From the reign of Vasily II through that of Vasily III, Muscovy steadily expanded its territory and the Muscovite princes asserted their authority over the annexed principalities. These processes were encouraged and justified by various theoretical principles that not only legitimized the right of the Muscovite line of princes to rule but also justified their enhanced powers. The powers ascribed to the grand princes were portrayed in the familiar ceremonial imagery and literary terminology drawn from Byzantine models and Orthodox religious texts. The theories that described grand princely authority thus reflected Muscovy’s Byzantine cultural heritage.
But the political system within which the Muscovite grand princes actually functioned was not Byzantine. It was built upon and shaped by economic resources available to the lands within Muscovy. It was created from and fashioned around social and political groups indigenous to Rus' society. It was constructed to address the problems posed by rapid expansion, to consolidate Muscovite rule in newly acquired lands, to administer and defend them, and to integrate them into a single cohesive state. As Muscovite princes and advisers confronted such issues, they drew upon not only Byzantine concepts but also the experience and examples of other neighbors, most prominently the Tatars, to design and organize gradually a political and administrative apparatus to govern the unified centralized state of Muscovy.
The muscovite economy
The rural economy
When the grand princes of Vladimir gathered the other Rus' principalities around Moscow, they also gained access to all their economic resources. They were contained in a land shaped like a huge inverted irregular triangle, with its broad base in the north stretching along the coast of the White Sea from Karelia (eastern Finland) to beyond the Pechora River and its peak formed by the southern tip of the Novgorod-Seversk principality, which included territories that had earlier been part ofthe Chernigov and Pereiaslavl' principalities. The western side ofthe triangle was formed by a line extending along the borders of Novgorod, Pskov, Smolensk, Starodub, and Novgorod-Seversk. Its eastern boundary, the third side of the triangle, went south from the northeastern corner ofthe country, then curved westward to pass through the fortress of Vasil'sursk, constructed in 1523 midway between Nizhnii Novgorod and Kazan'; it then followed the eastern boundaries of Riazan' and finally converged with the western border. Within that expanse the resources were substantial.
The mass of the population engaged in agriculture as its primary means of livelihood. Most of the peasants who cultivated the land lived on “black” or taxable lands that had no private owner, but were subject to the prince and regarded by the peasant community as its own. The remainder dwelled on private lands, owned by a prince, his boyars, Church hierarchs or monasteries, and in some cases even rich merchants. Those peasants were generally obligated to pay a rent known as obrok to the landowner, their landlord, for the use of his land. Obrok was assessed in cash, in crops, or in other goods produced on the estate (e. g., chickens, eggs, cartloads of wood, sides of bacon or beef). Alternatively, they might be required to pay their rent in the form of labor; but this type of obligation was not common in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. All peasants, unless they had been specifically released from the obligation, paid taxes to the prince.
The peasant villagers produced a variety of crops. For food they generally planted a crop of winter rye as well as a spring crop of spring rye, barley, buckwheat, millet, wheat, oats, peas, or some combination of these. In some regions “industrial” crops such as flax, hemp, and hops supplemented edible grains. The peasant farmers also raised livestock, cattle, sheep, hogs, and, ofcourse, horses, and harvested hay for fodder. They kept bees for wax and honey. They supplemented their crops by hunting for fur pelts and meat, by gathering berries, mushrooms, and wild fruits and nuts from the forest, and by fishing. For some peasants in settlements on rivers and lakes as well as those in coastal villages in the far north, fishing became the primary source of livelihood. By the end of the fifteenth century salt production was becoming another important rural economic activity; iron smelting, using bog ores and potash, and pitch, tar, and turpentine manufacturing were all important in the sixteenth century as well.
Although agriculture remained a constant feature of the Russian economy, the methods employed by the peasants changed in the fifteenth century. They did so largely in response to increases in population densities, which resulted from a combination of greater numbers of people and limited mobility. The Russian population, having sustained the effects ofrepeated wars and bouts with the plague and other epidemics, was once again growing in the second half of the fifteenth century. By 1500, it had reached its pre-plague levels, and thereafter continued to increase.
But, as their numbers grew, a variety of factors tended to inhibit the peasants’ mobility: social and family ties; responsibilities to their village and community; agreements with their landlord; debts or other financial obligations; and local legal prohibitions on movement. At the end of the fifteenth century, after Moscow had absorbed most of its neighboring principalities, limits were formally and universally imposed on peasants. The Sudebnik (law code) of 1497 allowed them to move from one location to another only during a two-week period surrounding St. George’s Day, which occurred in November after the harvest, and then only if all rents, fees, and other debts had been settled.
The effect of combining an increasing population with restrictions on mobility was greater density, i. e., more people dwelled in households, hamlets, and villages, and intensified pressure on the land. Under those conditions traditional methods proved inadequate. The custom had been, as noted, to employ the slash-and-burn method to prepare forested land for agricultural use. That technique had been well suited to a situation in which manpower was limited; peasants simply cut down the trees or slashed and stripped their bark to kill them, then burned the dried wood, and sowed their crops in the resulting forest clearings. Their favored field implement was a scratch plough, a forked instrument sufficient to scratch a furrow into the ashy layer covering the loose forest soil and light enough to move easily around tree stumps or skip over surface roots and other heavy obstacles. Such clearings did not remain fertile for more than a few growing seasons. Farmers regularly prepared new clearings to replace depleted ones, abandoning the older areas to be overgrown with brush and birch trees.
