Abstract

The Journey to Florence and A Note about Rome are both part of the Florentine Cyrillic corpus: the first travelogue describes the journey of a Russian delegation to Florence and back, the second one documents the pilgrimage of the Russians to the graves of the apostles in Rome. The motivations behind both journeys were different: while the one to Florence was an official journey in the services of Metropolitan Isidore, the journey to Rome was undertaken as a personal initiative. The 15th century text of A Note about Rome presents the oldest description of Rome in Cyrillic writing and it remained the only information about Rome for a Russian reader for the following 250 years. In this study, it is analysed in comparison with The Journey to Florence that provides the arguments for the Note’s dating – revealing that the Russian pilgrims visited Rome in 1438, between August 18th and October 8th. Besides the sacredness, the Russian pilgrims perceived the withered state of the Eternal City. It is not completely out of the question that the image of an old Rome was later connected with the image of fallen Constantinople – and it co-formed the perspective of a young Christian nation with the ambition of succession. The visit of Church of Saint Alexius, “Man of God” by the Russian pilgrims shows that the Roman saint was still an archetypal image of Byzantine-Slavic religiosity. Thus, he also stands as an example of communio sanctorum, which was the main connector of the Byzantine and Latin world at the Council of Florence.