Old Testament Narratives And The Militant Rhetoric In Russia, 1650 To 1700

Modern historians have widely acknowledged that the traditional Eastern Orthodoxy was less inclined to proclaim the Holy War against the enemies of faith and, thus, to dehumanize the non-Christian adversaries of the Russian tsardom than the confessions of the Western Christendom were by similar circumstances. The presented paper aims to challenge this view. The Russian political and religious propaganda of the late 17th century rarely appealed to the idea of the Holy War and called for extermination or enslavement of the infidels directly. Instead, the complex of Biblical metaphors was used. Whereas the Russian tsardom had been traditionally seen as the ‘New Israel’, the preachers of the 1680s and 1690s recalled the deeds of Moses, Joshua and Gedeon and compared the Muslim enemies of the realm – Tatars and Turks – with the cursed people of Canaan such as Midianites and Amalekites. Parallelly, the images of the violence Israelites committed against these people by divine sanction became popular in the religious wall painting, in part, due to some influences from the Western book illustration brought to Russia in the second half of the 17th century. Some religiously zealous contemporaries, from the advisors of the young Tsar Peter I to ordinary gentry, applied these negative Biblical images of religiously and ethnically suspected others not only to the Muslims but even to the Protestant population of the Baltic provinces of Sweden attacked during the Great Northern war adding a confessional dimension to the predominantly secular rhetoric of the government