Instruments for Consolidation of the Russian State in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century: Ficus, Service, and the Court

Abstract

The results of an investigation into the process of creating the Russian national state in the second half of the fifteenth century are given. The main directions of eliminating the political fragmentation of the Russian lands in the areas of the treasury, organization of public service, and the court of law are shown. Moscow’s fiscal policy is characterized by a desire to rely on Pomorye’s tenant communities and reduce the granting of immunities to landowners. The important role of innovations introduced into the land description system after the incorporation of Novgorod is noted. The variety in forms of service relations practiced in the united state made it possible to use in the service both traditionally organized detachments of service princes, small landowning members of the zemstvo, and cohorts of landowners. The institutions of central and local government, for all their imperfections, ensured the collection of taxes and the observance of law and order. The conflict potential of society was mitigated by the practice of filing collective petitions and judicial practices. In conclusion, the conventional ideas formed in the historiography about the type of state in Russia are revised and its characterization as a judicial monarchy is substantiated.

The situation in the Russian lands before the enthronement of Ivan III is described in the testament of Grand Prince Vasilii II (1461): “And when my children start living in their appanages, and my princess, and my son Ivan, and my son Yurii, and my children will send scribes, and their scribes will describe their appanages taking an oath [kissing the cross], and according to that result they will impose tax on the plows and on the people, and based on that assessment my princesses and my children will start paying my son Ivan tribute from their appanages.”¹ The tribute to the Horde bled the Russian lands in the 1440s–1470s. As shown in a separate work by the author, at least until 1467 tribute was paid from the Suzdal–Nizhny Novgorod lands to Kazan, and until 1476, the Grand Prince of Moscow annually paid a 7000-ruble sum of tribute to the Great Horde, in addition to the tribute coming from Ryazan, Tver, and other “great” principalities.²

The necessity to enhance the efficiency of the fiscus in order to satisfy the demands of principalities determined the future drawing up the land inventory “based on plows and people.” However, there are no reliable data on the inventories of the 1460s available to historians. S.B. Veselovskii assumed that, in 1465/1466, the scribe M.B. Volynskii drew up a land register of the Kostroma uyezd, and S.M. Kashtanov deems it possible that before 1467 A. Poluektov could have drawn up the land inventory of Vladimir uyezd.³ However, the registers (inventories) of Volynskii and Poluektov mentioned in later excerpts from documents are not dated and it is possible to test the presented hypotheses only by evidence of contractual letters and the assumption of the periodicity of inventories.

Letters of agreement between Ivan III and appanage princes testify that at least until the beginning of the 1480s, contrary to the testament of Vasilii II, his “children” did not have time to “draw up an inventory” because in letters of agreement as of 1481 there is a note: “And when we make an inventory of our patrimonial estates, we will pay your due according to this inventory.”⁴ From the litigation between the peasants of the Likurga volost with the metropolitan boyar children, it is known that before the period “between the metropolitans” (June 29, 1489–September 26, 1490), when Goryain Kuleshin compiled the inventory register of the lands of the Kostroma uyezd, Volynskii compiled the inventory register of the “old villages,” and “the new ones that the volost heads set up” were enregistered by T. Dolmatov.⁵ In this case, the inventory register of Volynsky, most likely, refers not to the 1460s but to the 1470s, or the first half of the 1480s.

The main fiscal resource of the state was the so-called “black” lands that in most cases were not subject to any tax exemptions. The grand princely power did not seek to ensure equal conditions for the payment of tributes by communities if it was necessary for its strengthening in the border areas. Interested in returning to the control of Moscow “knyazhshchin” (princely landed property) on the Dvina, Ivan III strengthened his position in the adjacent Ustyug lands. This is evidenced in 1462–1474 by a decree letter to the Ustyug governor (namestnik) and tiun (court servant or administrator) on the financial protection of the taxable population of Pezhma and the Zaechya River freed from the “burden” and tribute subject to the quitrent letter. “Ustyuzhans,” which should be understood as the totality of the taxable communities of the Velikii Ustyug uyezd, sought, but were not able to include the Pezhemtsy and Zarechans in the general uyezd tax layout.⁶ The quitrent principle of paying taxes (Pezhemtsy and Zarechans paid 1000 squirrels as quitrent instead of general taxes) was widespread both in state-owned and privately owned lands, but was most often used as a temporary measure.

In the interests of the treasury, the concentration of credit and monetary resources was carried out under the control of the Grand Prince. Appanage princes lost the right to mint coins, which was confirmed in the testament of Ivan III.⁷ As the lands around Moscow united, mints “money yards” in Novgorod and Tver passed under its control, where the minting of coins of the same weight continued, but already on behalf of the Grand Prince.

To the greatest extent, however, the interests of the treasury suffered from the widespread distribution of tax immunity. The sources of the 1460s already testify to a new direction in fiscal policy—the desire of the ruling group to reduce the privileges of tarkhanshchiks (landowners enjoying special privileges), ensuring the payment of tribute to the treasury and, in some cases, the execution of the yam (carrier and transport) duty. Apparently, already in 1462/1463, a revision of the tarkhan charters was undertaken, and at least part of the immunists lost their exemption from paying tribute and performing the yam duty. The above applies to the Simonov Monastery, whose tarkhan-unconvictionable charter for villages in the Rameneytse volost near Moscow was confirmed by Ivan III with an addition: “According to this letter, the Grand Prince Ivan Vasilyevich granted Archimandrite Simonovsky Afanasy and his brethren. He commanded them to break these letters with nothing, except tribute (and yam duty).” An undated inscription to the tarkhan-unconvictionable charter to the Spaso-Evfimiev Monastery contains the abolition of exemption from “tribute and quitrent.”⁸

According to S.M. Kashtanov, in the 1460s–1480s, there were only twelve cases where Ivan III granted an indefinite exemption from tribute and eleven cases of him granting temporary exemption. Tarkhan certificates of the majority of appanage princes, for example, Andrei Uglitskii for estates “with court and with tribute” also date back to the period before the early 1490s. In 1491, the government of the Grand Prince ceased the practice of issuing grant-charters with tax immunity to both secular and ecclesiastical major landowners.⁹ This was of particular importance for equalizing the conditions of service from patrimonial estates and manors (enfiefs) in the context of the spreading fief land property system and, in general, the introduction of the principles of making inventory of taxable objects based on land registry.

