Natalia Viktorovna Sokolova,
Candidate of Historical Sciences, Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Description of the Patriarch House Possessions at the Beginning of the Early 18th Century as a Source on the History of the Russian Orthodox Church
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2022-2-8
The article examines some of the results and prospects of studying the most important source on the history of the Russian Orthodox Church in the early 18th century – inventory books of church and monastery property, compiled in pursuance of the decree of Peter I of January 31, 1701. Genuine inventory books of Patriarch estates of 1701–1703 are being introduced into scientific circulation. The compilation, numbering more than a thousand sheets, contains descriptions of the Patriarch House possessions in 17 uyezds, which makes this sample representative. The documents make it possible to restore the chronology of the description, the names of the heads of scribal commissions, the names of settlements that were part of the Patriarch estates. They also allow to study in dynamics the land ownership of the Patriarch House, the Patriarch administration system, the organization of the Patriarch and peasant economy, the relationship between the peasant communities and the church parishes. The documents open up new opportunities for researching the history of parish churches and wooden temple architecture, as well as some aspects of the existence of printed and handwritten books at the turn of the 17th–18th centuries. The importance of this set of sources for studying the church reform of Peter I should be especially emphasized, since without taking into account the information available in them, any judgments about its initial period may be not only incomplete, but erroneous. Thus, the documents testify that the provision of the decree of January 31, 1701 was fulfilled in relation not only to the bishop’s and monastic estates, but also to the land holdings of the Patriarch. This circumstance entails an inevitable revision of some well-established assessments of this stage of the reforms. The study showed presence of common and specific features in the form and content of the inventory books of Patriarch, bishop and monastic estates. The author sees the existence of a “standard” nakaz instruction within the nakaznye pamyati of the Monastic Prikaz as one of the main reasons for the close similarity both in the census program and in the methods of work of the stolniks and nobles sent to the districts to describe the property of the Church – regardless of the ownership of the votchina villages. It is hypothesized that there was no special description of the Patriarch estates, separate from the bishops’ houses and monasteries. The inventory books of 1701–1703, being economic books of static and accounting nature cannot serve as a basis for any judgments about the plans of Peter I regarding the future fate of the patriarchate. However, it should be noted that at the time of creation of the Monastic Prikaz, the supreme power did not distinguish in any way the property and servants of the Patriarch House from all others in the Russian Orthodox Church, neither in their regulatory and administrative activities, nor in the course of practical implementation of the January decrees of 1701.
Publishing: 28/04/2022
The article has been received by the editor on 02.12.2021
How to cite: Sokolova N.V. Description of the Patriarch House Possessions at the Beginning of the Early 18th Century as a Source on the History of the Russian Orthodox Church // Historical Courier, 2022, No. 2 (22), pp. 127–140. [Available online: http://istkurier.ru/data/2022/ISTKURIER-2022-2-08.pdf]
Links: Issue 2 2022
Keywords: history of the Russian Orthodox Church, Church reform of Peter the Great, reforms of the church-state relations, secularization, inventory books