Following Clement and Origen rather than Augustine, Orthodox theology spoke less about the drama of personal salvation than about that of cosmic redemption.20 Whereas Augustine willed to Latin Christendom a brooding sense of original sin and of pessimism about the earthly city, these Eastern fathers willed to Orthodox Christendom a penchant for believing that the Christian Empire of the East might yet be transformed into the final, heavenly kingdom. Hesychast mysticism encouraged the Orthodox to be-
lieve that such a transformation was an imminent possibility through a spiritual intensification of their own lives-and ultimately of the entire Christian imperium.
In times of change and dislocation, the historical imagination tended to look for signs of the coming end of history and of approaching deliverance. Thus, the growing sense of destiny in Muscovy was directly related to the anguish among Orthodox monks at the final decline and fall of Byzantium.
The flight into apocalyptical prophecy began in the late fourteenth century in the late-blooming Slavic kingdoms of the Balkans, and spread to Muscovy via a migration of men and ideas from the Southern Slavs. Unlike the Southern Slav influx of the tenth century, which brought the confident faith of a united Byzantium, this second wave in the fifteenth infected Russia with the bombastic rhetoric and eschatological forebodings that had developed in Serbia and Bulgaria as they disintegrated before the advancing Turks.
The Serbian kingdom, during its golden age under Stephen Dushan, ???1-^. represented in many ways a dress rehearsal for the pattern of rule that was to emerge in Muscovy. Sudden military expansion was accompanied by a rapid inflation of princely pretensions. With speed and audacity Dushan assumed the titles of Tsar, Autocrat, and Emperor of the Romans; styled himself a successor to Constantine and Justinian; and summoned a council to set up a separate Serbian patriarchate. He sought, in brief, to supplant the old Byzantine Empire with a new Slavic-Greek empire. To sustain his claim he leaned heavily on the support of Mt. Athos and other monasteries that he had enriched and patronized.
The Bulgarian kingdom developed during its much longer period of independence from Byzantium a prophetic tradition which was to be taken over directly by Muscovy. Seeking to glorify the Bulgarian capital of Trnovo, the chroniclers referred to it as the New Rome, which had supplanted both the Rome of classical antiquity and the declining "second Rome" of Constantinople.
When the infidel Turks swept into the Balkans, crushing the Serbs at Kossovo in 1389 and overrunning the flaming Bulgarian capital four years later, the messianic hopes of Orthodox Slavdom had only one direction in which to turn: to the unvanquished prince and expanding church of Muscovy. In 1390 a Bulgarian monk from Trnovo, Cyprian, became Metropolitan of Moscow, and in the course of the fifteenth century men and ideas moved north to Muscovy and helped infect it with a new sense of historical calling.21 The Balkan monks had tended to sympathize politically with the anti-Latin zealots in Byzantium and theologically with the anti-
scholastic Hesychasts. They brought with them a fondness for the close alliance between monks and princes which had prevailed in the Southern Slav kingdoms and a deep hatred of Roman Catholicism, which in their view had surrounded the Orthodox Slavs with hostile principalities in the Balkans and had seduced the Church of Constantinople into humiliating reunion. The Southern Slavs also brought with them Balkan traditions of compiling synthetic genealogies to support the claims of the Serbian and Bulgarian kingdoms against Byzantium, and a penchant for ornate and pompous language heavily laden with archaic Church Slavonic forms. Particularly noteworthy and influential was the Tale of the Great Princes of Vladimir of Great Russia, by a Serbian emigre who solemnly connected the Muscovite princes not only with those of Kiev and the legendary Riurik but with the even more fanciful figure of Prussus, ruler of an imaginary ancient kingdom on the Vistula and a relative of Augustus Caesar, who was in turn related through Antony and Cleopatra to the Egyptian descendants of Noah and Shem. This widely copied work also encouraged Russians to think of themselves as successors of Byzantium by advancing the extraordinary fiction that the imperial regalia had been transferred from Constantinople to Kiev by Vladimir Monomachus, who was said to be the first tsar of all Russia.22
Meanwhile, a sense of having superseded Byzantium was subtly encouraged by one of the very few ideological conditions of Tatar overlord-ship: the requirement to pray for only one tsar: the Tatar khan. Though not uniformly observed or enforced among the tribute-paying Eastern Slavs, this restriction tended to remove from view in Muscovy the names of the later Byzantine Emperors. Muscovy found it only too easy to view the collapse of this increasingly remote empire in the mid-fifteenth century as God's chastisement of an unfaithful people.
In the Muscovite view-which was developed retrospectively in the late fifteenth century-the Byzantine Church betrayed its heritage by accepting union with Rome at Lyons, at Rome, and finally at the Council of Florence in 1437-9.
Ill-equipped to evaluate the theological issues, Muscovy equated Rome with the hostile knightly orders of the eastern Baltic and the growing power of the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom. The Muscovite church refused to accept the decisions of the council, driving into exile the Russian representative who had approved them, Metropolitan Isidore. This Greek prelate became a Catholic in exile, and was replaced as metropolitan by a native Russian at the Russian Church council of 1448.23 The Turkish capture of Constantinople five years later came to be viewed as God's revenge on Byzantium and prophetic confirmation that the Russian church had acted wisely in repudiating the Florentine union. Yet the sense of Russian in-
volvement in the Byzantine tragedy was far greater than nationalistic historians have often been willing to admit. From the late fourteenth century on, Muscovy was sending financial support as well as expressions of sympathetic concern to Constantinople.24 Those fleeing the Turks brought with them the fear that the whole Orthodox world might succumb. When the Khan Akhmet attacked Moscow in 1480, a Serbian monk issued a passionate plea to the populace not to follow
the Bulgars, Serbs, Greeks . . . Albanians, Croatians and Bosnians . . . and the many other lands which did not struggle manfully, whose fatherlands perished, whose lands and governments were destroyed, and whose people scattered in foreign lands.
Then, almost in the form of a prayer:
May your eyes never see the bondage and ravaging of your holy churches and homes, the murder of your children and the defiling of your wives and daughters-sufferings such as the Turks have brought to other great and revered lands.25
In such an atmosphere, the psychological pressures were great for the comforting belief that the Christian Empire had not died with the fall of Byzantium and the other "great and revered" Orthodox kingdoms of the Balkans. The site of empire had merely moved from Constantinople to the "new Rome" of Trnovo, which became, by simple substitution, the "third Rome" of Moscow. This famous image originated with Philotheus of the Eleazer Monastery in Pskov, who probably first propounded it to Ivan III, though the earliest surviving statement is in a letter to Vasily III of 1511: