Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/52

 28 a variety of other industries. They gathered up all the money in the country and turned it over in advantageous investments; they were big capitalists, almost the only ones in Russia—very big merchants, and far the largest of all the landed proprietors. The domains of the monastery of the Troïtsa, which comprised all the best land in the twenty-five districts, bore, at the close of this century, 106,600 peasants, and its revenue was calculated at 100,000 roubles, about 2,400,000 roubles of our money. Monsieur Ikonnikov ('Essay on the Byzantine Influence on the History of Russia,' 1869, Part I.) reckons the revenues of the monastic communities in South Russia at 824,593 roubles, drawn from 3,858,396 diéssiatines of land, tilled by 660,185 peasants; to these figures should be added the sums produced by the lands cultivated by the monasteries themselves.

These valuations, we may be sure, are only approximate. But the whole of the documents at our disposal give us an impression of considerable wealth, quite out of proportion with the general resources of the country.

It would be absolutely unjust to assert, as it was asserted even at that period, that the clergy, secular or regular, only used their material wealth for their own advantage. For long years here, as elsewhere, the moral consciousness of the people had no refuge save in the bosom of the Church, and no expression save in her teaching. Up to the middle of the sixteenth century the spiritual power of its chiefs, and notably of its Metropolitan, acted as a precious counterpoise to the omnipotence of the State. Among the rights claimed by the upper clergy, that of intervening in favour of the victims of arbitrary power and violence is written in letters of gold in the country's history.

And much more. The Church and her secular clergy were active co-operators, and, to a certain point, even the chief workers, in the great labour of national unification pursued at Moscow. This calls for explanation. Amongst the first gatherers of the soil of Russia' the idea of unity only appears in the half-conscious stage. The will of Simon the Superb, son of Kalita (1341–1353) does, indeed, enjoin on his son to march in the pafhpath [sic] he has traced out for him, 'so that the memory of our fathers and our own may not die out, and that the torch may not be extinguished.' Yet an anxiety very different from any ambitious dream of a great fatherland seems to have inspired these obscure Princes in their centuries of effort. When they bought village after village, added land to land, heaped their coffers with gold, silver, precious stones, and pearls; when they cheated their Tartar master of his tribute; when they misused and stripped their brother Kings, if any