Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (86 page)

Once Vladimir had secured his bride from a distinctly reluctant Emperor Basil and brought her in triumph to Kiev, he provided her with a setting worthy of her heritage. Kiev soon boasted a stone-built palace complex and the beginnings of a proliferation of stone churches amid its fleet of wooden buildings, remaking the city in a Christian mould. Byzantine in style were the monumental architecture, mosaics and frescoes - naturally no statues - together with the liturgy which they sheltered, but individual features took on a local life of their own. The churches of Kiev and its imitators sprouted multiple domes or cupolas in a fashion which went beyond their more sober Byzantine models, perhaps because in the first instance timber buildings made this elaboration a more practical possibility, and then the developing architectural fashion gave a spur to stonemasons to reproduce the same effect. The first cathedral in Kiev, a wooden structure, had no fewer than thirteen cupolas, and it was not uncommon for the greater churches throughout Rus' to have seven, which could be given a rationale in a number of different symbolic interpretations of the number.
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Likewise, over the course of time from its first development in the twelfth century, the iconostasis (see pp. 484-5) became an even more formidable feature in Russian churches than in the Greek tradition: where the Byzantine iconostasis customarily had three tiers of images of the saints, the Russian equivalent customarily had five by the fifteenth century, and as many as eight two centuries after that (see Plate 58).

This tendency to select particular themes from Byzantium and then develop them remorselessly was characteristic of what became Russian Orthodoxy. The first Kievan cathedral was unsurprisingly dedicated to the Holy Wisdom, but besides Hagia Sophia, another now long-vanished church of Constantinople worked particularly strikingly on the imaginations of the devout in Kiev. This was the shrine church of the Virgin of Blachernae, which since the sixth century had possessed the robe and miraculous icon of Mary the Virgin - both powerful defenders of the city against sieges and despicable iconoclasts over the centuries. The Virgin had allegedly given away her robe just before her death - what is in Eastern tradition called her Dormition, or falling asleep. In the eleventh century, a Christian convert in Kiev is said to have had a vision in which Mary commanded the building of a new church of the Dormition, using holy fire to sear its proposed plan into the ground. So this eleventh-century church in Kiev designed by God's own mother had a particular significance for Rus'. Cathedrals of the Dormition appeared all over the Russian world, each taking its distinctive (and, it must be said, basically unimaginative) cuboid design from the original in Kiev. The monumental Dormition cathedral built only a century later in Vladimir-on-the-Kliazma is one of the most perfect and satisfying. The imitations are the only way of gauging the appearance of the original, since the Kiev exemplar, much rebuilt, had departed rather far from the Virgin's blueprint by the time it was blown up by German soldiers in 1942. That last version of it now stands gloriously restored amid the Monastery of the Caves complex.
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Kievan spiritual tradition likewise creatively augmented its inheritance of saints from Byzantium. The first saints to be given honour in the newly created Church were Boris and Gleb, two sons of Prince Vladimir. A choice of royal founder-saints might seem predictable enough, but Boris and Gleb could hardly have been classed as candidates for sainthood in earlier centuries. Their sanctity consisted in the nature of their deaths: not exactly martyrdom for the faith, but political murder by their half-brother Prince Sviatopolk in his effort to ensure that he inherited power after Vladimir died in 1015. The real story of what happened in a murky set of political manoeuvres is unclear and in any case irrelevant to the spirit in which the murdered princes were commemorated: they were reverenced because it was said that they had refused to resist their murderers to avoid wider bloodshed, so their suffering was both entirely innocent and inspired by compassion and non-violence.
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Boris and Gleb can be seen as an example of a phenomenon common in the popular religion of medieval northern Europe generally, Latin as well as Orthodox: the feeling that those who met a violent and premature end for no good reason deserved to be regarded as saints. In western Europe, the authorities in Rome objected strongly to this idea - rightly in terms of Christian tradition - and issued bitter if usually futile condemnations of such local cults.
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The official reaction in Kiev was much less hostile. That reflected a strand in Russian spirituality which remained strong in later centuries: its 'kenotic' emphasis on the example which Christ gave of his emptying of the self, his humiliation and compassion for others. If Christ was passive, both in the modern usage of the word and (in a closer sense to the original Latin verb
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, 'to suffer') accepting of his suffering, so followers of Christ should imitate his self-emptying. A parish priest in Moscow familiar with both East and West once observed to me that the Western reaction to a problem is to look for a solution; the Orthodox are more inclined to live with it.
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It was easier for the Eastern tradition of 'synergy', or cooperation with divine grace, to warm to the theme of self-emptying than for Westerners drawing on Augustine of Hippo's crystallization of the doctrine that original sin had irredeemably tainted all human effort. Yet kenotic thinking has repeatedly crept back in Western Christianity. The last century's industrial production of innocent human death worldwide suggests that the theme has a Christian relevance wider than its original setting amid the frequent violence and cruelty of Russian history.