Relatively dense peasant populations, however, had both the means and the incentive to intensify their methods of production. After the middle of the fifteenth century, they increasingly substituted a three-field rotation method of farming for the standard slash-and-burn technique. The new method they adopted had the potential to raise more food from a given land area. Typically, peasants planted one field with a winter crop, one with a spring crop, and left the third fallow. By rotating the fields every year they were able to cultivate the same area repeatedly and thus farm more efficiently. This method required more labor than the traditional slash-and-burn technique because it was necessary to clear fields and then keep them weeded, drained, or irrigated as necessary. It also encouraged peasants to raise livestock, most importantly draft animals, which could be used to remove the heavy stumps and other encumbrances to create open fields and to pull heavier plows. The livestock also produced manure that enriched the repeatedly cultivated soil. As this method of farming became increasingly popular from the latter part of the fifteenth century, it enabled the growing peasant population, whose option to move on to more fertile land was being restricted, to produce sufficient quantities of foodstuffs to sustain themselves, their landlords, a growing urban population, and the government as well.
Forms of land tenure also began to change in the late fifteenth century. It was, as noted above, members ofthe upper strata ofsociety who owned the hereditary private estates on which many peasants dwelled. They had acquired those estates by the fifteenth century in a variety of ways. Princes had granted some to their relatives, courtiers, and servicemen. Lords of the Church, the metropolitan and bishops, also controlled vast tracts of land. Monasteries, which had been multiplying since the second halfofthe fourteenth century, also gained possession of large estates, some of which were simply appropriated, some granted by local princes, and some presented as gifts by other landowners. But landholdings were useful and lucrative only ifkept under production. Ifpeasant villages were not located on their estates, estate owners offered inducements for peasants to move to their lands and work on them. Those inducements might include loans or an exemption from paying taxes and rental obligations for several years. But if a peasant owed rent or was otherwise indebted to his landlord, it was more difficult for him to leave his residence.
Some private landholdings, often consisting of widely scattered parcels, had become in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries bases for lucrative economic enterprises. Before Novgorod’s demise, its boyars had used their northern lands as the source of goods, primarily squirrel pelts, that they sold through the city’s foreign trade market. Monasteries, encouraged by local and grand princes who gave gifts and also, importantly, issued charters granting them immunity or exemptions from a range of princely taxes and administrative fees, became engaged in a range of business activities, including domestic trade.
Toward the end of the fifteenth century, the rate of growth of some monasteries, e. g., the Holy Trinity and St. Cyril-Beloozero Monasteries, slowed considerably. Ivan III and to an even greater degree Vasily III rescinded some of their tax exemptions. But the existing agricultural and non-agricultural enterprises of these monasteries continued to thrive. Moreover, others expanded and new monasteries were founded. The northern Solovetskii Monastery, shortly before the annexation of Novgorod, was the recipient of numerous donations of land from local boyars. Unlike many of the other Nov-gorodian monasteries, whose lands were confiscated by Ivan III at the end of the century, Solovetskii not only kept its possessions but continued to grow; its control over key islands in the White Sea, as well as stretches of land on its shore and along the rivers emptying into it, gave the monastery control over vast and valuable economic resources, including salt, fish, tallow, and leather. The Volokolamsk Monastery, founded in 1479, provides a second example. Favored first by the appanage prince of Volok and later by Vasily III, it too received gifts of land and the means to purchase additional tracts. Whereas other monasteries lost much of their immunity from taxation, Volokolamsk remained better protected and became an important economic and political as well as spiritual institution.
In the late fifteenth century, another form of land tenure became widespread; it altered conditions for the peasants and ultimately placed even more of them under the authority of private landlords. The new type of estate was known as a pomest'e (pomest'ia in the plural). The landholder, a pomeshchik, had only a conditional title to his
Estate, which was issued to him by the grand prince. In return for rights to the estate and to the incomes derived from it, the pomeshchik owed the grand prince military service.
The pomest'e system was introduced on a large scale in the aftermath of the conquest of Novgorod. In the 1470s and 1480s, it will be recalled, Grand Prince Ivan III seized the estates of the Novgorod boyars as well as much of the landed property of the archbishop and the Novgorod monasteries; thus, approximately 80 percent of the private lands of Novgorod passed to the grand prince. Although he kept some of it as court lands and initially issued large parcels of land and villages to prominent Muscovite favorites, by the end of the century he had reclaimed most of those initial land grants and distributed a larger number of smaller estates to Muscovite military servicemen. Most were granted to the relatively low-ranking, provincial deti boiarskie (literally, boyars’ sons), but some estates were distributed to princes from subordinated branches of the dynasty and to boyars from Moscow. At the other end of the social scale, slaves, some ofwhom had served dispossessed Novgorodian boyars, and others willing to become provincial servicemen also acquired pomest'ia. Although it took longer to be adopted in Tver', the pomest'e system was established in Pskov, Smolensk, and Riazan' when they were annexed to Muscovy. The practice of issuing pomest'ia to servicemen became standard in the sixteenth century. As the system evolved, servicemen were not content simply to receive income from their allotments. Increasingly throughout the sixteenth century they settled on their estates, attempted to consolidate their often scattered holdings into contiguous farms, exercised some direction over their operations, and also sought to have them transferred to members of their own family when they died or retired from service.
The extension of the pomest'e system was a consequence of government confiscations and distributions of land on a massive scale. Thousands ofindividuals were uprooted from the annexed territories. Some dispossessed landowners were issued pomest'ia in the northeastern regions of Muscovy. Others were simply imprisoned. The eviction of local landowners dismantled the political and social elites in each of the annexed principalities. With their disappearance the local economies were also disrupted. In Novgorod boyars had carefully organized their estates to supply not only edible food products and livestock, but also the items that were sold to foreign merchants for export. Thus, peasants who dwelled on northern estates typically paid their rents to the owners of their lands in fur pelts as well as portions of their crops. When the grand prince confiscated these estates, the peasants were required to pay fixed amounts of grain and/or cash to his treasury. The economic risks of the peasantry, who had to adjust their activities to raise cash, consequently increased, while the supply of goods to the foreign market became less stable. Most of the pomeshchiki who subsequently received estates from the grand prince changed the rent mix again to reflect their preference for food supplies, fiber crops such as flax and hemp, and other items required for their own sustenance. Through all these changes the total value of the rents collected rose. The increased burden on the peasantry was compounded by a parallel increase in the number of taxes imposed by the Muscovite government.
