reputation in the orthodox Church, where he is reckoned among the saints as the "Defender of all Russia."
A turn in the wheel of fortune brought back the opposite party into power. Then Constantine was dismissed to his original see, where he ended his days, ordering in his will that his body should be cast out of the town as unworthy of burial. After it had been thus exposed for three days, it was buried with due honours in the church of St. Saviour. We may doubt whether the poor man's singular command should be attributed, as Mouravieff says, to "extraordinary humility,"[1] or to a melancholy sense of failure after his ambitious mission had begun so successfully.
Meanwhile, of course, the patriarch did not recognise Clement, who had been restored by the government and so had renewed the schism. Constantine was no longer available. Accordingly Luke appointed a third metropolitan, Theodore. Andrew Bogolubsky, one of the contending princes, wished him to make his own city of Vladimir the metropolitan see. He had built there the magnificent church of the Mother of God and deposited in it a miracle-working icon brought from Greece. If he had succeeded his daring policy might have cut the knot. Kiev would have been left high and dry with its discredited metropolitan, while the tide of Church favour flowed to the new ecclesiastical metropolis. But Luke was too wise to agree to the proposal. It would have meant a serious division in the Russian Church, not only between two parties, but between two great cities and their surrounding areas. Local ambition would then have been roused; and thus the schism would have been perpetuated long after any excuse for it had died away. All that the patriarch would do to honour the city of Vladimir was to allow the bishop of Rostoff to make it his centre, and sanction an annual festival in celebration of the prince's victory over the Bulgarians on the same day as that on which the Emperor Manuel celebrated his victory over the Saracens, a festival still observed on the first of August.
- ↑ P. 37.
