Why did Moscow imitate Byzantium, but did not become the Third Rome?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Where did we get the tradition of opposing the West? What did Russia take from Constantinople, in addition to domes on churches, Orthodoxy and the Old Bulgarian language? Why did Moscow constantly imitate Byzantium, but did not become the Third Rome? Why did the Byzantine emperors let go of their beards? In which region of present-day Russia was the last fragment of Byzantium preserved? Andrey Vinogradov, Candidate of Historical Sciences, Associate Professor at the Higher School of Economics, told Lente.ru about all this.

Justinian's plague

"Lenta.ru": It is known that the term "Byzantium" was invented by European historians during the Renaissance, and the Byzantines themselves called themselves Romans - that is, the Romans. But was Byzantium a natural continuation of Ancient Rome, preserved for another thousand years?

Andrei Vinogradov: Antiquity specialist Elena Fedorova figuratively wrote in her book that the inhabitants of Rome, waking up in the morning, did not yet realize that the Middle Ages had already begun. Historians have been arguing for a long time about where Rome ends and Byzantium begins. There is a wide range of dating - from the Edict of Milan in 313, when Christianity became a legal religion in the empire, to the death of the Basileus Heraclius in 641, when Byzantium lost vast territories in the East. By that time, there had been not only the transformation of the title of the ruler and changes in his appearance (henceforth, in imitation of the Persian Sassanids, the Byzantine emperors began to wear long beards), but also the replacement of Latin by the Greek language in official office work.

Therefore, most historians call this period (from the beginning of the 4th century to the middle of the 7th century) the early Byzantine era, although there are those who consider that time a continuation of Roman antiquity. Of course, the transformation of the Roman Empire with the growth of directly Byzantine signs (Christianity as a state religion, the rejection of Latin, the transition from the counting of years by the consuls to the era from the creation of the world, wearing a beard as a sign of the transition to the eastern version of the representation of power) took place gradually. For example, the Patriarch of Constantinople began to participate in the coronation of the Byzantine emperor only from the middle of the 5th century. This was a very important moment, because from now on the emperor received power not only from the Senate and the army, as it was before, but also from God.

It was then that the idea of a symphony appeared - the consent of the state and church authorities, borrowed by Russia from Byzantium?

It appeared a century later - under Justinian I, when the coronation began to take place in the newly built Hagia Sophia. But the source of law was still the laws of the twelve tables and the opinions of Roman lawyers. Justinian codified them, and only translated the new legislation (Novellae) into Greek.

Of course, Byzantium became a natural continuation of Ancient Rome, albeit a peculiar one. When in 395 the emperor Theodosius divided the empire between his sons - Arkady and Honorius, both parts of it began to develop in different ways. What we now call Byzantium is the transformation of the Eastern Roman Empire, while the Western Roman Empire degraded and disappeared under the onslaught of the barbarians in 476.

But after a few decades, Emperor Justinian managed to recapture the territory of modern Italy from the barbarians, along with Rome, part of Spain and the southern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Why did the Byzantines fail to gain a foothold there?

First, it testifies that by that time the paths of the West and the East of the Roman Empire had completely parted. The Eastern Roman Empire gradually switched to Greek traditions, not only in culture, but also in the system of government. In the West, the leading role remained with Latin. This was one of the first manifestations of the growing cultural and civilizational alienation between different parts of the once united state.

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Secondly, during the Great Migration of Peoples, the Eastern Roman Empire more successfully resisted the onslaught of the barbarians than the Western. And although the barbarians several times besieged Constantinople and regularly devastated the Balkans, in the East the empire was able to withstand, unlike the West. Therefore, it was already too late when, under Justinian, the Byzantines decided to retake the West from the barbarians. By that time, the ethnocultural and political landscape there had irreversibly changed. The Ostrogoths and Visigoths who came there for several decades mixed with the local Roman population, and for them the Byzantines were considered strangers.

Third, the continuous wars against the barbarians in the West and against Persia in the East severely undermined the strength of the Byzantine Empire. In addition, it was at this time that she seriously suffered from an epidemic of the bubonic plague (Justinian's plague), after which it took a long and difficult time to recover. According to some estimates, up to a third of the empire's population died in the Justinian plague.

Dark Ages

That is why a century later, during the Arab invasion, Byzantium lost almost all of the Eastern Mediterranean - the Caucasus, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Libya?