By the end of the fifteenth century and especially during the 1520s and 1530s, however, inflationary trends were visible. Prices were rising while the value of silver coin was dropping. Such trends benefited those peasants whose rents and obligations were defined in fixed amounts of cash, which were revised only rarely. The same trends may have also motivated the pomeshchiki’s desire to collect rent payments in set amounts of goods in kind rather than in cash.
The territorial expansion of Muscovy thus had serious economic and social consequences for the annexed territories. Although there were some exceptions, e. g., Tver', the elites of many of their societies were displaced. The appearance of women, such as Marfa Boretskaia in Novgorod, in prominent public and economic roles virtually ceased. The organization of agriculture on privately held estates was altered and accompanied by a shift in favored crops or products. Increased rents and the multiplication of taxes placed a heavier burden on the peasants. And heightened demand for labor and the need to keep the new pomest'ia operative contributed to the decision to restrict peasant mobility.
The urban economy
Nevertheless, the agrarian sector of society produced sufficient quantities of food to support not only the peasants themselves and the landowning groups in Muscovite society, but also growing urban populations. In some towns the number of inhabitants was substantial. Moscow quickly became the country’s largest city with a population variously estimated to have been between 50,000 and 100,000 persons in the fifteenth century. One account described it as twice as large as Florence or Prague by about 1520. Sigismund von Her-berstein, who visited Muscovy in 1515-16 and again in 1526 as an ambassador from the Holy Roman Empire, noted that, according to a recent census, Moscow contained 41,500 households.1 Novgorod, also considered quite large, had only about 25,000 to 30,000 inhabitants in the middle of the sixteenth century, while towns like Tver' and Nizhnii Novgorod probably each had no more than 10,000 residents.
Von Herberstein went on to describe Moscow as broad, spacious, and very dirty. “The city itself,” he wrote, “is built of wood, and tolerably large, and at a distance appears larger than it really is, for the gardens and spacious court-yards in every house make a great addition to the size of the city, which is again greatly increased by the houses of smiths and other artificers who employ fires. These houses extend in a long row at the end of the city, interspersed with fields and meadows.” He also described a section of mills available for public use, and repeated that, with the exception of a few stone houses, churches, and monasteries, and of course the masonry walls of the kremlin and its complex of buildings, the city was all wood.58 59
The bulk of the urban dwellers consisted of clergy, merchants, artisans, and slaves. In Moscow, as in other towns before their subordination, the prince and his courtiers, i. e., his boyars and retainers of lesser ranks, swelled the number of residents. Some rural landholders also owned property in towns. Before they were dispossessed, the Novgorodian boyars, for example, generally lived in the city of Novgorod rather than on any of their vast estates in the surrounding countryside. Rural monasteries frequently maintained agents in towns to oversee their urban business activities. Individuals in these categories could obtain food and other items required for their maintenance directly from the rural estates they owned or represented. But most town residents relied on domestic trade that brought foodstuffs from the villages to town markets and exchanged goods among towns to secure the items they needed.
Ambrogio (Ambrosio) Contarini, a Venetian diplomat who traveled through Muscovy during the reign of Ivan III, described one of the winter markets in Moscow:
The climate is so excessively cold, that the people stay nine months of the year indoors. As it is difficult to travel in the summer time, on account of the thick forests and the great quantity of mud caused by the melting of the ice, they are obliged to get in all their provisions in the spring, for which purpose they use their sani or sledges on which they stow everything, and are easily drawn by one horse. By the end of October the river which passes through the city [Moscow] is frozen over, and the shops and bazaars for the sale of all sorts of things are erected on it, scarcely anything being sold in the town. They do this, as the river, from being surrounded on all sides by the city, and so protected from the wind, is less cold than anywhere else. On this frozen river may be seen, daily, numbers of cows and pigs, great quantities of corn [i. e., grain], wood, hay, and every other necessary, nor does the supply fail during the whole winter. At the end of November, all those who have cows or pigs, kill and bring them, from time to time, to the city market. They are frozen whole, and it is curious to see so many skinned cows standing upright on their feet. The meat that you eat has sometimes been killed three months or more [earlier].60
Similar markets operated in other towns. Monasteries, operating under the terms of their immunity charters, participated in the trade of fish and firewood, grain and salt throughout the towns of northern Russia. Vladimir was supplied with grain ground at mills on the Kliaz'ma River. The Novgorod market was the scene for an exchange not only of foodstuffs, honey, wax, and leather goods, but also of tallow, flax, and hemp, for which it became renowned by the first decades of the sixteenth century.
Several industries received special impetus in this period. One of the factors stimulating their expansion was the increasing size of the population. The timber industry was one. Von Herberstein’s comments on Moscow suggest the reason. The expanding city was built almost exclusively of wood. Not only construction of houses and shops for its increasing population, but also the provision and maintenance of bridges, carts, river craft, fences, tools and implements, and fuel created a growing demand for wood. By the time Herber-stein made his observations, the forests in the immediate vicinity of Moscow had been depleted, and timber was being transported from other locales, such as Mozhaisk.
The salt-boiling industry provides another example. Salt was an essential item for Russian society. It was used not only to preserve meats, fish, and other foods, but also to cure hides and to process iron. But locally produced salt had been insufficient to meet the society’s needs, and therefore it had regularly been imported to the Russian lands either from the Baltic or from the Black, Azov, and Caspian Sea regions. In the early 1490s, however, Ivan III banned the import of salt. Although the ban was lifted in 1514, a domestic salt industry, operating from points across the Russian northlands from the Novgorod lands through the Dvina land to Sol' Vychegodsk on the Vychegda River in the northeast, gained momentum while the ban was in effect. It continued to be encouraged throughout the reign of Vasily III and successfully competed with foreign imports. Anika Stroganov, the progenitor of the influential Stroganov merchant family, began to build his family’s fortune by operating salt-boiling works at Sol' Vychegodskaia during this period.
