material gain (donors generously supported some monasteries with gifts of land and
treasure), religious leaders founded more than 250 new monasteries in the Russian
forest, in addition to many small hermitages of single hermit monks. To the extent
that some of the founders associated themselves with the grand princes of Muscovy,
Church and state made the most of the association, depicting in hagiography and
chronicles Russia’s rulers as particularly devoted to pious advisors. Russian histor-
ians in turn generalized that Orthodox spirituality particularly characterized early
Russia. This is undoubtedly an accident of the sources, since churchmen wrote the
histories and saints’Lives, and provided the documentary forms for state docu-
ments (such as wills and treaties) that are our principal sources for these centuries.
And, as we have said, Moscow’s grand princes did patronize the Church as a
legitimizing tool. But we must separate the projected image from any claims
about personal spirituality.
We can identify several trends in spirituality promoted by literate churchmen
who wrote hagiography or led monasteries. One was overtly political, but the more
dominant was moralistic, and focused onfinding paths to God. The political trend
we have encountered in discussions of the“imperial imaginary”: the Russian
Orthodox Church promoted itself and its secular partners through hagiography
and history writing. In thefifteenth century several diocesan and political centers
(Novgorod, Tver’, Rostov, Suzdal’) and Moscow promoted themselves by compil-
ing chronicles and promoting cults of saints that bolstered their own claims to local
power. Although the chronicle genre was unwieldy, its compilation of events from
biblical times to the present allowed a given princely family or bishop to depict their
lands as part of God’s providential design. Each regional chronicle assembled earlier
chronicles from Kyiv Rus’, which themselves began with a swift passage through
biblical history; they became thicker with local events toward the time of compos-
ition, and made sure to include encomia to rulers, bishops, and other notables
whose piety and patronage of the faith (the authors, after all, were churchmen)
demonstrated God’s blessing on their realms. Principalities such as Novgorod,
Rostov, and Tver’constructed pantheons of local saints, often founders of local
monasteries. After conquest by Moscow most of this regional chronicle writing
declined, save for Novgorod, while Moscow inaugurated vast compilations of“all-
Rus’”history that put it at the apex of historical time.
In thefifteenth century Church and state also used hagiography to promote
grand-princely power, focusing on cults of three sainted bishops who were closely
tied to the ruling family. Called the“Moscow miracleworkers,”they included
Metropolitan Peter (d. 1326), revered for bringing the metropolitancy to Moscow;
Metropolitan Aleksii (d. 1378), mentor to the young Grand Prince Dmitrii
Donskoi, who ruled 1359 to 1389 and came to the throne at age 9; and Metro-
politan Iona (d. 1461), honored for rejecting the Florence–Ferrara Church Union
of 1448. The great iconographer Dionisii painted large matching icons of Petr and
Aleksii, replete with scenes from their Lives, for Moscow’s newly constructed
Dormition Cathedral; hagiographies with extensive cycles of their miracles were
compiled. Chronicles describe grand princes venerating shrines to these miracle
workers on their way out to battle.
Varieties of Orthodoxy 249