Moscow, the "Third Rome"
After rejecting union with Rome and seeing Constantinople fall, the Russian church becomes self-governing and Moscow comes to see itself as the last guardian of true Orthodoxy.
- The Orthodox Church — Timothy Ware, Penguin (1993)
- Moscow, the Third Rome: The Origins and Transformations of a "Pivotal Moment" — Marshall Poe, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas (2001)
- Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 — Geoffrey Hosking, Harvard University Press (1997)
- The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to its History, Doctrine, and Spiritual Culture — John Anthony McGuckin, Wiley-Blackwell (2008)
In 1439, at the Council of Florence, a Byzantine delegation desperate for Western help against the Ottomans accepted union with Rome. At home the union was widely rejected, and in Moscow Grand Prince Vasily II arrested the Greek metropolitan who had signed it. In 1448 a council of Russian bishops chose their own metropolitan, Jonah, without Constantinople’s approval, making the Russian church self-governing in practice.
- The Orthodox Church — Timothy Ware, Penguin (1993)
- Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 — Geoffrey Hosking, Harvard University Press (1997)
When Constantinople fell five years later, many Russians read it as God’s judgement on the compromise. Around 1523–24 the monk Filofei of Pskov wrote to the grand prince that “two Romes have fallen, the third stands, and a fourth there will not be”. Ivan IV took the title of tsar (Caesar) in 1547, and in 1589 Constantinople’s patriarch, visiting Moscow, agreed to raise Moscow to a patriarchate.
- Moscow, the Third Rome: The Origins and Transformations of a "Pivotal Moment" — Marshall Poe, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas (2001)
- The Orthodox Church — Timothy Ware, Penguin (1993)
- The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to its History, Doctrine, and Spiritual Culture — John Anthony McGuckin, Wiley-Blackwell (2008)
The idea gave Russian Orthodoxy a sense of destiny, and also a tendency to tie the church to the state. Peter the Great abolished the patriarchate in 1721 and governed the church through a state Holy Synod; the patriarchate was restored only in 1917.
- The Orthodox Church — Timothy Ware, Penguin (1993)
- Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 — Geoffrey Hosking, Harvard University Press (1997)
When the Greeks compromised with Rome at Florence and Constantinople fell, Providence passed the care of the true faith to Orthodox Russia and its tsar, heir of the Christian emperors.
- The Orthodox Church — Timothy Ware, Penguin (1993)
- Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 — Geoffrey Hosking, Harvard University Press (1997)
The "Third Rome" phrase came from a monk's letter and was mainly a warning to the ruler to be righteous. Historians such as Marshall Poe argue it was not official state ideology until nineteenth-century writers made it famous.
- Moscow, the Third Rome: The Origins and Transformations of a "Pivotal Moment" — Marshall Poe, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas (2001)
- Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 — Geoffrey Hosking, Harvard University Press (1997)
Why it matters today
The Russian Orthodox Church is by far the largest Orthodox church, and the idea that Moscow has a special mission to defend Orthodoxy still echoes in Russian church and state rhetoric. Other Orthodox, especially Greeks and Ukrainians, see in it a bid for leadership that rivals Constantinople's, a tension behind many modern quarrels.