Russia. A History

But in the centre and north-west the service landholding system had a great impact on social relations. By the end of the century service landholding dominated here, although in the centre a significant minority of land remained hereditary. Hereditary tenure was preferred because in theory service landholdings could not be transferred. But since many service tenure holders also held hereditary land, and since service holdings from the very beginning were treated de facto as transferable and hereditable, and since hereditary landholders were also obliged to serve Moscow, hereditary owners (votchinniki

) and service tenure holders (pomeshchiki) did not constitute separate social forces, as has traditionally been thought. The landholding élite constituted a consolidated élite, with divisions in power, wealth, and status based on regional association and family heritage, but not according to the type of landholding.

Muscovite grand princes used the system of service landholding to create stronger regional élites by resettlement. From the early sixteenth century they moved new settlers from the centre to areas previously conquered: Novgorod (1478), Viazma (1494), Toropets (1499), Pskov (1510), and Smolensk (1514). Later they continued to make grants of land in conditional tenure to populate newly conquered areas or to bolster frontier economies shattered by war. In the 1570s, for example, petty landholders from the Novgorod environs were moved to the western border (Velikie Luki, Toropets, Dorogobuzh, Smolensk, Viazma), while others were moved to recently captured territories in Livonia. When Russians were driven out of Livonia, they were resettled on the Novgorod frontier. These relocations severed original regional attachments but created new ones elsewhere, forging new regional élites and perhaps a more integrated centre.

Other policies also worked to create regional ‘corporations’ and a central élite. Laws from Ivan III’s time forbade landholders in almost all regions, for example, to sell land to non-locals;parallel injunctions kept land within princely clans. Up until the mid-century Muscovy mustered the bulk of the army by region or princely clans; by the end of the sixteenth century it had developed a more differentiated system of regional gentry ‘corporations’ arranged around towns (goroda). At the social apex was the ‘sovereign’s court’ (gosudarev dvor

) with about 3,000 men at mid-century and set apart by privileges and largesse. In land, for example, by the end of the century the highest ranks received 3.5 times more service tenure land than the lowest. They also received largesse from the grand prince: after the victory of Kazan, Ivan IV is said to have distributed 48,000 roubles’ worth of precious objects to his men in three days of feasting. The sovereign’s court also had access to the Kremlin and the person of the ruler, attending daily and at ceremonial occasions and accompanying him on pilgrimages.

The grand princes also forged the metropolitan élite by bolstering the principle of clan. Access to boyar rank was hereditary within clans. Traditionally the number of clans with such access was small: from the 1300s to 1462 it stayed around ten. But with the influx of new servitor families, rulers added new clans to integrate and stabilize the élite. From 1462 to 1533, the number of boyar clans rose from around fifteen to twenty-four, and after the turbulence of Ivan IV’s minority (1533–47) it nearly doubled to forty-six. Rulers used their own marriages to establish the political pecking order among the boyars: with his marriage in 1547 to a daughter of a leading faction (the Romanov clan), for example, Ivan IV resolved the struggles during the period of his minority. In 1555 he went a step further towards reconciliation in the élite by marrying off his distant cousin to a member of the boyar clan, the Bel’skie princes, who had been on the ‘losing’ side in the minority.

Rulers made clan the organizing principle of the sovereign’s court below the boyar level as well. In the system of precedence (mestnichestvo

) they offered protection to injured honour for servitors who alleged that their military assignments were beneath their clan’s dignity, measured by genealogy and military service. To that end extensive official records of service and genealogies of the élite were compiled from Ivan III’s time (razriadnye and rodoslovnye knigi).