ABSTRACT
In the first decades of the sixteenth century a Russian monk, Filofei (or Philotheos in its Greek form), at the Monastery of Eleazar in Pskov wrote to the Tsar, Vassily III, ‘Two Romes have fallen, but the Third stands, and a Fourth shall never be.’1 This apocalyptic utterance addressed to the ruler in Moscow asserts that his city is not merely Tsargrad, the city of the Tsar, but Rome, the Third Rome. The name and glory, signifying the capital of Christianity, had, according to Filofei, long since departed from Italian Rome, whence it had passed to Byzantium, which took the name of Constantinople and soon became the Second Rome. But with the fall of that great city on the Bosporus before the Ottoman Turks in 1453, a little over a half-century before Filofei wrote, Moscow could now lay claim to the ancient name and all that it entailed. The monk was right. There never has been, and presumably never will be, a Fourth Rome.
