title: Chapter 6 Slavery and Empire
abstract: The preceding chapters showed representations of slavery and liberation in political culture, and the ways in which Muscovites interacted with them. During the middle Muscovite period, such representations increasingly shaped the worldview of wider sections of the population. The Orthodox religious imagery inherent in these ideas of liberation might indicate that their scope was limited to Orthodoxy, in which the Christian flock closed in on itself, closed ranks against dangerous external slaver