Barsov in search of the Russian Sovereigns coronation imperial roots

Secretary of the Moscow Society of Russian History and Antiquities E.V. Barsov created his classic work on the Byzantine sources of the coronation rite of Russian sovereigns for the coronation of Alexander III in 1883. Having examined his sources and the course of his work in the context of modern knowledge of late Byzantine and Russian coronation rites, we have shown that Barsov set purely archaeological tasks, publishing new texts and leaving known ones out of sight. He partially accomplished the task of finding “Greek originals” of the Russian coronation rite in the depths of centuries, set by the official concept of the 19th century. Having published the manuscript of the Yaroslavl Bishops House, the author of which reflected on the Byzantine roots of the coronation of Peter II in 1728, Barsov established that the treatise of Pseudo-Codinus cited in it was first used at the coronation of Feodor Alekseevich in 1676. The archaeologist described this reform from a formal point of view, but was unable to clarify its essence, which consisted in the establishment of the ideology of the sacred kingdom in Russia, because he published not the full rite of 1676, but an extract from it. Having refused to trace the Russian rite back to the mythical coronation of Vladimir Monomakh, Barsov attempted to find Greek originals for the Russian coronation from the rite of Dmitry the Grandson in 1498, relying on the article by A.V. Gorsky on the prayers from the Greek Euchologion at the coronation of the emperor and the description of the coronation of Manuel II in the walking of Ignatius Smolnyanin, included in the Yaroslavl manuscript. The latter was not used in Russian rites, and the prayers included in the Trebnik after the fall of Constantinople, together with the literary text of the Testament of Pseudo-Basil the Macedonian quoted in the 1498 rite, reflected the religious and cultural continuity of the Russian tradition from the Greek, and not the borrowing of the coronation rite, which until 1645 relied on Russian antiquity. The Byzantine stage in Russian coronation rites began with the borrowing of the Greek rite according to the treatise of Pseudo-Codinus (and not similar Greek texts) in 1676 and ended with the coronation of Nicholas II in 1896.