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The downfall of Byzantium and the collapse
of the Golden Horde enhanced the prestige of Moscow and for the first time
opened the way to its eventual role as a world power. In the minds of most
Russian leaders, and particularly of the church hierarchy, Constantinople was
considered the "New Rome" that replaced the "Decrepit"
first Rome, which betrayed true Christianity. They learned this from their
Greek teachers and the literature they brought to Russia with them, which
supported the theory of succession, according to which historic circumstances
and conditions gave Constantinople the right to succeed to the old Rome. With
the disappearance of Constantinople the mantle, had to pass to some body else.
After defeating the Tatars, liquidating the remaining independent
principalities and becoming the capital of a considerably enlarged and unified
all-Russian state, it became natural for Moscow to aspire to succeed
Constantinople as a new political and spiritual center of the Orthodox world.
All that Moscow's leaders needed, after the unfaithful Ottoman empire had
established itself firmly in Constantinople, was for somebody to further
elaborate the theory of historic succession between the dominant empires. The
first contribution to his effort had been already made by Pakhomii Logofet. In
his book "The Legend of Princes of Vladimir," which appeared around
1480, he linked Vladimir's Princes and the Moscow dynasty to the Roman emperor
Caesar Augustus. According to legend, Augustus had governors throughout his
huge empire, one of whom was his brother Pruss, who governed the area around
the river Visla. Rurik, the founder of the first Russian dynasty, was
supposedly Pruss' fourteenth-generation direct descendant. Thus alleged blood
relations between Moscow grand dukes and Caesar Augustus, the "Sovereign
of the Universe" became established. Then in the beginning of the 16 The
century Filofey (Filotheus), the Abbot of the Yeleazarov monastery in Pskov,
drew conclusions, and in an epistle addressed to the Grand Duke Vasili III
expounded the famous doctrine "Moscow - the Third Rome." His basic
idea was that the entire life of men and of peoples is determined by the will
of God. There is nothing fortuitous that guides their destinies; on the
contrary, everything unfolds in accordance with divine plan. According to
Filofey, both the first and the second Rome fell because they did not live up
to the true Christian religion. With their disappearance, the only truly
Christian kingdom left was Moscow, the third and last Rome, which divine grace
had destined to live for ever. Presumably dynastic ties with the Roman Caesar
Augustus and the fact that Vasili III was a child of Sophie Paleologue, niece
of the last Byzantine emperor, provided Filofey with necessary elements to
declare the Moscow grand duke "the only living tsar of the universe."
Filofey's scheme was not a novelty, and he had borrowed some ideas from similar
theories that already existed in Byzantine literature concerning the divine
origin of the secular power, or even from the Scriptures. The size of the new
Russian state and its large population made the theory seem feasible. Under
Ivan the Terrible it was officially accepted as the political doctrine of the
autocratic state. Here are two icons of the Moscow school Icon1, Icon2
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