Noteworthy also was the ignorance in Russia of subinfeudation. Boyars engaged themselves to serve princes only; and although well-to-do boyars sometimes had their own retainers, there were no complex ties of fealty linking prince, boyar and boyar's retainer, and therefore no network of mutual dependence so characteristic of western feudalism and so important for the political development of the west. The material side of western feudalism was the fief, that is property, either land or office, provisionally given to the vassal as reward for service. While modern scholars no longer adhere to the view that nearly all land in feudal Europe was held conditionally, no one questions that the fief was then the dominant form of land tenure. Property given servitors conditionally is known elsewhere; but the combination of the fief with vassalage is unique to western Europe.
Until recently it was widely believed that some kind of conditional land tenure had been known in appanage Russia at least since the 1330s, when Ivan 1 Kalita, the Great Prince of Moscow, had inserted in his testament a passage which seemed to allude to it. But the great authority on medieval landholding in Russia, S.B. Veselovskii, has shown that this belief rested on a misreading of the texts, and that, in fact, the first Russian fiefs (pomest'ia) were introduced only in the 1470s in conquered Novgorod.10 Until then, alod (votchina), which did not require service, was the only form of land tenure known in Russia. The absence in appanage Russia of any formal link between the ownership of land and the rendering of service signifies the absence of a fundamental feature of feudalism as practised in the west. Conditional land tenure, when it came to Russia in the 1470s, was not a feudal but an anti-feudal institution, introduced by the absolute monarchy for the purpose of destroying the class of 'feudal' princes and boyars (see below, Chapter 3). 'When [freemen in Russia] were vassals, they did not as yet receive compensation from the sovereign, or, at any rate, they did not have fiefs-terre, i.e. they lived, for the major part, on their alodial properties (votchiny)', writes Peter Struve, 'And when they began to receive fiefs-terre in the form of pomest'ia, they ceased to be vassals, i.e. contractual servants.'11
Appanage Russia did have an institution corresponding to fief-office in the so-called kormleniia, as provincial administrative posts were known. Appointments of this sort, however, were always made for limited periods (two years at the most), and they were not allowed to become the hereditary property of their holders, as was often the case
THE GENESIS OF THE PATRIMONIAL STATE IN RUSSIA
with the western fief-office. They represented, in effect, bonuses given to trusted servants in lieu of money of which the Russian princes were always desperately short.
The absence in medieval Russia of feudal institutions of the western European kind has had profound bearing on the deviation of Russia's political development from the course followed by western Europe. Feudalism is commonly regarded as an order antithetical to statehood; in ordinary speech 'feudal' signifies as much as inward-oriented, disorganized, lacking in public spirit. This usage, made popular by the French Revolution and liberal publicists of the nineteenth century, is not shared by modern historians. The latter are impressed by the hidden centripetal impulses inherent in western feudalism, and by the critical contributions it has made to the growth of modern statehood. Vassalage proved an excellent surrogate for public authority after that authority had declined and in places disappeared following the collapse of the Carolingian Empire. The authority which western kings could no longer exercise in their public capacity, as territorial rulers, they were able at least partly to enforce through personal liens over vassals. At first, feudal authority extended only to the vassals who had personally sworn fealty to the king (vassi dotninici); but in some western countries it was eventually extended to embrace also the vassals' vassals. In this manner through subinfeudation, a chain of command was forged which, though private and contractual in origin, functioned in a manner similar to the public and obligatory. It is from feudal institutions, too, that some of the most important political institutions of the modern state emerged. The feudal curia regis, originally a convocation of royal vassals assembled to give the king the advice which, as lord, he had a right to demand, became in thirteenth-century France a central organ of royal government employing salaried officials. The Estates General of thirteenth-century France and England transformed themselves from ad hoc gatherings, convoked in periods of national emergency, into parliaments which claimed as a right what had once been their obligation. The judiciary systems of England and France likewise grew out of feudal institutions, namely the right of the vassal to an open trial, administered by persons other than his lord. Thus, for all its apparent anarchist tendencies, feudalism furnished western monarchs with a superb set of instruments with which to consolidate their power and organize centralized states. Sovereignty over the persons of the vassals and control of their fiefs could be and in places actually became a means for the establishment of sovereignty over all the people and the territory which they inhabited. The rulers of Germany and Italy proved unable to make proper use of this instrument; those of England, France and Spain succeeded, and from 1300 onwards laid the foundation work of powerful, centralized states. In these three
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countries, feudalism provided the womb within which gestated the modern state.12
The Russian appanage prince, lacking vassalage and conditional land tenure, was at a great disadvantage compared to the western king. It was only on his private domains that he was master. It is, therefore, quite natural that he had an obsession with accumulating real estate. He bought land, traded it, married into it and seized it by force. This preoccupation had the consequence of transforming the more ambitious of the appanage princes into ordinary businessmen, strengthening in their mind the already well-developed proprietary instincts.
Because of this background, once the ideas of'state' and 'sovereignty' finally came to Russia (this occurred in the seventeenth century) they were instinctively perceived through the patrimonial prism. The tsars of Muscovy looked upon their empire extending from Poland to China with the eyes of landlords, much as their ancestors had once viewed their minuscule appanages. The proprietary manner of regarding the realm and its inhabitants impressed itself very deeply on the mind of Russian rulers and of their service class. When nineteenth-century emperors, men thoroughly western in their upbringing, adamantly refused to grant their country a constitution, they were behaving not unlike ordinary property owners afraid to jeopardize their title by some legal precedent. Nicholas n, Russia's last tsar, was by temperament ideally suited to serve as a constitutional monarch. Yet he could not bring himself to grant a constitution, or, after having been forced to do so, to respect it, because he conceived absolute authority as some kind of a property trust which he was duty-bound to pass intact to his heir. The patrimonial mentality constitutes the intellectual and psychological basis of that authoritarianism, common to most of Russia's rulers, whose essence lies in the refusal to grant the 'land', the patrimony, the right to exist apart from its owner, the ruler and his 'state'. The qualities characteristic of the internal development of early Russian statehood - an unusually wide gulf separating those in political authority from society, and a proprietary, patrimonial manner of exercising sovereignty - were intensified by a shattering external event, the Mongol conquest of 1237-41.