For this reason, too, but not only. In the VI-VII centuries, Byzantium was greatly overextended under the weight of internal and external challenges. For all his successes, Justinian was unable to overcome the religious schism that had been tearing apart the empire since the 4th century. Within Christianity, opposing currents appeared - Nikeanism, Arianism, Nestorianism, Monophysitism. They were supported by the inhabitants of the eastern provinces, and Constantinople severely persecuted them for heresy.

Therefore, in Egypt or Syria, the local Monophysite Christians happily greeted the Arab conquerors, because they hoped that they would not prevent them from believing in God as they saw fit, unlike the hated Chalcedonian Greeks. By the way, at first it was so. Another example concerns the year 614. Then the Jews helped the Persians take Jerusalem, with whom the Byzantines waged a protracted and bloody war. According to some versions, the reason was simple - Heraclius was going to forcibly convert Jews to Christianity.

Did the climatic changes that happened at the same time influence the weakening of Byzantium?

Byzantium has always been influenced by natural factors. For example, in 526 a strong earthquake completely destroyed one of the largest cities of the empire - Antioch. The climatic pessimum of the early Middle Ages led to a noticeable cooling. Then the Bosphorus even froze, and huge ice floes crashed against the city walls of Constantinople, which caused fear and horror among its inhabitants, who were expecting the end of the world.

Of course, the climatic pessimum, coupled with the reduction in the economic base of the empire due to the loss of many eastern provinces, greatly weakened it. When, under the onslaught of the Arabs, Constantinople lost control over Egypt, which had long supplied it with bread, it became a real disaster for Byzantium. When all these factors coincided, the Eastern Roman Empire plunged into the "dark ages" for two centuries.

The historian Andrei Andreev said that European jurisprudence is based on Justinian's digests found in Italy in the 11th century. You said that on the eve of this, there were "dark ages" in Byzantium, after which Byzantine legislation included many norms of barbarian law."Dark Ages" in the history of Byzantium - what is this?

The term was borrowed in the history of Byzantium from the Western cultural tradition, where the "Dark Ages" was the name of the period from the fall of the Western Roman Empire at the end of the 5th century to the "Carolingian Renaissance" at the end of the 8th century. In the Eastern Roman Empire, the "dark ages" were reckoned from the Arab conquests of the 7th century and the Avar-Slavic invasion of the Balkans. This era ended in the middle of the 9th century, which coincided with the end of Byzantine iconoclasm, and then with the establishment of the Macedonian dynasty.

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The "Dark Ages" is a heterogeneous and ambiguous historical period, when Byzantium either stood on the brink of final destruction, or won major victories over its enemies. On the one hand, an obvious cultural decline was observed in the empire: monumental construction ceased for a long time, many techniques of ancient architecture and art were lost, ancient books ceased to be copied.

On the other hand, all this paradoxically led to the penetration of Byzantine cultural traditions into the West. At that time, only Byzantine masters could create such masterpieces as the frescoes in the papal church of Santa Maria Antiqua in Rome or the frescoes in the Lombard temple in Castelseprio near Milan. The Muslim invasion of the East led to the fact that the local Christian population in whole provinces moved to the West. There is a known case when, after one Arab raid on Cyprus, almost all the inhabitants of Constantiana, the main city of the island, migrated to the Balkans.

That is, the "dark ages" also had positive sides?

Yes, after the suppression of the Roman state tradition and some barbarization of government and law, these same yesterday's barbarians began to quickly flow into Byzantine society. Actively working social elevators and vertical dynamics allowed the empire to recover relatively quickly from the "dark ages". In addition, Byzantium at that time was able to draw the majority of neighboring peoples into the orbit of its political, economic and cultural influence, which gave them a powerful impetus for further development. Historian Dmitry Obolensky called this phenomenon "Byzantine Commonwealth of Nations." Take, for example, the writing that the Goths, most of the Slavs, Georgians, Armenians and Caucasian Albanians received from the Byzantines.

Was Ancient Russia a member of this "Byzantine Commonwealth of Nations"?

Partially. Russia in relations with Byzantium generally occupied a special position. Politically, it did not depend in any way on Constantinople. The exception was the ruler of the Tmutarakan principality, who was part of the political system of the Rurik power and at the same time had the status of a Byzantine archon. This is a typical example of double legitimation - a frequent occurrence in the history of relations between large empires and their outskirts.

But in ecclesiastical and cultural terms, the dependence of Russia on Byzantium existed for a very long time. For several centuries, the Russian Church was part of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Everything that we now associate with Ancient Russia - temples and domes on them as a symbol of the firmament, icons, frescoes, mosaics, books - is a Byzantine heritage. Even most of the modern Russian names that appeared with us along with Christianity are of ancient Greek or Hebrew origin.

