The prince's residence... was not only the political centre of the state: it was also the centre of a large princely business enterprise... In the testaments of the princes of Moscow, Moscow - the farmstead often even overshadows Moscow - the capital. In the fifteenth century, Moscow is surrounded by a chain of large and small villages and by clearings, scattered along the basins of the Moskva and Iauza rivers, the property of the Great Prince and appanage princes. In the commercial settlements (posady) and in the towns stand their manors, orchards and kennels, along with whole communities of the princes' artisans and gardeners. Strung out along the Iauza, Neglinnaia and Kliazma rivers are the princes' mills. Along the low banks of the Moskva and the Khodynka spread out far-flung meadows, their property, some of them submerged under water. The environs of Moscow are settled with rent-paying peasants and slaves of the prince, his beaver-trappers, falconers, dog-keepers and stable boys. Beyond the Moskva river stretch apiaries (the so-called Dobranitskii Bee Forest) where, scattered in their villages, live the beekeepers. In the midst of all these hamlets, orchards, gardens, kennels and mills, stands the Kremlin, half-covered with princes' manors, their servants' quarters, warehouses, granaries, their falconers and the cottages of their tailors and artisans. This whole kaleidoscopic picture of the princely economy bears the unmistakable imprint of a large farming establishment. And the same holds true of the residences of the other princes. In Pereiaslavl, the capital of the principality of Riazan, we find the same rows of the princes' manor houses; in the city's environs, princely mills, fields, pastures; in the commercial settlements, fishermen and falconers, the property of the prince; and further away, their suburban bee-keepers.6
The management of these complex domains was entrusted to the domestic staff of the prince's household (dvor). It, too, consisted mostly of slaves; but even the freemen holding these posts were in a semi-bonded condition in the sense that they could not leave their employer without permission. The top official of the household was the dvoretskii or dvorskii, a kind of major-domo or head steward. Under him served diverse functionaries, each responsible for supervising a specific source
THE GENESIS OF THE PATRIMONIAL STATE IN RUSSIA
of income; one official assumed charge of the apiaries, another of the orchards, another yet of the falcons (which were used not for amusement but for hunting). An income-producing property was called put' and the officer in charge of it, putnji boiarin or putnik. A putnyi boiarin had assigned to him villages and promysly, revenues from which he used to support himself and his staff. Administrative functions of the dvor were organized along economic lines: that is, the putnyi boiarin administered and judged the slaves and other peasants employed in his particular branch of the economy. He enjoyed the same authority over the inhabitants of the villages and promysly assigned to him for his personal support.
Outside the princely domain, administrative responsibilities were held to a minimum. Lay and ecclesiastical landowners enjoyed extensive immunities which allowed them4o tax and to judge the population of their estates, while the black peasants governed themselves through their communal organizations. In so far, however, as it was necessary to perform certain public functions (e.g. tax gathering and later, after Mongol conquest, collection of the tribute), these were entrusted to the dvoretskii and his staff. The prince's household administration thus served in a double capacity; its principal task, managing the princely domain, was supplemented, when so required, by responsibilities over the principality at large - an essential characteristic of all regimes of the patrimonial type.
As one might expect, the slaves entrusted with administrative duties soon differentiated themselves from those employed in manual labour and formed a caste placed somewhere between freemen and bondmen. In some documents the two categories are distinguished as prikaznye liudi (commissioned men) and stradnye liudi (labouring men). By virtue of their responsibilities and the power that it gave them, the former constituted a kind of lower order of the nobility. Atthe same time, they had no confirmed rights whatever and their freedom of movement was subject to severe restrictions. In treaties between appanage princes it was customary to insert clauses pledging the parties not to lure away members of their respective household staffs, referred to by such names as slugi pod dvorskim (servants under the steward), dvornye liudi (household men), or, for short, dvoriane ('householders'). This group later became the nucleus of the basic service class of Muscovite and imperial Russia.
So much for the personal domain of the appanage prince. Outside his domain the appanage prince enjoyed precious little authority. The inhabitants at large owed him nothing but taxes, and could move from one principality to another with perfect ease. The right of freemen to roam about the land of Rus' was firmly rooted in customary law and formally acknowledged in treaties between princes. Its existence, of course, represented an anomaly; for whereas, after approximately 1150,
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the Russian princes turned into territorial rulers with a strongly developed proprietary sense, their military retainers and the commoners living on their land continued to behave as if Russia were still the common property of the whole dynasty. The former enrolled in the service and the latter rented land wherever they found conditions most attractive. The resolution of this contradiction constitutes one of the main themes of Russia's early modern history. It was accomplished only in the middle of the seventeenth century, when the rulers of Muscovy - by then, tsars of Russia - succeeded at long last in compelling both the military retainers and commoners to stay put. Until then, Russia had sedentary rulers and a floating population. The appanage prince could tax those living in his principality at large but he could not tell his taxpayers what to do; he had no subjects and therefore no public authority. Princes apart, the only landowners in medieval north-eastern Russia were the clergy and the boyars. We shall postpone discussion of clerical holdings to the chapter on the church (Chapter 9), and here touch only on lay properties. During the appanage period, the term boyar meant a secular landowner or seigneur.* The ancestors of these boyars had served in the druzhiny of the princes of the Kievan state. Like them, finding fewer and fewer opportunities to make money from international trade and robbing expeditions, they turned in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to the exploitation of land. The princes, unable to offer them incomes or loot, now distributed to them land from among their large reserves of wild, uncultivated territory. This land was held as votchina, which meant that the holder could bequeath it to his heirs. Article 91 of the Russian law code {Russkaia Pravda, Prostrannaia Redaktsiia), dating from the early twelfth century, states that if a boyar died without sons, his estate, instead of reverting to the Treasury, went to his daughters; a provision which indicates that by this time the boyars were absolute owners of their properties. The boyars apparently relied less than the princes on slave labour. Most of their land was rented out to tenant farmers with a smaller segment being sometimes retained by them for direct exploitation as demesne by domestic slaves or tenant farmers in payment of rent (boiarshchina, or as later contracted, barshchina). Large estates duplicated the princely domains and like them were administered by staffs of domestics organized according to puti. Rich boyars were virtual sovereigns. The administrators of the prince's household rarely interfered with their people, and sometimes were formally forbidden to do so by immunity charters.