Muscovite liturgical practices changed constantly. In Pskov in the early fifteenth century the priest Iov, citing Photios, the Greek metropolitan of Rus', contended that the triple-hallelujah was prevalent throughout Orthodoxy while the monk Evfrosin insisted one should chant the hallelujah twice. But by 1510 Evfrosin was recognised locally as a saint and in 1551 the Stoglav ruled as canonical the double-hallelujah and the related custom of crossing oneself with two fingers instead of three. Complaints entered at the Stoglav Council reveal other examples of how folkways permeated liturgical practices: the 'desecration' of the altar with offerings of food used for banqueting, cauls thought to be favourable omens for the newborn, soap for washing the sanctuary and salt placed on the altar before sunrise on Holy Thursday, then used to cure ailments in persons and cattle. In dispensing holy water to parishioners for protections and cures, the line between priest and sorcerer blurred. To shorten services, clergy chanted different parts of the liturgy simultaneously (mnogo- glasie) making it incomprehensible. Believers acquiesced, revering the 'magic' of the service. Priests also transformed the spoken liturgy into a 'continuous song' and began to walk in deasil, or with the sun, in rites and processions in a manner informed by tradition. When Metropolitan Gerontii, citing Greek practice, questioned the canonicity of proceeding in deasil in consecrating the Dormition cathedral in 1479, Grand Prince Ivan III rebuked him.11 By 1600 the liturgical cycle had become 'national'. Wedding rituals, like those described in the manual written in the 1550s 'On the Management of the Household' (Domostroi), were unions of clans carried out according to ancient custom. Their rites, such as the bride donning a matron's headwear (kika) symbolising her transformation from maiden into married woman, were anything but Christian. A priest sanctioned the ceremony, but a best man (druzhka) and a
10 V G. Vlasov, 'The Christianization of the Russian Peasants', in Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer (ed.), Russian Traditional Culture (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), p. 17; N. M. Nikol'skii, Istoriia russkoi tserkvi, 4th edn. (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1988), pp. 43-4,47,50-1; Eve Levin, 'Supplicatory Prayers as a Source for Popular Religious Culture in Muscovite Russia', in S. H. Baron and N. S. Kollmann (eds.),Religionand Culture in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997), p. 101.
11 Emchenko, Stoglav, pp. 290-3,304,309-10,313-15,319; Vlasov, 'Christianization', pp. 24-6; Nikol'skii, Istoriia, p. 43; Slovar', vol. ii, pt. 1, pp. 262-4.
matchmaker (svakha) presided. Church weddings became common only in the fourteenth century, and were followed by folk rituals for bedding, announcing a coupling and the purification of the couple. Still, by the sixteenth the binding of unions with a sacrament performed by an authority above and outside the clans had become customary. Rituals for commoners in the Domostroi and accounts of imperial weddings were similar.[144]
In the building boom of the sixteenth century a 'national' style of church architecture emerged. One of its elements was the construction of masonry churches with sharply vertical 'tent' roofs and rows of arched gables inspired by wooden tower churches built by village craftsmen. The first (1529-32) was the church of Ascension in Kolomenskoe built by Grand Prince Vasilii III. Another element of the new style was the appearance of icon screens separating the nave from the chancel with rows of intercessory figures turned towards a central icon Christ in His Powers over the holy doors to the sanctuary. Some trace its inspiration to late Byzantine spirituality; others to the Russian manner of decorating wooden churches. The oldest extant high iconostasis, painted in the 1420s, is in the Trinity church of the Trinity-Sergius monastery. New technologies of masonry construction and design also appeared. When Metropolitan Filipp's new cathedral church of the Dormition in the Kremlin collapsed before it was completed in 1474, Ivan III brought in Pskov builders and an engineer from Bologna, Aristotle Fioravanti. Fioravanti's five-domed church, completed in 1479, resembled Russian cross-in-square churches, while using Italian engineering techniques and exhibiting tastes and skills of Pskov builders in working limestone, brick and decorative tile (see Plate 15). Pskov builders also introduced the belfry to Muscovite church complexes, the first being that in the single tall drum on the church of the Holy Spirit (1476) at the Trinity-Sergius monastery. In 1505 Ivan commissioned the Venetian Alevisio the Younger to build the cathedral of the Archangel Michael as a family burial church. In its pilasters, cornices and scalloped gables, it resembled Venetian churches. New cathedrals such as that in the Novodevichii convent in Moscow (1524-5) or the Dormition cathedral in Rostov (c.1600), replicated these innovations. In churches of St John the Baptist in Diakovo (c.1547), Saints Boris and Gleb in Staritsa (1558-61) and the Intercession (St Basil's, 1555-61) on Red Square, builders produced a complex variant to this style. The Intercession church consisted of eight chapels surrounding a central altar with a tent roof. Exaggerated helmet cupolas, replacing traditional shallow domes, capped the heightened drums over each altar. Ideological schemes and Western models inspired its layout, and a Pskov builder oversaw its construction. By 1600 churches with multiple altars, tent roofs and helmet cupolas went up everywhere.[145]They blended forms, materials and techniques developed in many places, elements of popular religiosity and Renaissance innovations in engineering and design.
The huge quantity, variety and opulence of reliquaries, icons and other religious objects that laity donated to monasteries belie the view that its religiosity was a formality. Chronicle entries, such as that recording the appearance of an image of the Mother of God in 1383 over the River Tikhvinka in the Obonezhskaia territory of Novgorod, tell the same story. Its purported miracles attracted pilgrims. A century later bookmen entered new miracle tales into the Novgorod chronicle and Archbishop Serapion (1504-9) built a brick church to house the icon. In Moscow the cult entered the liturgical calendar and in 1524 Metropolitan Daniil wrote it into his 'history of Russia' known as the Nikon Chronicle. Complaints about the ubiquity of uncanonical or blasphemous icons reflected the Church's ambivalence about such 'appearances'. Even the court was complicit. Ivan Viskovatyi, Ivan IV's Keeper of the Seal, complained about icons with unprecedented imagery with which painters from Pskov and Novgorod redecorated Ivan IV's family church of the Annunciation after the fire of 1547.[146]
Reports of fires provide evidence that towns were filled with churches in which ordinary people shared liturgical experiences. The frequency ofreligious processions was another form of popular religiosity. They might be provincial celebrations like that in Ustiug in 1557 when its inhabitants proceeded with a cross to honour the raising of the church of St. Nicholas Velikoretskii. Or they could be great affairs like Metropolitan Filipp's processions on 30 April and 23 May, 1472, to inaugurate construction of the Dormition cathedral and to translate there the relics of metropolitans Photios, Kipriian and Iona.[147] No later than 1548 Metropolitan Makarii fashioned a court procession to celebrate Palm Sunday. Based upon a ritual he had observed in Novgorod, it re-enacted Jesus's entry into Jerusalem by having the tsar, afoot, lead the metropolitan, mounted on a horse and followed by nobles and clerics, to the Intercession church on Red Square. For the Epiphany Feast of 1558, Ivan IV led the hierarchy and the court onto the Moscow River to a hole in the ice where Makarii blessed the water with a cross. After that he splashed Ivan's son and the nobility, commoners filed by to fill pots, children and the ill were immersed, some Tatars baptised and Ivan's horse brought to drink. The baptism on the symbolic River Jordan, the animals and the healings were elements of popular feasts.[148] Although many rural settlements lacked churches, peasants also primarily and most deeply expressed their religiosity in communal celebrations. When they could not, they resented it. In a petition to the archbishop of Novgorod in 1582 peasants and deti boiarskie in a remote parish requested they be allowed to attend a neighbouring church. The petitioners said their priest could not communicate with them because his church was far away and required a boat to get there; as a result their ill died without confessing, there were no prayers when mothers gave birth and the young were not baptised.[149]
Popular religiosity is incomprehensible apart from monasteries. No one knows how many existed at one time, but E. I. Kolycheva estimates that 486 monasteries were founded between 1448 and 1600. Typically, they began as hermitages or sketes. As they grew, metropolitans encouraged them to organise with rules of communal living. Monasteries were subordinate to a bishop or were patrimonial (ktitorskie) houses like the Kirillo-Belozerskii monastery, initially supported by Princes Andrei (d. 1432) of Mozhaisk and his son Mikhail (d. 1486) of Vereia.[150] Great houses maintained donation books recording gifts, copybooks with records of land grants and feast books that recorded names of benefactors. The names of provincial landowners predominate, but benefactors came from every category of free people. Donors made grants in return for prayers for their souls and those of family members and ancestors. Although the Orthodox never formulated a doctrine of purgatory, death rituals provided for memorial prayers for forty days. About 1400 believers began to think this inadequate to assure the salvation of kin, whether they had died recently or long before. Their solution was to request commemorations at monasteries containing relics of intercessors and which could perform prayer rituals presumably in perpetuity. In exchange they gave monasteries gifts.[151] By 1500 the culture of commemoration became institutionalised in sinodiki, recording the names of those for whom donations were made. Iosif Volotskii founded a monastery in 1479 with a system in which a small sum bought a place in an 'eternal' (vechnyi) sinodik, a list read independently of the liturgical cycle. Fifty roubles purchased entry in a 'daily' (posiavdnevnyi) sinodik, a shorter list read at places in the liturgy for commemorations. Anniversary feasts cost 100 roubles. Other houses maintained analogous systems. The rich arranged commemorations at several houses. Requests for tonsure and burial near a miracle worker began in the late fifteenth century.[152]
Moscow's rulers made pilgrimages to monasteries to pray, underwrite feasts and give presents. Ivan IV often went on extended pilgrimages. Thus, on 21 May 1545 he visited the Trinity-Sergius monastery, houses in Pereiaslavl', Rostov and Iaroslavl', the Kirill and Ferapont monasteries near Beloozero, and the Dmitrii-Prilutskii monastery and three other houses near Vologda. Spouses of Muscovite rulers created a gendered cult of St Sergius. In 1499 Sophia Palae- ologa, Ivan III's second wife, donated an icon cloth to the Trinity-Sergius monastery giving credence to a story that Sergius's intercession allowed her to give Ivan an heir, Vasilii III. Sixteenth-century ideologues wrote that the miracle resulted from a pilgrimage. Tsaritsa Anastasiia went on foot to Trinity in 1547 to pray for an heir, as did Tsaritsa Irina in 1585.[153] Elites, who scheduled memorial feasts and made tonsure and burial at monasteries part of their death rituals, sought by public displays to reinforce family and social identities. But it is useless to distinguish between popular and noble religiosity. Peasant visits are attested in miracle tales and in charters that show monasteries dispensed beer to ordinary folk at feasts by which they celebrated transition rites and commemorated ancestors. Laity constantly visited cenobite houses;
their faith blended folkways and Christian practice in a harmonious culture of
commemoration.[154]
As much for economic and political reasons as out of piety, princes granted monasteries immunities from taxes and tariffs on their commerce, salt works, agriculture and fisheries. Ivan III halted the practice and even confiscated monastic lands in Novgorod. Thenceforth he and his successors controlled the appointment of hegumens to big houses and periodically inventoried monastic charters, causing some to be revoked. Paradoxically, Vasilii III gave monasteries generous gifts and Ivan IV lavish ones. During the prosperous i530s-i550s and in the aftermath of the oprichnina, there were no restraints on the accumulation of property and the wealth of the great houses skyrocketed. By 1600 the Simonovskii monastery near Moscow owned over fifty villages in nineteen uezdy and the Trinity-Sergius monastery owned an estimated 118,000 hectares in forty uezdy and commercial and industrial holdings in over fifteen towns. Monasteries held at least 20 per cent of all arable land.[155]
All this wealth and the presence of monks from aristocratic families could not but undermine rules of communal property, equality of status and a simple life. Iosif Volotskii accorded the Simonovskii and Kirillo-Belozerskii monasteries a reputation for austerity, one he initially emulated at his monastery. Monks wore simple attire, ate and prayed as one and had no personal property. Unable to maintain this order, Iosif, or during the illness that killed him in i5i5 co-hegumen Daniil, wrote a new rule. It provided for three classes of monks with graded privileges for food, dress and personal effects, and a more relaxed regime. At most monasteries monks from landowning families constituted a large component and most of the officers. Those who made donations in return for tonsure enjoyed incomes from donated property until they died; those without property were artisans, low-level managers or did menial tasks.[156] The career and writings of Nil Sorskii (d. 1508) explain why Iosif singled out the Kirillo-Belozerskii monastery for austerity. Nil was tonsured there and before 1489 travelled to centres of Orthodox spirituality on
Mount Athos. This set Nil on a new spiritual path. He founded a semi-hermitic skete on the Sora River modelled on that of early holy men and on what Kirill's hermitage once was like; its monks supported themselves, prepared their own food and ate it in solitude; they had no property other than icons and books to guide their devotions. Nil wrote that silence and a simple life provided the only environment in which a monk might bring God into his heart. The means, citing Simeon the New Theologian and Gregory of Sinai, was to recite the prayer, 'Lord Jesus Christ Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner'. In Byzantium it was a prayer of Hesychast mystics.[157] About 14 per cent of all monasteries were convents. Subsidiaries of male houses were small and possessed little property. Others were patrimonial houses like the Kremlin convent of the Ascension which Grand Prince Dmitrii I's widow Evdokiia (the nun Efrosiniia) founded in 1407. Vasilii III assured it a permanent existence in 1518 /19 by building a masonry church to house Evdokiia's relics and by making it the burial church for grand princesses. The Novodevichii monastery, which Vasilii founded near Moscow in 1525, housed nuns from well-born families and a miracle-working icon, assuring it rich donations. By 1602-3 it had 141 nuns. Wealthy convents had social hierarchies reflecting that outside their walls. For a donation elite families entered female relatives on their rolls, or donors to male houses specified that on their death they or their widows be given cells. This elite controlled property, came and went on family business, had servants and ruled, subject to their patrons. Nuns, whose entry was not connected with a grant, were common sisters who did necessary labour and lived communally with less rations.[158]
Heresy
While Iosif and Nil refined their ideals, others were criticising traditional beliefs, rituals and institutions. In 1467 Metropolitan Filipp wrote to Archbishop Iona of Novgorod about popular animosity in Iona's eparchy towards the Church and its wealth. Archbishop Gennadii told Metropolitan Zosima that a Jew in the entourage of Mikhail Olel'kovich, who came from Kiev to be Novgorod's prince in 1471, had caused the unrest. He warned prelates that it had infected priests, deacons, officials and simple people. In 1487 Gennadii charged four men with heresy and sent them to Moscow for judgement. Ivan III and
Metropolitan Gerontii exonerated one, found the others guilty of execrating icons and had them whipped. Gennadii thought this lenient and complained to Zosima that Gerontii (d. 1489) had allowed heretical priests Gavrilko and Denis to serve in Moscow, the latter at the Kremlin church of Michael the Archangel, and that Ivan's diplomat Fedor Kuritsyn protected them. Mobilising other bishops, Gennadii drove Aleksei from his church and compelled Zosimato convene another council. It met 17 October 1490, convicting some of desecrating icons and of the 'judaising' denial of Christ's divinity, and the monk Zakarii as a strigol'nik, referring to a Pskov heresy that denied the authority of simoniacal prelates. The council excommunicated and anathematised the heretics and sent them to Novgorod for punishment.[159] As long as Ivan favoured the governing faction that included Kuritsyn, freethinkers were immune from punishment in Moscow.
Gennadii and IosifVolotskii were alarmed. By Gennadii's account, heretical preachers had reached credulous Christians throughout the eparchy. Moreover, Ivan appointed Kuritsyn's confederate Kassian archimandrite of Novgorod's Iur'ev (St George) monastery. The Moscow heretics were few in number, but influential. Grand Princess Elena was reputed to be one. It must have galled Gennadii and Iosiftoo that the heretics were literate clerics and laymen whose views were not supposed to count in religious affairs. It is certain they preached that it was idolatry to worship man-made symbols of the faith, that venerating relics was superstition and monasticism unnecessary. Gennadii also likened their beliefs to those ofheretics who had denied the Trinity, saying they prayed like Jews. In their arguments, he complained, they cited passages from the Old Testament and texts called 'The Logic' (Logika) and 'The Six Wings' (Shestokril) unknown to him. 'The Logic' was informed by a rationalist approach to theology; the latter, an astronomical work, became important as the year 7000 approached, by our reckoning 1491/2. In eschatological lore, because the Lord created the world in seven days, it would be followed by 7,000 years of faith, after which Christians might expect chaos, Christ's second coming and a day of judgement. Its approach caused unease; when it passed without a stir, free thinkers ridiculed religious authority. Kuritsyn's version of a pseudo-letter of St Paul to the Laodicians, one of few surviving heretical writings, expressed a humanist Christianity.[160] Other heretics may have shared Kuritsyn's conviction that Christian piety derived from an individual conscience that privileged human rationality. But most of the accused were clerics, so it is wrong to think of the heresy as a secular critique of Orthodoxy.
To confound the heretics Gennadii recruited bookmen, including two Greeks, the Dominican Veniamin, and two Lubeckers, printer Bartholomaus Ghotan and doctor Niklaus Billow. Their great achievement was assembling the first complete Slavonic Bible in Muscovy in 1499. It was the source of later editions and the first printed Bible of Ivan Fedorov in West Bank Ukraine in 1580/1. Bulow translated Latin calendars and astronomy texts to compute a new paschal canon reaffirming Christ's second coming, and a translation of a medieval Latin refutation of Judaism.[161] Iosif Volotskii was the scourge of Moscow freethinkers. In the 'Book about the New Heresy' or 'Enlightener' (Prosvetitel'), which he wrote between 1502 and 1504 from reconstituted sermons, Iosif accused Ivan of abetting the heresy and said Zosima treated heretics lightly because he was a heretic. It was exceptional in equating the heresy with Judaism, an evil external to Orthodoxy. Gennadii said that Kuritsyn became a heretic after an embassy to Hungary in 1482-6.[162] Iosifs charge that the heretics proselytised Judaism under the guise of reforming Orthodoxy long has caused controversy because of its implication of unsavoury Jewish influences in Russia and counter-charges of Russian anti-Semitism. Ia. S. Lur'e has argued against Jewish influences, but Moishe Taube makes the case that the Shestokril and the Logika were translated from medieval Hebrew texts, identifies Gennadii's Kievan Jew as Zacharia ben Aharon and argues that Kuritsyn relied on a translation from Hebrew of the Secretum secretorum in the first section of the Laodicean Letter. No one disputes that the heretics solicited translations out of very Christian concerns.[163]
Having removed the court faction that included Kuritsyn, jailed his co-ruler Dmitrii and Dmitrii's mother Elena, and recognised Vasilii as sole heir in April 1502, Ivan III summoned Iosif to discuss what to do about heresy. According to Iosif, Ivan asked forgiveness for shielding heretics. In December 1504, Vasilii, Ivan and Metropolitan Simon convened a council that condemned Ivan-Volk Kuritsyn (sources last mentioned brother Fedor in i500) and two others as heretics and burnt them at the stake. In Novgorod heretics were burnt or imprisoned. Nil Sorskii's hostility to the heresy is documented. But Nil's disciple Vassian Patrikeev wrote that monks of the northern hermitages believed that, while the irreconcilable should be imprisoned, the Church should forgive the repentant. One disciple said Nil shared this view.[164] Nil probably concurred with Iosif about trying heretics, but parted company with him over the punishments.
