Russian Notions of Power and State in a European Perspective, 1462-1725: Assessing the Significance of Peter’s Reign 9781644694183

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements
Introduction: Explanation of Aims, Genre, and Terminology
Part One: Russia and Europe: Clarification of Terms and the Problem of the State
1. Issues of Methodology, Reception, and the Benefits of a Long-Term Approach
2. Territoriality, the Name, and the Nature of the Polity: From the Principality of Moscow to the Russian Empire
3. The Idea of the State in Western Christendom in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era
4. The Role of Metaphors and Allegorical Personifications in the Development of the Concept of the State in Western Christendom
5. The Meaning(s) of the European Perspective
6. The Birth and Meaning of the “Russian State Narrative”
7. The Consequences of the State Narrative: The Discovery of Gosudarstvo by Russian History-Writing
8. Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Muscovite Perceptions of Ruling Power: Characteristics and Methodological Aspects of a Comparison with Western Christendom
9. The Problem of Samoderzhavie
Part Two: Notions of Power and State in the Context of “Proprietary Dynasticism”: Russia and the Western Perspective
10. Richard Pipes’s Patrimonial Interpretation of Russia Reconsidered in the Light of “Proprietary Dynasticism”
11. Aspects of Rulership and Their Relation to Each Other in Early Modern Europe and Russia: Proprietary, Office, and Divine Right
12. Divine Right of Kings and Divine Right of Tsars: Aspects and Lessons of a Comparison
Part Three: The Origins of Theory of Law and State in the Works of Feofan Prokopovich: An Intellectual from the Kievan Nest in the Service of Peter the Great
13. Turning Points in the Life of Feofan Prokopovich, and His Most Important Political Works
14. Preliminary Notes on Prokopovich’s Theory of Law and State
15. Power, State, Law, Sovereignty, and Contractualism in Feofan Prokopovich’s Writings
16. Female Allegorical Personification of Russia during the Reign of Peter the Great and His Successors: Visual and Written Sources, and the Notion of State
Epilogue: The Importance of Gosudarstvennost′ in Contemporary Russia
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

RUSSIAN NOTIONS OF POWER AND STATE IN A EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVE, 1462-1725:

ASSEESS ASS SSII NG TTH HEE S I GNIF G NIFICANCE ICANCE OF PPEETTEER R’S ’S RE IG N

Series Russian Thought in Context Series Editor Daniel Beer (Royal Holloway, University of London) Editorial Board Yanni Kotsonis (NYU) Simon Werrett (UCL) Yvonne Howell (University of Richmond) John Randolph (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Ilya Vinitsky (Princeton University) Rebecca Reich (University of Cambridge) Mark Bassin (Södertörn University) Victoria Frede (University of California, Berkeley)

RUSSIAN NOTIONS OF POWER AND STATE IN A EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVE, 1462-1725:

ASSEESS ASS SSII NG TTH HEE S I GNIF G NIFICANCE ICANCE OF PPEETTEER R’S ’S RE IG N E N D R E S A S H A L MI

BOSTON 2022

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sashalmi, Endre, 1964- author. Title: Russian notions of power and state in a European perspective, 1462–1725: assessing the significance of Peter’s reign / Endre Sashalmi. Description: Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2022. | Series: Russian thought in context | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022016053 (print) | LCCN 2022016054 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644694176 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644694183 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781644694190 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Russia--Politics and government. | Peter I, Emperor of Russia, 1672–1725--Influence. | Russia--History--Peter I, 1689–1725. | Political science--Russia--History. | Political culture--Russia--History. | Power (Social sciences)--Russia. | Nation-building--Russia--History. | Feofan, Archbishop of Novgorod, 1681-1736--Influence. Classification: LCC DK133 .S27 2022 (print) | LCC DK133 (ebook) | DDC 947/.05--dc23/eng/20220427 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022016053 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022016054 Copyright © 2022 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN 9781644694176 (hardback) ISBN 9781644694183 (adobe pdf) ISBN 9781644694190 (epub) Cover design by Ivan Grave On the cover: Benjamin Patersen, A Monument to Peter I, etching, 1799 Book design by PHi Business Solutions Published by Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA, 02446, USA [email protected] www.academicstdiespress.com  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements Introduction: Explanation of Aims, Genre, and Terminology 

vii 1

Part One: Russia and Europe: Clarification of Terms and the Problem of the State 35 1. Issues of Methodology, Reception, and the Benefits of a Long-Term Approach  37 2. Territoriality, the Name, and the Nature of the Polity: From the Principality of Moscow to the Russian Empire 61 3. The Idea of the State in Western Christendom in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era 89 4. The Role of Metaphors and Allegorical Personifications in the Development of the Concept of the State in Western Christendom 112 5. The Meaning(s) of the European Perspective 138 6. The Birth and Meaning of the “Russian State Narrative”  165 7. The Consequences of the State Narrative: The Discovery of Gosudarstvo by Russian History-Writing 176 8. Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Muscovite Perceptions of Ruling Power: Characteristics and Methodological Aspects of a Comparison with Western Christendom 188 9. The Problem of Samoderzhavie252 Part Two: Notions of Power and State in the Context of “Proprietary Dynasticism”: Russia and the Western Perspective 10. Richard Pipes’s Patrimonial Interpretation of Russia Reconsidered in the Light of “Proprietary Dynasticism” 11. Aspects of Rulership and Their Relation to Each Other in Early Modern Europe and Russia: Proprietary, Office, and Divine Right 12. Divine Right of Kings and Divine Right of Tsars: Aspects and Lessons of a Comparison

281 283 299 340

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Contents

Part Three: The Origins of Theory of Law and State in the Works of Feofan Prokopovich: An Intellectual from the Kievan Nest in the Service of Peter the Great 13. Turning Points in the Life of Feofan Prokopovich, and His Most Important Political Works  14. Preliminary Notes on Prokopovich’s Theory of Law and State 15. Power, State, Law, Sovereignty, and Contractualism in Feofan Prokopovich’s Writings 16. Female Allegorical Personification of Russia during the Reign of Peter the Great and His Successors: Visual and Written Sources, and the Notion of State

363 365 374 385 440

Epilogue: The Importance of Gosudarstvennost′ in Contemporary Russia 453 Bibliography465 Index497

Preface and Acknowledgements

The dates in the book related to Russian History before 1918 are Old Style, according to the Julian Calendar. Note, however, that before 1700 the Muscovite year, following the Byzantine tradition, began not on January 1 but on September 1—the latter replacing March 31 by the fourteenth century, which had been in use as the first day of the new year in the Rus' principalities. 1700 also marked the beginning of the new computation of time in Russia using the birth of Christ as a reference point (B.C./A.D.) instead of the Byzantine tradition counting it from the Creation of the world, which was calculated to have happened 5508 years before the Incarnation. The precursor to this book, written in Hungarian (2018) and published under a similar title (A hatalom és az állam problematikája Oroszországban 1462–1725 között európai perspektívából/The Problematics of Power and State in Russia in a European Perspective between 1462–1725 [Budapest: Ludovika Egyetemi Kiadó, 2020]), was created in commission of the National University of Public Service under the priority project KÖFOP-2.1.2-VEKOP-15-2016-00001 titled “Public Service Development Establishing Good Governance,” a project led by Professor Lajos Cs. Kiss. The present English-language edition is, however, not simply a translation but a considerably enlarged (more than tripled in length) and revised version of the Hungarian volume, which owes its origin to the kind invitation made by the Director of Academic Studies Press, Dr. Igor Nemirovsky, after reading my article in the journal Russian History. (“Political Theology and the Emergence of Female Personifications of Russia in Visual Sources from a European Perspective: The Petrine Period as a Watershed,” Russian History 45, no. 1 [2018]: 70–85.) I am grateful to Brill for permission to include this article in the book, and to The State Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg) for permission to use the image of the cast of Peter the Great’s personal seal. I would also like to thank all those who improved the quality of this English language edition by their critical comments. I benefited a lot from the discussion of the manuscript organized in 2020 under the auspices of the symposium, “Recovering Forgotten History. The Image of East-Central Europe in EnglishLanguage Academic Textbooks,” a project with a long tradition, conceived by

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Preface and Acknowledgements

Professor Andrzej Kaminski (Georgetown University) and organized jointly by the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Department of History at Georgetown University. The four commentators who were asked to give expert advice on the first draft of the manuscript, Dr. Marta Jaworska-Oknińska (University of Warsaw), Professor James Collins (Georgetown University), Professor Dariusz Kołodziejczyk (University of Warsaw), Professor Oleksii Sokyrko (Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv), raised important issues and offered illuminating comments. I am particularly grateful to Jim for providing me with the manuscripts of his two books on the French political discourse on commonwealth and state, and also to Oleksii Sokyrko for a generous second reading of the revised text. Dr. Charles Halperin (Indiana University, Bloomington) kindly read the revised text and made thoughtful remarks, as did Dr. Andrey Ivanov (University of Wisconsin-Platteville) and Professor Antony Lentin (University of Cambridge), who read certain parts of the book. My greatest gratitude, however, should go to Professor Ann Kleimola (University of Nebraska). Besides supporting my academic career in the past twenty years, Ann has constantly helped me in the process of writing the book with her advice, as well as polishing the text of the first English language version of the manuscript. I would also like to thank the editors for their work on the text. The errors, of course, remain mine. Finally, I want to thank my family for their patience shown while working on the English version and dedicate the book to them: to my wife, Ágnes, and my sons, Gergely and Soma. Endre Sashalmi Kincsesbánya, April 2022

Introduction: Explanation of Aims, Genre, and Terminology

The aim of the present book is to highlight what might be called the main features and trends of Russian “political” thought in an era when sovereignty, state, and politics, as understood by authors and statesmen in Western Christendom, were non-existent at all in Russia, or were only beginning to be formulated and articulated there. The book, however, is by no means a history of Russian political thought as it does not intend to give a comprehensive survey of authors or works of the period,1 but mostly concentrates on enigmatic authors/sources that exerted a major impact on and shaped the general, official perception of rulership, or marked certain changes of importance in this perception. The issue of folkviews on power will not be dealt with in the book apart from a few references. It is worth noting, however, that Maureen Perrie, the leading scholar on Russian popular monarchism, is of the opinion that the “theoretical premise of popular monarchism” in many ways did not differ from the monarchism of the élite.2 This statement is particularly relevant with regard to the pre-Petrine period, but in many ways, it is also valid for most of the history of Imperial Russia. The differences between these two views or layers of monar­ chism were not significant in the sixteenth and most of the seventeenth century (a point I argued many years ago in a study by comparing the messages of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Russian proverbs with the most important premises of official Muscovite ideology),3 but there was a growing divergence

1 The most thorough survey of this kind is the magisterial book of Gary Hamburg, which, at present, is the best comprehensive treatment of the topic. Gary M. Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment: Faith, Politics, and Reason, 1500–1801 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). 2 Maureen Perrie, “Popular Monarchism: The Myth of the Ruler from Ivan the Terrible to Stalin,” in Reinterpreting Russia, ed. Geoffrey Hosking (London: Arnold, 1999), 160. 3 Endre Sashalmi, “16th–17th-Century Muscovite Ideology of Power in a European Perspective. Proverbs as Means of Understanding Muscovite Ideology,” in The Place of Russia in Europe, ed. Gyula Szvák (Budapest: Pannonica, 1999), 166–172.

2

Introduction

beginning in the late seventeenth century. Daniel Rowland, dealing with almost the same time span in his summary of Muscovite ideology as I do here, also underlined the all-pervasive nature of premises of ruling power: “The basis of all early modern Russian political thought was that the ruler, tsar or grand prince, was God’s viceroy on earth, or even the image (or icon) of God on earth. The ruler’s commandments were believed to reflect the will of God. This sentiment is found everywhere—even foreign observers routinely attributed it to all classes of Russians.”4 The idea that monarchic rule was “a divine trust” on the model of the Old Testament kingship of David, who was chosen by God, found expression at all levels of society from the top, down to the simple common folk: “While literate Russians were bombarded with this idea in texts of virtually all genres, the same was just as common and central in the experience of the illiterate majority.”5 To grasp the changes that occurred in official perception of rulership in the above period, special emphasis is given to those written and visual sources on power that pointed towards the depersonalization and secularization of rulership in Russia, and hence, the formation of the notion of the state. This was a process of which “Westernization” (not beginning but accelerating after about 1700) was a crucial but not the sole component, and was reflected, first of all, in the appearance of the Western idea of the “common good” in the 1680s, as well as the increasing references to gosudarstvo in a secular context from the 1660s onwards. For gosudarstvo is the term that eventually came to mean “state” in the modern sense in Russian, although only in the second half of the eighteenth century, or, one would say, even later. Due to the importance of “Westernization,” the topic will inevitably be analyzed in a European context, and the reader is asked to keep this in mind when reading the book. As for the European context, I include some original research of mine not published yet in English concerning the emergence of the concept of the “sovereign state” with regard to seventeenth-century England, and show through some examples the role that sixteenth- to seventeenth-century emblematics played in the emergence of the modern concept of the state, relying on sources not studied in depth, if at all, for this purpose.6 4 Daniel Rowland, “Muscovy,” in European Political Thought 1450–1700: Religion, Law and Philosophy, ed. Howell Lloyd, Glenn Burgess, and Simon Hodson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 275. 5 Rowland, “Muscovy,” 275. Rowland’s statements confirm the importance of proverbs on rulership—examples will be given below. 6 Emblematics, defined very simply, is a branch of symbolism in which an image and a text mutually interpret each other in explaining an abstraction, and the visual image is a symbolic

Introduction

Although the book will touch upon important issues of conceptual history (and tries to enrich the field emphasizing the role of imagery, most notably the allegorical personifications of the state) it will not be conceptual history in the classic sense. I will not engage in discussing different streams of conceptual history either, such as the methods of the “Cambridge school” or the German Begriffsgeschichte, but I rely on them whenever they prove to be relevant. For most of the period under discussion here, I try to avoid using the wording “political thought” with regard to Russia, and refer to thought on power, or ideology of power, instead.7 Although “ideology” might seem a modernizing term, yet, if we use it in the sense as it was described by Simon Dixon, it can embrace the scope of meanings present in recently introduced alternative terms with regard to Russia, such as “imperial imaginary.”8 In my view, both terms can refer to literary texts of various kinds (chronicles, mirrors of princes, and so forth), as well as visual images,9 rituals, topographical arrangements of buildings and space10 (secular as well as ecclesiastical), or even gardens conveying or projecting legitimacy.11 By “ideology” Dixon means “simply a series of beliefs used to justify the Russian Old regime”12 (expressed in Russia in the media just listed)—beliefs to representation of a concept. The term “emblematics” is a general one covering at least two genres: the emblem (Latin: emblema) itself, and the genre known as impresa (Italian), devise (French), or device (English). While the emblem consisted of three parts (a motto, an image, and an explanatory text), the device had only two components: a motto and an image. 7 I first expounded this view in 1999. Sashalmi, “16th–17th-Century Muscovite Ideology of Power in a European Perspective,” 169. Details see below. 8 This term, borrowed from Jane Burbank, is used by Nancy Shields Kollmann, The Russian Empire 1450–1801 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 129. 9 Rowland, “Muscovy,” 275–278. 10 The arrangement of the Red Square in Moscow in the second half of the sixteenth century is a good example, where the St. Basil’s Church (called “Jerusalem” in common parlance) and the Lobnoe mesto (“Place of the skull”), built as the imitation of the Golgotha, were to convey the dominant contemporary image of “Russia as the New Israel” and “Moscow as the New Jerusalem.” The annual Palm Sunday ritual involving the tsar and the metropolitan/patriarch served the same purpose: by reenacting Christ’s entrance to Jerusalem, it had the meaning that the tsar was to lead his folk to salvation. Michael S. Flier, “Political Ideas and Rituals,” in The Cambridge History of Russia, ed. Maureen Perrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 394. 11 French type gardens of the Baroque age (ca. 1590–1760)—appearing in Russia under Peter the Great—with “regimented bushes” trimmed into unnatural geometrical shapes were to express the image of absolute princely power of Western rulers: they were to show that “even Nature could be bent by the royal will.” Peter H. Wilson, Absolutism in Central Europe (London: Routledge, 2002), 70. 12 Simon Dixon, The Modernisation of Russia 1676–1825 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 189, fn. 1. In Russia the first set of ideas qualified as an “ideology” in the narrower sense of the term was probably the one generally called “Official Nationality” (1833)

3

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Introduction

which we should add the ones questioning the legitimacy of those in power, even though this latter issue by far will not be dealt with as thoroughly as the former one. Isaiah Berlin gave a more detailed characterization of what could be called “ideology” taken broadly, when he identified the subject of “Russian thought” as the study of “general ideas.”13 Calling the following description “no more than an approximation,” he stated: “By ‘general ideas’ we refer in effect to beliefs, attitudes, mental and emotional habits, some of which are vague and undefined, others of which have become crystallized into religious, legal, or political systems, moral doctrines ….”14 For him “general ideas” included “everything that is loosely collected under such descriptions as ‘intellectual background,’ ‘climate of opinion,’ ‘social mores’ and ‘general outlook’; that which is often referred to in ordinary language … as ideology.”15 Berlin’s view is also in line with Gary Hamburg’s remark emphasizing the unsystematic character of Russian thought between 1500 and 1801, calling attention to the lack of “the formal qualities of Western thinking—that is, abstractness, speculative precision, rigorously logical presentation.”16 These characterizations apply even more to the period preceding the eighteenth century and can confirm my usage of the word “notion,” which I prefer to “concept” especially when speaking about Russian rulership. Without engaging in an academic debate on the issue of definitions of notion and concept, the preference of using notion or notions to concept for most of the period under discussion regarding Russia indicates the lack of more or less clear-cut abstractions concerning ruling power17: abstractions, such as subject, positive law, natural law, forms of government, and so forth. Simon Dixon’s following statement is highly revealing for the problem of pre-Petrine perception of power that I will recall from time to time in the book. He claims that what is “striking about both the form and the language” of Muscovite ideology “is the degree to which philosophical [and I can add: legal] abstractions remained foreign” to it.18 The abovementioned abstractions or concepts in the early modern era in Western Christendom were all instrumental to the concept of state and sovereignty and rulership in general.

containing the triad of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Peoplehood,” which emerged as a reaction to the ideas of the French Revolution. 13 Isaiah Berlin, “Russian Intellectual History,” in The Power of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 69. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 24–25. 17 This usage is in line with Berlin’s characterization of Russian intellectual history. 18 Dixon, Modernisation, 190.

Introduction

In Russia an important although incomplete shift in the perception of ruling power from notions of personalized power towards an abstract notion of power and state accelerated around 1700, when the modern concept of state and sovereignty came to influence Russian thought on power. This statement immediately raises several related issues: the importance attributed to the European context; the question of reception; and, last but not least, the most crucial aspect of the approach, namely, whether or to what extent the legal notion of sovereignty and state existed in Russian thought roughly before the Petrine turn, regardless of the lack of such discourses. *** Before making some general remarks of introductory nature on the above issues just mentioned, I think it important to state here clearly, that the subject of this book is the notions of power and state in Russia and not the reality of the state as a force or institution. Therefore, I will give just a sketch, serving as a background information on Western Christendom and Russia of what is called the reality of the state, and not engage in a discussion of the use of the word “state” as a convention of historiography employed to describe various political formations existing in different times and places.19 For I second the view that the state is a “historical subject,” and also accept that the modern state as an institution, as well as the idea of the modern state, was born in Europe—two closely interrelated phenomena that emerged as a result of a long process under special circumstances.20 I contend that the modern concept of the state was hatched in Western Europe between ca. 1450 and ca. 1700, and likewise, the emergence of the main features of the modern state as an institution was also the product of this era, although this latter process lasted well into the eighteenth century.21 19 For this broad use of the term “state” see subchapters 1.2–1.3 in Andreas Osiander, Before the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 4–17. Also highly informative is chapter 1 of Jean-Louis Halpérin’s Five Legal Revolutions Since the 17th Century. An Analysis of a Global Legal History (Cham: Springer, 2014), 1–10. 20 Wolfgang Reinhard, Geschichte des modernen Staates. Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart [The history of the modern state. From the beginnings to our times] (Berlin: C. H. Beck, 2007), 4. 21 Wolfgang Reinhard is of the opinion that towards the end of the Ancien Régime “the basic characteristics of modern statehood have already developed in the most important territories of Europe.” Reinhard, Geschichte des modernen Staates, 86. Likewise, Halpérin asserts: “If we accept the existence of a Roman State or of medieval States, the question remains when and in what ways the so-called ‘modern state’ appeared in the Western world. There is no doubt that this ‘modern state’ was not simply the product of the revolutionary movements (in America and in France) at the end of the eighteenth century: the transfer of sovereignty (from the British crown to the United States of America and from the French king to the French nation)

5

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Introduction

The expression “modern state,” however, does not mean that it was the nineteenth-century concept and reality of the state (the nation state), which came into being in the wake of the French Revolution. In using the term modern state in the sense of an institution, or in other words, treating the state “on practical level,” the following aspects should be pondered22—the timing of which varied in the most important Western monarchies—keeping in mind that the problem of the modern state (both as an idea and an institution) is not limited to the dimension that an impersonal highest power has over its subjects but should also include the external dimension, that is, the relations this power has with other such powers as actors. 1) From the late fifteenth century onwards there was a growing emphasis by central governments everywhere in Western Europe on the regulation of various aspects of social life: the concept that contemporaries called “police” or “Polizei” (its meaning was different and much broader than the word has today), or what Foucault labelled “governmentality,” marked a new way of thinking about government. This attitude (to which a further impetus was given by the Reformation with the need to regulate religious doctrines, church government, the subjects’ religious behavior, and so forth) was reflected not only in the increasing number of decrees but also in a drive to codification, furthering thereby the notion that there was a primary source of law over a given territory, that is, the sovereign authority, which everyone should obey.23 In Halpérin’s famous formulation encapsulating the process

indicates that modern States already existed in the Old Regime and before the outcomes of Enlightenment.” Halpérin, Five Legal Revolutions, 3. For a similar view see the relevant section of Samuel E. Finer’s monumental work on the history of government, placing the emergence of the modern state between 1450 and 1750. Samuel E. Finer, The History of Government from Earlier Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), vol. 3: “The Modern State,” 1261–1473. 22 These practical criteria are similar but not confined to the ones mentioned by James Collins in a laconic manner as the main features of the state in early modern Europe. James Collins, “The State,” in Interpreting Early Modern Europe, ed. C. Scott Dixon and Beat Kümin (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 215. 23 A justification of the view that there was a shift towards the modern state as a reality, based on the increased number of legislative acts by the central governments in roughly the same period I selected, can be found in Jean-Louis Halpérin’s research: “It can be argued that new stages in the development of statutory law were reached, especially in the great kingdoms of England and France, from the end of the fifteenth century to the first half of the seventeenth.” With regard to England he mentions the period 1485–1688, pointing out that after 1688 an unprecedented upsurge in legislation began. Halpérin, Five Legal Revolutions, 10.

Introduction

under way: “laws form states, rather than states produce laws,”24 a statement highly plausible to the era under consideration. 2) There also emerged a novel view of oeconomia (economy): roughly before the seventeenth century this concept was identified with the management of the affairs of a household, but from the late sixteenth century it was more and more thought of as the concern of central governments. In other words, it was the emergence and development of mercantilist ideas, in the heart of which lay the paramount importance attributed to foreign trade, that elevated oeconomia to the sphere of public concern and linked it to the emerging concept of the state.25 The result was the birth of the term “political economy” in the early seventeenth century.26 By the mid-seventeenth century, however, another important term, “political arithmetic” made its appearance, which also concerned itself with economic matters on a larger, “national” scale but from a very different standpoint. “Political arithmetic” expressed the idea that “the prosperity and the strength” of a given country depended “on the number and the condition of its subjects.”27 Charles Davenant, who published important essays on the balance of power among European states, defined “political arithmetic” in 1701 as “the art of reasoning by figures upon things related to government,” which clearly shows that “political arithmetic” was a statist calculation.28 No wonder that its synonym would become “statistics”—a term derived from the word “state” (!)—by the mid-eighteenth century in German, and then in English. For especially in the German-speaking territories so-called “cameralist” ideas began to be expounded from the mid-seventeenth century on (with corresponding government policies), which culminated in the birth

24 Halpérin, Five Legal Revolutions, 4. 25 The most important mercantilist work of the seventeenth century, written by Thomas Mun in 1623, but published only in 1664, ends with the following statements on the importance of foreign trade: “For all which great and weighty reasons do so many well-governed States highly countenance the profession [that is, foreign trade], and carefully cherish the action, not only with Policy to increase it, but also with power to protect it from all forraign injuries: because they know it is a Principal in Reason of State to maintain and defend that which doth support them and their estates.” Thomas Mun, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade, 1664 (New York: Macmillan, 1895), 119. 26 The first occurrence of the term “political economy” is, perhaps, linked to a French mercantilist work, Traité de l’économie politique in 1615, but its author “merely gave a form to a burgeoning field of knowledge that had emerged decades earlier.” Aaron Kitch, Political Economy and the States of Literature in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2009), 3. 27 Pat Hudson and Mina Ishizu, History by Numbers. An Introduction to Quantitative Approaches (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 24. 28 Hudson and Ishizu, History by Numbers, 24.

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Introduction

of what is called Kameral- und Polizeiwissenshaften (Cameralist and Police Sciences) when in 1727 the Prussian king established a chair for Oeconomie, Policey und Kammer-Sachen (Economic, Police, and Chamber Affairs) at Halle University.29 The differences between the two doctrines, mercantilism and cameralism—which to a great extent were derived from the fact that cameralism came from those states that were not maritime powers—in an oversimplified manner can be summed up like this: while mercantilism saw bullion as the wealth of a country and its source depending primarily on foreign trade, cameralism was concerned with the resources and the people of a given land to increase princely revenue and prosperity of the population, but both pursued protectionist policies. 3) Also notable is the strengthening of the grip of central governments over the churches which was well under way in the fifteenth century (Edict of Bourges, France, 1438), and this trend continued in the sixteenth century in both Catholic (Concordat of Bologna, France, 1516) and Protestant countries—in the latter with the establishment of state-churches (in England: 1534, in Denmark: 1536, and in Sweden: 1527, 1544).30 4) The government apparatus increased in size in the sixteenth and mainly in the seventeenth centuries. Its professionalization also grew,31 as its members developed an ethos that their loyalty went beyond the loyalty to the person(s) in charge of the government at a given time, because of the

29 “This marked the beginning of the academic development of cameralism and Polizei as sciences to be taught to future state officials.” Keith Tribe, “Cameralism and the Science of Government,” The Journal of Modern History 56, no. 2 (1984): 263. Tribe explains that cameralism was principally the “administration of the state,” and oeconomie “relates to this administration materially to the objective of happiness,” while Polizei concerned itself “with the general condition of order.” It is important, however, as he remarks, that this “neat separation” makes sense “only on the basis of modern categories of economy, polity.” Tribe, “Cameralism and the Science of Government,” 266. 30 William Doyle argued that in case of the Catholic countries the “idea of the state, as we understand it now, was just half-formulated” before 1789, as only the Protestant territories “were free of the iurisdictional claims of the pope.” William Doyle, The Old European Order 1660– 1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 221. Yet, such papal claims did not invalidate the existence of an almost complete royal control over the church of a given kingdom in practice with regard to appointments, as in case of the Gallican Church, legalized in the Concordat of Bologna. Furthermore, in France the recognition of the pope as the head of the Catholic Church did not affect the acceptance of the theory of full royal sovereignty by Catholic prelates, as Bishop Bossuet’s work, “Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture” (written in the 1670s but published only in 1709), proves. 31 With regard to bureaucratization James Collins noted that “by 1750 French state officials generated the ultimate document of state bureaucracy: the memo about how to write memos.” Collins, “The State,” 216.

Introduction

distinction between the private and the public capacities of the person(s) in the government. 5) Central governments formed sizeable permanent armed forces (mainly after ca. 1660) and asserted that they had the sole right to maintain and control them (as Cardinal Richelieu practiced it with regard to the Huguenots in 1627, and would express it in his Political Testament some years later).32 6) Central governments increasingly relied on direct taxation to finance their enlarged expenses due to the challenges posed by the second phase (ca. 1660–1720) of the so-called “military revolution.”33 Eventually, there emerged the notion of national debt replacing the royal debt (first in England in 1694) as a consequence of financing problems and the new perception of “economy.” 7) The modern diplomatic network was born in Italy by the 1450s and spread throughout Europe by the Treaty of Utrecht, 1713. It meant the establishment of permanent embassies on reciprocal basis and specialized offices at home for conducting foreign affairs manned by trained personnel, and combined with the new principle by the end of the seventeenth century, that only sovereign entities have the right to send and receive ambassadors.34 8) Diplomatic practice accepted the principle expounded by scholars of law (notably by Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf) “that a credible internal and external peace” could only be achieved by the general recognition of territorially confined sovereign entities, and therefore, the necessity to integrate them “in some ‘supra-national’ system (typically the balance of power) that would eliminate the temptation of war”35—a system that should overrule dynastic claims. These are the main characteristics, in my view, which should be seen not only separately, in themselves, but as influencing and interacting with each other. All

32 The phenomena that I described in points 4 and 5 were vital in the process of territorial consolidation and the differentiation of the functions of governments between 1450 and 1750 according to Finer, History of Government, vol. 3, 1266. 33 Jeremy Black, “A Military Revolution? A 1660–1792 Perspective,” in The Military Revolution Debate, ed. Clifford J Roger (New York: Routledge, 2018), 97–99. 34 Matthew S. Anderson, The Rise of Modern Diplomacy 1450–1919 (London: Longman, 1993), 41, 42, 68–102. 35 Martti Koskenniemi, “Peace as Integration,” in A Cultural History of Peace in The Age of Enlightenment, ed. Stella Ghervas and David Armitage (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 134.

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of these phenomena are highly visible around the Treaty of Utrecht, a landmark in the history of the European states system.36 Although I would object to expand the use of the term “state” retrospectively going back in time further than the thirteenth century—the state conceived both as an idea and an institution—I do not think that we have to get rid of the use of the word “state” altogether, and give up describing the emergence of the modern state as a process of state-building from ca. 1300 onwards, if the limits of its usage are recognized. My view is partly similar to Joseph Strayer’s, but by no means in the sense, as he claimed, that by 1300 “some of the essential elements of the modern state began to appear,” yet it took until 1600 to overcome its inherent weaknesses.37 I contend that ca. 1300 the tangible beginnings of what can be called the “medieval state” can be observed in practice. My chronology is also different from Strayer’s, since he examined the period between 1100 and 1600—“The modern state, wherever we find it today, is based on the pattern which emerged in Europe in the period 1100 to 1600”—in seeking to identify the following aspects that he listed as the criteria of the modern state: the appearance of political units persisting in time and fixed in space, the development of permanent, impersonal institutions, agreement on the need for an authority which can give final judgments, and acceptance of the idea that this authority should receive the basic loyalty of its subjects.38 Precisely these were the criteria used by Mikhail Krom in his recent discussion of Russian statehood. Krom saw the decades from the 1550s to the Time of Troubles (1598–1613) as the “transition of the patrimonial monarchy (of tsarist patrimony) to the early modern state.”39 His identification (!) of certain Muscovite terms, such as the delo gosudarevo i zemskoe (“the affair of the master and the land”) with the Western notion of “common good” (bonum commune),

36 See this problem in details below. 37 Joseph R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 34. 38 Ibid., 10, 12. 39 Mikhail Krom, Rozhdenie gosudarstva: Moskovskaia Rus′ XV–XVI vekov [Birth of the state: Muscovite Rus′ of the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries] (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2018), 216.

Introduction

and treating it as a proof of the beginning of the “early modern state” in Russia around the mid-sixteenth century, is completely unacceptable to me.40 To make a distinction between the time span that is the subject of this book, and the preceding late medieval period (a label that applies only to Western Christendom between ca. 1300 and ca. 1470), it may be useful to employ for the latter the word “polities” as John Watts did.41 When he used the term “polity” and “polities” with regard to Western Christendom between 1300 and 1500, he did so because “with the choice of the word ‘polity’ rather than ‘state,’” he wanted to emphasize the “negotiation between government and the people” as well as “mutual action,” and, last but not least, he intended to evade the “association with the rise of the modern state.”42 Among the polities he distinguished so-called “regnal polities” or “regnal level polities”: the adjective “regnal” was not used by him to mean “royal,” but “pertaining to a realm, in the sense of a sizeable territory under a single government,” so it applied not only to monarchies but also to republics, and by “regnal level” he meant “the level of government claiming more-or-less sovereign authority over a territory.”43 He remarked with regard to “regnal polities” that by the later part of fifteenth century they “differentiated themselves from other political forms, in having the fullest kind of political community combined with the most complete level of political authority.”44 And added that these polities “had much in common with the ‘states’ discussed in other literature.”45 So, it is perhaps just inevitable that the reasoning somehow always ends up with the problem of the state. The term “polity” I will use in the sense of particular systems of government of an “organized society or community with its own institutions for making [and to add: executing] collectively binding decisions for a specified group of persons and/or within a bounded territory.”46 Regardless that the head of the community is supreme or not, in the sense that he/she is free of other powers outside

40 See the critical discussion of his ideas on certain aspects of Russian statehood later in the book. A detailed survey of Krom’s argument, including even some of his related writings and papers, and its criticism were given by Charles Halperin, “The Early Modern Muscovite State Reconsidered,” Studia Slavica et Balcanica Petropolitana 24, no. 2 (2018): 181–196. 41 John Watts, The Making of Polities: Europe, 1300–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 379, 422. 42 Ibid., 379. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., 379–380. 45 Ibid., 380. 46 Rainer Bauböck, “Multilevel Citizenship and Territorial Borders in the EU Polity,” IWE Working Papers 37 ( January 2003): 1–21, https://eif.univie.ac.at/downloads/workingpapers/IWE-Papers/WP37.pdf.

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his/her territory, and notwithstanding what the main purpose of his/her duty (religious and/or secular) is. This definition is broad enough to include not only Western monarchies of the mid-fifteenth century, the starting point of the comparison, but also Muscovy—yet, it is narrower than the concept and reality of the modern state.47 This way, the term polity is not at all contrasted to the process of Western state-building (it can embrace the “medieval state”), and at the same time it is broad enough not to exclude practical aspects of power relations at different levels—regardless whether the particular (in our case, Western or Russian) thought on power (or political thought proper) included/allowed or not either legal-institutional or non-institutional forms of negotiations between governments and people, and regardless of the existence of systematic intellectual expositions of ideas of sovereignty and state.48 That said on the meaning of polity, I think it essential what Charles Halperin formulated in his very recent article where he gave a survey of the many labels used by historians for the interpretation of Muscovite statehood under Ivan IV: “Unfortunately any political concept that equally applies well to the Dutch Republic, England, France, Muscovy and the Ottoman Empire, pays so much attention to functionality that it disregards institutional structure and political 47 James Collins uses the term “polities” not only with regard to the late Middle Ages but also for what he calls the “monarchical commonwealths” of early modern Europe, stating that many of these “monarchical commonwealths” (such as France) became “monarchical states in the seventeenth century.” Collins, “The State,” 216. Daniel Rowland, writing on Muscovite ideology, also employs the term “polity” with regard to the period between 1450 and 1700. 48 In the present comparison it is important to emphasize, however, that in using the term polity, the characteristics singled out by Watts regarding Western Christendom of the late Middle Ages, deserve special attention, for many of the features listed were missing in contemporary Muscovy. Thinking about polity thus often involved some distribution of political rights between the monarch, the few and the many, with the mixture varying from model to model. A common resolution was to recommend some kind of monarchy, but to argue that the monarch should be guided or restrained by devices which provided for the common good of the political community. Among these two particularly dominated. One of them was law, which was supposed to protect the community, both by tying the king to the dictates of reason and by reflecting the common will of the people, since law was commonly thought to be made with their assent or at their wish. The other was counsel, which enabled the direct representation of the people’s interests through the wise and good men who advised the ruler. Watts, The Making of Polities, 134. To this criteria I have to add the practical application of these principles through various representative institutions at different levels, among which the assemblies of estates deserve special attention, although the reality of representation was by no means restricted to them.

Introduction

theory entirely.”49 He made this remark in connection with the framework of interpretation of early modern European and Russian state-formation employing the term “fiscal-military state,” which, indeed, concentrates on functionality. I have to admit that I am in favor of using this term, although with regard to a later period of Russian history. Halperin’s statement, however, is so succinct that I cannot help using it for my purpose, as the issue he raised is all the more important when the topic is intellectual history taken broadly—and on the top of that in a comparative context! To drive the point home, when sovereignty, for instance, is conceived simply as the highest power of a person over the governed and a territory, who is independent of other rulers, because his power is derived directly from God, meanings that were present in the Russian terms samoderzhets—literally meaning a person who “rules” (derzhit) “on his own” (sam)—and gosudar′ in the sixteenth century, then, from a certain time, sovereignty can be applied to non-Western polities, Muscovy or the Ottoman Empire included, and the list can be left open.50 Yet, this view, which treats this power position as a matter of fact, and therefore is called “political sovereignty” in literature on the state, is simplistic and reductionist as it creates a hollow zone between the ruler and the governed. For it does not take into account institutional arrangements, plus, it neglects the differences in what way this power is expounded: legally or not, furthermore, whether there is any intellectual exposition of it or not, and finally whether 49 Charles Halperin, “The Nature of the Muscovite State during the Reign of Ivan IV: The Tyranny of Concepts,” in The State in Early Modern Russia: New Approaches, ed. Paul Bushkovitch (Bloomington: Slavica Publishers, 2019), 93, 77–95. Indeed, as it was written in the short afterword to Passerino d’Entréves’s book: “The state is not entirely the system of force. … As the rightful holder of power, it is essentially a legal construction.” Alessandro Passerin d’Entréves, The Notion of the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 234. 50 I agree with Robert Frost that “too much weight should not be placed upon the etymology of autocrat/samoderzhets.” Robert Frost, “Monarchies of Northern and Eastern Europe,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History 1350–1750, ed. Hamish Scott, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 399. At least this is the case prior to ca. 1700, even though some scholars are inclined to interpret samoderzhets in the sense of “sovereign,” despite the fact that samoderzhets is a highly debated term, with manifold and changing meanings over time. This view was held by Isabel de Madariaga who claimed that samoderzhets “by the end of the sixteenth century was used in Russian to express not only independence from a foreign overlord … but also the concept of internal sovereignty as expounded by, say, Jean Bodin.” Isabel de Madariaga, Politics and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia (London: Longman, 1998), 44. Recently the same opinion was advocated by Mikhail Krom. He expounded it in his book, and most recently in an article, speaking about not just the ruler’s sovereignty but plainly “state sovereignty” with regard to Ivan III in the 1470s and the 1480s. Krom, Rozhdenie gosudarstva, 65–79, and also Mikhail Krom, “Ideia suvereniteta v politicheskom diskurse Moskvoskoi Rusi XV veka” [The idea of sovereignty in fifteenth-century political discourse in Muscovite Rus′], Istoriia Rossii 53, no. 1 (2020): 23–36. See details later in the book.

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there is a distinction between the private and the public capacities of the person holding the highest and independent power.51 Indeed, the “emphatically public nature of rule” is a crucial aspect of the notions of sovereignty and state, and in Gianfranco Poggi’s view, “the emphasis on the distinctiveness of the task of the rulers constitutes the most significant difference between the Western absolute state and despotism.”52 The idea that power of governance is a personal possession of the ruler is incompatible with these two notions.53 As for Muscovite Russia, I completely accept Daniel Rowland’s statement— which will also recur in the text. Rowland wrote the most illuminating studies on Muscovite ideology of power, which have been recently issued under the enigmatic title “God, Tsar, and People: Political Culture in Early Modern Russia.”54 Back in 2007 he wrote in a book chapter that can be taken as a summary of his research on the topic: “Although Russian thinkers were ignorant of the concept of sovereignty as a term in formal political discourse, if we were to ask who was sovereign in the Russian state, the only correct answer from any abstract or theoretical point of view, would be that God Himself was sovereign.”55 I also accept, as 51 Typical is Krom’s statement related to the reign of Ivan III writing that “important improvements took place in the sphere of ideas: concepts of ‘gospodarstvo’ and ‘samoderzhavstvo,’ which contained the idea of sovereignty united with the notion of the unlimited power of the hereditary (patrimonial) ruler.” Krom, Rozhdenie gosudarstva, 67. Frost, however, remarked with regard to Russia that “the lack of any developed political philosophy advocating secular restraints on royal power, whether through institutions, notions of citizenship, or estate privileges, really mattered.” Frost, “Monarchies of Northern and Eastern Europe,” 399. 52 Gianfranco Poggi, The State. Its Nature, Development and Prospects (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 44–45. 53 Cristopher W. Morris, An Essay on the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 37. 54 Daniel Rowland, God, Tsar, and People: Political Culture in Early Modern Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020) 55 Rowland, “Muscovy,” 278. This is the only occasion that Rowland mentions the term sovereignty in the chapter on Muscovite thought on power, and he translates gosudar′, the term “most frequently used to refer to the ruler” not as “sovereign,” which is the usual English translation of this term in historiography, but “great lord,” since gosudar′ “more accurately signifies ‘great or supreme lord.’” With this translation Rowland intended to avoid Western associations because of the different perception of rulership, namely, that “God was seen as playing such an active role in Russian political life.” The same considerations motivated his translation of gosudarstvo not as “state” but as “realm” or “kingdom.” Rowland, “Muscovy,” 534, en. 14. In the same vein, he summarized the view of his life-long scholarship on this issue in the concluding chapter (“God, Tsar and People: Some Further Thoughts”) of his book where he stated: Muscovites believed in ways that Western Europeans thinkers had not for many centuries, that God Himself was the ultimate political authority, and that the legitimacy of a ruler and his commands depended in no small part on the perception that his will reflected God’s will. (This means, I believe, that terms like

Introduction

Jens Bartelson writes concerning sovereignty, that “notions of supreme authority originated in the myths of divine omnipotence” in the West,56 and certainly this idea played a part in Russia too. Nevertheless, sovereignty is not simply the idea of the ruler’s highest standing under (his/her) God(s) alone, and the ruler’s being like God on earth.57 There is a problem with this simplistic approach in my view. To begin with, this understanding of sovereignty implies the transfer of Western terminology, and thereby, to a great extent, a notion as well to a different culture. But this approach would not be able to answer the problems of reception of the Western concept of state and sovereignty under Peter the Great, as we shall plainly see. Typical of this approach is the one presented by Isabel de Madariaga, for instance. Struggling with the problem of reception of sovereignty in Russia, she admitted: “In Russia it was not until the reign of Peter I that it was found necessary to formulate clearly the full range of powers now claimed by the tsar, in part because of the increasing contacts between Russia and Europe.”58 Yet, just one sentence separates this statement from the one written before that, in which she claimed: “By the end of the seventeenth century the Russian political system corresponded closely, in terms of the nature of the political power of the

“state” and “sovereign” are misleading, terms which, after the Renaissance in Europe, denoted self-contained political systems in which reference to God’s will independent of the ruler’s will was systematically prohibited.) (Rowland, God, Tsar, and People, 368) 56 Jens Bartelson, Sovereignty as Symbolic Form (London: Routledge, 2014), 15. An echo of divine omnipotence is also recognizable in the expression of Hobbes, who calls the state a “Mortal God.” 57 I have found very useful for my argument the reasoning expounded in the article written by Nicholas Greenwood Onuf. In his view, the genealogy of the modern concept of sovereignty has three intellectual antecedents, “each reflecting the priorities of different political idioms, and all of them fusing in the crucible of Western Europe’s transformation into a world of states.” The first one derives from “the republican embrace of the great chain of being,” and it is “conveyed in the Latin word maiestas” meaning “dignity of some political arrangement, or person in a corporate sense.” (The “Great Chain of Being” means the hierarchical graduation of authority beginning with the Godhead and the heavenly hierarchy, going downwards to the worldly hierarchy and embracing not only human society but also the living world below humans, the worlds of animals and plants, and ending in the world of natural elements.) The second “conceptual antecedent is conveyed by the Latin word imperium”: generally translated as “‘supreme administrative power’, ‘rule’, and ‘dominion’” but to be understood in a broad sense as “rule by rules.” The third is “the very idea of respublica,” which “refers abstractly to whatever belongs to the people. In the first instance this must be their corporate entity, and by extension, political arrangements for the common good.” Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, “Sovereignty: Outline of a Conceptual History,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 16, no. 4 (Fall 1991): 435, 436–437. 58 de Madariaga, Politics and Culture, 44.

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ruler, with royal absolutism as incarnated in the monarchy of Louis XIV or the restored absolute monarchies of Denmark (1666) and Sweden (1693).”59 Such statements rather confuse than help real understanding of the issues analysed in the book. The concept of sovereignty in Jean Bodin’s view implied not only that the king of France was independent of foreign powers, especially the emperor and the pope, which, in fact, was the culmination of the age-old principle held by French jurists from the thirteenth century claiming that rex superiorem non recognoscens est in regno suo imperator (“the king who does not recognize a superior is an emperor in his kingdom”). He also asserted that the king was “unrestricted and unlimited by any ‘inferior magistrates’ or ‘popular assembly’” as his power was undivided and he stood under God alone.60 But this position of the king, for Bodin, was not just the consequence of holding power by divine right: it was by his exercising the power “to decree and annul laws” that he acted in the very manner of God.61 Indeed, Bodin’s doctrine of sovereignty heavily relied on “religious foundations” as it was “a profane transposition of the absolute way God and Pope exercise power over Christians.”62 As a consequence, the sovereign ruler was conceived as God on earth in the sense as a lawgiver. It means that “he occupied in his realm the place of God himself in the universe he created and ruled”63—to be sure: by laws! It was in this sense, that he was the image of God.64 For it is not be forgotten that “absolute power” (potestas absoluta) with the help of which Bodin defined sovereignty (as “an absolute and perpetual power”) originally came from Catholic theology. The term “absolute power” had been used to characterize the extraordinary manner when God’s power operated outside its ordinary way (potestas ordinaria), before both potestas absoluta and potestas ordinaria found their way to canon law to highlight papal power. It is not to be forgotten either that divine omnipotence for Bodin, and for moderate absolutist

59 Ibid. It is not clear what she meant by “restored absolute monarchy” as it was introduced in Denmark in 1661–1665, and in Sweden in the 1680s. 60 Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion 1562–1598, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 102, 103. 61 Alain de Benoist, “What Is Sovereignty?,” Telos 116 (Summer 1999): 103. 62 Ibid. 63 John H. Burns, “The Idea of Absolutism,” in Absolutism in Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. John Miller (London: Macmillan, 1990), 31. The Franciscan friar Diego Valadés in his Rhetorica Christiana (1579), which contains the visual depiction of the Great Chain of Being, wrote: “For the king is the likeness or a kind of image of God on earth, since he does the same within the confines of his kingdom, as God does in the universe.” Diego Valadés, Rhetorica Christiana (Perugia: Petrus Jacobus Petrutius, 1579), 181. 64 Morris, An Essay, 39.

Introduction

thinkers as well, was mediated in the realm of government through the hierarchy of laws: divine law, natural law, and positive law. For the sovereign ruler was not just under God in his standing above human (positive) law as the sole source of it, but he was also under law: divine law, natural law, and the fundamental laws of the kingdom. This legal argumentation was crucial to the birth of sovereignty. Yet, it would be a “mistake to think that modern sovereignty is merely a restatement of old ideas about power and authority. The elements may be present in different forms, especially in Roman law and in certain theological accounts God’s power. But the conception of political power that is thereby attached to a new type of political order [the state] is novel.”65 It is true that Bodin, the father of modern sovereignty, writing his République during and mainly as a response to the French Wars of Religion, was not consistent in his use of the Latin terms either for souveraineté (calling it maiestas or summa potestas in his Latin translation), or in his designation of the state even in French, using not just état but république (as in the title of his work) or even royaume. Yet, identifying the marks of sovereignty, among which legislation was the most important one, as well as placing this highest and public power under God in a political community in a legally constrained framework due to the scholastic perception of laws, to which the recognition of the legal idea of corporations should be added,66 represents a major difference in my view, between this kind of thought, and his Russian contemporary Ivan IV, who referred to himself, although rarely, as samoderzhets (autocrat), meaning that he could rule on his own, by virtue of his God-given power. Indeed, the concept of sovereignty has its own legal genealogy (as does the state), which Bodin makes it clear in his République, referring shortly to papal absolute power as a model for a sovereign king whose hand, like the pope’s, is not tied in making laws. While sovereignty was expounded in treatises in the West, Charles Halperin pointed out long ago that “a good deal of medieval Russian ideology was expressed in extremely laconic terms. Phrases, words, and titles served in lieu largely of theoretical treatises.”67 And added that “the creativity and subtlety of the ideologues” lay “in the manipulation of key concepts,” such as the transfer of

65 Morris, An Essay, 39–40. 66 “The recognition of different jurisdictions within France did not conflict with his concept of sovereignty, nor did the existence of corporate bodies within the kingdom.” Sophie Nicholls, “Sovereignty and Government in Jean Bodin’s Six livres de la République 1576,” Journal of History of Ideas 80, no. 1 ( January 2019): 65. 67 Charles J. Halperin, “Kiev and Moscow: An Aspect of Early Muscovite Thought,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 7, no. 3 (1980): 317.

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Introduction

the idea of the leadership over the “Russian land” to Moscow.68 Indeed, phrases and titles, such as tsar′, samoderzhets, gosudar′ (master) could convey the idea of one’s highest power over the governed, which was second only to God’s power, and gosudarstvo could also imply even a highest power over a territory in late sixteenth-century Muscovy—regardless of the lack of technical terms such as “supremacy” or “highest/supreme power” itself. Mikhail Krom’s approach is largely built upon these issues. Titles and phrases related to the highest and independent power of rulers (such as the adoption of the term maiestas by kings in the sixteenth century in their titutalory, originally reserved for the Holy Roman Emperor alone, or the just quoted rex superiorem non recognoscens est in regno suo imperator) were, of course, important in the West as well, to which the symbols of power, especially the adoption of the closed, or so-called imperial type of crown by Western rulers in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries should be added.69 However, the crucial question, and the main problem with Krom’s position, still remains for me, whether this highest power of a ruler over the governed and/or the territory is enough to justify the existence of the idea of sovereignty and state for the very reasons I have objected such an approach. A much more careful approach to the issue of the development of the concept of sovereignty is provided by Evgenii Roshchin, and I second his view that the issue of samoderzhavie is, at best, just a “precursor” of sovereignty.70 I do not deny, of course, the relative autonomy of thought on power that is not determined but at least conditioned by the nature of a given polity, and if one accepts this approach, it inevitably implies that the issue of state-building cannot be left out altogether from the narrative of this book, as notions of power here and there did not exist in vacuum. It is worth quoting a recent view regarding the label employed most often when sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Muscovy 68 Ibid., 317, 318. 69 For the political importance attributed to the closed crown by contemporaries, and its significance for Petrine Russia (an imperial crown was made for Peter’s wife for her coronation as Empress of Russia by Peter in 1724) see my study written on an early eighteenth-century Russian manuscript. Endre Sashalmi, “Istochnik russkoi rukopisi, predpolozhitel′nye obstoiatel′stva ee sozdaniia i ee politicheskoe znachenie,” in M. Aleshin et al., Rukopisnyi traktat “O koronakh” nachala XVIII v.: pamiatnik russko-vengerskikh kul′turnykh sviazei [A manuscript treatise “On crowns” of the beginning of the eighteenth century: A monument of Russo-Hungarian cultural contacts] (Moscow: Rossiiskaia akademiia nauk, 2013), 40–55. 70 Evgenii Nikolaevich Roshchin, “Istoriia poniatiia ‘suverenitet’ v Rossii” [History of the concept of “sovereignty” in Russia], in Istoricheskie poniatiia i politicheskie idei v Rossii XVI–XX veka: Sbornik nauchnykh rabot [Historical concepts and political ideas in Russia from the sixteenth to the twentieth century: A collection of scholarly works], ed. N. E. Koposov, N. D. Potapova, and M. M. Krom (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2006), 191.

Introduction

or the Russia of Peter the Great are compared as similar to Western monarchies both in terms of ruling power and the nature of the political system, namely, “absolute monarchy.” The comparison is all the more relevant in my view (and especially for the present undertaking) because absolutist thinkers were also the fathers of the modern concept of state and sovereignty. Absolute monarchy was a theory concerning the nature of government developed according to the norms and principles of Western political culture. As conceptualized by its proponents, absolute monarchy was a limited monarchy: kings were constrained by the need to obey natural as well as divine law, which extended to such areas as contract and succession law, and meant that there were theoretical as well as practical limits to royal power.71 In Muscovite Russia too, there were limits on the ruler’s power in theory as well as in practice: but the theoretical limits were “ill-defined” limits of literary nature,72 and, to be sure, “literary limits are not legal or constitutional limits.”73 I do not contend, either, that the legally unlimited nature of the ruler’s power and the lack of institutionalized negotiations between the rulers and the governed in Muscovy did exclude actual consultation, or even prohibit arrangements akin to a contract, with certain groups of peoples, because of their nomadic way of life or for other practical reasons.74 In other words, Muscovy was not a passive society with no influence at all on policymaking or even legislation. 71 Frost, “Monarchies of Northern and Eastern Europe,” 399. See my detailed views on this issue later in the book. 72 Daniel Rowland, “Did Muscovite Literary Ideology Place Limits on the Power of the Tsar (1540s–1660s)?,” Russian Review 49, no. 2 (1990): 126, 142, 155. 73 Halperin, “The Nature of the Muscovite State during the Reign of Ivan IV,” 94. Frost remarks that in Muscovy “there was little concern with the problem of the extent to which monarchs were bound by the law, and by what kind of law they were bound.” Frost, “Monarchies of Northern and Eastern Europe,” 407. 74 This aspect might be likened to what André Holenstein termed “the absence of uniform state authority” with regard to Western state-building. André Holenstein, Introduction to Empowering Interactions: Political Cultures and the Emergence of the State in Europe, 1300–1900, ed. Wim Blockmans et al. (Adershot: Ashsgate, 2008), 5. In the light of “the absence of uniform state authority,” if this phenomenon is taken broadly, Muscovite Russia might look similar to the states of early modern Europe. Matthew P. Romaniello called this phenomenon “layered sovereignty” or “composite sovereignty.” Matthew P. Romaniello, The Elusive Empire. Kazan and the Creation of Russia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 8–9. Apart from the doubt concerning the plausibility of the term “sovereignty,” a great difference still remains between Western Christendom and Russia in my view: namely, the lack of corporations

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This statement applies not only to court circles and the rulers’ advisory group, the boyar counselling (duma), which is obvious, but also to local communities because initiative from below surfaced in collective petitions, and terms, such as gosudarevy i zemskie dela (“affairs of the master and the land”), and even countrywide consultative gatherings, in the so-called “assemblies of the land” (zemskie sobory), a term coined by nineteenth-century historiography to denote these gatherings.75 But these phenomena show us “how the system actually worked,”76 and I agree that it is more plausible to describe its functioning not as “consensual” but “consultative.”77 This “consensual” school of Muscovite history has done a lot to change the understanding of the nature of the Muscovite government at work—one of its prominent scholars, Valerie Kivelson, labelled it the “soft” interpretation of the Muscovite system.78 This school emphasizes the importance of “political practice over legal or constitutional theory, which has its merits, but begs the question as to whether customary practices [in themselves] can create a constitutional regime.”79 These practices were no doubt important but they can hardly explain fully the ideological premises on which the Muscovite system was based, and they are irrelevant in exploring the existence of notions of state or sovereignty.80 The issue of succession, however, is partly different: although deeply embedded in power relations of the Russian court, examining the succession question in general can shed new light upon the notions of rulership, including even the

that represented the layering of the ruler’s authority. In the West, this phenomenon was called societas civilis cum imperio by early modern theorists. Holenstein, Introduction, 5. 75 The issue of the Law Code of 1649 itself was clearly the result of an initiative coming from below, with various articles reflecting the settling of problems that had caused complaints in the previous decades. 76 Frost, “Monarchies of Northern an Eastern Europe,” 398. Frost even added “and the mentalités that underpinned it.” 77 Ibid., 400. 78 Valerie A. Kivelson, “Muscovite ‘Citizenship’: Rights without Freedom,” The Journal of Modern History 74, no. 3 (September 2002): 467. 79 Halperin, “The Nature of the Muscovite State during the Reign of Ivan IV,” 93. 80 Even Nancy Shields Kollmann, the most influential scholar studying the mechanisms of Muscovite government and its social values, states: “If one surveys Muscovite literature for what might be called social theory, one does not find it. Unlike their European counterparts, Muscovites did not engage in abstract theory about society.” And she adds that some pieces of classical political theory (referring to Secreta Secretorum, or Pseudo-Aristotle, which, in fact, is a mirror of princes), and publicist literature (naming Ivan Peresvetov), which circulated in Muscovy, “were not systematized and had little social impact.” Nancy Shields Kollmann, By Honour Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 58.

Introduction

absence or existence of the ideas of state and sovereignty.81 In his most recent book Paul Bushkovitch rightly calls attention to the “relationship between royal power and succession practices” as an important aspect of absolute monarchies, although he obviously concentrates on political practice with regard to both Western Christendom and Russia in arguing in favor of abandoning the absolute monarchy—autocracy framework of interpretation.82 The following passages present his view on the relationship between succession and the idea of the state: The story of succession in Russia … is complicated by the radical difference between the ideas of the state in Russia and Western Europe before the time of Peter the Great. Until that time, there was no political theory or even political thought in the Western sense in Russia. There was a literature about the ruler, primarily about the question whether or not he was a good Christian. That sort of literature existed in the West, but alongside a philosophical heritage from Aristotle (including scholastic ideas of the state) and a legal tradition inherited from Roman law and its commentators. … In the absence of philosophical and theoretical underpinning to ideas of the state, the principal form of reflection on statehood came in texts that provided examples of good and bad monarchs.83 Indeed, Bushkovitch is right that the first real work of political thought in Russia showing the “full impact of Western legal and political thinking” was written by Feofan Prokopovich in connection with the succession to the imperial throne in 1722,84 provided that Shafirov’s defense (1717) of Russia’s just war against 81 I dealt with these issues previously in two of my articles: Endre Sashalmi, “La succession dans la Russie moscovite, 1425–1613” [Succession in Muscovite Russia 1425–1613], in Making and Breaking the Rules: Succession in Medieval Europe c. 1000–c. 1600, ed. Frederique Lachaud and Michael Penman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 145–161; and Endre Sashalmi, “God-Guided Contract and Scriptural Sovereignty: The Muscovite Perspective of Pravda voli monarshej,” Specimina nova. Pars prima. Sectio mediaevalis 5 (Pécs, 2009): 139–150. 82 Paul Bushkovitch, Succession to the Throne in Early Modern Russia. The Transfer of Power 1450– 1725 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 1. 83 Bushkovitch, Succession to the Throne, 12, 14. For a similar approach and an almost identical view on the comparison of succession in the West and Russia, see my article “La succession dans la Russie moscovite, 1425–1613,” which, despite the title, goes up to Peter’s 1722 law on succession: “Introduction: La succession dans la Russie moscovite et impériale—le contexte européen,” 147. 84 Bushkovitch, Succession to the Throne, xi, 333.

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Sweden is not considered on the ground that it dealt with issues of interstate relations. While, on the whole, I share Bushkovitch’s views expounded in the above quotation, his statement on the “absence of philosophical and theoretical underpinning to ideas of the state” and that the texts on “good and bad monarchs” were “the principal form of reflection on statehood” are contradictory as the following analysis shows. The contradiction arises from Bushkovitch’s dual use of the term “state.” On the one hand, he employs the word “state” as a convention in his analysis of Russian succession to the throne over the same time span covered in this book, making no distinction in its usage with regard to time and space. He refers to the Ottoman Empire, China, and the Tatar khanates as “states” following the general statement that “No state exists without a mechanism for the transfer of power from one ruler or group of rulers to another.”85 He claims that “the nature of succession is a crucial part of the structure and the functions of the state,” and calls the Kievan Rus′ the “Kievan state.”86 These statements, taken together and compared with the quotation, imply that there was no concept of state in Russia prior to 1700, while the state as a reality did exist—a conclusion underlined by his reference to the “complex mechanics of the state,” seeing succession as “one of the basic parts of these mechanics” in Russia.87 The comparison that Bushkovitch has undertaken in his book on the issue of succession and its implications for the ideas of state and sovereignty is impressive and detailed, and shows the validity of such comparisons between Russia and Western Christendom. Indeed, the regulation of succession is one of the indicatives of a much wider issue, the perception of ruling power. And, in this regard, it can be reduced theoretically to the basic question: who had the right to make the law or decision regulating succession? Was it God’s business, or the ruler’s, or did it belong to the (political) community? The treatise by the Jesuit Robert Parsons (1546–1610) published anonymously and entitled A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crown of England (1594) is indicative of how the issue of succession is embedded in a work of political thought proper, with its relations to the concept of the state. The title of his first chapter eloquently encapsulates the problem as it reads: “That Succession to Government by nearness of Blood, is not by Law of Nature and Divine, but only by Humane and

85 Ibid., viii. 86 Ibid., x, 22. 87 Ibid., 8, 290.

Introduction

Positive Laws of every particular Common-wealth, and consequently may upon just causes be altered by the same.”88 The intellectual background of authors in a given culture and its particular institutional setting were/are both conducive to ideas about ruling power. But we must not underestimate the contextualist effect that political events of various kinds exerted on thought of power, regardless of whether they involved the issues of succession or not. We can think of the role of calamities such as civil wars, as in Muscovy between 1425 and 1453, or the Wars of Religion in France in 1562–1598, or the political disturbances in Stuart England between 1640 and 1660 (involving even the abolition and the restoration of monarchy) and in 1688–1689, or interregna as in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth after the extinction of the Jagellonian dynasty (1572), or in Muscovy (1610–1613) during the Times of Troubles (1598–1613) following the extinction of the Moscow branch of the Rurik dynasty in 1598, or struggles between court factions during regencies, as in Muscovy between 1682 and 1689. All of them involved succession issues either as the very heart of the crisis, or part of it. And all of them had important consequences for the perception of rulership. Yet, the framework of intellectual thought did matter in each case. One may call my Western-oriented approach conservative, to which I do not object. It would place me into the group of historians of the “hard” school approach, but I am convinced that if the differences are not identified clearly enough, it would not help much in understanding the specificities of Russian thought on power, much less the reception of Western political concepts.89 Reception is shaped by many factors but one of them is, for sure, what is called “cultural translation,”90 which especially matters when we move from one cultural world to another, as in the present case. It is undeniable that the reception of Bodin’s République was different by his contemporaries in different countries. Yet, those who read it shared a more or less common intellectual heritage. Moreover, sovereignty and state after him became the key concepts of political discourse, which other main canonical thinkers of Western political

88 Robert Parsons, A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crown of England (1594), https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A56468.0001.001?view=toc. 89 I completely share the views of Daniel Rowland who emphasizes the differences between the political culture of Muscovy and Western Christendom in his essays and in his overall conclusion cited, including his waryness of using the term politics before 1700. Rowland, God, Tsar, and People, 367–368. The differences remained crucial in the Petrine period too, despite the infiltration of Western ideas. 90 Peter Burke, “The History and Theory of Reception,” in The Reception of Bodin, ed. Howell A. Lloyd (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 33.

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thought, like Grotius, Hobbes, or Pufendorf pondered. Pufendorf ’s De officio hominis et civis, similarly to Grotius’s De iure belli ac pacis were known to Feofan Prokopovich, Peter’s chief ideologist from Ukraine, and he used Grotius’s definition of sovereignty (1722) defending Peter’s 1722 succession law in the main tract of the new Petrine political ideology, Pravda voli monarshei vo opredelenii naslednika derzhavy svoei (“The justice of the monarch’s will in designating the heir of his state”). He commented on Grotius’s definition extensively, devoting a large section in his comments to what, after Bartelson, we can call the “myth of divine omnipotence.” And although Prokopovich used samoderzhavnyi gosudar′ clearly as a translation of the German souverainer Herr in this tract, this does not mean that samoderzhets in pre-Petrine Russia can be conceived as meaning “sovereign.”91 And with this we have arrived at the importance attributed to the period ca. 1700–1725 in Russian thought on power. The fact that Peter’s reign and particularly Feofan Prokopovich occupies a central role in the present narrative does not deny either the importance of other authors of the Petrine period, or certain important seventeenth-century developments concerning the changes in the meaning of gosudarstvo, and the existence of a transition period (1660s–1690s), or decades of fermentation,92 which will be amply demonstrated through various sources. With the emphasis of the post-1700 years in the structure of the book, I intend to show the significance of the change that occurred in Russian thought on power both in texts and iconography in a short time, as well as highlight the problem of reception of Western ideas.93 Last but not least, Prokopovich discussed not only the concept 91 Besides, he used the term monarkh gosudar′ in the same sense as “sovereign ruler.” Prokopovich’s novel treatment of the issue of highest power, and the Petrine era in general are considered as the real beginnings of the concept of sovereignty in Russia by Roshchin, and I share his views completely. Roshchin, “Istoriia poniatiia ‘suverenitet’ v Rossii,” 192, 199–200, 205–206, 230. Most recently the same view was expressed by Bushkovitch, Succession to the Throne, xi, 321–323. 92 Daniel Rowland refers to the period 1645–1700 as “ferment and innovation” but notes that the new ideas that appeared in Russia “under the intellectual leadership of learned Ukrainians and Belorussians” from the mid-seventeenth century, did not yet “result in the creation of a Western-style discourse of political thought—a complex phenomenon that did not emerge until the reign of Catherine the Great, if then.” Rowland, “Muscovy,” 273. A limited discourse, however, was clearly under way after 1700 through translations and the emergence of genuine political thought. 93 The importance of Peter in this regard is acknowledged by the two most influential American scholars of the “soft school.” Valerie Kivelson states that, although Peter did not put an end to favouritism and clientelism characteristic of Muscovy, the “tenor of official discourse shifted to favour procedure, routine and system over patronage and connections.” Valerie A. Kivelson, “Merciful Father, Impersonal State: Russian. Autocracy in Comparative Perspective,” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): 662. Likewise, Nancy Shields Kollmann acknowledges the

Introduction

of sovereignty (giving it a special interpretation) but he also laid down the basics of what would become the “state narrative” of Russian history, shaping thereby both historiography and political rhetoric in some ways up until now. The reorganization of government institutions often requires a new ideology, and Peter’s reforms, regardless how one evaluates them, that is, whether they were bad or good for Russia—an issue with which I am not concerned here— were, indeed, deep in many, although in not all spheres of life. Be it enough to mention that after Peter there was no return to the Muscovite practice of government: the chancelleries (prikazy) were mostly abolished and replaced by colleges (kollegii), that is, government departments; the ruler’s advisory group, known in historiography as the boyar duma, disappeared; the Senate was created (1711), which eventually became the highest governing body—just to list the changes in the administration of worldly affairs, to which, for the time being, we should add the abolishing of the patriarchate (established in 1589) and the creation of the so-called Holy Synod in its place (1721). Age-old institutions and practices of Muscovite government were gone, and the formerly mentioned newly created institutions, with the exception of colleges (replaced by ministries in 1802), survived until 1917–1918.94 The Petrine period also stands out due to the increased importance attributed to legislation (which cannot be separated from Peter’s reforms). Consequently the words meaning “legislator,” “legislative” were gaining ground at that time in Russia. Not only is the growth of the “sheer number of edicts” impressive, but also the chain of lengthy and systematic legislative acts, such as the Military Statute (Voinskii ustav, 1716) or the Spiritual Regulation (Dukhovnyi reglament, 1721). “Whereas in the second half of the seventeenth century the average number of decrees issued annually was 36, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century the figure rose to 160.”95 Moreover, in contrast to Muscovite legislation,

importance of changes in the sphere of ideas under Peter, which is one of my main goals in this book: “Beneath the obvious and dramatic changes in political ideology, institutions and high culture, much about Muscovy changed slowly, if at all.” Kollmann, By Honour Bound, 251. For the plausibility of the pre-1700 and post-1700 divide in the field of political ideas in Russia, and the crucial importance of Prokopovich’s Pravda voli monarshei in the new ideology see the title of a subchapter and a chapter in Bushkovitch’s Succession to the Throne, “Russian Idea of the Monarch and State to 1700,” 12–21, and “Peter’s Heirs and Feofan Prokopovich,” 290–328. 94 Evgenii V. Anisimov, The Reforms of Peter the Great: Progress Through Coercion in Russia (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), 4. 95 Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 123.

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“which was created in an evolutionary way,”96 exemplified mostly by the Law Code of 1649 in my view, as many of its articles relied on previous legislation on various matters, “Peter’s legislation was concerned less with fixing traditions and customs” but rather abolishing them.97 This would not mean, of course, that Petrine legislation was better, in many ways, surely, it was not so at all—yet, it relied on new principles. Until the late seventeenth century the rulers were to rule po starine, that is, “according to old manners,” which, however, did not prevent them from masking unprecedented steps as old practice, as we shall see later in Ivan III’s justification of making his grandson a co-ruler in 1498. Yet, the expectation to rule po starine implied a passivist role for the ruler, also termed as “negative government,” that is, avoiding changes.98 The emphasis to keep the practices of the past (the English idea of the “ancient constitution,” for instance) and avoid “novelty,” or “innovation” (words that were menacing and therefore abhorrent in seventeenth-century England) was a general characteristic of political rhetoric prior to the eighteenth century. By contrast, Peter plainly declared an activist role of the tsar99 (as we shall see), and did not refrain from stating in his decrees that the given regulation would bring something new and profitable to Russia. Yet, his rhetoric was also flexible, as historical precedent was invoked by him when he saw it fit to justify a given legislative act in abolishing what was thought to be an old and bad custom: namely, his 1722 statute on succession to the throne is a case in point. The contrast between the past and present was an important feature of Petrine panegyric plays too: the difference was emphasized between “previous times, prezhde, when Russia was in dishonour, bondage, and darkness, and nowadays, nyne, when it had become glorious.”100 With all these, I am not to say, of course, that “everything began with Peter.” In the Westernization of official ideology of rulership from the mid-seventeenth century the contribution of Ukrainian intellectuals was crucial in written and visual sources (mainly engravings), both directly as authors of such works, and indirectly as translators, or supervisors of schools. Yet, it would certainly be a grave mistake to underestimate the period of 1700–1725, the real era of “Petrine revolutions” (the titles of James Cracraft’s books that encapsulate the changes)

96 Ibid. 97 Ibid. 98 Cynthia H. Whittaker, “The Reforming Tsar: The Redefinition of Autocratic Duty in Eighteenth-Century Russia,” Slavic Review 51 (Spring 1992): 77. The term “negative government” is borrowed by her from Marc Raeff. 99 Ibid. 100 Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy. From Peter the Great to the Death of Nicholas I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 48.

Introduction

in the fields such as iconography, notions of power and state, political language and printing, and so forth.101 And while the notion of the state as expounded in Peter Shafirov’s work (1717) justifying the causes of the Great Northern War was of course an exception, where he significantly mentioned that the ruler is “obliged to protect his right and of the State [pravo svoe i Gosudarstva],” there was also an apparent change in the language of government decrees. After 1700 Peter consistently mentioned in the justification of his measures gosudarstvo, together or without obshchee dobro, obshchee blago (“common good”), pointing out what kind of benefit the given decree would bring to subjects (poddannye), or rather, how it served the interests of the gosudarstvo, which was clearly distinguished from the person of the ruler, and was an object of loyalty. Although gosudarstvo did yet not acquire the modern meaning of state, yet, it was coming closer to that in Russian legislative documents. Be it enough to quote a few lines from the first enigmatic source of this kind, Peter’s manifesto of April 16, 1702, which called foreigners into Russian service, without engaging in a discussion of it right now, just calling attention to its activist tone: It is sufficiently known to all the lands subjected by the God Almighty to Our government [Nashemu upravleniiu], that since Our accession to the throne, all Our efforts and intentions tended to govern this State [sim Gosudarstvom upravliat′], so that all Our subjects [poddannye], through Our care for the general good [o vseobshchem blage], would more and more improve their situations; for this reason We attempted to guard the internal quiet, protect the State [Gosudarstvo] from external attack and by all means improve and spread commerce. … We thought of other means to secure Our borders from enemy attacks and preserve the right and advantage of Our State [pravo i preimushchestvo Nashego Gosudarstva] and General Peace in Christendom.102

101 See James Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998); James Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004); Viktor Zhivov, Language and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia, transl. Marcus Lewitt (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009); and recently Simon Franklin, The Russian Graphosphere 1450–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 102 Translation is from Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 194, compared with the original text where the Russian terms are inserted from.

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Divine grace, of course, was to remain axiomatic as for the justification of power in imagery as well, but it was expressed in new, non-Orthodox iconography: either through the adoption of classical Roman imperial imagery, which compared Peter to antique gods (Mars, Hercules), or by employing symbols taken from Western religious symbolism (such as the triangle with rays, either with or without the all-seeing eye of God). Although the sacralization of the monarch increased (partly due to the “paganization” of the ruler, partly due to the disappearance of the balancing figure of the patriarch),103 the openly declared secular purpose of rulership, the new imagery and rituals (among which triumphal entries became the most important with the erection of triumphal gates), presenting the ruler in a new garb, marked the end of most Muscovite religious rituals in which the tsar’s role was seen as the key to the salvation of his people.104 Still, the question in precisely what ways the new trappings of power and the new imagery under Peter—apart from constituting an apparent breach with the past as presented by James Cracraft and Richard Wortman—contributed to the emergence of the idea of the state and sovereignty (in engravings, triumphal gates, emblematics in different media, such as in Peter’s personal seal and banners) furthering the separation of the person of the ruler (gosudar′) from gosudarstvo, has not been researched thoroughly enough.105 Finally, some more considerations on the “European exclusiveness”—as critics may label my approach—or, to put it differently, the justification of the European context of the comparison. Choosing Europe, which, in the time span analysed, culturally was identified with Western Christendom by contemporaries, does not at all mean that only European influences were the ones affecting Muscovite perceptions of power—far from that. The Europe-centeredness as the focus of the comparison is justified by one of the main aims of the book, the presentation of the development of the notion of the state in Russia. Since in

103 Hughes, Russia, 97. A further element of sacralization was that Peter insisted to be addressed “without patronymic, an honour previously reserved for the clergy or saints.” Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 49. Sermons eulogizing the tsar would simply refer to him as “Peter.” 104 The Poltava entry (1709), for which seven triumphal gates were made, eulogized Peter as Mars and the “All-Russian Hercules,” and made it unambiguous that “the triumphal entry had displaced the religious procession as the central public ritual of Russian monarchy” as Peter was “greeted with the chant previously sung” during the Palm Sunday ritual. Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 49. 105 With regard to flags, banners, state seals, coins, commemorative medals Cracraft laconically states that under Peter and his successors they served the symbolic representation of the rulers themselves and their state. Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery, 268.

Introduction

Russia the point of reference in the conscious adaptation/reception of political ideas from the mid-seventeenth century, both through texts and imagery, was the Western Christendom—which, in turn, formerly had been Muscovy’s main constituent other for centuries because of religious differences—it would be meaningless to enlarge the context and make comparisons with the Ottoman Empire, for instance. While Ivan Peresvetov, a Lithuanian adventurer, offered in the mid-sixteenth century in his petitions to Ivan IV (and in his tale about Sultan Mehmed) to follow the example of Mehmed II in establishing justice (meaning to rule with fear), this was certainly beyond question around the 1650s (when Muscovy accepted the role of becoming the protector and liberator of all Orthodox living under foreign rule) or much less in 1700 when Peter was eager to present Russia as a European power, fighting what was called the “Asian barbarism of the Turks.” In assessing the importance of influences that for the sake of simplicity are labelled as “foreign,” or, to use the seventeenth-century terminology, inozemnye (literally meaning “from other lands”), it is necessary to make a distinction between influences coming from within, that is, from the broad cultural community of which Muscovy was a part, and those coming outside of it. Through the conversion to Orthodoxy, the territories belonging to the Rus′ became part of the cultural community called the “Byzantine Commonwealth,” which, of course, included not only the Greeks but also the Orthodox Slavs in the Balkans. Therefore, Orthodox religious culture is the paradigm in which influences either from within or outside (be they Tatar, Ottoman, or Western) have to be placed. To complicate the issue of belonging to a larger religious-cultural world, from the late fifteenth to midseventeenth century the Muscovite clergy conceived their community— called in the sources, among others names, the “Russian land” (Russkaia zemlia) or later the “Muscovite realm” (Moskovskoe gosudarstvo)—as the only territory of true Orthodoxy. In the dimension “from within,” Serbian influences might be seen in the appearance of the title samoderzhets. Related to it is the practice of addressing the Muscovite ruler as “tsar of Eastern and Northern countries,” which was to express his high standing in the Orthodox world in the eyes of the Balkan Orthodox peoples. This address became a standardized formula in the title of the tsar in 1667. The Tatar influence or impact will be treated later on in this book in some details. Here let me just quote Vadim Trepavlov on the issue, as his words most closely concern my topic in the time span I discuss. He asserts that after the fall of Byzantium the “conscious imitation of the [Golden] horde’s statehood and

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the adoption of the horde’s ideological orientations was unimaginable.”106 For Muscovy the “ideological foundation” rested not “on the image and heritage of an alien Tatar conqueror-‘tsardom’ but that of the extinct Byzantium, which professed the same faith.”107 The Muscovite government took over from the Tatars “not the ideology but the techniques of power,” and the task of the Muscovite government was to “determine the place of Russia in the system of the successor khanates.”108 I second the above statements, yet it must be noted that the term “Tatar statehood” is meaningless in my view for many reasons. Let me just mention, for the time being, the lack of a clear concept of territoriality among nomadic peoples because of their non-sedentary way of life. What after 1462 happened to already existing Tatar presence in Muscovite ideology was its Christianization, best illustrated by the outlook and the story of the so-called Monomakh cap. The Monomakh cap, used by the Muscovite rulers as a symbol of power and also an object of inauguration (from 1547 at the latest) until the accession of Peter (1682), is, in fact, a decorated fur cap, probably a fourteenth-century Central Asian nomadic insignia, which clearly confirms the Tatar influence in the field of symbols of rulership. However, the cross on the top of the cap, on the one hand, and the legend created about it in the 1520s, that is, the “Tale of the Vladimir Princes,” on the other, clearly prove where the ideological emphasis lay. For the legend claimed that the cap had been the crown of the Byzantine emperors and (together with other gifts) was given by the Byzantine Emperor Konstantinos IX Monomakhos (died in 1055) to his grandson, Vladimir (born in 1053), the future Kievan Grand Prince (1113–1125), who, therefore, became known as Vladimir Monomakh and who was the distant ancestor of the Muscovite princes. As for later Tatar influences in the ideology, the conquest of Kazan′ (1552), and Astrakhan′ (1556) must be mentioned, or, to be precise, the role that these conquests, above all that of Kazan′, played in the salvation ideology of midsixteenth-century Muscovy.109 To be sure: again, as in case of the Monomakh

106 Vadim Vintserovits Trepavlov, “Belyi tsar′”. Obraz monarkha i predstavleniia o poddanstve u narodov Rossii v XV–XVIII vv. [The “white tsar.” The image of the monarch and notions of subjecthood among the peoples of Russia from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century], 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg: Oleg Abyshko, 2017), 94. 107 Ibid. 108 Ibid. 109 Jaroslaw Pelenski, Russia and Kazan. Conquest and Imperial Ideology (1438–1560s) (The Hague: Mouton, 1974).

Introduction

cap, the framework was the idea of Muscovy as an Orthodox tsardom. After the conquests, Ivan IV took the title of “tsar of Kazan′ and Astrakhan′,” and immediately after 1552 he had a Kazan′ cap made (1553), which, significantly, did not have a cross on the top! This meant that the “tsar replaced the former Tatar khans” in the hierarchy of power of the successor khanates of the Golden Horde— however, not as a khan but as the ruler of an Orthodox tsardom.110 The building of the St. Basil’s Church in the Red Square and the creation of the huge icon called Blessed Host of the Heavenly Tsar were the most important visible ideological manifestations of the Kazan′ victory, accompanied with grandiose literary works, most notably for our purpose, the “Book of Degrees of Tsarist Genealogy.”111 No surprise that neither the icon nor the “Book of Degrees” contained, even in a disguised manner, the slightest hint on conceiving the tsar as a kind of khan. True, the title “tsar of Kazan′ and Astrakhan′” was proudly added to the existing titles but it was only employed in “external use”, as it was “utilizied in diplomatic negotiations aimed at obtaining the recognition of the tsar’s imperial title by other powers.”112 It was as a reward for the conquest of Kazan′ that Ivan asked the patriarch of Constantinople’s recognition of his title as tsar, which the patriarch granted him in 1561—however, not on the ground of Ivan’s military victory but based on the legend of the Monomakh regalia, and because of “Ivan’s imperial ancestry in the person of Anna,” the Byzantine princess who became the wife of Vladimir (980–1015), the baptizer of the Rus′.113 As Jaroslaw Pelenski put it laconically: the Muscovite ruler was “a Christian tsar, ruling by the will of God, and in accordance with divine laws.”114 This statement can take us to the other non-European perspective in the comparison of Muscovy raised by some scholars, notably by Sergei Nefedov, advocating that the Ottoman Empire served as the model for Ivan III but especially for Ivan IV, and reforms of the army (such as the pomest′e, the military service landholding system introduced on large scale by Ivan III after 1478) and the government were adaptions of Ottoman practices.115 Furthermore, in Nefedov’s view, even the ideological inspiration of some measures, such as the idea of issuing the Law Code by Ivan III in 1497, and the severe punishments prescribed in it, were seen as the imitation of Mehmed II’s (1451–1481) policy. Nefedov saw 110 Trepavlov, “Belyi tsar′,” 107. 111 Pelenski, Russia and Kazan, 284. 112 Ibid., 299–300. 113 Ibid., 300. 114 Ibid., 299. 115 Sergei Nefedov, “Reformy Ivana III i Ivana IV: Osmanskoe vliianie” [The reforms of Ivan III and Ivan IV. The Ottoman influence], Voprosy istorii 11 (2002): 30–53.

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in the Law Code the Islamic concept of righteousness, and came to the following conclusion: “Ivan III completely accepted the foundation of eastern monarchy: defense of righteousness (spravedlivost′) requires severe punishments.”116 Also, he claimed that the Islamic idea of righteousness found its way into the text of the 1498 ceremony: it made Ivan III’s grandson, Dmitrii, a co-ruler, and Dmitrii was crowned in a ritual closely following the coronation of co-rulers in Byzantium. Nefedov mentions the following address (which was uttered twice by both the metropolitan and Ivan III as a warning to the heir) to justify his argument on the adoption of the Islamic idea of righteousness: “Love justice [pravdu] and mercy [milost′] and the righteous judgement [sud pravoi] and take care of the whole Orthodox Christianity [o pravoslavnom khristianstve] with all your heart.”117 Nefedov’s interpretation seems quite absurd to me on this point, since the sentence, as we shall see, contains the core of Muscovite ideology! With regard to the reign of Ivan IV, Nefedov refers to Ivan Peresvetov on the issue of righteousness derived from the Ottoman model, quoting Peresvetov’s famous words on the importance of linking pravda (justice) to groza (fear) (written by Peresvetov immediately after his reference to Mehmed’s example of punishing corrupt judges by impaling them alive): Justice [pravda]—this is a sincere joy to God, for this reason, it is expected [of the tsar] to strengthen justice [pravdu] in his tsardom. But to introduce justice [pravdu] in his tsardom means not to pardon even the loved one(s), when found guilty. It is impossible for the tsar to rule without inspiring fear [bez grozy], for just like a horse under the tsar without a bridle, such is a tsardom without fear [bez grozy].118 Let us pause for a second with Peresvetov. Even if it happened to be true that Ottoman practices served as models for Ivan III’s and Ivan IV’s governments, regardless of whether they can be linked to Peresvetov’s suggestions in Ivan IV’s case or not, what would all this say about Peresvetov’s ideal of rulership? Was really the sultan, the enemy of Christian faith, the embodiment of the ideal ruler for him? A closer analysis of Peresvetov’s views shows, as some scholars assert, that it would be a mistake to see in him “an Ottoman apologist,” and still less

116 Ibid., 37. 117 Ibid., 36–37. 118 Quoted ibid., 40.

Introduction

“an apostle of despotism.”119 Ironically, despite the secular aspects of his suggestions, Peresvetov, “in important respects,” was “a traditional thinker.”120 Jaroslaw Pelenski remarked that even in case of seculars authors, like him, “religious justification for human actions occupied a prominent position.”121 In fact, on the whole, Peresvetov remained within the Russian religious framework of thought, which identified justice (pravda) with Orthodox faith (pravoslavnaia vera)122— a view that dominated the clerical discourse on power from the early sixteenth to the late seventeenth century. Indeed, pravda had already been linked to groza (fear) as early as the fifteenth century, and this idea was prominent in Joseph of Volokolamsk’s writings in the early sixteenth century. All these mean that Peresvetov was not an exception but clearly knocking at an open door.123 To conclude on the adoption of the so-called European context approach and the emphasis on the differences of thought on power between Western Christendom and Russia, I intend to make it plain: choosing this focus does not mean that I eo ipso exclude the existence of similar phenomena. This is by no means the case, as especially the second part of the book will show, which deals with issues such as the rule by divine right, proprietary notions of power in Western Christendom and Russia. I do not deny either the infiltration of Western political notions before the mid-seventeenth century. However, in assessing the influence of Western ideas, one must necessarily consider the number of authors in Muscovy familiar with notions of power comprising the core of political thought of Western Christendom on the one hand, and more importantly, the significance and the long-term impact of these (or non-Western) notions in the web of the dominant paradigms of Muscovite thought. I will touch upon this issue briefly in the relevant section of the book with regard to Fedor Karpov, who was familiar with Aristotle (and whom he even referred to) and notions such as natural law. Yet, besides being an isolated example, he willy-nilly framed his ideas in accordance with the mainstream paradigms of Muscovite rulership.

119 Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 66. 120 Ibid. 121 Pelenski, Russia and Kazan, 177. 122 Gyula Szvák, commenting on the ideas of Ivan Peresvetov, concludes that he upheld “the traditional Orthodox interpretation of unity of pradva and vera, and the religious essence of pravda.” Gyula Szvák, Opyt mikroistoriografii [An attempt of microhistoriography] (Moscow: Aquilo Press, 2019), 38–39. 123 Hamburg is of the opinion that “Peresvetov’s idea of justice” did not differ “in principle from the notion of equity” advocated by the followers of Joseph of Volokolamsk. Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 66.

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RUSSIA AND EUROPE: C L A R I F I C AT I O N OF TERMS AND THE PROBLEM O F T H E S TAT E

CHAPTER 1

Issues of Methodology, Reception, and the Benefits of a Long-Term Approach

As has been said before, I try to avoid using the wording “political thought” with regard to Russia for most of the period under analysis: if we employ the terms “politics” and “political,” we have to be aware of the fact that they were practically unknown in Russian before the early eighteenth century, provided we disregard the sporadic appearance of the terms before ca. 1700. Likewise, the concept of “politics,” either in its thirteenth-century scholastic interpretation, defined simply as the “art of ruling a republic or kingdom according to justice and reason” (that is, government for the common good) and also called alternatively “civil science,” “civil prudence” and the like, or in its seventeenth-century meaning—“reason of state,” that is, “the knowledge of the means of preserving and enlarging the state”1—was also unknown.2 What we would translate with the adjective “political” had various forms in Russian during the early 1700s, such as politicheskii, politichnyi, or even politizovannyi, and their meanings were fluid. Some enigmatic authors of the Petrine period like Feofan Prokopovich used politicheskii in phrases such as “political teachings” and “political philosophy,”3 that is, in the very sense this term has in Russian today—a sense that we generally associate with the political. But others employed politicheskii in the sense “civilized,” a meaning, however, mostly 1 Maurizio Viroli, “The Revolution in the Concept of Politics,” Political Theory 20, no. 3 (August 1992): 475, 476. 2 Rowland plainly stated in his summary of Muscovite ideology: “Politics as we understand it, existed in Muscovy only rarely or not at all.” Rowland, God, Tsar, and People, 367. 3 Feofan Prokopovich, Pravda voli monarshei vo opredelenii naslednika derzhavy svoei [The justice of the monarch’s will in designating the heir of his state]. The text is edited and translated by Antony Lentin, Peter the Great: His Law on the Imperial Succession. The Official Commentary (Oxford: Headstart History, 1996), 122, 184. The Russian title is translated in various ways into English, the above translation is mine.

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associated with the another form, politichnyi.4 The lines of usage between the two forms were not clearly drawn in the first decades of the eighteenth century, and the separation and consolidation of the different meanings of politicheskii and politichnyi was slow, occurring significantly only in the last third of the eighteenth century.5 It was by the early 1780s that the adjective politicheskii (“referring to the government of state”)6 was related to the concept of politika (politics), the latter defined as “art of the statecraft” (Staatskunst) in multilingual dictionaries (Russian–German and French) or lexicons published in Russia.7 At that time, politicheskii was also freely used in political tracts, such as in Denis Fonvizin’s (1745–1792) Discourse on the Unchangeable State-Laws where we also find the Russian equivalent of the age-old commonplace Western term for the organic concept of the political community, the term “political body” (politicheskoe telo).8 Similar was the case with reception of the Western concept of sovereignty and state. One of the most recent articles penned by Sergei Pol′skoi on the reception of Western political concepts confirms my previous remarks emphasizing the differences between pre-1700 and post-1700 Russia with regard to the language of power, which shows clearly the challenges that Russian translators of Western legal and political texts or authors of such works in Russia faced, and also their efforts to find adequate terminology for Western political concepts.9 While I would not go so far as to say that during the decades of “terminological experiments,” that is, between 1700 and 1720, “for a Russian translator and reader … the familiar gosudarstvo was indissolubly tied to the monarch’s person, power, and lands,” it is convincing “that Russian translators seldom found Russian equivalents to convey the institutional and abstract concept of Status, Staat,

4 Ingrid Schierle, “Semantiken des Politischen im Russland des 18. Jahrhunderts” [The semantics of the political in eighteenth-century Russia], in “Politik”: Situationen eines Wortgebrauchs in Europa der Neuzeit [“Politics.” Contexts of word usage in Modern Europe], ed. Willibald Steinmetz (Frankfurt: Campus, 2007), 229. 5 Schierle, “Semantiken des Politischen im Russland des 18. Jahrhunderts,” 229. 6 Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 16. 7 Schierle, “Semantiken des Politischen im Russland des 18. Jahrhunderts,” 229. A very early example of this definition, although as an exception, appears in the foreword written in 1725 to the Russian translation of Richelieu’s “Political Testament.” I will refer to this foreword in the third part of this book. 8 Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin, Sobraniie sochinenii, ed. Georgii Panteleimonovich Makogonenko (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1959), vol. 2, 255. For the analysis of the political ideas of this short treatise see my article: Endre Sashalmi, “D. I. Fonvizin: ‘Discourse on the Unchangeable State-Laws,’” Specimina nova. Pars prima. Sectio mediaevalis 1 (Pécs, 2001): 139–154. 9 See Corpus of Russian Translations of Social and Political Works, https://krp.dhi-moskau.org/ en/translations/vvedenie-v-gistoriu-evropeiskuu.

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État. Instead, they used loan words, or replaced the word with Polonisms.”10 Translations were, of course, important but much more valuable for us are the treatises written in Petrine Russia commissioned by the ruler, which used Russian or Russianized terms in translating Western political concepts. Besides the translations of important political texts, such as Pufendorf ’s works, the impact of Western political iconography should not be underestimated either. We have to call attention to two principal works. The first of them is the book commonly known as the emblem book of Peter the Great, published in Amsterdam in 1705 (and republished in Russia in 1719) under the title Simvoly i Emblemata (“Symbols and emblems”). The Russian inscription at the bottom of the frontispiece (referring to Peter’s role in the publication) identified Peter (among other titles) as the “Emperor of Muscovy” (Imperator Moskovskii).11 As to its genre, it was a book of devices, to be precise, and nothing more than a simple Russian translation of the work of Daniel de la Feuille’s Devises et Emblémes (“Devices and emblems”), published in Amsterdam in 1691, yet this fact was not mentioned at all in the book.12 The work was to become the manual of non-religious Western imagery in Russia containing more than 800 numbered images. These images showed animals, plants, objects, mythological figures, and so forth, each of which was identified, and accompanied by a motto. The identification was given in Dutch (to take an example of political nature: “A lion with a scepter”), followed by the Russian motto underneath (“Who would take it from me”). Under this we find the motto in Latin (“Quis auferet?”)—the Russian motto in most cases proves to be a rather free translation!—followed by translations into French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, English, and German. Peter ordered the work of Daniel de la Feuille translated and a new decorative frontispiece was designed for it, with the big armored portrait of the young Peter in the central medallion, surrounded by eight other medallions containing a motto and an image, that is, a device. (Image 1.) The message of each device was to be

10 Sergei Pol′skoi, “Translation of Political Concepts in 18th-Century Russia. Strategies and Practices,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 21, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 248–249. For the detailed discussion of the same issue in relation to the concept of sovereignty see below. 11 The non-decorated inner title-page contains the Latin translation of the Russian inscription at the bottom of the frontispiece: here the book is referred to as Symbola et Emblemata, and Peter is called Imperator Moschoviae. For the iconography of the frontispiece see my article, Endre Sashalmi, “The Frontispiece of Peter the Great’s Simvoly i Emblemata,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 47, no. 4 (2013): 459–472. 12 Terminology of symbolism became quite imprecise by the late seventeenth century, and the word emblem was mostly used to designate an image only, while the word device often meant just the motto, which alternatively was also called a symbol. This state of affairs explains the title of de la Feuille’s work, and its Russian and Latin translations.

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Symbola et Emblemata (Amsterdam: Henricus Westenius, 1705). Getty Foundation. The file is from internetarchive.org, digitized by Sloan Foundation, public domain.

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interpreted in relation to the central portrait that showed the person to whom the devices belonged. In this way, the non-personal (general) meaning of each device was contextualized, as they were assigned a special meaning attached to a particular person, in the present case, to Peter. The other work of emblematics to be mentioned is the Russian translation of the most important emblem book of the seventeenth century, namely, Diego Saavedra’s Idea de un principe politico christiano en cien empresas (1640) from its Latin version Idea Principis Christiano-Politica centum symbolis expressa (“A Christian-political idea of a prince expressed in a hundred symbols”), which was published in 1649.13 Significantly, the Russian translation in 1716 was done by none other than Feofan Prokopovich who would soon write the most important works of the new Petrine ideology, one of which included the concept and a discussion of sovereignty. Even though the translation was not published, Saavedra’s book was a source of allegories for Prokopovich, and the long texts accompanying the images provided him concepts and terms of Western political thought, which, at the same time, posed a challenge to him in translating them into Russian.14 There can be no doubt, however, that the maker of iconographical change was Peter’s 1705 “emblem book.” One of the consequences of the new imagery was that visual allegorical personifications of Russia in the form of female figures made their appearance under Peter as part of Westernization. In my view, this novel phenomenon was very important for the articulation of the notion of state in Russia, similarly to the Western experience,15 as these visual images helped to make a distinction between the person of the ruler or those in power, and the slowly emerging notion of the state. The abovementioned “emblem book” directly contributed to one of the earliest examples of this kind of allegorical personifications in Russia. For the iconography of Peter’s personal seal made in 1710–1711, where Peter is depicted as a mason hewing Russia, in the form a female queen, out from a rough stone (Image 2) was the adaptation of the story of Pygmalion and Galatea, a story depicted in one of the images of Peter’s “emblem book.”16 13 Bushkovitch, Succession to the Throne, 314. 14 Bushkovitch, Succession to the Throne, 314, 316–317. 15 Regarding the connection between the allegorical personification of Venice as a female figure in the high Middle Ages and the idea of the state, David Rosand asserted: “Personification was possible only on the basis of an essential precondition: the abstract concept of the state.” David Rosand, Myths of Venice. The Figuration of a State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 3. Although I would rather say: the existence of some notion of the state, or the medieval notion of the state. 16 Robert Collis, The Petrine Instauration. Religion, Esotericism and Science at the Court of Peter the Great, 1689–1725 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 371–372.

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Cast from the seal inv. no. ERTh-2368. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Permission received from the museum.

Furthermore, this seal, referred to as an “emblem” (in fact, a device, as it contained an image and a motto), was mentioned in the commemorative sermon delivered by Feofan Prokopovich after Peter’s death on the occasion of the tsar’s name day. He hailed the deceased tsar in the following manner: “All of Russia is your statue, which has been cast by your immeasurable masterwork, which is authentically portrayed in your emblem [v tvoei embleme].”17 The appearance of visual personifications of Russia either as a queen or Minerva—hitherto a largely neglected field in research—and later on as “Mommy Russia” (Matushka Rus′/Rossiia) was all the more significant because Russian culture and mentality was strongly image-based, a characteristic derived from the all-embracing role that icons played in Russian daily life.18 Visualization 17 Also quoted by Collis, The Petrine Instauration, 372. Translation is mine from the Russian original. Feofan Prokopovich, Sochineniia, 144. A more detailed analysis of the iconography of the seal for the purpose of the study of political ideas see below. 18 One interesting reflection of this state of mind is the Russian word for “imagination,” voobrazhenie, which contains the word obraz, meaning not simply image, but precisely religious image, that is, icon (ikona). A further marker of the importance of iconic pattern of thought is, in my view, that deviation from a given norm is/was called bezobrazie. Nowadays it is used in the sense of deviant behavior, but, as Stephen L. Baehr has shown, bezobrazie (literally meaning “being without an image”), was used with the meaning of “shapeless,” “disfigured,” “deformed,” and so forth, in the sense very opposite to obraz, which sometimes meant “the form and embodiment of beauty,” or even “the visible symbol of the beauty of God.” Stephen L. Baehr, The Paradise Myth in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Utopian Patterns in Early Secular Russian Literature and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 17. No wonder that “the desire for images” has remained a characteristic feature of Russian culture. This attitude explains the special importance of the so-called lubok culture in Russia lasting not only

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in general received a new impetus with Peter, and “the visual was uniquely privileged in eighteenth-century Russian culture”—“an emphasis on visibility, the need to be seen and appreciated” played a crucial role for Peter.19 And what made Russia’s visual allegorical personification (an aspect of the general trend of visualization) even more remarkable with regard to the emergence of the notion of the state, lay in the fact that it was manifested in forms taken from Western pagan imagery (ancient mythology: as in Peter’s personal seal, and through the figure of Minerva), which previously had largely been absent in Russia, as it was banned by the Russian Orthodox Church. The visual allegorical personification of an entity distinct from the ruler was not, however, restricted to the employment of the female figures mentioned. The frontispiece to Peter’s Simvoly i Emblemata is a case in point, which— intended to address an audience at home and abroad alike—was designed to glorify Peter’s virtues, on the one hand, and Russia’s new status as a European

until the fall of tsarism but even after it—with a new impetus during Communist times—and indeed, up to the twenty-first century (see the cult of Communist and post-Soviet political leaders in images, broadsides, and posters). The Russian word lubok (plural: lubki) means folk picture, cheap popular print (broadside or poster), a format that appeared in Russia in the seventeenth century but became more important from the second half of the eighteenth century, and really flourished in the nineteenth century when it became widespread as a popular culture genre serving the needs of the common folk. Its production began as simple woodcuts but with the improvement of technology the quality changed significantly in the second half of the nineteenth century when lithography was adopted, and “lubok culture” became a kind of national staple by the beginning of the twentieth century. The composition of some lubki clearly followed iconic patterns (lack of linear perspective, for instance) and contained religious symbolism. (These features were even present in Communist posters.) By the late nineteenth century lubki were very often placed in the so-called “beautiful corner” (krasnyi ugolok) of peasant houses, a place reserved for icons in homes of the Russian Orthodox, which also shows that lubok culture was rooted in the veneration of icons. Hanna Chuchvaha, Art Periodical Culture in Late Imperial Russia (1898–1917): Print Modernism in Transition (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 24–25. The lubok was also used for political purposes by the government, especially from the late nineteenth century and during World War I. But the opposition to the tsarist regime also made use of it: the fact that the government could not control its production in the later years of the war played a great role in undermining the legitimacy of tsarist authority, and its potential for mobilization greatly contributed to the success of the Bolsheviks after the coup of October 24/November 7, 1917. On these questions see Stephen E. Norris, A War of Images. Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity 1812–1945 (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006); Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 19 Marcus Lewitt, The Visual Dominant in Eighteenth-Century Russia (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011), 6. Lewitt, while calling attention to the importance of Orthodox theological roots of visibility, did not specifically deal with the female allegorical personifications of Russia, which are central to my argument.

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power (presenting Russia as the rising sun and eclipsing the crescent, that is, the Ottomans), on the other.20 Peter is depicted, first of all, as an embodiment of military virtues (apparent in the central medallion containing his portrait where he is depicted in armor) but also as a statesman in the medallions that represent very well the characteristic features of the genre of the device. Among the medallions that depict Peter as a statesman is one associating him with the figure of Hercules holding the globe, visualizing Peter’s efforts. The image and the motto, “Not equal is the burden compared to strength” (Nizhe ne ravnoe silam bremia / Nec impar viribus onus) has the meaning that Peter is able to cope with the burden of rulership. The figure of Hercules, an archetype of rulership in early modern iconography, represents the immortal body of the ruler: it is the king’s body politic, an entity separated from the person of the ruler.21 From the sixteenth century onwards, in case of rulers’ portraits and statues it was not enough to reproduce “the appearance and the character” of the individual ruler but it was necessary to represent “the ideals and virtues” pertaining to the office.22 The individual king and the concept of kingship were both to be visualized in royal portraits and statues, reflecting thereby not only the artistic expectation of the age but also the idea of the king’s two bodies, the body natural and the body politic.23 Hercules (and Atlas) with the globe, however, both served not only as celebrated models of rulership of the age, but could also represent the given ruler’s apotheosis.24 The most directly relevant images regarding the issue of visualizing the emerging state in the frontispiece are the following medallions. The first one is the depiction of a double-headed eagle with three crowns above the heads, and a scepter and orb in its claws, that is, the coat of arms of Russia25 with the motto above the image: “The leader against the enemies is also like a shield” (Privodtsa na nepriiatelei ravno i shchit / Dux in hostes pariter ac clypeus). The second one is the depiction of two eagles (a smaller and a bigger one) flying towards the

20 The full analysis of the iconography of the medallions is not relevant here, for further details see my article mentioned before: Sashalmi, “The Frontispiece of Peter the Great’s Simvoly i Emblemata,” 459–472. 21 Friedrich Polleross, “From the exemplum virtutis to Apotheosis. Hercules as an Identification Figure in Portraiture. An Example of Adoption of Classical Forms of Representation,” in Iconography, Propaganda, and Legitimation, ed. Allan Ellenius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 46–48. 22 Ibid., 48. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 45. 25 The image here is the simplified version of the 1667 Russian state seal. The analysis of this seal see below.

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sun, with the motto above the image: “High is the hope of your State/Empire” (Nadezhda vysoka G[osu]darstva tvoego / Spes Imperii alta Tui).26 The latter image is a visualization of a well-known antique theme taken from Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, namely, that the eagle is the only animal capable of looking into the sun, and one eagle tests his sibling as a worthy heir by grasping him and flying with him towards the sun. Therefore, the image with the motto contains the idea of hereditary succession and the worthiness of the heir. But if the two images and mottos are taken together, the message sent is this: the brilliant future of Russia or the Russian state/empire is embodied in the present ruler and his successor. So, the distinction between ruler and gosudarstvo is visualized well enough, and in a more direct manner than through the figure of Hercules—which is not to say that the frontispiece in itself proves the clear existence of the concept of state in Russia, because it was designed in the West, and its iconography was novel to the Russians. Yet, the frontispiece clearly conveys the distinction between the ruler and an impersonal notion of power that existed only in a rudimentary form in Russia before roughly 1700, but from then on was present, expressed in texts (as in Peter’s 1702 manifesto) and images, despite the strong factors working against such a distinction. The appearance of Western political concepts notwithstanding, we cannot treat the process of Westernization as a simple act of borrowing, as the meaning of the concepts changed in the Russian context: in case one would prefer attributing a normative force to Western political concepts, we should rather speak of the distortion of their original meanings. This is, of course, the issue of “reception.”27 It goes without saying that “reception” of a concept or a text most often, or even inevitably, is not equivalent to a complete and perfect adoption of the original meaning or message—as was the case with the receptions (the plural is intentional) of Bodin’s République, a problem also aggravated by the many different Latin editions of the text.28 In fact, the “domestication” of a text or a concept is an act of “cultural translation.”29 The receptor, who could be a translator or an author of a tract, could shape the meaning either intentionally, due to various motivations (by emphasizing certain aspects of a concept while minimizing or omitting others, or omitting certain parts of a text, or even changing its structure) or unintentionally, due to culturally conditioned circumstances 26 In translations from Latin, gosudarstvo was often used to mean imperium besides “state.” 27 For the problem of reception in general see Peter Burke, “The History and Theory of Reception,” 21–38. 28 Howell A. Lloyd, “Conclusion,” in The Reception of Bodin, ed. Howell A. Lloyd (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 411–412, 414–415. 29 Burke, “The History and Theory of Reception,” 33.

