ABSTRACT
The Church's intercessions for two different kinds of tsar were to find their counterpart in two kinds of diplomatic relations. The metropolitan of all Rus' was now required to represent his own metropolia and, sometimes separately, the Byzantine patriarchate to the Mongol court. The conversion of the khan to Islam did away with the rare opportunities for inter-church and inter-faith cooperation provided by the tolerance of his predecessors. Russians were sufficiently well versed in such practices to curtail them in due course. In the first significant attempt to secularize church lands, the imperious grand-prince of Moscow Ivan III required that half the monastic lands of the Novgorod principality be surrendered to him when that city yielded to his rule. n the year of the millennium, as in the testing years of Mongol domination, the Church is once again uniquely placed, and therefore could be poised to stabilize, to guide and to uplift society at large.
