Like all dynasties, however, the Daniilovichi still faced the challenge of controlling their kinsmen. The Osman dynasty solved that problem with successively more coercive practices: from the late fourteenth century they practiced impartible inheritance to keep Ottoman territory undivided; Mehmed II (1451-81) instituted fratricide to eliminate rivals; a harem-based concubine and celibate sultanic marriage system, and the use offorcibly converted Christian slaves (devshirme system) to staff the court, limited and isolated political rivals. In Muscovy, policies were ostensibly less ruthless. Grand princes settled brothers and cousins on appanages with limited sovereign rights stipulated from the 1350s in treaties and wills that deployed a patrimonial vocabulary of "elder" and "younger" brother and personal loyalty.
More coercive policies included restricting collateral kinsmen from marrying and thereby producing heirs. OfVasilii II's six sons, one succeeded to the throne as Ivan III, one died before marriage, two were not allowed to marry and two married quite late. One of the latter two died without issue; the other faced another, more coercive strategy of control—imprisonment. Prison was expedient since it observed a Christian taboo on killing, particularly within the family; numerous dynastic kinsmen died in prison accused of treason, but the ruler was not identified with murder. Ivan III's next youngest brother, Uglich appanage Prince Andrei, for example, was imprisoned with his two sons in 1491 at a moment of political crisis. All died of their imprisonment, father in 1493, eldest son in 1522, and the younger son in 1540 having been released just before his death in a show of mercy. Similarly cruel policies were visited on Ivan IVs uncles: three of his father Vasilii III's four brothers were not allowed to marry, and when Vasilii III died in 1533 leaving 3-year-old Ivan as heir, the boyars reacted quickly. They arrested and imprisoned Ivan IVs eldest uncle, Iurii of Dmitrov. Soon after Iurii died in prison in 1536, his younger brother Andrei of Staritsa was sent to prison (1537), where he died, leaving behind only one young son, Vladimir. Ivan IV's other uncles died without issue. This left the mature Ivan IV with only one line of collateral kin—the Staritsa princes—who were assassinated in the Oprichnina. When Ivan IV died, he had only two male kin of any sort, his sons Fedor and Dmitrii, hardly a reassuring prospect for the future.
Neutralizing collateral dynastic kin did not eliminate struggles around succession within the court elite, but there were relatively few in Muscovite political history. In the 1490s, for example, succession was disputed between the lines of Ivan III's two wives (he married Princess Mariia Borisovna of Tver' in 1452 and Sofiia Paleologa in 1472). In the process a coronation ceremony, modeled on Byzantine rites for crown princes, was introduced for one ofthe candidates. When the future Vasilii III and his faction won the upper hand, the rival Patrikeev faction suffered the forcible tonsuring of three men and the execution of another. Throughout Ivan IV's minority in the 1530s-40s, factions of boyar clans (associated with Shuiskii, Bel'skii, and Mstislavskii princes) struggled over Ivan's eventual marriage, which would establish primacy within the elite. They exiled and imprisoned rivals to avoid outright violence, but also murdered a few men on each side. Tensions were resolved when the elite agreed to marry Ivan to a maiden of the Romanovs, a middling-rank clan in the Bel'skii faction. Even as the Bel'skii-Romanov faction triumphed, equilibrium was ensured by distribution of benefits to Shuiskii and Mstislavskii rivals as well. Succession came into question again in 1552 when, with Ivan IV gravely ill, many boyars refused to support his infant son, some favoring Ivan IV's cousin, the adult prince Vladimir of Staritsa. Ivan recovered, and some argue that this incident fueled his paranoid attacks in the Oprichnina of 1564-72.
Little effort was taken to publicly legitimize succession by dynastic inheritance until the time of Ivan IV. A tsarist coronation ceremony, oath taking by the populace, manifestos justifying rule—none of this is recorded until the mid- sixteenth century or later. Ivan IV succeeded as grand prince at age 3 in 1533 with no public show of legitimizing ritual or document. But when he reached maturity, after two decades of boyar strife, the court introduced an elaborate coronation ceremony (1547) elevating his title to "tsar" in addition to the traditional wedding ceremony, both ofwhich attested to stability having been restored at court. Modeled on Byzantine precedents, employing regalia evocative of that described in the Tale of the Princes of Vladimir, the ceremony included a peroration by Metropolitan Makarii reminding the ruler of his imperial eminence and duty to defend Church, faith, and people. A revised version from the 1550s, as Sergei Bogatyrev noted, elevated the ceremony by adding anointing to underscore the ruler's sacrality.
More overt demonstrations of legitimacy, however, were called for by the political crises that followed the demise of the Daniilovich dynasty in 1598 and the selection of an entirely new dynasty in 1613. Tsar Fedor Ivanovich died in 1598 without a direct or collateral heir, a result of the family line being pruned so ruthlessly in the sixteenth century. The boyar clans were faced with having to choose a successor from among themselves or from outside; initially Boris Godunov, brother-in-law to the deceased tsar and the power behind the throne throughout Tsar Fedor Ivanovich's rule (1584-98), took the throne. His accession was legitimized by elaborate recourse to the tradition of advice giving. Godunov's supporters, after forty days when his sister refused to take power as regent, organized in Moscow a council of approximately 100 church hierarchs, 50 boyars, 300 gentry, and a few dozen taxed townsmen. They declared for Boris Godunov and mounted a public procession to beseech him to take the position. Only then did Boris, legitimized by mass consensus, take the role, affirming it with an elaborate coronation. This was not a constitutional election, but affirmation using a traditional practice of consultation. When Godunov died in 1605, however, fellow boyar clans refused to accept his son's accession and there ensued almost a decade of struggle over the throne. Dynastic crisis opened the door to the "Time of Troubles": Sweden and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth invaded, Volga Cossacks led peasant uprisings against the center, and the army was in disarray as boyar leadership splintered.
It took until 1613 for elite factions to agree upon a successor while Russia suffered all manner of attempts at establishing legitimate rule. Because legitimacy had been solely associated with dynastic succession, the era was rife with pretenders. Save for a few boyars who might have understood the Polish parliamentary system, in Muscovy there was no political vocabulary of legitimacy other than dynastic succession; thus, candidates underscored their real genealogical claim to the ruling dynasty (Vasilii Shuiskii, for example), or "pretended" to be one of the Daniilo- vichi. Pretenderism endured into the eighteenth century, evidence of how deeply engrained was the ideology of patrimonial autocracy. In the Time of Troubles, a defrocked Russian monk who garnered Polish support posed as Ivan IV's son Dmitrii and took the throne briefly (1605-6). Several other "false Dmitriis" and other claimants of Daniilovich blood emerged in the chaos. After the First False Dmitrii, Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii (1606-10) took the throne. He scrambled to legitimize his accession by issuing manifestos condemning his predecessor as a "heretic" and imposter, citing his ancient princely heritage and claiming to have been selected by all the people. In his manifestos he promised not to abuse power by arresting without just cause and trial, a comment that some modern scholars take as a constitutional limit but that others see as a promise to restore the traditional consensus-based relationship with the boyar elite that had been destroyed in the time of Ivan IV.