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emanating from a different cultural background.30 These considerations should be given even more weight when we move from one broad cultural world to another, namely, from Western Christendom to Orthodox Russia.31 The European perspective in the study of Russian notions of power and state, however, can be useful not merely for revealing the nature of change in Russian ideology under the impact of Western ideas, as well as the “Russification” (if you like, “reception”) of concepts, that is, the alteration of their meaning in the matrix of Russian language and mentality. An overview of the emergence of the modern concept of state in the West itself can help us better understand the history of the Russian notion of state because it shows that this development was not an easy-going, smooth process in the West either: it was burdened with setbacks. My method, in accordance with the spirit of the present book series, puts a great emphasis on the issue of reception of Western ideas in Russia, but it also includes the dimensions that David Armitage called “transtemporal” and “serial contextual.”32 Besides the comparative nature of the study, the other main pillar of analysis is a contextualist source-based approach. In selecting primary sources from different periods of Russian history, a special emphasis was given to those enigmatic sources that can inform us on the main trends in notions of power, and the various meanings of the term gosudarstvo,33 as it goes without saying 30 Besides these factors, there were many others (even the physical shape of a book, whether it was big or small, as scholarly books on law and philosophy were traditionally of bigger size) that created a context of interpretation. Among them, the ones known as “paratexts” are crucial for our purpose: these include dedications, illustrations, prefatory verses, and so forth. Paratexts are described “as so many means available to authors, editors and publishers, of managing the responses of readers.” Burke, “The History and Theory of Reception,” 33. The fact that the emblem book of 1705, representing a new type of symbolism, appeared as Peter’s emblem book (with a new frontispiece depicting Peter in Western imagery and not in the guise of tsars), empowered the work with an authoritative force. 31 What is highly significant for our purpose among the various dimensions of “cultural translation” is “the incorporation of the text (and image!) within the sociocultural context of the translator” and “the transformation of meaning for purpose.” Sarah Maitland, What is Cultural Translation? (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 10. As Lewitt noted regarding the assimilation of Western forms by eighteenth-century Russian culture: “Translation entailed ‘transplantation’ from one soil to another, in which the new creation changed character in assimilating itself to the new linguistic and cultural environment.” Lewitt, Visual Dominant, 11. 32 David Armitage, “What’s the Big Idea? Intellectual History and the Longue Durée,” History of European Ideas 38 (2012): 498. 33 The earlier variant was gospodarstvo, eventually replaced by gosudarstvo in the seventeenth century, which most probably had its origin in spoken language. Since very often an abbreviated form is encountered in the sources (gsdrstvo) instead of the full version, it is impossible to determine precisely which variant was in the mind of the author at a given time. The classic standard discussion of this problem is: Zoltán András, Fejezetek az orosz szókincs történetéből

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that the occurrence of this word must not be confused with the existence of the notion of the state itself. The connection between terminology and concept (or, perhaps, we may rather call it a linguistic-conceptual interference) is a special one in the case of gosudarstvo, the Russian word for state, as gosudarstvo derives from the word gosudar′, which had the meaning “lord/master” or simply “ruler,” depending on which period of Russian history we deal with.34 Consequently, gosudarstvo had not only a strong personal but also a monarchical connotation even after it had come to be used in its present sense, that is, meaning “state.” Many historians, most notably Michael Cherniavsky and Richard Wortman, called attention to the fact that in Russia the ruler did not have “two bodies,” a “body natural” and a “body politic”;35 or when a kind of distinction between two emerged, “the identity was so close, as to be imperceptible.”36 One main purpose of the book, as said, is to show in a comparative manner how this distinction was developing, pointing out, at the same time, why this phenomenon could not take firm roots in Russia.

[Chapters from the history of Russian vocabulary] (Budapest: ELTE, 1987), 14–50. This is, however, a linguistic issue, and this aspect does not have a real significance for the present undertaking. In my book I will use gosudarstvo, unless a source in question says otherwise. 34 de Madariaga, Politics and Culture, 54. For a detailed discussion of the semantics of the word gosudar′, see below. 35 Michael Cherniavsky, Tsars and People. Studies in Russian Myths (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 44, 85. Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 405; Richard S. Wortman, Russian Monarchy: Representation and Rule (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013), xiv–xvi. 36 Arch Getty, Practising Stalinism: Bolsheviks, Boyars and the Persistence of Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 78. After the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in 1917, when “all kinds of authority were questioned, soldiers refused to swear loyalty to state (gosudarstvo) by saying ‘net gosudaria, net i gosudarstva,’” which has the meaning: “If there is no master/ruler, there is no state either.” For them gosudarstvo still “received its legitimacy and reality from the person” of the ruler. Arch Getty, “The Problem of Persistence,” in Rethinking the Russian Revolution as Historical Divide, ed. Matthias Neumann and Andy Willimott (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 34. The most notable example showing the endurance of this perception in Communist times was that, unlike the tsars’ bodies, Lenin’s body was not buried. Lenin was a “charismatic leader,” and after his death his comrades were not shy to express it. Zinovev calling him “our sun,” a “God-sent leader,” was not the only one using religious terminology (such as “prophet”). Getty, Practising Stalinism, 77. Eventually, the embalmed natural body of Lenin was used to embody an abstraction, the Communist ideology, and, at the same time, served as a visualized “body politic,” the visualization of the sovereignty of the Communist party. Alexei Yurchak, “Bodies of Lenin: Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty,” Representations 129, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 135, 136. In Communist times, besides the embalmed body of Lenin put on public display, another interesting example representing the endurance of the perception of the state/regime receiving “its legitimacy and reality” from the person of the deceased leader can be found in iconography, in the early symbols of the Soviet state: “Even some emblems of the Soviet state carried Lenin’s image, and it took long time to separate them.” Getty, Practising Stalinism, 78.

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Generally speaking, the connection between term and meaning is not a problem unique to Russia with regard to the state; even in France and England, the pioneer countries in early modern state theory, it had taken centuries before a consistent terminology could develop to denote the modern concept of the state. Indeed, the words état and “state” meaning condition, estate, standing, and so forth had existed long before the modern concept of the state emerged in the seventeenth century, and it also took time before État and State became the established terms for a sovereign territorial entity. Even Hobbes’s wording is not always consistent in this respect as he used “state” when “estate” should have been the appropriate term and vice versa.37 The present undertaking aims not only to highlight the peculiarities of Russian notions of power and state during the early modern period but, in line with “serial contextualism,” also intends to call attention to the necessity of a longue durée approach in understanding some aspects of Russian political thought and political vocabulary even as late as the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.38 From this point of view, the statement made by Walter Ullmann concerning the study of medieval Western political ideas is highly relevant. He claims that the study of political ideas of the Middle Ages is not an antiquarian genre, as it can provide some clues to present political convictions.39 While not treating

37 Osiander, Before the State, 443. 38 For a somewhat similar undertaking see Claudio Ingerflom, Le tsar, c’est moi. L’imposture permanente, d’Ivan le Terrible à Vladimir Poutine [I am the tsar. Permanent imposture from Ivan the Terrible to Vladimir Putin] (Paris: PUF, 2015). Ingerflom surveyed the issue of highly personalized perception of power in Russia, giving ample space in his book to the “false tsar” phenomenon and the problem of the notion of state. He has also addressed the problem of the Russian concept of state, the distinction between the use of gosudarstvo and the existence of the concept of state, in various studies written in French, Spanish, Russian and English, making his research essential in the field. The best summaries of his research on the topic in English probably are idem, “‘Loyalty to the State’ under Peter the Great? Return to the Sources and the Historicity of Concepts,” in Loyalties, Solidarities and Identities in Russian Society, History and Culture, ed. Ph. Ross Bullock, A. Byford, C. NunIngerflom, et al. (London: SSEES, University College London, 2013), www.academia. edu/6794886/_Loyalty_to_the_State_under_Peter_the_Great_Return_to_the_ Sources_and_the_Historicity_of_Concepts_in_Loyalties_Solidarities_and_Identities_ in_Russian_Society_History_and_Culture_edited_bay_Ph.Ross_Bullock_A.Byford_ C.Nun-Ingerflom_and_allii_SSEES_University_College_London_2013; and idem, “Theoretical Premises and Cognitive Distortions from the Uncritical Use of the Concept of ‘State’: The ‘Russian’ Case,” in Serve the Power(s), Serve the State: America and Eurasia, ed. Juan Carlos Garavaglia, Christian Lamouroux, and Michael J. Braddick (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 222–244. 39 Walter Ullmann, Medieval Political Thought (London: Penguins Books, 1975), 7, 229. He especially emphasized the importance of feudal relations (vassalage) and the ideas of feudal law in shaping political commitments (and institutions) such as the consent of the governed

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this kind of approach deterministic, and admitting of course that political ideas cannot be torn out their historical context, I am convinced that long term tendencies are also clearly perceptible in Russia with regard to certain political commitments. This belief is supported by Richard Wortman’s recent book on the study of Russian political rhetoric in which he analysed certain “charismatic words” over the course of three hundred years.40 These words are considered “charismatic” by the author because the “aura of authority is resonated” in them when they were, and are still used to “define notions of personal behaviour, concepts of law, and justice, as well as forms of official deference and loyalty.”41 One of these terms that has importance for my analysis is the “integrity of the state” (tselost′ gosudarstva), a phrase that made its appearance precisely during the reign of Peter the Great, whose rule was formative in the history of the Russian notion of state in general. The idea of the “integrity of the state” has accompanied Russian perceptions of power and state ever since, right up to now,42 finding its place (in a somewhat modified wording, gosudarstvennaia tselostnost′—“state integrity”) even in the 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation, and (as

on issues concerning them, and the rights of the individual. Back in the 1980s the Hungarian historian Jenő Szűcs (influenced partly by Ullmann), whose historical essay has exerted a great influence on Hungarian historiography, wrote: “On considering concepts like natural law, social contract and popular sovereignty, the transfer of power or the separation of powers, most people will certainly recall names such as Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu and Rousseau, and of the course the French Revolution and what followed it. There are certainly few who know these key problems were first pondered a good 500 hundred years before in Bologna, Paris and Oxford, if in a context fairly remote from the modern one and alien to it.” Yet, if one “seeks to identify the ‘original characteristics’ of the West (as March Bloch would have put it), this hardly considered correlation proves to be important.” Jenő Szűcs, “The Three Historical Regions of Europe. An Outline,” Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 29, nos. 2–4 (1983): 135. Most recently, also in the spirit of the longue durée approach, Ferenc Hörcher in his book calls attention to the intellectual and institutional heritage of the European city, stating: “European cities were not democratic in the modern sense of the word. Yet one can argue that the modern form of representative democracy learned a great deal from the form of self-governance that the European cities developed.” Ferenc Hörcher, The Political Philosophy of the European City. From Polis through City-State to Megapolis? (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2021), 248. 40 Richard S. Wortman, The Power of Language and Rhetoric in Russian Political History. Charismatic Words from the 18th to the 21st Centuries (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). For a short review of the book see Endre Sashalmi, “The Power of Language and Rhetoric in Russian Political History. Charismatic Words from the 18th to the 21st Centuries,” review of The Power of Language and Rhetoric in Russian Political History. Charismatic Words from the 18th to the 21st Centuries by Richard S. Wortman, Slavonica 23, no. 1 (2018): 72–74. I think Wortman’s book is a good example of Armitage’s concept of “history in ideas.” Armitage, “What’s the Big Idea,” 499. 41 Wortman, Power of Language and Rhetoric, 2. 42 Ibid., chapter 6, 159–182.

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Richard Wortman showed) in Vladimir Putin’s recent speeches. Similar is the case with the strong personal, quasi-monarchical perception of the word gosudarstvo (state).43 The period of roughly 250 years that I will cover in this book was vital not only because the end of it witnessed the birth of the “state narrative” of Russian history, which, as Wortman has shown, was to become part not only of Russian political thought but also Russian history-writing.44 This fact explains that short excursions in the book are devoted into later periods of Russian history. The time span chosen also proved to be crucial in the emergence of a perception of power that can legitimately be called “Russian” in the proper sense of the adjective. For it may not be self-evident which period deserves to be labelled as genuine Russian history, that is, when we can justly claim that the political entity called “Russia” (Rossiia) came into existence. Furthermore, as we shall see, even the semantics of the adjective “Russian” has had great signficance with regard to the history of the Russian concept of state. It is sufficient to mention here that in the Russian language, unlike in English or German, there are two adjectives, russkii and rossiiskii, which we cannot translate otherwise than “Russian.” The connotation of the two words, however, is different, and this difference is lost in translation—therefore, it will be neccesary to elucidate the semantic fields of these two adjectives for non-Russian speakers. I will return to this issue later on, but for the time being the reader should keep in mind that while russkii refers to the people, language and culture, rossiiskii refers to the political entity, the state: the Russian Tsardom (Rossiiskoe Tsarstvo) or, from 1721 on, the Russian Empire (Rossiiskaia Imperiia). As Geoffrey Hosking phrased it laconically: there are, in fact,“two kinds of ‘Russianness,’” one connected to the people, and one to the state.45

1.1. State-Formation in Early Modern Western Christendom By the late Middle Ages, that is, by the mid-fifteenth century where this book starts from, the political structure of monarchies in Western Christendom 43 As a contemporary example, Arch Getty mentions Putin’s 2004 coming to office “when activists invaded” the event, and “they were accused of trying to overthrow the state and received prison terms.” Getty, “The Problem of Persistence,” 34. For more examples on personal power and cult of Putin see also Getty, Practising Stalinism, 269–292. 44 Wortman, Power of Language and Rhetoric, 161, 166. 45 Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 (London: Fontana Press, 1998), xix.

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was based, for the most part, on an institutional power-sharing arrangement between monarchs and subjects called Ständestaat in German, which could be translated, although somewhat clumsily, as “estates-based state.” This arrangement had its backbone the web of various corps intermédiaires, or the so-called “corporate order,” to use Dietrich Gerhard’s terminology,46 which had become characteristic of every polity in Western Christendom by the late Middle Ages. The “estates-based state” relied on constituted bodies (craft and merchant guilds, universities, autonomous towns, and so forth) and was manifested in provincial assemblies of estates, and/or assemblies of estates of a kingdom47 with a great variety as to their composition, rights, and powers.48 The “estates-based state” in the framework of kingdoms was the territorial realization of the “monarchic model of representation,”49 and the Ständestaat of the late Middle Ages (or alternatively, the “regnal polity” or the “monarchical commonwealth”) was, in my interpretation, the “medieval state” (ca. 1300–1470s), in which the assemblies of estates represented the community of the realm as a corporate entity. But what kind of technical terms are to be used to describe the practical aspects of state-building afterwards, in the context of early modern Europe? One of the most recent significant approaches to this topic in English is given by Charlotte Backerra: “The most common form of premodern monarchical rule was the composite monarchy. In early modern Europe, the union of realms— kingdoms or principalities linked by the rule of a monarch—was a common phenomenon.”50 As for the question of typology the author states that “historiographical definitions of forms of monarchical rule are mostly based on discussions about state formation processes, and use either ‘state’ or ‘monarchy’ with adjectives.”51

46 Gerhard, Old Europe. A Study of Continuity 1000–1800 (New York: Academic Press, 1981) 47, 49–50. 47 That is why the Ständestaat is also translated as “polity of estates.” Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978), 36. 48 Ibid., 44. 49 Wim Blockmans, “Representation,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History c. 1415–c. 1500, vol. 7, ed. Cristopher Allmand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 61. Wim Blockmans used this term to distinguish between the type of representation realized through the assemblies of estates and the “communal model of representation”—this latter type did not involve a superior, as in case of the Swiss Cantons or the various towns’ leagues, regardless that they were organized on a territorial (such as the assembly of the towns of Castile) or a transregional basis (such as the Hanseatic League). Ibid., 61, 63. 50 Charlotte Backerra, “Personal Monarchy, Composite Monarchy and ‘Multiple Rule,’” in The Routledge History of Monarchy, ed. Elena Woodcare et al. (London: Routledge, 2019), 89. 51 Ibid., 90.

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I myself use the term composite-dynastic state or, in other words, the mosaic-like dynastic state for the period ca. 1470s–1660s to highlight the salient features of monarchies where the particular interests of the various territories (represented mainly but not exclusively by assemblies of estates) under a ruler were more important than the interest of the conglomerate as a whole, and of the dynasty to which their ruler belonged.52 Assemblies of estates and corporations remained instrumental in the composite-dynastic states as guardians of particular interests, institutions, laws and customs of the given provinces and kingdoms. By composite-dynastic state I mean the conglomeration of territories differing from each other in their laws and customs, institutions, but often in their denomination (after the Reformation) and language as well, where the common institutional bond linking these territories was a dynasty striving to accumulate lands by marriage, war, succession, and knowing no natural geographical boundaries in its ambitions to expand.53 The illuminating book chapter of Charlotte Backerra is a good example for supporting a strong argument concerning the plausibility of employing the term “composite monarchy,” and the author’s conclusions are worthy of quoting. Backerra asserts that composite monarchy was “a phenomenon shared by nearly every realm ruled by a monarchy” from the late Middle Ages to the end of the early modern era harangued by the French Revolution of 1789; its “specific structures and institutions” changed over time “according to regional requirements;” “the disparity between the laws of the various territories that made up

52 The phrase “composite-dynastic state” is my own creation. In the framework of interpretation of early modern European state-building the “dynastic state” as a technical term was probably first used by Gerhard, Old Europe, who devoted a subchapter to the discussion of this issue (88–94). The term and the concept, however, became widespread (it seems to me that independently of Gerhard’s book, which still has not received the response it deserves) due to Richard Bonney’s influential book The European Dynastic States 1494–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). The term “composite state” was suggested by Helmut G. Koenigsberger, Politicians and Virtuosi. Essays in Early Modern History (London: A&C Black, 1986), 1–25, and was disseminated by John H. Elliott, “A Europe of Composite Monarchies,” Past and Present 137 (November 1992): 48–71. Despite of the title of his article, Elliott used the terms “composite monarchy” and “composite state” practically interchangeably throughout the work, with the maior exception that the latter could apply to republics too. The term “mosaic state” was coined by Strayer, On the Medieval Origins, 53. For the application of Koenigsberger’s and Elliott’s terms, as well as the more recent alternatives, see Backerra, “Personal Monarchy, Composite Monarchy and ‘Multiple Rule,’” 90–92. 53 John Morrill recently used a similar expression, “dynastic agglomerates,” for the phenomenon that I call “composite–dynastic state”. John Morrill, “Dynasties, Realms, Peoples and StateFormation,” in Monarchy Transformed: Princes and their Elites in Early Modern Europe, ed. Robert von Friedeburg and  John Morrill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 17.

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a composite monarchy was common a characteristic.”54 While disparity in its various aspects (language, institutions, law, and so forth) was a salient characteristic of the territories comprising the composite monarchies, the unitary concept of state striving for homogeneity increasingly gained ground from the late eighteenth century onwards: “The unity of territory, people, government, language and political culture was seen as a ‘natural’ state.”55 But even before that, important developments were taking place in various composite monarchies in the seventeenth and most notably in the eighteenth centuries giving them more coherence. As noted above, I prefer using the term not monarchy but state, and use it with the adjective dynastic for the period beginning around the 1470s and lasting until about the mid-seventeenth century, to indicate the paramount importance of various aspects of “dynasticism” in the history of composite states.56 However, keeping in mind the administrative-institutional changes on the one hand, and the shifts in the political structures of the composite states on the other, which would all become especially marked from the 1660s onwards both in “state infrastructure,” and regarding the new type of power sharing arrangements (the drive towards absolute monarchy or constitutional monarchy) we need to turn to other terms of historiography. This approach justifies the employment of technical terms such as the “fiscal-military state,” which refers to the first issue, while “absolute monarchy,” or “absolutist state,” to the second. It does not mean, of course, that dynasticism ceased to be a factor in politics after the mid-seventeenth century but it was more and more superseded by or subordinated to other principles, such as the balance of power, to mention the most important one, while the compositeness of the states did not disappear either—yet there was a tendency to reduce compositeness, especially in the absolute monarchies. For the drive towards furthering unity in the composite states, first surfaced in the 1620s under the influence of Justus Lipsius’s “teachings about the ordered and disciplined state,” in which the idea of confessional unity was paramount, was resumed again from the 1660s, only to be strengthened towards the end of the century.57 I think the designation composite-dynastic state reflects best the main characteristics of early modern state-formation in the period from the 1470s to the 1660s, although not all political communities would fit into it. The United Provinces (becoming de facto independent in 1581 by the Act of Abjuration

54 Backerra, “Personal Monarchy, Composite Monarchy and ‘Multiple Rule,’” 105. 55 Ibid. 56 See details on the issue of dynasticism in part 2 of this book. 57 Elliott, “Europe of Composite Monarchies,” 62, 65–66.

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from the Spanish Crown), for instance, were a composite but not a dynastic state as it was a republic, despite the strong position and the ambitions of the House of Orange in their government. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (created by the real union of Poland and Lithuania in 1569 by the Union of Lublin), although a kingdom, but considered as a “republic of nobles” with the king being more like its figurehead, would not really qualify as a dynastic state after 1572 (the extinction of the Jagellonian dynasty). For the so-called Henrician Articles (1573) transformed the state into a pure elective monarchy and imposed special legal restrictions on the king even in matters of war and peace, and diplomacy, and, most importantly, prohibited the ruling king to nominate his successor. The compositeness of the state in some cases was apparent in the listing of the bunch of titles of the rulers, especially in the Spanish and Austrian branches of the Habsburgs,58 but where such a list was not customary, as in case of France,59 for instance, the compositeness of the state was no doubt a reality. Be it enough to mention merely the differences between the later incorporated territories of the French Crown, the pays d’états (such as the Duchy of Burgundy or the Duchy of Bretagne) with their provincial assemblies and parlements, and the pays d’élections where these institutions did not exist, but even this general division cannot grasp the variety of differences within each group. If the basis of differentiation among the early modern composite states is not the form of the state (monarchy or republic)—to use this modern expression—which renders the adjective “dynastic” irrelevant, then geography can be a further differentia specifica. From this point of view, the two main types of composite states were the ones composed of contiguous territories (“contiguous composite states”), such as France, Piedmont-Savoy, or the United Provinces, and the ones where the territories were separated either by sea or by the territories of other composite states, such as the possessions of the Spanish Habsburgs or the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg-Prussia.60 The conglomeration of territories in case of a monarchy could mean that a given dynasty might rule over not just heterogeneous and even geographically disconnected territories, as the Hohenzollerns in Brandenburg-Prussia, but also over more than one kingdom. This latter was the case with the Valois, although for a short time between 1558 and 1560 when Scotland was linked 58 Tim Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815 (London: Penguin Books, 2007), 218. 59 French kings did add the title comte de Provence, because Provence had not been part of the medieval kingdom of France. As late as Louis XIII, kings of France included the title comte de Provence et de Forcalquier on charters and legislation sent to the parlement at Aix-en-Provence, but this title did not appear in the same legislation sent to the other parlements. 60 Koenigsberger, Politicians and Virtuosi, 12.

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to France, and later with the Bourbons, Henry IV ruling also as king of France (1589) besides being already the king of Navarre.61 More characteristic examples of the type of “multiple kingdoms” are, however, provided by the Spanish Monarchy consisting of the Crown of Castile and Crown of Aragon (which in turn was composed of the Kingdom of Aragon, the Kingdom of Valencia and the Principality of Catalonia), or the Tudor and Stuart Monarchy ruling over two and three kingdoms respectively (after 1603), and even using the hollow title “King of France” until 1802, an inheritance from the fourteenth century. However, there was no major structural difference between those dynastic conglomerations or composite-dynastic states that consisted of simply dominions on the one hand (Brandenburg-Prussia and Piedmont-Savoy), and the ones representing the type of “multiple kingdoms,” or a kingdom with dominions, on the other. The major exception is that kingdoms, unlike a group of provinces, were not to be split due to dynastic agreements, as it happened to the dynastic conglomerate of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy in 1482 after his death in 1477. The Netherlands, which grew out of the northern part of Burgundian inheritance under the Habsburgs after 1482, and attached to the Spanish Crown in 1556, were eventually to be split due to the Unions of Arras and Utrecht in 1579, although as a result of not a dynastic division but a war of independence. The Union Treaty of Utrecht of the Protestant northern provinces produced, in my view, one of the most characteristic short statements on the main features of the composite-dynastic state. Its first article reads: i. The aforesaid provinces shall ally, confederate, and unite— and are allying, confederating, and uniting herewith—to hold together eternally in all ways and forms as if they were but one province, and shall not separate themselves from each other nor have themselves separated by testament, codicil, gift, cession, exchange, sale, treaties of peace and marriage or for any other reason, however it may come about. However, this is agreed without prejudice to the special and particular privileges, freedoms, exemptions, laws, statutes, laudable and traditional customs, usages, and all other rights of each province and of each town, member and inhabitant of those provinces.62 61 Although the kingdom of Navarre was merged into the crown of France in 1620, the title of the ruler retained the memory of a separate past until 1791, the ruler naming himself “King of France and Navarre.” 62 E. H. Kossmann, A. F. Mellink, Texts concerning the Revolt of the Netherlands, https://www. dbnl.org/tekst/koss002text01_01/koss002text01_01_0039.php.

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While the list “by testament, codicil, gift, cession, exchange, sale, treaties of peace and marriage” highlights the classic methods of dynasticism, the rest of the quotation shed light on the legal-institutional variety, the compositeness (including the differences in weights and measures from province to province, which is also mentioned in the treaty). Similarly, informative on the issue of the composite state is the text of a short summary of the history of the Netherlands expounded by the English diplomat James Howell in a letter in 1623. Arriving at the description of the events leading to the present situation of the Netherlands (and mentioning the Unions of Arras and Utrecht, 1579), he writes: The Netherlands, who had been formerly knit and concentred under one Sovereign Prince, were thus dismember’d; and as they subsist now, they are a State and a Province63: The Province having ten of the seventeen at least, is far greater, more populous, better soiled, and more stor’d with gentry. The State is richer and stronger, the one proceeding from their vast Navigation and Commerce, the other from the quality of their country, being defensible by rivers and sluices. …64 An English treatise preserved in a manuscript form only, entitled A Breife Consideration of the Twoe Kingdomes in the Handes of One Kinge as Followeth and composed after 1603, describes the personal union of England and Scotland as a kind of example on how to manage unions of different territories. It provides a superb insight into the nature of the composite-dynastic states, justifying, at the same time, the use of the term “state” for contemporary territorial conglomerations.65 The author of the anonymous treatise, in what functioned as the table of contents to the work, divided the subject into three parts: First Commodities that may result of such union, Secondlie the discomodities that may happen therby. Thirdly a discourse or relation of sundrie manners and formes of unitinge of kingdomes 63 The “province,” known in contemporary geography as Belgica Regia, similarly to the United Provinces (the “state”), known as Belgica Foederata, was also highly composite. 64 Epistolae Ho-Elianae. The Familiar Letters of James Howell, ed. Joseph Jacobs (London: David Nutt, 1892), vol. 1, 120. 65 A Breife Consideration of the Twoe Kingdomes in the Handes of One Kinge as Followeth, British Library, Additiomal MS 11600, ff. 65–72, https://mpese.ac.uk/t/TwoKingdomsOneKing. html.

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and dominions togeather, wherby may be conceaved w[hi]ch manner of them may serue fittest to the present purpose.66 According to the author, the ideal union is as follows: “There can be no p[er]fect vnion of twoe kingdomes except there be established a meeting of boeth States and as it were a com[m]on parliament for boeth kingdomes, for the gen[er] all causes w[hi]ch shall equallie concerne boeth people. …”67 (This sentence illustrates well enough the importance of assemblies of estates representing particular interests!) And the third part of the treatise (which contains various examples of unions taken from European history)68 is titled: “The third thing proposed was the considerac[i]on of the diuers formes of Vnited States and Kingdomes wherby may be obserued which shalbe the best to be followed.”69 The first sentence of its reads: “First there are sundrie manners of vnitinge of kingdomes vnder the goverment of one Soveraigne the first may be called the vnion of freedome and denizac[i]on, That is when the people of boeth kingdomes is made free of each other Nac[i]on to enioy equall liberties and ymmunities in boeth States. …”70 In fact, this treatise described the various ways of uniting territories, which some decades later (1647) would be narrowed down to two basic principles in the exposition of the famous Spanish lawyer, Juan Solórzano Pereira (1575– 1655). Pereira identified “two ways in which a newly acquired territory might be united to a king’s other dominions,” methods that he called “accessory” and “aeque principaliter” respectively.71 By these Pereira meant that, in the first case, the newly acquired territory (either or kingdom or province) was treated “iuridically as part and parcel” of the one to which it was attached (such was the case of the union of Wales with England in 1536, 1543), while in the second case the two territories continued “as distinct entities” (as in case of the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon) keeping their own laws, customs, and institutions.72 Elliott

66 Ibid., 65. 67 Ibid., 66r. This was realized in 1707 in Anglo-Scottish relations. 68 “In England. The principallitie of Wales vnited to the Crowne of England by the Statute. 27. H: 8. In Spaine. The kingdome of Navarr and Arragon w[i]th that of Castile and of Spaine and Portugall. / In Fraunce. The Duchie of Normandie and the Duchie of Brittanie to the Crowne of Fraunce. / In Germanie. The Netherlandes and vnited provinces of the lowe countries to the howse of Austria.” Ibid., 68v. 69 Ibid., 66v. 70 Ibid. 71 Elliott, “Europe of Composite Monarchies,” 52. 72 Ibid., 52–53.

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underlined that in early modern Europe, as a rule, the latter method prevailed, which underlined the compositeness of monarchies/states.73 From the mid-seventeenth century, however, there was a tendency of the “composite-dynastic states” to become so-called “fiscal-military states”—at least this was the case with the great powers of the age—which concerns the changes in the so-called state infrastructure, but the phenomenon also brought on tendencies of unification. The main characteristics of the “fiscal-military state” (which would apply both to Western powers and Russia alike) are as follows: (1) creation of large and permanent armed forces (armies and often navies in case of naval powers); (2) increase in the number of administrative personnel; (3) increased government activity in the economy (mercantilist policies) and growth of taxation to finance the expenses—not only through the rise of direct taxes but also by borrowings, and even extracting resources from the church. The variants of the term such as “fiscal-naval state” refer to differences in kind as in case of the United Provinces, or Great Britain, but I do not see why the “fiscalmilitary state” cannot be used as a general term, especially because even these maritime states had to finance sizeable armies in years of war. Enrico Gonzalez giving a recent survey of the debate on the “fiscal-military state,” and suggesting new aspects of its analysis, claims that “to some extent the term ‘fiscal-military state’ is a way of conceptualizing the state as a whole,” but made it clear that if we want to speak about “forms of government and political constitutions,” then it is superfluous to use it.74 And he also confirmed that different labels can be useful for one and the same state if different aspects of it are analysed.75 True, Western fiscal-military states could be absolute monarchies (as Denmark) but a fiscal-military state did not necessarily take the form of absolute monarchy: it could exist within a constitutional monarchy, as was the case of Great Britain by the 1720s, or even in a republic, as was the case of the United Provinces in the seventeenth century. European “fiscal-military states,” regardless of their political regimes, were more integrated (I deliberately use the 73 Ibid., 54. 74 González A. Enciso, War, Power and the Economy. Mercantilism and State-Formation in 18th-Century Europe (London: Routledge, 2017), 189–190. 75 Ibid., 47–51. I found useful for this purpose the distintion between “state infrastructure” and “regime type,” employed by Thomas Ertman for early modern European states, with regard to state administration and power-sharing arrangements respectively, while not approving his further terminological subdivisions and his explanation on the process of European statebuilding without reservations. Thomas Ertman, The Birth of the Leviathan. Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 6–7. My understanding of “state infrastructure” is, however, wider than his, as it is apparent in the characteristics of the “fiscal-military state.”

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adjective “integrated” and not “centralized”)76 than “composite-dynastic states,” but they still had many common characteristics, with absolute monarchies taking the lead in the process of integration. In practical terms, in “absolute monarchies,” in contrast to the “estate-based states,” princes and kings ruled without consulting the estates of the realm and/ or provincial diets, and legislated and taxed in their own right. This development, of course, was not uniform and does not mean that all polities became absolute monarchies, as diversity was still characteristic of Western Christendom. The issue of “absolute monarchy,” similarly to the “fiscal-military state,” would, in itself, require a whole book to be discussed.77 Here I merely want to draw attention to a few issues connected with the term. First of all, the theory of absolute monarchy—which is more closely relevant for this book than its practice and will be discussed later at length—fully developed by 1600, while absolute monarchy as a political system was developing in Europe from the mid-seventeenth century, definitely from the 1660s onwards. The “Age of Absolutism” as a phase in the history of European state-building is dated from 1648 to 1789, with the crucial decades falling between the Treaties of Westphalia (1648) and Utrecht (1713). The other important issue to be mentioned is that France, in my view, was not the sample case or model of absolute monarchy as a political system, partly because of the survival of provincial estates in some provinces with the right to assent to taxation (even though in a weakened position as, unlike before the mid-seventeenth century, the redress of grievances could be dealt with after giving their assent),78 and partly because of the existence of provincial parlements in these territories, besides the parlement of Paris. The Parisian parlement and the provincial parlements were not representative institutions but courts of law, 76 Eighteenth-century France, for instance, was a “fiscal-military state,” but it was not centralized. “Centralization” is a term that appeared in the wake of the French Revolution when the old system of administration was replaced by the uniform départments. 77 The best general survey on the topic of seventeenth-century absolute monarchies in English remains John Miller, ed., Absolutism in Seventeenth-Century Europe (London: Macmillan, 1990), but Dietrich Gerhard’s short summary on the essence of the absolutist states encapsulates its main features concerning the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Gerhard, Old Europe, 123–133. Also, Tim Blanning’s treatment of France, the Habsburg Monarchy, and BrandenburgPrussia with regard to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is very informative. Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory, 207–235. For the reassurance of the usefulness of “absolute monarchy,” if not for British or French history, then for Central Europe, the principalities within the Holy Roman Empire, and the Habsburg Monarchy, as well as for Scandinavia, Castile, and Portugal see Ronald G. Asch and Heinz Duchhardt, eds., Der Absolutismus—Ein Mythos? [Absolutism—A myth?] (Cologne: Böhlau, 1996), and Wilson, Absolutism in Central Europe. 78 Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory, 211.

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which were also constituent actors of legislation with the right to veto bills submitted by the king, even though the position of the Parisian parlement was weakened after 1673! That is why I can just partly agree with the following statements of Blanning concerning France, as I deny there the existence of absolute monarchy in practice; yet, I think his words plausibly characterize the general European pattern: “In practice and theory, at the level of both perception and reality, absolute monarchy was an identifiable phenomenon. What it most certainly was not was omnicompetent or totalitarian.”79 If a sample (not a model) case of absolute monarchy is to be named, that was, no doubt, Denmark from the 1660s! Yet, “relatively few states experienced the sudden change that Denmark underwent in 1660–5,” both as to its government structure and the complete refashioning of its constitutional base, where principles of absolute monarchy were enshrined in Denmark’s public law, in the socalled Royal Law (Kongelov), the fundamental law of the kingdom, in 1665.80 The term absolute monarchy should not imply that governments operated just through their officials/officeholders and governed by fiat, or they made no use of local élites, clientelism, and corporations in achieving their goals. Absolute monarchy did not abolish the backbone of the Ancien Régime, “the autonomous intermediate bodies.” Instead, “the absolute ruler established its institutions alongside the old corporate order,” and even Denmark was not an exception to it: the machinery of absolute monarchy “operated within the given traditional framework.”81 Absolute monarchy in practice is best understood as the increasing control of the royal government over the ruler’s territories without consulting the various assemblies of estates in taxation and legislation. Yet, corporations remained essential under the absolute monarchy, and even Bodin saw them as integral part of the political structure. These are the main categories in currency for the description of early modern European state-building. In the following survey, I attempt to ponder which one of these terms suits for the interpretation of Russian history between 1462 and 1725, as in one form or another they were applied to Russia. My purpose, however, is not to squeeze Russia into them but to show whether Russia can be seen on a European continuum. The overview, by no means a political history of the time span, is divided into two parts, the mid-seventeenth century marking an internal division: from that time on some parallels with European trends of state-building are clearly traceable. 79 Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory, 217. 80 Bonney, The European Dynastic States, 358–359. 81 Gerhard, Old Europe, 125–126, 132.

CHAPTER 2

Territoriality, the Name, and the Nature of the Polity: From the Principality of Moscow to the Russian Empire

2.1. Developments from ca. 1300 to the Mid-Seventeenth Century What was the nature of the link between Kievan Rus′ (which ceased to exist after 1240) and the Principality of Moscow (established around the turn of the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, long after the loose power structure of the Rus′ had been dissolved), on the one hand, and between the Principality of Moscow and Muscovite Russia (dated from 1462 onwards), on the other? When can we begin to speak of genuine Russian history? These questions cannot be answered without a short introduction into the issues identified in the title of this chapter: territoriality, the name, and the nature of the polity. When around 1300 the territory with its center in Moscow became an udel, that is, a separate principality with the right to be bequeathed to an heir, it was roughly 47 000 square kilometers but it grew to 430 000 by 1462 (a little smaller than the size of France at that time), when Ivan III inherited the throne of Moscow. The process that chronicles called the “gathering of the Russian lands” by Moscow princes—who by the grace of the Tatar khans1 also held the title

1 It is curious that Muscovite princes did not even use the Dei gratia equivalent, Bozheiu milostiiu, in their titulatory until 1449. This practice was adopted due to diplomatic correspondence with Poland.

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“Grand Prince of Vladimir” from 1328 on—accelerated after 1462, and eventually gave rise to Muscovite Russia or the Russian Tsardom (officially so-called from 1547), which grew out of the Principality of Moscow by the mid-sixteenth century as a consequence of territorial expansion. The territories comprised 1.700 thousand square kilometers on Ivan III’s death in 1505, and 2.500 000 square kilometers in 1533.2 After the conquest of Kazan′ (1552) and Astrakhan′ (1556) Khanates, in the 1560s Ivan IV (1533–1584) ruled a gigantic but thinly populated territory, inhabited by only 6–6.5 million people.3 The process outlined here was not, however, simply growth of territory, “because the expansion itself occurred as the result of a significant refashioning and implementation of internal policies by the grand princes and ruling elite.”4 Donald Ostrowsky encapsulated the essence of the change as follows: “These policies transformed Muscovy from a loosely organized confederation, roughly equivalent in structure to any of the neighbouring steppe khanates, into a monarch-in-council form of government”5 with a nascent bureaucratic structure, which had to cope with the administration of the enlarged territory.6 He compared these developments to those occurring in contemporary Western European monarchies, and called Muscovy a “dynastic state.”7 Likewise, Matthew P. Romaniello, referring to parallel developments in Western Christendom, plainly asserted: “The state assembled by Ivan III could best be described as a ‘composite monarchy,’” adding that it was this “composite state” that Ivan IV inherited in 1533.8 However, I will argue that the use of these terms is misleading for Russian history as they refer to a specific phase in the history

2 The most important acquisitions were Yaroslavl′ (1471), Perm′ (1472), Rostov (1473), Novgorod (1478), Tver′ (the ancient rival of Moscow; its 1485 conquest resulted in the adoption of the title Gospodar′ vseia Rusi, “Master of All Rus′,” in 1486), Viatka (1489), Pskov (1510), Smolensk (1514), and Riazan′ (1521). Of them, Novogord was by far the most important in material terms. The annexation of Novgorod alone more than doubled the size of Muscovite territory and provided the basis for creating a military service and landholding class, which became the foundation of Muscovite military potential. Donald Ostrowsky, “The Growth of Muscovy (1462–1533),” in The Cambridge History of Russia, ed. Maureen Perrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), vol. 1, 213. 3 Robert Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy 1304–1613 (London: Longman, 1987), 3. 4 Ostrowsky, “The Growth of Muscovy (1462–1533),” 213. 5 Ibid. Although Ostrowsky’s chapter deals with the period between 1462 and 1533, his statement is plausible regarding the reign of Ivan IV too. 6 The izba system, the first structure of organs of central government, created under Ivan III, later developed into the so-called prikaz (“chancellery”) system under Ivan IV in the 1540s–1560s. 7 Ostrowsky, “The Growth of Muscovy (1462–1533),” 213. 8 Romaniello, Elusive Empire, 23.

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of state-building in Western Europe and cannot serve as relevant analogies for contemporary Muscovy. Closely related to the process of expansion and the developments in the field of administration is the appearance of the term Russiia/Rossiia itself in historical sources of the sixteenth century to denote the territorial complex ruled by the Muscovite princes. Also important is the existence of alternative designations such as Moskovskoe gosudarstvo (“Muscovite realm”), that is, Muscovy or Moscovia as the country came to be called in Latin sources. What kind of considerations justify choosing 1462 as a starting point for the present analysis, which aims to study not the reality but the notions of power and state in Russia? The potential for territorial expansion and the forging of the “monarch-in-council form of government” already existed in the late 1440s and the 1450s. At Ivan III’s accession in 1462, he became the first Muscovite ruler who did not ask the Tatars to recognize his rule by granting a iarlyk (charter), which had been customary for his predecessors. Furthermore, according to some authors, Ivan’s father, Vasilii II (1425–1462) made Ivan grand prince and heir in 1448 (or early 1449) without the approval of the Tatar khan when he was merely eight years old.9 This unprecedented step suggests that the age-old external dependence of the Moscow princes on the Tatars came to an end around the mid-fifteenth century (if you like, “external sovereignty” was achieved in practice), even though it was not yet reflected in Muscovite coinage, as coins continued to bear the name of the khan until 1480. Furthermore, the Russian Church in 1448 became a de facto autocephalous church due to the breach with the patriarch of Constantinople, which occurred because Vasilii II did not accept the union of Western and Eastern Churches concluded at the Council of Florence in 1439. This de facto autocephalous status was to become permanent after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453.10 9 Gustave Alef, The Origins of Muscovite Autocracy (Berlin: Osteuropa-Institut, 1986), 42. 10 There is some evidence that before 1453 Vasilii II did not consider the breach with the patriarch of Constantinople as final. However, the fall of Constantinople drastically altered the political realities, first of all, the status of the Muscovite ruler who came to be regarded by the Russian Church as the successor of the Byzantine Emperor. V. V. Shaposhnik, “Tserkov′, gosudarstvo, obshchestvo v XV–XVI vv.” [Church, state, society in the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries], in Russkoe pravoslavie: Ot kreshcheniia do patriarshestva [Russian Orthodoxy: From conversion to patriarchate] (St. Petersburg: Sankt-Peterburgskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2012), 243–244. By the late sixteenth century many Orthodox Christians living in the Balkans shared this view, which is recorded even by Western travellers. When the title tsar′, officially taken by Ivan in 1547, was recognized by the patriarch of Constantinople in 1561, this act amounted to a quasi-official upgrading of the Muscovite ruler to the place held by the former Byzantine Emperors. The de iure recognition of the autocephalous status of the Russian Orthodox Church by Constantinople was to come soon: although it happened under

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These important events of the year 1448 happened in the midst of a dynastic war within the Muscovite ruling house (intermittent between 1425 and 1453 but culminating between 1446 and 1448), which centered around the succession to the throne. The abovementioned internal and external events inexorably influenced one another, and had the cumulative result that by 1462 the grand prince emerged as the sole decision maker with regard to succession, which reflected the shifting power relations within the Muscovite ruling dynasty.11 This increased power of the grand prince was tangible regarding the treatment of the territories and rights of the apanage princes of the Muscovite ruling dynasty. The importance of the appanages cannot be neglected but it would be equally wrong to overestimate it.12 Although it was the grand princes who created the new appanages for their sons, they had to respect the appanages of older creation, that is, the ones belonging to more distant relatives in the dynasty.13 The princes of the latter type of appanages had their own army, taxed the population within their territory, they could transmit their appanages to their heirs, and even had a share in making decisions with the grand prince on matters of war and peace.14 Although Vasilii II did not abolish the apanage system, as he created new ones for his sons, he placed the system on a new footing: the heredity of older appanages was terminated and only one apanage of this type survived until the end of his reign, the one whose prince was always on Vasilii’s side during the dynastic war.15 But even this prince had to acknowledge that in rank he was inferior to Vasilii’s sons.16 Among the newly created appanages the future grand prince, Ivan III, received by far the largest share of, acquiring more than half of Muscovy’s territory with the most populated and strategically important areas, while Ivan’s brothers got smaller and smaller shares in accordance with the genealogical order of descent.17 And Vasilii even seems to have banned the minting of money in the appanages of Ivan’s brothers.18

pressure, it was achieved in 1589 when the metropolitan of Moscow was given the rank of a patriarch by the patriarch of Constantinople who was detained in Moscow until the document was signed. 11 Alef, Origins, 48–51. 12 Crummey, Formation, 112. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Alef, Origins, 52. 18 Ibid.

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To sum up: at his accession in 1462 Ivan III had a position that was unparalleled in the history of the principality.19 Not only was the grip of the grand prince over the boyars and the appanage princes of the dynasty strengthened considerably but also his position vis-à-vis external powers (the Tatars and the patriarch of Constantinople) had changed significantly.20 With regard to the Tatars even the last remnants of the khan’s suzerainty were cast off after 1480, when the khan, facing Ivan III’s army, retreated from the Ugra River without a major clash. The most evident consequence of this symbolic turning point in Muscovite-Tatar relations was the change in the inscription on Muscovite coinage: Ivan III replaced the name of the khan with his own name on the reverse of his coins, although in Arabic characters (Iban).21 By that time, his efforts in marriage diplomacy had also succeeded brilliantly: he significantly upgraded the prestige of his dynasty by marrying the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, Sophia Paleologos, in 1472. The time had come to make use of these developments ideologically. “The Moscow-based power center was in need of creating its own legitimacy, especially after 1462. This was accomplished through the idea of the Kievan heritage, but the only real foundation of this idea was simply the descent of the Muscovite ruling dynasty.”22 It could not be otherwise, as no territorialinstitutional continuity existed with the Kievan past: in other words, the Principality of Moscow—unlike the Principality of Vladimir or Novgorod— had no Kievan antecedent. This state of affairs, however, did not prevent the emergence of a dynasty-based ideology, that is, a dynastic narrative of continuity going back to Kievan times, and even further, into the realm of legendary descent from the non-existent brother of the Roman Emperor Augustus, called Prus—a story expounded in the “Tale of the Vladimir Princes” in the early sixteenth century. This literary source became “a central—perhaps the central—narrative of mid-sixteenth-century” Muscovite ideology of power,23 which was followed by the grandiose “Book of Degrees” in the 1560s. “All Muscovite political ideology developed after Byzantium’s fall, roughly, in the

19 Ibid., 40–41. 20 Ibid., 40. 21 István Vásáry, “The Tatar Factor in the Formation of Muscovy’s Political Culture,” in Nomads as Agents of Cultural Change. The Mongols and Their Eurasian Predecessors, ed. Reuven Amitai and Michal Biran (Honolulu: University of Hawa’ii Press, 2015), 259. 22 Márta Font and Endre Sashalmi, Állam, hatalom, ideológia. Tanulmányok az orosz történelem sajátosságairól [State, power, and ideology. Studies on the peculiarity of the Russian history] (Budapest: Russica Pannonica, 2007), 137. 23 Franklin, Russian Graphosphere, 175.

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first half of the sixteenth century.”24 This ideology was mainly forged under Ivan III (1462–1505) and his son, Vasilii III (1505–1533), culminating in Ivan IV’s coronation as tsar in 1547, the justification of which (the coronation ordo) included a reference to Ivan’s abovementioned descent. And the ideology that crystallized in the decades around the mid-sixteenth century “presented the Byzantine notion of the emperor-dominated realm as the Kingdom of Christ on Earth.”25 This ideology, as we shall see later, did not contain even the slightest hint of an embryonic notion of the state; still, the territorial expansion and the parallel reshaping of the administration (the “monarch-in-council form of government”) were gradually reflected in the titles of Muscovite princes. From 1486 the title Gospodar′ vseia Rusi, “Master of All Rus′,” in the titulatory of the Muscovite ruler made clear the new pretensions of Ivan III: to be the master over the whole territory that once had comprised Kievan Rus′. Its first occurrence, in diplomatic correspondence with Lithuania in 1493, asserted “that the Orthodox Rurikids, not the Catholic Jagiellons, were the true inheritors of the political traditions of Kievan Rus′.”26 The Latinized version of the title Gospodar′ vseia Rusi, the Dominus totius Russiae, known to Muscovites from diplomatic correspondence with countries of Latin Christendom, resulted in the appearance of the term Russiia/Rossiia,27 which eventually replaced Rus′ in the official titulatory in the seventeenth century. The change from Rus′ to Rossiia, on the one hand, and the adoption of the title tsar′, on the other (1547), led to the emergence of a new name for the polity, Rossiiskoe tsarstvo (Russian Tsardom), reflecting the new status of its ruler.28 By the early seventeenth century, the most widespread term used for the lands ruled by the tsars as a synonym of Rossiia, except in the official titulatory, was Moskovskoe gosudarstvo, which had already been used widely in the second half of the sixteenth century. In the mid-seventeenth century the 1649 Law Code (Ulozhenie) issued by Tsar Aleksei (1645–1676) provides a clear example of the coexistence of different designations. In the Law Code the official short titulatory in the preamble

24 Ihor Ševčenko, “Byzantium and the Eastern Slavs after 1453,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 2, no. 1 (March 1978): 5. 25 Flier, “Political Ideas and Rituals,” 389. 26 Robert I. Frost, The Oxford History of Poland-Lithuania: The Making of the Polish-Lithuanian Union 1385–1569, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 285. 27 Rossiia probably made its appearance due to Greek influence. 28 Mikhail Nikolaevich Tikhomirov, Rossiiskoe gosudarstvo XV–XVII vekov [The Russian state from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries] (Moscow: Nauka, 1973), 14–17.

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referring to the act and the purpose of codification is as follows: Gosudar′, Tsar′, Aleksei Mikhailovich Velikii Kniaz′, vseia Russii Samoderzhets (“Master, Tsar, Aleksei Mikhailovich Grand Prince, Autocrat of All Russia”). But in the text of the Law Code the term Moskovskoe gosudarstvo is used instead of Russiia, even in the par excellence section dealing with the polity, that is, chapter 2, which defined political crime!29 The full titulatory of the Muscovite rulers, of course, was much longer than that reflecting the incorporation of various territories: “Like their Western counterparts, the Muscovite tsars retained the long list of formerly independent Rus′ principalities in their title even after Ivan’s coronation as tsar of Russia in 1547. As the realm grew, the Muscovite tsars meticulously reproduced the emblems of the annexed territories on their seals.”30 Russia, already having a gigantic territory even before the conquest of Kazan′ and Astrakhan′, expanded enormously throughout the seventeenth century, as the conquest of Kazan′ opened up the expansion to Siberia beginning from the early 1580s—in its significance this latter phenomenon can only be compared to the colonization of the New World. As a result, Russia’s territory reached 5.4 million square kilometers as early as 1600, and it rose to 16 million square kilometers by 1721. Although territorial acquisitions in the west were also important because of their military and economic potential—Little Russia (part of today’s Ukraine) in 1654, White Russia (part of today’s Belarus) in 1656, and Livonia (today’s Estonia and Latvia) in the Baltic in 1721—however, as for their size, they were no match compared to the eastward expansion. During the early seventeenth century, the terms Rossiia, Rossiiskoe Tsarstvo, and Moskovskoe gosudarstvo denoted the conglomeration of territories ruled by the tsars, similarly to Rossiiskoe gosudarstvo (“Russian realm”) or Vserossiiskoe gosudarstvo (“All-Russian realm”).31 Yet, the notion of the state in the sense “as something defined by an integral territorial space” was still undeveloped.32 The long list of territories in the titulatory of the ruler “were only beginning to be united under a single territorial definition,” and towards the end of the seventeenth century the terms just mentioned “were used either interchangeably with or simply replaced the older term Moskovskoe tsarstvo/gosudarstvo;” among the

29 For an analysis of the Law Code from the angle of the concept of state, see below. 30 Sergei Bogatyrev, “Localism and Integration in Muscovy,” in Russia Takes Shape. Patterns of Integration from the Middle Ages to the Present, ed. Sergei Bogatyrev (Helsinki: Academy of Sciences and Finnish Letters, 2004), 59. 31 Tikhomirov, Rossiiskoe gosudarstvo, 14, 16. 32 Williard Sunderland, “Imperial Space: Territorial Thought and Practice in the Eighteenth Century,” in Russian Empire: Space, People, Power 1700–1930, ed. Jane Burbank, Mark Von Hagen, and Anatolyi Remnev (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 35.

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abovementioned variants probably Rossiiskoe gosudarstvo had “a more comprehensive territorial-imperial meaning than Moskovskoe gosudarstvo,” as the former term also referred to the three conquered khanates (called tsardoms) of Kazan′, Astrakhan′, and Siberia.33 Despite the long list of territories in the titles of Muscovite rulers, Muscovite Russia did not become a “composite-dynastic state” or, in other words, a “mosaic(-like) dynastic state” where the particular interests of the various territories comprising the polity were more important than the interest of the whole. I completely agree with Mikhail Krom’s criticism of Romaniello’s book regarding the use of the term “composite state” mentioned before. Krom remarks that, unlike Western kings, “Muscovite rulers never tolerated any kind of local autonomy in the sense of self-government, representative bodies, etc.,” adding that “all the conquered lands, be it Great Novgorod or Kazan′, found themselves under the direct rule of the tsar, whose power in the region was delegated to a governor [voevoda].”34 Recently, Alexandr Filiushkin also expressed the view that Muscovite Russia did not become a “composite state.” In his article, he pointed out some factors hindering this development, such as the weakness of local institutions of the principalities swallowed by Muscovite rulers; the Muscovite attitude to ignore local traditions and rights and impose uniformity; “shared Orthodox faith, common culture and language;” and last, but not least, “the absence of natural borders.”35 Indeed, the listing of titles by Muscovite rulers, with some exceptions, such as the case of “Little Russia” after 1654 did not reflect a similar legal and institutional diversity and a corresponding complexity of limiting the royal power that was characteristic of Western compositedynastic states—it was this diversity that gave the Western early modern state its mosaic-like character. It is here that very briefly the scheme of Mikhail Krom’s recent book on Russian state-building has to be pondered, although without giving a detailed criticism of his argument, as it would eo ipso change the focus of this sub­ chapter.36 One of the methodological problems with Krom’s approach—which, no doubt, deserves attention because of its attempt to include comparisons with

33 Sunderland, “Imperial Space,” 56, en. 11. 34 Mikhail Krom, “Matthew P. Romaniello: Elusive Empire,” Cahiers du Monde Russe 53, no. 4 (2012): 623–624. 35 Aleksandr Ivanovich Filiushkin, “Why Did Russia not Become a Composite State?,” Russian History 47, no. 3 (2020): 201–223. 36 As Charles Halperin noted, Krom used both Russkoe gosudarstvo and Rossiiskoe gosudarstvo “indiscriminately,” stating that “Krom does not apparently assign distinctive meanings to each term.” Halperin, “The Early Modern Muscovite State Reconsidered,” 189.

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European state-formation—besides the terminological-conceptual issues, on which I commented before, is that it is not quite clear when he refers to the reality of the Russian state and when to the concept of the state, admitting that it is difficult to make such a distinction on many occasions because of the mutual relationship between the idea and the reality of the state. Krom presented Russian state-building of the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries (in fact until 1613) in the following manner. In 1425 the Principality of Muscovy did not qualify as a state by Strayer’s criteria: it was dependent on the Tatars, and the prince lacked not only external but also internal sovereignty. He underlines, and rightly does so, the importance of the dynastic wars of the 1430s–1440s in strengthening the grip of the grand prince not only over the apanage princes of Muscovy and the independent principality of Novgorod (1456) but also the church, with the establishment of its de facto autocephalous status forced out by the need of its support of Vasilii II in the civil war. Between 1462 and 1533 Muscovy, in Krom’s view, became a patrimonial state through the incorporation of various principalities with increasing concern of territoriality regarding Muscovy’s Western borders, and sovereignty was achieved both internally and externally. The title of his chapter on Ivan III is plain: “Ivan III: Attainment of State Sovereignty.”37 In the mid-sixteenth century, “Orthodoxy and the unlimited power of the tsar (who ideally listens to his ‘father’-metropolitan and the ‘good counsellors’) were the two pillars on which the Russian state [Rossiiskoe gosudarstvo] was built, which gradually grew out the framework of tsarist patrimony [votchina].”38 The next crucial phase came in the 1540s–1560s with further developments in administration (chancellery system), on the one hand, and the appearance of the notion of the public sphere, on the other. Krom stated that “the common good” was the concept “that no early modern state could dispense with,” and he saw the clear emergence of the common good in the widespread use of the term delo gosudarevo i zemskoe (“affair of the gosudar′ and the land”) in the mid-sixteenth century, remarking that the phrase became a topos adopted even by chroniclers.39 Furthermore, he linked the spread of the term to the calling of the first “assemblies of the land,” and in his view these phenomena “were two sides of the same process—the formation of the sphere of public policy”40—a bold statement with regard to a polity where the concepts 37 This title and his subsequent statements are strange enough in the light of this sentence: “In the age of Ivan III the concept of sovereignty did not exist either in the West or in Russia. It was Bodin who worked it out.” Krom, Rozhdenie gosudarstva, 75. 38 Ibid., 206. 39 Ibid., 213. 40 Ibid., 215.

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of public law and private law did not exist. In conclusion to this issue: “the formation of the sphere of public policy” reflected for him the “transition of the patrimonial monarchy (of tsarist patrimony) to the early modern state.”41 A further phase of the development of the concept of the common good he dated to the interregnum period (1610–1613) of the smuta (1598–1613) when decrees were issued in the name “of the whole land” (vsei zemli), and official documents spoke of “affairs of the land and other affairs.”42 His final conclusion reads: “The Russian state in the years of severe hardship became a fact of social consciousness and the basis of identity for many individuals and groups. With this one more step was made on the way from the patrimonial to the early modern state.”43

2.2. The Roots and the Development of Muscovite Autocracy What Donald Ostrowsky termed a “significant refashioning and implementation of internal policies by the grand princes and ruling elite”44 between 1462 and 1533, in fact, was the development of an autocratic power structure in Muscovy. What happened under Ivan III and Vasilii III was not just merely the “gathering of lands,” but rather the “gathering of power,” and this process “occurred upon decisively different intellectual foundations” than in the contemporary West45—a succinct characterization to which I must add the difference of institutional foundations.46 The organizing principle of “gathering of power” over other principalities was, in essence, the extension of patriarchal power—treating them as votchinas, that is, hereditary properties—as opposed to public power, for the latter concept was unknown to Muscovy.47 Crucial to

41 Ibid., 216. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 231. 44 Ostrowsky, “The Growth of Muscovy (1462–1533),” 213. 45 James W. Warhola, “Revisiting the Russian ‘Constrained Autocracy’: ‘Absolutism’ and Natural Rights Theories in Russia and the West,” in Civil Society and the Search for Justice in Russia, ed. Christopher Marsh and Nikolas K. Gvosdev (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2002), 25, 32. 46 Krom expressed a similar opinion: namely, that not simply the “gathering of lands” but the “gathering of power” took place. And this is the very point where I completely agree with him when he states that to see similarities with contemporary Western state-formation regarding the growth of royal power in Muscovy “will rather confuse than clarify the issue.” Krom, Rozhdenie gosudarstva, 20. 47 Warhola, “Revisiting the Russian ‘Constrained Autocracy,’” 25–30.

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this process of “gathering of power” was the support of the Russian Orthodox Church, which implied that Muscovite rulership “had an explicitly religious referent that did not include a discourse on natural law” or the rights of the subjects, and consequently ideas of popular sovereignty or the notion of impersonal rights of rulership.48 This autocratic power structure and its religious underpinning was described by Sigismund von Herberstein, an envoy of the Holy Roman Emperor to Vasilii III, in the following manner: In the sway which he holds over his people, he surpasses all monarchs of the whole world. … He uses his authority as much over ecclesiastics or laymen, and holds unlimited control over the lives and property of all his subjects; not one of his counsellors has sufficient authority to dare to oppose him, or even differ from him, on any subject. They openly confess that the will of the prince is the will of God, and whatever the prince does he does it by the will of God. …49 No doubt, it was an exaggeration that should not be accepted without reservation, yet what is written in the relation between the tsar and God deserves special attention, as it was echoed in later descriptions of Muscovy by Westerners. Gustave Alef, exploring “the origins of autocracy” in his pioneering work, claimed that its roots could be discerned under the rule of Vasilii II (1425– 1462) but its development took place under his two successors, his son and grandson.50 Ivan III and Vasilii III, indeed, “made major contributions to the institutional development of the Muscovite monarchy,” which concerned the administration of the much enlarged territory (the challenge of the “transition from household management to state administration”),51 and the way of dealing “with the ruling élite of the annexed territories.”52 The main question was how to integrate the annexed territories and their élites: the solution was that the local élites were “absorbed into the grand prince’s court,” so they had moved (or had

48 Ibid., 29–30. 49 Sigmund von Herberstein, Description of Moscow and Muscovy, ed. Bertold Picard, trans. J. B. C. Grundy (London: Dent, 1968), 30, 32. 50 Alef, Origins, 9–11, 17. 51 Crummey, Formation, 105. 52 Ibid., 101.

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been moved) from their original power base, and “the distinct legal and political traditions of the annexed areas” were liquidated.53 One factor in the origins of autocracy was, no doubt, the paramount importance attributed to the principle of service, which accompanied the history of Russia throughout the whole period covered in this book, and even well afterwards. Until 1762, when the nobility was exempted from compulsory service, every member of the society was expected to serve the tsar (from Peter, nominally the state).54 Everyone had to serve the ruler, and to an extent that was unknown in Western Christendom.55 Moreover, this mobilizing principle was applied during early Muscovite history in a power structure that was mostly akin to early medieval monarchies56: that is, the kingdom was seen as a patrimony, and often divided among the members of the ruling dynasty (a practice coming to an end under Vasilii III in Muscovy), and the so-called official corps intermédiaires had not yet developed. This was the case of fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury Muscovy. In Muscovy neither the practice nor the theory of the corporation (the concept of legal person called mostly universitas or communitas), which could counterbalance the patrimonial view, were present. And the system regulating the holding of positions by the ruling élite in the Muscovite army and the nascent administration, based on the combination of service and descent, that is, mestnichestvo—coming to its own under the reign of Ivan III and Vasilii III and being the consequence of the absorption of the ruling élites of the annexed territories to the Muscovite court—“worked to atomize” the boyar élite of Muscovite clans, and hindered the development of any corporate solidarity.57 As the system “kept the elite in a constant state of watchfulness and rivalry,” and the families and individuals belonging to the elite therefore linked themselves not to each other but to the grand prince, who was in charge of disposing positions,

53 Ibid., 101–107. Smolensk was a notable exception: it was allowed to keep its privileges after its conquest in 1514. Krom, Rozhdenie gosudarstva, 85. 54 Janet Hartley, A Social History of the Russian Empire 1650–1825 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 6. 55 Chester L. Dunning, Russia’s First Civil War. The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty (University Park: ennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 20. 56 David M. Goldfrank, “Paradoxes(?) of Seventeenth-Century Muscovy,” in Von Moskau nach St. Petersburg: Das Russische Reich im 17. Jahrhundert [From Moscow to St. Petersburg. The Russian Empire in the seventeenth century], ed. Hans-Joachim Torke (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000), 157. 57 Ann Kleimola, “The Changing Face of the Muscovite Aristocracy. The Sixteenth-Century Sources of Weakness,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas (Neue Folge) 25, no. 4 (1977): 482–485, Ann Kleimola, “Muscovy Redux,” Russian History 4, no. 1 (1977): 26.

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mestnichestvo strengthened the importance of vertical ties of dependence,58 instead of the formation of horizontal structures, characteristic of corporate organizations and social estates. Under these circumstances, in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Muscovy— and arguably even after the abolition of mestnichestvo in 1682—the principle of service held a place similar in its importance to the role that the idea of libertates (the rights comprising the basis of corporations and the social and political estates) played in Western Christendom. In the last resort, it is not important where the principle of service was derived from: either as the result of foreign cultural influence (taken over from the Tatars or Byzantium), or due to indigenous circumstances, namely, the scarcity of material resources and manpower in Muscovy. The amorphous nature of the society, in the sense of absent social estates and corporations, and the corresponding legal-political thinking buttressing them, together with the dependence of the church on the grand princes to an extent unknown in the Catholic world, led to the concentration of grand princely power by the early sixteenth century as described by Herberstein. That is why we should not give preponderance either to the Tatars or Byzantium, but rather look for the genuine roots of autocracy in the local socio-economic matrix,59 which nevertheless existed under the umbrella of Tatar overlordship. In an illuminating article summarizing research on the topic, the essence of which can be encapsulated in the phrase “Russia’s Debt to the Mongols”—to use Horace Dewey’s wording who, together with Ann Kleimola, did pioneering research in this field60—István Vásáry proposed to use the term “factor” for the interpretation of the “Tatar problem.” One may deny or minimize the significance or weight of these contacts for one side or the other, but the fact itself must be reckoned with. Within this framework, the connotation of the term “factor” is both narrower and broader than that of “influence”. Narrower in the sense that it does not speak of effects (in

58 Kleimola, “Muscovy Redux,” 26. 59 Hans-Joachim Torke, “Staat und Gesellschaft in Rußland im 17. Jahrhundert als Problem der europäischen Geschichte” [State and society in seventeenth-century Russia as a problem of European history], in Handbuch der Geschichte Rußlands 1613–1856. Vom Randstaat zur Hegemonialmacht [Handbook of Russian history 1613–1856: From a marginal state to a hegemonic power], vol. 2, ed. Klaus Zernack and Gottfried Schramm (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1986), 202. 60 Horace W. Dewey and Ann M. Kleimola, “Suretyship and Collective Responsibility in Pre-Petrine Russia,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 18, no. 3 (1970): 337–354.

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contrast to influence), and broader in that its presence is beyond doubt (unlike that of influence).61 In collective suretyship and responsibility, the ceremony of prostration in front of the ruler, the universal service rendered to the ruler, and so forth, “the Tatar model promoted, buttressed, or simply underscored certain features of native Russian institutions.”62 Similar is the case when we take the argument of Trepavlov concerning the importance of epithets/titles such as belyi tsar′ (white tsar) vol′nyi tsar′ (free tsar), vol′nyi chelovek (free man). From the end of the fifteenth century, when in principle Muscovy ceased to be the tributary of Tatars, and achieved independence, the epithet belyi tsar′, almost like a title, came to be used for/by the Muscovite rulers.63 The origin of the term may have been in the Mongol world and was used in the sense of highest, that is, independent ruler.64 Likewise, the term vol′nyi tsar′, later vol′nyi chelovek, functioned “as a kind of unofficial title” with the meaning similar to the belyi tsar′, but later it also acquired a meaning in relation to the governed: namely, the tsar had full power over them to reward and punish.65 Trepavlov concludes that, in both cases, “despite the evident ‘eastern’ influence, we cannot conclusively relate” the terms “to Tatar or other foreign borrowings,” as there “was a soil in genuine Russian culture” for their emergence.66 As for the allegedly Byzantine origins of Muscovite autocracy, the question again can be seen from the perspective similar to the Tatar factor. The adoption of certain titles (gospodar′, tsar′), the use of literary sources of Byzantine ideology, the adoption of symbols of power (the use of the two-headed eagle on the grand princely seal,67 the Monomakh regalia68) or Ivan III’s

61 Vásáry, “The Tatar Factor in the Formation of Muscovy’s Political Culture,” 254. 62 Ibid., 260. 63 Trepavlov, “Belyi tsar′,” 48. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 48–49. 66 Ibid., 51. 67 In fact, the two-headed eagle came to be used by Ivan III only after he had seen it on the seal of the Habsburgs in 1489, in the course of his diplomatic correspondence with Emperor Maximilian I, and originally its use was restricted to diplomatic relations between Ivan and the emperor. On this issue see Gustave Alef, “The Adoption of the Muscovite Two-Headed Eagle: A Discordant View,” Speculum, A Journal of Mediaeval Studies 41, no. 1 ( January 1966): 1–21. 68 Among them is the Monomakh cap, a typical symbol of rulership of the Mongol-Turkic peoples of the steppe, which was “christened” by its attribution to the Byzantine emperors and by putting the cross on its top, although the cross might have been a seventeenth-century addition. On this issue see Sergei Bogatyrev, “Shapka Monomakha i shlem naslednika. Reprezentatsiia vlasti i dinasticheskaia politika pri Vasilii III i Ivane Groznom” [The Monomakh cap and the

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marriage to the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, in other words, the emphasis on the Byzantine heritage were all important, but not as causes of autocratic power. Rather, these were means of legitimating and broadcasting the de facto power position of the grand prince. With regard to internal factors, the main pillar buttressing grand princely power was, no doubt, the Russian Church. One of its main contributions to the growth of Muscovy was that the church preserved the idea of unity in the midst of political fragmentation.69 Furthermore, the church greatly influenced the attitude to service. One of the most important phenomena with regard to service, from the fifteenth century onwards, “was the gradual loss of the boyars’ age-old right to free departure.”70 Everyone under the rule of the Moscow princes had to serve solely the Muscovite prince, and those who went over to the service of other princes of the former Rus′ lands, were treated as traitors by the church, which increasingly came under the domination of the Muscovite princes. Those who changed their master in the service were compared by some clerics to Judas (!) as early as the fifteenth century.71 Later on, the church served as the force “legitimating from inside the power monopoly” of Muscovite princes72— as did monk Joseph of Volokolamsk in the early sixteenth century (he stated that the Muscovite grand prince “was the master of all masters of the Russian land”), or metropolitan Makarii who crowned Ivan IV tsar in 1547. Whatever the origins of the principle of universal service, it was deeply grounded in religion in the period under consideration. In the sixteenth century service of the ruler was conceived as service rendered to God,73 as “God and

heir’s helmet. The representation of authority and the dynastic policy under Vasily III and Ivan the Terrible], Studia Slavica et Balcanica Petropolitana 9, no. 1 (2011) 171–200. 69 Emil Niederhauser, Kelet-Európa története [History of Eastern Europe] (Budapest: MTA Történettudományi Intézete, 2001), 67. 70 Vásáry, “The Tatar Factor in the Formation of Muscovy’s Political Culture,” 260. 71 Sergei Mikhailovich D′iakonov, Vlast′ moskovskikh gosudarei: Ocherki iz istorii politicheskikh idei Drevnei Rusi do kontsa XVI veka [The power of Muscovite rulers: Studies on the history of political ideas of Old Rus′ until the end of the sixteenth century] (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia I. N. Skorokhodova, 1910), 266. Yet, even under Ivan IV there were exceptions to this rule. 72 Ekkehard Klug, “Wie entstand und was war die Moskauer Autokratie?” [How did the Muscovite autocracy emerge and what was it?], in Zwischen Christianisierung und Europäisierung. Beiträge zur Geschichte Osteuropas in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit [Between Christianization and Europeanization. Contributions on medieval and early modern Eastern European history], ed. Eckhard Hübner, Ekkehard Klug, and Jan Kusber (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1998), 100. 73 Boris Andreevich Mironov, Sotsial′naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii (XVIII–nachalo XX v.) [Social history of Russia in the imperial period (from the eighteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century)] (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1999), vol. 2, 117; Marshall T. Poe,

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tsar stood together” at the pinnacle of existing order.74 Therefore, submission and servitude were praised virtues for Russians.75 This mentality was called by Marshall Poe the “cultural mythology of submission,” which he contrasted with the “cultural mythology of liberty” in Western Christendom.76 The church of the former Rus′ territories could and did exert an influence on political affairs, hence on the Muscovite princes as well, especially during the dynastic struggle of 1425–1453 when the support of the grand prince by the metropolitans was decisive. But the metropolitans were able to exert their influence, as it were, from inside, and not as the main representative of an institution independent of the grand prince. Dependence of the church was facilitated not only by the lack of “two powers theory” but also practical circumstances: the sheer fact that the leader of the church, the metropolitan, had his seat in the capital, Moscow (continuously from 1328 onwards)—a phenomenon known from Byzantium but unusual in royal monarchies of Western Christendom. The dependence of the metropolitans entered a new phase after 1448 when they were no longer confirmed or appointed by the patriarch of Constantinople. In other words, they were not subject to a higher external jurisdiction. This position, which can be called a de facto autocephalous status of the Russian Church, had an ambivalent impact: the freedom from the jurisdiction of the patriarch of Constantinople, in fact, had the result that the metropolitan residing in Moscow became even more dependent on the grand prince, as there remained no external power to counterbalance princely encroachments in church affairs.77 The metropolitans’ position was further weakened by the territorial expansion of Muscovy: the swallowing of rival principalities (“the gathering of lands”) by Moscow had the consequence that metropolitans could no longer maneouvre among the princes playing them out against each other.78 The dependence of the church on the ruler, however, had roots that went deeper. It was embedded in the Byzantine idea of “symphony,” which was clearly distinct from the so-called “two powers theory” meaning the separation of lay and spiritual powers—a doctrine so vital to Western Christianity after the Gregorian reform of the late eleventh century. This idea would only emerge in

“A People Born to Slavery”. Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography 1476–1748 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 218–219. 74 Valerie A. Kivelson, Autocracy in the Provinces. The Muscovite Gentry and Political Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 11. 75 Poe, “People Born to Slavery,” 218–219. 76 Ibid., 216–217. 77 Klug, “Wie entstand und was war die Moskauer Autokratie?,” 99. 78 Ibid.

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Russia in the mid-seventeenth century, when the conflict between patriarch Nikon and Tsar Aleksei came to its climax.79 And the hierocratic interpretation of the “two powers theory,” which claimed the supremacy of the chief representative of the sacral sphere over the ruler, as was the case with the Gregorian papacy, was unimaginable in the Orthodox Church.80 The power of Muscovite rulers over the church hierarchy is made plain by Ann Kleimola, who observes that, between 1462 and 1589, out of fourteen acting metropolitans only five served their office to the end: the rest were either deposed or resigned under pressure.81 Unlike the power of Muscovite rulers, the power of Western kings in the late Middle Ages was constrained by “both ideas and institutions” (among them by the Catholic Church, which was independent of secular powers) in the “estatebased state,” characteristic of the late Middle Ages. This means that the ruler’s foremost duty was to serve the common good, which implied that he had to “respect custom, and not legislate arbitrarily,” consult with the representatives of the territory before levying taxes and making important decisions—“and, above all, he had to respect his subjects’ property.”82 The most often quoted lines of Herberstein (the ones I also referred to) were reflections precisely on the lack of these principles and institutional arrangements.

79 Olga Tsapina calls “symphony” “the most famous shortcut for the Byzantine tradition of church–state relations,” embodying “a tendency to build a theory around a single word.” In her view: “The term can denote a harmony or equal partnership of an autonomous church and state or the organic unity of a Christian realm where things ecclesiastical were inseparable from things political as well as describe an implementable policy, inheritable ideology, or an aspirational idea often proclaimed but never realized.” Olga Tsapina, “Was there a Russian Tradition of Church–State Relation?,” 27, accessed April 12, 2020, https://www.academia. edu/41062270/The_1721_Church_Reform_and_Constructing_of_the_Orthodox_ Tradition_of_Church-State_Relations. Except for the use of terms “church” and “state,” I agree with this explanation and second her opinion that there was no “consistent theory of symphonia,” which historians try to cull “from disparate legal, hermeneutical, hagiographical, historical, and literary texts as well as liturgical praxis.” Tsapina, “Was there a Russian Tradition of Church–State Relation?,” 27. It is also necessary to add: as the two spheres, the lay and the spiritual, were not clearly delineated but rather intermingled (therefore they were not truly autonomous), problems arose when the patriarch or most often the emperor crossed a boundary allegedly falling within the range of authority of the other party, as in Russia the conflict between patriarch Nikon and Tsar Aleksei would show. 80 Alef, Origins, 70. 81 Ann Kleimola, “Muscovite Autocracy at Work. The Use of Disgrace as an Instrument of Control,” in Russian Law in Historical and Political Perspective, ed. William E. Butler (Leiden: Sijthoff, 1977), 37. 82 Richard Pipes, Russian Conservatism and Its Critics: A Study in Political Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 7–8.

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In Muscovy the most formidable weapon in exercising such a pervasive power described by Herberstein, was “disgrace,” called opala in Russian: it was used from the fifteenth century onwards by Muscovite rulers for strengthening their power over their subjects, and it was, first of all, the tool of political control.83 This is shown not only by the nature of the cases and their legal consequences for the victims but also by the very etymology of the term opala, meaning “anger”: therefore, disgrace can be seen as the consequences of the ruler’s anger! This etymology, at the same time, reveals the subjectivity and fluidity of the notion of disgrace. A seventeenth-century Russian proverb, “The tsar’s anger [gnev] and grace is in God’s hand,” also gives the same feeling: it reflects the undefined, extralegal character of opala. Not only was the reason of one’s falling into disgrace undefined but equally uncertain was the nature of punishment that disgrace involved, for it was up to the ruler to decide what form the punishment for disgrace should take.84 The consequence of opala could be simply banishment from court, appointment to a non-desirable post, internment.85 It could be, however, much harsher, such as exile, partial or complete confiscation of property, imprisonment, and finally even execution.86 The duration and the termination of disgrace, likewise, was unpredictable as it also depended exclusively on the ruler.87 In Western Christendom the relationship between the rulers and their subjects was seen as contractual, institutionalized in the various territorial assemblies of estates, which eventually led to constitutional arrangements.88 Muscovite Russia, however, so to say, “skipped an important, preparatory phase of state-building,” namely, that of the “corporate order.”89 As the “estate-based state” had its basis in the web of corporations, this phenomenon could not develop in Muscovy. Corporations, as stated before, remained essential under the absolute monarch: “Bodin’s overall position on the structure of the state implies the supremacy of the sovereign, public corporations following at the next level, and private corporations last.”90 Generally speaking, Muscovite princes ruled their lands with ease in political terms, but the practice of governing and implementations of decrees was 83 Kleimola, “Muscovite Autocracy at Work,” 29. 84 Ibid., 35–36. 85 Ibid., 35. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid., 35–36. 88 Pipes, Russian Conservatism and Its Critics, 6, 7. 89 Torke, “Staat und Gesellschaft in Rußland im 17. Jahrhundert als Problem der europäischen Geschichte,” 203. 90 Preston King, The Ideology of Order. The Comparative Analysis of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes (London: Routledge, 2013), 2nd ed., 82.

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another matter.91 As Robert Crummey stated: “the explanation for the monarch’s broad power lies not so much in the efficiency of his government as in the lack of barriers to his exercise of it, for no estates or corporate organizations limited the grand princes’ freedom of action, and no constitutional norms defined their authority.”92 This background described above explains not only the swiftness of strengthening Muscovite grand princely power after 1462 compared to the pace of strengthening of royal power in contemporary “composite-dynastic states,” but also should be the starting point for any comparison. Despite the loosely integrated character of the polity in Muscovite Russia, so characteristic of the “composite-dynastic states,” the idea of “localism” was not comparable to the sense of belonging to a certain pay or land as in the West, where “regionalism and corporate order,” which Dietrich Gerhard called “the basic themes of European history” (that is, of Western Christendom), went hand in hand.93 The absorption of local élites by the court of the ruler blocked the development of these two phenomena: the policy of “gathering the Russian lands” did not tolerate the existence of forms of self-government as practiced by Novgorod and Pskov, which were liquidated after their annexation. It was only in the territories acquired through expansion westward that the Russian government, “centralist and autocratic, was confronted with the task of integrating societies which possessed a corporate organization, different estates and regional traditions.”94 The solution designed to deal with the peoples of the southern steppe and Siberia was different, based on the document known as shert′, taken from the Crimean Tatars, “stipulating conditions of peace and military alliance.”95 The Muscovite government “extended the use of the term to its relations with other steppe peoples” while depriving it of its original meaning by regarding it “as an allegiance sworn by non-Orthodox people” to the tsar: it treated the oaths taken by some leaders of the given nomadic peoples or of various Siberian peoples according to their own customs, as an act of “eternal submission.”96 This was a practical solution, leaving these peoples largely undisturbed in their way of life for long, but with no impact whatsoever on the perception of the tsar’s 91 Crummey, Formation, 101. 92 Ibid. 93 Dietrich Gerhard, “Regionalism and Corporate Order as a Basic Theme of European History,” in Studies in Diplomatic History: Essays in Memory of David Bayne Horn, ed. Matthew S. Anderson (London: Longman, 1970), 159–160, 174–178. 94 Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire. A Multiethnic History, transl. Alfred Clayton (London: Routledge, 2014), 60. 95 Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier. The Making of a Colonial Empire 1500–1800 (Bloomington: Indiana Unversity Press, 2002), 53. 96 Ibid.

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power, as the tsarist government saw its relations with these peoples in terms of its relations with other subjects from the very beginning, and the nonnegotiable character of the shert′ was made increasingly clear to them by the tsarist officials from the early seventeenth century onwards.97 In an answer to a letter sent to the tsar by a Nogai chieftain in 1616, who had addressed the tsar as “his friend,” the clerk bluntly stated: “A servant (kholop) can never be the tsar’s friend.”98 For the “steppe code of conduct was at variance with the principle of patrimony,”99 a principle most clearly surfaced in the negotiations leading to the loss of Novgorod’s autonomy in 1478. It may well be that in the early seventeenth century regional identities existed and embryonic corporate ties developed not only in the peripheries but also in the core regions of Russia, mostly among the military servitors.100 Still, in Russia we find no statements similar to that of Pereira—a statement so characteristic of “composite-dynastic states”—who wrote in 1647: “The kingdoms [of Spain] must be ruled and governed as if the king who holds them all together were king only of each one of them.”101 Muscovite ideology played a crucial role in weakening regional spirit. In Muscovy “localism” or “local autonomy” (if this expression applies) “made sense only within the context” of the larger community: “The image of Russian Orthodox community served a unifying function in Muscovy and in significant measure determined the outlines of Muscovite political culture.”102 The larger community was given priority over regional interests, but, to be sure, this community was not conceived in territorial or institutional but religious terms.

2.3. Mid-Seventeenth-Century Developments and the Issue of Russian Statehood: The Importance of the Era between 1649 and 1725 Despite other claims, I second James Cracraft that Muscovy “had achieved at best a low or early level of modern statehood,” if not by the end of seventeenth

97 Ibid. 98 Ibid. 99 Kappeler, Russian Empire, 23. 100 Kivelson, Autocracy in the Provinces, 9. 101 Quoted by John Miller, Introduction to Absolutism in Seventeenth–Century Europe, ed. John Miller (London: Macmillan, 1990), 1. 102 Kivelson, Autocracy in the Provinces, 4–6. Filiushkin holds the same view, as we could see before, regarding the causes why Muscovy did not become a composite state.

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century as Cracraft stated,103 then, indeed, until the mid-seventeenth century. Cracraft, emphasizing the personal dimension of Tsar Aleksei’s (1645–1676) government on the basis of Grigorii Kotoshikhin’s description of Muscovy in the 1660s (who was a learned secretary in the Foreign Affairs Chancellery) remarked: there was “little formal or institutional definition of the state” that the tsar ruled “as his God-given possession, like a big father and high priest.”104 The marks of statehood were strengthened by Peter the Great,105 both with regard to government rhetoric through the almost obligatory reference to gosudarstvo, as well as his reforms of the institutional structure of the government. I think it useful to select a longer time span for interpreting Russian statebuilding in the period under analysis, and that would be the decades from the 1640s–1650s to 1725, during which Russia became a “fiscal-military state,” mostly due to Peter’s reforms after 1700.106 To what extent Russia became a “modern state” is another question, the answer for which I leave open for the reader to decide, but the marks of modern statehood were clearly in the making from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. Stefan Plaggenborg claims that from the mid-seventeenth century “the Leviathan played a central role” in Russia, referring to the importance of the Law Code of 1649 in shaping society into more clear legal categories, as well as the fiscal-military aspects of the changes, which, in his view, render the use of the label coined by Hans-Joachim Torke, staatsbedingte Gesellschaft (“the stateconditioned society”), highly plausible.107 With regard to the use of law, the scale of the 1649 Law Code, both as to its size and the number of issues it regulated, was unprecedented compared to the 1497 and the 1550 Sudebniki: it was a remarkable act of codification, which reflected the spirit of the Polizeistaat. Regarding territoriality, the construction of the so-called “Belgorod line” in the 1630s and 1640s at the edge of the southern steppe region (the chain of fortified places, which by 1650 consisted of twenty-two forts stretching over 800 kilometers, named after its central fortified settlement) is to be mentioned.108 In the mid-century (1647–1654) it was extended from Kozlov to Simbirsk (the

103 Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture, 146. 104 Ibid., 153. 105 Ibid., 156–158. 106 For this see Endre Sashalmi, “Russia as Fiscal-Military and a Composite Dynastic State,” in State and Nation in Russia and Central East Europe, ed. Gyula Szvák (Budapest: Russica Pannonica, 2009), 132–144. 107 Stefan Plaggenborg, Pravda. Gerechtigkeit, Herrschaft und sakrale Ordnung in Altrussland [Pravda. Justness, rulership, and sacred order in Old Russia] (Munich: Fink, 2018), 257–258. 108 Kollmann, The Russian Empire, 67.

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“Simbirsk line”).109 These massive defense lines, which included “earthen wall segments” as well, were to meet the challenge posed by the constant seasonal threat coming from the nomadic peoples. Their construction required great costs and also imposed the burden of provisioning these garrisons with food supplies: therefore, the first step was to settle colonists there.110 At the same time, these defense lines began to mark a shift from a permeable to a more rigid frontier separating Russia from the steppe region. As the catalyst of long-term changes, the impact of the protracted warfare must be mentioned, beginning in the mid-seventeenth century with Russia’s western neighbors (Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Sweden, 1654–1667), following with the Ottoman Empire (1678–1681), and culminating in the unprecedented challenge of the Great Northern War (1700–1721) with Sweden. The sharp rise of the armed forces, accompanied with various attempts of their modernization, required heavy taxation, the increase in the number of government officials, and the central government’s growing role in regulating the economy, mostly foreign trade and domestic industries vital to waging war. Without being engaged in any further details the following short account is illustrative of the phenomena just described. As for the size of the army, Russia entered the war with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth with an armed force of about 50 000 strong and came out with an army of 100 000 strong, while at the end of Peter’s reign the army is estimated to have been about 200 000 (with an addition of about 80 000 irregular troops), and the Baltic Navy, created from zero by Peter, numbered about 25 000 men serving on 34 warships in 1725.111 As for Russia’s administrative personnel, in the 1640s 837 officials were employed in the chancelleries, while 774 was the number of those in local administration based in the provinces.112 In 1721 the number of officials employed in the reformed organs of central administration was 3101, while in local administration the figure was 5478 in 1715, and it is estimated that the costs of administration doubled between 1715–1721 alone.113 True, Russia remained “undergoverned,” both in terms of the absolute number of officials, 109 Ibid., 68. 110 Brian Davies, “Muscovy at War and Peace,” in The Cambridge History of Russia, ed. Maureen Perrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), vol. 1, 494–495. 111 Hartley, Social History, 26. 112 Natalia F. Demidova, Sluzhilaia biurokratiia v Rossii v XVII v. i ee rol′ v formirovanii absoliutizma [The service bureaucracy in Russia in the seventeenth century and its role in the formation of absolutism] (Moscow: Nauka, 1987), 37. 113 Andrei Nikolaevich Medushevskii, Utverzhdenie absoliutizma v Rossii. Sravnitel′noistoricheskoe issledovanie [The strengthening of absolutism in Russia. A comparativehistorical research] (Moscow: Tekst, 1994), 298.

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and the ratio of the officials to the size of the population. The term maloliudie (“scarcity of people”) referred not only to sparsity of population but “especially to the lack of trained administrative personnel.”114 The first largescale attempt to regulate trade (after the first steps in 1653) came in 1667, and the regulation explicitly cited, among others, the destructive impact of the war as the need to promote foreign trade. Still, a more active involvement of the ruler in the economy both in promoting foreign trade, seeing in it the source of financial resources, and the establishment of new government-owned industrial enterprises came only with Peter, grounded in his war efforts: Jarmo Kotilaine plainly calls Peter’s economic policy a “mercantilism by necessity,” resulting from “military emergency,” and also emphasized the novel “role of the state as the force of economic modernization.”115 Arcadius Kahan called the “mercantilist-type policies” of Peter a “poor man’s mercantilism,” and classified him as “proto-mercantilist” due to Russia’s backwardness, as the tsar had to try “to create conditions that would eventually allow a mercantilist policy.”116 The driving force behind Peter’s policy should not be sought for in “philosophical convictions” but rather in his “activist attitude towards the role of government.”117 A tighter control of the tsars over the Russian Orthodox Church had already been under way in the Law Code, just to be strengthened after the council of 1666–1667, which approved the Nikonian reforms but weakened the position of the patriarchs. The Russian Church had to contribute increasingly to the needs of Russia’s wars from the mid-century in various ways. This trend was reinforced after 1700 by Peter leaving the patriarchal see vacant (1700–1721), which allowed him to make an extensive use of church resources (with the creation of a Monastery Prikaz in 1701 among others), while the ruler’s control over the church culminated in the termination of the patriarchate (1721). Finally, Peter’s turn to the West, as well as the creation of an alliance against Sweden and the need to import weaponry, led to Russia’s sudden integration into the European diplomatic system according to the rules of the age. The abovementioned phenomena between the mid-seventeenth century and 1725 can easily be compared both to the practical criteria of the modern state

114 Torke, “Staat und Gesellschaft in Rußland im 17. Jahrhundert als Problem der europäischen Geschichte,” 201. 115 Jarmo T. Kotilaine, “Mercantilism in Pre-Petrine Russia,” in Modernizing Muscovy. Reform and Social Change in Seventeenth-Century Russia, ed. Jarmo T. Kotilaine and Marshall Poe (London: Routledge, 2004), 166. 116 Arcadius Kahan, The Plow, the Hammer, and the Knout: An Economic History of EighteenthCentury Russia (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985), 236–237. 117 Ibid., 235.

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given before, and, first of all, the characteristics of the “fiscal-military state.” Although Russia became a “fiscal-military state,” the autocratic political structure remained unchanged. Because of the lack of corporations and the great variety of inbuilt privileges, the political structure of Muscovite and Petrine Russia was hardly comparable to Western absolute monarchies. In Muscovy, unlike in Western absolute monarchies, there was no need to curtail or cut out a “libertarian constitution” through neglecting or eliminating the assemblies of estates or other legally entrenched corporate bodies, as they did not exist in Russia.118 Peter the Great’s reforms of the army (replacing military servitors with conscription), his creation of the Baltic navy, his reorganization of the administration— the creation of “colleges” on a clearly functional basis, which eventually replaced the old prikaz system, and his experiments with local administration—not only broke the existing embryonic corporate ties in the provinces and contributed to making Russia more of a “unitary state” but also pointed to a bureaucratic direction in government.119 The specific nature of the Russian political system does not mean, however, that Muscovite and Petrine Russia, that is, the period under analysis, should not be viewed on a European continuum from the perspective of state-building. The most suitable concept is not the “estate-based state” or the “composite-dynastic state,” or else the “absolute monarchy” but the “fiscal-military state.” Using the European perspective, therefore, I think it is plausible to call Petrine Russia an “autocratic fiscal-military state.” The war needs were no doubt vital to the new attitude to territoriality born in the wake of the Russian defeat at Narva in 1700: the change in this direction began before Peter the Great’s reforms of the state administration dating roughly from 1718, and this shift in thinking was to affect also the designation of the territorial complex under the tsar. From about 1700 the sense of the country’s territory as a whole ruled by the tsar gained paramount importance: it shaped Peter’s military efforts (to recover lands claimed by former rulers) and allowed to exploit the land for the “common good.”120 This territory-oriented shift was manifested in the new way of thinking about “geography and geographical practice,” in other words, explorations of new territories, and “in assembling an everincreasing amount of territorial information,” which produced more detailed 118 Torke, “Staat und Gesellschaft in Rußland im 17. Jahrhundert als Problem der europäischen Geschichte,” 204–205. 119 Alexandr Kamenskii, Ot Petra do Pavla. Reformy v Rossii XVIII veka. Opyt tselostnogo analiza [From Peter to Paul. Reform in eighteenth-century Russia. An attempt of a complete analysis] (Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 2001), 156, 162. 120 Sunderland, “Imperial Space,” 35–36.

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and more reliable maps of Russia.121 No wonder that the word gosudarstvo was increasingly used in Petrine sources of every kind, which was partly due to the new importance of territorial spirit! Concomitant to this spirit was the establishment of the modern designation of this larger community, that is, Rossiia, with an increasingly standardized spelling. The rule of Peter was no doubt vital in this process. “If at the beginning of the [eighteenth] century various forms and spellings, such as Rosiia, Rossia were quite common, by the middle of the century Rossiia became the dominant one.”122 At the same time, in official government rhetoric Rossiia was forcing out other designations of the state, such as Rossiiskoe gosudarstvo or Vserossiiskaia Imperiia.123 This designation is used in the 1993 Constitution of Russia which explicitly states that Rossiia and Rossiiskaia Federatsiia are synonymous. Parallel to the spread of the term Rossiia, a neologism rossiianin was entering the Russian vocabulary in the early eighteenth century due to Feofan Prokopovich. This term was used both in official state documents and panegyric literature under Peter.124 This neologism, although not “representing the new concept of citizenship” (as Schierle claims), but designating (as she rightly remarks) “the ideal subject, a role model in serving the ruler and the Russian fatherland,”125 is significant. Within the context of this study, the spread of the term rossiianin is given great importance in Petrine sources as it lacked a religious or ethnic meaning. The essence of the term was to express belonging to the “bigger community”126: we can say it referred to the imperial subject affiliated with the community called the Russian Empire. This is precisely the point where we have to return to the issue of the so-called “two kinds of Russianness” mentioned before. The adjective russkii derived from the word Rus′—and encountered as early as the title of the first chronicle of the Rus′, which contains the phrase russkaia zemlia127—originally, and for centuries, did not have an ethnic meaning. It merely referred to something belonging to the Rus′. By the seventeenth century 121 Ibid., 37–40. 122 Ingrid Schierle, “Poniatie Rossiia v politicheskoi literature XVIII veka” [The concept of Russia in the political literature of the eighteenth century], in her Evoliutsiia poniatii v svete istorii russkoi kul′tury [Evolution of concepts in the light of history of Russian culture] (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskikh kul′tur, 2012), 207–208. 123 Ibid., 208. The term Vserossiiskaia Imperiia had been in use for some years before Peter took the title Imperator in 1721. 124 Details of this issue see below. 125 Ibid., 225. 126 Ibid. 127 The title is: “Tale of bygone years, where did the Rus′ land [Russkaia zemlia] come from.”

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at the latest, however, russkii definitely acquired a new meaning: it came to refer to the peoples, language, but above all faith, which was, and remained even in the eighteenth century (and well after that) the main marker of identity. Muscovites tended to regard faith as being a central attribute of belonging to one or another ethnic community. While of course cognizant of Orthodox communities elsewhere, they nonetheless viewed their own religion as the “Russian faith,” while Islam, for example, represented the “Tatar faith,” and Lutheranism the “German faith.”128 The Law Code of 1649 is symptomatic in identifying ethnic Russian, russkii, with Russian Orthodox.129 Thus, in the perception of contemporary Muscovy the term russkaia vera (“Russian faith”) was synonymous not simply with Orthodoxy but with true, that is, Muscovite Orthodoxy, and, what is more, even true Christianity.

128 Paul W. Werth, The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 32. 129 Article 70 in chapter 20 (“Judicial process for slaves”) is particularly telling: Unbaptized people of other lands [inozemnym nekreshchennym] in Moscow and in the provincial towns shall keep in their houses [only] people of other lands of various different faiths [inozemtsev zhe vsiakikh raznykh ver] for working [as slaves]. But Russian people [russkim liudiam] shall not be enslaved either on the basis of documents or voluntarily to unbaptized people of other lands [u inozemtsov nekreshchennykh] because in the past … it became known … that in Moscow and in the provincial towns Orthodox Christians [pravoslavnye Khrist′iane] were serving under those of other faiths, of unbaptized people of other lands [u inovernykh, u nekreshchennykh inozemtsov], and those Orthodox Christians [pravoslavnym Khrist′ianam] were suffering oppression and profanation at the hands of those of other faiths [ot inovertsov] and were dying without confession and without spiritual fathers. … And the Grand Master, Tsar, and Grand Prince of all Russia [vseia Rusii] Mikhail Fedorovich of blessed memory and … Filaret Nikitich, patriarch of Moscow and all Russia [vseia Rusii] ordered Orthodox Christians taken out of the houses of unbaptized people of other lands [u inozemtsov nekreshchennykh], and they ordered such Orthodox Christians henceforth not to be in the houses of those of other faiths, of the unbaptized, of people of other lands [u inovernykh, u nekreshchennykh, u inozemtsov]. And accordingly now Russian people [russkim liudiam] shall not be in the houses of unbaptized people of other lands [u inozemtsov nekreshchennykh]. The Muscovite Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649, ed. and trans. Richard Hellie (Irvine, CA: Charles Schlacks Jr., 1988), 183. (Hellie’s translation is modified at certain points)

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The term russkii eventually was to embrace everything not connected to the state, especially due to those reforms of Peter the Great, which were in opposition to traditional Muscovite Orthodoxy. The most emblematic and well-known of these Westernizing reforms was compulsory shaving prescribed by him for certain social groups, as the beard was the sign of Orthodoxy for male Russians. Peter’s Westernization, which many interpreted as an attack on Orthodox traditions, hence on everything subsumed under russkii, led not simply to the existence of “two kinds of Russianness” but eventually to the phenomenon called the “image of dual Russia,”130 in the sense of a socio-cultural rift between the lower and the upper classes of the society. The phrase, “image of dual Russia,” while containing the distinction between russkii and rossiiskii also expressed their opposition: the rift between the people (narod) and the state (gosudarstvo)! After Peter everything connected with rossiiskii was deeply associated with the state (Rossiia) and considered alien to russkii, and the mission for which russkii narod (Russian people) was predestined. This mission was expressed in the phrase “Holy Russia,” a favorite of nineteenth-century Slavophiles: a mission that could only be termed Sviataia Rus′ in Russian, and never Sviataia Rossiia! On the contrary, the adjective rossiiskii from the eighteenth century is used in references when belonging to the political entity is the issue.131 The neologism rossiianin, which under Tsarist Russia meant a subject of the Russian Empire (or, more precisely, a subject of the Russian Emperor), has been experiencing a renaissance recently, and designates a citizen of Russia(n Federation),132 regardless of national or ethnic considerations.

130 Robert C. Tucker, The Image of Dual Russia (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 1958). 131 As for contemporary Russia, the variant rossiiskii “generally prevailed in official discourse” of the 1990s, and this holds true not only for the text of the 1993 Constitution but also for “much of the society.” Graem Gill, Symbolism and Regime Change in Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 139. Yeltsin, in his public speeches, “tended to use Rossiiskii rather than Russkii”; ibid., 23. For the different conceptions of the community, the so-called “civic” and “nativist” (under Putin, from 2012 on) see ibid., 138–139. The text of the new Russian anthem (the melody of which is identical with the old anthem of the Soviet Union) is also interesting from this point of view: Rossiia—sviashchennaia nasha derzhava, Rossiia— liubimaia nasha strana! (“Russia—our sacred state, Russia—our beloved country!”) The anthem of the Soviet Union had the wording velikaia Rus′ (“great Rus′”), which “forged the unruinable union of free republics for ever.” 132 See for example the propagandistic TV commercial of Gazprom in the 2010s aiming to strengthen Russia’s inhabitants’ pride for the state, which ends as follows: My, Rossiiane (“We, Russians”). The equivalent of the term rossiianin in Communist times was most probably the adjective sovetskii, which did not have an ethnic meaning either but denoted one being the citizen of the Soviet Union.

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The conclusion that can be drawn from the short historical overview of the terms designating Russia is as follows. The establishment of the term Rossiia as the standard official designation of the state, together with the use of the neologism rossiianin, meaning simply a subject of Russia, were twin phenomena of the early eighteenth century that should be given due emphasis in an analysis dealing with the complex process of the development of the notion of the state (gosudarstvo) in Russia, as Peter’s reign was crucial in attempting to separate the person of the gosudar′ from gosudarstvo. The growing importance of the subjecthood distinctions was reflected not only in the use of rossiianin, but also in the spread of the word “subject” (poddannyi), the latter becoming frequent after about 1700. Last but not least, the importance of the subjecthood distinctions was manifested in the growing awareness attributed to territoriality under Peter, which is apparent in his treatment of foreigners in Russian service. Eric Lohr, relying on Margarete Woltner’s research, remarked that as early as the seventeenth century a kind of ius soli subjecthood was emerging in Russia, based on decisions that children of foreigners born in Russia were denied the right to leave the country.133 This process, however, culminated in Peter’s 1722 decree that sons of foreigners in service, born in Russia, were “automatically considered subjects of the tsar.”134

133 Eric Lohr, Russian Citizenship. From Empire to Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 16. 134 Ibid. And Lohr argues that Peter introduced other “important conceptual changes in naturalization policy and practice,” and one aspect of this was that “in 1700, he tried to clarify the relationship between naturalization and conversion to Orthodoxy by making the former a legal consequence of the latter.” Ibid., 22.

CHAPTER 3

The Idea of the State in Western Christendom in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era

3.1. The Problem of Medieval State, and the Medieval-Early Modern Divide As the Russian perception of power and the state is the focus of this study, the narrative has only touched in passing upon what we may call the reality of the state either in Western Christendom or Russia, although it could not be left out completely.1 In discussing the emergence of the modern concept of the state one cannot avoid asking whether it is plausible at all to use the concept of the state with regard to the Middle Ages. If so, which sub-period of the Middle Ages (high Middle Ages or late Middle Ages) would qualify for this kind of analysis?2 Furthermore, when can we speak of the existence of the modern concept of state? No doubt, the answers depend on the definition of the state itself. My aim in this chapter is not (and cannot be) to discuss various definitions of the

1 I share Kenneth Dyson’s approach to the problem of the state in Western Europe that we should treat it both as “an idea and institution,” although in his book the second aspect was not discussed in depth it would have deserved. Kenneth H. F. Dyson, The State Tradition in Western Europe. The Study of an Idea and Institution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). This kind of approach emphasizing the dialectic relationship between the idea and reality also shaped my previous cursory outline. 2 For these issues see especially: Ullmann, Medieval Political Thought, 17–18; John H. Burns, Introduction to The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, ed. John H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 1–2; Joseph Canning, A History of Medieval Political Thought (London: Longman, 1996), xix–xx; Anthony Black, Political Thought in Europe 1250–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 186–191.

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state. Instead, I will draw upon the work of those scholars whose definitions are useful not only for grasping the development of the idea of the state in historical perspective in Western Christendom, but which are also applicable for a comparison with Russia, even if the criteria should be used with reservations. The modern concept of the state, in my view, implies a legally framed secular supreme and final power over a given territory, separate from other powers of the same sort, an impersonal public power, independent of, and standing above, both governors and governed, having thereby the capacities of a legal entity, to which subjects/citizens owe their highest loyalty. From this it follows that by sovereignty I mean a legally framed secular supreme and final public power, which, at first, was linked to the person of the monarch, and eventually to a delineated territorial unit.3 Indeed, the concept of the modern state developed “along with that of sovereignty.”4 My analysis begins with the approach that Quentin Skinner outlined in his classic study, “The Foundations of Modern Political Thought” (1978), taking into account its criticism raised especially by Cary J. Nederman and David Armitage. According to Skinner, the development of the modern concept of the state, a process taking place roughly between 1300 and 1600, can be summarized briefly as follows: The decisive shift was made from the idea of the ruler “maintaining his state”—where this idea simply meant upholding his position—to the idea that there is a separate legal and constitutional order, that of the State, which the ruler has a duty to maintain. One effect of this transformation was that the power of the State, not that of the ruler, came to be envisaged as the basis of government. And this, in turn, enabled the State to be conceptualized in distinctively modern terms—as the sole source of law and legitimate force within its own territory, and as the sole appropriate object of its citizens’ allegiances.5

3 My definition of the modern state and sovereignty owes a lot to Morris, An Essay, 36–40, 178. 4 Ibid., 40. 5 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), vol. 1, ix–x. Skinner’s approach is all the more important, because in a stimulating article Oleg Kharkhordin followed Skinner’s footsteps in his account of the development of the Russian concept of state, a work that I will refer to in a later chapter of this book. Oleg Kharkhordin, “What Is the State? A Russian Concept of Gosudarstvo in the European Context,” History and Theory 40, no. 2 (2001): 206–240.

