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Architecture, Image, and Ritual in the Throne Rooms of Muscovy, 1550-1650: A Preliminary Survey
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Rude & Barbarous Kingdom Revisited: Essays in Russian History and Culture in Honor of Robert O. Crummey. Chester S. L. Dunning, Russell E. Martin, and Daniel Rowland, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2008, 53–71. Architecture, Image, and Ritual in the Throne Rooms of Muscovy, 1550–1650: A Preliminary Survey Daniel Rowland This paper attempts to build on Robert Crummey’s work by exploring two themes that he has written about: rituals and the secular elite of Muscovy.1 As the title indicates, it is more of a quick survey than a scholarly discussion of a complex but important set of problems presented by Muscovy’s two main throne rooms, the Hall of Facets (Granovitaia palata) and the Golden Hall (Zolotaia palata). Professor Crummey has examined in great detail the compo-‐‑ sition of the elite over time, and the various ties that bound elite and monarch together. Professor Crummey and other scholars2 have argued that the health and prosperity, even the very survival, of the Muscovite state throughout all of its life depended on the maintenance of a consensus among members of the ruling elite and between the elite and the monarch, and have uncovered many of the details of this relationship over both time and space. Less atten-‐‑ tion has been paid to the symbolic expression of this consensus, to the images used to portray the state, its elite, and its ruler to the elite itself (the court), to other residents of Muscovy, and to foreigners. The history of other premod-‐‑ ern states would lead us to believe that this type of symbolic action could serve as a powerful cohesive force for political organisms like the Muscovite state that lacked the wealth, bureaucratic reach, and military power to compel obedience from all subjects. This essay will concentrate on two places where this symbolic action was especially densely concentrated: the two throne rooms of the Moscow Kremlin. 1 Robert O. Crummey, Aristocrats and Servitors: The Boyar Elite in Russia, 1613–1689 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), together with related essays listed in this volume’s bibliography. On rituals, see idem, “Court Spectacles in Seventeenth-‐‑ Century Russia: Illusion and Reality,” in Essays in Honor of A. A. Zimin, ed. Daniel C. Waugh (Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers, 1985), 130–58. 2 In addition to the works cited in n. 1 above, see Edward L. Keenan, “Muscovite Polit-‐‑ ical Folkways,” The Russian Review 45 (1986): 115–81; Nancy Shields Kollmann, Kinship and Politics: The Making of the Muscovite Political System, 1345–1547 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987); Valerie A. Kivelson, Autocracy in the Provinces: The Muscovite Gentry and Political Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). 54 DANIEL ROWLAND These two halls of state are ideal examples of “glowing centers” as de-‐‑ fined by Clifford Geertz. According to Geertz, such centers are “concentrated loci of serious acts; they consist in the point or points in a society where the leading ideas come together with the leading institutions to create an arena in which the events that most vitally affect its members’ lives take place.”3 It is precisely this coincidence of political institutions and symbolic display that gave these throne rooms their power for contemporaries then and constitute their importance for historians now. The tsar and the members of his court spent many hours in these chambers, making (or enunciating) important deci-‐‑ sions or, through their persons and their dress, the costly furnishings of the rooms and rituals of unity and devotion, displaying to foreign visitors the power and wealth of the state and the unanimity of the court. The walls of each palace were covered with elaborate murals, those in the Golden Hall originating in the period right after the Moscow fire of 1547, and those in the Hall of Facets in the reign of Boris Godunov. More than any text, these mural cycles displayed the basic ideology of rulership in Muscovy. By depicting the governance of state in the context of Christian salvation history, they elevated the tsar and courtiers sitting immediately below to world historical signifi-‐‑ cance and connected their decisions to the will of God. This conviction that the tsar’s will reflected God’s will, reinforced in countless other ways and at-‐‑ tested by the observations of many foreign observers, was surely as vital a tool of statecraft as the army or the bureaucracy, and was, besides, a whole lot cheaper. The mural cycles are important to the historian for another reason. In...