founded the Dormition Monastery at Volokolamsk on his own terms. This section establishes both the stage and the man who stepped onto it.

Files in This Section

File Description
Muscovy in the Age of Ivan III The consolidating Muscovite state under Ivan III (r. 1462–1505): the gathering of the Russian lands, the 1480 Stand on the Ugra and the end of Tatar overlordship, the annexation of Novgorod (1478) and the first confiscations of church land, the marriage to Sophia Palaiologina (1472) and the Byzantine inheritance, the later “Third Rome” current (Filofei, c. 1523) handled critically, the wealth and social role of the church, and the pomestie service-land system that put fiscal pressure on monastic estates.
From Pafnuty of Borovsk to Volokolamsk Joseph’s formation: born Ivan Sanin (c. 1439/40) into a service-gentry family; tonsured and shaped under St. Pafnuty of Borovsk; abbot of Borovsk after Pafnuty’s death (1477); his failed attempt to impose a strict full cenobitic rule and the disputed reason for his departure; his tour of other monasteries (including Kirillo-Belozersk); and the 1479 foundation of the Dormition Monastery near Volokolamsk under Prince Boris of Volotsk.

See Also

References

  • Goldfrank, David M., ed. and trans. The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 36. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2000.
  • Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind, Vol. II: The Middle Ages, the Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Centuries. Ed. John Meyendorff. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966.
  • Meyendorff, John. Byzantium and the Rise of Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981; and Russia: Ritual Mind and Reality.
  • Crummey, Robert O. The Formation of Muscovy 1304–1613. London: Longman, 1987.
  • Ostrowski, Donald. Muscovy and the Mongols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; and “Church Polemics and Monastic Land Acquisition in Sixteenth-Century Muscovy.” Slavonic and East European Review 64, no. 3 (1986): 355–379.
  • Poe, Marshall. “Moscow, the Third Rome: The Origins and Transformations of a ‘Pivotal Moment.’” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 49 (2001): 412–429.
  • Lurie, Ya. S. (Lur’e). Ideologicheskaia bor’ba v russkoi publitsistike kontsa XV–nachala XVI veka. Moscow–Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1960.