who had fled his native Galicia after it had entered the Roman orbit, and deepened his anti-Catholicism with a stay in Nicaea just as the Latin crusaders were overrunning nearby Constantinople, in the early thirteenth century.15
Even more exalted than this story of victory over 'the Romans' were the tales of combat with the Tatars that became particularly popular after the victory at Kulikovo in 1380, under Dmitry Donskoy. The life of this lay prince was written in purely hagiographic style. He is repeatedly referred to as a saint, and is placed higher in the firmament of heaven than many biblical figures. The cause of Dmitry in the most famous epic of this period, 'The Tale from Beyond the Don' {Zadonshchina), is that of 'the Christian faith' and 'the holy churches'; just as the icon commissioned for Dmitry's grave by his widow was that of the Archangel Michael, the bearer of heavenly victory over the armies of Satan.18 Whereas epics of the Kievan era were relatively hospitable to naturalistic and even pagan detail, the Zadonshchina imparts a new spirit of fanaticism in a new idiom of eulogy and epithet.17
The extraordinary emphasis in the chronicles on the battle of Kulikovo (which was not in itself particularly decisive in turning back the tide of Tatar domination) represents in good measure the echoing by Muscovite chron-
iclers of the call-first sounded in Latin Christendom at the time of its great awakening several centuries earlier-for a Christian crusade against the infidel East. Once again, a people struggling out of darkness and division were invited to unite behind their faith to fight a common foe. The ideological accompaniment for the gradual subordination of all other major Russian princes to Moscow in the course of the fifteenth century was provided by a series of chronicles beginning with that of the St. Sergius Monastery in 1408, and by supporting songs and legends that stressed (in contrast to those of Novgorod, Pskov, and Tver) the importance of the holy war against the Tatars and the need for Muscovite leadership in reuniting 'the Russian land.'18
The monastic literature of the late fourteenth and the fifteenth century moved increasingly into the world of prophecy-developing two interrelated beliefs that lay at the heart of the Moscow ideology: (1) that Russian Christendom represents a special culminating chapter in an unbroken chain of sacred history; and (2) that Moscow and its rulers are the chosen bearers of this destiny.
The belief in a special destiny for Orthodox Christianity was not new. Orthodoxy was heir to the earliest sees of Christendom, including all the regions in which Christ himself had lived. Chiliastic teachings from the East entered early into Byzantine thinking. When Jerusalem was falling to the Moslems in 638 the true cross and other sacred relics were transferred to Constantinople, and the thought arose-particularly under the Macedonian dynasty at the time when Russia was being converted-that Constantinople might in some sense be the New Jerusalem as well as the New Rome.19
Just as the Eastern Church claimed to be the only truly apostolic church, so too the Eastern Empire claimed a specially sanctified genealogy through Babylonia, Persia, and Rome. From the end of the fourth century, Constantinople began to be thought of as the New Rome: capital of an empire with a destiny unlike that of any other on earth. Byzantium was not a but the Christian Empire, specially chosen to guide men along the path marked out by the chroniclers that led from Christ's incarnation to His Second Coming.
Following Clement and Origen rather than Augustine, Orthodox theology spoke less about the drama of personal salvation than about that of cosmic redemption.20 Whereas Augustine willed to Latin Christendom a brooding sense of original sin and of pessimism about the earthly city, these Eastern fathers willed to Orthodox Christendom a penchant for believing that the Christian Empire of the East might yet be transformed into the final, heavenly kingdom. Hesychast mysticism encouraged the Orthodox to be-
lieve that such a transformation was an imminent possibility through a spiritual intensification of their own lives-and ultimately of the entire Christian imperium.
In times of change and dislocation, the historical imagination tended to look for signs of the coming end of history and of approaching deliverance. Thus, the growing sense of destiny in Muscovy was directly related to the anguish among Orthodox monks at the final decline and fall of Byzantium.
The flight into apocalyptical prophecy began in the late fourteenth century in the late-blooming Slavic kingdoms of the Balkans, and spread to Muscovy via a migration of men and ideas from the Southern Slavs. Unlike the Southern Slav influx of the tenth century, which brought the confident faith of a united Byzantium, this second wave in the fifteenth infected Russia with the bombastic rhetoric and eschatological forebodings that had developed in Serbia and Bulgaria as they disintegrated before the advancing Turks.
The Serbian kingdom, during its golden age under Stephen Dushan, ???1-^. represented in many ways a dress rehearsal for the pattern of rule that was to emerge in Muscovy. Sudden military expansion was accompanied by a rapid inflation of princely pretensions. With speed and audacity Dushan assumed the titles of Tsar, Autocrat, and Emperor of the Romans; styled himself a successor to Constantine and Justinian; and summoned a council to set up a separate Serbian patriarchate. He sought, in brief, to supplant the old Byzantine Empire with a new Slavic-Greek empire. To sustain his claim he leaned heavily on the support of Mt. Athos and other monasteries that he had enriched and patronized.
The Bulgarian kingdom developed during its much longer period of independence from Byzantium a prophetic tradition which was to be taken over directly by Muscovy. Seeking to glorify the Bulgarian capital of Trnovo, the chroniclers referred to it as the New Rome, which had supplanted both the Rome of classical antiquity and the declining 'second Rome' of Constantinople.
When the infidel Turks swept into the Balkans, crushing the Serbs at Kossovo in 1389 and overrunning the flaming Bulgarian capital four years later, the messianic hopes of Orthodox Slavdom had only one direction in which to turn: to the unvanquished prince and expanding church of Muscovy. In 1390 a Bulgarian monk from Trnovo, Cyprian, became Metropolitan of Moscow, and in the course of the fifteenth century men and ideas moved north to Muscovy and helped infect it with a new sense of historical calling.21 The Balkan monks had tended to sympathize politically with the anti-Latin zealots in Byzantium and theologically with the anti-
scholastic Hesychasts. They brought with them a fondness for the close alliance between monks and princes which had prevailed in the Southern Slav kingdoms and a deep hatred of Roman Catholicism, which in their view had surrounded the Orthodox Slavs with hostile principalities in the Balkans and had seduced the Church of Constantinople into humiliating reunion. The Southern Slavs also brought with them Balkan traditions of compiling synthetic genealogies to support the claims of the Serbian and Bulgarian kingdoms against Byzantium, and a penchant for ornate and pompous language heavily laden with archaic Church Slavonic forms. Particularly noteworthy and influential was the Tale of the Great Princes of Vladimir of Great Russia, by a Serbian emigre who solemnly connected the Muscovite princes not only with those of Kiev and the legendary Riurik but with the even more fanciful figure of Prussus, ruler of an imaginary ancient kingdom on the Vistula and a relative of Augustus Caesar, who was in turn related through Antony and Cleopatra to the Egyptian descendants of Noah and Shem. This widely copied work also encouraged Russians to think of themselves as successors of Byzantium by advancing the extraordinary fiction that the imperial regalia had been transferred from Constantinople to Kiev by Vladimir Monomachus, who was said to be the first tsar of all Russia.22
Meanwhile, a sense of having superseded Byzantium was subtly encouraged by one of the very few ideological conditions of Tatar overlord-ship: the requirement to pray for only one tsar: the Tatar khan. Though not uniformly observed or enforced among the tribute-paying Eastern Slavs, this restriction tended to remove from view