Linked to the kenotic concept of innocence and denial of self-esteem was the new popularity which from very early on an old genre of Eastern saint enjoyed in the Christianity of Kievan Rus', and which has endured into modern Russian Orthodoxy: the Holy Fool. Perhaps real Holy Fools capered their way up the trade routes of eastern Europe to Kiev, but it is more likely that they were discovered by Kievan monks in the pages of Byzantine and Bulgarian saints' lives, and the idea fused with the growing local devotion to innocence and unreason. The first recorded local fool was Isaakii (d. 1090), who thoroughly disrupted life in Kiev's Caves Monastery before lapsing into passive introspection as a hermit. The polarity in his career between foolery and contemplation is significant, because both approaches to the divine reveal an instinct to look beyond the rational in spirituality. In eleventh-century Byzantium the same mood inspired Symeon the New Theologian, and later it enthused the exponents of Hesychasm (see pp. 469 and 489). Hesychasm and the Jesus Prayer became important elements in Russian spiritual practice. Individual introspection and wild individual extroversion pointed to a common core in kenotic spirituality, and they both complemented the ordered corporate solemnity of the Orthodox liturgy.
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Although Kiev thus took so much of its culture and religious outlook from Constantinople, the official relationship was frequently tense, and as in other Orthodox Churches in the Balkans, the local leadership was often anxious to assert itself against the Oecumenical Patriarch, who in 1039 had sanctioned the creation of a bishopric in Kiev which would act as 'metropolitan', or regional leader, to all bishoprics which would subsequently be founded in the newly Christianized lands. The princes of Kiev continued the contacts with Latin monarchs pioneered by Princess Olga; Prince Vladimir's son Jaroslav (reigned 1019-54) married six of his children to Western princely families. One of those marriages to Henry I of France in the 1020s introduced the Eastern name Philip to the Capetian family, and successive dynasties of the French monarchy continued to use it frequently in christening their children up to the nineteenth century - at the present day, it is the second name of the Orleanist pretender to the French throne. As relations between Constantinople and Rome deteriorated in the eleventh century, the same decline did not necessarily hold for Kiev. It took some time to persuade Kievan Christians that the Latins were heretics, a view which only became plausible to them during the thirteenth century, once Latin bishops in eastern Europe made it quite clear that they regarded the Church of Kiev as heretical and started poaching on territories within its jurisdiction.
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By that time, Rus' had been transformed by that same force which so devastated Asian Christianity: the westwards sweep of the Mongols, or, as they were known in northern Europe, the Tatars.