Iosifites and non-possessors
In 1499 Ivan raided Novgorod's eparchial treasury. Blaming Ivan's heretical advisers, Archbishop Gennadii prepared a sinodik anathematising all who seized Church property and commissioned Veniamin's 'Short Sermon' (Slovo kratka) which used the legend that Roman Emperor Constantine I had issued a charter to the Pope that made Church lands sacrosanct.[165] Then, in August- September 1503 Ivan apparently convened a Church council and placed before it the question of Church lands. Ivan hardly contemplated anything as drastic as his Novgorod confiscations. The hierarchy was a necessary ally and his servicemen, by reason of grants to monasteries for memorial prayers, had a stake in the existing order. Replying to Ivan's purported agenda, Metropolitan Simon cited Constantine's charter and claimed that Ivan's 'ancestors' Grand Princes Vladimir (d. 1015) and Iaroslav (d. 1054) of Kiev had upheld it. The anonymous 'Other Sermon' (Slovo inoe), written then or soon after ostensibly to defend the Trinity-Sergius monastery's jurisdiction over the village of Ilemna, provides a gloss on the 'reply', saying Ivan sought to make the Church dependent on the state treasury and granaries. Towards this end, it said, Ivan summoned Nil Sorskii who testified that 'it is not becoming to monks to own villages'. Most likely the anonymous 'Quarrel with Iosif Volotskii' had it right, saying Ivan ordered Nil and Iosif to be present and that they took opposing sides.[166] The lack of an official record, the late provenance of sources mentioning a council and their tendentiousness, has troubled historians.[167] Yet, the council certainly took place. In the absence of a record, one must conclude that the Church's opposition caused Ivan to draw back. Given the stakes, it is understandable why contemporaries treated the abortive council with silence, and why Iosif s disciples and Nil's, with their own agendas, provided biased accounts of it.
For fifty years these factions contested what constituted Orthodox tradition. Monks from Iosif s monastery and other large houses defended monastic property rights and autonomy, shared Iosif s hatred of heresy and extended its definition to include their rivals. Most defenders of Nil's heritage were from northern hermitages. Known as Non-possessors (nestiazhateli) for their dedication to vows of poverty, they were willing to forgive heretics who repented. Their leader was Vassian, whom Ivan III tonsured and sent to the Kirillo- Belozerskii monastery when he disgraced his father Ivan Patrikeev in 1499. Vassian became Nil's disciple and returned to Moscow in i509-i0 when Vasilii III's officials re-examined monastic immunities. For contemporaries he interpreted the meaning of the councils of 1503 and 1504. A monk, he argued, should empty himself of material burdens to cultivate piety, Nil's inner way. Neither Greek saintly monks, Saints Antonii and Feodosii ofthe Kiev Pecherskii (Caves) monastery, nor Saints Varlaam Khutynskii, Sergius Radonezhskii and Kirill Belozerskii, he said, acquired property. Vassian's compilation of canon law (kormchaia kniga) was also hostile to landed monasticism.[168]
In 1518 Vassian found an ally in Maximos 'the Greek' (Maksim Grek), whom Vasilii recruited as a translator. Maximos was born Michael Tivolis into a noble family in Epirus. About 1492 Michael joined Greek emigres in Italy. He knew John Lascaris and Marsilio Ficino, studied with Pico della Mirandola, helped Aldus Manutius print Greek classics, saw Savonarola in power and became a Dominican monk. Returning to Orthodoxy, Michael became the monk Maximos at the Vatopedi monastery on Mount Athos in 1505-6. Vasilii III refused to allow Maximos to return to Mount Athos. Subsequently, with a learning previously unknown in Russia, Maximos carried on a wide correspondence, wrote treatises on translation, onomastics and grammar, sermons about astrology, prophecy and apocryphal works, monographs on governance and polemics against other faiths. Iosifites viewed his learning with a suspicion reinforced by reports that he found Russian services provincial and liturgical books full of errors, and because of his association with Vassian. Also, Max- imos's descriptions for Vasilii and Vassian of monasteries on Mount Athos and of the Franciscan and Dominican orders, favourably reported that they supported themselves and owned no villages.[169]
In 1525 the Iosifite Metropolitan Daniil convened a court that on the slenderest evidence convicted Maximos of heresy and treasonous relations with the Turks. He was excommunicated and put in irons in the Iosifo-Volokolamskii monastery. Daniilbrought Maximos to trial again in 1531 on charges designed to entrap Vassian. His jailers said Maximos and Vassian had denigrated Muscovite liturgical innovations and that he doubted the sanctity of Pafnutii of Borovsk and other monks who owned villages. The council also detected 'Jewish' passages in Maximos's translation of Simeon Metaphrast's 'Life of the Mother of God'. Maximos's copyist, the monk Isak Sobaka, said he gave Vassian the translation; others attributed the errors to Vassian. The council excommunicated Vassian and confined him at the Iosifo-Volokolamskii monastery, where he died. It sent Maximos to the Otroch' monastery in Tver'. Although the Iosifites equated Non-possessors with 'judaisers', they could not isolate them. Bishop Akakii of Tver' removed Maximos's irons and allowed him books and to write. Ioasaf Skripitsyn, hegumen ofthe Trinity-Sergius monastery, replaced Daniil as metropolitan in 1539, lifted Isak's excommunication and made him hegumen of the Simonovskii monastery, then of the Kremlin Chudovskii (Miracles) monastery. But in 1542 a court faction replaced Ioasaf with Makarii. From a Moscow clerical family related to Iosif Volotskii, like Iosif, tonsured at the Pafnut'ev monastery, and Daniil's archbishop of Novgorod, Makarii abhorred heterodoxy. In 1549 he informed Vasilii III of Isak's complicity in Maximos's and Vassian's heresy and convicted him again.[170]
Reform
Maximos, judged by diplomat Ivan Beklemishev, his intimate and co-defendant in 1525, a 'wise man, able to assist us and enlighten us when we inquire how a sovereign should order the land, how people should be treated, and how a metropolitan should live', was the progenitor of a new literature exploring how to live a Christian life.[171] Addressing the interest in astrology generated by court doctor Niklaus Bulow, Maximos warned that man-made science offered the seductive delusion that external forces determined one's fate. It was dangerous because it relieved the believer of the God-given gift of free will. In a Sermon on Penitence he counselled that 'neither withdrawal from the world, donning a monk's habit . . . are so pleasing to God as a pure faith, an honest life and good works'.[172] Clerics, so diverse in their beliefs as the Non-possessor monk Artemii and Metropolitan Daniil, also addressed this theme. Artemii, like religious radicals in Poland-Lithuania, told correspondents Scripture was a better guide than miracles to living virtuously, stressing that the onus was on the seeker to let Scripture shape his or her existence. Daniil's sermons were more conventional; yet, he was the first Muscovite hierarch to write in this vein. His sermons, like Artemii's, privileged moral instruction along with ritual and devotional practices.[173] The Domostroi usually is cited to demonstrate that servicemen, state functionaries and townspeople valued moral instruction. Sil'vestr, a priest and icon painter in the Kremlin church of the Annunciation, dedicated a copy of this anonymous work to his son Anfim, telling him that a Christian household would shine in the esteem of others. Orthodoxy supplied the rituals structuring a system of deference defining the sexes, parents and children, master and slave. In chapters on child-rearing the father's role was protector of children and mentor in behaviour and trades to sons, his wife so educating daughters. They quoted Scripture to counsel against spoiling with kindness.[174] In Novgorod Makarii took reform in a different direction, the production by i538 of an encyclopedia organised as a menology, that is, with texts celebrating saints on their feast days. Organised in twelve books, one for each month, it was called a 'great menology' (velikie minei chetii) because it contained full biographies of saints, and because it appended other writings to the calendar. As metropolitan Makarii sponsored an expanded edition with biographies of those he had canonised and materials from his archive. Thus, to selections for July and August were appended the final edition of Iosif s 'Enlightener', a partial translation from Greek of Ricoldus of Florence's hostile account (c.1300) of Muslim beliefs, the Sermon compiled from Holy Writings (c.1462), excoriating those who had accepted union with Rome and praising Grand Prince Vasilii II for saving Muscovy, the earliest epistle by Filofei of Pskov (in 1524 to Misiur' Munekhin) describing Moscow as the third Rome, and letters of Russian prelates. Claiming he had preserved every sacred writing, Makarii retained a copy and presented the other to Ivan IV in 1552 as a reference book of authoritative texts.[175]
Ivan IV however, working with a new favourite, Artemii, had in mind more radical reforms. Artemii was from Pskov, a city touched by reformation currents in Poland-Lithuania. Ivan summoned him from a northern hermitage and compelled the Trinity-Sergius monastery to accept him as hegumen. Simultaneously, he convened the Stoglav Council inJanuary 1551. In his opening address Ivan said monasticism, founded to save souls, had become worldly; people became monks and nuns to live comfortably and to carouse with laity to the disregard of their calling. Ivan reminded the council that the acceptance of gifts and villages had brought monasteries to such a state. This caused Makarii and the Iosifite majority to answer that, since Constantine, Byzantine emperors, Church fathers and councils, Russian princes and Tatar khans had respected Church property. In the end no one was satisfied. The Iosifites conceded many points: the council recognised the government's right to inventory monastic lands; it promised to obey the provision in the Law Code of 1550 ending the issuance of immunity charters; it agreed to limitations of its right to acquire estates and to reductions in state subsidies for monasteries; and it recognised the tsar's decree of 15 September 1550 which re-established state taxation and jurisdiction in Church suburbs of Russian towns and banned the creation of new ones.[176] But the monasteries retained their considerable autonomy and the right to acquire property.
The council also committed itself to improving the behaviour of parish clergy and laity. To deal with human failing, it admonished people to attend church and open their hearts to God by confession. Decrying the ignorance or disregard of marriage laws, it repeated relevant canons. The clergy was to hold services and requiems regularly andput the fear of God into parishioners. So the laity would have no excuse to evade observances, it forbade the clergy to charge unreasonable fees for sacraments; parishioners who ignored admonitions to behave and disrupted or failed to attend services might be excommunicated. So the clergy understood its obligations, the council ordered seminaries be established in towns and reminded clerics of their mentoring duties. Unworthy clerics might be dismissed. The reforms were of little consequence, primarily because the Church failed to found seminaries or upgrade its administration. Ivan told the council that 'tenth men' were venal and that their levies impoverished parishioners, leaving the churches empty. Its answer was to replace them with senior priests (popovskie starosty) chosen from among and by local clergy. With their parishes, they were responsible for paying tithes.[177] Whether it produced more revenue is unclear; as a means to enhance the moral and theological acuity of the clergy and its ability to minister to parishioners, it was a step backward. Senior priests, autonomous of eparchial supervision, were hardly better educated than their juniors.
Artemii's tenure as a reformer ended with flight to the northern hermitages in July 1551. Retribution followed when Makarii in 1553-4 convened councils to hear charges tying him to heresies of serviceman Matvei Bashkin, runaway servant and monk Feodosii Kosoi and the official Ivan Viskovatyi. Viskovatyi was convicted of lesser charges, the others found guilty of heresy and excommunicated. In i555 and i556-7 courts convicted their disciples. Bashkin was sent to the Iosifo-Volokolamskii monastery, the others to the Solovetskii monastery whence they fled to Lithuania. Feodosii became an anti-trinitarian preacher; Artemii remained an Orthodox monk.[178] Official sources said the accused, apart from Viskovatyi, believed Jesus was less than God, and denied the efficacy of religious rites, symbols and the worship of saints and relics. It is difficult to know what Feodosii Kosoi espoused in the early 1550s, because refutations of his theology appeared after his flight and addressed his preaching in Lithuania where, according to one critic, he told crowds the Church was a union of all believers; before God, Tatars and Germans, and Christians were equal. The court heard testimony that Bashkin had enquired why believers owned slaves while professing to love others as they would have others love them. Although not unaware of reformation currents, Artemii's theology was in the Non-possessor tradition. He denied doubting the efficacy of requiems and symbols of faith, urging Ivan to expropriate monastic lands, that he 'wrote like aJew' or refused to curse the Novgorod heretics, saying only that salvation depended primarily on living righteously, and that the heretics' punishment had been unjust. This criticism of Iosif's Enlightener caused an uproar when
Bishop Kassian of Riazan', the only non-Iosifite on the court, agreed. Ivan and Makarii endorsed the book and removed Kassian from office.[179]
There was no mass movement for religious reform. Most believers were attached to rituals and institutions the heretics criticised. Moreover, sources circulated only in handwritten copies. The lack of a print culture, and a concomitant information revolution such as that sweeping Western Europe, guaranteed that Maximos's translations, sermons and polemics, the Church's pedagogical mission or the teachings of its critics would reach but a small number of people. The only press was that founded by Ivan IV and Makarii in 1553 and run by Kremlin deacons Ivan Fedorov and Petr Mstislavich. It printed six anonymous scriptural texts, and Fedorov's 'The Acts and Letters of the Apostles' (1564) and 'Book of Hours' (1565). Fedorov left in 1568 for Lithuania, one report saying that a mob, incited by clergy, burnt his press. However, that press produced thirteen more works either of Scripture, liturgical books or menologies between 1568 and 1606.[180]
Church and state
Soon after 1504 Iosif Volotskii exalted Moscow's ruler, utilising the double- edged maxims of the deacon Agapetus to Byzantine Emperor Justinian I. A familiar text within Orthodoxy, it taught that a ruler deserved the obedience of his subjects if he upheld Orthodox notions of virtue and justice. Iosif was the first to celebrate Moscow's emergence in a way that explored its implications for the relationship between Church and state. In 1519 Maximos referred Vasilii III to Justinian I's view that the spiritual power of the Church and the political power of the state must be in harmony.[181] Makarii reiterated this principle in crowning Ivan IV tsar in 1547. Modelled on Byzantine rites, the rite proclaimed the ruler's office divine, meaning that it involved sacerdotal obligations and the duty to uphold the faith. In 1561 the patriarch of Constantinople recognised Ivan's title and Fedor's imperial coronation in 1584 ended with a procession through Moscow. Like the Palm Sunday and Epiphany processions, its imperial imagery was steeped in Christian humility. To restore harmony between ranks of ruler and head of Church, Boris Godunov, acting for Tsar Fedor, in 1586 importuned Patriarch Joachim of Antioch, then visiting Moscow for alms, to arrange a synod to elevate Metropolitan Iov of Moscow to the rank of patriarch. Nothing happened, so when Patriarch Jeremiah II of Constantinople came to Moscow for alms in 1589, Boris detained him until he consecrated Iov as patriarch and proclaimed the Russian tsarstvo the third Rome. In May 1590 a synod, including all the Eastern patriarchs, confirmed Iov's ordination.[182] The reality of Iov's dignity was more tenuous. In 1448 Grand Prince Vasilii II had initiated Iona's installation as metropolitan. His successors also decided who became metropolitan or patriarch, oversaw his choice of prelates and often intervened to elevate or depose them. They proceeded more cautiously in ecclesiastical matters. In 1479 Metropolitan Gerontii retired to the Simonovskii monastery and refusedto hold services, to protest against Ivan III's interference in the consecration of the Dormition cathedral. Ivan had to come to him before he would return. But when Gerontii repeated the tactic in 1483, it failed to evoke the same response. Subsequently, rulers intervened more boldly in internal affairs of the Church, Ivan IV especially so, but such acts still resembled Byzantine notions of a harmony of spiritual and secular power. Ivan IV shattered this image when in 1569 he had Metropolitan Filipp killed. It was then remarkable that in 1590 a monk of the Solovetskii monastery wrote a life of Filipp proclaiming him a saint, and used Agapetus's words to condemn Ivan for martyring him.[183]
Time of Troubles
The Church found the Time of Troubles perplexing. Patriarch Iov, who had helped Godunov become tsar, was deposed by the first pretender. Reflecting on this in i606, the monk Terentii of the Kremlin Annunciation church described a dream in which the Lord lamented that there was no true tsar, patriarch, clergy or people in His 'new Israel'.[184] When Prince Vasilii Shuiskii overturned the pretender at the end of i606, he selected Germogen (Hermo- gen) as patriarch. Germogen was to lead resistance to the Polish occupation of Moscow and crown Michael Romanov tsar in 1613. The careers of his rival, Metropolitan Filaret of Rostov, and of Avraamii Palitsyn, the monk-narrator of the ordeal of the Trinity-Sergius monastery during the smuta (Time of Troubles), however, better typified the conflicted loyalties of prelates. Filaret had been Fedor Nikitich, the doyen of the Romanov family, thus related by marriage to Ivan IV In 1600 Tsar Boris tonsured him to end his political life. The first pretender freed Filaret, making him metropolitan of Rostov; the second pretender installed him as patriarch, a rival to Germogen. When his candidacy collapsed, Filaret negotiated with King Sigismund of Poland to make Sigis- mund's son Wladyslaw tsar. Filaret was in a Polish jail when Russian forces liberated Moscow and crowned his son Michael. Palitsyn, a failed serviceman, became a monk no earlier than 1597 and in 1608 was cellarer of the Trinity- Sergius monastery. Early in Michael's reign, he wrote a tale of the smuta. Its core was a description of a siege of the monastery, September 1608-January 1610, by the second pretender and the Poles. Authentic details, visions and miracles, and an anti-Polish patriotism informed its narrative. Yet, during the siege Palitsyn was in Moscow, intriguing to replace Shuiskii with Wladyslaw. For a time he favoured Sigismund's candidacy. The Polish occupation, however, consolidated for ordinary folk a faith-based national consciousness. Konrad Bussow, a German eyewitness, wrote that on 29 January 1611 commoners, resentful of Polish mockery of their services and dishonour to their saints, besieged them in the Kremlin. That spring, after the Poles forbade the Palm Sunday ritual, an angry crowd staged its version of the feast. What once was an elite affair had become a popular celebration in which an ersatz tsar, symbolically the humble Christ, led the Church, symbolised by Patriarch Germogen, to the Jerusalem chapel of the Intercession church, a symbolic renewal of the promise of salvation.[185]
16
The law
RICHARD HELLIE
There were significant changes in the law in this period. First, it completed the evolution from a dyadic process to a triadic process. Second, it made significant progress in the shift from a law based primarily on oral evidence to one based on written evidence. Third, it featured four major law codes, Sudebniki, which were major advances over what Russia had known previously.
The medieval legal compilation, the Russkaia pravda, which was initiated in 1016 and was completed in the 1170s, remained the 'fundamental law' of Russia through to 1549. What follows is a summary of the provisions of the Pravda.[186] This will be used for comparison to illustrate the evolution of middle Muscovite law, as the era of the Sudebniki is sometimes called.
