Political ideas and rituals

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521812276.018

17 - Political ideas and rituals

from Part II - The Expansion, Consolidation and Crisis of Muscovy (1462–1613)

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

Michael Flier

Edited by

Maureen Perrie

Show author details

Maureen Perrie: Affiliation:
University of Birmingham

Book contents

Get access

Summary

Shortly after the dedication of Moscow’s cathedral church in 1479, Grand Prince Ivan III accused Metropolitan Gerontii of contravening ritual tradition by leading the cross procession around the church counterclockwise (protiv solntsa) instead of clockwise (po solon’) during the dedication service. Perhaps Ivan was motivated by superstition, given the collapse of the previous reconstruction. Or perhaps he was influenced by the Catholic-orientated entourage around his second wife, Sophia Palaeologa, a former ward of the Pope. Whatever the cause, he forbade the consecration of any church in Moscow for three years while he investigated previous practice. Finding no conclusive protocols, he was obliged to recant in 1482 to prevent the metropolitan’s resignation. This rare personal episode involving ritual and political control reveals a connection that merits further enquiry.

Ritual, with its attendant symbols and actions, powerfully expresses the ways in which members of a society, especially its elites, see themselves and wish themselves to be seen. The present chapter seeks to describe and analyse the function of ritual in representing political ideas in Muscovy before the seventeenth century. Political ritual refers to that set of conventionalised events ruled by protocol and consisting of separate acts performed in public whose purpose is to confirmor restore links to a commonly held political concept or belief for the ritual’s participants and observers. The interlocking spheres of politics and religion inmedieval society presuppose the presentation of political ideology within a spiritual framework. Religious symbolism approximates the harmony of political structure with the providence of God.

Keywords

Dormition's rituals Cyclical rituals Contingent rituals Coronation ritual Muscovite rulership Muscovy political ideas Palm Sunday ritual

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Russia , pp. 387 - 408

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521812276.018 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Barsov, E. V., Drevne-russkie pamiatniki sviashchennogo venchaniia tsarei na tsarstvo (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1883).

Bocharov, G. N., ‘Tsarskoe Mesto Ivana Groznogo v moskovskom Uspenskom sobore’, in Vygolov, V. P. (ed.), ‘Pamiatniki russkoi arkhitektury i monumental’nogo iskusstva: Goroda, ansambli, zodchie (Moscow: Nauka, 1985).Google Scholar

Briusova, V. G., ‘Kompozitsiia “Novozavetnoi Troitsy” v stenopisi Uspenskogo sobora’, in Smirnova, E. S. (ed.), ‘Uspenskii sobor Moskovskogo Kremlia (Moscow: Nauka, 1985).Google Scholar

Dmitrieva, R. P., Skazanie o kniaz’iakh vladimirskikh (Moscow and Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1955).

Dukhovnye i dogovornye gramoty velikikh i udel’nykh kniazei XIV–XVI vv., ed. Cherepnin, L. V. (Moscow and Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1950).

Fennell, John, ‘The Last Years of Riurik Rostislavich’, in Waugh, D. C. (ed.), Essays in Honor of A. Zimin (Columbus, Oh.: Slavica, 1985).Google Scholar

Flier, Michael S., ‘Filling in the Blanks: The Church of the Intercession and the Architectonics of Medieval Muscovite Ritual’, ‘HUS 19 (1995).Google Scholar

Flier, Michael S., ‘K semioticheskomu analizu Zolotoi palaty Moskovskogo Kremlia’, in ‘Drevnerusskoe iskusstvo. Russkoe iskusstvo pozdnego srednevekov’ia: XVI vek (St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2003).Google Scholar

Flier, Michael S., ‘The Throne of Monomakh: Ivan the Terrible and the Architectonics of Destiny’, in Cracraft, James and Rowland, Daniel (eds.), ‘Architectures of Russian Identity 1500 to the Present (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003).Google Scholar

Flier, Michael S., ‘Till the End of Time: The Apocalypse in Russian Historical Experience before 1500’, in Kivelson, Valerie A. and Greene, Robert H. (eds.), Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice under the Tsars (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003).Google Scholar

Geanakoplos, Deno John, Byzantine East & Latin West: Two Worlds of Christendom in Middle Ages and Renaissance, Studies in Ecclesiastical and Cultural History (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966).

Goldfrank, David M., The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky, rev. edn, Cistercian Studies Series, no. 36 (Kalamazoo, Mich., and Cambridge, Mass.: Cistercian Publications, 2000).

Grabar’, I. E., et al. (eds.), ‘Istoriia russkogo iskusstva, 13 vols. (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1953–64), vol. III (1955), vol. IV (1959).

Hakluyt, Richard, The Principall Navigations Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation, 2 vols., facs. edn, ed. Quinn, David Beers and Skelton, Raleigh Ashlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965).

