ABSTRACT
During the period of the Mongol hegemony in Russia, from the middle of the thirteenth to the end of the fifteenth century, Russia had only intermittent contacts with Constantinople. The uncritical copying and re-copying of sacred books had caused the Russian Church to countenance manyunorthodox practices which persisted into the sixteenth century. According to Solovyev, when Ivan IV set up a printing press in Russia he was in part guided by the desire to supply the land with correct church books; even so, some of the early printers had to flee the country because they were accused of heretical views. A return to strict Orthodoxy was not achieved until Patriarch Nikon's great reforms in the seventeenth century.
