Already for a century before the conquest of Kazan’ the Grand Duchy of Moscow had been reorganizing itself to meet the challenge of absorbing new territories and assuming a more significant historical mission. It was not the only power which could lay claim to the inheritance of Kievan Rus’. The loosely organized aristocratic Grand Duchy of Lithuania was also a realistic contender, as was the oligarchic urban republic of Novgorod, with its ruling city council (vecbe) and its immense northern hinterland.
Ivan HI, however, decisively defeated the Novgorodian army in 1471 and thereafter took advantage of the city’s extensive territories to introduce a new system of both administration and army recruitment. He confiscated many of the lands belonging to Novgorod’s boyars and awarded them to his own servitors on condition that they raised troops to make available to him. This was the first widespread application of the pomest’e system: the rewarding of civil and military officials with ‘service estates’ which provided them with a living while they served the Grand Duke in the chancery or on the battlefield. Ivan III used it to raise troops to fight under his banner, and also to attract boyars from the other duchies of Rus’.
The system was continued by his son, Vasilii HI, and extended each time Muscovy absorbed new territories, for example, from Tver’, Riazan’ or Pskov. However, there were limits to the system: the Grand Duke did not wish to uproot his own followers who held their patrimonial estates within his own Grand Duchy. Furthermore, the church held huge landholdings which it was not prepared to surrender to the secular power. Ivan and Vasilii also started the process of converting their administration from one run by word of mouth for household management to one conducted in writing for the governance of a whole realm; in other words they created an embryonic bureaucracy.2
Ivan III and Vasilii III bolstered their augmented power by beginning to adopt the external show of sovereignty – asserting their independence of the Mongols – and of imperial dignity. Ivan married the niece of the last Byzantine Emperor, Sofia Paleologue, and he and his son intermittently employed the title Tsar’ (Caesar or Emperor), when they felt they could get it acknowledged. This symbolic acquisition of authority culminated in the coronation of Ivan IV as Tsar in 1547.
To some extent, however, these quasi-imperial pretensions were an illusion, concealing the reality that, given primitive technology and communications, power still rested with boyar clans, which used the autocratic façade to lend some stability and decorum to a power constellation which would otherwise have fallen apart in perpetual feuding. Court ceremonial, the Tsar’s religious processions, his public almsgivings and pilgrimages to distant monasteries all gave substance to an ideal of God-ordained rule which veiled the sordid brutality of internecine boyar rivalry. Boyars might fight each other for influence, but not for the throne itself, for that would plunge the entire realm into chaos. Ivan IV had ample opportunity to convince himself of this underlying reality during his minority, when boyars squabbled violently over the regency and his own favourites were murdered before his eyes, but he himself was left unharmed. He assumed full royal power convinced of the need to tame the boyars and make the reality more like the image.3
Soon after his coronation Ivan and his advisers made a start towards equipping Moscow for the role it was gradually but ostentatiously assuming, that of a sovereign and integrated Eurasian great power with extensive imperial responsibilities. The theorist who inspired this brief and imperfect but fruitful period of state-building was Ivan Semenovich Peresvetov, a minor nobleman from Lithuania who had seen service in a number of countries, including the Ottoman Empire, before coming to Moscow. When Ivan was crowned, Peresvetov presented him with a most unusual chelobitnaia (humble petition) in the form of two treatises, The Legend of the Fall of Tsar’grad and The Legend of Sultan Mehmet, which recounted the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by the Ottomans.4
The theme was well chosen. The fate of Byzantium was a constant preoccupation of the Muscovites, both because by now they were claiming its heritage, and also because its eclipse at the hands of the Ottomans was a precedent whose repetition they wished to avoid. The persistent raids from the south were a constant reminder of the danger. Peresvetov charged that Byzantium had fallen because of the irresponsible lifestyle of its aristocrats: their idleness, their greed, their feuding, their rapacious exploitation of the common people. The parallel with the Muscovite boyars was inescapable, especially to Ivan after his childhood experiences. Peresvetov contrasted the laxity of the Byzantine Emperors in tolerating this kind of behaviour with the wise statesmanship of the victorious Sultan Mehmet II, who drew his advisers and military leaders from all social classes according to merit, and did not allow kinship and precedence to enfeeble the sinews of the state.
Peresvetov was almost certainly right. The Ottomans owed the creation of their empire at least in large part to reforms which weakened the native Turkish nobles who had previously formed the backbone of its tribal confederacies. Those nobles had been supplanted at the Ottoman court by Christian youths recruited from the Balkans and converted to Islam under the devshirme system. They furnished both the Janissaries, the elite corps of the army, and the principal civilian advisers. The Sultan required all his military and governmental leaders, whatever their provenance, to accept the status of his personal slaves, in order to separate them forcibly from their kinship loyalties. The conquered city of Constantinople was used for the same purpose: to give his new elite a power base remote from the native grazing lands of the Turkish nobles.
Such a system had obvious attractions for a Muscovite ruler also building an empire on vulnerable territories on the frontier between Christianity and Islam, and also struggling to free himself from aristocratic clans. Peresvetov did not go as far as his Ottoman model, and refrained from recommending slavery; but he did propose that the army should be recruited and trained by the state and paid for directly out of the treasury. This would ensure that individual regiments could not become instruments of baronial feuding. He favoured a service nobility promoted on the basis of merit and achievement, but he did not envisage serfdom as a means of providing them with their livelihood: in so far as he considered the matter at all, he assumed they would be salaried out of tax revenues.
Peresvetov’s importance was that he offered a vision of a state able to mobilize the resources of its peoples and lands equitably and efficiently. He was one of the first European theorists of monarchical absolutism resting on the rule of law. He believed that a consistent law code should be published, and that its provisions should be guided by the concept of pravda (which in Russian means both truth and justice): it would be the task of the ‘wise and severe monarch’ to discern and uphold this principle, according no favour to the privileged and powerful.
In the early years of his reign we can see Ivan endeavouring to implement, in his own way, some of Peresvetov’s ideas, especially where they would enhance the strength and efficiency of the monarchy. At the same time he was trying to reach out beyond the fractious boyars and courtiers to make contact with the local elites of town and countryside and bind them into a more cohesive system of rule. Together with his Chosen Council, an ad hoc grouping of boyars, clergymen and service nobles personally chosen by him, he tried to make a start towards removing the ‘sovereign’s affairs’ (gosudarevo delo) from the private whims of the boyars and their agents, and bringing them under the control of himself in alliance with the ‘land’ (zemlia). The word zemlia is crucial to