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History of the Church of Russia

A. N. Mouravieff, tr. Blackmore, 1842

7. Hermogenes, Second Patriarch, A.D. 1606

Nor was the tempest at an end either in the interior of the kingdom: it was enough to have once excited and agitated men’s minds by a name dear to the hearts of the people, to cause the continual appearance of new pretenders and new traitors, with whom Basil in vain contended during the four years of his reign. It seemed as if Russia would not trust him, out of punishment for his first falsehood over the coffin of her prince. That very coffin, with the incorruptible remains of the blessed youth, Shouesky decided to remove to the capital, for the more complete satisfaction of the country, on which his letters had produced but little effect, even though accompanied by those of the Tsaritsa Martha. He sent Philaret metropolitan of Rostoff, the relative of Demetrius, together with Theodosius archbishop of Astrachan, for the holy relics to Ouglich; and himself took on his shoulders this royal burden to lower it into the tomb, which had been in past time prepared in the cathedral of the Archangel for the ashes of Boris. But a great number of miracles and healings being wrought at the coffin of the prince, the interment was never completed; it was placed in the middle of the church, to receive the pious honour of the faithful; and in the presence of the uncorrupted form of her son, the Tsaritsa his mother yet once more asked and received absolution from the patriarch Hermogenes for her unwilling falsehoods. Another great absolver and sufferer was called from the depths of his cell, where he had now grown blind, but still lingered on to mourn over the vanity of the world, Job, late patriarch of Moscow. On the brink of the grave, and only a few days before his death, he was moved by the prayers of the Tsar and the patriarch, to quit his convent of Starits, and come into the capital to absolve the inhabitants of Moscow, and the whole land of Russia, of their treason to the son of Boris, and of their oath of allegiance to the pretender. A touching spectacle was exhibited in the cathedral of the Assumption. Blind, and habited in the simple black gown of a monk, Job stood in the place of the patriarchs, side by side with Hermogenes, and listened to the profession of national repentance expressed in a letter of the Tsar, which was read to him aloud from the ambon. He himself in his turn read a letter of pardon to the people, and absolved them, as having been their patriarch, enumerating withal the calamities of his country, and his own personal sufferings in that same cathedral, where he then stood as a stranger come from another world, where there is neither trouble nor care, looking with calm compassion on the manifold strife and agitation of this. And as no testament is of force till after the death of the testator, Job almost as soon as he had returned to the monastery at Starits, died.

The standard of revolt was first raised in the South, by Shachofskoy, under the name of Demetrius, before any fresh pretender had yet been found by the family of Mnishek, while Marina and her father were still at Yaroslavla. Bolotnikoff, and Lapounoff, the military commander at Riazan, joined themselves to him, but the latter having discovered the fraud of his associates, left them in disgust. The district of Seversk was again in a state of revolt, and there appeared among the Cossacks of the Don yet another impostor, who called himself Peter, and pretended to be the son of the Tsar Theodore. Basil’s commanders fled; Toula, and Kalouga, fell into the hands of the insurgents, who were so daring as to advance upon the capital, but were defeated in their turn under its walls by the troops of the Tsar. They also fell upon the ungarrisoned city of Tver; but their spirited archbishop, Theoctistus, encouraged the citizens, and beat off the enemy. The sovereign himself was obliged to take the field, and after a long siege, succeeded in crushing the rebellion in the bud by the capture of Toula. But, notwithstanding the imprisonment or execution of the authors of the rebellion, Kalouga still remained in the hands of another band.

In the mean time, by the exertions of the insurgents, there was at length found among the lower classes of the people a man who assumed the character of Demetrius, appeared in the province of Seversk, and again collected about him a band of robbers, the wild volunteers of the Don, and the Shlachti or petty nobility of Poland. The confederates again¹ united themselves around him, as did also the nobles of Lithuania, the Prince Rojinsky, the Hetman Sapiega, and the partizan chieftain Lisofsky; they advanced towards the capital, which was all in confusion, and established themselves for a year and a half, at the distance of twelve versts from it, in the village of Toushine. Basil pitched his camp in the suburbs, and sent his nephew, the young Voivode Prince Michael Skopin, who had already distinguished himself by gaining several victories, to ask for assistance from the Swedes, as the situation of Russia was desperate. Treason manifested itself within the walls of Moscow; deserters from among the nobles coolly passed over from the Tsar to the pretender, who was known as the Robber of Toushine. The ambitious Marina joined herself to him, as soon as through the intercession of Sigismund she had been imprudently liberated from her imprisonment at Yaroslavla. The towns of Russia surrendered one after the other to Lisofsky and other Atamans, and few remained faithful to Basil. Hills of graves, to use the expression of the chronicles, rose up over all the land of Russia, which was torn to pieces on all sides by anarchy and rapine. It seemed as if the whole empire, which had been ages in forming, was suddenly dissolved, in spite of the exertions of the brave pastors of the Church, who held firmly by the throne, and suffered together with their flocks.

