It must have been their business sense rather than any political design (for which evidence is lacking) that accounts for the skill with which the princes of Moscow succeeded in neutralizing the most pernicious feature of Russian inheritance law. They could not entirely ignore custom which demanded that each male descendant receive an equal portion of the patrimony, but they did manage quietly to circumvent it. Their testaments read like the dispositions made by a landlord, and even Moscow and the title of Great Prince are bequeathed as if they were ordinary commodities. But the wealth and power of Moscow depended so heavily on its relations with the Horde that both were certain to be dissipated in no time unless special provisions were made to maintain some kind of seniority in the Muscovite house. Hence, in dictating their last wills, the Moscow princes began early to discriminate in favour of the eldest son, increasing his share with each generation until by the early sixteenth century he emerged as the indisputable head of the house. Dmitry Donskoi, who died in 1389, divided his patrimony among five sons, leaving the eldest, Basil 1, whom he designated Great Prince, about a third and making him responsible for 34-2 per cent of the Mongol tribute. Basil 1 happened to have had only one son, Basil 11, survive him and to him he left everything. As if wishing to guarantee that his status as exclusive heir would not be assailed by his, Basil I'S, brothers, he arranged to have Basil 11 placed on the throne while he was still alive. When death approached, Basil 11 assigned his eldest, Ivan in, as many towns as the other four sons combined. Ivan in continued this tradition
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by bequeathing his eldest, Basil m, sixty-six of the best towns of the ninety-nine towns in his possession; the remaining four sons had to divide among themselves appanages containing thirty-three of the minor towns. How much the share of the eldest son increased by these procedures may be gathered from the fact that whereas Basil I on his accession in 1389 owed 34-2 per cent of the Mongol tribute due from his father's estate, by the time his great-grandson Basil m ascended the throne in 1505 his theoretical share of the tribute (for it was no longer paid) rose to 71-7 per cent. Thus, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, the appanages allotted to the cadet heirs became mere lifelong provisions and as such no longer threatened the coherence of the family holdings. It now became customary for the appanages, as in feudal France, to revert to the Great Prince upon the holder's death. In this form, they survived until the expiration of the Riurik dynasty in 1598. A vital political reform - the introduction of a system of royal succession based on primogeniture - was accomplished quietly, almost surreptitiously, within the context of the law of property and through the institution of property inheritance. The adoption of this system gave the rulers of Moscow an immense advantage over rival princes who continued to split properties into equal shares among their heirs. As had been said earlier, the ascendancy of Moscow to the position of unquestioned pre-eminence in Russia involved two processes; an external one, aimed at compelling all the other appanage princes, as well as Novgorod and Lithuania, to acknowledge the ruler of Moscow as their sovereign; and an internal one, whose purpose it was to make sovereignty acquire the attributes of patrimonial or domainial power, i.e. full ownership of the land and its inhabitants. Both processes had their roots in the idea of votchina.
The Great Princes of Vladimir, whether their home was in Moscow, Tver or any other appanage principality, regarded their realm as their votchina, that is outright property. Their power over it was comparable to that of the possessor of dominium in Roman law, a power defined as 'absolute ownership excluding all other appropriation and involving the right to use, to abuse and to destroy at will'.4 At first, the princes' patrimonial claims were limited to the towns and volosti which they had either inherited or personally acquired. But from the middle of the fifteenth century, as the power of the Moscow princes grew and they began openly to aspire to all-Russian sovereignty, the term was broadened to include all of Rus'. 'Not only those cities and volosti which are now ours belong to our patrimony,' the legates of Ivan in once told the Lithuanians, 'all the land of Rus', Kiev and Smolensk, and the other cities which [the Lithuanian Great Prince] now holds in the Lithuanian
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land, they too by God's will, since the days of old, are our votchina [inherited] from our ancestors.'5 Later on, as he invaded Livonia which had never formed part of the Kievan state, Ivan iv did not hesitate to call it his votchina as well.
The concept of the kingdom as the personal patrimony of the prince was not entirely alien to western political thought. The record exists of a conversation between Frederick 11 and two legal experts in the course of which the Emperor asked them 'whether an emperor was not rightly the dominus of everything held by his subjects'. The interlocutor who had the courage to reply rejected it out of hand: 'he was lord in the political sense, but not in the sense of an owner.'9 Indeed it never struck root in the west, where theorists steadfastly adhered to the fundamental distinction between ownership and authority, between dominium and imperium or iurisdictio. The notion of political authority exercised as dominium carried visibly dangerous implications for the owners of private property, so numerous and influential in western Europe, and this sufficed to make the idea unacceptable. The spread of knowledge of Roman law during the twelfth century helped to give the distinction a powerful theoretical underpinning. In his Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576-86) Jean Bodin, the founder of the modern theory of sovereignty, isolated from the two traditional types of authority headed by one man, the monarchical and its corruption, the tyrannical, a third, which he called 'seigneuraP. (The English translator of 1606 rendered it as 'lordly'.) This type of monarchy, in his view, came into being by conquest of arms. The distinguishing characteristic of la monarchic seigneuriale was that 'the prince is become lord of the goods and persons of his subjects... governing them as a master of a family does his slaves'. Bodin added that in Europe there were only two such regimes, one in Turkey, the other in Muscovy, although they were common in Asia and Africa. In western Europe, he thought, the people would not tolerate this kind of government.'
At issue, of course, were not only ideas and labels. The patrimonial system rested on the assumption that there existed no separation between the properties of the ruler and those of the state. Western Europe insisted that this distinction be drawn. In France, beginning with approximately 1290, custom required the king to safeguard crown estates as an inviolate trust. After 1364, French kings had to swear an oath that they would not alienate any part of the royal domain as constituted on their accession; excluded were only revenues, personal properties and conquered territories. In the sixteenth century, it was further specified that the king's conquests were at his disposal for only ten years, after which they merged with the crown domains.8 In this way, the rulers of France, western Europe's most authoritarian, had to give up proprietary
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