More conventionally Christian were the accounts of the lives of the founders of the Kiev Monastery of the Caves, Saints Antonii and Feodosii. Antonii’s life was that of a hermit seeking salvation and nearness to God by prayer, tears, and fasting. Feodosii’s portrait was that of the abbot, hegumen in the Eastern Church, who also fled the temptations of the world but built a great institution to make this path possible for others. It was he who sought out a rule of liturgical observance and monastic life from the great monastery of the Studiou in Constantinople and it was he who built the church, the monastery walls and buildings, and supervised the monks until his death. The Caves Monastery, like its prototype in Constantinople, was not physically remote from the city of Kiev: today it is well within the city boundaries and Feodosii’s monks withdrew from the world, in part, to serve it better. In later accounts the monks perform acts of heroic asceticism, but also demonstrate to the people of Kiev the superiority of Orthodox Christianity by predicting the future and healing the sick, often in direct competition with representatives of the Latin faith, Armenian Christianity, and Judaism, as well as pagan sorcerers. In Nestor’s account of Feodosii’s life the hegumen was not shy in condemning acts of the Kiev princes that he thought to be unjust. In 1073 Princes Sviatoslav and Vsevolod expelled the rightful ruler, their elder brother Iziaslav. The usurpers sent for Feodosii to join them at a feast to celebrate their victory, but the holy monk replied, “I will not come to the table of Beelzebub and eat food soaked with blood and murder.”
In Kiev, Vladimiir’s son Iaroslav built the cathedral of the Holy Wisdom, Saint Sophia, in 1037. The dedication was in imitation of the great church of Constantinople, the sixth century cathedral of the Emperor Justinian. Later rebuilding conceals the original look of the exterior, which probably followed the Greek norms of the time. The basic plan was a nave and transept of equal length (the “Greek cross”), which gave the building a squarish look, and the roof surmounted with round drums supporting the domes. These would have been the Byzantine hemispherical domes, not the characteristic onion shape of later Russian churches. The Kievan Saint Sophia was also a much more modest creation than its grand prototype and followed middle Byzantine style in using several smaller domes instead of the enormous central dome created by Justinian’s architects.
The Kievan Saint Sophia was also connected with the prince’s palace by galleries, with a special place reserved for the prince and his family – a Byzantine touch later abandoned in Rus. The magnificent mosaics and frescoes, still extant today, also followed the Greek prototype, with inscriptions everywhere in Greek. At the top was (presumably) Christ as Pantocrator, the ruler of the universe, below him the extant images of the apostles, the Mother of God, and then the Eucharist. On the walls were the life of Christ and his Mother, prophets, and saints. This order put Christ in heaven, then symbolically depicted his movement down from the world of the spirit to the earth. The path lay through his Mother, his apostles, and the Eucharist, three ways in which the spirit of Christ reached the material world and thus to all men. The physical structure of the church signified the presence of Christ in the world in consequence of the Incarnation.
The Kievan Saint Sophia, like Greek and other Rus churches of the time, presumably had a row of icons along the altar rail. This row was not yet the high icon screen of later Russian churches, and thus the cathedral may have contained only a dozen or so images. Few icons exist today that can be surely dated to Kievan times, and none can be placed with any certitude in Kiev’s cathedral. The twelfth century is richer in surviving icons, the most famous example being the image of the Vladimir Mother of God, a Greek (probably Constantinople) icon that found its way to Vladimir in the northeast, where it rested in the Cathedral of the Dormition of the Mother of God in that city. It is a typical work of the period, with Mary in fine dress holding the infant Christ in her arms, again the visible image of the Incarnation and the presence of Christ in the world that is the center of the Orthodox understanding of his role. The physical image itself was crucial to belief in Christ’s presence. As the Byzantine monk Saint Theodore of the Studiou monastery put it: “If reverence toward the image of Christ is subverted, then Christ’s incarnation is also subverted”.
As the peasants cleared the land and tended their crops, and the princes built churches and warred on one another, a cloud was gathering on the horizon. In 1223 a new and strange people appeared on the southern steppes, and the Kipchaks hastened to assemble allies from among the Rus princes. The combined army went out to meet the newcomers and found them on the River Kalka, just north of the Sea of Azov. The strangers were the Mongols, who utterly destroyed the Kipchak/Rus army and went on to raid the area of Kiev. “They returned from the river Dniepr and we know not whence they came or whither they went. Only God knows whence they came against us for our sins,” said the Novgorod chronicler. They would come again.
2 Moscow, Novgorod, Lithuania, and the Mongols
After the gradual disintegration of Kiev Rus, the regional powers that supplanted it began to grow apart. In these centuries the territories of Novgorod and the old northeast began to form a distinct language and culture that we can call Russian. Though the older term Rus persisted until replaced by Russia (Rossiia) in the fifteenth century, for this period we may begin to call the area Russia and the people Russian. In these centuries, Russia, like the other territories of Kiev Rus that would fall to Lithuania, experienced a cataclysm in the form of the Mongol invasion, one that shaped its history for the next three centuries.
The Mongol Empire was the last and largest of the nomadic empires formed on the Eurasian steppe. It was largely the work of Temuchin, a Mongolian chieftain who united the Mongolian tribes in 1206 and took the name of Genghis Khan. In his mind, the Eternal Blue Heaven had granted him rule over all people who lived in felt tents, and he was thus the legitimate ruler of all inner Asian nomads. The steppe was not enough. In 1211 Genghis Khan moved south over the Great Wall and overran northern China. His armies then swept west, and by his death in 1227, they had added all of Inner and Central Asia to their domains.
The astonishing success of the Mongols came from their ability to balance the advantages of nomadic society with the benefits of sedentary civilizations. The basic unit of Mongol society was the clan, and in each clan the women tended to the animals and the men learned the arts of war. Genghis Khan mobilized the whole of his people for war, and the Mongols were superb horsemen, disciplined and skilled warriors, and ruthless conquerors. They could not take cities with cavalry, however, and thus the Mongols recruited men from China and Central Asia who knew how to make and use siege engines. This combination was unbeatable. Rich cities like Khwarezm in Central Asia that tried to resist were exterminated. Spreading terror before them, the Mongol armies overwhelmed Iran and Iraq and took the rest of China. A typhoon prevented them from taking Japan, but only in Viet Nam was human resistance strong enough to defeat them.