Already had the courageous Archbishop Theoctistus been taken prisoner at the capture of Tver, and slain on the road in making an attempt to escape and to avoid confinement at Toushine; Gennadius of Pskoff did not survive the treason of his city; Gelaktion of Souzdal died in exile, because he refused to give his blessing to the pretender; Joseph, bishop of Colomna, who had already been an opponent of the first pretender, was seized by the soldiers of the second, whom he was in vain endeavouring to bring to reason, and was dragged after them bound to a gun. The period of his trials had not yet terminated either for the future head of the Church, Philaret Romanoff, metropolitan of Rostoff. In the ancient church of the Assumption, the cathedral of his diocese, he entered as a martyr upon that ten years course of suffering, from which he came out as patriarch, after his son had been placed upon the throne. The traitors of Pereyaslavla suddenly attacked Rostoff, the citizens of which fled to the fortified town of Yaroslavla; but Philaret, as the good shepherd who lays down his life for the flock, refused absolutely to listen to them, when they besought him to seek safety in flight. He shut himself up in the cathedral, celebrated the liturgy, gave the communion to the people, and quietly awaited his fate. The rebels tumultuously besieged the doors: still the metropolitan did not cease from preaching until they burst into the church by violence, tore from him his episcopal robes, and dragged him, half dead, in his shirt, in the midst of their derision, to experience fresh insults at Toushine. There he was to endure the sight of the pretended Demetrius, and to witness his mock court and royalty, and did not recover his liberty till after the flight of the Robber of Toushine, when he was rescued by a detachment of Shouesky’s troops from the hands of the enemy, under the walls of the convent of St. Joseph of Volokolamsk.

In its turn the Trinity Lavra, to which from its situation none of the calamities of the capital could be indifferent, distinguished itself by the valour of its monks. After consultation held between the pretender and his confederates, Sapiega, hetman of Lithuania, and Lisofsky undertook the siege of this monastic fortress, in order to cut off the communication of the Tsar Basil with his northern and eastern provinces. The Archimandrite Joasaph, and the Voivodes Prince Dolgorouky and Golochvastoff, quitted themselves like men both in words and deeds, against treacherous negotiation and fierce assaults, and by the aid of the venerable Sergius, they supported for sixteen months a close siege; although 30,000 men of the enemy had placed gabions and surrounded their precinct with intrenchments, from which they kept up a constant fire of sixty pieces of artillery upon the walls and the churches. Desperate and fierce were the attacks by storming parties, and no less murderous the sallies of the besieged: about all the neighbourhood of the Lavra, in the woods, by the moats, and in the ravines, the work of slaughter was carried on with fury; the monks and the country peasants of the villages belonging to the monastery acquitted themselves as well as the bravest regular troops; mines were carried under the towers, but they were met underground by countermines, and towers that were on the point of being blown into the air remained unshaken. So evident was the protection of the holy Hegumens Sergius and Nicon, who, by appearances in dreams or visions, encouraged the brotherhood, of whom more than 800 men fell either by the sword or by sickness during the continuance of the siege; but the Lavra stood out: and not only did it then serve for the sole defence of the state, but while itself half overwhelmed by the enemy, it actually relieved Moscow with a supply of bread, when the famous Bursar Abram Palitsin, during a time of famine, opened, at the request of the Tsar, his stores, and twice supplied the exhausted capital.

Basil already felt his throne shake under him, surrounded as he was by storms such as Russia had never up to that time experienced. With difficulty he dispersed, in the square called Beautiful, a mob of insurgents, which the Patriarch Hermogenes had in vain attempted to reason with. Once more, however, for the last time, and that a short one, a gleam of sunshine broke on the fortunes of the Tsar, and brightened the darkness of his reign by the victories of his nephew, the young Prince Michael. With the assistance of the Metropolitan Isidore, he settled the citizens of Novogorod in their allegiance, concluded a convention with the Swedes, and, in conjunction with their General Delagardie, began gradually to clear the northern districts, routing the rebels and the Lithuanians on all sides. The convent of St. Macarius of Koliazinsk witnessed his victory. In the village of Alexandroff, once the dreaded abode of John, the young general intrenched himself, and had begun to concentrate upon that point the troops of the eastern provinces, when Sapiega and Lisofsky raised the siege, and fled from beneath the walls of the Lavra.

