By 1462, when Vasilii II died, he had defeated his rivals in the civil war, consolidated the support of the ruling class, and reached agreement with the
Table 9.1. Vasilii II and his immediate descendants
Vasilii II m. Mariia Iaroslavna
Ivan III (1440-1505)
| Iurii (1442-72) |
| Boris (1449-94) |
[see Table 9.2]
Andrei the Elder (1446-93)
Andrei the Younger (1452-81)
Ivan Dmitrii Ivan Fedor
(d. 1522) (d. 1541) (d. 1503) (d. 1513)
Rus' Church leaders. His son Ivan III inherited a domain that was relatively prosperous being able to extract tolls along the Moskva River and along those sections of the Oka and Volga rivers that it controlled, as well as tax peasant farmers who cultivated and harvested grain and forest products, such as honey, flax, wax and timber.
Among the indigenous continuities that laid the basis for further developments were the social structure of Muscovy and the Church of Rus'. The social structure itself and categories within the Muscovite domains remained fairly consistent while the composition within certain categories changed significantly.
Vasilii II made it clear in his will that his eldest son Ivan III should succeed him as grand prince. Nonetheless, he distributed his lands among his five sons (see Table 9.1: Vasilii II and his immediate descendants). Although Ivan received the bulk of Vasilii's lands (fourteen towns versus twelve towns divided among the other four sons), the younger sons, Iurii, Andrei the Elder, Boris and Andrei the Younger received substantial holdings. In effect, Ivan was primus inter pares among his brothers, and Ivan still had to call on his brothers to help him raise troops.
During this period, the Muscovite grand princes successfully ended the independence of other Rus' princes. In part they did so by forbidding them
independent contact with the Tatar khans so as to prevent them from receiving the iarlyk (patent) for their principality. And any iarlyk they had received had to be turned over to the grand prince. Thus, the Muscovite grand prince became the sole source of authority for these princes' legitimacy as rulers in their own domains.
Not having the means to gather large-scale forces themselves, the grand princes relied on the support of others to mobilise armies, at least until the end of the fifteenth century. During the fourteenth century, the grand princes relied mainly on the Tatar khans to supply large numbers of forces for major campaigns. The grand princes supplemented those troops with forces supplied by members of their own family (brothers, uncles and cousins) as well as by independent Rus' princes. On those occasions when the Tatar khan did not supply troops, the grand princes relied on the support given by independent Rus' princes. Early in the fifteenth century, the Tatar khans and independent Rus' princes stopped supplying forces to the Muscovite grand prince alto- gether,[26] so he had to rely more on members of his own family as well as on semi-independent 'service' princes (including Lithuanian, Rus'ian and Tatar), who contributed their own retinues and warriors.
Muscovy's internal governmental operation relied on reaching decisions through institutional consultation and consensus-building among the elite and, through that elite, with the ruling class. The Muscovite grand prince and the boyars made the most important laws of the realm in consultation with each other, and these laws were promulgated only with the consent of the boyars. The boyar duma was thus a political institution that had a prominent governmental role as a council of state. It had the same three functions as the divan of qarachi beys, the steppe khanate council of clan chieftains, and was most likely modelled on it. The approval of the boyars was required for all important governmental endeavours and the signatures of its members were mandatory on all matters of state-wide internal policy. Treaties and agreements had to be witnessed by boyars, and could also include brothers and sons of the ruler, close advisers, other prominent clan members, as well as religious leaders. Representatives of the boyars had to be present at any meetings the grand prince had with foreign ambassadors and envoys.[27] The ruler was thereby prevented from making agreements with foreign powers without the knowledge and approval of the boyar duma.
Since the grand prince had no standing army to speak of, his armies had to be gathered anew for each campaign, and demobilised after that campaign was over. The Muscovites of this period seem to have fought using steppe tactics and weapons, which depended on mounted archers with composite bows. Gravures in Sigismund von Herberstein's mid-sixteenth-century published version of his Notes on Muscovy show Muscovite mounted archers with the steppe recurved composite bow, which delivered an arrow more powerfully and at a greater distance than either the crossbow or the English longbow, and was superior to any firearm before the nineteenth century in terms of range, accuracy and rate of fire (see Plate 11). The military register books (razriadnye knigi) tell us the kind of regimental formations in which the Muscovite army fought. These formation arrangements were similar to those of Mongol and Tatar armies. But by the second half of the fifteenth century, Muscovy was already beginning to take part in the gunpowder revolution of the West. The chronicles describe the Muscovites using arquebuses against the Tatars in 1480. The men shooting these weapons were the forerunners of the strel'tsy (musketeers) of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
During the fifteenth century, commercial activity placed Moscow in the middle of a large merchant trade network that reached from the Black Sea well into the forests of the north. Three main trade routes cut across the steppe to the Black Sea. The most easterly one ran down the Don River to Tana. The middle route was mainly an overland route to Perekop and the Crimea. The westerly route ran from Moscow through Kaluga, Bryn, Briansk, then east of Kiev to Novgorod Severskii and Putivl'.[28] Our main sources of information about those trade routes come from the end of the fifteenth century when Muscovy began taking over protection of Rus' merchants plying those routes. Forest products for trade, as well as customs duties (tamga, kostki) and tolls (myt) on commerce passing through the territory Moscow controlled were the basis of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Muscovite prosperity.
As in most other countries of the time, over 85 per cent of the population of Muscovy was engaged in agricultural pursuits. Much of the peasantry were not free farmers but lived on the estates ofmagnates or the monasteries. Peasants' relationship with the landlords could be complex and acrimonious, resulting in court cases. Peasants, accustomed to being mobile from engaging in slash- and-burn agricultural methods, began to be restricted in their movements through state regulations.
About 10 per cent of the Muscovite population consisted of slaves. Different categories of slaves existed in Muscovy and some, considered elite slaves, served in governmental, provincial and estates administration.[29] Elite slaves occupied such positions as treasurer (kaznachei), administrative assistant (tiun), rural administrator (posel'skii), estate steward (kliuchnik), state secretaries and estate supervisors (d'iaki) and various other positions from translator (tolmach) to archer (strelok, luchnik).[30] During the time of Ivan III and Vasilii III there were few or no restrictions on who could own slaves. Such restrictions began to come later in the sixteenth century. People could also move in and out of slave status. When Ivan III introducedpomest'e (see below), he converted a number of elite military slaves into military servitors.[31]
26
The second
27
See Donald Ostrowski, 'Muscovite Adaptation of Steppe Political Institutions',
28
V E. Syroechkovskii, 'Puti i usloviia snoshenii Moskvy s Krymom na rubezhe XVI veka',
29
Richard Hellie,
p. 15.