Russia under the Old regime

90

Beautiful Stair. As he would not step out of the cart, he was forcibly carried to the Patriarch's Chamber and placed behind the table. Kozlovskii intentionally fell to the floor and lay there a long time. Orders were then given to place him at the table against his will; but as he would not sit up but constantly fell to the side, clerks were ordered to support him. After dinner, on the square of the Beautiful Stair Kozlovskii was informed of a decree that 'for his disobedience he was deprived of honour and the boyar title, and inscribed on the rolls of the city Serpeisk, so that, from this example, others would not find it advantageous to act in a similar manner'.6 Special boyar committees were set up to adjudicate mestnichestvo disputes. They usually decided against petitioners, and to discourage others often ordered them to be subjected to beating by the knout or some form of humiliation.

Now clearly mestnichestvo was never strictly enforced; had it been, Muscovite government would have had to grind to a halt. It was essentially a nuisance and an irritant, which served to remind the monarch that he was not full master in his house. Although strong tsars managed to keep the boyars in hand, whenever the monarchy was in difficulty -in times of regency or during interregna, for example - conflicts among the boyar clans threatened to destroy the unity of the state. All these considerations impelled the monarchy to build up alongside the ancient clans another body of servitors, less clannish, more dependent and pliable, a class which had never known free departure or ownership of votchiny.

It will be recalled (pp. 44-5) that appanage princes employed domestic servitors called dvoriane who performed on their domains all kinds of administrative responsibilities. Most of these people were slaves; but even freemen among them were constrained from leaving. These people closely resembled the ministeriales of feudal Germany and Austria. Their ranks were steadily swollen by the accretion of'boyars' sons' who lacked land and therefore liked to attach themselves to the prince's household to serve for whatever remuneration they could get. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Moscow had at its disposal a sizeable reservoir of such low-grade servitors. Because of their total dependence on him, they were well suited to serve the tsar as a counterbalance to the pedigreed families and clans.

A basic difference between boyars and dvoriane was that the former owned votchiny whereas the latter did not. It was the ownership of votchina land which determined whether a servitor enjoyed - even if in theory only - the right to free departure. With the expansion of Moscow, the land reserves of the tsar increased greatly, but so did the need for servitors because there were not enough boyars to man the garrison cities constructed to defend the country's long frontier. The idea therefore