Urban support was embedded in formulae and rituals of political legitimacy. In 1015 Sviatopolk (according to the chronicler antipathetic to him) bribed the Kievans so that they 'received' him, but 'their hearts were not with him', and he asked the men of Vyshgorod whether they would 'receive [him] with [their] heart'.[41] In 1024 Mstislav of Chernigov and Tmutorokan' advanced on Kiev, but the townspeople 'did not receive him'.[42] On 15 September 1068 a faction of the Kievans held a veche, a town meeting, on the market square, and the upshot was that a group of them expelled their prince Iziaslav, freed Vseslav Briacheslavich of Polotsk from incarceration, took him to the princely court and 'acclaimed' him there - though a few months later they 'received' Iziaslav again when he returned with an army from Poland.[43] In 1102 Sviatopolk Iziaslavich had an agreement with his cousin Vladimir Vsevolodovich (Mono- makh) that his (Sviatopolk's) son should replace Vladimir's son Mstislav as prince in Novgorod. But the Novgorodians would have none of it: 'we do not want either Sviatopolk or his son. Send us [Mstislav] even if he has two heads,' they are reported to have said. And Sviatopolk argued and cajoled but could not persuade them, so the Novgorodians kept Mstislav.[44] In 1113 (according to a chronicler favourable to him) Vladimir Monomakh accepted the Kievan throne not by dynastic necessity but only because the Kievans threatened to riot if he refused; and 'all the Kievans' greeted his entrance into the city.[45]This is all still some way away from the written, contractual form in which Novgorod was to set the terms and conditions for its prince from the latter part of the pre-Mongol period,[46] but to be 'received' or 'acclaimed' by the townspeople, to have the commitment of their 'hearts' (later formalised with an oath on the cross) was important for practical legitimacy.
A prince had a price. In return for protection and prestige, the townspeople surrendered a certain authority. No detailed records of governance survive (most likely none were produced), but we can trace aspects of princely rule through, for example, codes of law. Before the reign of Vladimir Sviatoslavich it is unlikely that any type of written law was formally operational in Rus'. This does not, of course, mean that the country was lawless, merely that dispute resolution and social discipline functioned according to custom. As the chronicle (quoting from a Byzantine source) succinctly puts it: 'ancestral custom is regarded as law for those who have no [written] law'.[47] By the death of Vladimir Monomakh, however, three types of law code had become established, albeit initially on a modest scale: codes issued with the authority of the Church ('canon law'), codes issued under the authority of a prince or princes (Russkaia pravda), and joint codes issued by princes with and for the Church. For princely governance the most important of these is Russkaia pravda.
Russkaia pravda is the generic name for a series of codes - or one could view it as a cumulative code - whose first version was issued by Iaroslav and which was subsequently adapted and expanded by his successors. Russkaia pravda begins with an article prescribing the degrees of kinship within which blood vengeance is permissible ('a brother may avenge [the murder of] his brother, or a son his father, or a father his son, or a brother's son or a sister's son [their uncle]').[48] Subsequently it consists mainly of a list of offences together with the penalty for each, plus a few articles dealing with procedure. The growth of the text of Russkaia pravda over this period is evidence for (though not necessarily proof of) the expanding expectations and claims of princely intervention in dispute resolution. Iaroslav's code is very brief, filling barely a page of a modern printed edition. It was chiefly concerned with discipline and disputes within the druzhina itself and the urban elite. It includes, for example, penalties for striking someone with a sword or sword-hilt, for cutting off an arm or a finger, for hiding a fugitive slave, for manhandling a Scandinavian, for damaging someone's beard or moustache, for stealing a horse, as well as procedures for recovering a stolen slave who has been sold on several times. The most notable additions to the code under Iaroslav's sons consist of penalties for damage inflicted on the prince's own servitors and property, while articles associated with Vladimir Monomakh are more detailed and also extend the overall scope of the code to deal with, in particular, the regulation of financial dealings including interest rates on loans.[49]
