The Russian Empire 1450–1801

On resistance: James C. Scott,Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) ...

11 Towns and Townsmen Townsmen in primarily Russian towns were not as different from the empire’sEast Slavic peasants as one wou ...

Time of Troubles, such that by the end of the seventeenth century another 110 towns had been created or acquired in territorial ...

with walls and widefirebreaks separating the town into neighborhoods:first the Kremlin, then the“Kitaigorod”trading neighborhood ...

Vladimir, Kolomna-Riazan’). Otherwise, streets were narrow and winding; homes were built inside a wooden fenced courtyard, not f ...

gentry, monasteries, bishops, and other hierarchs—and their“white”neighbor- hoods enjoyed freedom from taxation. Some urban resi ...

Some Russian towns in these centuries had even less of a“municipal”presence, with very fewposadskieand everyone in town engaged ...

ranged across European Russia and reached heights of success and depths of failure. Shorin was the son of agost’and became one h ...

Moscow riot (this time in protest of a new tax that he asgost’was in charge of levying), but his home was plundered. In the 1660 ...

Muscovy’s towns and townsmen from taxpayers togostirepresent in microcosm the diversity of an empire of“difference.”Towns were p ...

12 Varieties of Orthodoxy Empires project supranational ideologies to legitimize their power, often deriving their“imperial imag ...

On the one hand, eastern Orthodoxy is a quintessential religion of the book. It regards its task as preserving established dogma ...

Figure 12.1The mosaic and fresco interior of Kyiv’s eleventh-century Sofiia Cathedral demonstrates the three layers of church de ...

reading, responding, or listening. Thus holydays were celebrated with processions around the church and through public squares; ...

(1619–33) and Nikon (1652–8) amassed wealth and power for the patriarchate; enterprising bishops did the same for themselves. In ...

material gain (donors generously supported some monasteries with gifts of land and treasure), religious leaders founded more tha ...

Other church writings focused on monastic and by extension lay morality, although most likely the authors had in mind an elite a ...

spirituality (Figure 12.2). Nil argued that too easily such cenobitic communities slip into worldly vices, such as living off th ...

Whether these ideals and moralistic messages penetrated to laymen almost cannot be known. They were embodied in hagiography, ico ...

embracing conquered lands into the Muscovite state) and in the mid-seventeenth (to nationalize, as it were, some of the local cu ...