Popular religiosity is incomprehensible apart from monasteries. No one knows how many existed at one time, but E. I. Kolycheva estimates that 486 monasteries were founded between 1448 and 1600. Typically, they began as hermitages or sketes. As they grew, metropolitans encouraged them to organise with rules of communal living. Monasteries were subordinate to a bishop or were patrimonial (ktitorskie) houses like the Kirillo-Belozerskii monastery, initially supported by Princes Andrei (d. 1432) of Mozhaisk and his son Mikhail (d. 1486) of Vereia.[150] Great houses maintained donation books recording gifts, copybooks with records of land grants and feast books that recorded names of benefactors. The names of provincial landowners predominate, but benefactors came from every category of free people. Donors made grants in return for prayers for their souls and those of family members and ancestors. Although the Orthodox never formulated a doctrine of purgatory, death rituals provided for memorial prayers for forty days. About 1400 believers began to think this inadequate to assure the salvation of kin, whether they had died recently or long before. Their solution was to request commemorations at monasteries containing relics of intercessors and which could perform prayer rituals presumably in perpetuity. In exchange they gave monasteries gifts.[151] By 1500 the culture of commemoration became institutionalised in sinodiki, recording the names of those for whom donations were made. Iosif Volotskii founded a monastery in 1479 with a system in which a small sum bought a place in an 'eternal' (vechnyi) sinodik, a list read independently of the liturgical cycle. Fifty roubles purchased entry in a 'daily' (posiavdnevnyi) sinodik, a shorter list read at places in the liturgy for commemorations. Anniversary feasts cost 100 roubles. Other houses maintained analogous systems. The rich arranged commemorations at several houses. Requests for tonsure and burial near a miracle worker began in the late fifteenth century.[152]
Moscow's rulers made pilgrimages to monasteries to pray, underwrite feasts and give presents. Ivan IV often went on extended pilgrimages. Thus, on 21 May 1545 he visited the Trinity-Sergius monastery, houses in Pereiaslavl', Rostov and Iaroslavl', the Kirill and Ferapont monasteries near Beloozero, and the Dmitrii-Prilutskii monastery and three other houses near Vologda. Spouses of Muscovite rulers created a gendered cult of St Sergius. In 1499 Sophia Palae- ologa, Ivan III's second wife, donated an icon cloth to the Trinity-Sergius monastery giving credence to a story that Sergius's intercession allowed her to give Ivan an heir, Vasilii III. Sixteenth-century ideologues wrote that the miracle resulted from a pilgrimage. Tsaritsa Anastasiia went on foot to Trinity in 1547 to pray for an heir, as did Tsaritsa Irina in 1585.[153] Elites, who scheduled memorial feasts and made tonsure and burial at monasteries part of their death rituals, sought by public displays to reinforce family and social identities. But it is useless to distinguish between popular and noble religiosity. Peasant visits are attested in miracle tales and in charters that show monasteries dispensed beer to ordinary folk at feasts by which they celebrated transition rites and commemorated ancestors. Laity constantly visited cenobite houses;
their faith blended folkways and Christian practice in a harmonious culture of
commemoration.[154]
As much for economic and political reasons as out of piety, princes granted monasteries immunities from taxes and tariffs on their commerce, salt works, agriculture and fisheries. Ivan III halted the practice and even confiscated monastic lands in Novgorod. Thenceforth he and his successors controlled the appointment of hegumens to big houses and periodically inventoried monastic charters, causing some to be revoked. Paradoxically, Vasilii III gave monasteries generous gifts and Ivan IV lavish ones. During the prosperous i530s-i550s and in the aftermath of the oprichnina, there were no restraints on the accumulation of property and the wealth of the great houses skyrocketed. By 1600 the Simonovskii monastery near Moscow owned over fifty villages in nineteen uezdy and the Trinity-Sergius monastery owned an estimated 118,000 hectares in forty uezdy and commercial and industrial holdings in over fifteen towns. Monasteries held at least 20 per cent of all arable land.[155]
All this wealth and the presence of monks from aristocratic families could not but undermine rules of communal property, equality of status and a simple life. Iosif Volotskii accorded the Simonovskii and Kirillo-Belozerskii monasteries a reputation for austerity, one he initially emulated at his monastery. Monks wore simple attire, ate and prayed as one and had no personal property. Unable to maintain this order, Iosif, or during the illness that killed him in i5i5 co-hegumen Daniil, wrote a new rule. It provided for three classes of monks with graded privileges for food, dress and personal effects, and a more relaxed regime. At most monasteries monks from landowning families constituted a large component and most of the officers. Those who made donations in return for tonsure enjoyed incomes from donated property until they died; those without property were artisans, low-level managers or did menial tasks.[156] The career and writings of Nil Sorskii (d. 1508) explain why Iosif singled out the Kirillo-Belozerskii monastery for austerity. Nil was tonsured there and before 1489 travelled to centres of Orthodox spirituality on
Mount Athos. This set Nil on a new spiritual path. He founded a semi-hermitic skete on the Sora River modelled on that of early holy men and on what Kirill's hermitage once was like; its monks supported themselves, prepared their own food and ate it in solitude; they had no property other than icons and books to guide their devotions. Nil wrote that silence and a simple life provided the only environment in which a monk might bring God into his heart. The means, citing Simeon the New Theologian and Gregory of Sinai, was to recite the prayer, 'Lord Jesus Christ Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner'. In Byzantium it was a prayer of Hesychast mystics.[157] About 14 per cent of all monasteries were convents. Subsidiaries of male houses were small and possessed little property. Others were patrimonial houses like the Kremlin convent of the Ascension which Grand Prince Dmitrii I's widow Evdokiia (the nun Efrosiniia) founded in 1407. Vasilii III assured it a permanent existence in 1518 /19 by building a masonry church to house Evdokiia's relics and by making it the burial church for grand princesses. The Novodevichii monastery, which Vasilii founded near Moscow in 1525, housed nuns from well-born families and a miracle-working icon, assuring it rich donations. By 1602-3 it had 141 nuns. Wealthy convents had social hierarchies reflecting that outside their walls. For a donation elite families entered female relatives on their rolls, or donors to male houses specified that on their death they or their widows be given cells. This elite controlled property, came and went on family business, had servants and ruled, subject to their patrons. Nuns, whose entry was not connected with a grant, were common sisters who did necessary labour and lived communally with less rations.[158]
150
E. I. Kolycheva, 'Pravoslavnye monastyri vtoroipolovinyXV-XVI veka', in N. V Sinitsyna (ed.),
151
Daniel H. Kaiser, 'Death and Dying in Early Modern Russia', in Nancy Shields Kollmann (ed.),
337-53.
152
Ludwig Steindorff, 'Sravnenieistochnikovob organizatsiipominaniiausopshikhvIosifo- Volokolamskom i Troitse-Sergievom monastyriakh v XVI veke',
153
Nancy S. Kollmann, 'Pilgrimage, Procession and Symbolic Space in Sixteenth-Century Russian Politics', in Michael S. Flier and Daniel Rowland (eds.),
154
Emchenko,
156
A. A. Zimin and Ia. S. Lur'e (eds.),
157
M. S. Borovkova-Maikova, 'Nil Sorskogo predanieiustav',
158
E. B. Emchenko, 'Zhenskie monastyri v Rossii', in N. V Sinitsyna (ed.),