THE ANATOMY OF THE PATRIMONIAL REGIME
leaves, take his land for my son.' By the time this testament was written it had become accepted practice that he who held land on the territory of Moscow had to render service within its borders - if not to the tsar himself, then to one of his servitors. Failure to serve meant, in theory at least, forfeiture of the land. In practice, many landlords managed to evade service, and pass their days quietly on secluded estates. This is evidenced by a stream of decrees threatening dire punishment for failure to respond to a call to arms or desertion from the ranks. An accidentally preserved document from the Tver region indicates that in the second half of the sixteenth century more than one of every four votchina owners living there served no one.3 But the principle of compulsory service was established; the rest was a matter of enforcement. Ownership of land and rendering of service, traditionally separated in Russia, were made interdependent. A country which had had only alodial land ownership henceforth had only conditional land tenure. The fief, unknown in medieval, 'feudal' Russia, came to it under the auspices of the absolute monarchy. The imposition of compulsory service on all land owners represented a major triumph for the Russian monarchy: 'in no other European land was the sovereign able to make all non-clerical landholding conditional upon the performance of service for him'.4 But the battle was only half won. Although boyars no longer could refuse to serve their prince, they still had many ways of frustrating his will. Behind the facade of mono-cratic and autocratic monarchy survived powerful vestiges of the appanage era. Even though their principalities had been annexed to Moscow and they themselves enrolled in the ranks of the tsar's servitors, the richer among the one-time princes continued to behave on their properties like petty sovereigns. Annexation was often a mere formality; Moscow might take charge of the main town or towns, installing there its agents, but leave the countryside in the hands of the local prince and his boyars. Some of the deposed princes maintained household staffs with a quasi-governmental structure, dispensed immunity charters to monasteries and lay landlords, and marched into battle at the head of private regiments. And some, as we noted, refused to serve. Such landlords took great pride in their ancestry and consciously separated themselves from upstart service families. In the middle of the fifteenth century they began to keep books in which their ancestries were recorded in great detail. The most prestigious of these was the 'Sovereign's Book of Pedigrees' (Gosu-darev Rodoslovets) compiled in 1555-6. This book opened with the genealogy of the tsarist family, which it traced all the way back to the emperors of ancient Rome, then continued with the rest of the house of Riurik, the 'tsarist' dynasties of Kazan, Astrakhan and the Crimea, the appanage princes, and concluded with the most illustrious boyar houses. The families and clans included in this and similar lists were regarded as
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'pedigreed' (rodoslovnye). They formed a self-conscious and powerful body with the sensitivities of which the most wilful tsars had to reckon.
The pedigreed families and clans established something like a closed shop; they and they alone qualified for the highest ranks or chiny in the tsarist service, those oiboiar, okol'nichiiand dumnyi dvorianin. At the beginning of the seventeenth century nineteen clans, considered the most eminent, enjoyed special privileges enabling their senior representatives to reach the top of the rank hierarchy more or less automatically. Writing in the mid-seventeenth century, Kotoshikhin (p. 75 above), speaks of thirty clans enjoying the exclusive right to the highest posts, including membership in the tsarist council, top administrative offices in the principal towns, judgeships in the major prikazy and important diplomatic assignments. Servitors not inscribed in the genealogical books had to be content with service in the ranks of the cavalry and lesser administrative posts. The monarchy had to honour the system or risk the united opposition of the leading houses of the realm. The tsar could do anything but change the genealogical status of a boyar family; this was regarded as 'patrimony', beyond the competence even of royal power.
The pedigreed boyars not only restricted to themselves the pool of servitors available for high office; they also had a great deal to say about who among them would fill these posts. This they did through the institution of mestnichestvo or 'placement', introduced sometime early in the fifteenth century and formally abolished in 1682. The Muscovite service class, even in its upper ranks, was an amalgam of people of very different background and status; descendants of the Riurikides, whose lineage was as distinguished as that of the reigning house itself and who, had fortune's wheel turned otherwise, could well have sat on the imperial throne; heirs of baptized khans and Tatar princes; boyars whose ancestors had served the Moscow house; boyars of dispossessed appanage princes; a group known as 'boyars' sons' (deti boiarskie), like the Spanish hidalgos usually penniless and landless soldiers. Even among those considered pedigreed, there were great social distinctions. To avoid loss of status and dissolution in a grey mass, the pedigreed families and clans established a ranking system of extreme complexity and refinement which they compelled the monarchy to take into account in making higher service appointments and arranging ceremonial functions at the court or in church.
Each pedigreed clan had its own, internal order of precedence based on seniority. A father was one 'place' ahead of his sons, and two ahead of his grandsons. Seniority among brothers, uncles, nephews, cousins and in-laws as well as among the component families of the clan was regulated by elaborate codes. Whenever members of a given clan were due for a service appointment, great care was exercised to assure that
THE ANATOMY OF THE PATRIMONIAL REGIME
those with lower 'placement' status did not get ahead of those with a higher one.
More important yet were 'placement' accounts regulating relations among the families and clans. The service records of all servitors (consisting, in the seventeenth century, of approximately 3,000 clans divided into 15,000 families) were kept in the rolls of the Razriadnyi Prikaz, or, as it was known for short, Razriad. Preserved to this day, they run into thousands of volumes - a monument to the industry of the Muscovite civil service. From these records it was possible to ascertain what service appointments or what places at ceremonial functions one's ancestors and relatives had ever held, as well who had been above and who below them. These were entered into special mestnichestvo books. The boyars used the records to assure that in making appointments the tsar respected the relative ranking of the clans and of their individual members vis-a-vis one another. Clan honour required that a servitor should refuse any post which would have caused him to serve in a position subordinate to or even equal with anyone whose ancestors or relatives had been subordinate to his ancestors or relatives. To do otherwise debased for ever one's clan and lowered the service status of all its members, living and those yet unborn.* In this reckoning, the nature of the assignment or its intrinsic importance did not matter; all that counted was who served under whom. On the eve of every battle the tsar was besieged with petitions from servitors who objected to being put in command positions below their rightful 'places' (mesta). Were it not for the device of declaring certain military campaigns 'outside places' (i.e. exempt from being recorded and used in future mestnichestvo accounts) it is difficult to see how Moscow could have waged war. But in the civil service, and even more at court ceremonials, petitions and litigations of the most childish kind were commonplace. The following, reputed to be the last instance of a mestnichestvo squabble, may serve as an illustration: