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spiritual needs of the individual. Against the 'ndproperty' school stood most of the hierarchy and thewealthier monasteries, by now largely recruited from theupper landowning class, from which came their champion,Joseph, abbot of Volokolamsk (b. about 1439, d. 1515).An erudite controversialist, a masterful disciplinarian andcombative man of action, he openly supported monasticproperty on the ground, amongst others, that themonasteries were the necessary training grounds of thehierarchy, who must be of good birth; "if monasteriesshall not possess lands, how shall a man of honour andnoble birth assume the vows?"The Josephines won the day in the church council of1503, but the opposition both within and without thechurch continued. The state was urgently in need ofinhabited lands^to grant as payment for service, and itcould not fail to be deeply concerned "to the end thatthere be not loss of service, and that lands do not passfrom service." Ivan the Great had not hesitated, whenhe reduced Novgorod (1478), to deprive the monasteriesthere of over half their lands, but neither he nor hissuccessors finally applied this precedent to Muscovyproper. They found no more active supporters in theirwork of national unification than among the Josephines,and Ivan the Terrible, though he had the metropolitanPhilip deposed and (1569) murdered, did not go furtherthan an increase in taxation and service from churchlands and various measures to check the further acquisitionof monastic property and circumscribe ecclesiasticaljurisdiction and privileges.These measures were in fact only to a limited extentcarried out, but in the middle of the seventeenth century,as mentioned earlier (see above, p. 148), the needs of thegovernment and the military, landowning class were metin the new code of laws of 1649. This drastically reducedand controlled the jurisdiction and economic power of thechurch, and the monasteries were subjected to a new,secular 'department of monasteries.' The PatriarchNikon violently opposed "the accursed law book" andthe new department was subsequently for a timesuppressed, but Peter the Great, deeply impressed by187

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