The Beginning of Peter the Great’s Church Reform: Description of the Property of the Patriarchal House and the Cathedral of the Assumption

This article analyses the mechanisms behind the implementation of the church reform of Peter the Great at its initial stage. It studies the activity of the Monastic Prikaz, restored in January 1701, as the main instrument for carrying out transformations in the management of church and monastic land holdings and property. The problem context of the article can be defined by the concept that interprets the church reform of Peter the Great as the beginning of the secularisation era in Russia, as well as by studies related to the formal status and informal position of the Patriarch’s House in the first years after the death of Patriarch Adrian. The practice of applying the nominal decree of January 31, 1701, in relation to land ownership and property of the Patriarch is considered through the prism of a body of sources, different in origin (Razryad and Monastic prikazes, Treasury and House prikazes of the Patriarch). Prikaz records management documents and inventory books from the funds of the RGADA and the Department of Manuscripts at the State History Museum make it possible to identify an aspect of the activities of the Monastic Prikaz that has not previously attracted the attention of researchers. It has been established that the description of the property of the Patriarch’s House in the Moscow Kremlin and the Assumption Cathedral was carried out by the Monastic Prikaz itself, with the personal participation of its head boyar I. A. Musin-Pushkin and diaks Efim Zotov, Gerasim Potapiev, and Ivan Ivanov. The inventory books of the Patriarch’s House help significantly adjust the general chronology of measures taken for the description of land holdings and property of the Church. The outset of the description should be determined by the earliest of the inventory books – the inventory of the Patriarch’s House treasury, which has the date March 3, 1701, in the preamble. A conclusion is made about the two phases of the description of the Patriarch’s House’s movable property. By December 1701, changes in goal setting resulted in the decree of Peter the Great on the creation of new, “price” books, making it possible to get an idea of what a hypothetical confiscation of the Patriarch’s property could give the state treasury. The article proposes a reconstruction of the sources and methods for compiling such books. The results of the study indicate the presence of common and specific features in the policy of Peter the Great in relation to various categories of church property at the initial stage of the reform.