Download PDF | (Dumbarton Oaks Studies 19) George P. Majeska - Russian Travelers to Constantinople in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries-Dumbarton Oaks (1984).
487 Pages
Preface
THE present work is meant to satisfy the long-felt need for a modern scholarlyedition and translation of the late medieval Russian travel descriptions ofConstantinople, as well as to provide a full-scale analysis of their contents.Although naive, if not simplistic, in their reporting, these ingenuous descriptionsof journeys to Constantinople between the years 1349 and 1422 are key documents for understanding the topography of the Byzantine capital, and occasionally for solving other problems in Byzantine and Russian history.
In the study ofa society for which most of the documentary evidence has perished, such minorworks as these are precious sources. Up to the present, scholars have beencompletely dependent on old diplomatic editions of these works which simplyreproduced a single manuscript with an accompanying apparatus of chosenvariant readings; worse still was the fact that, since few Byzantinists werecompetent to read the original Old Russian texts of these travel narratives, theywere forced to rely on a wholly inadequate French rendering which, in fact, onlymirrored popular Russian publications that had been heavily doctored by their editor.
Unlike previous publications of the travel tales, or hozdenija, of the Russiantravelers to Constantinople, the texts presented below (except for the brief andtextually homogenous "Journey of Alexander the Clerk") are scholarly editions,that is, they are attempts insofar as possible to reconstruct the original author'stext from the manuscripts preserved today. That not everyone will accept everydecision and emendation made by the present editor goes without saying; thecomplete critical apparatus accompanying each text presents the reader withmaterial to verify or reconstrue the readings. Each text (again, except that ofAlexander) is based on all the preserved manuscripts of the work to which I havebeen able to gain access; it is unlikely that publication of the few manuscriptsunavailable because they are in archival collections to which I could not gainaccess would have changed very much. New editions of these texts demanded a translation, not only to make theirmaterial accessible to a wider range of scholars, but also because a translation isin itself an interpretation which clarifies ambiguities in the text.
The publicationof the five texts presented here, which together form a coherent body of information reflecting a compact period of approximately seventy-five years,' called also for a commentary which would analyze the material in the texts in order topresent a coherent picture of their major subject, Constantinople. A unifiedcommentary seemed the most efficient way to present the material, since itallowed the detail in each work to be compared and fitted with the facts in othertexts and with the results of scholarship on the individual subjects. The pivotalrole which the Russian travel descriptions play in any study of the physicalarrangement of late medieval Constantinople suggested strongly that the commentary sections should also be presented in such a way as to serve as a summaryof the state of modern scholarship on the individual monuments and sites of theByzantine capital. The relevant commentary sections are noted in the footnotesto the translations.
In general, works published after 1977 have not been used.Since I first began work on this subject, a number of institutions and individuals have aided in the project. Grateful acknowledgment is certainly due tothe libraries in the U.S.S.R. which allowed me to study manuscripts in theirpossession or supplied me with microfilms of manuscripts used for the presentedition: the Saltykov-Scedrin State Public Library, the Library of the Academyof Sciences of the U.S.S.R., and the Library of the Leningrad Section of theInstitute of History of the Academy of Sciences, all in Leningrad;ythe LeninLibrary and the State Historical Museum, both in Moscow; and the LobacevskijScholarly Library of the Kazan State University in Kazan.
Several institutionshave provided financial support at various stages of my research and theirgenerosity should not go unnoted: the Inter-University Committee on TravelGrants enabled me to spend an academic year in the U.S.S.R. studying manuscripts; the Research Foundation of the State University of New York, theFaculty of Social Sciences and the Department of History of the State Universityof New York at Buffalo, and the General Research Board of the Universityof Maryland all supported me during summers when much of the work on thisbook was done.
The Graduate School of the University of Maryland provideda grant to cover some of the costs of typing the manuscript and a generoussubsidy to aid in publishing the present work. A grant from the AmericanResearch Institute in Turkey allowed me to spend a month studying theByzantine monuments and excavations in Istanbul; a grant from the PenroseFund of the American Philosophical Society enabled me to visit the Byzantinesites of Thessaloniki and Mount Athos and to investigate Slavic manuscriptholdings there. A travel grant from Dumbarton Oaks made possible three weeksof manuscript work in the Soviet Union before the final editing of the textspublished here. Indeed, it is to the Center for Byzantine Studies of DumbartonOaks (Trustees for Harvard University) that much of the credit for the presentwork is due.
It was there that I served my "apprenticeship" in Byzantine Studiesas a Junior Fellow writing a dissertation. Later, as a Visiting Fellow, I completedthe draft of the present work. During the intervening ten years, as since, I haveregularly been able not only to use Dumbarton Oaks' unparalleled libraryresources, but also to benefit from conferring formally and informally with thefaculty, the staff, and visiting scholars.