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Skinner’s last statement, of course, contains the essential element of Max Weber’s classic definition of state (which Skinner does not fail to mention explicitly in a footnote): for Weber “a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Note that ‘territory’ is one of the characteristics of the state.”6 Skinner’s view puts the development of the modern concept of the state in a plausible historical perspective, although his chronological frame is debatable. My first objection regarding this chronology is that the notion of rights of governance distinct from and independent of the ruler with an existence of their own, as well as the idea of their inalienability, derived from the concept of office (officium), was clearly emerging around 1200 in England and Hungary, for instance, when the legal idea of the crown (corona) as a corporation entered into political discourse.7 Furthermore, the idea that kings are not subject to either the pope or the emperor, the idea that they are supreme, was also in the making as early as the 1190s in the work of Ricardus Anglicus, who gave imperium and iurisdictio to kings.8 In my second objection I rely on David Armitage’s observation that the development of the modern concept of state cannot be understood entirely “in terms of its internal, domestic or municipal capacities,” but it should include the dimension of “its nature, its powers or its rights as an international actor.”9 This is an issue affecting chronology too, as it was in the first half of the seventeenth century that important developments took place in this direction (thanks to Grotius and Hobbes). Cary Nederman criticized Skinner from another angle—which also had chronological implications—claiming that Skinner is trapped in a “linguistic overdeterminism,” as the “presence or absence of a vocabulary determines the

6 Max Weber, On Politics (1919), accessed April 23, 2020, https://www.panarchy.org/weber/ politics.html. 7 The concept of Corona Regni Hungariae (Crown of the Kingdom of Hungary) and later the Corona Regni Poloniae (Crown of the Kingdom of Poland) meant not only the distinction between the person of the king and the rights exercised by virtue of his office but eventually (by the fifteenth century) also the political community of the kingdoms in which membership (membra coronae), however, was expropriated and identified exclusively by the nobility. Furthermore, the concept of the corona in Hungary and Poland would also underpin a “persistent union between kingdoms” or once independent territories. Gerhard, Old Europe, 74. 8 Brian Tierney, Religion, Law and the Growth of Constitutional Thought 1150–1650 (New York: Cambridge University Press), 22. 9 David Armitage, “Hobbes and the Foundations of Modern International Thought,” in Rethinking The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ed. Annabel Brett, James Tully, and Holly Hamilton-Bleakley (Cambridge: Cambridge Universiry Press, 2006), 219–220.

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presence or absence of an idea” for him.10 This objection also questions the years around 1600 as a watershed. Skinner, after giving the above definition, turns to “historical semantics—from the concept of the State to the word ‘State,’” claiming that the “clearest sign that a society entered into a self-conscious possession of a new concept [is] … that a new vocabulary comes to be generated, in terms of which the concept is articulated and discussed.”11 In this respect he treats as the “decisive confirmation” of his thesis the fact that “by the end of the sixteenth century, at least in England and France, we find the words ‘State’ and ‘l’État’ beginning to be used for the first time in their modern sense.”12 While acknowledging that terminology is, no doubt, crucial to the history of the modern state, especially in the comparative venture undertaken in this book, Nederman, nevertheless, in my view, goes too far in his criticism of Skinner with regard to terminology as the marker of the existence of the concept. Especially in the light of James Collins’s forthcoming book, in which Collins clearly proves that in the last third of the sixteenth century the use of the term l’État in fact corresponded to a conceptual shift, a shift furthered by its capitalized orthography.13 In the debate about the use of the concept of the state, I second the opinion of those authors who point out that applying the concept of the state in analysing medieval political structures is irrelevant, and generally misleading for most of the period conventionally called the Middle Ages (ca. 300–1450). Before roughly 1200, the state did not exist either as an idea or (much less as) an institutional reality even in Western Europe. However, as the thirteenth century progressed, we can observe the beginnings of a political association called the “sovereign territorial state,”14 in the history of which the period between ca. 1450 and 1700 proved to be crucial. I argue that the modern concept of the state was born then. The term “sovereign territorial state” means that the idea of a supreme and final public power was fused with “territorial exclusivity”—in

10 Cary J. Nederman, Lineages of European Political Thought (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 54. 11 Skinner, Foundations, vol. 1, x. 12 Ibid. It seems to me, however, that in his more recent writing Skinner revised his view on chronology. Quentin Skinner, “The Sovereign State. A Genealogy,” in Sovereignty in Fragments. The Past, Present and Future of a Contested Concept, ed. Hent Kalmo and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 26–46. 13 James B. Collins, From Monarchical Commonwealth to Royal State, 1561–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 14 Hendryk Spruyt, The Sovereign State and its Competitors. An Analysis of Systems of Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3.

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other words, political power is exercised over a well-defined territory15 (welldefined in principle at least, as overlapping jurisdictions across country borders were part and parcel of the Old Regime). To put it differently, sovereignty can be limited only horizontally, by the reach of another supreme and final public power.16 As for the prehistory of the idea of territorial sovereignty it is significant that by the end of the fourteenth century such influential lawyers as Bartolus of Sassoferrato and Baldus de Ubaldis declared that Latin Christendom, that is, Europe, consisted of territorially organized political communities (whether in monarchical or republican form of government) with the purpose of maintaining the common good, within which there was a supreme power independent of any foreign power.17 This can be taken as the medieval concept of the state—although it was not yet, of course, the modern concept of the state: what was missing is the fusion of the abovementioned two notions. Relying on the research of Passerino d’Entrèves, Nederman summarized the core of the problem concerning the medieval and early modern divide regarding the concept of the state in the following manner: “The Middle Ages did not produce—and could not have produced—the idea of the state in the modern meaning, the modern state—both as a theoretical construct and a practical force—but it could not have emerged without the pre-existence of distinctively medieval ideas and institutions.”18 The modern construct was built upon ideas that were capable of acquiring new interpretations in a new context.19 As for the question of terminology, in the high and late Middle Ages there were various Latin terms used to designate an independent political community, terms such as respublica, regnum, civitas.20 But none of them was able to convey the link between territoriality and sovereignty.21 Indeed, as Jean Dunbabin 15 Ibid., 34–35. 16 Ibid., 35. 17 d’Entréves, Notion of the State, 98–99. This latter principle was expressed in the phrases rex superiorem non recognoscens, est in regno suo imperator (“the king who does not recognize a superior, is an emperor in his kingdom”) or civitas superiorem non recognoscens, est sibi princeps (“the community that does not recognize a superior is a prince to itself ”). The term princeps from the thirteenth century was increasingly used in a general sense, meaning a sovereign ruler. 18 Nederman, Lineages, 52. Nederman emphasizes that throughout his book Entréves “points to these preconditioning elements and their limits.” Ibid. 19 Ibid., 53. 20 The word civitas was even used by Hobbes in his famous definition of the state! 21 Jean Dunbabin, “Government: 1150–1450,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c. 350–c. 1450, ed. John H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 479.

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summarized the whole issue: “The first difficulty that the reader of medieval political literature has to face is the lack of an abstract noun capable of conveying the concept of state.”22 The lack of a precise term notwithstanding, the state was clearly in the making in the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries on two levels, both theoretical and practical (institutional): If medieval political writers did not as yet recognize either in name or substance the “State” in its modern acceptation, it is all the more interesting to see the effort they made to grasp the essence of the new political reality which was beginning to take shape during the last centuries of the Middle Ages.23 I agree with d’Entréves and Nederman that the discussion of the modern concept of the state requires a historical perspective, as political thinkers of the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries had some kind of notion of the state.24 For my purpose, the most useful criteria of the modern state were listed by Antony Black who devoted a whole chapter to the problem in his book on Political Thought in Europe 1250–1450. Although the chapter in question was entitled “State,” he made clear that he intended to deal with “the idea of the state” only.25 Black drew upon the work of Weber and Skinner in that he called the “definitions of state,” but he rather tried to put together a comprehensive list of what I would call typological elements. His schematic provides a useful tool for a short historical overview, as it is more rewarding to identify certain typological elements than to ponder various definitions.26 These elements, which I identify with short labels of my own in parentheses, are as follows: (1) “an order of power distinct from other orders”—the most important for us is the “religious order” (secular power aspect);27

22 Ibid. 23 d’Entréves, Notion, 29. 24 Ibid.; Nederman, Lineages, 22. It is telling and an allusion to the historicity of the thinking on the state that d’Entréves uses the word notion and not concept in the title of his book. 25 Black, Political Thought, 186. 26 Brian Nelson, The Making of the Modern State: A Theoretical Evolution (London: Macmillan, 2006), 7. 27 Black himself considered this distinction between the secular and religious powers “the most important distinction” of the period between 1250 and 1450. Black, Political Thought, 188. This issue, namely, the lack of such distinction, will be vital in my comparison with Russia.

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(2) “an authority exercised over a given territory and all its inhabitants” (territorial aspect); (3) “the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical coercion (as Weber put it)” (coercive aspect); (4) “legitimacy derived from inside the political community, not delegated by an external authority” (external aspect of sovereignty); (5) “a body or authority with some moral (as opposed to repressive) functions such as the imposition of law and order, the defense of justice and rights, promotion of a common welfare” (legal aspect); (6) “an apparatus of power whose existence remains independent of those who may happen to have control of it at any given time,” which Skinner calls a “recognizable modern conception of state” (impersonal governmental rights aspect).28 Having given this list, Black asserted: “We have seen that the idea of state in most of these senses was present or developing in this period”29—an assertion he substantiates in the following pages by presenting a summary of the different topics previously discussed in his book. Although Black speaks simply of the “idea of state,” his criteria, taken together, no doubt express the idea of the modern state or the modern concept of the state. Black then shifts his attention to those Latin terms, which had been in use to denote supreme political power before Bodin’s use in 1576 of the French souveraineté led to that term’s general adoption. In the late Middle Ages principatus, superioritas, auctoritas/potestas suprema, plenitudo potestatis, maiestas,30 to which we can add imperium and iurisdictio, were all used in the above meaning. In the translation of Bodin’s work into Latin (1586) maiestas was the preferred word for souveraineté, although he was not consistent, as summa potestas and imperium, were also used. Another enigmatic thinker, Grotius, also “used summa potestas and summum imperium indifferently” (De iure belli ac pacis, 1625) for sovereignty, while Hobbes was not an exception either before his writing the Leviathan (1651), treating these “two phrases as equivalent” (De Cive, 1642), and “he even listed them in the same context: summa potestas sive summum imperium sive dominium.”31 The turning point came with the Leviathan, and not just

28 Ibid., 186. 29 Ibid. In the following pages Black one by one enlists his arguments concerning the presence of these criteria. 30 Black, Political Thought, 186–187. 31 d’Entréves, Notion, 102.

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because of the clarity of its argument but also because of its language: it is significant that it was written not in Latin but in English. And eventually in this work Hobbes “condensed” the above “various expressions into one: sovereignty.”32 “No wonder it is to Hobbes that our thoughts readily turn when we think of the full implications of sovereignty.”33 These few examples show that souveraineté “was only slowly incorporated in other European languages. Its exact equivalent in Latin was for a long time doubtful, and Latin continued for more than a century to be the official language of writers on politics and law.”34 The plethora of Latin terms employed to denote supreme political power, like those referring to an independent political community, made it difficult for a coherent terminology to emerge. I contend that the great variety of Latin words in some sense was a barrier to denote either state or sovereignty because of the multiple connotations of these already mentioned terms. In both cases the consequence was that a vernacular word came to experience a remarkable career in later political thought35—état and souveraineté in French, “state” and “sovereignty” in English (its old English spelling being “soveraignitie,” betraying the French origin of the term). Early modern political discourse “was always a conversation in translation” between the Latin and the vernaculars.36 This is one of the crucial issues discussed by Willibald Steinmetz in his recent study on “vernacularization,” emphasizing the need for a comparative research on this neglected field of conceptual history.37 His definition of “vernacularization” reads as follows: “In abstract terms, vernacularization can be defined as the process whereby speakers of autochthonous spoken languages increase their efforts to adopt, translate and transform the terms of a prestigious written elite language, usually of old or foreign origin, to suit their own purposes.”38 And for the all-European context he adds:

32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Annabel Brett, “Political Thought,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History 1350–1750, ed. Hamish Scott, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 31. 36 Ibid. Possibly d’Entréves was one of the first authors to raise this issue, which figures prominently in new directions of conceptual history. d’Entréves, Notion, 102. 37 Willibald Steinmetz, “Multiple Transformations: Temporal Frameworks for a European Conceptual History,” in Conceptual History: Challenges, Conundrums, Complexities, ed. Willibald Steinmetz, Michael Freeden, and Javier Fernández-Sebastián (New York: Berghahn, 2017), 78–82. 38 Ibid., 78. In other words, this is the issue of “cultural translation.”

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The prime example of the process in medieval and early modern Western, Southern, Central and Northern Europe is of course the gradual replacement of Latin by the respective vernaculars in legal, political, academic, administrative, religious and other everyday contexts. In some parts of Southeastern Europe, Old Greek and Old Church Slavonic had played a similar, if more limited, role.39 The aspect called “conversation in translation” by Annabel Brett also holds true in case of the Westernization of Russian terminology. In the Russian case, however, we face a language problem much more complex than that connected to Steinmetz’s following remark: “in some cases vernacularization went along with the creation of a written language or its standardization.”40 This is a particularly important issue for Petrine Russia, as James Cracraft characterized the language situation in pre-Petrine Russia as follows: two written languages existed side by side: Church Slavonic, at once archaic, alien and cumbersome, which was regarded as the only literary language, and the official tongue [delovoi or prikaznyi iazyk] of government and business which was much closer to the vernacular, but neither of them was able to take the role of an “unifying language.”41 An interesting feature of the process of vernacularization, as well as standardization, under Peter was that in translations from foreign languages he specifically prescribed an instruction for translators: “not to translate with Church-Slavonic words but to write clearly and in the contemporary secular Russian language.”42

39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Cracraft, Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture, 24. For more details see ibid., 24–39. 42 Sergei Tyulenev, Translation and the Westernization in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Berlin: Frank and Timme, 2012), 186. The prestige of Church Slavonic was high, as it was considered a sacred language in a way that Latin never was in early modern Europe, although remaining the official language of the Catholic Church even in liturgy after the Reformation. In Russia it made a big difference, for example, how the Devil was named in certain contexts, as there existed different words for the Devil, such as the Church Slavonic bes (beast), or diavol (from the Greek diabolos, meaning etymologically “divider”), or the folk terms, nechistyi, meaning literally “unclean,” and chert. In Russia the Church Slavonic bes was used in exorcism, as it was considered the only effective word against the Devil, while the folk name, chert, was considered ineffective.

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In addition to the directive given for translators, in the vocabulary concerning power and administration the change was even furthered by the following strategy: “To enforce his designs, Peter devised an official language, conveyed in lexicons that officials were to consult.”43 These developments were, so to say, one side of the coin. The other side, no doubt, was Peter’s introduction of the so-called new “civil alphabet.” Even though it did not mean the “reform of the Cyrillic alphabet” as such—because Peter, in fact, “introduced a modified version for a specific context” (namely, “non-ecclesiastical printing”) by reducing slightly “the repertoire of letters,” and, most significantly, a “change in their appearance through the introduction of a new typeface”—its impact was crucial.44 Indeed, “something as apparently neutral as typeface could be used to assert a political position.”45 This was precisely the case with Peter’s reform, as the new typeface alphabet used for secular purpose (political thought included) with its letter-shapes more akin to the letters of the Latin alphabet (!), showed the increased importance of gosudarstvo vis-à-vis the church, similarly to the introduction of the new, A.D. computation of time commencing from 1700 on, which replaced the Byzantine practice using the date of the Creation (supposedly happening 5508 years before the birth of Christ) as starting point. Even the adoption of Arabic numerals, and especially the fact that their spread was largely concomitant to the new typeface, can be seen as part of the process of secularization, as Cyrillic letters had been used in Russia to express numerals.46 The impact of the “civil typeface,” the tendency to abstain from the use of Church Slavonic vocabulary in translations, and the use of Western loanwords of political nature, at the same time, was enhanced by the first Russian printing revolution under Peter47 because of the importance the tsar attributed to printing. There was a shift, as Simon Franklin noted “from print as a choice to print as an obligation in using printing as tool of authority.”48 Indeed, it was the Petrine period that witnessed the first attempt of

43 Wortman, Power of Language and Rhetoric, 9. 44 Franklin, Russian Graphosphere, 105. 45 Rab A. Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe. Culture and Education 1500–1800, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2014), 237. 46 Franklin, Russian Graphosphere, 105. These phenomena, at the same time, were all qualified as paratexts orientating the readers of these works, as different types of paratext served as “thresholds of interpretation,” to use the title of Gerard Genette’s classic book on the topic. Gerard Genette, Paratexts. Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge Unversity Press, 1997). 47 Gary Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of the Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 17–40; Cracraft, Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture, 257–267. 48 Franklin, Russian Graphosphere, 229.

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standardization of the language in the broadest sense (orthography, vocabulary, grammar) preparing the way for the emergence of Modern Russian language.49

3.2. The Birth of the Modern Concept of State in the Early Modern Era (1450–1700) The emergence of the modern idea of the state (as well as state formation) was a process of “secularization and depersonalization of sovereign power.”50 In the high Middle Ages canon lawyers gave birth to the concept of sovereignty (if not the term itself) in their efforts to define the pope’s legal position; then the language of papal sovereignty was transferred to the secular sphere—the prince, and eventually the state. As Mark Neocleous summarized the process laconically: “Where the prince once stepped into the shoes of the Pope, now the state stepped into the shoes of the king.”51 The author whose wording best illustrates the above development is none other than Bodin, to whom we owe the definition of the concept of sovereignty itself and the linking of the concept to the state: “Maiesty or Soveraigntie is the most high, absolute, and perpetuall power ouer the citizens and subjects in a Commonweale: which the Latines cal Maiestatem … the Italian Segnoria … that is to say, the gretest power to command.”52 When Bodin explains what the meaning of a king’s absolute power is—for despite linking sovereignty to the state he was preoccupied with monarchical sovereignty—that is, the right to create new laws and abolish existing ones, as the king is not bound by positive law, he explicitly refers to the pope: “And as the Pope can neuer bind his owne hands (as the Canonists say); so neither can a soueraigne prince bind his owne hands, albeit that he would.”53 Bodin’s reference can be properly understood if one knows (as mentioned before) that the legal term “absolute power” (potestas absoluta) was first used in the thirteenth century by theologians to describe the authority of the pope, just to be adopted by canon lawyers as well.54 Eventually royal absolute authority

49 Cracraft, Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture, 257, 289, 319. 50 Mark Neocleous, Imagining the State (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2003), 18. 51 Ibid. 52 The Six Bookes of a Common-weale. Written by I. Bodin a Famous Lawyer, and a Man of Great Experience in Matters of State. Out of the French and Latine Copies, Done into English, by Richard Knolles (London: [Printed by Adam Islip] impensis G. Bishop, 1606), 84. 53 Six Bookes of a Common-weale, 92. 54 Burns, “The Idea of Absolutism,” 32.

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was clothed in the legal language defining papal power: this terminology was taking root by the fifteenth century in those monarchies that “effectively undermined the universalist claims of pope and emperor alike.”55 Thus, the terminology of sovereignty migrated to the secular sphere, was attached to the person of the independent prince, and then adapted to the state. The other development crucial to the emergence of the modern concept of the state as well as the formation of the modern state as an institution was the factual strengthening of royal governments in the most important monarchies of Western Europe in the hundred years following the mid-fifteenth century. This phenomenon—occurring some decades later than the absolutist turn in political thought, which was present already in the 1440s – termed by some scholars as the era of “Renaissance monarchy,”56 was more visible from the 1470s onwards, the time that I see as the plausible beginning of the “compositedynastic state.” Although it would be an exaggeration to call the changes in sixteenth-century administration a “revolution,” as the title of the book “Tudor Revolution in Government”57 would imply in case of England, nevertheless, the development of a more highly organized royal administration (compared to late medieval monarchical apparatus) was apparent both in France and England. The interaction between the growth of the state as an institution and the development of the concept of the state must always be kept in mind, even though the focus here is on the analysis of the modern concept of the state: “The gradual awareness, from the late fifteenth century onwards, that a new kind of political association was emerging in Western Europe led to the search for an appropriate word with which to characterize this new phenomenon.”58 The word that won out among competing terms (respublica, regnum, civitas) was the derivative of the Latin status in the vernaculars: state, état, stato, Staat, and so forth. Though these words denoting the new phenomenon “came slowly into usage” and, to be sure, were employed “with little precision and consistency,”59 by the late sixteenth century the novel terminology acquired some degree of precision in the writings of lawyers and political theorists. By 1600 “State” and État (written with a capital letter to emphasize the difference from their former meanings) were capable to express the modern concept of the state: the link between the idea of 55 Ibid., 33. Bodin also emphasized the French king’s independence of both pope and emperor. 56 Robert Jean Knecht, French Renaissance Monarchy: Francis I and Henry II (New York: Longman, 1984). 57 Geoffrey R. Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government: Administrative Changes in the Reign of Henry VIII (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1953). 58 Dyson, State Tradition, 25. 59 Ibid.

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territoriality and supreme and final public power, that is, sovereignty.60 But they still were not the only ones in the pool! While in England about 1500 the word state “had possessed no political meaning” beyond such expressions as the “state of the king” or “state of the kingdom,” referring to their legal or other conditions, by the 1590s it was used “to signify the State in the modern sense.”61 Similarly, kings and statesmen who in the early Tudor Age (from 1485 until 1547) “spoke only of ‘country’, ‘people’, ‘kingdom’, and ‘realm’, began to conceptualize the state by the 1590s.”62 At the end of the century we encounter “State” in Privy Council documents and it found its way into royal proclamations by 1620.63 The fact that it was written with a capital first letter enhanced its importance in political discourse and state papers. The parallel developments in France from the mid-sixteenth through the seventeenth century can be summarized as follows with regard to the shifts of usage of political terminology. The situation in the first half of the sixteenth century was quite simple: Everyone used commonwealth terminology: the royal government; the nobility; the Parlementaires; the legal men; the Estates General; the local and provincial estates; the town councils; ordinary people … in their private writings. … The government often shifted in mid-century to a new phrase, the “good of the king’s service” [bien du service du roy]. That phrase gave way to the “good of my/his/your State,” in the 1570s and 1580s. In private, the royal secretaries preferred a neologism, “the good of the State” [bien de l’Estat]. The new orthography shows us the conscious choice for a neologism, just as the shift in modifier, from a personal adjective—my, by the king, your or his, by others—to a general, abstract article, “the,” marked the birth of the State as an abstract concept tied to a specific governmental model. …

60 Ibid., 27–28. 61 Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, ca. 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 19. 62 Michael Braddick asserts that the state as a reality, namely, “as a coordinated network of territorially bound offices exercising political power,” existed in Tudor England in the 1550s. This definition, he claims, would have been understandable not only to contemporaries by the end of the century, as the word “state” already implied this meaning, but it is also a plausible one from a modern perspective on the concept of state. Ibid., 9, 19. It is worth comparing Braddick’s definition with the one given by Raleigh in 1618. (See later!) 63 Ibid., 19–20.

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The “bien de l’Estat” took over political discourse under Henry IV and maintained its dominance into the eighteenth century.64 Bodin’s work deserves a special place in the process of conceptual and terminological development. The fact that he originally penned his “Six Books on the Commonwealth” in French, and not in Latin—it might well be that he was keeping to the 1539 decree of King Francis I ordering that langue d’oil was to be used in legal and administrative affairs—meant that he was not constrained (at least in the French version) by the various meanings of Latin terms used to refer to supreme power. Bodin’s novelty lay, among others, in his inclination to definitions. “A Commonweale is a lawfull government of many families, and of that which vnto them in common belongeth, with a puissant of soueraigntie [power of sovereignty].”65 Bodin made the issue of definition the heart of his method from the very beginning, stating that many theoreticians omitted such a definition, which is, however, essential: “For a definition is nothing else than the very end and scope of the matter propounded.”66 Even more important was his defining sovereignty,67 because, as he claimed, no one before him had done so: “neither lawyer nor politicall philosopher hath yet defined [it]: although it be the principall and most necessarie point for the vnderstanding of the nature of a Commonweale.”68 Contrary to common wisdom, it was not Bodin who invented the word souveraineté: it had been known long before, meaning, for example, moral or spiritual superiority. After giving the definition of sovereignty, Bodin went on explaining it and listed the five marks of sovereignty, among which foremost importance was given to the power to make and unmake laws. This prerogative was not just the first requisite but, in Bodin’s view, it was the essence of sovereignty that contained the rest. His emphasis on law making was also new, as the idea of supreme

64 Collins, From Monarchical Commonwealth. 65 Six Bookes of a Common-weale, 1. Collins calls attention to the “linguistic shift” in Knolles’s translation, as Bodin originally wrote “‘puissance souveraine,’ but Knolles flipped the parts of speech, and translated the term as ‘puissant sovereignty,’ clear evidence that Bodin’s noun— defined by him in chapter 8 of book I—had come into common currency and no longer needed to wait for a definition.” Collins, From Monarchical Commonwealth. 66 Six Bookes of a Common-weale, 1. 67 Ellen M. McClure, Sunspots and the Sun King: Sovereignty and Mediation in Seventeenth-Century France (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 27. 68 Six Bookes of a Common-weale, 84.

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power previously had been associated first of all with jurisdiction, the king being the highest and final judge.69 By the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the discussion of state and sovereignty was coming to the fore under the influence of Bodin.70 Not even two decades elapsed after the publication of Bodin’s book before Pierre Charron in 1595 gave a definition of the state that came close to the modern, impersonal concept: a domination, an ordering involving command and obedience, and … the foundation, the internal link, and the guiding spirit of human affairs; it is the bond within society which cannot exist without it, the vital essence which brings life to human and natural associations.71 And later, the French Cardin Le Bret (1558–1655), who, like his contemporary Richelieu, was interested in strengthening royal authority, asserted plainly in his De la souveraineté du roy (“Sovereignty of the king,” 1632) the nature of supreme power: “Sovereignty is no more divisible than the point in geometry.”72 This wording is all the more remarkable because it shows the free transfer of analogies from science to legal-political concepts—a tendency becoming paramount by the turn of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries.73 Although Bodin’s work was issued in English only in 1606 under the title, “The Six Bookes of a Common-weale written by I. Bodin,” the explanation that follows it immediately, “a Famous Lawyer and a Man of Great Experience in Matters of State,” reflected that the new terminology of the state was breaking through. And Sir Walter Raleigh, in the work attributed to him, “The Prince or Maxims of State,”74 defined the state as follows: “The State is a frame or set order of a commonwealth, or of the governors who rule the same, but especially the

69 Andrew Phillips, War, Religion and Empire: The Transformation of International Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 125. 70 Skinner, “The Sovereign State,” 27. 71 Quoted by Dyson, State Tradition, 27. 72 Quoted by Elisabeth Zoller, Introduction to Public Law. A Comparatve Study (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2008), 47. 73 Before the seventeenth century the characteristic way of transfer of terms by analogies— called “similitudes” or “correspondencies” by contemporaries—to the legal-political sphere was from theology first of all (as we could see it in case of absolute power). See this problem later in discussing the issue of “political theology.” 74 Written probably in 1618 but published only in 1642, after Raleigh’s death (1618) under his name.

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chief and sovereign governor who commandeth the rest.”75 Although the personal aspect is still present in this definition and in the title as well, Raleigh’s wording is significant. He was not a political thinker, but his formulation, like Charron’s, came close to the modern idea of the state.76 And his wording also shows what James Collins presented in the French case: the rhetoric of the monarchical commonweal(th) gave way to the rhetoric of the state, the latter pertaining to the ruler alone.77 Important is the fact that Raleigh immediately moved to list the marks of sovereignty, thereby linking sovereignty to the state. Raleigh closely followed Bodin in mentioning those five marks (although not in the same order, and not giving long explanations, which Bodin did). The State of Soveraignty consisteth in five points: 1.  2.  3.  4.  5. 

Making and annulling of laws. Creating and disposing of Magistrates. Power over life and death. Making of war and peace. Highest or last appeal.

75 Sir Walter Raleigh, The Prince or Maxims of State (London, 1642), in Selected Works of Sir Walter Raleigh, 1, http://173.45.234.110/renlit/ralebib.htm. 76 This work is a better example for showing Raleigh’s definition of the state than the CabinetCouncil, also attributed to him, because in the latter he simply quoted Bodin’s famous definitions of state and sovereignty. For the discussion of questions of authorship of these two writings see Ioannis D. Evrigenis: “Sir Walter Raleigh’s Machiavelli,” in Machiavellian Encounters in Tudor and Stuart England, ed. Alessandro Arienzo and Alessandra Petrina (London: Routledge, 2016), 59–62. 77 For the same development and its culmination in the post-Restoration England see Noah Dauber’s characterization: “The vision of the state as embedded or identified with commonwealth hung on in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a mere shadow of itself.” Noah Dauber, State and Commonwealth: The Theory of State in Early Modern England 1549–1640 (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 231. Similar to Raleigh’s definition is the one given by Philippe de Béthune in his Le Conseiller d’Estat, 1633, which serves as the motto of James Collins’s From Monarchical Commonwealth and reflects the change: That which one rightly calls State is nothing other than an order, by means of which are governed several households and communities, having for a goal the good of all in general. But we may also call State these households and communities assembled together under the same Government; and be it the one or the other sense, we may say that all general considerations that can serve in the handling of public affairs, regard either the establishment, or the conservation, or the expansion of the State.

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Where these five are, either in one or more, there is the State. These five points of State rest either in 1. One Monarchy or Kingdom 2. Some few chief men for Virtue or Wisdom called Aristocracy, 3.  Many called a Free State, or Popular State. These three sorts of government have respect to the common good, and therefore are just and Lawful States.78 Although it is true that from about 1600 state and sovereignty went hand in hand,79 they were not yet linked to each other so closely that contemporary theoreticians would use the phrase “sovereign state,” which was a very rare exception, without being elaborated: for not state sovereignty, but rather princely sovereignty remained the focus of analysis until the late seventeenth century. Despite that Raleigh was not consistent in his use of the terms “state”80 and “commonwealth,”81 his definition (and the content of his work in general, which included a considerable discussion of preserving and maintaining power, that is, the core of the “reason of state” argument) can serve as a justification for Skinner’s assertion. He claimed that as a result of the “confluence of thought” on sovereignty and reason of state “the term state began to be used with increasing confidence to refer to a specific type of union or civil association, that of a universitas or community of people living subject to the sovereign authority of a recognized monarch or ruling group.”82 The term “sovereign state” is encountered, and in quite a modern sense, although without any further theoretical analysis, in 1606, in the work of Edward

78 Raleigh, The Prince, 1. In the Cabinet-Council the first mark of sovereignty is “absolute power and authority to command all subjects in general, and every of them in particular, without the consent of any other person or persons, either greater or inferior to himself.” Walter Raleigh, Cabinet-Council, 38, Selected Works of Sir Walter Raleigh, http://173.45.234.110/renlit/ ralebib.htm. 79 Brett, “Political Thought,” 32. 80 Paul J. Steinberger, The Idea of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 11. See, for example, Raleigh’s wordings such as “State of Soveraignty,” or “Popular Estate” instead of “popular state.” Raleigh, The Prince, 3. 81 “Commonwealth” was also used by him in the sense of bad government of the multitude, that is, democracy. “A Commonwealth is the swerving or depravation of a free or popular State.” Raleigh, The Prince, 8. 82 Skinner, “The Sovereign State,” 27.

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Forset,83 and his comparison of sovereignty to the soul of the body politic foreshadowed Hobbes wording who called sovereignty an “artificial soul”: As in the creating of man God conioined a soule for action, in the body passive: so in his ordinance of mans sociable conversing (to make the union of the body politike) hath knit together a passiue subiection to an active superioritie: and as in euery man there is both a quickening and ruling soule, and a liuing ruled bodie; so in euery ciuill state there is a directing and commanding power, and an obeying and subjected alleageance. For as neither the soule alone, nor body alone (if they sould be seuered) can be a man, so not the ruler alone, nor the subjects alone, can be a commonweale. … In man the soule ruleth by reason, and in the State the Soveraigne governeth by laws; which may no less aptly be termed the soule of soveraignty, than reason is said to be the soule of the soule. … Surely, as in every individuall body the owne soule thereof is sufficeth for all naturall works, requisite to be effected therein: so in every soveraigne state, the ruling authoritie thereof is of itself competent and complete, for wellgoverning and ordering of all the affaires, needfull or behovable to be attended unto, in that entire territory … in any countrey, the commanding, summoning, and censuring of subjects, together with the sentencing of causes, hath his whole dependance and derivation from the rights and preheminence of the soveraignetie.84 Although these statements on sovereignty and state sound modern, containing even the allusion to the three branches of state power, and including the aspect of territoriality, Forset, like others, was mainly preoccupied with princely sovereignty. Still, it is one the earliest and most comprehensive definition of the modern/sovereign state known to me before Hobbes. The concept of territorial sovereignty, born in the early modern age, was catalyzed not only by developments in political thought. Seemingly unrelated

83 Edward Forset (1553–1630), an official, justice of the peace, member of Parliament, was a divine right royalist who emphasized the idea of harmony in the body politic. 84 Edward Forset, A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique (London: John Bill, 1606), 1–2, 4, 9–10.

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phenomena also contributed. One perhaps would not think of the importance of early modern cartography, which underlines the importance of the parallel use of written and visual sources for the study of political thought, and their interaction.85 It was the ability of the map “to figure the new state itself, to perform the shape of statehood.”86 When in maps of the late sixteenth century blue and red dotted lines (as is the case even today) took the place of former mimic depictions of borders symbolized by forests or hills87—often in clear contrast with geographical reality—this new way of marking borders had important consequences. Early modern maps thus had the potential to “give the elusive idea of the state concrete form, to those outside looking in, certainly, but also to those living within.”88 They made visible the sovereignty of a given state—to be constrained only horizontally—at the very time when the modern concept of sovereignty was proposed by Bodin in 1576. To be sure, geography and maps were already crucial to Bodin’s thinking on state and sovereignty, as Abraham Ortelius, the inventor of the atlas, (1570) was Bodin’s friend.89 The commentary attached to the 1601 English translation of Giovanni Botero’s Relazioni universali (written by him on papal initiative to summarize knowledge on the New World), which, to be sure, contained Mercator’s maps of the four continents, is remarkable on the issue of territorial sovereignty as it stated: “The enlarging of Dominion is the uniting and establishing of divers territories under one sovereigntie and government.”90 The early modern map was a novel phenomenon in the fifteenth–seventeenth centuries, so was the idea and the reality of the modern state.91 85 If you like, “history in ideas” (Armitage): the “state” expressed in words and in various (cartographic or allegorical) images. 86 Denis Wood, Rethinking the Power of Maps (New York: The Guilford Press, 2010), 31. Russia, although lagging behind in this respect, was not untouched by cartography in the seventeenth century: “mapping the heartland and mapping the frontiers constituted two pieces of a single project: the creation and imaginative consolidation of a territorial tsarist empire.” Valerie A. Kivelson, Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 10. Yet, it was the Petrine era, as mentioned before, which caused the emergence of the first significant attempts at map-making in Russia as a reflection of sense of territoriality. 87 Kimmo Katajala, “Maps, Borders and State-Building,” in Physical and Cultural Space in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. Marko Lamberg, Marko Hakanen, et al. (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2011), 74. 88 Wood, Rethinking, 31. 89 Marie-Dominique Couzinet, “On Bodin’s Method,” in The Reception of Bodin, ed. Howell A. Lloyd (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 42. 90 Quoted in Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 271. 91 Wood, Rethinking, 31.

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Similarly to the importance of new types of maps, there can be no doubt that allegorical personification of nations in female figures (the subject of the next chapter) played a great part in the formation of the idea of territorial sovereignty.92 In the so-called “Dutch virgin” coins (first example is from 1573) and engravings of this type from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (that is, the allegorical personifications of the United Provinces in the figure of a young woman), the fence around the female figure (and the gate guarded by lions) represented the symbolic borders of the United Provinces, the integrity of which was to be untouched—an integrity symbolized by the virgin herself. Another characteristic engraving from the history of the United Provinces is the strange map called Leo Hollandicus, which also came into fashion (in different versions, first in 1609) during the Dutch War of Independence, where the geographical contours of the seven provinces were joined in a manner that their borders could be squeezed into a figure of a lion standing on two legs.93 It is not a coincidence that the most famous version of it was published in 1648, after the United Provinces (The Netherlands) became independent in Westphalia. The use of “state”/état, however, was not yet consistent at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It remained burdened with contradictions while existing beside other, older political discourses.94 One of these discourses was the organic conception of the political community based on the analogy of the human body, that is, the body politic (corpus politicum). (See, for instance, the title of Forset’s book and his argument!) The other was centered on the concept of respublica/“commonwealth.” Annabel Brett sees respublica/“commonwealth” as the “third term central to early modern political thought,” and argues that the two newcomers, “state” and “sovereignty,” found “their senses only in that relation.”95 It was the strength of the two older discourses and their “normative overtone”96 that even Bodin, for whom the body analogy was also crucial, preferred république, the French version of respublica, to état.97 Moreover, he even used royaume (kingdom) to designate the state.98

92 See the analysis of the image Poly-Olbion in the next chapter! 93 Its earlier version was the Leo Belgicus, which represented all the seventeenth provinces raising against the Spanish rule. 94 Nederman, Lineages, 55. 95 Brett, “Political Thought,” 32. The title of her subchapter reads: “Sovereignty, State, and Commonwealth.” See the definition of state by Raleigh and Philippe de Béthune referred to before. 96 Brett, “Political Thought,” 32. 97 Nederman, Lineages, 55. 98 Osiander, Before the State, 442.

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Older designations of political community survived vigorously even in England, such as the “commonwealth,” the mirror translation of respublica— often written in the form “Common-wealth.” Besides these variants, the version “Commonweal” was also used (especially in the second half of the sixteenth century), hence nurturing a close association between the idea of the commonwealth and the common good.99 This association, in turn, harmonized with the organic concept of the political community as a body politic.100 It was only by the end of the seventeenth century that the fully modern use of the word “state” had triumphed in England.101 An inconsistency concerning the use of “state” and “estate” can be observed even with Hobbes, as I have mentioned before,102 and the variety of terms was also present even in the Leviathan (see the word “commonwealth” in the title and in the definition of the state as well). The more frequent occurrence of the word “state”/état around 1600 did not mean, as stated, that it was the most common term in political discourse: realm (regnum), or most of the time, “body politic” was preferred, and it was this latter term that made it possible to integrate the word “state” into current discourse, now with a new meaning.103 As the king had his duty to maintain “his state,” that is, his position and rights emanating from his office, this was thought to be possible if he maintained the common good, in other words, the “good State of Body Politic” of which he was the head, and this eventually led to his duty to maintain the state itself.104 It was after the mid-seventeenth century, and thanks to Hobbes’s influence (De Cive, 1642, Leviathan, 1651) that not the impersonal rights of the ruler pertaining to his office, and not his sovereignty but the sovereignty of the state was envisaged as the subject of political theory—by 1700 this was the case.105 Instead of concentrating on the relations between the sovereign ruler and his subjects, the relations between the sovereign state and its subjects was analysed:

99 William H. Sherman, “Anatomizing the Commonwealth: Language, Politics, and the Elizabethan Social Order,” in The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World, ed. Elizabeth Fowler and Roland Greene (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 106. 100 Sherman, “Anatomizing the Commonwealth,” 107. 101 Nederman, Lineages, 55. 102 Osiander, Before the State, 443. 103 Skinner, “The Sovereign State,” 28. 104 Ibid. 105 William M. Spellmann, European Political Thought 1600–1700 (London: Macmillan, 1998), 135.

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“the rights of states and duties of subjects,” in Hobbes’s phrasing.106 Klaus Roth characterized the developments from Machiavelli to Hobbes regarding the idea of the state as the “deepening” and the “transformation” of the concept.107 Hobbes had a major role in transforming the monarchical commonwealth by sublimating it in the state when he equated commonwealth with the state108— although the frontispiece image still contains remnants of the first notion with the figures of men making the body of the artificial man. It was also Hobbes who moved the previously dominant organic conception of the political community, the body analogy, towards an inorganic, artificial image with his use of the metaphor of clockwork for the body politic, which was no longer a natural but an artificial body, as the frontispiece of the Leviathan forcefully propagated, and which is also present in its introduction. Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governes the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal. For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the begining whereof is in some principall part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that Rationall and most excellent worke of Nature, Man. For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which, the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; The Magistrates, and other Officers of Judicature and Execution, artificiall Joynts; Reward and Punishment (by which fastned to the seat of the Soveraignty, every joynt and member is moved to performe his duty) are the Nerves, that do the same in the Body Naturall; The Wealth and Riches of all the particular members,

106 Skinner, The Foundations, vol. 2, 349. 107 Karl Roth, Genealogie des Staates [Genealogy of the state] (Berlin: Dunker and Humblot, 2011), 621. 108 Collins, From Monarchical Commonwealth.

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are the Strength; Salus Populi (the Peoples Safety) its Businesse; Counsellors, by whom all things needfull for it to know, are suggested unto it, are the Memory; Equity and Lawes, an artificiall Reason and Will; Concord, Health; Sedition, Sicknesse; and Civill War, Death. Lastly, the Pacts and Covenants, by which the parts of this Body Politique were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that Fiat, or the Let Us Make Man, pronounced by God in the Creation.109 As time went on, the ruler was seen not so much as the head of the body politic, devoted to preservation, but as an artisan, whose task was creation! This latter idea, as we shall see, was vital for Peter the Great.

109 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207h.htm#link2H_4_0261.

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CHAPTER 4

The Role of Metaphors and Allegorical Personifications in the Development of the Concept of the State in Western Christendom

4.1.  Introductory Methodological Remarks A study of the idea of the state, and not only that of the modern concept of state, cannot neglect the use of metaphors (of which the most important was the human body) and allegories (mostly personifications in the female form) for the political community both in written and visual sources. The need “to integrate the study of visual images and symbolic representations in the practice of conceptual history” has just recently been realized, calling attention to the “(gendered) figures” of Britannia, Germania, Marianne, and also the Russian bear, in connection with concepts of nation and nation state.1 Although the above 1 Willibald Steinmetz and Michael Freeden, introduction to Conceptual History: Challenges, Conundrums, Complexities, ed. Willibald Steinmetz, Michael Freeden, and Javier FernándezSebastián (New York: Berghahn, 2017), 8–9. Susanna Berger’s recent book proves convincingly the great importance of “visual commentaries as a way of articulating ideas.” She claims that “viewing and creation of imagery functioned as important instruments of philosophical thought [political philosophy proper included] and teaching,” and sees the crucial role of visual representations in the fact that “images often articulated ideas that could not quite be communicated in verbal language.” Susanna Berger, The Art of Philosophy. Visual Thinking in Europe from the Late Renaissance to the Early Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 1, 2.

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issues are very important, they are rarely given due emphasis, as the study of political thought or political concepts and political iconography (including the various pictorial representations of the political community/state) are usually treated separately,2 despite the importance that printed images exerted in the very period under consideration due to the invention of printing. And despite the fact that “people perceive and conceive in the light of narratives, pictures, and images. That is why art is central to politics.”3 Metaphors and allegories have the capacity “to ‘figure out’ the state,” to use Mark Neocleous’s phrase.4 The use of metaphors and allegories for the state is rooted in the nature of the human mind. Most of the time we speak of the state “in anthropomorphic terms,” and in this sense the state is “a body, a person, or an actor.”5 The explanation for this has been best formulated by Michael Walzer, in an oft-quoted passage, which has not been analysed in the depth that it deserves. The main problem with the state, Walzer points out, lies in the fact that the state is not a physical object, so it cannot be seen or touched: “The state is invisible. It has to be personified before it can be seen, symbolized before it can be loved, imagined before it can be conceived.”6 Metaphors (both organic and inorganic), and allegories (among them personifications, male or female) are the means that help us imagine the invisible political community, while flags and coats of arms are

2 A notable exception is the Handbuch der politischen Ikonographie [The handbook of political iconography], ed. Uwe Fleckner, Martin Warnke, and Hendrik Ziegler (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2011). See also the various works written on the frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan, notably Horst Bredekamp, Thomas Hobbes Der Leviathan: Das Urbild des modernen Staates und seine Gegenbilder, 1651–2001 [Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: The archimage of modern state and its counterimages, 1651–2001] (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2006); and his “Thomas Hobbes’s Visual Strategies,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 29–60. 3 Murray Edelman, From Art to Politics: How Artistic Creations Shape Political Conceptions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 7. 4 Neocleous, Imagining the State, 4. Neocleous’s work was, no doubt, one of the inspirations for my approach. Although he dealt with the use of the body metaphor for the state, he did not give a theoretical discussion of the role of metaphor and allegory. Likewise, he did not address the issue of visual strategy in “figuring out the state,” or to put it simply, visual sources, except in a short passage commenting on the frontispiece of the Leviathan. Nevertheless, this work represents a major shift in approaching the state: the aim to “‘figure out’ the state” for him meant “to avoid the question what the state is, and instead ask how it has been spoken of.” Ibid. 5 Erik Ringmar, “On the Ontological Status of the State,” European Journal of International Relations 2, no. 4 (December 1996): 440. Neocleous strongly echoes Ringmar (see also his chapter titles: “The Body of the State,” “The Mind of the State,” “The Personality of the State”) without using his work, as Ringmar is not among the bibliographical references. Neocleous, Imagining the State, 4. 6 Michael Walzer, “On the Role of Symbolism in Political Thought,” Political Science Quarterly 82 (1967): 194 (emphasis mine—E.S.).

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the most important symbols that were/are used to identify such a community, or nations/states. The exploration of the history of metaphors and allegories in written and visual sources is “thereby the history of language and discourse”— both textual and visual; in other words, it is “the exploration of the history of ideas.”7 The idea of the state as a “body” or a “person” goes back to the high and late Middle Ages, whereas the image of the state as an “actor” was nurtured by Renaissance thought, which perceived “both man and state as independent, and self-directing entities.”8 Indeed, from the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries onwards, the political community designated by the term Respublica in general, regardless of its form of government, was conceived as a “body politic” (corpus politicum) functioning in analogy with the human body, where the prince was the head and the various social estates and functionaries were the limbs and internal organs. But the Respublica was also a corporation, a legal person (persona ficta) for the lawyers. Therefore, if the state could be conceived and imagined as a body and a person, from this it was just one step to conceive it “in terms of reason”9—as the head moved and governed the body rationally, so did the prince, the political head of the body politic. “A state was not a state without a prince, and a prince was not a prince without a state.”10 This commitment is reflected in the wording of Giovanni Botero in his Della ragion di stato (1589) where the relationship between the state, reason of state, and prince was set forth as follows: STATE is a stable rule over a people and Reason of State is the knowledge of the means by which such a dominion may be founded, preserved and extended. Yet, although in the widest sense the term includes all these, it is concerned most nearly with preservation, and more nearly with extension than with foundation; for Reason of State assumes a ruler and a State (the one as artificer, the other as his material). …11

7 “Organic and Mechanical Metaphors in Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought,” Harvard Law Review 110, no. 8 (1997): 1832. 8 Ringmar, “On the Ontological,” 444. 9 Neocleous, Imagining the State, 38. 10 Ringmar, “On the Ontological,” 445. 11 Giovanni Botero, Reason of State, book 1, https://www.nlnrac.org/critics/machiavelli/ primary-source-documents/the-reason-of-state. It is highly interesting, in my view, that this state of mind is expressed in the iconography of the personal seal of Peter the Great mentioned before.

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Likewise, in 1603 Cesare Ripa in his Iconologia explained that reason of state (which in his understanding, similarly to Botero, is the science of maintaining power) “pertains to those who established themselves as rulers in their country or principality.”12 Significantly, Ripa presented a female allegorical personification of reason of state, an example that underlines the importance of iconography in the development of the concept of the state. Although reason of state “assumed a ruler and a state,” after a time theorists concluded that monarchy and state can be separated: “whatever may happen to its particular form, the state survives.”13 This became most obvious after 1649 in England. Not only was the monarch, King Charles I, beheaded but also the institution of monarchy was abolished by law! The political entity survived, of course, but now as a republic, which officially came to be designated as a “commonwealth and free state” between 1649 and 1660 (although in diplomacy the state was referred to as the “Republic of England”), adding thereby a negative connotation to the previously noble term “commonwealth.” The short-lived association of the term “commonwealth” with the Cromwellian version of a republican form of state proved to be strong enough to make the word “state” rather than “commonwealth” the preferred term after the 1660 Stuart Restoration. The fact that metaphors and allegories connected to the concept of state are mostly anthropomorphic is not accidental. “Long before the state became the abstract legal entity it is today, it was a body politic.”14 That is why we do not even recognize that in using expressions such as the “head of the state,” or “organs of the state,” our language is a reflection of an age-old metaphor, that of the human body. Thinking about the state metaphorically, either in terms of a human body or conceiving it as a machine (namely, a clockwork), a later phenomenon that dates from the mid-seventeenth century and has started its real career due to Hobbes’s Leviathan, we employ certain analogies: an organic analogy in the first case, and an inorganic, artificial one in the second—based on some alleged (structural or functional) similarities.15 King James called “similitudes” the 12 Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (Rome, 1603), “Ragione di stato.” 13 Neocleous, Imagining the State, 18. 14 Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 232. 15 The appearance of the mechanical metaphor of the machine (clockwork) did not immediately replace the human body but rather was fused with that, as we saw in Hobbes’s wording. For “no concept or metaphor ever exists in a vacuum, isolated from the dynamic force field of counter-concepts and competing, or at least alternative, metaphors in which it is situated at particular moments in its history.” Martin Jay, “‘Hey! What’s the Big Idea?’: Ruminations on the Question of Scale in Intellectual History,” New Literary History 48, no. 4 (Autumn 2017): 624. The appearance of mechanical metaphors nevertheless points to a general though not

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metaphors he used for the state (employing the terms “state,” “commonwealth,” and even “republick,” the Anglicized form of the French République) to illustrate “the office of the king”: “The king towards his people is rightly compared to a father of children and to a head of a body composed of divers members.”16 A metaphor, although it is based on analogy, is much more than merely a transfer of certain similarities: “If it were, it would fail to convey, or more important, to create meaning.”17 For a metaphor creates a specific “range of connotations,”18 or in other words, a “metaphorical field” (Bildfeld), which is “made of the two elements of the semantic fields held together,” namely, the “image-receiving field” and the “image-producing field.”19 Therefore, metaphors help not only to conceptualize something, including the state; at the same time they also shape and structure the framework of thought creating various associations.20 That is why it makes a great difference when one conceives the state in terms of an organic (human body) or inorganic (machine) entity. In the first case there is an inevitable association with disease, death, medical treatment, and so forth,

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abrupt shift in thinking. When people from the end of the seventeenth century in England were using metaphors for political purposes they tended “to turn from theology to sciences.” David J. Sturdy, Fractured Europe 1600–1721 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 393. The expression “Glorious Revolution” is eloquent in this regard, as “revolution” was taken from astronomy, the Latin revolutio being used for the motion of planets! And from the 1720s on, the new conception of the Newtonian universe became the favourite analogy for the “balance of the constitution.” As it is attested in the work of J. T. Desaguliers, who compared the British political system to the functioning of the solar system: The Newtonian System of the World, the Best Model of Government: An Allegorical Poem (London, 1728). King James VI and I. Political Writings, ed. James P. Somerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 76, 78. Besides the human body and the family, which were the most widespread among the political metaphors, the king also used the metaphor of the horse and rider in the same work. The importance of the horse and rider metaphor is discussed at the end of this chapter. Daisy Delogu, Allegorical Bodies. Power and Gender in Late Medieval France (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2014), 34. Monroe Beardsley’s phrase is quoted ibid. Jeremy Rayner, “Between Meaning and Event: An Historical Approach to Political Metaphors,” Political Studies 32, no. 4 (1984): 545. The use of the word “field” in the expressions “imagereceiving field” and the “image-producing field” is well-chosen. For a metaphor, as Max Black stated, is not simply an interaction between two “things” but rather two “system relations.” Max Black, “More about Metaphor,” Dialectica 31, nos. 3–4 (1977): 441. “Organic and Mechanical,” 1832. Similarly, “works of art rather create” than represent reality, because they, “like language, derive their imports … from metaphors they suggest to observers.” Edelman, From Art to Politics, 7, 64. The German term Bildfeld is eloquent because it contains the word Bild (image)—in fact, a metaphor, either rhetorical or visual, always creates a kind of image. “Conceptual history and metaphorology thus avoid some of the vulnerable assumptions of traditional history of ideas, which seeks to still semantic ambiguity.” Jay, “‘Hey! What’s the Big Idea?,’” 624.

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while in the latter the idea of planning, construction, improvement, and replaceable parts could come to one’s mind. Furthermore, having been accepted, each metaphor “defines the pattern of perception to which people respond” later on: it “becomes self-perpetuating.”21 By contrast, in allegorical use the state is, first of all, a person, an actor as in the Hungarian expression “Uncle State” (Állam Bácsi)22—“Uncle Sam” would be the English phrase for this—for instance, which is an allegorical personification. In this case the state is not “like something” (an organic creature or an inorganic object) but it acts, represents, and behaves as a human in a natural, personal capacity.23 Whereas in the metaphoric or analogical perception the state is conceived in terms of the parts and the whole, in the allegorical perception the state is an indivisible entity.24

21 Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964), 67, 72. 22 The word bácsi is a polite form of addressing an elderly male person by grown-ups or by children, if there is no blood relation between them. It is inserted after the person’s first name. 23 The term “Uncle State,” similarly to the epithet bat′ka (“father”) of the Belorusin president, Lukashenko, is a residual reflection of patriarchalism and a symptom of weakness of the depersonalized concept of the state, as it relies on the patriarchal analogy between the family and the political community. The term “Uncle State” at the same time, shows that the line between metaphor and allegory is not a sharp one, as this idea is derived from the image of the father transposed to the realm of political relations. This image is not only an age-old one, but surely the most widespread of all analogies present in different civilizations to describe the bond between governors and the governed, and the respective duties it entails on both sides. This was a common feature of early modern Europe, and Stuart England was not an exception, as we have just seen.   In Russia the image of the tsar as a “merciful benevolent father,” was part and parcel of Russian mentality, expressed, for example, in the patriarchal language of petitions (which is less known), and in the epithet tsar′ batiushka, which, in lieu of a better translation, is rendered as “Pappa Tsar.” The development of the impersonalized concept of the state in Russia was to struggle with this personalized image, which remained strong until 1917. (See this problem later in the book!)   Taking a look outside Europe, it is interesting to compare the timing of the appearance of the “household-state vision” of India in the nineteenth century, which, in contrast to Russia, did not precede “the notion of impersonal governance” but was its “by-product,” the result of modernization. “The discourse on personal family rule provided the foundation not for the negation of the administrative state, but rather as an additional pillar of legitimacy for the latter.” Milinda Banerjee: The Mortal God: Imagining the Sovereign in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 144. 24 For the comparison of metaphorical and allegorical thinking see Delogu, Allegorical Bodies, 31–37.

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4.2. Allegorical Personification and the Idea of State: Medieval Roots and Early Modern Manifestations King James I’s 1604 speech to Parliament on the relationship created by the union of the crowns of England and Scotland provides an eloquent early modern example of the combination of allegorical and metaphorical political thinking with regard to the state25: “What God hath conioyned, then let no man separate. I am the Husband, and all the whole Isle is my lawful Wife; I am the Head, and it is my Body. I am the shepherd, and it is my flocke.”26 These images used by King James were part of what may be termed “symbolic discourse,” to borrow the phrase of Graem Gill. The importance of “symbolic discourse” lies in the fact that the “coherent arrangement of symbols” in the past and in the present “justifies and legitimates regimes” regardless of the historical age.27 As I will show later, both of these images employed by James came from late medieval political theology but here, for our purposes, the allegorical personification has more relevance. In the medieval and early modern West the allegorical visual representation of the kingdom/fatherland and (later on) of nation/state—of which the female personification was the most common form—owed much to the idea of the kingdom as the king’s wife. By the early seventeenth century this personification had long been established in Western Christendom in written and visual sources alike. In 1607, just a few years after King James’s statement, Francis Bacon wrote in a similar manner on the marital relationship between the king and the kingdom: Reges enim regnis suis, ut Iupiter Iunoni veluti matrimonio iuncti recte censentur (“For princes may be rightly considered as if they are linked to their kingdoms by marriage, as Jove to Juno”).28 And in 1612, in the frontispiece of Michael Drayton’s panegyric work Poly-Olbion,29 Britannia was depicted allegorically as a queen sitting on a throne with a scepter in her right hand and a horn of plenty in her left, under two angels holding a laurel crown above her head. The most spectacular feature of this female figure, however, is her unique shape, which was clearly patterned on the geographical boundaries of the island 25 For the same issue in late medieval France see ibid. 26 Somerville, King James, 136. 27 Gill, Symbolism, 1–2. 28 Sander Brouwer, “The Bridegroom Who Did Not Come. Social and Amorous Unproductivity from Pushkin to the Silver Age,” in The Two Hundred Years of Pushkin, ed. Robert Reid (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), vol. 1, 57. 29 The title plays on the association between the Greek polyolbos meaning “rich in blessings” and Poly-Olbion meaning “many(-coloured) Albion.”

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of Great Britain, making the political message more direct by including even the territorial dimension in the female personification of the Kingdom of Great Britain.30 While, in the last resort, the origin of both examples used by James I goes back to passages in the Bible, Bacon’s formulation, like Drayton’s frontispiece, reveals the importance of the classical heritage for early modern European culture. Bacon’s wording reflects the use of ancient mythology, whereas Drayton’s frontispiece underlines the importance of the classical genre of visual representation, specifically the allegorical personification of lands/provinces by female figures, which had been common in Imperial Roman coins and in statues. This latter phenomenon was revived during the Renaissance along with ancient mythology. The two phenomena were often intertwined during the Renaissance and the Baroque Ages as female allegorical personifications of kingdoms/nations/ states in engravings, paintings, commemorative medals (including coronation jetons), and depictions of provinces derived from Imperial Roman symbolism (for example, the female figure of Britannia appearing in the sixteenth century as a replica of a Roman coin), were often modelled on or influenced by classical deities, especially Minerva31 and Dea Roma.32 As Caspar Hirschi has shown, Renaissance humanism in the fifteenth–seventeenth centuries played a great part in the spread of female personifications of the emerging “nations” (nationes), which were “mostly drawn on ancient models.”33 The female allegorical personification of countries and even continents was given a new impetus by the most influential emblematic manual of early modern Europe, the Iconologia of Cesare Ripa (the 1603 edition already contained images), which set the pattern with his depictions of Italia and her provinces and of the four continents. The principle Ripa used for personifying virtues and vices (the main subject of his work) and a few political concepts was the gender

30 To make the identification plain, the words “Great Britaine” are written under the feet of the female figure. 31 Thomas Maissen, “Die Bedeutung der christlichen Bildsprache für die Legitimation frühneuzeitlicher Staatlichkeit” [The importance of Christian image-languages for the legitimation of early modern statehood], in Religions-Politik [Politics of religion], vol. 1, ed. Alexander Heit and Georg Pfleiderer (Zürich: Nomos, 2013), 149. 32 The iconography of Dea Roma was a fusion of various iconographic traditions (among which the Amazon-type was a marked one), but it was essentially based on the figure of Athena with helmet, lance, and shield, which is why Dea Roma often cannot be distinguished clearly from Athena’s Roman equivalent, Minerva. However, the seated position, the profile pose, and Roman clothing are among Dea Roma’s characteristic features. 33 Caspar Hirschi, The Origins of Nationalism: An Alternative History from Ancient Rome to Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 32.

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of the word denoting the given concept in Italian: concepts denoted by masculine-gendered words were personified as males and those denoted by feminine-gendered words, as females. Among his political concepts ragione di stato (reason of state) is of special importance, for its female personification greatly influenced later personifications of the state itself: ragione di stato was depicted as a woman dressed in armor, wearing a helmet and having a rod in her hand, and was most probably modelled upon Minerva! The second part of Bacon’s statement, comparing the ruler’s marriage to his realm to the marriage of Jove to Juno, would have been unimaginable in Muscovy: whereas allegories evoking ancient deities were common in Western Christendom since the Renaissance, in Muscovy this practice was not only missing but was strictly forbidden. Before the late seventeenth century, and arguably before 1700, that is, before the so-called “Petrine Revolution in Russian imagery,” classical mythology was considered pagan and therefore was banned by the Russian Orthodox Church.34 In terms of the broader cultural context of visual representation and imagery in Russia, it should also be noted that statues of any kind were banned, not just in churches but in general.35 These bans in themselves might explain the lack of non-Christian visual allegorical representations of Russia in form of a female personification prior to about 1700. Moreover, we should not forget that the themes and imagery in icons were determined by explicit scriptural references and acts of divine liturgy. This last point is important because one can speak of an “iconic type of visuality” (ikonichnost′) in pre-Petrine Russia (I. A. Esaulov’s wording)36 opposed to the “allegorical type” of visuality. Leonid Ouspensky has stated that although “allegories are sometimes admitted in icons,” yet, “to regard an icon as a personification of an idea, virtues, etc. … is deprived of all factual foundation.”37 34 It could exist only in the inner circles of the court, which was represented by a few persons such as Simeon Polotskii (1629–1680) in the 1660s. 35 However (as an exception to the rule) as a result of influences of Western art, wooden sculptures known as “Christ in the Dungeon” appeared in Russia from the mid-seventeenth century in places that escaped the attention of official church authorities but bans against “icons carved, chiseled or sculptured” in churches continued. Statutes were deemed idolatry even in profane places: when in 1719 Peter ordered to buy a Roman marble statute of Venus for his Summer Garden from Italy, it was necessary to have soldiers guarding it from being vandalized. It is also eloquent that the marble statue (of a naked woman, which even made the matter worse in the eyes of traditionalists) was “immediately dubbed the ‘white she-devil’ by the Russians.” Solomon Volkov, Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists under the Tsars (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 17. 36 Quoted by Lewitt, Visual Dominant, 5. 37 Vladimir Lossky and Leonid Ouspensky, The Meaning of Icons (Crestwood, Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir Seminary Press, 1999), 37, fn. 1.

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Allegorical personification, by contrast, was common in Western culture from the Early Middle Ages on. It is therefore important to consider the differences in the broad cultural context of visual representation. In the classical and medieval periods we can observe the “virtually exclusive use of female form for personifications”: “Medieval allegory and its use of personified abstractions connect some of the central elements of Western thought—including questions of literary history, education, hermeneutics, and theology—to the representation of femininity and female characters in medieval literature and culture.”38 One immediate cause of the gendering of personifications was indeed the gendering of the language, for “in Latin abstract concepts are usually feminine, hence so are the personifications of those abstract concepts.”39 But the popularity of female personifications cannot be explained merely by taking into account the gendering issue. It was also due to the overwhelming impact of the literary works of two late ancient/early medieval authors, Prudentius and Martianus Capella, that the golden thread for the female allegorical personification of virtues and vices, and also of the “seven liberal arts” was established. Therefore, the female body served not only in literary works but also in the arts as the “figure of figuration” (with the additional aspect strengthening the female type of gendering that the word figura, similarly to allegoria, is also feminine!): “a figure that can be ornamented, disrobed, changed and generally formed by the process of thought.”40 This preoccupation with the female form of personification, in turn, led to a mindset that personifications ought to take the form of a female body,41 a phenomenon that did not change fundamentally during the Renaissance. Returning to Bacon’s formulation, his words are a very good illustration of what has been written above. In medieval, and to a great extent in early modern political literature as well, the term used for the political community regardless of the form of government was, as we have seen, Respublica, which, indeed, was even grammatically suitable for a female personification of the political community. But the gender of the word was not the primary point in determining the gender of a given personification, as Bacon’s formulation also proves, because he used the neuter regnum instead of Respublica.

38 Andrea Denny-Brown, “Personifications Visualized as Women,” in Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia, ed. Margaret Schaus (New York: Routledge, 2006), 647. 39 Denny-Brown, “Personifications Visualized,” 649. 40 Genevieve S. Gessert, “A Giant Corrupt Body. The Gendering of Renaissance Roma,” in Reception of Antiquity. Constructions of Gender in Medieval Art, ed. Marice Rose and Alison C. Poe (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 125. 41 Denny-Brown, “Personifications Visualized,” 649.

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Analysis of the origin of the words of King James takes us to “political theology” (which can be defined as the appropriation/borrowing of theological concepts for secular, political purpose), and consequently to the crucial differences between the late medieval/early modern Western Christendom and contemporary Muscovy in their ideologies of power. The idea of the king’s marriage to his kingdom comes from the biblical metaphor, in which Christ (Christus) is the bridegroom and the church (Ecclesia) is Christ’s bride, whereas the comparison of the kingdom with the human body, of which the king was the head, comes from the notion that Christ is the head of the church. King James’s examples, however, had their immediate origins in certain legal and philosophical phenomena of the high and late Middle Ages. “The idea of Christ as the head of the body-church or as the husband of the wife-church, became a model for the relationships between a bishop and his flock, the pope and his church, and eventually (through a series of ideological and ritual borrowings) for the relationship between the king and his kingdom.”42 This “series of ideological borrowings,” best expounded by Ernst Kantorowicz, led to the idea of the distinctiveness of the kingdom with rights of its own. But this development was missing in Russia. Although the idea of the tsar’s marriage to his tsardom was very strong in Muscovite Russia (originating from the same religious inspiration as in the West), the notion of the tsardom as an entity independent or merely separate from the ruler was virtually unknown in Russia until the early seventeenth century. Indeed, the concept of the kingdom as a legal entity did not exist at all, even in the eighteenth century. The reason for this was that Muscovite kingship did not become either “law-centered” or “polity-centered,” as happened in the West in the course of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries: it was, instead, “Christ-centered.”43 In Western Christendom there had been a drive by the Gregorian papacy to differentiate a “secular political sphere from the realm of the sacred,” a “process whereby the political came to be (at least in part) desacralized and comprehended no longer as something pertaining to the order of redemption.”44 This process never occurred either in Kievan Rus′ or in 42 Muir, Ritual, 255. We have seen the same transfer regarding the terminology of sovereignty too! 43 Kivelson, Autocracy in the Provinces, 16. 44 Francis Oakley, The Watershed of Modern Politics: Law, Virtue Kingship (1300–1650) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 289–290. See Black’s first point among his criteria! This partial desacralization of ruling power had the consequence that divine grace was no longer enough to justify rulership: rulers, of course, did not drop the formula “By the grace of God” from titulature (which has its origin in the Bible, Apostle Paul’s words) but they had to justify their rule with reference to law and the common good. I think the twelfth century is the time when one can properly speak of political theology in Western thought, which was first

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Muscovy. In Western Christendom this process of secularization had been an indispensable prerequisite for the “ideological borrowings” mentioned above, through which the achievements of legal thought in the high and late Middle Ages were adapted to the profane or political sphere. As a consequence, the line between the sacred and secular “gradually came to be moved in such a way as to enlarge the secular arena at expense of the realm which could be labelled unambiguously as ‘sacred.’”45 Consequently, the religious notion in question shared by both Western and Eastern Churches—that Christ is the bridegroom, and the church is Christ’s bride—produced a very different result in Muscovy. In the Western Christendom it strengthened the distinctiveness of the kingdom with rights of its own, a phenomenon superbly summarized by Kantorowicz: this image “was transformed from the spiritual to the secular and adapted to the jurists’ need for defining the relations between the Prince and the state—a state which, as a mystical or political body, was an entity in its own right, independent of the king and endowed with property which was not that of the king.”46 The kingdom (regnum), conceived as a political body as well as a corporation, and also as the king’s wife, could be used for political purposes. For it could counter the patrimonial pretensions of the rulers (their attempts to treat the kingdom as their private property) while generating loyalty, affection, and even patriotism. And, what is crucial for our purpose, the kingdom could be visually represented in the late Middle Ages. As the corporation was called persona ficta, that is, a fictive person, by the lawyers, the female gender of the term persona gave a further push to the emergence of the female allegorical personification of the kingdom or other political communities.47 Political theology, however, did not come to an end in the West in the late Middle Ages. Rather, it entered a new phase in the early modern period, as Thomas Maissen has demonstrated: with the emergence of the Bodinian concept of sovereignty, female visual representations of sovereignty or state/nation, either in the guise of Minerva or in the form of various secular appropriations of

hatched in the Policraticus of John of Salisbury (1159): even the title of the work speaks for itself although it is almost impossible to translate it, and the usual version, “Statesman,” is anachronistic. John of Salisbury not only used Roman law and classical authors besides the Bible as an integral part of his work to justify princely rule but also employed the influential organic metaphor of the human body for respublica borrowed from theology. 45 Oakley, Watershed of Modern Politics, 287–288. 46 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies. A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 216–217. 47 Maissen, “Die Bedeutung der christlichen Bildsprache für die Legitimation frühneuzeitlicher Staatlichkeit,” 92.

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religious imagery, became more and more significant.48 Late medieval political theology had the consequence that the body politic as a distinct entity acquired clear legal articulation. Early modern political theology, in turn, exerted great influence on “the pictorial language of politics”49 in visualizing the emerging concept of state/sovereignty through female personification. The impact this phenomenon exerted on the public was enormous due to the “printing revolution,” which heavily relied on images. To cite an example, in the late sixteenth century the sovereign Dutch state (1581) emerging from the war against Spain was depicted in engravings as a virgin in an enclosed garden, as I have mentioned before. This motif was one of the early modern female allegorical personifications of the sovereign political community borrowed from religious imagery. The state depicted allegorically as a hortus conclusus with a virgin in it, was in fact the direct transfer of a religious image to the state, namely, the iconographic tradition of the Virgin Mary sitting in an enclosed garden.50 This imagery, as also mentioned, would continue in the seventeenth century. Early modern visual representations of the state deserve special attention not only because of the phenomena pointed out by Walzer but also for the reasons identified by Joseph Strayer: “A state exists chiefly in the hearts and minds of its people, if they do not believe it is there, no logical exercise will bring it to life.”51 This statement is, of course, closely related to the factors mentioned by Walzer with regard to the perception of the state, and shares with them one basic characteristic, namely, that the state is a “construction.” Affection and loyalty are parts of this “constructedness,” and allegorical visual representations of states in a female form (think of the figures of Britannia, Svea [Sweden], Marianne, and others) are probably the most important ones in generating affection. In the Russian context and, understandably, in the context of this book one necessarily can think of the image of “Mother Russia.” The characteristic Russian toy itself, the matrioshka, and its very name (coming from mat′, that is, mother, of which matrioshka is the diminutive form) reflects the affective strength of this female allegorical personification as Joanna Hubbs has shown.52 This is despite the fact

48 Ibid., 76–93. 49 Ibid., 90. 50 Ibid., 131–137. Maissen considers that in Drayton’s frontispiece the figure of Britannia can be interpreted as a Virgin Queen, and she also can be conceived as the Anglican adaptation of the figure of Virgin Mary. Ibid., 126. 51 Strayer, Medieval Origins, 5. 52 “More than a doll and a relic from the forgotten past, Matrioshka remains a symbolic embodiment of ‘Mother Russia.’” Joanna Hubbs, Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), xii.

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that matrioshka is a more modern phenomenon—it only came into existence in the late nineteenth century based on a Japanese model. Early modern visual allegories of the state are worth analysing because it was “the pictorial world of early modern Europe,” especially the genre called “emblematics,” that brought on the “establishment of a direct link between word and image,” and hence made political concepts “comprehensible to human sense”53—among others, the concept of state itself. The classical emblem consisted of three parts: 1) a motto or inscription (inscriptio), very often just a word or a phrase as in Ripa’s work; 2) an image (pictura); and 3) an explanation (subscriptio).54 Therefore, the emblem was highly suitable to express the concept of state through its triad: the term (inscriptio), by designating the concept; the explanation, by giving a clarification (subscriptio); the image (pictura), by visualizing the given abstraction. In case of the state, the visualization could be expressed simply through the regalia of power such as the crown, scepter, and the orb, but more influential were those images that used allegorical personifications in male or female forms (with or without regalia), as they conveyed the message of the state as a person. Even the frontispiece to the book expounding the modern state theory, Hobbes’s Leviathan, can be interpreted in the framework of the classical emblem structure, although in an unusal manner.55 The message of this image, being a frontispiece to the book, is much more complex than the message of ordinary emblems.56 The title of the work, “Leviathan, or The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil” can be interpreted as the inscription, identifying the subject. The line on the top of the frontispiece, which reads Non est potestas super terram quae comparetur ei. Job 41.24. (“There is no power

53 Bettina Brandt, “‘Politik’ im Bild? Überlegungen zur Verhältnis von Begriff und Bild” [“Politics” in image? Thoughts on the relation between concept and image], in “Politik”. Situationen eines Wortgebrauchs im Europa der Neuzeit [“Politics.” Contexts of word usage in Modern Europe], ed. Willibald Steinmetz (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2007), 61. 54 Robin Raybould, An Introduction to the Symbolic Literature of the Renaissance (Oxford: Trafford Publishing, 2005), 249. 55 The Leviathan’s frontispiece has been the subject of thorough study and its emblematic nature is obvious. Nevertheless, my interpretation of the frontispiece is novel in the sense that it is done in the framework of the classical form of the emblem, that is, through the tripartite structure. 56 The general expectation of the age with regard to a frontispiece (in case it was not the author’s portrait) was to be “a proposal or a protocol for reading, suggesting to the reader a correct comprehension and a proper meaning for the text,” and also provide a condensed content of the book. Roger Chartier, General Introduction “Print Culture,” in The Culture of Print. The Power and Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, ed. Roger Chartier (Princeton: University Press, 1986), 6. This frontispiece is a par excellence example of the genre called paratext.

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on earth that can be compared to him”), can be interpreted as a kind of core explanation, the detailed content of which becomes fully clear when the image is decoded. The complex iconography of the image reveals not only the scope of state power but also the other two elements (the “matter and form” of the state) explicit in the title. The male crowned head, representing the sovereign, refers to the monarchical “form” of the body politic, but the body itself is an artificial upper body consisting of human figures representing the individuals who make up the “matter” of the state. The sword and a crozier in the hands of the crowned head are the symbols of secular and spiritual power respectively, which, together with the parallel continuation of these themes downwards in the cassettes, make the scope of state power visible in various ways and in different registers (both secular and spiritual). The transitory zone between the sword and the crozier, on the one hand, and the cassettes of the lower register, on the other, is comprised of a landscape that also reflects the distinction between the “civil and ecclesiastical” spheres through the depiction of a fortress (below the sword) and a town (below the crozier), which is dominated by the image of a church.57 Through this transitory zone a downward link is created to the first cassettes on both sides, containing the image of a castle and a church respectively.58 Original power, as expressed at length in the text of the Leviathan itself, rests in the individuals: political society and sovereignty are based on their contract made with each other, to which the sovereign (either one men or an assembly of men) is not a party, who, as a result of the contract (through which everyone renounces his own will) “bears their [the individuals’] persons,” and whose acts, as a consequence, are considered as their collective will. It is interesting to compare this message of the written text of the Leviathan and its frontispiece with William Blackstone’s definition of state, which has been heavily influenced by Hobbes: for him the state is a “political union,” that is, “a collective body,

57 Philip Manow, In the King’s Shadow: The Political Anatomy of Democratic Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 29. 58 The overall message of the upper part of the frontispiece corresponds even to our concept of the state shaped by Georg Jellinek’s definition, for whom the state is a supreme power (represented in the frontispiece by the king, crowned with a closed, that is, imperial crown, and underlined by the non est potestas … quae comparetur ei of the motto), exercised over a people (represented by the artificial upper body made up by the individuals), living in a defined territory (represented by the landscape and the island-like character of the territory, where the territorial component is underlined by the super terram of the motto).

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composed of multitude of individuals, united for their safety and convenience and intending to act together as one man.”59 In the frontispiece the source of sovereignty (that is, the individuals) is not hidden as in other emblems of the age depicting divine sovereignty. As shown by Peter Goodrich, divine sovereignty was expressed with various iconographic means in which the source of sovereignty, as a rule, was concealed, and as such was represented by a hand or arm stretching out of cloud (holding a crown, scepter, or sword as the symbol of sovereignty), or a radiating triangle with or without the all-seeing eye of God in it, or with God’s name in Hebrew written in it, and so forth.60 The inscription, Non est potestas super terram quae comparetur ei, is taken from the Bible, and no doubt, with the intention to make an allusion to the Pauline doctrine, Non est potestas nisi a Deo, of which it was just the opposite. The inscription should be interpreted in contrast to Paul’s words, the visual representations of which almost always hide God, the source of sovereignty (in various forms described above). In the frontispiece eradication of theology from politics is plainly reflected both in the inscription and the iconography: in accordance with the inscription “there is nothing” above the sovereign’s head; in the image “there is no theology, only jurisdiction—religion is reduced to the political” or, in other words, “into the business of the state.”61 One of the most eloquent early examples showing the importance of emblematics for the history of the concept of state, besides Cesare Ripa’s wellknown reason of state, is the 1579 Dutch engraving known under the name Politeia. (Image 3.) This engraving, designed by the famous Flemish painter Maerten de Vos and engraved by Johann Sadeler (I), has largely escaped the attention of historical scholarship. Only Bettina Brandt’s study has devoted some space to it and provided an insightful, although somewhat incomplete analysis of this piece of art, which deserves special attention because of its message and complex symbolism. According to Brandt’s eloquent definition this engraving is an example of the so-called “conceptual image” (Begriffsbild) and 59 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, book 1, reprint and suppl. ed. (London: Dawson, 1966), 52. The connection between the Leviathan’s text and Blackstone’s wording was noted by Skinner. Skinner, “The Sovereign State,” 40. 60 Peter Goodrich, Legal Embems and the Art of Law. Obiter depicta as the Vision of Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). “The Sovereign Likes to Hide: Visualizing Hierarchy” (ibid., 89–124) is the title of chapter 4 in his book where Goodrich superbly discusses this theme. 61 Justin Champion, “Decoding the Leviathan: Doing the History of Ideas through Images, 1651–1714,” in Printed Images in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Interpretation, ed. Michael Hunter (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 265.

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Johann Sadeler (I) Politeia (Staatskunst) after design by Maerten De Vos (Antwerp, 1579). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Public domain.

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these images “revived the Greco-Latin political vocabulary,” and with it “the tradition of antique knowledge.”62 The engraving was made during the revolt of the Netherlands against the tyranny of the Spanish king Philip II (1556–1598), precisely in the year that marked the separation of the southern Catholic and the northern Calvinist provinces under the terms of the Treaty of Arras and the Treaty of Utrecht respectively, in which the religious issue proved to be crucial, similarly to the cause of revolt itself. The message of the engraving was understandable to everyone in Europe regardless which side they took in the Reformation, because of the common medieval heritage in political thought and political imagery. The engraving belongs to a genre of the classical emblem having three constituent parts: motto/inscription, image, explanation.63 It depicts the female allegorical personification of “state governance” (Staatskunst) in a Minerva-like manner: a woman sitting on a throne under a baldachin, wearing antique clothing and holding a measuring stick in her right hand and a tablet in her left, and trampling on an old male person identified as Livor (Envy), the allegory of tyranny. The tablet has the name of the three forms of government on it, regnum, aristocratia, democratia, listed hierarchically, in the order reflecting their respective status in the common opinion of the age, which ranked monarchy above the two others. The interesting aspect of the list is not so much the replacement of monarchia by regnum. The real novelty is the upgrading of democratia, which appears among those forms of government that serve the commune bonum (common good)64—this Latin term, closely related to the content of the tablet, is written on the left side of the throne. The scales, the symbol of justice, placed in the inscription commune bonum, express the scholastic idea that if a government (regardless of its form) is directed towards the common good, then this government is just (regimen iustum). The word politeia (the motto), a par excellence ancient political term, had several meanings in the early modern period, which was a common phenomenon with Graeco-Latin terminology. It was used not only in the sense of a good government of a multitude, following the Aristotelian tradition (politeia was the opposite of democratia, as Aristotelian classification relegated democracy to the realm of bad governments) but also as a synonym of Respublica, that is, the designation of the political community/state itself. But here politeia is used in the sense that contemporaries already called politia (the Latinized form of politeia) 62 Brandt, “‘Politik’ im Bild?,” 61. 63 Ibid. 64 Handbuch der politischen Ikonographie, 227–228.

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and, indeed, increasingly with non-standardized vernaculars such as policey, policie, Polizei, and so forth (meaning “police”). The term covered a wideranging “legislative and administrative regulation of internal life of a community to promote general welfare and the condition of the good order.”65 The subscription in Latin at the bottom of the image, Constituit rerum formas Politeia serena, Si bona dat Regem, qu[a]e si perversa, Tirannum (“Majestic Police [that is, government] creates the shapes of things. If it is good, it gives a king, but if it is perverted, it gives a Tyrant”). This sentence also underlines that monarchy was deemed to be the best form of government—since the other two forms are left unmentioned—of which tyranny was the counterpart. At the same time this sentence, together with the objects symbolizing law, the measuring stick itself, as well as other objects (the t-square and the sextant, and also the various vessels for measurement, such as buckets, barrels, and strainers, some of them even having numerals written on them, both Arabic numerals and numerals denoted by Latin letters) on the right side of the measuring stick explain and elucidate the meaning of politeia-politia. These objects “thematise politics as a process,” that is, a government policy: the government of a state “is an activity that, in itself, is not good or bad but it can point in both directions.”66 Therefore, state governance is “responsible for the right measurement of things” as well as the “fight against things that are generally recognized as harmful,”67 that is, envy, allegorically represented by the old man. The figure of the woman comprises the center, that is, the mediation point between “law and its measurement, and its distribution.”68 This is the very point where a detail that escaped Brandt’s attention ties together the whole iconographical argument. Brandt did not notice the Latin phrase indigesta moles on the right side of the female figure, written in the section where the objects of legal symbolism can be seen. The phrase, literally meaning “undigested mass” should be translated as an “amorphous/shapeless mass,” but, of course, it has to be decoded in the context of the objects around it. The phrase indigesta moles coming from Ovid’s Metamorphoses was well known in humanist circles,69 and referred to the antique perception of chaos, which in Ovid’s view was rudis indigestaque moles, that is, “a rough and amorphous/shapeless mass.”

65 Mark Neocleous, “Social Police and the Mechanisms of Prevention: Patrick Colquhon and the Condition of Poverty,” British Journal of Criminology 40 (2000): 721. 66 Brandt, “‘Politik’ im Bild?,” 62. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. Note the connection between the Minerva-like female figure and the feminine-gendered word Politeia! 69 Eric M. MacPhail, Dancing around the Well. The Circulation of Commonplaces in Renaissance Humanism (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 7.

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Therefore, the first part of the subscription, constituit rerum formas, is related not only to measurement but also to the concept of indigesta moles, which in the context of the image refers to an undifferentiated condition or state of social relations preceding the adequate establishment of rules. As Susanna Berger noted, “early modern thinkers conceived of generation as a transformation of chaos into clarity,”70 and I think this state of mind is the clue here to the relation between the two sides of the image: state governance being the creative force giving shape (forma) to the matter (materia) imagined as indigesta moles.71 The Ovidian interpretation of indigesta moles and its relations to the different types of objects of measurement mentioned, at the same time, reminds me of the following biblical passages: “Your almighty power, Lord, created the world out of material that had no form at all” (Wisdom 11:17); “But you have chosen to measure, count, and weigh everything you do.” (Wisdom 11:20).72 If this association is plausible, of which I am convinced, then the image is a striking example of a hidden fusion of antique pagan and Christian ideas (which, of course, was characteristic of humanist way of thinking), and at the same time, it perceives the state as a terrestrial Deity, as a creator (indicated by the inscription constituit rerum formas). And let us be reminded—the creator is a lawmaker! It is the very idea of giving shape and creation that associates this engraving with the iconography of Peter’s personal seal, mentioned before, depicting the tsar as hewing out the female figure of Russia from a rough stone—a theme also coming from Ovid’s Metamorphoses! Both images can serve as examples of Berger’s statement that “most images created before 1800, and certainly most artworks in the more prestigious genres of that period, are incomprehensible without a reference to a text, such as the Bible, Ovid, Tacitus, regardless whether that text is literally inscribed onto the visual representation in question.”73 Engravings such as that of Sadeler’s were important because they could reach 70 Berger, Art of Philosophy, 202. 71 Berger successfully applied this approach (matter, creative force, form) in her iconographical analysis of the Leviathan’s frontispiece, and interpreted it as the visualization of the “generation of the body politic,” in other words, the image showing not a static condition but the nascent state in its formation, that is, the “process of generation” itself whereby the individuals are being incorporated into one. Ibid. She also underlines her argument by referring to the text itself, as Hobbes writes “in chapter 17 and elsewhere” about the “Generation of that great Leviathan.” Ibid. 72 St Augustine, referring to ancient poets, claimed that they described chaos as something “being a shapeless mass, without form, without quality, without measurement, without weight and number, without order and variety.” St. Augustine of Hippo, Writings against the Manicheans and the Donatists, transl. Richard Stothert and John Richard King (Altenmünster: Jazzybee Verlag, 2012), 29–32 (emphasis mine—E.S.). 73 Berger, Art of Philosophy, 39.

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a wider audience. But graphic art was not the only one that could exert a wider influence.

4.3. Royal Equestrian Statues and Royal Portraits as Representations of the State: Western Christendom and Russia Among the early modern visual representations of state equestrian statues of rulers placed in public spaces played an important role. Of course, equestrian portraits of rulers were also significant but only in court culture, and hence, they were less able to influence the public. Furthermore, they could not express the spatial, territorial dimension of rule either. I claim that the “old metaphor for rule,” the image of horse and rider,74 acquired new importance in the era of the emergence of the idea of the modern state. In the early modern era written and visual sources of this theme were becoming intertwined, as the following examples will show. The horse increasingly referred not so much to the military capacities of the ruler (this meaning, of course, was not lost and would be more marked again in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century) but, increasingly, to the idea of rulership.75 The horse, therefore, came to symbolize the people (the governed), the kingdom, or, expressis verbis, the state, as in King James’s Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598, 1616) where he stated: “And so the olde opinion of Philosophers prooves True. That it is better to liue in a Common-wealth where nothing is lawfull, than where all things are lawfull to all men; the Commonwealth at that time resembling an vndaunted [untamed] young horse that hath casten his rider.”76 Bernardo de Vargas Machuca in his 1619 manual on horsemanship made the connection between rule and horsemanship plain, stating that the highest honor for a king is the compliment that he is a good rider, for whoever can ride a horse

74 Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing. The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 61. 75 Handbuch der politischen Ikonographie, 313–314. 76 Sommerville, King James, 79. An interesting visual representation of the idea of the castened rider is the cartoon Horse America Throwing His Master (1779), which symbolizes the American colonies throwing off British tyrannical rule (see the iconography of the whip in the hand of the rider). Burke, Eyewitnessing, 61.

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can govern the people according to his will.77 The strength of this metaphor, no doubt, explains the preoccupation of even rulers of the seventeenth century, such as Charles I of England, with the art of horsemanship. For in England by the 1620s and 1630s the writings on horsemanship were becoming a commonplace with unambiguous political implications: “Skilled horsemanship not only symbolized, it manifested, good rule: the rule of a king who by his reason and virtue led men to self-regulation and obedience.”78 Visual arts reinforced this meaning in the seventeenth century. Equestrian statues, influenced by the antique prototype, that of the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, were revived in Renaissance Italy, and their placement in public spaces conveyed the assertion of “authority over the piazza in which they stood as the prince did over his domains.”79 The equestrian statue of Cosimo I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany (1569–1574) in Florence (done by Giambologna and erected in 1594) was followed by many others: statues of Henry IV (1589–1610), Louis XIII (1610–1643), and Louis XIV (1643–1715) in Paris, and of Philip III (1598– 1621) and Philip IV (1621–1660) in Madrid.80 The seventeenth century was also the great age of royal equestrian portraits of the “rulership type,”81 done, for example, by Rubens, Velázquez, van Dyck, just to mention the most prominent artists of this genre, which emphasized the kings’ capability of riding, that is, governing. In Russia, the horse-and-rider metaphor of rulership appeared quite late in works of art. Not only equestrian portraits but even ruler portraits in general were a rarity before Peter. Although the icon called the “Blessed Host of the Heavenly Tsar” made in the 1550s most probably contains the portrait of Ivan IV—the main figure among those on horseback, holding a cross in his hand— this is clearly not the representation of the image of rulership (as the name and theme of the icon prove). More than a hundred years later a curious image of the iconographic type of the ruler on horseback appears in the frontispiece to the 1663 Moscow Bible, which depicts Russia’s coat of arms. There, the face of St. George on the crest 77 Walter A. Liedtke and John F. Moffitt, “Velázquez, Olivares, and the Baroque Equestrian Portrait,” Burlington Magazine 123 (1981): 532. 78 Kevin Sharpe, Reading Authority and Representing Rule in Early Modern England (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 134–135. Compare this statement with the increasing use of the word “state” in its new meaning in England, as written in the previous chapter. 79 Burke, Eyewitnessing, 67. 80 Ibid. Giambologna was commissioned to forge the statue of the deceased King Henry IV of France (d. 1610) and also that of Philip III of Spain. As these statues were unfinished when Giambologna died, his pupil had to complete these works. 81 Liedtke and Moffitt, “Velázquez,” 534.

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of the two-headed eagle recognizably has the countenance of the living Tsar Aleksei. Still, the “ruler on horseback” theme here is again religious, not secular. Similarly, the posthumous equestrian portraits of Tsar Mikhail and Aleksei in the seventeenth century painted (on canvas) under Tsar Fedor III (1676–1682), depicting them as holding a cross upright, should be seen in a religious context. This message, besides the cross, is conveyed by the golden background, which echoes the colour symbolism of the icons. Regardless whether one sees in these portraits the motif of martyrdom as Franz Kämpfer did—for the martyrs in Orthodox iconography hold a cross upright in one hand, and a scroll (the symbol of faith) in the other82—or they are seen as Christian rulers as fighters for the faith, because the cross in the hand of the tsars is the so-called “Constantine cross,”83 these portraits most probably are the reflection of the growth of cult of Constantine the Great in Russia.84 This phenomenon, dated from the midseventeenth century, was closely connected to the newly emerged idea of Russia being the protector and liberator of all Orthodox living under Ottoman rule, in other words, of cult of Constantine the Great had a clear anti-Ottoman, hence an anti- Islamic edge to it.85 In 1655 Paisii, patriarch of Jerusalem, addressed Tsar Aleksei as the “new Constantine,” asking him to act in the interest of the whole Christianity, “‘in a way as God instructs it to your tsarist heart.’”86 The Constantine theme, with its other symbols, such as the imagery of the cross in the shining sun, and the inscription “In this sign you shall win” became common in Ukrainian and Russian imagery in the second half of the seventeenth century, appearing not only in engravings but also on tsarist banners, and was very important for Peter as well.87 Equestrian portraits depicting the ruler in a non-religious context appeared under Peter the Great in the post-1700 years but Peter’s equestrian portraits known to me do not belong to the rulership type: they represent the tsar as a 82 Franz Kämpfer, Das Russische Herrscherbild. Von Anfängen bis Peter dem Grossen [The Russian image of the ruler. From the beginnings to Peter the Great] (Recklinghausen: A. Bongers, 1978), 224. 83 Margarita Evgenievna Bychkova, Magiia vlasti [Magic of power] (Moscow: Territoriia, 2009), 140. 84 Ibid. 85 Vera Grigorievna Tchentsova, Vostochnaia tserkov′ i Rossiia posle Pereiaslavskoi rady 1654– 1658 [The Eastern Church and Russia after the Pereiaslav assembly 1654–1658] (Moscow: Gumanitarii, 2004), 20, 22. 86 Ibid., 83. 87 Georgii Vadimovich Vilinbakhov, “Legenda ‘o znameni Konstantinu’ v simvolike russkikh znamen XVII–XVIII vekov” [Legend “of Constantine’s banner” in the symbolism of Russian banners of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries], Iz istorii russkoi kul′tury. Trudy Gosudarstvennogo Ermitazha 23 (1983): 29–31.

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victorious military leader, an imperator in the original sense of the word, that is, the commander of the army. Equestrian portraits of rulership type are a phenomenon of the post-Petrine era: the first piece of art of this genre is probably the one that depicts Peter’s second wife, Catherine, as Empress Catherine I (1725–1727). In sculpture, the horse and rider metaphor of rulership came to Russia only with Catherine II, who commissioned the famous “Bronze Horseman” (1782) done by the French artist Falconet: this equestrian statue of Peter the Great erected in the new capital St. Petersburg was to honor the rule of her predecessor. To be sure, “the tsarist statue was a violation of the past in a primal sense” for it went against the ban of the Orthodox Church concerning graven images,88 a prohibition derived from the Old Testament. What is also of great significance for us is Falconet’s own explanation of the iconography of the rough stone in the statue. “He [Peter] extends his beneficent hand over the country he travelled.  … This is the emblem of difficulties he conquered”—Falconet wrote.89 This was clearly an allusion to “one of Peter’s favourite symbols,” the adapted story of Pygmalion and Galatea depicting Peter as hewing out Russia of a rough stone, a motive so important that it “was emblazoned on his standard and seal.”90 And this was the very emblem mentioned by Prokopovich in his sermon delivered after Peter’s death. In the “Bronze Horseman” statue the half-formed female allegory of Russia was replaced by the horse as the embodiment of the fully formed Russian state! Only in the nineteenth century the equestrian statues of the Russian tsars became tools of tsarist political ideology, in line with European iconography, although emphasizing rather the image of the ruling monarch than the state.91 Moving to the theme of monarchical portraits, various kinds of them were mushrooming during the early modern era in the West in the form of engravings due to the printing revolution in Catholic as well as in Protestant territories. While in Catholic countries the portraits of rulers, “eventually framed,” were hung in peasant houses along with the images of saints,92 in Protestant territories, such as in Elizabethan England, by contrast, the ruler’s portrait “replaced

88 Richard Wortman, “Statues of the Tsars,” in Remove Not the Ancient Landmark: Public Monuments and Moral Values, ed. Donald Reynolds (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1996), 112. 89 Ibid., 114. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid., 112. 92 Elisabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 108.

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images of the saints.”93 Even more important was coinage if the ruler’s portrait was part of it, where the ruler also took the place of saints.94 Indeed, “secular powers gradually took over what once had been the monopoly of the Church.”95 The phenomenon of the spread of ruler’s image in various visual media is of great importance for the present topic. As the ruler was “the embodiment of the state,” the image of the ruler was the most obvious means of personifying or representing the state: the “king became the incarnation of the state” who made it visible.96 Even portraits of rulers were alien to Muscovite Russia until the late seventeenth century. Indeed, “secular portraiture was unknown” and when it arrived in Russia under Polish and Ukrainian influences, it “was used to political ends.”97 What is important here is the fact that the ruler’s portrait, as we have seen, was always a portrait of rulership. In Russia those portraits of rulers that came down to us from the 1670s and 1680s before Sophia’s (one depicting Tsars Mikhail and Aleksei in a standing position, and the other depicting Tsar Fedor III) were so called “icon-portraits” painted posthumously98: they basically followed the principles of icon painting with some realistic features of the tsars, but the idea behind them (as with the icons) was to express eternity, by “reviving” the deceased persons.99 The first ruler who made use of portraiture for political purpose was Sophia Alekseevna, Peter’s half-sister and regent of Russia between 1682–1689.100 Her

93 Christina Wald, The Reformation of Romance (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 152. 94 Kurt Johanesson, “The Portrait of the Prince as a Rhetorical Genre,” in Iconography, Propaganda, and Legitimation, ed. Allan Ellenius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 23. 95 Allan Ellenius, Introduction “Visual Representation of the State as Propaganda and Legiti­ mation” to Iconography, Propaganda, and Legitimation, ed. Allan Ellenius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 5. 96 Ibid., 2, 5. In the context of this chapter it is worth quoting that Ellenius calls attention to the fact that in English (and French) the word representation “carries the meaning of a visual or conceptual image, often equivalent to a symbol or a metaphor.” Ibid., 2. 97 Kollmann, Russian Empire, 131. 98 The only exception is probably the portrait of Tsar Aleksei in the Tituliarnik (Book of Titles) of 1672 painted in his lifetime, but in its style it did not differ from the portraits of his predecessors contained in that book. 99 Lindsey Hughes, Sophia: Regent of Russia, 1657–1704 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 138. 100 Kämpfer ended his book on the Russian ruler image with Sophia, and examining just two engravings from the 1690s claimed that Peter “radically altered the old Russian traditions in the field of arts too,” and also that “after 1700, with the exception of the figure of St. George, nothing remained from the Byzantino-Slavic iconography or style.” Kämpfer, Das Russische Herrscherbild, 250. Although the second part of the statement can be refined, he grasps the essence of the change.

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painted portrait, known as her treasonous “coronation portrait,” depicted her on the crest of the two-headed eagle, in a garment wore by the tsars, with a Western imperial type of crown—instead of the Monomakh cap—holding an orb and scepter, and contained the inscription identifying her as samoderzhitsa. Her image (with the same regalia) also appeared in engravings (based on this portrait), which were intended for both home and foreign use, with Russian and Latin panegyric verses respectively: the texts praising her, and referring to her “tsarist face,” served her aspiration and the (eventually failed) effort to be a ruler in her own right.101 Peter understood well enough the importance of the new genre, and used engravings with his portrait on them extensively to promote the new image of rulership.102 Furthermore, it was during Peter’s reign, from the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, that the ruler’s portrait was to appear regularly on coins, a phenomenon that previously was just an exception.103 It may well be that the same reasoning stood behind this change that led to the spread of engravings containing Peter’s portrait: namely, to counterbalance Sophia’s legacy, as during her regency a golden coin was minted with the faces of Sophia and the two tsars, which conveyed the message of Sophia’s leadership. Whatever was the cause of the change, in the field of coinage Peter’s silver rubl′ was the most important bearer of a political message: both from the point of view of the new iconography in general, and the visual expression of the distinction between the ruler and the state in particular. After 1704 these coins followed the European pattern: Peter was represented in the manner of a Roman emperor with a laurel on his head on the averse, while on the reverse mostly stood the coat of arms of Russia, the double-headed eagle (or, less often, a cross, formed of four Cyrillic letters “P,” the initial of the tsar’s given name.)104

101 Hughes, Sophia, 142–143. 102 It might well be, as I argued, that even the composition of the frontispiece of Peter’s “emblem book,” intended for foreign use too, was in a way a reaction to Sophia’s treasonous engraving. Sashalmi, “The Frontispiece of Peter the Great’s Simvoly i Emblemata,” 462–463, fn. 12. 103 Vasilii Vaslievich Uzdennikov, Monety v Rossii 1700–1917 [Coins of Russia 1700–1917] (Moscow: Finansy i statistika, 1985), 116–124. 104 Cracraft, Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery, 264.

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CHAPTER 5

The Meaning(s) of the European Perspective

5.1.  Europe and Russia—Russia and Europe If one undertakes to analyse Russian notions of power and state from a European perspective, then it inevitably requires a clarification of what “Europe” meant for contemporaries both in geographical and cultural terms in the timespan discussed. This issue, at the same time, will provide a further argument in justifying the chronological parameters of this study, as the concept of Europe, which in cultural terms was clearly identical with the countries belonging to Western Christendom in the mid-fifteenth century, by 1725 had become associated with the system of sovereign states where the relations among the states were to be regulated by idea of the balance of power. It was mainly due to this transformation, and Russia’s emergence as a great power that the attitude of Western Christendom was changing towards Russia/Moscovia. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, Russia and the tsars had been considered on the same level as the Ottoman Turks and the sultans. The image prevailed that “Muscovites seemed closer to the infidel Turk than to ‘civilized’ European nations who defined themselves in opposition to a Barbarian oriental ‘other.’”1 The reason for this unfavorable judgement lay in the nature of the Ottoman and Muscovite political systems, since the form of government they had was labelled despotism or tyranny by Westerners (“Europeans”). Consequently, it was the victory of Peter the Great over Charles XII at Poltava in 1709—the “battle that shook Europe”2—and eventually Russia’s becoming a great power that led to the acceptance of Russia into the community

1 Dixon, Modernisation, 27. 2 Peter Englund, The Battle that Shook Europe: Poltava and the Birth of the Russian Empire (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003).

The Meaning(s) of the European Perspective

called Europe, much more than the so-called “Europeanization” of Russia by Peter’s reforms. The Poltava victory, followed by the decisive defeats of Sweden by Russia at sea (1714, 1716) caused growing concerns of her power, raising voices in Britain that clearly indicated that Russia was treated as part of Europe. Advocating the need to tame Russian expansion in the Baltic, the by-thencommonplace concept of balance of power was invoked in 1719 in British newspapers: the Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer stated that “from the earliest period of our naval power, Britain … lookt upon a just Balance between the northern powers to be a fundamental interest of her state;” while the Weekly Packet, making the same claim asserted that in case of the Russian conquest of Sweden “‘the Balance of Europe will certainly be destroy’d on that side.’”3 By the mid-century Russia’s place as a great power in the European balance of power was beyond doubt. During the War of Austrian Succession (1740–1748) the British Minister Plenipotentiary, Thomas Robinson, spoke in 1744 of the “just and necessary influence which the court of Russia ought to have, and will have, in the affairs of Europe.’”4 How did this change come about? On the one hand, the meaning of Europe changed; on the other hand, the attitude of the Russian government to Europe also changed considerably. The success story of the term “Europe” really began in the fifteenth century with the humanists. For them Europe meant the countries belonging to the Latin Church (Ecclesia Latina)—countries that accepted the pope as the head of their churches. This community, however, was most often referred to as Christianitas (Christendom), orbis Christianus (Christian world), or respublica Christiana (Christian commonwealth). Europa became a preferred term for the humanists, not least because it was an antique word and, unlike Christianitas, it fitted into a hexameter.5 Furthermore, for the humanists Europa was closely related to the idea of the shield/bulwark of Christendom (scutum/antemurale Christianitatis) as this notion, despite its name, had not only a religious but also a cultural element: for humanists the Ottoman Turks were not merely non-Christian but barbarian. Therefore, Christianitas, Respublica christiana, and Europa denoted a religious as well as cultural community: a community of shared political ideas, a community whose common cultural language was Latin, the same as the liturgical

3 Jeremy Black, “The Theory of the Balance of Power in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century: A Note on Sources,” Review of International Studies 9, no. 1 (1983): 58. 4 Ibid., 61, en. 17. 5 Denis Hay, Europe. The Emergence of an Idea (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1957), 28, 86–87.

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and administrative language of its church. The famous humanist Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (the future Pope Pious II, 1458–1464), a devoted advocate of the idea of the antemurale Christianitatis,6 who, by the way, coined the adjective europaeus in 1458, listing the peoples belonging to Europe in his work entitled De Europa (1434), mentioned only those belonging to the Latin Church, that is, Christianitas.7 Orthodox Christians, Muscovy included, were excluded from being part of Christendom/Europe.8 But even Piccolomini used Respublica christiana more often than Europa in referring to this religious and cultural community.9 Europe in the mid-fifteenth century was still a word belonging to a small group of scholars—a century later, however, it was “part of everyday speech.”10 The term Europa existed side by side with Christianitas and respublica Christiana during the fifteenth–seventeenth centuries, but by the early eighteenth century it became a word expressing a sense of unity not in religious but in political and cultural terms. The great geographical discoveries, the overseas colonization and the Reformation were, in the long run, working against those collective

6 Norman Housley, Religious Warfare in Europe 1400–1536 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 67. 7 Hay, Europe, 86–87. 8 It is plausible to mention here Liliya Berezhnaya’s scheme concerning the content of the idea of bulwark of Christendom as it will be useful in the analysis of Russia’s place in Europe regarding the cultural and confessional differences. In her opinion three factors were crucial in shaping this idea in the fifteenth century: the “anti-Ottoman front,” a “cultural boundary,” and a “confessional element,” the latter also being a component of the two former ones. From time to time, however, the “confessional component became an independent factor in shaping the idea” of bulwark of Christendom, which is proven by the change occurring in the notion of Polish antemurale thinking: in the second half of the sixteenth century, during the Livonian War (1558–1582) it was added to the anti-Ottoman dimension that Poland served as a bulwark of Catholicism against Orthodox Russia. Liliya Berezhnaya “‘Kazatskii bastion 17 veka’—vzgliad snaruzhi i iznutri” [The Cossack bulwark of the seventeenth century—a view from outside and from within], in Religion und Integration im Moskauer Russland: Konzepte und Praktiken, Potentiale und Grenzen im 14.–17. Jahrhundert [Religion and integration in Muscovite Russia: Concepts and practices, potentials and limits from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century], ed. Ludwig Steindorff (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010), 267. It was, in fact, the Livonian War that made the cultural exclusion of Russia from Europe final through the propaganda of written and visual media (such as engravings showing Russian atrocities), making a comparison of Russia with the Ottoman Empire as the land of barbarism: “Russia from the very beginning of the conflict was seen as an alien, external force which invaded the Baltic states from the outside of ‘Christendom.’” Alexander Filyushkin, “Livonian War in the Context of the European Wars of the 16th Century. Conquest, Borders, Politics,” Russian History 43, no. 1 (2016): 11, 12. To this we have to add the impact of contemporary Russica literature, which described Russia as a barbarian and despotic country. 9 Hay, Europe, 86–87, 96. 10 Bernard Guenée, States and Rulers in Later Medieval Europe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 3.

