In the initial stage of its disintegration, the Kievan state broke up into three major regions: one in the north, centred on Novgorod; a second one in the west and south-west, which Lithuania and Poland soon took over; and a third one in the north-east, in the area between the Oka and Volga, where power was eventually assumed by the principality of Moscow.
The most affluent and culturally advanced of these regions lay in the north-west. After Byzantium had collapsed, what was left of Russia's foreign commerce shifted to the Baltic, and Novgorod, with its dependency Pskov, replaced Kiev as the business capital of the country. Like the Khazars and the Normans before them, the merchants of Novgorod sold raw materials and imported luxuries. Owing to its extreme northern location, Novgorod could not grow enough food for its needs and had to buy cereals in Germany and the Volga-Oka mesopotamia. The slaves, traditionally Russia's major export commodity had no market in western Europe, where human bondage had become virtually extinct by this time; slaves, therefore, were left in Russia, with important economic and social consequences which will be noted later. The prosperity of Novgorod rested on close collaboration with the Hanseatic League of which it became an active member. German merchants established permanent settlements in Novgorod, Pskov and several other Russian cities. They had to pledge to deal with the producers only through the inter-mediacy of Russian agents; in return, they obtained full control of the entire foreign side of the business, including shipping and marketing. In search of commodities to trade with the Germans, the Novgorodians explored and colonized much of the north, extending the frontier of their state all the way to the Urals.
Politically, Novgorod began to detach itself from the other Kievan principalities around the middle of the twelfth century. Even at the height of Kievan statehood, it had enjoyed a somewhat privileged position, possibly because it was the senior of the Norman cities and because proximity to Scandinavia enabled it somewhat better to resist Slavization. The system of government evolved in Novgorod resembled in all essentials that familiar from the history of medieval city-states of western
THE GENESIS OF THE PATRIMONIAL STATE IN RUSSIA
Europe. The bulk of the wealth was in the hands not of princes but powerful merchant and landowning families. The task of expanding the territories of the principality, elsewhere assumed by the princes, was in Novgorod carried out by business entrepreneurs and peasants. Because they played a secondary role in the growth of Novgorod's wealth and territory, its princes enjoyed relatively little power. Their main task was to dispense justice and command the city-state's armed forces. All other political functions were concentrated in the veche which after 1200 became the locus of Novgorod's sovereignty. The veche elected the prince and laid down the rules which he was obliged to follow. The oldest of such contractual charters dates from 1265. The rules were strict, especially as concerned fiscal matters. The prince received in usufruct certain properties, but both he and his retainers were explicitly forbidden to accumulate estates or slaves on the territory of Novgorod, or even to exploit promysly without the veche's permission. The prince could not raise taxes, declare war or peace, or interfere in any manner with the institutions or policies of Novgorod. Sometimes he was specifically prohibited from entering into direct relations with the German merchants. These limitations were by no means empty formalities, as evidenced by the frequent expulsions from Novgorod of princes accused of violating their mandate; in one particularly turbulent 102-year period, Novgorod had 38 successive princes. The veche also controlled the civil administration of the city and of its provinces, and elected the head of its ecclesiastical establishment. Effective power in the veche lay in the hands of Novgorod boyars, a patriciate descended from the old druzhiny and composed of forty leading families, each organized into a corporation around a patron saint and his church. These families monopolized all the high offices and in large measure determined the course of the veche's deliberations. Their sense of self-confidence could not be duplicated in any other Russian city, then or later. Despite its civic pride, however, the Great Sovereign City of Novgorod (Gospodin Velikii Novgorod) lacked strong national ambitions. Content to trade and to lead undisturbed its own kind of existence, it made no attempt to replace Kiev as the centre of the country's political life. Economic exigencies which in the case of the Byzantine trade called for national unification, made no such demands in regard to the trade with the Hanseatic cities.
The situation in the western and south-western regions of the defunct Kievan state was different. By their constant raids, the Pechenegs and Cumans had made unbearable the life of the Slav settlers in the black earth region and the forest zone adjoining it: the latter had to abandon the steppe and withdraw into the safety of the forest. How insignificant the city of Kiev had become, long before its destruction by the Mongols in 1241, may be judged from the refusal of Prince Andrei Bogoliubskii of
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Suzdal in 1169 to move to Kiev, which he had conquered, to assume the title of Great Prince; he preferred to turn Kiev over to a younger brother and himself stay in his domain deep in the forest.
In the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the main territory of what had been the Kievan state - the basin of the Dnieper and its tributaries - fell under the control of Lithuanians. Moving into the vacuum created by the disintegration of the Kievan state, they encountered little resistance and soon made themselves masters of western and south-western Russia. The Lithuanian Great Prince did not interfere with the internal life of the conquered principalities, allowing local institutions and traditions to function. The petty princes became his vassals, paying him tribute and serving him in time of war, but in other respects they were not molested. The Great Prince had less landed property than the princes and their retainers combined. This unfavourable distribution of wealth compelled him to pay close attention to the wishes of the Council (Rada), composed of his major vassals. If in Novgorod the prince resembled an elected chief executive, the Great Prince of Lithuanian Rus' was not unlike a constitutional king.
In 1386 Lithuania and Poland entered into a dynastic union, after which the territories of Lithuania and Lithuanian Rus' gradually merged. A certain degree of administrative centralization followed and the old Lithuanian institutions disappeared; still, the government of the bi-national monarchy was anything but centralized. The upper classes in the eastern provinces profited from the steady decline of the Polish monarchy to extract for themselves all manner of liberties and privileges, such as title to their landed estates, easing of terms of state service, access to administrative offices, and participation in the elections of the kings of Poland. The Lithuanian nobility, partly Catholic, partly Orthodox, became a genuine aristocracy. Lithuania-Poland might well have absorbed most of the Russian population and obviated the necessity of creating a distinct Russian state were it not for the religious issue. In the early sixteenth century, Poland hovered on the brink of Protestantism. Its defection from Rome was ultimately prevented by a prodigious effort of the Catholic Church and its Jesuit arm. The danger averted, Rome determined not only to extirpate in the Lithuanian-Polish monarchy the remnants of Protestant influence, but also to pressure the Orthodox population living there to acknowledge its authority. The effort brought partial success in 1596 when a segment of the Orthodox hierarchy on Lithuanian territory formed the Uniate Church, Orthodox in ritual but subject to Rome's control. However, the majority of the Orthodox inhabitants refused to follow suit, and began to look east for support. The religious division, exacerbated by the Counter Reformation, caused a great deal of bitterness between Poles and