TATARS, LITHUANIA AND MUSCOVY (1240-1448)

The initial Mongol impact on Rus' was as catastrophic as in Asia. In 1240 they sacked Kiev in the course of a year's campaign in east-central Europe, the furthest west their destructive forays ever took them. Their assault in Hungary has been estimated to have caused the premature death of around 15-20% of the population, obliterating a whole set of relationships between Kievan Rus' and communities and networks of trade on the trans-Danubian Hungarian plain. The disaster was decisive in extinguishing the possibility that these links might have continued in their previously vigorous development, to shift the boundaries of Latin and Orthodox Christianity eastwards in central Europe.
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Although Kiev disappeared as a political force, its titular bishop, living in various refuges in the region often far from Kiev, remained as Orthodox Metropolitan to the Christians of all Rus'. Now there was a Tatar power dominating eastern Europe and exacting tribute from such political entities as it allowed to survive. The wing of this nomad movement, initially led by one of Genghis Khan's sons, which seized Rus' later came to be known by Russian historians as the Golden Horde, but is more accurately described as the Kipchak Khanate.
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To begin with, the Kipchak Khans kept their animist beliefs, but their people included many Turks, and they followed the general drift of Mongol leaders into Islam. Nevertheless, after their initial ferocity, the Tatars proved tolerant of Christianity, and allowed a bishopric to be established in their capital cities newly founded in the Volga basin (both successively called Sarai). They demanded little more than regular infusions of tribute and an equally valuable commodity: prayers for their khan from the Christian clergy. Overall, they interfered far less than other Muslims did with their Christian subjects, crucially making no effort to curb the Christian use of icons.
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Christian leaders in Rus' advocating submission to Tatar rule could take their cue from the Byzantine emperors: Constantinople soon did its best to cultivate the new power, desperate for allies against the encroaching Ottomans, and worried about the interest which the pope and Latin Christian rulers were showing in alliances with Mongols. A series of illegitimate daughters of the Palaeologos emperors found themselves shipped off in marriage to Kipchak Khans. Most of the bishops of Sarai were Greek-speakers, and there seems to have been a deliberate system of alternation for metropolitan in Kiev between a cleric born in Rus' and a candidate brought from Greece. But by now the emperor was a remote figure whose practical power had never recovered from being shattered by the Latins in 1204. Was there a Christian power to whom the bishops of Rus' could turn for more effective support?

Urban life suffered terribly all over Rus'. The Mongol onslaught had wiped out whole communities, and those who survived fled the ruined towns and dispersed into safe forests, bewildered at the scale of the disaster. It was yet another reason for Orthodox Christians to meditate on suffering, but not everyone could claim the innocence of the sainted Boris and Gleb. Many presumed that God must be punishing them for their sins, and they turned to prayer, both for themselves and for those who died. They naturally looked to monks as the experts in prayer, and over the next two centuries at least a hundred monasteries were founded in the newly colonized lands, with the principal monks drawn from the noble families who were the natural leaders of frontier society.
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But alongside this steady growth in the importance of monastic life, one great historic Christian city far to the north did survive the general wreck, and remained independent - Novgorod.

Novgorod could not ignore the new political configuration and paid tribute to the Tatars, but it came through the 1240s unscathed, simply because, for reasons of their own, the Tatars decided to abandon their attack northwards. It continued to prosper mightily on trade, particularly its control of fur-trapping, and it built up its own northern empire with a reach from the Baltic to the Ural Mountains. In the twelfth century it had ejected its Kievan princes: the constitution which it then created was a republic of merchant families in which the bishop had more say than the nominal princes, and in which ordinary people might feel that they also played a part in at least commenting at public assemblies on policy. Because of this broad distribution of responsibility, the citizens of Novgorod valued literacy far more than anywhere else in the region, and a rich haul of birch-bark texts dating over four centuries has been rediscovered to testify to how widespread was literacy in city society. This remarkable urban organization was unique in Rus'. The city was in close contact with the German merchant confederation of towns and cities known as the Hanseatic League, whose constitutions were developing in the same fashion, with their overlord a Holy Roman Emperor whose authority was increasingly distant. Novgorod was so proudly conscious of its republican status that in the fifteenth century it even minted coins whose designs imitated those of Venice, that other great aristocratic republic so far away.
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