Fearful Majesty

by Benson Bobrick

  In fact, no individual could be made to agree to hold an office either inferior to one his forefather had held or below that occupied by a man whose forefather had been less high-ranking than his own. An individual had to stand up for his “line” – not only its past but its future. If he accepted a rank inferior to that warranted by his pedigree, “he set a precedent that could damage the careers of his present and future relatives.”14 “Precedence” disputes were frequent, while every time a new appointment was made, other officials within the same military or administrative unit were automatically promoted or demoted according to scale. This made steady promotion by merit virtually impossible and tended to kill initiative. In effect, a limited circle of men possessing the requisite hereditary service relationship to other officeholders maintained a mathematical grip on key civil and military posts.

  Yet for all that mestnichestvo made a fetish of ancestral honor, it fundamentally expressed the priority given in Russian life to clan and family relations, as reflected, for example, in the enduring patronymic in Russian names. No one in sixteenth-century Russia had ever heard of the “individual” in the modern sense: Ivan was not “Ivan,” but “Ivan the son of, and grandson of, and cousin to”: kinship was inseparably a part of his identity. Little Grand Prince Ivan from the day of his birth was Ivan Vasilyevich – “the son of Vasily.” This poignant bond embraced the whole Russian community, understood as one great combined family over which the grand prince presided as father of all. Mestnichestvo merely mapped the most eminent bloodlines on the family tree.

  Nevertheless, it frustrated the grand prince in his power of appointment, and under Ivan III and Vasily III had caused him to rely increasingly on unofficial advisers. Moreover, since comparatively well-educated, literate men were needed for the new and more complex central administration developing in Moscow, he established the right to appoint qualified men of humble origin as dyaki or secretaries, and to promote them according to merit through the bureaucracy. Such assistants ranged from the lowliest underclerks of a sub-sub-department to the great state secretaries of the land. In between were the middling clerks attached to boyars, administrators, judges, and other officials. State secretaries, who administered the newly emerging prikazi or ministries, wielded a power comparable to that of senior members of the Duma. They qualified as “secretaries to the Duma,” took part in its deliberations, and were, so to speak, cabinet-level appointees.

  A minor nobility of “boyars’ sons” and courtiers filled out the ranks of government personnel.

  Provincial administration was given over to town and country district governors, whose principal responsibility was to preside as chief magistrates in the areas to which they were assigned. In lieu of salary, they “fed” off or derived their income from their locales by retaining a portion of the court fees and taxes they collected, and by levying food and other goods from the people in theoretically regulated amounts. Thus the system was called kormlenie or “feeding,” and it was (all agreed) incipiently predatory, for appointees were more or less expected to recoup whatever losses they had incurred elsewhere in the service of the grand prince. Moreover, though judicial bribery was prohibited by law, there was no clear penalty for it; and as the governor’s judicial revenues derived from litigation, which in turn derived from crime, the more crimes in his district, the higher his income. For certain officials, production of income had a clear priority over law and order, whereas to society – and the central administration – order and security were paramount and directly affected revenue that could be collected for the crown.

  That revenue should have been considerable. Property taxes were assessed per sokha, meaning a certain number of houses or shops or a certain amount of arable land. Land surveys were made regularly, and entered into cadastral books. Money was also raised by numerous commercial taxes, including customs duties, the tamga or sales tax (a fixed charge or unit theoretically imposed on every sale made in the marketplace), and by a graduated sales tax on major purchases like a horse. A direct source of state revenue was the myt or highway toll, which a merchant paid when he transported goods past a fixed geographical point, such as a crossroads, ford, or city gate. The rest went into the pockets of the governors, invariably appointed from boyar ranks.

  Yet to be a boyar was not necessarily to be rich. Some owned villages, hamlets, and large estates, and had a diversified staff of scribes, cooks, gardeners, falconers, and so forth; others were straitened by the expense of pursuing careers at court or of bringing their quota of troops into the field. A few were frankly destitute. One visiting dignitary discovered some boyars shamelessly grubbing among his discarded fruit and vegetable parings, “eating even onion peel.”