It would be impossible to single out all the individuals who have in variousways contributed to my work. Glenn Wing of the University of MarylandSchool of Architecture drew the maps. Robert Hafer of the University ofMaryland checked the index. Dr. Christine Y. Bethin of the University ofVirginia made useful suggestions on the language of the texts. Deepest thanks aredue to three scholars in the Soviet Union who have been most generous andhelpful: Drs. E. E. Granstrem, G. L. Kurbatov, and G. M. Prohorov. ProfessorK.-D. Seemann of Berlin has been generous with materials and knowledge, ashas Dr. Krijnie Ciggaar of Leiden. Members of the scholarly community ofDumbarton Oaks have regularly offered encouragement, advice, and information, particularly Professor Ernst Kitzinger and Mr. Robert Van Nice; so, too,have many of the visiting scholars at Dumbarton Oaks, especially theByzantinist-Slavists, Professors Dimitri Obolensky of Oxford and JohnMeyendorff of St. Vladimir's Seminary.
Over coffee, as over books, I havelearned much from all these people. Special gratitude must go to two scholarswho have also dealt with Russian travel tales and Constantinopolitan topography and who offered both help and encouragement over the years, ProfessorsCyril Mango of Oxford and Ihor Sevicenko of Harvard. The latter generouslyacted as "first reader" of my doctoral dissertation and in so doing provideda marvelous series of lessons on careful scholarship. Professor NicolasOikonomides of the Universite de Montreal and Dr. Charles Halperin read mostof the present work and offered suggestions which have clearly improved it. ThePublications Department of Dumbarton Oaks has lavished time and attentionon this volume in the best Dumbarton Oaks tradition, for which I am mostgrateful to Julia Warner, the head of the department, and to Dr. Peter Topping,Advisor for Publications. Nancy Rogers Bowen prepared the manuscript for theprinter with a care and patience which matched her professional editorial talents;I am happy to have worked with her. I owe, of course, special thanks to myfamily. My daughters Kristin and Tanya have evinced marvelous patience withtheir father's passion for old texts and a city which is no more; I appreciate theirtolerance for work which was too often done during time which was rightlytheirs. My wife Marilyn not only has offered encouragement in this project over along time, but also has been my most critical reader. To her literary skill, andeven more to her patience, the book is much indebted. Finally, I must acknowledge my indebtedness to the late Professor George Soulis, who introducedme to the study of Byzantine and medieval Slavic history at Indiana University.It was he who first suggested to me the possibility of working on early Russiantravel tales. His suggestion led to the present volume, which I respectfullydedicate to his memory.
The Cyrillic transliteration employed is the "continental system" as revised forDumbarton Oaks publications (i.e., Cyrillic "x" = Latin "h"). Greek is transliterated as either classical or modern Greek, depending on which has becomemore current for a given word; thus "the palace at Blachernae," but "Vlangaharbor." In general, names which have some currency in English are given in the common form (e.g., Dimitry, not Dmitrij, for the Russian name); for placenames the conventions of the International Association of Geographersarenormally followed. In the present work the word "convent" is used to signify amonastic foundation of nuns. As is customary, Old Russian texts are printed inmodern orthography, but with the letter "b" retained for its particular phonemicvalue. Commentary numbers serve also as the key to the locations ofConstantinopolitan monuments on plate ii. George P. MajeskaUniversity of MarylandAugust 1980
Introduction
CHRISTIAN PILGRIMAGE Pilgrimage, that is, journeying to venerate a sacred place or an object of cult, isa very ancient tradition. It is found in the early religions of India and Babylonia,as it is in the Jewish "going up to Jerusalem" and in the ancient Greeks' journeysto special shrines of the gods. It is not surprising, then, to find a similar expressionof faith in Christianity, which grew from the soil of Judaism and Hellenism.Christians who gathered to worship at the tombs of the martyrs were in a sensemaking a journey to a sacred place to venerate a cult object. Once Christianityhad become a legal religion in the Roman Empire, pilgrimage, not only to thetombs of the apostles and martyrs, but even to Palestine to pray "where ChristHimself had trod," began on a serious scale.
The fashion was set by the dowagerEmpress Helen, mother of Constantine the Great, who traveled to the "holyland" to worship at places consecrated by the presence of Christ in his earthly lifeand to recover relics of Christ's sojourn in this world. Her son dutifully erectedshrines at the holy places, and the trickle of visitors to Palestine broadened into astream of pilgrims. The Holy Sepulchre, the hill of Golgotha, the grotto ofBethlehem, and even the oak of Mamre, where Abraham was visited by a triad ofangels, became centers of pious tourism marked by impressive structures. This "materialization" of the spiritual teachings of Christianity did not findcomplete acceptance among the leaders of the Church. Gregory of Nyssa askedrhetorically if there were "more Holy Spirit at Jerusalem than in piousCappadocia," a sentiment echoed by Augustine, who railed against those whotraveled to Palestine "as if God were in one place." Yet John Chrysostom, whileconscious of the pitfalls inherent in overemphasizing the value of pilgrimage,himself wished his pastoral duties allowed him to travel to the Holy Land, andoccasionally recommended pilgrimage to others. Jerome reminded his friendPaulinus that heaven was "equally distant from Jerusalem and Britain," and thatin all his travels around the Near East St. Anthony had never bothered to visitJerusalem. Blessed Hilarion, even though he lived his life in Palestine, had visitedJerusalem only once, Jerome continued, and then only lest he be accused of"slighting the holy places." Yet Jerome himself made the pilgrimage to Palestineand retired there to translate the holy scriptures under the inspiration of theirmilieu, and invited others to come and pray "where Christ walked." If there was an ambivalence about the desirability of pilgrimage on the part ofthe most respected spokesmen for the Church, there seems to have been littleambivalence on the part of the laity and the monks.
