The Origins of Autocracy

But an antiheretical campaign throughout the nation did not fol­low. This gambit of the grand prince's was intended, no doubt, to buy off the hierarchy—to let some steam out of the boiling kettle of Jose- phite passions, and at this price to preserve Kuritsyn, Elena Stefa- novna, and his grandson and heir Dimitrii. But it seems, too, that un­der the influence of the events in Novgorod, the grand prince evolved the treacherous and cynical political scenario which was played out a few years later at the church assembly of 1504—a plan to trade

heresy for the church lands.

7. The First Assault

A letter sent by Iosif to the Archimandrite Mitrofan, the grand prince's personal chaplain, relates an unexpected scene, in which Ivan III invited Iosif, who had until quite recently been a disgraced monk, to visit him, and held a long conversation with him about church affairs. In the course of this, the sovereign suddenly revealed "to what heresy the archpriest Aleksei adhered and to what heresy Fedor Kuritsyn adhered," and even denounced his daughter-in-law, Elena, admitting that "he knew about their heresies" and asking for­giveness. What could be the meaning of this abandonment of friends and advisors whom he had supported for many years, this humble request for pardon on the part of a mighty ruler, addressed to a mo­rose and implacable nonconformist who pursued goals which were extremely dubious from the grand prince's point of view? What, if not an offer of a political deal? Apparently, however, Iosif remained unmoved. It is true that the grand prince did not hasten to fulfill his pledge to carry out the national campaign which Gennadii and Iosif had been seeking for more than a quarter of a century and "hunt out and uproot the heretics." A year after the meeting, Iosif complained bitterly in the same letter to Mitrofan of Ivan's failure to dispatch the promised witch-hunters: "I hoped that the sovereign would send them immediately, but it is already more than a year since that great day, and he, the sovereign, has not sent them.'"[99]

Instead of an antiheretical campaign, in fact, the grand prince pre­pared an unexpected blow at the hierarchy. It came in 1503, at what was perhaps the most dramatic church assembly in the history of Rus­sian Orthodoxy. The assembly had been called to consider a purely practical question—whether widowers were to be permitted to serve in the priesthood. The prelates assembled, spoke, adopted a decision to forbid widowed priests. Matters of third-rate importance remained to be dealt with. Suddenly, in the half-empty hall, the grand prince himself appeared. His speech was entirely unambiguous. As one of the documents describing this dramatic event has it: "The Grand Prince Ivan Vasil'evich wished to take from the metropolitan and the other church dignitaries, and from the monasteries, their villages, and unite them with his own, and to give all the metropolitan and other dignitaries money from his treasury and grain from his gra­naries."^2e In other words, he wanted to transfer the ecclesiastical busi­nessmen to the state service and put them on salary. The matter did not end there. The sovereign was followed onto the podium by his sons, Vasilii and Dimitrii, then by the Tver' boyar, Vasilii Borisov, then by the high secretaries, the heads of the Muscovite government departments, and, finally—and this was certainly the nucleus of the plan—by the dissidents, led by the leader of the second generation of Non-Acquirers, Nil Sorskii. This time they were not timid, as Paisii had been. They attacked the hierarchy in heated speeches, denounc­ing monastery landholding as a deviation from Christ's law, a sin, and an injustice. Note that until now the "accusers" (of the grand prince, the metropolitan, and the heretics) had been exclusively Josephites. To use modern language, this had been a critique from the right: the hierarchy attacked the state for deviating from the norms of piety. Now the attack came from the left. The church was finally split. The state now appeared in the role of guardian of the purity of Ortho­doxy—the situation for which Ivan III had waited so long in the mat­ter of Novgorod, in the struggle against Lithuania, and in the war with the hierarchy. According to some sources, the Non-Acquirers de­manded the secularization not of all the church lands, but merely of those of the monasteries. If this is true (and the attempt to divide the opposition was certainly in the spirit of Ivan III), then this was pre­cisely the compromise path which the English state took three dec­ades later in its struggle with the church. Along with all the other facts, it indicates a well-prepared and organized assault on the for­tress of the church.