Why no Russian Renaissance?

Russia was much closer to Byzantium than Western Europe. So why didn't it feed from the scholarship of the East on the fall of Constantinople, as the West did? Books by John Lawrence and Martin Sixsmith.

OK, this is an unfair question. But if one's closeness to the learning and culture of Byzantium is supposed to be related to one's ability to assimilate it and recover the riches of antiquity that supposedly fed so much of the Western European Renaissance, then Russia was far better positioned than Florence. Russia had long-standing trade relationships and routes to Constantinople, and shared the same Orthodox Christianity. Indeed it still sees itself as the last inheritor of Byzantine culture. Some of the largest cities in Europe in 1000's were Novgorod and Kiev, of the early Rus period after Viking/Varangian invasion of the nascent Slavic areas.

But there were countless hindrances. When the scholars of Byzantium fled the Muslim takeover in the 1400's, did they want to go to Russia? Not likely. Western Europe had already gone through a mini-renaissance in the 1200's, and was incomparably more diverse, academically advanced, and wealthy than Russia at the time. Also, the Mongols invaded Russia in 1237, ruling with a slowly loosening grip till 1480. This would obviously put a serious crimp into any renaissance.

Poland, next-door, had its own mini-renaissance, roughly through the 1500's. Even in this most distant province of Europe, Italian architecture, arts, and science penetrated, and yielded the brilliant response of Copernicus, among others. It turned out that exposure to Byzantium was only a small part of the recipe- a spark, but far from the most important ingredient. Poland's great period was based on riches from trade with the Baltics, and dominion over a great deal of what is Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia today, plus quite a bit of travel to Italy. Prosperity and its consequent cosmopolitanism was perhaps more imporant than contact with Byzantium alone.

Holy investiture

One could also imagine getting too much of a good thing. Byzantium itself was Orthodox Christian, and inheritor of Greek and Roman learning, but had itself nothing we would call a renaissance. There was something about Greek Orthodox Christianity that seems to have been, and still is, stultifying to free thought and scholarship.

Was Islam an influence? In the West, Islam was a transmitter of ancient texts and a source of independent scholarship, via the lengthy occupation of al-Andalus, as well as trade throughout the Mediterranian. This was at least as influential as the recovered treasures of Byzantium. But, being present at the very gates of Constantinople, and as a significant part of the Mongol empire, the Islamic influences must have been at least as strong in Byzantium itself as well as in Russia- but to little avail.

It is not a big point, but the historical irony is that Russia inherited the strong ruler model, the love of ornate ceremony, iconography, architecture, and the deeply entwined church-state model of Byzantium- some of which were rather retrograde characteristics- leaving the West to gain from some of its other, more positive achievements, or perhaps rather, transmissions from a deeper past.

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