The Mongol Invasion
The invasion of Russia by the Mongols had disastrous effects on the future of Russian civilization, but the church survived, both as the only unified social organization and as the main bearer of the Byzantine heritage. The “metropolitan of Kiev and all Russia,” who was appointed from Nicaea or from Constantinople, was a major political power, respected by the Mongol Khans. Exempt from taxes paid by the local princes to the Mongols and reporting only to his superior (the ecumenical patriarch), the head of the Russian Church—though he had to abandon his cathedral see of Kiev that had been devastated by the Mongols—acquired an unprecedented moral prestige. He retained ecclesiastical control over immense territories from the Carpathian Mountains to the Volga River, over the newly created episcopal see of Sarai (near the Caspian Sea), which was the capital of the Mongols, as well as over the Western principalities of the former Kievan Empire—even after they succeeded in winning independence (e.g., Galicia) or fell under the political control of Lithuania and Poland.