The first reliably known inventory, an excerpt from which has been preserved, dates back to 1481/1482 and was made by Fyodor Kiselev for the commercial property of the metropolitan department and the Nizhny Novgorod Pecherskii Monastery. The absence of references to units of taxation in the passage makes it impossible to characterize it in any way.¹⁰ The very first description of the lands in Northeastern Russia with units of taxation survived from 1491/1492 and refers to the metropolitan possessions of Pereyaslavskii uyezd. Its distinguishing feature is the list of peasant households in the villages; in the results for the volost Velikaya Sloboda and Opalev stan (district), the number of households and people and the assessment of the taxable capacity in plows (“arable land for five plows,” “arable land for two plows”) are given. In accordance with the same principles, when the taxable capacity of the entire volost was estimated in plows, the metropolitan village of Pushkino was described in Moscow uyezd in 1498/1499 and the metropolitan villages in Yuryev uyezd in 1497/1498.¹¹

The stated ways of accounting for tribute in the surviving excerpts cannot be attributed to the peculiarities of the scribe books of Northeastern Russia since the metropolitan possessions were separated in tax terms from neighboring lands and paid taxes to the treasury also separately, independently carrying out the layout within the volostkas. Different principles underlay the inventory description of the grand princely villages in Vladimir uyezd drawn up by P.G. Zabolotskii in 1498/1499, in a fragment of which the amount of arable land of the Grand Prince in tithes, peasant arable land in tithes, peasant hay in shocks, and arable land in the plow letter (description of urban and rural land holdings, including lands and crafts) are taken into account separately.¹²

For the first time, the new principles of compiling cadasters were embodied in the descriptions of the Novgorod land after its incorporation into the united state. Their development was associated with a large-scale reorganization of the landownership in the Novgorod Republic, which took place in the years 1478–1499. During the negotiations in the village of Troitskii in January–February 1478, the Novgorodians put forward three main conditions for Ivan III: “not to withdraw land from the Novgorod possessions, not to take away people’s inherited estates and property, and not to demand to be sent to service in Nizovskaya (Northeastern Russia).” In exchange for the preservation of inherited estates and retaining service in Novgorod, the posadniks (heads of the city government) and the village constables agreed to the confiscation of all categories of land in Torzhok, ten bishop’s volosts and half of the possessions of six monasteries, which, headed by the Yuriev monastery, constituted the Novgorod archimandritia. As a concession, Ivan III agreed to levy tribute from the Novgorod land, including Pomorie, in the amount of seven den’gas (half hryvnia) for a plow, without sending his own scribes and tributaries to the volosts: “will give on taking an oath (kissing the cross); and whoever conceals at least one obzha (measure of arable land and unit for lax assessment), and we will catch him out … .”¹³

The contractual verification of the number of obzhas in the former and preserved inherited estates led to the need to mobilize the data of manorial registers, which recorded information about the “old income” of the owners. It was not difficult to obtain data on monetary and grain income in the first few years after the incorporation of Novgorod because most of the secular and church landowners retained their lands; these owners’ manorial registers were called “old books” in later documentation. Beginning in 1482, the distribution of confiscated lands to new landowners began—to landed gentry, most of them transferred from Moscow uyezds on the condition of service. The formation of the fief system of land property followed other principles than the patrimonial landholding. The surviving grant-charters to landed gentry recorded the transfer of villages and hamlets “with income from money and grain in the old days, as were those villages and hamlets belonging to Bogdan, to Esipov, and to Ivan, to Kuzmin and to Khomutov, besides mine, the Grand Prince’s tribute.”¹⁴ The new landowner could not arbitrarily change the amount of income received in order to avoid the desolation of the estate, which was located on the land of the Grand Prince.

However, Ivan III, whose governors in Novgorod faced opposition to their administrative and judicial authority, backtracked on his original promises to the Novgorodians, and throughout the 1480s carried out new confiscations of ancestral estates, now from secular landowners, boyars, and gentry, whose families were evicted from Novgorod in uyezds of Northeastern Russia. The promise not to send his own scribes to Novgorod was also broken, for no later than 1486/1487 Moscow scribes appeared in the Novgorod lands. Evidence of this is the surviving extract from the cadaster of the Derevskaya pyatina from a letter from Timofei Petrovich Zamytskii and the Prince’s scribe Yakov Kochergin.¹⁵ The fact of scribes’ using in the 1480s fiscal taxable units of obzha and plow, which had existed in Novgorod of the republican era, indicates that Moscow scribes pursued the goal of fixing the rates of taxation of newly created estates.

