Medieval Western Europe was divided into a number of independent states, often opposing each other. The Catholic religion brought them spiritually closer together not only through a common church headed by the Papal Curia, but also through the Latinization of worship and science. In Russia, the unity of the state and faith was established with worship in the Church Slavonic language, which also greatly contributed to the unity of the people, especially with the multinational population. The creation of the Russian centralized state was accompanied by a corresponding religious propaganda, which expanded after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the establishment of Turkish rule in the Balkans. The end of the Byzantine Empire was characterized as a punishment for the "Florentine apostasy" (the 1439 union of the Orthodox Church with the Catholic Church). After the overthrow of the Golden Horde yoke (1480), with the annexation of Kazan (1552), Astrakhan (1556) and with the fall of the Siberian Khanate (1581-1584), the former eastern border of Russia was erased and the wall collapsed, which for centuries not only limited it geographically, but also squeezed it from the East. For the Russian people, the ways of advancing to the Don, the Volga basin, the Urals and Siberia were opened up. There was an opportunity to "withdraw" without military force, on their own, by free Cossacks, and the people moved. No amount of attachment to the ground could hold it up. The route laid out in 1581 by the Yermak bands to the Irtysh River, in less than 60 years, ran through all of Siberia and the Far East and ended in 1639 with the departure of the Cossack Ivan Moskvitin to the Pacific coast. So from the Volga-Oka interfluve, from the central Russian lands, long seized by feudal lords of all sorts and ranks, the Russian people moved away from the growing serfdom to the free lands and gained a foothold in the wide expanses of Siberia. In the minds of the people, "it was high to God, but ... Читать далее