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CHAPTER 3 THE TRIUMPH OF PATRIMONIALISM
The amalgamation of a welter of small, semi-sovereign political entities into a unitary state governed by an absolute king was accomplished in Russia by methods different from those made familiar by western history. As has been noted before, the appanage system differed from western feudalism in a number of respects, two of which had direct bearing on the course of Russia's political unification. For one, Russia had never had a single national sovereign (if one excepts, as one must, the Mongol khan); instead, it had a single royal dynasty divided into many competing branches. Secondly, the distintegration of national political authority occurred here not from its usurpation by feudatories, but from its apportionment among the princes themselves. For these related reasons, the establishment of a unitary state in Russia proved more complicated than in the west. There, it involved one basic task: cutting down to size the feudal usurpers and reclaiming from them on the monarch's behalf his theoretical but unexercisable powers. In Russia, two steps were required to attain the same end. First, it was necessary to settle in an unequivocal manner which of the numerous princes descended from the House of Riurik would become the exclusive possessor of royal authority-who would be Russia's 'monocrat' (edinoderzhets). After this issue had been resolved - and it had to be done by force because customary law offered no guidelines - then and only then could the victor turn his attention to the more familiar task of suppressing internal competitors and acquiring the status of 'autocrat' (samoderzhets) as well. In other words, in Russia the process leading from 'feudal' decentralization to unitary statehood required not one but two stages, the first of which pitted prince against prince, and the second, the triumphant 'Great Prince' against nobles and (to a lesser extent) ecclesiastics. In practice, of course, the establishment of 'monocracy' and 'autocracy' was by no means as neatly separated as these words might suggest. For the purposes of historical analysis, however, it makes sense to keep them distinct, because the striving for 'monocratic' authority,
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peculiar to Russia, provides important clues to that country's subsequent constitutional development.
Russia's national unification began around 1300, that is, concurrently with analogous developments in England, France and Spain. At the time, it was by no means a foregone conclusion that there would be a unitary Russian state or that its centre would lie in Moscow. Nothing is easier than to demonstrate that whatever happened had to happen. It is also a very satisfying exercise because it seems to confirm that all is always for the best, which cheers the common man and also suits his betters. However, the trouble with the concept of historical inevitability is that it works only retrospectively, i.e. for the writers of history, not for its makers. If the behaviour of the appanage princes is any indication, at the time when Russia's unification got under way, there was certainly no overwhelming sense of it being desirable, let alone inevitable. The theological and historical theories justifying the process were worked out much later. In fact, it would be difficult to prove that Russia could not have gone the way of Germany or Italy and entered the modern age thoroughly dismembered.
If, however, Russia were to be united, then, for reasons previously given, the task had to be accomplished neither by Novgorod nor by Lithuania, but by one of the north-eastern appanage principalities. Here, out of the original principality of Rostov the Great there had emerged, through the perpetual splitting of patrimonies, many appanages, large and small. After 1169, when Andrei Bogoliubskii had decided against abandoning his appanage in this area and moving to Kiev to assume the throne of Great Prince (see above, p. 37), the title of Great Prince came to be associated with his favourite city, Vladimir. His brothers and their progeny rotated control of Vladimir with Bogoliubskii's direct descendants. The Mongols respected the custom, and the person whom they invested as Great Prince assumed concurrently the title Prince of Vladimir, although he did not, as a rule, actually move there. Under the appanage system, the title of Great Prince gave the bearer very little authority over his brethren, but it did carry prestige as well as the right to collect the revenues of the city of Vladimir and its adjoining territories, for which reason it was coveted. The Mongols liked to invest with it princes whom they thought particularly accommodating.
In the competition for Vladimir and the title of Great Prince, the descendants of Prince Alexander Nevsky turned out to be the most successful contenders. The eldest son of the reigning prince of Vladimir, Nevsky served at the time of the Mongol invasion as prince of Novgorod and Pskov where he distinguished himself leading troops against the Germans, Swedes and Lithuanians. In 1242, after his father's death, he journeyed to Sarai to pay homage to the country's
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conqueror and most likely to request from him a iarlyk for Vladimir. For unknown reasons the Mongols entrusted Vladimir to Nevsky's younger brother, issuing him instead a charter for Kiev and Novgorod. But Nevsky did not give up. He bided his time and ten years later in 1252, succeeded in persuading the khan to reverse himself. With a Mongol force which the khan placed at his disposal he captured Vladimir, unseated his brother, and assumed the title of Great Prince. His subsequent behaviour fully justified the Mongols' confidence in him. In 1257-9 ne stamped out popular uprisings against Mongol census-takers which had broken out in Novgorod, and a few years later he did so again in several other rebellious cities, all of which must have pleased his masters. After Nevsky's death (1263) the Mongols several times took Vladimir from his descendants, investing with it, in turn, the princes of Tver, Riazan and Nizhnii Novgorod; but his offspring always recaptured it and in the end made Vladimir and the title of Great Prince the hereditary property (votchina) of their house.
Nevsky and his descendants owed their success to the adoption of a shrewd political strategy vis-a-vis the conqueror. The Golden Horde, whose servants they were, had been formed from an association of nomadic tribes and clans which Genghis Khan had fused to wage warfare. Even after it had become a large state with a numerous sedentary population, it lacked the necessary apparatus to administer a country as vast and sparsely populated as Russia. Their tax collectors (basqaqs) and census-takers accompanied by military retainers were very unpopular and provoked many uprisings which, brutally as the Mongols suppressed them, kept on recurring. If Russia had been as rich and civilized as China or Persia, the Mongols undoubtedly would have occupied it and assumed over it direct rule. But since this was not the case, they had no incentive to move into the forest; they much preferred to remain in the steppe with its excellent pastures and profitable trade routes. At first they experimented with Muslim tax-farmers, but this method did not work, and eventually they concluded that the job could best be done by the Russians themselves. Nevsky and even more his successors met this need. They assumed on behalf of the Horde the principal administrative and fiscal responsibilities over Russian territories, as compensation for which they gained for their principalities relative freedom from Mongol interference and for themselves influence at Sarai; the latter proved an immensely valuable weapon with which to undermine rival princes. As long as the money kept on being accurately delivered and the country remained reasonably peaceful, the Mongols had no reason to tamper with this arrangement.