Property inventory records of the second half of the 1480s were later called books of the “old style,” which were used as copies of summary documents in the compilation of the cadasters with overall land descriptions of 1499–1505 and predetermined their structure, in particular, the structure of the early cadaster of Derevskaya pyatina of 1499. At the final stage in 1499, a large-scale confiscation of episcopal and monastic lands was carried out; in Derevskaya pyatina, the church lost 48% of all its land.¹⁶ As a result, by the end of the fifteenth century, a powerful fief corporation of landowners had formed in the Novgorod lands, totally deprived of tax and judicial immunity and completely dependent on the authorities.¹⁷

By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the system of conditional landownership was widespread not only in the Novgorod lands of the northwest, where it arose as a result of large-scale land mobilizations, land expropriations, and mass dispossession of patrimonial land-owners that took place from the territory of the former Grand Principality of Vladimir. A similar fate awaited many of the 1632 Novgorodian patrimonial landowners who were resettled to the northeast, to the old uyezds of the great principality. V.B. Kobrin identified dozens of representatives of presumably Novgorodian families who settled in the Zamoskovye (Moscow) area as landed gentry.

He also noted that, on the borders between the grand princely (Moscow uyezd) and appanage (Dmitrovsky uyezd) possessions in 1504, there were more than 30 landowners on a conditional right, and some of the landed gentry named in the boundary letters had already lost their estates by this time.¹⁸ Semyon and Kuzma Rozhnov mentioned in the landmark book of 1504 are also known as the landed gentry of Zvenigorod uyezd. The villages, which were previously fixed on a manorial legal basis “as belonging to” Semyon, Kuzma, and their brother Grigory Mikhailov, the children of Rozhnov, were granted by appanage Prince Yurii Dmitrovskii “for future use and as a patrimonial estate” to P.M. Pleshcheev. The Rozhnovs, however, lost their estates only in Dmitrovskii uyezd; in Zvenigorod uyezd, Semyon Rozhnov and his brother retained “as fiefs” the villages of Voislavskoye, Ershovskoye, and Likharevskoye.¹⁹ In Mushkovo tret' of the Moscow uyezd, Kuzma Rozhnov lost his hamlet Turilovo and the village of Zamochnikovo but retained the village of Turilovo “for himself”; his brother Semyon Rozhnov lost the village of Rakovo in Mushkovo tret’, but, apparently, retained his share in the village of Balino, Luchinskaya volost, Moscow uyezd, which is recorded as the joint property of the Rozhnovs.²⁰ The described confiscations of estates were associated with the allocation of Dmitrovskii and Zvenigorod uyezds according to the testament of Ivan III as an appanage to Prince Yuri, who, as the sovereign owner of his appanage, was able to grant a patrimonial estate to Pleshcheev at the expense of fief lands. Previously, the Rozhnovs, whose estates had been confiscated, had to come to terms with their loss, which, perhaps, was compensated by grants from neighboring lands.

Thus, the fief system was implemented, firstly, because it fully met the requirements of the fiscus, since the peasants who inhabited the estates paid all the taxes, and, secondly, it set new conditions for service, which was the second important tool for state consolidation. In the second half of the fifteenth century, the main forms of service relations were developed, which existed in the Russian state right up to the oprichnina. The state as a whole remained a dispersed patrimonial monarchy, in which power and land were divided among the princes of the blood, who belonged to the dynastic lines of Rurik and Gediminas. Appanage princes, who received their lands according to the will of the Grand Prince, possessed the full power of authority in their appanages. In letters of agreement, both parties gave the obligation to “observe, and not offend, and not intervene” in the grand principality or appanages received from the donor-father. The Grand Prince guaranteed the full power of authority to the appanage prince: “over these villages for judgement and tribute in this land,” “to rule these villages holding court and collecting tribute.” A significant restriction was the prohibition of appanage princes to take “service princes with patrimonial estates” into the service; however, boyars, boyar children, and servants were given the opportunity to transfer to the service of any of the sovereigns.²¹

However, by 1480 the last norm of the treaties had practically no effect: the transition to service in the appanage of Prince I.V. Lyko-Obolenskii, who was removed from the Velikolukskii governorship and brought to trial, became the reason for his arrest by the bailiffs of Ivan III and punishment. The liquidation in 1472–1491 of the appanages belonging to the brothers and nephews of the Grand Prince (except for Volotskii) politically formalized the economic decline of the appanages. Letters of agreement and testaments of 1480s–1500s record the progressive impoverishment of appanage princes, whose debts to Moscow merchants could not be paid.²² B.N. Florya believes that the prohibition for the appanage princes to hire gardeners and artisans from the townspeople to serve as their servants was of decisive importance for the evolution of the service organization, which provided for the needs of the palace economy in the grand principality and appanages. Only the Grand Prince retained the right to this operation.²³ Despite the fact that the appanage system was reproduced when the monarch changed, as happened in 1503–1505, the potential of appanage princes was incomparable with the means available to the Grand Prince, and often to the service princes.

The status of the service princes was due to their origin and military–political potential. According to A.A. Zimin’s definition, the principality of a service prince “was regarded as an inheritable estate (passed over from the servant’s ancestors or granted to him by the Grand Prince), and was conditioned by the performance of service to the Moscow sovereign.”²⁴ This definition, however, does not take into account the limits of princely immunity, because not all princes who possessed patrimonial estates and served the sovereign owned lands with the right to collect taxes and hold court of law. In the 1460s, among the princes of Northeastern Russia (Suzdal, Tver, Starodub, Yaroslavl, etc.), there were groups of service princes proper, connected with the sovereign by special relations, and princes who transferred to the service directly “to the court” of the sovereign. The first category, undoubtedly, included the Suzdal and Rostov–Yaroslavl princes, who in the 1460s–1480s served as governor-princes in Novgorod and Pskov, and only in the 1490s switched to “Moscow” service.²⁵ The princes of the junior lines switched to the service of Moscow with the loss of all their sovereign rights, retaining only extensive tax and judicial privileges. This status was granted by the tarkhan-unconvictionable charter of 1464 to the Yaroslav princes who lost the right to collect tribute and hold court of law in cases of murder, and found themselves under the jurisdiction of the Grand Prince or his appointed boyar.²⁶

