The Ruthenian Psalter of Jacques Davy Du Perron Laurent Tatarenko
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
A French Page in the History of the Union of Brest: the Ruthenian Psalter of Jacques Davy Du Perron Laurent Tatarenko To cite this version: Laurent Tatarenko. A French Page in the History of the Union of Brest: the Ruthenian Psalter of Jacques Davy Du Perron. Archiwa, Biblioteki i Muzea Kościelne, 2020, pp.405-420. 10.31743/abmk.11783. hal-03090077 HAL Id: hal-03090077 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03090077 Submitted on 9 Mar 2021 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivatives| 4.0 International License ARCHIWA, BIBLIOTEKI I MUZEA KOŚCIELNE 114 (2020) https://doi.org/10.31743/abmk.11783 LAURENT TATARENKO* – PARIS (FRANCE) A FRENCH PAGE IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNION OF BREST: THE RUTHENIAN PSALTER OF JACQUES DAVY DU PERRON1 Summary Until now, the mission carried out in Rome by the Ruthenian bishops Hipacy Pociej and Cyryl Terlecki between November 1595 and March 1596 was main- ly known by a few scattered notes and reports left by the various members of the Curia, which were brought together in the second half of the 20th century in sources editions of Atanasij Velykyj. This is why the Ruthenian psalter found in the library of Évreux (Normandy) offers a new perspective on this founding stage of the Union of Brest. The book annotated by the hand of Pociej himself and offered to the French bishop Jacques Davy Du Perron, who was then in Rome, reflects both the ecclesiological conceptions of the Ruthenian bishop of Volodymyr and his desire to place the unionist polemic in a wider confes- sional context, well beyond the borders of the Polish-Lithuanian Common- wealth. The apparent failure of this initiative also comes as a testimony to the challenges faced by supporters of local Unions from the post-Tridentine period. Key words: Union of Brest; Ruthenian Cyrillic prints; 16th century; Kievan metropolitanate; Jacques Davy Du Perron *** In the evening of 15th November 1595, a procession of twenty-three people entered Borgo Nuovo Street which linked Castel Sant’Angelo to Saint Peter’s Ba- silica in Rome2. The purpose of this delegation, sent at the end of September and * Laurent Tatarenko – PhD in History; research scientist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), working at the Institute for Modern and Contemporary History (IHMC – UMR 8066, Paris); [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9163-396X 1 I would like to express my gratitude to Bernard Heyberger for having put me on the trail of the Ruthenian psalter from Évreux and to thank Lana Martysheva for the bibliographic indica- tions about the activities of Jacques Davy Du Perron in Rome. 2 DUB, n° 119, pp. 176-177. 406 LAURENT TATARENKO led by the Ruthenian bishops Hipacy Pociej and Cyryl Terlecki, was to conclude the Union between the Polish-Lithuanian Orthodox Church and the Holy See. The two bishops remained in the papal capital until the beginning of March of the fol- lowing year, i. e. more than two months after the solemn ceremony of December 23, which placed the metropolis of Kiev in the jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic Church. This episode, however central, remains still today a blurred area in the history of what was later designated as the “Union of Brest”, due to sparse and very succinct documentation. Indeed, the course of the Roman stay of the Ruthe- nian delegation remained largely on the fringes of the polemical literature which focused its attention on the heated debates of the local synod of Brest of October 1596 and on the subject of the ecclesiological relationship between the Eastern and Latin dogmas and traditions3. The Roman authors, for their part, remained laconic about the discussions which could take place between the two bishops and the prelates of the Curia, concentrating their narrative on the documents presented by the Ruthenian embassy, the historical considerations on the Eastern Slavs or the description of the pontifical ceremonial4. Thus, the sources available on the activities of the Ruthenian ambassadors refer to brief and sporadic notes from the Secretariat of State, to a few passages from the journals of the masters of ceremonies Paolo Alaleone da Branca and Giovanni Paolo Mucante as well as from an anonymous journal attributed by Atanasij Velykyj to a familiar of the Pope, to short mentions written by the Cardinal Giulio Antonio Santorio about his audiences with the sovereign pontiffs and to the registers of the Papal Treasury responsible for covering the living expenses of the Ruthenian delegation5. The