Russkaia pravda
The Pravda began as a court handbook to facilitate the protection of the people of Novgorod against mercenary Viking oppression. Accretions added around 1072 by Iaroslav's sons, probably based on estate codes, were motivated by an attempt to protect representatives of the princely administration and their property with sanctions of various fines for homicide or theft or destruction of princely property. The so-called 'Statute of Vladimir Monomakh' (1113-25) dealt particularly with debt. Accretions added during the reign of Vsevolod around 1176 included a 'slavery statute' (in which it was observed that a slave was not an animal, but had human characteristics - 'a to est' ne skot'), plus articles on court procedure, penal law and inheritance.
The Pravda was quite thorough on the matter of evidence. Witnesses could be either an eyewitness (vidok) or character/rumour witness (poslukh). Direct evidence, such as the testimony of a kidnapped or stolen slave or black and blue marks left by an assault, was considered definitive. The confront- ment/confrontation also produced good evidence. Various forms of divine revelation were also considered possible evidence, such as the oath and ordeal by iron and water. The Pravda was compiled for an oral society in which written evidence was so sparse that it was not worth mentioning.
Inheritance norms were also relatively elaborate. Wills (typically oral) were recognised. Guardianship was permitted. When there were no heirs, property escheated to the prince. Wives could not inherit, and children of female slaves could not inherit. A homestead was passed to the youngest son (presumably as a reward for having looked after the parents) and could not be divided.
Crimes were those against property, plus arson, murder and assault. The ordinary remedies were fines, but in addition banishment and exile were possible, as were confiscation of property, corporal punishment and execution.
The functions of law in the half-millennium Pravda era were the following: to limit the circle of relatives who could get vengeance; to expropriate from the relatives of the deceased for the prince the obligation to punish a killer; to protect citizens from the prince's retinue; to protect society against offenders; to protect the lower classes from the upper classes; to preserve order; and to establish harmony in a multi-ethnic society. The law also took on the obligation of protecting Christianity, preserving social hierarchy and male superiority while protecting helpless women, and enforcing collective responsibility. Law was also a centralising device, extending capital norms throughout the rest of Rus'. The law tried to support institutions of private property and protect commerce and business. One of the main functions of law was to provide financial support for officialdom and, in a minor way, maintain the army. Finally, like all law everywhere, the Russkaia pravda served as a device for resolving conflicts, regulating compensation for damages, and creating a more humane society - replacing the law of the jungle. Below this will be contrasted with the functions of middle Muscovite law.
The sources of the Russkaia pravda have been debated for centuries, with no resolution. Some have looked to Byzantium as the source of inspiration of the Pravda, but in fact not a single article in the Russian code can be traced to a Byzantine document. Scandinavian law might be another source.[187] The logical solution to this problem seems to be to assign authorship of the Pravda to the East Slavs themselves. When problems arose, they knew how to solve them. They could not read Greek, Latin or Swedish, so had nowhere to look for precedents and solution but within themselves.
Another hold-over from Kievan Russian law into this period was Church law. Two documents allegedly from the beginning of the eleventh century must be mentioned. The first was Vladimir's Church Statute.3 An elegantly simple document, it proclaimed a few universals that lasted down into the early modern period. One was that 'Church people' were not subject to state legal jurisdiction. 'Church people' included not only the obvious folk such as metropolitans, bishops, monastery elders, monks and priests, but also society's helpless, such as widows, beggars, wanderers, freedmen and the like. The second document was Iaroslav's Church Statute, which gave the Church jurisdiction over family law and numerous aspects of communal relations, what sometimes has been determined a usurpation of communal law.4 The latter was quite complex, and not destined to last very long. It was soon replaced by the Rudder or Pilot's Book (the Kormchaia kniga), translations into Church Slavonic of the Byzantine Nomocanon, the Church law.5 The Rudder began to be used in the last quarter of the thirteenth century and assumed the areas of jurisdiction that earlier had been claimed by Iaroslav's Church Statute. In addition to the Nomocanon, the Kormchaia kniga contained Byzantine civil law, such as the Ekloga and the Procheiros nomos.
Perhaps the major evolution between the Russkaia pravda and middle Muscovite law was that the legal process changed from a dyadic one to a triadic one.6 The dyadic legal process is a feature of societies that are largely consensual with minimal government. In such societies 'the state' offers judicial conflict resolution services for a fee. However, 'the state' has no or minimal interest in the judicial process other than the fee it generates for its official. 'The state' does not originate or prosecute cases, has no or few enforcement mechanisms, and has no jails. In such legal processes the aggrieved in both 'civil' and 'criminal' cases (the distinction did not exist) initiates the case as plaintiff, and the defendant is obliged to respond. The entire process is accusatorial, with
3 Kaiser, Laws of Rus', pp. 42-4.
4 Ibid., pp. 45-50.
5 Denver Cummings (trans.), The Rudder (Pedalion) of the Metaphorical Ship of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of the Orthodox Christians (Chicago: Orthodox Christian Education Society, 1957).
6 Daniel H. Kaiser, The Growth ofthe LawinMedievalRussia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). For much greater detail on the dyadic-triadic evolution, see his unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, 'The Transformation of Legal Relations in Old Rus' (Thirteenth to Fifteenth Centuries)', University of Chicago, 1977.
the 'plaintiff' bearing the entire burden of carrying the case forward. If the defendant fails to respond, he/she loses the case by default and must pay the fine decreed by the official acting as judge. Failure to pay the fine in such a society resulted in enslavement or banishment. The twenty-first-century model of dyadic law is international law and the World Court, where potential litigants appear only if they want to.
The triadic legal process is much different. The state has an interest in the case, and has officials to move the case along. The state itself is likely to initiate 'criminal cases', and, as the process becomes inquisitional, the official/judge sometimes assumes the role ofprosecutor. In a 'civil case', the plaintiff must press his case, but the judge is not obliged to be a neutral arbiter. The state is present to enforce verdicts. The jail, which appeared in Russia around 1550, becomes an important instrument of the process. Besides imprisonment, other sanctions supplement fines, such as corporal and capital punishment and mutilation.
The evolution from the dyadic to the triadic legal process was a gradual one. The consensual society gradually disappeared as Gemeinschaft yielded to Gesellschaft. This process had already made considerable headway in Novgorod, a city of at least 20,000 people before it was annexed by Moscow in 1478; in Pskov, a city of perhaps 15,000 people before it was annexed by Moscow in 1510; and in Moscow itself, which purportedly had 40,000 houses in the first half of the sixteenth century. The 'great break' in the move to the triadic legal process occurred in the 1520s, when law and order broke down throughout much of Muscovy, and what remained of the consensual society went with it. Numerous petitions were submitted to the capital demanding that action be taken against crime. In response, Moscow sent agents to the provinces to stop the crime wave. This brought the state directly into the criminal process in a way inconceivable earlier. From this time on the triadic process reigned supreme.
This was preceded by another series of events which had a major impact on the course of the law. At the end of the fifteenth century and in the first decade of the sixteenth century, three independent strands came together whose second-order consequence had a lasting impact on Russia.[188] The first issue was the dynastic controversy over who should succeed Ivan III, which was resolved at the end of the fifteenth century in favour of the son of his second marriage, Vasilii III. The second issue was that of the so-called Judais- ers, a group of dissident clergymen who adhered to many of the tenets of the
Old Testament but also represented advanced knowledge in Muscovy. Their adherents worked their way into the entourage of Ivan III, but were finally purged at Church councils at the outset of the sixteenth century. The third issue involved the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in the world. Since the middle of the fourteenth century the Church, and especially monasteries, had been accumulating lands, and by 1500 owned close to a third of all the populated land of Muscovy. This brought the Church in a major way into 'the world', which offended purists who believed that the role of the Church should be the salvation of souls, not the accumulation of property. The camps were divided into non-possessors/non-acquirers andpossessors/acquirers. The former were also called 'the trans-Volga [north of the Volga] elders' and were led by Nil Maikov Sorskii. Their major antagonist was the elder of the Volokolamsk monastery, Iosif (Ivan Sanin). The trans-Volga elders were defeated at the same councils which liquidated the Judaisers. Iosif was the victor in all three contests: the dynastic succession, Judaiser controversy and the issue of Church lands. Out of gratitude to Ivan III and Vasilii III, over the course of several tortured years he reformulated teachings of the Byzantine deacon Agapetus (fl. 527-48) into the doctrine 'in his body the sovereign is a man, but in his authority he is like God'.[189] This Russian version of the divine rights of kings underpinned Russian law and the monarchy down to its fall in 1917, and was then taken up in another format by the Soviets. For our purposes here, the Iosifite slogan, which was widely debated at the time and known to many people, served to legitimise Moscow's formalisation of the triadic legal system.
Before commencing the discussion of the Muscovite Sudebniki, a few words must be said about two other previous Russian law codes, the Pskov Judicial Charter (120 articles compiled between 1397 and 1467) and the Novgorod Judicial Charter (42 articles compiled sometime shortly after Moscow's 1478 annexation of the republic).[190] They represent the best of north-west Russian law of the time, which was considerably more advanced than the contemporary law of Muscovy.
The Pskov Judicial Charter
The Pskov Judicial Charter had its origins in the Russkaia pravda, in laws by rulers Aleksandr (r. 1327-30, 1332-7) and Konstantin (r. 1407-14), in decrees of the popular assembly (veche) and town ruling council (gospoda), and in Pskov customary or common law. It was one of the most important sources of the Muscovite Sudebnik of 1497. In Pskov the transition from dyadic to triadic law was under way, but by no means complete. The transition was evident in the office of the 'police officer, bailiff, guard' (pristav, from the verb pristaviti - to bring, to deliver, to issue an order, to appoint), who had the obligation to investigate criminal offences. The plaintiff was expected to be with him during an investigation, when he was his assistant in prosecuting his case.[191] He represented society, the community and the political authorities who appointed him (the prince and the mayor) when he witnessed agreements, investigated criminal offences, arrested a thief or debtor to enforce appearance in court and when he served as executioner.[192]
If it is accurate to generalise that the Russkaia pravda concentrated on procedural and criminal law, then by contrast one may state in summary that the Pskov statute was concerned primarily with civil norms: contract, property, inheritance and the legal status of the peasant.
Because landownership was almost irrelevant in Kievan Rus', the Pravda hardly distinguished immoveable from moveable property. Apparently urban property conflict resolution was not deemed sufficiently significant to codify. The situation was obviously different in Pskov, where the distinction between immoveable property and moveable property was sanguine.
By the fifteenth century the hereditary estate (votchina) was well established in Pskov. The law distinguished various forms of hereditary estate on the basis of who owned it (princely, monastic, boyaral, clan) and on the basis of how it had come into being (purchase or grant from the ruler). Pskov law theoretically permitted the sale of any property, moveable or immoveable. Land, however, was rarely a commodity in late medieval and early modern Russia because members of the seller's clan had the right to inherit the estate and could buy it back almost without any restrictions. This greatly inhibited the mobilisation of land because the market was suffocated by the redemption restrictions. In Pskov a land sale contract had to specify the last date on which a seller or his heirs could redeem a hereditary estate.[193] This was a modest concession to the market, but fundamentally the interest of the clan triumphed. Even the seller himself could redeem immoveable property unless he foreswore the right to do so in his sale document. The clan also could sue for the return of land willed to outsiders without its consent. Individualism was almost unheard of anywhere in Russia until after the mid-seventeenth century, but property law was just another factor hindering the development of individualism, in this case in the interest of the clan as a collective.
From a legal economic history perspective, an interesting provision allowed the possessor and tiller of land to gain ownership of the property after four or five years. Even if an owner had written documents on such land, he lost it if he did not use it for half a decade.[194] This did not apply to forests, where written documents were supreme. The goal here was to keep agricultural land in production. If an owner failed to do so, he could lose it to someone who would. This provision was frequently resorted to in suits.
The law of Pskov strove to protect the interests of owners. A sale made while drunk was void should either seller or buyer challenge it when sober.[195]A seller had to guarantee that the item being sold was not stolen.[196] Almost astonishingly advanced was the declared right of a buyer to void the transaction if the item was defective.[197] The Russkaia pravda stated that a finder owned whatever he had found, but Pskov legislation provided for the loser to sue the finder, who had to prove that he had not stolen the item in contention.[198] This evolution made sense, because in Kiev documentation was nearly absent and unreliable oral testimony would have had to have been resorted to, whereas Pskov had a much more sophisticated legal climate with the result that the costs of protecting the rights of the owner were bearable.
The Pskov law of contract was the most sophisticated in this period. The Pravda did not know written contracts, all were oral in the presence of witnesses. Pskov, however, prohibited oral contracts for over a rouble.[199] Pskov knew four kinds of contracts: (1) Oral. (2) A written document called a zapis', a copy ofwhich was preserved in the Trinity cathedral archive. Such a document could not be disputed in court. (3) Another written document, the riadnitsa, which was a record of monies paid, loans repaid, filed in the Trinity archive. This also could not be contested. (4) Something called a doska, etymologically probably something written on a tablet or board, but by the fifteenth century a private document not filed in the Trinity archive and something which could be contested at trial.[200] None of this entered mainstream Muscovite law.
Pskov provided a generally favourable legal climate for commerce, not surprising in the most 'Western' of the cities of Rus'. Storage, pawns and loans were all protected.[201] Interest on loans (imanie) was legal and no maximum was prescribed. Disputes were to be litigated before the ruling council (gospoda) of Pskov, which is assigned judicial responsibilities in many of the other articles of the statute.[202]
Labour law was introduced in Pskov. A worker (naimit - 'hireling') explicitly had the right to claim his wages. He was a free man who entered an oral contract with his employer whom he could sue. He also could leave whenever he wanted and get paid for the work done. The worker had to announce publicly his claims against the employer.[203]
Russian inheritance law became more sophisticated in the journey from Kiev to Pskov. In the earlier period wills were oral, and they still could be in Pskov. However, while still vital or on his deathbed in the presence of witnesses, a man could give away any moveable or immoveable property to whomever he wanted and that was a legal transaction.[204] However, written testaments came to be preferred, and they could be secured by depositing a copy in the Trinity cathedral archive. When a wife who owned land died, her widower husband could keep her property until his death or remarriage, at which time it reverted to her family. The same applied for a widow. Relatives could claim the clothes of a deceased wife if the widower remarried or of a deceased husband and the widower or widow was obliged to hand them over. Neither was required to take an oath that there were no more clothes. A widow could claim her moveable property from her father-in-law or brother-in-law and they were obligated to hand it over.[205]
'Criminal law' was definitely a minor - although necessary - interest in the Pskov Judicial Charter. Treason, punishable by death, was unknown in the Pravda. The death penalty was also prescribed for a third theft, horse-stealing, theft of property in the Pskov fortress churches (which, incidentally, were used by merchants for storage of their wares), arson and for flight abroad. For violating court decorum, the culprit could be placed in the stocks (dyba) and also fined.[206] Fines were also prescribed for a first and second theft.
The goal of criminal law punishments was primarily fourfold: (1) deterrence, the enunciation of threats to discourage other potential criminals; (2) incapacitation, to protect society by removing dangerous individuals, by capital punishment (note that jails did not exist and that banishment was not employed); (3) by raising the penalties, to discourage recidivism; (4) composition, to compensate those damaged.
Pskov used law to define and regulate society. Particularly important for the long run of Russian history was the condition of the tenant farmer (izornik). He might have taken a loan (pokruta) of grain, tools or cash from his lord, who also gave him land for a garden plot. If the farmer fled without repaying the loan (a form of theft), the master could seize his property. When he died, his obligations passed to his heirs, who got the rest of his estate after the loan was paid back. If he paid back the loan, he could move on St Phillip's Fast Day, 14 November, the ancestor of the Muscovite St George's Day (26 November), which was the major instrument initiating the enserfment of the peasantry in Russia. The izornik had the right to sue in court. In the absence of documents, the lord could make a public declaration of his claims against the izornik, take an oath to prove his claims and provide witnesses to prove that the farmer was a tenant on his property. Then a judgement would be entered against the izornik.[207]
The rules of evidence in Pskov were much more 'modern' than in Kiev. As repeatedly shown above, written evidence was definitely preferred in Pskov, a development that was not to occur in Muscovy until after 1550. Also important in Pskov was the written legal decision (pravaia gramota),[208] a summary of the case with the verdict which was given to the winning litigant. [209] The winner could use this document to advance his claims in case of further disputes. Oral marketplace declarations (zaklikan'ia) about lost items or slaves were still in use, as were zaklikan'ia when a hireling was trying to exact his wages from an employer[210] or a lord was attempting to exact a loan from a peasant.[211] Other important forms of evidence were witnesses and the oath. Property boundary disputes could be resolved by taking an oath on the cross.[212]
Article 37 of the Pskov Judicial Charter laid down the provisions for trials by combat to resolve judicial disputes. Trial by combat by the thirteenth century had driven out the Pravda's ordeal by iron and water.[213] Assistants were permitted at a trial by combat. Should the loser be killed in the combat, the winner could take his armour or whatever else he wore to the field, but nothing more. If the loser survived, he had to pay various fees to the officials present, nothing to the prince, and the winning litigant's claims.[214] By the end of the fifteenth century, trial by combat was being abandoned almost everywhere except in Muscovy in favour of written evidence (see below). In 1410 the Russian Orthodox Church had expressed opposition to trial by combat, supposedly an expression of divine judgement that was obviously a farce when the winner often proved to be the litigant who could hire the strongest brute to fight his case.
Article 71 makes it appear as though a legal profession was developing by forbidding an 'attorney' (posobnik) from conducting more than one trial a day. The term posobnik means 'aide', but one may assume that semi-professional lawyers were emerging because otherwise the issue of someone taking more than one case per day would not arise. The posobnik in the case of representation for women, monks, minors, the aged and the deafinmost cases was just an aide, presumably a relative, not one ofthe attorneys who could only handle one case a day. Further evidence that professional lawyers were beginning to appear can be found in the stipulations that no mayor (posadnik) or other official (vlastel') was permitted to litigate for anyone else. Both were permitted to litigate for themselves, and the mayor could argue a case for a church of which he was an elder.[215] This development was aborted, and sixteenth-century Russian sources only mention slaves who hung around the court offering advice to litigants - one presumes for a fee.[216] Only in 1864 did the Russian autocracy permit a bar to develop.
Pskov developed a sophisticated system of specialised courts. The court of the prince, mayors and hundreders handled the 'big cases': homicide, robbery, theft, assault and battery, fugitive debtors (another form of theft) and landownership disputes. The court of the mayor and judges elected by the popular assembly dealt with contracts. Courts of fraternal societies processed fights, disputes and other conflicts that occurred during feasts.
