The Russian Empire 1450–1801

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nexus. The intent was to record God’s providential work on earth; in Russia,
chronicles were written to inscribe Russian history into the path of universal
Christendom. Princes were of course depicted as pious and just, but the genre of
unsynthesized snippets of political, religious, and cosmic history, arranged chrono-
logically, made it difficult to promote a dynasty, a ruler, or a political viewpoint. All
was done implicitly. Moscow certainly did deploy the chronicle genre to assert its
legitimacy. As it conquered neighboring East Slavic centers that had had their own
chronicle tradition at bishops’sees (Novgorod, Pskov, Tver’, Viatka-Perm, Rostov),
Moscow developed the“all-Rus’”chronicle, massive compendiums that shuffled
together thousands of snippets (sometimes longer tales) from all these places. This
work culminated in the“Nikon”chronicle, completed in the 1520s, an immense
mélange of annalistic entries that began in biblical times, traced Christian history,
and focused on Moscow’s rise as regional power.
Production of immense historical works in almost unique copies, as a sort of
conspicuous display, continued at mid-century in the grand-princely and metro-
politan’s workshops in the Kremlin. Three huge works showcased Moscow’s piety,
power, and historical legitimacy, associated with Metropolitan Makarii and artisans
of Novgorod who joined Kremlin workshops when he left the Archbishopric of
Novgorod to become metropolitan. TheIlluminated Chronicle(Litsevoi letopisnyi
svod) used the text of the Nikon Chronicle and later additions, but its spectacular
novelty was its illustrations: more than half of almost each page (over 16,000
images in 20,000 pages) displayed a hand-painted depiction of the history
described. Done in iconographic style by icon and fresco painters, this art consti-
tutes one of the few loci of secular artistic imagery in Muscovy. In overall concept as
well, the work was new, diverging from earlier Byzantine or East Slavic illustrated
chronicles and also not emulating contemporary illustrated European printed
books. Its artists might have devised their multi-episodic scenes from tropes in
Orthodox icon and fresco painting. Thus it combined novelty with tradition, as did
another huge compendium of the court of Ivan IV, Makarii’sGreat Menology
(Velikie Minei Cheti). In size and content it was novel: twelve immense monthly
volumes of pietistic readings, including lives of saints particularly associated with
Russian history and the court. But the messages of these works was the traditional
providential message typical of Muscovite history writing: Russia belonged to
God’s creation, was a godly community, and was progressing to salvation. Apoca-
lyptic ideas were also encountered at court and in religious writings in this time,
expressed in some complex Novgorodian and Moscow icons and texts, but it was
not a key theme in these officially produced histories and menology. An unwieldy
project to showcase the dynasty demonstrates the limitations imposed by genre:
unprecedented in Muscovite history writing, theBook of Degrees(Stepennaia kniga)
was divided into chapters by ruler from Kyiv Rus’to Ivan IV; its text was edited
from compendious chronicles to focus on individual grand princes. But it could not
transcend the lack of narrative and argumentation intrinsic to annals.
These massive projects to define Muscovy’s piety and legitimacy were done,
apparently, for the court. None was printed and few were widely dispersed. The
Stepennaia knigawas copied and distributed to a handful of monastic centers and


132 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801

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