point of view of the Eastern bishops themselves appears only in two letters dated respectively 29 December 1595 and 13 January 1596, whose authenticity remains uncertain6. The nature of such a disparate corpus, containing materials which mainly pro- vide some factual elements, explains why historiography could only produce an incomplete and partly superficial picture of this founding act played out during 3 This subject has produced an abundant historiography, which is irrelevant to our study and thus is not mentioned exhaustively. We therefore refer the reader to the bibliography listed in Jan Stradomski’s monography (J. Stradomski, Spory o »wiarę grecką« w dawnej Rzeczypospolitej, Kra- kow 2003) and in his recent article (J. Stradomski, Spór o historię i wartości w świetle katolic- ko-unicko-prawosławnej polemiki religijnej w Pierwszej Rzeczypospolitej (koniec XVI – początek XVIII wieku), in: Między Wschodem a Zachodem. Prawosławie i unia, ed. M. Kuczyńska, Warsaw 2017, pp. 238-276.). 4 See for example the text inserted in the 7th tome of Cesare Baronio Annales ecclesiastici first published in 1596: C. Baronius, De Ruthenis ad communionem Sedis Apostolicae receptis monu- mentum, in: Annales ecclesiastici, t. 7, Rome 1596, pp. 677-687. 5 All this documentation is gathered in DUB, passim. 6 The first was addressed to the Ruthenian bishop of Lviv Gedeon Bałaban (DUB, n° 149-150, pp. 235-239). The original seems to have been written in Ruthenian and is known by a copy kept in the registers of the Castle court of Volodymyr (AJuZR, n° 116, pp. 482-485). The second docu- ment, which contains many chronological mistakes, was sent to the Primate of Poland Stansław Karnkowski (J.U. Niemcewicz, Dzieje panowania Zygmunta III, t. 1, Krakow 1860, pp. 274-277). THE RUTHENIAN PSALTER OF JACQUES DAVY DU PERRON 407 the four months spent by the Ruthenian bishops in Rome7. Such a perspective is reduced to assumptions about the content of the discussions and the possible solu- tions expressed by the parties8. The papal bulls and briefs, addressed to the Ru- thenian episcopate and to the different dignitaries of the Polish-Lithuanian Com- monwealth, provided very few explicit details about how the Union was to be put in practice. The chronology itself shows that Pociej and Terlecki were aware of these ambiguities and of the abusive interpretations that they could engender. In- deed, while from the first days of February everything seemed ready for the return journey, the Ruthenian delegation remained for almost another month in Rome9. In the briefs dated February 7 and addressed to the Metropolitan of Kiev and to the Eastern bishops who remained in the Commonwealth, the Union was des- cribed as a “conversion” which had made it possible to “dispel the darkness of old errors”10. This discordance with the position expressed in the conditions of the Kievan episcopate (called the XXXII Articles)11 could indeed push the ambas- sadors to start new discussions. Whatever their reaction could have been, the bull Decet Romanum Pontificem of 23th February 1596 abandoned the term conver- sion to speak rather of communio cum Romana Ecclesia and addressed several institutional aspects, as, in particular, that of the election and the consecration of the Uniate bishops12. Furthermore, the Ruthenian envoys came back to some practical issues such as the printing of Paschal tables or the use of particular litur- 7 Among the most detailed studies, see Makarij (Bulgakov), Istorija Russkoj Cerkvi, book 5, Moscow 1996, pp. 338-347; A.M. Ammann, Der Aufenhalt der ruthenischen Bischöfe Hypathius Pociej und Cyrillus Terlecki in Rom im Dezember und Januar l595-96, „Orientalia Christiana Pe- riodica”, 11 (1945), pp. 103-140; O. Halecki, From Florence to Brest (1439-1596), Rome 1958, pp. 315-341; A. Pekar, Ipatij Potij – provisnyk z’edynennja, „Analecta Ordinis Sancti Basilii Mag- ni”, 15 (1996), pp. 169-174; B. Gudziak, Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropolitanate, the Pa- triarchate of Constantinople and the Genesis of the Union of Brest, Cambridge MA, 1998, pp. 230- 238 ; M. V. Dmitriev, Meždu Rimom i Car’gradom. Genezis brestskoj cerkovnoj unii 1595-1596 gg., Moscow 2003, pp. 198-211; L. Tatarenko, La naissance de l’Union de Brest: la curie romaine et le tournant de l’année 1595, „Cahiers du monde russe”, 46/1-2 (2005), pp. 345-354. 8 However, sources suggest that still in January 1596 the bishops strongly insisted on meeting the pope, asserting that several issues had not been resolved (DUB, n° 157, p. 244). 9 As of February 7, the pope ordered to pay 2 000 scudi to the Ruthenians in order to cover their return costs (DUB, n° 171-186, pp. 264-288).