But this first trial of its courage served only for the commencement of those gigantic exertions, which the Lavra afterwards undertook in the cause of her country. Already her treasury was exhausted by three loans of 65,000 roubles, equal to a million at the present day, made to the Tsars Godounoff, the pretended Demetrius, and Shouesky: the last required still further succours: they gave up their plate and ornaments, when the long siege made the repair of their shattered walls indispensable. There were not many days now left for the Tsar Basil, before he was to be forced to take the monastic vows, and to be confined in a Polish prison; nor many either for the patriarch Hermogenes to confess the name of Christ on the pontifical throne, before he was to suffer martyrdom, when the happy idea was inspired from above into both their minds, to choose the archimandrite of the Starits, Dionysius, to be the superior of the Lavra in the place of Josaphat, who was dead, and thus to preserve their country. For when there was no longer either Tsar or patriarch, when Moscow itself, as one might almost say, had ceased to exist, being weighed down for a year and a half under the Polish yoke, the Lavra became the heart of all Russia: Dionysius alone took the place of all the other authorities, and as the visible representative of the protection of St. Sergius, overshadowed with his influence the whole land of Russia, and drew her together around the ruins of the capital.

The calamitous condition of the empire, which had war at once on all sides, moved her ancient enemy Sigismund also at length to invade her defenceless territories, not with a band of volunteer-confederates like the false Demetrius, but with a regular army; for he coveted for himself, and for his son Vladislaff, the throne of Moscow. The king hoped to find treason in Smolensk; but Smolensk, on the contrary, emulated the patriotism of the Lavra; the Voivode Shein and the Archbishop Sergius, fortified themselves there, and broke the force of the whole Polish invasion. The spirits and strength of their army were exhausted by the length of the siege, and this campaign of the Poles delivered Moscow itself for a time from the troops of the pretender, who was not acknowledged by the king. The counterfeit Demetrius fled with Marina to Kalouga, which remained faithful to him, and there got together a fresh band. But the traitors of Toushine, Saltikoff, and Mosalsky, offered the crown to Prince Vladislaff, the son of Sigismund.

In the mean time, opening himself a road by his victories, the Prince Michael triumphantly approached the capital. The people enthusiastically welcomed their deliverer: Liapounoff offered him the crown, which the youthful hero magnanimously refused; but the Tsar conceived a suspicion against him, envy obtained dominion over his brother and his wicked sister-in-law, daughter of the infamous Skouratoff, and Michael died suddenly at an entertainment given in their house. The rage of the people, which was with difficulty repressed, turned into lamentations over his early tomb. Once more, and now indeed for the last time, the throne of Basil was shaken to its foundations. The rebellion broke out again; Liapounoff wrested out of his hands the district of Riazan; Zaraisk² alone was preserved by the Prince Pojarsky, the future liberator of Russia; the fidelity of Kazan and other towns was shaken.

The Hetman Jolkefsky had by this time marched from before the walls of Smolensk upon Moscow, for the purpose of reducing it in the name of Vladislaff. Prince Demetrius Shouesky, who took the command of the army after the death of his brave nephew, met the hetman at Kloushine, near Mojaisk, was defeated, and put to flight. His allies the Swedes, under Delagardie, retreated upon Novogorod. The nest of traitors and bandits, which the pretended Demetrius had got together, began also to stir in Kalouga. His followers destroyed the monastery of Paphnoutieff³, where the brave Prince Volkonsky defended himself with the monks; the enemy again appeared near Moscow, at the village of Colomna. The capital was all in confusion, and turned against the unfortunate Tsar: the brother of Liapounoff, the Prince Galitzin, and other of the chief commanders of Moscow, came to an understanding with the traitors of Toushine, and determined to disown equally the pretended Demetrius and Basil, and to endeavour to work upon the latter to relinquish his throne, and entrust the helm of government to the senior boyar, the Prince Mistislafsky, with the Council of the Boyars, till a new election.

