In fact, the demi-god who bore these titles, who wore a crown braided with "tufts of diamonds as big as peas, resembling bunches of glittering grapes" and the imperial mantle embroidered with emeralds, pearls and gold, was a. relatively unassuming mortal. Tsar Alexis was recognized in his own time as "tishaishy tsar," the quietest, gentlest and most pious of all the tsars, and when he succeeded his father on the throne in 1645 at the age of sixteen, he was already known as "the Young Monk." In manhood, he grew taller than most Russians, about six feet, well built, inclined to fat. His roundish face was framed by light-brown hair, a mustache and a flowing brown beard. His eyes also were brown, their tone ranging from hardness in anger to warmth in affection and religious humility. "His Imperial Majesty is a goodly person, about two months older than King Charles II," reported his English physician, Dr. Samuel Collins, adding that his patron was "severe in his chastisements but very careful of his subjects' love. Being urged by a stranger to make it [punishable by] death for any man to desert his colors, he answered, 'It was a hard case to do that, for God has not given courage to all men alike.'"
Although he was tsar, Alexis' life inside the Kremlin was more like that of a monk. At four a.m., the Tsar threw aside his sable coverlet and stepped from his bed clad in shirt and drawers. He dressed and went immediately to the chapel next to his bedroom for twenty minutes of prayers and readings from devotional books. When he had kissed the icons and been sprinkled with holy water, he emerged and sent a chamberlain to bid the Tsaritsa good morning and ask after her health. A few minutes later, he went to her chamber to escort her to another chapel, where together they heard morning prayer and early mass.
Meanwhile, boyars, government officials and secretaries had gathered in a public anteroom awaiting the arrival of the Tsar from his private chambers. As soon as they saw "the bright eyes of the Tsar," they began to bow to the ground, some as many as thirty times, in gratitude for favors granted. For a while, Alexis listened to reports and petitions; then, at about nine a.m., the entire group went to hear a two-hour mass. During the service, however, the Tsar continued to converse quietly with his boyars, conducting public business and issuing instructions. Alexis never missed any divine service. "If he be well, he goes to it," said Dr. Collins. "If sick, it comes to him in his chamber. On fast days he frequents midnight prayers, standing four, five, or six hours together, prostrating himself on the ground, sometimes a thousand times, and on great festivals, fifteen hundred."
Following morning mass, the Tsar returned to administrative work with his boyars and secretaries until time for dinner at noon.
He ate alone at a high table surrounded by boyars who dined at lower tables along the walls of the room. He was served only by special boyars, who tasted his food and sipped his wine before offering him the cup. Meals were gargantuan; on festival days, as many as seventy dishes might be served at the Tsar's table. Zakuski, or hors d'oeuvres, included raw vegetables, especially cucumbers, salted fish, bacon and innumerable pirozhki, sometimes stuffed with egg, fish, rice or cabbage and herbs instead of meat. Then came soups and roasts of beef, mutton and pork, seasoned with onions, garlic, saffron and pepper. There were dishes of game and fish such as salmon, sturgeon and sterlet. Dessert was cakes, cheeses, preserves, fruits. Russians drank mostly vodka, beer or a milder drink called kvas, made of fermented black bread, variously flavored with raspberry, cherry or other fruits.
But Alexis rarely touched any of the succulent dishes that were presented to him. Instead, he sent them as presents to various boyars to show special favor. His own palate was monastically simple. He only ate plain rye bread and drank light wine or beer, perhaps with a few drops of cinnamon added; cinnamon, Dr. Collins reported, was the "aroma imperiale." During periods of religious fasting, said Dr. Collins, the Tsar "eats but three meals a week; for the rest, he takes a piece of brown bread and salt, a pickled mushroom or cucumber and drinks a cup of small beer. He eats fish but twice in Lent and observes it seven weeks altogether. ... In fine, no monk is more observant of canonical hours than he is of fasts. We may reckon he fasts almost eight months in twelve."
Following dinner, the Tsar slept for three hours until time to return to church for vespers, again with his boyars, again to consult on affairs of state during the religious service. Supper and the end of the day were spent either with his family or with intimate friends playing backgammon or chess. Alexis' special pleasure during these hours was to listen to people read or tell stories. He liked hearing passages from books of church history, or the lives of saints, or the presentation of religious dogma, but he also liked to hear the reports of Russian ambassadors traveling abroad, extracts from foreign newspapers or simple tales told by pilgrims and wanderers who had been brought to the palace to entertain the monarch. In warmer weather, Alexis left the Kremlin to visit his country mansions outside Moscow. One of these at Preobrazhenskoe on the Yauza River was the center of Alexis' favorite sport, falconry. Over the years, the enthusiastic hunstman built up an immense establishment of 200 falconers, 3,000 falcons and 100,000 pigeons.
Most of the time, however, Alexis prayed and worked. He never questioned his own divinely granted right to rule; in his mind, he and all monarchs were chosen by God and responsible only to God.* Beneath the tsar stood the nobility, divided into almost a dozen ranks. The greatest noblemen held the highest rank, that of boyar, and were members of the old princely families who held hereditary landed estates. Below were the lesser aristocracy and gentry who had been given estates in return for service. There was a small middle class of merchants, artisans and other townspeople and then—the huge base of the pyramid—the peasants and serfs who made up the overwhelming mass of Russian society; their conditions of life and methods of farming were roughly similar to those of the serfs of medieval Europe. Most Muscovites used the title "boyar" to include all noblemen and high officials. Meanwhile, the actual daily work of administering the tsar's government was in the hands of between thirty and forty departments known as Prikazy. Generally speaking, they were inefficient, wasteful, overlapping, difficult to control and corrupt—in brief, a bureaucracy which nobody had designed and over which no one had any real control.
From his dimly lit, incense-scented Kremlin rooms and chapels, Tsar Alexis ruled the largest nation on earth. Vast plains, endless tracts of dark forest and boundless expanses of desert and tundra stretched from Poland to the Pacific. Nowhere in this immensity of space was the wide horizon broken by more than shallow mountains and rolling hills. The only natural barriers to movement on the broad plain were the rivers, and from the earliest times these had been converted into a network of watery highways. In the region around Moscow, four great rivers had their tributary headwaters: the Dneiper, the Don and the mighty Volga flowed south to the Black and Caspian seas; the Dyina flowed north to the Baltic and frozen Arctic.