The ruler's obligation to heed the advice of his people was couched in a personalized language. Individuals were to approach him directly and humbly, and he was to give them "mercy" and "favor." Muscovy paralleled Chinggisid tradition in language and rituals of servility towards the ruler. Petitioners called themselves variously "slaves" (for the highest ranking), "orphans" (for taxpayers) and "intercessors" (for clerics); the document they submitted was called a chelobit'e, literally meaning "beating one's forehead to the ground," although such prostrations took place only in the most extreme circumstances (Figure 6.2). This terminology of servility, and court rituals that elevated the ruler, befuddled early modern European noblemen. Coming from an arena of bitter struggles for noble privilege and political freedoms in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France, England, Austria, Poland, and elsewhere, they took literally the terminology of "slavery" and denounced Muscovy as a despotism. And indeed, Muscovite rulers often exerted the complete power they claimed—they claimed all land patrimonially, liberally dispensed peasant villages (let alone conquered lands) to military men and favorites, and enserfed peasants to provide a steady tax and labor supply. But the language of tsarist humility and elite servility also provided parameters for political interaction.
The complex interplay of ideology and political reality can be observed in the judicial realm. Here the ruler was given opportunity to act on his obligation to
Figure 6.2 Hierarchs and secular leaders of conquered Novgorod prostrate themselves before Ivan III in the literal meaning of "petition" in Russian, to "beat one's forehead" to the ground. Here illustrated in the mid-sixteenth-century Illuminated Chronicle, submitting a personal petition to the ruler was the normal form of interacting with the tsar's bureaucracy. With permission of AKTEON Publishers.
protect his people from injustice, punish evil, and render true justice. In Muscovy people energetically used the court system; individuals petitioned for grievances (involving land disputes, crime, military service, taxation, and other realms) and courts responded in the ruler's name. Not only individuals but communities presented collective petitions about social injustice. They expected action and often received it; a wave of collective petitions contributed to the compilation of the 1649 Lawcode. Society felt a moral economy around the ruler's obligation to protect it from injustice. In 1636 a community righteously executed condemned criminals (who had been a scourge on the town) when it felt that the tsar's governor corruptly would not do it. In even more extreme circumstances rulers themselves honored the community's demands to punish evil-doers, even unto death. During rampaging urban uprisings in Moscow, on two occasions rulers—in 1648 Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich and in 1682, regents acting for the boy tsars Ioann and Peter Alekseevichi—sacrificed corrupt boyars to certain death by mob violence, knowing that the only way to stop the riots was to satisfy the moral economy ofthe crowd. In so doing, they acted out the ruler's liminal capability of "sacred violence," shedding blood to fulfill their obligation to protect the people from injustice, however high the cost.
Most of the time, however, Muscovite rulers fulfilled their obligation to provide justice more routinely. The empire-wide bureaucracy doubled as a judicial network (as discussed in Chapter 7); governors and scribes professionally trained in the law adjudicated cases of felony and high crime according to rudimentary legal handbooks of procedure and punishment (issued 1497, 1550, 1649, 1669) and individual decrees. Justice was not arbitrary. Like all sovereign states, Muscovy levied the death penalty for the worst crimes—murder, heresy, treason—and assigned lesser penalties (corporal punishment, fines) for lesser felonies and misdemeanors. Judges regularly tempered the written law by invoking "the tsar's mercy" to reduce sentences.
The empire-wide judicial system offered all subjects, regardless of confession or community, recourse in cases of highest crime, land disputes, service remuneration, and other major issues. Non-Russians participated in the criminal justice system as plaintiffs and defendants, witnesses and guarantors. Perhaps most interesting was the defense of personal honor. Individuals of all social ranks and ethnicities, from slaves to boyars, from Ukrainians to Tatars to Iakuts, could receive monetary compensation (on a graduated scale according to social rank) for verbal injury. The practice, echoing similar protections of personal honor in medieval and early Europe, helped to preserve stability in face-to-face communities, while garnering the ruler credit for protecting his people from injury. When European noblemen brought dueling to Muscovy in the late seventeenth century, it was immediately banned and the quarreling parties were sent to the tsar's courts to sue for dishonor. European style dueling became fashionable in Russia only at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Thus, Muscovy's imperial imaginary envisioned a world in which the ruler claimed wide authority, but was moderated in that authority by his Christian obligation to heed advice, protect his people from injustice, defend faith and realm, and lead his people to salvation. His power was limited by religion, by tradition, by the moral economy of his people. Ultimately, legitimacy was ensured by the ruler fulfilling these expectations. But the ideas themselves had to be disseminated if they were to bind the community together. In a setting of limited
Figure 6.3 The court artist traveling with Habsburg diplomats Augustin von Meyerberg and Horatio Clavuccio to Moscow in 1661 sketched this stunning image of tsar and patriarch re-enacting Christ's entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, one of several annual religious rituals in which the tsar participated. General Research Division, The New York Public Library.
literacy, texts were less important than visual media—art and physical embodiment in ritual and the built environment.
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Religious ritual displayed the ruler's piety, God's blessing on his realm, and his connection to his elite to the witnessing crowd (Figure 6.3). In the Kremlin, where the audience was the elite, Muscovite rulers participated in an annual schedule of liturgies on major Christian holy days from Epiphany in January through the Easter and Christmas cycles. Rituals that took him and his entourage outside of the Kremlin, such as cross processions in Moscow and annual pilgrimages around a circuit of central monasteries, allowed grand princes to symbolically "take possession" of their realm. They distributed alms to the poor, offered amnesties to prisoners, dined with local officials, and worshipped at local monasteries and shrines. They thereby displayed their piety, devotion to the Church, and compassion for the people. The ruler's entourage demonstrated the political hierarchy, from clerics to boyars to lesser servitors, and in their number and impressive clothing demonstrated the ruler's wealth and power. The impact on audienceand participants of such ritual is not recorded, but the intent of such rituals in all settings was "communicative." Their impact could be, as Emile Durkheim argued, cathartic, inspiring, and even integrating.
Some rituals were overtly political. When foreign diplomats came to Moscow, splendidly dressed cavalrymen lined the streets for miles and boyars in resplendent robes greeted the envoys. So overwhelming was the spectacle that even experienced ambassadors from wealthy countries with impressive civic structures and grand public ritual reported being awed and impressed. Others combined political and religious roles: at moments of succession, governors assembled the ruler's subjects to renew their oath of loyalty to the tsar. Orthodox subjects did so by physically kissing the cross, making a promise on one's very soul, a gesture so serious that, when used in courts of law to swear to testimony, litigants routinely settled cases to avoid imperiling their souls. Non-Orthodox subjects of the tsars took their oaths according to their own religions, equally solemnly.