The one hundred head cathedral of 1551 marked a certain stage in the development of the state, society, religion and culture. At the time of the cathedral, the Tsar of All Russia, Ivan Vasilievich, was twenty years old, but he was the king “in power”. Due to his young age, Ivan Vasilievich was burning with a thirst for reform, so that the country would become a powerful power and Holy Russia.
The middle of the XVI century is considered the time of modernization, when Russia turned from an unsettled power into the strongest country in Europe and Asia. Kazan and Astrakhan kingdom were conquered, there was a war with the Crimean Khanate. The Zemstvo dispensation of the Russian land began when the Zemstvos were created, taking part in the government through their representatives. The troops were modernized, and the nobility was formed, a new tax system was introduced.
In the 15th century, the Byzantine Empire fell , a blow was struck on the stronghold of Orthodox Christianity, and Russia took upon itself the burden of protecting Orthodoxy. The task was set to equip Russia according to Orthodox laws, and for this, church reform was required. The religious consciousness among the laity was very high, for the Russian man the soul always stood in the first place, but the highest ranks of the clergy, by their example, destroyed all the pillars of morality.
The cathedral began with the appeal of Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich to the assembled clergy. In his speech, which is described in the first chapters of the Council Code (the one-domed cathedral), he talked about how bad everything is in Holy Russia: the highest hierarchical circles of the clergy are mired in drunkenness, debauchery, sodomy, which was facilitated by property rights, that is, ownership of inhabited lands .
Not only did the priests fatten at the expense of lands assigned to the monasteries, but they also received a “rug” from the state treasury: wine, honey, food, clothes.
Ivan Vasilyevich asked the clergy to help in keeping the almshouses, redeem captive people and give part of the monastic lands to the servants, but the high priesthood did not want to sacrifice their possessions and treasury, and the tsar refused.
The 100-head cathedral is 100 chapters of the council code, which describe all the speeches, discussions and answers to the king's questions, of which there were 69. The result of this cathedral was the adoption of the following decisions:
- bring all church texts to deanery, that is, use only canonized ones;
- the service should be conducted in full Charter;
- overshadow themselves with a two-faced sign;
- write icons on the patterns (according to Rublev and Greek);
- eradicate ritual paganism;
- wedding was allowed from 15 years old for boys and from 12 years old girls;
- the one-domed cathedral forbade eating strangulation and blood (animals and birds caught in snares);
- baptism was to be carried out three times by immersion in water, and not by dousing;
- The issue of the redemption of polonyans was resolved;
- supervision of the monastery treasury is imputed to sovereign people, etc.
But the Stoglavy Cathedral was never able to equip the life of the higher church nobility, which continued to live in sin and sodomy.
The 100-head cathedral is the most important document that shows how civilized Russian society was in the 16th century. Many historians, not attaching importance to such important reforms of those years, denigrated and demeaned the events of the Russian Middle Ages.