The arms industry provides a third example that displayed marked growth from the late fifteenth century. By the 1470s Russian armies had been using cannon and artillery with gunpowder for almost a century. But it was only at that time that they began to use artillery and firearms in significant quantity and with greater regularity. The army that Ivan III led to Novgorod in 1478, for example, included an artillery unit. The Novgorodians, having experienced the effects of artillery assaults from the Teutonic Knights on some of its outlying fortresses, were already familiar with the damage that this weaponry could inflict. They had, as a result, reinforced the walls of those provincial forts as well as the city’s own kremlin by 1450. Nevertheless, they were evidently less than confident that their defenses were strong enough to sustain an artillery barrage; Richard Hellie concluded that simply the fact that Ivan III had artillery with him before Novgorod in 1478 frightened its inhabitants into surrendering. Gustave Alef, however, attributed the surrender less to the relatively ineffective cannon than to “hunger and. . . signs of plague.” Both noted that cannon were also used against Tver' in 1485 with similar results.61
Possibly because of periodic German and Swedish bans on the export of these items to Muscovy, both the artillery and the gunpowder used in them were being produced domestically by the last quarter of the fifteenth century. The expanded use of these weapons thus stimulated the development of gunpowder production, bronze casting (the preferred method of making cannon), lead - and then ironcasting for the cannonballs, and the manufacture of auxiliary equipment such as gun carriages to transport the artillery. Their production was assisted by Italian engineers, most notably Aristotle Fioravanti, whose architectural expertise was also valued by the Muscovites.
In towns throughout Muscovy, artisans were thus engaged in a wide variety of activities. Carpenters, stonemasons, coppersmiths, blacksmiths and armorsmiths, artists, jewelers and silversmiths, potters, weavers, leathermakers, and woodworkers as well as many other types of craftsmen produced items ranging from artillery to frames for precious icons; humble dwellings and workshops to magnificent fortified walls, towers, and cathedrals; simple candlesticks to cathedral chandeliers. Aided by apprentices and unskilled workers, they milled grain and molded candles; they built bridges and dug moats; they cast church bells, fired bricks, and forged cannon. Some of the items were made to order; others were sold at open market in the towns’ bustling posady or marketplaces, usually set beneath the city walls.
From the middle of the fifteenth century through the reign of Vasily III, Muscovy was thus prospering economically. Despite or, perhaps, because of economic disruption and reorganization in other principalities following their annexations and the imposition of more taxes on their populations, the signs of prosperity were most evident in Moscow itself. In the middle of the fifteenth century Novgorod, based on observations of monumental construction once again, still appeared to be more affluent than Moscow. But its wealth was dispersed among its boyars and merchants, and, especially because the need to rebuild their fortifications absorbed their resources, the number of other expensive construction projects they were able to finance was tapering off.
In contrast, Moscow was experiencing a resurgence in construction activity, which had waned during the dynastic wars. Already in the 1450s new stone structures were being erected in the kremlin. By the last quarter of the fifteenth century Moscow was engaged in a building spree. Within just a few decades the appearance of the centerpiece of the city, its triangular kremlin, was transformed. Upon completion thick new brick walls demarcated by a series of massive towers encased an ensemble ofpalaces and cathedrals, whose glittering gold cupolas rose above the fortress to shine over the city, the center of Orthodoxy.
The first project was the replacement of the Cathedral of the Assumption (Dormition), which had been built 150 years earlier by Ivan I Kalita and Metropolitan Petr and had fallen into decay. Ivan III authorized the construction of a new cathedral to be modeled after the twelfth-century cathedral in Vladimir. Begun in 1472, the structure collapsed in 1474. Ivan III then sent for Italian architects to take over the project. Aristotle Fioravanti, the same figure who contributed to Muscovite artillery production, arrived in Moscow in 1475 to design the cathedral and supervise its construction. The Cathedral of the Assumption was completed in 1479. Retaining traditions of Church architecture in northeastern Rus', the rectangular structure was surmounted by five cupolas. At its eastern end were five apses, reflecting the internal divisions of the cathedral. The outer face of the southern wall contained a band of arcading reminiscent of the facades ofSuzdalian churches built in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The result was a grand, elegant cathedral that employed traditional Suzdalian features, but replaced the heavy stolid quality of that school with a simplicity and delicacy characteristic of Novgoro-dian design blended with the balanced proportions and symmetry that distinguished the Italian Renaissance style. Inside, the cathedral was equally impressive: its iconostasis was painted by Dionysius and his associates, who carried forward the traditions of the school of Andrei Rublev: in 1514-15 frescoes covering its interior walls added to its grandeur. It was in this cathedral that Ivan III held the extravagant coronation ceremony for his grandson in 1498.
After the first attempt to build the Church of the Assumption had begun, a fire in the kremlin destroyed some of the other older churches as well as the residence of the metropolitan. Metropolitan Filipp died at the time of the fire. The disaster created both space and a need for more churches and residences. The Cathedral of the Assumption was consequently joined by the Cathedral of the Annunciation (1484-89), a private chapel for the princely family built by architects from Pskov and distinguished by its ogee arches, and the Church of the Deposition of Our Lady’s Robe (1485-86), which was attached to the metropolitan’s residence. In 1505, a new Cathedral of Archangel Michael was added to the ensemble on the kremlin’s cathedral square. Although its floorplan conformed to standard Orthodox churches, its architect, Alevisio Novi of Milan, selected red brick for
Figure 9.1 The Cathedral of the Dormition, Moscow (reproduced courtesy of Jack Kollmann)
Its walls and a contrasting white stone for its decorations, the most outstanding of which was the scalloped or shell-shaped design on the gables. Despite its bright appearance, this cathedral housed the tombs of the Daniilovichi.