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designations that were primarily of a religious nature. At the same time, it became more and more difficult for the statesmen of the composite-dynastic states to pursue a foreign policy corresponding to the dictates of confessional solidarity, in other words, to form alliances that clearly corresponded to the confessional divisions between Catholic and Protestant camps. The concept of the reason/interest of state implied the necessity of keeping or restoring the balance of power among the states, a maxim that overruled even confessional solidarity, as France’s entering the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) showed in 1635, when this Catholic country became an ally of the Protestant camp. The abovementioned developments were conducive to the triumph of a term not referring to faith as the basis of common identity. The idea of Europe became more and more politicized, and as such, it definitely replaced the notion of respublica Christiana by the beginning of the eighteenth century, a fact reflected not only in pamphlet literature but also in the wording of peace treaties. Terms referring to a community conceived on religious grounds (Christianitas, respublica Christiana) and religious phraseology (as invoking the Trinity) had become anachronistic and were dropped from the texts of peace treaties after Utrecht (1713), where they were mentioned for the last time,11 giving way to “Europe” and “balance of power.” According to the text of the treaty between Spain and Great Britain the union of the kingdoms of France and Spain threatened the “liberty and security of Europe,” therefore they should never be united under one and the same crowned head, and it is necessary to “establish the Peace and Tranquility of Christendom by an equal balance of power.”12 Parallel to the developments outlined here there was another phenomenon in the making, causing the change in the meaning of Europe. As a result of the geographical discoveries and the ensuing colonization, Europe had become the expression of a “cultural and political exclusivity and finally a superiority” by the late sixteenth century.13 This commitment was expressed by an Englishman, Samuel Purchas in the early seventeenth century in the following manner: “the Qualitie of Europe exceeds her Quantitie, in this the least, in that the best of the World.”14 This state of mind (“cultural and political superiority”) was clearly visible in figurative maps depicting Europe as the Queen among the continents 11 Hay, Europe, 96, 115–116. 12 Randall Lesaffer, “The Peace of Utrecht, and the Balance of Power and the Law of Nations,” in The 1713 Peace of Utrecht and Its Enduring Effects, ed. Alfred H. A. Soons (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 78–79. 13 Marc Bassin, “Russia between Europe and Asia: The Ideological Construction of Geographical Space,” Slavic Review 50, no. 1 (1991): 3. 14 Quoted ibid.

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with symbols of regalia.15 And it was also clearly reflected in Cesare Ripa’s allegorical personifications of the four known continents: the figures of Asia, America, and Africa are to be seen in contrast with the figure of Europa. The attributes around the crowned female figure of Europe (as well as Ripa’s explanation) make plain that Europe is the best continent in every respect (arts, sciences, warfare, religion, political system, and so forth). The fact that Orthodox Russia was not on Piccolomini’s list of countries belonging to Europe/Christendom can be explained by the long-term consequences of the Great Schism of 1054. After 1054 the Orthodox in general were called schismatics by the Latins, while the Latins, in turn, were called heretics by the Orthodox—though it is true that the anti-Latin sentiment was not marked in the Rus′ before the thirteenth century. In the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, however, a Latinophobia was emerging in the lands gathered by the grand princes of Moscow.16 In the sixteenth century Russians already prayed that the tsar save them from “the Latin and Muslim world.”17 In the sixteenth century foreigners in Russia recorded such anti-Latin sayings as “I wish I saw you in Latin faith” (meaning “I wish you were damned”) or “Go to the Latins!” (meaning “Go to Hell!”).18 No wonder that Russian tsars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries showed indifference to the idea of Europe either as a cultural or a geographical concept; therefore, the location of Europe’s eastern geographical border at the Don River was of no concern to them either.19 On the other side, in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries the general view of Russia in the countries belonging to Western Christianity, no matter whether Protestant or Catholic, was that she was a non-European country: Russia could be squeezed into Europe when Europe was conceived merely as a geographical term.20 Rare exceptions to this attitude were the occasional efforts of the emperors and 15 Ibid. 16 Endre Sashalmi, “Some Remarks on Russian Polonophobia: Poles and Lithuanians in Muscovite Sources from the Livonian War to the Mid-17th Century,” in Das Bild des Feindes: Konstruktion von Antagonismen und Kulturtransfer im Zeitalter der Türkenkriege. Ostmitteleuropa, Italien und Osmanisches Reich [The image of the enemy: construction of antagonisms and cultural transfer during the age of the Turkish wars. East Central Europe, Italy, and the Ottoman Empire], ed. Eckhard Leuschner and Thomas Wünsch (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2013), 165. 17 Joseph H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretative History of Russian Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 96. 18 Ibid. 19 Bassin, “Russia between Europe and Asia,” 4–5. 20 Pärtel Piirimäe, “Russia, the Turks and Europe: Legitimations of War and the Formation of European Identity in the Early Modern Period,” The Journal of Modern History 11, nos. 1–2 (2007): 76–79.

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papacy aiming to create the union of churches and, mainly, to involve the tsars in a war against the Ottomans: then, the religious and cultural concerns were temporarily neglected by the European powers.21 By the late seventeenth century Europe had come to signify a states system and an embodiment of superior civilization, an image that attracted the Westernizer Tsar Peter. At the same time, Russia’s foreign policy towards the Ottoman Empire changed dramatically. The reasons for this change were twofold. As mentioned before, from the mid-seventeenth century Russia presented itself as the protector and liberator of Orthodox Christians living under Ottoman rule.22 Furthermore, “after the acquisition of the Ukraine in the 1650s, Muscovy came into direct contact with the Ottoman Empire and was equally threatened by the renewed Ottoman expansion in the 1670s and 80s.”23 Moscow’s public celebration of the Ottoman defeat at Vienna in 1683 signalled the beginning of a new era.24 From 1686 Russia cooperated with the Holy League formed in 1684, and Peter’s campaigns against Azov in 1695–1696 were fought under the aegis of the Holy League, although Russia officially became part of the league only in 1697. The 1696 Azov victory was a turning point not only in Muscovite-Ottoman relations but also in the Russian attitude towards Europe as the victory was popularized not only in Russia but abroad as well. Printed broadsheets with a panegyric praising the victory, written in Greek, Latin and German, were distributed abroad by members of the Great Embassy of 1697–1698 (Peter’s unofficial visit to Europe during which he travelled half-incognito). The verse, addressed to the “Invincible Russian Monarch,” described Peter as a “strong King in Europe and Asia waging a godly war against the Saracens” and expressed the belief that he would eventually take back Constantinople from the Turks.25 To be European meant to be “Christian and civilized”—and as the Ottoman Empire was not Christian, it could not be either civilized or European26: it was considered an Asian country. So, Russia was received into “Europe” through the common front

21 Ibid., 76–77. 22 Endre Sashalmi, “The Idea of Bulwark of Christendom and the Russian Context: How Did Russia Become the Protector and Liberator of Orthodox Christians from the Last Bastion of Orthodoxy (1453–1711)?,” in Identitätsentwürfe im östlichen Europa—im Spannungsfeld von Selbst- und Fremdwahrnehmung [Sketches of identity in Eastern Europe and the perceptions of self and the other], ed. Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg et al. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2018), 60–63. 23 Piirimäe, “Russia, the Turks and Europe,” 79. 24 Ibid. 25 Panegiricheskaia literatura Petrovskogo vremeni [Panegyrical literature of the Petrine era], ed. Vasilii Petrovich Grebeniuk (Moscow: Nauka, 1979), 14. 26 Piirimäe, “Russia, the Turks and Europe,” 70–76.

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against the Ottomans on the one hand, and her emergence as a great power in the European system of states on the other. As a result of the dramatic change in Russia’s self-image, it became crucial for Peter that Russia should embrace a much larger portion of European territory than that which common geographical wisdom of the age postulated for her, with the Don River marking the border between Europe and Asia.27 Therefore, an “ideological construction of geographical space” took place in Russia during Peter’s reign, whereby Europe’s age-old eastern geographical border, the Don, was eventually replaced by the Ural Mountains.28 The historian and geographer Vasilii Tatishchev (1686–1750), an ardent executor of Peter’s reforms and representative of the new official outlook on Europe, took the initiative in shifting Russia’s geographical self-image. In the 1730s he described Europe in a manner echoing Purchas, stating that “by virtue of its [material] abundance, its scholarship, its strength, and its glory as well as the moderation of its climate Europe … dominates without question over all the other parts of the world.”29 The shift in the political and cultural identity of Russia, in which not Orthodoxy but Europe served as a compass (a shift also reflected in Peter’s new official title, Imperator), was to influence Russia’s geographical self-image as well: in this context the fact that Russia was a country stretching over two continents gained specific significance.30 The huge conglomeration of Russia’s territories was now conceived in terms of a dichotomy between Europe and Asia, that is, as an empire that had a civilized European part, and an Asian one yet to be civilized. It was not so much different from the contemporary sea empires, except that in the Russian case the homeland and the colonial lands were not separated by the oceans.31 No wonder that in the new Russian self-image the Don River was no longer a satisfactory border between Europe and Asia: it was necessary to push the border eastward to enlarge geographically what can be called “European Russia.” This initiative came from Tatishchev, who suggested the Ural Mountains as the new dividing line, which, as he asserted, was “much more appropriate and true to the configuration of the landscape.”32 The two parts of Russia, European and Asian Russia, were culturally different, but Tatishchev saw the Russian state, the political frame, as a common bond.33 In a few decades the new border suggested 27 Bassin, “Russia between Europe and Asia,” 3. 28 Ibid., 6. 29 Quoted ibid., 5. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 6. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid.

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by Tatishchev was accepted in Russian cartography,34 and eventually in Western cartography as well, honoring thereby Russia’s role in overthrowing Napoleon’s European hegemony.35

5.2. Russia and the European States System Seen from the Angles of International Political Thought and Diplomacy. Justification of Peter’s Imperial Title and of the Great Northern War When Peter died in 1725, Russia’s standing among the European states was undoubtedly different from its position at the beginning of his reign. Peter staked his claim to European-power status by adopting the title Imperator Vserossiiskii (All-Russian Emperor) in 1721, not long after the Treaty of Nystad had been concluded with Sweden. Though Russia officially became an empire, its international acceptance depended on having the title accepted by the other European powers. By that time Russia was a full member of the European diplomatic community.36 “By 1725 there were twelve resident Russian missions in Europe and eleven more or less permanent representatives in St. Petersburg.”37 Rank and precedence were, of course, still important among the European states in 1721, despite the new principles set forth during the negotiations of the Treaties of Utrecht less than a decade before, when formalities were suspended for the time of the conference, including even the round table for this purpose. The Utrecht Treaties, unlike that of Westphalia signed in Münster and Osnabrück in 1648, marked a new beginning in “interstate relations.”38 By 1713 the European state system had become more integrated geographically and institutionally (permanent embassies on the basis of parity with professional staffs came into existence), and it began to function according to new principles.39 Legitimacy of participants was not deduced from tradition, which had been so important in Westphalia, but from reality: it rested on “rationality and not traditionalism,”40 which made possible Russia’s integration into it.

34 Ibid., 7–8. 35 Hay, Europe, 125. 36 Anderson, Rise of Modern Diplomacy, 69–71. 37 Dixon, Modernisation, 28. 38 Lesaffer, “The Peace of Utrecht, and the Balance of Power and the Law of Nations,” 83–88. 39 Andreas Osiander, The States System of Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 101–102. 40 Ibid., 102–103.

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When we use a term such as “interstate relations” with regard to early modern Europe (1450–1789), we must remember that these relations were, in practice, predominantly interdynastic relations, since most states were monarchies. Peace treaties between Lodi (1454) and Westphalia were similar to private contracts and dynastic arrangements, that is, they were made by sovereign rulers who acted not in the name of their states they ruled, but on their own behalf—a clear symptom of which was the fact that rulers were mostly “referred to by their names and only in the second instance by their titles.”41 The birth of the modern concept of state in the seventeenth century did not result automatically in the submerging of the person of the ruler in this abstract entity. The ambassador in the seventeenth century was to represent his ruler as if the ruler were present in person of the ambassador, whose most important task was to protect the given ruler’s honor by all means. Therefore, it was a long time before the notion of the immortal and impersonal state gained priority over its mortal ruler.42 The use of the “possessive pronoun” by some rulers in expressions such as “my kingdom,” “my state” even in the eighteenth century, in fact, “projected a personal, not to say proprietorial, vision of kingship, fundamentally at odds with the objective concept of the state.”43 Yet, from the end of the seventeenth century the principle was to take hold that peace treaties made by crowned heads should be binding on their successors as well.44 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to give a detailed comparison of the principles shaping the Westphalian and Utrecht Treaties, but a few comments are necessary.45 First of all, the birth of the modern concept of state should not exclude the dimension that is called the development of “international political thought”—again, an issue that in certain aspects (such as the problem of just war) goes back to scholastic and canonist roots.46 As it has been noted, the development of the modern concept of state cannot be understood entirely “in terms of its internal, domestic or municipal capacities,” but it should include the

41 Randall Lesaffer, “Peace Treaties from Lodi to Westphalia,” in Peace Treaties and International Law in European History, ed. Randall Lesaffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 17–19. 42 Wilson, Absolutism, 50. 43 Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory, 288. See this in details in part 2 of this book. 44 Heinz Duchhardt, “Peace Treaties from Westphalia to the Revolutionary Era,” in Peace Treaties and International Law in European History, ed. Randall Lesaffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 47. 45 For a short comparison see my article: Endre Sashalmi, “The Novelty of the Utrecht Peace Settlement (1713),” Central European Papers 3 (2015): 20–33. 46 Edward Keene, International Political Thought: An Historical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 70, 86, 88, 93, 119.

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dimension of “its nature, its powers or its rights as an international actor,”47 in other words, the sovereignty of a state vis-à-vis other states. By the middle of the seventeenth century there existed two languages of international thought. One can be called “political” in the narrow or strict sense of the word, because it argued, in James Howell’s wording, “that the reason or interest of European states in general is to establish a balance of power among them in order to preserve their individual ‘liberties.’”48 The other was “legal or iurisprudential,” for it drew its central ideas from Western legal theory, such as “natural law” (ius naturale), “law of nations” (ius gentium), “although often formulated in novel ways,”49 as was clearly the case with Hugo Grotius. At the heart of the law of nature and of nations exposed by Grotius “lay the concept of the monarchic state,” for at least in international political thought, “European monarchs were understood as rulers of states” by the mid-seventeenth century.50 As for the theory of the state as an actor in the “international” arena, Hugo Grotius’s De iure belli ac pacis (1625) became the first classical legal exposition, but this dimension of the state is also apparent in Hobbes’s Leviathan. Not from the aspect of international law, of course, but deduced from Hobbes’s basic tenets of political theory, in which the concept of the state as a person played a crucial role: Hobbes, emphasizing the territorial dimension of the state, made it clear that states behave towards each other as individuals in the state of nature.51 The major change, however, came with Samuel Pufendorf, whose importance cannot be exaggerated for the present book, as he had the greatest impact on Petrine Russia. He treated the state as “a composite moral person,” stressing the concept of office as different from “the person holding the office” and prescribing thereby “‘a certain Method of governing’” for the ruler, the officeholder. At the same time, building on Hobbes, he conceived the state essentially as one existing as part of a states system and argued for “a system-based sovereignty which would allow states enter into agreements without giving up their sovereignty entirely.”52

47 Armitage, “Hobbes and the Foundations of Modern International Thought,” 219–220. 48 See what has been written earlier on the changing meaning of politics relying on Viroli. 49 Quoed by Keene, International Political Thought, 99. 50 Martti Koskenniemi, “Peace as Integration,” in A Cultural History of Peace in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Stella Ghervas and David Armitage (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 133. 51 Osiander, Before the State, 445. 52 Peter Schröder, Trust in Early Modern International Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 129, 130.

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The two abovementioned European peace treaties (of  Westphalia and Utrecht) deserve special attention with regard to the practical aspects of the “interstate”/ interdynastic relations. The Treaties of Westphalia, called the first “matricula of the European states,” were indirectly important for Russia. Russia, “although not a party to the peace treaties,” was mentioned as an ally of Sweden in the treaty signed by Sweden with the emperor in Osnabrück.53 Despite claims in recent Russian scholarship on international law concerning this reference, namely, that it made Muscovy a “‘generally recognized participant in international communication,’” this assertion is unlikely; and it is even less plausible to consider on this basis that “‘Russia signed the Treaty of Osnabrück together with Sweden.’”54 Although unknown to Russians at the time, the phrase of the treaty later would serve as one of the reasons that Peter the Great used to justify his war against Charles XII,55 claiming that Sweden’s mentioning Russia in this context was detrimental to the Russian honor. This move, together with the written justification of Russia’s war against the Swedish crown (1717), which contained elements of early modern international law, the first work of this kind in Russia, which was later published even abroad in various languages, clearly showed that Russia entered the international arena from an intellectual point of view. There is also a well-established view in political parlance and in historiography that looks at the Peace of Westphalia (1648) as a turning point in international relations, marking the birth of the system of sovereign states in Europe and of the “classical law of nations.”56 In accordance with this view, the term “Westphalian order” implies the “sovereignty and equality of states, the religious neutrality of the international order and the balance of power.”57 This interpretation, however, has been seriously and convincingly challenged recently by historians and specialists on international law alike.58 Randall Lesaffer, who belongs to the latter group, laconically states: “The truth is that none of these principles were 53 Lauri Mälksoo, Russian Approaches to International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 64. The passage in Latin (ibid., fn. 191) reads: “ex parte serenissimae reginae regnique Sueciae, omnes eius foederati … rex Poloniae, rex et regnum Lusitaniae, magnus dux Moscoviae” (“on behalf of the most illustrious queen and the kingdom of Sweden, all of her allies … the king of Poland, the king and kingdom of Portugal, the grand duke of Muscovy”). 54 Quoted ibid. 55 Matthew S. Anderson, Peter the Great (London: Longman, 1995), 11. 56 For the summary and criticism of this view see especially Randall Lesaffer, “The Classical Law of Nations (1500–1800),” in Research Handbook on the Theory and History of International Law, ed. Alexander Orakhelashvili (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2011), 414. 57 Ibid. 58 Sturdy, Fractured Europe, 70–75; Lothar Höbelt, “The Westphalian Peace: Augsburg Mark II or Celebrated Armistice?,” in The Holy Roman Empire 1495–1806, ed. Robert J. W. Evans and Peter H. Wilson (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 19–35; Joachim Whaley, Germany and the Holy Roman

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introduced, or even appear as principles of international relations in the Westphalian Peace Treaties.”59 Modern historiography likewise argues that the treaties of Münster and Osnabrück, the two towns in Westphalia where the negotiations were conducted due to the religious division, dealt not with the affairs of Europe but primarily with the affairs of the Empire, and the Westphalian Settlement was made in the spirit of tradition, and not of innovation.60 Peace was not reached by accepting new principles; on the contrary, it was concluded through the revival of old ones, which had been partly undermined by the long war.61 Territorial changes, for example, were justified by quoting hair-splitting dynastic rights, because it was not acceptable to base the transfer of territories on the right of conquest.62 Even the recognition of the independence of Switzerland and the United Provinces was not a radically new step, according to Andreas Osiander—it proved to be such only in retrospect.63 This is true especially in the Swiss case, which could be treated as an affair of the Empire. It is also clear that “no more than the treaty of 1499 did the members of the Confederation regard the Peace of Westphalia as marking the formal end of their belonging to the Holy Roman Empire.”64 Moreover, it is crucial in evaluating the Westphalian Settlement to remember that the terms “liberty and safety of Europe” and “balance of power” were not used in the documents of these peace treaties; and when the French suggested that “sovereignty” be included, the proposal was rejected. Indeed, “it was not the intention of those who framed the Peace of Westphalia to create a balance of power between sovereign states of Europe.”65 We can, however, find the terms “Europe” and “balance of power” in the Utrecht Treaties, as we have seen. The nimbus of Westphalia can most probably be explained by the large number of participants there, but this, in turn, reflected the involvement of all the major European powers in the long war.66 In fact, it was the Utrecht Settlement that “solidified many changes in diplomatic theory and practice.”67 The inclusion of the balance of power in the treaties Empire, vol. 1: From Maximilian I to the Peace of Westphalia 1492–1648 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 619–632. 59 Lesaffer, “The Classical Law of Nations (1500–1800),” 414. 60 Sturdy, Fractured Europe, 74. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Osiander, Before the State, 489. 64 Ibid. 65 Whaley, Germany, 637. 66 Höbelt, “The Westphalian Peace,” 27. 67 McClure, Sunspots and the Sunkings, 138.

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“gave it normative power and made it a useful argument of persuasion in the world of politics and diplomacy”: while it is true that dynastic claims “would remain foundational to the system of Europe,” still, in the eighteenth century they had to be balanced or “defended through an appeal to the balance of power.”68 François de Callières, the high envoy of Louis at Utrecht who published his De la manière de négocier avec les souverains (“On the manner of negotiating with sovereigns”) in 1716, a work that analysed the nature of diplomatic relations, conceived the states in Europe, as he put it, “like members of one and the same republic.”69 The importance of his treatise is summarized in the following manner: “He was groping towards a notion of a ‘system’ of interstate relations, at least in Europe, to be grounded in the interdependence of European states and their dynasties whose peaceful management would be the principal task of foreign policy.”70 The work was to become one of the most important diplomatic manuals for European courts, and it was known in Russia too: Peter’s chief advisor on diplomatic matters, Peter Shafirov, had a copy of Callières’s book in his library, of which Peter sponsored a Russian translation but this effort was realized only much later under Catherine II.71 What is significant for my purposes from the Russian perspective is not so much the problem of ceremonial issues and formalities emanating from the principles of rank and precedence, with which Russia was familiar even before the mutual establishment of embassies,72 but Russia’s new status, as after 1709 Peter used the title imperator. The significance of Utrecht was perfectly understood by Peter and his diplomats: it stood behind Peter’s second journey through Europe in 1717, which aimed “to strengthen his newly gained position of power and to foster relations with foreign courts.”73 In a proposal of a prospective alliance with France, the tsar even raised the issue that Russia could be the guarantor of the Utrecht settlement.74 What could be highly relevant for Peter was the issue of new monarchic titles, as in Utrecht the “international” recognition of royal titles happened for the first 68 Lesaffer, “The Peace of Utrecht, and the Balance of Power and the Law of Nations,” 89. 69 Koskenniemi, “Peace as Integration,” 134. 70 Ibid. 71 Hamish Scott, “Diplomatic Culture in Old Regime Europe,” in Cultures of Power in Europe during the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Hamish Scott and Brendan Simms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 64. 72 For this see Jan Hennings, Russia and Courtly Europe: Ritual and the Culture of Diplomacy, 1648–1725 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 73 Ibid., 187. 74 Ibid., 189.

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time at a peace conference. While there was no such recognition in Westphalia (although a new elector was added in the person of the Duke of Bavaria), there were two dynasties facing this problem in 1713. The title “King in Prussia” had already been taken by Frederick III, Elector of Brandenburg, in 1701 (becoming thereby King Frederick I) with the prior approval of the Emperor (in 1700).75 The legitimacy of this title, however, remained dubious until it was recognized in the treaties in Utrecht. Frederick was able to obtain recognition of this title in a treaty with Louis XIV (the treaty, in fact, was signed soon after Frederick’s death), “and the other powers followed suit implicitly by accepting that title in their treaties with Prussia.”76 This achievement made his son, Frederick William I (1713–1740), a full member in an exclusive club of rulers, the club of kings. This provides a good example how “international recognition” was to be understood and how it worked in practice. The case of the ruling dynasty of Savoy differed from the Hohenzollern situation because the duke of Savoy gained his royal title through being awarded the island of Sicily (long a kingdom) under the terms of the peace settlement. Though in 1720 Sicily was exchanged for Sardinia, the royal title remained. The gaining of a royal title in 1713, at the same time, was the result of a long and carefully designed campaign by the Savoyard rulers.77 Edward Keene gives the context within which Peter’s adoption of the imperial title should be placed, by pinpointing the changes affecting the rank and precedence system: The order of precedence was not … the only game in town. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries it was coming under increasing pressure as new rising powers sought to improve their position within it. The traditional status order 75 The origin of the title “King in Prussia” (Rex in Borussia) instead of “King of Prussia” (Rex Borussiae)—the latter one conforming to the general pattern of royal titles in Europe—should not be sought for in the reservation, as usually claimed, that the emperor did not want a king in the Holy Roman Empire (as Prussia was not part of the Empire anyway) but in the fact that the official title of the Elector Frederick III, who acquired the royal title, was Supremus Dux in Prussia, that is, “Archduke in Prussia” and not “of Prussia.” Furthermore, this version of the title “disarmed Polish suspicions by underscoring the territorial limits of the new kingdom.” Cristopher Clark, “When Culture Meets Power: The Prussian Coronation of 1701,” in Cultures of Power in Europe during the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Hamish Scott and Brendan Simms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 25. 76 Jan Hendrik and Willem Werzilj, International Law in Historical Perspective, vol. 6 (Leiden: Sijthoff, 1973), 168. 77 For this see especially Christopher Storrs, War, Diplomacy and the Rise of Savoy 1690–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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was under considerable challenge from the assertiveness of rising powers. Traditional sources of status, such as antiquity of lineage or title, began to be replaced by what one seventeenthcentury author perceptively described as the role of fortune, and the “continual revolutions” in the “order of powers.” … The Savoyard search for a royal title, and what Heinz Duchhardt has called a “wave of regalization” among German rulers, were all examples of how this process was beginning to escape the traditional authoritative controls of papal or imperial entitlement and points to the increasingly competitive and fluid nature of the ranking of princes in the early modern period.78 Before the official adoption of the title imperator a gesture was made to Peter while in France in 1717 as the “French court pleased the tsar by acknowledging him as Petrus Alexiewitz, Tzar Magnus Russorum Imperator,” in a form of a medal struck for the visit.79 As for Peter’s imperial title after 1721, the smaller German principalities and the major states of northern Europe (Prussia, Sweden, Denmark, the United Provinces) “made little or no difficulty about giving it formal recognition,” which was accomplished between 1722 and 1725.80 But Britain and the Habsburg Emperor delayed until 1742, while France and Spain waited until 1745.81 From the perspective of a statist approach, the legal grounding of the new title of the Russian ruler has special importance, and for this purpose a source hitherto not used in research deserves due attention. A convincing justification for the imperial title based on historical and legal grounds needed to be written for the European public, as Peter’s new title raised even more questions than the royal titles did. Martin Schmeizel, a Saxon from Transylvania who was a professor at Jena, undertook the task in 1722. It may well be that Schmeizel was commissioned to write this treatise, combining rationality and traditionalism, which was his inaugural lecture as a professor (Oratio inauguralis de titulo imperatoris, Jena, 1722).82 The work was written

78 Edward Keene, “International Hierarchy and the Origins of the Modern Practice of Intervention,” Review of International Studies 29, no. 5 (2013): 1086. 79 Hennings, Russia and Courtly Europe, 194. 80 Anderson, Peter the Great, 83. It is interesting that Frederick William recognized the title as “King in Prussia” and not as Elector of Brandenburg. De Madariaga, Politics, 39. 81 Anderson, Peter the Great, 83. 82 Previously, in 1713, Schmeizel published an important treatise on the origin, types, and importance of crowns, describing (among others) in details the crowns of European

The Meaning(s) of the European Perspective

according to the rules of an academic treatise (with footnote references to sources). Schmeizel carefully outlined the Russian claims to the title imperator, including ample historical material from the distant past and from his own time. Towards the end of the treatise he classified the Russian arguments into six categories. His presentation of the Russian claims made a persuasive case. The first argument pointed out that the Russian title tsar′ was a derivative of caesar and thus often translated into Latin by foreign courts as imperator.83 His second point presented a historical precedent of another type: the title imperator, he argued, had been used in diplomatic correspondence by Western powers (even by the Holy Roman Emperor) in letters and by ambassadors during negotiations at the Russian court so often “that nowadays this [title] is duly attributed to Peter at the court,” and therefore the tsar is anxious “not to seem less in estimation to foreigners than his predecessors did, whom he exceeds in the magnitude of his deeds and the extension of the borders of his empire [finium imperii sui prolatione].”84 Among these historical precedents his trump card was the letter of Emperor Maximilian written to Vasilii III in 1514 in which the Emperor used the title Kayser von allen Ruessen, the original of which had been discovered in Moscow in 1718 among the state documents.85 He also noted that in the same year Peter had this letter translated into many languages and published, and these translated letters were distributed to Russian envoys sent to different countries to show as proof of his imperial claims.86 Schmeizel’s reference to the letter is all the more important because precedent was crucial to Peter’s justification of the imperial title. After the letter had been discovered, Peter publicly showed the original copy to foreign diplomats in 1718, and ordered its publication in Russian and German (altogether 310 copies), with an introduction arguing that “this high honor [that is, the title ‘imperator’] has already been due to all Russian monarchs for a long time.”87

monarchs in accordance with the system of rank and precedence of his time, including the Monomakh cap of the Russian tsars. A synopsis in Russian was made of this Latin text under Peter, which was most likely related to his crowning his wife empress (1724), for which occasion a crown of a new, imperial type was made. See my study: Sashalmi, “Istochnik russkoi rukopisi,” 40–55. 83 Martin Schmeizel, Oratio inauguralis de titulo imperatoris ( Jena, 1722), 51. 84 Ibid., 51–52. 85 Ibid., 48–49. 86 Ibid., 49. 87 Olga G. Ageeva, “Titul ‘imperator’ i poniatie ‘imperiia’ v Rossii v pervoi chetverti XVIII veka” [The title “emperor” and the concept of empire in Russia in the first quarter of the eighteenth century], Mir istorii. Rossiiskii elektronnyi zhurnal 5 (1999), accessed April 23, 2020, http:// ricolor.org/history/mn/ptr/imperator/.

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In his third argument Schmeizel shifted the reasoning to dynastic right: “The third reason the Russians derive from Genealogy, which shows and teaches that Russian Monarchs deduce their origin and blood from the Byzantine Emperors.”88 It is crucial, in my view, that he does not mention the myth of descent from Emperor Augustus, even though the reason is quite understandable: this claim would have undercut his argument as being ridiculous in a treatise like this. The fourth reason in the author’s list was the use of the double-headed eagle in the coat of arms of Russia, the appearance of which is (rightly) linked by him to the previous issue, the Byzantine marriage of Ivan III.89 Schmeizel’s fifth reason rested on the opinion of political authors dealing with “rank and precedent” in Europe, as there were one or two of them (so the author) who gave the Russian ruler second place among the European monarchs after the emperor on the basis of Russia’s geographical extension, even designating the Russian ruler by the German term Kayser.90 Finally, he pointed out that Peter’s title “does not want to do away with the dignity and precedence of the Roman Emperor [Imperatoris Romani],” and Peter’s claim “is in no way detrimental to it as the title in question is Imperator totius Russiae.”91 Schmeizel, however, noted that all these reasons were debatable, and in conclusion he shifted the argument from history to the field of law, identifying this justification as his own primary contribution to the discussion. This argument is the most important one for our purpose as it concerns the issue of sovereignty. He concluded that in connection with Peter’s claims to use the title imperator “two questions have to be examined”: Can the tsar order his subjects generally to use the title imperator or not? There is no one who would call this in doubt. The key [of the] issue therefore lies in the second question: II. Is it possible to present the praise, which is intended to be reserved solely for the Caesar of the Romans [Caesari Romanorum], in a way that its use can be permitted to the Grand Prince of the Russians without doing harm to the majesty and precedence of the Emperor of the Romans [Romanorum Imperatoris]?92

88 Schmeizel, Oratio, 52. 89 Ibid., 53–57. Although it was not the only factor in the adoption of this symbol, as Gustave Alef has proven. 90 Ibid., 57–59. 91 Ibid., 59. 92 Ibid., 60.

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Schmeizel admitted that opinions of lawyers differed in this respect but added: “We cannot think that the common consent of everyone is necessary in this issue because in such ceremonies every person has his own freedom.”93 This wording clearly asserts the justness of Peter’s imperial claim. Again, what gives importance to Schmeizel’s treatise in the context of this study is the legal-historical argumentation, akin to wordings of international law. This kind of argumentation, as we shall see, was not confined to the justification of Peter’s adoption of the imperial title. There were two major political tracts written in Russian toward the end of Peter’s reign, in which legal-historical justification was paramount: “The Justice of the Monarch’s Will in Designating the Heir of His State” (1722) penned by Feofan Prokopovich, and “A Discourse Concerning the Just Causes of the War between Sweden and Russia” (1717) authored by Peter Pavlovich Shafirov, Peter’s skilled diplomat. The first work will feature prominently at the end of this book, as it was the Westernized version of autocracy, expounded as the justification for Peter’s law of succession of 1722 and thus heavily burdened with domestic political motivations. The second, important to the conduct of foreign affairs, declared the acceptance of European behavior in warfare—therefore, it was “a bid for membership in the European states system.”94 Peter Pavlovich Shafirov took on the task of producing the first Russian work dealing with issues falling into the category of international law. Shafirov, whose father had moved to Moscow from the Smolensk voivodeship after 1667 and became a translator in the Foreign Office Chancellery, followed his father’s footsteps: he worked in the same chancellery as a translator from German, but his education and exceptional talent in languages destined him to play the role of the key diplomat in Peter’s service.95 Be it enough to mention that besides his obvious knowledge of Polish and Russian (von Haus aus, so to say), he also knew Latin, German, Dutch, French, and Italian.96 He accompanied Peter on his travel to the West in 1697–1698 as a translator, and from 1703 he was committed with important tasks in the Foreign Office Chancellery, while from 1709 took part in important diplomatic

93 Ibid. Schmeizel’s defense of Peter’s new title was well positioned, because there were other writings openly opposing it! 94 Cracraft, Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture, 186. 95 John Elliott Butler, “Trekhsotletie vykhoda v svet pervoi russkoi original′noi knigi po mezhdunarodnomu publichnomu pravu” [The three-hundred-year anniversary of the publication of the first Russian original book on international law], Vestnik Universiteta imeni O. E. Kugafina (MPOA) 4 (2017): 50. 96 Ibid.

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negotiations, among which his role in the 1711 negotiations with the Ottomans must surely be mentioned. Then he was able to solve the most delicate issue in Peter’s life when the tsar’s army, led by Peter himself, was encircled by the much more numerous Ottoman army, roughly twice outnumbering the Russian army in size.97 Shafirov himself was taken hostage after free passage had been granted to the Russian army, and he would conduct the further negotiations in Constantinople until a peace was reached in 1713, but he returned to Russia only in 1714.98 Later, in 1717, he again accompanied Peter to Western Europe, Amsterdam and Paris, and his last diplomatic mission was the conclusion of the peace with Prussia in 1718.99 During 1710–1722 Shafirov was graciously awarded with various ranks and wealth, but all his fortune was lost in 1723 when he was accused of abuses in the postal service, then under his control, and sentenced to death. His fall was also due to the growing number of his influential enemies. He was deprived of all of his ranks and wealth, and even his precious library was confiscated.100 Luckily for him the death penalty was changed in the last minute to Siberian exile, which, in turn, was changed to an exile in Novgorod. After Peter’s death in 1725 Catherine I called him back to write her husband’s history but he could return to diplomatic tasks only under Empress Anne (1730–1740).101 All these facts show that Shafirov was the person to be entrusted with the task of writing an academic treatise justifying the war with Sweden, to be in line with the accepted behavior in the community of European states. While Shafirov’s work was, indeed, a turning point in the field of international law from the Russian perspective, it represented a genre called “war justification” rather than a treatise on international law.102 Yet, his work is a further evidence of the emerging notion of the state in Russia, namely, in the context of “interstate” relations. No doubt, Shafirov’s perception of Russia as a state provides the broad context involving the aspects of international law and war justification. The introduction, otherwise a panegyric to Peter—in the form of a dedication to Peter’s younger son from Catherine, the infant Peter Petrovich, in the hope that he will follow his father’s achievements—clearly reflects a shift toward statism. Shafirov asserts that Peter made Russia so sophisticated and glorious that

97 Ibid. 98 Ibid. 99 Ibid. 100 Ibid., 51. 101 Ibid. 102 Piirimäe, “Russia, the Turks and Europe,” 66–67.

The Meaning(s) of the European Perspective

although some decades ago it was reasoned and written about the Russian nation and State [o Rossiiskom narode i Gosudarstve]103 in other European states [v drugikh Evropeiskikh gosudarstvakh] as about the nations of India and Persia, and other nations, which, apart from some commerce, have no relations with Europe whatsoever; in the same vein, [it was reasoned and written about them] that they not only did not have any resonance and discussion at all in European affairs pertaining to war and peace, but she [Russia] was hardly even counted among the European nations. But nowadays there is not a single issue even in the remotest part of Europe in which the goodwill or alliance of His Tsarist Majesty, or the evasion of confrontation with him would not be desirable for reasons of precaution and security.104 Shafirov enumerated Peter’s reforms, devoting most space to the army and the fleet, but mentioning the encouragement of printing, the patronage of arts, and the introduction of new crafts—these latter two declared to have been “introduced for the utility of the State [k pol′ze Gosudarstvennoi].”105 At the same time he emphasized Peter’s efforts concerning good governance, which is proven by “the colleges set up by him … to deal with the internal and external affairs of the State, which were modelled on, and following the example of other police (or properly ordered) States [po obrazu i prikladu politizovannykh (ili pravil′no raspolozhennykh) Gosudarstv] … for the utility of the whole State [k pol′ze vsego Gosudarstva].”106 The adoption of the terminus technicus “police state” (apparently from German: Polizeistaat, wohl geordnete Staat) was a marker of civilization at that time similar to the criteria of a just war, as the term “police state” did not have the ominous overtones that it does today. In the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries the term Police/Policey/Polizei was not yet identical with the narrow idea of keeping order and prosecuting crime,

103 For the use of the adjective rossiiskii with regard to narod, see later what is written on this matter regarding the view of Prokopovich. 104 Petr Pavlovich Shafirov, Rassuzhdenie kakie zakonnye prichiny ego tsarskoe velichestvo Petr Pervyi tsar′ i povelitel′ vserossiiskii i prochaia i prochaia i prochaia k nachatiiu voiny protiv Korolia Karla 12 Shvedskogo1700 godu imel [Discourse concerning the just causes that his royal majesty Peter I, tsar and all-Russian emperor, etc., etc., etc., had in starting a war against the Swedish king Charles XII in the year of 1700] (St. Petersburg, 1717), 2. 105 Ibid., 4–6. 106 Ibid., 6. The term politizovannyi, considering the clarification in the brackets, here rather means “police” and not “civilized,” although two meanings are closely collected.

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which we associate with it now.107 It meant government in the broadest sense (as we have mentioned it in passing before, analysing the iconography of the engraving Politeia), aiming to regulate and order society towards a desired goal, namely, what the government thought to be the common good,108 or rather, “public utility,” which is different. The meaning of common good was not the same as it had been in the late Middle Ages, despite the use of the same term, when it was employed in the sense of just government accomplished through keeping every social estate in its place. Unlike this scholastic view, which held that the common good had to be preserved, the “police state” concept of common good was an activist one, coming close in meaning to “public utility,” and especially in Russia, to the “good of the state.” It was to be promoted by regulating “every aspect of people’s lives,”109 in which law played a special role. In the ideology of the “police state” law was conceived as the very means of regulating and ordering society, which could be accomplished through different legal rules: by ordinances, decrees, and other regulations, including, of course, law codes. The very first manifestation of this spirit in Russia, if not the appearance of the terms “police” or “well-regulated state,” which came only under Peter the Great, was no doubt the Law Code of 1649. But during Peter’s reign the number of decrees regulating almost every aspect of way of life increased dramatically. Peter in his 1724 manifesto made the meaning of “police” clear, explaining it meticulously, and concluding as follows: the police [politsiia] has it own special standing, namely: it facilitates rights and justice, begets good order and morality, gives everyone security from brigands, thieves … and the like, drives out disorderly and useless modes of life. … defends widows, orphans and strangers according to God’s commandments, trains the young in sensible cleanliness and honest knowledge; in short, over all these the police [politsiia] is the soul of the citizenry in all good order and the fundamental support of human security and comfort.110

107 Marc Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 5. 108 Ibid. 109 Dixon, Modernisation, 80. 110 Anisimov, Reforms, 217–218.

The Meaning(s) of the European Perspective

As becomes apparent from the previous short exposition of Shafirov’s introduction to his treatise, the nature of the state, that is, its self-definition/self-reflection became a concern for Peter because Europe was seen as the repository of civilization. Three key terms are recurrent in Shafirov’s treatise: Europe, Christian (now interpreted not narrowly as Russian Orthodox, but in the broader sense including all Christians in Europe), and civilized111 are emphasized to prove Russia’s new official cultural membership. (The fourth marker was the “police state.”) This sense of cultural belonging—that Russia can be counted among the civilized European states—included the expectation that Russia should follow a generally accepted norm in interstate relations, the law of nations (ius gentium) in waging war.112 At the heart of this principle was the limitation and regulation of warfare, as early modern governments attributed great importance to the idea of just war (bellum iustum).113 The general criteria of bellum iustum (an issue already discussed by canon lawyers and philosophers in the high and late Middle Ages) in early modern Europe were as follows: 1) recta auctoritas, meaning that the war had to be waged by a legitimate authority; 2) iusta causa, meaning that there had to be a just cause to declare war (such as the recovery of a territory conquered by an enemy); 3) recta intentio, meaning a legitimate intention or purpose to resolve the issue leading to the war, which included “the principle of last resort,” war being the last step after all other efforts to reach an agreement failed completely.114 From these principles a maxim of normative warfare followed: limitation of cruelty and bloodshed in reaching the desired end of the war, and the suspension of warfare once its cause has been eliminated. This commitment to the idea of a just war did not mean, of course, that the states followed the moral and legal principles of this idea in practice, but they were, at least, keen on providing a public justification of any given war.115 Shafirov’s treatise belonged to a genre that appeared in the sixteenth century and gained importance with the spread of printing. Now called a “war justification,” it eventually became a distinct genre in pamphlet literature of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries.116 By the time Peter ascended the throne, such justifications were a matter of routine for European governments, Sweden being a master of the genre not only the during the Thirty Years’ War but also in the 111 In the Russian text the adjective politichnyi is used in the sense “civilized”! 112 Piirimäe, “Russia, the Turks and Europe,” 63. 113 Ibid. 114 Ibid., 68. 115 Ibid., 63. 116 Ibid., 66–67.

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Great Northern War.117 Consequently, Peter’s Russia could not avoid this intellectual effort any longer without risking being called by its old label, a barbarian country. The government needed to convince the rest of Europe that Russia “was not only Christian but also a civilized place.”118 Peter commissioned Shafirov to write this treatise as early as 1714, and the work was done under Peter’s close supervision of the text, while Feofan Prokopovich, “Peter’s ideological mastermind” wrote the conclusion.119 After its publication in 1717 two more Russian publications followed (1719, 1722). Meanwhile it was translated into German and published some time between 1718 and 1721—this German translation became the source of an English translation issued in 1722.120 The print run of the 1722 Russian publication was enormous, 20 000 copies, which indicates the propagandistic purpose of the work.121 At the very beginning of his writing, before the introduction-dedication, Shafirov summarized the content of his work in three points, which he faithfully followed in the exposition of the arguments: 1. Righteous, important and lawful reasons, ancient and modern, because of which His Tsarist Majesty as a Christian Monarch and true father of his fatherland was not only obliged but inevitably forced to start this war against the Swedish Crown as an unpeaceful, hostile, and incessant persecutor of the Russian Empire from ancient times, even up until his felicitous reign. 2. And the one whose fault is the continuation of this war for such a long time, as well as the great shedding of human blood and devastation of lands, and who is the cause of these, is not in the least His Tsarist Majesty but none other than the Royal Swedish Majesty alone. 3. That during this war His Tsarist Majesty, for his part, acted with all sort of moderation, Christian mercy, and for the most part, in the manner of all political [that is, civilized] and Christian nations [politichnykh i khristianskikh narodov], and if it still happened that somewhere cruelty was shown, it

117 Ibid., 67. 118 Ibid., 79–80. 119 Hennings, Russia and Courtly Europe, 42–43. 120 Cracraft, Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture, 185. 121 Piirimäe, “Russia, the Turks and Europe,” 65.

The Meaning(s) of the European Perspective

was mainly to take revenge for Swedish cruelty that caused suffering for the troops of His Tsarist Majesty and his loyal subjects. But from the Swedish side, on the contrary, this war from the beginning and until this time has not been waged in the manner of political [civilized] nations but with all sort of cruelty, inhumanly and vexingly.122 These three points contained all the criteria of a just war mentioned above. According to Paul Bushkovitch the immediate influence of Pufendorf can be traced in Shafirov’s writing,123 but it is relevant to note that Grotius’s De iure belli ac pacis was published in Russian translation in 1716.124 Indeed, Shafirov quoted Pufendorf ’s “Introduction to the History of Principal Kingdoms and States of Europe” (which first appeared in German but became influential through its Latin translation) as a writing containing “ancient political maxims”— a work highly valued in contemporary Europe and by leading intellectuals of Petrine Russia alike.125 In a short time it was translated into Russian by Gavriil Buzhinskii, one of Peter’s influential Ukrainian protégés: “he worked from the Latin translation of Pufendorf ’s German,”126 and it was published first in 1718, then in 1723. Its significance for Russia was aptly summarized by Cracraft stating that it “provided the larger historical-political map on which the politically conscious” elite positioned itself under Peter, including not just Shafirov but also Prokopovich.127 And added: “It presented an entirely secular account of the emergent European system of sovereign states, each naturally possessing its own law, tradition and ‘interests’ or ‘common good’, yet, subject at the same time to the mutually agreed terms of an international law.”128 Shafirov linked the criteria of a just war to the concrete situation to buttress his position and refute the arguments of the enemy.129 In doing so, he dealt with seven areas in the treatise that had relevance to categories of contemporary international law,130 one of them being the historical continuity of the realm and 122 Shafirov, Rassuzhdenie (Foreword). 123 Paul Bushkovitch, “Peter the Great and the Northern War,” in The Cambridge History of Russia, ed. Dominic Lieven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), vol. 2, 497. 124 Not only treatises of international law were acquired and translated in Russia but also manuals of diplomacy. Scott, “Diplomatic Culture in Old Regime Europe,” 64. 125 Cracraft, Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture, 212. 126 Bushkovitch, Succession to the Throne, 318. 127 Cracraft, Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture, 214. 128 Ibid. 129 Piirimäe, “Russia, the Turks and Europe,” 66, 67. 130 Cracraft, Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture, 188.

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the ensuing territorial rights and claims.131 Despite the fact that Shafirov’s writing is not a treatise on international law per se, this aspect is crucial to the development of the concept of the state, similarly to Shafirov’s impersonal, legal use of gosudarstvo and korona (crown), and his reference to the “utility of the state,” which in fact was the synonym of the interest of state. If to single out just two passages to show the change and the modernity of his “Discourse,” both as to its content and language, in matters most pertinent to the subject of this book the following ones are eloquent. Towards the end of his discussion of the ancient causes of the war against Sweden, mentioning the Swedish Crown’s unlawful possession of the “provinces of Livonia and Eastland” for which it has “no another pretension besides force and occupation,” Shafirov concluded: the Tsarist Majesty, even if he had not had any other new and important reasons to launch a war against the Swedish Crown, by all laws of the nature, and civil laws [po vsem pravam natural′nym i grazhdanskim], he not only would have had, with good conscience, enough reasons, but as the father of the fatherland he was also obliged to launch a war for the recuperation of these hereditary provinces pilfered from his Crown [ot Korony svoei], unjustly, with the violation of the previous unforced eternal peace and voluntarily concluded defense alliance.132 And having substantiated his argument even with the breach of an oath, the particular causes justifying the launching of the present war, are elevated to general principles of international law: But since sovereigns [velikie potentaty] have no other judge over them in this world besides god, who, due to his long patience, the temporal sins committed here [in this world] benevolently allows to be judged in the future, according to the deeds. For this reason, every sovereign [potentate] is obliged to defend his right and of the State [pravo svoego i Gosudarstva] with power and arms given by that Almighty, and to repel force with force [nasilie nasiliem otvrashchat′] any time deemed fit for

131 Ibid. 132 Shafirov, Rassuzhdenie, 21.

The Meaning(s) of the European Perspective

this, which was the custom of the whole world from the beginning and will last until its end.133 Besides the reference to sovereign and sovereigns, which is the meaning of the term potentat (singular) and velikie potentaty, significant is the reference to the “rights of the State” without the possessive “his,” similarly to the mentioning of the self-defense principle of Roman law, vim vi repellere licet. Of the numerous new technical terms (words, “short phrases,” and “longer expressions”) of current international law in the treatise—including the expression “international law” (vsenarodnoe pravo) itself—James Cracraft composed a short but impressive inventory.134 John E. Butler, summarizing the most recent research on the importance of the treatise both from the legal and terminological points of view, singled out its importance in the history of international law in Russia as a breakthrough, which cannot be separated from the language it used. He underlined that the treatise, besides the wide scope of issues of international law dealt with in it, shows “the process of gradual replacement of the old diplomatic language of medieval Russia with European terminology,” and added that Shafirov was fully “aware of the ongoing terminological revolution.”135 As a confirmation of his statement remarked: “In the Discourse he thinks it necessary to explain the meaning of some Petrine terms, putting in brackets their Old Russian equivalents or suggesting a short clarification.”136 The abovementioned term, politizovannyh (ili pravil′no raspolozhennykh) Gosudarstv, is a good example in question. Among the causes of the war special attention was given by Shafirov to the claim to recover territories that were considered ancient Russian lands. During the war, this cause was often mentioned by the tsar as well, along with what Peter saw as a personal insult. The argument that these lands from time out of mind “had belonged to the Russian Empire, which the Swedes themselves cannot deny”137 figured because it best accorded with the principles of international law.138 At the same time, this wording marks an important shift from dynastic right towards territorial right. While Ivan IV during the Livonian War claimed territories on the basis of patrimonial rights, Shafirov based the claim on the 133 Ibid., 22. 134 Cracraft, Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture, 189–190. 135 Butler, “Trekhsotletie,” 49. 136 Ibid. 137 Rassuzhdenie (Foreword). 138 Piirimäe, “Russia, the Turks and Europe,” 82.

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right of the Russian Crown.139 The same issue is reflected already in the first sentence on the causes that speaks of the war not between Peter and Charles XII but “between the Russian Empire and the Swedish Crown.” Paul Bushkovitch claims that Shafirov broke with previous war justifications as he abandoned the religious cause, which had been current in declarations of wars against Poles and Swedes: namely, the protection of Orthodox religion is missing from his work.140 This aspect is also crucial for the development of the concept of state, from the point of view of interstate relations. Bushkovitch’s statement, however, is not correct, and the analysis of Shafirov’s argumentation requires a more nuanced approach. Yuri Stoyanov very clearly grasped this issue, stating that “the text sheds light on some of the religiously related episodes of the war,” namely, the alliance of Charles XII with the “‘hereditary’ enemies of Christendom,” the Turks and the Tatars, as well as “the alleged profanation of Orthodox Churches by Swedish troops.”141 So, religious considerations did not disappear but now they took the place of additional arguments justifying the war,142 as the core of reasoning was not the listing of atrocities against Orthodox religion! At the same time, the religious issue remained a characteristic casus belli of the wars against the Ottomans.143

139 Bushkovitch, “Peter the Great and the Northern War,” 496. 140 Ibid., 497. 141 Yuri Stoyanov, “Eastern Orthodox Christianity,” in Religion, War and Ethics. The Sourcebook of Textual Traditions, ed. Gregory M. Reichberg, Henryk Syse, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 196. 142 Ibid. 143 Bushkovitch, “Peter the Great and the Northern War,” 497.

CHAPTER 6

The Birth and Meaning of the “Russian State Narrative”

Terms such as “state” and “Europe” came to the center of attention, as we have seen, due to the changing attitude of the Russian government, which, from 1700 onwards was keen on improving Russia’s image in the West. The new geographical border between Europe and Asia suggested by Tatishchev, like Shafirov’s book, clearly attested that the comparison with Europe became the litmus test of Russia’s self-image, in both government rhetoric and Russian intellectual history: either to emphasize commonalities with Europe, or, on the contrary, to underline the peculiarities of Russia’s historical development. The latter issue is intrinsically connected to the problem of transtemporality and identity, which is apparent if we grasp the golden thread of what is called the “Russian idea.” Szergej Filippov, in his book on nineteenth-century Russian intellectual history,1 points out that the core of the “Russian idea” (which, in many ways, is a “vague and elusive notion” indeed) lies inextricably in Russia’s attitude to Europe: “the desire to ponder, understand and evaluate the ongoing fundamental problem of Russian history—the consequences resulting from the complex relations between Russia and the West characterized by comparison and inevitable counterposition.”2 In other words, Europe, or the “West,” has become and remained Russia’s “constituent other” ever since the reign of Peter. This issue as a topic of intellectual discourse can be dated roughly from the 1760s, the time of the Enlightenment, the birth of the Russian intelligentsia at

1 Filippov Szergej, Az “orosz eszme” alakváltozásai. Az orosz konzervativizmus, liberalizmus és radikalizmus [The changing shape of the “Russian idea.” Russian conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism] (Budapest: ELTE Ruszisztikai Központ, 2010), 13. 2 Ibid., 10–11.

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the age of Catherine the Great.3 And in this self-reflection a pivotal point has been attributed to the role of the state—for the so-called “Russian state narrative” focuses on the role, or rather the mission of the (autocratic) state in the course of Russian history, on the one hand, and the question of the adaptability of Western political models to Russia, on the other. The “Russian state narrative,” which emerged under Peter the Great, interpreted Russian history precisely in the framework of the history of the state itself, placing a strong emphasis on statehood and the Russian character. It is of great significance that this “state narrative” was first expounded by no lesser a person than Feofan Prokopovich, Peter’s chief ideologist. He set forth a new ideology of autocracy by including some key concepts of contemporary Western political thought, albeit in a manner suitable to his purpose: to justify legally unlimited power with the help of Western legal concepts. But the most important work of this new ideology, “The Justice of the Monarch’s Will,” laid down the main principles of the state narrative too. The treatise, written to defend and justify Peter’s 1722 law on succession, gave the ruler unconstrained right in everything, including the free choice of his successor enshrined in the succession statute. The statute based this right on the duty of the ruler to “care for the integrity of our state [popechenie o tselosti nashego gosudarstva], which with God’s help, is today greatly expanded, as it is evident to all.”4 In Wortman’s view, the statute on succession “ascertained the connection between the tsar’s unlimited absolute power5 and the well-being of the realm reflected in the size and the territorial unity of the empire.”6 Wortman did not analyse this issue in the text of “The Justice of the Monarch’s Will” (which included the succession statute itself after a foreword) but it is worth examining how this idea permeated the most important political writing of the Petrine era. The link between the ruler’s free choice in naming his successor and the integrity of the state was asserted by Prokopovich at the beginning of the exposition of his argument (following the foreword and the text of the statute): 3 Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought. From the Enlightenment to Marxism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979), xv–xvi. For the second quarter of the nineteenth century see the intellectual debate between the Westerners and the Slavophiles, while for the second half of the century most characteristically Danilevskii’s book: Nikolai Iakovlevich Danilevskii, Russia and Europe: The Slavic World’s Political and Cultural Relations with the Germanic-Roman West (1869), trans. and ann. Stephen M. Woodburn (Bloomington: Slavica Publications, 2013). 4 Prokopovich, Pravda voli monarshei, 130–131. The translation of Lentin is a little bit modified, concerning the beginning of the sentence. 5 The word “absolute” is not a fortunate choice. See this problem in details below. 6 Wortman, Power of Language and Rhetoric, 160.

The Bir th and Meaning of the “R ussian State Narrative”

this statute is a kind of prophylactic or preservative medicine for monarchy of all the Russias [vserossiskoi monarkhii], most effective both to accomplishing its welfare [k polucheniiu dobrogo] and in averting evil. Russia’s sons [synove rossiistii]7 must therefore not only keep it and maintain it forever, but must be unfailingly and wholeheartedly grateful to our Lawgiver [zakonodateliu] and Sovereign [samoderzhtsu], as a true Father of the Fatherland [ottsu otechestva], who in his great zeal for the Fatherland [k otechestvu blagoutrobii], has thought little of his own great pains and efforts not only to preserve it in integrity [its indivisibility, tseloe sokhranit′], but also to expand it greatly.8 Later in the text the right of free choice in selecting a successor was again explicitly linked to the ruler’s duty to care for the integrity of the Fatherland: Now if a sovereign must take such pains for the common good of people subject to him [o dobre obshchem naroda sebe poddanogo], surely he must strive diligently to see that his successor is virtuous, brave, skilful and such as would not only preserve the good condition of the Fatherland in its integrity [dobroe otechestva sostoianie ne tokmo sokhranil v tselosti] but would consolidate and strengthen it still more.9 Finally, Prokopovich underlined this issue in the section comparing elective and hereditary monarchy. In defense of the superiority of hereditary monarchy he asserted: “The hereditary monarch, knowing that his power is inalienable, takes as much pains for the integrity and welfare of the state [tak o tselosti i dobrom sostoianii gosudarstva] as for his own domestic welfare, wishing to leave his successors strong power [krepkuiu vlast′] and glory.”10 Here we have the idea of the integrity of the state linked to strong power of the monarch. 7 Note the statist terminology in the neologism rossiistii, the equivalent of rossiiane. 8 Prokopovich, Pravda voli monarshei, 134–137. The translation of Lentin is modified here. 9 Ibid., 200–201. The translation of Lentin is modified here. 10 Ibid., 234–235. The translation of Lentin is modified here. It is worth noting in the statist context that Prokopovich prefers the word dobro and obshchee dobro to blago and obshchee blago, which is in line with the ruler’s duty to care for the worldly needs and the material well-being of the subjects, as blago, meaning “boon,” had a religious overtone. Larysa Dovga, in examining the language of seventeenth-century Ukrainian church intellectuals shows that while dobro and blago were synonyms in the early seventeenth century, “at the end of the century ‘good’ is gradually establishing itself as the description of moral virtues and material

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Historical arguments were integral to Prokopovich’s political writings, justifying the political lesson on the importance of the unity of the state. Besides, the very idea of interpreting the flow of Russia’s history in the framework of different forms of government, a theme closely related to the concept of unity, most probably originated with him.11 He first expounded this theme in his sermon of 1716 shortly after Peter summoned him to the new capital. The panegyric sermon, as its title shows (Slovo pokhval′noe v den′ rozhdestva Blagorodneishego Gosudaria Tsarevicha Velikogo kniazia Petra Petrovicha) was delivered on the occasion of the first birthday of Peter’s second son (Peter Petrovich), born of the tsar’s second marriage.12 In the sermon he poined out, among others, the almost fatal consequences that deviation from strong monarchy brought to Rome and Russia as well.13 After pondering the changes in the forms of government in Roman history from the time of the kings through the republican period to the era of emperors, Prokopovich proceeded to a laconic summary of Russian history. He claimed that Vladimir’s (980–1015) division of the Rus′ lands among his sons after his death in 1015 meant the end of autocratic monarchy in Russia, equating the history of the Rus′ completely with a prehistory of his present Rossiia: How powerless Russia [Rossiia] had been after the death of Vladimir, for although the kin of autocrats did not become extinct, the autocratic scepter [samoderzhskii skipetr] was broken into pieces (which, in fact, was the termination of monarchy itself)! How much misery did she suffer from feuds and the conquest of barbarians! And she could not stand on her feet again until she had come under the dominion and inheritance of one scepter [that is, Ivan III].14 attractiveness, and the ‘boon’ as the heaven’s (metaphysical) gifts and expectation of ‘future age’ bliss.” Larysa Dovga, “Poniattevii apparat u diskursi ukrainskiikh tserkovnikh intelektualiv XVII st.: do postanovki problemi” [The conceptual apparatus in the discourse of Ukrainian church intellectuals of the seventeenth century: To the formulation of the problem], Sententiae 34, no. 1 (2016): 12. 11 For this issue see: Konstantin D. Bugrov: “Russia’s Territorial Size as a Concept for Domestic Politics: Territory, Military Strength and Forms of Government in 18th-Century Russian Political Thought,” Bylye Gody 37, no. 3 (2015): 491–498. 12 Feofan Prokopovich, Sochineniia [Works], ed. Igor Petrovich Eremin (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1961), 38–48. 13 For the arguments against republics in the sermon see Boris Maslov, “Why Republics Always Fail: Pondering Feofan Prokopovich’s Poetics of Absolutism,” Вивлioѳика: E-Journal of Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies 2 (2014): 24–46, https://www.academia.edu/9073120/ Why_Republics_Always_Fail_Pondering_Feofan_Prokopovich_s_poetics_of_absolutism. 14 Prokopovich, Sochineniia, 42.

The Bir th and Meaning of the “R ussian State Narrative”

In this sermon he used the term rossiiskii narod (“Russian nation”) with regard to the people, spoke of the rossiiskii rod (“Russian stock”) in referring to Muscovite times, and turned to his audience as rossiiane (subjects of Russia).15 Moreover, he “often used these terms in his St. Petersburg sermons and writings” after 1716.16 The employment of the neologism rossiiane, probably coined by him, similarly to the synove rossiistii (“sons of Russia”), encountered in his 1722 tract, were significant bearers of a new message. Although in using terms such as rossiiskii narod or rossiiskii rod Prokopovich followed the footsteps of the Ukrainian high clergy of the seventeenth century, yet, his interpretation was very different from theirs, as he assimilated this terminology to his statist-imperial approach of Russian history.17 Members of the Kiev high clergy used these and similar terms from the early seventeenth century on as the expression of the ethnic and religious unity of those Slavic people who once had been part of the Kievan Rus′ but became politically divided afterwards between Muscovy and Lithuania. These intellectuals encouraged the establishment of a political unity under the tsar, yet keeping the autonomy that “Little Russia” (Ukraine) enjoyed after the Pereiaslav Treaty of 1654 when the Cossacks placed Ukraine under the protectorate of the tsar. This political commitment was called by Zenon E. Kohut the concept of an “ethnodynastic tsardom.”18 By this term he encapsulated the ideas expressed in the chronicle entitled Synopsys (1674) and attributed to Innokentii Gizel, archimandrite of the Kievan Cave Monastery. By labelling this state of mind “ethnodynastic,” Kohut intended to distinguish it from the conception of Russian history labelled as “dynastic,” embedded in the Muscovite “Book of Degrees”19 and later in the short chronicle of Fedor Akimovich Griboedov 1669, which both conceived the flow of Russian history exclusively in the paradigm of the salvation story of the God-chosen dynasty. Absent in Griboedov’s presentation (based on the adaptation of the structural scheme of the “Book of Degrees”) was the “interest in the people of the Rus′ or any of their ethnic similarities,” similarly to the “notion of any reunion of previously lost Rus′ lands with the Muscovite Rus′

15 Serhii Plokhy, The Origins of the Slavic Nations. Pre-Modern Identities in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 276. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 276–277. 18 Zenon E. Kohut, “A Dynastic or Ethno-Dynastic Tsardom? Two Early Modern Concepts of Russia,” in Extending the Borders of Russian History, ed. Marsha Siefert (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2003), 17–30. 19 The analysis of this source see later.

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state.”20 What interested him was the continuity of power from Vladimir to the reigning Tsar Aleksei, employing for Vladimir those titles (autocrat, tsar), which were in use for Aleksei at that time: Griboedov’s principal goal was to “establish dynastic legitimacy” through the “transmission of the scepter of the Rus′.”21 For Griboedov (as well as for his manual, the “Book of Degrees”) “the Rus′ lands and the Russian Tsardom” were “the territorial possession of the Muscovite tsars.”22 Consequently, besides the divine mission of the dynasty, the the core of the argument was what I call “the rule by a single scepter-holder.” In the concept of the “ethnodynastic tsardom,” by contrast, the emphasis was not merely on the Rurikid dynasty but also on the rossiiskii narod, that is, on the common ethnic and religious bonds (Slavic origin and Orthodox faith) of a larger community, Rossiia, uniting “Little Russians,” “White Russians,” and “Great Russians,” who after the Kievan Rus′ lived under the authority of different rulers but eventually came under the protective umbrella of the tsar under Tsar Aleksei, the distant descendant of Rurik.23 This idea of unity of the rossiiskii rod, which also had an anti-Ottoman edge to it, was manifested emblematically in various Ukrainian engravings of the 1660s–1670s, which regularly depicted the double-headed eagle (often with the Mother of God on the crest of the eagle) and famous Kievan saints, St. Anthony and St. Feodosii—symbolizing thereby the protection of the tsar, who, by that time, was also the ruler of Little Russia and White Russia. Ideas of this sort, however, were also clearly expressed by the most prominent figure of the Muscovite court culture of the 1660s, Simeon Polotskii, a White Russian by birth, who served as a tutor to the children of Tsar Aleksei. Polotskii wrote his famous work, the “Russian Eagle” (Orel Rossiiskii)24 for Tsarevich Aleksei on the occasion of his presentation as heir to the throne on September 1, 1667. His work was a precursor of the great panegyric odes of the eighteenth century.25 This highly eclectic work is composed of pieces belonging to different literary genres: various types of verse—written in traditional graphic and syllabic manners—emblematic poetry, prosaic panegyrics, and so forth. Polotskii’s work “addresses the Russian heraldic eagle,” and through this

20 21 22 23 24

Ibid., 20. Ibid., 17, 19. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 23–24. Simeon Polotskii, Orel Rossiiskii, ed. N. A. Smirnov (St. Petersburg, 1915), Note the adjective Rossiiskii in the title! 25 Harsha Ram, The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 36.

The Bir th and Meaning of the “R ussian State Narrative”

(coat of arms-)emblem praises Tsar Aleksei and his son, Tsarevich Aleksei, who are both likened not only to an eagle but also to the sun. The frontispiece to the writing contains a drawing of the two-headed eagle placed in the sun radiating forty-eight sunbeams, and the mounted lancer on the crest of the eagle recognizably has the countenance of Tsar Aleksei! The first, and in my view, the most important piece of the cycle is called Enkomion (a type of panegyrics) where Polotskii defines the war waged against Poland for the possession of Little Russia and White Russia in such a manner: the most important thing is, that thanks to the fortune of our Master, a great many of the Orthodox Christian nation living in Little and White Russia were liberated from the hand of peoples confessing another faith; as it were, from a second Egyptian or Babylonian captivity.26 And, following the apologetic theme, the tsar and his heir are hailed as follows: God, give this radiant Sun to dissolve the dark clouds, and all kinds of powers inimical to Orthodoxy to disappear! God give that the Muslim Moon shall dim out by the growing light of the Sun! The unbelief of the dark night of this Asian country be enlightened [that is, baptized] by the light of faith. … The Christian nation will be praised, Orthodox tsar, thanks to you and your illustrious son. … Oh, Eagle of the All-Russian stock [Orle vserodnorossiiskii], you will be blessed and you will make your nest in the light of the righteous Sun on the cedars of Lebanon or on the rocks reaching into the clouds.27 Christian and Orthodox were synonyms for Polotskii, and what is important for us is the strange term, vserodnorossiiskii. It refers to an ethno-political identity: it means all [vse] the people, that is, Great Russians, Little Russians, and White Russians, who are part of a race [rod] through their common Slavic roots, and who are now united in one “state,” Russia [Rossiia]—metaphorically, under the wings of the Russian Eagle [Orel Rossiskii], the heraldic symbol of this state.28

26 Polotskii, Orel Rossiiskii, 11. 27 Ibid. 28 The new seal of Russia created in the same year (1667) also reflected these ideas. See this issue later.

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Prokopovich, however, had a conception of Russia different from the one conceived by Ukrainian high clergy and the hetmans who were keen on preserving Ukrainian autonomy, and the real turning point came after Poltava in 1709. In using rossiiskii rod Prokopovich deprived the term of the original ethnic meaning it had in the writings of seventeenth-century Ukrainian intellectuals, and filled it with a new, statist content: for him rossiiskii rod comprised everyone living under the rule of Peter, irrespectively of ethnic or religious affiliations. In the 1716 sermon quoted, he combined the rossiiskii rod with idea of “the rule by a single scepter-holder.” As Plokhy summarized the view of Prokopovich on this matter: Clearly, he saw the world in terms of political communities (nations), and apparently believed that in Russia there was supposed to be one Russian nation. The Slavo-Rossian nation of the author of the Synopsis, ambiguously rooted in the broader Slavic world, was given way to a nation largely defined by the borders of the Muscovite state. This view was quite concordant with the worldview of Samuel Pufendorf … whose works were well-known to Prokopovych.29 As he did not conceive Russia as “multinational or multiethnic state,” Prokopovich “generally avoided using the term ‘empire’ in relation to Russia,” and preferred instead “‘state’ or ‘monarchy.’”30 The terms rossiiane, rossiistii were the most eloquent collective terms expressing this idea. Statist terminology was also to dominate his exposition of the importance of political unity in “The Justice of the Monarch’s Will.” Prokopovich, using freely the term gosudarstvo, here described the division of the Rus′ territory and its fatal consequences as follows: … sovereign monarchs can partition their states [gosudarstvo svoe]; and many have done so, and have given a part to each of their sons to rule … for example Vladimir the Great between Iaroslav, Boris, Gleb and his other sons. There are many such examples; and we could give many such both from larger states and states of average size; but with so many other examples given above and below, we shall not enumerate them, but shall 29 Plokhy, The Origins of the Slavic Nations, 275–276. 30 Ibid., 276.

The Bir th and Meaning of the “R ussian State Narrative”

reckon them as one. In giving examples, however, we do not approve of such partitioning of states [takogo gosudarstv razdeleniia], nor can we approve it; for it is thoroughly bad for states, and leads not only to disorder and internal feuds [mezhdousobnym braniam], but sometimes even to utter ruin [k razoreniiu krainemu]: of which Russia [Rossiia] herself gave us a familiar example, when she was divided among the children of Vladimir. For everyone can see from the Russian [rossiiskikh!] chronicles (as many foreigners also report) what dissensions [nesoglasiia], factions [razdory] and civil wars [mezhdousobnye voiny] ensued among Vladimir’s divided successors whereby Russia [Rossiia] was reduced to such impotence, that to her great shame and misery she succumbed to the sway of the barbarian Tartars. … She could not regain her strength and free herself from the barbarian yoke until her scattered parts were reincorporated and reunited under the monarchical crown, which was most wisely and happily brought about by the abovementioned Grand Duke Ivan Vasil′evich [that is, Ivan III]. For this reason we cannot approve the partition of states [razdeleniia gosudarstv]. …31 The starting point in the chronology of my book, therefore, clearly accords with the premise of the “state narrative” born under Peter, namely, that the reign of Ivan III was deemed a turning point in Russia’s history as he restored the unity of the state. The history of the Rus′ was conceived as Russia’s (Rossiia) history, that is, the history of the state (gosudarstvo). In Prokopovich’s interpretation the key to Russia’s success lay in the persistence of monarchical government, in its autocratic form—because of the great size of the empire and the nature of its inhabitants.32 Richard Wortman called this commitment “the admonitory mode of Russian state narrative.”33 Strong autocratic monarchy was the only guarantee of Russia’s territorial integrity and unanimity of political opinion. Let us now unravel the internal link between territorial integrity and autocracy. If power over the territory was divided, it would lead to quarrels, disorder, internal feuds, and inevitable territorial fragmentation, exposing Russia to attacks by foreign enemies. This was the negative chain reaction triggered by 31 Prokopovich, Pravda voli monarshei, 262–265. 32 Wortman, Power of Language and Rhetoric, 166. 33 Ibid., 161.

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territorial division of power, which, in fact, would be the end of autocracy. To repeat Prokopovich’s words: “the autocratic scepter [samoderzhskii skipetr] was broken into pieces (which, in fact, was the termination of monarchy itself)!” Similarly, if autocratic power was constrained in any way, either legally, or institutionally (by parliament), it would have the same effect—if unity of power withers away, it will lead to the same chain of events: quarrels, disorder, and so forth. Prokopovich furthered his state narrative in this direction as early as 1734, commenting on the failed attempt of a court party to limit autocratic power in Russia in 1730. Due to the uncertainty of succession after Peter’s death, resulting from his 1722 statute that made succession to the throne unstable for the rest of the eighteenth century, the throne of Russia was offered to Peter’s niece, Anne of Courland, in 1730, after two brief reigns of Catherine I (1725–1727) and Peter the Great’s grandson, who ruled as Peter II (1727–1730). In 1730, a court party intending to remain in power after the sudden death of Peter II drafted a list of demands to which Anne was asked to agree as the precondition of her acceptance as ruler. The document even contained a security clause at the end of the conditions, namely, that in case she does not keep these points, she “will be deprived of the Russian crown.” These conditions would have limited her power severely, and, if realized, would have made Russia not so much a limited monarchy but an oligarchy.34 Although Anne agreed on the terms and even signed the document containing the limitations on her power, the attempt finally failed. Anne, having known that the majority of the nobility opposed the limitation of autocracy, tore up the document, and a manifesto was issued on the restoration of autocratic power.35 Prokopovich, the ardent defender of autocracy under Peter, “during the political crisis of 1730 played a duplicitous role, by trying to be on both sides simulatenously,” but after the failure of the attempt “pretended to have opposed the elite all along.”36As a justification of restoring autocracy, in 1734 he deduced the necessity of autocratic rule from the nature of the Russian people, linking it to the concept of tselost′. He summarized his ars politica concerning Russia’s government as follows:

34 Paul Dukes, The Making of Russian Absolutism 1613–1801, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1990), 115–118. 35 Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 85. 36 Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 282.

The Bir th and Meaning of the “R ussian State Narrative”

As it is inherent in the nature of the Russian people that they can be preserved only by an autocratic government [samoderzhavnym vladetel′stvom]. And if any other rule should gain ground [among them], then they would not be able to persist at all in integrity [unity, v tselosti] and in a good condition.37 To sum up: autocracy was the guarantee of the territorial integrity of the state, and eventually the welfare of the Russian people, and it was the only political system that suited the Russians. The commitment of linking the territorial integrity of the country to a strong monarchical power as the cornerstone of Russian statehood became a transtemporal idea, a state narrative. This state narrative, subsumed in the concept of tselost′ (integrity) was to become one of the central paradigms of conservative Russian political thought up to the present, as Richard Wortman has amply demonstrated: a narrative, that understandably would surface and feature prominently in times of political crises in different periods of Russian history. In addition to that, it also exerted a great influence on Russian historiography. It is this aspect that we need to examine now.

37 Quoted by Bugrov, “Russia’s Territorial Size as a Concept for Domestic Politics,” 494.

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CHAPTER 7

The Consequences of the State Narrative: The Discovery of Gosudarstvo by Russian History-Writing

As we have just seen, in the early eighteenth century Prokopovich established the foundations for the interpretation of Russian history as one based on the concept of tselost′, interwoven with the theme of forms of government.1 But it was Vasilii Tatishchev who built his grandiose “History of Russia” (Istoriia Rossiiskaia) on these premises, adding Montesquieu’s theory on the relation between the forms of government and the territorial extension of states, claiming that large states can survive only as monarchies.2 And, of course, monarchy meant autocracy for Tatishchev: “Large states [gosudartsva] that are not safe from neighbors cannot be preserved in integrity [v tselosti sokhranitsia ne mogut] without an absolute [autocratic] monarch.”3 Tatishchev was one the leading figures in the late Petrine and the post-Petrine era of the territory-minded approach, which saw geography “as a tool of statecraft”: science serving the needs and interests of the Russian state.4 No wonder that the integrity of the state was of paramount importance to him in his main work, the “History of Russia.”

1 Wortman did not deal with the issue of different forms of governments, a theme closely linked to the paradigm of tselost′ for Prokopovich. 2 Wortman, Power of Language and Rhetoric, 160. 3 Quoted ibid. Actually, this issue was raised in the literature well before Wortman’s work by Richard Pipes, although without a reference to the concept of tselost′: “This fact [the vastness of territory and its insecure borders] was remarked on by such eighteenth-century political theorists as Montesquieu and in Russia served as the principal justification for her autocratic form of government.” Pipes, Russian Conservatism, 8. 4 Sunderland, “Imperial Space,” 37.

The Consequences of the State Narrative

Tatishchev began to write it on Peter’s commission but it was published after his death only, during the reign of Catherine the Great.5 Sharing the proposition of Prokopovich on tselost′, and developing further his view that Russia’s history can be seen as going through different forms of government, he underlined that any kind of division of central power, be it either personal/institutional or territorial, was and would be fatal for Russia. He found the admonition to avoid the fatal consequences in the biblical passage: “If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand” (Luke 11:7, Mark 3:24). This passage served Tatishchev as a paradigm for framing the history of Russia as a process conceived in terms of different forms of government.6 As the biblical passage implied order, that is, harmony and unity,7 its political implication was the emphasis on concord and the justification of monarchy as the best form of government, one the one hand, and the indivisibility of the realm, on the other. Tatishchev saw the flow of Russia’s history as swinging between monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy,8 and not only used the Russian chronicles as raw material in presenting his (hi)story but also adopted their method of annalist chronicle-writing. Many of his entries begin with indicating a date (he counted years from the birth of Christ and not from the creation of the world, as was the case in Russia before 1700) and setting forth the events that happened at the given time, following the model of the Russian Primary Chronicle. Before presenting the grandiose year-by-year narrative of Russia’s history, Tatishchev provided a short theoretical preface on the origin of human government (in chapter 14, entitled “Of the ancient Russian government, and of others as examples”);9 then he went on to the classification of forms of government, and finally gave an abstract-like synopsis, or sketch of Russia’s history,10 placing it in the abovementioned theoretical framework. As he framed it, Russia’s history had moved from monarchy to aristocracy and democracy, and then back to monarchy. Tatishchev perceived the division of the “Rus′ land” among the

5 Vasilii Nikitich Tatishchev, Istoriia Rossiiskaia (St. Petersburg, 1768–1784), 4 vols. 6 For this see my article: Endre Sashalmi, “Chronicles, History-Writing and Ideology in Vasilii Tatishchev’s Istoriia Rossiiskaia: ‘If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand’ as a Leitmotiv in Interpreting Russia’s History,” in Hungary and Hungarians in Central and East European Narrative Sources (10th–17th Centuries), ed. Dániel Bagi et al. (Pécs: University of Pécs, 2019), 209–224. 7 Robert Antonin, The Ideal Ruler in Medieval Bohemia (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 236. This biblical motif can be found in various Bohemian chronicles. 8 It is significant that by the early eighteenth century democracy acquired a positive connotation as the rule of the multitude for the common good, from being a perverted form of politeia. 9 Vasilii Tatishchev, Istoriia Rossiiskaia, vol. 1, part 2, 527–547. 10 Ibid., 542–547.

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princes as the end of monarchy, which led to the rule of the princes, which he saw as aristocracy, while Novgorod in his view became a democracy. Monarchy was restored only by Ivan III (1462–1505), called “Ivan the Great” by Tatishchev, who began the “gathering of the Russian lands” and subordinated the princes to his power. Although Tatishchev did not link the beginning of troubles and fragmentation to the death of Vladimir (1015) but to a period beginning more than a hundred years later in 1155, the effects were the same as had been described by Prokopovich: The princes, who previously had been kept at bay, became so strong that they began to treat the Grand Prince as their equal, and he had nothing left of his superior position except the title, but he had no power at all, and thereby aristocracy [that is, rule of the few] came into existence, but without order.11 The result was the establishment of independent principalities and the resulting political fragmentation, which led to the Tatar yoke: As a consequence, autocracy [samoderzhavstvo], the strength and honor of Russian rulers vanished; … in Novgorod, Pskov, Polotsk genuine democratic government was introduced as grand princely power was so thoroughly eliminated. … Ivan the Great [Ivan III], as has been said, having thrown off the Tatar yoke, so to speak, revived perfect monarchy [sovershennuiu Monarkhiiu]. From all these [examples] everyone can see that for our state [nashemu gosudarstvu] monarchical government [monarsheskoe pravlenie] is more useful than any other, because, through it, the wealth, strength, and glory of the state [gosudarstva] are multiplied, whereas through the others they diminish and wither away.12 We have to emphasize that monarchy and autocracy were “interchangeable terms” for Tatishchev13: this was the meaning of “perfect monarchy” in his view. I think

11 Ibid., 543. 12 Ibid., 545. Here Tatishchev clearly formulated the principle that, as we shall see, was later expressed in a laconic manner by Karamzin. 13 Rudolph L. Daniels, V. N. Tatishchev: Guardian of the Petrine Revolution (Philadelphia: Franklin Publishing Company, 1973), 108, fn. 8.

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it is plausible to label Tatishchev’s approach as “practical historiography.” From the very beginning of his story, that is, from the invitation of the Varangians, and arguably throughout the whole work, his main task was “to underscore Russia’s need for a strong and uninterrupted monarchy.”14 Tatishchev’s whole narrative was based on this premise, and history-writing, for which chronicles were no doubt indispensable, served a clear ideological purpose. The description of the events of 1155, in which he puts the words of the crucial biblical passage in the mouth of a princely counsellor, illustrates his line of argument: It is most useful and pleasing to God to be reconciled with one’s sons, and it is useful for all subjects [polezno vsem poddannym] to live in peace. … For this reason it would be very good if Iurii [Iurii Dolgorukii] were reconciled with his sons and others, and if all other Princes listened to him as their elder, as if they were his sons, since they call him a father and Grand Prince; because the Princes under Rurik, Olga, Igor, and Vladimir were subjects [podvlastnye], and acted according to the will of these [latter rulers], and did not initiate anything without the will of the Grand Prince. But nowadays we see that everything is different; they either quarrel about their possessions or something else, they initiate war against each other, one brings in the Cumans against the other, another brings in the Hungarians or the Poles, and these [enemies], especially the Cumans, who came to help, do not care about the Rus′ land [Russkuiu zemliu] but devastate it, kill the people, and carry them into captivity, and the longer they stay the stronger they become, but the Christians are dying and therefore diminish in number and become powerless. But as even Christ has said: If a kingdom is divided, it cannot stand [ashche tsarstvo razdelitsia ne mozhet stoiat′]; we see the Rus′ land precisely as such, divided into many parts [Russkuiu zemliu razdelennuiu na mnogiia chasti], and it cannot hope for improvement but soon expect nothing but the invasion of foreigners who fully take possession of it and ruin [gubiat] the Rus′ land [Russkuiu zemliu].15 14 Ibid., 93. 15 Vasilii Tatishchev, Istoriia Rossiiskaia, vol. 3, 94. With regard to the importance of concord and tranquility in Tatishchev’s thought, underlined by the biblical passage employed, it is

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Gary Hamburg summarized Tatishchev’s political ideas as follows: “Tatishchev’s originality lay not in his effecting a radical break from the Muscovite tradition of political thinking, but rather in his thoroughgoing effort to affix secular connotations to traditionally Christian categories of political virtue.”16 Although the second part of Hamburg’s evaluation is sound, the first is debatable. Issues that we would call “political” were centered on the moral personality of the ruler in Muscovite times,17 and, unlike in the Petrine era, monarchical government as such did not need to be defended, as it was assumed to be given. In the Petrine era, however, not the moral personality of the ruler but the defense of hereditary monarchy became the prominent feature of Russian political though;18 needs to be added, in its autocratic version. Although the biblical passage in question (not surprisingly) had a strong moralizing tone, its novel significance lay in the fact that Tatishchev used it as a paradigm determining the course of Russia’s history, and it eventually became the justification of the monarchical form of government. Therefore, the use of the biblical passage illustrates Giovanna Brogi’s formulation: “The system of Tatishchev was based on two essential ideas: what is useful [polezno], and what is “pleasing to God [bogu priiatno].”19 In Tatishchev’s perception usefulness meant the utility of the state, with an emphasis on its integrity (tselost′) and with this approach he became the forerunner of the “statist school” of Russian historiography. The phrase, “integrity of the state,” however, found its way even into Russian playwriting during Catherine II, as it is attested by the celebrated political play of Nikolai Petrovich Nikolev (1758–1815) called “Sorena and Zamir,” written in 1784, performed for the first time in 1785 in Moscow, and printed in 1787. interesting to note that Konstantin Bugrov drew the following conclusion concerning eighteenth-century Russian monarchical discourse: “The key distinction in the political speech of monarchy was not that of limitation and arbitrariness but of tranquility and conflict.” And added: “the appraisal of tranquillity” was seen in moral terms. Konstantin Bugrov, “Moralism and Monarchism: Visions of Power in 18th-Century Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 21, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 291. Political reformers did not think in checks and balances: their projects “cannot be understood in terms of reshaping the powers of governing bodies at the expense of a monarch’s power,” since its absolute nature was thought to be necessary to do good. Ibid., 282. Bugrov’s conclusion is all the more interesting because the idea of harmony between the tsar and his boyars had been part of Muscovite ideology, as we shall see, and therefore represents a thread of continuity with eighteenth-century thought on power. 16 Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 353. 17 Paul Bushkovitch, Peter the Great. The Struggle for Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 441. 18 Ibid. 19 Giovanna Brogi Bercoff, “V. N. Tatiščev: l’innovation et la tradition” [V. N. Tatishschev: Innovation and tradition], Europa Orientalis 5 (1986): 407. She sees here the influence of Lipsius’s prudentia et virtus (prudence and virtue).

The Consequences of the State Narrative

The theme of the tragedy—being an adaptation of Voltaire’s play, Alzira, which is transposed to the context of Kievan history—is the conflict between (a certain) Mstislav, who is anachronistically called “Russian tsar” (tsar′ Rossiiskii) and the Cumans (Sorena is the wife of Zamir, the Cuman prince) flavored by a love story (Mstislav’s love towards Sorena). The political message of the play is that the ruler should not be blinded by his passions and do morally bad things by cunning (Mstislav’s machinations against the captured Zamir because of his love for Sorena) but show virtues. The advisor to the ruler is called Premysl’, that is, “Forethinker,” which is a “speaking name.” He says the following words to Mstislav on the government of tsars: The policy of tsars [politika tsarei] is not the law of cunning [zakon kovarstva], But [lies in] virtues and the integrity of the state [dobrodeteli i tselost′ gosudarstva]. The world can be deceived, but God can never be, Evil before Him remains evil for ever.20 Yet, there can be no doubt that it was through history-writing that the idea of the “integrity of the state” was disseminated, and Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin (1766–1826) had the key role in that. In analysing Russian notions of power and state and placing these issues in a European context, it is necessary to acknowledge that the role attributed to the state (gosudarstvo) as the prime mover of Russian history (despite eighteenth-century beginnings) was mainly the product of nineteenth-century Russian historiography.21 For the first time, this interpretation was most clearly articulated by Karamzin, the court historian to Tsar Alexander I (1801–1825), in his “History of the Russian State” (Istoriia Gosudarstva Rossiiskogo) that appeared in twelve volumes from 1818 onwards. The title of the work speaks for itself: in Karamzin’s view Russian history is none other than the history of the Russian state(hood). Contrary to Russian chronicles of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the central ordering theme or ideological framework of events described was not the role of the Russian Orthodox Church and the sanctity of the ruling

20 Nikolai Petrovich Nikolev, Sorena i Zamir [Sorena and Zamir], act 5, scene 2, http://az.lib. ru/n/nikolew_n_p/text_0010.shtml. The phrase tselost’ was employed in Catherine II’s coronation manifestoes, which explains its importance for Nikolev. 21 Ingerflom, “Theoretical Premises and Cognitive Distortions from the Uncritical Use of the Concept of ‘State,’” 226.

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dynasty. The framework in Karamzin’s interpretation of Russian history was the paradigm of the integrity of the state and autocratic ruling power: one could not exist without the other. This view was sweepingly formulated by him in his “Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia” (1811), opposing any constitutional reform. The following quotation from this work sheds light not only on the abovementioned correlation but also on the mystical, religious and national character of autocracy: Two state powers in one empire [v odnoi derzhave] are like two dreadful lions in one cage, ready to tear each other apart; and yet, law without authority is nothing. Autocracy has founded and resuscitated Russia. Any change in her political constitution has led in the past and must lead in the future to her perdition for she consists of very many and very different parts, each of which has its own civic needs. What, save unlimited monarchy, can produce in such a machine the required unity of action? If Alexander inspired by general hatred for the abuses of autocracy should lift a pen and prescribe himself laws other than those of God and of his conscience, then the true, virtuous citizen of Russia would presume to stop his hand, and to say: “Sire! You exceed the limits of your authority. Russia, taught by long disasters, vested before the holy altar the autocratic power [samoderzhavie] in your ancestor, asking that he rule her supremely, indivisibly. This covenant is the foundation of your authority, you have no other. You may do everything, but you may not limit your authority by law!” … Autocracy is the Palladium of Russia. Its integrity is essential to her happiness [tselost’].22 Grand Prince Vladimir, the baptizer of Rus′ (988), was an autocrat for Karamzin, similar to Ivan III who began the unification of Russia and reanimated autocracy, which eventually made Russia great. He saw the cause of decline, that is, territorial fragmentation, in Vladimir’s division of the territory of Rus′ among his sons, which put an end to autocracy. In his “History of the Russian State” Karamzin

22 N. M. Karamzin, Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia (1811), ed. and trans. Richard Pipes (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), 138–139, 200. The insertion of Russian terms into the translation is mine. The first and the last sentence in the translation are changed. Although the Memoir was not published in Russia until the twentieth century, Karamzin's commitment expressed here was disseminated through the impact of his History of the Russian State.

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wrote: “History must glorify the mind of Ivan, for wisdom of state taught him to strengthen Russia by the unification of its parts into a whole [tseloe] so that she attained independence and greatness.”23 At the same time, Karamzin “saw autocracy as undivided, rather than unlimited, power”—although the limitation was not of a legal nature, as he deemed that autocrcacy was not to be weakened “by unnecessary constitutional institutions”; yet, he believed that the autocrat should not behave unjustly but should rule wisely as a caring father who was “sensitive to public opinion.”24 Despite his legalistic (but anti-constitutionalist) terminology, in the latter respect (that is, the emphasis on a just and caring monarch) Karamzin, as we shall see, was very much in line with Muscovite premises of ruling power, which, by contrast, did not fit into legal–institutional categories. Regarding the “Memoir,” Andrzej Nowak emphasized that it “was not only— as it is usually interpreted—a manifesto against the plan of reforming the state” according to the plan of Mikhail Speranskii: Karamzin also expressed in it his anxiety about the possible restoration of Polish statehood, and criticized Alexander I that he did not prevent the establishment of the Duchy of  Warsaw by Napoleon in 1807.25 Karamzin’s anxiety grew even further about a restored Poland when the newly established Kingdom of Poland (1815) within the Russian Empire was given a constitution by the tsar, and later on when Alexander opened the session of the parliament of the Kingdom of Poland in 1818. For Alexander expressed his willingness to enlarge the kingdom with lands lost during the previous partitions, and he “also alluded to the possibility of extending to the Empire the constitutional system first introduced in Poland.”26 This, of course, touched the heart of the territorial integrity of the state, and what was intimately connected with it, the principle of autocracy as well! In his “Opinion of a Russian Citizen” (1819), Karamzin elevated the paradigm of preserving Russia’s territorial integrity to the tsar’s religious duty.27 Published only in 1862, this essay was known to several influential persons long 23 Quoted by Wortman, Power of Language and Rhetoric, 163. 24 William Leatherbarrow, “Conservativism in the Age of Alexander I and Nicholas I,” in A  History of Russian Thought, ed. William Leatherbarrow and Derek Offord (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 101. In this respect, he held views quite opposite to Prokopovich, emphasizing self-restraints, and the importance of customs that should not have been changed as Peter had done. 25 Andrzej Nowak, History of Geopolitics. A Contest for Eastern Europe (Warsaw: Polish Institute of International Affairs, 2006), 70. 26 Ibid., 72. 27 Steven Seegel, Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 50. In fact, this religious duty was already

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before that.28 Karamzin opposed the project of restoring the Old Kingdom of Poland, and called the Western Orthodox borderland territories, which once had belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, “eternally Russian”—in his view it was Tsar Alexander I’s duty as an Orthodox ruler to preserve these lands as part of Russia.29 Karamzin justified the Russian Empire’s territorial indivisibility in the following manner, using the word tselost′: You are thinking about restoring the Polish Kingdom; but is this restoration reconcilable with the law of the Russian state’s wellbeing [s zakonom gosudarstvennogo blaga Rossii]? Is it reconcilable with Your sacred duties,30 Your love of the Fatherland, and your love of rigtheousness itself? … Do rulers not take an oath to watch over the integrity of their states [tselost′ svoikh derzhav]? These lands had already been Russian when metropolitan Platon handed over to You the crown of [Vladimir] Monomakh, Peter and Catherine, whom [Catherine] You yourself have entitled “the Great.” Will it be said that she divided Poland illegally? But You would be acting even much more illegally, if you considered to undo her unrighteousness by the division of Russia itself. By sword we took Poland: that is our right, to which all states [gosudarstva] owe their existence, because all states were formed as a result of conquests. … Let the Polish Kingdom exist and even flourish as it is now; but let Russia exist and flourish too, as it is now and as it was left to You by Catherine.31 The expression that rulers must “watch over the integrity of their states” (tselost′ svoikh derzhav), and the emphasis on the preservation of the Kingdom of Poland and Russia as they are at the moment, however, implied not simply territorial integrity, but also the principle of preserving autocracy—as autocracy would

present in Karamzin’s Memoir (see the quoted passage above) as Karamzin referred to keep autocracy as a “covenant” between the tsar and the people. 28 Joseph Laurence Black, “Nicholas Karamzin’s ‘Opinion’ on Poland: 1819,” The International History Review 3, no. 1 ( January 1981): 15–16. 29 Seegel, Mapping Europe’s Borderlands, 50. 30 The corresponding line in the “Memoirs”: “Russia, taught by long disasters, vested before the holy altar the autocratic power [samoderzhavnuiu vlast′] in your ancestor.” 31 Mnenie russkogo grazhdanina [Opinion of a Russian citizen], http://dugward.ru/library/ karamzin/karamzin_mnenie_russkogo_grajdanina.html.

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have ceased to function in the restored territories had the restoration of the Old Kingdom of Poland been effected. For Karamzin, as it is attested by the first sentence of the above quotation, tselost′ served as the “law of the Russian state’s well-being” (zakonom gosudarstvennogo blaga Rossii). Karamzin’s importance in our analysis lies, on the one hand, in the fact that he set the stage for nineteenth-century Russian intellectual discourse, as the key figure thematising the issue of relations between Russia and the West.32 And the idea of tselost′ was central to this thematic. No doubt, Karamzin belongs to the canon of Russian intellectual history as the “‘founding father’ of Russian conservatism.”33 Russian conservatism, however, as Andrej Mitic remarked, had a differentia specifica, namely, that Russian conservatism, unlike Western conservatism, “cannot be understood simply as a reaction” to the French Revolution (which generated this stream of ideology), “but more as a reaction” to Westernization beginning from Peter the Great.34 It was in Karamzin’s footsteps—who approved autocracy but wrote that Russians “ceased to be Russians” due to Peter’s reforms—that Sergei Uvarov in 1833 formulated the official conservative ideology of Russia as an immediate reaction to the Decembrist movement (1825). His famous triad of Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationhood/ peoplehood (narodonost′)—intended as a counterpart to the ideas of liberty, equality, brotherhood of the French Revolution—eventually became known as “official nationality.” Besides inspiring the conservative Russian state ideology, Karamzin also had great influence on nineteenth-century Russian historiography concerning the role of the state, which is even more important for us. It is not surprising that this stream of Russian historiography, commencing in the late 1840s and producing historians such as Sergei Solov′ev (1820–1879) and Konstantin Kavelin (1818–1885), became known as the “state school” or “statist school.” In addition to Karamzin’s “History of the Russian State,” another publication should be credited for the emergence of this school: namely, the maps made by Ivan Akhmatov, published between 1821 and 1831 under the title “Historical, Chronological, Genealogical, and Geographic Atlas of the Russian State” and based on Karamzin’s “History.” The influence of cartography on the emergence of the statist school of Russian history is highly probable, given the clearly statist terminology in the titles of

32 Andrej Mitic, “The Idea of State in N. M. Karamzin’s Conservative Value System,” Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences 4, no. 5 (2011): 551. 33 Ibid., 550, 553. 34 Ibid., 551.

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Akhmatov’s maps, such as the “Origin of the Russian State.” Moreover, these maps were the “visual accompaniment to Karamzin’s early volumes”35 of the “History of the Russian State,” which strengthened even more the statist interpretation of Russian history. The representatives of the statist school of Russian historiography “proceeded from the premise that the vast expanses of Russia’s geography, its vulnerability to invasion, and the area’s sparse and scattered population all required the state to act as an organizer, mobilizer, defender, and surrogate of national development” in contrast to the West.36 This was clearly the Polizeistaat concept of government. To conclude on this chapter: the conception of Karamzin, and the statist school of Russian historiography, was clearly rooted in an early statist tradition that began with Feofan Prokopovich and was transmitted by Vasilii Tatishchev. At the same time, it must be added that the emergence of the statist school was also deeply embedded in a contemporary European intellectual development, namely, the Hegelian view of history, in which the idea of the state occupied a central role.37 Thereby, the emergence of the statist school of Russian historiography, partly being a reflection of a contemporary European phenomenon, further underlines both the importance of the European context and the method of “serial contextualism” in exploring the notion of the state in Russia. Russians historians of the nineteenth century tried to discover the state (gosudarstvo) as the main mover in the flow of Russian history, but without attempting to reconstruct the previous meanings of the term gosudarstvo.38 As a consequence, the term gosudarstvo, which had several meanings in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries such as realm, power position, or rule, was anachronistically empowered with the meaning state (gosudarstvo) in the writings of historians working on earlier centuries. Therefore, the distinction between the word and the concept was blurred, and the occurrence of the word gosudarstvo was conceived as the existence of the concept of the state (gosudarstvo) itself.39 This anachronistic use had the result that gosudarstvo featured prominently in the interpretation of ruling power: it was overemphasized at the expense 35 Seegel, Mapping Europe’s Borderlands, 50, 51. 36 David McDonald, “Domestic Conjunctures, the Russian State, and the World Outside 1700– 2006,” in Russian Foreign Policy in the 21st Century. The Shadow of the Past, ed. Robert Legvold (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 193. This mobilizing, organizing, and defending role of the state also became essential for the Eurasian interpretation of Russian history emerging in the 1920s. 37 Ingerflom, “Theoretical Premises and Cognitive Distortions from the Uncritical Use of the Concept of ‘State,’” 225. 38 Ibid., 227–228. 39 Ibid., 227–230.

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of examining other elements of ideology of power and government mechanism, creating thereby a false framework of interpretation for Russian political thought.40 A statist, legalistic approach was adopted for the study of sixteenthand seventeenth-century Muscovite ruling power, although this state of mind and vocabulary were largely missing before ca. 1700. Likewise, a legal-institutional approach was imposed on the study of mechanisms of government, phenomena such as the ruler’s asking advice from his counsellors (boyar duma), or the countrywide consultative assembly (zemskii sobor)—both of them historians’ terms coined in the nineteenth century—the functions of which were not formalized or conceived in legal-institutional or constitutional terms.

40 Ibid., 229–230.

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CHAPTER 8

Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Muscovite Perceptions of Ruling Power: Characteristics and Methodological Aspects of a Comparison with Western Christendom

8.1. The Dynasty- and God-centered Narrative of Power, and the Idea of “Rule by One Scepter-Holder” Before the eighteenth century, Russia was a world apart from Western Christendom with regard to the perception of ruling power. “To a degree almost unfathomable for twenty-first-century secular people, Russian thinking about politics before the eighteenth century rested on religious assumptions.”1 This is not to say, of course, that religion was not vital or did not stand in first place for people of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the Western Christendom and Russia alike. On the contrary, the worldview on both sides was far from what Charles Taylor called a “secular age.”2 Yet, in Russia the kind of secularization so succinctly phrased by Francis Oakley did not happen: there was no

1 Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 727. An insightful critical survey of the most important literary sources reflecting this phenomenon is given by Hamburg in his book in chapter 2 bearing the eloquent title: “God and Politics in Muscovy.” Ibid., 23–101. 2 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

Si x te e n t h - a n d S e v e n te e n t h - Ce n t u r y Mu s c ov i te Pe rc e p t i o n s o f R u l i ng Pow e r

differentiation of a “secular political sphere from the realm of the sacred,” no “process whereby the political came to be (at least in part) desacralized and comprehended no longer as something pertaining to the order of redemption.”3 And the word for “politics” in the Russian language, politika, which, in fact, was a Polish loanword, remained practically unknown before the early eighteenth century, as we have seen before. Likewise, any definition whatsoever of gosudarstvo, or the concept of sovereignty, and the term denoting it, were completely missing. I think it symptomatic that in Russia one of the first definitions of gosudarstvo with the meaning “state” comes from a geographical work written originally in German, which appeared in Russian translation in 1763. A chapter in Anton Friedrich Büsching’s (1724– 1793) translated book bears the title “On the state in general” (O gosudarstve voobshche), and it gives the following definition for gosudarstvo: “the State [Gosudarstvo] is an association of many families, the good condition of which depends solely on the highest government.”4 This wording is clearly a simplified version of Bodin’s definition. With regard to the first known mentioning of sovereignty and its definition in Russia we have to turn to the often quoted work of the new ideology under Peter the Great, Feofan Prokopovich’s “The Justice of the Monarch’s Will.” The relevant section reads: Let us approach still closer to the royal throne, and ask the meaning of that glorious title majesty [velichestvo], or, as other European peoples call it, from the Latin, maiestas [maestat] or Majestät [maestet]. The word itself, in its grammatical usage, simply means any kind of superiority. … But we are not here considering majesty [velichestvo] in this broad sense but only in the sense in which it is used in political philosophy … among all peoples, Slavic and others, the word Majestät or maiestas is used of the supreme honor; it refers to the supreme authorities alone, and it denotes not only their high dignity, than which, after God, there is none greater in the world, but also the real power of supreme lawgiving [vlast′ zakonodatel′nuiu kraine deistvitel′nuiu], the power of making supreme judgement [krainyi

3 Oakley, The Watershed of Modern Politics, 289–290. 4 Sergei Viktorovich Pol′skoi, “Ot ‘vsenarodstva’ k ‘publike’: K voprosu o ponimanii obshchestva v Rossii XVII–XVIII vv.” [From “all-peoplehood” to the “public”: To the question of conceptualizing society in Russia in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries], Otechestvennaia istoriia 47 (2011): 8.

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sud iznosiashchuiu], the power of giving undeniable order [povelenie neotritsaemoe izdaiushchuiu], the power what is itself not subject to any laws whatsoever. Such is the definition of majesty [velichestvo] by the most eminent jurists. …5 This passage, to be analysed at length later in the book, requires no further argument to explain the importance of this work for Russian political thought proper. Up to the early eighteenth century, however, in most of the period dealt with here, Russian perceptions of power and history—the two were almost inextricably linked to one another—were not state-centered or form-of-governmentcentered but dynasty- and God-centered. This statement means that in the expositions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century official ideology the events beginning from the establishment of the political formation called the Kievan Rus′ (an era that would be unhistorical to call “Russian history,” as I have shown in the Introduction) were interpreted in the framework of the continuity of the dynasty and the transfer of unbroken dynastic power from Kiev to Vladimir, and then to Moscow, as expounded in the “Tale of the Vladimir Princes,” for instance. As Jaroslaw Pelenski stated unequivocally: “This translation theory was to serve as the primary basis of Muscovite political claims.”6 However, this framework “was ‘closely correlated with the notion of unity of all Rus′ lands and the historical concept of Muscovy ‘gathering them.’”7 And all these were seen as the realization of God’s providential design.8 This complex phenomenon can be best studied in the works of history-writing, particularly in the “Book of Degrees,”—history-writing in this case is to be conceived in a very broad sense, which, without exception, was the realm of clerical activity linked to important monasteries. Events in the “Book of Degrees” were presented to convey how sanctity was becoming more and more deeply embedded in the moral character of reigning monarchs from generation to generation, reflecting the teleological idea of the ruler’s leading his people towards salvation. Mikhail Krom rightly pointed out one of the key points of the “Book of Degrees” (and his view accords with mine): “In such a providentialist and genealogical interpretation of the past, when the history of the country was presented as the genealogy of the ruling dynasty redeemed by God, the issue

5 Prokopovich, Pravda voli monarshei, 184–186. Translation is changed. 6 Pelenski, Russia and Kazan, 10. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid.

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of state formation, its chronology and preconditions could not even surface.”9 The heart of this issue lies in the main feature of Muscovy’s self-perception aptly formulated by Nancy Shields Kollmann, stating that “elite writers depict[ed] society as the Godly Christian community, not as a cohesive political unity of a common people.”10 Sergei Pol′skoi, in a similar vein, stated: “In the mind of a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Russian, state and society were conceived as a ‘social totality,’ which had it basis in religious unity. The Russian zemlia, tsarstvo, gosudarstvo were not so much the personal property of the ruler, but rather the territory under divine protection that was given to the ruler whose mission was to preserve order and the Law, that is, divine ordinances.”11 This community, at the same time, was like a patriarchal family. The ruler, like a “stern but fair, merciful and forgiving” father “provided justice and order,” and, above all, as we shall see, “providential blessing upon his people and his realm,”12 as a good shepherd. The most eloquent and most grandiose example of the perception of power that I call dynasty- and God-centered was the “Book of Degrees,” which is also important from another point of view, namely, because of its emphasis on the unity of power. The work was written in the early 1560s in monastic circles, after the adoption of the title “tsar” by Ivan IV (1547) and the conquest of Kazan′ (1552) and Astrakhan′ (1556) Khanates, which were considered turning points in the teleological perception of Russia’s fate as the last bastion of Orthodoxy.13 The “Book of Degrees” was a work that did not fit a conventional genre: it was

9 Krom, Rozhdenie gosudarstva, 11. Krom mentions this conceptual issue only in passing in his introduction, but on the previous page he plainly states: “The ‘Book of Degrees’ contains the complete doctrine of the dynastic state [tselostnaia doktrina dinasticheskogo gosudarstva], based on the chain of generations—the predecessors of the reigning monarch, Ivan IV.” Ibid., 10. While the “Book of Degrees” is a dynastic perception of power and history, it cannot be interpreted as “the doctrine of the dynastic state.” Krom, perhaps, wanted to apply the statement quoted in my main text only to sources coming from the ecclesiastical sphere, that is, to the genre broadly called chronicle-writing, because in the rest of the book he argued forcefully in a diametrically opposing direction, that is, in favour of the emergence of the concept of state on the basis of mostly chancellery-related sources. 10 Nancy Shields Kollmann, “Concepts of Society and Social Identity in Early Modern Russia,” in Religion and Culture in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine, ed. Samuel H. Baron and Nancy Shields Kollmann (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997), 34–51, 38–39. 11 Sergei Pol′skoi, “Osnovnye politicheskie poniatiia v Rossii XVIII v.” [Basic political concepts in eighteenth-century Russia], in Obshchestvennaia mysl′ v Rossii s drevneishikh vremen do serediny XIX v. [Social thought in Russia from the ancient times to the middle of the nineteenth century], ed. Andrei Borisovich Kamenskii, vol. 2. (Moscow: Rosspen, 2020), 145–146. 12 Kollmann, The Russian Empire, 154. 13 Gail Lenhoff, “The Construction of Russian History in Stepennaja Kniga,” Revue des études slaves 76, no. 1 (2005): 31.