This cultural and religious expansion was a deliberate policy of Constantinople. For example, after the defeat of the First Bulgarian Kingdom in 1014 by the emperor Vasily II the Bulgar fighter, the Byzantines got a lot of Slavic church books among the trophies, which they turned out to be completely unnecessary, since they were going to form the church structure in this territory in Greek.

Therefore, all these books went to Russia, which recently adopted Christianity from Byzantium. This is how the Church Slavonic language came to our ancestors (in fact, it is a variant of the Old Bulgarian language) and a written cultural tradition. One of the oldest Russian books "Izbornik 1076" is a copy of the Izbornik "Izbornik" by the Bulgarian Tsar Simeon I, rewritten in Russia.

How strong was the Greek influence on Russia in the late Byzantine era? Historian Mikhail Krom in an interview with "Lente.ru" said that after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the marriage of Ivan III to Sophia Palaeologus, Moscow adopted not only Byzantine terminology like the term "autocrat" (autocrat), but also long forgotten in their homeland customs and court ceremonies.

The Mongol invasion of Russia and the fall of Constantinople in 1204 severely disrupted the ties between Russia and Byzantium. This is even noticeable in the surviving ancient Russian texts. Since the 13th century, Constantinople has been slowly disappearing from the horizon of Russian life, but not completely.

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In the ecclesiastical sphere, Byzantium continued to exert a serious influence here, especially from the time when, after the Mongol invasion, two rival political forces emerged in Russia - Moscow and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. When the Metropolitan of Kiev moved first to Vladimir and then to Moscow, they regularly tried to create their own metropolis in the Western Russian lands subordinate to Lithuania. In Constantinople, this situation was successfully manipulated - either they recognized a separate metropolitanate in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, then in this dispute they took the side of Moscow.

But here the main thing is different - if the Western Russian lands (the Galicia-Volyn principality and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania), under the influence of contacts with their western neighbors, entered the European political world, then in northeastern Russia (in Moscow or Tver) a political model was established according to the pre-Mongol Byzantine sample. When Moscow got stronger and stronger, it really began to imitate Constantinople and strove to become a new sacred center.

The Wrong of the West

Hence the royal title of Ivan the Terrible?

Yes, as well as the desire to install its own patriarch in Moscow. The fact is that Constantinople considered itself both the New Rome and the New Jerusalem. It was there that all the main relics of the empire were concentrated - the Life-giving cross, the crown of thorns of Christ and many other shrines taken to Europe by the crusaders after the capture of the city in 1204. Later, Moscow imitated both Constantinople as the New Rome (hence the "city on seven hills") and Jerusalem. In other words, Constantinople was the focus of many Roman-pagan and Eastern Christian traditions and ceremonies, perceived by Moscow precisely in the Byzantine form.

You spoke about the capture and plundering of Constantinople by the European crusaders in 1204. The historian Alexander Nazarenko believes that this very moment became a turning point in the perception of the Russian people of their western neighbors, after which the "cultural and civilizational demarcation of the Catholic West and the Orthodox East" began. I also read that it was from this event that the tradition of anti-Western propaganda in Russia, which was carried out here by Byzantine clergy, originated. But was it the beginning of the decline of the once mighty empire?

Politically, 1204 was a complete disaster for Byzantium, which briefly disintegrated into several states. As for the religious sphere, the situation here is even more paradoxical. Until 1204, Russia was indeed constantly in ecclesiastical contact with the West, even in spite of the schism of 1054. As we now know, in the XII century Russian pilgrims visited Santiago de Compostela (Spain), their graffiti was recently found in Saint-Gilles-du-Garde, Ponce (France) and Lucca (Italy).

For example, when, in the 11th century, the Italians kidnapped the relics of St. Nicholas and took them to Bari, this event became a disaster for the Byzantines, and in Russia, on this occasion, they quickly established a new religious holiday, popularly known as Nikola Veshny. However, the capture of Constantinople by the Latins in 1204 was perceived in Russia no less painfully than in Byzantium itself.

Why?

First, the traditions of anti-Latin discussion are older than the events of 1204. Theological understanding of the "untruth of the West" began first in Byzantium, and then in Russia, approximately from the Photius schism of the 9th century. Secondly, this was superimposed on the formation of Old Russian identity - such processes always go through repulsion from the Other.

In this case, it was about the denial of those who prayed differently and received Communion in the wrong way. In these conditions, the Byzantine anti-Western polemic was perceived in Russia much stronger and lay on fertile ground. Therefore, the Russian Church in the matter of preserving the purity of the faith turned out to be stricter than Constantinople, which, for the sake of its own survival, concluded the Union of Lyons in 1274 and the Union of Florence in 1439 with the Vatican.