The construction of these churches required concentrated wealth and expressed the centrality of Muscovite secular power. It also signified the princes’ recognition of the heightened spiritual importance of Moscow in the wake of Constantinople’s collapse and the need for divine support and protection, especially as the date, 1492, of the expected apocalypse approached. The Cathedral of the Assumption had been initiated in 1472 just after the 1471 defeat of Novgorod. The conscious attempt to reproduce the Vladimir cathedral was an unambiguous signal that Moscow was asserting itselfas the successor to the former capital. Yet before this symbol of Moscow’s triumph could be completed, the kremlin had burned, the metropolitan had died, and the unfinished church had collapsed. In September 1479, shortly after the completion and dedication of the Cathedral of the Assumption, the kremlin had burned again. Despite their victories, the expansion of their territories, and their aggrandizement of secular attributes of power, the Muscovite grand princes could not ignore such signs, and through the construction of these churches they glorified and paid homage to their God.
Construction was not, however, limited to the kremlin churches. Beside them arose the Palace of Facets, which was built in 1487-91 by the Italian architects Marco Ruffo and Pietro Solario, and used for ceremonial receptions and other court functions; the princes’ living quarters were rebuilt between 1491 and 1508; and the Bell Tower of Ivan the Great was begun in 1505. In these, as well as most of the church projects, Italian architects exercised the predominant influence.
Moscow’s kremlin walls were also rebuilt and its towers constructed between 1485 and 1495. The thick, strong walls of the enclosure were not only symbols of the power of Muscovy. Punctured by turrets and small apertures through which fixed cannon and soldiers with small arms could shoot at a threatening army, the fortress was also a practical response to the changing style of warfare that had incorporated the use of artillery. The grand prince, accordingly, also rebuilt the fortifications of the city of Novgorod in 1484-90, as well as those of the outlying towns of the Novgorod lands and Pskov.
The grand princes as well as other Muscovite patrons sponsored construction well beyond the kremlin. Bridges, moats, and dams were built around the fortress. Prominent boyars also built palaces for themselves. In the early sixteenth century, Vasily III as well as merchants commissioned the construction ofchurches outside the kremlin in the posad or commercial quarter. One of the most innovative efforts of the era was the Church of the Ascension, built by Vasily III in 1532 at the village of Kolomenskoe, outside Moscow. Unlike the standard masonry churches on whose roofs cylindrical drums topped by cupolas were set, the brick Kolomenskoe church was marked by a soaring tent-shaped spire, a form typically reserved for wooden structures. Muscovites also undertook construction projects in newly annexed territories. The reinforcement of Novgorod’s fortifications in 1484-90 provides one example. But Vasily III and other Muscovites, most notably merchants who had replaced their evicted counterparts, sponsored churches as well. In the process, Muscovy imposed its architectural styles, along with its political authority and economic dominance, on the subordinated city.
Political consolidation
The complex of extravagant new structures in Moscow’s kremlin, combined with those elsewhere in the city and around the country, constituted a physical representation of the economic and political power of the Muscovite grand prince. The accumulation of wealth they reflected is even more remarkable when it is considered that their Italian architects demanded large salaries for their services, and, as will be discussed in the next chapter, That Muscovy was at war in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries with Lithuania and Livonia. The projects mounted by the Muscovite grand princes are not only indicative of the country’s prosperity, but of their ability to mobilize the society’s resources.
As Ivan III and Vasily III completed the process of “gathering the Russian lands” into Muscovy, they acquired an expanded resource base. They concentrated in their own treasury revenues that previously had been dispersed among autonomous princes. They also added new taxes to the customary tribute. Most ofthem were specifically related to the changing style of warfare, which was based on the use of artillery and firearms. A fee called the primet, for example, was being assessed by the early sixteenth century specifically to cover the costs of constructing siege equipment and rebuilding or reinforcing fortifications. Similarly, fees (gorodchikovaia poshlina) were assessed to support the officials (gorodovye prikazchiki) appointed to construct and maintain fortifications.
In addition to introducing new fees, the grand princes also converted other customary obligations, traditionally paid in labor or in kind, to monetary fees; simultaneously they imposed them on a broader range ofthe population. Support for the postal service or iam falls into that category. The post system had been introduced under the influence of the Mongol khans. During the reign of Ivan III it consisted of a series of relay stations, located along established routes, where official messengers could obtain fresh mounts and sustenance. Around the beginning of the sixteenth century, the service obligation of peasants to supply horses, carts, or sleighs and provisions for couriers as well as to maintain stations and roads in their immediate vicinity was converted into a monetary fee, iamskie den'gi. The collection of this fee, which was imposed universally on the tax-paying population, provided the central court treasury with the means to take over the operation of the postal system. Later, the practice of providing labor and fuel for the manufacture of gunpowder, which during the first part of the sixteenth century was required of peasants located near the production centers, was similarly transformed into a gunpowder fee, known as the iamchuzhnoe delo, paid in cash and collected from all tax-payers.
The array of taxes collected by the grand prince was used not only to build expensive structures and, as indicated, to improve the country’s defenses. More fundamentally, access to increased revenues enabled the grand prince to initiate and develop policies and institutions designed to oversee his expanded realm and to conduct its fiscal, judicial, military, and foreign affairs. The result was the formation of an administrative apparatus capable of carrying out the functions that transformed the diverse collection of principalities accumulated by Ivan III and Vasily III into a unified state centered around the grand prince.
The political institutions that evolved during the reigns of Ivan III and Vasily III were strikingly similar to Tatar government structures. The parallels have led some scholars to the conclusion that as early as the fourteenth century the Muscovites were emulating the administrative apparatus of the Golden Horde.62 The Horde’s political structure was centered around the khan, who depended upon the elders or beys of the Tatar clans for counsel, cooperation, and the conduct of district or provincial administration. He similarly relied upon a vizier to oversee the functions of his court, including his treasury and clerical staff.
