Rulers also used architecture as a symbolic statement. Ivan III reconstructed the Kremlin churches into a magnificent ensemble (including a family cathedral, the metropolitan’s see, and a mortuary cathedral) that demonstrated not only his power and strength but, by incorporating architectural motifs from Novgorod and Pskov, the breadth of his conquests. Significantly, the centre-piece of the ensemble was the Dormition (Uspenskii) Cathedral, copied specifically from the metropolitan’s see in Vladimir, not the Kiev example. Throughout the sixteenth century, this church was replicated—at the Trinity-Sergius Monastery, in Pereiaslavl-Zalesskii, Rostov, Vologda, Kazan, and elsewhere—stamping the landscape with a specifically Muscovite cultural idiom. Grand princes also left symbols of their authority in new churches and monasteries built to commemorate military victories (Sviazhsk, 1551; Kazan, 1552; the Church of the Intercession on the Moat or ‘St Basil’s’ in Moscow, 1555–61; Narva, 1558; Velikie Luki, 1562) or to spread their patronage (Mozhaisk, 1563; Pereiaslavl, 1564).
The state also extended protection to all society for ‘injured honour’ (beschest’e) , implicitly defining the state as a community unified by honour. Honour was defined as loyalty to the tsar, to the Church, to one’s social rank, to family and clan. Specifically excluded from the community of honour were ‘thieves, criminals, arsonists, and notorious evil men’, while even minstrels, bastards, and slaves were included (1589 law code). The state also appealed to all its inhabitants with a vision of community by according all subjects, even non-Orthodox, the right to petition the ruler. Individuals used formulae that accentuated their personal dependence on him: they referred to themselves with self-deprecating, although stylized, labels and beseeched the ruler for ‘favour’, be it a grant of land, release from service, or the resolution of litigation. Around 1550 a ‘Petitions Chancery’ was founded to encourage individuals to bring their grievances directly to the ruler.
Petitions, like the Domostroi, suggest symbolically that the ruler and his people were united in a patriarchal, personal family, that the realm constituted a single, homogeneous community. It has been noted that early seventeenth-century texts portray the tsardom as a ‘God-dependent’ community in which all, high and lowly, are personally dependent on the ruler and all equally share a responsibility to serve him loyally and offer him virtuous counsel when he errs. Sixteenth-century chronicle sources also strike these themes of consensus, unanimity, and patrimonial dependence, emphasizing the personal affection between grand princes and their boyars, or criticizing boyars for not giving the ruler counsel or for seeking ‘personal power’ (samovlastie). It is impossible to say how well these ideas were internalized by various strata of the population, but they were consistently and clearly articulated in the sources.
The central focus for building a cohesive state was the court, which sought to project a coherent public image of the realm and its relationship to the élite. Genealogies of the Daniilovich family traced its descent to the Vladimir-Suzdal principality (twelfth and thirteenth centuries), while panegyrics and hagiography created a pantheon of Muscovite heroes, most notably Grand Prince Dmitrii Donskoi (1359–89). The court also patronized cults of the ‘Moscow miracle-workers’, three fourteenth- and fifteenth-century metropolitans (Peter, Alexis, Iona) closely associated with the ruling dynasty. All these texts identified Moscow accurately with its fourteenth-century roots.
In the sixteenth century this vision became more universalist and less accurate. Genealogical tales of the Muscovite grand princes began to extend the family line through Kiev to ancient Rome in a typically Renaissance quest for a classical heritage. By the mid-century even more grandiose visions were constructed, with their roots firmly in the Orthodox past. Metropolitan Makarii’s mid-century compilations of hagiography chronicles, and didactic texts presented Muscovy as a holy kingdom, part of universal Christianity, linked through Kiev Rus to Byzantine Christianity and ultimately to God’s creation of the earth. Icons such as ‘Blessed is the Heavenly Host’ (popularly known as the ‘Church Militant’), new court ceremonies such as Epiphany and Palm Sunday processions, and fresco cycles that filled the interiors of the Kremlin churches and palaces after the fires of 1547, all elaborated a ‘Wisdom Theology’ that immersed the reader or viewer in a biblical world. This vision was decidedly apocalyptic, lending great drama to the symbolic message and perhaps dispensing tension or exaltation among the viewers.
One should be quite clear about what Muscovite ideology was not saying in the sixteenth century. Moscow was not, for example, styling itself the ‘Third Rome’, heir to Rome and Byzantium and natural leader of the world. The ‘Moscow, the Third Rome’ text was a minor theme encountered in only a few ecclesiastical texts; it was originally used only to exhort the tsars to be just and humble, not to justify overweening power. It was most warmly embraced in the seventeenth century, and then by the schismatic Old Believers, at the same time that it was being discredited by the official Church. Nor did Muscovite ideology primarily exalt the tsar as next to God in power and as separate and above the common man. Although this viewpoint, associated with the Byzantine philosopher Agapetus, makes its appearance in mid-sixteenth-century texts, it was usually balanced with Agapetus’ injunction to rulers to govern justly and with mercy. Nor did Muscovy see itself as a secular or pluralistic kingdom. There is no trace in sixteenth-century Muscovy of the keen debates over the natio that flourished in sixteenth-century England, France, Poland, and seventeenth-century Ukraine. Russia was outside that world of discourse; it defined itself in religious, not secular terms, as a family and community, not a state.
Much of this imagery directly appealed to the élite by making use of allegorical military themes. Moscow’s boyars and élite, although illiterate, could absorb a consistent vision of the state and their place in it by gazing at the frescos, battle standards, and icons that decorated the churches and chambers where they attended the tsar. Allegorically these depicted the state as the Lord’s heavenly army, a remarkably apt and probably compelling image for a state whose élite was defined by military service.
The image of the state as a Godly community of virtuous warriors and dependents of the tsar was acted out in collective meetings that first appeared in the mid-sixteenth century. Councils of the Land (zemskie sobory) were summoned at the initiative of the ruler; he set the agenda which usually concerned the issue of war and peace, but occasionally succession and taxation. Those present generally came from non-taxed social strata. The Councils were not parliamentary assemblies; they possessed neither legal definition, nor legislative initiative, nor decision-making power, nor consistent and representative composition. They seem to have fulfilled other functions than legislation; indeed, in the wake of the abolition of regional governors, they served as means of communication of state policy to the countryside to mobilize support for its military and fiscal policy. They also played an important symbolic role by physically creating a community of tsar and people in ritual fashion that may have worked cathartically as Emile Durkheim described rituals working to energize the community, to build bonds, and to resolve tensions. Clearly these were the challenges that stood before Muscovite rulers in the sixteenth century as they sought to bolster stability in constantly growing and vastly diverse lands.