Russia under the Old regime

63

by bequeathing his eldest, Basil m, sixty-six of the best towns of the ninety-nine towns in his possession; the remaining four sons had to divide among themselves appanages containing thirty-three of the minor towns. How much the share of the eldest son increased by these procedures may be gathered from the fact that whereas Basil I on his accession in 1389 owed 34-2 per cent of the Mongol tribute due from his father's estate, by the time his great-grandson Basil m ascended the throne in 1505 his theoretical share of the tribute (for it was no longer paid) rose to 71-7 per cent. Thus, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, the appanages allotted to the cadet heirs became mere lifelong provisions and as such no longer threatened the coherence of the family holdings. It now became customary for the appanages, as in feudal France, to revert to the Great Prince upon the holder's death. In this form, they survived until the expiration of the Riurik dynasty in 1598. A vital political reform - the introduction of a system of royal succession based on primogeniture - was accomplished quietly, almost surreptitiously, within the context of the law of property and through the institution of property inheritance. The adoption of this system gave the rulers of Moscow an immense advantage over rival princes who continued to split properties into equal shares among their heirs. As had been said earlier, the ascendancy of Moscow to the position of unquestioned pre-eminence in Russia involved two processes; an external one, aimed at compelling all the other appanage princes, as well as Novgorod and Lithuania, to acknowledge the ruler of Moscow as their sovereign; and an internal one, whose purpose it was to make sovereignty acquire the attributes of patrimonial or domainial power, i.e. full ownership of the land and its inhabitants. Both processes had their roots in the idea of votchina.

The Great Princes of Vladimir, whether their home was in Moscow, Tver or any other appanage principality, regarded their realm as their votchina, that is outright property. Their power over it was comparable to that of the possessor of dominium in Roman law, a power defined as 'absolute ownership excluding all other appropriation and involving the right to use, to abuse and to destroy at will'.4 At first, the princes' patrimonial claims were limited to the towns and volosti which they had either inherited or personally acquired. But from the middle of the fifteenth century, as the power of the Moscow princes grew and they began openly to aspire to all-Russian sovereignty, the term was broadened to include all of Rus'. 'Not only those cities and volosti which are now ours belong to our patrimony,' the legates of Ivan in once told the Lithuanians, 'all the land of Rus', Kiev and Smolensk, and the other cities which [the Lithuanian Great Prince] now holds in the Lithuanian