The pilgrim traffic to Palestine continued to swell into the fifth century, and devout laymen, fromemperors to landed magnates, contributed to the building of pilgrim hospices(xenodochia) and monasteries, not only in the Holy Land, but also at the variousway stations along the route. By the time pilgrimage came to be a canonicalpenance for sins, the Mediterranean world was served by a network of transportation lines and pilgrim inns connecting the ever growing number of Christianshrines, not only in Palestine, but wherever apostles had trod and martyrs haddied. The fifth-century emphasis on the human nature of Christ had, it seems,legitimized the veneration of Christ's mortal traces.I Contemporaneously with the growth of pilgrimage to the Holy Land a newpilgrimage center was growing up on the Bosporus. Constantinople, the "NewRome," could boast no apostolic foundation or famous martyrs. But with thesame zeal with which the Emperor Constantine and his successors gatheredancient columns and statues to decorate the new capital of the Empire, they setabout collecting there the holy relics which would make it also a pilgrimagecenter. Helen sent a piece of the "true cross" from Jerusalem, and Constantinesought the bodies of the twelve Apostles to grace his mortuary church, althoughhe succeeded only in obtaining relics of a few of the "seventy disciples." Formany emperors the gathering of holy relics for Constantinople's churchesbecame a sacred duty. The relics of Christ's Passion and the swaddling clothes ofthe infant Jesus found their way to Byzantium, along with the head of John theBaptist, the letter Christ had written to King Abgar of Edessa, and the portraitHe had sent the king, together with the brick on which the portrait had reproduced itself when it was hidden in a wall. When it was determined that the bodiesof the saints were by no means indivisible, not only were they appropriated tosanctify the imperial city, but fragments as well came from all over the Empireand beyond.
As the cult of religious images took hold in the Eastern Church,miraculous icons, too, came to be collected in Constantinople: those which bledand spoke, those which had been painted by "unseen hands," and even "lifeportraits" of the Mother of God painted by Luke the Evangelist. The zeal of theemperors and inhabitants of Constantinople seems to have known no bounds; bythe eleventh century Constantinople had become the most important depositoryof Christian relics in the medieval world, and a more popular goal of pilgrimagethan Palestine, which was now, in any case, in Moslem hands. The sacking of Constantinople by the knights of the Fourth Crusade dissipated many of the major relic hoards of the Byzantine capital and considerablyincreased the stock of relics spread around Western Europe, but Byzantium'smine of relics was apparently inexhaustible. Once the Greeks had regained possession of the city in 1261, new relics replaced those lost; the ethos ofConstantinople as a sacred city endowed with literally hundreds of these tokensof God's special esteem and protection weakened but slightly. Even comparatively sophisticated Western visitors seem rarely to have noted the apparentbilocation of esteemed Christian relics. Indeed, up until the very fall of the city tothe Turks in 1453 the image of Constantinople remained that of a sacred cityblessed with a unique treasury of relics of Christ, His mother, and the saints.
PILGRIMAGE IN RUSSIA
The tradition of pilgrimage to Christian shrines was part of the ByzantineChristian heritage taken over by Russia in the last years of the tenth century.Thus it is not surprising to find the young Theodosius, future abbot of the KievCaves Monastery, attempting in the early eleventh century to join a band ofpilgrims on their way to the land "where our Savior trod." The ascetic Anthony,who had founded the Caves Monastery, had already made a pilgrimage to theHoly Mountain of Athos. Before the end of the century other monks of thismonastery had also gone on pilgrimage, particularly to the Holy Land andConstantinople. In the first years of the twelfth century Daniel, prior of anotherRussian monastery, also journeyed to the Holy Land. Daniel left a narrative ofhis pilgrimage; nothing in it suggests that his long journey to worship at theshrines of Palestine was extraordinary. Russian pilgrims cannot have beenunknown in the Holy Land, and, in fact, several attended the Easter vigil withDaniel at the Holy Sepulchre. Later in the century we hear of Princess Evfrosinijaof Polotsk, a pious matron of princely blood and later a nun, whose lifelong wishto venerate the relics of Constantinople and the holy places of Palestine wasfinally fulfilled. She died in Jerusalem.
