As private property, the principalities in the north-east (and in the north-east only) were bequeathed in accord with the traditions of Russian customary law pertaining to property, that is after provisions had been set aside for the women and usually also for clerical establishments, they were divided into shares of approximately equal value for distribution among the male heirs. This practice may appear odd to the modern mind, accustomed as it is to regard the state as indivisible and the monarchy as subject to succession by primogeniture. But primogeniture is a relatively modern phenomenon. Although occasionally practised by primitive societies, it was unknown to antiquity; neither the Romans nor the German barbarians knew of it, and it also remained uncommon among Islamic peoples. It first appeared where property was intended to do more than merely furnish the personal support of the owner, i.e. where its function - to enable him to render military or other services - meant that it could not be reduced below a certain effective minimum. The popularity of primogeniture dates back to the grants of benefices made by Charlemagne. With the spread of feudalism and conditional land tenure it gained wide acceptance in Europe. The connection between conditional tenure and primogeniture is quite striking in the case of England, where alodial property was the least developed
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and primogeniture the most. Primogeniture survived feudalism in western Europe for two reasons. One was the growing familiarity with Roman law; Roman law knew no conditional ownership and tended to sweep aside the many restraints imposed by feudal custom on the eldest heir, transforming what had been intended as a kind of trusteeship into outright ownership. The other was the growth of capitalism which enabled the younger sons to earn a living without necessarily inheriting a share of the parental estate. Primogeniture, however, never struck root in Russia because here all the necessary conditions for it were missing, including knowledge of Roman law and opportunities in manufacture or trade. It has been a firm principle of Russian customary law to divide all property in equal shares among male heirs, and all attempts to change this tradition by the government have met with failure.
Upon the death of a north-eastern prince, the realm was apportioned among his sons, each of whom received his share or udel. Exactly the same practice was followed on private estates. Udel is customarily rendered in English as appanage, a term borrowed from the vocabulary of French feudalism. Alexander Eck, a Belgian medievalist, is quite correct in criticizing this usage on the grounds that while the terms udel and appanage both refer to provisions or 'livings' made by the sovereign for his sons, the French institution was only a lifelong grant which reverted to the treasury on the holder's death, whereas the udel was hereditary property, held in perpetuity*. Unfortunately, 'appanage' has become so deeply entrenched that it does not seem feasible to try to replace it.
The appanage which a Russian prince inherited from his father became his patrimony or votchina which, once the time came to draw up his last will, he in turn subdivided together with any acquisitions he himself might have made among his own sons. The practice led to a relentless diminution of the north-eastern principalities, some of which, in the end, were reduced to the size of small estates. The age when such subdividing took place - from the mid-twelfth to the mid-fifteenth century -is known in the historical literature as the 'appanage period' (udel 'nyi period).
One of the recurrent hazards of historical study is the difficulty of distinguishing theory from practice, and this is nowhere truer than in the case of Russia, where ambition always tends to run far ahead of the available means. Although in theory the principality belonged to the prince, in reality no appanage ruler had either the money or the administration to enforce a proprietary claim. In medieval Russia, effective ownership over land and any other natural resource (as distinct from theoretical ownership) was established exactly as Locke and other classical theorists imagined it, namely by 'removing' objects from the 'state of nature' and 'mixing' with them one's labour. Nine-tenths of the typical
THE GENESIS OF THE PATRIMONIAL STATE IN RUSSIA
principality was wilderness and therefore res nullius. Kliuchevskii describes as follows the procedure by which ownership was asserted in appanage Russia other than by inheritance:
This land is mine, because it is my men who cultivate it, whom I have attached to it: such was the dialectical process by which the first Russian landowners assimilated the idea of private property in land. Such juridical dialectic was natural at a time when the prevailing method of acquiring landed property in Russia was the occupation of wild expanses belonging to no one.6 Unable to colonize the empty land by themselves, but eager to have it populated because colonists enriched the area and brought income, princes solicited well-to-do military men, monasteries and peasant families to come and settle down. In this manner there emerged in each appanage principality three principal types of land tenure: 1. the private domains of the prince directly exploited by him; 2. the estates of the landowners and monastic establishments; and, 3. the so-called 'black lands', cultivated by free peasants. Economically, the three types did not differ much from each other except in size. Appanage Russia knew no large latifundia. Even the biggest properties consisted of numerous tiny units - villages of one or two households, fisheries, apiaries, orchards, mills, mines - all scattered pell-mell along river banks and in isolated forest clearings.
The prince was the principality's largest landowner. The lion's share of his revenues came from the exploitation of his private domains; the prince's economic power rested on the oikos, his household properties. This was worked and administered by a labour force composed mostly and in some principalities almost exclusively of slaves, called kholopy. The slaves came from two principal sources. One was war; many kholopy were captives and descendants of captives taken in raids on neighbouring principalities, so common during the appanage period, or in forays into the forest wilderness. The other source was the poor who had been either forced into bondage because they could not pay their debts, or else entered into bondage voluntarily in search of aid and protection. Historical experience suggests that in the case of economies based on slave labour the decisive factor may often be the supply rather than the demand: i.e. that slave economies can come into being because of the availability of a massive supply of slaves for whom work must be found.* The rupture of trade with Byzantium, where slaves had been in great demand, created in Russia of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a glut of human merchandise. There are recorded instances when, following successful military campaigns, five slaves were sold for the price * The slave economies of the Americas are an exception to this rule.
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of one goat. This oversupply must have provided a very strong inducement for the appange princes and landlords to turn to the exploitation ofland.
The main emphasis of the household economy of the appanage prince was not on growing cereals. The need for cereals of the princely household was easily satisfied, and the surplus was not of much use; Novgorod bought some, but its requirements, too, were limited, and as for distilling, the Russians learned that art from the Tatars only in the sixteenth century. The main energy went into promysly, preoccupation with which transformed some princely households into bustling business undertakings. The following description applies to a later age, but in its main outlines it is valid for the appanage period as welclass="underline"