The church’s marriage laws followed the same principles of asserting the power of fathers and husbands and requiring that that power be limited by regard for the welfare of wives and children. To that end, the law charged parents to obtain the consent of their children to the marriage partners they had chosen for them. This was an improvement over Rus common law and that of other Scandinavians, which did not have such a requirement.12 Parents who forced their daughters or sons to marry against their will were subject to fines. If a young woman did herself bodily harm rather than submit, the fine was substantial. (Rus criminal law followed the Scandinavian practice of fining wrongdoers rather than imprisoning them.)
Once married, the Rus were to stay that way, for the Orthodox church considered monogamy a commandment from God. Concubinage, common before conversion, was outlawed and remarriage after the death of a spouse was frowned upon. Husbands could request divorces from the church if their wives had committed sexual indiscretions, whereas wives could only petition on grounds that their husbands had done them great injury or attempted to impoverish them. Adulterous husbands were liable for fines. These were also the general principles of Catholic marriage law, but the Western church was less insistent on the “till-death-do-us-part” requirement. Catholic courts would grant annulments if they found that parents had coerced their children into marriage, if the husband was impotent, if the couple were close relatives, or if either partner had another spouse. Catholic law also occasionally permitted legal separation, as Rus law did not, and took a less censorious attitude toward remarriage than did Orthodox authorities, the Rus included.13
Rus criminal law mentions women rarely, perhaps because the drafters of the codes assumed that most crimes would be committed by men and perhaps also because female lawbreakers were customarily punished by their male relatives. The jurists did consider crimes against women serious offenses; the first two articles of Prince Iaroslav’s Church Statute concerned rape and the abduction of a woman by a man. These crimes were addressed also in the secular codes because they were considered crimes of violence as well as sexual offenses. A man found guilty of sexual assault had to pay a fine. There were Europeans, such as those in the Germanic lands and Iberia, who imposed physical punishments for rape, including execution; many others, including the English and French, did as the Rus and levied monetary penalties. The fines varied with the rank of the rape victim. A man who attacked the wife or daughter of a boyar (a warrior just below the prince in the social hierarchy) owed the substantial sum of five gold grivnas to the victim, and the same to the bishop. The lower-ranking the woman, the lower was the fine.
It is noteworthy that Rus rape statutes required that the fine be paid to the woman herself, rather than to her family, as was common elsewhere. Rus jurists believed that the victim was the most injured party in a rape, for she had suffered great damage to her reputation in addition to psychological and possibly physical trauma. This view grew out of the censorious attitude the Rus took toward sexual indiscretions by women. So important was it to them that a woman be known as virtuous that they considered spreading tales that a woman was promiscuous to be as grave an offense as raping her. So they leveled the same fines for slander as for rape. This concern about reputation and the provision for innocent women to receive restitution themselves were not common across Europe. They would be preserved in the revisions of the Rus law codes for hundreds of years.
The Appanage Period, 1240–1462
In 1237, thousands of Mongol cavalrymen, clad in leather armor and riding small, sturdy horses, trotted onto Rus territory. They had come to stay; their wives, children, slaves, extra horses, and flocks trundled along behind them. Three years later the Mongols had conquered all the princes. Rape was a weapon in their arsenal, as it has been in the arsenals of so many armies; tens of thousands of Rus women probably fell victim to their assaults. Serapion, a thirteenth-century bishop, summed up the disaster when he wrote, “There fell upon us a merciless people who devastated our land, took entire cities off to captivity, destroyed our holy churches, put our fathers and brothers to death, and defiled our mothers and sisters.”14 The Mongols had already cut a swath of conquest from China through Central Asia, but the Rus did not know this, and so they came to see their defeat by the rampaging infidels as God’s punishment for their sins.
The Mongols, so brutal in conquest, proved to be tolerant overlords. As long as Rus rulers paid their taxes on time and performed occasional obeisance before the khan, the Mongol king, the Mongols mostly left the Rus rulers and people alone. Indeed, the Mongols who conquered the Rus did not even live among their subjects, as their cousins in China did. Instead, christening themselves “the Golden Horde,” they settled in the grasslands along the Volga River, far to the south of the centers of Rus population. There they could pasture their enormous flocks and stay in touch with their people’s extended trade networks. They got along amicably with the Orthodox church, despite their own conversion to Islam. Indeed, Mongol rulers practiced religious toleration throughout their vast empire. They did interfere in Rus politics by backing princes who were favorably disposed toward them, and this meddling had consequences for the history of the Rus, but it had little impact on Rus political institutions.
Those changed largely because of developments within the Rus polity that had started long before the conquest. As the Rus expanded across their huge territory in the Kievan period, regions far from the capital city came to contain princely families. Since every son of a prince was a prince, the list of claimants to titles and property kept growing. This was particularly true in the northeast, the forested region that was to become central Russia. The earliest important political centers there were Rostov, Suzdal, and Vladimir. The titular leader of the northeast Rus princes was the grand prince of the city of Vladimir. Galicia and Volynia to the west of Kiev, and Chernigov and Smolensk to the north, also contained ambitious dynasties and a growing population by the early thirteenth century.
This process of territorial diffusion, begun before the Mongols came, continued apace thereafter. Kiev, no longer an economic or political center, slipped into obscurity and was taken over by energetic Lithuanian rulers in the fourteenth century. The Lithuanians also established themselves as overlords of much of the southwestern Rus lands, with the result that only the northeastern principalities remained independent of all outsiders save the Mongols. The Mongols’ control over them weakened in the fourteenth century, as internecine warfare between the leaders of the Golden Horde intensified.
“Appanage” is a term from French medieval history that refers to grants, often of land, given by sovereigns to their junior sons. It was adopted by Russian historians as the name of the period from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries when Rus lands were divided into a multiplicity of small princedoms. Never does the meekness and forgiveness preached by the monks seem to have fallen on deafer ears than during this time, when the princes employed their armies in almost constant warfare. They betrayed one another to the Mongols; they took oaths that they quickly broke; brothers killed brothers and uncles and cousins. Out of this deadly pursuit of power there emerged by the mid-fourteenth century the Danilovichi, a family that made its headquarters in Moscow. “They were a warrior band,” Nancy Kollmann has written, “united in the quest of booty and benefit.”15 The Danilovichi proved to be luckier and cleverer than the other princely families. They were particularly good at cultivating the support of the Mongols and the church. Their most successful prince was Vasili II, who ruled from 1425 to 1462, during which time he completed the subjugation of the other independent princes. With the ascent of his son, Ivan III, to the role of pre-eminent prince in 1462, another political era in Russian history, the Muscovite, began.