But of course Muscovite society had more differentiation than theory would suggest, even if not rigidly defined. The metaphor of a circle works well to envision these fluid relationships. The ruler takes the center, surrounded by permeable concentric circles of social groups whose greater distance from him indicates less access, lesser status, and fewer economic privileges. The broken concentric circles underscore the possibility of access to the ruler. The first grouping would be his inner circle—kinsmen, boyar in-laws, and his closest other advisors. They would be encircled by the rest of the boyars and church hierarchs resident in the Kremlin, most notably (if not in the inner circle) the head of the Church (metropolitan of Moscow, elevated to patriarch in 1589) and on occasion perhaps the highest of merchants (gosti) and state secretaries (d'iaki) who had access to court and were even given the rare right to own land. With changing marriage alliances and expansion of the boyar elite, there was a lot of interchange between these two rings.
Next out, still very close to the ruler, would be military servitors who constituted the senior officer corps, called the "Sovereign's Court" in the mid-sixteenth century and men "of the Moscow list" by the seventeenth. Perhaps of equal status, but living in a clerical, non-secular world, in this circle would also be church hierarchs (archbishops, bishops, abbots of the 3-5 richest monasteries). In the next circle would be provincial gentry, organized in regional corporations around towns in the heartland. These men served as military officers and local governors. Members of all these circles enjoyed the highest status and economic position in the realm; they could own family land outright (votchina), they received service-tenure land from the state (pomest'e), and they could possess serfs. They enjoyed the honorific privilege of using the patronymic in their names and of calling themselves "slaves" when they petitioned the tsar.
The next circle marks a step out in social and economic privilege. These were semi-privileged military groups who did not pay taxes, but could not own land and serfs. They were engineers, musketeers, Cossack regiments in garrisons, and most bureaucrats in central chanceries and local governors' office. They too called themselves "slaves" but did not use an honorific patronymic in official address. Perhaps in this circle would also go other relatively privileged groups, such as European foreigners in military service and the members of lesser, but still untaxed, merchant associations. Next comes those people who called themselves the tsar's "orphans" when they petitioned, taxpayers of several types: townsmen, peasants belonging to the ruling family and those belonging to the state, serfs owned by an ecclesiastical or secular landlord. In this circle also belong the iasak-paying natives of the Middle Volga, Siberia, and the steppe. Beyond these circles might be a circle of personal, indentured servants, who paid no tax (kholopy), a status eliminated in the early eighteenth century. Outside the circles, two exceptions through the seventeenth century, the Don Cossacks and the Hetmanate: self-governing, they stood in vassal relation to the tsar, and their populace turned to those respective hetmans, rather than the tsar, for grievances and aid.
Such a graduated circle suggests both real differences in wealth, power, and prestige and also essential equalities shared by the ruler's subjects. All lacked legal definitions of corporate estates or personal rights. All served, all had honor, all could petition the ruler, and all—women, serfs, slaves, and non-Russians alike— could participate in legal proceedings as plaintiffs, witnesses, and sureties. They were connected to the ruler, each group receiving its own special deal with the sovereign.
THE INNER CIRCLE AND BOYARS
The court elite received the best deal. In Muscovy, these were the boyars, the great men of the realm, who were easily co-opted as Moscow rose to power even in the century before 1450. Moscow emerged as a partnership of grand princes and boyar clans; boyars were constantly at the grand princes' sides: they witnessed grand-princely wills and treaties, they stood by the ruler during diplomatic audiences, they are depicted in the Illuminated Chronicle constantly in attendance on the ruler. As noted in Chapter 6, the central interdependence of ruler and his men was idealized in the ruling ideology as the ruler's obligation to take advice. In principle he should listen to all righteous people, but two groups enjoyed constant access to his counsels—clerics and boyars (Figure 9.1). Muscovy had a very weakly developed concept of tyranny and resistance to rule, but the theme is repeated in historical accounts that a bad ruler was one who did not listen to good advice but ruled on his own. Grand princes tended to be related by marriage to the boyars of their inner circle and they certainly knew all their boyars personally. Rulers occasionally gathered larger assemblies to symbolically assemble the realm for advice giving and consensus (the so-called Councils of the Land).
Figure 9.1 This is one of several images in this late seventeenth-century illustrated history of Tsar Michael Romanov's marriage in 1624 that shows him consulting with his boyars. ("Opisanie v litsakh torzhestva...," Moscow, 1810). General Research Division, The New York Public Library.
Well into the seventeenth century, the personal, face-to-face relationship of the ruler and his boyars endured. A boyar's position was hereditary—succession to boyar rank followed collateral succession within clans; in the fourteenth to mid- fifteenth century there were ten to thirteen boyar families at any given time and often fewer boyars, as men had to reach a certain maturity to take the role. This elite changed and grew—new clans could be brought in as expanding clans fissured into separate families or by choice of the grand prince and/or the group of boyars. From 1462 to 1533, a time of military and bureaucratic growth, the number of boyar clans rose gradually from about fifteen to about twenty-four, and the new title of okol'nichii was devised to accommodate more men in high rank about 1490. The system of rule, based on heredity, was remarkably stable: behind a "facade" of the grand prince's claim to possess all power, boyars were there to run the army, foreign policy, and other administrative leadership, regardless of the grand prince's age, health, or personal qualities.
Stability among the boyars was ensured, as it was in the elite at large, by generous distribution of benefits: grants of service-tenure land (pomest'e), peasant labor, outright gifts. The boyar elite was structured by affinity—alliances of dependency, friendship, and kinship. Marriage forged enduring alliances and mutual obligations between clans and determined the pecking order among all the clans. From the mid-fifteenth century, as a rule the grand prince's marriage, often to an elite clan (although rarely one of the most powerful), established the inner circle, which was then cemented by boyar marriages to kinsmen or kinswomen of the new royal bride. Those inner circles often lasted two or three generations before being displaced by another faction; the Vel'iaminov clan was there at the beginning, dominant from a key marriage to the future Ivan II in 1345 until about 1433. They were edged out by the faction around the prestigious Patrikeev clan (princes from the Grand Duchy), which was ousted in 1499 by a coalition of clans including the Zakhar'iny (future Romanovs) and Cheliadniny. These clans were dominant until Vasilii III's death in 1533 left the 3-year-old Ivan IV on the throne and a two- decade-long minority. It was resolved with the victory of the same faction, now including the Bel'skii princes and the Romanov clan (Ivan IVs wife in 1547). One of Ivan IV's most pernicious acts was to marry upwards of six times after his first wife, Anastasiia Romanovna, died in 1560. Boyar clans strategized over decades to cultivate connections with the tsar's in-laws, and constant change ofthe tsar's bride wreaked havoc with status and power among the boyars. Ivan IV died in 1584, and a stable, old-fashioned inner circle was restored around the Godunov clan on the strength of Boris Godunov's sister's marriage to Tsar Fedor Ivanovich.