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the fact that about fourteen per cent, of the peasantrywere computed to belong to the church, in his usualpiecemeal way brought church lands effectively into hisrecruiting and taxation net and reduced the ecclesiasticalcourts to a nullity.After further transitional confusion, the final secularizationof almost all the church lands was decreed in 1764,and there was a drastic closing down of monasteries,over half of the total of more than a thousand. Nearlya million male church serfs became in effect statepeasants, under rather better conditions than before,and with substantially the same amount of land as theyhad previously occupied. Unlike the lay serf-owners in1861, the church was not bought out by state purchase.The state simply kept for itself seven-eighths of therevenues from church lands and doled out the residueto the clergy.This economic subjection of the church by the statewas intimately linked with its political and religioussubordination since the time of Peter the Great. Thedivorce between the official church and religion has atno period of Russian history been more marked thanduring the last two centuries. The reasons for thisdivorce and for the reduction of the church virtually toa department of the state lie in the great struggles in thethird quarter of the seventeenth century for independenceof the church and for reform, which resulted at one andthe same time in the abasement of the patriarchate andin the Schism.The claim to independence of lay control found itsprotagonist in the redoubtable Patriarch Nikon (1605-81),of a peasant family from Nizhni-Novgorod province, a disconcertingcompound of asceticism, learning, pride, andimperiousness. Not content with reasserting the equalityof, and equipoise between, the spiritual and temporalpowers, Nikon eventually came to assert, in a mannerhitherto unknown in Russia, the superiority of thespiritual power and even the subordination of the tsarto the patriarch. The arguments so familiar in themedieval papal armoury of the sun and the moon, thetwo swords and the donation of Constantine appeared188