Toward foreign ambassadors, especially if they came from the west, the Moscow court liked to display deliberate rudeness, as if to show that in its eyes they represented rulers of inferior rank. As Moscow perceived it, a true sovereign had to meet three tests: he had to be of ancient lineage, he had to have come to the throne by hereditary right, and he had to be independent of any other power, external as well as internal.2* Moscow was exceedingly proud of its ancient lineage, which it considerably extended by connecting itself to the Roman imperial house of Augustus. From the heights of this spurious genealogical tree it could look down on almost all contemporary royal houses. As concerns the manner of accession, here too the principle of inheritance was greatly stressed; a true king had to be patrimonial (votchinnyi) not elected (posazhennyi). As long as the Polish throne was occupied by a hereditary monarch, Sigismund Augustus, Ivan iv addressed the king of Poland as 'brother'. But he refused to address Sigismund's successor, Stephan Bathory, in the same manner because this king had been elected to office. The greatest importance of all was attached to the criterion of independence. A ruler was a true sovereign or samoderzhets (autokrator) only if he could do with his realm as he pleased. Limitation on royal authority was called urok (instruction) and a limited monarch was an uriadnik ('man under contract' or 'on commission'). Whenever the question of establishing relations with a new foreign power confronted tsarist Moscow it made careful inquiries to determine whether its ruler was indeed in every way his own master - not only in respect to other states, which was standard procedure in western diplomacy as well, but also within his own realm. An early example of such practice occurred in 1532 when the Emperor Babur of the newly founded Moghul dynasty of India sent an embassy to Moscow to establish 'amicable and brotherly' relations with the Great Prince of Moscow, Basil III. Moscow's response to this overture was negative. The Great Prince 'did not order to be brothers with him [Babur] because he was not familiar with his state, and it was not known whether he was a sovereign or under contract'.26 These assumptions were also spelled out in a letter which Ivan iv sent in 1570 to Queen Elizabeth:
We thought that you lord it over your domain, and rule by yourself, and seek honour for yourself and profit for your realm. And it is for these reasons that we wanted to engage in these affairs with you. But [now we see that] there are men who rule beside you, and not only men [liudi] but trading boors [muzhiki torgovye] [who] concern themselves not with our sovereign safety, and honours and income from our lands, but seek their own merchant profit.* Ultimately, only two sovereigns met the high standards set by Moscow: the Turkish Sultan and its own Great Prince - the very two rulers Bodin had singled out as Europe's 'seigneural' monarchs. We can now understand Ivan iv's scornful reaction to Possevino's mention of other 'illustrious' Christian kings.
To conclude the discussion of patrimonial kingship in early modern Russia, attention must be drawn to an interesting etymological fact. Among early Slavs two words were used interchangeably to designate the paterfamilias with full authority over the family's possessions as well as the lives of its minor members (whom he could sell into slavery). These words were gospodin (or gospod) and gosudar' (or gospodar). These
* Iurii V.Tolstoi, Pervye sorok let snoshenii mezhdu Rossiieiu i Anglieiu, 1553-1593 (St Petersburg 1875), P- I09- The opening sentence of this passage reads in Russian: 'I my chaiali togo chto ty na svoem gosudarstve gosudarynia i sama vladeesh i svoei gosudar'skoi chesti smotrish i svoemu gosudarstvu pribytka.' The contemporary English translator did not know what to make of this, so strange was the patrimonial language to his ears. He omitted the phrase 'and rule by yourself ('i sama vladeesh') and translated 'gosudarstvo' and its derivatives variously as 'rule', 'land', and 'country' (ibid., p. 114) which, as we shall shortly see, these words did not mean at all.
