interference of secular authorities and creating a hierarchy of authority flowing from the patriarch to the laity. As contemporaries noted, however, Nikon freed the prelates and other clergy from secular powers only to subordinate them to his own. Too often he neglected to consult a church council before he acted, provoking resentment and resistance where he needed support. Nikon also was energetic in the area of monastic reform, sternly punishing those who flouted the monastic rule. Perhaps Nikon’s more important contributions in this area were the three monasteries he founded: the Monastery of the Cross, the Monstery of the Iveron Mother of God, and the Monastery of the Resurrection (or New Jerusalem). Richly endowed, both materially and spiritually, the latter two were centers of learning as well as piety. All were subordinated directly to Nikon. Finally, Nikon did not ignore the shortcomings in the popular practice and celebration of religion. He initiated campaigns against the wandering minstrels and jesters, with their profane music and ribald jokes, and also against icons he deemed painted in an improper manner. Such campaigns manifested his zeal to dignify popular piety and reform popular religious practices, but they often offended the powerful as well as the humble.
Scholars have disagreed as to whether Nikon’s goal was to assert the superiority of church over state, or simply to achieve the symphony between church and state that is the Byzantine ideal. In reality, Nikon’s power depended on the tsar’s favor. As long as Nikon enjoyed the confidence and support of the tsar, those whom he offended in his zeal were powerless against him. By 1658, however, the tsar’s attitude towards Nikon had cooled. On July 10, 1658, feeling snubbed by the tsar’s failure to invite him to an important state reception, Nikon celebrated the liturgy in the Cathedral of the Dormition, donned simple monastic garb, announced to those assembled that he would no longer be patriarch, and walked away.
Nikon’s action was without precedent. After two years, Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich convened a church council to address the situation. All agreed that a new patriarch should be chosen, but no consensus could be achieved on what to do with Nikon. Nikon complicated the matter by asserting that he had renounced the patriarchal throne but not his calling, and that he alone had the power to establish a new patriarch.
In 1666, after lengthy exchanges, the patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch agreed to travel to Moscow to participate in a church council to resolve the affair. Before the eastern patriarchs arrived, delegates assembled and reaffirmed the correctness of the reform program itself. Those who opposed the reform were condemned as heretics. Thus officially began the church schism. The eastern patriarchs arrived, and on November 7 another church council convened for the purpose of deciding the case of Nikon. On December 12, 1666, Nikon was found guilty of abandoning the patriarchal throne; of slandering the tsar, the Russian Church, and all the Russian people as heretics; of insulting the eastern patriarchs; and of deposing
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and exiling bishops without a church council. He was removed officially as patriarch, stripped of his priestly functions, demoted to the rank of a simple monk, and exiled to the Ferapontov monastery in the far north. In 1676 he was transferred to the Kirillov monastery, also in the north. In 1681, as a result of the intercession of Tsar Fyodor Alex-eyevich, Nikon was given permission to return to Moscow. He died on the return journey, on August 17, 1681, and was buried in the Monastery of the Resurrection. See also: ALEXEI MIKHAILOVICH; AVVAKUM PETROVICH; OLD BELIEVERS; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH; ZEALOTS OF PIETY
Lobachev, S.V. (2001). “Patriarch Nikon’s Rise to Power.” Slavonic and East European Review 79(2):290-307. Lupinin, Nickolas. (1984). Religious Revolt in the Eighteenth Century: The Schism of the Russian Church. Princeton, NJ: Kingston Press. Meyendorff, Paul. (1991). Russia, Ritual, and Reform: The Liturgical Reforms of Nikon in the Seventeenth Century. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Press.. Michels, Georg B. (1999). At War with the Church: Religious Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Russia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Palmer, William. (1871). The Patriarch and the Tsar. 6 vols. London: Tr?bner. Soloviev, Sergei M. (2000). History of Russia, Vol. 21: The Tsar and the Patriarch: Stenka Razin Revolts on the Don, 1662-1675, tr. and ed. T. Allan Smith. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press.