  THOUGH KORMLENIE ADMINISTRATION was the basis of the judiciary, legal theory and practice in Muscovy actually compared favorably with what could be found in much of Europe. Based on the Sudebnik or Law Code promulgated in 1497 by Ivan III (in turn founded on the ancient Russkaya Pravda ascribed to Yaroslav the Wise), it went a long way toward delivering Russia from the legal chaos of its Mongol past. There were higher and lower courts, procedures for empaneling a jury, for appeal, and for obtaining bail, a recognition of “conflict-of-interest” as applied to a judge, a scale of fines and punishments for various types of crimes, rules for litigation in both personal and property disputes, rules of evidence, and authenticating transcripts to assure that a rational format had been followed in conducting a trial. The victorious party received a document called a pravaya gramota, which consisted of the trial record and the court’s final decision.

  The chief town or provincial magistrates handled all but the gravest civil and criminal cases. These were referred to a central government court, or on appeal to the Duma, its Privy Council, or even the sovereign himself. To establish authority over far-flung hamlets, magistrates were assisted by a corps of mobile officials resembling bailiffs, who took suspects into custody or summoned defendants to trial. The central courts in Moscow, as well as bishops seeking to police distant monasteries, also had bailiffs wielding powers in their name.

  Most lawsuits had to come to trial within three years. Litigants were expected to represent themselves, to produce what witnesses or evidence they could, and (instead of swearing on the Bible) to confirm their oaths by kissing the cross. Heavy fines were imposed for bearing false witness; an eyewitness who failed to come forward was also culpable under the law.

  Court fees were substantial, and a case was brought at some financial risk. To discourage nuisance suits, the offending litigant had to pay the entire cost of the proceedings to the party deemed harassed.

  Out-of-court settlements were common.

  Occasionally, when there was no corroborating evidence – and the judge himself could not determine the truth – the issue might be decided in “God’s court” by a duel, with a hatchet, dagger, or club. If the accused was deemed “incapable” (too old, too young, crippled, a woman or a priest), he (or she) was entitled to hire a proxy. For obvious reasons the accuser could not.

  Torture was sometimes authorized to extract a confession, usually if a defendant was a “known criminal” or had a prior conviction. (Though the Mongolians had introduced torture into Russian legal procedure, it was High Church enthusiasm for the methods of the Spanish Inquisition that apparently contributed to its wider adoption.)

  In Muscovy it was generally administered with the knout – a whip made of strips of leather “as big as a man’s finger,” like a cat-o’-nine-tails – or by wrenching at a rib “with a payre of hote tongs.” Convicted thieves were whipped or had their heels crushed. For a third offense they were hanged. Delinquent debtors faced pravezh, or “the righter” – daily beatings with a cudgel on the shins and calves until the debt was paid. An irreparably insolvent debtor might be given to the plaintiff as a slave. Sedition, murder, arson, kidnapping, and espionage were all capital crimes, as was podmet (the planting of evidence in a frameup). Led to their doom with their hands bound together hold
ing a burning candle, the condemned were variously hanged, beheaded, broken on a wheel, impaled, beaten to death, drowned, or burned in an iron cage. Women convicted of killing their husbands were “buried alive. Counterfeiters had molten lead poured down their throats. Those found guilty of sacrilege were torn to pieces with iron hooks.”15 The word of five or six “respectable citizens” alone was sufficient to convict a man of even a capital crime. As anomalous as this may seem, in sixteenth-century Muscovy to find five or six men in one place willing to kiss the cross to a lie, at mortal peril to their souls, was probably rare.

  To kiss the cross was about the most serious thing one could do. As Metropolitan Nicephorus had put it centuries before in his advice to Prince Vladimir II Monomakh: “First test your heart as to whether you can abide by your word, then kiss the Cross, and having given your oath once, abide by it, lest you destroy your soul.”16

  THE RUSSIANS WERE a religious people and hearkened to the Church as a mighty force in their lives. This was no less true of Vasily III (despite his divorce) than of the humblest peasant mumbling prayers at his toil. The German ambassador von Herberstein vividly remembered how Vasily III, on campaign, once stood trembling in his tent when the communion host accidentally fell on the ground. Nor could he be calmed until a priest had picked it up.

