Production of immense historical works in almost unique copies, as a sort of conspicuous display, continued at mid-century in the grand-princely and metropolitan's workshops in the Kremlin. Three huge works showcased Moscow's piety, power, and historical legitimacy, associated with Metropolitan Makarii and artisans of Novgorod who joined Kremlin workshops when he left the Archbishopric of Novgorod to become metropolitan. The Illuminated Chronicle (Litsevoi letopisnyi svod) used the text of the Nikon Chronicle and later additions, but its spectacular novelty was its illustrations: more than half of almost each page (over 16,000 images in 20,000 pages) displayed a hand-painted depiction of the history described. Done in iconographic style by icon and fresco painters, this art constitutes one of the few loci of secular artistic imagery in Muscovy. In overall concept as well, the work was new, diverging from earlier Byzantine or East Slavic illustrated chronicles and also not emulating contemporary illustrated European printed books. Its artists might have devised their multi-episodic scenes from tropes in Orthodox icon and fresco painting. Thus it combined novelty with tradition, as did another huge compendium of the court of Ivan IV, Makarii's Great Menology (Velikie Minei Cheti). In size and content it was noveclass="underline" twelve immense monthly volumes of pietistic readings, including lives of saints particularly associated with Russian history and the court. But the messages of these works was the traditional providential message typical of Muscovite history writing: Russia belonged to God's creation, was a godly community, and was progressing to salvation. Apocalyptic ideas were also encountered at court and in religious writings in this time, expressed in some complex Novgorodian and Moscow icons and texts, but it was not a key theme in these officially produced histories and menology. An unwieldy project to showcase the dynasty demonstrates the limitations imposed by genre: unprecedented in Muscovite history writing, the Book of Degrees (Stepennaia kniga) was divided into chapters by ruler from Kyiv Rus' to Ivan IV; its text was edited from compendious chronicles to focus on individual grand princes. But it could not transcend the lack of narrative and argumentation intrinsic to annals.
These massive projects to define Muscovy's piety and legitimacy were done, apparently, for the court. None was printed and few were widely dispersed. The Stepennaia kniga was copied and distributed to a handful of monastic centers and the Menology had broader distribution. But the Illuminated Chronicle was never reproduced, never bound, and never taken from the Kremlin in Muscovite centuries. Immense and difficult to encompass, these compendia might have been more symbolic than communicative. Like treasures in royal courts around the world, they were written for display or for the edification of the court clerical and boyar elite; they stand as physical symbols of Moscow's territorial expansion and ideological control. For those literate folk who wrote, illustrated, or dipped into them, they do evidence Muscovy's unifying vision of legitimacy based on godly appointment and the tsar's piety and justice.
Other genres also disseminated that unifying vision to the elite at court. Frescos and icons in Kremlin cathedrals linked Moscow and its princes with the biblical narrative. Following Byzantine tradition, the interior decoration of Muscovite churches depicted the connection of heaven and earth through successive bands ofimages. As Otto Demus describes, the dome was the sphere ofGod and seraphim and Old Testament prophets; interior decoration transitioned to Christ's incarnation and his life in the middle band; at ground level, the saints who embodied God's grace on earth adorned walls and pillars. Images ofrulers were rarely included in Russian church interiors (unlike depictions of emperors in Byzantine churches), except for the princely necropolis in the Kremlin's Archangel Michael Cathedral. Here, each ruler was generically depicted, with a halo, on wall frescos. Otherwise, church interiors evoked the ruling family by honoring saints particularly associated with it, such as the sainted Metropolitans Peter, Aleksii, and Iona (fourteenth and fifteenth century) and Filipp (d. 1569). Their icons took honored places in the Kremlin Dormition Cathedral iconostasis. Here also was the revered Vladimir Mother of God icon: a twelfth-century Byzantine work, it had been brought to Kiev in 1125, to Vladimir in 1155, to Moscow temporarily in 1395, and in the late fifteenth century was permanently installed in the Dormition Cathedral (Figure 6.1).
Church interiors also served as political sites by displaying images of favorite saints from provincial centers conquered by Moscow. Revered, often credited with supernatural grace, such "miracle-working" local icons were transported with special ceremony to Moscow where they were copied and returned with fanfare to their hometowns, creating a sacral link between center and periphery. At mid- sixteenth century the Church officially recognized numerous local saints into the Church's official hagiography in further display of imperial unity.
These religious ensembles depicted the grand prince's power as grounded in his piety and devotion to the faith and legitimized by God's blessing. Court ceremony and texts accentuate the ideal ruler's splendor and majesty, but couch these attributes in a rhetoric of humility. Multiple sources in sixteenth-century Muscovy (such as works by Joseph Volotskii and Metropolitan Makarii's Menology) included the philosophy of sixth-century Byzantine theorist Agapetus, who reminded rulers that their power is like that of God, and therefore they must be humble, just, and protective of their people. Myriad Muscovite sources strike that theme. The Stepennaia kniga praises Vasilii III's justice, for example: "His imperial heart and mind are always on guard and deliberating wisely, guarding all men from danger with just laws and sternly repelling the streams of lawlessness ... For truly you are
Figure 6.1 The Illuminated Chronicle of mid-sixteenth century depicts Grand Prince Ivan III praying to the revered Vladimir Mother of God icon in the Kremlin's Dormition Cathedral. With permission of AKTEON Publishers.
called tsar... who are crowned with the crown of chastity and draped in the purple robe of justice." Eulogies to grand princes in chronicles throughout the Rus' lands praise them for their piety, patronage, of the Church and compassion to the poor, for their defense of the realm and their loyalty to their men. They are not praised for education, manliness, innovation, or worldly achievements. Implicitly, the purpose of political power is to lead one's people to salvation, set a moral example of Christian love, and preserve tradition—a cautionary message to an audience of rulers and elites busily pursuing empire and clan self-interest. Agapetus' advice to princes circulated through the seventeenth century; Kyiv Metropolitan Peter Mohyla printed a version in 1628 that was reprinted in Moscow in 1660. Peter I owned a copy of it, alongside a collection of rather different European theories of absolutism.
At the same time at mid-sixteenth century, as Boris Uspenskii and Viktor Zhivov have forcefully argued, rhetoric from the Church elevated the sacred stature of the ruler. By taking the title of "tsar," by emphasizing the powerful half of the Agapetan duality, by creating a coronation ceremony and later modifying it to add anointing, ideologues were asserting that the tsar's authority was other-worldly, connected to God, unchallengeable. Uspenskii and Zhivov stress that the image of the tsar as sacred was to be taken metaphorically, but that later generations often took it literally, producing a broadening of the concept of tsarist power. One might remark that such broadening complemented other discourses and political mandates that penetrated Russia, particularly in the seventeenth century, that encouraged rulers, particularly Aleksei Mikhailovich, to claim broader power over society and Church. Another important implication of the heightening of sacred rhetoric, Uspenskii notes, is that the only discourse of legitimacy in Muscovy became "pretenderism," that is, to claim blood kinship to the charismatic ruler. Uspenskii broadens the concept of "pretender" to all manner of political rivalries, but even the most narrow definition finds repeated examples in the political turbulence of the seventeenth century and later.