The Muscovites of the day were not desirous of opening their country to foreign influences. Their national pride had worked out the theory of Moscow as the Third Rome, the capital of the Christian Orthodox empire _par excellence_, and they stubbornly believed that any contact with the outside world or the new learning could only lead to the development of heresy and the marring of the pristine virtue of their Orthodox religion. The Patriarch of Moscow was forbidden to dine at the same table with foreigners, even of the highest rank, and the example was followed by all classes of the population. Within the country formal education was at a low ebb. Education had never taken root at Moscow as it had in Kiev. There were not the direct connections with the outside world that had made the Grand Princes of Kiev part of the European family of nations. Moscow was a closed centre and the ideas of intellectual regimentation had gone so far that in the religious disputes of the sixteenth century, it could seriously be advanced that the writing of a book on theology was prohibited by the Seventh Oecumenical Council and that the preparation of any work was necessarily heretical. The Muscovites despised the Greeks, even though they were Orthodox, and they had little more respect for the scholars of Kiev. There are very few records of attempts made by the Tsars of Moscow to secure Greek scholars from Constantinople during these centuries, at the time when the Ukrainian princes and brotherhoods were only too willing to have Greek teachers in their schools and were trying to raise the intellectual level of the clergy and the other classes of the population. It goes without saying that Moscow regarded Poland and Lithuania, with their Catholic culture, as worse than pagan and refused to have any relations with them. The outstanding example of an attempt to secure a scholar from abroad was the case of Maxim the Greek, who was invited to Moscow to correct the Church books in the reign of Tsar Vasily III. The attempt was disastrous to the poor Greek, for even the slightest change in the books seemed to be ominous to the Muscovites and Maxim found himself in prison for many years. The only city included in the Muscovite Tsardom in which there was any attempt to develop independent thought was Novgorod, which as a trading centre had maintained connections with the Hanseatic League; but even the efforts of the Archbishops of Novgorod were received with little favor in the self-satisfied Moscow.