  In the structure of the Russian Church, the whole realm comprised a single metropolitanate, so-called because the chief hierarch – the metropolitan – has his see in the capital.† From his own Kremlin residence, he presided over one of the largest Christian populations in Europe.

  In doctrine, liturgy, and iconography the Russian Orthodox Church had remained fundamentally “Greek.” It accepted the first seven ecumenical councils as the Seven Pillars of the Church, but believed Catholics had gone astray in their unlawful observance of fasting on the Sabbath, in dropping a week from Lent (so as to “allure men to their fold by the gluttony of feasting”17), in rejecting the idea of a married priesthood, in using unleavened bread in the Eucharist (which in the symbolism of the liturgy as understood by the East was tantamount to denying the human nature of Christ), and in adopting without conciliar approval the word Filioque (“and from the son”) with regard to the procession of the Holy Spirit in the language of the Creed.‡ Russians also denied the existence of Purgatory, yet believed in a sort of Limbo where souls awaited the last Judgment; used auricular confession “and thinke that they are purged by the very action from so many sinnes as they confesse by name”;18 held children to be sinless until the age of seven; believed in justification by works as well as faith; and fervently prayed to intercessory saints (especially the Virgin and St. Nicholas) because “like a prince of this world, God must bee sued unto by mediators about him.”19

  In Russian Orthodox practice, baptism was by complete immersion thrice; the sign of the cross was made from right to left; services were conducted in the vernacular; and Communion was administered under both kinds, with the bread and wine mixed together and served to the communicant in a spoon. The Eucharist was linked to the sacrament of Penance, which was emphasized as “an annual purification or spiritual bath”20 that culminated in Communion as a sign of pardon and reconciliation with the Church.

  Services were long (four hours on the average) with the congregation usually standing, and throughout the year the faithful were expected to abide by a very demanding calendar of fasts. Four long annual fasts together with the two regular fast days of each week – Wednesday and Friday (commemorating Christ’s betrayal and crucifixion) – amounted to almost half the year. Nevertheless, even in “extreme sicknesse,” according to a contemporary, most Russians observed the regimen “so strictly, and with such blinde devotion, as that they will rather die than eat one bit of flesh or egges.”21

  Such habitual self-denial was of course monastic, and monasticism was the core of the Church. Though not materially suppressed by the Mongols, it had undergone a kind of spiritual death until its amazing and prolific revival in the fourteenth century, when after the founding of Holy Trinity Monastery by St. Sergius, it spread east to the foothills of the Urals and north to the White Sea. By the end of the fifteenth century, there were over 200 monasteries in Muscovy, each sheltering from 20 to 400 monks, with countless hermitages scattered through the forests of the north. By the mid-sixteenth century, a Protestant visitor could write: “Of friers they have an infinit rabble, farre greater than in any other countrey where Popery is professed. Every city and good part of the countrey swarmeth ful of them. For they have wrought (as the Popish friers did by their superstition and hypocrisie) that if any part of the realme bee better or sweeter then other, there standeth a friery or a monastery dedicated to some saint.”22

  Most laymen also wore a cross about the neck and carried a rosary or “numbring beads,” while icons adorned gables, doors, and posts and enjoyed the place of honor in every Muscovite home. “When one visits another,” wrote von Herberstein, “and enters the house, he immediately takes his hat off and looks round to see where the image is, and signs himself three times with the cross, and bowing says, ‘O Lord, have mercy.’”23 So dependent was their devotion, it was said, that if Russians could not find an icon or cross to stare at “they would not pray.”24 Though Protestants regarded this as a “Popish” and “horrible excess of idolatry,”25 even Catholics were appalled to see Muscovites “prostrating and knocking their heads to the ground before images, as to God himself.” Moreover, although the internal adornment of Russian churches was fixed by tradition – with the Pantocrator (a figure of Christ as Lord of the Universe) placed in the cupola or dome, the Holy Virgin in the apse, pictures commemorating holidays in the central part of the church, and the Last Judgment on the wall facing the sanctuary – icons painted on wood gradually filled every niche and corner, enveloped every column, and covered every wall. Some eventually were made to form a standing screen, or iconostasis, that completely divided the sanctuary from the rest of the church.

