Orthodox publicists love to remember the Kulikovo field. And if at this moment such a publicist denounces villains - "neopagans", then he will not fail to notice - they say, here it is, Mother Orthodox Russia, blessed for the battle by St. Sergius of Radonezh, with the monk Peresvet in front. And where, they say, were your pagans, polkans and kukers (kukers of Orthodox publicists are especially worried; not only because of their outstanding masculine qualities in every sense, it's not for nothing that Kuraev complains that Orthodoxy has a woman's face) ?!
Indeed, if we judge about the Kulikovo field by school textbooks, and by, say, the cartoon "Swans of Nepryadvy" (the cartoon, I do not argue, is really good) - then yes, everything was so - and Sergius blessed the prince, and Peresvet in the same cassock Yes, a skufeyka galloped to the battle with the Horde chained in iron.
Just turn to the sources. And beautiful - even now varnish a miniature under Palekh! - the picture will crumble. There are too many mysteries around Peresvet. Chronicles about him are generally silent. He is silent about him and about his brother Oslyabya and the life of Sergius of Radonezh. And this is just amazing - is the blessing of two brothers from the monastery for the battle with the nasty Horde people really such a passable, worthless detail ?! How Sergius dug a garden is important, but how did he send two guys from the monastery to fight for the Fatherland and the faith - nonsense? Indeed, according to later, a hundred years after the battle, recorded legends, Sergius entrusted the brothers - sometimes they are called novices - schema …
It is difficult for a modern person to understand what is so out of the ordinary here. However, this situation is unusual, to put it mildly. The Church is often called the army of Christ, and, as in any army, it has its own rigid subordination. The schemnik - in other words, the schema monk - is one of the highest ranks in this army. First, a person becomes a novice - for three years, then he is tonsured, made a ryasophor - not yet a monk! - then there is just a monk, then - a hieromonk, but only then … Did you feel it? To believe that an ordinary monk - not to mention a novice - was put on a schema is like believing that a lieutenant was promoted to lieutenant general for some feat. Such transformations occur only in the dreams of the cadet Bigler from "The Brave Soldier Schweik". Or here's another - according to the laws of the Orthodox Church, neither a priest, nor, even more so,monks have no right under any circumstances to take up arms and take part in hostilities. There have been regimental priests in the history of Russia who, with a cross in their hands, walked alongside the soldiers to the enemy redoubts - for which, of course, they received honor and praise - but even there, in the thick of the battle, none of them took up arms; Orthodox Christians did not have the militant monasticism of Catholics, all these Templars, Hospitallers, Johannites and other swordsmen. That is, an Orthodox monk who receives a schema and participates in a battle with weapons in his hands is such a miracle, such a double lack of vision that he would have a place on the pages of chronicles and lives, next to tailed stars, earthquakes, talking horses and similar rarities. However - silence!There have been regimental priests in the history of Russia who, with a cross in their hands, walked alongside the soldiers to the enemy redoubts - for which, of course, they received honor and praise - but even there, in the thick of the battle, none of them took up arms; Orthodox Christians did not have the militant monasticism of Catholics, all these Templars, Hospitallers, Johannites and other swordsmen. That is, an Orthodox monk who receives a schema and participates in a battle with weapons in his hands is such a miracle, such a double lack of vision that he would have a place on the pages of chronicles and lives, next to tailed stars, earthquakes, talking horses and similar rarities. However - silence!There have been regimental priests in the history of Russia who, with a cross in their hands, walked alongside the soldiers to the enemy redoubts - for which, of course, they received honor and praise - but even there, in the thick of the battle, none of them took up arms; Orthodox Christians did not have the militant monasticism of Catholics, all these Templars, Hospitallers, Johannites and other swordsmen. That is, an Orthodox monk who receives a schema and participates in a battle with weapons in his hands is such a miracle, such a double lack of vision that he would have a place on the pages of chronicles and lives, next to tailed stars, earthquakes, talking horses and similar rarities. However - silence!all these Templars, Hospitallers, Johannites and other sword-bearers. That is, an Orthodox monk who receives a schema and participates in a battle with weapons in his hands is such a miracle, such a double lack of vision that he would have a place on the pages of chronicles and lives, next to tailed stars, earthquakes, talking horses and similar rarities. However - silence!all these Templars, Hospitallers, Johannites and other sword-bearers. That is, an Orthodox monk who receives a schema and participates in a battle with weapons in his hands is such a miracle, such a double lack of vision that he would have a place on the pages of chronicles and lives, next to tailed stars, earthquakes, talking horses and similar rarities. However - silence!