While Evfrosinija's story might be legendary in part, the audience for which it arose seems to have had no doubts aboutthe possibility of pilgrimage to "Tsargrad" and Jerusalem. In 1200 DobrinjaJadrejkovic, the future Archbishop Anthony of Novgorod, made a pilgrimage toConstantinople, leaving us perhaps the most detailed single description of theshrines and relics of that city in the Middle Ages. There is serious reason to believe that the pilgrims known from sources to havetraveled to Palestine and Byzantium are but a tiny fraction of those who madethe journey. Pilgrims (kaleki) were, after all, a category of people large enough tobe listed as "church people" subject to ecclesiastical courts from the time of St.Vladimir. Doubtless, the twelfth-century Bishop Nifont of Novgorodexaggerated, however, when he replied to a question from the priest Kirik by callingpilgrimage "a curse which is ruining the land." He railed against those who leavetheir families to wander about to "Jerusalem and other cities" in search of salvation, all the time living off the generosity and hospitality of others, not onlyon the road, but also after they return from the holy places to tell the story of theiradventures. Such "professional pilgrims," the so-called kaleki perehozniki, were,in fact, often little more than undisciplined Christian minstrels, wandering aboutthe country singing their "spiritual songs" (cTHxH AyxoBHbie) in return for food,hospitality, and, particularly, drink. It might be this aspect of the pilgrimage cult,rather than the numbers involved, which distressed Bishop Nifont. That pilgrimage was not a rare phenomenon, however, is suggested by the lively memoryof pilgrims in Russian folklore, which has its roots in the pre-Mongol period. Notonly do individual pilgrims appear in the byliny (folk epics), but pilgrim bandshave a tendency to appear when an epic hero needs a group with which to travel.Indeed, the pilgrim cloak and broad-brimmed "hat of the Greek land" is afavorite disguise for heroes in trouble. One wonders how many from the jollyband of "Forty Pilgrims and yet Another" ("Copox xa.a n c xanuxolo") fromthe widely circulated bylina cycle of that name are "heroes in trouble"; they formthe kind of pilgrim band Chaucer would have understood well. Even the bylinacycle built around the favorite Novgorod folk hero Vasilij Buslaev depicts thehero going on pilgrimage "to kiss Christ's tomb and bathe in river Jordan" afterhe has killed his godfather (a pilgrim, or sometimes a monk) following a drinkingbout. If the Buslaev poem's statement, that "if you're a thief or a robber whenyou're young, you've got to save your soul when you're old," reflects the normalbackground of the pilgrims of early Russia, one can see how they can imperiouslydemand food and drink of those they descend on, as they do with great success inthe poems; one can also understand good Bishop Nifont's consternation atpeople going off on pilgrimage. What Nifont could not control external circumstances did.
The Latin conquestof Constantinople in 1204 and the insecure conditions on the Russian steppearound that time slowed considerably the flow of Russian pilgrims to the NearEast. The Mongol conquest of Russia stopped pilgrimage almost completely inmost of Russia. But while the Russian pilgrim traffic would not assume majorproportions again until the nineteenth century, some travel to Constantinopleand the Christian shrines of the East continued. Significant is a passing referencein the Laurentian Chronicle under the year 1282 to a band of pilgrims happenedupon by Tatar raiders. By 1301, indeed, even with a smaller number of pilgrimssetting out for the holy places, the old complaints about pilgrims are heard againwhen Bishop Theognostus of Sarai asks advice on pilgrimage from the HolySynod in Constantinople. The Synod's answer is both clear and reminiscent ofNifont's judgment: Theognostus should forbid these pointless journeys bypeople living on other men's substance, and all the more since they return hometo spread untrue stories about other lands. It was only in Novgorod that the tradition of journeying to worship in theHoly Land and Constantinople continued with any degree of regularity duringthe years of the Mongol domination of Russia. Like Anthony a century before, Basil "Kaleka" ("the pilgrim") was raised to the episcopal throne ofNovgorod after his pilgrimage. The comparative freedom of the Novgorod landunder the "Tatar yoke," the merchant republic's commercial ties withByzantium, and the special relationship its autonomous church attempted tokeep with Constantinople help account for the continuing travel of Novgorodians to the Levant. The fact that three of the five preserved pilgrimdescriptions of Constantinople published here are of Novgorodian provenance istestimony to the perseverance of the pilgrim tradition in that northern city. Certainly other parts of Russia saw pilgrims visit the holy places of the East inthe fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as Tatar power waned, but not in the sameproportion in which they went from Novgorod.
Some were genuine pilgrims,such as Epiphanius the Wise, biographer of Sergius of Radonez, and the DeaconZosima whose account is published below, but many more went on churchbusiness (like Ignatius of Smolensk) or as merchants (like Alexander the Clerk).Some Russians even lived in Constantinople and on Athos on a more or lesspermanent basis, but they were not then true pilgrims. One might judge fromEpiphanius' eulogy of St. Sergius, in fact, that journeying to the shrines of theNear East was held in no high esteem in central Russia of the fourteenth andfifteenth centuries. Epiphanius praises Sergius for living a saintly life in his rusticcell, rather than "flitting hither and yon, wandering from place to place" visitingConstantinople, the Holy Mountain, and Jerusalem like someone "deprived ofreason." The middle of the fifteenth century saw a serious break in the continuity of theRussian pilgrim tradition.
