The findings of this chapter suggest that the fourteenth century has a stronger claim than the thirteenth century to be the century in which anti-Latin hostility both intensified and became more widespread in texts. New anti-Latin polemic is included in the Rusian kormchaia; Galicia uses the filioque
controversy to distance itself from Rome; the composer of the Tale of Dovmont berates the ‘pagan
Latins’. What’s more, as I demonstrated in Chapter Two, by the mid-fourteenth century, the
Novgorod First chronicle has begun to routinely present Latins as adherents of a different faith and an existential threat to Rusian Orthodoxy.63 The thirteenth century may see signs of rhetorical change to come (the Tale of the Life of Aleksandr Nevskii is first among them), but this change only really materialises in the fourteenth century.64
Why should this be? At least by the middle of the fourteenth century, there are certain new historical factors at play which could have provoked or catalysed increasingly negative attitudes to and representations of Latins. Both Poland and Sweden were attempting to expand onto Rusian territory, as the Novgorod First chronicle reports in the 1340s.65 By 1387, the powerful polity of Lithuania had officially accepted Latin Christianity after decades of wavering between Rome and Constantinople.66 However, increasing Latin pressure on Rus’s western borders in the mid to late fourteenth century is probably not the sole reason for increasing hostility. After all, the first hints of rhetorical change in depictions of Latins date to earlier than the middle of the fourteenth century—perhaps to as early as the late thirteenth century if the Tale of the Life of Aleksandr Nevskii is considered to be at the vanguard of these developments.
Perhaps texts were simply slow to change in response to thirteenth-century shifts in attitudes to Latins. As this chapter has repeatedly stressed, we have no access to attitudes or perceptions except as
63 See p. 65.
64 A conclusion which Floria also points towards on the basis of the Tale of Dovmont and the Novgorod First chronicle’s entry for 1349. Floria, U istokov, p. 212.
65 PSRL 3, pp. 361, 359–60.
66 S.C. Rowell, Lithuania Ascending: A Pagan Empire Within East-Central Europe, 1295–1345 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 149–304.
divined from historical events or extrapolated from texts. However, it is certainly possible that Rusian perceptions of Latins did in fact evolve in the thirteenth century, but that it took until the fourteenth century for this shift to influence depictions of Latins. It might simply have taken time for increasing hostility to register in writing, and for the (increasingly widespread?) idea of Latins as religiously different or even Other to become the subject of new literary conventions. According to this interpretation, fourteenth-century texts would belatedly reflect a sea change in attitudes to Latins.
The question of changing Rusian perceptions of Latins should also be analysed within a broader context. The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw shifts in perceptions of the Other, in its many forms, across the Latin world. David Abulafia interprets the later Middle Ages as the period when ‘fuzzy and foggy’ religious frontiers in what is now Europe were ‘replaced by mental barricades’.67 Sharon Kinoshita and Geraldine Heng see related thirteenth- and fourteenth-century changes in ways of conceptualising Others. Heng discusses the rise of what she calls medieval nationalism, along with discourses of essential biological and spiritual difference between peoples;68 Kinoshita notes the appearance of ‘increasingly disciplinary taxonomies’ of the Other in the thirteenth- and fourteenth- century Latin world.69
In other words, the solidifying of previously fluid boundaries between religious and political groups in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was not a phenomenon restricted to Rus. This observation does not constitute an explanation for the increasingly antagonistic depictions of Latins in late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Rus. Most of the institutions and contexts which Abulafia, Heng, Kinoshita and others consider to have been crucibles for thirteenth- and fourteenth-century discursive shifts were irrelevant to Rus. The anti-heretical proclamations of the Fourth Lateran Council and the violence of the Albigensian Crusade were not Rusian affairs; there is little evidence that Rusian writers felt the sack of Constantinople by crusading Franks to be a moment of ‘epistemic rupture’.70 More work is also needed to ascertain the extent to which Rusian attitudes to all sorts of Others, not just Latins, hardened in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: after all, the sweeping epistemic changes that Abulafia, Kinoshita and Heng discuss concerned not only conceptions of other Christian groups, but of religious and ethnic Others in general. Still, the Rusian ‘mental barricades’ erected
67 David Abulafia, ‘Introduction: Seven Types of Ambiguity, c. 1100–1500’, in Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices, ed. by David Abulafia and Nora Berend (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 1–34 (p. 33).
68 Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 70.
69 Sharon Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 2.
against Latins in the fourteenth century bear a striking resemblance to those being erected in the Latin world.
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There are only two periods of Early Rusian history that might plausibly class as rhetorical turning- points in depictions of Latins. The first is the mid-late eleventh century, the period of the Schism and its immediate aftermath, when the concept of Latins as corrupt Christians seems to have first taken hold in Rus—but only in a restricted group of mostly polemical texts, not in the broader literary or cultural sphere of Rus. The second is the very end of the period this thesis considers, the early-mid fourteenth century, which sees the beginning of a rhetorical shift which will continue throughout the fourteenth century. Rusian composers include anti-Latin polemic in their canon law compendia; religious hostility towards Latins begins to spread beyond canon law, infiltrating texts of various genres, including chronicles; and Latins come to be depicted not simply as schismatics or imperfect Christians, but as people of another faith, even (eventually) ‘pagans’.
In Early Rus, then, a text’s time of composition is a relatively poor predictor of its representations of Latins. This may be a negative conclusion, but it is not an insignificant one. Firstly, it brings into question much of the scholarship on depictions of and attitudes to Latins. At least after the Schism, particular events in the history of Rus–Latin relations do not trigger immediate rhetorical change. Scholars’ talk of ‘turning-points’ in Early Rusian depictions and perceptions of Latins is therefore misleading. What’s more, on the basis of the evidence available to us, depictions of Latins do not become steadily more hostile throughout the Early Rusian period; for those interested in
representations of Latins (and written representations of Latins have been among our principal sources for relations ‘on the ground’), time of composition does not have the degree of explanatory power with which historians have sometimes endowed it. This conclusion also provides a rationale for the investigation of alternative factors which might affect depictions of Latins: if time of composition does not influence portrayals, what does? Chapters One to Three investigated genre and theme; the final chapter of this thesis turns to place of composition, another promising but little studied predictor of the tenor of Early Rusian depictions of Latins and the Latin world.