Hitherto taxation, local government and justice had been ‘privatized’ under a system known as kormlenie or ‘feeding’, that is, handled by the prince’s appointed officials as part of their patrimony. In return for their services they kept a part of the income raised. In theory the amount they were entitled to was agreed in advance, but in practice it was difficult to monitor. Ivan wanted greater control over both the revenues and the ‘feeders’, so he now replaced kormlenie with a system under which these functions were exercised by elected local assemblies, known as zemstva (or in the case of criminal justice, guby). In doing this, Ivan was giving official status to elected village and urban assemblies (usually denoted by the word mir) which already existed informally in many places. Their starosty, or ‘elders’, now took over most of the functions of the prince’s appointees.
This reform was very imperfect. It did not apply in territories where there was direct military danger, like the south, or the western border with Lithuania and Livonia. Furthermore, it created very tiny local government units, often just one village or group of villages, not linked with one another or with the central government. The members of the mir assemblies were bound by ‘mutual responsibility’ for their tax revenues and for the conduct of their elected officials, which meant they had to make up shortfalls and damages out of their own pockets. All this generated a reluctant and ineffective local administrative, judicial and fiscal system, which in practice soon had to be supplemented once more by appointed officials.5
Nevertheless Ivan made some attempt to draw the people of the zemlia into consultation with himself. In 1549 he convened a so-called ‘Council of Reconciliation’ (sobor primireniia) to deal with the conflicts which had flared up during his minority and had provoked rioting in Moscow after his coronation. There were consultations with lay people over a law code in 1550 and with clergymen, service nobles, merchants and government officials in 1566 over whether to continue the war he was waging in Livonia [see the p. 52] and how to pay for it.6 Often referred to in historical literature as zemskie sobory or ‘assemblies of the land’, these were not representative assemblies in the sense in which that term was understood in the medieval West: they were more like consultations of the Tsar with such local agents as could be conveniently assembled. But they do indicate a desire to spread the responsibility for state authority wider than the court.7
To gain a tighter grip over the army Ivan tried to extend the system of ‘service estates’ (pomest’ia) introduced by his grandfather. In 1550 he published a so-called ‘Thousand Book’, a list of one thousand leading servitors whom he wished to summon to state service, endowing them with cultivated land in the neighbourhood of Moscow. He was unable, however, to implement his plan in full because the church refused to surrender any of the immense acreage in the hands of its hishops and monasteries. All the same, he issued a decree in 1556 laying down in principle the military duties of all those who held landed estates, whether hereditary patrimonies (votchiny) or pomest’ia. Their obligations varied somewhat from region to region, but broadly speaking 150 desiatiny of arable land obliged a servitor to furnish one fully equipped armed man for the Tsar’s service. These requirements meant that for the first time, at least in theory, there were now limits to the rights of holders of patrimonial estates. Ivan also restricted the right of boyars to serve in the army according to the seniority of their family.8
Ivan tried to incorporate these measures in the religious world view to which he subscribed personally and which, as we have seen, was the legitimization of his burgeoning empire. He began his reign and his marriage with a pilgrimage to the monastery of the Trinity and St Sergii, which had been at the centre of Moscow’s religious life in the middle ages. He launched his work of reform, as we have seen, by summoning a special so-called ‘Council of Reconciliation’, at which he reproached the boyars with their disloyal behaviour towards him, but also confessed his own sins and called for general repentance.
Since his imperial claims rested on religious as much as on secular grounds, Ivan tried to bring order and discipline to the church as much as to the state. If the priests were drunken and the monks corrupt, and if the scriptures were mistranslated, then what price talk of the Third Rome? In 1551 he summoned a Church Council and submitted to it a long series of questions, a hundred in number – hence the Council’s generally accepted name, Stoglav, or ‘a hundred headings’. He himself participated in the debates, as the Byzantine Emperor had done at the early ecumenical councils. The Councils of 1547 and 1549 had consolidated the church’s claim to a ‘great tradition’ of its own. Now Ivan wanted both to discipline the church internally to make it more worthy of its great mission, and to persuade it to yield some of its landholdings to award to his military servitors.
The Council decreed a large number of measures raising standards and tightening discipline within both parishes and monasteries. It also considered the question whether the scriptures and liturgical practices needed reforming to bring them into line with Greek models. It explicitly upheld existing texts and liturgical practices-such as making the sign of the cross with two fingers raised, rather than with three as was the practice elsewhere in the Orthodox world, including Novgorod. The Council resisted Ivan’s wish to pursue a widespread secularization of church lands, but accepted a degree of limitation on them.9
The problem with the Stoglav resolutions was that in the turbulence of the coming decades there was no way of ensuring that they were carried out, and in the seventeenth century most of the reforming work had to be carried out again from the beginning. The question of the scriptures and liturgy would also be raised again then.
Ivan was a pious, learned and intense young man. His view of the world and of his own duties was imbued with a kind of monastic spirit, as if he took wholly seriously the notion of the ‘Third Rome’ becoming God’s kingdom on earth.10 At the same time, his ideals were patently too grandiose, ascetic and demanding. As a result, at times he would veer from heartfelt contrition and self-denial into orgies of sensuality and sadism. The tension was present in his personality, as a result probably of his strange upbringing, but it was exacerbated by the circumstances in which he had to rule, as head of an empire proclaiming an exalted religious and secular mission on the basis of inadequate resources and a still insecure tradition.
It is not surprising, then, that before long his reform programme ran into the ground and both Ivan and his realm were plunged into a divisive and destructive crisis. In 1558 he launched a third military campaign, to follow those of Kazan’ and Astrakhan’, this time against the Livonian Knights, in order to secure an outlet to the Baltic Sea and thus to easier contact with other European powers. Early successes gave way to setbacks as Lithuania intervened against Muscovy and the war became more general and costly. In 1560, moreover, Ivan’s beloved wife, Anastasia, died, removing a restraining element on his unstable personality, and he fell out with several leading members of his Chosen Council.
One of them, Prince Andrei Kurbskii, actually abandoned his military command and went over to Lithuania. From the safety of his new home he wrote a series of devastating epistles designed to discredit Ivan. They raise issues of fundamental importance in understanding the new style of monarchy, not least because Kurbskii accepted its basic validity as a model. He was not a proponent of appanage princely freedoms, nor was he a western liberal humanist of the renaissance type. He believed in the religious mission of Rus’ and in absolute monarchy as the means to fulfil it, but he felt that to be true to that mission, the monarchy must observe its own laws and those of God. He referred to Rus’ as ‘the holy Russian land’, and he accused Ivan of defiling her by his gross and sinful behaviour. The Muscovite armies he called ‘the strong in Israel’, and berated Ivan for beating and killing his own commanders. Ivan rejected many of the charges and hurled others back in Kurbskii’s face, but the main burden of his response was that