Muscovy in the Age of Ivan III

The world into which St. Joseph of Volotsk was born and in which he labored: the consolidating Muscovite state under Ivan III (the Great, r. 1462–1505), which gathered the Russian lands, threw off the Mongol-Tatar overlordship at the 1480 “Stand on the Ugra,” annexed Novgorod, married the Byzantine inheritance through Sophia (Zoe) Palaiologina, and began — through the pomestie service-land system — to look hungrily on the vast estates of the church. This file sets the political, economic, and ideological stage of the abbot’s career; it does not yet treat his theology of the prince, which is reserved for its own section.

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

The Gathering of the Russian Lands

The Muscovy of Joseph of Volotsk’s lifetime (c. 1439/40–1515) was a state in the act of becoming an empire. Over the long reign of Grand Prince Ivan III Vasilievich of Moscow (b. 1440, r. 1462–1505), the patchwork of semi-independent principalities, city-republics, and appanage (udel) lordships that had survived the Mongol centuries was drawn, by conquest, purchase, inheritance, and intimidation, into a single Muscovite autocracy. This process — the sobiranie russkikh zemel’, “the gathering of the Russian lands” — is the master fact of the period, and every other development, including the church’s, is conditioned by it (Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia, 1981, ch. on the rise of Moscow; on the broader period see The Mongol and Muscovite Periods).

Ivan absorbed Yaroslavl (1463), Rostov (1474), the great northern republic of Novgorod (final annexation 1478), and the principality of Tver, Moscow’s historic rival, in 1485; by the end of his reign the appanage system that had fragmented the dynasty since the time of the Mongol conquest was effectively broken, the surviving princes reduced to servitors of Moscow (Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy 1304–1613, 1987, on the reign of Ivan III; Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia, 1981). Ivan styled himself, increasingly, gosudar’ vseia Rusi, “sovereign of all Rus’,” and adopted the double-headed eagle and a ceremonial that drew on both Byzantine and Western imperial models. The autocratic, centralized state under whose shadow Joseph would build his monastery and write his epistles to grand princes was, in its essentials, Ivan’s creation.

The Stand on the Ugra and the End of the Horde’s Overlordship

The hinge event of the reign — and the one that most colored the religious imagination of the age — was the ending of Tatar suzerainty. Since the conquests of the thirteenth century the princes of Rus’ had held their thrones at the pleasure of the khans of the Golden Horde, paying tribute and receiving the yarlyk, the patent of office. Ivan’s refusal of tribute provoked the campaign of Khan Akhmat of the Great Horde in 1480, which ended not in a pitched battle but in the famous Stand on the Ugra River (Stoianie na Ugre): the two armies faced each other across the Ugra through the autumn of 1480 until, in November, Akhmat withdrew without forcing a crossing (Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy, 1987; Vernadsky, Russia at the Dawn of the Modern Age, 1959, on 1480). Conventionally — and with the simplifications a symbolic date invites — 1480 is taken as the end of the “Tatar yoke” over north-eastern Rus’.

The event acquired at once a providential meaning. The chronicles and the so-called Epistle to the Ugra attributed to Archbishop Vassian Rylo of Rostov framed Ivan’s stand as a holy war and the deliverance as God’s vindication of an Orthodox sovereign against the infidel (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. II, 1966, on the chronicle theology of the period; Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia, 1981). For the generation in which Joseph came to maturity, the lesson drawn was that Muscovy was now the one free and independent Orthodox realm — a conclusion that would feed, by stages, into the larger ideological currents discussed below.

Novgorod, Heresy, and the Confiscation of Church Lands

The fall of Novgorod is doubly important for Joseph’s story, because Novgorod is also where the heresy he would spend his life combating first appears in the sources. The republic, with its veche assembly, its commercial wealth, and its leanings toward Lithuania, was crushed in two campaigns; after the decisive subjugation of 1478 Ivan deported leading boyar families and, critically, confiscated immense tracts of land — including a large share of the holdings of the Novgorod archbishopric and its monasteries — to redistribute as service estates (Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy, 1987, on the Novgorod confiscations; Fennell, A History of the Russian Church to 1448, 1995, for the antecedents). The Novgorod secularizations of the 1470s–1490s were the first large-scale demonstration in Muscovy that the prince’s need for land could override the inviolability of church property — a demonstration whose implications were not lost on contemporaries and which stands directly behind the estates controversy of 1503.

