CHAPTER IV
THE PATRIARCHATE
The reign of Ivan's son, the amiable, feeble Feodor, is noteworthy in Church history as the time when the brief patriarchate of Moscow was established. Hitherto there had been five patriarchs—the patriarchs of Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem. But Rome was now apostate. Like Matthias who was chosen to fill Judas's vacant place, the patriarch of Moscow was to make up the normal number again. The piety of Feodor is credited with the idea of this daring ecclesiastical innovation; but circumstances had prepared the way for it. The fall of Constantinople and the loss of liberty suffered by its patriarchs under the Turks; the spread of Christianity over Russia and the shifting of the centre of gravity of Oriental Christianity from the Greek to the Sclavonic peoples; the removal of the metropolitan from Kiev to Vladimir, and then his settlement at Moscow, in the very heart of Russia, so far away from Constantinople; the centralising of government in the hands of the tsar and the consequent consolidation of the vast area over which his sway extended; the printing of the Bible and other books in the language of the people; and the Russianising of the Church and exclusion of Greek elements—all these factors combined to render the now merely nominal subjec-
404
