Dr Andrey V. Ivanov - Birth of an Empire: Feofan Prokopovych and the Metamorphosis of Petrine Russia

IAS Residential Fellow Dr Andrey V. Ivanov delivers a seminar on their research -

What is an empire? Prior to 1721, the Latin title of “imperator” belonged exclusively to the  Western, Eastern or Holy Roman political entities  This monopoly ended with the Petrine proclamation of the world’s first non-Roman imperium, and later, with similar proclamations by Napoleonic France, Iturbide’s Mexico, Braganza Brazil, and Wilhelmine Germany. “Empire” lost its narrow legal connotation, acquiring broader multivalent meanings. But it was Ukrainian archbishop Feofan Prokopovych (1677-1736), who initiated the concepts that got us to this point. An erudite polymath, Feofan served as the chief ideologist of first, Ukrainian Hetman Ivan Mazepa, and then, Peter I. As the seminar will demonstrate, forging the new empire was a direct product of the archbishop’s versatile scholarly breadth. Prokopovych godfathered the empire’s birth through an interdisciplinary endeavor that engaged with the political theories of the early European Enlightenment, Boylean physics, Holy Roman imperial  jurisprudence, and Lutheran theology.

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