Muscovite soldiers were not primarily mercenaries nor were Muscovite saints basically moralists. The Russian ideal of kenotic sainthood does not correspond exactly with the 'imitation of Christ' advocated by Thomas a Kempis and the 'new devotion' of late medieval Europe. Muscovites spoke of 'following' or 'serving' rather than 'imitating' Christ, and put greater stress on the suffering and martyrdom which such service entailed. They dwelt on Christ's mission rather than his teachings, which were in any case not widely known in the absence of a complete Slavonic New Testament. Man's function was to enlist in that mission: to serve God by beating off his enemies and by following Christ in those features of his earthly life that were fully understood-his personal compassion and willingness to suffer.
In general practice, however, the monastic civilization of Muscovy was dominated more by fanaticism than kenoticism, more by compulsion than
compassion. This emphasis is illustrated vividly by Ivan the Terrible, the first ideologist to rule Muscovy, the first ruler to be formally crowned tsar, and the man who ruled Russia longer than any other figure in its history.
Ascending the throne in 1533 at the age of three, Ivan reigned for just over a half century and became even in his lifetime the subject of fearful fascination and confused controversy that he has remained till this day.53
In some ways Ivan can be seen as a kind of fundamentalist survival of Byzantium. Following his Josephite teachers, he used Byzantine texts to justify his absolutism and Byzantine rituals in having himself crowned in 1547 with the Russian form of the old imperial title. His sense of imperial pretense, formalistic traditionalism, and elaborate court intrigue all seem reminiscent of the vanished world of Constantinople. Yet his passion for absolute dominance over the ecclesiastical as well as the civil sphere represented caeseropapism in excess of anything in Byzantium, and has together with his cruelty and caprice led many to compare him with the Tatar khans, with whom he grappled so successfully in the early years of his reign. The leading contemporary apologist for Ivan's ruthlessness, Ivan Peresvetov, may have infected the tsar with some of his own admiration for the Turkish sultan and his Janissaries.54 Some of Ivan's more famous acts of cruelty seem lifted from the legends of Dracula, which were popular in early sixteenth-century Russia, with their tales of a cruel yet gallant fifteenth-century governor of Wallachia, an exposed Balkan principality between the Turkish and Catholic worlds.55
Worldly Western contemporaries often expressed admiration for his forceful rule. Many entered his service, and one visitor from Renaissance Italy used terms reminiscent of Machiavelli's Prince in hailing Ivan for le singulare suoi virtu.™ Then as now, there has been a tendency to see in Ivan merely another example of the strong ruler struggling to centralize power and build a modern nation at the expense of a traditional, landhold-ing aristocracy. From this perspective the men of his famed oprichnina, or 'separate estate,' appear not so much as oriental Janissaries but as builders of the modern service state. They were the first group to swear allegiance not just to the sovereign (gosudar') or the 'sovereign's business' (gosuda-revo delo) but to the sovereign state (gosudarstvo).5'
There are, however, far too many differences between Ivan and his Tudor or Bourbon contemporaries to permit his name to be quietly buried in some anonymous list of modernizing state builders. His cruelty and pretension were regarded by almost every contemporary Western observer as more extreme than anything they had ever seen.58 His very innovations, moreover, appear on closer examination to stem not from some new secular perspective but from his very desire 10 preserve tradition. The man who
placed Russia irrevocably on the path toward European statehood was at the same time the supreme codifier of the Muscovite ideology. Much of the confused ambivalence that Russians came to feel toward modernization and Europeanization resulted from this unresolved tension between the highly experimental policies and the fanatically traditional explanations of Ivan IV.
Ivan was steeped in Muscovite traditionalism by his monastic tutors, corresponded extensively with monastic leaders, and made frequent pilgrimages to monastic shrines-including at least one 38-mile penitential procession in bare feet from Moscow to the monastery of St. Sergius. He sometimes spoke of himself as a monk, and personally defended Orthodoxy in theological debates with Western thinkers who ranged from the left wing of Protestantism (the Czech Brethren) to the new right wing of Catholicism (the Society of Jesus).
Under Ivan the monastic conception of the prince as leader of an organic Christian civilization was translated into reality. Rival centers of potential political power-traditional landholding boyars, proud cities like Novgorod, and even those friends who sought to formalize conciliar limitations on autocracy-all were subjected to humiliations. The power and potential independence of the Church hierarchy was checked by the imprisonment and murder of the ranking metropolitan: Philip of Moscow. Dissident religious views were expunged by anti-Jewish pogroms in western Russia and by the trial and execution of early Protestant leaders from the same region.
The justification for his rule was rooted in the historical theology of Muscovy. The massive Book of Degrees of the Imperial Genealogy, drawn up by his monastic advisers, carried to new extremes the blending of sacred and secular history. Hagiography was applied wholesale to the descriptions of tsars, and imperial ancestries were traced to miracle-working saints as well as emperors of antiquity. Ivan was as diligent in gathering in for Moscow the historical legends and monastic ideologists of Novgorod and other principalities as he was in crushing their independent political pretensions.
In all of his activities, Ivan conceived of himself as head of a monolithic religious civilization, never simply as a military or political leader. His campaign against the Tatars at Kazan in 1552 was a kind of religious procession, a storming of Jericho. The great Kazan Cathedral was built in Red Square, and came to be named for the holy fool, Vasily the Blessed, to whom the victory was credited. Its nine asymmetrical tent roofs, exotically gilded and capped by onion cupolas, represent in many ways the climax of Muscovite architecture, and form a striking contrast with the balanced Italo-Byzantine cathedrals built in the Kremlin under Ivan
III. Many other churches arose in this high Muscovite style, and more than ten were named for holy fools under Ivan.69
Ivan's legislative council of 1549-50-which provided some precedent for later parliamentary 'councils of the land' (zemskie sobory)-was conceived as a religious gathering.60 The Church code enacted in 1551 known as the hundred chapters was designed only to 'confirm former tradition,' and prescribed rales for everything from icon painting to shaving and drinking. Every day of the calendar was covered and almost every saint depicted in the 27,000 large pages of the encyclopedia of holy readings, Cheti Mnei.el Every aspect of domestic activity was ritualized with semi-monastic rules of conduct in the 'Household Book' (Domostroy). Even the oprich-nina was bound together with the vows, rules, and dress of a monastic order.
The consequence of this radical monasticization of society was the virtual elimination of secular culture in the course of the sixteenth century. Whereas Russia had previously reproduced a substantial number of secular tales and fables-drawn both from Byzantium and the West through the Southern and Western Slavs respectively-'there did not appear in Russian literature of the sixteenth century a single work of belles lettres similar to those already known in the fifteenth. . . . There cannot be found in Russian manuscripts of the sixteenth even those literary works which were known in fifteenth century Russia and were subsequently widely disseminated in the seventeenth.'62 The chronicles and the newly embellished genealogies, hagiographies, military tales, and polemics of the age were purged of 'useless stories.' Nil Sorsky, no less than Joseph of Volokolamsk, favored this form of censorship; and the 'hundred chapters' of 1551 extended these prohibitions on secular culture to music and art as well. By the time of Ivan the Terrible, Muscovy had set itself off even from other Orthodox Slavs by the totality of its historical
