Russia. The patriarchs of Antioch and Alexandria were there as well as Russian metropolitans and bishops. Nicon came in his patriarchal robes. At the sight of the great man summoned as a defendant, Alexis burst into tears. But the tsar was impotent to save his old friend. A variety of charges were brought against him, consisting in the main of accusations of arbitrary, tyrannical dealings with the Church, on the ground of which he was formally deposed, stripped of his robes, and sent as a prisoner to a monastery at Bielo-ozero.
Nicon lived to see the end of the patriarchate and the establishment of the Holy Synod under Peter the Great. He may have owed his fall from power in a measure to his own harshness; but he had been a great ecclesiastic and a great statesman, correcting abuses in the Church and helping to establish the unity and power of the nation. He has been called the Russian Thomas à Becket,[1] a comparison that does not do justice to his merits.
- ↑ Leroy Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, part iii. p. 154.