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a history of a special kind, written not according to the annalistic conventions of the Russian chronicle tradition (arranging the events year by year) but as the rule of seventeen princes beginning from the rulers of Kievan Rus′ to Ivan IV, each one of them representing a “degree,” hence the title of the work, but the narrative is filled with prayers, liturgical texts, lives of saints, and other material. The princely reigns are carefully embedded in a framework to convey a teleological message: the sanctity of the Rurik dynasty leading Orthodox Russia to salvation. It is thus a history that “provides a cohesive moral justification of the dynasty’s power”;14 it is a history of tsardom structured by degrees “to convey the royal dynasty’s sanctity.”15 Indeed, the “Book of Degrees” is a pivotal source in which “the concept of dynastic monarchy” reached its culmination.16 The preface to the “Book of Degrees,” the first words of which served as the title of the work itself, illustrates the dynasty- and God-centered framework of perception: the flow of Russian history conceived in this double paradigm is nowhere expressed better. In Gail Lenhoff ’s wording, the preface sets forth the book’s theological premises in terms of metaphors serving as figures or types for Russia’s historical course: the tree (linking the genealogical tree of the rulers, the Jesse Tree, and the tree in King Nebuchadnezzar’s prophetic dream); the ladder (a conflation of Jacob’s ladder and St. John Climacus’s divine ladder of perfection); and water (baptism).17 These metaphors are manifested in the preface as follows: A tale of the holy piety of Russia’s rulers and their holy seed, and others; a book of degrees of the royal genealogy, which was (manifested) in the piety of the divinely-affirmed scepter-holders who shone forth in the Russian land, who were from God, like trees of paradise, planted by the rivers of water, and who were watered with Orthodoxy, and nurtured with divine wisdom and grace;

14 Ibid., 49. 15 Ibid., 40. 16 Aleksei Vasilievich Sirenov, Rodoslovnye dreva russkikh tsarei XVII–XVIII vv. [Genealogical trees of Russian tsars of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries] (Moscow: Iubileinaia kniga, 2018), 10. 17 Gail Lenhoff, “Book of Degrees,” in Gale Encyclopedia of Russian History, accessed April 6, 2012, http://www.answers.com/topic/book-of-degrees. For a more detailed analysis see Lenhoff, “The Construction of Russian History,” 38–40.

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and who shone forth with divine glory; who were like a garden: luxuriant, and with beautiful foliage and blessed flowers; fruitful and ripe and exuding a divine fragrance; great and tall, and with many noble offshoots, extending like bright branches, growing through virtues pleasing to God. And many from its root and its branches through diverse labours, as on golden steps, erected a ladder, which ascends to heaven and does not falter, securing for themselves and for those who came after them unhindered access to God.18 Since the ideology of power in Russia was, in fact, theology of power, and considering the fact that Orthodox theology was/is incomprehensible without the concept of the image/icon (the “icon is a painted theology”), the use of metaphors conveying religious associations was vital to Muscovite ideology of power. The metaphor of the heavenly garden, and, in general, floral imagery, was central to Muscovite perceptions of ruling power.19 “These comparisons had the effect of sanctifying both the royal house and Rus′.”20 The “Book of Degrees” compares the birth of the dynasty to the Garden of Eden, and the story of the tsardom is presented in the framework of the abovementioned theological premises, with the addition of the Orthodox idea of “symphony” as the main structuring principle. Each degree is a story of a given prince and his contemporary metropolitan(s) (as explicitly stated in the successive entries). Indeed, the “symphony” between the Russian Church and the Russian rulers is the golden thread of Russian history in the “Book of Degrees.”21 This history is moving towards the present on the basis of premises laid down in the preface, and the idea of “symphony” is also reflected in the advice that metropolitans give to rulers as well as in the prayers of the church hierarchs and

18 Stepennaia kniga tsarskogo rodosloviia po drevneishim spiskam [Book of degrees of royal genealogy according to the oldest manuscripts], ed. Nikolai Nikolaevich Pokrovskii and Gail Lenhoff (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskikh kul′tur, 2007), vol. 1, 147. English translation is quoted from Lenhoff, “The Construction of Russian History in Stepennaja Kniga,” 48. 19 In its importance, the imagery of the God-blessed tree as an organic metaphor of the tsardom can be compared to the metaphor of the human body in Western political thought—with the crucial difference that the concept of government, an activity distinct from religion and serving purely secular purposes, was unknown in Muscovy until the late sevententh century. 20 Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 69. 21 Nikolai Nikolaevich Pokrovskii, “Vvedenie” [Introduction] to Stepennaia kniga tsarskogo rodosloviia po drevneishim spiskam [Book of degrees of royal genealogy according to the oldest manuscripts], ed. Nikolai Nikolaevich Pokrovskii and Gail Lenhoff (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskikh kul′tur, 2007), vol. 1, 113.

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the whole Russian Church, which “provide the protection of higher powers” for Russia.22 The dynastic thread is augmented with lives of saints (among them those of metropolitans), descriptions of miracle-working icons, and so forth to comprise a grandiose salvation history. Thereby Russia becomes both a “holy place” and “a site of a spiritual struggle for salvation.”23 And in line with the text of Ivan IV’s coronation ordo composed by metropolitan Makarii, the “Book of Degrees” also conceived Russia as the “New Israel”24—a metaphor abundant either implicitly or explicitly in Muscovite sources on power from the mid-sixteenth century on. The close cooperation between rulers and the church creates a growing sanctity for successive members of the ruling dynasty, culminating in the person of the current tsar, Ivan IV.25 Thus, the “principle of hereditary rule was connected with dynastic messianism” under Ivan IV, while each and every ruler’s reign “was interpreted as a Christ-like act of heroism.”26

22 Ibid., 113–114. 23 Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 69. 24 Ibid., 84. 25 Pokrovskii, “Vvedenie,” 114. 26 Andrei V. Karavashkin, Literaturnyi obychai Drevnei Rusi [Literary custom of the Old Rus′] (Moscow: Rosspen, 2011), 486. It is interesting to mention in the context of the 1560s, when the “Book of Degrees” was written, the iconography of the new seal (1562) of Ivan IV, as its reverse depicted an unicorn on the crest of the double-headed eagle instead of the mounted lancer present in the averse—a symbol that, similarly to the message of the “Book of Degrees,” implied the divine mission of the tsar. According to Hieronim Grala, the appearance of the unicorn, a highly religious biblical symbol representing the rule of Christ over the world, was closely connected to Ivan’s military victories over Kazan′ and Astrakhan′. Hieronim Grala, “K izucheniiu russkoi gosudarstvennoi sfragistiki XVI v. Litovskie ‘koliumny’ na Bol′shoi gosudarstvennoi pechati Ivana Groznogo” [To the study of Russian state sphragistics of the sixteenth century. Lithuanian “columns” on the great state seal of Ivan the Terrible], Russia Mediaevalis 9 (1997): 83–87. In analyzing the iconography of the seal, he stated that its “significance in the propaganda concerning the theoretical base of tsarist power” was unprecedented, adding (by quoting the opinion of Günther Stöckl) that the seal tells much more about the monarch’s power than the source known as the correspondence between Ivan and Kurbskii. Ibid., 79. The view that the new symbol was adopted right after the recognition of Ivan’s claim to the title tsar by the patriarch of Constantinople in 1561, and it expressed the divine mission of the ruler, is shared by Evgenii Pchelov, who quotes the words of the Moscow Metropolitan Pimen addressed to Ivan in 1563: “The Lord God … has raised up a horn of our salvation to you, God-crowned tsar, and entrusted [vruchil] the scepter of the Russian tsardom, the staff of power, the staff that is rightfully yours, to you, who will put court judgments in order, preserve eternal truth [khraniashchago istinu vo veki], establish law and justice [tvoriashcha sud i pravdu] in the land and follow the path of morality.” Evgenii Vladimirovich Pchelov, Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gerb: Kompozitsiia, stilistika v istoricheskom kontekste [Russian state emblem: Composition and style in a historical context] (Moscow: Biblioteka RASh, 2005), 29–31. The unicorn also appeared in Ivan’s great seal of 1577, which otherwise was very different from the

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Despite the essential conceptual differences between the Petrine and Muscovite perceptions of power, there is one element common to both the dynastic and the state narrative. The “Book of Degrees” clearly expressed the necessity of Russia’s territory being ruled by one monarch only,27 although it was not the first work to warn against territorial fragmentation and advocate the principle of unity. Looking back from the perspective of the sixteenth century, it retrospectively justified the “gathering of the Russian lands.” Although the “state narrative” born under Peter the Great also had at its core the maxim of “rule by one,” that is, the unitary character of the state, in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries the notion of unity had been embedded in the dynasty- and God-centered paradigm. When the core element of “rule by one” was linked to the idea of “integrity of the state” (tselost′ gosudarstva) by Prokopovich under Peter the Great, then the dynastic narrative was completely stripped of its Orthodox religious trappings characteristic of the “Book of Degrees.”28 But the pre-history of the “state narrative” was clearly rooted in literary works, such as the “Book of Degrees.”29 Having finished with the idea of salvation, let us turn attention to the issue of “rule by one” phenomenon in the “Book of Degrees.” The “Book of Degrees” describes the political situation after the death of Vladimir Monomakh (1125) as follows: “After Grand Prince Vladimir passed away, the Russian Tsardom [Rossiiskoe Tsarstvo]30 began to fall apart into many pieces. The preeminence of leadership [pervonachal′stvo], together with the honor, began to be transferred to others.”31 The next subchapter, which deals with the emergence of Muscovy’s leadership (although only the town of Moscow and not the principality of

iconography of the previous one. The images of the seals are contained in the Illustrations of Pchelov’s book (images 3–4.). 27 This statement was made by Bugrov but without quoting any passages from the text of the “Book of Degrees” or referring to any relevant section of the text on this matter. Bugrov, “Russia’s Territorial Size as a Concept for Domestic Politics,” 493. 28 The unitary character of the Rus′ in the “Book of Degrees” is emphasized by Pelenski. Pelenski, Russia and Kazan, 10, 112, 288. 29 Pelenski’s following remark is highly informative, and the reader is asked to recall what has been written on Tatischchev before. “Russian historiography of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was profoundly influenced by the historical ideas and ideological propositions of the Muscovite chronicles of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In these chronicles Russian historians of modern times were provided with a ready-made conceptual framework for early Russian history. In particular, the idea of ‘continuity’ from the Kievan state to Muscovy was accepted as matter of fact.” Ibid., 10, fn. 4. 30 Note the adjective Rossiiskoe referring to the territory of the realm, and the anachronistic use of the word tsardom. 31 Stepennaia kniga, vol. 1, 413.

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Moscow existed at that time) reads: “The Grand Prince Iurii Dolgorukii, ruling in the town of Moscow saved by God, renewed in it the preeminence in leadership [pervonachal′stvo] of the pious tsardom, and nowadays his royal seed rules with glory, strengthened by the right hand of divine providence and filled with his grace, and the forthcoming story is evidently their story.”32 The turning point in this chain of events in the “Book of Degrees,” of course, was the reign of Ivan III, called “gosudar′ [master] samoderzhets [autocrat] vseia Rusi [of all Rus′]”—the first ruler who merited these titles in this source! The text hailed Ivan in the following manner: since God “gives the realm, the power and glory to whomsoever he wants, as well as the scepter of rule,” so the Lord glorified him, the “strong fighter of Orthodoxy,” the “extirpator of all kinds of heresies,” who “made autocracy [samovlastie] triumphant” and “subdued the potentates around his country.”33 In other words, his deeds on behalf of the Russian Orthodox Church earned him the favor of God. In the “Book of Degrees” God’s favor is mediated through Mary, the Mother of God and the “divine protectress of Moscow.”34 This theme, divine providence through divine intercession, is also crucial to the God-centered paradigm of the “Book of Degrees,” a theme often manifested through the miracle-working icon of the Vladimir Mother of God—the most revered icon in Russia, which had been moved to Moscow from the town of Vladimir at the end of the fourteenth century. In the “Book of Degrees” this icon “became the palladium of the tsardom.”35 It is clear that in the “Book of Degrees” the unity of the Russian Tsardom, the core idea of “rule by one” was embedded in the dynasty- and God-centered perception of power and history, as part of the divine plan leading to the triumph of Orthodoxy. Although Prokopovich also mentions divine providence in his state narrative as a rhetorical device, as we have seen, his wording should not deceive us. In the “Book of Degrees” the unification of Russian lands was not based on practical consideration, in other words, on political utility or the interest of the state, as was the case in Prokopovich’s argument. 32 Stepennaia kniga, vol. 1, 414–415. This is one of the two fragments that Krom quotes when he writes that “the issue of state formation, its chronology and preconditions could not even surface” in such a worldview. The other fragment is related to Daniil (died in 1303), mentioning that he got “in inheritance the God-provisioned rule [v nasledie bogosnabdimoe derzhavstvo] of the aforementioned town of Moscow.” Krom, Rozhdenie gosudarstva, 10–11. 33 Stepennaia kniga, vol. 2, 217. 34 Lenhoff, “The Construction of Russian History in Stepennaja Kniga,” 47. 35 Ibid. The best visual source of the Muscovite era illustrating this complex imagery (act of planting, floral imagery, intercession of Mother of God, and so forth) is the icon called “The Planting of the Tree of the Russian State” (1663). Its analysis see later in the book.

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8.2. The Nature of the Muscovite Ruler’s Power and His Duties. Images of the Good and the Bad Ruler The nature of ruling power, its origin, and duties that we can call the divine right of the tsars after 1547 was, of course, manifested even before the official adoption of the title tsar in works much less complex and grandiose than the “Book of Degrees.” Muscovite ideology did not need “elaborate literary constructs”—it was much more characteristic, from the late fifteenth century onwards, to justify the ruler’s authority “simply by referring to God, antiquity and local tradition,”36 or simply to God and the ancestors.37 Besides these elements, of which, no doubt, the linking of the ruler’s power to God was crucial, the rulers’ titles had paramount significance: not only that of the tsar′, but, first of all, gosudar′. Ivan IV stated: “We are masters in our realm [gosudari na svoem gosudarstve] and possess from our ancestors what was given to us by God.”38 Therefore, besides biblical lines, titles, phrases (such as the “Russian land,” which could be conceived as representing both local tradition and the ancestors) comprised the operative vocabulary of ruling power. To repeat Halperin’s statement: “a good deal of medieval Russian ideology was expressed in extremely laconic terms. Phrases, words, and titles served in lieu largely of theoretical treatises.”39 Instead, “the creativity and subtlety of the ideologues” lay “in the manipulation of key concepts,” such as the transfer of the idea of the leadership over the “Russian land” to Moscow.40 This idea was markedly present in the “Book of Degrees” as shown, but it was just the continuation and culmination of a process that began in the early fifteenth century. All these characteristics can be traced, for example, in the letters and sermons of the monk Iosif Volotskii (1439/1440–1515), abbot of Volokolamsk monastery—known also in English historiography as Joseph of Volokolamsk— written to various lay and ecclesiastical dignitaries, including Grand Prince Vasilii III, on the occasion of the so-called Judaizer heresy, which began in Novgorod in the late fifteenth century. These letters and sermons contain a condensed set of 36 Ševčenko, “Byzantium and the Eastern Slavs after 1453,” 10. 37 Pavel Milyukov, Russia and Its Crisis (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 400. 38 Lev Nikolaevich Pushkarev: “Bogoizbrannost′ monarkha v mentalitete russkikh pridvornykh deiatelei rubezha novogo vremeni” [God-electedness of the monarch in the mentality of Russian court society at the turn of the modern age], in Tsar′ i tsarstvo v russkom obshchestvennom soznanii [Tsar and tsardom in Russian social consciousness], ed. Aleksandr Ivanovich Kupriianov and Lev Nikolaevich Pushkarev (Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 1999), 59–69, 68. 39 Halperin, “Kiev and Moscow,” 317. 40 Ibid., 317, 318.

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ideas summarizing the essence of the Muscovite ideology of power, which were taken as authoritative for much of the seventeenth century. As for his letters, the most characteristic example of his thoughts, in my view, is his 1507 letter to Grand Prince Vasilii III: My Master [gosudar′]! In the likeness of heavenly power [nebesnyia vlasti] has given to you the heavenly king [nebesnyi tsar′] the scepter of strong earthly rule [skipetr zemnogo tsarstviia sily] to teach the men to preserve justice [pravdu khraniti] and keep them away from devilish desires [besovskoe zhelanie]. Like a steersman who is always vigilant, your tsarist insightful mind [tsarskii um], too, observes strictly the regulation of good law[s] [dobrogo zakona pravilo], drying up firmly the streams of unlawfulness [bezakoniia potoky], whereby the ship of earthly life, so to say, your blessed rule [vseblagogo tsarstviia], is not stained by waves of injustice [volnamy nepravdy]. … As the fearful and allseeing eye [strashnoe i vsevidiashchee oko] of the heavenly king [tsaria nebesnogo] has an insight into the heart of all the people and knows their all thoughts, so your royal sharp mind has more strength than anyone else to make your rule beneficial; and [for this reason] be fearful [strashen] for the sake of your position and royal power [sana radi i vlasti tsarskia], and avoid turning it into malice but direct it towards piety [na blagochestie]. The sun has its task to shine with its rays on every creature, the virtuous tsar [tsar′] has to have mercy [milovati] on the lowly and the offended ones. … For a pious tsar [blagochestivyi tsariu], like you, ought to strive by all means both to show piety and save those from spiritual and bodily temptation who are under you[r care]: and the spiritual temptation is the heretical teaching [ereticheskoe uchenie], while the bodily temptation is brigandage, robbery, theft, and injustice [nepravda], and offences, and all other evil things, as they harm bodily and not spiritually. As you are a powerful tsar [drzhavnyi tsar′], and have received your scepter of rule from God, therefore, hearken, how you please the one who has given it to you, for you have to answer before the Lord not only for yourself but also give account to God for the evil deeds of others, if you give them licence [to do so]. For the tsar [tsar′], by nature, is like all other men, but in power [vlastiiu zhe podoben] he is like God the Almighty. As God wants to save all men, so the

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tsar [tsar′] should shelter every soul entrusted to him. Thereby, having fulfilled divine will you will receive from God the endless joy and will rule with him for ever, rejoice.41 Joseph of Volokolamsk incorporated his sermons between 1493 and 1511 in a lengthy manuscript that he called simply a “book,” first compiled about 1504, but making an extended version in about 1511, years after the suppression of Judaizer heresy in 1504.42 The first version begins with the words, “Tale of the appearance of the Novgorodian heresy” followed by a uniform entry, “Sermon against the Novgorodian heretics,” which served as a chapter title for the eleven chapters in the first version, sixteen in the final compilation.43 Joseph’s work (known as the “Book against the Novgordian Heresy”) was so popular and highly esteemed that in the seventeenth century eventually it was renamed the “Illuminator/Enlightener” [Prosvetitel′]44 by his admirers,45 called “Josephites” (Iosifliane) in historical literature after the first name of the author. But the importance of his work was already recognized by the “Book of Degrees” itself, which hailed it as “an extraordinary book upholding Orthodoxy.”46 The word Prosvetitel′, translated as “Illuminator/Enlightener,” however, has a connotation lost in the English translation, as it was to be understood in a religious sense— Prince Vladimir the Great who converted the Eastern Slavs to Christianity at the end of the tenth century (988) was called the “Illuminator/Enlightener of Rus′” in the sense of “baptizer” of Rus′. As it is apparent from the above context, the Prosvetitel′ is not a theoretical treatise on ruling power, but it contains scattered 41 Ia. S. Lur′e and A. A. Zimin, eds., Poslaniia Iosifa Volotskogo [The letters of Joseph of Volokolamsk] (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1959), 183–185. Depending on the context the word tsar′ can also be rendered as “king,” as it was used for Jewish kings of the Old Testament in general, and even for Christ in liturgy, who was/is called nebesnyi tsar′, “heavenly king.” Consequently, tsarstvo can be translated as “kingdom,” while the adjective tsarskii “tsarist” can also be rendered as “royal.” Yet, it must be mentioned that the word tsar’ was also used for the Byzantine emperors and the Tatar khans in Russian sources with the connotation of expressing a higher standing of a ruler: therefore, occasionally “tsarist” can be rendered as “imperial.” Depending on the context of/in the sources I will translate tsar′ as “king” when it is more appropriate. 42 Vladimir Alekseevich Tomsinov, Istoriia russkoi politicheskoi i pravovoi mysli X–XVIII veka [History of Russian political and legal thought from the tenth to the eighteenth century] (Moscow: Zertsalo, 2003), 93. A short overview of the structures of the two versions as well as a good critical analysis of its content and Joseph’s ideas is provided by Gary Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 46–53. 43 Tomsinov, Istoriia, 93. 44 Iosif Volotskii, Prosvetitel′ [Enlightener] (Kazan′, 1896) 45 Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 47. 46 Ibid., 82.

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statements on this issue embedded in the fight against the Judaizer heresy. Some of these crucial statements draw heavily upon a sixth-century Byzantine mirror of princes, the so-called “Hortatory Chapters” of Agapetos. The hortatory, admonitory character of the Prosvetitel′ is eloquently spelled out in passages like this, which can even serve as a summary of the book: Hearken then, and understand that it is from God that power [derzhava] is given to you, you are the servants of God. He placed you here as the shepherds and guardians of his people to keep the flock intact from the wolves. God chose you in His own stead and put you on His throne and gave life and mercy [milost′] into your hands, and it was God’s hand that gave you your sword: for your part do not keep the truth in injustice [istinu v nepravde]; fear the heavenly scythe and do not give free rein to the will of the evildoers and do not let them loose on just men like hellish dogs.47 Therefore, rulers of various ranks, princes and the grand prince in particular, must chastise the wicked and protect the good, but above all keep their folk firm in Orthodoxy as God has placed them on his throne. Laconically stated, this is the political message of Joseph’s letters, sermons and the Prosvetitel′. The grand prince, however, has the widest responsibility: God placed him in his stead on earth and “gave him judgement [sud] and grace [milost′], and entrusted to him [vruchil emu] the power [vlast′] and care [popechenie] over the churches and monasteries [tserkovnoe i monastyrskoe], and of all Orthodox Christianity of all the Russian land [i vsego pravoslavnogo khristianstva vseia Russkiia zemlia].”48 While in this fragment we have both the origin and the main purpose of the ruling power of the grand prince in a condensed manner, the wording vruchil emu reveals an additional dimension, namely, the issue of marriage between the ruler and the “Russian land.” The English translation cannot convey the sixteenthcentury meaning of the crucial Russian verb vruchit′, as it also “denotes the action of giving in marriage.”49 The whole passage, seen from this angle, unambiguously refers to the grand prince’s marriage to the Russian land, and through

47 Volotskii, Prosvetitel′, 488. Marc Raeff, “An Early Theorist of Absolutism: Joseph of Volokolamsk,” The American Slavic and East European Review 8, no. 2 (April 1949): 82. Raeff ’s translation of the phrase “istinu v nepravde” is changed. 48 Quoted by Tomsinov, Istoriia, 102. 49 Ingerflom, “‘Loyalty to the State,’” 9.

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it, to the Orthodox Russian Church—this message is clear, despite the fact that neither the “Russian land” (Russkaia zemlia) nor the church are called expressis verbis the bride of the ruler. In discussing the application of the biblical image of marriage between Christ and the church to the Russian tsar and tsardom, the following phenomenon deserves attention. In his Prosvetitel′ Joseph most often uses the word tsar′ to refer to the ruler. Although it can be rendered as “king,” the word had other important dimensions, as mentioned before. One of the most important of these dimensions was that in liturgical texts Christ was/is called the “Heavenly King” (nebesnyi tsar′), and this liturgical usage had made the word tsar′ a special one even before its official adoption as the most important monarchical title of the Russian ruler, as it implied divine selection.50 If tsar′ is translated as “king,” which in certain contexts is more appropriate, this association is lost. It was important even then when Joseph was writing his works, that is, prior to Ivan IV’s official adoption of this title at his coronation in 1547. This act resulted in a close association between the person of the reigning tsar and Christ because of the previously mentioned liturgical usage, and consequently Muscovite rulership became highly “Christocentric”: not simply due to the adoption of the title tsar′51 but also to the coronation, as the coronation reinforced the bond between the Muscovite ruler and the “Russian land”/Russian Church. For in the discussion of the application of the biblical metaphor of marriage between Christ and the church to the Russian tsar and tsardom, the Russian term designating the tsar’s coronation, venchanie na tsarstvo, is crucial. Russian rulers after 1547 were crowned tsars in the Assumption Cathedral, and the name of the coronation ceremony, venchanie na tsarstvo, can be translated literally as “the tsar’s wedding with the tsardom,” as venchanie (coronation) of the bride and the groom is an integral part of the Orthodox wedding ritual. The association between “wedding coronation” (venchanie) and “coronation ceremony” (venchanie na tsarstvo) is straightforward, as “the name of both rites comes from an object”: at a certain stage in the Russian Orthodox nuptial service (which followed the Byzantine tradition), a wreath (venok or venets) is placed on the heads of the bridegroom and the bride by the priest: hence venchanie,

50 Boris Andreevich Uspenskii, Izbrannye trudy [Selected works], vol. 2 (Moscow: Gnosis, 1994), 76–77. 51 The title tsar′ meant that the ruler united temporal and spiritual authority (as Christ was both king and priest), and therefore the bearer of totality of power, whose person was sacred. Aleksandr Filiushkin, “Terminy ‘tsar′’ i ‘tsarstvo’ na Rusi” [The terms “tsar” and “tsardom” in Russia], Voprosy istorii 8 (1997): 144–145.

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from venets.52 The Monomakh cap (Manamakhova shapka) placed on the head of Ivan IV in 1547 was also called tsarskii venets (“imperial crown/wreath”) in the sources. The Muscovite usage of the allegory of Christ as bridegroom and the church as His bride, however, differed from that in the West. Sander Brouwer dealt with this comparison very briefly, citing the examples from King James I and Francis Bacon mentioned before,53 but without touching upon the fundamentally different Muscovite broad cultural context and the peculiarities of the Muscovite ideology of power. Relying on Kantorowicz, Brouwer writes: “Whereas in Western Europe the image of the king as husband of the land had strong fiscal-juridical background, such a background seems to have missing in Russia. There the transfer of ecclesiastical imagery to the secular sphere probably owes more to the process of the sacralization of the figure of the tsar.”54 The first part of Brouwer’s statement is correct, similarly to the issue of the sacralisation of the tsar’s person. But Brouwer’s second sentence is misleading. It is not correct to speak of a “transfer” to a “secular sphere” because this kind of separation was never drawn in Muscovy: therefore one cannot properly say that in the Muscovite case there existed a “political theology” in the sense used by Kantorowicz, that is, an appropriation/borrowing of theological concepts for secular, political purposes. Rather, one can simply state that there was the application of the abovementioned biblical notion of marriage to the person of the tsar and the tsardom. It could not be otherwise. Since the community ruled by the tsar was conceived as a purely religious community, there could be no transfer, as there was no secular sphere. The issue of the marriage between tsar and tsardom, compared with the marriage between the king and his realm in France, was superbly highlighted recently by Claudio Ingerflom: “The spouse of the French king is either the ‘kingdom’ or, for almost all the jurists, the ‘respublica’, but this marriage is ‘civil’, ‘moral’, ‘holy’, ‘sacred’ and ‘political’: this alliance avoids blending the religious register with the legal.”55 Furthermore, equally important is that in Western thought the king in his capacity as the administrator and “‘the political husband of the Republic’” is distinct from the respublica: therefore, “he cannot do with it as he pleases.”56

52 Ivan Biliarsky, “Marriage and Power,” Studia Ceranea 5 (2015): 14, 17. 53 Brouwer, “The Bridegroom Who Did Not Come,” 56–58. 54 Ibid., 58. 55 Ingerflom, “‘Loyalty to the State’ under Peter the Great?,” 9. 56 Ibid.

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Returning to the analysis of Joseph of Volokolamsk’s conception of the ruler, besides considering him the implied husband of the Russian land and the church, Joseph many times explicitly described the ruler as a shepherd of his Orthodox flock (the same way King James I spoke of himself)—thus the ruler was responsible for temporal and spiritual matters alike, including the salvation of his people. This mission also elevated the ruler high above the governed even before the official adoption of the title “tsar”: God has put you in His own stead on His throne. That is why it befits tsars/kings and princes [tsariam i kniaziam] to promote by all means piety [o blagochestii] and save those under them [sushchikh pod nim] from all kinds of temptations, of both soul and body. The sun has its task to shine on the people of this earth; the tsar [tsar′] has his task too to take care of those under him. You received the scepter of kingship [skipetr tsarstviia] from God, see to it that you satisfy Him who has given it to you. … For in body the tsar [tsar′] is like unto all men, but in power he is like unto God Almighty.57 The two motifs here, the comparison of the ruler to the Sun and the reference to the human and divine nature of the ruler, are taken from the early medieval Byzantine author Agapetos, and they are the most common clichés appearing in Joseph’s letters and the sources relying on him.58 But by far the most frequently encountered phrase of his is: “God chose you in His own stead and put you on His throne.” 57 Volotskii, Prosvetitel′, 547. Raeff, “An Early Theorist of Absolutism,” 82. First three lines of the translation are mine. 58 However, in Russia the mortal, human nature of the ruler/tsar did not receive the same emphasis and importance as it did in Byzantium. On the contrary, the emphasis on divine nature became the rule. I am grateful to Professor Aleksei Lidov for sharing this detail with me. This contention is underlined by Hamburg in his comment on Joseph’s 1507 letter: “Iosif wanted to stress the similarities between divine rule and royal administration, including the parallel between divine omniscience and a tsar’s keen grasp on the hearts of his subjects.” Therefore, his use of Agapetos was selective: he did not cite, among other things, “Agapetos’s maxim that the emperor is ‘together with everyone, the slave of God.’” Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 54. Similarly, Mariia Svoboda, comparing the views of Agapetos and Ivan Timofeev (an author writing in the early seventeenth century) in her article, calls attention to Timofeev’s emphasis on the sacred nature of the tsar’s person. Mariia Svoboda, “Obraz tsaria vo ‘Vremennike’ Ivana Timofeeva” [The image of the tsar in the “Chronicle” of Ivan Timofeev], Trudy otdela drevnerusskoi literatury 52 (2001): 389.

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For the purpose of a comparison with Western thought on power, the reference to the human and divine nature of the ruler is the most relevant. The distinction between the ruler’s human nature and the God-like character of his power is, indeed, a kind of distinction made between the notion of power as such and the person wielding it, but it is in no way identical with the separation that existed in Western thought between the person of the ruler and the powers exercised because of his office (officium). In the latter case this separation, as we have seen, was a crucial precondition for the emergence of the concept of the crown, and eventually that of the state.59 The distinction in Joseph of Volokolamsk’s writings is merely an admonition emphasizing the mortal nature of the ruler (sometimes he adds the phrase “you shall die like a man”) and not a legal-political concept similar to that of the crown as a legal entity, or the “king’s two bodies” of sixteenth- or seventeenth-century English political thought. In Muscovite sources of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, especially in coronation orders, the phrase pravit′ v pravdu (“to rule justly”) figures prominently. In the coronation order of Tsar Fedor III in 1676 we read: “Oh Tsar, you have received your scepter from God to govern [pravit′] the people of the Great Russian Tsardom, and you judge and govern your men with justice [razsuditi i praviti v pravdu].”60 This phrase did not and could not mean the ruler’s obligation to remain within the legal limits of his office in a Western sense (to preserve everyone in his rights and privileges and not to alienate the iura coronae) but an expectation and a duty to keep the governed away from wicked actions and punish the wrongdoers. The idea of justice (pravda) was closely linked to the fear (groza) of the ruler, a commitment advocated strongly by Joseph: evildoers should be punished severely with the purpose to keep everyone away from wicked actions. “Where the tsar is, there is justice [pravda] and fear [groza],” goes a Russian proverb. The idea that the ruler should be awe-inspiring (groznyi) had long been part of the ideas on ruling power in Russian literary sources of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,

59 Janet Coleman also gives crucial importance to this distinction: “Now the modern notion of the state is said to distinguish state authority from that of the rulers entrusted with the temporary exercise of state powers. This view was already established during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in the notion of ‘office’ and in the sense that customs and laws were meant to ‘rule’ in perpetuity for the common good.” Janet Coleman, A History of Political Thought: From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 273. 60 Quoted by Mikhail Valerianovich Zyzykin, Tsarskaia vlast′ i zakon o prestonasledii [Tsarist power and the law on succession to the throne] (Sofia: Novaia zhizn′, 1924), 66.

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well before the emergence of Moscow.61 In the sixteenth century, the linking of the idea of pravda to groza became common,62 and Joseph was an early but highly influential representative of this process! Here a note on pravda, which in lieu of a better translation was rendered as “justice,” is necessary. The term pravda referred to a crucial but highly hazy notion in Muscovy.63 It had “not so much legal but ethico-religious” meaning,64 requiring in general that the ruler maintain the established order and comply wholly with the teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church. No doubt, pravda was a par excellence “charismatic word” not only in post-Petrine Russia but long before that, although with shifting meanings in different periods of Russian history.65 We can say that its “charismatic” nature was even stronger in pre-Petrine Russia. For between roughly 1500–1700 it was inexorably linked to “faith” (vera): vera i pravda (faith and justice) were inseparable, at least in ecclesiastical sources.66 Indeed, pravda was used by Joseph in the sense of “cosmic order” established on earth by the Orthodox ruler.67 Stefan Plaggenborg claims, and rightly so, that the “prominence of the concept of pravda (pravda-Begriff) in the sources” written by Joseph and others shows that “pravda was the central concept of legitimation of rulership.”68

61 Sergei Bogatyrev, The Sovereign and His Counsellors: Ritualised Consultations in Muscovite Political Culture, 1350s–1570s (Helsinki: The Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, 2000), 43. 62 Ibid., 88. 63 For this highly complicated issue see Plaggenborg, Pravda; and for a short insightful summary Alfons Brüning, “Symphonia, kosmische Harmonie, Moral. Moskauer Diskurse über gerechte Herrschaft im 16. und 17. Jahnrhundert” [Symphony, cosmic harmony, moral. Muscovite discourse on the just rule in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries], in Gerechtigkeit und gerechte Herrschaft vom 15. bis zum 17. Jahrhundert. Beiträge zur historischen Gerechtigkeitsforschung [ Justness and just rule from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century: Contributions to historical research on justice], ed. Stefan Plaggenborg (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2020), 23–52. 64 Tomsinov, Istoriia, 103. 65 Wortman, Power of Language and Rhetoric, 132–157. Its legislative connotation in the Petrine period see below. 66 Brüning, “Symphonia, kosmische Harmonie, Moral,” 31–32. 67 Stefan Plaggenborg, “Die gerechteste aller Ordnungen. Iosif Volockijs Apologie der gerechten Herrschaft im Russland um 1500” [The most just of all orders. Iosif Volotskii’s apologee of just rulership in Russia around 1500], in Gerechtigkeit und gerechte Herrschaft vom 15. bis zum 17. Jahrhundert. Beiträge zur historischen Gerechtigkeitsforschung [ Justness and just rule from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century: Contributions to historical research on justice], ed. Stefan Plaggenborg (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2020), 68–69. 68 Ibid., 54, For a more detailed discussion of pravda in Joseph of Volokolamsk’s thought, see Plaggenborg, Pravda, 75–108.

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Wortman summarized this highly complicated issue succinctly: Vladimir Dal′ defined pravda as “istina na dele” or “truth in activity, in image, for the good (blago), legal justice (pravosudie), or justice in general (spravedlivost′).” Its ambiguities are not conveyed by the French verité or the English “truth.” In fact, the boundaries of the word’s meaning are vague and shifting, adapting to the needs of the speaker to lend legal, philosophical, political, even theological gravitas and uplift to his particular viewpoint. In this way, pravda is the perfect charismatic word: its cloudy meanings are given associations with higher authorities of any type on any occasion, evoking sacral overtones for its referent.69 Even the Law Code of 1649 did not represent a marked shift (emphasis is on the adjective marked) towards a more legal meaning of pravda as “positive law was adjusted to pravda [in the sense] as the order of the world.”70 Yet, by the end of Peter’s reign considerable progress was made in this regard.71 But in Muscovite Russia pravda had not simply a sacral overtone—sacredness was the very essence of pravda in religious sources.72 In literary texts, and Joseph of Volokolamsk’s were no exception, references to the law (zakon) “were often vague, based on biblical use of the term, often meaning God’s law or even ‘Christianity.’”73 He did not have an interest in positive law at all.74 And he had no concept whatsoever of natural law either, which is crucial for the interpretation of the meaning of pravda in his works, and generally in Muscovite Russia.75 Consequently, in Muscovy “the preconditions of 69 Wortman, Power of Language and Rhetoric, 133. 70 Plaggenborg, Pravda, 349. 71 See this below in the detailed analysis of Pravda voli monarshei. Although in a St. Petersburg lexicon Gerechtigkeit, that is, “justness” or “righteousness,” was still translated as pravda and not spravedlivost′. Brüning, “Symphonia, kosmische Harmonie, Moral,” 48–49. 72 Ibid., 51. 73 Rowland, “Muscovy,” 289. 74 Plaggenborg, “Die gerechteste aller Ordnungen,” 67. 75 It is necessary to mention, however, that the above understanding of pravda and the attitude to positive law was not the only one as represented by Joseph and his followers, even metropolitans among them. A notable exception is his contemporary, the diplomat Fedor Karpov, whose views differed considerably from the ecclesiastical authors. His letter written to the Josephite metropolitan Daniil around 1536 on the issue of “endurance” (trpenie) as a virtue, to be shown by the people to superiors, reveals that he had a notion of a secular human community. He raised the question whether the “matter of the people, or the kingdom or the

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‘just rulership,’” in the legal sense as it was understood in contemporary Europe, “were visibly weak.”76 In Western thought rulership was integrated into an elaborate system of laws: a framework involving positive (man-made) law, natural law, and divine law.77 Therefore, Joseph’s wording that “It is written: the Prince is the justice [pravda] of this world,”78 should be taken in a very broad sense described above, that is, the ruler should comply with the cosmic order by his governance. This meaning was further reinforced by the fact that the following biblical passage was the standard part of Russian Orthodox liturgy: “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness/justice [zhazhdushchie pravdy]: for they shall be satiated” (Matthew 5:6). All the points discussed before are quite clear when Joseph moves to the admonition that the ruler has to refrain from sinful desires, that is, to his presentation of the bad ruler.

rulership [delo narodnoe, ili tsarstvo, ili vladychstvo], with regard to their perdurablity, has to do more with justice [pravdu] or with endurance [trpenie]?” And answered that “justice [pravda] is necessary in all kind of civil matters and in the kingdom [v vsiakom gradskom dele i tsarstve] for the continuity of the kingdom [k pribytiu tsartsva],” as “the matter of the people in communities and kingdoms [delo narodnoe v gradekh i tsarstvekh] will become extinct by long endurance torturing the souls; long endurance without justice and law [bez pravdy i zakona] ruins the good of the society [dobro obshchestva] and turns the matter of the people [delo narodnoe] into nothing, introduces evil morals in kingdoms and turns people disobedient to the masters [liudei gosudarem neposlushnykh] because of [their] misery. Therefore, every community [grad] and kingdom [tsarstvo], according to Aristotle, shall be governed by the leaders [ot nachal′nik] justly [v pravde] and with transparent just laws [izvestnymi zakonamy pravednymi], and not with endurance.” He also used the word podvlastnyi (subject) many times, and knew the distinction between natural law (zakon estestvennyi) and human positive law. All these point to the interpretation that pravda for Karpov most probably meant righteousness in the secular sense. He mentioned the name of Aristotle once more, giving even a reference to his book, although without naming it. Yet, despite all these Western influences, Karpov framed his argument in the pravda-groza-milost′ triad, the paradigm of ecclesiastical perception of ruling power at that time. He stated that “the leader of any autocracy [nachal′nik vsiakogo samodrzhstva] has to force those who commit sins by lavishing or doing harm to be in concord with the good ones through the fear of justice and law [grozoiu pravdy i zakona], but he has to take care of the good subjects with his reward and innate mercy [milostiiu]. … For it is because of mercy [radi milosti] that the superior and the king [tsar′] are most loved by the subjects, while they are feared because of truth [radi istiny].” Stating that pravda and milost′ must necessarily go hand in hand, as the one without the other is futile, he concludes: “But mercy underpinned by justice [pravdoiu], and justice [pravda] ornamented by mercy, preserve the king [tsar′] and the kingdom [tsarstvo] for a long time.” Fedor Karpov, Poslanie mitropolitu Daniilu [Letter to the Metropolitan Daniil], http://drevne-rus-lit.niv.ru/drevne-rus-lit/text/sochineniyafedora-karpova/sochineniya-fedora-karpova-original.htm. Karpov, however, had no impact at all on later authors and remained an exception to the rule. 76 Alfons Brüning, “Symphonia, kosmische Harmonie, Moral,” 23. 77 See what has been written on “absolute power” before. 78 Quted by Raeff, “An Early Theorist of Absolutism,” 82.

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The tsar is the servant of God to punish and to pardon men. But if a tsar who rules over men is himself ruled by evil passions and sins, such as avarice and anger, falsehood and injustice [nepravdu], pride and fury, and, which is the worst of all, unbelief [neverie] and blasphemy [khulu], such a tsar is not a servant of God but a Devil [diavol], not a tsar but a torturer [muchitel′]. And this kind of tsar, because of his falsehood, Our Lord Jesus Christ does not call a tsar but a fox. … The three youths not only did not submit to the command of tsar Nebuchadnezzar, but called him a lawless enemy and an abominable apostate [merzkogo otstupnika], and wickeder than the entire world. And you should not obey such a tsar or prince who wants to tempt you to impiety [nechestie] and falsehood, even if he tortures you or threatens you with death. The witnesses to this are the prophets and apostles, and all the martyrs [mucheniki] who were killed by the impious tsars [nechestivye tsari] because they did not subject themselves to their behaviour. This is the way that tsars/kings and princes are to be served.79 Paul Bushkovitch’s general statement quoted previously (“In the absence of philosophical and theoretical underpinning to ideas of the state, the principal form of reflection on statehood came in texts that provided examples of good and bad monarchs”80) applies well to Joseph’s ideas, provided the word “statehood” is replaced by “rulership” or “power”—otherwise there is a contradiction in it, which would make the interpretation of Joseph’s above passage on the bad ruler difficult. To interpret this passage we should note that piety figured prominently in literature and even in the ruler’s titulature throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The titulature “always included one or more words for ‘pious’ (blagovernyi, blagochestivyi),”81 and Joseph, significantly, uses their antonyms,

79 Volotskii, Prosvetitel′, 287. For the English translation of the passage I consulted the versions given by Raeff, “An Early Theorist of Absolutism,” 88; Rowland, “Did Muscovite Literary Ideology,” 127; and David Goldfrank, “The Deep Origins of Tsar′-Muchitel′: A Nagging Problem of Muscovite Political Theory,” Russian History 32 (Winter 2005): 343–344, without following anyone of them on the whole. 80 Bushkovitch, Succession to the Throne, 14. 81 Rowland, “Muscovy,” 279.

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neverie, nechestie, to describe a bad ruler, besides, of course, his use of nepravda.82 As for the change in the ruler’s duty under Peter, it is highly indicative that he no longer deemed it necessary to refer to the ruler’s piety in official titulatory.83 Accordingly, in 1697 “he enjoined officials from writing ‘theology’, as he put it, when referring to his title in state documents.”84 The formula “By the grace of God” was still kept for a while, but by 1722 a “fully secular” version of the titulatory came into use: “We, Peter the First, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias.”85 Joseph’s warnings to the ruler, as well as the sins identified by him, are clearly part of the ethico-religious sphere,86 in accordance with his expectations imposed on a pious ruler. Among the sins listed, the most heinous ones are offenses against faith: blasphemy and unbelief (neverie). The latter one is to be understood as “impiety” in a very broad sense, meaning paganism, apostasy—and even heresy, considering that Joseph’s book was written against the Novgorodian heretics. The conflation of Old Testament and New Testament impious rulers is confirmed by the explicit reference to Nebuchadnezzar, as an apostate! The paramount importance attributed to the ruler’s religious duty is also underlined by his presentation of the good and the bad ruler in the form of the antithesis of tsar and torturer (muchitel′). This theme comes up in Joseph’s book not only in the passage just quoted, but also towards the end of his book (two pages after the exaltation of the ruler), where he compared the ruler to God regarding the ruler’s position. Yet, strangely enough, this passage is not quoted in the literature, in contrast to the other, longer passage on the bad ruler. I know only one instance, David Goldfrank’s article, which not only mentioned it but also devoted a long reasoning to this passage, which, in Goldfrank’s view, can be taken as Joseph’s “final words on secular authority,” claiming the “deep secular origins” of the antithesis of tsar′ and muchitel′.87 Whatever the “origins” could be, I contend that in Joseph’s thinking this theme clearly reflected the paramount importance of the religious view on ruling power. The passage in question reads:

82 It is interesting to note that the words nechestie and its adjective nechestivyi used by Joseph are close in sound to the popular Russian word for the Devil, nechistyi. 83 Marc Raeff, Understanding Imperial Russia. State and Society in Old Regime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 6. 84 Whittaker, “The Reforming Tsar,” 83. 85 Ibid. 86 Ihor Ševčenko, “A Neglected Byzantine Source of Muscovite Political Ideology,” Harvard Slavic Studies 2 (1954): 176; Raeff, “An Early Theorist of Absolutism,” 87. 87 Goldfrank, “The Deep Origins of Tsar′-Muchitel′,” 346, 349.

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“The holy Apostles speak concerning kings and bishops, of those who do not provide or take care of those under them: indeed, an impious king [tsar′ zlochestivyi], heedless of those under him, is not a king [tsar′], but a torturer [muchitel′], and an evil bishop, heedless of his flock, is not a shepherd but a wolf.”88 There is no mention in it of other sins (avarice, anger, and so forth) besides impiety, which is none other than the neglecting of duties by the ruler. In the longer passage on the muchitel′ Joseph raised the question that the governed (the word poddannyi or podvlastnyi, “subject,” was not used by Joseph) may disobey an evil ruler. However, there was no guideline as to what Joseph’s phrase, “you do not obey” meant in practice. “Even though this principle of disobedience was not a new idea in Russia either, there its logical consequences had never been clearly defined.”89 What can be and what cannot be done in case of a ruler committing the sins listed, especially in case of an “impious tsar” [nechestivyi tsar′], that is, a non-Orthodox (and by this token an apostate or infidel) ruler? Should the governed take the path of passive obedience, following the example of Christian martyrs who did not obey the pagan emperors but still accepted the death punishment that the rulers meted out for them? This is the most probable supposition as there is a clear reference to their examples by Joseph. Or, should the governed show passive resistance, disobeying such a ruler but trying to evade the consequences of this behavior by hiding, or fleeing abroad and so forth? This option is less probable. Is active resistance permitted for the governed? This is very unlikely. And if permitted, can it be defensive or preventive? These questions were never resolved because they never considered in this way, as they were in Western Christendom. The bad rulers, characteristically, were considered God’s punishments, an idea also shared by early medieval writers in the West. In Western Christendom until the twelfth century the notions of good rulers and bad rulers (tyrants) were both shaped by the main characteristics of medieval worldview. And this worldview “was dominated by typology” (positive and negative figures, such as Kings David and Solomon, or Nero and Julian the Apostate, respectively) and “conditioned by verses,” mainly biblical references.90 Western perception of tyranny, however, also relied on a highly influential text,

88 Volotskii, Prosvetitel′, 549. Goldfrank’s translation is slightly changed. Goldfrank, “The Deep Origins of Tsar′-Muchitel′,” 346. 89 Raeff, “An Early Theorist of Absolutism,” 88. 90 Laura Slater, Art and Political Thought in Medieval England 1150–1350 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2018), 10.

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the “Etymologies” of Isidore of Seville who, while admitting no right to resist to tyrants, made a clear distinction between a king (rex) and tyrant (tyrannus), treating them as opposites. In his explanation, playing on the similarity of orthography of words rex and recte (“correct”) and stating that the “king is called so from correct [manner of] ruling” (rex a recte regendo vocatur), he conceived the tyrant not as “a bad king,” or “unjust king,” but not a king at all, as king and tyrant were two distinct qualities for him.91 Under the impact of his distinction, “a bad king,” or “unjust king” would become an oxymoron for later treatment of tyranny,92 and led to the rex-tyrannus dichotomy. John of Salisbury in his Policraticus (1159) furthered the distinction between king and tyrant: the good ruler was the imago divinitatis (“image of divinity) in the sense of “imago aequitatis,” that is, the “image equity” or “image of justice”93 (a meaning close to the concept of natural law), while the tyrant was imago diaboli (image of the Devil). Furthermore, he already made a distinction between a usurper and the ruler who did not govern in the interest of public utility, and even raised the theoretical possibility of tyrannicide. In the thirteenth century, when the Aristotelian view of politics was integrated into Western political thought through St. Thomas Aquinas, this made possible a more secular approach to the problem of tyranny.94 From Aquinas the concept of tyranny, and “the consistent philosophical justification for tyrannicide was

91 Cary J. Nederman, “There Are No ‘Bad Kings’: Tyrannical Characters and Evil Counselors in Medieval Political Thought,” in Evil Lords: Theories and Representation of Tyranny from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Hester Schadee and Nikos Panou (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 139–140. 92 Ibid., 137, 139–140. 93 Nederman states that “throughout the Policraticus, aequitas is used interchangeably with iustitia; where there is a distinction between them, it seems of equity in relation to the moral nature of justice.” Cary J. Nederman, “A Duty to Kill: John of Salisbury’s Theory of Tyrannicide,” The Review of Politics 50, no. 3 (Summer 1988): 386, en. 51. 94 “From antiquity to the Renaissance, the legitimacy and effectiveness of monarchical rule were viewed as in large measure dependent on the moral rectitude of the ruler. … Conversely, the sovereign’s failure to cement his life and governance on the exercise of virtue and eradication of vice could only result in conduct antithetical to the common good, and consequently in compromised legitimacy.” Hester Schadee and Nikos Panou, Introduction, “Tyranny as Bad Rule in the West,” to Evil Lords: Theories and Representation of Tyranny from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Hester Schadee and Nikos Panou (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 6. While agreeing with this summary, the concept of the common good should be given more emphasis, as it became a measurement of any government in the thirteenth century: a government was just only if it considered the common good as its goal. And this is one of the important differences between the Western and the Muscovite perceptions of bad rule: the latter being constrained in the dichotomy of virtues and vices.

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premised on natural law doctrines,” but “the consent or disapproval of God’s higher law was invoked with equal vigour on either side of the debate.”95 Scholarly literature on tyranny was growing in the late Middle Ages, just to explode in the sixteenth century due to the Reformation, going so far as to grant permission of tyrannicide. Interestingly enough, authors of this doctrine could be found in both Catholic and Calvinist camps.96 Late medieval concept of tyranny distinguished between a tyrant ex defectu tituli (“lack of title”: a ruler without just claim to the throne either by virtue of election or inheritance, or a combination of both), in other words, a usurper, on the one hand, and a tyrant ex parte exercitii (“by reason of exercise” [of power]: a ruler coming to power through lawful means but governing for personal profit and not for the common good), on the other. In the fourteenth century the approach to the problem culminated in a separate tract on tyranny, written by Bartolus of Sassoferrato (died 1357), one of the greatest lawyers of the late Middle Ages, possibly linked to his treatise De regimine civitatis. Besides elaborating meticulously on the above distinction, the tyrant for him was a ruler “who does not rule according to the law” (non iure principatur). The Reformation modified the twofold distinction of tyranny by adding a third category, the heretic ruler, who, by his stand on religion became a tyrantheretic either in the eyes of the papacy, if converted to Protestantism, or in the eyes of his own subjects, if they became Protestant while their ruler remained Catholic. Theories on resistance to tyrants (either heretic or non-heretic tyrants) were often based on the idea of a governmental contract between the ruler and the subjects.97 And contractarian thought, in turn, relied heavily on natural law theories from the thirteenth century onwards. In Muscovy, however, the legal-political perception of tyranny was missing, mainly due to the lack of natural law reasoning and the notion of bonum commune. So was the theoretical treatment of the forms of resistance, not to mention the possibility of tyrannicide, from which authors abhorred. Only typologies and texts, mainly biblical references provided the framework of thought on bad rulers who, by and large, were considered God’s punishment. Boris Uspenskii claims that in Western Christendom “unjust rulers were usually compared with corrupt biblical kings,” while in Russia the comparison of the tsar to Christ

95 Shannon K. Brincat, “Death to Tyrants. The Political Philosophy of Tyrannicide,” part 1, Journal of International Political Theory 4, no. 2 (2008): 224. 96 This shared doctrine made King James I say that “Jesuits are nothing but Puritan Papists,” as both agreed on the killing of kings. 97 On the issue of contractarianism in the West and Russia, see below.

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had the consequence that bad rulers “were compared to the Antichrist,”98 or the Devil, as in case of Joseph of Volokolamsk.99 We should rather say that in Muscovy the religious aspect was paramount, and a good example of this thinking is the passage quoted from Joseph of Volokolamsk containing even the paired words: muchitel′ and muchenik. They stand in causal relationship, as muchenik meant passion-sufferer. Therefore, term muchitel′ can be best interpreted not so much as a tormentor but as a “martyr-maker,” and not as a tyrant conceived in terms of political theory.100 Uspenskii’s statement concerning the image of the Antichrist has to be modified and augmented, however, as under the impact of the Reformation, the tyrant-Antichrist motif was also characteristic of Western thought on tyranny. During the revolts of the Netherlands against Philip II, after the Northern Provinces had declared their sovereignty in 1581 (the Act of Abjuration itself relied on Bartolus’s definition of tyranny), the war was going on, and in the subsequent decades the concept of tyranny underwent a change in the pamphlet literature written against Philip II.101 While both legal and religious arguments were employed, sometimes the difference between the classic concept of tyranny and Antichrist were completely blurred.102 Philip II was accused that he “wanted to rule over the soul”—this was the main feature of his tyranny.103 And in England, in the seventeenth century, Charles I was called a tyrant, and “for many he was directly associated with popery and the Antichrist,”104 no doubt for the same reason that Philip II had been. The execution of Charles I in 1649 after a trial by a special court, as he was accused of and found guilty of tyranny for trampling on the rights and liberty of his subjects—this chain of events itself was unprecedented in the West. It was one of the causes generating important shifts in political thought, which were

98 Boris Andreevich Uspenskii, Tsar i imperator. Pomazanie na tsarstvo i semantika monarshikh titulov [Tsar and emperor. Anointment for tsardom and the semantics of monarchical titles] (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul′tury, 2000), 28. 99 The motif that the ruler committing unbelief or impiety is the servant of the Devil can be found in Byzantine literature since Justinian. Matei Cazacu, Dracula (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 232. 100 Plaggenborg, “Die gerechteste aller Ordnungen,” 63; Plaggenborg, Pravda, 89. 101 Martin van Gelderen, “‘So meerly humane’: Theories of Resistance in Early Modern Europe,” in Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ed. Annabel Brett, James Tully, and Holly Hamilton-Bleakley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 166. 102 Ibid. The engraving Politeia (1579) analysed in the book did not have this kind of, or in fact, any kind of confessional load. 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid., 165.

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closely related to both the development of the concept of state, and the attitude to tyranny. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, other paradigms of political theory—reason of state as well as a new absolutism— while by no means constituting a complete break with the past, nonetheless complicated or rejected reliance on virtue as the foundational principle of government. The former current of thought—traditionally associated with Machiavelli—excused certain vices as pragmatically necessary for governance. The latter allowed the argument—archetypically advanced by Thomas Hobbes—that virtue and vices alike were superseded by the greater good of unchallengeable sovereignty. From both perspectives, the demise of the Aristotelian understanding of political morality marks the end of the bad ruler as a personally flawed, indeed evil, lord.105 In Muscovy a completely different phenomenon caused changes in the perception of the problem of a bad ruler—an issue becoming more complicated because of the extinction of the ruling dynasty in 1598, which opened the way to the Time of Troubles. What is to be done with a “false tsar” (lzhe-tsar′)—an issue that Joseph of Volokolamsk obviously did not ponder as this problem occurred only in the early seventeenth century, when the title to rule came to the fore. Yet, the problem of the “false tsar” could also evoke distant associations with the elusive idea of pravda, as a false tsar was called not only samotsar′ and samozvanets literally a “tsar by himself [of his own ambition]” and “who [just] calls himself tsar” but also nepravednyi tsar′, that is, “not a true tsar” (in the sense of not a “real tsar”), or even a nesushchii tsar′ (“not tsar of essence”)! This issue of legitimacy became a burning one during the Time of Troubles, when impostors claimed the throne, and one of them, the First False Dmitrii (in 1605–1606), could even seize power. He was followed by a so-called “elected tsar,” Vasilii Shuiskii (1606– 1610), also named mnimyi tsar′ (“sham/pretended tsar”) or nesushchii tsar′ (“not tsar of essence”), who did not possess the moral qualities of a presushchii tsar′ (that is, a “tsar of quintessence”) due to the lack of his birthright, and therefore he inevitably turned into a bad tsar.106 So, the title to rule raised the question: what is to be done if the ruler is not a tsar by virtue of his birth (neprirozhdennyi 105 Hester Schadee and Nikos Panou, Introduction to Evil Lords, 6. 106 Svoboda, “Obraz tsaria vo ‘Vremennike’ Ivana Timofeeva,” 388–391.

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tsar′), therefore not God’s elect, and hence not a true tsar (nepravednyi tsar′): for the true or real tsar (pravednyi tsar′) was tsar by virtue of his birth(right) (prirozhdennyi tsar′). In the chronicles written on the Time of Troubles, a distinction was made between good tsars, who were real tsars, that is, born of tsarist blood, hence being God’s elects, and bad ones, being either impostors or “sham/pretended tsars.”107 Moreover, we can even meet the term “tyrant” (tiran) and “tyranny” (tiranstvo) in the sources on the Time of Troubles in making a distinction between good tsars and bad ones. Bad tsars were bad because of the way they came to power: they assumed power not by virtue of their birth, which meant that they could not be God’s elects. While in Western Christendom there was no casual relation between a tyrant-usurper who inevitably was to become a tyrant by his acts of governing, in Russia, by contrast, the rulers during the Time of Troubles were tyrants ex parte exercitii for the very reason that they did not have a title to the throne, as royal blood, which they lacked, was the marker of divine grace and divine will. Consequently, according to the contemporary perception, the First False Dmitrii was elevated to the throne by the Devil, while the “shamtsars” Boris Godunov and Shuiskii, elected by the people alone without divine blessing, seized the throne through machination and ambition108: consequently none of them were God’s elects. Of the First False Dmitrii it was written that “the Devil can elevate man to a high position,” while Shuiskii was accused of cruelty, “exercising power in the manner of a martyr-maker [muchitel′ski]” and the “peoples under his power were living in tyranny [v tiranstve].”109 In both cases, the comparisons reflect the cliché of Joseph of Volokolamsk, with the additional use of the word “tyranny.” Occasionally, however, the reverse of the previously presented casual reasoning was possible, namely, when the title to the throne of a true tsar by birth was questioned because of his misgovernment, due to the deviation from the true faith, as it happened during the Church Schism in the mid-seventeenth century. Then Tsar Aleksei, because of his support of the church reform, was called not only “an impious heretic [nechestivyi eretik], a new apostate of Orthodox faith

107 Vladimir Evgrafovich Val′denberg, “Poniatie o tirane v drevnerusskoi literature s sravneniem s zapadnoi” [The concept of tyrant in Old Russian literature compared to the Western one], Izvestiia po russkomu iazyku i slovesnosti (1926): 222–223. 108 Ibid., 223. 109 Quoted ibid.

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[novyi otstupnik pravoslavnoi very]” but also a martyr-maker (muchitel′),110 and even an Antichrist.111 Therefore, in the eyes of many, he could not be a true tsar! Sometimes the dissatisfaction with tsarist government, if it was not due to religious but economic and other causes as in 1648, was not really directed against the tsar himself, but his bad advisors were accused of diverting the tsar from the right path.112 This kind of reasoning was used to justify rebellions called “rebellion in the name of the good tsar against the bad councillors.”113 This belief, that is, that the ruler is good and only his counsellors are wicked, however, was not confined to Russia alone, but also existed in Western Christendom,114 although nowhere was it so strong and long-lived as in Russia.115 This was closely connected to the importance of the genre called the “mirror of princes,”116 which attributed a great role to the influence of counsellors in decision-making. As Daniel Rowland showed, Muscovite thought on power regarding good and bad rulers remained in the framework of a “symbolic language” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.117 It can be illustrated by Joseph of Volokolamsk’s comparison of the good ruler to God and the Sun, and the bad one to the Devil. Rowland’s study also reveals the continuity of these images and the paradigms they represented well into the seventeenth century: the leader of the Old Believers, Avvakum, associating Tsar Aleksei with the Devil and the Antichrist, “was using the same language, but in more explicit form,” which had been characteristic of previous authors of the age of Ivan IV and the first decades of the seventeenth century.118 In the spirit of “serial contextualism” and continuity, it is perhaps instructive to finish the discussion of the issue of bad rulers and tyranny in Russia with an example taken from the early nineteenth century, namely, the Decembrists’ perception of tyranny. The writing attributed to Sergei Ivanovich Murav′ev-Apostol 110 Quoted ibid., 224–225. 111 Peter T. de Simone, Old Believers in Imperial Russia. Oppression, Opportunism and Religious Identity in Tsarist Moscow (London: I. B. Tauris, 2018), 14, 139, 205. 112 “In its simplest and most common expression, popular monarchism took the form of the adage, ‘The tsar wants it but the boyars resist.’” Daniel Field, Rebels in the Name of the Tsar (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 14. 113 Maureen Perrie, “Samozvantsy XVII v. i vopros o legitimnosti praviashchego tsaria” [Pretenders of the seventeenth century and the question of the ruling tsar’s legitimacy], in Samozvantsy i samozvanchestvo v Moszkovii [Pretenders and pretenderism in Muscovy], ed. Gyula Szvák (Budapest: Russica Pannonicana, 2010), 75–76. 114 For this stereotype see Nederman, “There Are No ‘Bad Kings,’” 150–151. 115 More details on this belief see below. 116 Nederman, “There Are No ‘Bad Kings,’” 151. 117 Rowland, “Did Muscovite Literary Ideology,” 131. 118 Ibid., 151.

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(1796–1826), the prominent figure of the Southern Society of Decembrists, of which he became the leader in 1825 (and one of those who was eventually executed after the revolt), bearing the title “Orthodox Catechism,”119 is highly relevant from this point of view.120 The model for this catechism was the one composed by the Spanish liberal officers in 1808, translated into Russian in 1812: the format was kept but its content was modified by Murav′ev-Apostol and his fellow officer, Mikhail Bestuzhev-Riumin, “to fit Russian conditions.”121 In the name of the Father and Son and the Holy Spirit.122 Question: For what has God created man? Answer: For that he should believe in him and should be free and happy. … Question: Why is the Russian people [russkii narod] and the Russian soldiers are unhappy? Answer: Because the tsars had stolen their freedom. Question: Did it happen that the tsars act against God’s will? Answer:  Yes … the tsars only tyrannize [tiraniaiut] the people. Question: Is it a duty to obey tsars if they act against God’s will? Answer: No! … Question: What does our holy law command for the Russian people and soldiers to do? Answer: To throw off the burden of servitude, and by rising against tyranny and impiety [protiv tiranstva i nechestiia] swear: May it be one king [tsar′] in heaven and earth for all—Jesus Christ.

119 For a recent discussion of the catechism see Richard Stites, The Four Horsemen: Riding to Liberty in Post-Napoleonic Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 240, 290–292, 307–308. 120 Izbrannye sotsial′no-politicheskie i filosofskie proizvedeniia dekabristov [Selected socio-political and philosophical works of the Decembrists], ed. I. Ia. Shipanov and S. Ia. Shtraikh (Moscow: MGU, 1951), vol. 1: Pravoslavnyi katekhizis, 191–193. 121 Stites, The Four Horsemen, 240. 122 This invocation was missing from the Spanish Catechism.

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Question: What can hold [us] back from accomplishing this holy heroic deed [podvig]? Answer: Nothing! Those who oppose this holy heroic deed, are traitors [predateli], apostates [bogootstupniki] who have sold their souls to impiety [prodavshie dushi svoi nechestiiu], and grief befalls them, the hypocrites, as a dreadful divine punishment in this word and the other as well. Question: How to rise for all with pure heart? Answer: Take arms and follow bravely those who speak in the Lord’s name, remembering the words of our savior: “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness/justice [zhazhdushchie pravdy]: for they shall be satiated”;123 and eradicating the injustice and the impiety of tyranny [nepravdu i nechestie tiranstva],124 restore the government [pravlenie] conforming to divine law. … And the ones who stay, those, like Judas the traitor [Iuda predatel′], will be anathemized and damned. Amen.125 The officers who were influenced by Western constitutional ideas knew well the age-old beliefs of the common soldiers. For the latter, non-obedience or rather rebellion to the tsar could be justified only through the age-old belief of the “impious tsar,” hence not on legal but strictly and exclusively on religious grounds! The phrase “injustice and impiety of tyranny” clearly echoes the spirit of the Josephite view on the bad ruler. Yet, we should not forget, as Andrey Ivanov emphasized recently, that “the Decembrists were not rabid atheists,” and the “theological visions” of such prominent Decembrists as Nikita and Sergei Murav′ev, “incorporated the language of Enlightenment constitutional heritage in emphasizing ‘human rights given by God’ and arguing that God cursed tyranny or ‘evil authority.’”126 As it is apparent from the above quotations, this statement, equally holds true in case of the Orthodox Catechism 123 As mentioned, this biblical passage was a standard part of Russian Orthodox liturgy. 124 The phrase nechestie i nepravdu chelovekov, “impiety and injustice of people,” is found in Romans 1:18. 125 Pravoslavnyi katekhizis, 191–192. 126 Andrey V. Ivanov, A Spiritual Revolution. The Impact of Reformation and Enlightenment in Orthodox Russia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020), 234–235.

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regarding the language and argument it used: for the republican convictions of the Decembrists conceived tsarist rule as eo ipso tyranny, an opposite to individual liberty—a view, of, course, utterly different from Muscovite perception of bad rule—which was justified on religious grounds. In the light of what has been written in this chapter it seems practical to ponder the basic questions of political thought in the scholastic understanding of the concept of politics in the forthcoming analysis of Muscovite ideas on power from the European perspective. In other words, from an angle when politics was not yet conceived in the modern sense, that is, what it had become in the wake of Machiavelli by the early seventeenth century: the acquisition, maintenance and extension of power—a meaning, that was originally linked to the expression, ragione di stato. By the early 1630s, however, ragione di stato was called “political prudence.”

8.3.  Possible Aspects of a Comparison It is plausible to ask the following general questions of political thought in undertaking a comparative analysis of ruling power in Western Christendom and Russia to explore the main points of divergence and similarities. 1. What is the origin of ruling power? Where does it come from? Does it come from God, or the people? In Walter Ullmann’s wording, this issue is the “descending and ascending theory of power and government”: more directly, the principle of theocracy or popular sovereignty.127 But we can go further than Ullmann: Does power come from both God and the people at the same time: that is, from God through the people? If from both God and the people, which one of the two is the more important? In other words, does the inclusion of the people have any significance for the theory and practice of power? Although the issue of derivation of power is of great importance, Joseph Canning has pointed out that looking up on the history of political thought exclusively in these terms (“derivation of power from downward, as it were, from God, or upwards”) would remain simplistic—so, this aspect must be supplemented by another one.128

127 Ullmann, Medieval, 12–13. 128 Canning, History, 19. This issue, in fact, had been raised long before Canning’s book was published, by Passerino d’Entréves concerning the basic questions of political thought: “The first is a request to determine the ultimate foundation of power, what justifies the right that

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2. What is the purpose of government? Is it of secular or transcendent ordination? According to Canning, “in interpreting medieval political thought quite as much weight, if not more, should be given to the purpose” of power, that is, its ordination, as to its origin.129 3. What are the limits of governmental power as deduced and emanating from the origin and purpose of this power? Are these limits of a legalconstitutional nature, or moral, or ethico-religious? 4. What is the best form of government? Is it monarchy, aristocracy, democracy—or the so-called mixed government (regimen commixtum), combining elements of two or three?   Until the eighteenth century Western terminology did not generally make a distinction between the form of state (monarchy or republic) and the form of government (for example, constitutional or absolute monarchy). It was Montesquieu who introduced the modern dual classification, making a distinction between monarchy and republic.130 Before that the expression “form of government” (forma regiminis) was used as an umbrella term. For instance, monarchy, aristocracy (rule of the few, in fact, a republic) and democracy (rule of the commoners) were all forms of government, similarly to different types of monarchy, such as mixed monarchy (monarchia mixta), or absolute monarchy (monarchia absoluta), despite the fact that in today’s parlance only the latter ones could be termed rightly as forms of government. 5. What is the essence of supreme political power (called sovereignty after Bodin), and what are the marks of it? 6. In whom, or, with the emergence of the concept of state, where does this power rest? Before roughly 1700 Muscovite Russian authors dwelt only on the first two issues but without any exposition in theoretical treatises where propositions would have been discussed with arguments pro and contra, in the manner of the scholastic method (thesis–antithesis–synthesis). Moreover, the reconciliation of divine grace and popular derivation of power was not an issue in the same way as it was in Western Christendom. In Western political thought in the twelfth certain men claim over their fellow men. The second is a request to define the purpose of political power, together with its limits.” d’Entréves, Notion, 182. 129 Canning, History, 19, d’Entréves, Notion, 182–185. 130 In fact, Montesquieu, confusingly for us, also added “despotism” as a third type, the form of monarchy practiced among non-European people. The first attempt to make a dual classification, that is, distinguish between monarchy and republic only, was probably done by Machiavelli in the Prince.

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and thirteenth centuries, the mainstream interpretation was that political power, in the last resort, came from God, but through the people: and as the people were the more immediate source of power, they were entitled to have some share in the government, which materialized in the assemblies of estates, mostly in the late Middle Ages. In Russia this kind of reconciliation of divine grace and popular derivation of power was unthinkable, as we shall see. Furthermore, instead of considering the advantages and disadvantages of different forms of government, Muscovy was strongly committed to the monarchical principle, but without any reasoning. It was taken for granted as the only suitable and acceptable form of rule established by God,131 and not the best one among the various forms of government, an idea characteristic of medieval and early modern Western thought. What we have in Muscovy is a collection of categorical statements taken from the Bible on the origin of power: “There is no power but of God,” “By me kings reign,” “God gives power to whomsoever he likes,” and so forth. To be sure, without using the tools of logic to make a distinction between power as such and the person wielding it. The crucial Pauline statement “There is no power but of God” was interpreted in this spirit, and even erroneously quoted in this version: “There is no ruler but of God.” In Western Christendom, however, in the thirteenth century the scholastic interpretation made distinctions regarding the substance (substantia), form (forma—form of government) and exercise (exercitium—the person or people wielding) of power. Let us recall again Dixon’s statement that the striking feature of Muscovite ideology in terms of both “form and language is the degree to which philosophical [and I can add: legal] abstractions remained foreign” to it.132 In addition to relevant biblical passages, we find only laconic statements (as mentioned before): reference in a short sentence to God (divine grace), the ancestors (descent), and occasionally the legendary fiction connecting the Rurikid and Romanov dynasties to Emperor Augustus through his non-existent brother, Prus. The limits of power, likewise, can be deduced from biblical and Byzantine admonitions, as in Joseph of Volokolamsk’s letters and sermons representing the genre called the mirror of princes. The framework of the ruler-image was drawn by “biblical history and Orthodox piety,”133 to which the dynastic principle must be added.

131 See later the Russian interpretation of gosudarstvo as monarchy! 132 Dixon, Modernisation, 190. 133 Kollmann, Russian Empire, 131.

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Notions on Muscovite ruling power, however, as stated before, can be reconstructed from sources other than written ones (narrative and admonitory type). Pictorial sources are also crucial (the study of icons, and, to a lesser extent, engravings from the 1660s onwards), similarly to the analysis of newly built churches, such as the St. Basil’s Church (officially called “Cathedral of the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos on the Moat”) erected to commemorate the conquest of Kazan′ in 1552. Last but not least, ideology was, of course, apparent in those annual religious rituals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in which the tsar participated: the most important of these rituals were the New Year’s Ritual (September 1), the Blessing of the Waters on the Feast of Theophany (involving the boyars and the high clergy when the metropolitan/patriarch sprinkled water on the tsar and the boyars from the Moscow river, called temporarily the Jordan on this occasion), and, above all, the so-called Palm Sunday ritual.134 The Palm Sunday ritual, introduced by metropolitan Makarii in the midsixteenth century, imitated Christ’s triumphant entrance into Jerusalem.135 The metropolitan of Moscow and All Russia, and after 1589 the patriarch, sat on a horse disguised for the occasion as a donkey, which was led by the tsar, and the procession visited the cathedrals in the Kremlin. After the St. Basil’s Church had been built up, the procession left the Kremlin through the main gate, the Gate of the Savior, to this church, and then returned to the Kremlin.136 This ritual, which, unlike the Blessing of the Waters, came to an end under Peter (last celebrated in 1696), had the symbolic meaning that the tsar, imitating Christ’s mission, led his people towards salvation.137 Performance of duties that God imposed on the tsar, the core elements of which were punishing the wicked and keeping religious prescriptions and the harmonious relationship with the church, “was understood by Muscovite Orthodox not only as a condition of good government but a step toward building God’s realm on earth.”138 Consequently, obedience to the ruler by the governed was taken as a religious duty, as God’s command, “to serve their ruler loyally.”139

134 Flier, “Political Ideas and Rituals,” 401–408. 135 Michael S. Flier, “Breaking the Code: The Image of the Tsar in the Muscovite Palm Sunday Ritual,” in Medieval Russian Culture, ed. Michael S. Flier and Daniel Rowland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 224. 136 Ibid., 214, 228, 232. 137 Flier, “Breaking the Code,” 242. 138 Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 727. 139 Ibid.

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In her recent book on the Russian Empire, in the chapter entitled “Broadcasting Legitimacy,” Nancy Shields Kollmann provided a superb summary of genres expressing Muscovite ideology, giving various examples and stating: “Byzantium provided a rich toolkit for claiming legitimacy—literary genres (chronicles, hagiography), religious ritual, political ceremony and regalia, icons and frescoes, church architecture, and an elaborate political theory of ruler, state, and society.”140 What I cannot agree with in this sentence is the wording “political theory of ruler, state, and society” for reasons discussed at the beginning of the book, unless the terms “political theory,” and, first of all, “state” are understood simply as historians’ conventions and not narrower technical terms. Since my purpose in this book is precisely to throw light on these concepts in a comparative manner, it makes me disagree with this formulation,141 while endorsing her otherwise sweeping summary of what I call Muscovite ideology/thought on power.

8.4.  Stability and Change in Muscovite Ideology of Power The source-based approach I advocated in the introduction to this book does not mean the adoption of the method of analysing Russian sources by moving from one author to another and going forward in time. The stability of the ideology until the late seventeenth century does not require this kind of approach. Russia is a special case that allows concentrating on enigmatic authors and sources to search for clues that indicate stability as well as developments that affected the meaning of gosudarstvo over the course of the seventeenth century. Before the eighteenth century the history of Russian ideas on power does not have a canon or chain of authors comparable to the one that marks the development of political thought in the West between ca. 1450 and 1700 (ranging from Machiavelli through Bodin, Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf to Locke and others). As for notions of power (and state), between 1500 and 1725 two authors stand out as representatives of official ideology of the Muscovite and Petrine era respectively: Joseph of Volokolamsk and Feofan Prokopovich. Both were monks, but their education and reasoning regarding the ruler’s power were

140 Kollmann, Russian Empire, 130. 141 In her previous article, quoted before, however, she clearly emphasized the difference between Western and Russian perception of the realm, that is, the contrast between the “political” and “Godly” community, which she, by the way, also does elsewhere in the book. Kollmann, Russian Empire, 154–155.

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radically different, despite some underlying continuity. The use of the scholastic method, reference to natural law in pondering the origin of ruling power, or the consideration of forms of government (among many other issues) were clearly present in the most important work of the new Petrine ideology. Beginning with Prokopovich, “one of the creators of monarchical language,” the defense of the monarchical form of government dominated Russian political discourse. Was monarchy useful for Russia or not? If so, what form should it take, autocratic (Karamzin) or constitutional (Mikhail Speranskii)?142 Borrowing the title of Richard Pipes’s book, “Russian Conservatism” (advocating the first type of governance) and “its critics” belonged to the same discourse, that of monarchism.143 The fact that Joseph of Volokolamsk and especially Feofan Prokopovich are given preeminence in the book does not mean, of course, that other authors will not be treated apart from them. But before Prokopovich their impact on Russian ideology of power was, on the whole, negligible, therefore, these authors did not form the chain of successive authors that could be called the Russian canon of ideology. Indeed, Muscovite ideology of power remained fairly stable in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.144 Yet, that does not mean it was static. At its core it continued to be dynasty- and God-centered, but the extinction of the Rurikid dynasty (1598) and the short interregnum (1610–1613) witnessed the appearance of false tsars, a phenomenon that itself was the consequence of the lack of distinction between the concept of impersonal ruling power and the personal power of a given ruler whose legitimacy was derived from his belonging to the God-elected dynasty. In response to these events, some clarification of ideological elements emerged.145 The Polish occupation of Moscow raised the possibility of a foreign dynasty, leading the metropolitan to declare in 1610 that only an Orthodox Russian could occupy the tsarist throne.146 The principle of dynastic continuity required that the person be a relative of the last genuine tsar, Fedor I (1584–1598), and God’s providence required his identity be revealed by an assembly of the Muscovite realm (Moskovskoe gosudarstvo).147 In the ambiguous contemporary phraseology: “the people of the Muscovite realm of all ranks” would “elect someone 142 Bugrov, “Russia’s Territorial Size as a Concept for Domestic Politics,” 96, 97. 143 Ibid., 97. Until the early nineteenth century the radical Decembrists represented the major exception. 144 Tomsinov, Istoriia, 142. 145 Ibid., 142–143. 146 Ibid., 143. 147 Ibid.

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whom God gives from the Moscow and Russian clans.”148 These seemingly contradictory principles were reconciled in the charters confirming the election of both Boris Godunov in 1598 and Tsar Mikhail Romanov in 1613 respectively: God acted through the people to reveal the identity of His chosen whom He had already preselected from the relatives of the last tsar. The following fragment from the Confirmation Charter of Mikhail Romanov illustrates the attempt to paper over emerging cracks in the ideology. Mikhail was allegedly begged by the members of the assembly to accept his “election” in the following manner: Merciful Master, Mikhail Fedorovich! Do not oppose the providence of the Most High God, but do obey His will … for previous tsars had also ruled as tsars pre-selected by God [predizbrannye Bogom], and their pious root led to the pious and true … tsar and grand prince Fedor Ivanovich; but this root was completed and came to an end with him. And in his place God confers on you [vozlozhit] this tsarist honor as you are a Godelected flower [Bogom izbrannyi tsvet], specifically related to the tsarist family. … As Denis the Aeropagite … has said: God has favored humanity with the most precious honor, that is, with royal honor. Whomsoever God wants to endow with this boon, He endows the person with this honor already in the mother’s womb and prepares the person for it from infancy. Indeed, you were pre-selected in the same way. … Mikhail Fedorovich, and not through the unanimous thinking of the people, or in accordance with human choice. For it was by the just judgment of God that this tsarist election [tsarskoe izbranie] has been conferred [vozlozhil] on you … because the voice of God is the voice of the people [in the other version: the voice of the people is the voice of God].149

148 Ibid. 149 Utverzhdennaia gramota ob izbranii na Moskovskoe gosudarstvo Mikhaila Fedorovicha Romanova [Confirmation charter on the election of Mikhail Fedorovich for the Muscovite realm], ed. Sergei A. Belokurov (Moscow: Sinodal′naia tipografiia, 1906), 56. The idea of God acting through the people was given a Western garb by Feofan Prokopovich in his Pravda voli monarshei (1722) as we shall see below. For the motif of “the voice of the people is the voice of God,” in later sources under Tsar Mikhail see Viacheslav N. Kozliakov, Mikhail Fedorovich (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 2010), 312–320.

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Thus, the official exposition of Mikhail Romanov’s accession declares that the people gathered in the Assumption Cathedral were merely the vehicle “for expressing and confirming God’s will,” and the “election” by the assembly was not conceived “as a rival basis for political initiative”150: it was not a real “election,” that is, an act in its own right. It was merely the means by which divine pre-selection was communicated to this world.151 Election was to be preceded by divine preselection, which means that the highly personal perception of ruling power was, indeed, restored despite reference to the people’s will. In other words, not so much ruling power but the ruler himself came from God through the people, where the people had no will independent of God’s will. The meaning of “election” was simply the recognition of God’s will by the people in the way Jephthah was “elected” by the Jews ( Judges 11:5–11).152 The justification of Mikhail also incorporated floral imagery to prove that the Romanovs were in no way a new dynasty, but a kind of side-branch growing out of the old trunk of Rurikids. Therefore, the dynasty- and God-centered perception of power was confirmed and restored. And the “restoration” of tsarist power by its very nature precluded that conditions could be imposed on the new tsar,153 although in case of a foreign ruler this option was considered when Sigismund III was a candidate of a Moscow court group in 1610 during the interregnum. The interregnum led to a modification of earlier ideology, from an another angle, as the idea of the tsardom as “the tsar’s wife” with an existence of its own was explicitly articulated in Russian literature for the first time: the realm/tsardom as such (gosudarstvo/tsarstvo), now conceived as a “bride” or “widow” could, and indeed did, exist independently of the ruler. It is crucial in my view that this phenomenon coincided with the spread of the term Moskovskoe gosudarstvo (“Muscovite realm”). The interregnum during the Time of Troubles forced the recognition of a distinction between the tsar and his realm, although without attributing to the latter any legal standing or the legal-political implications of being a corporation, as these notions were unknown.154

150 Kivelson, Autocracy in the Provinces, 13. 151 Ibid.; Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 111. 152 Vladimir Moss, Christian Power in the Age of Reason. From the Fall of Constantinople to the French Revolution (1453–1789) https://studylibfr.com/doc/10034199/777-the-age-ofreason, 359. 153 Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 111. 154 Endre Sashalmi, “‘God is high up, the tsar is far away’: The Nature of Polity and Political Culture in Seventeenth-Century Russia. A Comparative View,” in Empowering Interactions. Political Cultures and the Emergence of the State in Europe 1300–1900, ed. Wim Blockmans et al. (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 131, 133–134.

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In 1612 the “Muscovite realm” (Moskovskoe gosudarstvo) was described, in a short literary work called the “Lament on the Captivity and the Final Ruin of the Muscovite Realm,” as a place where in the past, before the Time of Troubles, the palaces of the tsars were gorgeously decorated and the country was flourishing: This bright and wonderful realm was possessed [gosudarstvom vladeli] by great tsars, and native princes were proud of it, and daringly speaking, it stood out with its perfect arranging in everything, and in lightness and glory was superior to everyone, as a bride prepared for her bridegroom for a beautiful wedding [kak nevesta zhenikhu na prekrasnyi brak ugotovlennaia].155 There is no explicit reference here to the relevant biblical passage, but as the “Lament” became very widely read in Russia, it could have contributed to the spread of the notion of marriage between tsar and tsardom in the literate layers of society. In another, much longer narrative, written around 1617, Ivan Timofeev, one of the chroniclers of the Time of Troubles, entitled the section of his work on the 1610–1613 interregnum “On the Widowhood of the Muscovite realm” (O vdovstve Moskovskogo gosudarstva). He plainly stated: “Until the election and the recent accession to tsarist rule of Mikhail Fedorovich by the elevation of God … our land [zemlia] was like a kind of widow … since she was abandoned by her husband [iako vdova … izhe po muzhu ostaema].”156 Timofeev’s identification of the “Muscovite realm” (Moskovskoe gosudarstvo) and the “land” (zemlia) as a widow (vdova) is all the more interesting because the issue of gender is irrelevant in the case of gosudarstvo, which is a neuter noun in Russian, while zemlia is feminine! I think it cannot be a chronological coincidence that the following scene, which clearly expresses the distinct existence of the Russian Tsardom, occurred in the aftermath of the Time of Troubles. At one of the weddings of the new tsar Mikhail Romanov, either in 1624 or 1626, his bride wore a headdress (kika) with the names of the most important Russian towns on it.157 Thereby the

155 This and the following examples were very briefly mentioned by Brouwer, “The Bridegroom Who Did Not Come,” 56–57, but I quote them from the original sources and in my own translation. Pamiatniki literatury drevnei Rusi: XVII vek [Manuscripts of Old Russian literature: The seventeenth century] (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1988), 132. 156 Vremennik d′iaka Ivana Timofeeva [Chronicle of the secretary Ivan Timofeev] (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia M. A. Aleksandrova, 1907), 198. 157 Brouwer, “The Bridegroom Who Did Not Come,” 56.

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real bride physically embodied the allegorical vision of Russia as a woman and the bride of the tsar.158 While I do not share the view that “the seventeenth century started a fundamental transformation in thinking about state, society parallel to European absolutist policies,” and I also doubt that “the crucial step had been made enunciating a more secular vision of society and state,”159 I accept that even in church circles a view was developing that “empowered the ruler more explicitly than ever before,”160 and indeed, with more emphasis on secular duties. But “this vision” and these duties became more clearly visible only towards the end of the “decades of fermentation” (especially in the 1690s) in official documents, different kinds of panegyric sources and the field of iconography of power. Another important factor that influenced the dynastic- and Christ-centered perception was the mid-seventeenth-century conflict between Tsar Aleksei and patriarch Nikon between 1658 and 1666 over the leadership of the Russian Church, the outcome of which made the Russian Orthodox Church even more dependent on the tsar than ever before. The close cooperation of Aleksei and Nikon between 1652 and 1658 (in 1657–1658 they very often worked, ate, and prayed together)161 can be seen as a realization of the Byzantine idea(l) of “symphony,” which some historians call “political Orthodoxy.”162 Their cooperation culminated in the reform of the Russian Orthodox Church: between 1653 and 1657, mistakes in religious texts were corrected, and the rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church were adapted to be in line with those of the Greek Orthodox Church. The relationship between the tsar and the patriarch, however, deteriorated from 1658 onwards, leading to the self-exile of Nikon. Though Nikon did not resign, he did not perform his functions as patriarch either. Aleksei summoned a Russian Church Council in 1660 to solve the problem: it eventually deposed Nikon but the patriarch declared the decision null and void. After 1660 Nikon turned to the Western, Catholic idea of “two powers” and made use of the metaphors of “two swords” and “Sun and Moon” to elucidate more sharply the distinction between the lay and spiritual powers, and hence to defend the

158 It is interesting to note here that France in the late Middle Ages in festive parades was even represented/embodied by a living woman, a practice that came to an end under Henry II (1547–1559). 159 Kollmann, By Honour Bound, 221. 160 Ibid., 221–222. 161 Philip Longworth, Alexis: Tsar of All the Russias (London: Secker and Warburg, 1984), 124. 162 Nikolas Pissis, Russland in der politischen Vorstellungen der griechischen Kulturwelt 1645–1725 [Russia in the political imagination of the Greek cultural world], Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen, 2020, 258.

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freedom of the church from the interference of the tsar, although he did not conceive the abovementioned metaphors in a hierocratic interpretation: the patriarch, as the “image of Christ,” as Nikon put it, had only moral preeminence with regard to the tsar. In Nikon’s view “the priesthood was higher than the tsardom regarding its origins and operation,” but “functionally, that is, in the sphere that nowadays is the subject of ‘political teachings,’” both of these powers were not only equal but also “highly separated and isolated from each other,” so, he broke with the concept of symphony.163 His position even then was not a Russian edition of the Investiture Contest, as the conflict between him and the tsar “was not precoded,” that is, not based on theoretical convictions but personal motivations were the crucial ones instead.164 Consequently, Nikon’s views concerning his standing in relation to the the tsar were not consistent but changing under the pressure of circumstances.165 The “Nikon affair” was only resolved in 1666 with the Great Church Council of Moscow attended by two eastern patriarchs, the patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch. This council deposed Nikon but left his church reforms in force. One of the charges against Nikon was the undefined accusation that he had meddled in things beyond his concern, which is quite elusive and reflects well enough the undefined relations between emperor/tsar and patriarch in “political Orthodoxy.” In fact, we know that he generally wanted to loosen the dependence of the church on the tsar. The charges against him should be seen in the light of Crummey’s formulation: “Many of his arguments and examples do indeed come from classic Orthodox texts. Nevertheless, the vehemence with which he made his case stretched the elastic notion of ‘symphony’ beyond the breaking point.”166 And the winner in this struggle was no doubt the tsarist power.167 For the tsar’s power over the church was formulated in an unambiguous manner, unprecedented in previous ecclesiastical regulation. The wording of the 1666 council’s declaration sounds rather modern, in some ways it even prefigures Peter’s Spiritual Regulation (with the major difference that the office of the patriarch was abolished in 1721). 163 Sergei Filippov, Religioznaia bor′ba i krizis traditionalizma v Rossii XVII veka [Religious war and the crisis of traditionalism in seventeenth-century Russia] (Budapest: Russica Pannonica, 2007), 161. 164 Pissis, Russland, 258–259. 165 Filippov, Religioznaia bor′ba, 163. 166 Robert O. Crummey, “The Orthodox Church and the Schism,” in The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 1, ed. Maureen Perrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 635. Nikon’s view of the relationship between the church and the tsar was manifested, for instance, in his claim of complete freedom from lay interference in ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Ibid. 167 Filippov, Religioznaia bor′ba, 180.

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As God is all-encompassing in the heavens, on the earth in the manner of God are those who hold royal power [derzhashchii tsarskoi vlasti] in state affairs [v gosudartsvennykh delakh]. For the tsar has to be a perfect Lord and a sole lawgiver [edinogo zakonodavtsa] in all civil matters [vsekh del grazhdanskikh]. And the patriarch has to be obedient to the tsar as to one who is established in the highest dignity and the scourge of God. … Noone has such a freedom that would allow to resist the tsarist command [tsarskomu poveleniiu], for it has the force law [zakon bo est′].168 Yet, the pictorial representation, expressing best the increased importance of the tsar, and the outcome of the conflict between Aleksei and Nikon, Simon Ushakov’s icon “The Planting of the Tree of the Russian State” (1663), employs a visual language that confirms the dynasty- and Christ-centered perception of power. (Image 4.) The icon can be considered a visual representation of the contrast between past and present: the “symphony” characteristic of Moscow’s historical past on the one hand, and the present dominance of the tsar over the church on the other. This state of affairs had the result that salvation of Russia was inexorably and solely linked to the piety of the reigning tsar and his family. How are these messages expressed in the icon, and how is the dynasty- and Godcentered ideology reflected in its iconography? The icon clearly had an immediate political relevance when it was painted. The fact that Ushakov “specifically dated his work with reference to Aleksei’s reign” is not only crucial to the interpretation of the icon169 but was also quite unusual, even more so than Ushakov’s signature on the icon (in the seventeenth century icon painters in Russia tended to sign their works). In an icon, a special genre of visual expression, which otherwise has precisely the conception of timelessness or eternity as its essence,170 the indication of historical time is quite unusual. 168 Anton Vladimirovich Kartashev, Ocherki po istorii Russkoi tserkvi [Essays on the history of the Russian Church] (Moscow: Terra, 1992), vol. 2, 214. 169 “This icon was painted in the 7176th year from the creation of the world [1668] flowing under the sun in the time of the pious and Christ-loving sovereign Tsar and Great Prince Aleksei Mikhailovich, Autocrat (samoderzhets) of all Great and Little and White Russia.” Lindsey Hughes, “Simon Ushakov’s Icon, ‘The Tree of the Muscovite State,’” in Russische und Ukrainische Geschichte vom 16.–18. Jahrhundert [Russian and Ukrainian history from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century], ed. Robert O. Crummey, Holm Sundhaussen, and Ricarda Vulpius (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001), 227, fn. 12, 232. 170 For the conception of time in icon art see Clemena Antonova, Space, Time and Presence in the Icon (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).

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“The Planting of the Tree of the Russian State” (Panegyric to the Icon of Vladimir Mother of God).

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The fact that recent research dates the painting of the icon to 1663, earlier than the date indicated on it now (1668),171 could raise interesting questions. Was the date written on the icon only in 1668, or was it there already in 1663 and altered later? In 1663 Nikon’s status as patriarch was dubious, at least, but he was not yet officially deposed, while in 1668 there was an elected and acting patriarch already in Russia. Whatever the correct date is, the fact remains that neither Nikon, nor the acting patriarch in 1668 are depicted in the icon, which means that the figure of the patriarch was irrelevant, regardless the exact year of the making/dating of the icon. The conceptual framework of the icon rests upon a compositional structure featuring three layers of time and space.172 “On the bottom—the earth, the present, the material dimension—the earthly tsar with the tsaritsa and the children,” and the clearly recognizable tower-gates of the Kremlin; “on the top— the heaven, the future, the spiritual sphere—the heavenly king.”173 At the same time, the antithesis of these two spheres “is complemented with the idea of a link between them as represented by the tree,” thereby making a third zone.174 In this space-and-time triad the mediators are the deceased figures in the medallions, the representatives of Russian history.175 The idea of mediation, however, is most strongly represented by the “national” icon, the icon of Vladimir Mother of God, in the center: the status of the Mother of God as the most important intercessor for Russia is clearly expressed in the size of her image in the icon. At the same time, her image establishes the hidden link with the Kievan past. The tree dominating the composition is a modified tree of Jesse.176 Besides tsars and princes, it depicts various Russian saints representing different forms of sainthood. Christ is at the top of the icon, in accordance with princely genealogical trees modelled on the tree of Jesse, but he is set apart in a cloud (marking the boundary between heaven and earth). Christ holds a mantle in his right hand (probably a mantle of protection associated with Mary)177and a crown in his left. He is in the company of two angels, floating below him on each side.

171 Sirenov, Rodoslovnye dreva, 28–29. 172 V. G. Chubinskaia, “Ikona Simona Ushakova ‘Bogomater′ Vladimirskaia’” [Simon Ushakov’s Icon of Vladimir Mother of God], Trudy otdela drevnerusskoi literatury 38 (1985): 292. 173 Ibid. 174 Ibid. 175 Ibid. 176 Kämpfer, Das Russische Herrscherbild, 242. 177 Wil van den Bercken, “The Canonisation of Nicholas II in Iconographical Perspective: Political Themes in Russian Icons,” in Orthodox Christianity and Contemporary Europe, ed. Jonathan Sutton and Wil van den Bercken (Leuven: Peeters, 2003), 186.

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The tree, growing out of the Assumption Cathedral of the Kremlin (rather than from the loins of Jesse or the founders of dynasties, as in traditional iconography) is planted by the real founder of Moscow’s greatness, Grand Prince Ivan Kalita (1325–1341), and watered by metropolitan Peter, the first metropolitan who transferred the metropolitan see to Moscow in 1326 and died there the same year. On the left side178 of the tree are images of important metropolitans and two patriarchs, Iov (1589–1607) and Filaret (1619–1633), who symbolize the continuity from the Rurikids to the Romanovs (not only chronologically, as Filaret was the father of the first Romanov tsar, Mikhail). At the top of this side of the tree there are the figures of Tsarevich Dmitrii (died in 1591) on the very top, and (descending from left to the right) Tsar Fedor I (1584–1598), the last Rurikid tsar, and to his right most possibly the first Romanov on the throne, Tsar Mikhail.179 On the right side of the tree we find, also in a chronological order, one princesaint, Alexander Nevskii (also a dynastic and spiritual link), and six monastic saints (the most famous of them is Sergii Radonezhskii), followed by the top three figures who are the “holy fools” (iurodivye): Ivan the Big Hat (at the very top), then (descending from left to right) Basil the Blessed (the most famous of all the holy fools), and finally Maxim the Blessed. As for the figures depicted on the tree, “all the men on the left-hand branch were buried in the Kremlin … and thus intimately associated with the icon’s landscape,” while “most of the saints on the right were associated with the expansion of Moscow.”180 At the bottom, on the left side of the tree stands the reigning Tsar Aleksei— emblematically near the Savior’s Tower-Gate of the Kremlin and praying to Christ. It was this gate, “the most sacred of all the Kremlin entrances through which major processions of the cross” passed, which began their way from the Assumption Cathedral.181 The wife of the tsar and their two sons, Aleksei Alekseevich (the heir to the throne, presented publicly in 1667) and Fedor Alekseevich, are near the St. Nicholas’s Tower-Gate. It is an extraordinary phenomenon that living people, the reigning tsar and his family, are depicted in the sacred space of the icon, and they are even nimbed as saints are. Each of the figures in the icon (except Christ, the Mother of God, and Tsarevich Fedor) holds a scroll in their hand with an inscription on it. The

178 Description is given according to the viewer’s right and left. 179 Isolde Thyrêt, Between God and Tsar: Religious Symbolism and the Royal Women of Muscovite Russia (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), 71. 180 Hughes, “Simon Ushakov’s Icon, ‘The Tree of the Muscovite State,’” 232. 181 Ibid., 231.

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inscriptions call the plant invariably a “tree” or a “vine,” which is not unusual considering that the tree of Jesse was often (as here) depicted in the form of a vine. Grigorii Filimonov summarized the conception of Ushakov’s icon as follows: He wanted to depict the strength of Moscow in its historical development, which in his interpretation was nurtured by a special grace coming from above [Christ]. This was the very reason he needed the Assumption Cathedral with its founders [Ivan Kalita and metropolitan Peter—the latter was even buried in this church when only its walls were erected] and the blossoming tree growing out of it, and containing the Mother of God in its center, the saints of Moscow on its sides, and the walls of the Kremlin with the then reigning ruling house.182 This grace and protection began with Ivan Kalita and metropolitan Peter and now it is enjoyed by the Romanovs.183 The icon is unusually rich in inscriptions. Some of them are taken from the Bible, from the Psalms and Revelations; for the most part, however, the texts (the inscriptions on the medallions and on the scrolls held by the tsaritsa and her elder son) are written in the genre of the Akathistos hymn, with occasional adaptations of the original.184 The “Book of Degrees,” as I have shown elsewhere, served as an inspiration for the icon—let me just repeat here that the main theological premises set forth in “Book of Degrees,” such as the planting (of the trees) and watering, are present in the icon explicitly. Likewise, the icon scene also reflects the idea of symphony in the joint actions of Ivan Kalita and Metropolitan Peter. I would argue, however, that the symphony depicted in the icon is merely the symphony of the past, not of the present, and the aim of the icon was not to hide but rather to express the contrast between past and present. The most eloquent proof of this state of affairs is that the patriarch, as mentioned (Nikon, if the 1663 new dating is correct, or the new patriarch after Nikon’s deposition, if the icon was made in 1668) is not depicted in the icon! And it is also telling in my view that the crown in the

182 Grigorii Filimonov, “Simon Ushakov i sovremennaia emu epokha russkoi ikonopisi” [Simon Ushakov and his contemporary epoch of Russian icon painting], in Sbornik na 1873 god (Moscow: Obschchestvo drevnerusskogo iskusstva pri Moskovskom publichnom muzee, 1873), 38. 183 Ibid., 39. 184 Thyrêt, Between God and Tsar, 74–76, 212, n. 96, 105.

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hand of Christ is very similar to patriarch Nikon’s great crown—a fact Filimonov noted but without drawing any conclusion from it.185 In my view, the icon was a visual representation of the de facto situation that characterized the relations between the tsar and the church: the role of the patriarch (it is indifferent whether this was Nikon or not) was negligible. At the same time, the icon could have been a visual response to the challenge posed by Nikon’s theory of “two swords” claiming for himself an independent sphere of action: the right to govern the affairs of the church without the interference of the tsar. Besides the missing figure of the patriarch, there is further hidden evidence supporting my interpretation that the tsar’s role in the church changed considerably. The only living people depicted in the icon are the tsar himself and members of his family. Tsar Aleksei prays directly to Christ (“Save, Lord, your people and bless your heritage”), while his wife and his children, together with the deceased saints (among them even church hierarchs) represented on the tree, pray to the Mother of God.186 In my view, the enhanced role of the tsar is implied by the very words of his prayer, which make him appear to perform a priestly function! This assertion is based on the fact that the biblical words uttered by the tsar were part of the Orthodox liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, but in the liturgy they were said by the priest! Taking visual and textual (and liturgical) evidence together, the message is clear: salvation for Russia rests with the living pious tsar and his pious family, who are supported by the intercession of holy ancestors and Russian saints, and, above all, by the Mother of God. The prayers of saintly ancestors and saints are important but the role of any other living person, including even the patriarch, does not matter. The Nikon affair did not result in significant changes in the established principles of ideology, except for the fact that the dynasty’s role became even more marked at the expense of the church hierarchy. But most important for our purposes: the idea of an impersonal secular power over a given territory, the idea of the state, or the legalist idea of sovereignty were completely foreign to this thinking. The icon analysed here in passing, “The Planting of the Tree of the Russian State,” or, to use the more plausible alternative name also given to it by posterity, “Panegyric to the Icon of Vladimir Mother of God,” is one of the best illustrations of Rowland’s oft-quoted view on the issue of sovereignty in Muscovite thought, that in Muscovy “God was sovereign,” as the living tsar and Christ were depicted in a hierarchical manner. Stephen L. Baehr summarized the message of the icon as follows: 185 Filimonov, “Simon Ushakov i sovremennaia emu epokha russkoi ikonopisi,” 34. 186 Thyrêt, Between God and Tsar, 74–75.

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Ushakov places Christ and the Mother of God in approximately the same position in his “tree of state” that they would occupy in the typical Orthodox dome church: Christ at the top centre looks down as He usually does from the central cupola; the Mother of God is in the middle of the painting, symbolic of her role as intercessor between heaven and earth (as her midway position between ground and cupola symbolizes in church frescoes). The symbolism of the dome church (portraying heaven as descending to earth) is thus transferred, in effect, to the new secular state, which, like the church becomes a “paradise in this world”—an “icon” or “image” of heaven on earth.187 Although it is not fortunate to use the term “secular state” and refer to the “transfer” of religious symbolism, the rest of the interpretation is correct and highly useful. We should rather interpret the icon—as in case of the marriage of the tsar to the tsardom—as the application of the imagery described by Baehr to express the idea of Russia as a “Godly community.” Indeed, icon- theology was the “key to political legitimacy” in Orthodox Christian society.188 The icon was the heart and center of thought on ruling power in Byzantium,189 and it was equally true in Muscovite Russia. It is not possible to understand the Muscovite ideology of power without the idea of the tsar as the “image,” or, rather, “icon of God” (obraz bozhii)—the use of the word “icon” instead of “image” is more plausible because of the religious connotation of the indigenous Russian term, obraz, the synonym of the Greek eikon (the Russian version of which was ikona), as for today’s ears, the religious aspect is lost in case of the word “image.” The idea that the tsar was the icon of God on earth was vital in panegyric and patriotic literature “from the late seventeenth century throughout the early nineteenth century”—an eloquent example is Simeon Polotskii’s directly calling Tsar Aleksei an “icon of God,” using in his address not second-person plural (vy) but singular (ty): Bozhii ty obraz, tsariu Aleksie190 (“You191 are the icon of God, Tsar Aleksei”).

187 Baehr, Paradise Myth in Eighteenth-Century Russia, 26. The same idea is conveyed by the “Book of Degrees.” 188 Susan Buck-Morss, “Visual Empire,” Diacritics 37, nos. 2–3 (2007): 180. 189 Ibid., 178. 190 Baehr, The Paradise Myth in Eighteenth-Century Russia, 27. 191 While English language does not differentiate between second-person singular and plural “you,” Russian has ty and vy, where the latter (vy), at the same time, also serves as a polite way of addressing someone.

