Russia under the Old regime

THE ANATOMY OF THE PATRIMONIAL REGIME

leaves, take his land for my son.' By the time this testament was written it had become accepted practice that he who held land on the territory of Moscow had to render service within its borders - if not to the tsar himself, then to one of his servitors. Failure to serve meant, in theory at least, forfeiture of the land. In practice, many landlords managed to evade service, and pass their days quietly on secluded estates. This is evidenced by a stream of decrees threatening dire punishment for failure to respond to a call to arms or desertion from the ranks. An accidentally preserved document from the Tver region indicates that in the second half of the sixteenth century more than one of every four votchina owners living there served no one.3 But the principle of compulsory service was established; the rest was a matter of enforcement. Ownership of land and rendering of service, traditionally separated in Russia, were made interdependent. A country which had had only alodial land ownership henceforth had only conditional land tenure. The fief, unknown in medieval, 'feudal' Russia, came to it under the auspices of the absolute monarchy. The imposition of compulsory service on all land owners represented a major triumph for the Russian monarchy: 'in no other European land was the sovereign able to make all non-clerical landholding conditional upon the performance of service for him'.4 But the battle was only half won. Although boyars no longer could refuse to serve their prince, they still had many ways of frustrating his will. Behind the facade of mono-cratic and autocratic monarchy survived powerful vestiges of the appanage era. Even though their principalities had been annexed to Moscow and they themselves enrolled in the ranks of the tsar's servitors, the richer among the one-time princes continued to behave on their properties like petty sovereigns. Annexation was often a mere formality; Moscow might take charge of the main town or towns, installing there its agents, but leave the countryside in the hands of the local prince and his boyars. Some of the deposed princes maintained household staffs with a quasi-governmental structure, dispensed immunity charters to monasteries and lay landlords, and marched into battle at the head of private regiments. And some, as we noted, refused to serve. Such landlords took great pride in their ancestry and consciously separated themselves from upstart service families. In the middle of the fifteenth century they began to keep books in which their ancestries were recorded in great detail. The most prestigious of these was the 'Sovereign's Book of Pedigrees' (Gosu-darev Rodoslovets) compiled in 1555-6. This book opened with the genealogy of the tsarist family, which it traced all the way back to the emperors of ancient Rome, then continued with the rest of the house of Riurik, the 'tsarist' dynasties of Kazan, Astrakhan and the Crimea, the appanage princes, and concluded with the most illustrious boyar houses. The families and clans included in this and similar lists were regarded as