The Constantinopolitan Church's submission toRome at the Council of Florence made the Orthodox Russians wary of contactwith the uniate Greeks. Soon thereafter, in any case, Constantinople fell to theTurks, and the relics which had drawn pilgrims to Constantinople were dispersedand desecrated, while the traditional route to the Near East was blocked, or atleast was made considerably more difficult. For the next three hundred yearsmost Russian visitors to Constantinople and the eastern Mediterranean weremerchants, diplomats, or ecclesiastics on official business. Only in the nineteenthcentury, under the influence of pietism, was a true pilgrim traffic reborn; andnineteenth-century pilgrimage was a very modern version of the medieval pilgrimage phenomenon, orchestrated by the imperial government and officialbenevolent associations which created special steamship lines and hospices toreceive literally thousands of Russian pilgrims where Prior Daniel had once wonspecial permission to light a single lamp at the tomb of Christ in the name of the"Russian land RUSSIAN PILGRIM TALES The Old Russian pilgrim tale, or hozdenie, owed its popularity to the fact that it was an adventure story acceptable to the Church. Like Lives of saints (which thepilgrim tales often recall in their title, zitie, or "Life"), the theme of the ho2deniewas the quest for sanctity.
The pilgrim tales chronicled the courage, if not the"heroic virtue," displayed by those traveling to far-off lands to venerate the holyplaces and the wonder-working remains of Christ, His mother, and the saints. Shipwreck, piracy, and bandit raids made the attainment of the goal-worshiping at shrines and partaking of their special holiness-a true climax. Thepilgrim tales were not as stereotyped and transparently pious as Lives of thesaints, and their religious outlook was more intrinsic than the often forcedmoralism of medieval tales (skazanya and povesti) and secular biographies. Judged to extoll Christian ideals and to instruct in Christian tradition, thepilgrim tales originally were copied by monks into manuscript collections ofpious reading together with sermons and aphorisms of the Fathers of theChurch. It is only as Russia's Middle Ages wane that hozdenija find their place ingeographical tomes next to secular accounts of journeys abroad. Moreover, thisnew view of the value of hozdenija was the judgment of only a few litei%ti. Well into modern times the simpler folk continued to regard these works as testimonies to God's grace. They were sometimes copied by hand even in thenineteenth century, and the popular editions of the last century were purchasedin large numbers not so much for their antiquarian interest as for their piouscontent. The pilgrim tale is a literary genre which originated in Russia'. Unlike most types of early Russian literature it is not derived from a well-known Byzantineliterary form.
The prototype of Russian pilgrim tales is the Old Russian"Pilgrimage of Prior Daniel" ("Xoxcexie HryMexa ,L axlriuia"), written in the first years of the twelfth century. Daniel's work is also the most remarkable exampleof the genre written in the Middle Ages. The "Pilgrimage of Prior Daniel" has asits core the author's experiences in the Holy Land, but his description of Palestineand its shrines is, as it were, framed by the narrative of his journey to the HolyLand from Constantinople and back again to the Byzantine capital. He describesthe various ports of call on his voyages and notes things of interest about placeshe visited: who rules them, exotic plants which grow there, products produced, and, of course, famous shrines. Daniel has a keen sense for the salient detail andthe interesting fact which will keep the reader's attention. His narrative of hisperegrinations around Palestine is also enlivened by well-chosen anecdotes, notonly about what he saw, but also about what happened to him: he describes theplace where Mary died and the river Jordan, but he also describes his fear ofhighwaymen and the necessity of traveling in armed caravans. The climax ofDaniel's work is his description of the coming of the "fire from heaven" to lightthe candles at the Easter vigil in Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre andthe emotions he experienced in the presence of this great wonder. Thereafter, the reader is subconsciously drawn into Daniel's pilgrimage as the author seekspermission to place a special lamp at the "tomb of the Lord" in the name of allthe faithful of Rus'; the reader rejoices with him when he later returns to theshrine and finds "the Russian lamp" still burning. Daniel's literary skill is againdemonstrated in his masterful prose style. His simple, straightforward colloquialRussian flows marvelously in the narrative sections. The interspersed descriptions of shrines, relics, and religious services, however, are in archaic Slavonicized Russian reminiscent of the Church Slavonic language used for formalworship. Indeed, Daniel often quotes the scriptures and ritual in Church Slavonic.This literary device raises such moments of religious feeling to a higher plane bydrawing on the connotations of the liturgical language of the Church in Russia.