Of the contemporary Kulikovo battle of the monuments of Peresvet, one mentions "Zadonshchina", but she is completely silent about Sergius and his blessing. The light in her "shines with a golden armor". That's all the tales about the cassock or the schema! With all due respect to the famous artist Viktor Vasnetsov, he was wrong in portraying Peresvet in the schema. The Soviet artist Avilov and the pagan Konstantin Vasiliev were right in depicting Peresvet in the armor of a Russian hero.
In the earliest editions of Zadonshchina, Peresvet is not even referred to as a monkey. "The good-natured Peresvet gallops on his overalls, the whistle of the fence field." Is the humble monk good? Further - more: "and the word is like this:" Lutchi would be on my own swords, rather than from the filthy ones full ". Oil painting by Repin's brush, "Swam" is called.
An Orthodox monk preaches suicide with his own sword as a preference for captivity. Why, this is the normal ethics of the Russian pagan warrior of the times of Igor or Svyatoslav! The Greek Leo the Deacon and the Arab Ibn Miskaveikh write about the Russians, throwing themselves at their own blades, just not to be captured by the enemy.
But whether he was a monk, a bad suspicion creeps in. If there was, then definitely not the Trinity Monastery of Sergius of Radonezh, because in the synodikon - the memorial list - of the Trinity Monastery, the name of Alexander Peresvet is absent (as, incidentally, his brother - Rodion Oslyabi). Both heroes are buried in the Staro-Simonovsky Monastery - a thing also absolutely incredible if they were monks of another monastery. How could the Trinity Monastery allow such famous and outstanding brothers to rest in a “foreign” land?
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By the way, both brothers at the time of the battle were by no means plump-lipped, beardless warriors from "Nepryadva Swans", but people more than adults. The youngest, Oslyabi, had an adult son who died on the Kulikovo field. The family of the elder, Peresvet, was not interrupted either - in the 16th century, his distant descendant, a Lithuanian native Ivan Peresvetov, appeared in Russia.
But stop! Why is there a Lithuanian native? Yes, because the brothers are called in all sources "boyars of Bryansk" or "Lyubuchans" - natives of the town of Lyubutsk on the Oka, located not far from Bryansk. And at the time of Kulikov, the fields were the lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Russia. And on the Kulikovo field, the Bryansk boyars could only find themselves under the banners of their suzerain Litvin, Prince Dmitry Olgerdovich of Bryansk, who came to the service of the Prince of Moscow in the winter of 1379-1380.
When did Peresvet and Oslyabya manage to get a monk's hair? Moreover, in a monastery located on Moscow lands? Moreover, to have time to go through the hearing in six months - as we remember, three years old - and "rise" to the rank of schemniks?
Questions, questions, questions … and none of them are answered. More precisely, there is - one for all at once. In the year of the Battle of Kulikovo, neither Peresvet nor Oslyabya were monks. Neither the Trinity Monastery, nor any other - for the monk is freed from all worldly duties, and if the brothers took monastic vows on Lithuanian soil, they had no reason to follow their - already former - overlord to the Moscow principality.
By the way, Dmitry Olgerdovich himself was baptized already at a mature age. In the souls of his boyars, the judgment on the "sacrilegious" remark of Peresvet, Christianity also did not have time to put down roots. As in the soul of another Lithuanian emigrant, voivode Dmitry Bobrok, before the battle, he was bewitching his namesake, the Grand Duke of Moscow, not yet nicknamed Donskoy, about victory over the wolf's howl, dawn and "the voice of the earth." According to Galkovsky, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Russian peasants - by the way, from the Western Russian, "Lithuanian" during the Peresvet Smolensk Territories - like this, at sunrise, bowed to the ground, bowed secretly and removed the cross first. Dmitry Ivanovich kept the secret; curious if he took off the cross?
