IMPERIALCLUB.IT

   From the earliest oral tradition of epic songs, rich in tribal memories and pagan sacredness, from the storytellers of the year 1000 throughout the Slavic world to the subsequent Christian stratifications of written literature over the centuries, the reform of the Cyrillic alphabet was necessary to facilitate access to culture for a greater number of people. Only towards the end of the century and the early 1700s, with the advent of Peter I "the Great," did Russian history begin a slow renewal, becoming part of the grand European politics and customs of the time.
   This led to the continuation of the spirit of the tradition of the Rurichid princes, which would later find ideal forms of conjunction with Renaissance models in the sciences and arts. And it is above all in the dynasty of the ancient lineage of Rijurik that one can best discern that universality of the unifying centre of Slavism which, due to its principal "otherness" to the Western world, led to the Muscovite state being considered the "third Rome" after the fall of Constantinople. Byzantine inheritance which was accepted through marriage by Tsar Ivan III when he married (1472) Zoe (later Sofia) Paleologus, niece of the last Byzantine emperor Constantine XI Paleologus of Morea.

The idea of ​​a blood relationship between the Russian princes and the Roman emperors is discussed in Spiridon-Savva's Poslanie and the Povest' or knjaz'jach vladimirskich, which link Rijurik to the lineage of Prus, brother of Emperor Caesar Augustus (Dmitrieva 1955, pp. 162, 175, 188-189, 197, 208), who gave him the Roman lands around the Vistula, in present-day Poland, as also narrated in the Legend of the Princes of Vladimir. Ivan the Terrible shared the same view when he declared to King John III of Sweden: "We descend from Augustus, and you pass judgment on us against the will of God" (Ivan Groznyj 1951, p. 158).
   Claiming an abstract Roman heritage, yet ideologically symbolic and sacred, the fulcrum of a new world to come. And the last Grand Dukes of Muscovy, who had vainly fought for the throne of their forefathers, along the original Ruric lineage of Saint Vladimir, Ivan III, and Ivan IV "the Terrible," from the initial grip of religious culture imposed for centuries with fire and sword, began to open up to other cultural horizons, between past and future, still within the bounds of the sacred, but now more illuminated by the light of science and reason.
   Hence the strength and innovative grandeur of the last Dynasty of Muscovy, which already then positioned itself as an undisputed center of interculturality between the Muslim and Western worlds; with values ​​further increased and strengthened later, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by the enlightened lifeblood and Renaissance vision brought by the princely House of Tiberius-Dobrynia, of the same lineage of Russian and Byzantine blood as those great Ruric princes of the dynasty of Saint Wladimir of Kiev and Dobrynia of Novgorod.