When "Metropolitan" Was the Highest Title a Church Had

Before the establishment of the Moscow Patriarchate in 1589, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church held the title metropolitan rather than patriarch, first as Metropolitan of Kiev and later of Moscow, answerable in principle to the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople from which Russian Christianity had originally received its bishops; the elevation of the Moscow see to a patriarchate in 1589, negotiated with Constantinople partly under considerable political pressure from the Russian state, marks the point at which a church that had operated for centuries under a metropolitan as its highest authority formally gained the more senior title, illustrating that metropolitan has, at different times and places, functioned as the actual summit of an entire national church rather than only as a mid-level provincial rank.

A comparable pattern persists in several smaller autocephalous Orthodox churches today, including the Orthodox Church in America and the Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, whose primates are titled metropolitan rather than patriarch even though each heads a fully independent, self-governing church, showing that the historic hierarchy of titles, metropolitan below patriarch, does not track a strict hierarchy of actual ecclesiastical independence, since a metropolitan-led church can be every bit as autocephalous as a patriarch-led one.