Russia under the Old regime

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peculiar to Russia, provides important clues to that country's subsequent constitutional development.

Russia's national unification began around 1300, that is, concurrently with analogous developments in England, France and Spain. At the time, it was by no means a foregone conclusion that there would be a unitary Russian state or that its centre would lie in Moscow. Nothing is easier than to demonstrate that whatever happened had to happen. It is also a very satisfying exercise because it seems to confirm that all is always for the best, which cheers the common man and also suits his betters. However, the trouble with the concept of historical inevitability is that it works only retrospectively, i.e. for the writers of history, not for its makers. If the behaviour of the appanage princes is any indication, at the time when Russia's unification got under way, there was certainly no overwhelming sense of it being desirable, let alone inevitable. The theological and historical theories justifying the process were worked out much later. In fact, it would be difficult to prove that Russia could not have gone the way of Germany or Italy and entered the modern age thoroughly dismembered.

If, however, Russia were to be united, then, for reasons previously given, the task had to be accomplished neither by Novgorod nor by Lithuania, but by one of the north-eastern appanage principalities. Here, out of the original principality of Rostov the Great there had emerged, through the perpetual splitting of patrimonies, many appanages, large and small. After 1169, when Andrei Bogoliubskii had decided against abandoning his appanage in this area and moving to Kiev to assume the throne of Great Prince (see above, p. 37), the title of Great Prince came to be associated with his favourite city, Vladimir. His brothers and their progeny rotated control of Vladimir with Bogoliubskii's direct descendants. The Mongols respected the custom, and the person whom they invested as Great Prince assumed concurrently the title Prince of Vladimir, although he did not, as a rule, actually move there. Under the appanage system, the title of Great Prince gave the bearer very little authority over his brethren, but it did carry prestige as well as the right to collect the revenues of the city of Vladimir and its adjoining territories, for which reason it was coveted. The Mongols liked to invest with it princes whom they thought particularly accommodating.

In the competition for Vladimir and the title of Great Prince, the descendants of Prince Alexander Nevsky turned out to be the most successful contenders. The eldest son of the reigning prince of Vladimir, Nevsky served at the time of the Mongol invasion as prince of Novgorod and Pskov where he distinguished himself leading troops against the Germans, Swedes and Lithuanians. In 1242, after his father's death, he journeyed to Sarai to pay homage to the country's