Through the introduction of pomest'e, the grand princes were able to maintain a group of cavalry (estimated at around 17,500 by the time of the reign of Ivan IV)20 who were ready at a moment's notice (at least in principle) to
top Church prelates along with 'all the princes and boyars' as deciding and issuing the code together with the tsar: Sudebniki XV-XVI vekov, p. 366.
17 See e.g. Sbornik ImperatorskogoRusskogo istoricheskogo obshchestva, vol. 35 (1882), p. 503, no. 85; p. 630, no. 93; PRP, 8 vols. (Moscow: Gosiurizdat, 1952-63), vyp. iv: Pamiatniki prava periodaukrepleniiarusskogo tsentralizovannogo gosudarstvaXV-XVIIvv., ed. L. V Cherepnin (1956), pp. 486, 487, 495, 514, 515, 516, 517-518, 524, 526, 529; PRP, vyp.v: Pamiatniki prava perioda soslovno-predstavitel'noi monarkhii. Pervaia polovina XVII v., ed. L. V Cherepnin (:959), p. 237; Tysiachnaiakniga 1550g. iDvorovaia tetrad'piatidesiatykhgodovXVIveka, ed. A. A. Zimin (Moscow and Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1950), p. 53.
18 Pamiatniki diplomaticheskikh snoshenii drevnei Rossi s derzhavami inostrannymi, 10 vols. (St Petersburg: Tipografiia II Otdeleniia Sobstvennoi E. I. V Kantseliarii, 1851-71), vol. i (1851), col. 1.
19 AAE, 4 vols. (St Petersburg: Tipografiia II Otdeleniia Sobstvennoi E.I. V Kantseliarii, 1836), vol. i, p. 142.
20 Richard Hellie, EnserfmentandMilitary Change in Muscovy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 267.
muster for combat and who were beholden to the Muscovite grand prince for providing them with a means of financial support. In addition, other servitors were maintained as vicegerents (namestniki and volosteli) through kormlenie grants, which were of limited tenure, and through outright stipends given by the grand prince.21
Contemporary evidence tells us of a thriving commercial life in Muscovy during this period. Pastoral nomads brought tens of thousands of horses to Moscow each year. In 1474, the chronicles state that 3,200 merchants and 600 envoys arrived in Moscowfrom Sarai with 40,000 horses for sale.22 The 'Chronicle Notes of Mark Levkeinskii' mentions the Nogais' coming to Moscow with 80,000 horses in 1530; with 30,000 horses in 1531; and with 50,000 horses in 1534.23 Also under 1534, the Voskresenie and Nikon chronicles report another trade contingent from the Nogai Tatars of 4,700 merchants, 70 murzy (gentry), 70 envoys, and 8,000 horses.24 Although such economic information in the chronicles is rare and not subject to verification, we can find some confirmation of the numbers of horses the Tatars sold annually in Moscow in the account of Giles Fletcher from the late sixteenth century: 'there are brought yeerely to the Mosko to be exchanged for other commodities 30. or 40. thousand Tartar horse, which they call Cones [koni]'.25 Rus' merchants were also active in other cities. On 24 June 1505, for example, the khan of Kazan', Muhammed Emin, precipitated a war with Muscovy when he arrested Muscovite merchants in Kazan', executing some of them and sending others into slavery.26
Perhaps the only contemporary estimate ofthe size ofthe Muscovite economy comes from George Trakhaniot (Percamota), a Greek in the employ of the Muscovite grand prince. On a diplomatic mission in 1486 to the court of the duke of Milan, he reported that the income of the Muscovite state 'exceeds each year over a million gold ducats, this ducat being of the value and weight of those of Turkey and Venice'.27 Trakhaniot goes on to report that
21 Herberstein, Notes, vol. i, p. 30.
22 Ioasafovskaia letopis', p. 88; PSRL, vol. viii, p. 180; PSRL, vol. xii, p. 156; PSRL, vol. xviii (St Petersburg: Tipografiia M. A. Aleksandrova, 1913), p. 249; PSRL, vol. xxvi (Moscow and Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1959), p. 254; PSRL, vol. xxviii (Moscow and Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1959), p. 308; and 'Letopisnye zapisi Marka Levkeinskogo', in A. A. Zimin, 'Kratkie letopisi xv-xvi vv.', Istoricheskii arkhiv 5 (1950): 10.
23 'Letopisnye zapisi Marka Levkeinskogo', 12-13.
24 PSRL, vol. viii, p. 287; PSRL, vol. xiii (Moscow: Nauka, 1965), p. 80. Cf. PSRL, vol. xx (St Petersburg: Tipografiia M. A. Aleksandrova, 1910), p. 425.
25 Giles Fletcher, Of the Russe Common Wealth, or Maner ofGovernementby the Russe Emperour, (Commonly Called the Emperour ofMoskovia) with the Manners, and Fashions of the People of That Country (London: T. D. for Thomas Charde, 1591), fo. 70v.
26 PSRL, vol. vi.2, col. 373; PSRL, vol. viii, pp. 244-5; PSRL, vol. xii, p. 259.
27 George Trakhaniot, 'Notes and Information about the Affairs and the Ruler of Russia', in Robert M. Croskey and E. C. Ronquist, 'George Trakhaniot's Description of Russia
[c]ertain provinces . . . give in tribute each year great quantities of sables, ermines, and squirrel skins. Certain others bring cloth and other necessaries for the use and maintenance of the court. Even the meats, honey, beer, fodder, and hay used by the Lord and others of the court are brought by communities and provinces according to certain quantities imposed by ordinance . . .28
Trakhaniot's descriptions corroborate the earlier statement of Contarini about Moscow's significance as a fur-trading centre:
Many merchants from Germany and Poland gather in the city throughout the winter. They buy furs exclusively - sables, foxes, ermines, squirrels, and sometimes wolves. And although these furs are procured at places many days' journey from the city of Moscow, mostly in the areas toward the northeast, and even maybe the northwest, all are brought to this place and the merchants buy the furs here.29
The large amounts of wealth reported by our sources derived mainly from commercial activity along the major rivers of the area - the Volga, Oka and Moskva and their tributaries.
In Church affairs, this period saw the dominance of councils, beginning with councils in 1447 and, especially, 1448, where the Rus' bishops chose their own metropolitan. A number of the councils (1488, 1490, 1504, 1525 and 1531) were concerned with questions of heresy and the investigation of alleged heretics. Councils in 1455, 1459, 1478,1492,1500, 1503 and 1509 discussed other ecclesiastical issues. The Council of 1503, for example, made decisions on matters of ecclesiastical discipline and procedure, including forbidding the payment of fees for the placement of priests and deacons, establishing the minimum age for clerics, prohibiting a priest from celebrating Mass while drunk or the day after being drunk, stipulating that widowered priests must enter a monastery and forbidding monks and nuns from living in the same monastery. The prohibition against taking fees for clerical placement appears to have been in response to the claims ofthe heretics that fees were uncanonical.
The issue of secularisation of Church and monastic lands has been traditionally associated with the 1503 Church Council, but that association is based on faulty and unreliable polemical sources of the mid-sixteenth century. There
in 1486', RH17 (1990): 61. Trakhaniot most likely is referring to the equivalent amount of wealth in terms that his listeners could understand and should not be taken to mean that gold coins circulated in Muscovy
28 Trakhaniot, 'Notes andinformation', 61. Accordingto Croskey, the ermine in the portrait Lady with an Ermine by Leonardo da Vinci may have been among the gifts of furs and live sables that Trakhaniot brought to Milan: Croskey and Ronquist, 'George Trakhaniot's Description of Russia', 58-9.