In the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Muscovy was imagined as both a new Jerusalem and a new Rome, but it is the notion of Moscow as the Third Rome that has attracted the most attention from historians, given the metaphor’s inspiration of a new model of relations between church and sovereign. Moscow was called a Third Rome in a number of letters dating from the early sixteenth century and attributed to the monk Filofei, who resided in one of the Pskov monasteries on lands recently annexed by Moscow.