Halperin, Charles, ‘The Russian Land and the Russian Tsar: The Emergence of Muscovite Ideology, 1380–1408’, FOG 23 (1976).Google Scholar

Kämpfer, Frank, ‘“Ruβland an der Schwelle zur Neuzeit“: Kunst, Ideologie und historisches Bewuβtsein unter Ivan Groznyj’, ‘JGO 23 (1975).Google Scholar

Keenan, Edward L., ‘Muscovite Political Folkways’, RR 45 (1986)Google Scholar

Kollmann, Nancy Shields, Kinship and Politics: The Making of the Muscovite Political System, 1345 –1547 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987).

Kollmann, Nancy Shields, ‘Consensus Politics: The Dynastic Crisis of the 1490s Reconsidered’, RR 45 (1986).Google Scholar

Kollmann, Nancy Shields, By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999).

Kotošixin, Grigorij, O Rossii v carstvovanie Alekseja Mixajloviča. Text and commentary, ed. Pennington, A. E. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).

Majeska, George P., Russian Travelers to Constantinople in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, Dumbarton Oaks Studies, no. 19 (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1984).

Majeska, George P., ‘The Moscow Coronation of 1498 Reconsidered’, JGO 26 (1978).Google Scholar

Miller, David B., ‘The Velikie Minei Chetii and the Stepennaia Kniga of Metropolitan Makarii and the Origins of Russian National Consciousness’, FOG 26 (1979).Google Scholar

Nazarenko, A. V., Drevniaia Rus’ na mezhdunarodnykh putiakh. Mezhdistsiplinarnye ocherki kul’turnykh, torgovykh, politicheskikh sviazei IX–XII vekov (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 2001).

Nikol’skii, Konstantin, Osluzhbakh Russkoi tserkvi byvshikh vprezhnikh pechatnykh bogosluzhebnykh knigakh (St Petersburg: Tipografiia Tovarishchestva ‘Obshchestvennaia pol’za’, 1885).

Ostrowski, Donald, Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, 1304–1 5 89 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Pelenski, Jaroslaw, ‘The Origins of the Official Muscovite Claims to the “Kievan Inheritance”’, HUS 1 (1977).Google Scholar

Pelenski, Jaroslaw, ‘The Emergence of the Muscovite Claims to the Byzantine-Kievan “Imperial Inheritance”’, HUS 7 (1983).Google Scholar

Podobedova, O. I., Moskovskaia shkola zhivopisi pri Ivane IV: Raboty v Moskovskom Kremle 40-kh–70-kh godov XVI v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1972).

Poe, Marshall, ‘A People Born to Slavery’: Russia in Early Modern Ethnography, 1476–1748 (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 2000).

Possevino, Antonio, The Moscovia of Antonio Possevino, S.J., intro. and trans. Graham, Hugh F., UCIS Series in Russian and East European Studies, no. 1 (Pittsburgh: University Center for International Studies, University of Pittsburgh, 1977).

PSRL, vol. XX, pt. 1 (St Petersburg: Tipografiia M. A. Aleksandrova, 1910).

Rowland, Daniel, ‘Moscow–the Third Rome or the New Israel?’, RR 55 (1996).Google Scholar

Savarenskaia, T. F. (ed.), Arkhitekturnye ansambli Moskvy XV–nachala XX vekov: Printsipy khudozhestvennogo edinstva (Moscow: Stroiizdat, 1997).

Ševčenko, Ihor, ‘A Neglected Byzantine Source of Muscovite Political Ideology’, Harvard Slavic Studies 2 (1954); reprinted in Cherniavsky, Michael (ed.), The Structure of Russian History. Interpretive Essays (New York: Random House, 1970); and in Ševčenko, Ihor, Byzantium and the Slavs in Letters and Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1991).Google Scholar

Sterligova, I. A., ‘Ierusalimy kak liturgicheskie sosudy v Drevnei Rusi’, in Batalov, Andrei and Lidov, Aleksei (eds.), Ierusalim v russkoi kul’ture (Moscow: Nauka, 1994).Google Scholar

Tolstaia, T. V., Uspenskii sobor Moskovskogo Kremlia (Moscow: Nauka, 1979).

Uspenskii, B. A., Tsar‘i patriarkh: Kharizma vlasti v Rossii (Vizantiiskaia model‘i ee russkoe pereosmyslenie) (Moscow: Iazykirusskoi kul’tury, 1998).

von Herberstein, Sigismund, Notes upon Russia, 2 vols., trans. Major, R. H. (New York: Burt Franklin, 1851–2).

Vygolov, V. P., Arkhitektura Moskovskoi Rusi serediny XV veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1988).

Zhivov, V. M., and Uspenskii, B. A., ‘Tsar’ i Bog: Semioticheskie aspekty sakralizatsii monarkha v Rossii’, in Iazyki kul’tury i problemy perevodimosti (Moscow: Nauka, 1978).Google Scholar

Book contents

17 - Political ideas and rituals

Summary

Keywords

Access options

References

Save book to Kindle

Save book to Dropbox

Save book to Google Drive