The legal process in Pskov was primarily a dyadic one. Moreover, there was no distinction between the criminal and civil process. The trial was accusatory, both parties were present, it was not an inquisition with the judge taking a major role. In the horizontal process, citizens brought all cases. The primary goal of procedure was the speedy resolution of conflicts (and, incidentally, the rapid payment of fees). 'Justice' was probably secondary. In petty cases, there was no summons with force at its disposal to bring the accused to trial. After five days, a defendant who did not appear just lost the case.[217]
Besides regulating conflict, a major function of the Pskov Judicial Statute was to provide income for officialdom. Law as a cash source was crucial in the development of triadic relations as the law took on a life of its own independent ofthe regulation of conflict. The apparatus of judges, bailiffs and scribes were all paid. A crucial function of law became the regulation of the income of this horde. Along with this went the issue of bribery. Article 4 forbade the taking of secret, that is, illegal, bribes. To the modern mind, this seems like an oxymoron, but in the East Slavic late-medieval era this was just a form of regulating income-gathering, one of the major functions of the justice system.
Other functions of law in Pskov were to support and protect the Church; to maintain sex distinctions (sex discrimination was noticeably less than in later Muscovite law); and to support the family: a son who would not feed his parents was disinherited automatically.[218]
The Novgorod Judicial Charter
The Novgorod Judicial Charter is extant in only one copy, and is incomplete. It is generally assumed that it had some relation to the law of the Republic of Novgorod, but the extant copy was clearly written under Moscow's dictation after the Republic's annexation in 1478. Sorting out what were Novgorodian norms prior to 1478 from what was mandated by the Moscow occupation forces seems to be impossible - with one exception: a number of articles dictate that the Muscovites and the Novgorodians were to function together. The Novgorodian mayor was to try cases together with the governor sent from Moscow, and the Moscow grand prince had the right to hear appeals of any verdict rendered in Novgorod.[219] Moscow's governor could also hear cases
independently.[220]
Many of the Novgorodian provisions were the same as or variations on what existed in Kiev and Pskov. The judicial process was to be orderly, with no intimidation or use of force.[221] Only two friends could accompany a litigant to trial. If there were more than two, the two allowed had to pay a fine.[222] Anyone who assaulted a bailiff delivering a summons automatically lost the case.[223]Trials had to be expeditious, no longer than a month.[224] Land disputes had to be resolved in two months. In what must have been a Muscovite addition, local officials (a mayor or military commander) were to be fined the ruinous sum of 50 roubles for any delay. The plaintiff had the right to use bailiffs to compel the judge to complete the case on time.[225] In another sign that the Novgorodian legislators were aware of the harm resulting from 'the law's delay' (Shakespeare's phrase), any litigant who failed to show up on time when a case had been postponed automatically lost the case. Similarly, if a litigant had a representative/attorney to represent him and the representative died, the litigant had to choose another one, appear himself or lose the case.[226]These provisions allowed only one postponement of a case.
The central issue of fees for judicial services was spelled out, including the delivery of summonses. The loser had to pay the court fees promptly.[227] A losing defendant had a month to pay the plaintiff, or the latter could seize his person, presumably to enslave him. If the loser hid, then all Novgorod was to punish him.[228] This is a wonderful statement of the essence of the dyadic process: either the loser does what the court decrees, or the entire community will punish him.
A new principle was introduced in land disputes. First, the plaintiff had to sue on the issue of forcible seizure of the property, and then about the issue of actual ownership.[229] This resembled English common law, which prescribed that suits had to be prosecuted one at a time and that they could not be mixed. One might note here also that Novgorod did not adopt the Pskov four- or five- year land possession rule. This was probably for several reasons: Novgorod had far more land than did Pskov, so someone who wanted to farm could easily find land no one else was using. Moreover, Pskovian land was of higher quality and thus more valuable than was the case in the Republic of Novgorod, which overall was more concerned about urban issues than was Pskov.
Another new procedural rule was that a plaintiff had to take an oath on the cross (kiss the cross) before a suit would be heard. Failure to do so by either the plaintiff or the defendant resulted in automatic loss of the case.[230] Oath-taking was not decisive in such cases, but Novgorod had more faith in such evidence than did earlier legislators, which reflects the fact that Christianisation made considerable progress in Russia among the 'masses' between 1350 and 1480. Presumably this was also an 'efficiency' measure: if a superstitious litigant would not even kiss the cross before the case began, it saved the trouble of hearing the case itself. Representation, by an 'attorney' or a relative, was allowed, but the litigant had to kiss the cross first. A son could kiss the cross for his widowed mother, but if he refused, she had to do it at home. In suits over boat ownership, the 'attorney' and witnesses had to kiss the cross.[231]Officials also were required to swear that they would be honest in court.[232]Honesty was mentioned in the context of the Moscow agent's (tiun) court, where it was mentioned that each litigant had to be attended by a Novgorodian bailiff (pristav) and again the matter of the oath was mentioned, this time for the judges.[233] One may assume that the bailiffs were to assist the litigants in matters such as bringing witnesses to court.
In an ambiguous article, the Novgorod Judicial Charter enumerates what today would be termed 'felonies': theft, robbery, battery, arson and homicide, as well as the people who might commit them. The ambiguity lies in whether the accused in these felonies was a slave, or all kinds of other Novgorodians. The issue of slavery - presumably whether or not someone was a slave - was added to the list. Slavery was an extraordinarily prominent institution in Novgorod, and it is surprising that more of the charter is not devoted to that issue.[234] (Perhaps it was in parts that don't survive.) Cases could be initiated by citizens (part of the dyadic process) by swearing an oath and signing the accusation. Once a complaint had been made, officials were to bring the accused to court. Force (sila) could not be used to bring in the accused, one assumes because the defendant was still only accused but not yet found guilty. Officials who employed unnecessary force were themselves guilty of a crime.[235]A similar uncertainty is present in article 37, where the issue seems to be felonies committed by slaves, claims against them leading to enslavement by the victim-plaintiffs and relationship to the previous slave-owner. As in most slave systems, the former slave-owner is liable for the conduct of his slave and must compensate the victim for any wrongs committed by his slave. Slave systems varied in the degree to which they recognised the humanity of slaves (as Pskov said, the slave is not an animal), his responsibility for his actions, his ability to be a witness in court and so on, but all systems held the owner ultimately responsible for the actions of his chattel. Novgorodian law did not allow such an accused to sell himself to a fourth person, who had to assume liability for his chattel's wrongs. Similar ambiguity is inherent in article 38, which seems to say that a slave accused of a crime must kiss the cross or else settle the case without the aid of his owner. One assumes that a slave who opted to defend himself risked becoming the slave of the plaintiff. As many slaves had chosen their owners to whom they sold themselves, the law seems to say that, if the slave wanted to stay with his former master, he had to help him out by mounting a credible defence, or else risk being transferred to an owner he did not know or choose. For a slave who was innocent of the charges, this presented a dilemma - either defend yourself properly, or fall into alien hands.
Immunities
The immunity was an important institution in late-medieval and early modern Russia. The immunity charter was issued by a ruling prince to a private individual or Church body (typically, an important magnate or monastery) granting the immunity holder exemption either from taxation or from the jurisdiction of the issuer's court, or both. There is a major issue in the historiography over whether this signified the weakness of the state authority (the issuer could not do everything himself, so contracted it out to others) or was a sign of state authority strength (as a privilege, the state allowed the immunity holder to reap the financial windfall resulting from the cancellation of selected taxes or from holding trials from which otherwise the state officials would gain income).[236] Vast numbers of immunity charters have been published and their exemptions serve as the primary source for the types of taxation that existed - if the grantee of the immunity was freed from paying such and such a tax, the assumption is that everyone else had to pay it. Here we are more interested, however, in judicial immunities, which again illustrated the types of crimes the issuer of the immunity was interested in. When immunities first appeared, there were no limitations on the exemption from the officials of the princely court and only the landlord holding the immunity could conduct trials in that jurisdiction. But those rights began to be limited from the end of the fourteenth century with the rise of Moscow. Murder and red-handed robbery cases were reserved for the prince's officials. By 1425 so-called 'joint courts', presided over by an official of the grand prince and someone representing the immunity holder, had to issue verdicts and punish thieves and robbers. After the Muscovite civil war, in the 1450s, judicial rights were further limited and murder became universally exempted from immunity jurisdiction, and robbery and red-handed theft were also occasionally exempted.
As a rule, Ivan III limited judicial immunities further as he desired that his own officials should be able to collect the fees from all legal cases. His immunities granted to monasteries at the end of the 1480s and beginning of the 1490s typically reserved for the prince only murder trials, but in such documents issued to lay lords the area of exclusion was larger: murder, robbery and red-handed theft.[237] In the period of Ivan IV's minority, 'the period of boyar rule', the issuance of immunities was renewed to the point that 238 such documents are still extant.[238] Most of them were tax and customs immunities, but many were judicial as well. A really generous judicial immunity would allow a monastery to hold trials involving all offences, a more limited one would reserve the major felonies for the officials of the grand prince. In 1551 all immunities were reviewed and those not renewed lapsed.[239] Immunities were revived during the oprichnina (1565-72), but Ivan's death in 1584 marked the end of an era for immunities.[240] Although both article 43 of the 1550 Sudebnik and article 92 of the 1589 Sudebnik forbade the granting of immunity charters and demanded their recall, limited immunities continued to be granted into the seventeenth century, but essentially they died out with the strengthening of the Muscovite chancellery (prikaz) system.
The Muscovite Sudebniki
Nothing is known about the origins of the Sudebnik of 1497. The succession crisis had just passed. Civil disorders were a frequent reason for the compilation of law in Russia, but almost certainly not that time. A number of rulers liked to see themselves as latter-day Constantines orJustinians, but there is no evidence that the declining Ivan III could be included in those numbers. All we know is that the document is extant and that it initiated certain threads which were to be central in Middle Muscovite law, such as serfdom and the claim that officials could not make law: when the law did not give a precise solution to a precise problem, the case had to be sent to Moscow for resolution. We must also recall that there is only one copy extant of the 1497 Sudebnik, whereas many pre-1550 copies of the Russkaia pravda are still available. The number of surviving texts is assumed to correspond to the use of the relative law codes. The compiler (someone in the circle of Fedor Vasil'evich Kuritsyn) of the code borrowed eleven of its articles from the Pskov Judicial Charter, two from the Russkaia pravda, and a dozen of them from grand-princely orders to provincial governors working on three-year rotations in the 'feeding' system (kormlenie).
The 1550 Sudebnik (two-thirds of which originated in the 1497 code) does not have anyone's signature on it, but the assumption is that it was one of the fruits of attempts to restore order after the chaos of Ivan IV's minority, which included uprisings in Moscow. Around 1550 Ivan's inner kitchen cabinet (known in the literature as 'the chosen council') instituted a number of reforms, both military and judicial. The 100-article Sudebnik was one ofthe reforms. Another seventy-three supplemental articles were added between 1550 and 1607. These 173 articles were the basis of Russian law until the Ulozhenie (Law Code) of 1649, supplemented by the chancelleries' scroll records of their own practices. About fifty copies of the 1550 code are extant.
In 1589 people in the Russian north (the White Sea littoral region, also known as the Dvina Land) decided that they needed a Sudebnik to meet their needs. They produced a short version (fifty-six articles, which were conceived of as an addition to the 1550 code) and an expanded version (231 articles). They might have been ignored were it not for the fact that surviving evidence indicates that the 1589 Sudebnik was used for conflict resolutions whose paper trail ended in Moscow. About 64 per cent of the expanded version came from the 1550 predecessor, a handful of others from various statutes of 1556, and 27 per cent were compiled to meet the needs of the north. They are largely grouped at the end of the code.
The last Sudebnik was presumably compiled in 1606 by the invading Polish forces accompanying False Dmitrii I to the Moscow throne. This 'Composite Sudebnik', as it is known, was probably never used anywhere by anyone - although the fact that it now exists in five copies implies that people were sufficiently interested in it to copy it. The 1606 document made an effort to group the articles into logical categories that comprised twenty-five chapters. The West Russian Lithuanian Statute of 1588 contained twenty-five chapters, and it is possible that some West Russians had a hand in drafting the 1606 code. Incidentally, the great Ulozhenie of 1649 also had twenty-five chapters. The Composite Sudebnik incorporated the 1550 code and its supplements mentioned above, decrees of 1562 and 1572 on princely estates, and laws of 1597, 1602, and 1606 on slaves and peasants. Anachronistically, it ignores the two major 1592 pieces of social legislation: (1) the 'temporary' repeal of the right of peasants to leave their lords on St George's Day (26 November) and (2) the placing of a five-year-statute of limitations on the right to sue for the recovery of fugitive peasants. Peasants were not free in the Rzeczpospolita, and so this was not a 'comparative oversight'. Perhaps the invading Poles hoped to woo the Russian peasants to their side by pitting them against their masters and the officialdom of Boris Godunov. This is something we will never know.
The Sudebniki were primarily court handbooks. Thus it is not surprising that fees which could be charged for judicial services were among their major concern, as well as who those officials were who were entitled to collect the fees.[241] Procedures were prescribed,[242] and almost incidentally the delicts which were subject to the prince's jurisdiction.[243]
The years 1497-1606 witnessed as much change in Russian local administration as any other period one can think of. In the fifteenth century the prince's agent in any locale was his governor (voevoda, namestnik) to govern a precise area on rotation for periods of one to three years. The governor was expected to take in sufficient revenue (called 'feeding' - kormlenie) to allow him to support himself for another period in Moscow, where he probably served in the cavalry.[244] Voevoda-justice was a dyadic process supreme. The governor went to his assignment and took his slaves with him. Depending on his personal energy level, each governor apportioned the duties between himself and his slaves. There are transcripts extant in which all the people in a trial were slaves: the judge, the plaintiff and the accused. To simplify, by 1556 the Moscow-sent governor was phased out, in favour of locally elected officials who were to manage criminal and civil cases. This was not total decentralisation because Moscow demanded that the elected officials report to the capital immediately upon election and then required them to submit records of their practice either annually or biannually. This was how the Poles found the situation when they arrived in 1606. The 1589 Sudebnik still mentioned the voevoda for reasons that no one comprehends.
Also for reasons no one comprehends, the Sudebniki prohibited bribe-taking. Earlier that form of revenue raising was just regulated.[245]
The hordes of officials had their fees spelled out for almost anything imaginable - for holding of trials, for writing and sealing documents, for travelling on foot and on horseback to perform their missions (such as delivering summonses or bringing someone in for trial); for registering loans and slaves. The Sudebniki also prescribed the percentage of suits to be turned over to the court as well as a host of other fees, all of which were to assure that those carrying out Middle Muscovite law would not go hungry.[246]
As mentioned earlier, Russian law especially worried about 'the law's delay'. Expeditious resolution of conflicts and payment ofthe required fees was almost always uppermost in the oral society of 1497,[247] which was becoming increasingly literate after 1550.[248] Delaying the process, which by 1550 had become triadic, was something the state (at least in theory) would not tolerate.[249]
The most elemental point of the Sudebniki was that judges in no way could make law, by interpretation, by analogy, by 'flexibility' or any other means. The judge had to resolve the case in front of him on the basis of what was presented at trial. Any other case had to be sent to Moscow for resolution.[250]The degree of centralisation called for in 1550 is extraordinary: many cases had to be sent to Moscow for final resolution.[251] The 'Agapetus state' (in which the sovereign believed he was God's vicegerent on earth and most of his subjects concurred in that belief) could not tolerate norms being established anywhere other than in Moscow. In the eighteenth century, this led to a clogging of the Russian courts, which was only undone by Alexander II's famous Judicial Reform of 1864.
There were different levels of courts in early modern Russia - local, peasant, provincial, capital, the ruler's court - but there was no system of appeal.[252] The verdict a litigant got was the verdict the litigant was stuck with. The law's assumption (and also its demand) was that the judge was a disinterested person who weighed the testimony and, following the rules, rendered a verdict which any reasonable person in the same circumstances would issue. A litigant could sue ajudge for malfeasance, but that was another matter-which did not reopen the case. Official malfeasance was a major concern in 1550, and much of the code's severe punishments (high fines, public flogging, jailing) were reserved for officials who abused their positions.[253] A litigant also could appeal to the sovereign (grand prince until 1547, tsar after that), and the ruler, employing what we might call his 'Agapetus powers', could reverse the case. That was not spelled out in the law at all, and if such a reversal occurred, it was an expression of his arbitrariness, not because anyone believed he had divine knowledge of the case. Whether this happened, and, if so, how often, is unknown. The law itself in 1550 became frequently an expression of arbitrariness. Instead of laying down a sanction for an offence, it just said that the culprit would be punished as the tsar decreed, a legal expression of the Agapetus state.[254]
The evolution of the rules of evidence is one of the most interesting developments in the Sudebniki. As just mentioned, the society was making a radical transition in this period from one based primarily on oral tradition[255] to one in which written documents could (it is too early to say 'should') play a major role (already seen in the Pskov Judicial Charter). The major force propelling this forward was the introduction of the chancelleries (prikazy) in 1550, which themselves kept records and demanded that their agents in the provinces keep them informed with a constant flow of information. By the i570s-i580s all officials of the Provincial Felony Administration were required to be literate. Those men were elected by their peers from among the ranks of the middle service class, the provincial cavalrymen.
Another form of evidence was divine revelation, such as the casting of lots,[256]the oath,[257] and the judicial duel (pole), the subject of a surprising number of articles.[258] Trial by combat seems to have been almost the premier form of evidence/proof in 1497 and 1550. At some time at the end of the sixteenth century it went out of use. No one knows why, but a good suggestion has been that the introduction of firearms (especially pistols) cast aspersion on notions that whoever was the better shot was the person designated by God as the righteous one. Another factor putting the duel out of business may have been the introduction of the concept of dishonour in the 1550 Sudebnik,[259] which expanded to the point in 1649 that everyone from the lowest slave or peasant to the highest boyar in Muscovy had a dishonour value either stated in the law or based on his governmental compensation entitlement level. Thus instead of having to fight a physical duel, a person who felt he had been dishonoured could go to court and the court would determine whether or not this was so. The oath suffered a decline in prestige as presumably the populace began to have increasing doubts that the Russian Orthodox Church was the sole source of truth. Material evidence (the stolen goods, for example) was used, as were varying forms of human evidence. One was witnesses (presumably primarily eyewitnesses; character, rumour or hearsay witnesses were no longer distinguished),[260] another was the judicial confrontation (the plaintiff had to confront the defendant face to face and repeat his charges). The last form of evidence was the investigation (a special subset of which was the 'general investigation' (poval'nyi obysk) in which an entire community was interrogated about 'Who owned the cow with the crooked horn?'; the litigant who got the most 'votes' won the case).[261]
Primitive societies had troubles deciding what to do with people between the time an accusation was initiated and a court verdict was rendered. Such societies did not have jails to detain the accused, which many would say is punishing the accused before he is found guilty in any case. An alternative to jail was to let a contract to someone to keep chained to the wall a detainee, who then had to pay a 'chaining fee' (pozheleznoe) for the detention as well as somehow pay for his keep (or perhaps have relatives bring him food).[262]The Sudebnik of 1497 provided an alternative: an accused could post bail or satisdation (poruka) in lieu of being chained to a wall.[263]
By 1613 'crimes' and especially punishments differed markedly from what had been the practices in the 1170s. Most of this can be viewed as part of the evolution from the dyadic to the triadic legal process. In the Pravda, 'crimes' were torts in which the wronged was supposed to receive composition and compensation. The more modern notion of 'society' as the real victim was totally absent. The notion that society was the victim of crime became prevalent in the Sudebniki. Then the question arises: how is the criminal to pay his debt to society? Sitting in prison is one answer, but Muscovy did not have prisons until 1550,[264] and they were not used very much for penal incarceration until decades later. Exile and banishment are other useful social sanctions, but are very expensive in labour-short societies such as was Muscovy. The same holds for capital punishment:[265] who can benefit from a dead man (unless he is so heinous that society can tolerate him under no circumstance)? Corporal punishment proved to be the answer.[266] There were any number of forces pushing Muscovy in the direction of corporal punishment savagery (which peaked in the 'Felony Statute' of i663, combining chapters 2i and 22 of the Ulozhenie of 1649), including more 'Western' law such as the West Russian Lithuanian Statutes of 1529,1566 and 1588, but the major impetus was certainly the domestic requirement of 'getting tough' on crime. The Byzantine legal heritage may have played a role in the increasing savagery of Muscovite law, but it is fairly evident that the Mongol hegemony (i237-i480) did not.
