The Church Theft and Sacrilege in Domestic Law from the 10th to the 17th Centuries

The pre-Petrine period (10th–17th centuries) played a crucial role in the formation of the categories of the church theft and sacrilege as punishable offenses in Russian law. Incorporation of extensive normative materials both of state and canonical nature, as well as an overview of the development of the offenses under consideration over eight centuries, leads to understanding the law-maker’s rationale in regulating liability for the commission of the church theft and sacrilege. The author concludes that legal landmarks of the pre-Mongol period contain provisions concerning the church theft, though not its formal definition. Nonetheless, these texts characterize the church theft as a form of misappropriation and as a qualified theft. Another distinctive feature of the law of this period is an underdeveloped concept of res divini iuris (things of divine law), known in Roman and Byzantine law, or its analogues. Although, substantively, the protection of items comparable to those considered as res divini iuris constitutes the main object of the crime of the church theft and aims entirely at their material preservation, the law-maker failed to define the scope of these categories precisely. That tendency persisted throughout the 13th to 17th centuries as well. At the same time, during this period, the law-maker envisaged the death penalty for the church theft, whereas other forms of theft were subject to recidivism penalties. In the course of the 17th-century codification and adoption of the Sobornoye Ulozheniye, the law-maker classified the church theft as a property crime, distinguishing it from other religious offenses. Sacrilege as a punishable act first appears in the 16th-century ecclesiastical authorities’ decrees that interpreted the rules of the Holy Apostles; however, from the 10th to the 17th centuries, sacrilege was not mentioned as a crime in state law. Therefore, it can be argued that throughout the period under examination, sacrilege neither supplanted nor succeeded the church theft: for an extended time, both offenses developed in parallel and independently of one another.