The high level of literary skill displayed in the "Pilgrimage of Prior Daniel"and its consequent popularity (it exists today in almost one hundred fifty manuscript codices) made Daniel's work the standard by which all later pilgrimdescriptions would be judged. Writers, it would seem, were conscious of thisliterary ideal and imitated the model, perhaps too scrupulously; whole sectionswere sometimes reproduced under a later pilgrim's name. Judged by the standards of the "Pilgrimage of Prior Daniel," the later hozdenija are not particularlysuccessful literary works, perhaps with the exception of Anthony of Novgorod's"Pilgrim Book" (KHHra IlanoMHHx) which describes Constantinople in the year1200. There is no question, however, that the five texts published in the presentvolume are, from a literary point of view, only plebeian imitations of the Danielprototype. They take from Daniel the concept of a topographically arrangeddescription of a visit to a series of shrines and the prescribed use of the two typesof language in specified circumstances, but little else. It would seem that therather free-form genre which Daniel created to express his own experiencesbecame a constricting mold for later pilgrims. They imitate the model, but onlyformally and mechanically, and the results are "flat" and uninteresting. Insteadof Daniel's lively and varied language, seasoned with appropriate background,one regularly finds the mechanical and repetitive: "We came to A and veneratedB, which reposes there. Nearby is C and the relics of D which cure many sick."Missing almost completely is the excitement of the personal response and realemotions; stereotypes take the place of the fresh experience. Indeed, the medievalRussian reading public must have shared this opinion of the later pilgrim tales,for the texts were copied in far fewer numbers than Daniel's work was.
The literary value of the five Russian pilgrim descriptions of Constantinoplepublished here, then, is frankly slight. Their value as historical sources, however, should not be underestimated. While in other historical contexts such naivelycharming works as these would evoke little interest except among antiquarians,careful study of these texts can do much to illuminate areas of Russian andByzantine history practically untreated in more standard types of historicalsource material. So basic a question as communications routes between Russiaand Constantinople cannot be studied without serious reference to the routesoutlined by the pilgrim-authors Ignatius of Smolensk and Deacon Zosima. Theirworks contain the most careful delineations of Russia's arteries of communication with Byzantium preserved from the Middle Ages. Similarly, political andchronological references in the pilgrim tales can fill in blanks in historicalscholarship, especially in Byzantine history, a field well supplied with tendentious histories and monkish chronicles as primary sources but almost devoid ofbasic documentary materials.
The paucity of Byzantine historical sources issuggested by the fact that Ignatius of Smolensk's brief description of the uprisingled by John VII in Constantinople in 1390 is the only extant account of this event, and that the same text's description of the coronation of Emperor Manuel II in1392 is the primary evidence for Manuel's being crowned in that year. EvenDeacon Zosima's list of Manuel's sons and their appanages is an importantdocument for understanding the governmental system under the laterPalaeologan emperors. Of even greater historical value, however, is the information the later Russianpilgrim tales include on the topography of the capital of the Eastern Empire inthe late Middle Ages. While Byzantine authors, for the most part, simplyassumed that their readers were acquainted with the arrangement of the variouspublic buildings in the city, the Russian visitors took great care to spell out therelationship of the individual shrines and attractions to each other. Partly theydid this, no doubt, in imitation of Prior Daniel's careful geographical notes onPalestine in the prototype, of Russian pilgrim tales; and partly they did so, ofcourse, because they realized their readers would be unfamiliar with the physiognomy of the Byzantine capital. Careful study of the Russian pilgrim talessignificantly advances modern scholarship's knowledge of the physical city andits various monuments and can be of particular help to archeologists concernedwith medieval Constantinople, especially in identifying sites. The Russian pilgrim descriptions of Constantinople are not simply lists ofbuildings and monuments, it should be noted. While certain Constantinopolitanmonuments, such as the great Cathedral of St. Sophia and the famed JustinianColumn, were worthy of note in and of themselves, it was the holy relicspreserved in the shrines of the Byzantine capital which, in large part, drew thepilgrims to the metropolis on the Bosporus. Here were gathered in the "cityguarded by God" objects mentioned in the very scriptures, bodies of saints whoseLives were read out in the churches, the robe of the Virgin which had calledupstorms to destroy invaders of the imperial city, as described in a popular liturgical hymn, and miracle-working images from tales recounted in the ritual. Unlikevisitors from other cultures, where different rites and customs prevailed, theRussians, who had been nurtured in the services of the Byzantine Church inRussia, were familiar with all these things; they had heard of them from childhood. It is for this reason that the Russian pilgrims are such dependable reportersof what shrines they visited and what relics they saw in Constantinople. They didnot discover hitherto unknown Christian treasures or, for the most part, hearnew stories of wonders, as did, for instance, Western visitors who rarely kept therelics and stories straight. Rather, they recognized objects and stories long storedin their memories. Medieval Russians and Byzantines belonged to the same"cultural community"; the hozdenija are eloquent testimony of how deeplyRussia had drunk at the well of Byzantine civilization. In turn, the writings of theRussian pilgrims served to enhance and strengthen Byzantine culture in Russia.Readers of the hozdenija in Russia not only learned facts about Constantinople,but also found their perceptions of the city as a sacred entity confirmed.