Prior to 1497, capital punishment was reserved for few offences. But the 1550 Sudebnik lengthened the list to include some homicides, arson, horse theft, theft from a church, theft of a slave, treason, brigandage, rebellion, recidivism for lesser felonies.[267] The issue of intent did not enter into Muscovite sanctions until the Ulozhenie ofi649. A thiefwith a criminal reputation and apprehended with stolen goods was put to death if accused by five or six men. Plaintiffs' claims were exacted from his property. The 'burden of proof for execution in i550 was expanded to a general inquest of the population. If the inquest recorded that he was a good person, he was to be tried by normal procedures. Regardless, he was to be tortured.[268] If he confessed, he was to be executed. If he failed to confess, he was to be jailed for life. In i589 torture was made more precise: 100 blows with the knout (which certainly would have killed an ordinary person). In 1589, if the inquest reported the accused to be a good person, he was to be acquitted immediately.[269]
Other punishments ranged from flogging with the knout (for a first theft, plus a fine), incarceration, to the old-fashioned fine.[270] A most visible element in the criminal sphere was the increasing introduction of the government. Ordinary subjects could still file complaints, but anything 'interesting' was soon taken over and prosecuted by the state.
The 'Agapetus state' came to believe that it had enhanced responsibilities not only in the political and criminal spheres, but increasingly in all other spheres of life as well. The three factors in any economy are land, labour and capital. By i6i3 the government laid claims to nearly complete control over the first two, and probably would have over capital as well had there been much to control. (See Chapter 23.) Control over land prior to 1480 was primarily a political exercise, not an economic one. Land was so sparsely populated that control over any particular parcel (except in the few urban areas) was hardly something to be contested. Control over large areas was important because the state and its agents could travel around and find people to tax, occasionally to levy military recruits from, and to be present to offer conflict resolution services to on demand. Monasteries were really the sole exception. They could collect rents only from peasants living on their parcels of lands and estates. This was why it was the monasteries which introduced St George's Day to control the mobility of their peasant debtors during the chaotic labour situation after the civil war of 1425-53.
But by the 1497 Sudebnik much had changed. On the issue of land, the government of Ivan III discovered afterthe annexation of Novgorod and the deportation of its landowners that land could be mobilised to enhance its military might. Thus the first 'service-class revolution' was initiated by replacing the Novgorodian landowners with Muscovite cavalrymen, who were assigned service landholdings on which lived about thirty peasant households to pay them rent to enable them to render military service. Each landholding (pomest'e) was tenureable only while service was being rendered; after service ceased, the pomeshchik had to surrender his assigned lands to another serviceman. The system was mentioned in the 1497 Sudebnik.[271] As Moscow grew in size, many of the annexed lands were put into the pomest'e system. In 1556, as part of the campaign to raise troops to annexe the lower Volga (south of Kazan', annexed in i552), the government got the idea that it could demand service from all land (previously service from the other major form of landholding, landownership - the votchina - had been in some respects optional). The 1556 edict prescribed that one outfitted cavalryman had to be provided from each 100 cheti (1 chet' = 1.39 US acres or half a hectare) of populated land.[272] This forced estate owners into the market to hire military slaves to meet their recruiting quotas and the military muster records are full of lists of these slave cavalrymen. By the 1580s perhaps 80 per cent of the military land fund was pomest'e land and it appeared as though the votchina might die out. This did not happen because every pomeshchik's aspiration was to become a votchinnik who could pass his estate to his heirs, which became often practice in the second halfofthe seventeenth century and dejure reality in the eighteenth century. Prior to 1450 East Slavic princes regarded all land in their domains as their personal patrimonial property which they were free to dispose of as they pleased. After 1556, most usable land de facto was land which could be mobilised by the state for military
purposes.[273]
Mobilising the land, the hypertrophic state set about controlling all labour. This began with St George's Day limitations for monastery debtors in the 1450s. That demonstrated what could be done, and in the 1497 Sudebnik it was applied to all peasants.[274] As discussed in considerably greater detail in Chapter 12, in 1592 all peasants were forbidden to move at all. As also discussed in Chapter 12, having decided that it had the power to control the legal status of the peasantry, the state decided that it could alter the status of the slaves. Slaves were the subject of a remarkable number of articles in i497, far more than any other sector of society.[275] Except for emancipations, such dramatic state interventions in the institution of slavery are rare in human history. Full slavery was melded into limited service contract slavery, and then in the i590s the nature of the 'limitation' changed from an antichresis (see Chapter 12) of one year that defaulted to hereditary full slavery upon inability after a year to repay a loan to slavery for the life ofthe owner, followed by compulsory emancipation upon his death. In 1550 the government decreed that able-bodied townsmen had to live in the juridical towns, not on monastery urban property.95 In the 1590s the government decided that it had the right to control the mobility of townsmen (paralleling the control over peasant mobility),96 which culminated in the 1649 Ulozhenie's prohibition against townsmen's leaving their place of urban residence. This is a perfect example of how the 'Agapetus monarchy' developed the maximalist state which found few areas of Russian life where it could not intervene.97 Comparatively, what is interesting is the use of law in this evolution. In America, for example, law is often seen as a very conservative institution that is the codification of a reality that sometimes has already passed. In early modern Russia, on the other hand, law became the statement of social programmes that the state was hoping to enact; and it usually could enforce most of what it had enacted. In this respect Muscovy was the perfect ancestor of the Soviet Union, a radical political organisation with a programme of social change it was constantly attempting to enact. The result was the first service-class revolution.
A few more words need to be said about landed property. The conditional service landholdings (pomest'ia) have been mentioned. Hereditary estates (votchiny) were of various kinds: princely, boyaral, monastery, clan, granted and purchased. Each had its own rules for sale and the possibility of redemption. Monastery estates in practice were inalienable, but most votchiny could be given away, willed by testament, sold, exchanged and mortgaged. In reality, landed property was rarely mobilised in the economy because service landholdings were state property reserved for military service and private hereditary estates could be redeemed for up to forty years after sale at the price the seller had received for it.98 Thus it made no sense for any private person to buy land, and as a result it is impossible to find agricultural land prices in Muscovy.99
By the end of the fifteenth century the land in Muscovy was beginning to fill up, and contests over landownership became more frequent. In the interests
95 1550 Sudebnik, art. 91; 1589 Sudebnik, arts. 184,188, 189. This had no 1497 precedent.
96 Richard Hellie (ed. and trans.), Muscovite Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Syllabus Division, 1967 and 1970), pp. 33-47.
97 Richard Hellie, 'The Expanding Role of the State in Russia', in Jarmo T. Kotilaine and Marshall T. Poe (eds.), Modernizing Muscovy: Reform and Social Change in Seventeenth- Century Russia (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 29-56.
98 1550 Sudebnik, art. 85. This had no 1497 antecedent. See also 1589 Sudebnik, arts. 164,165.
99 Richard Hellie, The Economy and Material Culture of Russia 1600-1725 (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1999), pp. 391-3, 411.
ofefficiency seen throughout this chapter, the i497 Sudebnik imposed statutes of limitations on the filing of suits over landownership between monasteries, members of the service class, and peasants (three years) and between the sovereign, monasteries and servicemen (six years).[276] Here one can see the ancestor of the five-year statute of limitations on the filing of suits for the recovery of fugitive serfs of i592. There were no statutes of limitations on the filing of suits for moveable property, including slaves.
The rules of inheritance were spelled out in the Sudebniki. An oral or written will had precedence. In its absence, a son inherited. Next was a daughter, then other members of the clan. Failing that, property escheated to the prince.[277]
As observed by D. P. Makovskii some decades ago, prior to Ivan's oprich- nina (1565-72) Muscovy was developing into a commercial society.[278] This is evident in the law, where numerous articles deal with loans.[279] Of particular interest is the provision permitting borrowing with the payment of interest.[280]New legislation on branding horses may or may not reflect an increasing commoditisation of horses.[281]
By 1613 Russian law had changed considerably from the law of the late Middle Ages, but elements of continuity must also be stressed. First and foremost was the fact that law remained a major revenue-raising device for officialdom. Law remained a device for cleaning up social messes, be they felonies or civil disputes. The major distinction between the earlier era and the pre-Romanov decades was that the distinction between felonies - in which the state took an increasing interest - and civil disputes, about which the state ordinarily could not care less, was heightened by changes in the essence of society that required a change in the legal process from a dyadic one to a triadic one as well as changes in the nature of the state power, from a relatively benign and weak organism with few pretensions, to an increasingly assertive autocracy that recognised few limitations on its authority. This was facilitated by increasing literacy both in the capital and in the provinces among the handfuls of people who mattered and who were essential for keeping the records required for keeping track of slave ownership, land allocation and possession, military service and compensation, foreign relations and accusations of domestic treason, post roads, and what happened at trial. Law still had the function of determining inheritance and preserving male superiority and regime dominance, but almost to an astonishing extent it became the government's mouthpiece for directing social change towards a rigidly stratified, almost-caste society. Law became a major instrument in preserving what the legislators wanted to keep from the past while simultaneously serving as a major instrument in assisting change in desired directions.
Political ideas and rituals
MICHAEL S. FLIER
Shortly afterthe dedication of Moscow's cathedral church in 1479, Grand Prince Ivan III accused Metropolitan Gerontii of contravening ritual tradition by leading the cross procession around the church counterclockwise (protiv solntsa) instead of clockwise (po solon') during the dedication service. Perhaps Ivan was motivated by superstition, given the collapse of the previous reconstruction. Or perhaps he was influenced by the Catholic-orientated entourage around his second wife, Sophia Palaeologa, a former ward of the Pope. Whatever the cause, he forbade the consecration of any church in Moscow for three years while he investigated previous practice. Finding no conclusive protocols, he was obliged to recant in 1482 to prevent the metropolitan's resignation.[282] This rare personal episode involving ritual and political control reveals a connection that merits further enquiry.
Ritual, with its attendant symbols and actions, powerfully expresses the ways in which members of a society, especially its elites, see themselves and wish themselves to be seen. The present chapter seeks to describe and analyse the function of ritual in representing political ideas in Muscovy before the seventeenth century. Political ritual refers to that set of conventionalised events ruled by protocol and consisting of separate acts performed in public whose purpose is to confirm or restore links to a commonly held political concept or belief for the ritual's participants and observers. The interlocking spheres of politics and religion in medieval society presuppose the presentation ofpolitical ideology within a spiritual framework. Religious symbolism approximates the harmony of political structure with the providence of God.
As with any rite, the successful performance of a ritual is understood to be transformative. A grand prince is made tsar; water is made holy to benefit those in need of grace; a subject is confirmed in his loyalty and politically inferior position; a society is rededicated to the possibility of resurrection after death. Such are the psychological and spiritual transformations rituals bring about.
The political life of Muscovite society was replete with rituals. Perhaps the most daunting was kissing the cross (krestnoe tselovanie) in a church to solemnify an oath or declaration as true. Princes forged alliances, confirmed treaties and attested wills by kissing the cross. Litigants in court disputes without clear evidence faced the terrifying prospect of standing before the cross, kissing it the fateful third time, and swearing the truth of their testimony. Frequently they opted for other forms of resolution.2
The ritual of petition produced different relationships. In describing ritual practice at the Muscovite court in the early sixteenth century, Sigismund von Herberstein, the ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor, wrote:
whenever anyone makes a petition, or offers thanks, it is the custom to bow the head; if he wishes to do so in a very marked manner, he bends himself so low as to touch the ground with his hand; but ifhe desires to offer his thanks to the grand-duke for any great favour, or to beg anything of him, he then bows himself so low as to touch the ground with his forehead.3
This ritual, combined with references to petitioners as slaves (kholopy) and the ruler as master (gosudar'), convinced many foreigners, including Herberstein, that Muscovy was a despotic state. Bit' chelom 'to beat one's forehead' was, after all, the Muscovite term for paying obeisance and the source for chelobitie (chelobit'e) 'petition', literally beating of the forehead.
Cross kissing was a Kievan and Muscovite ritual that confirmed a relationship of obeisance before God, rendering all persons, high and low, equal before their creator. The beating of the head, by contrast, was a ritual that confirmed an asymmetrical relationship, rendering petitioner and petitioned unequal in status and affirming the political and social hierarchy of Muscovite life.
Muscovy and the ideology of rulership
The correlation of ritual and political ideas begins with the historical transformation of Muscovy and the development of a myth to account for it. By
2 Giles Fletcher, 'Ofthe Russe Commonwealth', in Lloyd E. Berry and Robert O. Crummey (eds.), Rude and Barbarous Kingdom: Russia in the Accounts of Sixteenth-Century English Voyagers (Madison: University ofWisconsin Press, 1968), pp. 174-5; Nancy Shields Kollmann, By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 119-20.
3 Sigismund von Herberstein, Notes upon Russia., 2 vols., trans. R. H. Major (New York: Burt Franklin, 1851-2), vol. ii, pp. 124-5.
the mid-fifteenth century, Moscow was adjusting to an altered position in the world of Eastern Orthodoxy. Rejecting the Union of Florence and Ferrara, the Muscovites refused to consult the Greeks when selecting their new metropolitan in 1448 and in effect formed an autocephalous Orthodox Church. Thereafter, the Muscovite Church promulgated an anti-Tatar, anti-Muslim campaign in the chronicles in counterpoint to the pure Christian tradition represented by Moscow.[283] Moscow was increasingly portrayed as inheriting the legacy of Kievan Rus' and with it, the myth of the Rus'ian Land, which was ultimately incorporated into the myth of the Muscovite ruler.[284] Constantinople's capture by the Turks in 1453 and the seemingly providential expansion ofthe Muscovite principality thereafter opened new vistas for Ivan III when he ascended to the throne in i462.By 1480, Archbishop Vassian Rylo was urging him to become the great Christian tsar and liberator of the Rus'ian Land, the 'New Israel', in its struggle against the Golden Horde, the 'godless sons of Hagar'.[285]
The ideology that crystallised in Muscovy during the reigns of Ivan III (14621505), his son, Vasilii III (1505-33) and grandson, Ivan IV (1533-84) presented the Byzantine notion of the emperor-dominated realm as the Kingdom of Christ on Earth. If allusion to Agapetus gave the ruler absolute political authority over the state ('though an emperor in body be like all other men, yet in power he is like God'), the Epanagoge of Patriarch Photius and other Byzantine political literature known in Muscovy at the time broadly demarcated spheres of authority apportioned among temporal and spiritual leaders.[286] Church polemicists such as Iosif Volotskii in TheEnlightener praised the power and authority of the grand prince, but insisted on the mobilisation of wise advisers - temporal and spiritual - against authority that transgressed the laws of God.[287]
Muscovite rulership and the Kievan legacy were expressed most clearly in the invented tradition of The Tale of the Princes of Vladimir (c.1510). The
Roman genealogy that traced the Riurikid dynasty back to Prus, a kinsman of Augustus Caesar, may have been included to assure Europeans that the use of the term 'tsar' for the Muscovite ruler was legitimate. The Monomakh legend provided a Byzantine pedigree for Muscovite Orthodox rulership in the form of concrete royal symbols of authority sent by Byzantine emperor Constantine Monomachos to Vladimir Monomakh to be used at the latter's installation as Kievan grand prince.[288]
In theory the Muscovite ruler had unlimited power and authority in rendering God's will, but in practice he governed with the support and close involvement of a secular and ecclesiastical elite.[289] It was this ruling elite that faced the imminent Apocalypse at the approach of 1492, the portentous year 7000 in the Byzantine reckoning. In this context, the city of Moscow itself was reconceptualised in Orthodox Christian terms as the New Jerusalem and Muscovy came to be understood as the embodiment of the Chosen People, whose ruler chosen by God was prepared to lead them to salvation.[290]
Ritual and setting
In three centuries Moscow had evolved from a mere outpost to a city with a walled fortress and pretensions to greatness. By the 1470s, the earlier structures built to mark the rise of a city - limestone walls, stone churches, royal palace and halls - were dilapidated.[291] Ivan III, better than any of his immediate predecessors, understood how setting and ritual might serve to integrate the notions of the emerging Muscovite state and a ruling elite. In an impressive environment, solemn rituals could elevate the person of the ruler and help confirm his position at the apex of society. There was no place more suitable for rituals of high purpose than the Kremlin, the fortress of Moscow.
Cathedral Square was one of the semiotically most charged spaces within the Kremlin (see Figure 17.1). It was bounded on the north by the cathedral
| Figure 17.1. Cathedral Square, Moscow Kremlin KEY: 1. Cathedral of the Dormition |
| 2. Cathedral of Archangel Michael |
| 3. Cathedral of Annunciation |
| 4. Faceted Hall |
| 5. Golden Hall |
| 6. Beautiful (Red) Porch |
| 7. Palace |
| 8. Bell Tower 'Ivan the Great' |
| 9. Tainik Tower |
of the Dormition (primary cathedral church), on the east by the bell tower 'Ivan the Great', on the south by the cathedral of the Archangel Michael (royal necropolis), and on the west by the cathedral of the Annunciation (palace church), the Golden Hall (throne room), the adjacent Beautiful (Red) Porch and Staircase, and the Faceted Hall (reception hall).
The cathedral of the Dormition (1475-9) was designed by Bolognese architect Aristotele Fioravanti after the Muscovite effort to rebuild resulted in a disastrous collapse in 1474.[292] Fioravanti reshaped the older Vladimir Dormition plan in a Renaissance compositional key, maintaining modified medieval Vladimir-Suzdal' features on the exterior. He created a dramatic southern portal facing Cathedral Square, harmonised the dimensions of the bays, flattened the apses, and produced a characteristically north-eastern limestone facade that prompted contemporaries to describe the building as though carved 'from a single stone'.[293] He opened up the internal space to the highest vaults, eliminating the gallery that would traditionally have ensconced the royal family. The place of the grand prince was relocated to the ground floor near the southern portal, which became an effective alternative point of egress for the ruler during processions.