  Of course, even Orthodox Russia had its indifferent churchgoers, whose familiar type one contemporary bishop thus singled out for rebuke: “When you hear Scripture read or expounded, you stop your ears like an asp… you are hardly inside the church, before you yawn and stretch and cross one leg over the other and stick out your hip and fidget and make faces like a boor.”26 One such cheerfully scrawled his defiance on a cathedral wall: “Yakim stood here and fell asleep but did not [in penance] dash his brow upon the stone.”27

  Potentially more subversive were the wandering yurydivy or Holy Fools, popularly revered as saints, who went “starke naked” in the fiercest weather, “with their haire hanging long and wildely about their shoulders,” and often self-encumbered “with an iron coller or chaine. These they take as prophets and men of great holines,” noted a contemporary, “giving them a liberty to speak as Pasquils [court jesters] what they list without any controulment, thogh it be of the very highest himselfe” – meaning the grand prince.28

  Their seemingly irrational and impoverished ways, shameful or outrageous behavior sanctified by 1 Corinthians, stood in pointed contrast to both the pretensions of secular power and the worldly behavior and hypocrisy of many monks and ecclesiastics.

  Monasteries, indeed, were hotbeds of every kind of vice, and the ignorance of the clergy was notorious. One Westerner remarked: “I talked with one of the bishops… where (to trie his skill) I offered him a Russe Testament, and turned him to the First Chapter of Saint Matthewes Gospel, where he beganne to reade. I asked him first what part of scripture it was, that hee had read? he answered, that hee could not well tell. How manie Evangelistes there were in the newe Testament? He sayde he knew not. How manie Apostles there were? He thought there were Twelve.” The advice of another hierarch to a group of novitiates – to look pious, with eyes lowered, neck bent, face pale, and “to cry often” – is superficial enough to be striking.29

  In Muscovy, rudimentary literacy was a real distinction where scarcely one in a thousand knew how to read. Public sc
hools even of primary grade did not exist, and aside from private tutors hired by nobles, education was reserved for the clergy and conducted by monastic schools.

  However, the notion that a book was scarcely to be found in all the land is mistaken. Some priests and dyaki were gifted scholars, translators, and literati, and one, for example, took a stab at translating Ovid. Despite the absence of printing, large monastic libraries had between 200 and 300 manuscript volumes, and though these were mostly of a liturgical or homiletic character – the lives of saints, ascetical treatises, and apocrypha – ancient Greek wit and wisdom were preserved in a fragmentary way in Izborniki or collections. Moreover, a knowledge of Byzantine canon law and legislation was to be had in the Kormchaya and the Nomocanon, two fundamental texts, while science was chiefly represented (as in the medieval West) by commentaries on the creation of the world.

  The Russians made no distinction between Scripture and patristic literature. St. John Chrysostom the “Golden-Mouthed” and Ephrem the Syrian were the Fathers most revered, followed by St. John Climacus and St. Basil the Great. The most popular work among the didactic or “Wisdom” literature of the Old Testament was the apocryphal book of Jesus, son of Sirach. The Psalter served as the first reader for a child or novice and as the common devotional book for laymen. The New Testament was divided into the Gospel and the Apostle (Epistles). Remarkably enough, the Old Testament was not completely translated into Church Slavonic until the end of the fifteenth century (500 years after the conversion of Russia to Christianity), when a Dominican monk in Novgorod compiled the first complete Russian Bible based on the Latin Vulgate.