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND Constantinople long played an important role in Russian life. It was the lure ofthe imperial city and the profits to be gained from trading with it which hadprecipitated the foundation of the Rus' state along the Dnieper route "from theVarangians to the Greeks" in the ninth century. With the adoption of ByzantineChristianity in the last years of the following century a new dimension accrued tothe image of Constantinople in medieval Rus'. Not only was Byzantium thewealthiest and most civilized city the Russians had encountered, but it was alsothe fountainhead of their adopted national faith. There, in the capital of theChristian Roman Empire, resided the "ecumenical" patriarch who guidedRussia's church life and guaranteed the purity of its faith. There it was, indeed,that the content of Christianity had unfolded in Great Councils of the Church;there could be seen the living testimony that God guided and guarded His people."Tsargrad," to the Russians, was a sacred city, an almost mythical place where itwas assumed that God wrought wonders. The concept of the "New Rome"mingled with the vision of the "New Jerusalem." Constantinople continued to be a source of Russia's Christian culture longafter the primary evangelization of this northern people. Many of the bishops,and most of the ruling metropolitans of the Church, were Greeks sent fromByzantium who preserved close ties with the patriarchate at Constantinople.The bishops from Byzantium traveled back and forth between Russia and theByzantine capital, bringing to Russia not only ecclesiastical directives from thepatriarch and synod at Constantinople, but also books which would influence thedevelopment of Russian culture and tastes. Byzantine artists likewise journeyedto Russia to paint icons and decorate churches, for all agreed that Byzantineartistic productions were not only the finest available, but, indeed, the standardsagainst which all other works would be judged. Trade, too, continued between the two states until the Turkish conquest, albeit with occasional periods ofreduced volume. It should not, then, be at all surprising that Constantinople wasthe most common goal of Russian pilgrims, both the "true" pilgrims drawnuniquely by the relics, shrines, and sacred aura of the city, and those pilgrims whocombined their devotions with business trips to the Byzantine capital as merchants, ecclesiastics, or diplomats.' The fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries were a period of revitalization ofties between Russia and Byzantium. Part of the reason for the reinvigoration ofRusso-Byzantine contacts was political developments in Russia. The fourteenthcentury saw the gradual waning of Mongol control over the Eastern Slavs. Theloosening of Mongol political control made foreign travel easier for Russians. Italso allowed the emergence of two strong centers of power, Lithuania andMoscow, which vied for leadership of the patrimony of ancient Rus'. The grandprinces of Lithuania had spread their influence over much of the Ukraine andWhite Russia attempting, it would seem, to reconstitute the old Kievan Russianstate in the areas where Tatar control had been least effectively enforced.Claiming the venerable city of Kiev and generally allied with the princes of Tver, a northeastern Russian principality and onetime holder of the grand princelytitle, which now played the role of a spoiler, Lithuania created a viable statewhich attracted many of the lesser princes of western Rus' because of its looseconfederation system of government and the promise of freedom from Tatarexactions. The culture of the Lithuanian state was Russian. However, theOrthodox faith of the majority of the population of Lithuania, which might moreaptly be called the "West Russian" state, was not necessarily shared by the rulingLithuanian grand princes; they were pagan into the 1370's, and Roman Catholicafter 1387. Lithuania, however, had a worthy competitor for hegemony over the Russianpeople: the growing principality of Moscow. Born in the raw northeast reaches ofthe old Kievan Russian federation, Moscow owed to many factors its phenomenal growth from an undistinguished hunting lodge in the twelfth century tothe capital of a powerful centralizing state in the fourteenth century. Thesefactors need not be rehearsed here, for they are the common coin of historians ofRussia, but two bear special note: the role of the grand prince of Moscow as chiefRussian representative of the Mongol khan, and the influence of the Church. Having gained over the years power, prestige, and money as deputy of the hatedTatar overlord, the prince of Moscow changed into a champion of Russianindependence by successfully challenging Mongol military might at the famedbattle of Kulikovo Field in 1380. The battle also delivered a serious blow to theRussian pretensions of the Lithuanians, who had allied themselves with theMongols.