The Metropolitan's Pew, mentioned in many of the Dormition's rituals, was apparently installed between 1479 and the mid-1480s in a space adjacent to the south-east pillar of the nave facing the iconostasis.[294] More than seven decades passed before the self-standing Tsar's Pew was installed on 1 September 1551, four years after Ivan IV was officially crowned as the first tsar. Better known as the Monomakh Throne, the Pew boasted twelve carved wooden panels based on excerpts from the Monomakh legend taken from The Tale of the Princes of Vladimir. Apart from military forays against the Byzantines, the panels depicted Monomakh in consultation with a boyar council, the arrival of the royal Byzantine regalia in Kiev, and their use in the crowning of Vladimir Monomakh as grand prince, all messages immediately relevant to Muscovite ideology. The theme of Jerusalem was represented in the inscription around the cornice, which reproduced God's injunction about dynastic continuity and wise rulership to King David and King Solomon. Furthermore, the composition of the Pew bore a clear affinity to the Dormition's Small Zion, a silver liturgical vessel representingJerusalem's Holy Sepulchre and carried in solemn processions.16
The cathedral of Archangel Michael (1505-8) was designed by another Italian architect, Alevisio the Younger. He retained the asymmetrical bays from the earlier medieval plan, but added striking Renaissance ornament, including limestone articulation against a red-brick facade and distinctive, large scallop- shell gables signifying rebirth. This was fitting symbolism for a site devoted to the memory of the royal dynasty, whose sarcophagi occupied the southern and later northern part of the nave and a side chapel near the sanctuary
The cathedral of the Annunciation (1484-9) had been rebuilt by native Psko- vian architects, who skilfully combined the basic Suzdalian articulated cube with its blind arcade frieze and ogival gables together with brickwork and design redolent of Pskov and Novgorod, a stylistic marriage signalling Muscovite success in 'the gathering of the Rus'ian lands'.
The Faceted Hall (1487-91) was designed by Italians Marco Ruffo and Pietro Antonio Solario in the style of a northern Italian Renaissance palazzo, but with an obvious allusion to its namesake in Novgorod. Named after the carved facets on the eastern facade facing the Square, it was notable for its internal design with a huge central pier supporting groined vaults. The pier served as a staging area for official receptions and banquets hosted by the grand prince. The Faceted Hall is often mentioned in foreign accounts as the site of numerous rituals of status and conciliation as regards foreign audiences, seating protocol, the tasting and distribution of food and the proposing of toasts.17
The Golden Hall was planned by Ivan III but completed by his son, Vasilii III, in 1508. Reached off a great landing, the Beautiful (Red) Porch overlooking Cathedral Square, the Golden Hall consisted of a vestibule, where dignitaries gathered, and the throne room. The name was apparently inspired by the Chrysotriklinos, the Golden Hall throne room of the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople. Severely damaged in the Moscow fire of 1547, the Golden Hall was completely rebuilt by order of the newly crowned tsar, Ivan IV and decorated with elaborate and controversial murals that referred to allegories and historical events important to Muscovite ideology.18
16 I. A. Sterligova, 'Ierusalimy kak liturgicheskie sosudy v Drevnei Rusi', in Ierusalim v russkoi kul'ture, ed. Andrei Batalov and Aleksei Lidov (Moscow: Nauka, 1994), p. 50; Michael S. Flier, 'The Throne of Monomakh: Ivan the Terrible and the Architectonics of Destiny', in James Cracraft and Daniel Rowland (eds.), Architectures of Russian Identity 1500 to the Present (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 30-2.
17 Herberstein, Notes, vol. ii, pp. 127-32; Richard Chancellor, 'The First Voyage to Russia', in Berry and Crummey (eds.), Rude and Barbarous Kingdom, pp. 25-7.
18 O. I. Podobedova, Moskovskaia shkola zhivopisi pri Ivane IV:Raboty v Moskovskom Kremle 40-kh-j0-kh godov XVI v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1972), pp. 59-68; David B. Miller, 'The
The major architectural innovation beyond the Kremlin itselfwas the church of the Intercession on the Moat, later known as St Basil's cathedral. Built in Beautiful (Red) Square in celebration of Ivan IV's victory over the Kazan' khanate in 1552, the church underwent a slow progression in 1555 from individual shrines to a composite set of correlated chapels, which, taken together, resemble Jerusalem in microcosm.19 Completed in 1561 on a site adjacent to the central marketplace and the world of the non-elite, the Intercession stood as an antipode to the core structures of Cathedral Square behind the Kremlin walls.
In 1598 / 9, just to the north of the Intercession, a raised round dais was built in stone, possibly replacing an earlier wooden structure.20 Called Golgotha (Lobnoe mesto 'place of the skull'), it was a site for major royal proclamations, including declarations of war, announcements of royal births and deaths and the naming of heirs apparent, perhaps replacing the original city tribune. It was also used as a station for major cross processions led by the chief prelate and the tsar, rituals featuring the palladium of Moscow, the icon of the Vladimir Mother of God, in honour of her benevolent protection. Golgotha, by its very name and placement near the Intercession 'Jerusalem', made manifest Moscow's self-perception as the New Jerusalem.
The political rituals that realised most directly the myth of the Muscovite ruler and his realm were either contingent, prompted by circumstance, or cyclical, governed by the ecclesiastical calendar. They were direct, requiring the presence of the ruler, or indirect, referring to his office. In addition to the actual protocols of ceremony, the locus of performance, whether inside or outside Moscow and its golden centre, provided significant points of reference that guided and enriched the message intended. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the etiquette involving foreign diplomats, from whom we have quite extensive responses.21
Viskovatyi Affair of 1553-54: Official Art, the Emergence of Autocracy, and the Disintegration of Medieval Russian Culture', RH 8 (1981): 298, 308, 314-20; Michael S. Flier, 'K semioticheskomu analizu Zolotoi palaty Moskovskogo Kremlia', in Drevnerusskoe iskusstvo. Russkoe iskusstvopozdnego srednevekov'ia:XVIvek (St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2003), pp. 180-6; Daniel Rowland, 'Two Cultures, One Throneroom: Secular Courtiers and Orthodox Culture in the Golden Hall of the Moscow Kremlin', in Kivelson and Greene (eds.), Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice under the Tsars, pp. 40-53.
19 Michael S. Flier, 'Fillingin the Blanks: The Church ofthe Intercession and the Architectonics of Medieval Muscovite Ritual', HUS19 (1995): 120-37; Savarenskaia (ed.), Arkhitek- turnye ansambli Moskvy, pp. 54-99.
20 PSRL, vol. xxxiv (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1978), p. 202; B. A. Uspenskii, Tsar' i patriarkh: Kharizma vlasti v Rossii (Vizantiiskaia model' i ee russkoe pereosmyslenie) (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul'tury, 1998), p. 455 (n. 52).
21 Marshall Poe, A People Born to Slavery':Russia in Early Modern Ethnography, 1476-1748 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 39-81.
Contingent rituals
Foreign diplomatic rituals
In a report that resonates with others from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers, Herberstein commented on the indirect but nonetheless elaborate ritual etiquette that faced foreign embassies upon approaching Muscovite territory.[295] Each part of the protocol - initial contact, local interview, delay for instructions from Moscow, escort, entrance into Moscow, sequestering and audience with the Muscovite ruler - confirmed relative status. Ritual gestures such as dismounting from horses or sledges, or the baring of heads in anticipation of verbal exchange, were carried out in a specific order, designed to place the prestige of the Muscovite representative, and indirectly that of the grand prince, above that of the foreign visitor and his master.
Royal escorts rode ahead of and behind the embassy along the entire route, allowing no one to fall behind or join the entourage. Symbolically the royal reach extended to the very borders ofthe realm, envelopingthe foreign element and drawing it towards the centre. At each station new representatives were dispatched from the centre to receive the members of the embassy and greet them in the name of the ruler until at last, after several days or even weeks of waiting outside the city, they were escorted into Moscowpast crowds of people intentionally brought there. Entering the Kremlin on foot, they encountered huge numbers of soldiers and separate ranks of courtiers - enough people, so Herberstein reasoned, to impress foreigners with the sheer quantity of subjects and the consequent power of the grand prince. The closer the envoys came to the site of the grand prince, the more frequent were the successions of ever more highly placed ranks of nobility, each rank moving into position directly behind the embassy as the next higher one waited to greet them.
Once ushered into the throne room itself, the envoys descended several steps to the floor. From this position they were obliged to look up at the sumptuously attired ruler on a raised throne. Additionally they confronted his numerous courtiers, clad in golden cloth down to their ankles, the boyars resplendent in their high fur hats, and all seated on benches above the steps against the other three walls in an orderly array.[296] The English merchant Richard Chancellor reported that 'this so honorable an assembly, so great a majesty of the emperor and of the place, might very well have amazed our men and have dashed them out of countenance. . .'[297] The papal legate to
Ivan IV, Antonio Possevino, judged that in the splendour of his court and those who populate it, the tsar 'rivals the Pope and surpasses other kings'.[298]The English commercial agent Jerome Horsey noted with admiration Ivan IV's four royal guards (ryndy) flanking the throne, dressed in shiny silver cloth and bearing ceremonial pole-axes.[299] The carefully arranged hierarchy of courtiers dominated by the tsar was all-encompassing and meant to impress visitors with the size, authority and immeasurable wealth of the Muscovite court. All petitioners were required to repeat the ruler's lengthy series of titles, a list based on rank and geographic spread. Omission of any title on the list was not tolerated.[300] The most important ceremonial act during the audience was the diplomat's kissing of the tsar's right hand, if it was offered.[301] Ritual enquiries about health were then followed by the formal presentation of gifts by the diplomat.
Royal progresses
As a complement to the ritualised travel of diplomats towards the centre, the royal progress from centre to periphery allowed the ruler himself to promulgate Muscovite ideology by travelling to cities, towns and monasteries in elaborate processions, with icons and other ecclesiastical accoutrements.[302]Such a ritual stamping out of territory and creation of royal space tied the land to the ruler through contiguity. Participating in impressive ceremonies of entrance (adventus) and departure (profectio), the ruler was able to take possession of the site physically and spiritually by means of an awe-inspiring display of the sort demonstrated by Ivan IV when he captured and entered Kazan' in 1552 and then returned to Moscow in a triumphant procession.[303]
Bride shows
The authority of the ruler was represented directly or indirectly in rituals intended to preserve harmony and balance among the court elite. Marriage arrangements, for instance, helped maintain a tenuous power network among specific clans at court. The intricate organisation of bride shows, performed ritually before the ruler, guaranteed him and his family firm control over the selection process and the relationships to be strengthened, weakened or ended.[304]
Surrender-by-the-head ritual
The indirect ritual of surrender by the head (vydacha golovoiu) was intended to confirm the hierarchy among elites established by the rules of precedence (mestnichestvo) and is described in Kotoshikhin's seventeenth-century account of the Muscovite court.[305] Violators ofprecedence were sent in disgrace on foot instead of on horseback from the Kremlin, a metonym of the tsar's power, to the house of the offended party, where the tsar's representatives announced the ruler's decision to the winner as he stood on an upstairs porch. The semiotic oppositions of low and high were complemented by the loser's permission to insult the winner for emotional release without retaliation. The ritual reinforced the image ofthe ruler as charismatic and autocratic, and that of the noble elite as accommodating and supportive advisers committed to preserving the order and stability that made government by consensus possible.[306]
Coronation ritual
Although we have no record of the investiture ceremony of the grand princes of Kievan Rus' or of their counterparts in Muscovite Rus' before the late fifteenth century, some form of installation ceremony surely existed. The direct formula that appears in chronicle accounts simply notes that such-and-such a prince assumed authority (siede lit. 'sat') in a given capital or that a more highly placed ruler installed him on the throne (posadi lit. 'seated').
The earliest evidence of an actual coronation ceremony in Muscovy dates from 4 February i498, when a ritual based on the Byzantine ceremony for co- emperors was used to lend legitimacy to Ivan III's naming a controversial heir apparent - grandson Dmitrii rather than second son Vasilii - to the Muscovite throne. By 1502, Vasilii had regained favour and was named grand prince and thus entitled to succeed his father. Interestingly, the performance of the coronation ceremony had not guaranteed the succession to Dmitrii, thus revealing its culturally compromised status as a political device. This point was driven home when Vasilii himself assumed the role of heir apparent in 1502 and ascended to the throne of his late father in 1505, in both instances without the ritual of coronation.
The accession of Ivan IV in 1533, however, proved a turning point in the conception of the Muscovite ruler. Surviving several court intrigues, Ivan found an ally in Makarii, archbishop of Novgorod, and from 1542, metropolitan of Moscow. Through a number of cultural initiatives, the revision of the Great Reading Menology and the writing of the Book of Degrees among the most significant, Makarii sought to elevate the position and authority of the tsar as a messianic figure, in effect, to sacralise him and accord him special charisma.[307]In 1547, Makarii was prepared to declare Ivan not simply grand prince, but tsar and autocrat, a God-chosen sovereign. Accordingly, he devised an appropriate coronation ceremony based on the Byzantine model used for Dmitrii, a ritual appropriate for transforming the sixteen-year-old prince into a tsar.
Ivan was officially crowned on 16 January 1547 in the Dormition cathedral in a ritual that had many implications for the historical and eschatological significance of the Muscovite ruler. The date was significant because it fell on the first Sunday after the final observance of Epiphany, which celebrates God's satisfaction with Christ's baptism by John ('the Forerunner') in the River Jordan. Ritually 'anointed', Christ begins his ministry in the Holy Land with this event, an appropriate analogue to Ivan's official beginning as tsar of Muscovy, the New Israel.[308]
The coronation ceremony in the Dormition cathedral combined high solemnity with the symbolism of legend and Scripture to create an effect with universal impact. Ordered ranks of the clergy flanked chairs set up for Makarii and Ivan on a specially built dais in the centre of the cathedral. Gold brocades covered the space between the dais and the Royal Doors of the iconostasis, where a stand was placed to hold the royal regalia, which the grand prince's confessor had brought high on a golden plate 'with fear and trembling', accompanied by a highly placed entourage that stood guard. As bells began to ring across Moscow some thirty minutes later, Ivan left his quarters in a solemn procession, preceded by his confessor sprinkling holy water along the path and followed by his brother and members of the nobility.
The regalia were tangible links to the Monomakh legend, overt signs of the ruler's Kievan and Byzantine pedigrees. Significantly, their number changed over the course ofthe sixteenth century, apparently to embellish the ceremony with more visible symbols of power and authority. In Dmitrii's coronation, only the barmy, an elaborately embroidered and bejewelled neck-piece, and a cap (shapka) were mentioned, the same combination found in grand-princely testaments from the time of Ivan I Kalita (c. 1339).[309] In the ceremony for Ivan IV a cross made from the True Cross was included. This inventory matches three of the five items in Monomakh's regalia specifically enumerated in The Tale of the Princes of Vladimir and correlated texts.[310] Of the remaining two, a gold chain was added to the Extended version of Ivan's ceremony, but the carnelian box much enjoyed by Caesar Augustus was never incorporated into the ceremony. Perhaps its exclusion was an explicit sign that as relevant as Roman genealogy might be for foreign recognition of the title 'tsar', only 'Byzantine' artefacts were deemed suitable for the spiritual confirmation of the Muscovite ruler.[311]
Ordered ranks of the clergy and the nobility lined Ivan's way to the dais. All were commanded to stand silent and not dare transgress the ruler's path. The bells stopped on his arrival. After introductory prayers, Metropolitan Makarii lifted the cross from the golden plate, placed it on Ivan's neck, and addressed the God of Revelation. He associated the anointing of David by Samuel as king over Israel with the anointing of Grand Prince Ivan Vasil'evich as tsar of all Rus'. He wished the grand prince a long life, his reign now legitimised by the Byzantine regalia. Makarii invested Ivan with the barmy, and the cap of Monomakh, and after a blessing of the tsar, admonished him on the duties of an Orthodox Christian ruler, the text based largely on Pseudo-Basil's Instruction to his son Leo.[312] The liturgy ended with communion before the iconostasis.
Ivan left the Dormition through the south portal and stood at the exit while a shower of gold and silver coins was poured over his head three times. He then processed over a path strewn with velvet and damask cloth to the Archangel Michael cathedral to hear a litany and pray before the graves of his royal predecessors. Leaving that cathedral through the western door, he was again showered three times with gold and silver coins. He processed over a cloth-strewn path to the Annunciation cathedral, where he heard a litany. Descending the stairs onto the square again, he walked to the central staircase leading up to the Golden Hall and was showered once again with gold and silver coins three times before leaving for his own quarters in the palace.40 He hosted a magnificent banquet for the high clergy and nobility in the Faceted Hall. Meanwhile those remaining behind in the Dormition were permitted to break up the specially built dais and take away material keepsakes sanctified by the ritual itself.41
An additional ceremony, the anointing of the new tsar, was apparently introduced only in 1584 for the coronation of Fedor Ivanovich, as represented in the Extended version of the ritual. Performed before communion, it was not equivalent to the Byzantine anointing of the forehead with sacred myrrh, but rather identical with the sacrament of chrismation, as performed at baptisms, with anointing of the head, the eyes, the ears, the chest and both sides of the hands (see Plate 17).42 This additional act not only likened the Muscovite tsars to the Byzantine emperors and the Old Testament kings they were emulating, but to Christ himself at his baptism, a further sacralisation of the Muscovite ruler.43
The act of showering the tsar with coins provided a visible connection between locale and function. He acted as Christ's representative on earth at the Dormition, heir of a noble dynasty at the Archangel Michael and ruler of the realm at the Annunciation, with the symbolic values of fecundity and longevity signified by the showering of coins at each station. Ironically, the inclusion of this ritual act is based on error contained in a pilgrim's description of the 1392 Byzantine coronation ceremony, apparently used as a source in composing the Muscovite ritual. Either Ignatii of Smolensk misinterpreted the Byzantine custom of showering coins on the milling crowd out of imperial largesse, or a later scribe misread his copy of Ignatii's text, mistaking a particle for an object pronoun, thereby showering him (the emperor) with the coins.44
The coronation, the most important ofthe contingent rituals for conveying the sacred foundation of the office of tsar, occurred only once for each reign.
40 PSRL, vol. xiii, pp. 150-1, 451-3.
41 E. V Barsov Drevne-russkiepamiatnikisviashchennogovenchaniiatsareinatsarstvo (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1883), pp. 66, 90; PSRL, vol. xiii, p. 150.
42 Barsov Drevne-russkiepamiatniki, pp. 61-4; Uspenskii, Tsar' i Patriarkh, pp. 14-29,111-12.
43 Uspenskii, Tsar' i Patriarkh, p. 20.
44 George P. Majeska, 'The Moscow Coronation of 1498 Reconsidered', JGO 26 (1978): 356-7, and his Russian Travelers to Constantinople in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, Dumbarton Oaks Studies, no. 19 (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1984), pp. 112-13, 435-6; Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols, p. 186 (n. 104).
It was the royal rituals performed at regular intervals that helped promulgate for the secular and spiritual elite the myth of the Muscovite ruler, especially through reference to artefacts and sites associated with his transformation.
