I decided to put up some supplemental texts for the benefit of Birdjaguar and anyone else trying to follow the Muscovite political intrigue to come, and also for my amusement as I will be messing around with different styles. This one is about the religious line, as it will be important, plus maybe useful to his Popehood given his recent initiative.
Hope it's okay. Am working on the other two now.
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FUN FACTS ABOUT LATE 15th CENTURY RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH
Fun Fact the First: it is not officially autocephalous, but de facto the Metropolitan of Kiev (based in Moscow since 1325) is quite free from the Patriarch of Constantinople in the ordinary running of affairs, especially after the fall of the Byzantine Empire (earlier the Metropolitan's candidature was determined by the Patriarch and the Emperor; now it's just the Patriarch, and the Great Prince can easily override him if he wants: that much has already been demonstrated back in 1440s). On the other hand, also de facto, he is not quite free from the Great Prince, though more recently it was more like a "symphonia", the Metropolitan and the Great Prince working together against the less obedient nobles
and the less obedient clergymen.
Fun Fact the Second: the clergy is divided into the white clergy (priests) and the black clergy (monks). The white clergy has more freedoms, including the right to marry, but the black clergy is in the end far more powerful. The highest white clergy can climb is the position of a protopope (simply "first priest"; pope is colloquial Russian term for priest in general) in charge of a cathedral: incidentally, the two most prestigious cathedrals are the Cathedral of the Dormition and the Cathedral of the Archangel in Moscow.
Only the black clergy can be invested as bishops and above (note that the archbishop of Novgorod is particularly powerful, thanks to his traditional influence and high amount of church lands - this is the one remnant of the Novgorodian establishment that not even Ivan the Great had dared touch, at least for now); consequentially, only a member of the black clergy can become the Metropolitan of Kiev. Ofcourse, the black clergy is far more ascetic and reglamented as well; exact degree of ascetism varies from monastery to monastery, from code to code.
Fun Fact the Third: Muscovite monasticism has been booming in all regards since the second half of the 14th century (the name you are looking for is Sergius of Radonezh, the 14th century Russian version of Gandalf). Monasteries are being founded all over the place, and the old ones have been gaining in land and wealth; icon writing, theology and other writings have been advancing in leaps and bounds as well, as it were. The Trinity-Sergius Lavra is by far the most notable monastery by now; the Paphnutius Borovskiy Monastery is noteworthy as well. Two other monasteries need to be mentioned in connection of intermonasterial ideological struggles. The Non-Possessors, keen on hardcore mystical Byzantine asceticism, not so keen on ecclesiastical wealth in general and monasterial landownership in particular, and led by firebrand "starets" ("elder") Nil Sorsky/Nilus of Sora, are centered at the Cyril-Belozersk Monastery, though widespread elsewhere as well. Their archenemies are the Josephites, headed by and named after Iosif Volotsky/Joseph of Volotsk, who didn't get along with anyone, criticised some of the strictest monasteries available as horribly lax and eventually went and founded his own at Volokolamsk (to be known as the Joseph-Volokolamsk Monastery), just to show them. He showed pretty much everyone by introducing very strict discipline, work ethic and collectivism; he also created a ruthlessly efficient economic system in his monasterial lands, won the love of the nearby peasants by giving them all excess produce in lean times (i.e. almost all the time) and attracted retiring nobles to be recycled as what one might call the managing cadres of the monastery. Basically, this was the idea of the landed, reglamented monastery taken to its logical extreme, and it worked out better than many might have expected, so a lot of like-minded reformists begun to support Iosif, and many other, more moderate monasteries allied with him against Nil Sorsky. Neither movement was considered quite heretical just yet, especially since both of them are equally opposed to the Hebrew heresy and the Latin heresy currently coming in primarily through Novgorod, but the debates are fierce. Both are technically willing to advocate caeseropapism as long as the caesar meets his moral obligations before God, but are also among the few prepared to actively and openly stand up to the Great Prince in various matters.
Fun Fact the Fourth: The "Latin heresy" is rather complicated (and I fully count on BananaLee to make it more complicated still). In the broadest sense this could be applied to the whole of Roman Catholicism, relations with which ahve been traditionally ambiguous and vaguely hostile. It's just that, a few flare-ups aside, boht sides recognised each other as Christian and both churches had other things to deal with, though Catholic missioanries did try and get into Russia again. Technically, they
did get into western Russia which is a part of Lithuania, but so far progress has been fairly limited. Those pesky Latins became a somewhat more topical issue since the Council of Florence (1431-1439), which was, among other things, an attempt to achieve an ecumenical union between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. The Greek Metropolitan of Kiev, Isidor (called Sidor by the less Hellenophilic of Muscovites), had been a big enthusiast of such an union, and did his best both at the council and immeditely after to bring it about; everything fell apart (well, it was already beginning to unravel, but Isidor did have some success in Kiev and Smolensk on his way back) when he came back to Moscow and the Great Prince Vasily II decided that he, himself, was the last true protector of orthodoxy, heckled the Metropolitan when he tried to announce the union and soon put him under arrest, replacing him with the token consent of the Patriarch of Constantinople. All the bishops present at the scene immediately agreed that Isidor was probably some manner of heretic; hence, a heresy and not just a schism, though the Latins had been called heretics before whenever convenient. Anyway, the important parts were those: firstly, the idea of the union was not quite dead yet, and it was bad tone among the bishops to seem to be in favour; secondly, the Great Prince was now the Protector of Orthodoxy, and so had a reputation to keep up. Which, Mr. Banana, is why I could not possibly have accepted your proposal as yet.
