In so doing, Muscovy followed the example of most empires by creating a supranational ideology that depended upon a dominant religion, but not exclusively. Imperial ideologies need to somehow encompass their diverse peoples. As Karen Barkey reminds us, skillful imperial rulers patronize a dominant religion, but do not let the institutional Church run the show. In the Ottoman empire, for example, Sunni sultans openly made alliances with Sufi Muslims; they expected religious (kadi) judges around the realm to administer Sharia law in accord with local custom and sultanic law, not dogmatically. In Russia, similarly, the state's self- representation was based on Orthodoxy, but ecclesiastical interests were almost always subordinated to the political. It was a Chinggisid legacy to tolerate native religions, reflected in the Ottoman empire's giving them "separate, unequal, protected" status (in Barkey's phrase). In practice, this meant that the dominant religion, whether Orthodoxy or Sunni Islam, had the sole right to proselytize and convert, but that campaigns of conversion were rare. The status of other faiths could be lesser; in the Ottoman empire, non-Muslims paid higher taxes and wore different dress or other markers ofdifference; in the Russian empire, non-Orthodox often paid lower taxes and burdens such as military recruitment, but enjoyed limited access to official position and, as we have seen, could become targets of missionary activity campaigns when their homelands became desired objects (Middle Volga, Bashkiria). In both empires the dominant religion aggressively persecuted sects within the faith that they deemed hereticaclass="underline" in Russia, the Old Believers and Uniates; in the Ottoman empire, Shiites.
In turning to Byzantine Orthodoxy, then, Muscovy was grounding its imperial imaginary but not limiting itself. Byzantium provided a rich toolkit for claiming legitimacy—literary genres (chronicles, hagiography), religious ritual, political ceremony and regalia, icons and frescos, church architecture, and an elaborated political theory of ruler, state, and society. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century writers and artists at the grand prince's and metropolitan's courts projected an image of Muscovy as a powerful and pious godly realm using Byzantine precedents, such as coronation ceremonies (1498, 1547), icon themes and fresco cycles and the genre of chronicle writing. Moscow also borrowed from other influences. Ivan III's court, for example, took the Roman symbol of a double-headed eagle directly from the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperors in the late fifteenth century, and in the 1510s and 1520s Russia joined in an early modern European trend of claiming antique ancestry. Attributed to various authors with literary or diplomatic connections with central Europe, the Tale of the Princes of Vladimir depicted imperial regalia being transferred from Caesar Augustus to the Byzantine Emperor at Constantinople to Grand Prince Vladimir Monomakh in Kyiv, to the grand princes of Vladimir and finally to Moscow. About that time an exquisite crown of Uzbek golden filigree, given to Muscovite rulers before the fifteenth century, was modified with the addition of a cross and precious stones to support this claim of translatio imperii; it came to be called the "Crown of Monomakh." The Tale was deployed widely; parts of it were included in the 1547 coronation ceremony and scenes from it, notably one showing the grand prince in council with his men, were carved on an elaborate tsarist pew erected in the Dormition Cathedral.
In addition to linking Russia to Roman imperial heritage, the Tale might be considered an effort to promote the ruling Daniilovich dynasty, as it includes their genealogy alongside a scurrilous one of their rivals, the Lithuanian Gedyminides. In the first third of the sixteenth century, leading military and political clans (the boyar elite) were also assembling their genealogies as competition for status at court intensified. Tapping into translatio imperii legitimacy, several claimed mythic foreign ancestries from Europe or the Horde. Dynastic promotion persisted: Sergei Bogatyrev has shown that the coronation ritual was edited in the late 1550s to elevate the ruler's sacrality and a royal banner, helmet, and crown were also designed to elevate the ruler's glory, ultimately associating Ivan IV with the righteous victory of the Apocalypse. But it should be remarked that the dynastic theme pales in comparison to its use by Muscovy's contemporaries. In England, for example, secular writing, portraiture, and imagery shored up the new Tudor dynasty: Tudor kings commissioned histories to glorify their line; the Tudor rose appeared everywhere in interior decoration, clothing and mementoes, documents. Tudor kings adorned public buildings with frescos of themselves with family; they distributed portrait miniatures to followers and embossed their portraits on royal documents. British gentry followed suit by commissioning their own portraits and assembling galleries of images of rulers and dignitaries. Similarly, at the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ottoman court, the imperial imaginary combined the sultan's Islamic piety and justice with an accent on dynasty. Books of portraits of sultans were compiled, portrait medallions were widely distributed, and expert illuminators at the Topkapi palace compiled massive illustrated histories of Suleiman the Magnificent and his predecessors. Russia's Daniilovichi were not so expansive in their self-promotion.
Like the Tudors and Osmanlis, in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Russia's rulers did deploy art and history writing to project legitimacy, but with a religious, not dynastic, focus. Secular portraiture was unknown in Russia until the last quarter of the seventeenth century, when Polish cultural influence through Ukraine brought the genre to Russia. Once it arrived, portraits, as Lindsey Hughes has shown, were put to political ends. In oils, tempera, and printed frontispieces tsars, Patriarch Nikon, and courtiers depicted themselves in styles ranging from iconographic to realistic, often with insignia and baroque panegyrics extolling their piety, valor, and wisdom. Most notable were regent Sofiia Alekseevna's portraits of herself in coronation regalia. Similarly, sixteenth-century Russia lacked secular artists, literature, and printing. Ideological expression, like all creative expression outside of folk art, was in the hands of the Church.
Clerical authors and artists legitimized power by placing the state and ruler in the contexts of biblical history and Orthodox religiosity. Lacking a secular elite and genres of political philosophy in the Muscovite centuries, clerics did not produce theoretical statements about the relationship of tsar and people, the purpose of political power, or the rights and obligations of subjects. An ideology seeing the ruler as appointed by God and the realm as a godly community emerges between the lines of sources not necessarily designed for such a purpose. Muscovite history writing, for example, provided a vehicle for ideal images of ruler, state, and society, but it has to be read against the grain. Unfamiliar with either the Greek genre of istoria or its early modern European epigones (histories in which the author consciously shapes a persuasive narrative with argument and moral message), Muscovy used only the genre of annalistic chronicle. Chronicles are written paratactically, compiling information with no authorial voice, argument, or causal nexus. The intent was to record God's providential work on earth; in Russia, chronicles were written to inscribe Russian history into the path of universal Christendom. Princes were of course depicted as pious and just, but the genre of unsynthesized snippets of political, religious, and cosmic history, arranged chronologically, made it difficult to promote a dynasty, a ruler, or a political viewpoint. All was done implicitly. Moscow certainly did deploy the chronicle genre to assert its legitimacy. As it conquered neighboring East Slavic centers that had had their own chronicle tradition at bishops' sees (Novgorod, Pskov, Tver', Viatka-Perm, Rostov), Moscow developed the "all-Rus'" chronicle, massive compendiums that shuffled together thousands of snippets (sometimes longer tales) from all these places. This work culminated in the "Nikon" chronicle, completed in the 1520s, an immense melange of annalistic entries that began in biblical times, traced Christian history, and focused on Moscow's rise as regional power.