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Chapter Three Sergius, a Russian Icon On 21 September in 1504, in the penultimate year of his reign, “Grand Prince Ivan Vasilevich and his son Grand Prince Vasilii Ivanovich and [his other] children departed Moscow and were that fall at the life-giving Trinity Sergius monastery.”1 Their pilgrimage was timed to celebrate St. Sergius’s feast day, 25 September. By then Sergius’s cult had become an “all-Rus’” celebration and his monastery something like a national shrine. It attracted pilgrims from all parts of Rus’ and inspired deeds far beyond its walls. Such fame had serious consequences for Trinity. Powerful constituencies sought to share in Trinity’s charisma. In turn they expected to share in defining and redefining Sergius’s significance. Trinity lost its monopoly to shape the cult. Although its financial, artistic, and intellectual resources, and ultimately its inviolability as preserver of Sergius’s relics, allowed it considerable influence, its brothers perforce had to develop antennae sensitive to how their inventions played at the court of Moscow’s rulers or in the chancellery of the metropolitanate, later the patriarchate. In some instances Trinity formed “joint ventures” with these patrons in interpreting Sergius’s cult. * Pakhomii the Serb continued to work at Trinity. He described and appended to his Third Edition of the life new miracles attributed to Sergius that happened in 1448–49, during Martinian’s tenure. He also produced a “prologue” edition of Sergius’s life to be read on feast days. Then there are variants of Sergius’s life, the earliest manuscripts of which date from around 1450, which Kloss called Pakhomii’s Fourth Edition and others which he called Pakhomii’s Fifth and dated to 1459.2 The later editions in all their variants contained the episode in which Sergius’s intercession was instrumental in Dmitrii Donskoi’s victory over the Tatars in 1380.3 A standard hagiographical narrative had come into being. Clifford Geertz described such narratives as a master fiction. It had four acts. In act one Dmitrii came 77 Sergius, a Russian Icon to Trinity for Sergius’s blessing; Sergius, who possessed a “gift of prophesy,” foretold that with God’s help, for which he would offer prayers, Dmitrii would win and with his army return safely; Dmitrii thereupon vowed that he would found a monastery dedicated to the Mother of God to celebrate the victory. In the second act Dmitrii, en route to meet the Tatars, received Sergius’s message urging him to press on. The battle was the third act, one punctuated by a miraclulous vision of gleaming, bloody armor that prophesied victory for Dmitrii’s army. In the last act Dmitrii returned victorious to Trinity to fulfill his vow to build a monastery dedicated to the Mother of God. Editions of Sergius’s life containing this story survive in over 100 manuscripts copied in many places from the mid-fifteenth through the seventeenth century. The story was present in the Extended Edition of 1518 and thereafter in over 40 manuscripts. One was an illuminated version containing 651 (or 652) miniatures that the tsar’s masters produced about 1590 in Moscow. By then the narrative was an authenticating strategy.4 Its salient quality, aside from repetition, was that it enlisted fiction to demonstrate the “truth” that Sergius was the agent and the Kulikovo battle the proof of a divine solicitude for Orthodox Russia. Another way of putting it is that society ’s optimistic expectations for the future of the Muscovite Russian state could only be justified by a powerful master fiction in which Sergius was the vessel through which God protected his chosen people. Sergius’s cult now grew rapidly in popularity in areas beyond Moscow’s domains, earliest of all in the grand principality of Tver’. Epifanii had had longstanding ties there, as had Abbot Nikon and his successors. In his turn Pakhomii described a posthumous miracle in which a visit to Sergius’s remains cured the Tver’ citizen zakharii Borozdin; in another miracle composed in 1448–49, Pakhomii said pilgrims flocked to Trinity to celebrate the feast of the Epiphany “from many towns and countries, not only from [towns] of Muscovy, but from far away areas, that is from [towns in] Lithuania , Riazan’, and Tver’.”5 As tangible evidence of this Grand Prince Boris Aleksandrovich of Tver’ (d. 1461) and his brothers gave Trinity a village with surrounding hamlets near Kashin on the north bank of the Volga. Boris also issued six charters assuring Trinity tax immunities...

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