35 R. E. F. Smith, Peasant Farming in Muscovy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 100-2.
the pomest'e. Instead, the grand prince could choose to which of his servitors he would grant a pomest'e estate or to withhold such a grant as he pleased. Similarly the grand prince could grant pomest'ia to those from whom he had taken their votchiny, such as the Novgorodian landholders.
Pomest'e was similar to votchina in most respects. It, like votchina, could be and was inherited, and this was so from its inception.[42] The condition for inheritance was that someone in the family, a son or brother, could continue to provide service to the grand prince. Otherwise, the pomest'e reverted to the grand-princely land fund to be granted to someone else. The rates of turnover from one family to another were similar for both pomest'e and votchina. The holder considered the land to be his indefinitely; it was not temporary or provisional as long as a suitable heir could provide military service. Pomest'e land could be exchanged for other pomest'e land, just as votchina land could be exchanged for other votchina land. The historian V B. Kobrin has, however, pointed out three differences between pomest'e and votchina.Apomeshchik could not, as a votchinnik could do, sell his estate; nor could he mortgage it (say, to obtain cash) or give it away (say, to a monastery).[43] These three prohibitions associated with pomest'e indicate its origins in the need for Ivan III to provide a livelihood for his military servitors. Its similarity to iqta landholding among the Muslims has led to the suggestion that Ivan III borrowed the principles and concepts of iqta for his system of military land grants. Such a borrowing would have been facilitated by advice from the Chingisid princes and other Tatars then coming into the Muscovite military system.[44]
Although the establishment of pomest'e created a ready-made military force that owed allegiance directly to the grand prince, both Ivan III and Vasilii III still found themselves having to rely on service princes and family members to mobilise troops. They could, however, now call on an ever-greater number of warrior-servitors without any intermediaries. As a result, grand-princely family members and service princes began to lose their semi-independent military and political status. The pomest'e system in effect gave the grand prince, if not a standing army, at least a military force available to be called up quickly for whatever purpose he together with the boyar duma deemed necessary.
Foreign influences
Both Ivan III and Vasilii III sought out and adapted foreign institutions and technical skills to their policy needs. A few of these influences are mentioned below.
Most of the steppe influences on Muscovy had already occurred by 1462.[45]Both Ivan III and Vasilii III actively maintained the iam, a network of way stations for travel, inherited from the Mongols. Herberstein describes this system: 'The prince has post stations in all parts of the dominions, with a regular number of horses at the different places, so that when the royal courier is sent anywhere, he may immediately have a horse without delay . . . On one occasion, a servant of mine rode on such post horses from Novgorod to Moscow, a distance of six hundred versts [642.1 km] ... in seventy-two hours.'[46] During the reign of Ivan III the introduction ofpomest'e, as mentioned, was based on Islamic iqta introduced via refugee Tatars from the Qipchaq khanate. Certain Tatar record-keeping practices, such as the use of scrolls, were introduced into Muscovite chanceries at this time.
A major influence from the West was the influx of Lithuanian nobility into Muscovite service in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Patrikeevs, for example, were a prominent princely family in Lithuania whose members dominated the boyar duma during most of the reign of Ivan III.[47] One estimate of the number of families of the ruling class in the seventeenth century with Polish-Lithuanian and 'Western European' names places it at 49.4 per cent (452 of 915 families).[48] The transformation of Muscovy into something more than just a government ofpersonal rule and allegiances but also a government of laws and institutions correlates with the influx of Lithuanian nobility into Muscovite service and was accomplished with their active support.
Initial contacts between Italy and Muscovy occurred at the Council of Florence in 1438-9. Rus' merchants had contact with Italian merchants in Kaffa and Tana until the Italians were expelled by the Ottoman Turks in 1475. The marriage of Ivan III to Zoe (Sofiia) Palaeologa in 1472 brought many Italicised Greeks in her entourage to Moscow who took government positions.43 What these Italicised Greeks may have brought was an understanding of an organised state structure that had not existed in Muscovy previously and did not exist among Muscovy's immediate neighbours.
A major visible act of state-building - the makeover of the Muscovite Kremlin - involved the contracting of Italian architects and engineers. The Italian architect Aristotle Fioravanti was brought in by Ivan III to design and oversee the construction of the Dormition cathedral from 1475 to 1479. Italian architects Marco Ruffo and Pietro Antonio Solario designed and oversaw the construction of the Hall of Facets (Granovitaia palata) from 1487 to 1491. In 1505, the cathedral of the Archangel Michael, designed by Alevisio Lamberti da Montagnana of Venice, was completed. The present crenellated walls and towers of the Moscow Kremlin also owe their design to Italians such as Solario and Antonio Friazin.44 The magnificent set of court and church buildings that resulted is still an imposing sight today. At the time it was more than enough to proclaim the message of state power the Muscovite rulers and elite wished to convey, especially to foreign ambassadors, who were also subjected to majestic court rituals.
Foreign policies
Both Ivan III and Vasilii III had far-ranging foreign policies. Their predominant concern was with the steppe and Moldavia45 but also extended far westward. Ivan III, for example, reached an agreement with King Jan of Denmark against Sweden, and he negotiated with the Holy Roman Emperor in regard to a treaty directed against Poland-Lithuania. Vasilii III continued negotiations with the Holy Roman Emperor engaged in diplomatic contact with France.
As early as 1314, Novgorod had asked Iurii Daniilovich, grand prince of Moscow, to serve as prince. The idea was to protect Novgorod from the
43 See e.g. Robert Croskey, 'Byzantine Greeks in Late Fifteenth- and Early Sixteenth[-] Century Russia', in The Byzantine Legacy in Eastern Europe, ed. Lowell Clucas (Boulder, Colo: East European Monographs, 1988), pp. 35-56.
44 For further information about Italian architectural influence in the Moscow Kremlin, see William Craft Brumfield, A History of Russian Architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 95-106; and William Craft Brumfield, Gold in Azure: One Thousand Years of Russian Architecture (Boston: David R. Godine, 1983), pp. 139-57.
42
Iu. G. Alekseev and A. I. Kopanev, 'Razvitie pomestnoi sistemy vXVI v.', in
44
See my 'The Military Land Grant along the Muslim-Christian Frontier',
45
For a list of steppe influences on Muscovy, see table 2 in Ostrowski, 'Muscovite Adaptation', 295.
47
It has been suggested that the dynastic crisis of the late i490s, in which a number of the Patrikeevs were arrested and disgraced, was the result of an attempt on the part of other boyars to reduce their power: Nancy Shields Kollmann, 'Consensus Politics: The Dynastic Crisis of the 1490s Reconsidered', RR 45 (1986): 235-67.
48
The estimate is N. P. Zagoskin's as reported in M. F. Vladimirskii-Budanov,