Princes Belskii, Vorotynskii, Belevskii, Trubetskoi, Mosalskii, and Mezetskii, who arrived in Russia from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania at the height of the war with it at the end of the fifteenth century, were also included in the category of “serving” or service princes, a special group of the ruling elite within the Grand Prince’s court. According to the Russian–Lithuanian treaty of 1503, S.I. Starodubskii, V.I. Shemyachich, S.I. Belskii, princes Trubetskoi and Mosalskii, and “our other servants” were accepted as the servants of the Moscow sovereign.²⁷ The high status of the princes Belskii was due to their being the descendants of Gediminas, and later on because of their family ties with the Grand Prince’s family. Prince F.I. Belskii, who left Lithuania for Moscow in 1481/1482, received from the Grand Prince as a patrimonial estate the lands confiscated from Novgorod landowners in Derevskaya Pyatina: “the city of Demon inheritable estate and Moreva with many volosts.”²⁸ Frolov erroneously claims that the lands in Derevskaya pyatina were given to Belskii as a fief-office.

Analysis of the Moreva property descriptions in the cadaster of 1499 confirms that Belskii owned it not as a fief governor but as a service prince. Firstly, part of the villages in Moreva belonged “to the prince’s servants,” which could only take place in the case of patrimonial landholding by the prince of the volost; only in this case could he give villages to his servants for holding, while the fief governors did not have such a right. Secondly, in the results of the property descriptions of Moreva volost, Belskii’s “princely income” is clearly distinguished as that of a patrimonial landowner and “remuneration of the volost head and tivun (bailiff)” and a governor’s official, from which it follows that these are fundamentally different types of income. In addition to money, the composition of the "prince’s income” included small income, black kuna, and konevshchina, typically state taxes that could not be transferred to the fief governor. In terms of its volume (40 Novgorod rubles, in addition to quitrent payments in grain), Belskii’s income was also incomparable with the remuneration of the volost head and his tiun (10.5 Novgorod rubles and four hryvnias with six dengas).²⁹

After falling from grace in the 1490s, Belskii received as a patrimonial estate Lukh, Kineshma, and two volosts and married Anna Vasilievna, daughter of the sister of Ivan III Anna and of the Grand Prince of Ryazan Vasilii Ivanovich.³⁰ The Belskiis, like other service princes, fell under the legal norm of interprincely agreements on the confiscation of their lands in the event of leaving for the appanage princes, and their patrimonial estates in the event of a childless death passed to the sovereign, as happened with the city of Belaya, which had belonged to Prince Semyon Belskii.³¹ In 1500, the descendants of Olgerd’s second son, the princes Trubetskoi, also went to serve in Moscow, retaining the sovereign possession of their ancestral Trubchevsk as part of the Russian state.³²

The Chernigov-Severskii princes of Southwestern Russia (Obolenskii, Vorotynskii, Odoevskii, Mezetskii, etc.) were also included in the category of “servants”: this was the way the Russian ambassadors described the Belevskii princes who owned the “dolnitsa” (share) of the city of Belev during negotiations with Lithuania. According to the agreement of 1494, the Grand Prince of Lithuania Alexander recognized the service of the descendants of the Chernigov princes to the Moscow sovereign, confirming that “the princes Novoselskii, Odoevskii, and Vorotynskii, and Peremyshlskii, and Belevskii are all yours, of the Grand Prince Ivan and your children and with their homelands.”³³ The princes Vorotynskii switched over to service in Moscow in 1487–1492, retaining an extensive appanage in the cities of Vorotynsk, Pere-myshl, Mosalsk, Serpeisk, Opakov, and volosts that were in shared ownership. However, the childless death of Dmitrii and Semyon Vorotynskii led to the fact that by 1503 two-thirds of Vorotynsk, Serpeisk, Opakov, and volosts passed to the hands of Ivan III and his heirs.³⁴

An equally unenviable fate befell the princes Odoevskii, who went to serve in Moscow in the 1480s because, after the death of the childless princes, two lots of Odoev also passed into the possession of the Grand Prince’s family.³⁵ The princes Mosalskii who moved to serve in Moscow in 1500 also received the status of “servants,” enshrined in an agreement with Lithuania in 1503.³⁶ Prince Mikhail Mezetskii, who left for the service of Ivan III in 1492, ten years later actually lost his status as a “servant”: according to the Grand Prince’s testament 1504, he lost his “lot” of the town of Meschesk as a result of the exchange, and the volost Oleksin received “by exchange letter” in Starodub he held as an ordinary patrimonial landowner, since “the court and tribute” in it belonged to Vasilii III.³⁷

The most influential of the “servants” who entered the service of the Grand Prince of Moscow in 1500 were Prince Semyon Ivanovich Mozhaiskii (great-grandson of Dmitri Donskoi) and Prince Vasilii Ivanovich Shemyachich (grandson of Vasilii the Dark’s enemy Dmitrii Yuryevich Shemyaka). Their estates, unlike those owned by the rest of the service princes, were more like appanages: according to an order to the Moscow ambassador, Prince Semyon Ivanovich “came from the goroda with Chernigov, and with Starodub, and with Gom, and with Lyubich.” His son, Prince Vasilii Starodubskii, later received from the overlord the Khotun palace (royal) volost, as well as, together with Prince Vasilii Shemyachich, the volosts of Tovarkov and Konopkar on the Ugra River.³⁸

