Ritual, with its attendant symbols and actions, powerfully expresses the ways in which members of a society, especially its elites, see themselves and wish themselves to be seen. The present chapter seeks to describe and analyse the function of ritual in representing political ideas in Muscovy before the seventeenth century. Political ritual refers to that set of conventionalised events ruled by protocol and consisting of separate acts performed in public whose purpose is to confirm or restore links to a commonly held political concept or belief for the ritual's participants and observers. The interlocking spheres of politics and religion in medieval society presuppose the presentation ofpolitical ideology within a spiritual framework. Religious symbolism approximates the harmony of political structure with the providence of God.
As with any rite, the successful performance of a ritual is understood to be transformative. A grand prince is made tsar; water is made holy to benefit those in need of grace; a subject is confirmed in his loyalty and politically inferior position; a society is rededicated to the possibility of resurrection after death. Such are the psychological and spiritual transformations rituals bring about.
The political life of Muscovite society was replete with rituals. Perhaps the most daunting was kissing the cross (krestnoe tselovanie) in a church to solemnify an oath or declaration as true. Princes forged alliances, confirmed treaties and attested wills by kissing the cross. Litigants in court disputes without clear evidence faced the terrifying prospect of standing before the cross, kissing it the fateful third time, and swearing the truth of their testimony. Frequently they opted for other forms of resolution.2
The ritual of petition produced different relationships. In describing ritual practice at the Muscovite court in the early sixteenth century, Sigismund von Herberstein, the ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor, wrote:
whenever anyone makes a petition, or offers thanks, it is the custom to bow the head; if he wishes to do so in a very marked manner, he bends himself so low as to touch the ground with his hand; but ifhe desires to offer his thanks to the grand-duke for any great favour, or to beg anything of him, he then bows himself so low as to touch the ground with his forehead.3
This ritual, combined with references to petitioners as slaves (kholopy) and the ruler as master (gosudar'), convinced many foreigners, including Herberstein, that Muscovy was a despotic state. Bit' chelom 'to beat one's forehead' was, after all, the Muscovite term for paying obeisance and the source for chelobitie (chelobit'e) 'petition', literally beating of the forehead.
Cross kissing was a Kievan and Muscovite ritual that confirmed a relationship of obeisance before God, rendering all persons, high and low, equal before their creator. The beating of the head, by contrast, was a ritual that confirmed an asymmetrical relationship, rendering petitioner and petitioned unequal in status and affirming the political and social hierarchy of Muscovite life.
Muscovy and the ideology of rulership
The correlation of ritual and political ideas begins with the historical transformation of Muscovy and the development of a myth to account for it. By
2 Giles Fletcher, 'Ofthe Russe Commonwealth', in Lloyd E. Berry and Robert O. Crummey (eds.), Rude and Barbarous Kingdom: Russia in the Accounts of Sixteenth-Century English Voyagers (Madison: University ofWisconsin Press, 1968), pp. 174-5; Nancy Shields Kollmann, By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 119-20.
3 Sigismund von Herberstein, Notes upon Russia., 2 vols., trans. R. H. Major (New York: Burt Franklin, 1851-2), vol. ii, pp. 124-5.
the mid-fifteenth century, Moscow was adjusting to an altered position in the world of Eastern Orthodoxy. Rejecting the Union of Florence and Ferrara, the Muscovites refused to consult the Greeks when selecting their new metropolitan in 1448 and in effect formed an autocephalous Orthodox Church. Thereafter, the Muscovite Church promulgated an anti-Tatar, anti-Muslim campaign in the chronicles in counterpoint to the pure Christian tradition represented by Moscow.[283] Moscow was increasingly portrayed as inheriting the legacy of Kievan Rus' and with it, the myth of the Rus'ian Land, which was ultimately incorporated into the myth of the Muscovite ruler.[284] Constantinople's capture by the Turks in 1453 and the seemingly providential expansion ofthe Muscovite principality thereafter opened new vistas for Ivan III when he ascended to the throne in i462.By 1480, Archbishop Vassian Rylo was urging him to become the great Christian tsar and liberator of the Rus'ian Land, the 'New Israel', in its struggle against the Golden Horde, the 'godless sons of Hagar'.[285]
The ideology that crystallised in Muscovy during the reigns of Ivan III (14621505), his son, Vasilii III (1505-33) and grandson, Ivan IV (1533-84) presented the Byzantine notion of the emperor-dominated realm as the Kingdom of Christ on Earth. If allusion to Agapetus gave the ruler absolute political authority over the state ('though an emperor in body be like all other men, yet in power he is like God'), the Epanagoge of Patriarch Photius and other Byzantine political literature known in Muscovy at the time broadly demarcated spheres of authority apportioned among temporal and spiritual leaders.[286] Church polemicists such as Iosif Volotskii in TheEnlightener praised the power and authority of the grand prince, but insisted on the mobilisation of wise advisers - temporal and spiritual - against authority that transgressed the laws of God.[287]
Muscovite rulership and the Kievan legacy were expressed most clearly in the invented tradition of The Tale of the Princes of Vladimir (c.1510). The
Roman genealogy that traced the Riurikid dynasty back to Prus, a kinsman of Augustus Caesar, may have been included to assure Europeans that the use of the term 'tsar' for the Muscovite ruler was legitimate. The Monomakh legend provided a Byzantine pedigree for Muscovite Orthodox rulership in the form of concrete royal symbols of authority sent by Byzantine emperor Constantine Monomachos to Vladimir Monomakh to be used at the latter's installation as Kievan grand prince.[288]
In theory the Muscovite ruler had unlimited power and authority in rendering God's will, but in practice he governed with the support and close involvement of a secular and ecclesiastical elite.[289] It was this ruling elite that faced the imminent Apocalypse at the approach of 1492, the portentous year 7000 in the Byzantine reckoning. In this context, the city of Moscow itself was reconceptualised in Orthodox Christian terms as the New Jerusalem and Muscovy came to be understood as the embodiment of the Chosen People, whose ruler chosen by God was prepared to lead them to salvation.[290]
Ritual and setting
In three centuries Moscow had evolved from a mere outpost to a city with a walled fortress and pretensions to greatness. By the 1470s, the earlier structures built to mark the rise of a city - limestone walls, stone churches, royal palace and halls - were dilapidated.[291] Ivan III, better than any of his immediate predecessors, understood how setting and ritual might serve to integrate the notions of the emerging Muscovite state and a ruling elite. In an impressive environment, solemn rituals could elevate the person of the ruler and help confirm his position at the apex of society. There was no place more suitable for rituals of high purpose than the Kremlin, the fortress of Moscow.
283
Donald Ostrowski,
284
Charles J. Halperin, 'The Russian Land and the Russian Tsar: The Emergence of Muscovite Ideology, 1380-1408',
286
Deno John Geanakoplos,
287
David M. Goldfrank,
289
Edward L. Keenan, 'Muscovite Political Folkways', RR 45 (1986): 128-36; Nancy Shields Kollmann,
290
Ostrowski,
291
I. E. Grabar' (ed.),