most ambitious single effort to simulate 'the angelic trumpets' of the world to come; and the proliferation of lesser bell towers throughout the sprawling city of ioo,ooo3 attracted to the new capital the enduring designation of 'Moscow of the forty forties,' or sixteen hundred belfries.
Moscow, the second great city of Russian culture, has remained the largest city of Russia and an enduring symbol for the Russian imagination. The new empire of the Eastern Slavs that slowly emerged out of the divisions and humiliations of the appanage period was known as Muscovy long before it was called Russia. Moscow was the site of the 'third Rome' for apocalyptical monks in the sixteenth century, and of the 'third international' for apocalyptical revolutionaries in the twentieth. The exotic beauty of the Kremlin-even though partly the work of Italians-came to symbolize the prophetic pretensions of modern Russia and its thirst for some earthly taste of the heavenly kingdom.
Of all the northern Orthodox cities to survive the initial Mongol assault, Moscow must have seemed one of the least likely candidates for future greatness. It was a relatively new wooden settlement built along a tributary of the Volga, with shabby walls not even made of oak. It lacked the cathedrals and historic links with Kiev and Byzantium, of Vladimir and Suzdal; the economic strength and Western contacts of Novgorod and Tver; and the fortified position of Smolensk. It is not even mentioned in the chronicles until the mid-twelfth century, it did not have its own permanent resident prince until the early fourteenth, and none of its original buildings are known to have survived even into the seventeenth.
The rise of the 'third Rome,' like that of the first, has long tantalized historians. There are almost no surviving records for the critical 140 years
between the fall of Kiev and the turning of the Tatar tide under the leadership of Moscow at Kulikovo field in 1380. Perhaps for this very reason, there is a certain fascination in weighing and balancing the factors usually cited to explain the rapid emergence of Muscovy: its favorable central location, the skill of its grand dukes, its special position as collecting agent of the Mongol tribute, and the disunity of its rivals. Yet these explanations-like those of Soviet economic determinists in more recent years-seem insufficient to account fully for the new impetus and sense of purpose that Muscovy suddenly demonstrated-in the icon workshop as well as on the battlefield.
To understand the rise of Muscovy, one must consider the religious stirrings which pre-existed and underlay its political accomplishments. Long before there was any political or economic homogeneity among the Eastern Slavs, there was a religious bond, which was tightened during the Mongol period.
The Orthodox Church brought Russia out of its dark ages, providing a sense of unity for its scattered people, higher purpose for its princes, and inspiration for its creative artists. In the course of the fourteenth century, the prevailing term for a simple Russian peasant became krest'ianin, which was apparently synonymous with 'Christian' (khristianin).* The phrase 'of all Rus',' which later became a key part of the tsar's title, was first invoked at the very nadir of Russian unity and power at the turn of the thirteenth century, not by any prince, but by the ranking prelate of the Russian Church, the Metropolitan of Vladimir.5 The transfer of the Metropolitan's seat from Vladimir to Moscow in 1326 was probably an even more important milestone in the emergence of Moscow to national leadership than the celebrated bestowal by the Tatars in the following year of the title 'Great Prince' on Ivan Kalita, Prince of Moscow. Probably more important than Kalita or any of the early Muscovite Princes in establishing this leadership was Alexis, the fourteenth-century Metropolitan of Moscow, and the first Muscovite ever to occupy such a high ecclesiastical position.
Within the church the monasteries played the key role in the revival of Russian civilization, just as they had somewhat earlier in the West. Monastic revival helped to consolidate the special position of Moscow within Russia, and inspired Russians everywhere with the sense of destiny, militance, and colonizing zeal on which subsequent successes depended.
The monastic revival of the north took definite form in the 1330's, when Metropolitan Alexis began to build a large number of churches within the Moscow Kremlin, providing a new religious aura to the citadel of power and centers of worship for several new monastic communities. Unlike the carefully organized and regulated monasteries of Western Christendom,
these communities were loosely structured. Although they subscribed to the ritualized communal rule of St. Theodore Studite, discipline was irregular, the monks often gathering only for common meals and worship services. One reason for this relative laxness was the very centrality of the monasteries in Russian civilization. In contrast to most other monasteries of the Christian East, early Russian monasteries had generally been founded inside the leading princely cities, and monastic vows were often undertaken by figures who continued their previous political, economic, and military activities. Thus, the activities of Alexis as monk and metropolitan were in many ways merely a continuation under more impressive auspices of his earlier military and political exploits as a member of the noble Biakont family in Moscow. Yet Alexis' new-found belief that God was with him brought new strength to the Muscovite cause. His relics were subsequently reverenced along with those of the first metropolitan of Moscow, Peter, who had been canonized at the insistence of Ivan Kalita. The most important of the new monasteries built by Alexis inside the Kremlin was named the Monastery of the Miracles in honor of the wonder-working powers attributed to the saintly lives and relics of these early metropolitans.
The central figure in the monastic revival and in the unification of Russia during the fourteenth century was Sergius of Radonezh. Like his friend Alexis, Sergius was of noble origin; but his conversion to a religious profession was more profound and seminal. Sergius had come to Moscow from Rostov, a vanquished rival city to the east. Disillusioned with Moscow and the lax older traditions of monastic life, he set off into the forest to recapture through prayer and self-denial the holiness of the early Church. His piety and physical bravery attracted others to the new monastery he founded northeast of Moscow in 1337. Dedicated to the Holy Trinity and later named for its founder, this monastery became for Muscovy what the Monastery of the Caves had been for Kiev: a center of civilization, a shrine for pilgrimage, and the second Lavra, or large parent monastery, in Russian history.
Certain distinctions between the monastery of St. Sergius and older ones in Kiev and Novgorod point to the new role monasteries were to play in Russian civilization. St. Sergius' monastery was located outside of the political center, and its demands on the individual-in terms of physical labor and ascetic forbearance-were far more severe. This exposed location encouraged the monastery also to assume the roles of fortress and colonizing center.
The monastic revival in Russia depended not only on the heroism and sanctity of men like Sergius but also on important spiritual influences from the crumbling Byzantine Empire. Perplexed by its own misfortunes and
embittered by harassment from the Catholic West, Byzantine monasticism in the late thirteenth and the fourteenth century increasingly turned away from the Studite rule in the monasteries and from the growing influence of Western scholasticism to a new mystical movement known as Hesychasm.6
This movement contended that there was a direct personal way to God available to man through the 'inner calm' (hesychia) which came from ascetic discipline of the flesh and silent prayers of the spirit. Darkness, fasting, and holding the breath were seen as aids to the achievement of this inner calm, and the traditional sacraments of the Church and even the verbal prayer of an individual believer subtly came to be viewed as irrelevant if not positively distracting. The Hesychasts believed that such a process of inner purification would prepare man for divine illumination: for a glimpse of the uncreated light from God which had appeared to the apostles on Mount Tabor at the time of Christ's Transfiguration. The Hesychasts sought to avoid the heretical assertion that man could achieve identity with God by insisting that this illumination placed man only in contact with the 'energy' (energeia) and not the 'essence' {ousia) of the divine. This distinction and the belief that man could gain a glimpse of the
