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12 - Art and liturgy in Russia: Rublev and his successors

from PART II - THE RUSSIAN CHURCH

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Lindsey Hughes
Edited by
Michael Angold
Michael Angold
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Summary

In the thirteenth century large parts of Russia fell to the Mongol invaders. The initial impact on religious life and art was devastating. Priests and monks were slain, churches and icons were burned, cult objects made of precious metals and gems were looted. The anonymous author of The Tale of the Destruction of Riazan, the first city to be attacked in 1237, recounted:

They burnt the whole city of Riazan with all its renowned beauty and wealth and seized the relatives of the princes of Kiev and Chernigov. They destroyed God’s churches and spilt much blood on the sacred altars. Not one person was left alive in the city, all had died and supped from the same cup of death. And all this came about for our sins.

Even if we make allowances for the rhetorical insistence upon complete annihilation, the losses were devastating. The sheer number of Orthodox Christians who perished at the hands of pagans, together with the belief that God had inflicted ruin on Russia as a punishment ‘for our sins’, left the survivors and their descendants with the imperative of praying for the souls of the dead and the salvation of the living. In this disaster lay the seeds of a religious revival that has been described as ‘the flowering of Russian holiness’.

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The Cambridge History of Christianity , pp. 276 - 301
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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