Cyclical rituals
The Church calendar dominated life throughout Muscovy. Apart from the numerous Church services that the tsar and the nobility regularly attended, there were five rituals of especial importance. These demarcated major junctures in the annual cycle and expressed the fundamental values of the Muscovite myth in highly marked settings. Two were non-narrative - the New Year's ritual and the Last Judgement ritual; three contained dramatised narrative - the Fiery Furnace ritual, the Epiphany ritual and the Palm Sunday ritual. All five entailed the presence of the heads of Church and state in Moscow and underscored various perspectives on the relationship between the God- ordained ruler, the Church and the ruler's spiritual and secular advisers. Each of the five rituals highlighted particular portions of the semiotically sacred space demarcated by the Kremlin and its immediate environs, and each was marked by a special tolling of bells that resonated across the Kremlin.[313]
New Year's ritual
The celebration of the Valediction of the Year (Letoprovozhdenie) took place on the morning of 1 September.[314] The metropolitan preceded two deacons, each carrying a Gospel lectionary, and the remaining clergy in a cross procession from the Dormition to the space between the Annunciation and the Archangel Michael cathedrals, where two chairs had been placed for the metropolitan and the tsar. In an apparent sign of humility, the tsar without the royal regalia proceeded from the porch of the Annunciation to the centre space. The ceremony represented a farewell to the old year and a greeting to the new, a transition symbolised by antiphonal choirs and two Gospel lectionaries. The books were placed on separate lecterns, flanking an icon of St Simeon the Stylite, whose feast is celebrated on 1 September.
The prescribed psalms concerned the redemption and destiny of the Chosen People (Ps. 73 [74] and 2) and the covenant between the Chosen People and God (Ps. 64 [65]), the last including the proclamation 'Thou crownest the year with thy goodness'. The reading from Isaiah 61: 1-9 includes his declaration 'The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted ... to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour.' Prayers and thanksgiving for kings (1 Tim. 2: 1-7) were followed by a Gospel reading, in which Christ refers to Isaiah's declaration (Luke 4: 16-22). The passages were read twice, line for line, first by the metropolitan from one lectionary, then by the archdeacon from the other. The ritual doubling appears to emphasise the union of beginning and ending, the year to come, as the year of the Lord's favour. Immersing the cross in holy water, the metropolitan initiated the new year by signing to the four corners of the earth, and, after wishing the tsar many long years, he sprinkled him with holy water, and then the nobility by rank, and finally all others gathered. The tsar returned to the Annunciation to celebrate the Eucharist.
The transition to a new age, the blessings conferred on the ruler and the Chosen People, the anointing of Christ as emblematic of the year of the Lord's favour were all positive signs that expressed the relationship between ruler and ruled under the benevolent protection of God. It is noteworthy that two of the three major inscriptions surrounding the enormous image of Christ Emmanuel as Final Judge on the ceiling of the Golden Hall throne room were taken from the New Year service.[315] This connection between ritual and throne room reinforced the perception of the reign of Ivan IV as a new age in Muscovite Rus'.
The Last Judgement ritual Meatfare Sunday, the day before Shrovetide (Maslenitsa), is devoted to the most fateful event awaiting all Christians, the Last Judgement.[316] In a ceremony reminiscent of the New Year ritual, the heads of Church and state walked in cross processions from their respective churches, the Annunciation and Dormition, to the north-eastern part of Cathedral Square behind the Dor- mition apses, where chairs for each were set up alongside lecterns that held two Gospel lectionaries flanking an icon of the Last Judgement. Following hymns devoted to the Last Judgement, the archdeacon read Old Testament excerpts, warning of the impending days of destruction and despair but holding out salvation for God's Chosen People (Joel 2: 1-27 and 3: 1-5, Isa. 13: 6) and describing the terrifying vision of the Ancient of Days and the Last Judgement (Dan. 7: i-i4). For the Gospel readings, the metropolitan faced east, the direction of the resurrection, and read about the fates of the righteous and the sinful at the Last Judgement (Matt. 25: 31-46). The archdeacon standing opposite him read the same passage facing west, the direction associated with the Last Judgement.[317] The doubled reading, analogous to that performed in the New Year ritual, underscored the transformative juncture of the Apocalypse.
The tsar was singled out as the primary representative whose good health and blessings would redound to the Chosen People as a whole, and especially to the nobility, who followed him in receiving a sprinkling of holy water before dismissal. The ritual was performed beneath the east-facing outside murals of the Dormition with the central image of the New Testament Trinity, iconography closely associated with the Last Judgement.[318] Through annual ritual, the destiny of Moscow and its ruler were confirmed before the beginning of the Great Fast leading up to Easter.
Fiery Furnace ritual December 17 is a feast day that celebrates the three Hebrew youths Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah (Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego). Refusing to bow to the golden idol of King Nebuchadnezzar, they were cast into a fiery furnace on orders of the ruler, spurred on by his evil advisers, the Chaldeans. Visited by an angel, the youths remained unharmed, but the Chaldean jailers who had cast them in were themselves destroyed by the flames. Astonished at the youths' deliverance, Nebuchadnezzar ordered their release and praised God, recognising his superiority (Daniel 3).
The Fiery Furnace ritual was performed in the presence of the tsar on the first or second Sunday before Christmas during matins and included the seventh and eighth canticles, which refer to the three youths. A raised dais (peshch' 'furnace') was placed in front of the Royal Gates of the Dormition iconostasis. In the sanctuary, a deacon used a long cloth to bind the necks of the three boys performing the roles of the three youths and led them through the north doors and into the custody of the waiting Chaldeans. After they were taken into the centre of the furnace, 'The Song of the Three Holy Children' (Dan. 3) was sung. When the archdeacon uttered the words 'the angel of the Lord came down into the oven', the image of an angel painted on parchment was lowered from above into the furnace to the accompaniment of loud noise simulating thunder. After bowing to the angel, the three youths traced the inner circumference of the furnace three times, singing the 'Prayer of Azariah'. The Chaldeans bowed to the spared youths and led them out of the furnace. The youths approached the metropolitan and wished him and the royal family many long years of life. Then, in order, the officiating clergy and then the boyars sang 'many long years' to the tsar.
The narrative itself served as an allegory of the relationship between the ruler, his advisers, and God's chosen. The transformation of the ruler from evil to good is carried out in the face of the destruction of the Chaldean advisers by fire and the salvation of the youths. In its allusion to the evil potential of bad advisers on the ruler, the Fiery Furnace ritual can be grouped with other Muscovite cultural artefacts that underscore the ruler's duty before God and his people, for example, the Golden Hall vestibule murals and the Monomakh Throne.
Epiphany ritual
The Christmas season ended with a major ritual celebrating the baptism of Christ in the River Jordan. The Blessing of the Waters was the climax of a solemn ceremony on the morning of 6 January that began with a cross procession as much as a mile in length, involving the heads of Church and state, moving from the Moscow Dormition, through the then passable Tainik tower out of the Kremlin, and onto the ice of the Moscow River.[319] A hole some 18 feet square had been made in the ice to reveal the river beneath, ceremonially renamed the 'Jordan' (lordan'). The clergy arranged themselves around the hole with a platform set up on one side to hold the metropolitan's throne. The tsar stood bare-headed on the ice. After the 'Jordan' was hallowed, the metropolitan took up some water in his hands and cast it first on the tsar, then in similar fashion on the other nobles in order. Once the tsar and his entourage had departed, the crowds of onlookers rushed to partake of the newly sanctified water. The English merchant Anthony Jenkinson describes their joyful plunge in 1558: 'but y preasse that there was about the water when the Emperour was gone, was wonderful to behold, for there came about 5000. pots to be filled of that water: for that Muscovite which hath no part of that water, thinks himselfe unhappy.'[320]
The Epiphany ritual impressed all foreigners who witnessed it.[321] Like the New Year ritual, it marked a major transformation, a purification and regeneration. But with the procession extending beyond the walls of the Kremlin, the ritual invited all Muscovites, regardless of station, to participate. The regenerative blessing of the holy water cast first upon the tsar and then his elites accrued symbolically to the people of Muscovy as well, inviting their clamour to immerse themselves, their loved ones, and even their valued animals in the newly sanctified water.[322]
Jenkinson misread the symbolism of the ritual when he concluded that the tsar's baring of his head and standing while the metropolitan and the clergy sat must signal a lesser dignity on the part of the ruler.[323] He was unaware that liturgically, the clergy were required to sit during the Old Testament readings and stand for the New Testament lections. Furthermore he failed to realise that the ritual gave overt expression to one of the chief characteristics contained in the image of the tsar as representative of Christ on earth, namely, his humility, a virtue lauded by contemporary writers.[324] The iconography of the baptism itself shows Christ standing in the River Jordan with John's right hand blessing his bare head. Just as Christ humbled himself in that ritual, so too did the tsar humble himself in the course of universal spiritual renewal.
Palm Sunday ritual
The Palm Sunday ritual was the most impressive of all the royal rituals in Moscow (see Plate 18).[325] We have no Muscovite account of it prior to the seventeenth century, but members of the Russia Company described it in their ethnographic reports. In 1558, one of Anthony Jenkinson's entourage wrote:
- First, they have a tree of a good bignesse which is made fast upon two sleds, as though it were growing there, and it is hanged with apples, raisins, figs and dates and with many fruits abundantly. In the midst of ye same tree stand 5 boyes in white vestures, which sing in the tree before the procession.
The float was followed in turn by a long cross procession of acolytes, numerous richly attired prelates, and half of the Muscovite nobility The central focus of the procession was a re-enactment ofChrist's triumphant entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.
- First, there is a horse covered with white linnen cloth down to ye ground, his eares being made long with the same cloth like to an asses ears. Upon this horse the Metropolitane sitteth sidelong like a woman: in his lappe lieth a faire booke [the Gospels], with a crucifix of Goldsmiths worke upon the cover, which he holdest fast with his left hand, and in his right hand he hath a crosse of gold, with which crosse he ceaseth not to blesse the people as he rideth.
Some thirty sons of priests spread large pieces of cloth in the path of the approaching Christ, picking them up as soon as the horse passed over them and running ahead to spread them out again.
- One of the Emperores noble men leadeth the horse by the head, but the Emperour himselfe going on foote leadeth the horse by the ende of the reine of his bridle with one of his hands, and in the other of his hands he had a branch of a Palme tree: after this followed the rest of the Emperours Noble men and Gentlemen, with a great number of other people.[326]
Beginning at the Dormition, the procession apparently moved to a chapel dedicated to the Entry into Jerusalem within the Kremlin (Annunciation cathedral?),[327] before returning to the Dormition for dismissal, whereupon the ceremonial tree was broken apart and distributed to the assembled throng. The tsar was given 200 roubles by the metropolitan, which some foreigners interpreted as payment for service rendered.[328] The lower position of the tsar vis-a-vis the metropolitan was taken by many foreign observers as yet another sign of the ruler's lesser status, without considering the tsar's identification with Christ through humility, as seen in the Epiphany ritual.[329]
Sometime after completion ofthe church ofthe Intercession on the Moat in 1561, the procession extended out of the Kremlin onto Beautiful (Red) Square and in view of the people. The tsar and metropolitan participated in a short ceremony in the Intercession's Chapel of the Entry into Jerusalem before returning to the Dormition. This re-enactment of Christ's adventus near the microcosm ofJerusalem outside the walls of the Kremlin encouraged those in attendance, participants and observers, to see the city re-entered as Moscow transformed, the New Jerusalem. The emotional and spiritual power of the ceremony was amply demonstrated in 1611, when the Polish forces occupying Moscow cancelled the Palm Sunday ritual: they were obliged to reinstate it to avoid a riot.[330]
Typological characteristics
These five rituals presented distinct aspects of the political ideas that made up the myth of the Muscovite ruler. All required the presence of the ruler, but one, the Fiery Furnace ritual, was performed as a liturgical drama and afforded him a passive, observer's role. It was also the only one of the five performed completely inside the Dormition and the only one that alluded to a distinction between good and evil emperors, and good and evil advisers, elements of a typology realised in contemporary literature.[331] Two ofthe rituals were limited to the outside spaces within the Kremlin (New Year and Last Judgement rituals in Cathedral Square) and featured the contemplation of crossing temporal boundaries, from the year ending to the 'year of the Lord's favour', and from history to eternity, respectively. Both alluded to Kremlin iconography, in the Golden Hall and outside the Dormition cathedral, respectively.
The two most significant and solemn of the royal rituals were much more complex in nature, revealing not only protocols of performance but semiotic representation on the iconographic, historical and eschatological levels. The Epiphany ritual and the revised Palm Sunday ritual utilised space inside and outside the Kremlin, emblematic of their more extensive, universal significance. Both used performance to re-enact events in the life of Christ, thereby introducing immediate association with the Holy Land: the Moscow River with the River Jordan, and the city of Moscow with the New Jerusalem. Both were influenced by the iconography of the Baptism and the Entry into Jerusalem. And both recalled pivotal historical events: the baptism of Vladimir, which launched the Christian history of the Rus', and Ivan IV's defeat of Kazan', which resulted in his triumphant entry into Moscow. As though at communion, observers of both rituals could partake of material objects made holy in the presence of the prelate and ruler: the water of the Moscow River and the constructed tree.
The contingent rituals were concerned primarily with matters of the present; the cyclical rituals with issues of fate and deliverance. This is especially true for the rituals thematically tied to Jerusalem. With the microcosmic Jerusalem as a site of pilgrimage, the River Jordan as an annual source of regeneration, and Golgotha as pulpit, the leaders of Church and state declared their intention by century's end to supplement the political ideas of Muscovy with a clearer vision of its messianic destiny following the Last Judgement and the Apocalypse. It was this conception of Muscovite ideology that survived the demise of the Riurikid dynasty and was carefully nurtured by its Romanov successors as the seventeenth century unfolded.
i8
The Time of Troubles (1603-1613)
MAUREEN PERRIE
Historians have used the term, 'The Time of Troubles' (smutnoe vremia, smuta), to refer to various series of events in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The classic study by S. F. Platonov, first published in 1899, dated the start of the Troubles to the death of Ivan the Terrible in 1584, when a power struggle among the boyars began. It ended, according to Platonov, with the election of Michael Romanov to the throne in 1613.[332] In the Soviet period, the term, 'Time of Troubles', was abandoned in favour of the concept of a 'peasant war', derived from Friedrich Engels's study ofthe events in Germany in 1525.[333] I. I. Smirnov's account of the Bolotnikov revolt of 1606-7 identified that episode alone as the 'first peasant war' in Russia, but after Stalin's death some Soviet historians argued that the entire sequence of events from 1603 (the Khlopko uprising) to 1614 (the defeat of Zarutskii's movement) constituted a 'peasant war'.[334] Towards the end of the Soviet era, Russian historians rejected the notion of a 'peasant war' and either reverted to the use of the older term, 'Time of Troubles', or introduced the idea of a 'civil war'.[335] Western historians were never persuaded by the 'peasant war' concept for this period, preferring to retain the term, 'Time of Troubles'.[336] Chester Dunning's adoption of 'civil war' terminology, like that of the Russian historians R. G. Skrynnikov and
A. L. Stanislavskii, involves a conscious rejection of'class struggle' approaches to the period, and stresses vertical rather than horizontal divisions in Russian society. The 'civil war' approach also plays down the significance of foreign intervention - which was heavily stressed both in Stalin-era Soviet historiography and in some pre-revolutionary accounts - and finds the origins of the Troubles primarily in internal Russian problems.
This chapter presents the 'Time of Troubles' as beginning with the First False Dmitrii's invasion of Russia in the autumn of 1604. In the aftermath of the famine of 1601-3, the pretender's challenge to Boris Godunov's legitimacy as tsar interacted with the social grievances of the population of the southern frontier to produce a highly explosive mixture.
The First False Dmitrii
In the summer of 1603 a young man appeared on the estate of Prince Adam Vishnevetskii at Brahin in Lithuania. He claimed to be Tsarevich Dmitrii, Ivan the Terrible's youngest son, who had died under mysterious circumstances at Uglich in 1591. The youth explained that he had escaped from assassins sent by Boris Godunov to kill him, and was now seeking help to gain his rightful throne. Vishnevetskii apparently found his story credible, and reported it first to the Polish chancellor, Jan Zamoyski, and then to King Sigismund himself. The pretender obtained the patronage of Adam Vishnevetskii's cousin, Prince Constantine Vishnevetskii, and of Prince Constantine's father-in-law, Jerzy Mniszech, the Palatine of Sandomierz, whose family seat was at Sambor, in Poland. Mniszech offered Dmitrii military aid in return for the promise of territorial gains at the expense of Russia. Their agreement was cemented by the pretender's betrothal to Mniszech's daughter, Marina, and by his secret adoption of Roman Catholicism. In March 1604 the self-styled Dmitrii had an audience with the king in Cracow, where they discussed the prospect of Russia's conversion to Catholicism. The king, however, faced strong opposition in the Sejm to a military adventure in support of the pretender, which would have infringed the peace treaty that had been concluded between Poland and Russia in 1601. Sigismund was able to offer only unofficial encouragement to the undertaking. Dmitrii returned with Mniszech to Sambor, and spent the summer gathering military support. At the end of August they began their march on Muscovy to topple the 'usurper' Boris Godunov from the throne.
Who was this pretender who has become known as the 'First False Dmitrii'? Boris Godunov's government identified him as Grigorii Otrep'ev, a renegade monk of noble origin. This view has predominated in subsequent scholarship, although there have been some dissenting voices: Chester Dunning not only rejects the view that the pretender was Otrep'ev, but has even revived the idea that he may indeed have been Dmitrii of Uglich.[337] Although Dmitrii's real identity is impossible to prove definitively, the argument that he was Otrep'ev continues to be the most persuasive in the eyes of most modern historians.[338]It is also true, however, that the pretender performed his role with such self- confidence that he himselfmay well have believed that he really was Tsarevich Dmitrii.
Various conspiracy theories name certain boyar clans as the pretender's patrons, who aimed to use him as a lever to unseat Godunov. The families most frequently mentioned in this connection are the Romanovs, the Cherkasskiis, the Shuiskiis and the Nagois. But, as A. P. Pavlov has noted, there is little convincing evidence of boyar involvement in a plot to set up a pretender.[339] It is more likely that Otrep'ev acted on his own initiative, perhaps motivated by a desire for revenge against Godunov for the tsar's persecution of his patrons, the Romanovs, in 1600.[340]
In the autumn of 1604 the pretender crossed the Russian frontier near Kiev with a small army of Polish troops and cossacks. The first Russian border fortress, Moravsk(Monastyrevskii Ostrog) surrendered without a struggle, and it was followed by other towns in the Seversk (south-west) region: Chernigov, Putivl', Ryl'sk and Kursk. Dmitrii also gained the support of the peasants of the prosperous Komaritskaia district. The fortress of Novgorod Severskii, however, was well defended by Godunov's general P. F. Basmanov, and at the beginning of January 1605 the pretender's Polish mercenaries mutinied, angered by his failure to pay them. But by this time Dmitrii had been joined by several thousand Don and Zaporozhian cossacks. He pressed on towards the Russian heartland, occupying Sevsk without opposition, but on 21 January he encountered an army commanded by Prince F. I. Mstislavskii, and suffered a severe defeat at Dobrynichi. In spite of this military setback, the rising in Dmitrii's favour continued to spread through the towns of the southern steppe, where his support came primarily from the petty military servitors who were dissatisfied with Godunov's policies towards them. The governors of these frontier fortresses who remained loyal to Godunov were overthrown by the townspeople and the garrison troops as traitors to the 'true tsar' Dmitrii. Apart from the Komaritskaia district, the region contained few peasants, and the 'peasant war' formula of Soviet historiography has little relevance to this stage ofthe pretender's campaign. Although he obtained support primarily from the lower classes, including the minor servicemen, Dmitrii based his appeal on his claim to be the 'true tsar', and did not make a specific bid for the backing ofthe poor. His only proclamation to survive from this period, datedNovember 1604, is addressed to all social groups in the conventional descending hierarchical order.[341] The function of pretence, as Dmitrii's success clearly demonstrated, was to unite all those with grievances against the reigning tsar under the banner of a candidate for the throne who could claim an alternative - and superior - basis for his political legitimacy.