The Patriarch Hermogenes strongly opposed this new treason; but he was not listened to. Basil was deposed from the throne, and compelled to receive the tonsure in the Choudoff monastery, while his wife became a nun in the Ivanoff convent⁴. One of the conspirators pronounced the words of the vow for the Tsar, upon whom the whole proceeding was compulsory. The patriarch declared that it was not binding. But the adherents of the pretender deceived the boyars of Moscow, and as soon as they were without a Tsar, proposed again the counterfeit Demetrius. But Jolkefsky was now close at hand. Under such pressing circumstances, Prince Mistislafsky proposed to the council to elect Vladislaff of Poland as their Tsar. Again the patriarch rose up in opposition, imploring them not to sacrifice the Church, and suggested offering the crown, either to the illustrious nobleman Prince Basil Galitzin, or to the youth Michael, the son of Philaret Romanoff, and grand-nephew to the first consort of John; but the majority of voices decided in favour of Vladislaff, because they feared there would be no strength in their own countrymen who were proposed for election. Conferences were opened with Jolkefsky, who joyfully accepted proposals so flattering to Poland, and without waiting for any authority from Sigismund, solemnly concluded a convention with the patriarch and the boyars. All the conditions were to the advantage of Russia, and ambassadors of the first distinction, Prince Basil Galitzin, and the Metropolitan Philaret of Rostoff, both of whom might have had some pretensions to the throne, together with Abram the bursar of the Trinity, were sent to the camp before Smolensk, to ask Sigismund to give them his son to be their Tsar, with this condition, that he should be baptized into the orthodox faith. Hermogenes conjured them not to betray their country, and Philaret made a vow that he would be ready to die in defence of the faith.

In the mean time, the inhabitants of the capital swore allegiance to Vladislaff; the pretender, deserted by his Polish allies, fled again to Kalouga, where he was soon afterwards killed for his cruelty; and Marina was left there alone with a son to whom she had lately given birth. But Jolkefsky did not retire from Moscow: it was inundated by the traitors of Toushine, Saltikoff, Mosalsky, and Molekanoff: they went to the cathedral to ask the blessing of the patriarch: the pastor answered them firmly: “If you have come into the church with an honest intention and without guile, may a blessing be upon you, but if not, then an anathema!” Their honesty soon shewed itself; for during the night they admitted the Poles into the Kremlin, under the pretence of putting down a riot of the mob, and in the morning their arms glittered, to the terror of the citizens, on the walls of the Kremlin and the Kitai. The hetman had been waiting only for this to depart; he left in Moscow, as commandant, Gonsevsky, and the Council of the Boyars for the civil administration, and took with him the two brothers of the Tsar, and Basil himself, out of the monastery of Volokolamsk, where he had been confined, and set forth to join the king before Smolensk. There our ambassadors were already suffering from ill-treatment, and astonished the enemy no less by their firmness and endurance, than the besieged citizens did by their brave defence of the town. The king did not enter into the great views of the hetman; he was by no means pleased that Vladislaff should reign, but wished rather to be master himself; and as a first preliminary, he demanded the surrender of Smolensk, and supplies of money. Philaret and Galitzin, begged him even with tears not to disavow the acts of the hetman, but in vain; the hetman himself, when he saw the convention set aside, and the fruit of his own victories lost by the petty ambition of Sigismund, retired from the camp, having first delivered up to the king Basil, who maintained his own dignity in misfortune, and did not demean himself before his proud conqueror. But the inflexible ambassadors, after having for a long time endured cold and privation, as did their Tsar himself, were sent under guard to Poland, where they lay for nine years in a painful confinement.

At length, the general dissatisfaction felt against Sigismund and the violence of the Poles broke out openly. Hermogenes bestowed his blessing on all those who should enrol themselves in behalf of their country. Liapounoff with his province of Riazan took up arms. The people were loud in their murmurs, and were constantly quarrelling with the Poles. Letters from Moscow and Smolensk, for succour, were circulated in all parts of the empire. The epistles of Dionysius, the archimandrite of the Trinity monastery, to the voivodes, were most powerful and moving; at his pathetic appeal even the leaders of Toushine began to move, and the Prince Troubetskoy, and Zaroutsky, the Ataman of the Cossacks, who soon, however, again changed sides; but while they hesitated, Moscow was consumed by fire.

