the Menology had broader distribution. But theIlluminated Chroniclewas never
reproduced, never bound, and never taken from the Kremlin in Muscovite cen-
turies. Immense and difficult to encompass, these compendia might have been
more symbolic than communicative. Like treasures in royal courts around the
world, they were written for display or for the edification of the court clerical and
boyar elite; they stand as physical symbols of Moscow’s territorial expansion and
ideological control. For those literate folk who wrote, illustrated, or dipped into
them, they do evidence Muscovy’s unifying vision of legitimacy based on godly
appointment and the tsar’s piety and justice.
Other genres also disseminated that unifying vision to the elite at court. Frescos
and icons in Kremlin cathedrals linked Moscow and its princes with the biblical
narrative. Following Byzantine tradition, the interior decoration of Muscovite
churches depicted the connection of heaven and earth through successive bands
of images. As Otto Demus describes, the dome was the sphere of God and seraphim
and Old Testament prophets; interior decoration transitioned to Christ’s incarna-
tion and his life in the middle band; at ground level, the saints who embodied
God’s grace on earth adorned walls and pillars. Images of rulers were rarely included
in Russian church interiors (unlike depictions of emperors in Byzantine churches),
except for the princely necropolis in the Kremlin’s Archangel Michael Cathedral.
Here, each ruler was generically depicted, with a halo, on wall frescos. Otherwise,
church interiors evoked the ruling family by honoring saints particularly associated
with it, such as the sainted Metropolitans Peter, Aleksii, and Iona (fourteenth and
fifteenth century) and Filipp (d. 1569). Their icons took honored places in the
Kremlin Dormition Cathedral iconostasis. Here also was the revered Vladimir
Mother of God icon: a twelfth-century Byzantine work, it had been brought to
Kiev in 1125, to Vladimir in 1155, to Moscow temporarily in 1395, and in the late
fifteenth century was permanently installed in the Dormition Cathedral (Figure 6.1).
Church interiors also served as political sites by displaying images of favorite
saints from provincial centers conquered by Moscow. Revered, often credited with
supernatural grace, such“miracle-working” local icons were transported with
special ceremony to Moscow where they were copied and returned with fanfare
to their hometowns, creating a sacral link between center and periphery. At mid-
sixteenth century the Church officially recognized numerous local saints into the
Church’sofficial hagiography in further display of imperial unity.
These religious ensembles depicted the grand prince’s power as grounded in his
piety and devotion to the faith and legitimized by God’s blessing. Court ceremony
and texts accentuate the ideal ruler’s splendor and majesty, but couch these
attributes in a rhetoric of humility. Multiple sources in sixteenth-century Muscovy
(such as works by Joseph Volotskii and Metropolitan Makarii’sMenology) included
the philosophy of sixth-century Byzantine theorist Agapetus, who reminded rulers
that their power is like that of God, and therefore they must be humble, just, and
protective of their people. Myriad Muscovite sources strike that theme. The
Stepennaia knigapraises Vasilii III’s justice, for example:“His imperial heart and
mind are always on guard and deliberating wisely, guarding all men from danger
with just laws and sternly repelling the streams of lawlessness...For truly you are
Broadcasting Legitimacy 133