Ecclesiastical Conflicts and their Solutions in the Yaroslavichs Era (1054–1073)

The article reconstructs the panorama of the crises in the Russian Church under the Yaroslavichs in 1054–1073 and the attempts to resolve them. Immediately after Yaroslav’s death, Greek Metropolitan Efrem became involved in the controversy between the Roman and Constantinopolitan Churches. He took a sharply anti-Latin position and added many new items to the list of Roman ‘sins’, which affected the interests of Izyaslav and Svyatoslav Yaroslavichs married to princesses from Latin Europe. But in a conflict between Izyaslav and the monks of Pechery monastery due to the tonsuring of princely servants, the metropolitan apparently supported de facto the prince, which led to the emigration of some of the Pecherites. The emerging centrifugal tendencies in the Russian Church gave rise in 1055 to a conflict between Ephraim and Bishop Luka of Novgorod, who might have aspired to the status of archbishop and whom the metropolitan, on the far-fetched accusation of his servant (probably of involvement in gambling), subjected to three years of imprisonment in a Kiev monastery. Luka’s return to Novgorod in 1058/9 and the punishment of the slave Dudiki, who had slandered him, marks the end of the church crisis of the 1050s. However, after the first internecine war of 1068–1069 the Russian Church also found itself involved in political conflicts. After the expulsion of Izyaslav from Kiev in 1068, disintegration trends gave rise to the creation of new metropolitans in the capital cities of the younger Yaroslavichs, which increased their political prestige: in Chernigov (before 1072) and Pereyaslav (before 1076). These metropolitans were only titular (without episcopal suffragans), but the latter existed till the 1100s, which postponed the restoration of the unity of the Church of Russia for another third of a century.