Following the domainial practice, the rulers of Moscow divided the empire's population into two main estates. Those who served them in a military or administrative capacity comprised the service estate (sluzhiloe soslovie). The others - farmers, artisans, traders, trappers, fishermen and sundry manual workers - formed the estate of 'ft'a^/o-bearers', the word tiaglo designating the load of taxes and labour which the commoners owed the tsar. The two groups were sometimes distinguished as 'big men' (muzhi or liudi) and 'little men' (muzhiki). As during the appanage period, the clergy formed a separate social order, parallel to the secular one. It neither paid taxes nor served.*
The distinction between servitors and commoners was of fundamental importance for the social history of Muscovite and imperial Russia. On the one side of the dividing line stood those working directly for the sovereign, men who (figuratively speaking) formed part of his household. They were not a nobility in the western sense because they lacked the corporate privileges which in the west distinguished nobles from ordinary mortals. Even the most eminent Muscovite servitor could be deprived of life and property at his sovereign's whim. Collectively,
* Moscow also retained the class of slaves (kholofyi), inherited from the past, whose members lived entirely outside the social structure. They will be referred to later in this chapter.
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however, the service estate enjoyed very real material benefits. The most valuable of these was monopoly on land and serfs; until 1861, with brief exceptions, only those registered on the rolls of the service class could hold landed estates and employ serf labour (the clergy, as always, forming an exception to the rule). On the other side, stood the little men or muzhiki who enjoyed neither personal rights nor economic benefits, except such as they managed to acquire in defiance of the law. Their job it was to produce the goods and contribute the labour necessary to sustain the monarchy and its servitors.
The gulf separating the two estates was virtually impassable. Early Moscow tolerated a certain amount of social mobility and in its own interest even encouraged some of it; but the historic tendency pointed unmistakably in the direction of caste formation. The Muscovite state, being interested only in service and incomes, wanted everything to be in its proper place. The bureaucracy was structured to match the society which it administered; it too wanted maximum social rigidity, that is, the least possible movement of people from one category of tax or service obligation to another, since each such shift confused its account books. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, laws were passed prohibiting peasants from leaving their farms and tradesmen from changing their places of residence. Clergymen were forbidden to abandon the priesthood; priests' sons had to follow their fathers' vocation. Commoners were not to enter the ranks of the service class under the threat of heavy penalties. Sons of service personnel upon reaching adolescence had to register in the office that supervised such matters. The cumulative effect of these measures was to make social status in Muscovite Russia hereditary.
We will now take up in turn the history of Muscovite servitors and commoners and show how each became bonded to the monarchy. In general historical surveys it is sometimes said that Russian boyars lost the right of free departure because in time Moscow had gobbled up all the appanage principalities and they no longer had anywhere to go. In fact, however, this right had been effectively subverted before Moscow absorbed the rest of appanage Russia. The practice had never been a popular one with the appanage princes. What made it particularly noxious was that sometimes disaffected boyars quit their prince en masse, leaving him on the eve of battle without troops - a situation Basil 1 of Moscow confronted twice, once in 1433 and then again in 1446. Novgorod is believed, as early as the thirteenth century, to have taken measures to prevent boyars holding votchiny on its territory from enrolling in the service of princes outside its boundaries. Moscow began to interfere with the right of free departure already in the 1370s.2 At first,
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the Muscovite princes tried to intimidate would-be defectors by harassing them personally and looting their estates. These measures, however, did not have the desired effect, and much stronger devices were introduced under Ivan in. In 1474, suspecting the loyalty of Daniel Kholm-skii, a powerful appanage prince from Tver, Ivan exacted from him an oath that neither he nor his children would ever abandon Muscovite service. The tsar had the metropolitan and another boyar witness the oath; and then, for good measure, he required eight boyars to put up bail of eight thousand rubles which they were to forfeit in the event Kholmskii or his offspring violated the oath. This procedure was repeated on subsequent occasions, the number of guarantors sometimes exceeding one hundred. A kind of collective responsibility binding the higher echelons of the service class thus came into being. With lesser servitors, cruder methods were employed. Upon departing from a prince a boyar required a document certifying the nature of his service and his rank. If Moscow wished to prevent his departure, the chancery in charge of service records could refuse to issue such a certificate, or else it would issue one but deliberately lower the recipient's position and rank: in either event, his career was damaged. Moscow also applied pressure on appanage princes to return to it departed boyars, sometimes using force. As the territory of Moscow grew, safety from the long arm of its prince could be found only in Lithuania. But after 1386 whoever went there automatically became an apostate, because in that year Lithuania was converted to Catholicism - which meant that the tsar felt free to confiscate not only the properties of the defector himself but also those of his family and clan. Curiously, in treaties with other appanage princes, Moscow insisted on the inclusion of the traditional formulas affirming the right of boyars to choose their prince which it no longer observed itself. This was a ploy, designed to assure the unimpeded flow to Moscow of servitors from the independent principalities. Whenever the flow happened to proceed in the opposite direction, Moscow knew how to stop it, treaties or no.
The right of free departure was honoured in name as late as the 1530s, but in reality it had been abrogated several decades earlier. As is the case with nearly all landmarks of Russian social history, the legal record reflects very inadequately the process by which this change was carried out. No general statute exists forbidding free movement of boyars any more than there is one enserfing the peasantry. The practice resulted from a combination of concrete measures taken to frustrate boyar departures, and of occasional ordinances, such as that contained in the testament of Ivan HI in regard to the principality of Iaroslavclass="underline" 'the boyars and boyar sons of Iaroslavl... with their votchiny and purchased lands must not leave my son, Basil [111] for anyone anywhere; and from him who