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The idea of the tsar as the “icon of God” in Muscovite Russia was even reinforced by the phrase referring to the tsar as the “living icon of God.” It might well be that this usage influenced the appearance of icons, from the midsixteenth century on, in which living tsars were depicted. This phenomenon would become more common in the seventeenth century when not just living tsars but also living members of the ruling dynasty were represented in icons. Its aim was of the sacralization of the person of the tsar as well as his dynasty192— creating thereby the complete blurring of distinctions such as human and divine, temporal and eternal. And the central role in this blurring, or linking of heaven and earth was played by the Mother of God as intercessor,193 as in Ushakov’s icon. There can be no doubt that “conventional wisdom” even in Western Christendom “linked the power of the ruler to the will of God. But Muscovite political thought remained God-dependent in a very real sense, since the divinity was imagined to play a crucial and continuing role in Russian politics.”194 However, from the 1660s new devices were employed to express that “God was the sovereign in Russia.” It is true that “sovereignty is a transcendental category”195 (at least as to its origins), but equally important is the laconic statement of Carl Schmitt, that “all significant concepts of modern theory of state are secularized theological concepts.”196 Yet, even in the West, much more characteristic of the age was the idea of sovereignty by divine right both in written and visual sources than Hobbes’s secular derivation of sovereignty, clearly expressed in the frontispiece to the Leviathan, which had nothing transcendental in it, as mentioned before. The following comparison is suggestive, placing similarities and differences on a balance between the West and Muscovy if symbolism is included into the analysis of sovereignty. In this regard it is worth quoting again (now in full) Jens Bartelson on the role of symbolism in the development of the idea of sovereignty: While notions of supreme authority originated in the myths of divine omnipotence, symbols of sovereignty were indispensable for representing royal authority during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, until sovereignty resurfaces as a core 192 Oleg Tarasov, Icon and Devotion. Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 282–284. 193 Buck-Morss, “Visual Empire,” 180. 194 Rowland, “Muscovy,” 278. 195 Buck-Morss, “Visual Empire,” 172. 196 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 36.

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assumption of legal and political science during the twentieth century.197 Bartelson does not give an example, but these symbols were highly important for Hobbes’s visual strategies too: not just the sword and the bishop’s staff symbolizing sovereignty in temporal and spiritual matters, but also the closed, socalled imperial crown on the head of the bearer of sovereignty. For, as I have noted, it was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that European monarchs had a closed, that is, imperial type of crown made for themselves, clearly denying thereby that this imagery was the privilege of the Holy Roman emperor. A striking symbolic representation of the idea of sovereignty, a representation characteristic of the age believing in divine right, which unites image and text, is the emblem entitled, “To Kings both Sword and Mace pertaine; And these they do not bear in vaine” (Image 5) from the emblem book of George Wither (1635), which gives the following explanation: When thou behold’st that on a Day of State, The King (or some inferior Magistrate) Walke forth in publicke and the royall Mace, The Sword or Scepter borne before his face. … These vulgar Emblems are significant, And that authority, which, Princes grant To Bodies-Politick, was heretofore, Declared, by those Ensignes which they bore. The bruzin Mace (although, perhaps, with us It be not in these times restrained, thus) That branch of Royall-power did signifie, Which doth by Fines or losse of liberty Correct offenders. By the Sword they meant, That larger branch of pow’r, to represent, Which takes the Malefactors life away. … Who get this pow’r … thou still honour them. Lest thou, in those the pow’r of God contemne. If not for theirs, yet for thy Sov’raignes cause, Whom these do personne; Or for the Lawes.…198 197 Bartelson, Sovereignty, 15. 198 George Wither, A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (London: Henry Taunton, 1635), 137. Italics are according to the original text.

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George Wither, A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (London: Henry Taunton, 1635), 137. Pennsylvania State University. Special Collections Library. The file is from Creative Commons, no copyright.

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The image depicts an arm stretching out from a cloud (symbol of God-given power), holding a scepter in upright position with an armored fist on the top of the scepter holding a sword pointing in the direction of the cloud. The inscription in a circle around the image is Non sine causa, which is a fragment on Godgiven power from Romans 13:4. In this image and text we have the essentials of divine right sovereignty: the state, which is conceived as a body politic, derives its authority through the prince, who is the sovereign, and whose authority, represented by the sword and mace (symbolizing lawmaking), is given to him by God, the hidden source of sovereignty. If we compare this terminology with Joseph of Volokolamsk’s admonitions, or Ushakov’s icon, then the difference between Muscovite and contemporary Western ideology of power is crucial— an issue to which I will return later comparing the divine right of kings and divine right of tsars. However, in the Muscovy of the 1660s there existed expositions of the ruler’s power uniting image and text other than Ushakov’s icon, which had things in common with Western imagery of sovereignty relying on emblem symbolism. One is Simeon Polotskii’s already mentioned work, the “Russian Eagle,” written, as said before, for the presentation of the heir on September 1, 1667, while the other is the description of the new great seal of Tsar Aleksei from the end of the year 1667, which was called a “state seal” (gosudarstvennaia pechat′). Polotskii’s work, although known most probably just in the innermost court circles as it was not printed and has come down to us only in one original ornamented copy and a non-decorated synodal copy, represents a new direction regarding the expositions of ruling power. However, it was novel not in the sense that it significantly differed in content from the mainstream clerical thought on power but rather in genre, the tools Polotskii used to express his view on tsarist authority. In the “Russian Eagle,” a work enjoying official status, he used pagan symbolism both in text and image (the Zodiac), and he was the first to employ emblematics in Russia for legitimating rulership.199 In fact, the “Russian Eagle,” taken as a whole, can be conceived as broadly corresponding to the tripartite criteria of the classical emblem structure that Polotskii knew well enough. The work contains a drawing (image), which, in its center, depicts a doubleheaded eagle wearing three Western-type closed crowns, two of which are placed on the heads of the eagle and the third one is placed a little higher, between them. The eagle is pictured on the background of the sun, which radiates forty-eight sunbeams, and in each sunbeam there is a name of a virtue. Above the image the 199 Anthony Hippisley, “The Emblem in the Writings of Simeon Polockij,” The Slavic and East European Journal 14, no. 2 (1971): 167–183.

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following inscription (motto) can be read, which is a quotation from the Bible: “He has placed his dwelling in the sun.”200 The image and motto together make a device, but the rest of the writing (its prosaic texts, such as the “Encomion,” as well as the verses) can be interpreted as the explanation (subscription) to the image and the motto, hence the work as a whole can be interpreted as an emblem. What makes the image even more interesting is not just the fact that the face of the mounted lancer (wearing the Monomakh crown) on the crest of the twoheaded eagle is the recognizable countenance of the reigning Tsar, Aleksei, but also that the eagle holds a scepter and a sword in its claws as symbols of power. In this latter respect, it is tempting to draw a parallel with Wither’s emblem, yet, there is no explanation of the symbolism of the scepter and the sword, while the God-given power of the tsar with its traditional trappings is exposed at length, alongside the inclusion of pagan elements into the eulogy. The synodal (nondecorated) copy of the “Russian Eagle,” unlike the decorated one, contains a dedication, which encapsulates the message, and the main subjects of symbolism around which the work is constructed.201 Polotskii, as mentioned previously, hailed tsar Aleksei and his son, comparing both of them to an eagle and the sun. He called the heir to the throne “a newly appeared little sun,” and in the dedication he wrote that the heir “shines with the teaching of the spiritual light of the little sun of Nazareth.”202 Furthermore, the heir is described as “the outgrowth of the most glorious tree,” “a most fertile branch” who is the “defender of the church and brings sweet fruits of virtues for the tsardom,” which gives a good reason to rejoice “for all the Orthodoxly Russian nation” (narod pravoslavno rossiiskii).203 Polotskii states that his contribution to the celebration of the special day of the heir’s presentation lays in describing how “nowadays the Russian Eagle is radiating the beams of virtues in the sun,” an accomplishment that is even greater than the merits of Apollo, and “what spiritual voyage in the zodiac” (zodii dukhovnyi put′) the heir should take.204

200 Psalms 18(19):4. Hippisley remarks that it was due to a mistranslation in the Vulgate and the Church Slavonic Bible as well that this line could be used for this purpose, namely, to link it to the Russian heraldic eagle. Hippisley, “The Emblem in the Writings of Simeon Polockij,” 178. 201 Polotskii, Orel Rossiiskii, IV–V. 202 Ibid., XXV. 203 Ibid., XXVI. 204 Ibid., XXVI–XXVII.

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In accordance with this dedication Polotskii expounded in the “Encomion” the ruler’s duties with the help of the following metaphor, “kings [tsarie] are similar to the radiant sun.” Just as it is the natural task of the sun to bring forth all kinds of fruits, illuminating the universe with its light-bringing rays, so it is the duty of the person of Tsarist rank [Tsrska sanovne odolzhenie litsa], who illuminates all those around him in the radiance of his renown, characterized by good deeds to serve as an excellent model [obrazno] of honorable human behavior, inspiring philanthropy, good order, and virtuous citizenry [grazhdanstva]. For it is usual that those being led look up to their leaders in doing things: and thus they become like them. … The citizens usually tend to be like the[ir] leaders. It is characteristic of the Sun, wherever it may be, to create daylight and dispel the darkness of night. Similarly, the majesty of those who hold the scepter [velichestvu Skipetroderzhtsev] with their right hand, assisted by the daylight of their virtues [svetom dobrodetelei] and the sunbeams of their glory, shall everywhere drive out all need and sorrow from the governed.205 He then goes on stating that although such is the task of the tsars/kings, still there are rulers who are tsars/kings only in name, as they do not deserve this title because of their way of governing. They are the ones who outwardly appear in crowns decorated with gold and moulded from many valuable coins, but inside they are slaves of things, also slaves of their own passions, and consequently [slaves] of the Prince of Darkness of this world, bound with eternal chains: Others come to the same end because they are faithless barbarians [varvarskogo bezveriia]; others because of their heresy abominable to God or their apostasy [bgomerskoe eretichestva ili otstupnichetsva]; or finally because of their foul malicious way of life. You yourself, like a Phoenix, indeed, like the Sun in the universe, are the only one of this kind, a faithful [blagovernyi], God-protected, pious [blagochestivyi] Master Tsar and Grand

205 Ibid., 7.

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Prince, Aleksei Mikhailovich, Autocrat of All Great, Little and White Russia. For in words and deeds, both inwardly and outwardly, you are a righteous tsar [prvdnyi tsar′], a pious tsar, a tsar whom the King of All Time has chosen and anointed [izbrannyi i pomazannyi] and put on the glorious Orthodox Russian throne [na pravoslavnom Rossiiskom prestole]. A tsar whom God’s right hand has crowned with a crown more worthy than [a crown of] stones. A tsar who has been dignified with a scepter by the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. You are tsar by virtue of the word, as everyone calls you so. You are tsar by your deeds, as every deed of yours is worthy of a tsar, which shows that God himself has selected you as tsar [tebia tsaria ot Boga izbrana] and prepared you to hold the scepter from the moment of your creation. Every deed of yours is a perfect deed, every word of yours is a word of divine wisdom [premudro]: whatever you do is a blessing, and whatever you say is wise. You are tsar outwardly… as you wear tsarist robes. … You are tsar inwardly as you exercise the rule entrusted to you by God in a way worthy of a ruler [ot Boga tvoemu vruchennym pravleniiu gosudarski tsarstvueshi] over many peoples besides your own [Russians], and command as an autocrat [samoderzhavno povelevaeshi]:206 likewise, within yourself, you rule over your passions and control them: indeed, this is the true essence of rulership [istinneishee tsarstvovanie].207 The use of the novel term of grazhdanstvo (which is translated invariably by different authors as “society,”208 or “polity,” or “state,”209of which only the first one seems to be appropriate), however, did not change the traditional church view on power. The emphasis on God-given power, the cultivation of royal virtues, the comparison of the ruler with the Sun, the ruler as the image and likeness of God and the primary importance of religious duties were all part of traditional Muscovite ideology: tsar and God were almost the same. Apart from the “Russian Eagle,” Polotskii dealt with the issue of rulership in his two poems, Grazhdanstvo and Nachal′nik (“Leader”), and Hamburg calls these two poems the “crucial texts” of Polotskii’s “presentation of secular

206 Here samoderzhavno clearly has an ethico-religious meaning! 207 Polotskii, Orel Rossiiskii, 8–9. 208 Kollmann, By Honour Bound, 61. 209 Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 197.

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authority.”210 I agree that they do not differ either significantly from the mainstream of Muscovite thought—Polotskii calls the ruler the shepherd of his flock whose main duty is “to defend them from wolves”211—and I think this statement is true of Polotskii’s thought in general.212 “Although many historians tried to interpret the shift from an Eastern to a Western orientation in terms of a transition from religious to secular thinking, the shift was in fact largely (although not exclusively) a transformation within the religious sphere.”213 What was really a novel element in Polotskii’s “Russian Eagle,” I think, lies in the trend emphasized by Ernest Zitser, stating that from the mid-seventeenth century the legitimacy of tsarist power was increasingly using the allegorical language of the Baroque, a “highly charged figurative language.”214 This general statement also applies to the state seal of 1667 because of its emblematic character. The tsarist ukaz of December 14 is entitled: “On the tsarist title and on the state seal” (O titule tsarskom i o gosudarstvennoi pechati).215 The official explanation of this seal, called a coat of arms (gerb) in the explanatory text, decodes the symbolism of the seal precisely in relation to the elements of the following official title of the ruler written on the rim of the seal216: By the grace of God, we, grand master, tsar, and grand prince, Aleksei Mikhailovich, autocrat of Great and Little and White Russia [Velikiia i Malyia i Belyia Rossii], and also the heir [naslednik) as well as the master and possessor [gosudar′ i obladatel′] of many states [mnogikh gosudarstv], and Eastern [Vostochnykh] and Western [Zapadnykh] and Northern [Severnykh] lands of the fathers and forefathers.217

210 Ibid. 211 Ibid. 212 Apart from the abovementioned novel elements there was much in common between Polotskii’s ideas on rulership and the Josephite perception of power. This view is shared by Hamburg, ibid., 199. 213 Ibid., 201. 214 Ernest Zitser, The Transfigured Kingdom: Sacred Parody and Chrismatic Authority at the Court of Peter the Great (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 19. 215 Pchelov, Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gerb, 41. The image of the seal is contained in the Illustrations of Pchelov’s book (image 9). 216 Ibid., 42. 217 Ibid.

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The official explanation of the symbolism of the seal, enacted in the decree of 14 December 1667, states: The two-headed eagle is the state coat of arms [gerb derzhavnyi] of the Grand Master, Tsar, and Grand Prince, Aleksei Mikhailovich, Autocrat of Great and Little and White Russia [Velikiia i Malyia i Belyia Rossii], His Tsarist Majesty of the Russian Tsardom [Ego Tsarskogo Velichestva Rossiiskogo Tsarstviia], on which there are three crowns depicted, signifying the three great famous tsardoms of Kazan′, Astrakhan′, and Siberia, which are submitted to the God-preserved command and highest power [vysochaishei derzhave] of the most merciful Master, His Tsarist Majesty. On the right side of the eagle there are three towns, in accordance with the description of the title, [representations] of Great and Little and White Russia,218 on the left side of the eagle the three towns with their inscriptions represent [obrazuiut] the Eastern and Western and the Northern [lands of the title];219 under the eagle is the symbol [znak] of fathers and forefathers;220 on the crest the representation of the heir [izobrazhenie naslednika], in the claws the scepter and the apple [that is, the orb], too, display the most merciful Master, His Tsarist Majesty, Autocrat and Possessor [samoderzhtsa i obladatelia].221 Thus, the title, the formula “By the grace of God,” and the reference to the ruler as the “heir” of the territories “of fathers and forefathers” expressed the traditional God- and dynasty-centered perception of power, and the principle of descent (ancestors) is represented even visually by the mimic (dynastic) tree and the figures of people on its two sides. However, the identification of the figure of the mounted lancer on the crest might be ambiguous if we compare the title and the explanation: while in the title the reigning tsar is explicitly identified 218 They are mimic representations of towns (in which prominence is given to churches with crosses on the top) differing from each other and accompanied by the letters V. M. B. respectively, which are the abbreviations of the first letters of the territories indicated in the title: Velikiia, Malyia, Belyia [Rossii]. 219 In the same manner, non-identical mimic representations of towns are also accompanied by abbreviations (V. Z. S.), the first letters of the words Vostochnykh, Zapadnykh, Severnykh (zemel′). 220 A mimic tree, ending in the quill of the double-headed eagle; on the two sides of the tree there are mimic figures of people. 221 Russian original in Pchelov, Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gerb, 41–42.

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as the heir of the ancestors, in the explanation the mounted lancer refers not to the reigning tsar but to the heir of the reigning tsar—an impression implied by the last sentence of the explanation, which states that the scepter and the sword display the ruler himself. Taking account the closeness in time between the presentation of the “Russian Eagle” and the creation of the new state seal, this interpretation has certain credit. However, in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries the great majority of interpretations identified the mounted lancer with the ruler, an identification nurtured by the fact that the lancer was often depicted with a crown on his head.222 The phrase “Eastern [Vostochnykh] and Northern [Severnykh] lands” deserves a short analysis too. For the reference to the tsar as “Eastern tsar” (which “in solemn addressing almost turned into a title formula”) or calling him “tsar/ruler of Eastern and Northern countries/lands” served to express the high esteem of the Muscovite ruler in the eyes of the Eastern and Southern Orthodox Slavic peoples.223 But the phrase “Eastern and Northern countries” is also encountered in the correspondence of Muscovite rulers with the Ottomans, which might have appeared under Serbian influence.224 The use of the epithet “Eastern tsar” was widespread during the reign of Tsar Mikhail and Aleksei among the Ukrainian clergy and with Bogdan Khmel’nitskii.225 The phrase “Eastern and Northern countries” sometimes appeared together with another epithet, “white tsar”: the monks of the Hilandar Monastery Mount of Athos addressed Ivan IV as the “White tsar of Eastern and Northern countries.”226 This conveyed not only the Orthodoxy of Ivan but also his highest, independent standing in the Orthodox World.227 The “Eastern tsar” and the “tsar/ruler of Eastern and Northern countries/lands” therefore implied the special status of the Muscovite ruler in the Orthodox world, and eventually the phrase “Eastern and Northern lands” found its way into Muscovite state symbolism. Making a conclusion concerning the seal, taking into account its iconographic explanation, it can be argued that the seal shows a Janus-faced character. The content is the traditional Muscovite God- and dynasty-centered perception of

222 Magdolna Ágoston, Velikoknazheskaia pechati 1497 g. [The grand princely seal of the year 1497] (Moscow: Drevlekhranilishche, 2005), 318–322. 223 Trepavlov, “Belyi tsar′,” 51. 224 Ibid., 52. 225 Ibid., 51. 226 Ibid. 227 As Trepavlov has shown, this was the perception of the common folk in Russia too, as belyi tsar′ and pravoslavnyi tsar′ were often used as synonyms in Russian historical songs of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Ibid., 55.

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power (indeed, except for the missing reference to God’s will, it is similar to the laconic statements uttered by Ivan III or Ivan IV), to which the ruler’s special standing in Orthodoxy can be added. This content, nevertheless, is expressed in a new genre (emblematics). Furthermore, the identification of the seal as a “state seal,” the mentioning of the tsar’s “highest power” and the sense of an increasing territory-orientedness, accompanied with the reference to the scepter and the orb as the representations of the tsar, at the same time can be taken as clear signs of a change towards a more impersonal notion of power. Evgenii Pchelov stated plainly: “In the description there prevails a secular, power-based interpretation.”228 I second his opinion that the 1667 seal represented “the statist-political idea in a more significant manner” (or rather a shift towards this idea) than the previous seals,229 especially if it is compared to Ivan IV’s seals, which were to convey primarily the message of the tsar’s divine mission. The shift towards an impersonal direction is most visible in the appearance of the scepter and the orb (in the claws of the two-headed eagle) for the first time in the seal of a Muscovite ruler. These regalia, adopted as the imitation of Western Christian royal insignia under Boris Godunov, had long been in use by the first Romanovs—although not as fixed objects, as both Mikhail and Aleksei had a scepter and an orb made for themselves—but only in 1667 they appeared in a seal. By then these regalia had long been symbols of sovereignty in Western iconography, together with the closed crown. The infiltration of some Western terms and ideas in the writings of some authors, ecclesiastical and secular alike, in the 1660s and the 1670s is beyond doubt, yet, to claim, as George Weickhardt did, that authors like Simeon Polotskii, or Grigorii Kotoshikhin, had some political ideas in common with Hobbes or Locke (“shared a common ground” with them), and argue that Polotskii was not an apologist of divine right is a complete misunderstanding of their thought on power, and distorts their interpretation.230 Rather, the case was as Paul Bushkovitch formulated in the following manner: Beginning in the later years of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, Russian culture acquired some new themes and new vocabulary. In a modest way, it also took on some new conceptions of monarch

228 Pchelov, Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gerb, 41. 229 Ibid. 230 George G. Weickhardt, “Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Russia,” Russian History 21, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 336–337.

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and even of monarchy. The innovations came overwhelmingly to and through the court of the tsar and élite of the Church.231 A good case in point is the Vasiliologion (“A sermon on kings/monarchs”) written by the Moldavian exile, Nikolai Spafarii, at the Muscovite court, which was presented to the tsar in September 1674. It may well be that the timing was not accidental, as the presentation of Tsarevich Fedor took place on September 1, 1674, made necessary by the death of Tsarevich Aleksei in 1670. If this hypothesis is valid, then we can draw a parallel between the 1667 and the 1674 presentations: namely, that on both occasions a writing on rulership was a kind of educational gift to the heir presumptive, a conjunction confirmed by the content of the Vasiliologion. This work contained eighteen short monarchical biographies with a didactic purpose.232 But what is of primary importance for us here is the introduction presenting the nature of a ruler’s duties: “Spafarii’s work was distinct from the traditional views of monarchs prevailing in Russia for its new attitude to the religious element.”233 Attributing what follows here to Plato, Spafarii wrote: The king [tsar′] is the image of God [obraz Bozhii] on earth, and as his lieutenant [namestnik] he punishes the wicked but to the good he does in their favour. For what is the greatest thing among the men, for the one who is to rule many, than to make laws and rules [zakony i ustavy uzakoniti], move the sea, the land, the rivers, peace and war?234 While endorsing monarchy as the best form of government, in the introduction Spafarii “barely mentions correct religious faith,” rather emphasizes the “utility of the people” (narodnopolezno) as the essence of the wise rule of kings.235 These phenomena represented, in my view, differences in kind and not in nature in Muscovite ideology (which was rather stable although not static at all), and above all, these ideas were formulated by individuals who did not at all represent the mainstream of thought. In other words, they were not representative

231 Paul Bushkovitch, “The Vasiliologion of Nikolai Spafarii Milescu,” Russian History 36, no. 1 (2009): 1. 232 Ibid., 4. 233 Ibid. 234 Ibid. 235 Ibid., 5–6.

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thinkers of the 1660s and the 1670s but exceptional figures of the tsarist court (Polotskii, Spafarii), belonging to the “decades of fermentation.” As for Muscovite church circles, the most important change in the ideology of power in the 1680s, besides the shifting emphasis from the religious towards the worldly duties of rulership, was the even more apparent shift of emphasis from the dynasty in general to the person of the ruler.236 These two phenomena were, of course, not unrelated, and surfaced in the issues of suitability to the throne: not only concerning the choice within the male line of the Romanovs in 1682,237 but also in the possibility of female rule under the regency of Sophia. The “language and symbols” of power were used more “aggressively” by those who supported Sophia’s aspirations, making use of both traditional and new genres.238 There was an upsurge in panegyric literature, on the one hand, and a corresponding clear iconographic strategy on the other, first to enhance Sophia’s role in the government as a regent, and eventually to build up Sophia’s legitimacy as a ruler on her own right.239 The tools included the manipulation of Orthodox theology and iconography to this end, as well as the use of Western imagery of female allegorical personifications of religious and non-religious virtues.240 Both panegyrics and visual sources elaborated on and made use of the meaning of Sophia’s name, as “Sophia” means “divine wisdom” in Greek.241 As a consequence, Icons of Divine Wisdom (Premudrost′) became widespread, making allusion to Sophia as regent,242 as Divine Wisdom is represented in icons as a crowned woman with wings sitting on a throne. Furthermore, the icons of Sophia’s patron saint (St. Sophia) were also used to enhance her position.243 The task of those who supported Sophia was to replace the so-called male gendered “Christo-centric” iconography (and rituals) of rulership pertaining to the tsar with the female-gendered iconography of divine wisdom, whose mediator or even earthly personification Sophia was,244 presenting her, at the beginning of

236 Kollmann, By Honour Bound, 220. 237 See this problem later in details where succession to the throne is discussed. 238 Kollmann, By Honour Bound, 219. 239 Hughes, Sophia, 165–170. Aleksei Petrovich Bogdanov, Moskovskaia publitsistika poslednei chetverti xvii veka [Socio-political publications in Muscovy of the last quarter of the seventeenth century] (Moscow: Institut Istorii RAN, 2001), 210–241, 253–260, 317–318. 240 Kollmann, By Honour Bound, 220. 241 Hughes, Sophia, 168, Bogdanov, Moskovskaia publitsistika, 317–318, 237–239. 242 Elizabeth Kristofovich Zelensky, “‘Sophia the Wisdom of God’: The Function of Religious Imagery during the Regency of Sofiia Alekseevna of Muscovy,” in Women and Sovereignty, ed. Louise Olga Fradenburg (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), 200–201. 243 Hughes, Sophia, 146. 244 Zelensky, “‘Sophia the Wisdom of God,’” 192.

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her regency, as the key to the stability of the rule of the two tsars, but eventually elevating her to the status of the tsars themselves, that is, to legitimate her as a ruler on her own right.245 A clear proof of this latter trend was the already mentioned “coronation portrait” of Sophia and the engravings modelled on that. Probably this was the first clear attempt to link visually the title samoderzhets, in its female form, samoderzhitsa, to the symbols of sovereignty (as she was depicted with scepter, orb, and crown) used in the West. However, the venture to buttress Sophia’s claim as a ruler in her own right failed. It did so, on the one hand, because the replacement of the male gendered “Christo-centric” iconography of rulership with the female-gendered iconography of divine wisdom was understandable just to a few people even at the court, and its means were cumbersome.246 On the other hand, female rulership in its own right went against the traditional role of royal women in Muscovite Russia, a position that Elizabeth Zelensky called “liminality,”247 that is, a so-called threshold position. This threshold position was reconcilable with the idea that royal woman were spiritual helpers and intercessors of tsars to gain God’s favor for them, but excluded female rulership in its own right.248 What Sophia and her circle proved unable to accomplish—to eliminate this threshold position and put a woman on the throne—would pose no problem for Peter, who was succeeded by his second wife Catherine in 1725, despite the fact that Catherine, unlike Sophia, was not even of royal blood as he came from a peasant family, and, on top of that, she was illiterate. In the conclusion to this chapter, I can state: whereas around 1700 the analysis of the rights of the sovereign state stood in the center of Western political thought, the concepts of state and sovereignty in the sense understood in the West were not part of Muscovite thinking on power, which still conceived power in highly personal terms. And, as Paul Bushkovitch remarked, “the moral personality of the ruler” remained the dominant theme,249 either in its traditional, male-gendered and Christ-centered expositions, or in the attempt to replace it with a female-gendered representation of earthly and theological virtues for Sophia, in which the “wisdom theme” dominated. Lindsey Hughes, drawing the conclusion on the latter issue wrote: “Classical references all but disappear, whilst religious imagery firmly re-establishes itself, even though biblical 245 Hughes, Sophia, 168–169. 246 Gary Marker, Imperial Saint. The Cult of St. Catherine and the Dawn of Female Rule in Russia (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), 13. 247 Zelensky, “‘Sophia the Wisdom of God,’” 194. 248 Thyrêt, Between God and Tsar, 169. 249 Bushkovitch, Peter the Great, 441.

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references are interpreted and incorporated in varied and ingenious ways.”250 And she added that, for the most part, “the imagery summoned up in praise of Sophia had a biblical derivation.”251 This was the case, regardless that gosudarstvo was in use for more than two hundred years, and despite its more frequent appearance in official sources as a reference to legitimating government action as the seventeenth century was coming to an end.

250 Hughes, Sophia, 168. 251 Ibid.

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CHAPTER 9

The Problem of Samoderzhavie

9.1. Russian Autocracy in Historical Retrospective, and the Autocracy-Absolutism Paradigm In the previous pages, especially regarding the concept of tselost′ gosudarstva (integrity of state) the term “autocracy” was often used as the translation of the Russian word samoderzhavie or samoderzhavstvo, both being the derivatives of samoderzhets, which was the most important title of the Russian rulers from Peter the Great on—the one referring to the scope of the Russian emperor’s power. In 1721 Feofan Prokopovich made the following statement on ruling power in his Spiritual Regulation in a general manner: “The power of monarchs is autocratic [power] [Monarkhov vlast est′ samoderzhavnaia], to which obedience, out of conscience, God himself commands.”1 Although he did not specifically mention the Russian ruler here, the most important titles of Russian rulers from 1721 were imperator and samoderzhets. Gavriil Buzhinskii, an important intellectual figure of the Petrine era, in the dedication of his translation of Pufendorf ’s “Introduction to the History of Principal Kingdoms and States of Europe” to Peter, addressed the tsar as the “Most illustrious and invincible autocrat and emperor” (avtokrator i imperator), using the transliterated Greek form. The first appearance of the term samoderzhets in Russia—a mirror translation of the title of the Byzantine emperor, the autokrator meaning “self-ruler”—is dated from the mid-fifteenth century, when after the fall of Byzantium in 1453 1 Dukhovnyi Reglament Vsepresvetleishago, Derzhavneishago gosudaria Petra Pervago, Imperatora i Samoderzhtsa Vserossiiskago [Spiritual regulation of the most illustrious most mighty ruler, Peter the First, emperor and autocrat of all Russia] (Moscow: Sinodal′naia tipografiia, 1904), 14.

The Problem of Samoderzhavie

the Russian Church began to use it sporadically for the Grand Prince of Moscow, similarly to the title tsar′, as the Grand Prince of Muscovy increasingly came to be seen as the successor to the position formerly held by Byzantine emperor. The title, however, did not become a standard part of the titulature of Russian rulers before the seventeenth century, and it was to have a legal character only towards the end of Peter’s reign, as we shall see. Prior to the early eighteenth century samoderzhets did not have a meaning that we could interpret in a constitutionalist framework, and its application differed “at different periods of Russian history.”2 Therefore, similarly to the term gosudarstvo, samoderzhets requires a serial contextual analysis. Regarding the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, Alexander Filiushkin and Charles Halperin have made new significant contributions to this old topic, and here I merely present a short summary of their research. The following statements of Halperin eloquently present the nature of the problem concerning samoderzhets: “Like most Muscovite political concepts, the term was multivalent. How many meanings were attached to it remains an open question”; and he added that “in some cases the meaning attached to the term remains unclear and definitions can only be inferred from context.”3 He identified three main meanings of the term in the sixteenth century, that of the “independent ruler, pious ruler, and unlimited ruler.”4 The categorization of these aspects is most useful, as they will help us understand the problem of samoderzhets in later periods of Russian history, from the early eighteenth century on. For I claim that it was from that time that these three meanings of the term were clearly fused into one, and samoderzhets came to mean a divinely selected ruler (regardless of his being pious or impious), independent of any external authorities, whose power was unlimited in internal affairs both legally and institutionally. This meaning, as we shall see, can be inferred from the main political tract of the Petrine era written by Prokopovich. No doubt, the Westernization of Russian ideology of power was vital to this fusion of the two meanings, influenced by the appearance of the Russian perception of sovereignty, in the sense of a highest and independent power both externally and internally, although one that was legally unlimited. Let us proceed not chronologically, beginning not with the Muscovite period, but retrospectively, taking the nineteenth century as a point of departure when the meaning of samoderzhets became more apprehensible, and was interpreted

2 Hughes, Sophia, 5. 3 Charles J. Halperin, “Ivan IV as Autocrat (Samoderzhets),” Cahiers du Monde Russe 55, nos. 3–4 (2014): 198. 4 Ibid.

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clearly from a European constitutionalist perspective. In the nineteenth century, when the differences between the Russian political system and the emerging constitutional monarchies of Europe became even more visible than before, the word samoderzhets in Europe was translated as autocrat, and the political system that the Russians called samoderzhavie was termed autocracy.5 This was the very time in Russia when the specific nature of the Russian political system was expounded in a way that emphasized the lack of division of powers as well as the lack of legal limitations on ruling power. This approach, of course, was in line both with the Russian and Western approaches to political systems—in the wake of the French Revolution it was important to show what the peculiarity of the Russian political system was with regard to the West. While the constitutionalist elements (division of powers and rule of law) inevitably came to the fore in such a comparison for conservative Russian authors (denying these limitations) and for scholars of Russian state law as well, yet, samoderzhavie could not be conceived in Russia simply by referring to the lack of the above principles of constitutionalism. As Mitic rightly remarks (and we could already see this perception before in Karamzin’s wording), samoderzhavie for conservative Russian intellectuals was “a specific product of Russian history, Christian orthodox faith and ‘national spirit’ that makes it almost impossible to be translated in the Western law and political terminology.”6 Relying on the views of some pre1917 Russian conservative thinkers, Mitic goes on: … some of the most authoritative proponents of samoderzhavie, completely in conservative spirit, question even the possibility of theoretical founding of this central political concept of Russian history. To define samoderzhavie in this perception means to “belittle” it, to “limit”7 and deform its essence, samoderzhavie represents the fact of supraiuridical character, the fact that cannot be “capsuled” by means of law and political terminology, the fact that steps into the “field of faith.”8 5 de Madariaga, Politics, 55–56. 6 Mitic, “The Idea of State,” 552. 7 Here Mitic relies on the writer and philosopher Vasilii Rozanov’s (1856–1919) view, who, although being a conservative, was critical of autocracy. Vasilii Vasilievich Rozanov, O podrazumevaevom smysle nashei monarkhii [On the subconscious meaning of our monarchy] (St. Petersbrug: Tip. A. S. Suvorina, 1912), 49. Mitic, “The Idea of State,” 554. 8 Here Mitic relies on the famous Russian theologian Pavel Florenskii’s (1882–1937) view, who treated samoderzhavie as part of religious commitments. Pavel Florenskii, Okolo Khomiakova [Around Khomiakov] (Sergiev Posad: Tip. Sv.-Tr. Sergievoi Lavry, 1916), 26; Mitic, “The Idea of State,” 554.

The Problem of Samoderzhavie

This belief is reflected in Karamzin’s wording that “samoderzhavie is the Palladium of Russia,”9 that is, her divine protector! The description given by Mitic is probably one of the best short characterizations, although not a definition of samoderzhavie. And in a footnote Mitic also remarked that “to equate samoderzhavie with Western concept of absolutism is especially semantically and stylistically unacceptable”10—a contention that has been my argument for more than twenty years, and expounded in many of my articles. To be sure, autocracy is often defined, although erroneously, as an extreme form of absolute monarchy. Therefore, it is indispensable now to provide a short definition of the latter to make the differences clear. Absolute monarchy, according to the mainstream of its theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, meant that the king was independent of all institutions, both foreign and domestic, stood above and was not bound by positive laws (rex legibus [ab]solutus) in order to preserve/promote the common good, still, he was below the law (rex sub lege) in the sense that he was constrained by fundamental laws (leges fundamentales), natural law (ius naturale) and divine law (ius divinum). Consequently, absolute power, which entailed, first of all, the right to make positive laws, impose taxes at the king’s pleasure, appoint to offices, and so forth, meant not legally unlimited but institutionally unconstrained full power. From this it follows that rule of law and absolute monarchy were not mutually exclusive notions, rather they must be considered as complementary, and absolute monarchy should not be confused with tyranny or despotism, despite the fact that an absolute ruler united in his hand what from the mid-seventeenth century on came to be called the three branches of government. Finally, absolute monarchy should not be equated with divine right of kings, although the most of the absolutist authors were advocate of this doctrine as well.11 We have to approach the issue of samoderzhavie, translated as autocracy, with these reservations kept in mind. Notwithstanding the above reservations concerning the possibility of the (legal) definition of samoderzhavie, a definition was deemed necessary by the government in Russia after the Decembrist movement of 1825, as the Decembrists tried to limit autocracy by introducing a constitution. Nicholas Riasanovsky eloquently and laconically stated on the issue of the contemporary definition of samoderzhavie: “Even pithy legal formulations of autocracy usually included two items: the absolute nature of imperial

9 Mitic, “The Idea of State,” 554. 10 Ibid., 552. 11 For a detailed explanation of this issue, see below in the next chapter.

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power,12 and the link between the emperor and God. For in the last analysis God provided the foundation for the authority of the tsar.”13 The phrase “the tsar’s heart is in the Lord’s/God’s hand” was, indeed, the favorite one used to make this link clear.14 Taken from the Bible with some modification, it was known in Russia also as a proverb as early as the seventeenth century. This phrase was part and parcel of ruling power not only in the sixteenth century but, indeed, up to 1917.15 These two issues, the idea of divine origin of autocratic power and its legally unlimited and even arbitrary nature, were the central questions that the Decembrists attacked in their writings. Similarly to the supporters of autocracy, they also illustrated their views on autocracy by including proverbs referring to God and the tsar—but understandably, from the opposite standpoint. Nikita Mikhailovich Murav′ev (1795–1843), the leader of the Northern Society of the Decembrists, who wrote a plan of a constitution (preferring constitutional monarchy), was also the author of a short pamphlet relevant for our purpose, called the “Curious Conversation.” The pamphlet, written in 1822, was disseminated before the uprising. It encapsulates a laconic view on autocracy by the Decembrists in the manner similar to what we saw in the “Orthodox Catechism.”16 Question: What does an autocratic ruler [gosudar′ samoderzhavnyi] mean? Answer: An autocratic or arbitrary ruler [gosudar′ samoderzhavnyi ili samovlastnyi] is the one who rules the land by himself, does not acknowledge the power of reason [vlast′ rassudka], and the laws of God and men; he rules on his own, that is, according to his caprice disregarding reasons [prichiny].

12 The use of the term “absolute” is relevant only if we understand it here merely in the narrow technical sense, namely, that this power is above positive laws. To attach a meaning more than that to the term “absolute” in the Russian context, would be misleading, as in the West the mainstream expositions of absolute power of the monarchs were compatible with, and embedded in the idea of rule of law, as stated before. 13 Nicholas Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia 1825–1855 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 96–97. 14 Ibid., 97. 15 Sashalmi, “16th–17th-Century Muscovite Ideology of Power in a European Perspective,” 167–168, 172. 16 Izbrannye sotsial′no-politicheskie i filosofskie proizvedeniia dekabristov, vol. 2, Liubopytnyi razgovor, 330–332.

The Problem of Samoderzhavie

Question: Who installed arbitrary rulers? Answer: No one … But the rulers little by little, with cunning of every kind, acquired unlimited power [bezpredel′nuiu vlast′] for themselves, imitating the Tatar khan and the Turkish Sultan. Question: Wasn’t it God himself who established autocracy [samoderzhavie]? Answer: God, in his graciousness, never established wickedness [zla]. Question: Why is it said then, “There is no power but of God?” Answer: Wicked power cannot be of God. … Question: Can permanent laws not exist under autocracy [pri samoderzhavii]? Answer: An autocracy or arbitrary rule [samoderzhavie ili samovlastie] does not stand them. … Question: Why cannot an arbitrary rule [samovlastie] stand the laws? Answer: Because the ruler is empowered to do whatever pleases him. Today it comes to his mind this, tomorrow something else, but to our utility [do pol′zy nashei] he does not do much, hence the proverb: Close to the tsar is close to death.17 Autocracy, in their view, was a government against the law of God! Obviously, these kind of ideas could not be tolerated, and after the repression of the Decembrist movement the strengthening of old principles of autocratic rule was necessary, which the government laid down in legislation. Moving to official legal formulations of autocracy, the relevant article of the Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire (1832) must be mentioned as article  1 stated also laconically and unambiguously the essence of autocracy: “The All-Russian Emperor [Imperator Vserossiiskii] is an autocratic and unlimited [samoderzhavnyi i neogranichennyii] monarch. To obey his highest power/ authority [verkhovnoi vlasti], not only out of fear but also of conscience, God himself commands.”18 17 Ibid., 331. 18 Quoted by Nikolai Mikhailovich Korkunov, Russkoe gosudarstvennoe pravo [Russian state law] (St. Petersburg: Stasiulevich, 1904), 200.

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Furthermore, the short catechism of 1832 written in the wake of the 1831 Polish insurrection and designed for the “rebellious Poles,” contained the same principle of obedience in questions 5 and 12.19 Question 5: What kind of obedience do we owe to the emperor? Answer: a perfect, passive, and boundless one in all matters. … Question 12: How does God consider a failure in respect and loyalty to the emperor? Answer: As the most horrible sin, and the most dreadful crime.20 The 1832 legal definition of the emperor’s power was based, in the last resort, on the Spiritual Regulation (1721) with some minor modifications. The 1832 definition, in fact, is an extended version of it, with adding the adjective “unlimited” to the first part, and the noun “fear” to the second. At the same time, the 1832 wording is a specific one, because of its reference to the “All-Russian Emperor.” This latter feature might be explained by the fact that while in the Petrine era the aim was to place the Russian monarch in the European club of rulers, in 1832, on the contrary, it was necessary to emphasize his singularity, in the wake of European constitutional struggles. The 1832 definition in the Fundamental Laws raises several important issues, which have puzzled many historians ever since. I have to begin with the naming of the law itself! For a Western mind, there is a contradiction between the meaning of the term “fundamental laws” in Western legal thought, and the content of the above definition concerning the Russian emperor’s power. For the term “fundamental laws” (making its appearance first in France in the 1570s) in the West was synonymous with “constitution” before the late eighteenth century: it meant those laws which could not be changed, being thereby a restriction even on an absolute ruler!21 In Russia, however, the Fundamental Laws of 1832 codified precisely the opposite—namely, the legally unlimited nature of the

19 Riasanovsky, Nicholas I, 96, fn. 49. 20 Quoted ibid. 21 Absolute power and constitution were not contradictory concepts before the late eighteenth century, the American Constitution of 1787. Besides theoretical works on absolute monarchy, the most eloquent example of it is the Danish Royal Law (Kongelov) of 1665 declaring the absolute nature of the king’s power, which, nevertheless stated that “this Royal Law … as the proper foundation of the kingdom and its constitution must forever remain unchangeable and irrevocable.” Ernst Ekman, “The Danish Royal Law of 1665,” The Journal of Modern History 29, no. 2 (1957): 106.

The Problem of Samoderzhavie

emperor’s power being the fundamental law of Russia. Thus, Karamzin’s words quoted previously (“You can do everything, but you cannot limit your authority by the law”) prefigured the codification of this spirit as a legal maxim of Russian state law. The second philological and, of course, political issue of the definition to be dealt with, is the relation (and consequently the meaning) of samoderzhavnyi to the other adjective, neogranichennyi, as both were used for the characterization of power. The latter term, neogranichennyi, is unambiguous—it can be translated simply as “unlimited” (and “unlimited” is, in fact, the mirror translation of the term in English). But did the two adjectives have the same meaning or not? For the Decembrists this was not a question, as we have seen, the answer being: “Yes.” The interpretation of the wording of the law, however, remained a puzzle to commentators on Russian state law in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,22 and the issue became a burning one after the 1905 Revolution when the new version of Fundamental Laws was to be drawn up in 1906. According to Korkunov, a nineteenth-century influential commentator on Russian state laws, the term neogranichennyi was synonymous with samoderzhavnyi and it was included in the definition “for reasons of greater clarity,” that is, explaining the term samoderzhavnyi.23 Others, however, interpreted samoderzhavnyi meaning the external aspect of sovereignty, that is, not being subject to any power outside the state, while neogranichennyi was to mean legally unlimited internally, towards the subjects.24 On August 6, 1905 Nicholas II issued a “Highest Manifesto,” announcing the calling of a “consultative” assembly, the so-called Soveshchatel′naia Gosudarstvennaia Duma (“Consultative State Duma”). In the manifesto he “expressly emphasized” that the duma would not affect his “autocratic power” (samoderzhavnaia vlast′) laid down in the Fundamental Laws (of the nineteenth century), and referred to the “concord and unity” (soglasie i edinstvo) of the tsar and people as “the great moral force that had created Russia in the course of the centuries.”25 The central issue of the negotiations with the tsar preceding

22 Alexander M. Yakovlev, “The Rule-of-Law Ideal and Russian Reality,” in Legal Reform in Post-Communist Europe. A View from Within, ed. Stanislaw Frankowsky and Paul B. Stephan III (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1995), 11–12. 23 Korkunov, Russkoe gosudarstvennoe pravo, 200. 24 This interpretation of samoderzhavnyi, which was in line with the original meaning of the term samoderzhets, that is, a ruler receiving his power from no outside authority (see below), was acceptable to constitutionalist. 25 Volker Sellin, European Monarchies from 1814 to 1906: A Century of Restorations (Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2017), 105.

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the issue of the New Fundamental Laws in April 1906 was how to make compatible the meaning of the term samoderzhavnaia vlast′ and its preservation with the existence of an assembly.26 A solution was reached after the tsar had been persuaded by Baron Schwanebach saying that although the assembly would mean a “limitation of autocratic rights,” it could be conceived as a “self-limitation” that would “strengthen Your Majesty’s hallowed authority.”27 Therefore, the term samoderzhavnyi was kept in the new Fundamental Laws, whereas neogranichennyi was dropped, as the ruler’s power was no longer considered unlimited because of the establishment of the State Duma—although it remained ambivalent in what way the ruler’s power was limited, as conservatives claimed that it was merely self-limitation, and liberals insisted that it was an institutional-constitutional change.28 As the term samoderzhavnaia vlast′ had long been used to mean “unlimited power” in legal terms, an inherent conflict between the tsar and the duma was coded for the subsequent decade to come, the years between 1906–1917. The tsar, a conservative to the extreme, by retaining the adjective samoderzhavnyi “indicated in this way that his power was supreme in ways not subject to legal definition.”29 Therefore, he refused to call and acknowledge the Fundamental Laws a “constitution” (konstitutsiia)— the term obviously of Western origin—because thereby he would have accepted legal-instituional limitations on his power.30 Despite all these controversies, the 1906 Fundamental Laws witnessed the appearance of a novel concept of Russian state law: “The integrity of the state for the first time is defined separately from the powers of the monarch.”31 Article 1 made it plain: “The Russian state is one and indivisible” (Gosudarstvo Rossiiskoe edino i nerazdel′no).32 In Wortman’s view, this provision “was completely new to Russian legislation” despite the fact that articles 4–6 moved “from the state to 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 105–106. 28 Geoffrey A. Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma, 1907– 1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 10. 29 Wortman, Power of Language and Rhetoric, 173. 30 Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 44, 153–154; Sellin, European Monarchies from 1814 to 1906, 105. Sellin argues that this standpoint of the tsar, just as the spirit expressed in his August Manifesto, was similar to the Bourbon restoration: the French King Louis XVIII conceived the “charte constitutionelle as a bestowal of privilege,” and not as a legally binding document imposed on him. Sellin, European Monarchies from 1814 to 1906, 105. Hence, in Sellin’s view, what Nicholas II did was also a “constitution through restoration” as was the trend in nineteenth-century Europe, which is the main argument of his book. Although we should add that the Russian case was rather a sham-constitution. 31 Wortman, Power of Language and Rhetoric, 172. 32 Ibid.

The Problem of Samoderzhavie

the monarch,”33 weakening thereby the importance of the novel formulation. Article 4 stated: “Supreme Autocratic Power belongs to the All-Russian Emperor. To obey his supreme power is ordained not only by fear but by conscience as well.” (Therefore, it is clear that the whole problem of the interpretation of samoderzhavie was, no doubt, closely connected to the notion of the “Russian state narrative” advocating the integrity of the state!) Furthermore, article 5 declared another crucial point of the issue of samoderzhavie, namely, that the person of the emperor is “sacred and inviolable.”34 Therefore, articles 4–5, taken together, reinforced the non-legal nature of autocratic power and emphasized its character as part of (Russian Orthodox) faith, which, in turn, empowered the tsar’s power with a supralegal character. And it is here that we should return to the “suprajuridical” (or extrajuridical) nature of the term samoderzhavie and samoderzhets discussed by Mitic before. We have to start from the etymology of the word samoderzhavie: sam means “self,” while derzhava means “power,” “dominion,” and also “orb,” but it was even used for the “state,” as the synonym of gosudarstvo under Peter the Great. Besides, derzhava had a very strong religious overtone, which I consider crucial for the meaning of samoderzhets, as derzhava is used with reference to the power of God in liturgy: Ako Tvoia derzhava, i Tvoe est′ Tsarstvo (“For Thine is the dominion, and Thine is the Kingdom”). I claim that this aspect was crucial in determining the meaning of samoderzhets and samoderzhavie. As Anatoly Reshetnikov eloquently stated: “One thing that the ancient authors made clear was that derzhava, as an attribute of an earthly ruler, was only given by the grace of god and remained itself of divine origin.”35 It is also worth quoting Yakovlev’s comments on this issue: So samoderzhavie means not only a “monarchy,” but a monarchy that is self-centered, the self-perpetuating power of the tsar, who

33 Ibid., 173. 34 Ibid. For an example of the transfer of sacredness in the other direction, from the ruler to the state, see the first line of the present anthem of Russia: Rossiia—sviashchennaia nasha derzhava! 35 Anatoly Reshetnikov, “The Evolution of Russia’s Great Power Discourse: A Conceptual History of Velikaya Derzhava” (PhD diss., Central European University, Budapest, 2018), 48, https://dsps.ceu.edu/sites/pds.ceu.hu/files/attachment/basicpage/478/reshetnikovanatolyir-dissertation2018.pdf. As he showed, derzhava “in combination with the word ‘god’” was interpreted in these senses: “‘power of god’ (sila Gospoda), ‘might of god’ (mogushchestvo Gospoda).” And added that “one of the most widespread codas of Church Slavonic texts looked something like this: “Glory and power (derzhava) to our God with Father and Holy Spirit always and for all eternity! Amen.” Ibid.

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needs no “outside” justification for his dominance, because the person who is sitting on the throne is samoderzhets. This further means that he keeps all power of the state in his own hands. And this is not only l’État c’est moi36: the concept means “I hold the state in my own hands, the entirety of state power is entirely at my disposal, and no justification for and no restriction of my power is needed or by definition is possible.”37 Similarly, Bokhanov claims that samoderzhets means that one “wields” power (vlast′) “by virtue of proprietary, personal capacity: that is, I own it and possess it. In other words, autocracy is to wield power by virtue of personal might.”38 Since only God’s power is the one based on himself, requiring no other justification, samoderzhets can be only the person whose power is also based on God’s non-mediated power. The second problem concerning the 1832 definition arises from the translation of the word vlast′ in the given context: should be it translated simply as power or rather as authority? To understand it we have to turn to the second part of this legal definition, which, in fact, is simply an adaptation of Romans 13:5, as I have identified it long ago: “Therefore, it is necessary to submit to authority, not only to avoid punishment, but also as a matter of conscience.” Regarding authority and power, it is worth noting that the Russian language never uses the word avtoritet, that is, authority, in the context associated with government power (vlast′)—political authority in Russian is simply politicheskaia vlast′.39 With regard to the state “in Russian one uses a word, the meaning of which supposes compliance (power—vlast′). … In Russian ‘state authority’ means only ‘state power’, an institution that commands obedience and compliance under the threat of punishment and thus it is to be feared. This is vlast′.”40

36 This is, of course, the phrase “I am the state,” attributed, although erroneously, to Louis XIV who most probably never said it. The phrase was probably invented by Voltaire! Pipes, Russian Conservatism, 8. Yakovlev presumably used it here in the sense that the ruler embodies the state in his person. See this problem below. 37 Yakovlev, “The Rule-of-Law Ideal and Russian Reality,” 11. Yakovlev’s argument here, which I completely accept, however, does not include this religious meaning of derzhava as the cause of the “self-centered, self-perpetuating power” of the ruler. 38 P. E. Kazanskii, Vlast′ Vserossiiskogo Imperatora. Ocherki deistvuiushchego russkogo prava [The power of the all-Russian emperor. Essays on the Russian law in force] (Odessa: Tekhnik, 1913), 402. Quoted by Aleksandr Bokhanov, Samoderzhavie. Ideia tsarskoi vlasti [Autocracy. The idea of tsarist power] (Moscow: Russkoe slovo, 2002), 185. 39 Yakovlev, “The Rule-of-Law Ideal and Russian Reality,” 7. 40 Ibid.

The Problem of Samoderzhavie

Commenting on the wording of the 1832 definition, Aleksandr Bokhanov remarked: “The lawgiver did not consider it necessary or possible to use in this case other justifications.”41 Both adjectives (necessary and possible) deserve attention (which are in line with Yakovlev’s view), as divine ordination expressed in the Pauline biblical passage made legitimizing principles other than divine grace not only superfluous but also irrelevant, as no grounding of legitimacy was conceivable in popular consent according to mainstream Russian political thought. The religious overtone of the adjective samoderzhavnyi, because of its being the derivative of derzhava, was even reinforced by the biblical passage—no wonder that samoderzhavie was conceived as part of Orthodox faith in Russia! Going further in Bokhanov’s footsteps, if it is true as he claims that “tsarist power” (tsarskaia vlast′) and “autocratic power” (samoderzhavnaia vlast′) “were practically treated as synonyms” in the sixteenth century, which is highly probable in my view as the title “tsar” implied divine appointment42—and metropolitan Makarii addressed Ivan IV as samoderzhets after his coronation as tsar in 154743—then the simplicity of the 1721 and the 1832 definitions is understandable. The identification of tsarskaia vlast′ with samoderzhavnaia vlast′ survived even Peter the Great, as Bokhanov remarked, despite the adoption of 41 Bokhanov, Samoderzhavie, 237. 42 Ibid., 192. An indirect proof of Bokhanov’s claim can be, in my view, the contemporary naming of false tsars. The terms samotsar′ or samozvanets, similarly to samoderzhets, contain the word sam (“[him]self ”) but mean someone who (as I have mentioned before) is “a tsar by himself [out of his own ambition]” (samotsar′), or one “who [just] calls himself tsar” (samozvanets), respectively. Consequently, such a person is not a “rightful tsar” or “true tsar” (nepravednyi tsar′, neistinnyi tsar′), in other words, not a ruler selected by divine grace through royal descent: he is the opposite of a rightful tsar (pravednyi tsar′), a “tsar by virtue of [his] birth” (prirozhdennyi tsar′). The identification of tsar′ and samoderzhets rests on this: the tsar holds power by his virtue of being tsar; he is samoderzhets, because, unlike the samotsar′, he is God’s elect. This view is supported by the case quoted by Ingerflom. When in 1775 a peasant in Siberia, named Petr Fedorovich Kaverzhin, was asked by a guard about his identity, the peasant said: “I am Petr Fedorovich.” As the story happened after the suppression of the rebellion of Emelian Pugachev (1773–1775), who claimed that he was Tsar Peter III (Petr Fedorovich, deposed by his wife Catherine II in 1762 and soon killed), after this ambiguous answer, the guard asked the peasant sarcastically: “Aren’t you Pugachev?” The peasant replied: “No, I am not Pugachev, and at home I am the autocrat [samoderzhets].” Ingerflom, Le tsar, c’est moi, 265. The peasant was arrested for uttering this, as his answer was still interpreted as a charge for a “false tsar” case because of calling himself samoderzhets! Ibid. This case clearly underlines the identification of the (true) tsar and the autocrat of Russia. 43 Bokhanov’s contention that samoderzhavnaia vlast′ and tsarskaia vlast’ were synonyms is plausible also on the ground of the liturgical juxtaposition, Ako Tvoia derzhava, i Tvoe est′ Tsarstvo, which could well be the source of this association! We can boldly state that samoderzhets and tsar′ were the most “charismatic words” in pre-1917 Russian history. I think it is above all these titles that could be added to Wortman’s list of “charismatic words,” that is, words in which the “aura of authority is resonated.”

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the title imperator by Peter in 1721: although the official title was Imperator i Samoderzhets Vserossiiskii, Moskovskii, Kievskii, Vladimirskii, Novgorodskii, but then the titulatory went on as Tsar′ Kazanskii, Astrakhanskii, Sibirskii, and so forth!44 The title tsar had an exotic sound or overtone in Europe at that time, which is why it was relegated to the background in the full title and linked to the territories with Asiatic associations. The “geopolitical heritage” of the Golden Horde lingered on only in the titles Tsar′ Kazanskii, Astrakhanskii, Sibirskii: Peter “officially remained tsar precisely with regard to the former khanates and only with regard to them.”45 Unofficially, however, nothing changed: the ruler remained tsar for the majority of the Russians too, despite Peter’s adoption of the new title imperator: tsar′, and hence, samoderzhets! Claudio Ingerflom also holds the same view as the title of chapter 5 of his book reads: “The Autocratic Principle of Identity—to Be a Tsar.”46 On the basis of what has been written above, by “Russian autocracy” I mean an authority and a political system in which the tsar’s, that is, a God-appointed ruler’s (scope of) power is not limited either by corporate institutions or laws (positive laws, fundamental laws, natural law), and the ruler’s policy is not subject to public opinion. And the only limitation recognized by the ruler is the law of God, which he interprets as it pleases him.47 It must be noted, however, that concentrating on the lack of division of state power, that is, on legal-constitutional and institutional aspects, is an approach acceptable with regard to eighteenth-century Russia, but we have to be aware of the shortcomings of this kind of approach before that. For I have to agree with Hans-Joachim Torke’s statement that the “concepts of Western legal and social history” are, for the most part, unsuitable for the analysis of pre-eighteenth-century Russian history.48 There existed no social and political estates (and no assemblies of estates), not to mention the legal concept of sovereignty and the legal grounding of the ruler’s power, which clearly made their appearance in the works of Feofan Prokopovich.49

44 Bokhanov, Samoderzhavie, 192. 45 Trepavlov, “Belyi tsar′,” 117. 46 The title of chapter 5 is: “Le principe autocratique d’identité: Appartenir ou être tsar.” Ingerflom, Le tsar, c’est moi, 107–133. 47 Alef, Origins, 10. 48 Torke, “Staat und Gesellschaft in Rußland im 17. Jahrhundert als Problem der europäischen Geschichte,” 201. 49 For the problem of the lack of social estates, for instance, see Janet Hartley’s statement: “The concept of a social estate as a legally defined social group developed only slowly in Russia. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century the word soslovie came into use as a word to define a social group which incorporated some sense of a legal social estate with rights and obligations.” Hartley, Social History, 28.

The Problem of Samoderzhavie

A so-called law-minded approach to the perception of the power of the Russian tsars is relevant only from the 1680s onwards, or rather from about 1700, as Russia’s case was special in Europe. Muscovite ideology of rulership lacked not only the idea of rule of law (in its seventeenth-century meaning: compliance with fundamental laws and natural law) but also the language (vocabulary) of law—both crucial to absolutist ideology. Therefore, Western concepts of law (natural law, for instance, or the distinction between private law and public law, and others) and even the term potestas absoluta were virtually unknown in Muscovy. This is essential for understanding the meanings of samoderzhets in Muscovite times. As Halperin stated: “Muscovy was not a constitutional regime so the term never possessed a fixed juridical meaning.”50 Let us now ponder the three meanings of the term that he identified in Muscovite sources: “independent ruler,” “pious ruler,” and “unlimited ruler.” As Halperin noted, these terms “overlapped and in a single occurrence might have had multiple meanings; however, each of these three meanings manifested a distinctive emphasis.”51 The word samoderzhets originally denoted a monarch who held his power directly from God, and not from any other ruler.52 So, it did not refer to the limits of the monarch’s power but to its origin and independence from outside interference. Although the use of the term samoderzhets became more frequent in the sixteenth century, it did not become a standard of the ruler’s titulatory until the seventeenth, and the first ruler to be crowned not only tsar but also samoderzhets was Ivan the Terrible’s son, Fedor Ivanovich (1584).53 Halperin’s following remark is also crucial: Infrequently in official church documents but more often in unofficial discourse by or to clerics than in official state or church documents the word “autocrat” denoted not necessarily an independent ruler but one who governed in accordance with the Orthodox Christian theory that the state and church [to be precise: the tsar and the church] should act in harmony or symphony, that is, they should cooperate for the benefit

50 Halperin, “Ivan IV as Autocrat (Samoderzhets),” 198. 51 Ibid. 52 Marc Szeftel, “The Title of the Muscovite Monarch up to the End of the Seventeenth Century,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 13, nos. 1–2 (1979): 66. 53 Aleksandr Ivanovich Filiushkin, Tituly russkikh gosudarei [Titles of Russian rulers] (Moscow: Allians-Arkheo, 2006), 55–63; Halperin, “Ivan IV as Autocrat (Samoderzhets),” 199.

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and propagation of the faith and the maintenance of religious morality.54 In these sources the term was “a literary embellishment” and had a “rhetorical, not legal, significance.”55 Many ecclesiastical authors who used the term did so precisely because they wanted to argue against what was the notion of an unlimited ruler!56 However, as early as the sixteenth century, during the time of Ivan IV, a new meaning of the term was clearly being formed denoting an “exclusive, strong power”:57 a ruler who does not need to take advice of either clergy or boyars but decides matters on his own.58 One might think that in the seventeenth century the Law Code of 1649 could provide the most authentic use of samoderzhets as a title with a legal meaning, due to the nature of the source: samoderzhets was part of Tsar Aleksei’s titulatory, yet, without any definition or even significance whatsoever attributed to it in the Law Code. In the context of the 1660s Grigorii Kotoshikhin’s explanation of the term must be mentioned, especially because he used the term in connection with gosudarstvo. Before escaping to Sweden, Kotoshikhin worked in the Chancellery of Foreign Affairs from the mid-1640s to the early 1660s,59 so he knew quite well the working language of Muscovite officialdom. In 1664 he escaped to Poland, then arrived in Narva, which was under Swedish rule at that time.60 Finally, he got to Stockholm where he entered royal service but he was soon sentenced to death and executed for murdering his landlord.61 It was probably the Swedish royal council that commissioned him to write his book for the Swedish audience, “On Russia under the rule of Aleksei Mikhailovich,” as it had two Swedish translations in 1669 and 1682.62 Kotoshikhin explains that Tsar Aleksei consults with his boyars but he is not obliged to do so: that is why he “calls himself ‘autocrat’ and rules his state

54 Halperin, “Ivan IV as Autocrat (Samoderzhets),” 202. For a similar view see Gyula Szvák, Russkaia paradigma. Rusofobskie zapiski rusofila [The Russian paradigm. Russophobian writings of a Russophile] (St. Petersburg: Aleteia, 2010), 89. 55 Halperin, “Ivan IV as Autocrat (Samoderzhets),” 202. 56 Ibid., 209. 57 Filiushkin, Tituly, 63. 58 Halperin, “Ivan IV as Autocrat (Samoderzhets),” 209–211. 59 Anne E. Pennington, Introduction to O Rossii tsarstvovaniia Alekseia Mikhailovicha, by Grigorij Kotoshikhin, ed. Anne E. Pennington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 1. 60 Ibid., 3–4. 61 Ibid., 5–7. 62 Ibid., 6, 9.

The Problem of Samoderzhavie

according to his own will [gsdrstvo svoe pravit po svoei vole]”: in “affairs of his state, great and small [velikie i malye svoego gsdrstva dela] he decides himself what he wants to do, then issues a decree.”63 Despite of this legally minded approach to the term, it was due to the need to base the Russian ruler’s power on legal grounds from Peter that samoderzhets came to acquire public-law character, with the meaning of being an unlimited ruler both legally and institutionally. The title, which most immediately referred to the nature of relations between the ruler and the ruled, beginning from Ivan III and throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth century, a title having a legal character in a certain sense (that of patrimonial right), was no doubt gospodar′/gosudar′. It became a standard title after Ivan III’s defeat of Tver′ (1485), when he took the title Gospodar′ vseia Rusi, “Master of All Rus′” in 1486.64 Although Ivan did not demand addressing him either as samoderzhets or tsar′—despite the fact that after 1472, following the marriage of Ivan to the niece of the last Byzantine Emperor, he encouraged the title tsar′ be acknowledged abroad—he made the use of the title gospodar′ mandatory.65 Examples from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries show that gospodar′/gosudar′ referred to a ruler who did not share power with anyone and was not limited by conditions or contracts. The interpretation of the term gospodarstvo/gosudarstvo comes up for first time in the period under discussion precisely with regard to the meaning of gospodar′ used in the above sense. After Ivan had defeated Novgorod in 1477 (which finally culminated in the termination of its autonomy in 1478), he made plain during the negotiations with the leaders of Novgorod that he was gospodar′, which he explained this way: And you petitioned me, the grand prince, to make you know, how our rule/power position should be in my patrimony [kak nashemu gosudarstvu byti v nashei otchine], and this is our, the grand princes’ way of rule [or power position, nashe gosudarstvo takovo]: there shall be no veche66 bell, no posadnik67 in Novgorod,

63 See Grigorij Kotoshikhin, O Rossii tsarstvovaniia Alekseia Mikhailovicha, ed. Anne E. Pennington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 140. 64 Alef, Origins, 92. 65 Ibid. 66 The name of the popular assembly possessing extensive rights in Novgorod, which survived from the time of the Kievan Rus′. The bell was used to call the assembly, and hence it became the symbol of Novgorod’s independence. 67 The name of the most important elected town official in Novgorod sharing power with the prince, a position that also had a continuity from Kievan Rus′.

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but we alone shall hold power [gosudarstvo nam svoe derzhati] … as it is in the Low Lands [that is, in Moscow].68 In 1489 Ivan III rejected the Holy Roman Emperor’s offer, made through his envoy, to grant Ivan a royal crown with the argument below: We, by God’s will, are masters [gosudari] in our lands from time immemorable, from the first of our ancestors, and our elevation we have from God, as had our ancestors, so too it is with us, and we implore God that He should grant us and our children the same to the end of time to be masters in our lands as we now are; but appointment, as heretofore we have not desired, so we do not desire such now.69 Mikhail Krom in his recent article argued that these two quotations from Ivan III serve as illustrations how the “patrimonial idea,” or the “patrimonial rule” as perceived by Ivan fulfilled the “principles of sovereignty”: the affair with Novgorod showing its internal aspect (“the unlimited power of the grand prince, which included also the right of supreme property over the land”), while the other, its external dimension (through “the unbroken dynastic tradition” and “the inseparable connection” of the dynasty with the land, which it ruled by God’s grace).70 Krom concluded: “As we can see, the patrimonial (landlordly)71 discourse proved to be flexible enough to express the idea of absoluteness and unity of grand princely power within the country, and its independence in the international arena.”72 The very heart of the problem, however, is the patrimonial discourse, reflecting the lack of a distinction between the public and private capacities of the grand prince on the one hand, and the lack of a legal framing of this power (which the adjective “absolute” would imply) on the other, and it should not be confused with sovereignty. Two often quoted sixteenth-century examples, given by Richard Pipes (and others), are also illuminating concerning the meaning of gosudar′.73 In 1532 Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty, wanted to establish “amicable and brotherly” relations with Vasilii III but the grand prince rejected it on the ground 68 69 70 71 72 73

Translation is based on the text in Krom, “Ideia suvereniteta,” 32. Alef ’s translation is slightly changed. Alef, Origins, 86. Krom, “Ideia suvereniteta,” 31–32. The words used by Krom are “patrirmonal′nyi (votchinnyi).” Ibid., 33. The following translations are based on the Russian texts.

The Problem of Samoderzhavie

that “he does not know his realm/position [gosudarstvo] and it is not known to him whether he is a master [gosudar′] or a ruler under contract [uriadnik] in his realm [na svoem gosudarstve].”74 The term uriadnik comes from the word riad—this meant the contract between the princes and the veche at the time of the Rus′. It was due to this fact that a limited monarch was called uriadnik, a ruler constrained by contract, while limitation on ruling power was termed urok (otherwise meaning “instruction” or “lesson”).75 The other example is related to the Anglo-Russian diplomatic and trade relations under Queen Elizabeth I and Ivan IV. In his letter of 1570 written to the queen, Ivan expressed his resentment on the activity of the English merchants in Russia that he found strange as, in his view, they preferred their own profit at the expense of their ruler’s honor, and mentioning this he drew the following conclusion concerning the queen’s standing in her country: And we thought that you were Gosudarinia [female equivalent of Master, that is, Gosudar′] in your realm/in your domination76 [na svoem gosudarstve], and you yourself rule [sama vladeesh′] and seek your own masterly honor [gosudarskuiu chest′] and the benefits for the realm [vygody dlia gosudarstva]—that is why we started these negotiations with you. But, it is clear, that in your home[land] other men rule instead of you [u tebia, pomimo tebia drugie liudi vladeiut], and not just men but trading boors, and they do not care about our masterly persons and honors, and the benefits for the country [vygody dlia strany] but seek their own trading profit. Meanwhile you exist in your maidenly status, like any ordinary maiden. … Let these boors who disregarded our masterly persons and honors, and the benefits for the country [vygodamy dlia strany] but care about matters of trade, see how they will trade [in the future]. The Muscovite realm [Moskovskoe

74 T. D. Lavrentsova, N. M. Goldberg, and K. A. Antonova, eds., Russko-indiiskie otnosheniia v XVII veke. Sbornik dokumentov [Relations between Russia and India in the seventeenth century. Collection of documents] (Moscow: Izdatel′stvo vostochnoi literatury, 1958), 6; Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York: Scribner, 1974), 77. 75 Pipes, Russia, 77. 76 Kharkhordin here interprets gosudarstvo as “domination,” but both “realm” and “domination” are plausible in my view. Kharkhordin, “What Is the state?,” 217.

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gosudarstvo] even without the English goods has not been poor/ weak until now.77 Finally, Ivan IV’s letter of 1579 to the Polish king Stephen Báthori deserve attention as many points of the ideology are spelled out in it. The Lord … elevates tsars and princes and rulers for every country and gives power to whomsoever He wills. And no one receives honor by virtue of self-ambition [chest′ o sebe], but only the one having God’s calling receives it. We have ruled [gosudarstvuem] for 717 years [beginning] from the great Rurik, but you have been only from yesterday on such a high throne [na takom velikom gosudarstve]. You are the first in your kin whom, by God’s grace, the nations and countries [narody i stra[n]y] of the Polish Kingdom elected for, and then seated on these thrones [posadili na te gosudarstva]78 to organize them [ustraivati ikh] but not to rule over them [vladeti imi]. For they are people acting according to their own volition [liudi vo svoe[i] povol′nosti], and therefore you take an oath to the whole land regarding the royal honor [na maiestate vse zemli prisiagaesh], but to us the right hand of the Almighty God has given the rulership [dala gosudarstvo], and [it is] not [given] from any kind of men [chelovek nikhto zhe], and by God’s right hand and grace we rule our realm by ourselves [vladeem svoim gosudarstvom sami], but not from men we receive the rulership [gosudarstvo]. Does a son not receive from the father the patrimonial inheritance [otecheskoe nasledie] through

77 It is important to call attention to the fact that gosudarstvo here means not just a “feature or quality of being a ruler” but also “realm,” as it is apparent in the expressions when the benefits are mentioned. A further indication of this meaning of gosudarstvo can be seen in the date given at the end of letter, which reads: “Written in our Muscovite realm [v nashem Moskovskom gosudarstve] in the year 7079 from the creation of the world, 24 October.” Poslaniia Ivana Groznogo [The letters of Ivan the Terrible], ed. Dmitrii S. Likhachev and Iakov S. Lur′e (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1951), 332–333. 78 An interesting detail concerning the meaning of gosudarstvo in chronicle sources of the first half of the sixteenth century is given by Krom proving that gosudarstvo often meant “throne” (prestol). Krom, Rozhdenie, 226. I think this is precisely the case here as well, as the king of Poland was also the Grand Duke of Lithuania, and this is reflected in the wording “nations and countries of the Polish kingdom.” The word gosudarstvo used in the meaning of “throne” is also apparent in other letters of Ivan, written to the king of Sweden, John III. See these examples below.

The Problem of Samoderzhavie

the blessing [blagosloveniem] given by self-will and self-power [samovlastno i samoderzhavno]?79 The content (divine ordination, internal and external independence) is very similar to Ivan III’s words uttered in 1489 but in addition to that the patrimonial notion of power is spelled out in the last sentence—although not with regard to the title gosudar′ but with the help of the adverbial form of samoderzhavnyi. Summing up what has been said: I claim that it is indispensable to make a difference between the fifteenth- to seventeenth-century use of the term samoderzhets on the one hand, and the idea of autocratic power on the other, as— apart from a few exceptions—the term that implied an institutionally and legally unlimited rule was, in fact, gospodar′/gosudar′: even though legal reasoning was not characteristic of Muscovite perception of power. In Western literature gospodar′/gosudar′ is often translated as “sovereign,” a translation to which I object in most cases, as it would bring inappropriate analogies, and hide the differences in meanings—the most important one being the par excellence legal nature and public character of the term “sovereign.”

9.2. Interpretation of Muscovite Ideology of Power as an Autocracy: Pitfalls, and the Study of Muscovite Ideology in Its Own Right Because of the lack of legal concepts and a legal definition of ruling power, it is questionable whether it would make much sense to concentrate on legalinstitutional issues in analysing both Muscovite perception of power and its exercise. I second Robert Crummey’s statement that it is highly significant “how governments define and justify their power,” as this can have important consequences on the practice of government as well.80 We cannot understand sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Russian ideology and governmental practice unless we are aware that unlimited God-given power was conceptually different before Peter the Great and after him. While Peter, or rather his chief ideologist, perceived and justified it with legal-political concepts 79 Boris Andreevich Uspenskii, “Zagadochnaia forma v titule russkikh tsarei” [An enigmatic form in the title of Russian tsars], Slověne 9, no. 1 (2020): 166. 80 Robert O. Crummey, “Seventeenth-Century Russia: Theories and Models,” in Von Moskau nach St. Petersburg. Das russische Reich im 17. Jahrhundert [From Moscow to St. Petersburg. The Russian Empire in the seventeenth century], ed. Hans-Joachim Torke (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000), 118.

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(sovereignty, common good), for Muscovite bookmen this power was self-evident. It was just there, without feeling even the need to give an explanation,81 either legal or any other kind, for its existence. So, the tsar’s power was based on premises that were conceptually different from that of the Western kings— despite similar features to be discussed later—and can be properly understood if seen in their own cultural context. This matrix was the theology of the Russian Orthodox Church.82 While in Western Christendom thought on power in the period discussed, or rather political thought in the proper sense, relied on three premises—religion, law, philosophy—the latter two were missing in Muscovy.83 Written and visual sources, similarly to the most important annual religious rituals, as we have seen, make plain that the tsar’s power was conceived as part and parcel of theology, the “tool of divine providence, operating through the anointed of the church.”84 The ruler was “God-ordained, God-selected, Godcrowned and God-protected,”85 and even God-inspired tsar. Therefore, if “we remove God and His relationship with tsar and subject, we are left without any coherent set of ideas at all.”86 This exclusively religious framework of thought was due to the fact that “secularization” in the sense used by Oakley, the one I have referred to previously, did not take place in Muscovy. Although the ruler’s power “was envisioned as unlimited in theory,”87 still, this image of the ruler as an autocrat was not the only one. Besides the image of the ruler as an all-powerful instrument and implementor of God’s will (a feature noted by Western travellers to Muscovy and often called despotism) there existed other and “equally official aspects” of rule that “mitigated” the autocratic image.88 Neglecting them would render understanding Russian perception of power one-sided, overlooking its special features—at the same time, it would also make difficult to understand some mechanisms of governmental practice.89 It is true that autocracy in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries did not mean that the tsar’s power was devoid of any norms. Still, we should not

81 Poe, “People Born to Slavery,” 215, 224. 82 Zyzykin, Tsarskaia vlast′, 67. 83 Rowland, “Muscovy,” 296–297. 84 Zyzykin, Tsarskaia vlast′, 67. 85 Halperin, “Ivan IV as Autocrat (Samoderzhets),” 212. 86 Daniel Rowland, “The Problem of Advice in Muscovites Tales about the Time of Troubles,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 6, no. 2 (1979): 264. 87 Kollmann, Russian Empire, 154. 88 Kivelson, Autocracy in the Provinces, 212. 89 Kollmann, Russian Emipre, 154–155.

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overestimate the importance of these norms—at the same time we have to emphasize that they were not of legal or institutional but of ethico-religious nature and in my view it is not proper to call them limitations but rather expectations! These expectations were “norms of proper behavior” tsars had to follow or “ideals to be reached” but they were never formalized legally.90 And here, I think, the crucial difference lies between the “hard” and “soft” interpretation of Muscovite ideology: that is, one emphasizing difference, while the other similarities with contemporary Western Christendom. I myself, as stated, support the former interpretation. “Traditional lore had given to the ‘good’ or ‘true’ tsar a collection of standard royal attributes”91—first of all, he had to defend and keep Orthodoxy unaltered.92 But also he “was to be a wise patriarch, an impartial and merciful judge, a protector of the downtrodden, open to petitioners and humble enough to seek good advice and avoid flatterers.”93 In contrast to Western Christendom these norms were expressed not in coronation oaths, much less in coronation charters or even contracts (these phenomena were unknown!) but first of all in religious imagery, ceremonies, and admonitions by clergymen in the manner of the mirrors of princes. The fact that the abovementioned expectations are not be interpreted from a legal or political viewpoint was due to the “Byzantino-Muscovite specificity,” namely, the Orthodox notion of “symphony.”94 The ruler was not a common layman, but part and parcel of the church, without him the very existence of the church was inconceivable, and his most important duty was to care for the souls of the governed besides administering mundane matters: in other words, the calling of the ruler and his power transcended the matters of this world.

90 Pavel Vladimirovich Lukin, Narodnye predstavleniia o gosudarstvennoi vlasti [Folk conceptions of state power] (Moscow: Nauka, 2000), 253. It is remarkable that Konstantin Bugrov very recently came to a similar conclusion concerning even the reforms projects of the eighteenth century—the major difference being the use of the novel concept of the common good, unknown to most Muscovite thought before the 1680s. He writes: “The monarchical political thought of eighteenth-century Russia in all its variations recognized the existence of certain limitations on power. These limitations, however, were not procedural or institutional, because the monarch was considered to be a supreme moral authority. Rather than see the proposals of reforms as attempts to circumscribe monarchical authority (arbitrariness vs. law), a historian ought to treat them as attempts to support the monarch’s power by ensuing that its exercise be directed to the common good.” Bugrov, “Moralism and Monarchism,” 281. 91 Whittaker, “The Reforming Tsar,” 81. 92 Rowland, “Did Muscovite Literary Ideology,” 148. 93 Whittaker, “The Reforming Tsar,” 81. 94 Filippov Szergej’s remark. See also Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 173.

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The most important image mitigating the notion of the all-powerful ruler was the one that presented the ruler as a “merciful father.”95 There was a strong expectation that the ruler, as God’s elect and the “nominally universal proprietor”96 of the realm, should take care of his subjects, or rather the people under him, as the word poddannyi (subject) was rarely used before 1700.97 The ruler was not conceived in public law terms as a lawgiver but a patron and caring father having benevolence towards everyone. This belief was expressed in the right that everyone could submit a petition to the tsar to ask for his favor or redress. It is impossible to understand not only Muscovite administration, but also the whole political culture of Muscovy without petitions.98 The Russian term for petition, chelobitnaia gramota, literally means “foreheadknocking charter.” Forehead-knocking (chelobit′e) was an important ceremony in Muscovite Russia expected of everyone as a conventional style of greeting the ruler in his presence. Therefore, chelobitnaia gramota can be best translated as a “written humble request” (I simply call it “petition”). Petition became a literary genre by the middle of the sixteenth century with standard formulae and found its way into the practice of administration when the Petition Chancellery was established, possibly in 1550.99 “Interactions with the state were almost always framed as supplications for mercy.”100 This was true not only in the field of administration (in the correspondence of local officials with the central government) but also in cases when individuals and collectives turned to the tsar. There were two types of petitions in the seventeenth century: ones written by individuals, and collective petitions coming most often from the military servitors of different regions. Petitions were addressed to the tsar himself and ended with the petitioner’s “direct and subservient request” to have the tsar’s “mercy.”101 This direct, personal relationship between the tsar and the individuals or collectives is reflected 95 Kivelson, “Merciful Father, Impersonal State,” 656. 96 Poe, “People Born to Slavery,” 222–223. 97 Occasionally it is encountered in the letters of Ivan IV written to foreign rulers, such as the one addressed to Queen Elisabeth in 1570 or King John III of Sweden in 1573 but the usage was rather random. Poslaniia Ivana Groznogo, 330, 347. 98 Kivelson, Autocracy in the Provinces, 217. 99 For this question see: Horace W. Dewey and A. M. Kleimola, “The Petition (Chelobitnaia) as an Old Russian Literary Genre,” The Slavic and East European Journal 14, no. 3 (1970): 284–301. For seventeenth-century petitions see especially Sergei Sergeevich Volkov, Leksika russkikh chelobitnykh XVII veka [The vocabulary of Russian petitions of the seventeenth century] (Leningrad: Izdatel′stvo Leningradskogo universiteta, 1974). 100 Kivelson, Autocracy in the Provinces, 11. 101 Nancy Shields Kollmann, “Concepts of Society and Social Identity in Early Modern Russia,” 35.

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not only in the fact that no organ of administration was identified to make the necessary measures, but also in the custom of submitting petitions personally to the tsar himself. Indeed, “physical access to the ruler”102 was of great importance and it was in accordance with the political culture of Muscovy in which there was no room for the concept of the “tsar’s politic body” besides his “natural body.” Petitions had three standard parts. In the first part the petitioner(s) addressed the tsar, identified himself or themselves and added the formula b′et chelom or b′iut chelom (in collective petitions) meaning literally “knock(s) forehead” but, in fact, meaning “petition(s).” Petitions were written in “a language of submissiveness and personal connection to the tsar” for petitioners identified themselves in a “childlike” and “subordinate” manner “by referring to themselves with diminutives, a form of name customarily used for children, dependents and loved ones.”103 Then came the narrative part, the request itself in which previous service (if relevant) was often mentioned to win the tsar’s favor. Given the importance of service in Muscovite (and even in Petrine Russia) this kind of reference was natural. The third part was a concluding formula: “Master, Tsar! Have mercy on me/us,” “reward me/us”! In some cases it was added: “do as God (or: the Holy Ghost) instructs you,” or “as God puts it on your heart.”104 These phrases are clearly the proof of the inherently religious nature of Muscovite ideology and had their origin in its main premise: “The tsar’s heart is in God’s hand” (the tsar’s decision being the reflection of God’s will.) Petitions thus reveal the main features of Muscovite ideology in a very condensed manner: the principle of service, the patrimonial (non-institutional) character of the “political” community where “the personal was political,”105 the divine inspiration of the tsar as well as the belief in the tsar’s benevolence. The dichotomy of the “petitioner’s insignificance” and the idea of the “all-powerful tsar” was accompanied with “the subjects’ right to call attention to their woes.”106 In petitions individuals and collectives could express their expectations and their belief in the tsar’s benevolence, and even express warnings concerning the tsar’s duties but these warnings were often framed in a religious phraseology and conceived as a Christian duty to speak up, so that the “Muscovite realm” could be spared the wrath of God. Irrespective of the subservient language of the 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid., 35–36. For example, the petitioner whose name was Ivan ( John) would refer to himself as Ivashko (Little John). Common people added to their names that they were the tsar’s “orphans.” 104 Volkov, Leksika, 100. 105 Kivelson, Autocracy in the Provinces, 18. 106 Ibid., 217.

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petitions, they were effective in calling the government’s attention to various problems (such as conflicts with foreigners living in Russia) and often achieved their goals. The non-mediated, non-institutional relationship between the tsar and his people fostered by petitioning was crucial to the belief in the “good tsar.” Official ideology emphasized “the innate benevolence of the tsar” towards everyone and the tsar was portrayed as “an impartial fount of justice.”107 In my view, the idea of the “good tsar,” the ruler as the embodiment of justice, was strengthened by the accidental similarity in Russian of the words “to govern” (pravit′) and “justice” (pravda). I have already mentioned the expression pravit′ v pravdu (“to govern justly/with justice”) in discussing the notion of pravda, an expression encountered in seventeenth-century sources of every kind, petitions included. In documents sent by officials the ruler is often addressed by the formula “merciful and just [pravednyi] tsar” and formulaic references to the tsar as “just tsar” are common in petitions too.108 The notion of pravda in the mind of the governed, no matter what they associated with it, was not only standing above the law (zakon)—law was not highly esteemed by them when the issue was the defense of their interests or rights.109 “For them seeking pravda did not mean a strict compliance with the law, but its merciful administration in case of each and every petitioner.”110 In the early seventeenth century the idea of the “good tsar” protecting powerless common people by dispensing justice was, so to say, institutionalized. Complaints in petitions again “strong people” (as contemporaries put it) became so numerous that this phrase became an “established legal term” and even a distinct Petition Chancellery, the “Chancellery in which People Petition against Strong People” was set up!111 This was the institutional manifestation of the idea of the “good and merciful tsar.” The importance of positive law, however, was slowly gaining ground from the middle of the seventeenth century, as demonstrated by

107 Dixon, Modernisation, 194. 108 Volkov, Leksika, 130–131. 109 Pavel V. Sedov, “Pravda i zakon (sudebnaia praktika vtoroi poloviny XVII veka glazami ee uchastnikov)” [ Justice and law (judicial practice in the second half of the seventeenth century in the eyes of its participants)], in Rusistika Ruslana Grigorevicha Skrynnikova [The Russian studies of Ruslan Grigorevich Skrynnikov], ed. Gyula Szvák and Igor O. Tiumentsev (Budapest: Russica Pannonicana, 2011), 252. 110 Ibid., 244–245. 111 Kivelson, Autocracy in the Provinces, 220.

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the codification112 and the application of laws embodied in the 1649 Ulozhenie, which was the first law code to be printed in Russia, and sent out to the provinces. Submitting petitions personally to the tsar was prohibited by the Law Code of 1649 on pain of being beaten with the bastinadoes (or imprisoned). Thereafter the petitioner first had to submit the petition to the relevant chancellery, and direct appeal to the tsar was left open only in cases when the petition was unanswered.113 The old custom, however, was so deeply rooted that, despite later bans in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,114 it was still alive in 1905 when the notorious scenario of the “Bloody Sunday” took place.115 A further expectation of the tsar was to live in harmony with his boyars, kinsmen, and the clergy and act collectively with them.116 An expectation emanating partly from the perception of power relations based on non-institutional premises but on affinitive relations of kinship and patronage, as in Muscovy neither ideology of power, nor actual governmental practice envisioned power relations between the ruler and the governed in terms of institutions. “The political world was organized around clans, marriage, kinship and clientage.”117 This harmony between tsar and the abovementioned groups, and the tsar and the people in general, was not a “secular-constitutional harmony” but an “ethico-religious” one.118

112 The preamble, for instance, declares that the purpose of issuing the Law Code is that “trial and punishment [sud i rasprava] shall be equal to people of all ranks of the Muscovite Realm [Moskovskogo Gosudarstva],” and the use of the term pravda in the meaning of legal justice, that is, in a sense clearly different from the one encountered in ecclesiastical sources, is also traceable. See the following articles: Muscovite Law Code, 52 (chap. 10, §148) and 216 (chap. 21, §90). 113 Ibid., 27 (chap. 10, §20). 114 Kivelson, Autocracy in the Provinces, 243; Kollmann, “Concepts of Society and Social Identity in Early Modern Russia,” 35. 115 The idea of “getting to the tsar” was deeply rooted in the belief that the tsar is good, just his counsellors/ministers who hide the truth from the ruler are wicked. Field, Rebels, 14. 116 Bushkovitch, Peter the Great, 24–25; Kivelson, Autocracy in the Provinces, 212–213. 117 Kollmann, Russian Empire, 154. 118 Bushkovitch, Peter the Great, 24. Again, the idea of symphony should be kept in mind! Rituals were crucial everywhere in early modern Europe representing the harmony between the ruler and the ruled, and defining the relationship between them: “they created a ritual structure for the state before the era of written constitutions.” Muir, Ritual, 230. Edward Muir called this phenomenon “government as a ritual process” (Muir, Ritual, chap. 7, 229–268.) The role of religious rituals, such as the Palm Sunday ritual or the Blessing of the Waters, just to mention the most important ones, was even more important for Muscovite Russia due to the lack of basic principles regulating government behavior enshrined in legal documents (such as the Bill of Rights), often called constitutiones, which were characteristic for Western Christendom. The plural use of the Latin constitutio shows very well that these laws were not yet conceived a system, that is, a constitution, but simply separate pieces of legislation.

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In this respect, and generally, in tying the different elements of ideology together, a central role was attributed to “counsel(ling).”119 For autocracy is not incompatible with the fact that the ruler from time to time would consult with his close advisors, officials, or even the wider strata of the society in making decisions.120 But those present on such occasions simply give advice, performing thereby a duty and not exercising a right, and the resolutions are by no means binding on the ruler. Advice-giving, similarly to harmony, was of religious-prophetic and not of legalconstitutional nature.121 Advice was framed not in the language of civic humanism, with reference to ancient authors and history, characteristic of contemporary Western Christendom. Official ideology conceived the relations of the tsar and his advice-giving boyars after the model of Christ and his apostles.122 The problem of the so-called “Muscovite assemblies”123 also should be seen from a religious angle and as a non-institutionalized advice-giving. The sobor vseia zemli, “assembly of the whole land/country,” to use the contemporary term, did not in any way resemble Western assemblies of estates either in their early or in their mature form. Originating in the mid-sixteenth century, the assemblies became important for the government after the turmoil of the Time of Troubles, but what changed in the seventeenth century was not their “competence,” but only their “composition.”124 The word sobor, besides its meaning “cathedral church,” originally was the name of the church council in Muscovy and indeed, the church hierarchy was part of the assemblies. It can be thus plausibly assumed that these councils provided the inspiration not only for the name but also for the practice of calling assemblies of wider social composition including not only the church hierarchs and boyars, but also military servitors selected by local government officials and from time to time townspeople. The decade after 1613 and the 1630s–1640s witnessed two most active phases in the history of the assemblies, which came to an end in 1653. The most subtle statement of opinion on the character of the assemblies was probably given by Nancy Shields Kollmann, who commented on their ideological framework as well: “In form and symbolism they were consistent with Muscovite ideology, an ideology that mandated personal consultation between tsar and his people. They should

119 Kivelson, Autocracy in the Provinces, 213. 120 Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment, 8. 121 Rowland, “Did Muscovite Literary Ideology,” 154. 122 Bogatyrev, “Localism and Integration in Muscovy,” 88. 123 This name was suggested by Hans-Joachim Torke, “Tak nazyvaemye zemskie sobory v Rossii” [The so-called assemblies of the land in Muscovy], Voprosy istorii 22, no. 11 (1991): 3–10. 124 Vasilii Osipovich Kliuchevskii, Kurs russkoi istorii [Course of Russian history] (Moscow: Nauka, 1988), vol. 3, 187.

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probably best be regarded as a consultative process rather than as formal institutions, particularly of a proto-parliamentary type.”125 Consultation and counsel, are, however, not the same as the right of consent! Indeed, the assemblies “never intended to represent the non-existent estates”126 in Muscovy, and had no legal right to assent to taxation and legislation. The most important reasons for summoning the assemblies were as follows: the need of information on the state of the provinces especially in the decade after 1613, the declaration of government policy and the intention to calm down social unrest. In practice, the assemblies were not immune to popular initiative. But those who were present came to the assemblies to “perform a duty and not to exercise a right.”127 Therefore, service and not right (that is, corporatism) is the key notion linking petitions and the assemblies, since no concept of representation and political consent (including the principle of “redress before supply”) existed. The assemblies lacked any theoretical underpinning and Russia did not know the main principle of medieval and early modern parliamentarism in the West: “what touches all must be approved by all.” If the “Muscovite assemblies” could occasionally influence government policy and legislation, they did so not on the basis of the right to express grievances and not as a constituent part of the legislative process, but by articulating requests that the tsar might or might not have taken into account. To sum up: It is plausible to conceive Muscovite ideology as one based on fictional patron-client relations with regard to the ruler and the governed, where these relations were reinforced by the divine right of the tsars. The idea of supreme power was not articulated in this non-institutional context through legal-philosophical reasoning but through the following commitments: the tsar as the proprietor of the realm; the tsar and God as the central elements of existing social order; the tsar as the main protector and defender of Orthodox faith, and the father of this Orthodox community.128 The following comparison will ponder the first two aspects in a comparative manner.

125 Kollmann, “Concepts of Society and Social Identity in Early Modern Russia,” 39. 126 Donald Ostrowsky, “The Assembly of the Land (Zemskii Sobor) as a Representative Institution,” in Modernizing Muscovy: Reform and Change in Seventeenth–Century Russia, ed. Jarmo Kotilane and Marshall Poe (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 141. 127 Thornton Anderson, Russian Political Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 103. 128 Charles Halperin in his review of Krom’s book noted concerning Krom’s view, expounded in his November 18, 2016 presentation (“The Muscovite Tsardom as an Early Modern State”) at the conference of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (Washington, D.C., United States), that Krom underlined the “the lack of abstract theory” of state as “the most significant difference” between Russia and the European states—a statement that did not enter Krom’s book, “except concerning regencies.” Halperin, “The Early Modern Muscovite State Reconsidered,” 182, 192.

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NOTIONS OF P O W E R A N D S TAT E IN THE CONTEXT O F “ P R O P R I E TA R Y DYNA STICISM”: RUSSIA AND THE WESTERN PER SPECTIVE

CHAPTER 10

Richard Pipes’s Patrimonial Interpretation of Russia Reconsidered in the Light of “Proprietary Dynasticism”

Though the title mentions Richard Pipes, this chapter will not recount the reactions that his well-known book, “Russia under the Old Regime” evoked.1 Pipes’s work is rather taken as a point of departure—not so much because of the influence his book has exerted, but because some of his statements provide a foundation for the following analysis, which is based on a methodology I presented earlier.2 Back in 2005 I was probably the first to apply the concept of “proprietary dynasticism” to the study of Muscovite notions of power, and then to Muscovite state-building itself. What follows here is a revised and significantly extended version of my previous study on the topic. The fundamental argument, however, has not changed, although supplemented and updated with my own research as well as that of other historians. The methodology applied might, in a certain sense, be reminiscent of Valerie Kivelson’s thought-provoking article on Muscovite “citizenship.”3 Kivelson tried to arrive at a synthesis between the despotic school and the revisionist school 1 Pipes, Russia. For the most important objections see Marc Szeftel, “Two Negative Reappraisals of Russian Pre-Revolutionary Development,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 14, no. 1 (1980): 74–87; and George G. Weickhardt, “The Pre-Petrine Law of Property,” Slavic Review 52, no. 4 (1993): 663–679. The debate went on with Pipes’s answer and Weickhardt’s reply to it. Richard Pipes and George G. Weickhardt, “Was There Private Property in Muscovite Russia?,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 524–538. 2 Endre Sashalmi, “Some Remarks on ‘Proprietary Dynasticism’ and the Development of the Concept of State in 17th-Century Russia (Richard Pipes’s Interpretation of Muscovy and the European Perspective),” Specimina nova. Pars prima. Sectio Mediaevalis 3 (2005): 157–194. 3 Kivelson, “Muscovite ‘Citizenship,’” 465–489.

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of Russian history (which she labelled as the “hard” and “soft” interpretations respectively) “through a new way of thinking about the problem of state and society in Muscovy.”4 I also propose(d) a new way of thinking about Russian notions of power and state, but from an angle very different from Kivelson’s: I try to place the “hard” interpretation in a wider European context by applying the concept of “proprietary dynasticism” to the West and Russia alike, complemented by a source-based analysis of the development of the notion of state in Russia. This latter issue was the subject of Oleg Kharkhordin’s classic study,5 but my source base is much wider and my approach includes dimensions not considered by Kharkhordin. Some of the obvious similarities between the approaches are not so much due to borrowings but rather to a common source of inspiration: namely, the direct influence of Quentin Skinner, whose ideas on the development of the notion of state I applied to Russia in my (Hungarianlanguage) PhD dissertation defended in 1997. *** As in the case of “autocracy,” I begin the discussion of the issue of “proprietary dynasticism” by referring to the Decembrists, namely, Nikita Murav′ev’s “Plan of a Constitution” (1821). The Russian people [narod] is free and independent; it is not, and it cannot be the belonging [prinadlezhnostiu] to any person and family. (chap. 1, §1) … Women shall not inherit the imperial power and shall not transmit to anyone the right to inherit it through marriage—the society [obshchestvo] of free people is not a patrimony [otchina] and cannot serve as a dowry. The imperial title is established as hereditary for reasons of convenience, and not for the reason that it is really a family property. (chap. 10, §111)6 Taken together, these two articles in the constitution proposed by the Northern Society of Decembrists reflect one of the first condemnations in Russia of the phenomenon that is called “proprietary dynasticism.” Muscovite perceptions on rulership, however, were completely different in the sixteenth and seventeenth 4 Ibid., 467. 5 Kharkhordin, “What Is the State?,” 206–240. 6 Izbrannye sotsial′no-politicheskie i filosofskie proizvedeniia dekabristov, vol. 1, 296, 320.

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centuries, when universal service to the tsar and “proprietary dynasticism” were undisputed basic tenets shared by the society. The term “proprietary dynasticism” was coined by Herbert H. Rowen to describe the early modern view that “public power was dynastic property.”7 Muscovy was no exception, with one important difference: “Muscovite bookmen, in contrast to Western lawyers, never specially discussed the problem of a difference between the ruler’s power as a hereditary property [that is, votchina] and the ruler’s power as a duty”8—in other words, the ruler’s power as an office. By contrast, under Peter the Great it was precisely the reference to the ruler’s duty, namely, his duty to care for the common good, that Prokopovich used in the “Justice of the Monarch’s Will” (1722) to justify Peter’s statute on succession. The justification, however, contained the following contradiction: although the regulation of succession was done in the name of the ruler’s duties emanating from his office, the argument relied on a fully proprietary conviction, as the statute (and Prokopovich’s defense of it) gave a free hand to each monarch to decide who would follow him. Therefore, Peter’s legal regulation did not differ qualitatively from earlier ideas on succession: Muscovite rulers considered the realm as their votchina, that is, a hereditary property to pass on as they pleased—although the choice remained within the circle of the ruling family—and Peter merely enacted this right.9 With regard to Peter’s 1722 regulation Simon Dixon eloquently pointed out that “the tsar still regarded the state as his own property, to dispose of as he thought fit just as he had disposed of Aleksei” in 1718,10 despite the considerable 7 Herbert H. Rowen, The King’s State. Proprietary Dynasticism in Early Modern France (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1980), 169. 8 Sergei Bogatyrev, “Dinastiia kak factor razvitiia Rossiiskogo gosudarstva v XVI veke” [Dynasty as a factor in the development of the Russian state in the sixteenth century], in The Role of the State in the Historical Development of Russia, ed. Gyula Szvák (Budapest: Russica Pannonica, 2010), 70–71. Since my application of the concept of “proprietary dynasticism” to Russia in a European context in my 2005 study, other scholars, such as Sergei Bogatyrev, have also found it useful in interpreting Russian history, either under the influence of my work or independently of it. 9 See my opinion on this issue in details see below. The exclusion of Aleksei from succession and the 1722 succession statute, however, was an “extraordinary step” in the eyes of contemporaries, and the enactment of the tsar “was received with shock as not the least revolutionary of his innovations.” Lentin, Introduction, 17. 10 Dixon, Modernisation, 13–14. Ingerflom, who also quotes Dixon’s statement, holds the same view on the issue of Aleksei’s disinheritance and the nature of Peter’s 1722 succession law. The title of his subchapter is telling: “… et propriétaire de la Russie” (“… and the Proprietor of Russia”). Ingerflom, Le tsar, c’est moi, 266–267, 270. Lorenz Erren’s statement that “Peter’s 1722 law reaffirmed ancient Roman ‘fundamental law’ doctrine, stipulating that the empire was a res publica, that rulers did not own their scepters as private property, and that any

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evolution that had taken place in the meaning of the word gosudarstvo in terms of its separation from the person of the ruler (gosudar′). What is the more specific meaning of the term “proprietary dynasticism”? It means that rulers looked upon the conglomeration of their territories, which came to be called “their States” in the first half of the seventeenth century,11 as the patrimony of their dynasty. The symptoms of this state of mind were mentioned previously as classic methods of dynasticism in the discussion of the composite-dynastic state: “testament, codicil, gift, cession, exchange, sale, treaties of peace and marriage” were established practices to keep and increase the territories under the rule of a given dynasty. This outlook was evident in dynastic claims to territories/countries on various grounds resulting in dynastic wars (such as the Habsburg–Valois Wars, commonly known as the Italian Wars in 1494–1559). Claims to territories as a dowry likewise could lead to conflict, as was the case in the War of Devolution waged by Louis XIV against Spain in 1667–1668. Dynasties partitioned territories/countries among family members or between different branches of the dynasty, as the Habsburgs did in 1556, creating thereby the Spanish and the Austrian lines of descent. Succession was treated as a family matter, that is, as a part of private law, while subjects and their goods were considered the property of the ruler/dynasty, at least rhetorically.12 Louis XIV boldly affirmed the proprietary view, the “principle of the ownership of the state,” in both theory and practice.13 Besides the issue of succession, the treatment of subjects and their goods as private property reveals most clearly the idea that rulers saw the realm as their personal domain. Louis XIV once said about rulers: “Everything which is within the limits of their states belongs to them.”14 This sentence conveys the same meaning as the famous phrase attributed to him, “I am the state,” the authenticity of which has already been discussed. But he undoubtedly expressed the same kind of attitude in an authentic treatise entitled “The Craft of Kingship” (1679), the conclusion of which reads: “When we have the state in mind, we are working for ourselves. The welfare decision about succession therefore was a matter of politics and not of (hereditary) law,” is completely unacceptable to me. Lorenz Erren, “Feofan Prokopovich’s Pravda voli monarshei as Fundamental Law of the Russian Empire,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 17, no. 2 (Spring 2016): 354. Yet, he is also of the opinion that Peter’s law on succession was not a complete novelty if compared with the Muscovite period. 11 Martin van Creveld, The Rise and the Decline of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 126. 12 Rowen, King’s State, 18, 22. 13 Ibid., 76, 170. 14 Alexander Yanov, The Origins of Autocracy. Ivan the Terrible in Russian History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 44.

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of the one creates the glory of the other.”15 Rowen summarized the Sun King’s political beliefs as follows in the framework of relationship between the body politic and body natural of Louis’s kingship: “Although he accepted the principle of the abstract state, he hardly did so in its pure form; he was too committed to the unity of the idea of the state with the interest of his family and himself for that.”16 It is worth noting that a passage in “The Justice of the Monarch’s Will,” quoted previously in another context, is reminiscent of the spirit suggested by Louis’s words concerning his standing in relation to the welfare of the state: “The hereditary monarch, knowing that his power is inalienable, takes as much pains for the integrity and welfare of the state [tak o tselosti i dobrom sostoianii gosudarstva] as for his own domestic welfare, wishing to leave his successors strong power [krepkuiu vlast′] and glory.”17 And the same principle was expressed in Russia, in Emperor Paul’s (1797–1801) “Statute of the Imperial Family” (1797). Its first sentence reads: “The essential element …, the firm ground of the illustrious condition of any State is the improvement of the ruling family.”18 While statements of this kind were not at all unusual in Western Christendom during the seventeenth century, by the end of the eighteenth century they were becoming increasingly obsolete with the growing commitment to the principle that identified the king primarily as the first servant of the state.

15 Rowen, King’s State, 79. 16 Ibid., 76. It is worth noting here the view of Louis Marin who, influenced by the concept of the “king’s two bodies” and the importance of royal portraiture, claimed that under Louis XIV the French king had not two but three bodies. This claim was based on the fact that subjects bowed before the king’s portrait, which functioned as the “sacramental body” of the king, akin to the consecrated host, regarding the reverence shown to it due to the doctrine of real presence. In his interpretation the person of the king united three bodies: “a physical historical body [body natural], a juridico-political body [body politic], and a sacramental, semiotic body,—the sacramental body, the ‘portrait’ performing the exchange without remainder (or seeking to eliminate all remainder) between the historical body and the body politic.” Louis Marin, Portrait of the King, trans. Martha M. Houle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 12, 14. However, at the core of this ritual, in the last resort, still lay the distinction “between the historical body and the body politic,” as Marin’s own explanation shows. Therefore, this curiosity of the Sun King’s reign, is indicative, in my view, of what is called a “royal religion” of French kingship, also manifesting itself in the importance attributed to the old practice of healing the scrofula, or the likewise old usage of the canopy in royal entries above the king, the most obvious parallel between the corpus regis and corpus Christi. Unlike the reverence shown to the royal portrait, these instances involved the real presence of the king. 17 Prokopovich, Pravda voli monarshei, 234–235. 18 Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii [Complete collection of the laws of the Russian Empire] (St. Petersburg, 1830), 525 (no. 17, §906, April 5, 1797).

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The above examples and statements taken from the history of Western Europe cast doubt on the plausibility of Pipes’s interpretation of Russian history. Pipes contrasted Russia with the West, claiming that the patrimonial (concept of the) state was an exclusively Russian characteristic distinguishing Russia from the West.19 In a cursory comparison of Western and Russian concepts of the state, Pipes referred to the “famous pronouncement” of Louis XIV to highlight the contrasting traditions. Of this “famous pronouncement” he wrote, correctly, that it was “of doubtful provenance and probably apocryphal,” but he also claimed that it breathed “a sentiment so contrary to the entire Western tradition!”20 And he immediately added: “Far more characteristic, as well as being authentic, are the words uttered by Louis on his deathbed: ‘I am going away, but the state lives for ever.’”21 While the first claim (concerning the contrast between the Western and the Russian tradition) is erroneous, the second tells only half (or less than half) of the story. For the two perceptions, that is, the one permeating the “Craft of Kingship” and the other made by the dying king, should not be seen in isolation and conceived as mutually exclusive principles: rather they should be treated as interrelated, two sides of the coin. James Collins’s general statement regarding Old Regime France holds true regarding the relation between “proprietary dynasticism” and the modern concept of state as well. He warned that we should not apply “our ideas of consistency to Old Regime France; to understand it, one must accept contradictions and inconsistencies, the social and political reality of a system of this and that, not this or that.”22 Similarly, while underlining the importance of “allodial property notions” for early modern Western monarchies, Rowen made clear that at the same time “the elements of the notion of an abstract, impersonal (or suprapersonal) state, distinct from the person and will of the ruler, began to be sharpened and strengthened.”23 He concludes that historians “have almost always treated proprietary dynasticism as an aberration, not the ordinary practice of the time.”24 He convincingly demonstrated through the example of the French Monarchy

19 Pipes, Russia, XVII–XVIII. 20 Ibid., 127. 21 Ibid. The more precise translation of the second part of the passage reads: “… the state remains for ever.” 22 James B. Collins, The State in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 4, fn. 3. 23 Rowen, King’s State, 11. 24 Ibid., 169.

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that this perception should be revised, and “proprietary dynasticism” should be treated as an important dimension of “Old Regime” monarchies.25 There is no need to argue further that “proprietary dynasticism” as such cannot in itself constitute the basis of “Russian backwardness” or a peculiarity of its development. Therefore, Pipes’s statements concerning gosudarstvo will appear in a different light: “Although we translate gosudarstvo as ‘state’ the more accurate equivalent would be ‘domain.’”26 He justified his statement on the ground that until the middle of the seventeenth century, the “state” for the Russians, “in so far as they thought of it at all,” meant the ruler, “his person, his private staff and his patrimony.”27 In his view, “the idea of state as an entity distinct from the sovereign entered Russian vocabulary in the seventeenth century.”28 There are problems, however, with these statements. One of them is that Pipes conflates the idea of the state with the use of the term gosudarstvo. Furthermore, we shall see that gosudarstvo could be distinguished from the person of the ruler even before the mid-seventeenth century, that is, before the Westernization of Russian ideology. But the existence of a distinction between gosudar′ and gosudarstvo does not in itself mean the appearance of the concept of state in seventeenth-century Russia, much less the existence of a theory of state. Oleg Kharkhordin’s pioneering research on the development of the concept of state in Russia is worth quoting at length: Summing up the early development of the Russian term for the state, one sees a parallel emergence of both connotations that one finds in lo stato or “the state” in early modern Europe. Both lo stato and gosudarstvo signify aspects of the personal domination of the prince,29 il suo stato (though the Italian principe commands free men in the sense of non-slaves while the Russian gosudar′ rules his subjects like serfs).30 Both words also signify territories

25 Ibid. 26 Pipes, Russia, 127, 78. 27 Ibid., 127. 28 Ibid. 29 As in case of Ivan III’s claim regarding Novgorod in 1477 where gosudarstvo means “rule” (Kharkhordin, “What Is the State?,” 216) or “domination.” 30 As the Muscovites could not make a distinction between dominium and imperium, that is, power over private property and what we can call “sovereignty,” “gosudarstvo was rule and command, but rule and command as practiced in one’s patrimonium over serfs and members of the family.” Ibid. The other major difference was that gosudarstvo, unlike lo stato, “state,” état, and other terms derived from the Latin status, did not have a legal connotation. Ibid.

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that sovereigns control. The most decisive innovation, however, was one that happened, according to Skinner, in the beginning of the sixteenth century in Italian, and in the beginning of the seventeenth in English—the designation by lo stato and “the state” of an apparatus of government, independent of both the rulers and the ruled. This happens in Russian as well, but only in the early to mid-eighteenth century.31 Kharkhordin also notes that “this extension” occurred in Russian but “in a different manner than in Western Europe,” and he sees the cause of it in “the absence of long-established republican or absolutist traditions of political thought.”32 However, I will argue that the key to the different path was the lack of a clear-cut office theory of rulership in Russia. Kharkhordin is right that “the first and decisive distinction that led to the formation of the familiar triplet ruler/state/ruled in Russia was the distinction between the ruler and the country.”33 On the basis of Chernaia’s article he claims that “some leanings in this direction are found” under Tsar Aleksei, a process he summarizes as follows: “Personal service to the czar gradually came to be interpreted as service to the country, or better, to the fatherland, and this altered emphasis helped for the first time to separate state affairs from the personal affairs of the czar.”34 And he concludes that despite these early manifestations of this development “the decisive shift in discourse” came with Peter the Great, as he “introduced a notion of the common good and attempted radically to distance the person of the czar from the body of the country.”35 In my view, however, the distinction between service rendered to the tsar and service rendered to gosudarstvo existed much earlier than has been supposed by previous historiography, and what happened from the mid-seventeenth century was that the distinction became more noticeable, and perhaps for first time in Russia, it was slowly becoming conceptualized. The distinction between gosudar′ and gosudarstvo became particularly clear during the smuta. By then, the term Moskovskoe gosudarstvo “was an expression understandable to everyone.”36 What is more, contemporaries during the smuta could look upon the term as 31 Ibid., 217. Kharkhordin claims, partly on the basis of the usage of the adjective gosudarstvennyi, that gosudarstvo came to acquire this meaning in the eighteenth century. Ibid., 217, 224. 32 Ibid., 217–218. 33 Ibid., 218. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 219. 36 Kliuchevskii, Kurs, vol. 3, 63.

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“something that was not only conceivable but really existing even without the ruler”;37 official documents during the interregnum were issued in the name “of the people of Moskovskoe gosudarstvo.”38 Moskovskoe gosudarstvo was clearly an object of loyalty, even if (or perhaps because) it had strong religious implications: it referred to the territory of true Orthodoxy delineated by the political boundaries of Muscovy. It is in this very sense that gosudarstvo was used in a quotation from the source called “A New Tale on the Most Glorious Russian Tsardom” (written about 1611), which Krom considers an important proof of “how deeply the idea of statehood [ideia gosudarstvennosti] penetrated into the minds of the contemporaries.”39 The intentions of the enemy are described by the chronicler in the following manner: “since many years back all these damned [okaianniki] and godless [bezbozhniki] [people] have been thinking of our great realm [nashe velikoe gosudarstvo] … how they could steal our great realm [velikoe gosudarstvo nashe] and extirpate the Christian faith [vera khristian′skaia].”40 This is clearly not the deep idea of statehood but the deeply religious notion of the realm (gosudarstvo). For the Russian worldview of that time held that Muscovy was the only community/territory of true Orthodoxy and vice versa.41 I shall try to prove with the help of some prikaz sources that at least in the chancelleries if not in the ecclesiastical sphere, a distinction between gosudar′ and gosudarstvo, and service rendered to the tsar and to gosudarstvo, existed right after the smuta in the decades between 1613 and the mid-century: that is, in a much less troubled period when Russia was again ruled by a legitimate tsar. At the same time, I do not mean to say that this distinction was either clearcut or well-established, especially if Muscovy is compared with the West. Yet, Moskovskoe gosudarstvo had an important role in contemporary Muscovite chancellery rhetoric as an object of loyalty, if not yet as a legal concept. This analysis can show the difference in terminology and approach between chancellery and ecclesiastical sources, even if this difference was not so marked as the difference between the various languages of political thought in the early modern West. According to Glenn Burgess, in seventeenth-century England, for example, there existed the languages of common law, Roman law, and theology as the

37 Ibid. See the allegorical personification of Russia as a widow mentioned before. 38 Ibid., 63–64. 39 Krom, Rozhdenie, 230. 40 Quoted ibid. 41 Serhii Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 296.

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main languages of discourse for the expression of political ideas.42 They possessed certain coherence and independence, although they were by no means closed, and each of them employed special terms and concepts distinguishing the one from the others.43 A comparison of the development of the concept of state in Russia and in Western Christendom can be risky, of course, as Nancy Shields Kollmann rightly asserted,44 but if the traps involved in such a comparison are kept in mind, my method can be a productive one. This comparison is all the more justified because there was a conscious effort in Russia from the 1660s to assimilate Western notions of rulership. I am convinced that the inclusion of “proprietary dynasticism” into historical analysis as an aspect in its own right would result in a better understanding not only of France and other Western monarchies as Rowen asserted,45 but also of Muscovite and Imperial Russia. Instead of treating it as a peculiar Russian feature, it should be treated as a feature common to all monarchies. Seen from this angle it can be a useful “neutral” aspect in a comparative analysis. If we abandon, on the one hand, the juxtaposition of “idealized images of a servile Muscovy to free Europe,”46 as suggested by Marshall Poe, and look upon “proprietary dynasticism” or the “patrimonial [concepts of] state” (this latter term is preferred by Poe to “despotism” on the ground of its neutrality)47 as a shared characteristic on the other, as I have suggested, it will be possible to provide a more plausible interpretation of Russia’s past. Namely, “proprietary dynasticism” should be treated on a comparative European continuum. So, if we get rid of those negative value judgements that the proprietary attitude evoked, then not the existence of “proprietary dynasticism” but the degree of its strength will be a distinguishing characteristic of Russia: the strong belief in what Poe termed the tsar’s “nominal universal proprietorship.”48 In Western Christendom there were just a few authors who, along with some rulers, would approve “universal royal ownership,”49 while in Russia almost no one questioned it. For the general belief was that “property in a regime of universal royal ownership was insecure.”50 Hence this claim was considered extreme, 42 Glenn Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution. An Introduction to English Political Thought 1603–1642 (London: Macmillan, 1992), 117–118. 43 Burgess, Politics of the Ancient Constitution, 117. 44 Kollmann, “Concepts of Society and Social Identity in Early Modern Russia,” 43. 45 Rowen, King’s State, 169. 46 Poe, “People Born to Slavery,” 225. 47 Ibid., 220. 48 Ibid., 222–223. 49 Ibid., 222. 50 Ibid.

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and was “never taken as an axiom and was always disputed both in theory and in practice.”51 On the contrary, as Robert Crummey noted, “Muscovite law did not recognize private property in any absolute sense.”52 The strength of the belief in the tsar’s “nominal universal proprietorship” is supported by a wide range of sources. Foreign accounts of Russia, such as that of Adam Olearius in the seventeenth century, bear witness to this: in the famous passage describing the Russians’ belief in the tsar as a terrestrial deity and the executor of divine will, Olearius also mentions the commitment common among the Russians that “everything they have belongs not so much to them as to God and the grand prince.”53 The strength of the proprietary dimension in seventeenth-century Muscovy is also confirmed by contemporary proverbs: “Everything is God’s and the Master’s” (Vse bozh′e i gosudarevo). This pronouncement, attributed to Ivan the Terrible, came to be treated as a proverb in the seventeenth century.54 Indeed, this is the perception to which Olearius referred in his description. I contend that the strength of “nominal universal proprietorship” is reflected in some seventeenth-century Russian political crimes cases. The term “political crime” is an elusive notion as it always depends on the perceptions of power,

51 Yanov, Origins, 44. Finer similarly points out the “Legalism” of the “Modern State” (1450– 1750) in the West: “Lawboundedness, respect for private property … together imply that rulership was in some senses limited. This limitedness of government was strongly reinforced by two other legalistic characteristics, the first being that a distinction came to be drawn between public law and private law, between private ownership and state power, and the distinction resurfaced between the private person of the monarch and the res publica, which came to be conceived as an abstract and faceless nomocracy.” Finer, History of Government, vol. 3, 1298–1299. 52 Robert O. Crummey, “Seventeenth-Century Russia: Theories and Models,” 129. Crummey, at the same time, accepts Weickhardt’s argument that “Muscovite law contained more stipulations protecting individual and clan property than Pipes admits.” Ibid., fn. 67. I am grateful to Prof. Antony Lentin for the following comment, which is more than illuminating in a comparative study: “Strictly speaking, under English land law, a landowner’s title to his land is still nominally subject to that of the ultimate notional owner, the sovereign. See Cheshire, Land Law” (email correspondence). This reveals the survival of antiquated notions in the West, and confirms at the same time the usefulness of the European perspective. The book in question is Geoffrey Chevalier Cheshire and Edward Hector Burn, Modern Law of Real Property (London: Butterworths, 1972). 53 For this and for sixteenth-century mentions of the same spirit by foreigners see Marshall Poe, “What did Russians Mean When They Called Themselves ‘Slaves of the Tsar’?,” Slavic Review 57, no. 3 (1998): 603. 54 Lev Nikolaevich Pushkarev, Obshchestvenno-politicheskaia mysl′ Rossii. Vtoraia polovina XVII veka [Socio-political thought in Russia. Second half of the seventeenth century] (Moscow: Nauka, 1982), 88.

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values and mentality characteristic of a given society at a given time. The term appeared in the “vocabulary of Western European nations at the time of the French Revolution”: before that most of the crimes belonging this special category (that is, crimes against the states or those in power) “fell under the broad ambit of the concept of treason,” or crimen laesae maiestatis in the countries with Roman law tradition.55 Without being involved in the niceties of an all exhausting definition, “political crime” can be broadly defined as acts and intentions of all kinds, be they either direct or indirect and of secular or spiritual nature, which are conceived as threats to the stability, security, legitimacy of the existing order, and of those exercising governmental power, or conceived as insulting to the dignity of the regime in a given society at a given time. These cases, known in Russia as slovo i delo Gosudarevo, included not only treason proper but also lèse majesté.56 The following political crime cases, as in Pavel Lukin’s book, are generally treated as a source for the study of popular beliefs about the tsar. We should not forget, however, that the cases were put down in writing by officials, and this fact in itself warns us not to look at these cases simply as a reflection of popular beliefs about the ruler: for we have to take into account the possibility of interpretation. At the same time, verdicts in the relevant cases reflect the official view. Two examples, to be quoted from Novombergskii’s collection, will suffice to prove this contention.57 These cases had already drawn the attention of other historians.58 In 1626/27 a tradesman from Mozhaisk who was herding the horses of musketeers asked one of the musketeers about the horses. The musketeer uttered the following words: “The land is the master’s [zemlia gosudareva], and we and our horses are the master’s [gosudarevy] as well.”59 The tradesman was of different opinion, for he replied: “This land is ours; the master [gosudar′] owns

55 Barton L. Ingraham, Political Crime in Europe. A Comparative Study of France, Germany and England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 19–20. 56 A detailed discussion of these issues, including the origin of the term slovo i delo Gosudarevo itself, see below. 57 Slovo i delo gosudarevy. Protsessy do izdaniia Ulozheniia Alekseia Mikhailovicha [The master’s word and deed. Trials until the publication of the “Ulozhenie” of Aleksei Mikhailovich], ed. Nikolai Iakovlevich Novombergskii (Moscow: Tipografiia A. I. Snegireva, 1911), 28–30 (no. 27), 49–50 (no. 43). 58 Andrei L. Yurganov, “Categories of Russian Medieval Culture,” Russian Studies in History (Winter 1999–2000): Flirting with Postmodernism, ed. Nancy Shields Kollmann, 64–65. Lukin, Narodnye predstavleniia, 19–20. 59 The English translation of the passages is taken from Yurganov, “Categories of Russian Medieval Culture,” 64.

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the land, the meadows and the horses in Moscow.”60 The tradesman was put on trial for saying this, and the verdict was that he was to be beaten “severely with bastinadoes and jailed for one week, so that in the future neither he nor others will utter such words.”61 Although such cases were rare in Russia the “masses continued to believe that everything in the Russian state belonged to the tsar.”62 Andrei Iurganov is right to say: “This mindset stabilized society.”63 Marshall Poe holds the same opinion on this state of mind in Muscovy, claiming that “nominal universal proprietorship secured property if only in a fictitious or psychological sense. … In this way, ‘all that is mine is God’s and the tsar’s’ could be understood … as a threat to possible felons.”64 Pavel Lukin also remarked in connection with the case cited that in popular belief the tsar was the proprietor of things and people in his realm.65 It was the adjective vol′nyi that expressed this perception of power, meaning that the ruler was “free” (volen), in the sense of having full power, “to reward and punish” anyone in his own right.66 This attitude was, of course, very different from the one reflected in a contemporary English saying used to condemn King Charles’s policy: “We know our houses as our castles.”67 Belief in the “nominal universal proprietorship” of the tsar could produce funny and absurd statements as in the case when a prison guard was accused of comparing his beard to the ruler’s. According to the investigation this charge was false, as the drunken prisoner said to his guard: “Don’t swear at me, peasant, or I’ll tear your beard out.” But the guard’s answer was as follows: “You’d better not pull my beard, for I am the master’s [gosudarev] peasant, and my beard is the master’s [gosudareva] too.” The guard was acquitted, “because the words he uttered were entirely permissible (although completely absurd from today’s viewpoint).”68 Regarding this case Kivelson wrote that it reflected the salient feature of political self-identification in Muscovy: “The explicitly political relationship that Muscovites expressed most often and called on most strongly was a direct link upward to the sovereign.”69 The idea of belonging to the master, to be precise, appeared not only in petition formulae but also in a “non-formulaic setting” as in this case mentioned: here the sense of belonging 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., 65. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid. 64 Poe, “People Born to Slavery,” 222–223. 65 Lukin, Narodnye predstavleniia, 28. 66 Ibid., 20. 67 Better known today as “An Englishman’s home is his castle.” 68 Yurganov, “Categories of Russian Medieval Culture,” 65. 69 Kivelson, “Muscovite ‘Citizenship,’” 469–470.

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to the ruler “conferred on the person, and his beard, a particular inviolability and entitled him to make certain claim to dignity and protection.”70 The summary of Kivelson’s conception on political self-identification in Muscovy is as follows: “Because the tsar stood for the polity, the powerful vertical relationship with the sovereign was inherently political and not just religious, devotional, or personal. Identifying oneself as belonging to the tsar was inherently a political act of identifying oneself with the Muscovite polity.”71 This statement on selfidentification, indeed, grasps an important point, which I can accept, apart from the Western-couched wording of the conclusion. This identification, however, could include a reference not only to the ruler alone, but also to God and tsar/gosudar′ as two co-equal powers, which shows the religious background behind it. In a political crime case of 1676 an icon painter gave the following answer when he was asked whose peasant he was: “I am God’s and the grand master’s [velikogo gosudaria] peasant, then I am the peasant of my lord, Fedor Grigorevich Pleshcheev.”72 There is a contemporary proverb, “The soul belongs to God, the body belongs to the master [telo gosudarevo], the back belongs to the [land]lord,”73 expressing a somewhat similar belief. (These examples illustrate how well-chosen Poe’s term, “nominal universal proprietorship,” is.) Commenting on this last case Lukin made the same statement as Kivelson did in her explanation of the “beard case” as quoted above: in Lukin’s view this case reflected the “thing most important for each man at any time—selfidentification.”74 Furthermore, he notes that the well-established phrase Bog da gosudar′ (“God and master”) reflected the belief in God and the ruler as the two “highest values.”75 Since this belief was universal and not a peculiarity characteristic of the common folk only,76 the following statement seems to be justified: the clue to understanding the tsar’s nominal universal proprietorship is the deeply rooted belief reflected in the phrase Bog da gosudar′. To prove the direct relationship between the proprietary attitude and this phrase it is sufficient to recall the abovementioned proverb, Vse bozh′e i gosudarevo. Hence, it was the belief in God and the tsar as two internally linked quasi-equal powers that lay

70 Kivelson, “Muscovite ‘Citizenship,’” 469–470. 71 Kivelson, “Muscovite ‘Citizenship,’” 470. 72 Quoted by Lukin, Narodnye predstavleniia, 32. 73 Sashalmi, “16th–17th-Century Muscovite Ideology of Power in a European Perspective,” 171. 74 Lukin, Narodnye predstavleniia, 32. 75 Ibid., 35. 76 Ibid., 29–35.

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at the heart of strong proprietary claims. It could not be otherwise, since, as mentioned before, “God and tsar stood together at the apex of the established order.”77 Therefore, “when Russians called the tsar gosudar′, they were reminded that he was master of Russia, just as God (Gospod′) was master of all men.”78 The phrase “volen Bog da tsarskoe velichestvo” (“free is God, as well as the tsarist majesty”) used with regard to reward is also an example.79 And it is not an accident either, that the word vol′nyi is often linked to samoderzhets and samoderzhavnyi in the sixteenth century.80 The expression “for the coronation of your free and autocratic rule” (na venchanie tvoego vol′nogo i samoderzhavnogo tsarstviia) is encountered three times in the introduction to the coronation ordo of Fedor I in 1584,81 and here samoderzhavnyi refers to God-given power. The contention that the problem of proprietorship is closely linked to appeals to divinity, though not necessarily in a strong manner as was the case in Russia, is supported by Western analogies, which place this issue in a European context.82 As John H. Burns clearly stated in his detailed and authoritative study on the problem of dominium in high and late medieval Western thought: There is, on the one hand, the essentially juristic use of the term—above all in the law and legal theory of property relationships. On the other hand, equally evident on the face of the record, there is a theological sense in which the term is used above all with reference to the power of God, but used in such contexts as ensure its relevance at the same time to human situations and human societies. Neither of these ways of thinking about dominium was, so to say, fully autonomous: neither operated exclusively with its own material and its own terms of art.83

77 Kivelson, Autocracy, 11. 78 Ibid., 9. 79 Trepavlov, “Belyi tsar′,” 51, fn. 1. 80 Ibid., 50. 81 Ibid. 82 Antonio Feros writes that those authors in late fifteenth-century Spain who claimed that the ruler’s power came from the community, unlike others who conceived the monarch as God’s representative, did not regard the king “as the ‘master of the kingdom’ but as its administrator or tutor.” Antonio Feros, Kingship and Favoritism in the Spain of Philip III, 1598–1621 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 72. 83 John H. Burns, Lordship, Kingship, and Empire. The Idea of Monarchy 1400–1525 (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1988), 16–17.

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This religiously conditioned proprietarism justifies the comparison undertaken, even though the juristic aspect is irrelevant with regard to Muscovy because of the lack of Roman law and legal theory. At the same time, it does matter that in Western Christendom there was always a conceptual distinction between rulership and ownership from the twelfth century onwards, at the latest, due to the impact of Roman law. This fact cannot be overestimated and militates against the “soft school” in a comparison of Russia with Western Christendom, explaining, at the same time, one of the major differences between Muscovy and the contemporary Western Christendom: namely, that the proprietary type of selfidentification was not characteristic of Western Christendom, where an estatebased self-identification prevailed!

CHAPTER 11

Aspects of Rulership and Their Relation to Each Other in Early Modern Europe and Russia: Proprietary, Office, and Divine Right

My method, which treats proprietary dynasticism on a “comparative continuum,” also draws heavily on Joe H. Shennan’s work.1 Shennan, who cursorily compared seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France and Russia, was admittedly strongly influenced by Rowen.2 He described Louis XIV as a “proprietary monarch,” an “administrative monarch,” the “chief justiciar,” and “God’s lieutenant,”3 but he did not use these categories for analysing Russian notions of power. Shennan’s categories, I think, can be reduced to three aspects of rulership: proprietary, office, and divine right, respectively. These three aspects of kingship, which strongly influenced each other, are useful for a comparative analysis of the development of the concept of state in the West and Russia alike. A central role should be attributed to the office aspect, and its relationship to the other two must be clarified. In some sense this aspect is also present, if only implicitly, in Kharkhordin’s approach.4 I, however, attribute a crucial importance to the concept of kingship as an office. 1 Joe H. Shennan, Liberty and Order in Early Modern Europe. The Subject and the State 1600– 1800 (London: Longman, 1986) 2 For Shennan’s debt to Rowen see Shennan, Liberty and Order in Early Modern Europe, 31. en. 8. 3 Shennan, Liberty and Order in Early Modern Europe, 20–30. 4 See Kharkhordin, “What Is the State?,” 210, 212, regarding the West, and ibid., 218–220, regarding Russia. He speaks of the “vocation of princes,” which entailed a “corresponding status appropriate to them,” and of the duties imposed on the king by the status regis. Ibid., 210.

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11.1. The Proprietary and Office Aspects of Rulership. Meanings of Gosudarstvo in Muscovy prior to 1700 Although Shennan declares that in a comparison of France with Russia “we are not comparing like with like,” his conclusion reads: There was a fundamental difference between the two concepts of royal office which is best illustrated by reference to the contrasting legal traditions. Whereas in the West the king’s office was inherited along with a host of legal obligations which to a considerable extent prescribed its holder’s authority, in Muscovy the tsardom offered the incumbent unrestricted power.5 Shennan is right to point out the differences in legal traditions, yet, the major difference, in fact, lay in the lack of the concept of office and the ensuing extremely personal(-theocratic) perception of power in Russia—a perception that was not altered fundamentally despite the events of the smuta. As Marshall Poe, in line with my argument, stated unequivocally: “The clergy said and the commoners believed that the tsar was selected by the Lord not to hold the office of tsar but to be tsar.6 Furthermore, legal tradition and the idea of office were strongly interwoven in Western Christendom as is shown by the introduction of the coronation oath by the Western Church in the ninth century for kings: the king’s office was to preserve his subjects’ rights, which he had to promise in the oath.7 The lack of the concept of office resulted in the lack of a coronation oath in Russia.8 The sole event of this kind that might be mentioned as an exception, the “program of pledges” by Vasilii Shuiskii in 1606, “which he outlined in the charter announcing his ascension to the throne” as follows: With regard to Russia, while emphasizing the importance of the change in the perception of service (the shift from service to the ruler to service to the gosudarstvo) he does not explicitly mention the concept of office, although he remarks that Peter conceived himself “as a caretaker and curator,” and emphasizes the novel concept of the common good. Ibid., 219–220. 5 Shennan, Liberty and Order in Early Modern Europe, 67. 6 Marshall Poe, “The Central Government and its Institutions,” in The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 1, ed. Maureen Perrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 436–437. 7 Passerino d’Entréves sees this oath coming from feudal law as expressing the mutual obligations between the ruler and the ruled. d’Entréves, Notion, 86. 8 I am grateful to Prof. Richard Wortman who (in a personal discussion of this issue) confirmed my contention. He also remarked that the tsar’s duties were pointing towards God, rather than towards the people. (Or, I can add, not towards an entity such as the crown as a legal fiction.)

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I shall not, as master, condemn any man to death without a fair trial by his boyar peers; nor shall I confiscate estates, manor houses or property from his brothers, his wife or children, provided they were not in complicity with him. … Nor shall I, as master, accept false testimony at face value … in order that innocent Orthodox Christians not perish. … And furthermore, I, Tsar and Grand Prince Vasilii Ivanovich of all Russia, kiss the cross before all Orthodox Christians that I shall act as a true and righteous judge, and I shall not show disfavour to any innocent person, and that I shall not treat any of my adversaries unjustly, and that I shall refrain from the use of coercion [against them].9 Furthermore his promise also contained “to govern the Russian tsardom through general counsel [obshchim sovetom Rossiskoe tsartsvo upravliat′].”10 Looking at the promise from a formal point of view, it was, to some extent, akin to the coronation promises (diploma inaugurale) known from Hungarian history, for instance, (the duty to keep the rights of the crown and the liberties of the subjects), which kings had to issue before their coronations when they took the oath (iuramentum), or the Polish pacta conventa (“agreed points”) after 1572, that is, conditions changing and depending on the given political context, which each new king had to negotiate at his accession. Yet, the similarities should not be pressed any further than that, due to the differences in political cultures, and the content of the promise. I completely agree with Gary Hamburg that Shuiskii’s oath was in no way a “bill of rights,”11 and it was not of contractual nature either. Most importantly, this method was not applied later on in case of other tsars, Mikhail Romanov’s accession included, which could have been the occasion to the reframe his election in legal-constitutional terms, which (as we have seen) did not happen. If the promise is placed in the short-term Muscovite context of the turbulent events of the smuta, as well as in Muscovite thought on power, the following conclusions can be drawn. The excesses of the former reigns, especially of Godunov’s were to be prevented with new principles guaranteeing the protection of life and property of individuals and their close relative within the elite. It may well be, that these principles have been borrowed from the law codes of the Polish-Lithuanian

9 Quoted from Hamburg, Russia’s Path, 107, with minor changes as to the titles. 10 Russian phrase is quoted ibid. Translation is changed. 11 Ibid.

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Commonwealth,12 where it was known as neminem captivabimus nisi iure victum (“We shall not arrest anyone without a verdict”), which shows that Russian perception of power was not untouched by political ideas of Western Christendom. The stipulation of Shuiskii’s promise, that he would take counsel in governing the tsardom, was in no way a novelty—save that it was said openly—as counsel had been part of Muscovite ideology as we have seen, conceived in a religious framework; an allusion to this framework is confirmed by the appearance of the term “Orthodox Christians” in the promise. Furthermore, as Hamburg noted, “the phrase stopped short of stipulating that he would follow mechanically the advice of the Boyar Duma or of any particular agency of government.”13 To this I can just add: at that time even the word duma can rather be interpreted as an act of counselling and not an institution (as “Boyar Duma” is not a contemporary term), and the word sovet is also encountered in this sense, although more rarely. Even though the promise was the result of a bargain between Shuiskii and his entourage helping him to overthrow the First False Dmitrii and access the throne, it did not imply a contract of government. Yet, it does show the importance of an unprecedented political context and the possibility of including Western concepts in Muscovite ideology. It is significant that the coronation oath, which in Western Christendom was introduced as a consequence of office theory14 and had a long tradition by the seventeenth century, was not introduced in Imperial Russia either, despite the emergence of the idea of rulership as a public office during Peter’s reign. The importance of the coronation oath and its connection with the idea of the king’s office is underlined even by the prominent divine right theorist, King James VI (I): for him “this oath in the Coronation is the clearest, ciuill, and fundamentall Law, whereby the Kings office is properly defined.”15 And before making this conclusion in a long passage he described the content of it as follows: in the Coronation of our owne Kings, as well as of euery Christian Monarche, they giue their Oath, first to maintaine the Religion presently professed within countrie, according to their lawes whereby it is established, and to punish all those that should presse to alter or disturbe the profession thereof; And 12 Ibid. Hamburg here relies on the opinion of Sergei Solov′ev. 13 Ibid. 14 Canning, History, 59. 15 King James VI and I, 65. James’s work, Trew Law of Free Monarchies, has an eloquent subtitle: The Reciprocal and Mutual Duty betwixt a Free King and His Natural Subjects—even though he denied that there was a contract between him and his subjects.

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next to maintaine all the lowable and good Lawes made by their predecessours: to see them put in execution. … And lastly, to maintaine the whole countrey, and euery state therein, in all their ancient Priuiledges and Liberties, as well against all forreine enemies, as among themselues: And shortly, to procure the weale and flourishing of his people. …16 In Western Christendom the idea of rulership as a public office was the most important force in counterbalancing the principle of “proprietary dynasticism,” which was “only one element in the picture” to be sure, and was “seldom set forth in unabashed nakedness”: “Its proponents in practice and theory almost always accepted the principle of service at the heart of the office theory of public power.”17 The idea of office, presented as early as the seventh century in an influential work by Isidore of Seville,18 which from the high Middle Ages “served to objectify the state”19 through the works of lawyers and philosophers, had in its core the “distinction between the persons of the rulers and the office and institutions they occupy.”20 With emergence of the modern notion of state, this idea has developed into our linguistic distinction between “state” and “government”: the entity as the repository of sovereign power and those wielding it.21 Some attempts have been made to examine the issue of the ruler’s office in the Russian context, most notably by Michael Cherniavsky. Referring to him, Richard Wortman noted: “Michael Cherniavsky observed that the sophisticated legal distinction between the immortal body politic and the mortal body of the ruler, a characteristic that was present to a greater or lesser degree in various Western states, never took hold in Russia.”22 But on closer examination, even Cherniavsky’s treatment of this issue is self-contradictory. He claimed that “the conception of a sharp distinction between the person and the office of 16 Ibid., 64–65. 17 Rowen, King’s State, 169–170. 18 Canning, History, 20. 19 Dyson, State Tradition, 28. The concept of office, substantiated by the coronation oath, at the same time, was one of the sources of the idea of a contract between the people and the ruler. John M. Kelly, A Short History of Western Legal Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 96–97. The notion of political contract, however, was practically unknown in pre-Petrine Russia. For a short comparative study of the contractarian thought in the West and Russia see my article, Endre Sashalmi, “Contract Theory and the Westernization of Russian Ideology under Peter the Great,” Specimina Nova. Pars prima. Sectio mediaevalis 2 (2003): 89–100. Some aspects of this issue are to be discussed later in the book. 20 Morris, An Essay, 37. 21 Ibid. 22 Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 405.

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the prince, between King and Crown, was attained by the sixteenth century, at the earliest, and then only in England.”23 Although he referred to Kantorowicz as the source of his statement, Kantorowicz’s work, in fact, clearly contradicts Cherniavsky’s argument, showing that this distinction was clear-cut from the thirteenth century on, at the latest, and not just in England. Cherniavsky however, was not even consistent, for elsewhere he mentioned this distinction in connection with the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries.24 Further undermining his own argument, he wrote regarding Peter’s perception of state: “in Russia (as elsewhere) the line between the ruler’s ‘I am the first servant of the State’ and ‘L’état c’est moi’ could not be perceived.”25 And most significantly, according to Cherniavsky, the most important question for Russia is not the one addressing the problem “why the Russians did not develop the concept of the abstract State to counterbalance the prince.”26 The development of the concept of the state in the West as outlined in the first part of this book, however, shows the crucial importance of the idea of the royal office. At the same time, the fact that in the thirteenth century the ruler was called the administrator of the polity (administrator rei publicae) is symptomatic of the influence of the proprietary aspect on the office principle. As the term administrator came from property law, this means that “property notions” exerted a strong and long lasting influence on what is called “the office theory of kingship.”27 The importance attributed to the maintenance of status regis and status regni/ status rei publicae emanating from the king’s office, explains why the derivatives of the Latin status (état, staat, “state,” and others) became the most common designations of the impersonal public power, the state. It is of great significance, since status and its derivatives as well convey “the sense of ranking, order, establishment—in other words, a concept which implies law.”28 These implications are, however, missing from the Russian word gosudarstvo;29 in addition to that gosudarstvo, being the derivative of gosudar′, has a strong personal connotation. 23 Cherniavsky, Tsars and People, 44. 24 Ibid., 29, 33. 25 Ibid., 85. 26 Ibid., 44. 27 Rowen, King’s State, 23. Palacios Rubios (1450–1524), a distinguished Spanish lawyer who was appointed as member of the royal council (1504) stated: “to the king is confined solely the administration of the kingdom, and not dominion over things, for the property and the rights of the State are public, and cannot be the private patrimony of anyone.” Quoted in John H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 (London: Pelican Books, 1970), 82. 28 Pipes, Russia, 78, 129. 29 Ibid., 78.

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While not denying the existence of a very vague distinction between gosudar′ and gosudarstvo in the sixteenth century, in Russia the emergence of a more significant stage of distinction was not the result of intellectual reasoning on the relationship between the office and the officeholder, but rather a consequence of the impact of political events: the oprichnina and, above, all the interregnum of the smuta. This problem has been discussed previously in connection with the female allegorical personification of Russia (as bride or widow), where I mentioned that this phenomenon coincided with the spread of such terms as Moskovskoe gosudarstvo (Muscovite realm). Now it is time to examine in a detailed manner what meanings gosudarstvo had in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Russia. *** In Muscovite Russia gosudarstvo had different meanings30: its meaning changed over time from the late fifteenth century, but it is important to emphasize that the new meanings did not replace one another—they rather existed simultaneously. To begin with, the notorious affair of Novgorod with Ivan III, and the other two sixteenth-century examples quoted (Emperor Babur, Queen Elizabeth I), made it clear that gosudarstvo had the meaning of “feature or quality of being gosudar′,”31 in the sense of a ruler not sharing power with anyone, and not limited by any contract. However, a ruler’s quality or rather standing also depended on descent for Ivan IV: these two qualities are clear from his letter of 1573 to the king of Sweden. At the beginning of the letter Ivan states: Firstly: you write your name before mine—this is indecent, for to us [to Ivan] brother is the Roman caesar and so are other great rulers, but for you it is impossible to be their brother as the Swedish land [Shvedskaia zemlia] with regard to [its] honor is below these realms [nizhe etikh gosudarstv], as it will be proven in the followings. You say that the Swedish land is the hereditary property [votchina] of your father: then, you make us know whose son your father, Gustav, is, what the name of your grandfather was, was your grandfather on the throne [na gosudarstve] at all, and with what kind of rulers was he in brotherly relations and friendship? … If there existed a true kingship [nastoiashchee

30 A good short summary of these meanings in Krom, Rozhdenie, 225–228. 31 Kharkhordin, “What Is the State?,” 216.

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korolevstvo] in your case, then the archbishop and the counsellors and the whole land [vsia zemlia] would not have been regarded as companions to your father. … However, more authentic of all will be if you send us the record of your kin … stating who sat after whom on the throne [na prestole], with what kind of rulers they were in brotherly relations, and then from these we can figure out the greatness of your realm/standing [velichie tvoego gosudarstva].32 This quotation reveals another aspect of the meaning of gosudarstvo, namely, the ruler’s standing vis-à-vis other rulers, which consequently determines the standing of a realm. Therefore, in Ivan’s view, it is a duty of rulers to guard their “dignity” (dostoinstvo), which Ivan does not fail to do: “we keep our honor [chest′] as it is expected of our tsarist majesty [tsarskomu velichestvu].”33 During the sixteenth century gosudarstvo acquired other meanings that we had referred to before. It could “describe either the people or the territory governed by the tsar, sometimes both: in this sense, it is best translated as ‘realm’ or ‘dominion.’”34 These meanings are especially clear in the form Moskovskoe gosudarstvo,35 the most widespread version used in the sixteenth and especially in the seventeenth century, emphasizing, at the same time, the role of the capital, Moscow, called the “reigning town” (tsarstvuiushchii gorod) by contemporaries.

32 Poslaniia Ivana Groznogo, 337, 344. 33 Ibid., 346. 34 Dixon, Modernisation, 190. It is worth calling attention to a parallel here with the West, namely, between the extension of the meaning of status from being the designation of the ruler’s position to its reference to the ruler’s people and the territory, and the extension of the meaning of gosudarstvo from designating the power position of the ruler to its reference to the people and the territory under the rule of the gosudar′. Andreas Osiander summarized the research of W. Mager on this issue as follows: in the West “from the late pre-Reformation period onwards, there was a tendency to extend the meaning of status to include the subjects and/or territories of the lordships (in the functional sense of ‘the quality or position of being lord’) so designated. If, as often happened, someone was simultaneously duke of A, duke of B, margrave of C, and so on, it was convenient to designate as his status or ‘states’ (the nominative singular and the nominative plural of the Latin word are spelled the same) both the multiple titles of lordship that he might hold, and the inhabitants and territories of those lordships.” Osiander, Before the State, 8. I think this was the very thing happening in Russia around 1600! 35 Moskovskoe gosudarstvo being the synonym of “country” or “realm” is evident, for instance, in the letter written by Ivan IV to Queen Elisabeth in 1570, which has been discussed previously.

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But gosudarstvo could signify “throne” (prestol), as we have seen36—a meaning also alive in 1613. In the seventeenth century gosudarstvo could also mean “country” (strana) or just part of the country, often in connection with Siberia (gosudarstvo Sibiri), but also parts of the country as with Kazan′ and Astrakhan′, so it was often used in plural.37 Ingerflom claims that the “first meaning of gosudarstvo, in the general sense, was empire or kingdom (tsarstvo),”38 which can explain why gosudarstvo was used most often (but not exclusively!) with Kazan′, Astrakhan′, and Siberia: they were tsardoms (tsarstva), and their importance was underlined even in the 1667 seal. Daniel Rowland, as mentioned before, translated gosudarstvo as “realm” and “kingdom” (since it referred to the realm of the gosudar′) with regard to the period from 1450 to 1700 “to avoid confusion with more specialized senses of ‘state,’” which the term “state” had in Western political thought of the early modern era39—an approach that I warmly welcome. In what follows here, I shall try to demonstrate briefly the various meanings of gosudarstvo in the early seventeenth century in an integrated manner, by showing how it was used in an extremely important official document of the early seventeenth century, the confirmation charter of Tsar Mikhail, compiled in 1613. The document is telling as it was mostly drawn from sources dating from the very end of the sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries.40 Moskovskoe gosudarstvo (and to a lesser extent gosudarstvo) is used here with astonishing frequency. The short passage written on the reign of Vasilii Shuiskii (1606–1610) in the confirmation charter of Mikhail contains many of the above meanings of gosudarstvo and reveals additional ones. The situation after the death of the First False Dmitrii (1606) is presented as follows:

36 This meaning is also evident in Ivan IV’s earlier letter written to the Swedish King John III in 1572 concerning the latter’s shaky position as king: “And then, in autumn, we were told that you had died, but in spring it was said that you had been chased from your throne [sognali s gosudarstva] by your brother, Charles, and your son-in-law, Magnus. But after that news came … as if you were on your throne [na svoem gosudarstve].” Poslaniia Ivana Groznogo, 336. 37 Dixon, Modernisation, 190; Claudio Sergio Nun Ingerflom, “How Old Magic Does the Trick for Modern Politics,” Russian History 40, nos. 3–4 (2013): 430, fn. 7. 38 Nun-Ingerflom, “How Old Magic Does the Trick for Modern Politics,” 430, fn. 7. 39 Rowland, “Muscovy,” 534, en. 14. 40 The Dictionary of Russian Language of Eleventh–Seventeenth Centuries could be useful for the purpose too, but the examples given there cannot be so focused chronologically and therefore integrated semantically as the passages quoted from one and the same document, the Confirmation Charter.

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and then all the metropolitans, the archbishops … and the whole illuminated church council [sobor], and the boyars … and all the people of the Muscovite realm [Moskovskogo gosudarstva] assembled, and having taken counsel like-mindedly, as a result of God’s holy will and also of the work of the Holy Ghost, they all unanimously proclaimed … that Vasilii Ivanovich should take the scepter of tsardom and he should strengthen the true Orthodox faith … since he has descended from the root of the great masters, our Russian tsars and grand princes—that is, from the kin of grand prince Rurik, and indeed from the kin of Augustus, the Roman Emperor.41 When Shuiskii hesitated, he was convinced by the declaration: “the voice of the people is the voice of God.”42 A further practical consideration to make Shuiskii accept the throne was also persuasive: “if he does not obey … all the neighboring princes will notice that great Russia is without rulership/domination [bez gosudarstva].”43 This situation, the source argues, is not only harmful, but also goes against tradition, for “the peoples of Russia [Rosiistii narody]44 are not accustomed [ne obykosha] to not being ruled [bezgosudarstvenny byvati].”45 Finally, so the charter, Shuiskii agreed and accepted the throne. But the people changed their minds when Sigismund, aiming to seize the Russian throne, sent a letter “to the boyars and to the whole Muscovite realm [k vsemu Moskovskomu gosudarstvu] asserting that his son, prince Władysław, should be on the Muscovite throne [byt′ na Moskovskom gosudarstve], and be crowned for the Muscovite realm [venchat′sia bylo na Moskovskoe gosudarstvo].”46 The “people of the Muscovite realm [liudi Moskovskogo gosudarstva] … gave credence to the letter and asked” Vasilii Shuiskii “to give up his rule [gosudarstvo svoe ostavil]”; he agreed, and “for the tranquillity of Christendom gave up his rule [gosudarstvo svoe ostavil].”47 The real intention of Sigismund and the Poles, however, was “to destroy the true

41 Utverzhdennaia gramota, 32–33, fn. 7. 42 Ibid., 33, fn. 7. 43 Ibid. 44 The early occurrence of the adjective Rosiistii is interesting as it will appear also in Pravda voli monarshei. 45 Utverzhdennaia gramota, 33, fn. 7. 46 Ibid., 35. 47 Ibid., 35–36.

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Orthodox uncorrupted Christian faith, and to establish firmly their Latin faith in the whole Muscovite realm [vo vsem Moskovskom gosudarstve].”48 It is thus clear that Moskovskoe gosudarstvo had patriotic and religious connotations—and it was an indispensable reference term with regard to rulership in the early seventeenth century. Krom, using Strayer’s last criterion of the state, namely, the transfer of loyalty to an impersonal entity, boldly asserts regarding Moskovskoe gosudarstvo that “state patriotism” arose in Russia during the Time of Troubles.49 I happily agree with the existence of patriotism, but I doubt it was “state patriotism,” as patriotism is not to be confused with the existence of the concept of state! Patriotism, as expressed, for example in the idea of pro rege et regno/patria, even in case of an interregnum, should not be equated with the existence of the concept of state. For a comparative perspective we must recall Dyson’s statement claiming that it was due to the “work of legists” that “by the early seventeenth century the state was established as a fundamental legal concept in France,” the meaning of which he summarized as follows: The idea of the state connoted a territorial unit ruled by a single sovereign; the continuity of royal government and its vast apparatus of offices apart from the mortal life of the king; and a community enjoying a unity of sentiment as a consequence of living under a common sovereign. It was a permanent entity endowed with certain superior purposes. Nevertheless, there remained an ambiguity in the term which made it difficult to rid it of patrimonial implications.50 The unity of sentiment was no doubt present and strong during the smuta, but this was not enough. It is the last element, the patrimonial character of état, which has been noted by many historians,51 that takes us further in our analysis. État is much better for the purpose of a comparison with Muscovy than the English “state,” where this connotation was not so pronounced—partly due to the mid-seventeenth-century political crisis, when the monarchy was temporarily abolished (1649–1660). Hillay Zmora, writing about France, also

48 Ibid., 36. 49 Krom, Rozhdenie gosudarstva, 219–231. 50 Dyson, State Tradition, 28–29. 51 Ibid., 29; Hillay Zmora, Monarchy, Aristocracy and the State in Europe 1300–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 5.

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mentions the “pronounced patrimonial character” of the early modern state, but besides the monarchical aspect of patrimonialism he identifies another one: “while the state was not yet impersonal, it did not appertain solely to the monarch; it did develop an existence inchoately distinct from the ruler, precisely because it was deeply penetrated by social interests and therefore not entirely distinct from some of the nominally ruled either.”52 Zmora equates these “social interests” with the “vested interests of office-holders who manned the state,”53 which means that Zmora’s statement clarifies the second element in Dyson’s definition (“the continuity of royal government and its vast apparatus of offices apart from the mortal life of the king”). It is apparent that the second element, the concept of “the king’s body politic,” which subsumed the king’s office and other offices as well, is clearly missing from the concept of gosudarstvo. (The territorial aspect, the feelings of unity were, of course, present.) Furthermore, the lack of “dynastic officialdom”—as the “venal-heredity,” in other words, the practice of transmitting offices “like any other piece of real property”54 was called—had important consequences for Muscovy. The fact that the government apparatus in Muscovy had no hereditary claims to posts was one of the many reasons explaining why it was difficult, though not impossible, for officials to articulate interests distinct from those of the gosudar′, a difficulty strengthening the perception of gosudarstvo as belonging to the gosudar′ alone, and consequently retarding the development of a distinction between them.55 With regard to the notion of a “higher” purpose in Dyson’s formulation, Moskovskoe gosudarstvo, similarly to the état, embodied higher purposes, but they were not secular, as the Muscovite realm, as already stated, was a “Godly Christian community, not a cohesive political unity of a common people:”56 it was the only true Christian land.

52 Zmora, Monarchy, 5. 53 Ibid. 54 Ralph E. Giesey, “From Monarchomachism to Dynastic Officialdom,” in State and Society in Europe from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, ed. Jaroslaw Pelenski (Warsaw: Warsaw University Press, 1981), 166. 55 It is interesting to note Kharkhordin’s contention, which suggests that there is a possible connection between the growth of bureaucracy and the development of the notion of state in Russia, although he did not mention Western analogies or consider the impact of venal-heredity either. In his view it might not be accidental that the “antecedents of a modern bureaucratic apparatus formed” under Aleksei “coincide with the first timid attempts at assertions of working for the common good;” he especially underlines this connection for the Petrine era. Kharkhordin, “What is the State?,” 231–232. On this problem see below! 56 Kollmann, “Concepts of Society and Social Identity in Early Modern Russia,” 38–39.

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11.2. The Meaning of Gosudarstvo in the Light of Oaths of Loyalty and Political Crime in the Seventeenth Century. Notions of Power and State in the 1649 Law Code, and the First Clear Signs of Gosudarstvo’s Westernization 11.2.1. From the Smuta to the Law Code of 1649 A comparison of the development of the concept of state in the West and Russia might be done in ways other than those applied in the previous pages. One approach that can be integrated into my analysis is provided by Simon Dixon. His short but insightful survey on the problem of the concept of state in Russia between the early seventeenth and the early nineteenth centuries deserves special attention. Of course, one cannot expect to find a detailed discussion of this highly controversial issue in a chapter in a textbook covering a great time span. Dixon claims that Muscovy did not know the concept of “an impersonal entity above and distinct from both the ruler and his subjects,” and the “abstract notion of loyalty to the ‘state’ did not exist.”57 He finds support for his contentions in a survey of “two related theoretical notions: treason (izmena) and the oath of loyalty (prisiaga) taken by Russian subjects to each new tsar on his accession.”58 Since treason was the most important category of political crime, Dixon traced the history of political crime in Russia covering the subject briefly from 1649 until 1825.59 Regarding the oath of allegiance, however, he gave only one example, the oath that officials had to swear in 1722.60 Let us test Dixon’s method in the light of the sources and begin with the smuta. The oath of loyalty taken by government officials and people of all ranks of the Muscovite realm after Vasilii Shuiskii had been removed from the throne in 1610 is a good departure as it was composed during an interregnum period. The person in question swore (literally, “kissed the cross” in contemporary terminology, as kissing the cross was the ritual required to be performed to validate the words uttered) to the following: we … all kinds of people of the whole Muscovite realm [Moskovskogo Gdrtva] petitioned the boyar Prince Fedor

57 Dixon, Modernisation, 189–190. 58 Ibid., 195. 59 Ibid., 195–197. 60 Ibid., 197.

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Ivanovich Mstislavskii and his fellows that it would please us if they took the direction of the Muscovite realm [pozhalovali priamili Moskovskoe Gdrtvo] until God gives us a Master [Gdria] for the Muscovite throne [na Moskovskoe Gdrtvo]; and we should kiss the cross on that: we should obey them in all matters, and be satisfied with all their sentences passed for services or sins to anyone, and stand for the Muscovite realm [za Moskovskoe Gdrtvo] with them, and fight the traitors until death; but do not want the thief, who is called Tsarevich Dmitrii61 for the Muscovite throne [na Moskovskoe Gdrtvo]. … But to elect [vybrati] a Master for the Muscovite throne [na Moskovskoe Gdrtvo] by the boyars and all kinds of people of the whole land [vsiakim liudem vseiu zemleiu] … whom God gives for the Muscovite throne [kogo dast Bog na Moskovskoe Gdrtvo]. But to renounce the previous Master, Tsar and Grand Prince of All Russia [Vseia Rusi] Vasilii Ivanovich [Shuiskii] …62 While it is clear that gosudarstvo is distinct from the ruler and the ruled, the text, however, does not allow for supposing the existence of impersonal rights pertaining to gosudarstvo akin to the iura coronae. The meaning of gosudarstvo here, besides “throne,” is “realm”: that is, a community and a territory to be governed—now not by a Master/Tsar but by a council. And again, we should note the phrase: “elect [vybrati] a Master for the Muscovite throne [na Moskovskoe Gdrtvo] … whom God gives.” The next characteristic example of the oath of loyalty is the one taken in 1626/27—this oath was deemed necessary because of Tsar Mikhail’s second marriage, as he wanted to safeguard the life of his wife and their prospective children to be born of that marriage, avoiding the possibility of machinations that had happened to his first wife due to power ambitions of internal factions at the court. This oath, although taken not at the accession of a tsar should be given special attention for the following reasons. It contains not only a general segment applicable to people of all ranks, but also separate sections for different ranks of the court. Most importantly, it became a model for oaths of loyalty for the rest of the century!63 Consequently, if there was a prikaz notion of gosudarstvo

61 Second False Dmitrii (died in 1610). 62 Sobranie gosudarstvennykh gramot i dogovorov [Collection of state documents and treaties] (Moscow, 1828), vol. 4, 390. 63 Demidova, Sluzhilaia biurokratiia, 151.

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(not identical with the one encountered in the ecclesiastical sources) in the seventeenth century, which should not be equated with the concept of state, to be sure, this was the very oath that could reflect it. The word gosudarstvo is used in the text many times and in contexts highly relevant for our purposes: I swear to my master, tsar and grand prince of Russia Mikhail Fedorovich, and to his tsaritsa Evdokhiia Lukianovna grand princess, and to their tsarist children, whom God will give them in the future … that I serve him, my master … and safeguard his masterly health in every way …, and I do not think of any evil thing concerning the master; and besides my master … I do not want any other master either from other realms [iz drugikh gosudarstv] or from the Russian clans [to be the ruler] for the throne of Vladimir and Moscow [na Vladimirskoe i Moskovskoe gosudarstvo] and for all other great realms of the Russian Tsardom [na vse velikie gosudarstva Rossiiskogo Tsarstviia];64 and I do not desire the realm under him, that is, under the master [gosudarstva pod nim, gosudarem]. …65 But if someone is not willing to serve Mikhail Fedorovich, tsar and grand prince of Russia, or has dealings with traitors, or Tatars or Lithuanian and German people, then I have to fight against these people for my master and for his realm up to my death [za gosudaria svoego i za ego gosudarstvo].66 In the oath composed for boyars and okol′nichie67 we find the following obligation: “to serve my master … in all matters … and want for him, the master, and his lands [ego zemliam] good … without any evil intention.”68 Finally the section composed for duma secretaries (dumnye d′iaki) included the obligation: neither to say anything negative about the Muscovite realm [Moskovskoe gosudarstvo] and all the great realms [velikie gosudarstva] of the Russian Tsardom to foreigners, nor to think such

64 Note the use of gosudarstvo in plural form! 65 The attempt to take possession of the Muscovite realm was dealt with in an article of the Law Code of 1649 (chap. 2, §2) as a type of treason. See below. 66 Nil Aleksandrovich Popov, ed., Akty moskovskogo gosudarstva [Documents of the Muscovite state] (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Imperatorskoi akademii nauk, 1890), vol. 1, 216–217. 67 The rank okol′nichii, literary meaning “one around [the ruler],” was second to the most prestigious one, that of the boyar at the court. 68 Popov, Akty moskovskogo gosudarstva, 217.

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a thing, and not to desire any kind of evil to the Muscovite realm [Moskovskomu gosudarstvu] in any way.69 The above passages, especially the last one, show eloquently that in the 1620s, at the very time when the tsar’s universal proprietorship was confirmed by various sources discussed, we find an oath pointing to an impersonal loyalty: loyalty to the “master and his realm,” “his lands,” and even simply to gosudarstvo. Kollmann’s explanation can place the phrase “the master, and his lands [ego zemliam]” into a historical perspective: “Generally ‘the Land’ was envisioned as being separate from the tsar, the privileged military ranks, and the apparatus of government. The usage of the term ‘Land’ fairly explicitly distinguishes between the tsar’s realm and a perhaps vestigial public sphere; this distinction is evident since the mid-sixteenth century.”70 This separation between ruler and Land, and a certain sense of “the public,” as in the phrase “acting as all the Land,” reflects, in her view, a certain “distinction between state and society.”71 A similar view has been expressed by Krom very recently, as pointed out before. Yet, this “vestigial public sphere” must not be equated with the concept of the common good, as Krom did it. Furthermore, before the smuta the distinction between the ruler and the Land was not and could not be surfaced as clearly as during and after the smuta—not only in chancellery sources but also in narrative sources in which Russia was presented as a bride or a widow. This and subsequent oaths of loyalty in the seventeenth century became the “main source on which the list of offences” in seventeenth-century penitential books was based. Curiously enough, these penitential books “paid little attention to wrongs against the Church.”72 This source demonstrates the importance of chancelleries in shaping Muscovite notions on power. Other contemporary sources also reveal a distinction between the ruler and gosudarstvo involving implicitly the issue of loyalty: they are all the more important because these sources were written not during an interregnum. There is a formulary dating from 1627 for the granting of votchina estates to those who performed great service during the 1617–1618 campaign of the Polish Prince

69 Ibid., 218. 70 Kollmann, “Concepts of Society and Social Identity in Early Modern Russia,” 41. This meaning in the mid-sixteenth century is also confirmed by the lament of a chronicler, in which the boyars are accused of “looking after their own [welfare], rather than after that of the gosudar′ or the land.” Quoted by Kharkhordin, “What Is the State?,” 219. 71 Kollmann, “Concepts of Society and Social Identity in Early Modern Russia,” 42–43. 72 B. N. Floria, Essays. The Comparative Approach in Early Modern Russian History, ed. Nancy Shields Kollmann, Russian Studies in History (Winter 2000–2001): 79, 85, fn. 26.

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Władysław (future king of Poland, 1632–1648) against Moscow. The text declares that Tsar Mikhail “rewarded the person (who is named) for his true service [za ego priamuiu sluzhbu] rendered to us and to the whole Muscovite realm [k nam i ko vsemu Moskovskomu gosudarstvu]” when Władysław “came to our realm [pod nashe gosudarstvo] under the ruling town, Moscow.”73 For Władysław wanted to take the Muscovite realm [Moskovskoe gosudarstvo], and to raze it to the ground, and to pollute the churches of God, and to trample upon our holy, true, pure, Orthodox Christian faith [sviatuiu nashu istinnuiu neprochennuiu pravoslavnuiu khrist′ianskuiu veru], and to impose his damned heretic Latin faith [prokliatuiu ereticheskuiu latynskuiu veru].74 But the named person was with the tsar in the besieged capital, stood strongly for the Orthodox Christian faith, and for the holy churches of God, and for us, the grand master against Władysław … and fought manly in the battles … strongly demonstrated his service and righteousness [mnoguiu svoiu sluzhbu i pravdu] to us and to the whole Muscovite realm [k nam i ko vsemu Moskovskomu gosudarstvu].75 Moskovskoe gosudarstvo here obviously means the country, or the land, of genuine Orthodox faith, and a distinction was made between loyal service rendered to the ruler and gosudarstvo alike. While it is true that Moskovskoe gosudarstvo, or simply gosudarstvo, did not mean “state” in the Western sense in the abovementioned sources, yet, it was distinguished from the person of the ruler. There can be no doubt that in the chancelleries the distinction between the ruler and gosudarstvo existed. Therefore, as the previous examples showed, I cannot agree with Chernaia who claimed that the idea of service to the gosudarstvo appeared in Russia only after (and as

73 Zakonodatel′nye akty Russkogo gosudarstva vtoroi poloviny XVI–pervoi poloviny XVII veka [Legislative documents of the Russian state from the second half of the sixteenth to the first half of the seventeenth century], ed. N. B. Miuller and N. E. Nosova (Leningrad: Nauka, 1986), 135. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid., 135–136.

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a consequence of) the emergence of the concept of common good in the late seventeenth century.76 Pursuing our investigation further and approaching the meaning of gosudarstvo in chancellery sources, the Law Code of 1649 is an obvious source to turn to, as it provides a broader perspective on the notions of power, a context for placing gosudarstvo in the web of these notions. This broader perspective here refers, above all, to the issue of political crime. Dixon’s conclusion with regard to the concept of state, the meaning of gosudarstvo, and the perception of treason in the Law Code is as follows. He states that until 1716 (the promulgation of Peter’s Military Statute) “political crime was defined by chapter II of the Ulozhenie which gave unprecedented prominence to treachery.”77 He emphasizes the significance of the title of this chapter of the Law Code, which does not mention gosudarstvo at all, but refers to the ruler’s honor and health instead, and adds that in this chapter the “sole mention of ‘the state’—in the phrase, Moskovskoe gosudarstvo, employs the territorial sense.”78 Finally, from the perspectives of the concepts of treason and the state in the Law Code he concludes: “A traitor thus betrayed not an impersonal abstraction, but the tsar in person typically by pledging allegiance to a rival individual. … The only impersonal notion of treason known in Muscovy was apostasy, which survived along with personal betrayal into the Petrine period.”79 Yet, a thorough examination of the Law Code shows that, in fact, it uses gosudarstvo both with and without the adjective Moskovskoe, not only in chapter 2 but also elsewhere. And while it is on the whole true that both versions in the Law Code convey predominantly the territorial meaning, it would be an error to draw the conclusion that the chapter focused exclusively on the person of the ruler. Furthermore, Stefan Plaggenborg, commenting on the idea of the state in seventeenth-century Russia, emphasizes the importance of the Law Code in general, referring not only to chapter 2 but also to other chapters (special importance in this context is given to chapters 4–7), and claims that the Code shows a shift towards the perception of the “state as a legal entity.”80 In other words, 76 Liudmila A. Chernaia, “Ot idei sluzheniia gosudariu k idee sluzheniia otechestvu v russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli vtoroi poloviny XVII–nachala XVIII veka” [From the idea of serving the ruler to the idea of serving the fatherland in Russian social thought of the second half of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century], in Obshchestvennaia mysl′: issledovaniia i publikatsii [Social thought: Research and publications], ed. A. L. Andreev and K. Kh. Delokarov, vol. 1 (Moscow: Nauka, 1989), 34. 77 Dixon, Modernisation, 195. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid. 80 Plaggenborg, Pravda, 256–257.

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the state, “conceived as suprapersonal institutions and an independent organization, in which the ruler undoubtedly plays a dominant role—yet it exists independently of the person of the ruler and can make decisions, that is, it governs and keeps the existing order—was able to strengthen from the mid-seventeenth century in Russia.”81 Let us ponder the plausibility of Dixon’s and Plaggenborg’s statements in the light of the relevant articles of the Law Code. My aim concerning the analysis of the Code is threefold: to comment on the meaning of what is called “political crime” in seventeenth-century Russia and the role that the Code played in the process of its development; to trace the meaning of political crime (especially treason) in the Law Code in articles not confined solely to chapter 2; to show the meanings of gosudarstvo. Finally, based on these results, I intend to draw a conclusion on the notion of the state regarding the Law Code. The analysis has to begin with the contemporary Russian term used for political crime: this term became established in the form slovo i delo Gosudarevo, and generally is translated as the “Sovereign’s word and deed.” Gosudar′, as discussed before, was the title of the ruler meaning a legally unlimited independent monarch (whose power, however, was not conceived in legal terms) ruling his realm as a patrimony, which, therefore, I rendered as “Master.” Yet, considering the wording of certain passages of the Law Code in the context of the subject matter, which is equally important for the semantics of the term, I am inclined to use the word “Sovereign” in the translation of the relevant passages of the Law Code, adding that this usage here cannot be separated from the more impersonal meaning of gosudarstvo in the text, which goes beyond the framework of patrimonialism. In Muscovy political crime, as mentioned, was dealt with in chapter 2 of the Code entitled “On the Sovereign’s Honor, and How to Safeguard His Sovereign Health” (O Gosudarskoi chesti, i kak Ego Gosudarskoe zdorov′e oberegat′) and the technical term in the Law Code, mentioned in article 14, was Gosudarevo delo ili slovo. If slaves of people of any kind of rank proceed to initiate a Gosudarevo delo ili slovo case on their own behalf; but subsequently they themselves proceed to say that they know of no Gosudarevo delo ili slovo case, but they had initiated the Gosudarevo delo ili slovo case to escape a beating by someone [the

81 Ibid., 257.

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accused], or they were drunk: beat them with the knout for that, and having beaten them with the knout, give them back to their owners.82 The above quotation provides a good start for understanding political crime in Russia in several respects. We have to begin with the term itself. As for its history, based on my research studying the cases in Novombergskii’s collection, it can be stated that until 1649 these cases were referred to in the sources either as Gosudarevo delo or Gosudarevo slovo, that is, delo and slovo were used separately and not standing in a pair. I found only two cases in Novombergskii’s collection when the words stood together, but then in the form Gosudarevo delo i slovo.83 The term Gosudarevo delo was also used in chapter 2 of the Law Code separately in phrases such as velikoe Gosudarevo delo (“Sovereign’s deed of great importance”) and Gosudarevo velikoe delo ili izmena (“Sovereign’s deed of great importance or treason”).84 Later on, the phrase became known in the form, slovo i delo Gosudarevo (“the Sovereign’s word and deed”), and it is the version used in historical literature. Furthermore, as article 14 of the Law Code also shows, slovo i delo Gosudarevo was used not only in a narrow sense, that is, as the designation of the political crime itself. It also referred to the entire system of investigation of this crime, since every individual was obliged, on pain of death, to denounce to the authorities any information that could be offensive or harmful regarding the tsar, his entourage, or his government in any conceivable way. The person went to the authorities and said: slovo i delo Gosudarevo, and then told them the details of the situation serving as the ground of denunciation, to be followed by the investigation of the case. In chapter 2, which, as mentioned, identifies two issues, the ruler’s honor and health, as objects to safeguard, there are two articles (1 and 13) that explicitly refer to the ruler’s health, and two (18–19) that can be closely associated with it because of the wording “evil intention” (zloi umysl′), while two others (20–21) explicitly deal with the physical assault on the ruler, his council, entourage, and everyone in the tsar’s civil and military service as part of a plot. Apart from that, most of the articles deal with treachery, and the consequences that it entails for those committing it and for their relatives, as well as with the duty to denounce the offenders. Therefore, according to Tel′berg, it can be assumed that all crimes 82 Muscovite Law Code, 6 (chap 2, §14). Translation is changed. 83 Slovo i delo gosudarevy, 9 (no. 9) and 147 (no. 86). 84 Muscovite Law Code, 5–6 (chap. 2, §§12, 16, 17).

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unrelated to the ruler’s health were understood as pertaining to the ruler’s honor, treason included.85 (And honor, as Nancy Shields Kollmann showed, was understood in a very broad sense.86) The Law Code, indeed, clearly identified cases, as we shall see, which meet the strict definition of the crime known as treason: that is, betrayal of a ruler or government by a person or persons owing allegiance to them, through acts posing threats to their security: acts ranging from aiding enemies in various ways, levying war against the ruler or the government, and culminating in an attempt to overthrow them, yet, we should note that treason was wider than these crimes. It could include, as in England (Treason Act of 1351), assaults on the person of the ruler and his close relatives and entourage, or counterfeiting of the royal seal. These crimes also appeared in the Law Code (in Chapter 2, as mentioned, and in Chapter 4 respectively) without the use of the term treason (izmena), which should warn us not to limit treason to the impersonal betrayal of the state as Dixon did, considering that monarchy was the predominant form of state everywhere in Europe. Although some acts and intentions in the Law Code were specified as treason, there was no taxative list of this crime (as in England, for instance, where seven branches of it were defined),87 while Gosudarevo delo ili slovo was used as an umbrella term for political crime. Indeed, the Law Code “did not specify the range of its application”88: despite the title of the chapter on political crime, it did not mention explicitly the most common type of this sort in seventeenthcentury Russia, namely, the verbal offence of the ruler’s honor.89 This lacuna is all the more striking because both before and after 1649 there were different expressions used for these kind of acts, indicating the degree of the crime.90 Verbal offence of the ruler’s honor could cover a wide variety of utterances 85 Georgii T. Tel′berg, Ocherki politicheskogo suda i politicheskikh prestuplenii v Moskosvkom gosudarstve [Studies in political trials and political crimes in the Muscovite state] (Moscow: Tipografiia Imperatorskogo moskovskogo universiteta, 1912), 57. Although article 13 refers to things concerning the ruler’s health “or any other treasonous act” (ili kotoroe izmennoe delo), which would suggest that crimes against the ruler’s health also fell in the category of treason, articles 16–17, however, mention Gosudarevo velikoe delo ili izmena without any specification. Despite these uncertainties, Tel′berg’s statement is plausible. 86 For this problem see Kollmann, By Honor Bound. 87 The Statute of 1351 “revolutionized the law of treason” as it clearly specified the cases when it could be applied. J. Taylor McConkie, “State Treason: The History and Validity of Treason against Individual States,” Kentucky Law Journal 101, no. 2 (2013): 284. 88 Nina B. Golikova, Politicheskie protsessy pri Petre I [Political trials under Peter I] (Moscow: MGU, 1957), 21. 89 Tel′berg, Ocherki, 106, 113. 90 Ibid., 105–106.

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related to the tsar: his person, such as indecent statements about his descent (the most serious being his rightful title to the throne, hence questioning his legitimacy), his family, his behavior, his governance, and the like.91 Most of these statements were uttered in drunkenness or in conversations that had nothing to do with an actual threat or offense with regard to the tsar, as in the “beard case.” Perhaps, we should not underestimate the fact that tsar′, being a sacred word, could also affect denunciations, as its use in an improper context could be perceived as sacrilege.92 There is a warrant for this view. As for the terminology of political crime, it was only during Peter’s reign that slovo i delo Gosudarevo occasionally was referred to as gosudarstvennoe prestuplenie, that is, “state crime.”93 Yet, it did not mean much as will be apparent from Peter’s 1716 Military Statute. The relevant article explicitly mentioned: “If someone sins against His Majesty’s person by [uttering] abusive words [khulitel′nymy slovamy], despise his activity and intentions and reasons about them in an indecent manner, that [person] deserves to be deprived of his life and punished by beheading.”94 Besides the personalist nature of this vague definition, we should note that khulitel′nyi also had the meaning of “sacrilegious,” which underlines the plausibility that the ruler’s honor, consequently, political crime, was closely connected with the sacred nature of the word tsar. Because of the imprecise nature of the term Gosudarevo delo or slovo, it became a “dreadful formula,” a “blanket charge” that “allowed for no distinction between treason and lèse majesté.”95 The problem of verbal statements about the ruler, however, had a special aspect or dimension in the context of the seventeenth century, namely, that verbal statements could be conceived as not only insulting but also harmful for the ruler in case they concerned his health. Therefore, the term “evil intention” was, for the most part, interpreted as sorcery, meaning different kinds of black magic, which is confirmed by cases before and after the publication of the Law Code.96 Curses were still conceived as having magical effect in seventeenth-century Russia, and deemed to be a real threat to the tsar.97 91 Ibid., 106–110. 92 Gail Lehnhoff ’s comment on Maureen Perrie’s paper delivered on political crime in Russia at a conference in Budapest, May 2002. 93 William F. Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight. Magic in Russia (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 413. 94 Ustav Voinskii 1716 [Military Statute 1716], 120–121, http://nlr.ru/nlr_visit/RA4149/ ustav-voinskiy-petra. 95 Dixon, Modernisation, 196. 96 Tel′berg, Ocherki, 67–68. 97 Maureen Perrie, “Indecent, Unseemly and Inappropriate Words. Popular Criticism of the Tsar 1648–1650,” in Russische und Ukrainische Geschichte vom 16.–18. Jahrhundert [Russian

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Let us address the idea of the state in the Law Code by combining the analysis of the issue of treason and the meaning of gosudarstvo. Concerning chapter 2, Plaggenborg states that its 22 articles “name several types of crimes against the ruler and the state,”98 without pointing out which of these articles are related specifically to the state. While article 1 of this chapter refers to crimes against the ruler’s health, others articles, indeed, contain certain degree of abstraction. A shift from the territorial meaning towards a more abstract one can be noticed in articles 2–3, if we examine their wording. Their impersonal nature is even more apparent when compared to article 1. 1. If someone by any intent proceeds to think up an evil deed against the Sovereign’s health [na Gosudarskoe zdorov′e zloe delo], and someone denounces his evil intent, and after that denunciation that evil intent of his is established conclusively, that he conceived an evil deed against His Tsarist Majesty, and he intended to carry it out: after investigation, punish such a person with death. 2. Likewise, if someone being under the rule of His Tsarist Majesty [kto pri derzhave Tsarskogo Velichestva], desiring to take possessions of the Muscovite state [Moskovskim gosudarstvom zavladet′] and to become its Sovereign [i Gosudarem byt′] begins to assemble an armed force to effect his evil intention; or if someone proceeds to make friends with enemies of [His] Tsarist Majesty, and to establish secret relations by [exchanging] advisory letters, and to render them aid in various ways so that those enemies of the Sovereign, using his secret relationship with the enemy, may take possessions of the Muscovite state [Moskovskim gosudarstvom zavladet′], or commit any other bad deed; and someone denounces his activity; and after that denunciation his treason is established conclusively: punish this traitor with death accordingly.99 3. If someone surrenders a town to an enemy of His Tsarist Majesty in an act of treason [sdast izmenoiu]; or, someone receives people from abroad [zarubezhnykh liudei] into the towns of His Tsarist Majesty from other states [iz inykh gosudarstv] for the purpose of similarly committing treason; and it is established conclusively: punish such traitors with death also.100

 and Ukrainian history of the sixteenth–eighteenth centuries], ed. Robert O. Crummey, Holm Sundhaussen, and Ricarda Vulpius (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001), 146. 98 Plaggenborg, Pravda, 256. 99 Muscovite Law Code, 4. Hellie’s translation is modified! 100 Ibid. Half of Hellie’s translation is changed here!

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Iurganov states unambiguously: “The second chapter described the Russian tsar as the supreme head of the state. Articles 2, 3 (and 4) dealt specifically with treason against the Muscovite state.”101 Georgii Tel′berg was more nuanced, claiming that article 2 referred to actions aiming to seize the “totality of supreme rights,” adding that “not the supreme state power in general, rather the supreme power concentrated in the hand of the legitimate tsar.”102 Although I refrain from reading that much modernity into the text as to justify the phrase, “supreme head of the state,” the fact remains that article 2 contains a shift from the person of the ruler towards an impersonal direction, and Tel′berg’s view is plausible. This shift towards abstraction may be attributed to borrowing from Lithuanian Law (Third Statute of Lithuania, 1588), which, as Richard Hellie pointed out, was one of the main sources of the Law Code, and of this passage in particular.103 Tel′berg showed that the wording of the relevant articles of the Third Statute of Lithuania was not simply copied without alterations but adapted by the authors of the Law Code.104 Apart from chapter 2, chapters 6 and 7 are particularly important for our topic not simply because of the occurrence of the terms Moskovskoe gosudarstvo and gosudarstvo in their articles but because of their content. Chapter 6 bears the title: “On travel documents into other States [v inye Gosudarstva].” Article 1: If someone happens to leave the Muscovite state [Moskovskoe gosudarstvo] for a commercial enterprise, or for any other personal purpose, to another state [v inoe gosudarstvo], which state [gosudarstvo] is at peace with the Muscovite state [Moskovskim gosudarstvom], that person in Moscow shall petition the Sovereign [Gosudariu]. … Article 3: If someone travels to any [other] state [v kotoroe gosudarstvo] without a travel document, and having been in another state [i byv v inom gosudarstve] returns to the Muscovite state [v Moskovskoe gosudarstvo]; and someone else proceeds to denounce him [alleging] that he travelled on his own volition 101 Yurganov, “Categories of Russian Medieval Culture,” 65. In article 4, however, gosudarstvo is not mentioned at all! 102 Tel′berg, Ocherki, 75–76. 103 Richard Hellie, “The Origins of Denunciation in Muscovy,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 24, nos. 1–2 (Spring–Summer 1997): 16. 104 Tel′berg, Ocherki, 62.

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without a travel document for treasonous purpose [dlia izmeny] or any other reprehensible purpose: on the basis of that denunciation, conduct a rigorous investigation by all methods of inquiry of that person who travelled to another state [v inoe gosudarstvo] without the [Sovereign’s] travel document. If they say about him in the investigation that he indeed rode into another state [v inoe gosudarstvo] without a travel document to commit treason dlia izmeny], or for any other reprehensible purpose: after investigation, punish that person with death for treason [za izmenu].105 The wording that a given gosudarstvo “is at peace with Moskovskoe gosudarstvo” and the context of these two passages both justify the use of the word state in the translation, similarly to the articles quoted from chapter 2. Furthermore, the wording and the content of chapter 7 are also important, in particular its telling title: “On the service of various military personnel of the Muscovite state [Moskovskogo gosudarstva].” Although the articles speak of “service rendered to the Sovereign” (Gosudareva sluzhba) and none of the thirty-two articles mention service rendered to gosudarstvo, the introductory sentence and article 1 are worth examining: The Sovereign, Tsar, and Grand Prince Aleksei Mikhailovich has eternal peace and treaty with the Polish, and the Lithuanian, and the Swedish [s Nemetskim (!)], and other neighbouring states [s inymu okrestnymi gosudarstvy]. 1. If  by some means war breaks out between any [foreign] state and the Muscovite state [s kotorym gosudarstvom u Moskovskogo gosudarstva], or at some time the Sovereign resolves to avenge an enmity of his Sovereign foe; and he orders sent against them his own Sovereign’s boyars and generals, and with them military personnel of various ranks; and for that service the Sovereign orders his Sovereign compensation paid to his Sovereign military personnel of the entire Muscovite state [vsego Moskovskogo gosudarstva]: levy cash for the Sovereign’s compensation to the

105 Muscovite Law Code, 10–11. Hellie’s translation is slightly changed.

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military personnel from the entire Muscovite state [so vsego Moskovskogo gosudarstva] and impose requisitions depending on the nature of the service.106 In this passage we encounter two meanings of Moskovskoe gosudarstvo: an impersonal one, in reference to peace and treaties with neighbors, as well as to war, where the word gosudarstvo is used without an adjective to mean neighbors, and a territorial one, most apparent in reference to the levy. Plaggenborg’s statement concerning the notion of the state in the Law Code deserves special attention: “the state was defined in terms of crimes committed against it, and not in a positive way, [specifying] what the state is, or what it has to be,”107 which is highly revealing for one of the meanings associated with gosudarstvo even later on, namely, repressive force! Keeping in mind the distinction between the ruler and gosudarstvo, as well as the crucial importance attributed to the ruler’s honor, we can raise the obvious question: was the honor of Moskovskoe gosudarstvo also protected, similarly to the verbal offence of the ruler’s honor? Especially in the light of the 1626 oath of the duma secretaries in which a non-personal perception of honor is present, as they swore not “to say anything negative about the Muscovite realm [Moskovskoe gosudarstvo] and all the great realms [velikie gosudarstva] of the Russian Tsardom to foreigners.” Indeed, seventeenth-century Muscovite judicial practice seems to have known the offence of the honor of Moskovskoe gosudarstvo. While there is no trace of this issue in the Law Code itself, judicial practice of the seventeenth century can provide some insight into it before and after 1649. There is a case from 1646/47 implying that the honor of Moskovskoe gosudarstvo was protected, for the term Moskovskoe gosudarstvo is used in this context.108 A drunken man, a certain Ivan Dmitriev, allegedly said “unseemly words [nepodobnye slovesa] about Moscow,” which led to the start of an investigation.109 When the investigation began, the authorities twice referred to the charge as such: the named person “said unacceptable words [neprigozhie rechi] about Moskovskoe gosudarstvo.”110 Finally, it turned out that there were no such words either about Moscow, or Moskovskoe gosudarstvo.

106 Muscovite Law Code, 11–12. 107 Plaggenborg, Pravda, 257. 108 Slovo i delo gosudarevy, 152–154 (no. 90). 109 Ibid., 152. 110 Ibid.

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In connection with a later case (1692) Lukin remarked that Moscow was often identified with the person of the tsar in the minds of seventeenth-century people, which is why they reported cases in which Moscow was mentioned improperly.111 In these instances the “non-personal” became personal. But the clause of the oath of loyalty, and the 1646/47 case show that Moscow could be conceived in “non-personal” terms too, and references to the capital could be understood as references concerning Moskovskoe gosudarstvo, the honor of which was also protected. In line with the European perspective, one can ask how does the Western concept of political crime compare with that of Muscovy? Although in seventeenth-century Europe the term état/state was claiming a place in cases that were classified as political crimes—Richelieu for example stated that “even the thought of a crime against the state should be punished”112—it would be a long time before crimes against the state as such would be given priority in the broad list of crimes conceived as political. As Barton Ingraham summarized it: “before 1770 laws protecting political authority and sovereignty” were concerned with “betrayal of personal loyalty owed to the Head of the State, rather than the ‘State’ itself,” with “injuries inflicted on the monarch personally or on members of his immediate familial or administrative household; insults to his personal dignity and authority,” or challenging his legitimacy.113 In this sense the Muscovite practice was very similar. This highly personal perception of political crime in the West is understandable, given the strength in the seventeenth century of the doctrine known as the divine right of kings. As Joseph Strayer noted, loyalty to rulers reached its peak in the belief of the king’s divine right.114 Therefore, I think it is not accidental that “before the development of the conception of popular sovereignty in the second half of the eighteenth century, monarchs remained the primary objects of state crime in both political theory and judicial practice, despite the existence of sophisticated theories of state sovereignty.”115 Last but not least, it is worth mentioning that crimes against religion, or the established church, apostasy included, were often perceived as political crimes, hence apostasy was not devoid of personal implications for rulers either in Russia or in the West, especially when the ruler was the head of the church. 111 Lukin, Narodnye predstavleniia, 29. 112 Jonathan Daly, “Political Crime in Late Imperial Russia,” The Journal of Modern History 74, no. 1 (March 2002): 64–65. 113 Ingraham, Political Crime, 39. 114 Strayer, Medieval Origins, 108. 115 Daly, “Political Crime in Late Imperial Russia,” 65.

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In England an Act of 1581 “made it treason to withdraw subjects from their obedience to the Queen or their membership in the Church of England,”116 of which Elizabeth I was the supreme governor, and held the title “Defender of the Faith.” Apostasy in Russia was, likewise, not simply an impersonal type of treason. Although the tsar did not have a comparable title, he was in fact seen as the defender of true Orthodoxy. “The close association in the minds of contemporaries between spiritual and temporal authorities made it possible to treat the tsar’s opponents as enemies of the Orthodox faith in general.”117 To summarize: in comparison with Western Christendom, Russia in the middle of the seventeenth century was almost on a par with Western European countries so far as the definition of political crime and the perception of loyalty are concerned. Yet, Russia was a different world in the sphere of political theory, not to mention state theory proper and political discourse. The use of each of these terms is misleading for Muscovy. When Hobbes and his colleagues were setting forth the modern theory of state, Russian clerical contemporaries of Western thinkers were still living with a completely different mindset. They “were still preoccupied with the struggle between good and evil,” and their vocabulary was “predominantly biblical in origin, the Old Testament, in particular, providing an abundant reservoir of apocalyptic imagery.”118 Yet, it is to be emphasized that all these reservations do not invalidate the existence of a distinction between gosudar′ and gosudarstvo prior to the mid-seventeenth century, as well as the importance of the Law Code in shaping a “statist” language of power, although these facts did not mean the appearance of such a discourse. In other words, there can be no doubt that in some chancellery sources, and the Law Code as well, the meaning of gosudarstvo went well beyond that of the realm: that is, a community and a territory ruled by an independent monarch or government. Therefore, my contention is that the emergence of a more secular vocabulary of power in Russia after the 1660s was not an ex nihilo process, that is, a process taking place simply because of and as a consequence of growing familiarity with Western ideas. Rather, these ideas helped to conceptualize already existing changes in the meaning of gosudarstvo that began during the smuta and received a legal exposition through the Law Code’s various references to Moskovskoe gosudarstvo and even simply to gosudarstvo in highly politicized contexts.

116 E. Neville Williams, The Penguin Dictionary of English and European History 1485–1789 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 126. 117 Plokhy, Cossacks, 292. 118 Dixon, Modernisation, 190.

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11.2.2. Changes during the “Decades of Fermentation” (1660s–1690s) Perhaps this conceptual development is reflected in the more frequent use of the terms gosudarstvennoe delo, gosudarstvennye dela, and dela gosudarstva in the second half of the century, which, depending on the context, can be translated as “state affair,” “state affairs,” and “affairs of state.” We already encounter the new terminology in the Law Code of 1649: gosudarstvennye dela is mentioned twice in the preamble in the form Gosudarstvennye i zemskie dela, instead of the usual gosudarevy i zemskie dela. The third mentioning of the term is even more interesting: “On Sundays no one shall hold trials and work in the chancelleries. No business shall be conducted except the most essential state affairs [samykh nuzhnykh gosudarstvennykh del].”119 This is reminiscent of the idea of the reason of state, for urgent worldly obligations could overrule a religious duty, that is, the observance of the Lord’s day, yet it would stress the similarities too far. The term gosudarstvennye dela appears two times in the preamble to the New Commercial Code of 1667, in the section where general principles concerning gosudarstvo are expected to be found. The importance of the source lies in the fact that one of its authors was Afanasii Ordin-Nashchokin (1605–1680), a man with experience in both internal and foreign affairs. He played a key role in concluding the Truce of Andrusovo (1667) with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and before that, besides conducting other diplomatic duties, he also had been appointed to various important posts, such as the military governor (voevoda) of Pskov. As a reward for his diplomatic success he was given the rank of boyar and even was commissioned to lead the Foreign Affairs 119 Translation, except for the term “state affairs,” is from Muscovite Law Code, 28. Hellie translates gosudarstvennye dela as “affairs of the sovereign,” but the English equivalent is “state affairs.” The difference is significant, and the appearance of the term gosudarstvennye dela is of great importance for the evolution of a distinction between gosudar′ and gosudarstvo. But the term gosudarstvennye dela was, in fact, known before 1649: it was used in a political crime case initiated in 1648 because someone in his sleep got “an instruction from God … on high affairs of the realm” (o gosudarstvennykh velikikh delakh). Novombergskii, Slovo i delo gosudarevy, 187 (no. 114). Moreover, the term is encountered as early as 1613 in Mikhail Romanov’s confirmation charter. The “election” of Tsar Mikhail was characterized as a bol′shoe gosudarstvennoe delo, which, due to the wholly religious context, can be translated as “an affair of great importance for the realm.” Utverzhdennaia gramota, 44. Although the term is also present in some chancellery sources of the smuta, these are exceptional cases, in my view, similarly to their occurrence in the Law Code. After 1613 the term seems to have gone into oblivion, just to resurface in the 1660s in contexts that would justify the translations as “state affair(s).” This usage is confirmed by the use of the adjective gosudarstvennyi with regard to decrees and revenues!

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Chancellery with a new title created for its directors “guard of the tsarist great seal and the state’s foreign affairs [gosudarstvennykh posol′skikh del oberegatel′].”120 So, he was a man familiar with political terminology and had experience in the practice of government as well, in domestic and foreign affairs alike. The preamble to the New Commercial Code (a document that peaked “the dual agendas of mercantilism and protectionism,” and drew on foreign practices)121 is useful for our purpose as it mentions not only the worldly needs of the people, but also the need to increase revenues from dues as a primary “state affair.” The preamble mentions the tsarist majesty’s favor concerning the people’s tearful petition that the merchants of the Muscovite state and border towns of Great Russia [Moskovskogo gosudarstva i porubezhnykh gorodov Velikie Rosii torgovye liudi] should enjoy free trade; for in all neighboring states too, the protection and integrity of free and profitable trade is one of the most important state affairs [vo vsekh gosudarstvakh okrestnykh v pervykh gosudarstvennykh delakh], serving the purpose of collection of customs dues and the worldly needs of all the people [vsenarodnykh pozhitkov mirskikh].122 Furthermore, it also refers to “state benefits,” which partly depend on the observance of previous “state decrees”: And the heads of customs houses and their sworn assistant officials, serving by turns and by election from among the elite merchants [iz gostei] and the top-ranking traders, in the capital, Moscow, and in the border towns of Great Russia, acting by their faith in accordance with Christ’s commandments in the Holy Gospels and in fear of God’s righteous judgment, shall uphold the previously established state decrees [prezhnikh postanovlennykh gosudarstvennykh ukazov] in their entirety, and also those that follow, shall be zealous in safeguarding all state benefits from the collection of customs dues [ko vsiakoi gosudarstvennoi zborov

120 Hennings, Russia and Courtly Europe, 74. 121 Jarmo T. Kotilaine, Russia’s Foreign Trade and Economic Expansion in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 223, 224. 122 Novotorgovyi ustav 1667 g. [New commercial code of the year 1667], http://www.hist.msu. ru/ER/Etext/novotorg.htm.

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tamozhennykh pribyli] and in diligently defending traders from any ruinous outside offenses, and they shall look after all that without fail.123 Another important source of the 1660s with regard to the use of the term dela gosudarstva as well gosudarstvennye dela, Grigorii Kotoshikhin’s work is also vital, because it also reflects the language of a person in government service, especially active in foreign affairs. He identified the aim of his work in a letter, which has come down to us only in Swedish, as follows: “to describe the Muscovite state.”124 In his book he used gosudarstvo much more often without the adjective “Muscovite,” and employed the terms “Christian states” (khristianskie gosudarstva) and “Muslim states” (busurmanskie gosudarstva), along with “subjects” (poddannye) and “subjecthood” (poddanstvo)—the last one even with regard to states in a phrase: “states and lands are subordinated to his possession and subjecthood” (gosudarstva i zemlii poddaiutsia emu v obladatel′stvo i poddanstvo).125 These developments are, no doubt, important also in the light of his detailed description of the mechanisms of government, the chancellery system, and the tsar’s council, the duma. With regard to the latter, he mentioned that it discussed internal and external matters as was “the norm in other states,” but pointed out the differences, which Gary Hamburg summarized as follows: “The duma was neither an independent branch of government nor a body operating according to legal writ.”126 As James Cracraft noted in passing, and Hamburg expounded at more length, Kotoshikhin “did not abstractly characterize the tsarist system under Aleksei Mikhailovich.”127 True, that was not Kotoshikhin’s main goal in writing his book—he aimed to describe the functioning of the government instead—yet, the lack of a theoretical aspect is important. Nancy Shields Kollmann’s remark in connection with Kotoshikhin’s work grasped the point, stating that it was “the only narrative source” that might be used for Muscovite social and political theory, but “it focuses on government institutions and the elite, and is descriptive more than analytical.”128

123 Novotorgovyi ustav 1667 g. 124 Pennington, Introduction, 6. 125 The usage of these terms is from the section of his work dealing with the issue how to write the ruler’s title to documents sent to different powers, east and west. Kotoshikhin, O Rossii tsarstvovaniia Alekseia Mikhailovicha, 52–53. 126 Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 151. 127 Ibid., 152. 128 Kollmann, By Honour Bound, 58.

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Kotoshikhin saw the government as operating on the basis of a “moral consensus” between the tsar and boyars: the pious and righteous tsar (that is, free of arbitrary excesses that once had characterized Ivan IV’s reign, which Kotoshikhin called tyrannical), acted in harmony with the boyars.129 However, Kotoshikhin was aware of the fact that “this moral consensus could neither restrain a wilful tsar from acting the tyrant, nor prevent ambitious boyars or pretenders from usurping royal authority.”130 It is symptomatic, I think, that he saw in the silence of the boyars the cause that the First False Dmitrii was able to seize the throne in 1605, attributing this silence to the machinations of the Devil.131 Both of these motifs, and generally the broader issue of the “moral consensus” clearly relate Kotoshikhin to the traditional perception of the Time of Troubles, on the one hand, and to the main current of Muscovite thought on the other: the perception of rulership in ethico-religious terms. This shows the strength of the religious view of governance, emphasizing the importance of restraints, which were of non-institutional and non-legal nature but personal (that is, moral admonitions). Despite this perception, his work provides a good insight into a learned bureaucrat’s view of the gosudarstvo, presenting the operation of the Russian government as a system, which is apparent from the structure of his book. Moving forward in the seventeenth century, and taking a look at the language of the official documents of the Razin revolt (1669–1671), the sources convey the impression that occasionally a distinction was made between treason against the tsar and treason against gosudarstvo. Razin was charged with treason (izmena) committed against both the tsar and Moskovskoe gosudarstvo.132 Distinctions between acts committed against the ruler and gosudarstvo can also be clearly traced in the charges against Ivan Khovanskii and his son in 1682, in the troubled year marking the beginning of the reign of two tsars in Russia.133 Yet, the wording of these charges reveals the fluid nature of political crime, which included various aspects of treason as well as concerns about the ruler’s health and his honor. Ivan was accused of looting the treasury by dispensing money without an order: thereby he “brought great ruin to the whole State [vsemu zhe Gosudarstvu] and hardships to the people.”134 Furthermore, Ivan and his son in

129 Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 152. 130 Ibid., 153. 131 Ibid., 150, 153. 132 Krest′ianskaia voina pod predvoditel′stvom Stepana Razina. Sbornik dokumentov [Peasant revolt under the leadership of Stepan Razin. Collection of documents] (Moscow: Akademiia Nauk SSSR, 1957), vol. 2, 7–8, 9–10, 36–37, vol. 3, 158. 133 The problem of two tsars see below. 134 Sobranie gosudarstvennykh gramot i dogovorov, vol. 4, 459.

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their service “brought defamation and losses to the State [Gosudarstvu prinosili ponoshenie i ubytok], but did nothing to promote the eternal praise of the name of their Great Sovereigns and the benefit of the whole State [vsemu Gosudarstvu pribyli].”135 Finally Ivan’s “evil intention against the power [na derzhavu] of the Great Sovereigns and against their health was unmasked” and his “treachery and intention to take possession of the Muscovite state [Moskovskoe gosudarstvo] became obvious.”136 Thus, the charges echoed the wording on political crime in the Law Code, but with an undoubtedly greater emphasis on gosudarstvo as an entity. The term gosudarstvo even found its way into a literary genre, the language of which was more traditional than that of the chancelleries, namely, into panegyric literature. In a long panegyric written in 1687 to exhort the troops going off on campaign against the Crimean Tatars the author called them to fight “for the Orthodox faith,” “for the Sovereigns” and “for the whole state [gosudarstvo].”137 All these examples demonstrate that there were terms in seventeenth-century Muscovy before the accelerated Westernization of thought on power (that is, around 1700) such as zemlia, gosudarstvo, and, above all, probably gosudarstvennye dela, dela gosudarstva, which implied a difference, if not between the “grand prince’s authority and the powers of an abstract state,”138 then between the ruler’s power and the powers of a vaguely understood impersonal entity. This view, however, was predominantly limited to chancellery sources. But despite the changes in the meaning of gosudarstvo and the existence of the above terms, the statement of Poe, that “no known Muscovite author of the era used one of these terms as the basis for a conceptual distinction between the office of the prince and the officeholder,”139 holds true until the end of the century, regardless of the clerical or prikaz background of the authors. In the West an autochthonous office theory sharpened the existing distinction between rex and regnum/respublica. 135 Ibid., 460. 136 Ibid., 462. 137 Pamiatniki obshchestvenno-politicheskoi mysli v Rossii kontsa XVII veka. Literaturnye panegiriki [Manuscripts of socio-political thought in Russia at the end of the seventeenth century], ed. Andrei Petrovich Bogdanov (Moscow: Institut Istorii SSSR, 1983), 159. 138 Poe, “What did Russians Mean,” 589. Poe mentions zemlia, kniazhenie, and gosudarstvo in this context. 139 Ibid., 589–590. Rowland writes similarly: “I know only one attempt (by Ivan Timofeev) in Muscovite sources before 1630 to separate the corrupted person of the ruler from his incorruptible throne, and this suggestion was not pursued.” Daniel Rowland, “Ivan the Terrible as a Carolingian Renaissance Prince,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 19 (1995): Rhetoric of the Medieval Slavic World. Essays Presented to Edward L. Keenan on His Sixtieth Birthday by His Colleagues and Students, ed. Nancy Shields Kollmann, Donald Ostrowsky, and Daniel Rowland, 603.

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In Russia the formation of Kharkhordin’s triplet, gosudar′/gosudarstvo/poddannye was delayed, because the distinction between gosudar′ and gosudarstvo, a distinction not so clear-cut as in the West, was not accompanied by the clearly articulated idea of rulership as a public office serving the common good. Until Peter the Great we do not have statements similar to the one that Margrave Christian Ernst of Beyreuth made to Strasbourg University in 1659: “A good prince must always remember that the supreme law is the good of the state. The state is not to serve the ruler, but instead the prince must disappear within it [ganz im Staate aufgehen].”140 Indeed, as has been noted more than once, classical Muscovite ideology was unable to separate clearly “the body politic from the body natural,” a separation to which the concept of office was crucial: consequently “the personal and political aspects of the ruler remained interwoven,”141 especially for ecclesiastical authors, which explains why Agapetos had such paramount importance in Muscovite (and to a certain extent also in Imperial) Russia. While it is true that Agapetos was also popular in seventeenth-century Western Europe—which is understandable as this century witnessed the flourishing of the divine right of kings—there he represented merely one genre (the mirror of princes) of the many genres of political thought, which included tracts on royal sovereignty, balance of power thinking, and other issues. One of the earliest examples in Russia reminiscent of Kharkhordin’s triplet occurs in monk Avraamii’s missive written in 1696, although in a very simple wording. The context was as follows. When Peter returned from his triumphant Azov campaign in 1696 and visited the Andreevskii Monastery near Moscow, one of the monks, called Avraamii, following the tradition of personal petitioning, handed over a booklet to him. After taking a look at the handwriting, the tsar returned it to Avraamii telling him to produce a more readable version.142 Some months later, possibly towards the end of the year, Avraamii sent the booklet and a letter to Peter asking the tsar to see him on account of the importance of the matter. Avraamii, however, gravely miscalculated the response his proposal evoked, as early in 1697 his questioning began by the chancellery dealing with slovo i delo Gosudarevo cases, for Avraamii committed this crime through his written criticism of the Peter’s behavior and his way of ruling.143 It is not

140 Wilson, Absolutism, 54. 141 Rowland, “Ivan the Terrible as a Carolingian Renaissance Prince,” 603. 142 Golikova, Politicheskie protsessy, 84. 143 Ibid.

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known for sure whether Peter actually saw the missive or not,144 but its tone was no doubt unusually harsh and therefore an offense to the tsar’s honor, despite the fact that Avraamii tried to soften the criticism by presenting it as a bunch of information and rumors heard from others. It may well be, in my view, that Avraamii’s case contributed to the restriction issued by Peter in 1701 on the use of ink and paper in monasteries. For the purpose of this move was not economic but “to prevent political sedition that could stem from the monks’ ‘graphomania’ [sochinitel′stvo].”145 The missive is generally regarded as a critique of Peter’s behavior and governmental policy based on the established notions of Muscovite ideology.146 In an earlier study I argued that this statement was only partially true.147 There can be no doubt about the presence of the traditional elements in the missive, of which I just mention the most important ones: the use of the term “Orthodox Christians” in referring to the governed; the criticism that Peter did not listen to the advice of his relatives and the admonitions of clergymen (mentioning explicitly the word pouchenie); reference to the right of the patriarch to turn to the tsar with a request to change his decision on a given issue (that is, the quasilegal practice known as pechalovanie, intercession) although without mentioning the term itself explicitly and extending this right to members of the high clergy, and even to the church council.148 Furthermore, the admonition that every man has the duty to become similar to the merciful God, but this expectation is even more incumbent on the tsar as in “honor and power he has preeminence to many,”149 is clearly reminiscent of the advice of Joseph of Volokolamsk, who 144 Ibid., 85. 145 Ivanov, Spiritual Revolution, 28. 146 Hughes, Russia, 450. Bushkovitch is of the same opinion: in his view the missive is “a typical product of Russian political thinking, it remained entirely in the moral realm: Peter did not pay enough attention to the church, he was stubborn and did not listen to the advice of his mother and wife, there was too much bribery in the chanceries.” Bushkovitch, Peter the Great, 188–189. Gary Hamburg’s treatment of the missive is the most thorough one that I have come across. Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 284–286. Yet, in his good summary of Avraamii’s ideas he concludes: “The only aspect of the petition that deviated in a small way from traditional views was the final section, wherein Avraamii discussed the need for the tsar to limit royal expenditures and to cut taxes on the peasants.” Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 286. 147 For the question of a more detailed analysis of Avraamii’s political ideas see my article: Endre Sashalmi, “Towards a New Ideology: Muscovite Notions of Rulership and Western Influences in Avraamij’s Missive (1696),” in Muscovy: The Peculiarities of its Development, ed. Gyula Szvák (Budapest: Magyar Ruszisztikai Intézet, 2003), 143–154. 148 Tetradi startsa Avraamiia [The papers of the Elder Avraamii], ed. Natalia Alekseevna Baklanova, Istoricheskii arkhiv 6 (1951): 146–147, 150–151. 149 Ibid., 151.

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stated that nothing could make the ruler more similar to God than being merciful. These features of the missive are in line with the main tenets of Muscovite ideology. Yet, Avraamii’s writing, at the same time, shows the degree to which traditional ideology was infused with Western notions of rulership, notions that soon were to become the prominent and indispensable features of the new Petrine ideology, which was expressed for the first time in Peter’s manifesto of April 16, 1702. Avraamii’s criticism (presented as if it were the opinion of others) referred not only to the excesses of Peter’s personal behavior (the tsar did not give up his childish games, and as a mature man he did things that were not pleasing to God) but also his “engagements in unnecessary campaigns”: with doing so, the tsar “did not care, as it could have been expected of him, to do something useful for all [vsem poleznoe].”150 Most pertinent to the present topic is the blame of general nature concerning Peter’s way of governing: “Having abandoned any kind of government of his state [pokinuv vsiakoe pravlenie gosudarstva svoego) he ordered that it be governed by a … bribe-taker, who just wants to get rich. …”151 Furthermore, instead of placing good officials to deal with the execution of justice, “a matter necessary for God, and the people under his command in the whole state [delo bogu i ego podnachal′nym liudam vsego gosudarstva potrebnoe],” Peter appointed bad ones who “ruin the state [gubiat gosudarstvo].”152 But the novel elements of the booklet do not end here. Avraamii made an important distinction when he referred to the right of the patriarch and the high clergy to intercede the tsar, warning him that he should refrain from things “unnecessary for God and good people alike” and start to care for those things that are necessary. Avraamii spoke of the respective duties of the church hierarchy and the church council, and that of the tsar in the following manner: “the Lord God has ordained them to care for every man with regard to the Lord God; similarly, Orthodox tsars have to care for all kinds of worldly matters of common necessity [o vsiakikh mirskikh obshchikh nuzhnykh delakh].”153 Here we find not only the idea of a distinction between spiritual and secular affairs, a distinction emphasized forcefully by some clergymen around the turn of the century—an idea that had already surfaced in the conflict between Nikon and Aleksei—but also the notion that soon came to be called “the common good.” This distinction was underlined later in the text saying that God supposedly

150 Ibid., 145. 151 Ibid. 152 Ibid. 153 Ibid., 147.

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will not ask tsars, and grand princes, and autocrats, and people in the chancelleries to give an account of [their performing of] long prayers and many genuflections … and the conditions of churches and monasteries. … But he will ask them to give account of correct beliefs [very pravy] and fair justice rendered to all [suda vsem pravedno], poor and rich, widows and orphans, as well as to princes and senators, and temporary commissioners of power in a republic [vremennikom pospolitu], so to say, to all the people living in this world, loyal and not loyal.154 The issue of execution of justice is the most central problem he addressed: pravda and nepravda feature prominently in the missive but not in the same sense as they were understood by the clergy, in the sense of laws of Orthodoxy. Pravda clearly had a secular meaning as it was used with regard to the proper execution of justice by the judges. Furthermore, for Avraamii, pravda meant not only righteousness but also compliance with written law, which is proven not only by his repeated mentioning of the term “lawfully” (zakonno), but also by his explicit reference to the 1649 Law Code, for he urged the tsar to “look after the judges, so that they should judge justly, in the manner written in the law book [stob oni pravedno sudili, kak o chem v knige sudebnoi napisano].”155 This worldly perception of pravda is easily explained by the fact that Avraamii had been an official in one of the most important chancelleries before he became a monk. Going even further the path of a more secular perception of rulership, Avraamii makes another interesting distinction that is reminiscent of the idea of the scholastic perception of humans living in this world in two capacities: namely, being simply humans in general (regardless of their faith or being part of a politically organized society), and being a people living in an organized political community. He writes that for the satisfaction of their needs from the land, the water, the air, people “are endowed with reason [razumom] and will, and human desires with regard to different things” but to satisfy their needs is difficult “not only because they act in this [earthly] world but also because they are simultaneously acting in a state [v odnom gosudarstve] where they are living.”156

154 Ibid., 152. 155 Ibid., 153. 156 Ibid., 155.

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Therefore, he defines the duty of the ruler in the following manner: it is necessary for every autocrat [kiizhdomu samoderzhtsu], as much as he can, with reason [po sile razumom] to provide and create for his subjects [poddannym svoim] those things without which it is impossible to live in this world for any man, and these things should not be made expensive with statutory taxes. And because of this mercy, from the small and to the great, all will pray for him to God not only in one state [ne tokmo odnogo gosudarstva] but in many, and for this he will be blessed and praised not only by his subjects [ot svoikh poddannykh] but also by the subjects of many other neighboring states [ot mnogikh okrestnykh chuzhikh gosudarstv].157 If we add to the abovementioned novel aspects of Avraamii’s missive that a rudimentary idea of natural law is also present in the writing—in expressions such as estestvennyi zakon (natural law), zdravyi razum (common sense), and pravit′ razumno (to govern reasonably)—and that he used the word poddannye (“subjects”) more often than “Orthodox Christian” in referring to the governed, it can plausibly be argued that Avraamii’s work, as a whole, conveys the idea that the tsar did not fulfil his duties emanating from his worldly office: to govern his state in a way that serves the common utility of the governed.158 All these mean that for Avraamii gosudarstvo was clearly more than merely a realm, that is, a community and a territory ruled by an independent monarch. It was a politically organized community under a ruler who was to govern his state for the common good of his people. Although Kollmann did not analyse Avraamii’s missive, I think her statement could serve an excellent illustration of its content. Regarding the changes in the 1680s and the 1690s in the perception of rulership, she remarked that some authors and political figures “went beyond the traditional Muscovite concept and practice of politics, even while maintaining the idiom of Godly community.” The tsar’s role was “no longer just national salvation” but the government also “turned towards goals of societal welfare and change.”159

157 Ibid. 158 Sashalmi, “Towards a New Ideology,” 149, 153. 159 Kollmann, By Honour Bound, 221. Hamburg notes that Avraamii knew the Holy Scripture well and was familiar with the 1649 Law Code. Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 286.

