01 — The Russia of His Birth

The world into which St. Tikhon was born in 1724: a church three years into the Petrine settlement — patriarchate abolished, Holy Synod installed, Latin schools rising — and, at that church’s social floor, the destitute hereditary caste of the sextons, one of whose orphans this collection follows to the episcopate and the calendar of the saints.

This section sets the two contexts everything else presupposes. The first file treats the synodal church and its schools as the given world of Tikhon’s whole career; the second the clerical estate’s poverty and the sexton family at Korotsk.

Files

File	Description
the-petrine-settlement.md	The abolition of the patriarchate, the Spiritual Regulation and Synod, the Latin schools, and the synodal century as Tikhon’s given world
the-world-of-the-clerical-estate.md	The hereditary clerical caste, the sexton’s family at Korotsk, the famine-childhood scenes and their attestation

See Also

• 02 — From Timofey to Tikhon — the life that begins in this world
• 06 — The Western Question — the historiographical debate over the Latin schools’ legacy
• The Synodal Period — the repository’s fuller treatment
• Collection README — the master guide