The Council of the Boyars had already lost all its authority; Gonsevsky urged the patriarch to forbid any general rising; the traitor Saltikoff insolently demanded the same. “I will forbid it,” firmly replied Hermogenes, “when I see Vladislaff baptized, and the Poles evacuating the country; if this is not to be, then I enjoin on all to rise, and absolve them from their oath to the King’s son.” Saltikoff lifted his dagger against the old man; the prelate made the sign of the cross over him, and said, “I oppose this sign against thy audacity; a curse light upon thy head for ever;” and then, turning to the Prince Mistislafsky, who had voted for the election of the son of Sigismund, he said to him quietly, “Thou wast first in place, and thou oughtest to have been the first to suffer for the right; but thou sufferedst thyself to be led away, and the Lord will pluck thee and thy root away out of the land of the living.” Time passed on, and the storm of patriotism rose higher and higher: once more the boyars were sent with a threatening message to Hermogenes: “All will be quiet,” he again replied to Saltikoff, “if thou, O traitor, wilt only remove thyself with thy Lithuanians: as for me, I give my blessing to all who are ready to die for the orthodox faith, for I see it insulted, and I cannot endure to hear the Latin singing in the palace of the Tsar Boris.” They placed him under guard, and compelled him, for the last time, to perform the usual ceremonies on Palm Sunday.

In Passion week, an insurrection of the people broke out, originating in an accidental fray with some of the Poles, and Gonsevsky’s guards eagerly seized the opportunity for bloodshed and pillage; flames broke out, and spread themselves over all the capital, which was nearly defenceless; the Prince Pojarsky alone fought in the midst of the smoke with the enemy, and fell wounded. For three days Moscow continued burning, the fire being continually rekindled wherever it became extinguished, and so the whole city was all at once reduced to a desert. The Poles raged with merciless barbarity, and the inhabitants fled in all directions. There remained only the Kremlin blackened outside with smoke, and the Kitai⁵, which was a den of Russian traitors. Surrounded by the smoking ruins of the capital, Hermogenes could no longer remain patriarch; he was deposed from his throne, and confined in the Choudoff monastery, while, in the place of the venerable elder, the Greek Ignatius, who had been the creature of the counterfeit Demetrius, was brought forth from his cell, and occupied, for the second time, as mock-patriarch, the throne of two such prelates as Job and Hermogenes. With such sufferings was the commencement of the patriarchate in Russia attended. Job, indeed, was only a confessor for the faith; but this was not enough for Hermogenes: he endured to the end, and was accounted worthy of the crown of martyrdom: inflexible alike to prayers and threats, he was starved to death in prison, to be a pledge of deliverance to his country.

Then the voivodes drew their forces together round Moscow, and shut up their enemies within a circle in which they hoped to reduce them by famine. The Bursar Abram was sent from the Trinity Lavra with holy water⁶ to the camp of the warriors, to confirm their resolution. A quarrel had broken out between Liapounoff, Troubetskoy, and the traitor Zaroutsky, whom the first-named of the three accused of treachery; and the Ataman, having joined himself with Marina for ambitious designs, murdered this brave defender of his country at a conference.

Meanwhile, after a siege of two years, the patriotic city of Smolensk was taken by assault; but Sigismund neither dared nor was able to advance farther with his exhausted army. He sent to the assistance of those who were besieged in the Kremlin the detachment of the Hetman Khotkevich, but returned himself with his illustrious prisoners, the Boyar Shein and the Archbishop Sergius, to celebrate his victory in Warsaw; where other noble captives, the Tsar Shouesky, his brothers, and the ambassadors, were still pining in confinement. The king’s personal vanity was gratified by the outward eclat of triumph; but this was all: the throne of Moscow was lost for ever both to himself and to Vladislaff.

But the weakness and anarchy which prevailed in Russia made her enemies of her former allies, and raised up new pretenders to the crown to follow the example of Sigismund. The Swedish General Delagardie, who had retreated to Novogorod after the battle at Kloushine with Jolkefsky, began to take measures in favour of his own sovereign, and seized upon several of the frontier fortresses; he took Novogorod itself, which however, though ungarrisoned, cost him a bloody engagement with the citizens, who were encouraged, from the summit of the walls of St. Sophia, by their Metropolitan Isidore, the zealous guardian of his flock. Superior force overcame valour, and Delagardie compelled Great Novogorod to conclude a convention, by which she bound herself to acknowledge as Tsar of Moscow one of the sons of the king of Sweden, either Gustavus Adolphus, or Philip, according as their father Charles IX. should choose; in the mean time he continued to reduce the northern provinces in their name; but he met with a stout opposition from the Solovetskay Lavra.

