The Effects of the Tatar Occupation.

For more than three centuries the Russian duchies were vassal states of the Mongol Empire, a circumstance that contributed to further alienation of Russia from central and western Europe. However, the importance of this matter has been frequently exaggerated. Western historiography has fostered an exaggerated conception of the racial changes among the Eastern Slavs produced by the admixture of Tatar blood. In reality the Tatar admixture among the Russian people at that time was insignificant since the Tatars left no sizable contingents of occupation troops in the Russian duchies. After quick, successful incursions, their mounted armies withdrew, leaving the conquered land in charge of Russian vassal dukes. For the most part they maintained contact with these vassals only through small embassies. Thus there was little mingling of blood. The number of “occupation children” was far less than the “normal” percentage that armies of occupation in all ages have left behind in countries they occupy for any length of time. However, some Russian noble families made political marriages with the daughters of Mongol princes, with the result that the small percentage of Mongol blood was greater in the Russian aristocracy than among the common people.

Nevertheless, political adherence to the Mongol Empire did result in a turning away from western Europe. The diplomatic intercourse, the marriages, the regular exchange of embassies of the Russian duchies with the neighboring duchies of the West Slavs, and with Scandinavia and Germany was discontinued. The formidable tribute that the Mongol khans extracted from the Russian duchies also choked off the economic relations between the Russian duchies and their neighbors to the west. Moreover, the crusaders, by occupying the islands from Malta to Cyprus, had reopened Mediterranean trade, hitherto paralyzed by the Saracens. Italian ports could once again trade with the Levant. Asiatic goods, which had hitherto found their way to the Hanse cities of the Baltic by way of Novgorod, could once more pour into western Europe by way of the Mediterranean. In addition, the integration of the Russian duchies in the administrative apparatus of the Mongol Empire brought about certain changes in the governmental practices of these duchies. These changes represented a break with the previous traditions, which had more or less followed the pattern of medieval European feudalism.

Suspicion of the West was further reinforced in the “Time of Troubles” preceding the election of the first Romanov, Tsar Michael. During this period Poland made repeated efforts to win control of the Moscow Duchy. These fresh invasions from the West seemed to the Russians a continuation of the Crusades, for one of the professed aims of the Polish invaders was subjugation of the Russian Orthodox Church to the leadership of Rome. To the Russians the Poles were worse foes than the Tatars — the Tatars, after all, had never interfered with the Orthodox Church, whereas in all the upheavals stirred up and nursed by the Poles during the Time of Troubles, hostility to Orthodoxy was a crucial element.

For these and many other reasons which we cannot here particularize, Russia developed her curiously ambivalent attitude toward western Europe. On the one hand pre-Revolutionary Russia was conscious of her solidarity with Christian Europe as against the non-Christian powers of Asia — a solidarity that might also be manifested in the contest against anti-Christian revolutionary forces arising in western Europe itself and seeking to overthrow the traditional Christian social order, as was the case during the Napoleonic wars. On the other hand there arose a sense of profound difference between Orthodox Russia and the Roman Catholic West; wariness was intensified into a highly idiosyncratic mingling of hatred and love. But even during periods of her most intense aloofness from the Roman Catholic or the Protestant West, Russia never cast her lot with Asia. On the contrary, she regarded the attitudes of the European powers toward her quarrels with Turkey in the Crimean War and with Japan in the Russo-Japanese War as betrayals. In the last analysis, Russia believed in European solidarity. Nothing in her ecclesiastical and religious history accords with the popular theory that Russia belongs to Asia.

There is a long history behind the Orthodox Church's collaboration with the Protestant churches. This goes back to the time of the Reformation when direct relations were established between German Protestant theologians and the Patriarch of Constantinople. The first overtures were made by Philipp Melanchthon, who communicated with the Patriarch of Constantinople through a former secretary of the patriarchate who called on him in Wittenberg. Melanchthon profited by the occasion to work out a Greek translation of the Augsburg Confession. The translation, however, was not sent to Constantinople until the end of the sixteenth century, when Protestant envoys dispatched by the theological faculty of Tьbingen University handed it to Patriarch Jeremias II. The patriarch's reply marked the first phase of a new era of theological thinking within the Orthodox Church. Although Orthodoxy had little understanding of the tenets of the Reformers her theologians could not refrain from plunging into the struggle being waged in the West over the definition of the “pure doctrine.” Orthodoxy embarked upon a phase that present-day Orthodox theologians have justly called “pseudomorphosis” in which Orthodoxy felt herself obliged to take positions on problems alien to her. In these controversies the Orthodox theologians frequently adopted the terminology of the contending parties of the West.

Symptomatic of Orthodoxy's shifting sympathies was the procession of pro-Rome and pro-Reform patriarchs of Byzantium. Often they would hold their patriarchal throne a few months only to be overthrown by conspiracies within their own ranks or by intrigues conducted among the rival European powers at the Sublime Porte. The most important personality of this turbulent era in the history of the Greek Church was Patriarch Cyril Lukaris. His Confession of Faith, published in Geneva, brought Orthodox doctrine extremely close to Protestantism. He fell victim, however, to the combined intrigues of the Jesuits, the Catholic powers and enemies in his own Orthodox camp and in 1638 was executed on the order of the sultan in Constantinople. A fine specimen of “pseudomorphosis” was the polemic written against his Confession by Peter Mogila, wherein Roman Catholic arguments are mustered to attack Patriarch Cyril's Reformed creed.

The Orthodox dislike for Rome, which grew stronger after the Union of Brest (1596) had established a united Catholic Church under Polish auspices, impelled numerous young Orthodox theologians to attend Protestant universities in Germany, Switzerland and England, since there were no Orthodox academies in the Orthodox countries under Turkish rule. In this way not only Reformed ideas but Protestant educational methods found their way into Orthodoxy. Both the Russian and the Greek Orthodox churches approached particularly close to German Protestantism during the heyday of Pietism. This tendency was fostered by Peter the Great, who had great sympathy for what he regarded as the more progressive character of European Protestantism. Peter undertook to reform the constitution of the Orthodox Church, abolished the old patriarchate, and patterned his new synodal constitution on the organization of the German Protestant territorial churches. Russian translations of German religious writings, such as Johann Arndt Four Books of True Christianity, commissioned and printed in Halle by August Hermann Francke, were widely disseminated among the Orthodox.

The era of the Holy Alliance, the pact of 1815 wherein Orthodox Russia, Catholic Austria and Protestant Prussia, having waged a joint struggle against Napoleon, now committed themselves to a continuing friendship, encouraged a new and more intensive rapprochement and collaboration between Russian Orthodoxy and German Protestantism. It laid the groundwork for the chief ecumenical ideas that a century later were to be realized in practice. Franz von Baader, himself a Roman Catholic, summed up the new attitude in a formula that was echoed by many Protestants: Audiatur et tertia pars! — The third party must also be heard! At the heart of this formula was the recognition that the Reformation was a specifically Western reaction to a specifically Occidental form of Christianity, namely Roman Catholicism, but that the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant churches by no means represented the whole of Christendom. Rather, the schism that resulted from the Reformation was to be understood as a product of the far older schism between Rome and Byzantium, which had resulted from the West's embracing of the idea of Roman primacy in the ninth century.

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