Free Russia by Philip Longworth

built a little church. But Stefan could not stand the solitude, and soon headed off to Moscow. There he entered the Monastery of the Apparition. Its abbot, Aleksei, was to become metropolitan. Stefan himself was to rise to become an abbot and chaplain to the Grand Prince. He was in the world now, if not of it. But Bartholomew remained a hermit in his wilderness, living a life of hard physical toil, prayer and meditation. He was to remain there in solitude for two years. A vision of the Devil he had about this time reflected concerns which were as much political as religious, however, for ‘the evil forces’ appeared before him ‘clothed and hatted in the Lithuanian style’- the style, that is, of the Catholic West. The future saint was a patriot.
    Word of the pious hermit spread, and people came to him in the forest bringing little gifts. Three or four even came to join him. He built ‘cells’ for them. But he also began to make occasional forays into the world he had forsaken. On one he persuaded a monk, who was also a priest, to shave his head and rechristen him a monk. His new name was Sergei, or Sergius. More and more young men came to live near Sergius as hermits, until, — reluctantly, so we are told - he agreed to the transformation of the settlement of separate hermitages into a monastery, and to his own installation as its abbot. He was to supervise the community and enforce strict discipline over the monks. The year was 1353—4 and he was thirty-one or thirty-two.
    This would hardly have been done without the blessing of Metropolitan Aleksei. The Church had recognized the popularity of Sergius’s initiative, and set out to capture and direct the trend. Sergius was encouraged to organize an expansion of the movement, to found new monasteries further out into the Russian ‘wilderness’. Aside from the benefits of charityand piety that it would bring, putting the energies of so many displaced or undirected young men to productive account turned out to be of strategic economic significance too. So monks were sent out to form communities of their own, and all the time fresh recruits came in wanting the peace of mind and solace that came of prayer and physical labour. A twelve-year-old orphan of Sergius’s brother became a novice, then a monk with the name of Fedor. He was later to found a monastery in Moscow and become archbishop of Rostov. But most of the monks who went out founded monasteries in the ‘wilderness’ of the countryside, not, as convention until that time dictated, at the edge of towns.
    Sergius the hermit-turned-organizer became political. In 1358 he was sent to the Prince of Rostov, to the territory where his own family had hailed from, to persuade him to concede in his dispute with Moscow. Seven years later he undertook another mission as peacemaker, between two warring brothers over which of them should be prince of Nizhnii-Novgorod, which controlled an important confluence further down the Volga. He not only blessed Grand Prince Dmitrii before his victory over the Tatars at Kulikovo in 1380, he is reputed to have given him strategic advice, though he was also among those who fled Moscow at the approach of the vengeful Tatar leader Tokhtamysh, who sacked the city two years later. Sergius died in 1392. The site of his first hermit’s cell at Zagorsk, north of Moscow, had already grown to be the Trinity—St Sergius monastic centre. It was to become the administrative centre for the Patriarch of All Russia, and a patriotic symbol for all Russians.
    The story of St Sergius helps to explain how Russia relocated itself further to the north in the thirteenth century. It also throws light on how it came to occupy so vast a territory. The policy of princes, particularly Moscow’s prince, of encouraging settlement on unfarmed land in strategic areas was significant in this respect, but the foundation of monasteries in ‘the wilderness’, as Sergius had done, was fundamental to the process.
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