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From the fourteenth century, when the power of thenew grand-princes of Moscow was being extended byany and every means, increased emphasis was given tothe regular quotations from the Epistle to the Romansxiii and the first Epistle of St Peter ii as to the paramountduty of obedience to the powers that be. Fromthe middle of the fifteenth century the dominantelements in the church, in extolling the grand-princesof Moscow as the Tsars of All Russia, magnified andexhorted them as successors to the divinely institutedByzantine autocracy, as requiring all honour andobedience and as wielding authority not only in alltemporal matters but, with reservations, in religiousmatters. The grand-prince was now "the Sovereignand Autocrat of All Russia, the new Tsar Constantinefor the new city of Constantinople—Moscow. . . ."The formula of Moscow as 'the third Rome,' first setout early in the sixteenth century, perhaps in part suggestedby southern Slav models, was popularized forthe next hundred and fifty years in a variety of formsas one of the constituents of the new nationalistic,Orthodox tsarism: "All Christian tsardoms have cometo an end and have been gathered together into onetsardom of our sovereign, according to the book of theprophets, that is to say the Russian tsardom: for twoRomes have fallen, but the third stands, and a fourththere will not be."The ground for this magniloquent conception was thedouble collapse of the Byzantine empire, its religiousbetrayal of Orthodoxy at the council of Florence (1430)when the eastern and western churches were nominallyreunited, and its material extinction by the capture ofConstantinople by the Turks (1453). The effect of theformer event will be explained in a subsequent chapter(see pp. 185-186). The latter was represented in Moscownot only as a punishment for acceptance of 'the Latinheresy,' but also as a consequence of the lack of rulein the last years of the Palaeologi, when power wasusurped by a council of magnates and an overmightyclergy. Ivan the Terrible himself used this closingperiod of the Byzantine empire as an awful warning of89