«Декларации независимости» Новгорода в ранних новгородских произведениях Пахомия Логофета

Abstract

At the end of the 1430s, Archbishop Evfimii II of Novgorod commissioned Pachomius Logothetes (the Serb) to compose two cycles of texts for the two local religious feasts — the feast of the Novgorodian icon of Our Lady of the Sign («Znamenie»), associated with the legend of the miraculous rescue of Novgorod from the besieging army of Grand Prince Andrei of Suzdal in 1169–1170, and the feast of St. Varlaam Khutynskii. Both cycles contain statements that express some aspects of political independence of Novgorod. I compare these declarative phrases from Pachomius’s texts with a similar phrase in the anonymous «Slovo o znamenii», which was the main source for Pachomius’s Znamenskii cycle. This comparison shows that Pachomius did not retain the notion that the Novgorodian right to territories was divinely sanctioned. Instead, he paid special attention to different aspects of political power: the political independence of Novgorod, the right of the Novgorodians to invite and expel princes, and the duties of such a prince. I argue that these observations are connected with the main ideas of the rest of the Znamenskii cycle where Pachomius presents the Mother of God and even God himself as protectors of Novgorod and emphasizes the exceptionally high status of Archbishop Ioann as an agent who conveys the will of God to the people of Novgorod. Considering what we know about Archbishop Evfimii’s II political activities and the ideological trends that are revealed in the Novgorodian chronicles, I suggest that the task that Pachomius had likely in mind when composing the Znamenskii cycle was the legitimation of the power of the archbishop in his capacity as the head of the independent Novgorod republic.