Prince Vasilii Ivanovich Shemyachich came over to the side of Moscow with no less extensive possessions, which included Novgorod–Severskii, Rylsk, Radogoshch, and Putivl, and the last two cities were “granted” to him by Ivan III from among the conquered lands. Another city granted to Prince Vasilii was Malyi Yaroslavets, the conditions of ownership of which can be judged definitively from the grant-charter to the Trinity-Serigev Monastery in 1516. According to the charter, Vasilii III “granted his servant prince Vasilii Ivanovich Yaroslavl the right of court and tribute.” The judicial prerogatives of Prince Vasilii extended to the majority of the taxable population of the uyezd, and only those who had immunity, like the Trinity patrimonial estate, were beyond the jurisdiction of the “servant” and his tiuns, with the exception of the joint trials. The main tax, tribute, went to the treasury of a service prince: “And Prince Vasilii receives tribute from those villages and from villages from monasteries from year to year on plows, just as I command you to take tribute from your cities from Borovsk and from Mozhaisk, the determined sum from the plow, and except the tribute do not take anything from them.”³⁹ The concentration of tribute in the hands of the service princes, as well as the judicial authority over all landowners who did not have tarkhan charters from the Grand Prince, turned Starodubskii and Shemyachich, in fact, not into subjects of Moscow, but into vassals who were under its protectorate.

The princes Vyazemskii in the winter of 1492–1493 ended up in Moscow as prisoners after the capture of Vyazma by Russian troops, after which they were granted nothing else but Vyazma. Due to the fragmentation of their patrimonial estates, they did not receive the status of service princes and did not retain possession of the city of Vyazma.⁴⁰

The power of the appanage and service princes in the territories under their jurisdiction was offset by their absence from the Duma of the Grand Prince. In the second half of the fifteenth century, the Boyar Duma recruited mainly old servants of the Moscow princes, whose ancestors began to serve these princes in the ranks of the old Moscow boyars. During the reign of Ivan III, the composition of the Duma changed several times, but its structure and the number of Duma members were surprisingly stable. According to the reconstruction by Zimin, in 1461/1462 on the eve of the accession to the throne of Ivan III, the Duma consisted of 10–11 people, of which five were descendants of old Moscow apanage princes. By the time of Ivan III’s death, the Duma consisted of five boyars and seven okolnichys, of which four were descendants of old Moscow apanage princes.

Both in 1461/1462 and in 1505, the Duma included one titled Duma member from the family of the Patrikeev princes (Prince Ivan Yuryevich and Prince D.V. Shchenya), two or one Duma member from the Obolenskii family (Prince Vasilii Ivanovich and Prince Ivan Vasilyevich Striga in 1461/1462 and Prince P.V. Nagoi in 1505). Other titled Duma members were representatives of the Ryapolovskii, Kholmskii, and Yaroslavskii families.⁴¹ Descendants of apanage princes filed a special cross-kissing (or “transgressive” in case of some guilt) record of fidelity to the throne, evidence of which is the only surviving record on behalf of Prince D.D. Kholmskii of 1474.⁴² The record was followed by the rise of Prince Kholmskii at court and his co-optation to the Duma by 1479.

At the Sovereign’s court, among the untitled old Moscow boyars, the most powerful and numerous were people from the Ratsha clan (Chelyadnins, Buturlins), Kobylin (Zakharyins, Kolychevs), Morozovs, Saburovs and Godunovs, and Pleshcheevs. A prominent role was played by the descendants of the Redega (Khabarovs, Glebovs, Gusevs, Podzhogins), the Zabolotskiis, Kutuzovs, Novosiltsevs, and the Tver and Ryazan boyar families (Borisovs, Zhitovs, Karpovs, Nashchokins, Nagiye, Denisievs-Bulgakovs, Verderevskys, and Izmailovs), as well as the descendants of the Greeks who came over for service of the great Moscow prince (Khovrins and Trakhaniotovs).⁴³

From among these clans, administrators were selected for the Treasury, palace institutions, and for the positions of governors in large cities, primarily in Moscow. The execution of the office by the Moscow governor, due to its exceptional importance, was not limited by time: for example, Prince I.Yu. Patrikeyev held the position of Moscow governor for 27 years, from 1472 to 1499.⁴⁴ The testament of Ivan III of 1504 includes the treasurer D.V. Ovtsa and state clerks, including S. Bashein, head of the palace administration P.V. Velikii-Shestunov, and the palace clerks, the head of the Tver palace administration, the Tver clerks and stewards, the head of palace administration in Novgorod the Great, and the local treasurers, clerks, and stewards. In addition, separate “treasuries” are mentioned at Beloozero and in Vologda.⁴⁵ Apparently, the testament of 1504 fragmentarily presents the country’s financial management structure, which is characterized by rudimentary centralization. In addition to the main treasury headed by the Grand Prince’s treasurer, there were fiscal management centers in Novgorod the Great (Novgorod head of administration, treasurers, clerks, stewards), Beloozero, and Vologda, where taxes were collected, which, apparently, were partly spent locally.

At the lower level of the Sovereign Court at the end of the fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth century, there were boyar children—that was the name of service people who had a different official status, descended not only from princely and boyar families, but also servants from the “dissolved” courts. The “court” boyar children, in contrast to the “city” boyar children, were called up for service in the capital and participated in national affairs: military campaigns, embassy receptions, diplomatic missions, and central and local government.