That said...
Things got a bit more complicated still since then, as Great Prince Ivan III was a) strongly pragmatic and b) wanted to marry a Paleologue after his first wife died, and there was one available, but she was very much in the care of the Catholic Church (not legally, but de facto). Fortuitiously, the Church kept her and her increasingly Italianised relatives around so that it could marry her off to someone, as it would've been very prestigious if otherwise probably useless for almost every European monarch. Ivan III exchanged some embassies with Pope Paul II and reached an agreement; then Sophia (or Zoe) Paleologue moved to Moscow with a huge entourage of Italianised Greeks, Italian artists and Catholic priests headed by Basilios Bessarion, the ideological father of the idea of an union. The Orthodox Church was outraged, but eventually it all worked out fine: the Orthodox bishops had some cheap laughs at the expense of the rather unpopular Bessarion, Ivan III kept the delegation from doing anything remotely useful to its cause, and the marriage went ahead. Bessarion had to come back; but the Italian artists remained, and for a while, so had some of the priests, though their influence was naturally marginalised. Still, this was more contact than had existed in, say, the 1440s.
There was another, initially unrelated development in the reign of Ivan III. Novgorod had always had stronger contacts with western Europe than perhaps even some of the Lithuanian Russian cities; in the 15th century it became a conduit of all kinds of influence. The Union and Catholicism had not gained much ground here, the Novgorodian archbishop was powerful enough to prevent that as long as he was willing. But Archbishop Gennadiy, while never going so far as to advocate the union or to allow missionary activity on his turf, nevertheless did establish some ties with the Roman Catholic Church, and specifically with a Dominican monk named Veniamin (Benjamin) who had some mighty interesting things to say about how they deal with heretics out in the West. Archbishop Gennadiy was very curious about this stuff at the time because of...
Fun Fact the Fifth: ...the Hebrew heresy! Actually, it is more commonly called the Judaising or Judaiser heresy, if we go with the literal translation (Wikipedia wisely prefers to call it the Heresy of Skharia the Jew), but I have my reasons for calling it this. It is a very dark and confusing matter, and honestly Jews don't seem to have been too involved directly, apart from Skharia the Jew (Zacharia), who honestly did not have all that much to do with it either. It all started in Novgorod, back when it was still independent in the early 1470s; as said, it was a conduit of all kinds of Latin European influences, including assorted alternate translations of holy texts, mystical, alchemical and astrological treatises and so on. Zacharia translated a lot of those things as well and they became pretty popular amongst elements of the Novgorodian white clergy: especially popes Dionysius (Denis), Alexius (Aleksey), and their various friends and relatives. The sect started as an intellectual circle/ecclesiastical political clique, standing in favour of various reforms and in opposition to some practices and ideas that were far more profitable to the archbishop, the monasteries and the poorer parish priests than to the cream of the urban white clergy crop. Simony was opposed, literal Trinity was put under some doubt and some vaguely Protestant-sounding ideas about faith, salvation and the role of the Church were advanced. As Novgorod lost its independence (not without Gennadiy's help due to prior contacts and cooperation) the heretics gained more adherents, if in a loose sense only; they also managed to befriend the Great Prince by helping him justify the confiscation of some monasterial lands in newly conquered Novgorod, and in 1480 he rewarded Dionysius and Alexius by shielding them from Gennadiy, who was about to crack down on them, and making them protopopes at the Cathedral of the Archangel and the Cathedral of the Dormition, respectively. Zacharia and several others potentially implicated also decided to keep close to the court, and before long they found both sympathetic listeners and allies for their reformist agenda, mainly among the court faction of Elena, the wife of Ivan the Young. Fyodor Kuritsyn, who was something of an amateur mystic himself and an ally of Elena, got implicated in particular. Zosima, the current Metropolitan, was accused of sympathy for the heretics; it seems that he backed them out of political considerations (he both hated Gennadiy personally and was not too keen on how powerful and independent the archbishop of Novgorod still remained), but only up to a point. Gennadiy tried to get the Great Prince to let him crack down on those heretics regardless. The Great Prince decided that it would be very nice to seize some church lands and realised that it was pretty fun to have two quarreling parties of clergymen at his court if he was going to try and do that, and for the next decade made sure to play them off against each other. Gennadiy contacted the Dominicans, made a new and better translation of the Bible, wrote letters to many other prominent religious leaders and establishing an alliance with both Iosif Volotsky
and Nil Sorsky, and did many other things as well, but up to now had only very limited success against the actual heretics. One of the other things he did was reach a rather natural if obviously loose alliance with Sophia Paleologue, what with his enemies already being her enemies; still, as long as Elena's party remained the party of Ivan, the heir to the throne, as well as of many leading and highly influential statesmen, success seemed quite remote...
Fun Fact the Sixth: Wannabe reformers who like to rag on the Catholic Church and its corruption might want to take note of the fact that, as per the decision of a Russian ecumenical council at some point in the late 13th century (1299? Can't seem to confirm), simony is pretty much okay and completely legal.
Obviously, that was one of the more popular grievances as of the late 15th century.