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words have a common root, gos, derived from the Indo-European ghes, 'to strike', from which developed also many words in the European vocabulary having to do with the home and its antithesis, the outsider, such as the Latin kostis (stranger, enemy) and hostia (sacrificial victim), and the English opposites, 'host' and 'guest'.26 In documents of the Kievan and early appanage periods, gospodin and gosudar' were used indiscriminately to describe both ruler and proprietor, which is not surprising given the absence of any significant distinction between authority and ownership at that stage of Russia's historical development. There was one important exception to this rule, namely that the slave owner was invariably called gosudar. Towards the end of the appanage period a distinction developed; gospodin came to be applied to authority in the public sphere and gosudar in the private. The appanage prince was normally addressed by freemen as gospodin. Novgorod, too, called itself Gospodin Velikii Novgorod, meaning 'The Great Sovereign [Gity-State of] Novgorod'. Gosudar, on the other hand, came to be restricted to what in classical Greek would have been called despotes, and in Latin, dominus. The prince was gospodin of the freemen living in his appanage, whereas he was gosudar of his slaves. On their estates, ordinary votchina-owners were also addressed as gosudar even as late as the seventeenth century.
Such was the prevailing practice until Moscow rose to a position of national pre-eminence. It is a reflection of the proprietary character of princely authority in Russia that its tsars did away with that distinction and insisted on being addressed exclusively as gosudar. This custom was introduced in the early fifteenth century, and possibly represented a deliberate imitation of Mongol practices. Ivan m stamped his coins and seals with the title gosudar and demanded to be thus addressed. Upon the accession of Ivan iv gosudar became part of the formal title of the sovereigns of Russia, used in all official documents. It is obviously significant that the term for 'sovereign' in modern Russian should derive from the vocabulary of private law, from a word which had meant owner and particularly owner of slaves. Although we translate gosudarstvo as 'state' a more accurate equivalent would be 'domain'. The word 'state' implies a distinction between private and public, between dominium and imperium. Gosudarstvo carries no such connotation; it is dominium, pure and simple, signifying as has been noted, 'absolute ownership excluding all other appropriation and involving the right to use, to abuse and to destroy at will'.* Like other historians, in tracing the evolution of Russian monarchy
* As Leonard Schapiro indicates (Totalitarianism, London 1972, p. 129) the English 'state' and its counterparts derive etymologically from the Latin status which conveys the sense of ranking, order, establishment - in other words, a concept which implies law. These implications are missing from the concept gosudar*. we have concentrated on Moscow, because Moscow became the capital of a Russian empire and its history is the best known of all the principalities. But the patrimonial mentality and institutions were not confined to Muscovy; they were rooted in the appanage system and the whole geopolitical situation of north-eastern Russia. A literary work composed in 1446-53 in Tver (Slovo inoka Fomy) extols the prince of Tver in much the same language that thepublicistic literature of Moscow later applied to its ruler. It calls him tsar, gosudar, autocrat (samoder-zhets) and a successor to the imperial title, and refers to Tver as the new capital of the Orthodox faith.27 This fragment suggests that if events had gone otherwise historians might well have talked of Tver as the fountain-head of the patrimonial regime in Russia. It is in a mood of great confidence that in the middle of the fifteenth century Moscow began to gather the vast 'patrimony' to which it laid claim. In theory, Moscow expansionist drive had as its objective the assembly of all the land of Rus'; hence, most of Lithuania was included. But, as we have noted, so were Kazan, Astrakhan and Livonia, none of which had ever been part of the Kievan state. Given the absence of natural frontiers in this part of the world it would have been impossible even with the best of will to draw a boundary separating the land of Rus' from territories inhabited by other races and religions. There were Finns and Turks under Russian rule when the national state was only beginning to take shape. Later, other nationalities joined them. As a result, the building of the national state and the forging of an empire, processes which in the west were clearly separated both in time and space, proceeded in Russia concurrently and contiguously and became virtually indistinguishable. Once an area had been annexed to Moscow, whether or not it had ever formed part of Kiev, and whatever the ethnic and religious affiliation of its indigenous population, it immediately joined the 'patrimony' of the ruling house, and all succeeding monarchs treated it as a sacred trust which was not under any circumstances to be given up. The tenacity with which Russian governments, whatever their professed ideology, have held on to every square inch of land that has ever belonged to any of them is embedded in the patrimonial mentality. It is a territorial expression of the same principle by virtue of which Russia's rulers have refused voluntarily to concede to their subjects one iota of political power.*