Russia’s other neighbors to the west were of little account. The Livonian Order was too small and too decentralized to matter much in political affairs, and Sweden (including Finland) was part of the united kingdom of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden until 1520. The center of gravity of the three kingdoms was in Denmark, which was too far to the west to pay much attention to the remote border of Finland and Russia. Trade continued through both Livonia and Finland, and even increased in importance, but with little overall political effect.
The situation of its neighbors allowed Russia to emerge onto the stage of European politics at an exceptionally favorable moment. The Tatar khanates were preoccupied with one another and the Ottomans, while Livonia and Sweden for very different reasons scarcely impinged on Russia’s consciousness. Russia had only one important rival, Poland-Lithuania, the primary focus of its foreign policy. That rival was powerful enough to provide a challenge to the new state of Ivan III, a challenge which he handled with great skill.
The new Russian state that emerged at the end of the fifteenth century was much larger and more complex than the medieval Moscow principality even in its later phases. A new state required new institutions and terminology. The Grand Prince began to style himself “Sovereign of All Rus” or even “autocrat,” the latter to signify his new independence from the Horde and any other claimants. Ivan III did not rule alone, any more than did his predecessors. Russia’s ruling elite now included princelings and boyars from the newly acquired territories, Iaroslavl’ and Rostov princes, and Lithuanian Gediminovichi – all of whom formed an expanded ruling elite around the prince of Moscow. This new elite was small for the time being, for in Ivan III’s time it comprised only eighteen or so families, growing to about forty-five by 1550. Most of the senior men from these clans made up the duma, or council of the Grand Prince, and held the rank of boyar, or that of a sort of junior boyar with the untranslatable title “okol’nichii.”1 Just barely a formal institution, the duma met with the prince in the palace and discussed the major issues of law and administration, war and peace. The men of these ruling clans attained the rank of boyar and other ranks and offices by tradition and a complex system of precedence (Russian “mestnichestvo”) that regulated their place in the court, military, and government hierarchy. The precedence system mandated that no man should serve the prince at a lesser rank and office than had his ancestors.
The Grand Prince had some leeway with the precedence system, for it did not dictate exactly who in each clan should receive what rank. The system required only that some of the men from each of the great families should receive certain ranks, and that the greatest should sit in the duma and receive the rank of boyar. In theory the princes could appoint anyone to the duma, but in practice they chose members of the same families year after year, adding new ones only occasionally. These men were not just servants of the prince, but also immensely wealthy aristocrats with great landholdings – the pinnacle of a much larger landholding class. The Russian nobleman’s primary duty was service in the army, mainly on the frontier, for the administration of the state was in the hand of a tiny group of officials and princely servants.
Some of these officials were great boyars, like the treasurers, usually chosen from the Greek Khovrin clan, or the major domo and the equerry, who managed the Kremlin palace and the prince’s household. To assist these aristocrats there were also secretaries, men of lesser status from the prince’s household who were sometimes of Tatar origin. Most of them served in the Treasury, where a dozen or so clerks and copyists kept the records of foreign policy and the charters and testaments of the princes, carefully preserved with the furs, jewels, tax receipts in silver, and other treasures in the basement under the palace church of the Kremlin, the Cathedral of the Annunciation. In the time of Ivan III there were only a few dozen such secretaries, and the state was still essentially the prince’s household, its offices being rooms in his palace.
For all their dominant role in Russian politics, the Kremlin and its elite were not the whole of Russia. Several million of peasants, almost all of them still free and most of them tenants only of the crown, made up the great mass of its population. They grew the food, raised cows and chickens, and supplemented their meager fare from the berries, mushrooms, and wild game of the great forests. Their status as tenants of the crown, however, was rapidly coming to an end as the great monasteries and the boyars encroached on their lands. The Grand Princes needed to reward loyal supporters, especially in newly annexed territories, and to maintain a cavalry army as well. The army had to live off its own, from the private lands of the cavalrymen. The princes so far lacked cash to pay them, and thus it was not merely to curry favor that the princes granted lands. The only restriction that they could put on such grants was to give them with the proviso that the estate could not be sold or willed without the knowledge of the prince. This type of grant was called pomest’e, and great boyars as well as humble provincials received such lands. The landholding class of cavalrymen fell into two broad groups: the “Sovereign’s court” who served in Moscow (at least in theory) immediately below the boyars, and the “town gentry” of the provinces. The “town gentry” normally held their lands mainly in one local area and served together in the cavalry. The elite of the army was the Sovereign’s court. The growth of the state and its army meant constant tinkering with the organization of the landholding gentry, but the basic outlines that began to form late in the fifteenth century remained until the end of the sixteenth. Then the pomest’e system spread to the southern borders, considerably enlarging the landholding class at the expense of the peasant freeholders. This new situation contributed greatly to the upheavals of the ensuing decades.
The gentry resided mainly in the towns, most of which were small, and the boyars lived in Moscow. A few centers, Moscow, Novgorod, and Pskov were real cities that supported merchants who traded with Western Europe or the Near East. Though a largely agrarian economy, Russia was not bereft of crafts or commerce, nor was it a land of subsistence peasants cut off from any markets. The sheer size of the country and the sparse population dictated exchange among regions: almost all salt, for example, came from saline springs in the northern taiga belt until late in the seventeenth century. The men who boiled down the water to make salt and ship it south made great fortunes. Most notable were the Stroganovs, who amassed a fortune large enough to finance the first steps in the conquest of Siberia. Novgorod and its neighbor Pskov remained important centers of trade with northern Europe through the Baltic Sea, but their capacity was limited by the small rivers and absence of large harbors at the east end of the Gulf of Finland. Then in 1553 the English sea captain and explorer Richard Chancellor made his way around Norway into the White Sea, landing at the mouth of the Northern Dvina River. With this voyage a direct path for large ships opened to Western Europe, and Tsar Ivan the Terrible encouraged the English Muscovy Company to bring their ships every summer to the northern port. The Dvina and other rivers made possible the long journey from Moscow to the new port of Archangel, and the English were soon joined by the even more enterprising Dutch. Moscow itself was the hub of all Russian trade, and the city grew rapidly throughout the 1500s. Commerce with Russia was not minor for the Dutch and English, for by 1600 the Dutchmen engaged in the Archangel trade had made so much money that they could form a new company, the Dutch East India Company, which then set out to conquer what is today Indonesia. The Russian trade partly financed Holland’s greatest commercial adventure.