Russia under the Old regime

THE GENESIS OF THE PATRIMONIAL STATE IN RUSSIA

Europe. The bulk of the wealth was in the hands not of princes but powerful merchant and landowning families. The task of expanding the territories of the principality, elsewhere assumed by the princes, was in Novgorod carried out by business entrepreneurs and peasants. Because they played a secondary role in the growth of Novgorod's wealth and territory, its princes enjoyed relatively little power. Their main task was to dispense justice and command the city-state's armed forces. All other political functions were concentrated in the veche which after 1200 became the locus of Novgorod's sovereignty. The veche elected the prince and laid down the rules which he was obliged to follow. The oldest of such contractual charters dates from 1265. The rules were strict, especially as concerned fiscal matters. The prince received in usufruct certain properties, but both he and his retainers were explicitly forbidden to accumulate estates or slaves on the territory of Novgorod, or even to exploit promysly without the veche's permission. The prince could not raise taxes, declare war or peace, or interfere in any manner with the institutions or policies of Novgorod. Sometimes he was specifically prohibited from entering into direct relations with the German merchants. These limitations were by no means empty formalities, as evidenced by the frequent expulsions from Novgorod of princes accused of violating their mandate; in one particularly turbulent 102-year period, Novgorod had 38 successive princes. The veche also controlled the civil administration of the city and of its provinces, and elected the head of its ecclesiastical establishment. Effective power in the veche lay in the hands of Novgorod boyars, a patriciate descended from the old druzhiny and composed of forty leading families, each organized into a corporation around a patron saint and his church. These families monopolized all the high offices and in large measure determined the course of the veche's deliberations. Their sense of self-confidence could not be duplicated in any other Russian city, then or later. Despite its civic pride, however, the Great Sovereign City of Novgorod (Gospodin Velikii Novgorod) lacked strong national ambitions. Content to trade and to lead undisturbed its own kind of existence, it made no attempt to replace Kiev as the centre of the country's political life. Economic exigencies which in the case of the Byzantine trade called for national unification, made no such demands in regard to the trade with the Hanseatic cities.

The situation in the western and south-western regions of the defunct Kievan state was different. By their constant raids, the Pechenegs and Cumans had made unbearable the life of the Slav settlers in the black earth region and the forest zone adjoining it: the latter had to abandon the steppe and withdraw into the safety of the forest. How insignificant the city of Kiev had become, long before its destruction by the Mongols in 1241, may be judged from the refusal of Prince Andrei Bogoliubskii of