Oslyabya, who survived in the Kulikovskaya Sich, later served in the boyars of another Lithuanian immigrant - Metropolitan Cyprian, and in his old age he was indeed tonsured a monk. So, one must think, and appeared in the sources "monk Rodion Oslyabya", well, if in "Zadonshchina" (the first lists of which do not even hint at the monasticism of the Bryansk boyars) he calls Peresvet a brother, then the monks-chroniclers made a "logical" conclusion, retroactively inscribing both heroes of the Kulikov field into their ranks. And this happened, judging by the chronicles and lists of "Zadonshchina" not earlier than the end of the 15th century, when the yoke had already been finally overthrown and the last attempt to restore it failed (Khan Akhmat in 1480). At the same time, "The Legend of the Mamayev Massacre" appeared, which reshaped almost the entire history of the Battle of Kulikovo "on the topic of the day"and the mention of an unprecedented campaign to the Kulikovo field of Yagaila (in the "Legend …" of Olgerd, who died a few years before the battle on Nepryadva), who knows why he turned half-way. Let me laugh at the widespread explanations that the fierce warrior and commander was "frightened" of the remnants of the Moscow army, which had just endured a terrible battle. This can be explained well - the rivalry between Moscow and Lithuania in the gathering of Russian lands was in full swing, Lithuania - more precisely, the Rzeczpospolita - became Catholic and began, on its own, ultimately, to oppress the Orthodox - in short, it was just necessary to say about Lithuania some nasty thing. At least just to "gloss over" the active participation of Andrey and Dmitry Olgerdovich with their subjects - Bobrok, Peresvet, Oslyabey - in the great victory over the Horde.
But the desire of the church to take over the names of the heroes of the Kulikov field is also understandable. The Church also wanted to “gloss over” something - just not other people's exploits, but their own … hmmm, here somehow no censorship definitions can be found on the tongue … well, let's say, its own behavior during the yoke. The labels that were awarded to the metropolitans by the khans Mengu-Temir, Uzbek, Janibek and their descendants speak for themselves. Under the threat of painful death, it was forbidden not only to inflict any harm on “church worshipers” or to encroach on their property - even verbally insult the Orthodox faith! It is clear against whom these decrees were directed: until the 13th century, the temples of the Ancient Gods operated in Russia, until the 13th century pagan rituals were performed in Russian cities. But best of all is the motivation behind these harsh prohibitions in the khan's labels:"They pray for us and for our entire race and strengthen our army."
What can I say … I want not to speak - to shout! It is especially good to read this after reading the heartbreaking "On the devastation of the Ryazan land by Batu", and in addition - descriptions of the excavations of cities burned by the Horde with children's skeletons in furnaces and the crucified remains of raped and murdered women, after reading dry archaeological statistics - 75 % of the cities and villages of northeastern Russia did not survive the 13th century, were completely destroyed - this despite the fact that there was a massacre in the survivors, only a few survived … with descriptions of slave markets on the Black Sea coast of that time, filled with golden-haired, blue-eyed living goods from Russia …
They prayed to their god for them! They strengthened this army! And they really strengthened it - when the Tver people rebelled against the Horde yoke and killed the tax collector Cholkhan (Shchelkan Dudentievich from the epic, who “whoever does not have a horse will take a child, who doesn’t have a child will take a wife, those who do not have a wife will take it himself” … By the way, tribute was not paid at all), when the Moscow prince Kalita, together with the Horde, defeated and burned Tver, and the Tver prince Alexander fled to free Pskov, which the long paws of the Horde could not reach, Metropolitan Theognost, under threat of excommunication, forced the Pskovites to hand over the defender of the Russian people for execution Tatars.
Believe it or not, readers, even in the 15th century, the churchmen did not in the least conceal this alliance with the Horde. They boasted of them, wrote to Ivan III, who had encroached on the church lands: "there are many and from the unfaithful and ungodly kings … too much for the holy churches to fight, not only in their countries, but in your kingdom of Russia, and gave labels." You don’t know what more to be touched by - this wondrous - “your Russian kingdom” (just the current “this country”) - or the very infinite arrogance that defends the property acquired during the occupation in a barely liberated country by references to the laws of the occupiers.
However, soon Russia finally put the Horde in its place on the Ugra, and the clergy - right there, "and not wearing their husband's boots," rushed to cling to the victory over the Horde. This is how they posthumously “tonsured” into Trinity monks the half-pagans from the dense forests of Bryansk, the boyar brothers Oslyabya and Peresvet.
Historical Alexander Peresvet has never been a monk, the monastery of Sergius, unless he passed by. I know that this article will change little - as there were, and will remain countless pictures of Peresvet, contrary to all common sense, galloping at the enemy in a long cassock, the ecstatic howls of calm marks and ducks about “the feat of the schema master Peresvet blessed for battle by St. Sergius. " Here and on the cover of the magazine "Rodina", №7 for 2004, again Peresvet in a halo, schema and bast shoes (!) Attacks Chelubey, chained together with a horse in armor. Well, to the free - will, to the free - the truth, and the "saved" - their paradise, their stolen heroes and stolen exploits. To each his own. I didn't write for them …
Author: L. R. Prozorov