The local government was mostly based on the system of kormleniye, which was a Russian version of prebend, performance of official duties paid by citizens. This type of funding was provided for the positions of governors, volost heads, and for various items of income, such as the right to hold the position of a tiun, judicial office, property manager, and collect duty of administrative (pischeye) or stable and forage (yaselnicheye) origin. As a rule, governors of cities were representatives of old service families, and their functional duties consisted in ensuring the defense of the city, mobilizing uyezd service people, administering justice, and ensuring commercial and industrial activities. The posts of volost heads were usually held by representatives of the lower strata of the sovereign’s court, or of local service communities, although the profitability of the administrations of volost heads, especially in Pomorye, could be significant. Prebend funding was provided to a service person periodically, chosen from a queue of applicants for an annual period and could be extended for special merits. Service with prebend funding was perceived by a person as a marker of his social status. Thus, Fedor Kobets, captured by Lithuanians, who had previously received the prebend (kormleniye) right to collect horse-and-carriage duties in Novgorod called himself the “stable superintendant of Novgorod the Great.”⁴⁶

The administrative apparatus of the governors and of volost heads (tiuns, administrative and judicial clerks), as a rule, was staffed from among the ministerial serfs. M. Weber called the functions performed by such servants “extrapatrimonial,” deduced them from the “arbitrary discretion of the master,” and considered the prebend system itself to be an extreme form of the fief system of remuneration for service.⁴⁷ Payment for the service of fief governors and their apparatus was carried out by the local population, which collected in its favor entry and three festive payments, calculated in kind and in monetary terms. Prebend payments were collected by elected village headmen and village policemen separately from privately owned and state-owned lands. Trade was controlled by the duty officers of a fief governor, who levied a customs duty “yavka” from trading people and penalty fees “protamozhye” from violators who traded outside the established places. Court fees levied by fief governors were supposed to be a guarantee of their administration of justice, since they made governors and volost heads materially interested in resolving cases before trial or in court.

The children of boyars “from the cities” carried out military service as part of uyezd militias already in the second half of the XV century. In 1496, Ivan III sent to Kazan “many children of the boyars of his own court and lower cities, children of the boyars, Novogorodians, and from Murom, and Kostroma, and many other cities.”⁴⁸ For the first time in the lists of noble families, “urban boyar children” are mentioned in the autumn of 1508 in Vyazma during the war with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The waywode of the advanced regiment, Prince V.V. Shuiskii was ordered “to leave people from his people who he has, 500 people of the heads of boyar children, besides those who are with him princes and boyar children from the court and from cities.”⁴⁹

The service also included “zemtsy,” a stratum of small patrimonial landowners, unprivileged landowners from the outlying lands, who were included in the united state. Their fate turned out to be contradictory, and while in most of the territory of the Russian state the zemstvos disappeared, having joined manorial corporations, or degenerated into peasants, in Novgorod, zemstvo landownership survived until the seventeemth century.⁵⁰ The described variety in forms of service relations in the united Russian state reveals both unexpired relics of the appanage era and new orders based on regulation and control.

“In the historiography, these new orders were invariably identified with the legal system, the apotheosis of the development of which at the end of the fifteenth century is considered the creation of the Sudebnik (Legal Code) of 1497, which combined the norms of common and princely law.”⁵¹ However, numerous contradictions in the legal norms reflected in the articles of the Sudebnik do not allow us to recognize their totality as a system of law, at least somewhat similar to the ancient Roman or modern European legal systems. In the conditions of isolation from the influence of Roman law, the only way to introduce a new order was to borrow legal norms from the legislative codes of the Russian lands and to develop judicial practices based on them, which, along with the petitions of subjects, became the most important tool for consolidating society.

Collective petitions and the right of subjects to submit them are considered in the modern historiography as a characteristic feature of European monarchies of the early modern period.⁵² The earliest references to collective petitions to the Grand Prince of Moscow date back to the second half of the 1470s. Ivan III received massive petitions for judicial protection from the Novgorodians during his “peaceful march” to Novgorod in the winter of 1474–1476. Their result was the trial and conviction of the boyars and their clientele for “assault” (robbery with use of force) on the court of the opposing group. In 1479–1480, the collective petition submitted by the inhabitants of Velikiye Luki, recently included in the state, with a complaint against the governor I.V. Lyko-Obolenskii resulted in his accusation by the Grand Prince of injustice and compulsion to pay compensation (“extorted money in sales”).⁵³ The above facts give grounds to conclude that the authorities considered collective petitions as an important channel of “feedback” with territorial communities.

However, an incomparably more important channel was judicial practices, which were only partially regulated by legislation, changes in which, as well as in fiscal practices, were stimulated by the subordination of Novgorod. The question of revising the Pskov–Novgorod legislation by Moscow was raised already by P.I. Belyaev and L.V. Cherepnin.⁵⁴ Waging a war against the republic in 1471, Ivan III pursued his goal of restoring the position of the Grand Prince’s power in Novgorod, including in court. The innovation, made simultaneously with the conclusion of the Korostyn Treaty on August 11, 1471, concerned several articles of the Novgorod Judicial Charter. An important fragment of the Korostyn Treaty interprets these innovations as follows: “This is the final document on Novgorod about the court signed by the Grand Princes’ names and stamped by their stamps. And there are stipulations in the Novgorod charter against assaulters, and robbers, and frauds; and the Great Prince will take one copy of this final document and the other copy will be taken by Novogorod the Great. Whoever would give a bribe or whoever would start taking bribes at the konets (several streets), and in trading yards, and in the district, and along the streets from robbers, and from a spotter, and from an assaulter, such an amount shall be recovered from him, half to the Grand Prince, according to the Novgorod charter, and half to Novgorod the Great. Village heads and stallkeepers cannot be judged anywhere without the Grand Prince’s governors and the posadnik.”⁵⁵

In the surviving fragments of the Novgorod judicial charter, traces of the edition of 1471 can be traced in Articles 2, 6, 10, 28, and 42. Article 2 (“And the posadnik will conduct law proceedings with the governors of the Grand Prince in the old manner; and without the governors of the Grand Prince, the posadnik shall not give judgement”) affirms the priority of the Grand Prince’s governor in the court of the posadnik.⁵⁶ Subsequent articles contained prohibitions on inciting a crowd to attack a court or an opposing party, and obligations immediately to consider cases of hitting and robbing, and to complete a land case by a single composition of the court.⁵⁷ Such changes in the text of the Novgorod judicial charter could only have been made as a result of the joint work of clerks from both Moscow and Novgorod.

