The Russian Empire 1450–1801

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intensified. Tapping intotranslatio imperiilegitimacy, several claimed mythic
foreign ancestries from Europe or the Horde. Dynastic promotion persisted: Sergei
Bogatyrev has shown that the coronation ritual was edited in the late 1550s to
elevate the ruler’s sacrality and a royal banner, helmet, and crown were also
designed to elevate the ruler’s glory, ultimately associating Ivan IV with the
righteous victory of the Apocalypse. But it should be remarked that the dynastic
theme pales in comparison to its use by Muscovy’s contemporaries. In England, for
example, secular writing, portraiture, and imagery shored up the new Tudor
dynasty: Tudor kings commissioned histories to glorify their line; the Tudor rose
appeared everywhere in interior decoration, clothing and mementoes, documents.
Tudor kings adorned public buildings with frescos of themselves with family; they
distributed portrait miniatures to followers and embossed their portraits on royal
documents. British gentry followed suit by commissioning their own portraits and
assembling galleries of images of rulers and dignitaries. Similarly, at thefifteenth-
and sixteenth-century Ottoman court, the imperial imaginary combined the sul-
tan’s Islamic piety and justice with an accent on dynasty. Books of portraits of
sultans were compiled, portrait medallions were widely distributed, and expert
illuminators at the Topkapi palace compiled massive illustrated histories of Suleiman
the Magnificent and his predecessors. Russia’s Daniilovichi were not so expansive in
their self-promotion.
Like the Tudors and Osmanlis, in the latefifteenth and sixteenth centuries
Russia’s rulers did deploy art and history writing to project legitimacy, but with a
religious, not dynastic, focus. Secular portraiture was unknown in Russia until the
last quarter of the seventeenth century, when Polish cultural influence through
Ukraine brought the genre to Russia. Once it arrived, portraits, as Lindsey Hughes
has shown, were put to political ends. In oils, tempera, and printed frontispieces
tsars, Patriarch Nikon, and courtiers depicted themselves in styles ranging from
iconographic to realistic, often with insignia and baroque panegyrics extolling their
piety, valor, and wisdom. Most notable were regent Sofiia Alekseevna’s portraits of
herself in coronation regalia. Similarly, sixteenth-century Russia lacked secular
artists, literature, and printing. Ideological expression, like all creative expression
outside of folk art, was in the hands of the Church.
Clerical authors and artists legitimized power by placing the state and ruler in the
contexts of biblical history and Orthodox religiosity. Lacking a secular elite and
genres of political philosophy in the Muscovite centuries, clerics did not produce
theoretical statements about the relationship of tsar and people, the purpose of
political power, or the rights and obligations of subjects. An ideology seeing the
ruler as appointed by God and the realm as a godly community emerges between
the lines of sources not necessarily designed for such a purpose. Muscovite history
writing, for example, provided a vehicle for ideal images of ruler, state, and society,
but it has to be read against the grain. Unfamiliar with either the Greek genre of
istoriaor its early modern European epigones (histories in which the author
consciously shapes a persuasive narrative with argument and moral message),
Muscovy used only the genre of annalistic chronicle. Chronicles are written
paratactically, compiling information with no authorial voice, argument, or causal


Broadcasting Legitimacy 131
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