By the reign of Ivan III, parallel institutions had become the instruments of administration in Muscovy. But they were used to implement policies in the sedentary society of the amalgamated Rus' principalities. They functioned in the context of Rus' traditions. The concepts that were required to justify and legitimize the expanding power of the grand prince and his government did not, therefore, acknowledge their probable Tatar prototypes, but were drawn from the pervasive Orthodox ideology. Tatar models for organizing and exercising power were encased in Byzantine and Orthodox Christian theory and symbol; they assumed their own Muscovite character and substance.
The Muscovite court
The Muscovite political system, as it evolved in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, set the grand prince at its center and vested him with full political power. But, despite the centralized character of the political system and the unchallenged concentration of authority in his office and person, the grand prince did not exercise unlimited power. Tradition, practical necessity, and perhaps the wisdom derived from the model of effective Tatar political arrangements placed constraints on the sovereign. In his decisions and functions he depended upon the advice of his relatives, Church hierarchs, and his own servitors. In the implementation of his policies he required the cooperation and loyalty of his courtiers, on the one hand, and a staff of state secretaries, scribes, and clerks, on the other. Both of those groups performed administrative duties at the central and provincial levels.
The grand prince’s court was an institution that evolved from the military retinues that every prince in the Riurikid dynasty had customarily maintained. Previously, even when displaced as rulers, northern Rus' princes had owned sufficient landed estates to support themselves; they had also enjoyed the option of offering their military service or administrative expertise to any of the numerous remaining princely courts or even to Lithuania. But as Muscovy expanded, their range of options had narrowed. Entering the service of one of the few remaining appanage princes or an ecclesiastic hierarch diminished the status of both the service prince and his family, and transfer to the Lithuanian court ultimately came to be regarded as treasonous. Thus, as members of the elite lost their economic and political freedoms, they became dependent upon the grand prince for their status, position, and wealth.
Although some continued to hold hereditary landed estates, compensation for their service to the grand prince became their main source of income. For those assigned pomest'ia, rents and supplies were paid by peasants on their estates. Participation in victorious military ventures supplemented those incomes with booty. In addition, often as a reward for fulfilling military or court assignments, servicemen might be given provincial administrative appointments, for which they also received payment. After Muscovy successfully incorporated most of the other northern Rus' principalities, the chief and preferred source of these personal economic rewards was service to the grand prince. As the issuer of these rewards, however, the grand prince also acquired the power to retract his favor and the benefits he had bestowed.
Prospects of advancement and reward evidently outweighed the associated risks. Displaced princes and their retainers congregated at Moscow, where they sought positions at the Muscovite court and joined families already in the grand prince’s service. The servitors at court were ranked according to their status. The highest ranks were boyar and okol'nichii. Below them were additional categories of Moscow courtiers. Other servitors, accorded yet lower ranks, were based outside Moscow in the provinces. Although there was a wide range between the prestige and political influence of boyars and of the deti boiarskie, who served from the provinces, all were members of a privileged group in Muscovite society.
Within the court a spirit of rivalry prevailed. Although the Muscovite regime had assumed responsibility for more military and administrative functions in conjunction with its territorial expansion, population growth and the influx of servicemen from annexed territories to the Muscovite court kept the numbers of servitors larger than the numbers of lucrative postings. The ratio of servicemen to desirable posts prompted the competition among the service families.
Gradually, through the reigns of Ivan III and Vasily III, a system known as mestnichestvo evolved to assimilate new families into the Muscovite court and to govern the promotion of servitors to higher rank. The system, whose name is derived from the word mesto or place, was originally designed as a means of assigning seats at court ceremonies according to status. It was then applied to appointments of high-level servitors to military and civil posts, and later spread to lower ranks as well. Mestnichestvo determined the relative “place” or status of each servitor. At the heart of what developed into an intricate system was a simple principle: the closer a servitor’s “place” was to that of the grand prince, who stood at the center of the mestnichestvo matrix, the higher his status. “Place” or status was calculated by weighing together the service records of an individual and his kin, the status of his family in relation to others, and his seniority within his own clan. An individual’s or family’s status could be elevated by manipulating any of those factors, for example, by forging marital ties with families of higher rank or by unusual performance in military or administrative assignments. The system thus amalgamated factors of high birth, which served the interests of princely families, and of service, which gave advantages to the untitled Muscovite clans.
Although mestnichestvo related fundamentally to status, it also influenced military and civil duty assignments. A record of loyal service was necessary even for members of the most prestigious families to achieve the highest ranks at court. But mestnichestvo, as it evolved, incorporated the principle that no serviceman should be required to fill a post deemed inferior to another’s if the first serviceman’s “place” was higher than the second’s. By the same token, no serviceman would be assigned as a superior to others who had precedence over him. Mestnichestvo did not determine a servitor’s specific military or civil posting, but it did require that appointments respect the relative “places” of the servitors.
The atmosphere ofcompetition in which the grand prince’s servitors functioned did not dissipate with the development of the mestnichestvo. Rather, the system institutionalized disputes and channeled them into the grand prince’s administrative machinery. As mestnich-estvo matured during the second quarter of the sixteenth century, ranking service families sought to elevate their status by serving in high-level positions and marrying into prestigious families. They jealously guarded their own status, tracked their own and others’ service appointments, and challenged any assignments they considered dishonorable. Petitions for reassignment were directed to officials of the grand prince; suits were resolved by an expression of his authority.
