The Russian reaction

Nonchalant is the way one historian has characterised the Russian attitude to the fall of Constantinople, ¹ but this fails to do justice to the complexity of the Russian reaction. This stemmed from the distrust felt for the Byzantine emperor and patriarch in the wake of the council of Ferrara Florence, which came to be seen as a betrayal of Orthodoxy. However, it was impossible for Russians to be indifferent to the fate of Constantinople, because it was the religious centre to which over the centuries they had looked for guidance. ² It was a place of pilgrimage, as the numerous late medieval pilgrim narratives attest. ³ The pilgrims gravitated towards the shrines, relics and icons of Tsar’grad, as they called Constantinople. The emperor and his court scarcely figure in their narratives. The Russians showed very little interest in the Byzantine emperor. When at the end of the fourteenth century Vasilii I, Grand Prince of Moscow (1389–1425), informed the patriarch of Constantinople that ‘we have a church, but no emperor’, he was being realistic. The patriarch protested that however reduced the emperor’s material circumstances might have become, he remained the God-given guarantor of the unity of the Orthodox faith. The Grand Prince appeared to give this claim grudging acceptance, though this may only reflect an improvement in relations with Byzantium secured through the good offices of the Greek archbishop of Russia, Photios (1408–31). In 1414 the Grand Prince’s daughter Anna married John VIII Palaiologos, heir to the Byzantine throne. The relationship between the Grand Prince and the Byzantine imperial house was given visual form on Archbishop Photios’s embroidered sakkos or episcopal tunic. This showed John VIII Palaiologos and his Russian empress facing the Grand Prince and his consort. A nimbus is used to underline the superior status of the Byzantine pair. ⁴