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The “Third Rome” and Russia: Russia Inherits the Orthodox
Legacy
As the fifteenth century approached, the handwriting was on the wall:
Byzantium was dying, its few lasting remnants of empire soon to be snuffed out
by the Ottoman conquest of 1453. But the concept of the Orthodox Church, the
great mother church, had been powerfully implanted across the region; it would
not die. In this chapter, we will see how the Byzantine torch was, fatefully,
passed on to Russia, where a flame of resentment and suspicion toward the West
would be nourished and take on new character over the next five hundred years
down to today. Anti-Westernism in the Orthodox Church was maintained even as
Islam took over the imperial mantle in Constantinople.
Islam had now largely completed the assertion of its dominant role across the
entire former Byzantine Empire—the Ottoman Empire would resemble the
Byzantine in many respects, only now in Muslim garb. The Ottomans inherited
and perpetuated numbers of Byzantine ruling institutions in its management of
the multireligious and multiethnic empire. While the psychological blow to
Eastern Christianity of defeat and loss of power was huge, it is important to note
that Islam did not become the eternal deadly enemy of Christianity in these
Eastern reaches of the world; they all lived too close together for that. Whatever
the now-subject Christians felt about it, there was little choice but intimate
coexistence on both sides. Certainly, there were numerous discontents here and
there, local uprisings and revolts periodically, especially as the Ottoman Empire
itself gradually weakened and separatist nationalist movements, encouraged by
Europe, grew. Some rebellions were put down with great harshness. But local
Christians had periodically revolted against Byzantine rule earlier on. And there
were also local revolts by Muslim populations against Ottoman rule as well over
this long period.
Large empires are never free of periodic violent discontent in one locale or
another. Given a thousand years of Orthodox distrust of Rome and the West on

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the one hand, and the new imperative of Orthodox coexistence with Islam on the
other, Islam’s final attainment of power across the region seems to have brought
remarkably little dislocation. Indeed, large communities of Christians in the
Arab regions had already been living under Islamic rule for some six hundred
years even before Constantinople fell. The year 1453 may be perceived as a
symbolic watershed, but it disguises the power of continuity in the region.
Whoever sat in possession of Anatolian, Levantine, and Balkan territories
inherited some built-in geopolitical legacies of tension with the West. And in
Russia we will see strong elements of this legacy passed on to the eastern Slavic
world, creating new complex relationships between Muslim and Christian.
ACCORDING TO ANCIENT RUSSIAN historical accounts, both Catholic and
Orthodox missionaries had made their way over a thousand years ago to Kiev,
the birthplace of the early pagan Russian state. In a victory for Constantinople
over Rome, the Bulgarians and several other Slavic peoples had already opted
for Orthodoxy over Latin Christianity in an earlier century. Prince Vladimir the
Great of Kiev is said to have dispatched envoys to the centers of each of the
great religions in order to assess the suitability of each for official adoption by
Russia. Rich anecdotal accounts narrate the envoys’ reactions as they reported
back:
Of the Muslim Bulgarians of the Volga the envoys reported there is no
gladness among them; only sorrow and a great stench, and that their
religion was undesirable due to its taboo against alcoholic beverages and
pork; supposedly, Vladimir observed on that occasion: “Drinking is the
joy of the Rus.”
Vladimir sent envoys to the Jews as well, “questioning them about their
religion but ultimately rejecting it, saying that their loss of Jerusalem was
evidence of their having been abandoned by God.” Finally the choice lay
between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. “In the gloomy churches of the Germans
his emissaries saw no beauty; but at Hagia Sophia [in Constantinople], where the
full festival ritual of the Byzantine Church was set in motion to impress them,
they found their ideal: ‘We no longer knew whether we were in heaven or on
earth,’ they reported, ‘nor such beauty, and we know not how to tell of it.’ ” Thus
was the fateful choice made with huge civilizational implications for the future,

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although we may be sure that there were major political as well as theological
gains to be had for Vladimir through an alliance with Constantinople.
The conversion of Russia was a huge geopolitical prize for Orthodoxy: to this
day, Russia remains the single largest Orthodox communion in the world. Russia
is also the only religious link the Orthodox Church possesses to a major world
power. At the same time, an expanding Russian Empire would take in larger and
larger Muslim populations under its control, transforming Russia into an
important Muslim state as well.
The Ottomans had been in no doubt about the historic and cultural character
of the prize they had acquired from the Byzantines; they had long been familiar
with the Byzantine ruling and administrative system as they gradually
incorporated outlying parts of the empire into their own. Sultan Mehmet quickly
sought to reestablish Constantinople as an international and multicultural capital.
He invited all those Christians who had fled to return and restore the city to its
former character. The patriarch of Constantinople was granted authority to
oversee all Orthodox communities within the empire. In fact, the new power of
the patriarch and his administrators under the Ottoman Turks came to be
resented by some outlying Orthodox communities as an infringement upon their
former autonomous authority. But the Orthodox Church was now settling in for a
long four-hundred-year coexistence within the Ottoman Empire that would
change them both.
At the same time, the church paid a high cultural price. Even though it was
able to operate with considerable religious authority within the Ottoman Empire,
its political power, shorn of the backing of an Orthodox state, had been greatly
reduced. The church grew isolated within the empire, and its contacts with
intellectual and theological trends in the West diminished. The church grew
more introverted and continued an earlier drift away from intellectual and
“rational” pursuits to emphasize what had always been a hallmark of Orthodoxy
—the importance of faith and religious mystery in personal spiritual life. The
church developed a deeper feeling of dichotomy between Eastern and Western
Christianity: in Orthodox eyes, Latin Catholicism and the West were imbued
with materialism, rationalism (the mind over faith and spirit), individualism, and
corruption through close papal and church association with power, leading to a
spiritual emptiness. The Orthodox Church saw its own spirit as emanating
directly from the earliest teachings of Jesus himself, unsullied by the politics of
the Latin Church and papacy. Orthodox spirituality and otherworldliness were
perceived to reflect what the West lacked in its alleged spiritual impoverishment.
These themes ran deep in the Orthodox psyche and persist in its rhetoric to this
day.

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