The system of mestnichestvo formalized competition among Muscovite servitors. It muted disputes and defused potentially disruptive feuds among rival clans. It eased the process of transforming autonomous princes and their retainers into servicemen ofthe grand prince. But it also reinforced the dependency of all the courtiers on the grand prince, who was ultimately responsible for their inclusion in or expulsion from the service elite, for every appointment, promotion, or demotion, and for adjudication of their disputes. Rather than encourage the coalescence of an “aristocracy” that sought to institutionalize its power and prestige at the expense of the grand prince, the competitive nature of the service system functioned to bind even the most highly placed families and individuals in the Muscovite state not to each other, but to the grand prince whose own position was both elevated and strengthened by the dynamics of the court politics surrounding him.
Provincial administration
It was from the ranks of the servitors at the Moscow court that the grand princes appointed provincial administrators. When the Muscovite grand prince annexed a principality, he replaced its prince with his own namestnik, variously translated as governor, lieutenant, viceregent, or viceroy, who was responsible to him and represented his authority. The practice was a continuation of the custom followed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by Muscovite and Tver' princes who had established their governors in Novgorod, for example, and other towns where they asserted their authority. Governors of very important towns were selected from the highest-ranking servicemen, but lower-ranked servicemen from Moscow provided the personnel to fill most of the provincial governorships, just as they occupied other junior administrative posts.
Muscovite governors served for varying periods, sometimes for months, occasionally for decades. Special charters, issued in the name of the grand prince to the local populace, outlined the governors’ responsibilities for collecting the prince’s tax revenues, preserving public order and safety, and judging legal cases. Immunity charters, on the other hand, removed specific populations, frequently on ecclesiastical lands, from a governor’s jurisdiction. Generally, however, the maintenance of roads, bridges, and defensive capabilities was within the purview of the governors. Deputies, constables, and bailiffs assisted them in carrying out these duties. In rural districts volost' chiefs (volosteli) performed comparable tasks.
Governors and other provincial officials were paid through a system, operative from at least the fourteenth century, known as korm-lenie or “feeding.” According to this system, the populace of each locality provided its governor or volost' chief with food supplies for himself and his horses. Selected fees, notably those derived from judicial and commercial activities, were assigned to them as supplemental salaries. In the fifteenth century the amounts paid to each official were regulated by the central government, as was the frequency of deliveries. Typically payments were made twice a year, on Christmas and St. Peter’s Day (June 29). A third payment, at Easter, became more common in the sixteenth century. Subordinate officials were similarly supported; they received smaller amounts of goods in kind as well as specific fees assessed for transferring certain types of property, serving warrants, issuing official documents, and performing other formal transactions.
With time, some of the functions of the governors and volost' chiefs were transferred to other specialized officers. The gorodovye prikazchiki, for example, were appointed to oversee the reconstruction and maintenance of fortresses and defense. As their duties broadened to supervise local militias as well as to raising revenue and labor for public construction projects, their importance grew at the expense of the governors’. The introduction of other officers with responsibilities for collecting customs and other commercial fees and for legal matters concerning land tenure similarly eroded the powers of the governors. The new officers were not supported by kormlenie. Instead, as noted above, special taxes were levied to provide revenue to pay their salaries.
Governors and other officials appointed from the Muscovite court formed the layer of provincial administration that replaced princes from local branches of the dynasty in annexed territories. They were the bearers of Muscovite authority in the provinces. They collected the grand prince’s taxes, mustered his military forces, implemented his law and his policies, and thereby bound his diverse lands to Moscow, the center of his extended realm.
The central administration
The duma
Although they regularly filled posts in provincial administration, the Muscovite courtiers most commonly performed military duties. They constituted the pool from which officers for the grand prince’s regiments were drawn. Servicemen were also called upon to undertake diplomatic duties and travel abroad as special emissaries of the grand prince. A few, selected on the basis of both their prestigious lineage and long, respectable, if not necessarily distinguished, service careers, achieved the highest ranks at court.
Those servitors, the boyars and okol'nichie, formed an exclusive elite, commonly although inappropriately called the “boyar duma.” Generally numbering only ten to fifteen at any given time, the members ofthe duma had personal access to the grand prince and regularly advised him on policy decisions and matters of state, including issues regarding war and peace, major financial expenditures, and the selection of marriage partners for members of the royal family.
In addition to counseling the grand prince, boyars participated in court ceremonies. They received foreign envoys with or on behalf of the grand prince; they participated in negotiations; and they were present when treaties were signed. On occasion they were also sent abroad as diplomatic envoys. In addition, boyars exercised direct influence and power in military and civil affairs. They were appointed to be commanders of the grand prince’s regiments and governors of particularly important towns. They supervised the functions of administrative units within the court treasury. They served as judges; and they witnessed and co-signed state documents.
The rank of okol'nichii carried a somewhat lower status than boyar, but nevertheless connoted high honor. It appears to have been introduced in the late fifteenth century in conjunction with the growing numbers of prestigious families entering Muscovite service. Usually granted to servitors with at least fifteen years’ experience, the title was typically accorded to men who were younger than the boyars or had less seniority in their own families; the rank of boyar was bestowed even later in one’s career, after an average of twenty years of service.
Some scholars, notably Gustave Alef and Ann Kleimola, have discerned in addition a tendency for the career paths of okol'nichie and boyars to take different directions. Although acknowledging exceptions, they identified okol'nichie with administrative, court, and diplomatic service, but not with the military duties, including regimental commands, that typified careers of servicemen who became boyars.63 Nancy Shields Kollmann, however, argued that boyars and okol'nichie served in essentially the same capacities; the distinction between the two ranks, in her view, was one of status.64
Despite the increased size of the grand princely service corps, the number of duma members remained low. Its composition, however, fluctuated. Throughout the fifteenth century virtually all the boyars and okol'nichie were selected from untitled, albeit privileged, families. Muscovite expansion, which brought princes of annexed lands into the grand prince’s service, also precipitated a challenge to those families that had long and faithfully served Moscow’s princes, had achieved the highest ranks, and had monopolized the most influential roles at court and in the administration.
