its lands and privileges. In return, he deserved complete ecclesiastical support, his authority extending not only to all secular matters but also to Church administration. The possessors emphasized, too, a formal and ritualistic approach to religion, the sanctity of Church services, rituals, practices, and teachings, and a violent and complete suppression of all dissent.
The non-possessors, who because of their origin in the monasteries of the northeast, have sometimes been called the 'elders from beyond the Volga,' had as their chief spokesman Nil Sorskii - or Nilus of Sora - a man of striking spiritual qualities. The non-possessors, as their name indicates, objected to ecclesiastical wealth and in particular to monastic landholding. They insisted that the monks should in fact carry out their vows, that they must be poor, must work for their living, and must remain truly 'dead to the world.' The Church and the State should be independent of each other; most especially, the State, which belonged to a lower order of reality, had no right to interfere in religious matters. The non-possessors stressed contemplation and the inner spiritual light, together with a striving for moral perfection, as against ecclesiastical formalism and ritualism. Furthermore, by contrast with the possessors, they differentiated in the teaching of the Church among Holy Writ, tradition, and human custom, considering only Holy Writ - that is, God's commandments - as completely binding. The rest could be criticized and changed. But even those who challenged the foundations of the Church were to be met with persuasion, never with force.
The Church council of 1503 decided in favor of the possessors. Joseph
of Volok and his associates cited Byzantine examples in support of their position and also argued, in practical terms, the necessity for the Church to have a large and rich establishment in order to perform its different functions, including the exercise of charity on a large scale. Their views, especially on relations of Church and State, suited on the whole the rising absolutism of Moscow, although it seems plausible that Ivan III sympathized with the non- possessors in the hope of acquiring monastic lands. After Joseph of Volok died in 1515, subsequently to be proclaimed a saint, other high clerics continued his work, notably Daniel, who became metropolitan in 1521. At the councils of 1524 and 1531, and even as late as 1554-55, some of Nil Sorskii's chief followers were declared to be heretics. Nil Sorskii himself, however, was canonized.
In explaining the controversy between the possessors and the non-possessors, many scholars, including Soviet historians as a group, have emphasized that the possessors championed the rise of the authority of the Muscovite rulers and the interests of those elements in Russian society which favored this rise. The non- possessors, on the other hand, with their high social connections, reflected the aristocratic opposition to centralization. In a different context, that of the history of the Orthodox Church, the non-possessors may be considered to have derived from the mystical and contemplative tradition of Eastern monasticism, especially as practiced on Mount Athos. However, in a still broader sense, the possessors and the non-possessors expressed two recurrent attitudes that devoted Christians have taken toward things of this world, burdened as they have been by an incompatibility between the temporal and the eternal standards and goals of behavior. The non-possessors, thus, resemble the Franciscans in the West as well as other religious groups that have tried hard to be in, and yet not of, this world. And even after all the sixteenth-century councils they remained an important part of the Russian Church as an attitude and a point of view.
Such essentially secular intellectual issues of the period as that of the position and power of the ruler often acquired a religious coloring. The problem of authority, its character and its limitations, became paramount as Moscow rose to 'gather Russia' and as its princes turned into autocratic tsars. As already mentioned, a number of legends and doctrines appeared to justify and buttress these new developments. For example, one tale about the princes of Vladimir, which originated, apparently, in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, related how Vladimir Monomakh of Kiev, the celebrated ancestor of the Muscovite princes, received from his maternal grandfather, the Byzantine emperor Constantine Monomakh, certain regalia of his high office: a headdress which came to be known as 'the hat of Monomakh' and some other items of formal attire. Still more grandly, the princes of Moscow came to be connected to the Roman emperors. According to the new genealogy, Augustus, a sovereign of Rome and the world,
in his old age divided his possessions among his relatives, placing his brother Prus as ruler on the banks of the Vistula. Riurik was a fourteenth-generation descendant of this Prus, St. Vladimir a fourth-generation descendant of Riurik, and Vladimir Monomakh a fourth-generation descendant of St. Vladimir. Concurrently with this revision of the genealogy of the princes of Moscpw, Christianity in Russia was antedated and St. Andrew, the apostle, was proclaimed its true originator.
But the most interesting doctrine - and one that has received divergent interpretations from scholars - was that of Moscow as the Third Rome. Its originator, an abbot from Pskov named Philotheus or Filofei, wrote a letter to Basil III in 1510 which described three Romes: the Church of Old Rome, which fell because of a heresy, the Church of Constantinople brought down by the infidels, and finally the Church in Basil Ill's own tsardom which, like the sun, was to illumine the entire world - furthermore, after two Romes had fallen, Moscow the Third Rome would stand permanently, for there was to be no fourth. Some scholars have stressed the political aspects of this doctrine, and recently it has even been repeatedly cited as evidence of a secular Russian imperialism and aggression. It is, therefore, necessary to emphasize that Philotheus thought, in the first place, of Churches, not States, and that he was concerned with the preservation of the true faith, not political expansion. And, in any case, the Muscovite rulers in their foreign policy never endorsed the view of Moscow as the Third Rome, remaining, as already mentioned, quite uninterested in the possibility of a Byzantine inheritance, while at the same time determined to recover the inheritance of the princes of Kiev.
The literature of the appanage period has generally been rated rather low. This judgment applies with full force only to the extant written works, although the oral, folkloristic tradition too, while it continued to be rich and varied, failed to produce tales equal in artistry to the Kievan byliny. As a qualification it might be added that, in the opinion of certain scholars, surviving material is insufficient to enable us to form a definitive view of the scope and quality of appanage literature.
The Mongol conquest of Russia gave rise to a number of factual narratives as well as semi-legendary and legendary stories. These dwelt on the bitter fighting, the horror, and the devastation of the invasion and interpreted the events as divine punishment for the Russians' sins. The best artistic accounts of the catastrophe can be read in the series dealing with the Mongol ravage of Riazan and in the
in turn found reflection in literature. Thus the
Accounts of the outside world can be found in the sizeable travel literature of the period. Foremost in this category stands Athanasius Nikitin's celebrated
Church literature, including sermons, continued to be produced on what must have been a considerable scale. Hagiography deserves special notice. Lives of saints composed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, for example, of Abraham of Smolensk, Alexander Nevskii, Michael of Chernigov, and Metropolitan Peter, are characterized by simplicity and biographical detail. Unfortunately for the historian, a new style, artificial, pompous,
