Whatever heresies may have existed in early Russia, with the ascendancy of Moscow these perished, and the prelates had only to guard against the wiles of Rome and to stay its power on the confines of the kingdom. During the reign of Vasili the Blind the unsuccessful attempt of the Metropolitan Isidor to introduce Romish practices intensified the conservatism of the prelates. In 1582, Anthony Possevin, a Jesuit emissary of the Pope, Gregory XIII., had long discussions with Ivan the Terrible in the Granovitaia Palata respecting the union of the Churches. Ivan was outspoken: the emissary returned unsatisfied. The false Dmitri's view has already been given: he was overthrown and the supremacy of the orthodox prelates increased by Boris Godunov's initiation of the Patriarchate. The Tsar Michael and his father Philaret appear to have been always in accord, and then the temporal power of the prelates was equal to that of the sovereign. Alexis, a boy of seventeen, was unfortunate in having as collaborator the sturdy Nikon. After his absence in the war against the Poles he found Nikon, as Veliki Gossudar, a title reserved for the Tsars, absolutely autocratic. The Tsar objected to the use of the title by the Patriarch; Nikon resigned his office, and retired to the Vosskresenki Monastery on the Varvarka, expecting Alexis would seek him, but the Tsar did not visit him nor did he appoint another patriarch. Nikon had already given great offence to the clergy for, attracted by some text on one of the ecclesiastical vestments that had been received from Greece, he recognised a considerable difference between the Greek rendering and that current in Slavonic; prosecuting his investigations further he found many discrepancies and tried in all things to revert to the older practice. His action was construed as the introduction of new procedure--and consequently vigorously opposed--and orthodoxy split into two camps; those who agreed with the head of the Church that the ancient practice was correct and should be introduced and the more conservative who would not depart from that to which they had been accustomed, and it is they who are known as the "Old Believers," for the alterations proposed by Nikon ultimately became general. Although the Patriarch had resigned he continued to receive the clergy and concern himself with the direction of ecclesiastical affairs. In 1654 he angered the people by going into private chapels and houses and removing all copies of the ikon Nerukotvorenni, "not made with hands," because unlike the ikons of Mount Athos. The priest visited Moscow, and the people paraded the empty ikon cases and the defaced ikons, attributing to this outrage the plague from which so many suffered, and the clergy then left Moscow in large numbers fearing assault. In 1659 the Tsar's emissaries informed him that he ought no longer to interfere. He thereupon withdrew from Moscow. In Advent 1664