Tag: Religion

The Millenarian Midterm

Mike Coté2 Comments

American politics is replete with apocalyptic and millenarian rhetoric; this has only ramped up in the leadup to the 2022 midterm election. Thankfully, those who feel this way are dead wrong.

Norman Cohn published his excellent academic tome on European religious apocalypticism, The Pursuit of the Millennium, in 1957. It dealt primarily with groups and events which occurred nearly a thousand years earlier, yet it is just as relevant to modern politics as it is to Medieval heresy. Cohn describes an era that was rapidly changing socially, culturally, economically, and politically; he writes of charismatic prophets, millenarian movements, and revolutionary vanguards. In the Middle Ages in Europe, these changes and the various group responses to them revolved heavily around religion – the center of life for the people of the time. This period was full of religious sects and ideologies which believed in the immediate coming of the end of the world and the replacement of the current society with a new world order[1] – either the Kingdom of God, or a version of Hell on Earth. These millenarian movements were very Manichaean in their outlook; they saw only good and evil, with no area in between. Of course, the members of the in-group were good and fought for Christ, while their persecutors were evil servants of Satan or the Antichrist.

Given this eternal struggle for the future of existence – a future that would, again, be decided imminently – accepted social morality and religious doctrine were quick casualties to the necessity of winning the battle for the soul of the world. One such sect, the adherents of the Free Spirit movement, were spread across Europe over five centuries and, according to Cohn, represented “the only thoroughly revolutionary social doctrine that existed” at the time.[2] Their brand of radical individual salvation led to “an affirmation of freedom so reckless and unqualified that it amounted to a total denial of every kind of restraint and limitation;”[3] everything could be theologically justified. This attitude was embraced by many millenarian groups during the Middle Ages, often leading them into violence, revolt, drastic social change, harsh treatment of dissent, and – eventually – death at the hands of the Church or State. All of this stemmed from the idea that the end was nigh, and true believers had to act accordingly to achieve salvation and defeat the foe which sought to destroy the world God built for His children.

If you’ve been paying attention to politics over the past several years, you may find these ideas and tropes painfully familiar. Our partisan politics – the closest thing modern secular society has to Medieval religion – has been riven by Manichaean thinking, revolutionary eschatology, radical ideologies, and apocalyptic warnings. People on both right and left see their ideological rivals as seriously attempting to destroy the country – if not the entirety of civilization – and claim the current moment as the precipice of either total victory or total defeat for their cause. These stakes are viewed as permanent, with no path back for the losers in the new world created by and for the victors. As such, any actions taken to avert this catastrophe are justified and justifiable. “By any means necessary” is not an uncommon adage to hear in radical political circles. This is all millenarian thinking. And as the 2022 midterms approach, this millenarianism has ramped up to 11.

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‘Scratch a Russian’: The Influence of the ‘Mongol Yoke’ on Russia

Mike Coté1 Comment

Introduction     

“Scratch a Russian and you’ll find a Tatar.” This famous aphorism playing up the relationship between Russians and the steppe peoples who once lorded over them under the auspices of the Golden Horde has been used to denigrate or dismiss Russia in comparison to Western Europe for centuries. But does this maxim contain a grain, or more, of truth? The debate over this important question has been raging for longer than the Horde control over Russia lasted, and it has no conclusive end in sight. According to Charles Halperin, “Most specialists in medieval Russian history have described the Mongol influence as negligible or entirely deleterious” (Golden Horde vii), but more recent scholarship has challenged these age-old conclusions. In a lively discussion in the pages of the journal Kritika, scholars Halperin, Donald Ostrowski, and David Goldfrank litigate this issue with gusto; these debates exemplify the diverse positions that can be plausibly argued given the available evidence.  In the case of the ‘Mongol Yoke’, clear evidence is unfortunately lacking. Due to the sack of the Golden Horde capital of Sarai by the warlord Tamerlane around 1395, we are entirely lacking any archival records of the Tatar[*] administration of Russia. Russian sources are far more prevalent, but as will be discussed later, are also heavily biased against the Tatars and any possible positive influence they had on their Russian successors. Given this evidentiary challenge, falling on either side of a binary on the question of the impact of the ‘Mongol Yoke’ seems somewhat absurd, yet many scholars take these positions. The true answer likely lies deep in the gray area between the two poles. This paper will argue that the ‘Mongol Yoke’ had a distinct, significant impact on its direct successor state of Muscovy, as well as future Russia, but that the new state did not necessarily see itself as a direct continuation of the Tatar legacy nor did it adopt Tatar institutions wholesale. Evidence of the Tatar impact, or lack thereof, in the areas of economics, military matters, the administrative state and its institutions, religion, and culture will be examined.

