Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/51

 Rh complete confusion of organs, functions, and prerogatives was reached.

Yet means whereby the Church might have maintained and safeguarded her independence were not lacking. Even to the administration of her property her prerogatives were equal to the Sovereign's. The Church lands, like the Sovereign's, were, from the judicial and administrative point of view, save in the case of certain criminal affairs—theft, murder, brigandage—quite independent of the local authorities. And these lands were vast. The wealth of the clergy—secular and regular, but regular especially—most unequally divided, but constantly increasing, exceeded that of all the other classes. The properties owned by the Metropolite at the close of the sixteenth century brought in as much as 3,000 roubles a year, and the archbishopric of Novgorod, with 10,000 or 12,000 roubles a year, was richer still. The other bishoprics were more or less well dowered, but all of them richly. The parochial clergy, with their modest allotments, sometimes not exceeding three diéssiatines, and seldom attaining, thirty or their subventions (rougi) varying from nineteen roubles to twelve kopecks, could not hope much from the liberality of the faithful, generally bestowed on the monastic establishments, and were less well provided.

Four times a year at least the priest, bearing cross and holy water, passed round his parish with outstretched hand, but even on the results of this quarterly begging expedition the Bishops took their tithes.

The greater part of the public wealth was in the hands of the 'black' clergy. Not only was their landed property much larger, but their revenues were increased by the tribute of the national piety, which frequently produced enormous sums. From Ivan IV. alone the monastery of the Troïtsa must have received, in less than thirty years, the sum of 25,000 roubles, averaging, according to some calculations, about a million roubles of our money. The monastery of St. Cyril at Biélooziéro, less highly favoured, received 18,493 roubles in the same space of time, without reckoning gifts in kind—a hundred pounds of honey, for instance, in 1570, ten horses the next year, and from time to time ikons and sacred objects of great value, one single gift of sacerdotal vestments being reckoned at 6,000 roubles.

On these huge lands of theirs, generally free from all imposts, on which they levied their own taxes, to which they attracted and on which they kept an abundant supply of labour, the monks added to the harvests of a soil that was better farmed than any other in the country, and to the perpetual aggrandizement of their properties resulting from increased