The experience of the clerks in delimiting the powers of judges in Novgorod could not but affect the judicial practice in Moscow. Between September 12, 1472, and September 14, 1473, when after the death of Yurii Dmitrovskii Ivan III usurped his patrimony, including half a third of Moscow, the compilation of the so-called “Record of homicide” was undertaken.⁵⁸ The Grand Prince, of course, needed to streamline the Moscow courts by increasing the powers of the governors, each of which was responsible for a third of the city, two of whom now represented his interests. According to the norms of the “Record,” the powers of a governor responsible for a third of the city extended to a wide range of criminal cases, including homicide (murder), theft when a thief was and was not caught red-handed, and “poena” cases, punishable by a fine. The jurisdiction of the Moscow governors extended to cities such as Serpukhov, Ruza, and Zvenigorod, and this order was preserved even after the restoration of appanages according to the testament of Ivan III. As suggested by G.V. Semenchenko, the governors of the cities, “gravitating to Moscow” in cases of murder, had to notify the Moscow governors of the murderers caught at the place of a crime.⁵⁹

At the same time, in 1474, a copy of the Pskov Judicial Charter was made for the needs of Moscow legislators, and in 1484–1486 its text was radically edited. As shown by L.V. Cherepnin, on the initiative of the Grand Prince’s governor Ya.V. Obolenskii in Pskov, the veche court was liquidated, replaced by the Gospoda (Ospoda) court of law in the princely court. Work in the field of codification of legal norms used in the courts of the emerging Russian state and state entities dependent thereon affected the legislation of both Pskov and Moscow. P.I. Belyaev and L.V. Cherepnin identified the articles of the Pskov Judicial Charter, which, in a revised form, became the direct source of the statutory letters of the governor’s administration (Art. 8, 49, 80, 93) and the Code of Law 1497 (Art. 17, 20, 21, 22, 36, 40, 47, 60, 105, 109).⁶⁰

From the fifteenth century, the only statutory charter of the governorship has been preserved—Belozerskaya (1488). G.V. Semenchenko came to the conclusion that, even before the approval of the Sudebnik of 1497, there was a “sample” (single form) of the statutory charter of the governor’s administration, on the basis of which such documents were drawn up, which have not survived to this day. The researcher, however, focused entirely on comparing the amount of the “award” collected by the “boyar” and the governor in accordance with the articles of the statutory letters of the governor’s office and the Sudebnik of 1497, based on which he concluded that the three “blocks” of the code of laws were drawn up at different times. From his viewpoint, the discrepancy in the size of the amount awarded between articles 3–7 and 38 of the Sudebnik indicates that initially (in the second half of the 1480s) the government established a fixed award equal to 10% of the claim amount. Later (in September 1497), the legislator returned to the norm of the award equal to the amount of the claim (or half of this amount).⁶¹

Semenchenko, however, did not take into account the fact that Article 38 of the Sudebnik of 1497 mentions certain “charters,” in accordance with the norms of which the governor was to collect court fees “from the guilty party.” Moreover, in the event that “there is no charter anywhere” (“where there is no charter”), duties could be levied in the amount of the claim, or half of the claim. If by “charters” of Article 38, we mean the statutory letters of the governor’s office,⁶² then the situation with the size of the “award” with regard to the Sudebnik and charters appears to be as follows. In 1497, the legislator was informed that the statutory charters of the governor’s administration were issued for far from every city or land (“where there is no charter”). Various norms of “awarding” appeared in the effective charters of the administration of the governor, two altyns or eight dengas, or “part of the amount of the claim,” or " half of the amount of the claim," or other norms unknown to us. That is why, in the “Decree by the Governor on the City Court” (Article 38), the legislator was forced for those cities and uyezds, “where there is no charter”, to introduce the maximum rate of thte “award” equivalent to the amount of the claim, and for the “boyar court” in the capital, he introduced a norm of 10% of the amount of the claim.

The absence of statutory charters for governorships issued by the Moscow government in many lands resulted in the fact that the further development of the law was utterly determined by judicial practices, the source of the history of which are the surviving materials on court cases over the land. Conflicts between landowners and land users were complicated by the widespread judicial immunity, which, unlike tax immunity, was preserved in the second half of the fifteenth century. The terms of judicial immunity implied the right of the landowner to judge his peasants and to participate in court in the case of litigation with neighboring peasants. Thus, the land court in the first instance was carried out with the participation of two judges—visiting or common (local). Thus, a trial on the wasteland of Zvenigorod uyezd between the metropolitan peasants and the peasants of the appanage prince Andrei Vasilyevich was judged by visiting judges,. the head of the administration of Metropolitan Semyon and the princely judge I. Khvoshchinskii. In the second instance, the case was transferred to the court of the Grand Prince Ivan III, who, in the presence of three boyars, made a decision based on the “spisok” (minutes of the first meeting).⁶³