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The Road Not Taken: Medieval Novgorod as an Alternate Path in Russian History

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Introduction

Counterfactuals and hypotheticals can be useful frames through which to examine history, as they can help scholars understand that the future is never set in stone and that contingent factors leading to diverging paths can result in wildly different potential outcomes for societies. Pre-Imperial Russian history is replete with these sorts of ‘what-if’ questions, ranging from thoughts about possible development were the Mongols to have avoided Russia to changes that may have resulted from a full Polish takeover of Muscovy during the Time of Troubles. One such question that sparks the imagination is: What would Russian history look like if the medieval statelet which anchored the nascent Russian nation was Novgorod instead of Muscovy? Would Russia have made a decisive turn towards Europe, centuries before the actions of Peter the Great? Unfortunately, historians can never know the answers to these questions; yet by studying the unique cultural aspects of medieval Novgorod, its parallel, but opposing development with respect to Muscovy, and the institutions and policies that made it different, we can envision the road not taken.

Medieval Novgorod, often styled as ‘Great Novgorod’ (Velikii Novgorod) or ‘Lord Novgorod the Great’ (gospodin Velikii Novgorod) after the mid-fourteenth century[1], was a semi-autonomous city-state located in the northwest of the lands comprising the polity of Kievan Rus’. It was distinct in nearly all attributes of state and society – economics, culture, religion, foreign relations, and internal politics – from other Russian polities of the time, particularly Muscovy. Novgorod was an essentially independent entity within greater Russia from the time of its expulsion of Prince Vsevolod Mstislavich in 1136 through its capture by Grand Prince Ivan III in 1478[2], but its history and alternative path began at least two centuries earlier. The city-state’s unusual character was reflected in its status as the only nominally republican polity in the Russian lands, as well as its ability to abstract itself from many of the typical concerns and politics that roiled its neighbors. It was able to keep its singular way of life, system of government, and ancient privileges of self-rule intact through five centuries of unmitigated chaos which completely upended the rest of Russian society. Novgorod’s history can be handily divided into four segments: the period of early settlement and development (900s to 1136), the phase of initial autonomy under Kiev (1136 to 1240), the era of local rule under the Mongols (1240 to 1387), and the final age of independence before the Muscovite takeover (1387 to 1478).[3] During this era of autonomy and self-rule, the city-state controlled more than the city of Novgorod proper and its immediate environs; it held and administered a territorial and colonial empire that, at its zenith, “stretched from the Baltic to the Urals and covered an area approximately the size of present day France, Belgium and the Netherlands combined.”[4]

Many attributes of Novgorod were remarkable when it came to the rest of Russia in the medieval period, but four key factors are the most relevant to the city-state’s development as an alternative to Muscovy: internal politics, foreign affairs, economics and commerce, and religion and culture. All of these realms of Novgorodian civilization were distinct from those of Muscovy in the medieval era and presage some of Imperial Russia’s future alignments and ideologies. From strong relations with the West, especially Germany, to the focus on commercial expansion and resource exploitation, Novgorod was reminiscent of Peter the Great’s Russia, as well as contemporary European maritime city-states. Novgorod was an outpost of high culture and religious piety in an age when neither were in large supply elsewhere in Russia; the pragmatic policies of the city-state allowed it to weather the storms of internecine Russian warfare, Mongol invasion and hegemony, and rising Muscovite autocracy – at least until 1478. It was in that fateful year that Novgorod’s nominal autonomy, independent status, and inimitable civic ethos fell to the armies of Moscow; still, Novgorodian cultural currents remained bubbling under the surface as a wellspring of the famed Russian ideology of dissent for centuries afterwards.[5] Before delving into the specific traits of Novgorodian life that made it special, it is critical to contextualize how and why Novgorod was able to develop this exceptionality.

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Pandemic Restrictions & Religious Freedom

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Why the Supreme Court got it right in overruling California’s draconian lockdown rules.

The United States has been dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic for over a year now. Some states — including my own, New Jersey — have been in varying stages of lockdown or otherwise heavily restricted for many of those past 365 days. California is a perhaps the exemplar of this lockdown approach, having drastically curtailed civil rights for millions of its citizens under the guise of Governor Gavin Newsom’s “emergency powers”. Just a week and a half ago, those restrictions — in California and by proxy elsewhere — were dealt a crushing blow by a majority of the Supreme Court. Much of the coverage of this important decision has been framed negatively, focusing on the religiosity of the petitioners, the fact that the decision was a split one, or decrying the Court’s ‘new direction’ after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Some pundits have even gone as far as claiming that the Court’s decision “Doubles Down On Religious Rights Amid Pandemic,” or that the majority had ulterior motives for its decision, as they are all “ultraconservatives” whose decision “may kill people”. This is all utter nonsense. The Supreme Court absolutely made the right decision in this case when it comes to religious rights under the First Amendment and the government’s power to curtail them in times of crisis.

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