During the first three decades of the sixteenth century, members of those princely families penetrated the exclusive circle in increasing numbers. The Shuiskii family, descended from the princes of Suzdal'-Nizhnii Novgorod, was among the most eminent in this group. The first member of this family to become a boyar was Prince Vasily Vasil'evich Nemoi Shuiskii, who acquired that rank by 1508/09, after having entered the grand prince’s service by 1491/92. The Shuiskii family would figure prominently in political affairs after the death of Vasily III. Similarly, representatives of the dynastic branches of Rostov, laroslavl', and Tver', whose ancestors had entered Muscovite service in the 1460s and 1470s, became boyars in the early years of the sixteenth century.
Selected emigre princes, who had voluntarily transferred their service from Lithuania to Muscovy, were also elevated to boyar rank during this period. Among them were members of the Bel'skii family, who would become the Shuiskii clan’s chief rivals. Prince Fedor Ivanovich Bel'skii came from Lithuania in 1481 to enter the grand prince’s service; he later married Ivan Ill’s niece, and two of his sons became boyars in the 1520s and 1530s. The Glinskii clan, which will be discussed below, constitutes another example of an emigre princely family from Lithuania that gained entrance into Muscovy’s elite circle.
When the duma acquired princely members, another distinction between boyars and okol'nichie materialized. For untitled servitors, experience at the rank of okol'nichii became a virtual requirement before advancement to the status of boyar would be approved; but princes tended to skip over the second-level rank and be admitted to the duma as boyars.
Duma politics
Although in principle all political power centered in the person of the grand prince, duma members had significant, if informal influence. Tradition, practicality, and the example of the Tatar khans’ relationship with their parallel councils of beys,8 Rather than legal or institutional prerogatives, guided the informal process ofconsultation. Acting officially as military commanders, judges, and administrators and unofficially as patrons of courtiers of lower ranks, they were instrumental in implementing the policies adopted by the grand prince through the discharge of their own duties as well as by guiding the conduct of their proteges. Consequently, even in the absence of formal restraints, the exercise of grand princely power was functionally tempered by the influence and advice of his “duma.”
But, as was true for the court in general, the boyars and okol'nichie functioned in an intensely competitive atmosphere. Their rivalry was driven by the urge, common to all the courtiers, to gain the benefits associated with high status: prestige, political influence, and material wealth. But at the highest levels ofcourt, where the continuing arrival of new servitors, including prestigious princes, was perceived as a challenge and potential threat by the untitled Muscovite families, it was particularly acute.
Ostrc’wski, “Mongol Origins ofMuscovite Political Institutions,” p. 533.
The task of integrating all the elite families into a single hierarchy of servitors, all loyal and subordinate to the Muscovite grand prince, was not simple. Established duma members attempted to limit access to their status and reserve the honor, wealth, power, and influence associated with it for themselves and their kin. Practicality obliged the grand princes to recognize and respond to the interests of their lieutenants in the duma. As a result, they tended to give priority to relatives and clients of duma members when adding new boyars and okol'nichie to that body. Selected families thus acquired “hereditary rights” to the top court ranks.
Nancy Shields Kollmann presented the thesis that, once an individual became a boyar, his heirs automatically became eligible for that rank. She described a pattern of inheritance reminiscent of the lateral succession system that had been traditional among the Riurikids. Within a boyar family, the rank was accorded to members of a single generation in order of seniority, then to the sons of those who had achieved boyar rank. Some practices deviated from the old princely model. More than one family member could hold the rank simultaneously. Furthermore, even upon the death of a boyar, the next eligible member of his family might not replace him immediately. Factors such as age, service record, or experience and pressures deriving from the political relationships or balance of power among the remaining boyars might delay a promotion.65
Despite this tendency to preserve exclusivity, the composition of the duma was not static. Some eligible servitors did not survive the long apprenticeship, and their descendants lost access to the inner circle. Other boyars lost the grand prince’s favor; an individual’s disgrace could adversely affect his relatives’ status and retard or prevent their promotion to the highest rank. On the other hand, new families gradually gained admission to the duma.
Mestnichestvo provided the mechanism by which both the new princely servitors and the old Muscovite clans could achieve high rank, wealth, and power in the service of the grand prince. It allowed a relatively smooth, but slow and controlled integration of titled servicemen into the Muscovite duma without displacing established Muscovite boyar families. The emphasis on loyal service, which became one of the system’s main components, so well preserved the status and opportunities of the Muscovite clans that it was not until the
Sixteenth century, especially during the final years of Vasily Ill’s reign, that princely candidates, including members of both the Bel'skii and the Shuiskii families, were admitted in any significant numbers to the duma. And it was not until after his reign that princely boyars outnumbered the untitled boyars. “Newcomers” were thus absorbed through the mestnichestvo system into Muscovite service in an orderly manner and without sacrificing the honor and experience of the established untitled Muscovite clans.
The grand princes’ cognizance of and respect for their elite servitors’ interests are evident not only in their cautious approach to admitting new families into the duma. They are reflected as well in at least two specific episodes, involving decisions that affected the dynasty, the court, and the Muscovite state. Both episodes suggest that the Muscovite political system, however centralized in principle, had another dimension, represented by the role of duma members, in the decision-making process. Among the duma members, individual quests for status and power intermingled with concerns for state policies and, at times, were indistinguishable. But motivated by personal or public goals, ranking servicemen actively participated in shaping decisions ofthe grand prince. Both episodes also demonstrate that the grand princes took the interests and concerns of their duma members into account when making those decisions. In one case Ivan III altered his decision to accommodate his duma. In the other Vasily III manipulated duma membership to reduce its influence over his action.
The first episode was the succession crisis of the 1490s, discussed in the previous chapter. The selection of Ivan Ill’s heir was a matter of concern not only to members of the dynasty but also to the boyars, whose own status depended upon their close ties to the grand prince. They also had a common interest in preventing any single one oftheir clans from acquiring a disproportionate share of influence and wealth.
World History