Boris Godunov died suddenly in Moscow on 13 April 1605, when the pretender was encamped at Putivl', where he had retreated after his defeat at Dobrynichi in January. At the time of his death, Boris's army was besieging the small fortress of Kromy, to the north-east of Putivl', which was held forthe pretender by the Don cossack ataman Korela. The boyars in Moscow swore allegiance to Boris's young son, Fedor, but uncertainty about the stability of support for Fedor Borisovich undermined the morale of the government troops at Kromy On 7 May the army mutinied, and many of its commanders, including Peter Basmanov, went over to Dmitrii. A deputation led by Prince Ivan Golitsyn was sent to Putivl' from Kromy to report that the troops had defected to 'Tsar Dmitrii', and the pretender marched unopposed towards Moscow.
From Krapivna, near Tula, Dmitrii sent two envoys to Moscow with a proclamation calling on the inhabitants of the capital to recognise him as their tsar. They were escorted into the centre of the city by insurgents from the outskirts. On the morning of 1 June, Dmitrii's proclamation was read out to the people of Moscow who had assembled on Red Square. Many ofthe boyars, most of whom had by now abandoned the cause of Fedor Godunov, were present to hear the pretender's fulsome promises of rewards for the transfer of their loyalty.[342] The proclamation triggered a popular uprising in the capital which was directed primarily against the Godunovs and their supporters. The administration of the city in Dmitrii's name was taken over by Bogdan Bel'skii, who had been disgraced in 1600 and had returned to Moscow only as a result of a political amnesty declared on Boris's death. Before the pretender entered the capital his agents murdered Fedor Borisovich and his mother; and Patriarch Iov, who had been attacked during the popular uprising for his continued loyalty to the Godunovs, was stripped of his office.
On 20 June 1605 the pretender made a triumphal entry into Moscow, where he was greeted as the 'true sun' shining on Russia.[343] Accordingto some contemporary sources, many of those who continued to oppose him, and to express scepticism about his identity, were secretly arrested, imprisoned and put to death; but only two public executions took place. The brothers Shuiskii were brought to trial, accused of plotting to kill the new tsar. All three were found guilty. Prince Vasilii Shuiskii was sentenced to death, but he was reprieved at the last moment and sent into exile with his brothers. Soon after this, the pretender's credibility received an important boost when the former Tsaritsa Mariia Nagaia (now the nun Marfa), the mother of Dmitrii of Uglich, publicly recognised him as her son. On 2i July, three days after Marfa's arrival in the capital, Dmitrii was crowned in the Dormition cathedral in the Kremlin.
Historians have offered conflicting assessments of Dmitrii's achievements as tsar. The problem of reaching a balanced evaluation is complicated not only by the brevity of his reign, but also by the lack of official sources, since many documents were destroyed after his overthrow in May 1606. Some scholars have presented him as an enlightened reformer, who brought a refreshing element of Westernising modernisation into the traditional world of Muscovite politics, before being swept from power by a backlash of conservative boyar opposition to his innovations; others have seen him as an opportunist who was unable to cope with the complexities of power, and paid the price for his failures. A recent Russian study suggests that Dmitrii relied on a boyar duma whose aristocratic composition was not too dissimilar from that of Boris Godunov, and that his domestic policy was fairly traditional. In the end he was overthrown as a result of the machinations of the most powerful faction in the duma, which no longer found him to be a useful figurehead.[344] Chester Dunning, too, stresses continuity in policy between Tsar Dmitrii and his immediate predecessors; and he argues that the pretender's opponents were only a small and unrepresentative group of boyars.[345]
There has been particular controversy among historians about Dmitrii's social legislation which affected the position of slaves and peasants. A law of 7 January 1606 forbade the joint assignment of a bondsman to more than one owner, thereby ensuring that slaves would be freed on the deaths of their master. A decree of 1 February 1606 stated that those peasants who had fled during the famine years of 1601-2 because their masters were unable to feed them were not to be returned to their old lords, but were to remain as slaves or serfs of their new masters.[346] There is a general scholarly consensus that these two pieces of legislation represented minor concessions to the slaves and peasants respectively.[347] There is no convincing evidence, however, to support V I. Koretskii's assertion that Dmitrii was planning to issue a new law code which would have restored the peasants' right of departure on St George's Day from the autumn of 1606.[348] In general, Dmitrii preserved the institutions of slavery and serfdom, and was more concerned to protect the interests of the slave- and serf-owning nobles than those of their bondsmen. He also rewarded the petty servicemen of the southern and south-western towns who had provided the main base of his support in the course of his march on Moscow. They were granted lands and money; their obligation to till the land for the state was abolished; and they were exempted from the payment of taxes for ten years. The gentry of other regions, however, did not benefit significantly, in terms of land and money payments, from Dmitrii's rule.[349]
In some other spheres, Dmitrii's policies were more innovative. He planned to promote science and education, and introduced new types of military training for his troops. He sought to raise Russia's international prestige by adopting the title 'tsesar' (emperor). In his foreign policy he at first gave some indications that he was willing to support Poland in its war against Sweden, but he subsequently abandoned this scheme in favour of an ambitious plan to launch a crusade against the Crimean Tatars and the Turks, a project which was encouraged by the Pope and King Sigismund. Before the campaign could be launched, however, the pretender was overthrown and killed.
After Dmitrii's coronation, the initial doubts about his identity seemed to have been appeased, and by the end of 1605 he was sufficiently confident of his position to pardon the Shuiskiis and permit them to return to the capital. There they soon resumed their plotting against him: some sources refer to a number of abortive assassination attempts in early 1606. In March, a conspiracy against Dmitrii was uncovered in the ranks of his own bodyguard of musketeers; the pretender himself incited the strel'tsy to tear the 'traitors' to pieces. After this episode, organised opposition appeared to subside; but the Shuiskiis and their allies were only biding their time.
Aspects of the new tsar's behaviour created favourable soil for his opponents. In spite of promises that he had made when he was a penniless fugitive in Poland, Dmitrii made no attempt in his short reign to convert Russia to Catholicism. He did, however, have Polish favourites, including his secretaries Jan and Stanislaw Buczynski; he was tolerant of non-Orthodox believers; and he disregarded many traditional court practices, adopting Western-style dress, and furbishing his new palace in the Kremlin in the latest Polish style. The main pretext for the conspirators' action against the 'heretical' tsar, however, was provided by his marriage to Marina Mniszech. The new tsar's choice of a foreign bride, who was unwilling to convert to Orthodoxy, antagonised many Russians; and the arrogant behaviour of Marina's Polish escort when they arrived in Moscow on 2 May 1606 played into the hands of the pretender's enemies. Early on the morning of 17 May, a week after Dmitrii's wedding, the conspirators raised the cry that the Poles were attacking the tsar. The Muscovites rushed to the Kremlin, and fell upon the hated foreigners. Meanwhile, the tsar was murdered by the assassins as he tried to escape from his apartment.
Two days after the pretender's death, Prince Vasilii Shuiskii was declared tsar. A senior member of the Suzdal' princely clan, Shuiskii had some claim to the throne on the basis of his Riurikid lineage; but the legitimacy of his 'election' as tsar was very dubious from the outset. Opposition to Shuiskii soon mobilised under the slogan of restoring Tsar Dmitrii - who, it was claimed, had not in fact perished in the uprising of 17 May - to the throne. The rumours about Dmitrii's escape from death were spread by his Russian supporters, and were of course welcomed by Marina Mniszech, who had been arrested along with her father and the Polish envoys to Moscow after her husband's death.
The Bolotnikov revolt
The main centre of opposition to Shuiskii was the town of Putivl', which had been an important base of support for the pretender in the course of his march towards Moscow in 1605. Immediately after his arrival in Putivl', Prince Grigorii Shakhovskoi, the new governor appointed by Shuiskii, defected to 'Tsar Dmitrii'; and many other towns in the Seversk region also refused to acknowledge Shuiskii as tsar. The belief that Dmitrii had escaped death - which served to legitimise the townspeople's rejection of Shuiskii - was not based only on rumours from Moscow. It was also strengthened by the actions of Michael Molchanov, one of Tsar Dmitrii's closest confidants, who had fled from the capital on the day of the pretender's murder. Molchanov rode to Putivl', where he promoted the idea that Dmitrii was still alive; from Putivl' he went to Sambor, in Poland - the home of the Mniszech family - where he began to play the role of the late tsar. He did not, however, appear in public as Dmitrii, probably because he bore no physical resemblance to the first pretender, who had been a familiar figure at Sambor.
At some time in the summer of 1606 a certain Ivan Isaevich Bolotnikov arrived in Putivl', claiming that he had met Tsar Dmitrii at Sambor and had been appointed by him as commander of his army. Bolotnikov was a former military bondsman and cossack who had been captured by the Turks and served as a galley-slave before escaping and returning to Russia through Poland. Shakhovskoi accepted his claims, and put him in charge of one of the two armies which marched from Putivl' towards Moscow by separate routes in the autumn of 1606. The leaders ofthe second army were of higher social status than Bolotnikov: it was commanded by the petty nobleman Istoma Pashkov, and it was later joined by the servicemen of Riazan' under Prokopii Liapunov. At the beginning of November the two armies joined forces at Kolomenskoe, on the outskirts of Moscow, and began to besiege the capital.
The siege lasted for about a month. The anti-Shuiskii forces sent various messages to the inhabitants of the city. Pashkov, who was the first to reach Moscow, appealed to the inhabitants to surrender, and to hand over the Shuiskiis as traitors to Tsar Dmitrii. Some sources suggest that later, after Bolotnikov's arrival, the besiegers called on the lower classes in the capital to rise up against the rich. Patriarch Germogen claimed that the rebels distributed leaflets inciting bond-slaves to kill their masters, and promising them their wives and lands; encouraged the city's 'rogues' to kill the merchants and seize their property; and promised high court ranks to those who joined them.[350] Some scholars doubt, however, whether Germogen's pro-Shuiskii propaganda accurately reflected the rebels' appeals;[351] even if it did, the insurgents' programme - with its promises of landed estates and noble ranks - hardly amounted to the call for an 'anti-feudal' social revolution which the older historiography detected in it. In spite of the fears which were aroused among the upper classes, no popular uprising materialised in the capital -perhaps because Shuiskii managed to persuade the Muscovites that the rebels held them collectively responsible for the events of 17 May, and planned to massacre them all. The insurgents' position was also weakened by their inability to produce
Tsar Dmitrii in person. Finally, divisions within the besiegers' camp led to the defection of Liapunov and Pashkov to Shuiskii's side: it is unclear whether these divisions reflected purely personal rivalries among the commanders, or whether social tensions also played a part. On 2 December, Tsar Vasilii's troops launched an attack on the besieging forces. Pashkov and his men deserted to Shuiskii in the course of the battle, and Bolotnikov retreated to Kaluga with the remains of the rebel army, still in fairly good order. In spite of this military defeat, the revolt continued across an extensive swathe of territory from the south-west frontier to the Volga basin.
Another pretender had appeared on the Volga even before the death of the First False Dmitrii. In the spring of 1606 a young cossack called Il'ia Korovin was chosen by a band of Terek cossacks to play the part of 'Tsarevich Peter', a non-existent son of Tsar Fedor Ivanovich. Although any real son of Tsar Fedor's would have had a better claim to the throne than Dmitrii ofUglich, the cossacks do not seem to have wanted to replace Dmitrii with Peter; they always acted in Dmitrii's name. They evidently felt that they had not been adequately rewarded for their services to Dmitrii, but they blamed the boyars for this, rather than the tsar.[352] Peter's pretence was clearly modelled on that of Dmitrii; its function, however, was not to overthrow the tsar, but rather to enhance the cossacks' bid to persuade him to grant them a suitable reward. Peter and his supporters rampaged upriver, looting merchant ships as they went; but when they heard of Dmitrii's overthrow and murder, they retreated back down the Volga, before crossing over to the rivers Don and Donets. Around November i606 they moved to Putivl' at the invitation of Prince Grigorii Shakhovskoi, who was still holding the town for Bolotnikov. Here Peter launched a reign of terror against 'traitors to Tsar Dmitrii': he ordered the execution of many noblemen who had been captured by the insurgents during their march on Moscow and were imprisoned at Putivl'. In February 1607 Peter moved his troops from Putivl' to Tula in order to offer support to Bolotnikov, who was besieged by Shuiskii's army in nearby Kaluga. In May, Bolotnikov managed to break out of Kaluga and join Peter's forces in Tula.
After Tsarevich Peter's departure from the Volga, the region continued to support Tsar Dmitrii. The rebellion which developed on the lower Volga from the summer of 1606 was largely independent of the revolt in the Seversk lands. The first major town to reject Shuiskii was Astrakhan', the great commercial port at the mouth of the Volga, on the Caspian Sea. On 17 June 1606 its inhabitants staged an uprising against Shuiskii, and the city governor, Prince I. D. Khvorostinin, transferred his loyalty to Dmitrii. Pro-Shuiskii troops under the command of F. I. Sheremetev took up camp on the island of Balchik, a few miles upstream from Astrakhan', where they remained for more than a year. A number of new pretenders, apparently modelling themselves on Tsarevich Peter, appeared in Astrakhan' at around this time: Tsarevich Ivan Augustus, who claimed to be a son of Ivan the Terrible; Osinovik, a son of Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich; and Lavr (or Lavrentii), another supposed son of Tsar Fedor Ivanovich.[353] None of these pretenders had a real historical prototype. Ivan Augustus's relationship with Prince Khvorostinin, the governor of Astrakhan', appears to have been similar to that of Tsarevich Peter with Prince Shakhovskoi at Putivl'; like Peter, Ivan Augustus acted in the name of Tsar Dmitrii, and his sphere of influence extended up the Volga at least as far as Tsaritsyn.[354]
Bolotnikov's forces had been united with those of Tsarevich Peter at Tula in May 1607; on 30 June, Tsar Vasilii arrived outside the gates of the town at the head of a large army, and laid siege to it. By the autumn of 1607 the defenders of the town found themselves in a desperate situation. Shuiskii had built a dam on the River Upa downstream from Tula, which caused the town to flood. All communications were cut off, and the inhabitants suffered terrible hardship and hunger. Eventually Tsarevich Peter and Bolotnikov opened negotiations with Shuiskii, and on 10 October Tula surrendered. Tsarevich Peter was tortured and interrogated before being executed in Moscow in January 1608. In February 1611 Bolotnikov was exiled to Kargopol', where he was imprisoned for a time, and then blinded and drowned. Prince Shakhovskoi was banished to a monastery, but soon escaped and subsequently joined the supporters of the Second False Dmitrii.
The Second False Dmitrii
The failure of Tsar Dmitrii to put in an appearance had greatly demoralised Bolotnikov's forces, but a second False Dmitrii had in fact surfaced in Russia well before the fall of Tula. This new pretender revealed himself in the town of Starodub, in the Seversk region, in June 1607.
By the autumn of 1606 Michael Molchanov had abandoned his attempt to adopt the identity of Tsar Dmitrii and had left Sambor.[355] The rebel camp, however, was still in urgent need of a new Dmitrii. There is some evidence that at the end of December 1606 Tsarevich Peter travelled from Putivl' to Lithuania, supposedly in search of his 'uncle' Dmitrii, and that this journey may have been linked to the first stages of the setting up of a new pretender- tsar: the earliest traces of the Second False Dmitrii can be found in the winter of 1606-7 in the Belorussian lands of Poland-Lithuania which were visited by Tsarevich Peter at about the same time.[356]
There is still no agreement about the identity of the Second False Dmitrii. Many older historians depicted him as a puppet of the Polish government; but some recent scholars have argued that his sponsors were Russians involved in the Bolotnikov revolt. They give greatest credence to sources which suggest that he was a poor schoolteacher from Lithuanian Belorussia who was coerced into playing the role of Dmitrii by some minor Polish noblemen who were in contact with Tsarevich Peter and other Russian insurgents based in Putivl'.[357]There is evidence to indicate, however, that the Second False Dmitrii may have initiated the intrigue himself (there were by now several precedents for him to follow), or at least participated in it willingly.[358] Certainly the new pretender acquired Russian supporters as soon as he crossed the border from Lithuania, and they helped to stage the revelation of his 'true' royal identity at Starodub. There he was also 'recognised' by Ivan Martynovich Zarutskii, a cossack leader from the Ukraine, who had been sent by Bolotnikov to search for Tsar Dmitrii. Zarutskii was subsequently to become one ofthe most important commanders in the pretender's service.
At Starodub Dmitrii and his accomplices began to recruit troops to go to the assistance of Bolotnikov and Tsarevich Peter in besieged Tula. Most of the towns in the Seversk region soon acknowledged the new Tsar Dmitrii and provided him with servicemen, but much of his small army comprised mercenaries from Poland-Lithuania. In September 1607 Dmitrii left Starodub, but he had advanced no further than Belev when he learned that Tula had fallen on 10 October. The pretender retreated to Karachev, and then to Orel, where he set up camp. During the winter of 1607-8 he recruited new forces. Some of these were the remnants of Bolotnikov's army from Tula; cossack reinforcements came from the Don, Volga, Terek and Dnieper; and new bands of mercenaries from Poland-Lithuania also joined him.[359]
While encamped at Orel, Dmitrii made a bid for the support ofthe slaves of Shuiskii's supporters, promising them their masters' lands, wives and daughters if they transferred their allegiance to him. There has been considerable scholarly controversy about the pretender's policy towards peasants and slaves at this time. It seems most probable that, like Bolotnikov, the Second False Dmitrii was hoping to attract military bondsmen into his service by offering them a share of the property confiscated from their 'traitor' lords. Certainly the pretender did not pursue an 'anti-feudal' policy: he granted lands and peasants to the Russian servicemen and foreign mercenaries who supported him. Shuiskii responded with measures of his own in February and March 1608. These have also been the subject of conflicting interpretations, but they seem to have been designed to attract both servicemen and slaves to his side.[360]
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