Russia,
towards the end of the tenth century, to the capture of Constantinople by
the Turks in 1453, the Russian Church was governed by a metropolitan,
consecrated by the Patriarch of Constantinople. After this event, the
metropolitans were consecrated by the Russian bishops till 1588, when a
patriarch of Russia was instituted by that of Constantinople, who had
arrived at Moscow, in order to obtain pecuniary assistance for his church.
The patriarch enjoyed considerable influence, which modified in some
respects the despotic authority of the Czar. It was Peter the Great who
abolished this dignity in 1702, after the death of the Patriarch Adrian,
and declared himself the head of the Russian Church.

He introduced several regulations to restrict the power of the clergy, and
to improve their education. It appears that the violent reforms by which
that monarch tried to introduce the civilization of western Europe amongst
his subjects, had produced an intellectual movement in their church, but
which, not squaring with the views of the imperial reformer, was violently
suppressed by him. Thus, in 1713, a physician called Demetrius
Tveritinoff, and some other persons, began to attack the worship of
images, and to explain the sacrament of communion in the same sense as has
been done by Calvin.

These reformers were anathematised by the order of the Czar, and one of
them was executed in 1714.(101) Next year, 1715, a Russian priest, called
Thomas, probably a disciple of the above-mentioned reformers, began
publicly to inveigh against the worship of saints and other practices of
his church, and went even so far as to break the images placed in the
churches. He was burnt alive, and nothing more was heard afterwards of
such reformers. The Russian clergy regained their influence under the
reign of the Empress Elizabeth, 1742-62, a weak-minded, bigoted woman, who
was continually making pilgrimages to the shrines of various Russian
saints and miraculous images, displaying on those occasions such a
splendour and such munificence to the objects of her devotion, that the
finances of her state were injured by it.(102) Elizabeth's nephew and
successor, Peter III., Duke of Holstein, who, for the sake of the throne,
had passed from the Lutheran communion to the Greek Church, entertained
the greatest contempt for his new religion. This half-crazy, unfortunate
prince, instead of trying to reform the Russian Church by promoting a
superior inform