Apparently, the practice of visiting judges led to the emergence of the so-called appointed (“given”) judges, whom the sovereign “gave” to the plaintiff and the defendant. V.B. Kobrin showed that the functions of appointed judges were limited to the preliminary investigation and preparation of a court record with the participation of jurors.⁶⁴ Such an appointed judge could take the testimony of titled landowners. Thus, at the court hearings of 1496–1498 on land disputes between the Trinity-Sergius Monastery and the Obolenskii princes in Maloyaroslavetskii uyezd, princes F.I. Lykov, I.V. Kashin, and I.K. Obolenskii acted as defendants before the appointed judge V.G. Zverev. In the second instance, the court record had to be “reported to the sovereign the Grand Prince,” on whose behalf Prince I.Yu Patrikeev judged, before whom both plaintiffs stood trial.⁶⁵ In 1498/1499 Zverev judged in the first instance the land dispute between the Simonov Monastery and the local patrimonial landowner Bashlov in Moscow uyezd, making the plaintiffs stand trial before the scribe prince V.I. Golenin (on “reporting” to him the circumstances of the case).⁶⁶ In addition to the functions of a judge, Zverev in the years 1496–1505 acted three times as a land surveyor, setting the boundaries between the lands of the Trinity-Sergius Monastery and the Grand Prince’s possessions and the lands of the princes Obolenskii.⁶⁷

In the last resort, land affairs were judged by appointed boyars, among whom were members of the Boyar Duma, the Moscow governor, treasurers, and the heads of administration. Despite the clear tendency to transfer cases by a report to a high-ranking sovereign’s servants, until the end of the fifteenth century not only the appanage princes but also the Grand Prince of All Russia took upon themselves the decision of land disputes in the last instance.

The code of law of Ivan III became the first national judicial procedure code, in the legal norms of which some innovations borrowed from earlier legislative collections were enshrined. The most important of them was the ban on judges taking “secret bribes” proclaimed in Article 4 of the Pskov Judicial Charter and reproduced in Article 1 of the Sudebnik. Article 12 of the Sudebnik prescribes the obligatory presence at the criminal court of “good people” who testify under oath, and article 38 requires the presence at the court of the governor with the boyar court of the palace administration head, the headman, and the “best” people. Yu.G. Alekseev, after analyzing the presence of “people” at court hearings on land cases, came to the conclusion that the local court with the participation of “good people” was a traditional form of existence of the court on the basis of “community spirit.”⁶⁸

However, the researcher did not take into consideration that the Belozersk charter and the Sudebnik defined legal procedure in general. Since all information about the presence of “jurors” at meetings chronologically preceding the adoption of laws in 1488 and 1497 is known from the minutes of the land court, it is more logical to assume that the application of this principle to all judicial practice was an innovation. Its significance is not limited to the control of local communities over the governorship, as, for example, A.G. Polyak believed.⁶⁹ Since many circumstances of the local communities’ life were considered in the course of court hearings, the presence of a palace administration head, headman, and good people made judicial practice into the basic principle of local administration.

The combination of the above-considered administrative approaches to the spheres of fiscus, service, and the court of law resulted in the emergence of a state, the essence of which up to now provokes heated discussions. Zimin was convinced that “the Russian state took shape in the form of an estate monarchy,” a sign of which, from his viewpoint, was the formation of an estatist state, and representatives of the “ruling class” received privileged rights.⁷⁰ Meanwhile, the definition of Russia at the end of the fifteenth century as an estate monarchy conflicts with our knowledge of the estate monarchy in the countries of Western Europe, for example, in France. Based on the experience of studying the relations of state power with the ruling class in Western Europe, N.A. Khachaturian defines the estate monarchy as a combination of centralization and diffusion of power in the hands of local sovereigns. They “acted in their immunity districts and in the bodies of estate representation as direct partners of state power.”⁷¹ It is easy to see that in Russia of fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there was no combination of these conditions: the bodies of estate representation and the estates themselves appeared only in the middle of the sixteenth century, simultaneously with the elimination of even those modest immunity privileges that Russian landowners used to have.

Alekseev deems it possible to speak of the Russian state of the second half of the fifteenth century as “based on zemstvo and service,” which served as an “instrument for the integration of society, i.e., a bearer and defender of general national rather than social, class interests.”⁷² We consider it necessary to emphasize our fundamental disagreement with the approach outlined by Alekseev. First, the state is not such an uncomplicated, simple phenomenon that it can be classified as an “instrument.” Even a medieval state, and Russia of the second half of the fifteenth century, no doubt, was such, appears as a set of institutions, the combination of which determines the direction of development of society, and their focus is the power of the monarch. Secondly, the activities of state institutions are embodied in the collection of taxes, the organization of service, the provision of justice, and many less important areas, and the instruments of this activity are fiscus, service, and the court.

The data presented in this article substantiate a fundamentally different concept: the integration (consolidation) of communities is usually carried out in the interests of the ruling class, which at the ascending stage of civilizational development coincide with the national interest. As in any agrarian medieval society in Russia in the second half of the fifteenth century, this ruling class consisted of privileged landowners who occupied dominant positions in the system of service and the court, which focused on the personality of the monarch. In France, from the twelvth century through the first half of the sixteenth century, the dominating idea was the implementation of traditional justice as the essence of the monarch’s power, which makes it possible to define French absolutism as a judicial monarchy.⁷³

Similar ideas were characteristic of Russian subjects, contemporaries and eyewitnesses of the process of crystallization of state institutions in Russia. Joseph Volotskii, in a letter to Tretyakov, justifying the transfer of his monastery under the supreme patronage of the Grand Prince, presented the court of law as an attribute of his power: “And for this sake, I found such a sovereign whose court ruling is not disputed.”⁷⁴ Since the lines of governance of Russian society inevitably passed through the courts, it seems that the Russian state of the second half of the fifteenth century can also be typologized as a judicial monarchy in its infancy. Only in the course of the formation of estates during the sixteenth century were judicial practices replaced by administrative ones; the use of the latter reached its apogee in the years of the Oprichnina.