This Lavra had been fortified with strong walls before, at the time of the first incursions of the Swedes, by order of the Tsar Theodore, and had been provided with artillery, and with musqueteers from its own dependant villages, as had also the Soumsky, and other forts depending upon it on the coast. When the troubles of the pretenders began, the king of Sweden enquired, through his generals, of the Hegumen Anthony, whom he acknowledged as Tsar, Shouesky, or the pretended Demetrius; and at the same time made a designing offer of his protection; but he received a resolute answer, “That no stranger should ever be Tsar of Russia, and that the Lavra stood not in any need of his soldiers.” From that time it did not yield to the Trinity itself in its zeal for the common good; it gave a benevolence of 500 roubles to the Tsar Basil and the Prince Michael, for the pay of their Swedish allies, and actively co-operated besides towards the restoration of tranquillity to the country. By the prudence of the Hegumen Anthony, the whole district of the coast was saved from the Swedes, who, after their unsuccessful attempt by fraud, several times advanced to the Soumsky Fort, and even went in their vessels to besiege the monastery itself. But that glorious place, to which the remains of the great martyr, the Metropolitan Philip, some time its superior, had been lately translated, could not be shaken in its fidelity to its country; and during the whole time of the troubles, till the final conclusion of peace with the Swedes, the high-souled Hegumen Anthony, and his successor Irenarchus, stood there sleeplessly on guard.

At length, when all appeared to be lost, when the last resources of the country were exhausted, and every part ruined, suddenly, by the help of God, she recovered herself, shook off from her the ashes of her towns and villages, and flourished in renewed strength. The Trinity Lavra, by its ardent patriotism, rekindled the same flame in her chilled and paralysed members: the holy Archimandrite Dionysius was ever on the watch, and neglected no opportunity: he took care of the people who fled out of the capital; turned the whole of the convent into one great hospital for the sufferers; armed the servants of the house; sent letters in different directions, to Kazan, which was in a state of agitation, to the Metropolitan Ephraim, urging that they should co-operate with the general rising, also to the districts down the Volga, and to the North; and at the same time found the necessary provisions and supplies for the voivodes who were besieging Moscow. In consequence of a mysterious vision, a fast of purification was imposed on the whole land of Russia, and in Nijny the spark of pure self-devotion broke out in the heart of the citizen Minin, who found his example responded to by the whole nation. There the military force which was to free the country was concentrated, under the command of Pojarsky, who had risen again from his bed of sickness.

The unceasing entreaties of Dionysius and Abram moved the Prince to disregard the danger which threatened him under the walls of Moscow, in the camp of the troops there, from factious feuds, and to advance from Yaroslaff, where he had been long making his preparations, for the accomplishment of his great work. The Bursar Abram was continually with the armies, where he was no less active and efficient a personage than the Prince or Minin, and besides all this, was historian at the same time. His eloquent pen has handed down to posterity the deeds of that time, and has informed us how his conciliatory discourses re-established peace and quiet in the divided camp, till at length, together with Zaroutsky, treason fled from out of it. Abram contributed to the victory gained by Pojarsky on the day of the hard-fought battle of the Daëvichy-plain with the Polish hetman, by persuading the Cossacks to leave their trenches and take part in the action. Having received from the old man the name of St. Sergius for their war-cry, they rushed through the river Moskva, shouting, “For St. Sergius!” “For St. Sergius!” and put to flight the Lithuanians. The Poles held out obstinately in the Kremlin. In the mean time new disturbances broke out among the Cossacks, who indignantly complained of their own poverty and the riches of their leaders, and prepared to disband themselves; but the archimandrite and the bursar sent to their camp the last remaining treasures of the Lavra, which were copes studded with pearls, begging them with tears not to desert their country, and they, touched by this appeal, swore to endure every privation.

Shortly afterwards, the venerable Sergius appeared in a dream to the Greek Archbishop Arsenius, who was confined in the Kremlin, and comforted him by foretelling their deliverance. The Kitai was taken by assault, and the Kremlin capitulated. The Archimandrite Dionysius, and all the assembled clergy, entered with the chant of thanksgivings, and proceeded to the church of the Assumption, and there they all shed tears when they saw the desolation of the holy place⁷. Both the archimandrite and the bursar were present at the unanimous election of Michael, the youthful son of Philaret, which took place in the town-house of the Trinity Monastery, to the delight and wonder of all. The synod and the council spoke as one man. The bursar announced from the public place the election to the people, and the people also, as with one voice, re-echoed the same name.

The Council of the Provinces appointed as deputies to Michael whom they had just elected, to invite him to accept the kingdom, Theodoret, archbishop of Riazan, the Bursar Abram, and the Boyar Sheremeteff, and wrote a letter in the name of all Russia to Sigismund, in which, after recounting all his acts of perfidy, she renounced through them all allegiance to Vladislaff his son, and requested him to restore his illustrious prisoners in exchange for Poles; but the father of the Tsar, the metropolitan of Rostoff, was too valuable a pledge for his enemies to decide to release him, although the firmness of the venerable prelate was a complete bar to their hopes.