It was also at Novgorod, in 1470–1471, that the movement later called the “Judaizers” (zhidovstvuyushchie) is first reported, said to have been introduced by a certain Skhariia in the entourage of a visiting Lithuanian prince, and from there to have spread to Moscow (Lurie, Ideologicheskaia bor’ba v russkoi publitsistike, 1960; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. II, 1966). The full and genuinely contested question of what this movement actually was belongs to its own section (What the Heresy Was); here it is enough to note that the city Ivan annexed in 1478 was, in Joseph’s reading of events, also the seedbed of the most dangerous spiritual threat of the age.

Sophia Palaiologina and the Byzantine Inheritance

In 1453 Constantinople had fallen to the Ottomans, and the Byzantine empire — the oikoumene of which Rus’ had understood itself a junior member since its baptism — was extinguished. In 1472 Ivan III married Sophia (Zoe) Palaiologina, niece of the last emperor Constantine XI, a marriage arranged in Rome under the auspices of the papacy in the afterglow of the Council of Florence and intended (vainly, as it turned out) to draw Moscow toward union (Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia, 1981, on the marriage and its diplomatic background; Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy, 1987). Sophia arrived with a Greek and Italianate retinue, and her presence is conventionally linked to the elaboration of court ceremonial, the building program in the Kremlin under Italian architects, and the adoption of the double-headed eagle.

The temptation — old in the textbooks and not absent from the sources — is to read this marriage as the moment Moscow consciously claimed to be the heir of Byzantium. The more careful scholarship counsels restraint. Meyendorff in particular stressed that the dynastic and ceremonial borrowing of the 1470s–1490s should not be collapsed into a developed “translation of empire” ideology, which is a later and partly retrospective construction (Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia, 1981; Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols, 1998, on the gradualness and limits of the Byzantine “inheritance”). The Byzantine inheritance in the age of Ivan III is better understood as a fund of prestige and symbol drawn upon piecemeal than as a settled imperial program.

“Third Rome”: A Later Current, Handled Carefully

No idea is more often, and more anachronistically, attached to this period than the doctrine of Moscow as the Third Rome. It must be handled with precision. The classic formulation — “two Romes have fallen, the third stands, and a fourth there shall not be” — comes from the epistles of the monk Filofei (Philotheus) of Pskov, written in the reign of Ivan’s successor Vasili III, conventionally dated to circa 1523–1524, that is, after Joseph of Volotsk’s death in 1515 (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. II, 1966, on Filofei; Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia, 1981).

Two cautions follow. First, the chronology forbids treating “Third Rome” as a doctrine Joseph held or as the framework of his political theology; it is a near-contemporary but distinct development. Second, the scope and significance of Filofei’s idea are themselves contested in the scholarship: [Disputed: the older view (e.g., influential nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century readings, and as popularized in much survey literature) treats "Moscow the Third Rome" as a foundational Muscovite imperial-messianic ideology of the early sixteenth century; against this, a substantial body of later scholarship — notably Marshall Poe, "Moscow, the Third Rome: The Origins and Transformations of a 'Pivotal Moment'," *Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas* 49 (2001), and Donald Ostrowski — argues that the phrase was a marginal eschatological-ecclesiological notion in its own day, given its grand "imperial doctrine" reading mainly by later historiography]. What can be said for the age of Ivan III is that the materials out of which such an idea could be built — the fall of Constantinople, the throwing off of the Horde, the marriage to a Palaiologina, the sense of Muscovy as the last free Orthodox realm — were all present, while the doctrine itself crystallized only afterward.