In your opinion, the Union of Florence and the help of the West could have saved Byzantium from a final collapse, or the empire was already doomed by that time?

Of course, by this time Byzantium had outlived its usefulness and was doomed. It’s even amazing how she was able to last until the middle of the 15th century. In fact, the empire was supposed to fall at the end of the XIV century, when the Ottoman Turks besieged and nearly took Constantinople. Byzantium was able to survive for another half a century thanks to the invasion of Tamerlane, who defeated the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid I in the battle of Ankara in 1402. As for the West, after the Union of Florence, he really tried to help the Greeks. But the crusade against the Ottoman Turks, assembled under the auspices of the Vatican, ended with the defeat of the European knights at the battle of Varna in 1444.

Crimean shard of Byzantium

Now we sometimes like to say that the West constantly deceived Byzantium and, as a result, left it at the mercy of the Turks.

If we are talking about the events of the 15th century, then this is not at all the case. The Byzantines tried to deceive the Latins in the same way - they were well aware of their cunning not only in the West. In Russia, at the beginning of the 12th century, the chronicler wrote that "the Greeks are crafty." From the memoirs of Sylvester Syropulus it is clear that in Florence the Byzantines did not want to sign the union at all, but they simply had no other choice.

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If we talk about the Turks, by the middle of the 15th century they had captured almost all of the Balkans and were already threatening other European countries, while Constantinople remained deep in their rear. The only people who really helped the Byzantines defend it during the siege of 1453 were the Genoese. So, I consider such reproaches unfair - unfortunately, they are very often used in our country to politicize the events of the past.

The principality of Theodoro in Crimea, which outlived Byzantium by 20 years, was its last fragment?

Yes, this late Byzantine state fell in 1475 along with the last Genoese fortresses in the Crimea. But the problem is that we still know very little about Theodoro's history. Most of the surviving sources about him are Genoese notary documents and letters. The inscriptions of the principality of Theodoro are known, where their own symbols (a cross with the name of Jesus Christ), a Genoese cross and an eagle of the Comnenian dynasty, rulers of the Trebizond Empire, are present at the same time. So Theodoro tried to maneuver between powerful forces in the region, while maintaining independence.

Do you know anything about the ethnic composition of the population of Theodoro?

It was very colorful, because the Crimea is like a bag into which everyone constantly crawls, and there is no way to get out of there. Therefore, since ancient times, a variety of peoples settled there - the Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans, ancient Greeks and others. Then the Goths came to Crimea, whose language remained there until the 16th century, and then the Turks with the Krymchaks and Karaites. All of them were constantly mixed with each other - according to written sources, Greek, Gothic and Turkic names often alternated in Theodoro.

Do you think the Ottoman Empire became, in a sense, the heir to the dead Byzantium, or, as Solzhenitsyn said about another case, related to it as a murderer to a murdered one?

One cannot speak of a complete imitation of the Ottoman Empire by Byzantium, if only because it was a Muslim state based on other principles - for example, the Turkish sultan was considered the caliph of all Muslims. But Mehmed II the Conqueror, who took Constantinople in 1453, in his youth lived in the Byzantine capital as a hostage and took a lot from there.

In addition, before that, the Ottoman Turks had seized the state of the Seljuk Turks in Asia Minor - the Rum Sultanate. But what does the word "Rum" mean?

A distorted name for Rome?

Quite right. So from ancient times in the East they called first the Roman Empire, and then Byzantium. Therefore, in the system of power of the Ottoman Empire, one can notice some Byzantine features. From Constantinople, for example, Istanbul adopted the idea of unconditional domination over a vast area from modern Moldova to Egypt. Similar signs can be found in the administrative apparatus of both states, although all bureaucratic empires are somewhat similar to each other.

And what about Russia? Our country can be considered the successor of Byzantium? Did it become the Third Rome, as Elder Philotheus once wrote about?

Russia always wanted this very much, but in Byzantium itself the concept of the Third Rome never existed. On the contrary, it was believed there that Constantinople would forever remain the New Rome, and there would never be another. By the middle of the 15th century, when Byzantium became a tiny and weak state on the outskirts of Europe, its main political capital was the possession of an uninterrupted thousand-year-old Roman imperial tradition.

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After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, this tradition was finally suppressed. Therefore, no other Christian state, no matter how powerful it may be, even due to the lack of historical legitimacy, could and cannot claim the status of the successor of Rome and Constantinople.