CATHY J. POTTER
only spiritual alms, he avoided the amassing of goods and dependent labor required for material charity. In 1489, Archbishop Gennady of Novgorod sought out Nil, who helped produce Joseph of Volok’s anti-heretical, theological polemics.
Nil’s disciples included his traveling companion Innokenty Okhlyabinin, founder of another hermitage based on Nil’s precepts; the Kirillov elders Gury Tushin and German Podolny, one a bibliophile, the other an opponent of condemning heretics; the disgraced prince-boyar Vassian Pa-trikeyev, the most strident “Non-possessor” during 1511-1531; and two of Joseph’s leading acolytes.
Nil’s expert book-copying, most notably an authoritative collection of saints lives, was distinguished by use of Greek originals to make corrections. His polished corpus of well-respected writings include the regulatory Tradition (Predanie) for his hermitage; an eleven-discourse, patristic-based Rule (Ustav) for “spiritual activity”; and didactic epistles to German, Gury, and Vassian. The leitmotifs are nonattachment, stillness with myti-cal prayer, and combating the eight pernicious “thoughts” (the Catholic seven deadly sins plus despondency). Contemporary writings do not show that Nil himself opposed and protested the execution of heretics or advocated confiscation of monastic villages, as later claimed and still widely believed.
Locally venerated, Nil has been seen as Russia’s great elder and as relatively liberal for his day. He was added as a saint to official church calendars only in modern times. See also: CHURCH COUNCIL; KIRILL- BELOOZERO MONASTERY; POSSESSORS AND NON-POSSESSORS; MONASTI-CISM; ORTHODOXY; SAINTS
NIL SORSKY, ST.
(c. 1433-1508), ascetic master and editor-copyist.
Brother of the state secretary Andrei Maykov (active 1450s-1490s), Nil entered the Kirillov-Belozersk monastery in the 1440s or 1450s, went to Mt. Athos at some time for special training, and in 1470 was a leading Kirillov elder. Dissatisfied with materialism and secular interests there, he founded the Sorsky Hermitage on a Kirillov property, where he enforced a strict, self-supporting regimen and taught the Athonite, hesychastic mode of prayer. By favoring monastic dispensation of
Maloney, George A. (2000). Nil Sorsky. Costa Mesa, CA: Paulist Press. Ostrowski, Donald. (1988). “Toward Establishing the Canon of Nil Sorsky’s Works.” Oxford Slavonic Papers 31:35-50. Ostrowski, Donald. (1995). “Loving Silence and Avoiding Pleasant Conversations. The Political Views of Nil Sorskii.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 19: 476- 96.
NKVD See STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF.
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The Nogai, known as Mangit ulus in contemporary sources, was a loosely forged tribal union of nomadic Turkic (Kipchak-Uzbek) pastoralists claiming descent from Nogai (d. 1299), the founder of the Golden Horde. Sunni Muslim, Nogai khanate was formed in 1391, when the Tatar general Edig?, the leader of the Mangit Mongol tribe, seceded from the political orbit of the Golden Horde. Initially, No-gai lands stretched from the left bank of the lower Volga to the Ural River. The capital Saraichik, the only town in the khanate, was situated on the lower Ural in Central Asia. With Muscovite incorporation of the khanates of Kazan (1552) and Astrakhan (1556), the Nogai Horde divided into three parts: the Great Nogai Horde, occupying the original core of the khanate’s lands, apparently became Muscovite vassals; the Lesser Nogai Horde, located along the right bank of the Volga-Kuban-Azov region, submitted to the Crimean Khanate; and the Altiul Horde, which occupied the Emba basin. Due to famine and pressures from nomadic Kalmyks to the east in the 1570s through the early 1600s, the Great and Lesser Nogai Hoards reunited and joined the Ottoman-Crimean alliance. During Catherine II’s (r. 1762-1796) wars with the Ottomans, most of the remnants of the Nogai were incorporated into the Russian Empire.
Because of its decentralized government, diverse trading partners, and conflicting allegiances with the other