The church Joseph served was, by the standards of the age, enormously wealthy and socially indispensable. Monasteries had been the principal beneficiaries of pious donation since the fourteenth-century cenobitic revival associated with St. Sergius of Radonezh (see St. Sergius of Radonezh), and by the late fifteenth century the great houses held extensive lands, peasant villages, salt-works, fisheries, and cash, much of it given in exchange for the perpetual commemoration of the donors’ souls (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. II, 1966, on monastic landholding; Ostrowski, “Church Polemics and Monastic Land Acquisition in Sixteenth-Century Muscovy,” SEER 64, 1986, 355–379). The monasteries were, in effect, the principal organs of organized charity, hospitality, and famine-relief in Muscovite society; they housed the literate and copied the books; they buried and prayed for the dead of the gentry and the princely houses. This social function is the indispensable background to Joseph’s later defense of monastic estates as the material basis of the church’s works of mercy (The Case for Monastic Estates).

At the same time, the very scale of monastic wealth made it a target — both for ascetic critique from within (the Trans-Volga elders around St. Nilus of Sora held that monks should not own villages at all; see St. Nilus of Sora) and for fiscal envy from the state. The broader shape of Russian monasticism in this period — the cenobitic and the hesychast-eremitic currents alike — is treated in the orthodoxy core (Russian Monasticism).

The Pomestie System and the Fiscal Pressure on Church Estates

The structural reason the state’s gaze fell on church land was the rise of the pomestie. To raise and maintain a cavalry army without a developed money economy, Ivan III and his successors granted out land — pomestie, “service-land” — to servitors (the pomeshchiki) on condition of military service, in contrast to the older hereditary votchina estate (Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy, 1987, on the pomestie system; Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy, 1971, on the service-land economy). The system created a permanent state demand for grantable land, and the Novgorod confiscations had already shown where a hungry treasury could find it: in the holdings of the church.

This is the concrete fiscal pressure behind the famous council of 1503, at which — according to the later Josephite tradition — Ivan III raised, and Joseph of Volotsk’s party defeated, a proposal to secularize monastic villages (the council and the genuine uncertainties about what was proposed there are treated in The 1503 Council and the Two Ways). Whatever the precise content of 1503, the underlying tension was real and recurrent: a centralizing state that needed land to pay its servitors, set against a church whose social mission rested on the lands it held. The questions of church governance and of the proper relation of ecclesiastical property to the sovereign power that this tension raised would occupy Russian churchmen for the next two centuries (see Church Governance). Into precisely this world — newly freed from the Horde, newly aware of its Orthodox solitude, newly centralized, and newly covetous of church land — St. Joseph of Volotsk stepped as abbot and controversialist.

References

Crummey, Robert O. The Formation of Muscovy 1304–1613. London: Longman, 1987. (The reign of Ivan III; the gathering of the lands; the Novgorod confiscations; the pomestie system; the council of 1503.)
Meyendorff, John. Byzantium and the Rise of Russia: A Study of Byzantino-Russian Relations in the Fourteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. (The rise of Moscow, the Byzantine inheritance, the marriage to Sophia Palaiologina, and the cautions against an early “Third Rome” reading.) See also his Russia: Ritual Mind and Reality.
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. (Monastic landholding; chronicle theology of 1480; Filofei of Pskov and the “Third Rome” current.)
Ostrowski, Donald. Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, 1304–1589. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. (The gradualness and limits of the Byzantine “inheritance.”)
Ostrowski, Donald. “Church Polemics and Monastic Land Acquisition in Sixteenth-Century Muscovy.” Slavonic and East European Review 64, no. 3 (1986): 355–379. (Monastic estates and the framing of the controversy.)
Poe, Marshall. “Moscow, the Third Rome: The Origins and Transformations of a ‘Pivotal Moment.’” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 49 (2001): 412–429. (The revisionist case against reading “Third Rome” as a foundational early-sixteenth-century imperial ideology.)
Lurie, Ya. S. (Lur’e). Ideologicheskaia bor’ba v russkoi publitsistike kontsa XV–nachala XVI veka. Moscow–Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1960. (The Novgorod origins of the “Judaizer” movement.)
Hellie, Richard. Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. (The service-land economy and the demand for grantable land.)
Vernadsky, George. Russia at the Dawn of the Modern Age. A History of Russia, Vol. 4. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959. (The Stand on the Ugra and the diplomacy of 1480.)
Fennell, John. A History of the Russian Church to 1448. London: Longman, 1995. (The antecedents of church landholding and church-state relations before Ivan III.)