Russia under the Old regime

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land, they too by God's will, since the days of old, are our votchina [inherited] from our ancestors.'5 Later on, as he invaded Livonia which had never formed part of the Kievan state, Ivan iv did not hesitate to call it his votchina as well.

The concept of the kingdom as the personal patrimony of the prince was not entirely alien to western political thought. The record exists of a conversation between Frederick 11 and two legal experts in the course of which the Emperor asked them 'whether an emperor was not rightly the dominus of everything held by his subjects'. The interlocutor who had the courage to reply rejected it out of hand: 'he was lord in the political sense, but not in the sense of an owner.'9 Indeed it never struck root in the west, where theorists steadfastly adhered to the fundamental distinction between ownership and authority, between dominium and imperium or iurisdictio. The notion of political authority exercised as dominium carried visibly dangerous implications for the owners of private property, so numerous and influential in western Europe, and this sufficed to make the idea unacceptable. The spread of knowledge of Roman law during the twelfth century helped to give the distinction a powerful theoretical underpinning. In his Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576-86) Jean Bodin, the founder of the modern theory of sovereignty, isolated from the two traditional types of authority headed by one man, the monarchical and its corruption, the tyrannical, a third, which he called 'seigneuraP. (The English translator of 1606 rendered it as 'lordly'.) This type of monarchy, in his view, came into being by conquest of arms. The distinguishing characteristic of la monarchic seigneuriale was that 'the prince is become lord of the goods and persons of his subjects... governing them as a master of a family does his slaves'. Bodin added that in Europe there were only two such regimes, one in Turkey, the other in Muscovy, although they were common in Asia and Africa. In western Europe, he thought, the people would not tolerate this kind of government.'

At issue, of course, were not only ideas and labels. The patrimonial system rested on the assumption that there existed no separation between the properties of the ruler and those of the state. Western Europe insisted that this distinction be drawn. In France, beginning with approximately 1290, custom required the king to safeguard crown estates as an inviolate trust. After 1364, French kings had to swear an oath that they would not alienate any part of the royal domain as constituted on their accession; excluded were only revenues, personal properties and conquered territories. In the sixteenth century, it was further specified that the king's conquests were at his disposal for only ten years, after which they merged with the crown domains.8 In this way, the rulers of France, western Europe's most authoritarian, had to give up proprietary