Crucial to the realm's legitimacy were the women at court, as Isolde Thyret has argued. On the one hand, the tsar's wife (tsaritsa), sisters, and daughters (tsarevny) were players in court politics—tsaritsy were behind-the-scenes marriage brokers; they could represent their fathers' and brothers' interests; they administered bureaucracies, lands, and budgets of their own. In a unique cache of letters from 1654 to 1675 from Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich to his wife and sisters, he treats them as partners in hard-ball politics. He informs them of how the military campaign was going and how certain boyars were behaving and asks them to take care of the families of men killed in battle. But ideology also gave royal women a more spiritual role. They were considered intercessors for God's blessing on the realm and for the tsar's mercy to his people. In his letters, Aleksei Mikhailovich implores their prayers and attributes his military success to their intercession to God. The public petitioned to tsaritsy to plead with the tsar for them. Their piety was as essential to the legitimacy of the realm as was that of the church.
Just as the tsar was expected to heed the intercession of his family and clerics, rulers were expected to be open to the advice-giving of all his people, speaking righteously. A ruler who did not heed advice or patronized too narrow a circle of advisors was criticized, although Muscovy did not work out a legal or even theoretical right to resist a tyrant. Muscovite rulers are depicted regularly consulting churchmen, great men of the realm, and even all the people. The protocols of the 1551 Stoglav Church Council depict Ivan IV asking the assembled hierarchs of the Church to "speak in unanimity... assist me, all of you together and in unanimity." An early seventeenth-century chronicle castigated the people for their "foolish silence... when they did not dare to tell the tsar about the truth." The tsar and his people were to work together to keep the tsar righteous; this was not a constitutional connection, but a personal relationship of Christian compassion and righteous advice.
The relationship between the ruler and his men was a central focus of ideological writings. Here one might expect the theme of military prowess to be accentuated in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when Moscow's grand princes and boyars were conquering lands and assembling the state. Moscow's grand princes and boyars were a quintessential warrior band—a small cohesive elite notably successful on the battlefield. Bravery and manliness is a mainstay of many imperial myths; the Ottoman Osmanli family, for example, continued to style itself as frontier warriors for Islam (gazi) even as it also embraced Byzantine and Persian imperial imagery. But in most Muscovite sources (art, history writing, hagiography, encomia to princes), warrior attributes such as courage, valor, and skill in warfare were downplayed in favor of piety, as we see with the few warrior saints honored in the Russian tradition (Boris and Gleb, Alexander Nevskii). Still, one element of a warrior band ethos rings loud and clear in sources produced by the church, and that is the obligation of the ruler to respect, honor, and consult his men. A twelfth- century encomium (included in Muscovite chronicles) to Kyivan Grand Prince Vladimir declared, "For Vladimir loved his retinue and consulted them about the administration of his land, about wars and about the law of his land," while the mid-sixteenth-century Chronicle of the Beginning of the Tsardom depicts Grand Prince Vasilii III telling his men on his deathbed, "I ruled the Rus' land with you and I held you in honor" and entrusting his wife and children to their care.
Pragmatically early modern rulers needed the support of their elites, particularly in Muscovy, which lacked the complex social structure (middle classes, gentry and aristocracy, professional classes) with which kings in Europe leveraged power. The expectation that the ruler receive the advice of his men was observed by monarchs across Europe in the medieval and early modern periods, and in the Mongol horde with which Moscow's princes were personally familiar. While the Ottoman sultan in the sixteenth century developed an aloofness that elevated his status, looking on at council meetings and diplomatic receptions from hidden upper sanctuaries, Muscovite ritual and text consistently depicted rulers surrounded by clerics and boyars. Chronicles praised boyars as "wishing well" for the ruler and giving him good advice, and condemned those who refused to participate in council or who acted on their own volition. Significantly, in all the representation of consultation, there was no reference to disputation, disagreement, or compromise, the stuff of real politics; rather, stabilizing "unanimity" was the explicit goal ofadvice giving. In diplomatic audiences, for example, the grand prince sat on a raised throne, but was always accompanied by boyars who lined the room. Ivan III in 1488 is said to have refused to discuss issues with a visiting diplomat without his boyars present, and chronicle and diplomatic sources constantly underscore that the grand prince consulted boyars in decision making. Respect was ceremonially marked in banquets, where grand princes personally distributed choice food and drink, as well as valuable presents, to the assembled great men.
Historians have institutionalized such consultation as the "Boyar Duma," as if it were a fixed, proto-parliamentary body. This is too reified an image; consultation with boyars took place constantly and personally, with hours of meeting defined only late in the seventeenth century when the number ofmen in conciliar ranks had grown so large that format meetings were necessary. That immense size (almost 150 men) also spelled the end ofMuscovy's traditional face-to-face, personalized politics of tsar and his men. Personal advice giving continued in a small inner circle of tsar and favored boyars and in-laws.
Similarly amorphous were assemblies of most social ranks (peasants were excluded) summoned in the name of the tsar on an irregular basis to discuss issues of pressing state concern—the succession of a new dynasty (1598, 1613), taxation, legal reform, war, and peace. About thirty such assemblies are cited between the 1540s and 1653; dubbed "Councils of the Land" by nineteenth-century historians, they had none of the attributes of early modern parliaments (fixed meeting times, division into chambers representing different social groups, elected and/or representative membership, legal definitions of spheres of competence, power of fisc, legislation, or other constraints on executive power). Rather, they legitimized the government in moments of political crisis or import. Displays of ideal, consultative rulership, such councils also probably functioned as communication between state and society, particularly from the center down. Not constitutional bodies, "Councils of the Land" fulfilled the expectations of the ideology of Moscow's patrimonial ruler.