The provisions of Russkaia pravda are a mixture of custom and innovation. Equivalent types of code can be found in other early medieval north European legal compilations, but the details are specific to Rus'. The introduction and growth of the code seem to reflect princely attempts to advance two processes: the standardisation of practice, and the social extension of princely authority. The very first written code may have been issued for Novgorod while Iaroslav was prince in Kiev, so that the decision to use a written document was a device to promote standard administrative practices in the prince's absence. More revealingly, an article agreed by Iaroslav's sons states that the penalty for killing the prince's stablemaster was to be 80 grivnas 'as Iziaslav established when the people of Dorogobuzh killed his stablemaster'.[50] Here the written code is used to standardise dynastic practice across local jurisdictions. At the same time the nature and number of articles shows changes in the princes' presumptions about their power to intervene. The earliest provisions deal with regulating direct retribution (blood feuds, vendettas) and with specifying sums to be paid in compensation to the victims or their families. The princes never managed fully to prohibit blood-vengeance (although they apparently tried to do so), but gradually compensation was supplemented or replaced by fines: that is to say, the idea that an offender was primarily responsible to the victim made way for the notion that an offender was responsible to the ruler. 'Horizontal', or 'dyadic' judicial practices began to make way for vertical, or 'triadic', relations.[51] Moreover, this was occurring as the princes were broadening the scope oftheir assumed judicial authority, expandingboth the range of people directly affected and the range of behaviours covered by their written rules. Even in its early stages, therefore, the text of Russkaia pravda reflects the growing incursion of formal mechanisms of princely authority into the mutual relations and activities of the urban population.
The expansion and harmonisation of rules through written codes was linked to a larger process of political and social integration. The ruling dynasty was only one of the institutions promoting this process through written codes of law. The other relevant institution was the Church. 'We Christians', wrote the chronicler, 'have one law.'[52] Here, however, he is not referring to princely secular law but to the laws of Christianity, the authority of the Church and its teachings: the authority of the Bible in general, and more specifically the authority of the practical codes produced over the centuries under the general heading of canon law. Canon law, combined with Byzantine imperial legislation relating to the Church, was conveyed in reference books known as nomocanons (Kormchie knigi in the Russian tradition). Much of a nomocanon is concerned with the Church's own internal dogmas and disciplines, but substantial sections are also relevant to the wider community, and one of the prime responsibilities of churchmen in Rus' was to promote behaviour compatible with canon law, to interpret and apply the rules and guidelines in local circumstances. In promoting social and cultural integration, the Church was thus potentially a very significant partner for the princes, for the Church had pretensions to affect areas of behaviour far beyond the reach of the princes' writ. The Church took regulation beyond the public sphere and into the home, into daily life. It prescribed what food could or could not be eaten on which days through the year, whom and how one could or could not marry, what to wear or not wear, when to have or not to have sexual intercourse and in what manner. Clearly these are areas where custom was likely to be powerful and - across the lands of the Rus' - diverse. Some of our most eloquent sources record the responses of senior churchmen to practical pastoral questions. Thus, for example, Metropolitan Ioann II (c.1077-89) is asked to advise on a miscellany of issues: whether in the cold northern winters it was permissible to wear leather undergarments made from the hides of animals which were considered unclean for eating (answer - yes); or how to deal with those who married according to local pagan rituals (answer - impose the same penance that one would impose on fornicators); or whether a ritually unclean mother should be allowed to breastfeed her sick baby (answer - yes, if the child's life is otherwise in danger).[53]
46
In the period covered by this chapter it was not unusual for the prince of Kiev to appoint his eldest son to Novgorod while still a child: obviously not as direct ruler but as an emblem of the princely connection to Kiev, while day-to-day authority was vested in an appointed governor (
48
49
Iaroslav's
51
See, over a longer period, Daniel H. Kaiser,
53
The 'canonical responses' ofIoann ii: Slavonic text in