This chapter surveys the institutional structure and economic position of the Russian Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century. After the relatively uneventful tenure of Patriarch Filaret, the Muscovite Church began to feel pressure for change from within and from without. When Patriarch Nikon became patriarch in 1652, many of the latent tensions within the Russian Church erupted into open conflict. During his tenure in Novgorod, Nikon made it clear that, in his opinion, the ecclesiastical hierarchy was the natural leader in the campaign to revitalize Russian Orthodoxy. Belief was a significant element in the resistance of the Don ossacks to Moscow's administrative control. The Russian Orthodox community had fallen into schism. In competition with the state-supported official Church, the Old Believers had begun to build their own organisations, select their own cadre of leaders and create their own religious culture. Thus, the Russian Orthodox Church soon had to bend before the onslaught of a wilful reforming autocrat.

The religious history of the fifteenth century was dominated by the Great Schism. The religious education of the laity had never occupied so high a place among the priorities of those clergy who took their duties seriously. The majority of priests capable of preaching and eager to do so effectively lived in towns, and thus their normal congregations represented only a small proportion of the total Christian population. At the beginning of the fifteenth century a ruling of the Inquisition listed the actions characteristic of a good and faithful Christian. The Catholic belongs to a complex society which cannot function without priests. Image-makers, painters and sculptors, put the resources of their talents and craft at the service of this multi-faceted religion. As people can estimate the frequency and regularity of religious practice, they can establish that the majority of the faithful did carry out the prescriptions of the Church, year in, year out.