Perhaps even more telling in the long run than the psychological importance ofthe challenge to the hated Tatars was the prestige which accrued to Moscowwhen it became the religious capital of all the Russian lands. Ever since the holyMetropolitan Peter had died in Moscow in 1326, all the rulers of the RussianChurch had made Moscow their residence, even though they often held jurisdiction also over the Orthodox faithful in the Lithuanian state. Perhaps at firstwooed to move to Moscow in order to bring the prestige of the Church to aprincipality with no long history, the "Metropolitans of Kiev and All Rus"' resided in Moscow eventually because of deliberate policy of the patriarchate inConstantinople. For reasons which are not completely clear, although theyprobably derive from the Lithuanian grand princes' paganism and dallianceswith Roman Catholic Poland, the Byzantine religious authorities supported asingle unified church for all Orthodox Russians, with its center at Moscow.Given the traditional role of the Church as legitimizer of political power,ecclesiastical support gave Moscow a clear ideological superiority over its rivals.Lack of such support, of course, seriously grated on the Lithuanians, a fact whichhelps explain the extraordinary number of high ecclesiastics going back and forthbetween Lithuania, Muscovy, and Byzantium in this period. Sandwiched between Muscovy and Lithuania stood the proud, autonomousRussian city-state, "Lord Novgorod the Great." Located far to the northwest,Novgorod had never fitted easily into the political configuration of Rus'. InKievan times Novgorod had been an appendage to the grand princely throne; theonly Russian state to escape Tatar devastation, it gained autonomy and prospered by maintaining commercial contacts beyond the lands of Rus'. An important symbol of Novgorod's independent status was its elected archbishop. All themore fiercely did the Novgorodians cling to this symbol of their special positionas the Muscovite princes infringed on their freedoms and pressed toward absorption of the merchant republic. The patriarchate at Constantinople was the majorguarantor of their free ecclesiastical status, and, just as the. Lithuanian grandprinces (and, indeed, also the Polish rulers of Galician Ukraine) pressed forseparate hierarchies as tokens of their separateness from Moscow, so did thelords of Novgorod. Their close commercial ties doubtless facilitated their ecclesiastical diplomacy.6 The Constantinople to which the Russian pilgrims made their way in thefourteenth and fifteenth centuries was, if the truth be told, but a shell of its formergreatness. No longer the ruling city of the Mediterranean world or even the majorpower of the eastern Mediterranean, as it had been into the twelfth century, theNew Rome on the Bosporus was, in fact, but the capital of one of several Balkan'There are, of course, many works on Russia in the pivotal period 1300-1453; most accessible isG. Vernadsky, A History of Russia. III: The Mongols and Russia (New Haven, 1953). More detailedstudies include J. L. I. Fennell, The Emergence of Moscow, 1304-1359 (Berkeley-Los Angeles, 1968);A. E. Presnjakov, O6pa3oeanue eeAuxopyccuozo zocydapcmea (Petrograd, 1918), English trans.(Chicago, 1970); and L. V. Cerepnin, O6pa3oeanue pyccxozo yenmpanusoeauuozo zocydapcmea 6XIV-XV eexax (Moscow, 1960). The role of Byzantium and of the Church in Russian politics of thisperiod is the subject of John Meyendorff's study, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia (Cambridge,1981), which the author graciously allowed me to read in typescript.
states, its territory constantly shrinking. The agrarian base of its economy hadwithered with loss of territory to foreign rule and to ungovernable magnates. Thetrade which had once provided the margin of profit to endow the Empire withunparalleled wealth was now in the hands of the maritime cities of Italy. Thepoverty of the Byzantine state treasury in this period was such that an emperorwould have to pawn the crown jewels to hire mercenaries to substitute for theonce triumphant imperial army. The "Empire" had never really recovered fromthe sacking and pillage of its capital by the Crusaders in 1204. The Greeks wereable to retake the city in 1261, but serious repair of the looted and burnedbuildings was beyond their resources. Even the Great Palace, the "Palace of theEmperor Constantine," as the Russian travelers call it, was finally abandoned;the Palaeologan emperors could not afford to replace the bronze roof tiles melteddown by the Franks. What had once been the most populous city in Europe nowsprouted vineyards and vegetable patches within the city walls; unused buildingsfell to ruin, and even major churches were closed for repairs for years at a time asthe authorities sought the wherewithal to finance the work. Hierarchs solicitedcontributions from abroad to repair churches just as emperors wandered overEurope begging funds to provide soldiers to save the city from what seemed to beits inevitable fall to the Turks.' Financially bankrupt and forced into the role of pawn to the Genoese orVenetians, the Empire never retreated from its conception of itself as theChristian empire. As so often happens, mystique outlived reality. To theRussians, the mystique of the divinely constituted empire and its sacred capitalseems to have dimmed but slightly. The emperor was vice-gerent of God, andConstantinople, the imperial capital, continued to be for them the mythic city ofChristian shrines presided over by God's civil and ecclesiastical representatives inthis world. The patriarch and synod at Constantinople, like the books of ecclesiastical ritual, constantly promulgated this teaching. Coups d'e'tat and political fragmentation did not change the Russian perception of the Empire and itscapital as the icon of the Kingdom of Heaven. God dwelt in a special way in theshrines of Tsirgrad, and political plots and military defeats were assumed,somehow, to be part of God's larger plan for His people. Such a conception ofByzantium would reign in Russian minds until the submission of the ByzantineChurch to Rome in 1439. This event shattered Russia's vision of Byzantium aspreceptor of the divine order in this world, leaving open the way for a new mythof God's chosen people in Russia.
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