example, Sunni sultans openly made alliances with SufiMuslims; they expected
religious (kadi) judges around the realm to administer Sharia law in accord with
local custom and sultanic law, not dogmatically. In Russia, similarly, the state’s self-
representation was based on Orthodoxy, but ecclesiastical interests were almost
always subordinated to the political. It was a Chinggisid legacy to tolerate native
religions, reflected in the Ottoman empire’s giving them “separate, unequal,
protected”status (in Barkey’s phrase). In practice, this meant that the dominant
religion, whether Orthodoxy or Sunni Islam, had the sole right to proselytize and
convert, but that campaigns of conversion were rare. The status of other faiths
could be lesser; in the Ottoman empire, non-Muslims paid higher taxes and wore
different dress or other markers of difference; in the Russian empire, non-Orthodox
often paid lower taxes and burdens such as military recruitment, but enjoyed
limited access to official position and, as we have seen, could become targets
of missionary activity campaigns when their homelands became desired objects
(Middle Volga, Bashkiria). In both empires the dominant religion aggressively
persecuted sects within the faith that they deemed heretical: in Russia, the Old
Believers and Uniates; in the Ottoman empire, Shiites.
In turning to Byzantine Orthodoxy, then, Muscovy was grounding its imperial
imaginary but not limiting itself. Byzantium provided a rich toolkit for claiming
legitimacy—literary genres (chronicles, hagiography), religious ritual, political cere-
mony and regalia, icons and frescos, church architecture, and an elaborated political
theory of ruler, state, and society. In the latefifteenth and early sixteenth century
writers and artists at the grand prince’s and metropolitan’s courts projected an
image of Muscovy as a powerful and pious godly realm using Byzantine precedents,
such as coronation ceremonies (1498, 1547), icon themes and fresco cycles and the
genre of chronicle writing. Moscow also borrowed from other influences. Ivan III’s
court, for example, took the Roman symbol of a double-headed eagle directly from
the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperors in the latefifteenth century, and in the
1510s and 1520s Russia joined in an early modern European trend of claiming
antique ancestry. Attributed to various authors with literary or diplomatic connec-
tions with central Europe, theTale of the Princes of Vladimirdepicted imperial
regalia being transferred from Caesar Augustus to the Byzantine Emperor at
Constantinople to Grand Prince Vladimir Monomakh in Kyiv, to the grand princes
of Vladimir andfinally to Moscow. About that time an exquisite crown of Uzbek
goldenfiligree, given to Muscovite rulers before thefifteenth century, was modified
with the addition of a cross and precious stones to support this claim oftranslatio
imperii; it came to be called the“Crown of Monomakh.”TheTalewas deployed
widely; parts of it were included in the 1547 coronation ceremony and scenes from
it, notably one showing the grand prince in council with his men, were carved on an
elaborate tsarist pew erected in the Dormition Cathedral.
In addition to linking Russia to Roman imperial heritage, theTalemight be
considered an effort to promote the ruling Daniilovich dynasty, as it includes their
genealogy alongside a scurrilous one of their rivals, the Lithuanian Gedyminides. In
thefirst third of the sixteenth century, leading military and political clans (the boyar
elite) were also assembling their genealogies as competition for status at court
130 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801