Byzantium and the Rise of Russia- Church History - Book

Author: Fr. John Meyendorff Published: 1989 Size: 9x6 Pages: 326  Paperback The history of Russia is often considered as if that immense country had always been an isolated continent. However, at the time of its rise as a nation, it was politically a province of the Mongol Empire, whose capital was in Central Asia; and ecclesiastically, it was a dependency of the Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople, of Byzantium. This book describes the role of Byzantine (predominately ecclesiastical) diplomacy in the emergence of Moscow as the capital of Russia in the fourteenth century, and the cultural, religious, and political ties which connected the Northern periphery of the Byzantine Orthodox "Commonwealth" with its center in Constantinople. The princes of Moscow, dynastically and culturally the successors of the early medieval princes of Kiev, struggled with several competitors, particularly the Grand-Princes of Lithuania, in their attempts at "gathering the Russian lands" around themsel