local clergy, or by the drawing of lots developed. It was last used in the election of Archbishop Sergei in 1483, the first Muscovite archbishop of Novgorod. This local election gave the archbishops considerable autonomy in church matters, although they were consecrated by the local metropolitan and maintained ties to the Russian church throughout this period. While some Russian chronicles refer to all Novgorodian prelates as archbishops, the office was not formally raised to the archiepiscopal status until 1165. There is evidence, however, that suggests that Nifont (r. 1130-1156) held the archiepiscopal title personally even before that. An antimins (embroidered communion cloth) from the St. Nicholas Cathedral on the Market bears an inscription referring to Nifont as archbishop. After the creation of the archiepiscopate, Martirii appears to have been the only one (before the creation of the metropolitanate in 1589) not to have been an archbishop, as none of his seals found in archaeological excavations speak of him as anything other than "bishop." Politically the archbishop of Novgorod grew in power during Novgorod's period of independence, traditionally 1136 to 1478, until just before the Mongol Invasion (1237–1240) and then fell into decline until about the archiepiscopate of Vasilii Kalika (1330–1352). It then continued to grow in power into the early fifteenth century. During this time, the archbishops carried out a number of important political functions: they headed embassies to bring peace and ransom captives, they patronized civil (as opposed to ecclesiastical) construction projects such as the Detinets (Kremlin) in Novgorod, the fortress at Orekhov (also known as Oreshek) that was rebuilt in stone by Vasilii Kalika in 1352, the city walls built around Novgorod in the 1330s, and so forth. They administered the ecclesiastical courts, which in Novgorod adjudicated cases that elsewhere in the Orthodox world were left to secular courts; they signed treaties on behalf of the city; they oversaw standards of weights and measures in the city marketplace; their vicars may have administered outlying districts, such as Staraya Ladoga; and they generally shared decision-making with the boyars who ran the city. The Muscovite period After the Muscovite conquest in 1470–1478, the office fell somewhat into decline. The first three Muscovite archbishops were removed in disgrace, although the second one, Gennady (1484–1504), successfully suppressed the Judaizer Heresy (called the Zhidovstvuyuschiye in Russian) and compiled the first complete corpus of the Bible in Slavonic (the Gennady Bible, now housed in