By 1600 churches with multiple altars, tent roofs and helmet cupolas went up everywhere. They blended forms, materials and techniques developed in many places, elements of popular religiosity and Renaissance innovations in engineering and design. In 1467 Metropolitan Filipp wrote to Archbishop Iona of Novgorod about popular animosity in Iona's eparchy towards the Church and its wealth. Archbishop Gennadii told Metropolitan Zosima that a Jew in the entourage of Mikhail Olel' kovich, who came from Kiev to be Novgorod's prince in 1471, had caused the unrest. In 1487 Gennadii charged four men with heresy and sent them to Moscow for judgement. In 1525 the Iosifite Metropolitan Daniil convened a court that on the slenderest evidence convicted Maximos of heresy and treasonous relations with the Turks. Soon after 1504 Iosif Volotskii exalted Moscow's ruler, utilising the double-edged maxims of the deacon Agapetus to Byzantine Emperor Justinian I. The Church found the Time of Troubles perplexing.

This chapter presents the 'Time of Troubles' as beginning with the First False Dmitrii's invasion of Russia in the autumn of 1604. In the aftermath of the famine of 1601-3, the pretender's challenge to Boris Godunov's legitimacy as tsar interacted with the social grievances of the population of the southern frontier to produce a highly explosive mixture. The dynastic crisis of 1598 gave rise to the First False Dmitrii; and his triumphs in their turn inspired new pretenders. The failure of Tsar Dmitrii to put in an appearance had greatly demoralized Bolotnikov's forces, but a second False Dmitrii had in fact surfaced in Russia well before the fall of Tula. The most remarkable consequence of the Time of Troubles was the fact that the autocratic monarchical system survived more or less unchanged from the late sixteenth century, with no significant new restrictions on the power of the tsar.

Russia achieves cultural salvation by imitating and assimilating Western culture. To understand Muscovite high culture one must initially abandon the search for the genres, activities and practitioners defined by Western experience. Western architectural ideas emanated from the Armoury and Foreign Office workshops, where craftsmen had access to prints, maps and illustrated books. The Westernised tastes of its owner, Peter I's tutor Prince Boris Golitsyn, who knew Latin and had access to Italian craftsmen, place the church at Dubrovitsy at the very limits of transitional culture. The royal churches and residences swallowed up icons by the dozen and the Armoury's studios employed the best icon painters in the land. The tsar's theatre accelerated the importation of Western instruments and musical scores, previously virtually unknown. After the Time of Troubles many historical narratives appeared that retold real-life events and showed an interest in personalities, for example Avraamii Palitsyn's Skazanie of the Troubles and Katyrev-Rostovskii's Book of Chronicles.