His youthful son, not expecting the brilliant destiny which awaited him, was living humbly with his mother, the nun, at Kostroma, in the Hypatieff convent. The arrival of the deputies filled with alarm the tender mother, who had already experienced so many misfortunes. For a long time she rejected all their entreaties for herself and for her son, for whom it was a perilous and alarming thing to exchange the quiet of their convent for a stormy throne, shaken by all the horrors of war and civil discord; but after she had shed many tears, the presence of two miraculous Icons, that of our Lady of Vladimir, and the Theodorofskay, by which they implored her, moved the nun Martha to relent, and she yielded up her son to his country. The religious procession of Michael to the capital by the sanctuaries of Yaroslavla, Rostoff, Pereyaslavla, and the Trinity Lavra, which all lay on his road, was in truth but one continued public testimony of royal piety and popular affection. Three metropolitans, Ephraim of Kazan, Jonah of The Steeps, and Cyrill of Rostoff, who had been invited by the people to resume his former diocese, and had exerted himself greatly by his exhortations for the preservation of his country, crowned him with the crown of Monomachus in the cathedral of the Assumption; and letters statutory, of the whole synod of clergy, and of the council, put the seal to the election of the Romanoffs, by establishing for ever the right of an hereditary autocracy, which had been shaken by the unfortunate elections of Godounoff and Shouesky.

But as yet, neither the internal nor external disturbances had subsided; extensive districts of Russia still remained in the hands of her enemies; near Moscow itself, there were some towns in possession of traitors, and others given up to riots and anarchy. Zaroutsky was still formidable by the numbers of his confederates; thousands of Lithuanians, Cossacks, and Russian traitors, were dispersed in every direction, and by their sudden attacks pillaged the defenceless towns in different quarters of the empire. The Crimeans threatened us with their incursions. Little Russia, the Don, and the Oural, were ready now, as formerly, to support any new mischief for the sake of plunder. The experienced commanders of Poland and Sweden, Jolkefsky, Khotkevich, and Delagardie, were ready to advance at the first word of their masters. In Poland, the king, Sigismund, was a zealot for Rome, who was prompted at once by views of personal ambition and by ecclesiastical considerations to attempt the subjugation of Russia to the pope. A formidable neighbour, in the hero Gustavus Adolphus, had ascended the throne of Sweden. The Russian people was indeed enthusiastically disposed towards Michael, but yet had become too much used, in the course of so many years, to see frequent changes of their rulers; the royal council itself consisted of nobles who had seen through the reigns of five Tsars within a short space, and had been themselves, in part, the causers of anarchy; yet, in the midst of all these dangers from within and from without, the youthful Michael, inexperienced indeed, but pure before God and men, and unconnected with all the horrors of the past, was established by the hand of Providence to be the harbinger of a bright future to Russia.

That he might give greater weight and consistency to the Council of the Boyars, which had been so unsteady in the time of his predecessors, Michael strengthened it by uniting to it the council of the bishops, whose patriotism had been unwavering, and by their joint consultations the business of the state was transacted. After the return of the two senior metropolitans to their dioceses of Kazan and Rostoff, Jonah of The Steeps, as guardian of the patriarchal throne, ruled the Church for a time. The young Tsar sent embassies into distant countries to re-establish the political connection of the empire, with Shah Abbas of Persia, with the Emperor Rudolph, and with the maritime powers of Holland and England, whose mediation had a favourable influence on Poland and Sweden: at the same time he gave orders to lay siege to Smolensk, and his voivodes the Princes Pojarsky, Cherkassky, and others, were constantly fighting in the neighbourhood of the capital with passing bodies of the Lithuanians. Astrachan, and the South of Russia, were quieted by the capture of the traitor Zaroutsky and Marina; but in the North, Gustavus Adolphus advanced upon Pskoff, though without gaining any advantage. The troops of Delagardie plundered the wealthy Novogorod, which from that time never recovered its former greatness. But the spirit of its citizens was not yet extinguished; Cyprian, the noble archimandrite of the Khoutinsky monastery, persuaded the voivodes and the chief citizens to turn themselves to the new Tsar, and through the influence of the Metropolitan Isidore, he was sent by the Swedes as if for the purpose of negotiation with the Russian government; when he was at Moscow, he asked and obtained from Michael the pardon of all who had sworn allegiance to the Swedish prince, and so reunited again the ancient city of Novogorod to Russia, for which he suffered severe penalties after his return.

