Since the 15th century, the Russian Orthodox Church had a cardinal role in defining the coalescing
Muscovite collective identity, newly emerging after the overthrow of the
Tatar Yoke. In 1439, spurned by the
Byzantine Emperor who desperately required European assistance against the Turks, all
but one of the Greek Orthodox bishops present at the
Council of Florence acceded to a
reunion with the Roman Pontiff. Though the union was later repudiated by the people of Constantinople and many of the priesthood, the news of it shocked the Russians, who regarded the act as a corruption of the Byzantine Mother Church and a capitulation to the heretical and despised Catholics. In 1441, Prince
Vasily II imprisoned Metropolitan
Isidore, who supported the union, and in 1448 the Russian bishops elected
Jonah in his stead, making the Muscovite Church de facto
autocephalous and producing a
schism with the Greeks. In 1453,
Constantinople fell to the Turks, and the disaster was perceived in Russia as a divine punishment vindicating its stance. The Greek-speaking Orthodox were now under Muslim or Catholic rule, and Muscovy remained the only independent Orthodox power. A sense of superiority and election permeated Russia following the downfall of the Second Rome. Before, the nation generally followed the Greek-speaking church,
from which it received the faith in the 9th century: In the 14th century, after Byzantium adopted the
Sabbaite typicon in place of the
Studite, the Russians followed suit within a century. But after 1453, the Greeks were no longer considered as reliable teachers, but as contaminated by foreign influence, reviled in the xenophobic and deeply religious Muscovy, priding itself on its strict isolation from the outside world. Russian Christianity was now espoused as the only true remaining form of Orthodoxy, untainted and uncorrupted. Learned churchmen ascribed to their nation the titles of "New Rome", "New Israel", and "New Jerusalem". Elder
Philotheus of Pskov was most prominent in formulating this position, stating in 1523 that Moscow was the
third and last Rome before the End Times, the guardian of authentic Christianity destined to rule the earth. Philotheus recorded
The Legend of the White Cowl, a supposed account of such an item which belonged to the last Orthodox Pope in Rome, was then transferred to the Patriarch of Constantinopole, and finally arrived in
Novgorod, symbolizing the transfer of true faith between the three Romes. The Metropolitans of Novgorod wore white cowls, presumably in remembrance of that. The principality inherited from the Byzantines a most negative view of the Latin West, and of foreigners altogether: Catholics, Muslims, Jews and
animists were all regarded as barely differentiated
pogany, "pagans", an adjective still synonymous with "loathsome" in modern Russian. Apart from the main religious differences between Western and Eastern Christianity, virtually all "Latin" customs, like shaving or eating bloodied meat, were considered revolting. Science, especially astronomy, was regarded as sorcery, and secular art as defiling: portraits or landscape drawings were unknown, and visual art was confined mostly to icon painting. Apart from administrative tracts, the entire literature was religious; when
printing was introduced in the mid-16th century, it was monopolized by the state, and used as an instrument of control rather than for spreading new ideas. Noblewomen lived in
secluded quarters and under a strict regimen of separation from men. The country's geographical remoteness, intellectual backwardness and harsh rulership allowed it to maintain a separation from Europe that the mercantile and intellectual centre Constantinople could never exercise. Few Muscovites travelled abroad, and foreigners required special permission to enter and were closely monitored to discourage any contact with the native population that was not strictly necessary. Apart from military professionals, that the warlike state could not afford to do without, such permits were granted sparingly. As scripture and the service books were originally translated from Greek, and Muscovy was intellectually backward and lacking in scholarship, Russian religious parochialism was plagued by self-contradiction and self-doubt from the start. Most of the patristic literature remained untranslated, beyond the reach of Muscovite churchmen. Greek scholars were required to gain access to the tradition of which Russia claimed to be the sole possessor. In 1518 the learned monk
Maximus the Greek was summoned to Moscow to aid in the translation of several sacred works from his language to Slavonic, and to correct the liturgical manuscripts – not for the last time, the ecclesiastical hierarchy became aware that poor scribal transmission and lack of systematic conventions resulted in inconsistencies between the extant texts, and even to what it deemed as heresies that entered them. Maximus attempted to introduce uniform rules on transcription and grammar. In 1525, he was tried for heresy, accused among other crimes of corrupting the prayer books. Apart from getting involved in internal church conflicts, Maximus' downfall was also precipitated because Russian clerics could not accept a foreigner tampering with their sacred traditions. The invitation of foreign scholars ceased for over a century after the Maximus affair, leaving the Russian church even more isolated. Eventually, his work was widely accepted, and even the most conservative elements in the Muscovite church came to regard him as a revered authority. In 1551, keen to eliminate all abuses and irregularities from the nation's religious life, Russian church hierarchs convened under
Ivan the Terrible in the
Stoglav ("hundred chapters") Synod. Apart from numerous administrative decisions and a repeated injunction to correct the faulty service books "based on ancient manuscripts", they also discussed ritual and liturgy. Guided by a strong conviction that even the slightest minutiae were ultimately derived from ancient tradition, and therefore no diversity could be allowed, they determined that an Orthodox Christian must cross oneself with "two fingers" (folding together the thumb, ring and little fingers, while holding the index and middle fingers upright), that the
Alleluia in the liturgy should be recited twice, and that only baptism by triple immersion was acceptable. They rejected contrary customs that appeared in the land – crossing with "three fingers" (folding the thumb, index and middle fingers together) and tripling the Alleluia – as foreign and unorthodox. The actual, historical development of church rites and customs is difficult to reconstruct. Professor
Nikolay Kapterev concluded that the "two-fingered" sign of the cross appeared among the Greeks no later than the 9th century, and became a highly symbolic gesture in the Orthodox struggle against the "
Monophysites", stressing Christ's dual nature. Contemporary Greek service books contain anathemas against those who cross themselves differently. As Christianity was brought to the Eastern Slavs at the time, the two-fingered sign of the cross was revered in Russia. In the 13th century, the "three-fingered" sign emerged in Byzantium and gained popularity, eventually eclipsing any other variant. It slowly spread to other lands; Orthodox tracts from the 1590s written in
Poland-Lithuania still mandate the two-fingered sign, but soon after, the three-fingered became dominant in that region. Although the Stoglav deemed the first as the authentic Russian practice and the second as foreign, the older sign was still common in Serbia and Lithuania in the 17th century, while the three-fingered sign was quite popular in northeastern Russia. Such complex circumstances also mark the emergence and development of other ritual specifics. In 1589, while on a journey to Russia to collect alms, Ecumenical Patriarch
Jeremias II was forcibly detained by Regent
Boris Godunov until he acquisced to grant the Russian church an
autocephalous status and promote the Metropolitan of Moscow to the rank of patriarch. The schism with the Greeks ended, with both sides recognizing the orthodoxy of each other, and Russia was formally reintegrated into the ecumenical church, in implicit acceptance of its independence and standing. The charter which granted autocephaly and established the patriarchate, and implored the Russians to full religious unity with the other Orthodox, the
chrysobull, became a foundational document of the Muscovite church. ==Pressures for reform (1612-1651)==