Peter of Moscow

Origins and early life

Peter was born in the land of Volhynia, in south-western Rus', of pious parents named Theodore and Eupraxia. The tradition relates that before his birth his mother received in a dream a foreshadowing of the blessedness appointed for her son. At the age of twelve he entered a monastery, where he applied himself to the learning of the day and to his monastic obediences, gave much time to the Scriptures, and learned the art of iconography — the icons he painted were given to the brethren and to the pilgrims who came to the house. For the virtue and severity of his life the abbot had him ordained hieromonk.

Ascetic struggle and the monastery on the Rata

After years in the community Peter sought, with his abbot's blessing, a place of greater solitude. He built himself a cell on the bank of the river Rata, in Volhynia, and lived there in silence; but disciples gathered, as they always did about such men, and there grew up around him the monastery afterwards called Novodvorsk (Novy Dvor), with a church dedicated to the Saviour. Chosen abbot, Peter guided his monks by word and example and, the life stresses, never turned in anger on an erring brother. His fame spread beyond the district, and Prince Yuri of Galicia came often to the monastery for his counsel. It was in these years, when Metropolitan Maximus of Kiev and Vladimir passed through on his visitation, that Peter presented to the metropolitan an icon of the Dormition of the Theotokos which he had painted with his own hand — the same image before which Maximus prayed for the Russian land to the end of his days.

Metropolitan of Russia

When Maximus died (1305) the see of the Russian metropolitanate — long since removed from Kiev, ruined and depopulated by the Mongol sack of 1240, to Vladimir on the Klyazma — fell vacant. An abbot named Gerontius, ambitious for the primacy, set out for Constantinople with Maximus's vestments, staff and the icon Peter had painted, hoping to be consecrated; the Grand Prince of Vladimir, Saint Michael of Tver, supported his candidacy. But on the suggestion of Prince Yuri of Galicia, Peter too was sent to the Ecumenical Patriarch, and it was he whom God had chosen. The tradition tells that as Gerontius crossed the Black Sea the Mother of God appeared to him in a storm and said that he laboured in vain, for the painter of her icon, the abbot of the Rata, would be raised to the throne of Kiev. So it fell out: Patriarch Athanasius I of Constantinople consecrated Peter Metropolitan of Kiev and All Russia (about 1308), investing him with the very vestments, staff and icon that Gerontius had carried.

The hierarch amid the Tatar yoke

Peter returned to Rus' in 1308, coming first to Kiev — by then a shell of the mother-city — and then to Vladimir, the working seat of the metropolitanate. His first years were hard. The land groaned under the Tatar yoke and its own divisions; Tver and Moscow contended for the grand-princely dignity, and Peter, whose elevation Michael of Tver had opposed, met opposition and even a formal accusation of simony laid against him before a council at Pereyaslavl, from which he was cleared. Constrained by the disorder of the times, he had often to move his residence. On his journeys through the vast diocese he preached unceasingly to clergy and people the keeping of Christian piety, reconciled quarrelling princes, and laboured to hold the Church together as the one abiding institution of a broken land. In 1312 he travelled to the Horde and obtained from Khan Uzbek a yarlyk confirming the ancient immunities and rights of the Russian clergy.

The move to Moscow and the Dormition Cathedral

Peter's lasting act was his friendship with Moscow. Where he had found no support in Tver, he found it in the Muscovite princes — first Yuri, then his brother Ivan Kalita — and he came increasingly to reside in their small but rising town. In 1325, at the request of the Grand Prince Ivan Kalita, Peter transferred the metropolitan residence from Vladimir to Moscow. The significance of the act was immense: it made Moscow the ecclesiastical capital of Russia and lent the young principality the immeasurable authority of the Church, an authority Moscow would draw upon for two centuries. Peter, the chronicles say, prophesied that Moscow would be delivered from its enemies and raised above all the cities of the Russian land, and that his own bones would rest there. With his blessing the foundations of the cathedral of the Dormition of the Theotokos were laid in the Kremlin in August 1326 — the first stone church of Moscow and the shrine of its metropolitans and, later, its tsars. He prepared with his own hands a stone tomb for himself in the wall of the rising church.

Repose

Peter did not live to see the cathedral finished. He reposed at Moscow on December 21, 1326, and was buried in the crypt he had made ready in the unfinished Dormition Cathedral. From his tomb many healings followed, a number of them, the tradition notes, done in secret — a token, the Church reads, of the deep humility that marked him after death as in life.

Veneration and later cultus

The veneration of the first hierarch to rest in Moscow spread quickly. In 1339, under his successor Metropolitan Theognostus, and with the confirmation of Constantinople, Peter was numbered among the saints — the first canonised wonderworker of Moscow. His tomb became the sacred pledge of the city's rising fortunes: princes kissed the cross upon it in sign of fidelity to the Grand Prince of Moscow, government treaties were sworn over it, and no great undertaking of state was begun without prayer at the grave of "Peter the Wonderworker." After the annexation of Novgorod under Ivan III its people, who had once chosen their own archbishops in Saint Sophia, swore henceforth to consecrate them only at Peter's grave; and it was there that the first hierarchs of the Russian Church were named. His relics were translated twice — in 1472, during the rebuilding of the Dormition Cathedral, and in 1479, at the consecration of the new cathedral raised by Aristotele Fioravanti — and feasts were established in memory of these events on October 5 and August 24.