At length, seeing the obstinacy of the Russians, the Swedes determined to conclude a peace with them, through the mediation of the English ambassador, at the village of Stoloboff in the district of Novogorod; and though the northern possessions of Russia, Ingria and Carelia, were wrested from her for a time, this peace was indispensably necessary to enable her to assume a better attitude towards another still more powerful enemy, namely, Poland. The conferences which had been opened with her under the walls of Smolensk were broken off, notwithstanding the mediation of the Imperial ambassadors, and the last terrible invasion, under the command of the Prince Vladislaff, shook Russia to her centre once more, before she was to enjoy the rest which she desired. The retreat of our voivodes from the siege of Smolensk, and the surrender of the towns along the road to the capital, marked again with disasters the commencement of this campaign; but Mojaisk, about which the fate of the capital was destined to be decided, stood firm. The prince passed it, and with the assistance of Sagaidachny, the hetman of the Cossacks from beyond The Falls, struck a blow at Moscow, which was now however filled with a different spirit. On every side she repulsed the attack of the Poles. At last, the Lithuanian forces advanced against the sacred precinct of the Trinity Lavra; the Archimandrite Dionysius and the bursar gave orders to fire the suburbs, and again fortified themselves to stand a siege. At the feet of St. Sergius, the thunder-cloud was destined to burst and dissolve, which for fifteen years had rolled over the darkened horizon of Russia; and its last bolt glanced on the Lavra, as if for nothing else than to illumine it with new brilliancy; for it alone had stood out this long tempest, without tarnishing its glory, by any single act of treason. Within view of its walls, in the neighbouring village of Diouline, conferences were opened with the prince for peace, and after long negotiations, a truce for fifteen years was concluded, with very great sacrifices on the part of Russia, which ceded Livonia, Smolensk, and the western towns; but still it was the means of preserving the distracted empire.

Then at last were liberated our illustrious prisoners, who had so long pined in captivity, first the living, and afterwards also those that were dead; the Tsar Shouesky and his brothers had been buried in a crossway in Warsaw, under a pillar, with an inscription recording their melancholy fate; our inflexible ambassador, the Prince Galitzin, was also dead; but there returned alive the brave Voivode Shein, with Sergius, archbishop of Smolensk, and, to the inexpressible joy of his royal son, Philaret himself, the metropolitan of Rostoff. The meeting between the son, now Tsar, and the prelate his father, at his entry into the capital, was most affecting; each wished to fall at the feet of the other; and by a tender mutual embrace, they sealed the union between the Church and the State, which they represented severally in their persons.

At this remarkable period, so difficult and unsettled for the Church both of Northern and of Southern Russia, for neither the one nor the other had pastors, there came to Moscow Theophanes, patriarch of Jerusalem, as an angel of peace to them both. The Eastern patriarchs having heard of the troubles which prevailed among their brethren in the Russian empire, and of the Romish persecutions of Orthodoxy, which had become powerless in the South from the want of bishops, met for consultation at the Sepulchre of our Lord, and sent its meek guardian to set in order the Russian Church: the patriarch of Constantinople gave him authority to act in his name, and sent with him as exarch from himself the Archimandrite Arsenius.

At his first visit to the Russian capital, just before the liberation of the father of the sovereign, Theophanes found the Church in a state of agitation, on account of some corrections which had been made in the Trebnik, or Office Book⁸. The Tsar himself had remarked the gross errors which had not only crept long before into the MSS. copies of the Church books, but even into those which had been printed in the time of the patriarchs Job and Hermogenes, and had committed to the holy Dionysius, in conjunction with the brotherhood of the Trinity, the task of correcting these errors by the books of the learned Greek Maximus, and others which were preserved in the Lavra; for from the time of the Hundred Chapter Council, and down to that of Nikon, this work was a constant object of solicitude both to the Tsars and to the patriarchs. Dionysius, having collated the Russian Trebnik with the Greek, expunged from the Office for the Blessing of the Water⁹ the words “by fire,” incorrectly inserted after the invocation of the Holy Spirit on the water; he likewise corrected certain Exclamations or Responses, in which the doxology of the Holy Trinity was joined with a preceding prayer to the Son of God; and for this he was subjected to a most bitter persecution from Jonah, the ignorant metropolitan of The Steeps. For the space of a whole year the holy elder suffered close confinement, blows, and torture, beside insults from the people, who absurdly accused him of wishing to extirpate the element of fire from the land of Russia; and all this he endured with exceeding meekness and patience, as a confessor for the word of God. The arrival of the patriarch alleviated the hardships of his lot.

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