It is necessary, however, to credit the Phanariotes with a quite genuine devotion to the cause of learning and education, which they alone were able to provide inside the oppressed Christian ghetto. The advantages they obtained from the Porte (the Turkish government) for building schools and for developing Greek letters in the Romanian principalities of Moldavia and Walachia that were entrusted to their rule came to play a substantial role in the rebirth of Greece. Relations with the West
The Union of Florence became fully inoperative as soon as the Turks occupied Constantinople (1453). In 1484 a council of bishops condemned it officially. Neither the sultan nor the majority of the Orthodox Greeks were favourable to the continuation of political ties with Western Christendom. The Byzantine cultural revival of the Palaeologan period was the first to experience adverse effects from the occupation. Intellectual dialogue with the West became impossible. Through liturgical worship and the traditional spirituality of the monasteries, the Orthodox faith was preserved in the former Byzantine world. Some self-educated men were able to develop the Orthodox tradition through writings and publications, but they were isolated exceptions. Probably the most remarkable among them was St. Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, the Hagiorite (1748–1809), who edited the famous Philocalia, an anthology of spiritual writings, and also translated and adapted Western spiritual writings (e.g., those of the Jesuit founder, St. Ignatius of Loyola) into modern Greek.
The only way for Orthodox Greeks, Slavs, or Romanians to acquire an education higher than the elementary level was to go to the West. Several of them were able to do so, but in the process they became detached from their own theological and spiritual tradition.
The West, in spite of much ignorance and prejudice, had a constant interest in the Eastern church. At times there was a genuine and respectful curiosity; in other instances, political and proselytistic (conversion) concerns prevailed. Thus, in 1573–81 a lengthy correspondence was initiated by Lutheran scholars from Tübingen (in Germany). Although interesting as a historical event, this correspondence, which includes the Answers of Patriarch Jeremias II (patriarch 1572–95), shows how little mutual understanding was possible at that time between the reformers and traditional Eastern Christianity.
Relations with the West, especially after the 17th century, were often vitiated in the East by the incredible corruption of the Turkish government, which constantly fostered diplomatic intrigues. An outstanding example of such manipulation was the kharāj, a tax required by the Porte at each patriarchal election. Western diplomats were often ready to provide the amount needed in order to secure the election of candidates favourable to their causes. The French and Austrian ambassadors, for example, supported candidates who would favour the establishment of Roman Catholic influence in the Christian ghetto, while the British and Dutch envoys supported patriarchs who were open to Protestant ideas. Thus, a gifted and Western-educated patriarch, Cyril Lucaris, was elected and deposed five times between 1620 and 1638. His stormy reign was marked by the publication in Geneva of a Confession of Faith (1629), which was, to the great amazement of all contemporaries, purely Calvinistic (i.e., it contained Reformed Protestant views). The episode ended in tragedy. Cyril was strangled by Turkish soldiers at the instigation of the pro-French and pro-Austrian party. Six successive Orthodox councils condemned the Confession: Constantinople, 1638; Kiev, 1640; Jassy, 1642; Constantinople, 1672; Jerusalem, 1672; and Constantinople, 1691. In order to refute its positions, the metropolitan of Kiev, Petro Mohyla, published his own Orthodox Confession of Faith (1640), which was followed in 1672 by the Confession of the patriarch of Jerusalem, Dosítheos Notaras. Both, especially Petro Mohyla, were under strong Latin influence.
These episodes were followed in the 18th century by a strong anti-Western reaction that was inspired in part by Roman Catholic missionary activity and the church unions of Brest-Litovsk (1596), Uzhhorod (1646), and Antioch (1724), formal agreements under which several Orthodox priests agreed (under political coercion in the case of Brest-Litovsk) to accept the authority of the pope in Rome while being allowed to preserve liturgical and linguistic independence. In 1755 the Synod of Constantinople decreed that all Westerners—Latin or Protestant—had invalid sacraments and were only to be admitted into the Orthodox Church through baptism. The church of Russia (1448–1800) The “third Rome” Origin of the Muscovite patriarchate
At the Council of Florence, the Greek “metropolitan of Kiev and all Russia,” Isidore, was one of the major architects of the Union of Florence. Having signed the decree, he returned to Moscow in 1441 as a Roman cardinal but was rejected by both church and state, arrested, and then allowed to escape to Lithuania. In 1448, after much hesitation, the Russians received a new primate, Jonas, elected by their own bishops. Their church became autocephalous, administratively independent under a “metropolitan of all Russia,” residing in Moscow. In territories controlled by Poland, Rome (in 1458) appointed another “metropolitan of Kiev and all Russia.” The tendencies toward separation from Moscow that had existed in Ukraine since the Mongol invasion and that were supported by the kings of Poland thus received official sanction. In 1470, however, this metropolitan broke the union with the Latins and reentered—nominally—the jurisdiction of Constantinople, by then under Turkish control.
Cathedral of St. Basil the Blessed (built 1554–60), Moscow.K. Scholz/H. Armstrong Roberts
After this the fate of the two churches “of all Russia” became quite distinct. The metropolitanate of Kiev developed under the control of Roman Catholic Poland. Hard pressed by the Polish kings, the majority of its bishops, against the will of the majority of their flock, eventually accepted union with Rome at Brest-Litovsk (1596). In 1620, however, an Orthodox hierarchy was reestablished, and a Romanian nobleman, Petro Mohyla, was elected metropolitan of Kiev (1632). He suppressed the old school at Kiev that taught a curriculum based on Greco-Slavic letters and literature and created the first Orthodox theological school of the modern period, the famous Academy of Kiev. Modelled after the Latin seminaries of Poland, with instruction given in Latin, this school served as the theological training centre for almost the entire Russian high clergy in the 17th and 18th centuries. In 1686 Ukraine was finally reunited with Muscovy, and the metropolitanate of Kiev was attached to the patriarchate of Moscow, with approval given by Constantinople.
Muscovite Russia, meanwhile, had acquired the consciousness of being the last bulwark of true Orthodoxy. In 1472 Grand Prince Ivan III (reigned 1462–1505) married Sofia (Zoë), the niece of the last Byzantine emperor. The Muscovite sovereign began to use more and more of the Byzantine imperial ceremonial, and he assumed the double-headed eagle as his state emblem. In 1510 the monk Philotheus of Pskov addressed Vasily III as “tsar” (emperor), saying: “Two Romes have fallen, but the third stands, and a fourth there will not be.” The meaning of the sentence was that the first Rome was heretical, the second—Byzantium—was under Turkish control, and the third was Moscow. Ivan IV (the Terrible) was crowned emperor, according to the Byzantine ceremonial, by the metropolitan of Moscow, Makary, on Jan. 16, 1547. In 1551 he solemnly presided in Moscow over a great council of Russian bishops, the Stoglav (“Council of 100 Chapters”), in which various issues of discipline and liturgy were settled and numerous Russian saints were canonized. These obvious efforts to live up to the title of the “third Rome” lacked one final sanction: the head of the Russian church did not have the title of “patriarch.” The “tsars” of Bulgaria and Serbia did not hesitate in the past to bestow the title on their own primates, but the Russians wanted an unquestionable authentication and waited for proper opportunity. It occurred in 1589, when the patriarch of Constantinople, Jeremias II, was on a fund-raising tour of Russia. He could not resist the pressure of his hosts and established the metropolitan Job as “patriarch of Moscow and all Russia.” Confirmed later by the other Eastern patriarchs, the new patriarchate obtained the fifth place in the honorific order of the Oriental sees, after the patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. Relations between patriarch and tsar