were Protestants, was considerable. In the main it was civilising and social, but Protestant ideas and Protestant piety aroused imitation and thought throughout wide circles. Before long, Protestant influence was displayed in ecclesiastical and religious fields, Russian theologians undertaking the study of Protestant theology. This trend, which soon made itself felt in the domains of literature and art as well (a German pastor founded the first European theatre in Moscow), was all the more decisive inasmuch as Protestants were considered less dangerous than Catholics. In 1631, when teachers were summoned from Europe for the reorganisation of the army, the tsar expressly commanded that no Frenchmen, and above all no Catholics, were to be engaged; but Swedes, Dutchmen, Englishmen, and Danes were employed.
The European influence of the great movement of the reformation and the renaissance naturally made itself felt first of all in the ecclesiastical domain. Maxim the Greek, who had listened in Italy to the sermons of Savonarola and was in touch with the humanists Lascaris and Manutius, was sent from Athos to Moscow in the year 1515, at the desire of the grand prince, to supervise translations. In Moscow Maxim worked; not merely as translator and reviser of liturgical books, but also as reformer. His religious ideals and his life were a reproach to the ecclesiastical and social life of the Russians. Consequently the metropolitans and grand princes of Moscow sacrificed him to his enemies, and he, an opponent of monasticism, was relegated to various monasteries successively. For thirty-one years, from 1525 to 1556, this man trained in all the learning of Europe could make no use of his powers, for the council that sentenced him forbade him to write.
The criticism of the Russian liturgical books initiated by Maxim was rigorously pursued in the following century by the patriarch Nikon. In view of the great importance of liturgy in the Russian church, it will readily be understood that as time passed the more cultured clerics and laymen found it impossible to tolerate the errors with which the text had been so freely interspersed by inefficient translators and mechanical copyists. Besides Maxim there were still a number of Greeks in the church, men who could not fail to note these errors, and in the seventeenth century the matter of revising the texts became an important ecclesiastical question. In
