The lifting up of soaring wooden pyramids from raised octagonal churches throughout this period probably represents the adoption of wooden construction methods which pre-existed Christianity in the Great Russian north. Whatever obscure relationship the Russian tent roof may bear to Scandinavian, Caucasian, or Mongol forms, its development from primitive, horizontal log construction and its translation from wood into stone and brick in the sixteenth century was a development unique to northern Russia. The new onion dome and the pointed onion-shaped gables and arches also have anticipations if not roots in other cultures (particularly those of Islam); but the wholesale replacement of the spherical Byzantine and early Russian dome with this new elongated shape and its florid decorative use-not least atop tent roofs-is also peculiar to Muscovy.1 The supreme surviving example of the Muscovite style, the wooden Church of the Transfiguration at Kizhi, on Lake Onega, has been likened to a giant fir tree because of the massive, jagged shape produced by superimposing twenty-two onion domes on its sharp, pyramidal roof. The new vertical thrust of the tent and onion shapes is related both to the material need for snow-shedding roofs and to the spiritual intensification of the new Muscovite civilization. These gilded new shapes rising out of the woods and snow of the north seemed to represent something distinct from either Byzantium or the West.
The Byzantine cupola over a church describes the dome of heaven covering earth; the Gothic spire describes the uncontainable striving upward, thi lifting up from earth to heaven of the weight of stone. Finally, our fatherland's "onion dome" incarnates the idea of deep prayerful fervor rising towards the heavens. . . . This summit of the Russian church is like a tongue of fire crowned by a cross and reaching up to the cross. When
looking from afar in the clear sunlight at an old Russian monastery or town, it seems to be burning with a many-colored flame; and when these flames glimmer from afar amid endless snow-covered fields, they attract us to them like a distant, ethereal vision of the City of God.2
Of all the gilded spires and domes that drew Russians in from the countryside to new urban centers of civilization none were more imposing than those of Moscow and its ecclesiastic citadel, the Kremlin. Seated on the high ground at the center of Moscow, the Kremlin had, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, gathered behind its moats and walls a host of objects which seemed to offer the Orthodox some "distant, ethereal vision of the City of God." Here were the largest bells, the most splendid icons (including the Vladimir Mother of God and Rublev's greatest iconostasis), and a cluster of magnificent new churches rising over the graves of princes and saints. Highest of all stood the domes of the bell tower of Ivan the Great. Its more than fifty bells represented the most ambitious single effort to simulate "the angelic trumpets" of the world to come; and the proliferation of lesser bell towers throughout the sprawling city of ioo,ooo3 attracted to the new capital the enduring designation of "Moscow of the forty forties," or sixteen hundred belfries.
Moscow, the second great city of Russian culture, has remained the largest city of Russia and an enduring symbol for the Russian imagination. The new empire of the Eastern Slavs that slowly emerged out of the divisions and humiliations of the appanage period was known as Muscovy long before it was called Russia. Moscow was the site of the "third Rome" for apocalyptical monks in the sixteenth century, and of the "third international" for apocalyptical revolutionaries in the twentieth. The exotic beauty of the Kremlin-even though partly the work of Italians-came to symbolize the prophetic pretensions of modern Russia and its thirst for some earthly taste of the heavenly kingdom.
Of all the northern Orthodox cities to survive the initial Mongol assault, Moscow must have seemed one of the least likely candidates for future greatness. It was a relatively new wooden settlement built along a tributary of the Volga, with shabby walls not even made of oak. It lacked the cathedrals and historic links with Kiev and Byzantium, of Vladimir and Suzdal; the economic strength and Western contacts of Novgorod and Tver; and the fortified position of Smolensk. It is not even mentioned in the chronicles until the mid-twelfth century, it did not have its own permanent resident prince until the early fourteenth, and none of its original buildings are known to have survived even into the seventeenth.
The rise of the "third Rome," like that of the first, has long tantalized historians. There are almost no surviving records for the critical 140 years
between the fall of Kiev and the turning of the Tatar tide under the leadership of Moscow at Kulikovo field in 1380. Perhaps for this very reason, there is a certain fascination in weighing and balancing the factors usually cited to explain the rapid emergence of Muscovy: its favorable central location, the skill of its grand dukes, its special position as collecting agent of the Mongol tribute, and the disunity of its rivals. Yet these explanations-like those of Soviet economic determinists in more recent years-seem insufficient to account fully for the new impetus and sense of purpose that Muscovy suddenly demonstrated-in the icon workshop as well as on the battlefield.
To understand the rise of Muscovy, one must consider the religious stirrings which pre-existed and underlay its political accomplishments. Long before there was any political or economic homogeneity among the Eastern Slavs, there was a religious bond, which was tightened during the Mongol period.
The Orthodox Church brought Russia out of its dark ages, providing a sense of unity for its scattered people, higher purpose for its princes, and inspiration for its creative artists. In the course of the fourteenth century, the prevailing term for a simple Russian peasant became krest'ianin, which was apparently synonymous with "Christian" (khristianin).* The phrase "of all Rus'," which later became a key part of the tsar's title, was first invoked at the very nadir of Russian unity and power at the turn of the thirteenth century, not by any prince, but by the ranking prelate of the Russian Church, the Metropolitan of Vladimir.5 The transfer of the Metropolitan's seat from Vladimir to Moscow in 1326 was probably an even more important milestone in the emergence of Moscow to national leadership than the celebrated bestowal by the Tatars in the following year of the title "Great Prince" on Ivan Kalita, Prince of Moscow. Probably more important than Kalita or any of the early Muscovite Princes in establishing this leadership was Alexis, the fourteenth-century Metropolitan of Moscow, and the first Muscovite ever to occupy such a high ecclesiastical position.
Within the church the monasteries played the key role in the revival of Russian civilization, just as they had somewhat earlier in the West. Monastic revival helped to consolidate the special position of Moscow within Russia, and inspired Russians everywhere with the sense of destiny, militance, and colonizing zeal on which subsequent successes depended.
The monastic revival of the north took definite form in the 1330's, when Metropolitan Alexis began to build a large number of churches within the Moscow Kremlin, providing a new religious aura to the citadel of power and centers of worship for several new monastic communities. Unlike the carefully organized and regulated monasteries of Western Christendom,
these communities were loosely structured. Although they subscribed to the ritualized communal rule of St. Theodore Studite, discipline was irregular, the monks often gathering only for common meals and worship services. One reason for this relative laxness was the very centrality of the monasteries in Russian civilization. In contrast to most other monasteries of the Christian East, early Russian monasteries had generally been founded inside the leading princely cities, and monastic vows were often undertaken by figures who continued their previous political, economic, and military activities. Thus, the activities of Alexis as monk and metropolitan were in many ways merely a continuation under more impressive auspices of his earlier military and political exploits as a member of the noble Biakont family in Moscow. Yet Alexis' new-found belief that God was with him brought new strength to the Muscovite cause. His relics were subsequently reverenced along with those of the first metropolitan of Moscow, Peter, who had been canonized at the insistence of Ivan Kalita. The most important of the new monasteries built by Alexis inside the Kremlin was named the Monastery of the Miracles in honor of the wonder-working powers attributed to the saintly lives and relics of these early metropolitans.