Sainthood, State, and Identity: Some Remarks on the Meaning of the Russian Saints’ Cults in the Middle Ages

Medieval Rus’ was a successor of Eastern Christianity, the Byzantine Church with its ideas about holiness and saints. However, it has rather the Northern German model of holiness that initially spread in the Ancient Russian lands. It included aristocratic, princely cults, cults of canonized church hierarchs, and missionaries. The first saints were princes Boris and Gleb, Olga, Vladimir the Baptist, then Alexander Nevsky, Dovmont of Pskov, etc. The cults planted by authorities contributed to sacralization of the power itself, the cult of the rulers’ personae which in time formed a stable pantheon identified with the ideas of a united Russia in the political perturbations of the 12th–14th centuries. It is the veneration of princes-soldiers including the ones mentioned above as well as Dmitry Donskoy and princes martyrs (Michael of Chernigov). These cults helped to preserve the memory of united ancient Russia in the context of the Mongol conquest in the 13th–14th centuries. In the 15th century the Orthodox Christians of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Moscow Rus’, Novgorod, Pskov, Tver lands, and the Ryazan Principality split from each other. Since the 14th century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania had taken the attempts to establish its own Orthodox metropolitanate independent from the Metropolitan of Kiev and all Russia residing in Moscow since 1325. In 1356, the Metropolitanate of Novogrudok was established, in 1371—the Metropolitanate of Galicia, and in 1416—the Metropolitanate of Kiev and Lithuania with the latter soon moving to Vilna. The Florence Union of 1439 caused Moscow to refuse its submission to Constantinople and form the autocephalous Russian Orthodox Church in 1448. Along with preparation for the new status of the Church there was intensification of canonization process. Thus, in the second quarter of the 15th century the Novgorod diocese Archbishop Euthymius canonized half of the medieval bishops and archbishops of Great Novgorod living in the 11th–14th centuries. Russia was intensively forming its group of Orthodox saints who had shone in the Russian land since its dawn. Through this, Russia’s autocephalous status was to be made legitimate since it had enough holy ascetics to glorify it and provide grounds for its high independent role.