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Another relevant feature in Avraamii’s missive with regard to the notion of the state is that he noted, although with resentment, the growth of the number of central government officials in the chancelleries. Indeed, their number grew more than threefold between the 1640s and the 1690s: from 837 to 2739.160 In my view, Avraamii’s resentment confirms Kharkhordin’s supposition that possibly there was a connection between the large quantity of officials and the development of the notion of state in this period. Indeed, if we link Avraamii’s abovementioned novel terminology to the bureaucratization of the central government, such a conjunction seems well-founded.161 And we should not forget either that it was from the mid-seventeenth century mainly due to protracted warfare that the practical marks of modern statehood (as given previously) were becoming more apparent in Muscovy.162 It is highly illuminating here to refer to a comparison taken from French history, although the example comes from the sixteenth century. James Collins, in arguing that “the vocabulary of State and the actual State evolved together,” quotes the words of the First President of the Parlement of Paris, who reminded King Henry III (1574–1589) that his France was very different from that of Louis XII (1498–1515) and Francis I (1515–1547): “It’s a horrible and incredible thing to see 1500 or 1600 people employed doing that which 10 or 12 handled in the times of kings Louis XII and Francis I.”163 To conclude: It is of great importance that Avraamii, formerly being an official, had a government experience, which influenced his criticism of Peter not only on particular details of his policy but also with regard to rulership in general. As with Kotoshikhin in the 1660s, thirty years later we have a Muscovite ex-bureaucrat writing on government. These two writings, although of very different genres, give an impression about the prikaz view of gosudarstvo. These writings also underline the general observation regarding Western Christendom, that most authors in early modern Europe who wrote treatises on law, state, sovereignty, almost always had some kind of government or political experience (Bodin, for instance, was a leading figure of the Third Estate at the Estates-General of 160 Demidova, Sluzhilaia biurokratiia, 37. 161 This correlation, at the same time, underlines Koselleck’s contention on the relationship between a concept and reality. For this issue in general see Reinhart Koselleck, “A Response to Comments on the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe,” in The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts: New Studies on Begriffsgeschichte, ed. Hartmut Lehmann and Melvin Richter (Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, 1996), 60–71. 162 The New Commercial Code of 1667, which intended to regulate trade by considering the country’s trade as a whole, explicitly mentioned that the regulations were necessary because of the calamities caused by the war. 163 Collins, From Monarchical Commonwealth.

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1576–1577). Avraamii’s missive is important as it shows how far the distinction between tsar and gosudarstvo had gone in 1690s. All these developments notwithstanding, the crucial direct question, “What is gosudarstvo?,” was not raised, and there was no systematic investigation into the nature of gosudarstvo either in Muscovy or even during reign of Peter the Great. This fact underlines the importance of Western scholarly discourse on the office theory of kingship from the thirteenth through the seventeenth centuries, which culminated in the birth of the modern concept of state. In Russia the lack of office theory of rulership meant that there was no organic link, that is, no continuous age-old traditional tie between this idea and the emergence of the modern concept of state—the former, unlike the term for state, was borrowed from the West. Previous examples, however, showed that alongside the idea of service to the ruler, the idea of service to his/the realm existed even as early as the first half of the seventeenth century, and underline that in tracing the history of gosudarstvo the developments of the first half of seventeenth century must not be underestimated. In the late seventeenth century the notion of the ruler’s duty to serve the people’s wordly needs, or even the common good, was added to the traditional duties, along with the incomplete adoption of the Western idea of rulership as an office. And, as Dixon rightly points out, it was from only ca. 1700 that the “usefulness” of the changes and that of “the new political vocabulary” “began to be fully exploited.”164 Yet, it would be erroneous to read too much modernity even into the Petrine concept of gosudarstvo,165 a problem I will discuss in the third part of the book. But the distinction between the ruler and gosudarstvo definitely existed by the late seventeenth century, together with the notion of loyalty to gosudarstvo. I consider it crucial in the development of the Russian notion of the state that the phase of the “monarchical commonwealth,” the community of citizens under a monarch, from which the shift to the “monarchical state” occurred in the West, was missing in Muscovy! “As visiting foreigners often noted, there was no talk of the ‘commonwealth’, the ‘common good’, or common anything,”166 and the common good is encountered in an official document in 1682 only. Consequently, the common good under Peter simply became the “good of the state.” Telling is the statement of Nikolai Pavlenko who tried to grasp the meaning of the common good in Russian legislative documents of the eighteenth century concentrating on Peter’s reign. He concluded: the idea of common good lacked 164 Dixon, Modernisation, 192. 165 Ibid., 191–195, Kharkhordin, “What Is the State?,” 220–222. 166 Poe, “The Central Government,” 436.

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precision, it was fluid, therefore “it is difficult to distinguish the ‘good of the subjects’ from the ‘good of the fatherland,’ and this latter from the utility of the state or from the interest of the state.”167 This perception, no doubt, was nurtured by the term gosudarstvo itself due to the monarchical connotation of the term. Yet, it was the absence of an age-old discourse on the political community (resonating in an embryonic form in Avraamii’s missive) and the importance of the role and rule of law in the relations between the governor(s) and the governed, which, in my view, for many years precluded the notion of commonwealth of citizens from taking its place alongside gosudarstvo in Russian thought, which occurred only during Catherine II’s reign.

167 Nikolai Ivanovich Pavlenko, “Petr I. K izucheniiu sotsial′no-politicheskikh vzgliadov” [Peter I. To the study of his socio-political views], in Rossiia v period reform Petra I [Russia in the age of reforms of Peter I], ed. Nikolai Ivanovich Pavlenko et al. (Moscow: Nauka, 1973), 61.

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CHAPTER 12

Divine Right of Kings and Divine Right of Tsars: Aspects and Lessons of a Comparison

12.1. The Meaning of the Divine Right of Kings, and the Relation of the Idea of God’s Lieutenancy to the Idea of Office Although there can be no doubt about the emergence of the modern concept of state in seventeenth-century Western political theory, to look upon the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries only from the isolated perspective of the modern concept of state while neglecting other forces at work, “proprietary dynasticism” included, would lead to a distorted perception of the past. From the seventeenth century onwards, the modern concept of state was struggling for recognition in competition with the corporate order and “proprietary dynasticism” on the one hand, and the belief in the divine right of kings on the other. If “proprietary dynasticism” might disquiet the great majority of political thinkers, the latter was widely accepted by them: indeed, as stated previously, the seventeenth century witnessed the peak of expositions of the belief in the divine right of kings.1 It is time to discuss at length what this doctrine was about and what kind of developments were influencing it in the early modern period. While between ca. 1200–1450 the idea of the king as the representative of the people and his office serving the common good was accepted in Western political

1 For a characteristic and short exposition of these principles, see James VI’s Trew Law, especially King James VI and I, 72; and John N. Figgis, The Divine Right of Kings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), 9–10.

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thought (the strengthening of the “ascending theory of power,” in Ullmann’s wording), from the middle of the fifteenth century a new trend was clearly emerging: in the most important Western monarchies the idea of the ruler as God’s representative on earth (the “descending theory of power,” in Ullmann’s wording) was gaining greater acceptance.2 This phenomenon resulted in the king’s office being subsumed and almost dissolved in the person of the ruling king. “The monarch was the possessor of all powers, not because of his office but because of his divine nature.”3 Divine right of kings meant not merely that the king ruled Dei gratia, “by the Grace of God”—it went much deeper than that.4 This perception of royal power implied that rulers had some close relationship with the divinity.5 Belief in the divine right of kings was characteristic of the whole early modern era, and it was articulated both in political theory and rituals of royal power.6 In brief, the divine right of kings was the combination of rulership by God’s grace, divine appointment, and the belief in the God-like image of the ruler who occupied a position on earth comparable to God.7 The most important addition to these elements in the early seventeenth century was that the identity of the king as the chosen of God was manifested in birthright: the principle of heredity favoring one person only, namely, through primogeniture, was accepted as an integral part of the doctrine. The distinct origins of these two constitutive parts were, however, preserved: therefore in seventeenth-century England references to the king’s divine right very often were accompanied by a reference to hereditary succession. According to the theory of the divine right of kings, the ruler’s power was not merely an analogy of God’s power but its embodiment on earth. “The state gains its personality through the fact that virtue and power descended from the person of the divinity to the person of the ruler.”8 In other words, the distinction between the “two persons” or the “two bodies” of the king, his private 2 Shennan, Liberty and Order in Early Modern Europe, 19; Feros, Kingship, 72–73; Black, Political Thought, 184–185. 3 Feros, Kingship, 72. 4 Matthias Range, “‘Dei gratia’ and the Divine Right of Kings,” in The Routledge History of Monarchy, ed. Elena Woodacre et al. (London: Routledge, 2019), 132–137. 5 Shennan, Liberty and Order in Early Modern Europe, 20. 6 Muir, Rituals, 246. 7 Peter Wende, “Das Herrscherbild des 17. Jahrhunderts in England” [The image of the ruler in seventeenth-century England], in Das Herrscherbild im 17 Jahrhundert [The image of the ruler in the seventeenth century], ed. Konrad Repgen (Munster: Aschendorff, 1991), 63. 8 Victoria Silver, “Sidney’s Discourses on Political Images and Royalist Iconography,” in Writing and Political Engagement in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Derek Hirst and Richard Strier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 173. See, for instance, the text of George Wither’s emblem analysed earlier in this book.

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and public personality, or his mortal and immortal body, that is, his immortal rights, was paling, although it did not disappear.9 Therefore, in analysing the development of the concept of state, examining the relationship between divine right and office principles is fundamental. The characteristics of the fully fledged version of early modern divine right theory can be grasped in the following checklist. 1. Monarchy is a divinely ordained institution and the best form of government. 2. The power of kings is received directly from God on the basis of descent, excluding any constitutive intermediaries (the church or the people or secular institutions such as the parliament). 3. The order of succession is firmly fixed (by the principle of primogeniture) and unchangeable, although not necessarily laid down in statute law (fundamental law): in other words, not simply descent, but the degree of relationship is crucial. 4. The right to the throne acquired thereby is indefeasible and the consecration of the king (unction and coronation) is merely declarative, not constitutive. 5. Despite the principle of heredity, the power of kings is derived directly from God, since He is the final cause of life and death. Consequently, it depends on God when He takes the king from this earthly world—an act that automatically confers the title of king on the person who until then was just the heir to the throne. 6. God endows the king with a special ability (the notion of arcana imperii) to interpret the needs of the realm entrusted to him by God. 7. The king is responsible for the government of the realm, he has to use his office for the common good, but because of the divine commitment he is accountable to God alone, the giver of his power, and not to the people. 8. As a consequence, the king cannot be deposed by anyone (church, people, institutions, or the pope, or the emperor), active resistance against him is a sin, and it is against God’s command of obedience. 9. The king’s command should be followed unless it is against divine law: in this case the example of Christian martyrs is to be followed. 10. The king’s power is sacred. 11. The king is like God on earth.

9 Feros, Kingship, 72.

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It is of great significance that in Western Christendom early modern divine right theory (no matter whether its proponents were absolutist or not10) preserved the idea of office, despite the elevation of the person of the ruler high above other mortals, into a quasi-celestial sphere. King James VI (I) wrote: “Kings are called Gods by the propheticall King Dauid, because they sit upon GOD his Throne in the earth, and haue the count of their administration to give unto him. Their office is To minister Iustice and Iudgement to the people. …”11 The fully fledged divine right theory, in some sense, was a compromise between plain proprietarism and the principle of rulership as an office when it came to embody the fixed hereditary principle, as the issue of succession was beyond the scope of the ruler’s prerogative to change it. In divine right theory the king was not merely “one point of divine order,” but he was “portrayed as the lone point of divine order within an otherwise chaotic and contingent temporal world.”12 Inherent in divine right of kings was the emphasis on the special ability of the ruler to interpret the needs of his people, an ability he possessed as God’s anointed, and this notion “inhibited too close an analysis of the fountain head of royal government.”13 With the weakening of the idea of divine right, however, “a more dispassionate scrutiny of the nature of royal authority” (or rather, scrutiny of the nature of the royal office) “became possible,”14 which contributed to the weakening of proprietary attitudes and, in turn, helped to conceptualize the modern view of the state. Thus, it took a long time before the modern concept of state finally triumphed over the two strongly entrenched notions of proprietary dynasticism and the belief in divine right. Martin van Creveld claims that it was in the period between 1648 and 1789 that the “person of the ruler and his ‘state’ were separated from each other until the first became almost entirely unimportant in comparison with the second.”15 The early modern concept of political crime, as Ingraham 10 The doctrine of the divine right of kings should not be confused with absolutism, although divine rightists easily embraced the Bodinian concept of (royal) sovereignty, and hence divine right became the most widespread justification of absolute monarchy in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, but not all divine rightists were advocates of absolute royal power. Divine right ideas and absolutist argumentation were not the same thing, they had distinct origins: the first came from theology, the latter from legal science. Burgess, Absolute Monarchy, 96–97. For the distinction between the two see also Range, “‘Dei gratia’ and the Divine Right of Kings,” 138. 11 King James VI and I, 64. 12 David Engster, Divine Sovereignty. The Origins of the Modern State Power (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), 9. 13 Ibid., 9, 121, 122. 14 Shennan, Liberty and Order in Early Modern Europe, 29–30. 15 van Creveld, Rise and Decline, 127.

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described it, clearly confirms van Creveld’s view. These considerations also warn us not to exaggerate “Russian backwardness,” but it would be an even greater mistake to forget about the enormous differences between Western Christendom and Russia. And, if similarities and differences are placed on a balance sheet, I would definitely emphasize the importance of differences and come down on the side of the “hard” interpretation of Muscovy. Let us now examine in a comparative manner the idea of the ruler as God’s lieutenant, by comparing the divine right of kings and the divine right of tsars. Despite other claims, the view that the notion of divine right is appropriate in the analysis of Muscovite and Imperial Russia alike, can hardly be discarded. Paul Dukes identifies the ideology of the Romanovs as “basically divine right, but with a growing secular component—the ‘general good’, and so on.”16 Similarly, Lentin states: “The tsar of Muscovy had always been conceived of in divine right terms … and Peter adhered unhesitatingly to a tradition which sanctified his prerogatives.”17 At the same time, “because in Russia and elsewhere, succession by primogeniture was understood as an integral part of divine-right monarchy, it was essential for Peter to demonstrate that the two were separable.”18 This was the very reason Peter commissioned Feofan Prokopovich to compose the tract called “The Justice of the Monarch’s Will in Designating the Heir of his State.”

12.2. Divine Right of Kings and Divine Right of Tsars: Assessment of Similarities and Differences In comparing divine right ideas in Western Christendom and Russia, it should be stated that the Muscovite version of divine right, namely, the divine right of tsars, was very different from the divine right of kings, despite the fact that the main source of divine right in both cases was the Bible and its locus classicus was Romans 13.19 Therefore, to highlight the differences one must concentrate not only on the origin of power, but also on its purpose—a method I already emphasized previously in this book. One more aspect, however, must be added, and this is the way the ruler’s power operated. Before moving to a comparison considering these three aspects, some other preliminary remarks are necessary.

16 Dukes, Making of Russian Absolutism, 206. 17 Lentin, Introduction, 32. 18 Ibid., 33. 19 Ibid., 32.

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To begin with, Muscovite divine right, as has been noted more than once, was very simple. The simplicity of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Muscovite divine right, as well as its popularity, is also confirmed by seventeenth-century proverbs, in which God and tsar are mentioned together, such as “The tsar’s judgement is God’s judgement,” “The prayer to God, [and the] service to the tsar is not in vain.”20 Some of them were of biblical origin such as “Fear God and honor the tsar,” or “The heart of the tsar is in God’s hand.” The latter were the favorite statements of Muscovite bookmen to legitimize power and command obedience, and the church popularized them to the extent that they were treated as proverbs in the seventeenth century. This clearly proves that the basic tenets of ideology were all-encompassing in the society. Similarly, the divine right of kings, besides having scholarly expositions, of course, was also “essentially a popular theory,” which was “proclaimed in the pulpit, published in the marketplace”21: therefore, a comparison is even more justified. Another difference between the two doctrines was that despite the firm roots of divine right in theology, in the West its proponents also used a legal-political vocabulary besides biblical references—a vocabulary in which the sovereign– subject relationship was crucial in matters of obedience in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. The use of this kind of vocabulary is not surprising given the strength of what Kantorowicz called “spiritual-secular hybridism,” that is, the “cross-relations” between the two spheres, the spiritual and the secular.22 In Muscovy the parallel to the sovereign/subject dichotomy was expressed in religious terms: in the title of the tsar′, the very term to express God-given authority, or gosudar′,23 and “Orthodox Christian” (pravoslavnyi khristianin). Daniel Rowland aptly formulated this aspect of Muscovite thought on power: “the religious side of political thought was hypertrophied.”24 Jaroslaw Pelenski also remarked: “The fact that many ideological documents were written by clergymen until the end of the sixteenth century in itself reveals the highly ecclesiastical

20 Sashalmi, “16th–17th-Century Muscovite Ideology in European Perspective,” 166–172. This aspect was also emphasized by Marshall Poe: “Muscovites had an entire catalogue of sayings to the effect that the tsar was like God (and, one might add, the God of Moses rather than Jesus).” Poe, “The Central Government,” 436. 21 Gerald M. Straka, Anglican Reaction to the Revolution of 1688 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), 80. 22 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, “Mysteries of State. An Absolutist Concept and its Late Medieval Origins,” in his Selected Studies (Locust Valley, NY: J. J. Augustin, 1965), 381. See what has been written previously in the book on political theology! 23 The latter title also conveyed a strong religious implication because of the frequent use of Bog da gosudar′, an issue treated before. 24 Rowland, “Muscovy,” 269.

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tone of political literature. It would be strange to find ecclesiastical bookmen conceiving any other explanation for historical and political developments than that of Divine Providence.”25 Indeed, the balance between religion, law and philosophy in the Muscovite thought on power throughout the period under discussion was very different from the one known in Western Christendom.26 Despite that fact that the Muscovite government in the seventeenth century was coming to sense the importance of law, as especially the 1649 Law Code shows. Still, law did not have the importance attributed to it in Western Christendom: “the idea of natural law was never developed”27 (there were merely sporadic and isolated references to it, as with Fedor Karpov), while political philosophy was practically unknown.28 The religious perception of power is reflected in the fact that the word poddannyi (a Polish loanword), although it was known in the second half of the sixteenth century, was rarely used before the end of the seventeenth. This is not surprising as “subject” is “an abstract legal term.”29 Finally, closely connected to the problem of the religious frame of reference is the matrix in which Western and Muscovite divine right views were formed.30 Western kings had to defend themselves for centuries from the pretensions of the papacy and the empire, the two institutions with universal claims, and also from theories allowing the right of active resistance for the people. The early modern version of the divine right of kings had a strong anti-papal edge, defending kings from the hierocratic deposing power of the papacy, which strongly attempted to vindicate this right in the era of intense religious conflicts arising from the Reformation. At the same time, the idea of the divine right could dismiss active resistance against the king coming from below. *** Moving to a detailed comparison based on the principles highlighted above, among the characteristics listed as basic tenets of the divine right of kings, points 1–5 are concerned with the origin of power. In Muscovy, as we have seen, power could come only from God alone, and there was no discussion

25 Pelenski, Russia and the Conquest of Kazan, 177. 26 Rowland, “Muscovy,” 269. Therefore, Muscovite ideology should not be called absolutist because of the absence of those legal concepts and legal reasoning that were used by absolutist thinkers. For this see what has been written earlier in this book on autocracy. 27 Ibid., 298. 28 Ibid., 293–298. 29 Rowland, “The Problem of Advice in Muscovites Tales about the Time of Troubles,” 270. 30 Rowland, “Did Muscovite Literary Ideology,” 129–130.

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of the merits and shortcomings of the different forms of government, or the virtues of so-called “limited” and “absolute monarchy.” Autocracy was generally accepted: “Recalling that Russian autocracy had no real political theorist on the order of Bodin, James I, or Hobbes, one might even go further and suggest that the ideological hegemony of tsarism was so profound that even its basic precepts did not require explication.”31 Therefore, Muscovite ideology of power was monolithic both with regard to the origin of power and the form that ruling power should take, which clearly was not the case in Western Christendom where rival theories of power had always existed (from the twelfth century in an increasingly systematic manner), consequently Western political thought can be termed pluralistic. The divine right of kings, was just one stream of thought, but indeed the most influential in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Regarding the issue of succession, divine right of the tsars, similarly to divine right of kings, was also based on descent. Therefore, to emphasize the relationship of the Romanovs to the last members of the Rurikid dynasty (Ivan IV and Fedor I)—no matter how tenuous or distant in fact this relationship was—and through them to distant forefathers, including even the fictive descent from Caesar Augustus, was essential in 1613.32 The issue of descent, however, represents a broader problem to be discussed here at length. In Western Christendom the principles of monarchical succession inherited from the Middle Ages, that is, the fact that elective and hereditary principles were not seen as two opposing choices but were rather seen as complementary, created an ever increasing political problem in the early modern era. In those kingdoms that did not become pure elective monarchies, such as the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth, a solution was invented to avoid political crisis through “a workable rule of succession.”33 It was not an easy-going process, however. In Western Europe it was mainly due to the interdynastic wars and the confessional struggles between rulers and their subjects, which permeated

31 Poe, “People Born to Slavery,” 215, 224. 32 Dunning, “Russia’s First Civil War,” 443, 445. Thyrêt, Between God and Tsar, 58–60; Cynthia H. Whittaker, Russian Monarchy. Eighteenth-Century Rulers and Writers in Political Dialogue (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), 27. For the emphasis on continuity regarding the rituals of the first two Romanov royal marriages, see most recently: Russell E. Martin, The Tsar’s Happy Occasion. Ritual and Dynasty in the Weddings of Russia’s Rulers, 1495–1745 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021), 52–64. 33 Howard Nenner, The Right to Be King. Succession to the Throne of England, 1603–1714 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 7.

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the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that succession to the throne came to be regulated in a statute law, which often contained a religious clause. The Act of Settlement (1701) in England is one well-known example, the Danish fundamental law, the Kongelov of 1665 (according to which the king had to be Lutheran), is another (even if less well-known). The above struggles were conducive to the divine right of kings’ fusion with the principle of strict heredity of royal office through primogeniture around 1600—henceforward, primogeniture was treated as giving an indefeasible right to the throne, to evade political struggles over succession. This was, however, just theory, which did not mean that it was easy to enact a firm law of succession based on the fully developed theory of the divine right of kings. Although divine right of kings was strong in seventeenth-century England, furthermore, the actual succession followed male primogeniture between 1603 and 1685, still, England provides a good case study of succession problems due to the absence of a fixed succession law: just to mention the exclusion crisis of 1679–1681 when the parliament could not deprive James (the future James II, 1685–1688) of his birthright to succeed, or the clause of the Bill of Rights (1689), which banned Catholics from the throne. I find it necessary to point out that the issue of succession in Muscovite and Petrine Russia has relevance in my comparison of the divine right of kings with the divine right of the tsars from the angle of descent only: namely, that the divine right of the tsars did not include the principle of a fixed order of succession with the indefeasible right of one particular individual to the throne. But succession also has a broader perspective going beyond divine right, with other implications on the perception of power. In contrast to Bushkovitch’s opinion, I contend that succession has, in fact, a lot do with the problems of autocratic and absolute power. It is well-known that there was no statute law regulating succession in Muscovy. This is the fact on which historians agree—but apart from that, they disagree on the issue whether there existed an unwritten custom that was by and large observed, or consciously pursued with regard to succession. Considering that another important English-language contribution has recently appeared on the issue of regulation of Russian succession, penned by Russell Martin, which represents contradictory or seemingly contradictory views compared to Bushkovitch’s monograph, it is necessary to consider them at some length. But before entering this comparison, let us begin with my conclusion on the issue of succession written more than a decade ago on Muscovite succession and Peter’s statute of 1722:

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The designation of the heir was the exclusive right of the grand prince by the early sixteenth century, and seen from this angle Peter’s statute, which merely enacted this right, was not, in my view, as remote from Muscovite principles as some historians assume. But after 1722, in principle, the nominated heir could indeed be any person: even a woman, even non-Orthodox, and even a person having no ties of blood to the ruling family at all. Seen from these angles, the statute, of course, meant a clear break with the past, especially when one considers the importance attributed to descent and Orthodoxy as the basis of legitimacy in pre-Petrine Russia. Nevertheless, the succession statute tried to hide the novel consequences of the right of free designation behind the mantle of tradition, because it invoked the past, the decisions of Ivan III (1498, 1502) as a precedent, even though Ivan’s designation of the heir remained within the dynasty in both cases. Tradition, however, played a part in the succession statute of 1722 in another way as well: as Pierre Gonneau has shown, the wording of passages of Ivan’s decisions reflected the direct influence of the relevant passages of important sixteenth-century sources, the Book of Degrees34 and the Nikon Chronicle. At the same time, the statute “did not merely borrow certain parts from these sources”, but also “modernized their terminology and even edited them so that their idea of tsardom would coincide with Peter’s needs”.35

34 With regard to the “Book of Degrees,” it is worth mentioning that this work used the term naslednik (heir) consistently, “back to Kievan times … and also for the later Moscow princes Vasilii I and Ivan III.” Bushkovitch, Succession to the Throne, 112. 35 Sashalmi, “God-Guided Contract and Scriptural Sovereignty,” 140–141. Bushkovitch’s discussion reinforces my conclusions: Peter the Great’s succession law of February 5, 1722 is supposed to have wrought a radical change in succession to the throne. … As we have seen, in context that was not a complete break. Previous tsars had, in fact, chosen successors other than the eldest son and the law adduced the examples of Ivan III’s choice of Vasilii. What the law did not state, however, is that the choices had all been within the ruling family and Peter’s law did not make that qualification. The importance of the law, however, was in another area: for the first time, succession practices were encoded in written law, not merely in custom. Bushkovitch, Succession to the Throne, 327.

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According to Russell Martin there was an observable tendency, namely, “agnatic primogeniture” in Muscovite succession and there existed various devices to buttress it.36 In his view, Muscovite rulers (princes and tsars) clearly pursued “agnatic primogeniture” from 1389 on using “several strategies” to this end until the accession of the Romanovs (1613), such as “testaments, treaties, surety oaths, public nomination ceremonies and the association of the heir”— measures employed either alone or in combinations “with the single purpose of establishing primogeniture in the line of the descendants of Ivan Kalita.”37 With the Romanovs, the previous procedures of succession were abandoned, as they rejected both testament and anticipatory association: “Mikhail Romanov did not associate any of his sons on the throne, neither did he write a will designating an heir.”38 Indeed, the early Romanovs seem to have abandoned the practice of writing wills to name their successors, or, if they did so, the wills have not come down to us. Instead, a new method was introduced regarding succession—the presentation of the heir to the throne during the lifetime of the reigning tsar. In Russell Martin’s view, this invention, which did not entail corulership, was “a new way to secure primogeniturial succession in the dynasty,” as in each case “the heir presented was the eldest son.”39 This tradition was no longer feasible when Tsar Fedor III died childless in 1682. Then his less than ten-year-old half-brother, Peter, was put on the throne, bypassing Fedor’s brother, Ivan, who was older than Peter, but was deemed incompetent to rule both physically and mentally. Within weeks, however, this solution gave way to a new arrangement, due to the struggle of court factions: the co-rulership of Ivan V as “first tsar” and Peter as “second tsar,” lasting until Ivan’s death is 1696.40 More recently, Paul Bushkovitch has arrived at the following conclusion in his book dedicated to the problem: The procedure of succession in the ruling family of the Moscow principality and the Russian state, from at least 1450, relied on the public designation of the successor, not on automatic primogeniture. Peter was not introducing anything new in practice. The change that he did make was to convert a custom into a written 36 Russell Martin, “Anticipatory Association of the Heir in Early Modern Russia: Primogeniture and Succession in Russia’s Ruling Dynasties,” in The Routledge History of Monarchy, ed. Elena Woodacre et al. (London: Routledge, 2019), 420–442. 37 Ibid., 421. 38 Ibid., 421, 435. 39 Ibid., 435, 436. 40 Ibid., 436.

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law and to extend it to include heirs not from the imperial family: in theory, though never in practice. … In the centuries before Peter, formal designation was necessary because the succession was not fully defined even in custom, hence, when the ruler died without children in 1598 the only possibility was an election.41 The views of the two historians are not diametrically opposed to each other. I think that Lindsey Hughes’s laconic statement that “observance of primogeniture was a matter of custom rather than a constitution”42 can provide a reconciliation of Russell Martin’s and Paul Bushkovitch’s views, as it grasps the heart of the problem. For a “custom” is not to be interpreted as a static notion, which the following analysis, too, hopefully proves. Muscovite princes beginning with Ivan Kalita appointed their successors in their wills (1339), and this practice was followed until the sixteenth century, but other devices were also employed to ensure smooth transfer of power. The study of these wills before 1462 (the starting point of this book) would bring us too far afield, but there is a good monograph on the topic written by my former PhD student. Her conclusion on the content of these wills concerning succession is as follows. Between 1336 and 1462 two principles took shape: one was the growing importance of the church, especially the role of the metropolitans for providing legitimacy for these acts—beginning from Dmitrii Donskoi, the metropolitans gave their blessings for the decisions of the princes in the protocollum of wills, and legitimized the wills with their signature and seal—the other was the general acceptance of the vertical order of succession by 1462.43 In accordance with the principle of vertical succession following strict male primogeniture, Ivan III made his grandson, named Dmitrii (born of his eldest son Ivan who died in 1490), his co-ruler and successor in 1498 in a ceremony that closely followed the ritual of co-rulership in Byzantium, including the coronation of Dmitrii.44 Ivan III addressed the metropolitan in the following manner:

41 Bushkovitch, Succession to the Throne, 6. 42 Hughes, Russia, 8. 43 Timea Bótor, A tatár függéstől az önálló uralkodóig: a Moszkvai Fejedelemség története a nagyfejedelmi végrendeletek (1336–1462) tükrében [From the Tatar dependence to the independent ruler: The history of the Muscovite Grand Principality in the mirror of the testaments of the grand princes (1336–1462)] (Budapest: Ruszisztikai Központ, 2011), 181, 276–287. 44 Janet Martin, Medieval Russia, 980–1584 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 247.

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Father Metropolitan! By divine approval [bozhiim izvoleniem] this has been an ancient tradition of ours [starina nasha] from our forefathers [praroditelei] up until now: our fathers, the grand princes, bestowed [pozhalovali] the grand principality on their eldest sons [synoviam svoim starshim], and I also was the first son of my father, Vasilii, who blessed me [blagoslovil] with the grand principality besides himself [pri sebe] [as co-ruler].45 However, by divine will, my son, Ivan died, but he has left a son after him, Dmitrii, and now I bless him with the grand principality of Vladimir, Moscow and Novgorod after me [posle sebia], and you, father, also bless him [ty by ego … blagoslovil] for the grand principality.46 After the ceremony Ivan said: Dmitrii, my grandson! I bestowed [pozhaloval] on you and blessed [blagoslovil] you with the grand principality, and you shall be God-fearing in your heart, you shall love justice [pravdu] and mercy and the righteous judgement, and take care of all Orthodox Christianity wholeheartedly.47 Clearly, divine grace was not the privilege of one single ruler but “it was given to the ruling kin in general.”48 And it was necessary to point out that “the authority of the prince was lawful through the blessing” of the living ruler and the distant ancestors.49 The two speeches represent an early statement on the nature of ruling power coming from a grand prince in a critical situation,50 in a dynastic crisis that raised the issue of legitimacy of rulership. Hence, the problem of succession sheds light on the early interpretation of Muscovite divine right. The fact that a coronation was necessary was the consequence of a dynastic crisis. Various explanations have been put forward concerning the purpose of this coronation, 45 Reference to his making of co-ruler in 1448/49. 46 Quoted by Zyzykin, Tsarskaia vlast′, 27; K. A. Solov′ev, “Vlast′ Moskovskogo gosudaria vo vtoroi polovine XV v. Ofitsial′naia pozitsiia” [The power of the Muscovite ruler in the second half of the fifteenth century. The official position], Voprosy istorii 7 (2012): 42. 47 Solov′ev, “Vlast′ Moskovskogo gosudaria vo vtoroi polovine XV v.,” 42. 48 Ibid., 43. 49 Andrei Petrovich Bogdanov, Moskovskaia publitsistika poslednei chetvertii XVII veka [Socio-political publications in Muscovy of the last quarter of the seventeenth century] (Moscow: Institut Rossiiskoi Istorii RAN, 2001), 29. 50 Solov′ev, “Vlast′ Moskovskogo gosudaria vo vtoroi polovine XV v.,” 45.

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and I second Janet Martin’s opinion that George Majeska’s seems to be the most plausible. As the throne was to be passed not from father to son, as previously had been the custom in most cases,51 the order of succession diverged from the norm as it leaped over a generation.52 Although the principle of strict male primogeniture operated here clearly for the first time in Muscovy in the succession from grandfather to grandson, the generation leap was a novelty, which required the grandiose involvement of the church for legitimizing the break with tradition.53 Mikhail Zyzykin also emphasized the importance of tradition (starina) on this occasion, but he called attention to the flexible interpretation of starina.54 Novel decisions had to be clothed and legitimized by referring to tradition, as grand princes “did not consider it possible to create new grounds of legitimacy according to their own wishes.”55 The novelty, that is, the generation leap, was to be disguised as part of the tradition: the novelty was hidden in the emphasis placed on the principle of the firstborn male as a successor, which was presented as a fact of continuity—despite the actual succession from grandfather to grandson. It was this flexible interpretation of starina, Zyzykin claimed, that shows why grand princes “did not create general legal principles” but rather turned to precedent, whenever needed, even if in a fictive manner.56 This way starina could be used as a tool depending on the ruler’s will, which is proven by the events of 1502 when Ivan III had second thoughts on the succession. Changing his previous decision, Ivan deprived Dmitrii of his right to rule, which Ivan transferred to his second (by then his eldest) son, Vasilii, born of his second marriage with Sophia Paleologos. Janet Martin rightly calls attention to the fact that changing the order of succession within a short time reflected well the power of the grand prince: the decision belonged solely to the ruler, which was accepted by everyone.57 There was no dynastic war over succession, as it had been the case under Vasilii II (between 1425 and 1453) when primogeniture also clashed with seniority, and no outside power was involved in making a decision over this issue either, as it had happened in 1431 when the Tatar khan was approached to have the final

51 It was only in 1325 and 1353 that the throne passed not from father to son but from one brother to another, but in these cases there were no other male heirs! 52 Martin, Medieval Russia, 247. 53 Quoted ibid. 54 Zyzykin, Tsarskaia vlast′, 28. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Martin, Medieval Russia, 248.

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word in the quarrel over succession. Ivan III’s justification was simple: “Am I not free [to decide] with regard to my grandsons and children? I give the principality to whomever I want.”58 With the decision of Ivan III in 1502, the “system of vertical succession” was refined: “It upheld the principle that only the son of a grand prince was eligible for the throne, and further defined the heir as the eldest surviving son of the last ruler.”59 Zyzykin, somewhat differently, claimed that in 1502 the custom of inheritance from father to son was restored, but its observance would in the future depend on the ruler, due to deviation from it in 1498.60 I contend that the exclusive right of the ruler to decide the question of succession might explain why the issue was not enacted in a statute in the sixteenth century, and, instead, the tradition of naming the successor in wills was followed. The degree of descent in itself did not give a right to rule, it was just one factor.61 In the absence of a will “the regulating principle was that one of the sons of the deceased ruler was to be put on the throne, above all, the eldest one.”62 This principle, applied under normal circumstances (normal in the sense that there was a surviving male tsarevich, as was the case until 1598 and after 1613), is in line with Hughes’s abovementioned statement, and inclusive enough with regard to the various strategies ensuring it mentioned by Russell Martin. These strategies serving the purpose of making the ruler’s will explicit, were procedures “understood not in terms of formal, still less ‘constitutional’ stipulations, but rather as moral and customary agreement in which the participants did not depart from the unwritten rules, unless there was a very good reason to do so.”63 The official sixteenth-century formula found in documents concerning succession was that the ruler “blessed and in his will appointed” (blagoslavil i v dukhovnoi gramote naznachil) his successor.64 Ivan III’s 1504 testament reads: “I bless my eldest son, Vasilii, with my patrimony [otchinoiu], the grand principality

58 Quoted by Zyzykin, Tsarskaia vlast′, 26. 59 Martin, Medieval Russia, 248. The issue of the possibility of female succession in 1598 and 1689, in the case of Tsar Fedor’s widow, Irina, and in the case of Peter’s half sister, Sophia, who acted as a regent under the joint rule of two tsars from 1682 until 1689—but would have liked to rule on her own right—is beyond the aim of this comparison. For these two cases see Thyrêt, Between God and Tsar, 80, 102, 117, 139–179; and for Sophia’s case see Ernest A. Zitser, The Transfigured Kingdom, 22–44. 60 Zyzykin, Tsarskaia vlast′, 27. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 102. 64 I am grateful to Prof. L. E. Morozova for this detail, given in a personal conversation.

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[velikim kniazhestvom], with which my father blessed [blagoslavil] me, and which was given to us by God.”65 According to Iurganov, the words pozhaloval (bestowed) and blagoslavil (blessed) “expressed major issues of jurisdiction” in Muscovite Russia, namely, “in relations between the supreme authority and the individual.”66 And regarding the importance of the term blagoslavil in connection with the wills of the grand princes he wrote that “through these wills the Russian State itself passed by inheritance, having become the hereditary property of the ruling family, which restricted membership to the closest relatives in the paternal line.”67 Until 1598, the extinction of the Kalitich line (of the Rurikids), it was “the testament that conferred the approval” to rule—for Boris Godunov (not related through blood at all to the ruling house) it was a confirmation document, which certified his “election” as tsar,68 similarly to Mikhail Romanov, whose confirmation charter relied heavily on Godunov’s. The idea of their “election” by the people and the church hierarchy in both cases was conceived simply as the reflection of God’s will.69 In Russell Martin’s view, between 1389 and 1613 the policy to ensure “agnatic primogeniture was significantly assisted by the adoption of the custom of anticipatory association,” both until the extinction of Muscovite Rurikids in 1598 and under the short reign of Boris Godunov (1598–1605).70 The anticipatory association of the heir, the first clear instance of which is dated 1448/49, could even be augmented with a ceremony of crowning the co-ruler, like in 1498, or simply proclaimed, as in 1502, or in case of Boris Godunov’s son in 1598.71 “So strong was the primogeniturial habit among the boyar kingmakers in the Kremlin in 1598 that they conceived of the dynasty as a single man—Fedor I—rather than as a vast lineage with many collateral lines.”72 This perception can explain 65 The Testaments of the Grand Princes of Moscow, trans. and ed. Robert Craig Howes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961), 143. 66 Yurganov, “Categories of Russian Medieval Culture,” 35. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid., 48. 69 For the various threads of thought aiming to legitimize the rule of Godunov and the first Romanov ruler through the alleged designation of Boris Godunov and Mikhail Romanov by Tsars Ivan IV and Fedor during their lifetime, as well as the involvement of the people and the church hierarchy in the process of their “election,” and the role attributed to royal women, see especially Kozliakov, Mikhail Fedorovich, 33; Isaiah Gruber, Orthodox Russia in Crisis: Church and Nation in the Time of Troubles (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2012), 95–96; Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 102–111. 70 Martin, “Anticipatory Association of the Heir in Early Modern Russia,” 421, 434. 71 Ibid., 425, 430–431, 434. 72 Ibid., 433.

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the role assigned to Fedor’s widow, Irina, and through her the accession of her brother Boris Godunov to the throne in 1598.73 In the case of a legitimacy crisis, as in 1598, 1606, and 1613, tsar-electing assemblies and confirmation charters were employed as new devices creating legitimacy—although in the case of Vasilii Shuiskii it was not an assembly of the whole land, but just a gathering of his supporters in Moscow, which made him “not so much an elected tsar as tsar by shouting.”74 The Romanovs’ new method, the presentation of the heir to the throne during the lifetime of the reigning tsar, was linked to a fixed date of the ritual year. The ceremony took place on September 1, when the heir reached thirteen or fourteen years of age: the tsar presented the heir to the public and named him as the future tsar.75 The timing of the presentations was not accidental, as September 1 was the beginning of the new year in Russia before Peter changed the calendar in 1699. And the celebration of the new year on September 1 was one of the most important religious rituals of Muscovite Russia before Peter abolished it.76 There were three such presentations of the heir in the seventeenth century: the first in 1642 when Mikhail presented his firstborn son, Aleksei; then in 1667 when Tsar Aleksei presented his son, also called Aleksei, but the heir died in 1670, and therefore a new presentation was necessary, that of Tsarevich Fedor in 1674.77 This last one was the most grandiose and most public of the three presentations as it took place on Red Square, and not only the boyars and the high clergy but even the foreign ambassadors were present, besides the people of Moscow. Under the early Romanovs the presentation of the heir and his blessing by the tsar before his death conferred the same legitimacy on the new ruler as a testament would have done. The documents announcing the succession used the same phrase (blagoslavil na tsarstvo, blagoslavil tsarstvom) as had been customary before, as the Romanovs were very keen to preserve tradition to ensure dynastic continuity. “Wills and anticipatory association had passed out 73 Ibid. 74 Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 105. 75 Joseph T. Fuhrmann, Tsar Aleksei, His Reign and His Russia (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1981), 8. Martin gives the age of thirteen, as this was “the age of majority for male dynasts in the Old Dynasty,” Martin, “Anticipatory Association of the Heir in Early Modern Russia,” 435. 76 Flier, “Political Ideas and Rituals,” 401–402. 77 Martin mentions two additional presentations of Tsarevich Aleksei besides the one in 1667, namely, in 1668 and in 1669. Martin, “Anticipatory Association of the Heir in Early Modern Russia,” 435. Nevertheless, the 1667 presentation surely stood out with its grandiosity.

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of fashion as tools of dynasticism, but primogeniture remained alive and well in Romanov Russia.”78 In 1682, however, the tradition of the succession of the eldest surviving son was turned upside-down in two ways. At first, Peter was proclaimed tsar instead of his elder (although incompetent) half-brother, Ivan. As this solution was not satisfactory at the court for Ivan’s relatives, who were determined not to lose their grip on power, they initiated a revolt of the musketeers (strel′tsy) to turn back the clock. The result was the proclamation of co-tsars, unprecedented in Russia under normal circumstances (although it had happened once during the Time of Troubles that there were two tsars when the Second False Dmitrii and Vasilii Shuiskii reigned simultaneously for a while, but they were rivals and not co-rulers). Ivan became Ivan V (1682–1696) and was given the title of “first tsar,” while Peter became “second tsar.” This solution was not an example of the principle of primogeniture at work, for primogeniture, strictly applied, excluded the possibility of two tsars even if numbered according to their birth, although it might be a shadowy reflection of primogeniture. The crisis of Muscovite traditions was manifested not only in the unprecedented events just described, but also in the public documents announcing the succession.79 The patriarch, after leaving the deathbed of Tsar Fedor I, put the “unusually practical question” to the crowd gathered in the courtyard of the palace, and then to the boyars and clergy around him.80 As we read in the patriarch’s manifesto informing about the procedure: “By the will and judgement of God, Tsar Fedor is dead … and now the question is, which one of the two tsarevichs, the grandsons of Mikhail Fedorovich, should be the heir to the tsarist throne and scepter of their brother of blessed memory?”81 As both the crowd and the court elite threw their lot with the young Peter, bypassing his elder half-brother—“unanimously expressing that Peter Alekseevich should be the Master-Tsar by the election of all ranks of people of the Muscovite state [Moskovskogo gosudarstva]”82—who was not yet ten years old, the patriarch blessed Peter and left the place.83 Equally significant was the official justification of the decision on succession: it was mentioned that Ivan

78 Ibid., 436. 79 Douglas J. Bennet Jr., “The Beginnings of Enlightened Absolutism in Russia,” in Major Problems in Early Modern Russian History, ed. Nany Shields Kollmann (New York: Garland, 1992), 411. 80 Ibid. 81 Sobranie gosudarstvennykh gramot i dogovorov, vol. 3, 412–413. 82 Ibid., 413. 83 Kliuchevskii, Kurs, vol. 3, 77.

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was “weak-minded.”84 “There was no written law of succession to rule out the accession of a younger brother under these circumstances.”85 For the first time in Muscovite history, the principle of suitability, the issue of idoneitas, was raised. Divine inspiration as a source of legitimacy was also missing from the manifesto justifying the rule of co-tsars: in fact it was the masking of bitter and bloody struggles in inner court circles, which was reflected in the official statement that the boyars, the patriarch and the clergy asked Peter and Ivan to rule jointly for the peace of the people.86 Furthermore, the benefits of double rule were buttressed with historical examples mentioning that one tsar could stay in Kremlin while the other was on a campaign.87 This justification was purely secular, akin to the idea of the interest of state. The mysticism that had been characteristic of every succession between 1598 and 1613, an eloquent example of which was given in the fragment quoted from the Confirmation Charter, disappeared from the manifestos of 1682.88 Exactly forty years after 1682, when Peter abolished inheritance from father to son, he referred to it simply as “a bad custom.”89 In his decree he expressed his disappointment with this tradition: he did not understand, he wrote, why “this bad custom was so deeply rooted” in Russia.90 Peter did not see himself as acting arbitrarily, but in effect as “the first servant of the state” acting for the “general good.”91 Neither in 1682 nor in 1722 was there any public law institution that could have annulled the decisions. Russia was not France where the Sun King’s will (1714), in which Louis legitimized his bastards and thereby empowered them with the right to inherit the throne (after the Orleans and the Condés), was declared null and void by the parlement shortly after the king’s death in 1715.92 In France the order of succession had already been enacted as early as 1328 in a regulation, which much later came to be known as the Salic Law: it prescribed male primogeniture, that is, barred women from the throne, but it also deprived women from passing on the right to inherit the throne. Although this regulation did not acquire the force of a fundamental law until the late

84 Hughes, Russia, 8. 85 Ibid. 86 Bennet, “The Beginnings of Enlightened Absolutism in Russia,” 411. 87 Hans-Joachim Torke, “Petrine Russia,” in Russia: A History, ed. Gregory L. Freeze (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 83. 88 Bennet, “The Beginnings of Enlightened Absolutism in Russia,” 411. 89 Prokopovich, Pravda voli monarshei, 128. 90 Ibid., 129. 91 Wortman, Power of Language and Rhetoric, 160. 92 Rowen, King’s State, 90–91.

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sixteenth century,93 it could produce statements that the French throne was not hereditary, because it was the law that identified the ruler and those in the line of succession. In France the impact of the feudal law of inheritance (advocating male primogeniture) on the fundamental law of succession, and especially the theorizing of lawyers, were “building up slowly the political abstraction of power.”94 Liah Greenfeld eloquently put the issue of fundamental law of succession in the context of the divine right of kings: The king was divinely appointed but he acceded according to decidedly human “constitutional” law of the kingdom. Neville Figgis emphasized the legalistic and secular variant of the French Divine Right theory in his comparison of the French doctrine with its seventeenth-century English counterpart. In His dependence on Salic law, God Himself was secularized. Yet this secularization had no element of entzauberung in it. The nature of the sacred changed but it remained sacred.95 Such a prominent divine right theorist of absolute monarchy as Bishop Bossuet, the court priest of Louis XIV, maintained the inviolability of the fundamental laws of France: the Salic Law and the inalienability of crown lands. Bushkovitch’s contention that the “monarch was free to ignore existing laws, whether written law or legal fictions like the French ‘fundamental laws’ (one of which was the law of succession) under certain circumstances,”96 is diametrically opposed to contemporary absolutist theory, and even to political practice! In Russia, the transfer of tsarist authority from father to successor, his right to choose the heir to his territory, by contrast, “became the mark of personalization of autocratic power to the extent that the Russian tsar (literally the emperor) was no longer obliged to choose his successor among his descendants.”97 This was manifested in Peter’s 1722 law on succession. And its justification by Prokopovich was a new exposition of autocratic power.

93 Derek Whaly, “From a Salic Law to the Salic Law: The Creation and the Re-Creation of the Royal Succession System in France,” in The Routledge History of Monarchy, ed. Elena Woodacre et al. (London: Routledge, 2019), 455. 94 Ingerflom, Le tsar, c’est moi, 271. 95 Greenfeld, Nationalism, 111. Greenfeld’s perception of secularization is very much similar to the one used by Oakley, to which I have referred before! 96 Bushkovitch, Succession to the Throne, 322. 97 Ingerflom, Le tsar, c’est moi, 271.

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Having finished with the principle of descent and moving further in the comparison, two other aspects are to be analysed. God’s role in investing the ruler with power is more direct in the case of the tsars compared to the divine right of kings. This is the link to the operation and the purpose of power (see points 6 and 7 in the definition of Western divine right), which are treated together. In the divine right of kings the ruler’s ability to interpret the needs of the realm is not necessarily identified with the idea of the king’s being constantly inspired by God and therefore reflecting His will, although it is true that these beliefs are present occasionally.98 This belief, however, was the standard commitment in the divine right of the tsars. What is more, and what should be emphasized in a comparative context, is the nature of the concept known as the “mystery of monarchy.” For this concept, in the last resort, belonged to the realm of law: it had its roots in legal science.99 King James I referred to this concept as the “deepest mysteries of monarchy” or the “deepest mysteries that belong to the persons or state of Kings and Princes who are Gods on earth,” and also as “my Prerogative or mystery of State,” “our government or the mysteries of State,” and finally the “mystery of the King’s power.”100 If the legal implications are not clear enough, Kantorowicz’s statement makes them obvious: “There seems … little doubt it was from the stratum of the ‘Mysteries of Justice’—‘Justice’ standing in that period for ‘Government’ or ‘State’—that James I’s concept of Mysteries of State arose.”101 Having examined all these aspects, it is not particularly striking to say that divine right in Muscovy was more profound than the authority of any Western ruler, despite the fact that the tsars did not claim to possess the miraculous ability to heal scrofula, as the French and English kings did. Muscovite/Imperial divine right did not simply mean that the tsars based their rule on divine authority: it was “more than the ‘divine right of kings,’” for the tsar was “more than a

98 In France, at the end of the sixteenth century, some ardent supporters of Henry IV came up with ideas that were considered extreme. Pierre Constant (1598) claimed that human laws “found their inviolability in that divinity, with which they had been inspired by the king, their maker,” while David du Rivault (1596) “identified royal enactments with divine law itself, both in original source, and immediate effect.” William Farr Church, Constitutional Thought in Sixteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941), 311. (These authors, however, were by no means representatives of mainstream divine right political thought). Ibid., 312. Similarly, for Joseph of Volokolamsk human positive law made by the ruler did not differ too much from divine law! 99 Kantorowicz, Mysteries of State, 381, 382. 100 Ibid., 383. 101 Ibid., 385.

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ruler ordained by God”—he was God on earth for his people.102 Mironov writes: “the tsar was God’s direct lieutenant on earth” in contrast with Western kings “who were merely considered God’s anointed.”103 The problem is with the term “lieutenant.” For lieutenancy contains the idea of office, which is confirmed by the existence of a coronation oath. King James, expounding the office of kings, drove the point home when he remarked on the relations between the king and his subjects. To repeat his words: the king is “ordained for them and they not for him; and therefore countable to that Great God, who placed him as his lieutenant over them … to procure the weale of both soules and bodies. … And this oath in the Coronation is the clearest, civill and fundamentall Law, whereby the Kings office is properly defined.”104 As there was no office theory in Muscovy, Muscovite divine right, unlike the Western formulation, did not contain the articulated idea of office. Rather, we can speak simply about the tsar’s duties instead—duties to be performed as God’s living image on earth and being constantly inspired by Him, rather than being God’s representative. And these duties were predominantly religious rather than secular. The idea that the tsar was God’s elect, and placed on the throne directly by Him, entailed that notion that through the person of the tsar God Himself, and not so much his representative/minister, governed the realm. Consequently, the tsar’s will was seen as the will of God. While in divine right of kings God was remote, the final source of legitimacy, “the last word,” and (although I would not say that) functionally merely a “rhetorical device,” in the divine right of the tsars God was the conditio sine qua non of the doctrine.105 Muscovite ideology was “God-dependent,” based on the assumption of “God’s constant and direct intervention in the world.”106 As stated before: “Once we remove God and His relationship with tsar and subject, we are left without any coherent set of ideas at all.”107 Without God, Muscovite ideology “makes no sense.”108 Here lies the crucial conceptual difference between Western and Muscovite references to the ruler’s God-like image. 102 Figes and Kolonitskii, Interpreting, 5. 103 Mironov, Sotsial′naia istoriia, vol. 2, 116. 104 King James VI and I, 65. 105 Rowland, “The Problem of Advice in Muscovite Tales about the Time of Troubles,” 129–130, 152. In connection with France, David Parker expressed the view that the deification of the king served to create the illusion that the king was strong, for it was considered necessary by some people for the stability of government. David Parker, The Making of French Absolutism (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), 150. 106 Rowland, “The Problem of Advice in Muscovite Tales about the Time of Troubles,” 264–265. 107 Ibid., 278–279. 108 Ibid., 279.

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The notion of office and the priority of worldly duties were, of course, assimilated into Russian divine right (“the growing secular component,” in Paul Duke’s wording) but only in Petrine times, and what is more significant, imperfectly. The new official ideology, which I have termed “the divine right of the Russian Emperor,” attributed great significance to these things, but no coronation oath was introduced. The notion of office in the divine right of kings set a limit to the king’s power, to serve the common good. In Petrine divine right the idea of office, the idea of being the first servant of the state, had the opposite purpose: to broaden the Emperor’s power in the name of the common good (of the state). Therefore, along with the novel notion of common good, the traditional biblical passages crucial to Muscovite and Petrine divine right alike were quoted in “The Justice of the Monarkh’s Will” “to expand the scope of the tsar’s God-given authority, not to limit it within the confines of Muscovite tradition.”109 Petrine divine right, in contrast with Muscovite and Western divine right, was designed to justify change and not to maintain tradition. The following chapters will show how and why Feofan Prokopovich integrated law and Western political philosophy into Muscovite divine right ideology.

109 Lentin, Introduction, 40. But in this tract, unlike in Muscovite sources, the “defence of hereditary monarchy against elective monarchy” was also a central point of the argument. Bushkovitch, Peter the Great, 441.

Par t Three

THE ORIGINS OF T H EO RY O F L AW A N D S TAT E I N T H E W O R K S O F F E O FA N PROKOPOVICH: AN INTELLECTUAL F R O M T H E K I E VA N NEST IN THE S E RV I C E O F P ET E R T H E G R E AT

CHAPTER 13

Turning Points in the Life of Feofan Prokopovich, and His Most Important Political Works

To present a short oeuvre of the most often quoted author in this book is indispensable for understanding the contribution that Prokopovich made to Russian thought on power. Otherwise, not only his importance but also the political contexts of his writings would be hidden for the reader, similarly to his intellectual background, an issue that (among other problems) has recently received a superb treatment by Andrey Ivanov.1 The enigmatic person of the Petrine era, the man who became known as Feofan Prokopovich, was born in Kiev in 1681 (other sources indicate 1677) in a merchant family. He was given the name Eleazar (or Elisei) at his baptism, and his family name was most probably not Prokopovich but Tsereiskii. The change of names, both Christian and family name, marked important turning points in his life. The role of Kiev, and, in a broader sense, Ukraine as an intellectual center, had been essential in Muscovy’s Westernization even by the time Prokopovich was born. This intellectual influence became significant from the mid-seventeenth century onwards with an ever increasing importance after 1709, the battle at Poltava. In the mid-seventeenth century it was the Russian Church Reform (1653–1657) and the Pereiaslav Treaty of 1654 (concluded between

1 The main events in the life of Prokopovich are presented here on the basis of James Cracraft, “Feofan Prokopovich,” in The Eighteenth Century in Russia, ed. John G. Garrard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 75–105; Tomsinov, Istoriia, 174–176; and Ivanov, Spiritual Revolution, 41–124. As Ivanov’s is the most detailed and the most interpretative treatment of the issue, footnoting reflects those events that were crucial to Prokopovich’s intellectual background.

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the Cossack Hetman Bogdan Khmel′nitskii and the tsar’s representative) establishing Ukraine as a protectorate of Tsar Aleksei and drawing the territory away from the Polish Crown, which marked a turning point regarding Western influences in Muscovy through the mediation of Ukrainian intellectuals. It is not generally known that the West came to Russia through Ukraine.2 The relationship of Ukraine with the Russian tsars was a special one after 1654, as Ukraine, under the rule of its hetman elected by the Cossacks, enjoyed considerable autonomy. The war that broke out between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Muscovy over Ukraine ended with the Truce of Andrusovo in 1667 when Ukraine was divided: the territories west of the right bank of the Dnieper river were returned to the Polish Crown, while the territories on the left bank and Kiev on the right bank comprised the lands of the protectorate.3 Kiev, besides its age-old famous Monastery of the Caves, no doubt owed its importance to its Mohyla College, established in 1632 and upgraded to the Kievan Academy in 1701: its rapid development as a flourishing intellectual center took place under Hetman Mazepa, no doubt, due to his patronage.4 In 1693, Mazepa obtained from the co-tsars, Ivan and Peter, a charter that officially recognized the right of the institution to teach philosophy and theology, “including in Greek and Latin,” and the elevation to the rank of an academy was also Mazepa’s achievement.5 As the curriculum of the institution was organized according to that of the Jesuit colleges, Latin was not simply part of the education but the language of instruction as well. What is especially important from our point of view is not only the fact that through the knowledge of Latin Western concepts became known to those who studied there but also the role attributed to emblematics as a genre, as in Jesuit schools the making of emblems was part of the intellectual training.6 The college together with the Slavic-Greek-Latin 2 Max J. Okenfuss, The Rise and Fall of Latin Humanism in Early-Modern Russia (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 45–62. Needless to say, that the territory under the rule of the hetman called “Little Russia” by the Muscovite government and “Ukraina” (Ukraine) by the Cossacks, was not identical with the territory of present day Ukraine. 3 The subsequent histories of the two halves, at times united under a common hetman, and the nature of their dependence are beyond the scope of this book. 4 Tatiana Tairova-Yakovleva, Ivan Mazepa and the Russian Empire (Montreal: MacGill-Queens University Press, 2020), 202–203. 5 Ibid., 202. 6 One example of this kind, having immediate relevance with regard to the writings of Prokopovich, is the work with illustrations published in Kiev in 1712 under the title Ifika ieropolitika: ili Filosofiia nravouchitel′naia simvolamy i prispodoblenii iz′′iasnena k nastavleniiu i pol′ze iunym [Religious-political ethics: or Moralizing philosophy with symbols and similarities explained for the instruction and benefit of the youth] (Kiev: Kievo-Pecherskaia lavra, 1712). On this see later in the book.

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Academy established in Moscow in 1686 were the main intellectual centers of Muscovy’s Westernization. As Eleazar became an orphan at an early age, his upbringing fell to his uncle on his mother’s side, named Feofan Prokopovich, the college rector: therefore, Eleazar naturally became a pupil of the college. Indeed, it was in honor of his patron that Eleazar would later take the name under which he became known to posterity. After the uncle’s death he was fortunate to find new patrons, in the person of the metropolitan of Kiev, and another one whose identity is not known to us. It was a well-established practice of the Mohyla College to send the most talented students to the Jesuit colleges located in the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and around 1696 this happened to Eleazar as well. There was, however, a precondition to that: he had to reject Orthodoxy and become a Uniate (Greek Catholic).7 His talent did not go unnoticed in the new environment either, and as a consequence he was sent to Rome in 1698 where he spent almost three years in the Greek College of St Athanasius.8 (This so-called “temporary apostasy,” as later he would reconvert, was neither unique, “nor confined to a particular geography,” as it was also practiced among the Orthodox of the Eastern Mediterranean.9) In Rome, his name in the register appears as Samuil Tsereiskii, indicating that his Christian name was changed as a result of his conversion. This note in the register, at the same time, serves as the basis of the supposition that his original family name was Tsereiskii and not Prokopovich. Eleazar proved to be a very talented student of the College of St Athanasius, as the records of the college testify, yet, after less than three years he became disillusioned with Rome, and in 1701 he unexpectedly and hurriedly left the city.10 Instead of returning straight to Kiev, he made his way to the Holy Roman Empire. His “peregrinations” in the Protestant German territories, where he came to know the works of various Protestant authors and “developed strong connections with a number of contemporary German scholars,” exerted a great influence on him to the point that due to his leading role in the later reforms of the Russian Orthodox Church inspired by Protestant theology, earned him the designation of the “Russian Luther” by

7 The Uniate Church was established in 1596 by the Union of Brest in the Orthodox territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1620, however, the Orthodox hierarchy was restored by the patriarch of Jerusalem through his consecration of a metropolitan in Kiev as well as five bishops. 8 Ivanov, Spiritual Revolution, 41. 9 Ibid., 44. 10 Ibid., 45–48.

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one of his contemporaries.11 The “peregrinations” or the “German stopover” (1701–1704) is the part of his life that cannot be reconstructed precisely but the one that proved to be crucial in shaping his views on ruling power.12 As Ivanov remarked, Prokopovich’s “political ideology as it relates to the power of the monarchy is a well-studied subject” having “supporters and detractors” on the issue of “enlightened absolutism;” the “related subject of the tsar’s religious authority, however, has been received far less attention.”13 The latter issue is important, for it is plausible to argue, as we shall see later, that Prokopovich used his Protestantinfluenced theology “not only to alter church doctrine and administration, but also to change the projection of the Orthodox monarch’s power.”14 Upon his return to Kiev Prokopovich abjured his affiliation with the Uniate Church, and again turned Orthodox, in which faith he would stay until his death. In 1704 he became the teacher of poetics at the academy, and in 1705 he took monastic vows—that was the time when he took the name Feofan as his monastic name, and Prokopovich as a family name, obviously in honor of his uncle. In 1705, he wrote a historical play called “Vladimir” (the baptizer of Rus′, canonized in the thirteenth century), which he dedicated to Mazepa, praising in the dedication the hetman’s patronage of the Academy, and addressing him with these words: “See yourself in Vladimir—your courage, your glory.”15 Prokopovich was rapidly climbing up the ladder of the academic career: he taught rhetoric, philosophy, even natural sciences, and soon became the leading scholar of the academy. When Peter visited Kiev in 1706, he was the person who greeted the tsar with a sermon. In 1708, when Hetman Mazepa allied himself with the Swedish King Charles XII, the governor of Kiev informed Peter that among the Kievan clergy only Prokopovich was the tsar’s supporter. After the victory over the Swedes in the battle of Poltava in 1709 it was again Prokopovich who delivered a sermon honoring Peter when the tsar entered Kiev, but he also witnessed Peter’s nearly fatal Prut campaign in 1711,16 as he was ordered to the camp to encourage the Russian army led by Peter himself. It was not a coincidence that already in 1711 he was appointed the abbot of the Monastery of the Caves, the rector of the academy, and professor of theology.

11 Ibid., 48–49, 56, 85. 12 This issue is one of the many novelties of Ivanov’s recent book. 13 Ivanov, Spiritual Revolution, 76. 14 Ibid. 15 Tairova-Yakovleva, Ivan Mazepa, 202. 16 The Russian army was encircled by the Ottomans but Peter’s diplomat, Peter Shafirov, could negotiate an armistice—it might well be, as was rumored, that he did it by bribing the vizir′ with the jewels of Peter’s second wife, as Catherine was also in the camp.

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It was comparatively late, only in 1716, that Prokopovich moved to the new capital, St. Petersburg, as Peter wanted him around since he needed Prokopovich’s talent to continue the Westernization of Russia. The personnel trained in Kiev and imbued with Western culture played a crucial role in Peter’s policy of Westernization: besides the already mentioned Gavriil Buzhinskii it is inevitable to mention Iosif Turoboiskii, who will be discussed later in the book with regard to the new ideology as expressed in a new imagery.17 But in the group of these learned men from the Kievan academy the most important and probably the most educated one who came to support Peter’s policy was no doubt Prokopovich. He knew Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, besides, of course, Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian, furthermore, he was well versed in Italian (due to his stay in Rome) and also in German. As for his impact on the Russian Church, Ivanov calls him the “most audacious church reformer in the history of Imperial Russia,”18 and I try to show here his importance in the history of Russian thought on ruling power. Upon his arrival in the new capital, he immediately debuted with a panegyric sermon serving a clear political purpose: the occasion was the celebration of the first birthday of Peter’s son, Peter Petrovich, born of the tsar’s second marriage. But Prokopovich’s task was not merely to greet the tsarevich and express the public joy because of the continuation of the tsarist blood—these celebrations were suitable to disseminate general principles of rulership (such as the origin and purpose of power), and above all, to make use of them for actual political purposes. It was precisely the case with this sermon as Prokopovich’s work was conceived in a strained political atmosphere when the conflict between Peter and his first son, Aleksei, born of his first marriage, was approaching its climax. Aleksei was not willing to fulfil the task assigned to him by Peter, namely, to get involved in matters of state to the extent Peter expected him and continue the work that Peter had embarked on. For the tsar, Aleksei’s reluctant attitude raised the issue of his suitability as a successor to the throne. As an architect of the new ideology of rulership, Prokopovich made clear his premises on ruling power in the sermon of 1718 entitled Slovo o vlasti i chesti Tsarskoi and delivered on Palm Sunday in the “Reigning St. Petersburg,”19 and therefore it deserves special attention. The full title in English reads: “Sermon on

17 For the importance of these persons in the service of Peter the Great see Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture, 213–216, 222, 226, 553. 18 Ivanov, Spiritual Revolution, 6. 19 The adjective “reigning” (tsarstvuiushchii) formerly was applied to Moscow when it was the capital of Russia.

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Royal/Tsarist Authority and Honor. How It Is Established in the World by God Himself, and How Men Are obliged to Honor Kings [Tsarei] and Obey Them, And Who the People Are Who Oppose Them and How Great Is the Sin They Have.”20 The political context of the sermon was the deterioration of Tsarevich Aleksei’s relations with Peter, as under the cover of a trip abroad in 1716, Aleksei escaped from Russia and went to the court of the Habsburg Emperor, who gave him a residence in Italy, near Naples. Eventually Aleksei was persuaded by Peter’s envoy to return to Russia with the promise that he would face no repression. But after his return, Peter deprived Aleksei of his right to follow him as successor in 1718, due to his “unworthiness,” and Aleksei was charged by a special court set up for his trial, which finally passed a death sentence.21 In the sermon, written and delivered in the heat of this conflict, but still before the above verdict was made, Prokopovich condemned those (including Aleksei but without mentioning his name) who did not support Peter’s reforms, placing his emphasis on the question of obedience to rulers, and expounded his views on political power. As the sermon was delivered on Palm Sunday, the religious feast provided a good context to convey the political message on obedience, even though the Palm Sunday Ritual itself had long ceased to exist by 1718. As we have seen before, at the heart of the Palm Sunday Ritual lay the humility of the tsar, who “in humble imitation of Christ’s earthly ministry” led his Russian Orthodox subjects towards salvation.22 The ritual was confined to Moscow by synodal decree after 1678.23 It is not particularly relevant whether Peter deliberately abolished this ritual in 1697 because he thought of it as one strengthening the political position of the patriarch, or simply abandoned it as he was not in Moscow at Easter in the years 1697–1700, and later just allowed the ritual to go into oblivion,24 for he did not fill the office of the patriarch after 1700. Whatever the truth is, the feast of Palm Sunday, celebrating Christ’s glorious entrance to Jerusalem, was more important than the ritual itself, and one purpose of the sermon was to remind the subjects of the similarities between Christ and Tsar Peter. Nowhere is this idea expressed with a greater force than at 20 I used H. G. Lunt’s English translation of the text: Feofan Prokopovich, “Sermon on Royal Authority and Honour,” in Russian Intellectual History. An Anthology, ed. Marc Raeff (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1966), 14–30, while also consulting the original Russian version (Prokopovich, Sochineniia, Slovo o vlasti i chesti tsarskoi) and changed the translation whenever I deemed necessary. 21 Nikolai Ivanovich Pavlenko, Tsarevich Aleksei (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2008), 129–135, 214–223. 22 Flier, “Breaking the Code,” 230, 242. 23 Ibid., 241. 24 Hughes, Russia, 274–275.

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the end of the sermon where Peter is called Christ by Prokopovich: “… we have not recognized many of Thy good deeds, shown forth to us in Peter; we confess therefore that we are unworthy and have been ungrateful. … Lord save Thine christ [spasi khrista svoego] and hear him from Thy holy heaven. Lord, save the Tsar and hear us!”25 Thus, Prokopovich made obedience of the subjects to the tsar, first of all, a religious duty, although natural law reasoning also played a part in his argument, as we shall see.26 Meanwhile, he was climbing up the ladder of the church hierarchy: he became the bishop of Pskov and Narva in 1718 (his seat, however, being in Narva), and even archbishop of Novgorod and Velikie Luki in 1725 (after Peter’s death). His prominent role in the last ten years of the Petrine era is shown by the fact that he was the one who delivered the funeral oratory at Peter’s burial. The ideological and practical contribution of Prokopovich to Peter’s policy was enormous. He penned the document regulating the new administrative structure of the Russian Orthodox Church, called the Spiritual Regulation (1721), which, by abolishing the patriarchate, made the church heavily dependent on the ruler, and was given an important position in the new organ governing the church, the Holy Synod (which replaced the patriarch), as its vice president. The ruler’s right to reform the church, and hence the Russian Church Reform of 1721 expounded in the Regulation was legitimated by him in a writing reflecting the Erastian view on the relations between the ruler and the church. In 1722, explaining the new situation (the replacement of the patriarchate with the synod) in an essay called “Historical Investigation,” he commented on the title pontifex, showing its origin with the pagan Roman emperors and its usage by Christian emperors and arguing that although Christian rulers are not allowed to perform priestly functions (unlike their pagan ancestors), they have full power in political matters of the church. His conclusion is plain: “PONTIFICAL power, separated from priestly functions, is highly political [politicheskaia].”27 It was in 1722, however, that the most scholarly exposition of the new ideology appeared in print, “The Justice of the Monarch’s Will in Designating

25 Prokopovich, Sochineniia, 93, Prokopovich, “Sermon on Royal Authority and Honor,” 30. 26 Calling the tsar “Christ” was part of the phenomenon of the ruler’s sacralization, which in Peter’s case began as early as 1701 in panegyric literature. Tyulenev, Translation, 146. 27 Rozysk istoricheskii, koikh radi vin, i v iakovom razume byli i naritsalisia imperatory rimstii, kak iazychestie tak i khristianstii pontifeksami … [Historical investigation, for what reasons and in which sense the emperors, pagan and Christian alike, were pontifexes and were called so], https://azbyka.ru/otechnik/Patrologija/nyne-vse-my-boleem-teologiejiz-istorii-russkogo-bogoslovija-predsinodalnoj-epohi/11.

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the Heir of his State.”28 This tract offers the richest scope of issues in terms of political thought: issues (such as the idea of contract, the close connection between fatherly and monarchical power and its implications on the subjects’ obedience) dealt with in the 1718 sermon were expounded in a much more detailed and systematic manner, as can be expected of a treatise on power. The political context of the treatise was obvious. After the exclusion of Tsarevich Aleksei and his son Peter Alekseevich (the future Peter II, 1727–1730) from succession, and the sudden death of the intended heir, the infant Peter Petrovich in 1719, Peter decided to regulate the succession to the throne in 1722. Indeed, in Russell Martin’s wording, the statute was “as much as an acknowledgment” of the failure of Peter’s plan “to be founder of a new imperial house” (descending from him and his second wife Catherine), “as it was a response” to the consequences of disinheriting his son Aleksei.29 The statute, in theory, put an end to the principle of blood—the “principle of heredity” was subordinated to “the principle of utility.”30 For the throne could be inherited by anyone whom  the  reigning monarch found “suitable” and “worthy”—regardless of the fact that the person designated would be a blood relative or not, and most surprisingly, an explicit religious (confessional) clause was not mentioned either as a precondition to qualify as a successor. What mattered, was the ruler’s will, as the title of the work defending the statute made it plain. In a recent excellent study Sergei Pol′skoi has argued convincingly that the succession statute of Peter and “The Justice of the Monarch’s Will” were, in fact, being written simultaneously—so the commission given for Prokopovich to write this justification predated the actual issue of the statute.31 He has also proven in the same study that the most important elements of argumentation

28 For the arguments of translating pravda with “justice” in the title and in the treatise itself see Antony Lentin, “Prokopovich, Pravda and Proof: Some Myth about Pravda voli monarshei,” Specimina nova. Pars prima. Sectio mediaevalis 5 (2009): 128–132. It is interesting to note in this regard that in one of his sermons Prokopovich remarked of Peter, what amounted to much more than a panegyric, that “on the Russian Throne seems to be not a man but justice [pravda] itself,” as he attributed the existence of justice in Russia to the tsar’s personality. Adam Drozdek, “Sermons of Prokopovich: From Ascetism to the Allure of Power,” Cuadernos de Rusistica Española 12 (2016): 166. 29 Martin, The Tsar’s Happy Occasion, 234. 30 Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 64; Wortman, Power of Language and Rhetoric, 160. 31 Sergei Pol′skoi, “‘Istiazanie po natura′lnoi pravde’: Legitimatsiia nasiliia i stanovlenie ratsional′nogo iazyka v Rossii v XVIII veke” [“Torture by natural law”: Legitimation of force and the emergence of rational language in Russia in the eighteenth century], in Kembridzhskaia shkola: Teoriia i praktika intellektual′noi itsorii [The Cambridge school: Theory and practice of intellectual history], ed. Timur Antashev and Mikhail Velizhev (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2018), 419.

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in the treatise were simply borrowings from the work of a German jurist, Gottlieb Samuel Treuer (1683–1743), who, in a tract written in German in 1718, discussed the legal issues raised by Aleksei’s exclusion from succession.32 This tract was soon translated into Russian by the early 1720s, and was used by Prokopovich in writing his treatise justifying Peter’s succession statute.33 Although he relied on authors other than Treuer, Prokopovich took the core of his argument34 but changed it freely whenever he saw fit for his purpose. Pol’skoi’s comparison of the Russian translation of Treuer’s work with the text of “The Justice of the Monarch’s Will” shows that borrowings are beyond doubt in case of the following issues most relevant to us: the existence or lack of conditions in case of the contract between the people and their first ruler with regard to an elective and hereditary monarchy respectively; the idea of sovereignty and its designation by foreign terms (maiestat, maiestet—from the German Majestät); the main structure of the argument based on both fatherly power and ruling power in general.35 Indeed, Prokopovich’s argumentation set out from this double proposition borrowed from Treuer,36 focusing on the patriarchal power and its relation to ruling power. If a father, who is a commoner, has the right to deprive his firstborn son of his right to inherit, which Prokopovich justified by examples cited from Roman law and the Bible (in the latter case recalling the example of Jacob and Esau), “how could a father, who is also a ruler [gosudar′], not have it? For a sovereign ruler [samoderzhavnyi gosudar′] is a ruler not only for the people subject to him but also for his own children.”37 In 1722 the tract was printed in 1200 copies with the new “civil alphabet” introduced by Peter (but copies were also issued with Church Slavonic letters), “which was between four and six times of the normal print-run.”38 The importance of the treatise is also shown by the fact that Peter personally supervised its writing, and having read the final version, approved its publication.39 The 1722 issue was followed by an enormous print run of over 19000 copies in 1726 under Catherine I (1725–1727).40

32 Ibid., 415. 33 Ibid., 415–419. 34 Ibid., 419. 35 Ibid., 423–428. 36 Ibid., 428. 37 Prokopovich, Pravda voli monarshei, 168–169. Translation is somewhat changed. 38 Lentin, Introduction, 66. 39 Ibid., 65–66, Pol′skoi, “‘Istiazanie po natura′lnoi pravde,’” 417–419. 40 Lentin, Introduction, 66–67.

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CHAPTER 14

Preliminary Notes on Prokopovich’s Theory of Law and State

14.1. The Role of Prokopovich as a Milestone in the Perception of Law and State in Russia The previously mentioned writings of Prokopovich (his sermons of 1716 and 1718, the Spiritual Regulation, the “Historical Investigation,” and, above all, his 1722 tract justifying Peter’s statute on succession) are the most suitable ones for expounding the issues identified in the chapter title, although relevant passages can be found in his other works too.1 As the main goal of this chapter is to pinpoint the shifts in the perception of law and state in Russia introduced by Prokopovich, the analysis here no longer concentrates on the specific contexts that led to the composition of these works. The fact that these writings were commissioned by the tsar and served a given political purpose determined by specific political circumstances of Peter’s reign (circumstances that I previously briefly highlighted) does not mean that they cannot be the subject of a discussion from the general viewpoint of the history of law and state in Russia. Even the massive borrowings from Treuer’s translated tract would not invalidate this approach. All these factors, taken together, rather represent the close relationship between political intention and political thought. In other words, Prokopovich’s abovementioned writings were ideological in the sense understood by the Cambridge School’s methodology, which conceives political thought as “a multiplicity of 1 Tomsinov, similarly to previous literature, also concentrates on these writings (Tomsinov, Istoriia, 176–177) as the most suitable ones (except for the “Historical Investigation”) for the reconstruction of Prokopovich’s political ideas, but he gives by far the best short summary of them in Russian. In English the best short analytical survey of his political ideas is given by Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 267–271.

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language acts performed by language users in historical contexts” for a specific purpose: either to legitimize or challenge certain convictions, beliefs or institutions.2 In doing so, language users can choose various stylistic and discursive tools available in a certain cultural context as well as make use of visual imagery for these purposes. In case one would argue to dismiss the works of Prokopovich on the ground that they served an actual political purpose, then it should not be forgotten that the early modern treatises marking the birth of the modern concept of the state, those of Bodin and Hobbes, were also ideological, in so far as they clearly owed their origins to specific political circumstances. Both were written (if not on commission) as a reaction to specific political events: in the midst of crises brought on by the French Wars of Religion and the Religious Wars of the British Isles respectively. As for “language acts,” we have to address, briefly, the problem of the character of the language used by Prokopovich. The issue here is not (yet) language in the sense of different discourses, such as languages of theology, law, or philosophy, but the linguistic aspect regarding his style, and his attitude to the use of Church Slavonic and foreign borrowings as editor and author. Prokopovich’s commitment to “simplicity,” depending on the context and the audience, was in line with Peter’s expectations, as the goal was to change the “character of the language: ‘simple’ Russian is to replace Church Slavonic” in vocabulary, grammar, and other spheres.3 Viktor Zhivov summarized the importance of Prokopovich in this regard as follows: “Feofan Prokopovich’s work as editor is especially significant, as he was one the main exponents of Peter’s cultural policy; his activity between 1717 and 1726 was just as important an example of this policy as the activities of the tsar himself.”4 Striving for simplicity, however, did not mean that he always used a simplified language as an author: “his choice of linguistic register was functionally motivated,” which means that “the characteristics of his language depended on the functional purpose of the text.”5 Finally, and for our purpose here most significantly, the manner of borrowing Western terms in the Petrine era in general should be addressed briefly, an attitude that was highly characteristic of Prokopovich. As Zhivov noted, borrowings were not simply

2 John G. A. Pocock, Political Thought and History. Essays on Theory and Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), VII–IX. 3 Zhivov, Language and Culture, 76. The various issues of the “simple language” in the Petrine era are discussed by Zhivov in details in the first chapter of his book (ibid., 49–117). 4 Ibid., 76. 5 Ibid., 110.

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motivated by the need to import various types of “new things and ideas” (scientific, legal, political, military, and others): This pragmatic factor certainly played a role in the process of borrowing, but it was not the only one, and perhaps not the most important. Borrowings served first of all as markers of the new cultural orientation—that is, primarily not a pragmatic, but a semiotic function. Their use indicated adherence to the new Petrine culture, the assimilation of a new system of values and at the same time the rejection of traditional notions. The intensity of using borrowings was conditioned by this particular role, so that words arrived not following things and ideas, but anticipated them or without being correlated to them. This semiotic function of borrowings is fully visible in those cases where textual borrowings are accompanied by glosses that give lexical equivalents in common terms that the reader would understand.6 Zhivov gave a few illustrations of this kind of language policy of using “lexical equivalents” from Pravda voli monarshei (for example, rezony or dovody, both meaning “reasons”), ekzemply or primery both meaning “examples”), and concluded: “they may be cited as a characteristic feature of that ‘civic’ literature that Peter initiated.”7 This state of mind and language policy, in fact, can be said to belong to the broad phenomenon known as langage (after Pierre Bourdieu), that is, a special language used by a few.8 My main interest in Prokopovich is, however, not linguistic but his contribution to the new ideology as an author, which is a much broader issue, although not unrelated to the previous characteristics of “simplicity,” “semiotic function of borrowings,” that is, the “civic” turn, and the use of different “linguistic registers.” The main question for me is the one raised in the title of this chapter: Why 6 Ibid., 110–111. 7 Ibid., 111. 8 The role of langage is a prominent topic in James Collins’s recent book on late medieval and early modern French political practice and political rhetoric, where (following Bourdieu) he writes that, “‘langage’ carries the sense of a specialized vocabulary, one often known only to specialists,” calling attention, at the same time, to the importance of the fact that a new vocabulary in French political discourse “often began as a specialized ‘langage’ of those involved in political life and, especially, in the law, but it had to function in the larger universe of communication.” James B. Collins, The French Monarchical Commonwealth, 1356–1561 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). This characterization and use of langage is very much in line with Prokopovich’s political role and his contribution to the new ideology of power.

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can we consider Prokopovich a milestone in the history of law and state, or perhaps more accurately, in the history of political ideology in Russia? One factor was crucial in this matter: the discourses available for him were different from the ones available to Muscovite clergy due to his training. Besides Orthodox theology, Protestant theology, natural law, and political philosophy entered his arsenal of arguments. Many of the issues pondered by Prokopovich had been dealt with well before him in Russia. For example, a much lengthier tract was written by the Croatian Catholic priest, Iurii Krizhanich, who went to Russia in the early 1660s, but its influence was very limited. Krizhanich’s book, entitled “Discourse on Governance,” was not printed, and it is questionable to what extent it was known even in high court circles. We can, however, assert that Prokopovich was the first influential thinker in Russia who, relying on his knowledge of Western political thought, raised the issues of the origin of ruling power in a theoretical manner, which means that he was not satisfied with the axiomatic biblical statements characteristic of the Muscovite view on ruling power quoting merely its divine ordination. He tried to buttress it with a rational explanation too, as he introduced the Western idea of natural law and contract (more exactly, the socalled original governmental contract) into the reservoir of legitimizing political power. Furthermore, he was the first in Russia to use the term and the concept of sovereignty, similarly to the classification of laws (positive law, natural law, divine law) and to discuss their relation to sovereignty and ruling power. If not the first one regarding the reference to different forms of government, he, nevertheless, commented on this issue extensively, pondering especially the advantages of a hereditary monarchy over an elective monarchy, while emphasizing the common good as the main concern of ruling power. Furthermore, he freely used the word gosudarstvo (see later the contexts of usage in quotations especially from the Spiritual Regulation, and the “Justice of the Monarch’s Will”), which, at the same time, does not mean that he adopted the modern concept of the state, and, in contrast to sovereignty, he did not define what gosudarstvo was. Last, but not least, the fact should be underlined that his sermons and his political tract were printed: it means that his views on rulership, which reflected his Western education, could reach a somewhat wider educated public.9 His Pravda voli monarshei became known even to a foreign audience, as an 9 It is somewhat strange, however, that “all of his famous sermons were printed and reprinted in traditional Cyrillic types.” Cracraft, Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture, 267. The reason for this, perhaps, can be seen in the intention to give them a more sacred meaning.

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anonymous German translation was published in Berlin in 1724 under the title Das Recht der Monarchen, in willkühriger Bestellung der Reichsfolge, by none other than Ambrosius Haude, “official publisher to the Prussian Academy of Sciences.”10 And before that a “close and accurate epitome” of it was published in Latin “in the monthly scholarly periodical Acta Eruditorum” in 1723 in Leipzig.11 In light of what has been written above, I claim that in Russia we can rightly link the origins of theoretical thinking on law and state to the name of Prokopovich. If one were to venture to compile the Russian canon of thinkers on power, or even the canon of Russian political thought in the proper sense, then a prominent place should be given to Prokopovich—and not merely because he used terms freely such as “political philosophy,” or “science of government.” Tomsinov calls Prokopovich “a new type of political thinker” (or it may be better to call him the political thinker), and characterizes him as the “ideologist of state power.”12 All these novelties notwithstanding, his works represent only the beginnings of theory of law and state, despite his knowledge of established Western political concepts. We should not forget that Prokopovich was not a lawyer but a highly educated monk (and later bishop), hence the Bible as the primary source of argument was more prominent in his works than natural law and contract. This fact will be apparent in his explanation of the origin of political power and his discussion of the concept of sovereignty. What Antony Lentin very succinctly formulated regarding Prokopovich’s main political writing also applies to his political sermons: besides his Western orientation, there is a “preponderant weight” lent to “scriptural authority.”13 Autocratic power was still conceived by him as God-given,14 which was clearly the heritage of the Muscovite past. And it would remain so throughout the eighteenth century: “the God-electedness of the monarch was not called in doubt.”15 Even so, his writings, no doubt, mark a definite shift from the Muscovite perception of power when the abovementioned issues were not present at all, or could only be traced sporadically. What happened under Peter was that Prokopovich “filled the official doctrine of autocratic power with a

10 Lentin, Introduction, 66. 11 Ibid.; Lentin, “Prokopovich, Pravda and Proof,” 129. 12 Tomsinov, Istoriia, 164. 13 Lentin, Introduction, 31. 14 Tomsinov, Istoriia, 166. 15 Joachim Klein, “Pokhvala vlastiteliu: Panegiricheskaia poeziia i russkii absoliutizm” [Praising the ruler: Panegyrical poetry and Russian absolutism], Slovĕne 2 (2015): 43.

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new content.”16 In the center of his argument stood not the moral personality of the ruler, but the defense of hereditary monarchy as the best form of government17—it needs to be added: monarchy in its autocratic version. Instead of the defense of Orthodoxy, the reference point became the newly adapted idea of common good,18 although in Prokopovich’s interpretation its meaning was identical with the tsar’s will. Prokopovich, however, was a turning point not only retrospectively but also prospectively because of the impact he exerted on the future definitions (1797, 1832) of the ruler’s power regarding its origin and scope. This aspect is all the more important because Prokopovich’s views cannot be called a par excellence theory of law and state: his main goal was not to work out a systematic state theory but to provide an updated justification of legally unlimited ruling power (autocracy). This is one of the reasons that we should not expect him to employ a clear-cut, completely coherent terminology. The other reason was the broad cultural context of Russia where issues of political thought he dealt with had not been discussed previously. Let us be reminded again of Dixon’s statement that the striking feature of Muscovite ideology in terms of  both form and language “is the degree to which philosophical [and I can add: legal] abstractions remained foreign” to it, and its vocabulary was “predominantly biblical in origin.”19 This is the background against which the contribution of Prokopovich to Russian thought on power and political terminology must be judged. He introduced numerous new terms into Russian political vocabulary (among them “political philosophy” and “sovereignty”). It was in his capacity as the “consistent promoter” of not “enlightened absolutism,” a term to which I would object, but what I would call Europeanized autocracy, that “he made his most lasting impact on Russian verbal culture” with his orations, speeches, and political works.20 Many new terms of political nature were taking root due to him: terms such as legislator/lawgiver (zakonodatel′) or monarch (monarkh). This latter word, meaning ruler in general, does not seem to have a great importance at first sight, and to non-Russian speakers. Still, its usage exerted an influence on the 16 Tomsinov, Istoriia, 164. 17 Bushkovitch, Peter the Great, 441. 18 For the use of the term “common good” and similar expression prior to 1702 see Mikhail A. Kiselev, “Pervye shagi estestvennogo prava v Rossii i reformy Petra” [The first steps of natural law in Russia and the reforms of Peter], in Estestvennoe pravo i dobrodetel′. Integratsiia evropeiskogo vliianiia v rossiiskuiu politicheskuiu kul′turu [Natural law and virtue. Integration of European influence into Russian political culture], ed. Konstantin D. Bugrov and Mikhail A. Kiselev (Ekaterinburg: Izdatel′stvo Ural′skogo universiteta, 2016), 114–116. 19 Dixon, Modernisation, 190. 20 Cracraft, Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture, 182–184, 222–223.

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separation of the person of the ruler (gosudar′) from gosudarstvo as has been shown by Mikhail Kiselev, due to the lack of a personal association between monarkh and gosudarstvo.21 Besides employing Western (Latin, German, Polish) loanwords, Prokopovich also tried to find Russian words as synonyms for Western political concepts, and in some cases this method inevitably produced a specific connotation as in case of monarkhiia (monarchy), for instance, which he equated with samoderzhavstvo22—thereby specifically defining monarchy as autocratic. As the chief ideologist of the tsar, Prokopovich was constrained not only by Peter’s expectation to justify his legally unlimited ruling power with selective use of Western concepts23 adapted for this purpose, but also by the linguistic and mental matrix he inherited, which willy-nilly moulded the meaning of Western concepts.24 Tomsinov, without giving details or explanation, characterized this phenomenon as such: “Western European legal and political ideas were woven into the web of traditional Russian perceptions of state and power and hence lost their original meaning.”25 Western influences only touched the surface26: they were just a glaze on the façade of autocracy, the core of which remained essentially the same. Therefore, in the Russian context the remark made by Willibald Steinmetz with regard to one aspect of conceptual history, namely, concerning the impact exerted by the insertion of Latin or other foreignlanguage terms in their vernaculized forms into native texts, is even more plausible than in Western Christendom. Not just because of the unfamiliarity with foreign languages, Latin included, until the late seventeenth century even among the learned circles of Russia—Latin being confined just to the top intellectuals, both lay and clerical, at that time27—but also due to the “semiotic function of borrowings” mentioned. All these factors were, of course, part of the phenomenon called “reception.”

21 On this issue see below in details. 22 Prokopovich, Pravda voli monarshei, 202. 23 Gundula Helmert, Der Staatsbegriff im petrinischen Russland [The concept of state in Petrine Russia] (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1996), 328. 24 This issue, in case of Prokopovich’s translation of Saavedra and Buzhinskii’s translation of Pufendorf, is superbly illustrated by Bushkovitch, Succession to the Throne, 316–319. At the beginning of his book Buzhinskii even included a section called “Interpretation of some difficult words” (Tolkovanie nekikh rechenii trudnykh); among them were monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Bushkovitch, Succession to the Throne, 318. 25 Tomsinov, Istoriia, 207. 26 Ibid. 27 See the establishment of Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy and the familiarity with Polish and Latin by some important laymen at the court of Sophia.

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14.2. The Necessity of the New Concepts and Vocabulary of Power Given the fact that the core of ideology, namely, the divinely instituted and unlimited nature of ruling power, essentially remained stable, the question arises: why was the old justification (terminology and approach) not satisfactory for Peter? One obvious explanation would be Peter’s new attitude to Europe: he did not want to be an exotic ruler any longer but one among the crowned European monarchs. True, this self-image was propagated by the newly adopted Western iconography and the use of the title imperator, often in Latin, from the early 1700s,28 well before imperator became an official title in 1721. In Muscovy the most important title had been the tsar′, and back then the framework of reference was, first of all, the Byzantine Church tradition,29 and besides tsar′ the title samoderzhets was also part of the Byzantine heritage. This orientation, however, was no longer fully adequate for an imperator associating himself with European culture. For Peter, the title imperator did not mean “the extension of his power” but it was a reflection of a “changing cultural orientation.”30 The reference point became the Latin West, whose sovereign rulers at that time followed Roman imperial imagery. The contrast of portraits of seventeenth-century tsars, wearing priest-like clothing and a pendant cross, with Peter’s secular armored portraits often bearing Latin inscriptions, are eloquent.31 Concomitant to the change of image from the early 1700s on was the change of justification of the ruler’s power: with reference to the common good and selective use of absolutist terminology. The two titles in the short official titulatory of Peter, samoderzhets and imperator (“We, Peter the First, by God’s grace All-Russian autocrat and imperator”32), reflect both tradition and innovation—the Janus-faced character of autocratic rulership. 28 Wortman, Scenarios, 46. 29 Mikhail A. Kiselev, “Mezhdutsarstvie 1730 g. v Rossii: problema formy i soderzhaniia politicheskogo krizisa” [The 1730 interregnum in Russia: the problem of form and content of the political crisis], in Alternatives, Turning Points and Regime Changes in Russian History and Culture, ed. Gyula Szvák (Budapest: ELTE Ruszisztikai Központ, 2015), 98. 30 Uspenskii, Tsar′ i imperator, 48. 31 Lindsey Hughes, “From Tsar to Emperor: Portraits of Aleksei and Peter I,” in Picturing Russia. Explorations in Visual Culture, ed. Valerie A. Kivelson and Joan Neuberger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 51–56. 32 The numbering of Russian rulers starting with Peter, in accordance with the age-old tradition used in case of Western rulers, was, of course, also part of the process called Westernization. Previously, after the given name of the ruler stood the otchestvo, that is, the name derived from the father’s given name: thus, Peter the First was Peter Alekseevich according to old style. The old titulatory of Peter was as follows: “By the grace of God [Bozhieiu milostiiu], We the

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The comparison of the ruler’s power “to the ancient Roman monarchical power,” at the same time, served as a basis for the subordination of the Russian Church to the imperator, which took place in the aftermath of the adoption of the imperial title. Peter declared during the Church Reform: “God has allowed me to be the corrector both for laity and clergy: for them I am both—a ruler and a patriarch. It has gone into oblivion that in most ancient times these two were united.”33 The creation of the new image of power, in itself, however, does not give a full explanation of the need to forge a new ideology of power using Western political concepts. The adaptation of Western political concepts and terminology, as Samuel Benson claimed, was made necessary because of the appearance of Western teachings that (as a non-intended side effect of Westernization), posed a challenge to the idea of the unlimited power of the tsar.34 One of these challenges came from the belligerent Catholic view on ruling power, which, besides advocating the separation of lay and spiritual powers, called for the political superiority of the latter, a view known as the hierocratic doctrine; the other challenge came from those contractarian theories that allowed the right of active resistance to rulers.35 Seen from this perspective, so Benson, the creation of the new ideology, one based not exclusively on the premises of the Russian Orthodox Church, “was not so much a bold innovation, rather a response to the challenge posed by Western ideas”36 to traditional Muscovite ideology. The Western concepts, adapted by Prokopovich to his purpose, provided “an auxiliary legitimation” for unlimited ruling power.37 Most Illustrious and Most Mighty Grand Master [Velikii Gosudar′], Tsar and Grand Prince Peter Alekseevich, Autocrat [Samoderzhets] of All Great, Little, and White Russia.” Tomsinov, Istoriia, 166. The “middle phase” between the old Muscovite version and the one adopted in 1721 was this: “By the grace of God [Bozhieiu milostiiu], We, Peter the First, Tsar and Autocrat of All Russia [Tsar’ i Samoderzhets Vserossiiskii],” as recored in the Military Statute of 1716. 33 Quoted by Tomsinov, Istoriia, 169. 34 Sumner Benson, “The Role of Western Political Thought in Petrine Russia,” CanadianAmerican Slavic Studies 8, no. 2 (1974): 254–264. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 254. Bushkovitch’s claim that under Peter the unlimited power of the ruler needed no justification does not withstand criticism. Paul Bushkovitch “Political Ideology in the Reign of Peter I: Feofan Prokopovich, Succession to the Throne and the West,” DHI Moskau: Vorträge zum 18. und 19. Jahrhundert 11 (2012): 13, 20, https://perspectivia.net/publikationen/ vortraege-moskau/bushkovitch_ideology. 37 Benson, “The Role of Western Political Thought in Petrine Russia,” 265, Aleksandr Borisovich Zaichenko, “Teoriia prosveshchennogo absoliutizma v proizvedeniiakh Feofana Prokopovicha” [Theory of enlightened absolutism in the writings of Feofan Prokopovich], in Iz istorii russkogo prava [On the history of Russian law] (Moscow: Institut gosudarstva i prava, 1984), 80.

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The response to the challenge posed by Western ideas considered subversive for the Russian ruler’s position raises the question of applicability of the Cambridge School’s discursive-contextualist method of conceptual history for the Petrine period. What I have in mind is a limited scope of discoursivity, in the form of short reactions to Western ideas,38 which inevitably had an effect on the language(s) of power.39 To be sure, under the circumstances of Petrine Russia a genuine discoursivity was out of question for many reasons.40 Still, discoursivity, taken in a very narrow sense, can be observed in the writings of Prokopovich, as in his discussion of sovereignty, for instance. Furthermore, from time to time, Prokopovich refers in his writings to political teachings that are contrary to his views, although he rarely gets involved in their refutation but makes categorical statements instead. A very good example is the foreword of his main political work, which begins as follows: Whoever wishes to read this booklet, not out of idle curiosity, but for a clearer understanding of the truth, take note: it is not written with the intention of defending His Imperial Majesty’s,

38 A similar view was expressed by Maslov, although without referring to the method I mentioned. Except for his first statement, I share his views: “Contrary to the widely held view, Prokopovich was not interested in importing Western ideas. Yet, it would be similarly erroneous to isolate his thought from European political philosophy. Feofan should receive credit as an original thinker who engaged in an often polemical dialogue with his contemporaries, which most likely was not lost on the better-educated members of his audience.” Maslov, “Why Republics Always Fail,” 35. Concerning this polemic Maslov underlines that Prokopovich was the defender of autocratic monarchy as the best form of government. Ibid., 34–35. Recently, the question of discoursivity and contextualism concerning the Petrine era has been raised by Pol′skoi, asking, among others, the following questions: why was the new rationalist justification of power necessary? “To whom, above all, was the new government discourse addressed?” Pol′skoi, “‘Istiazanie po natural’noi pravde,’” 413–414. The discoursivecontextualist approach was applied by him in his comparison of the Russian translation of Treuer’s tract with Pravda voli monarshei. 39 Gary Hamburg mentions the “mixture of different discourses and the openness to secular intellectual currents” with regard to the terminology used in Prokopovich’s works. Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 266. 40 The genuine application of the method of the Cambridge School is impossible due to the lack of a corpus of texts allowing such an approach. The reasons for this are manifold. Beyond the low development of printing, which, despite the “Petrine printing revolution,” was not comparable to the role that printing played in the West, the actual state monopoly of printing was one obstacle; the other was the definition of political crime, which punished even verbal criticism of the tsar or his government—just to mention the most important factors. It was probably the Slavophiles–Westernizers debate in the first half of the nineteenth century that possibly would meet the criteria of a real discoursivity in Russian intellectual history.

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our Autocrat’s statute [Samoderzhtsa nashego, Ego Imperatorskogo Velichestva ustav] (which is known to everyone and is set out below) from the objection of any critics versed in political theory. For among such theorists we do not anticipate that there is even one who could find fault with the statute.41 Before that, in his 1718 sermon, Prokopovich referred to papal hierocracy (without using the phrase itself) as an ignominious view concerning the subjects’ obedience, which allows the pope to depose rulers and release the clergy from obedience to rulers.42 These facts not only justify Benson’s statement on the necessity of a reformed ideology but also shed light on the application of the discoursive method in a narrow sense, an issue to which I return later.

41 Prokopovich, Pravda voli monarshei, 122–123. 42 For more details see the beginning of the next subchapter.

CHAPTER 15

Power, State, Law, Sovereignty, and Contractualism in Feofan Prokopovich’s Writings

Of the five writings comprising the most important pieces of my analysis, two were sermons (1716, 1718), the others were systematic writings: the Spiritual Regulation was a legislative act, the “Historical Investigation” written in its support was a “theological essay,”1 while “The Justice of the Monarch’s Will” was a political treatise that Kliuchevskii called a “small encyclopedia of state law.” Although Kliuchevskii’s statement is an overestimation, if seen from the perspective of previous political vocabulary, the impact of Westernization is striking in the work, and can be traced in a condensed manner. That is why the greatest weight is given to this writing in mapping the issues identified in the title of the chapter. In doing so, the analysis will not follow the structure of the given works mentioned above but will proceed according to logical categories identified by relevant buzzwords. These aspects are, for the most part, similar to or identical with the ones raised and employed in the analysis of Muscovite thought on power. In order to understand the nature of the change in political ideas, as well as the continuity with the Muscovite era, and make the reader familiar with Prokopovich’s arguments, it will be inevitable to quote passages at length from the abovementioned works. And last but not least, I think it important to call attention to the problem of translation of Russian terms, which makes it

1 Ivanov, Spiritual Revolution, 76.

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necessary to include original Russian terms extensively, in order to show those connotations that disappear if just a simple translation is provided.

15.1. The Nature and Scope of Ruling Power, and the Emerging Notions of Church and State It seems practical to start the analysis with the Spiritual Regulation because the two fragments below, taken together, contain those three key terms (monarkh, gosudarstvo, samoderzhavnaia vlast′) that, as we shall see, are vital for the topic as a whole. The first one (known to us from previous discussion of autocracy) defines the power of rulers in general (“The power of monarchs is autocratic [Monarkhov vlast est′ samoderzhavnaia], to which obedience, out of conscience, God himself commands”),2 while the second explains the necessity of abolishing the patriarch’s office. The meaning of this definition has been discussed already at length, so we can move to the second issue, the reasons given to justify the abolishing of the patriarchate (somewhat later showing even its prehistory, which has been rarely done before in historiography, although this reveals a close link with Prokopovich’s 1718 sermon): Also important is this: in a collegial governance the fatherland does not have to fear revolts and tumults that happen in case of a single person of a clerical governor [dukhovnogo pravitelia]. As the simple people do not know what the difference is between clerical power [dukhovnaia vlast′] and Autocratic power [ot Samoderzhavnoi], but amazed by the honor and glory of the highest pastor think that this kind of governor is like a second Master, having the same power as the Autocrat [est′ to vtoroi Gosudar′, Samoderzhtsu ravnosilnyi] or even more than he, and that the clerical estate [dukhovnyi chin] is another and better State [Gosudarstvo]; and this is what the people are used to think on their own.3

2 Dukhovnyi Reglament, 14. 3 Dukhovnyi Reglament, 16. Regarding the formulation that the dukhovnyi chin “is another and better state,” Ivanov indicates (in brackets and with a question mark) that dukhovnyi chin here might be conceived as a “hint at Byzantine sacerdotium?” Ivanov, Spiritual Revolution, 74.

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This is the very point when the possible influence of Hobbes on Prokopovich, an influence that has not been proven yet, deserves a note. The possibility of borrowing from Hobbes by Prokopovich was generally raised regarding Prokopovich’s view of the contract between the ruler and the people, namely, the emphasis on the indissoluble bond created through the contract—this view holds on despite the fact that the contract conceived by Hobbes was a contract concluded by the individuals among themselves. However, it is the above statements concerning the status of the clergy and its political leadership that most closely resemble the Hobbesian view to the point that we might well suspect a direct Hobbesian influence: Temporall and Spirituall Government, are but two words brought into the world, to make men see double, and mistake their Lawfull Soveraign. … There is therefore no other Government in this life, neither of State, nor Religion, but Temporall; nor teaching of any doctrine, lawfull to any Subject, which the Governor both of the State, and of the Religion, forbiddeth to be taught: And that Governor must be one; or else there must needs follow Faction, and Civil war in the Common-wealth, between the Church and State; between Spiritualists, and Temporalists. … The Doctors of the Church, are called Pastors; so also are Civill Soveraignes: But if Pastors be not subordinate one to another, so as that there may bee one chief Pastor, men will be taught contrary Doctrines, whereof both may be, and one must be false. Who that one chief Pastor is, according to the law of Nature, hath been already shewn; namely, that it is the Civill Soveraign.4 This view was already present in Prokopovich’s 1718 sermon, and there it was unambiguously targeted at the hierocratic doctrine, which comes up twice in the sermon. First Prokopovich states that there are, even in his days, followers of the view advocating non-obedience of the clergy to secular powers. His sentence that “the Pope excepting himself and his clergy from [obedience to] the state authorities [ot vlastei derzhavneishikh], but deluding himself that he has the power to give and take away scepters of kings,”5 could even serve as a definition of papal hierocracy. Later in the sermon, he returns to this issue in a sarcastic 4 Hobbes, Leviathan, part 1, chapter 39, “A Christian Common-wealth and a Church All One,” https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm#link2H_4_0538. 5 Prokopovich, Sochineniia, 79; Prokopovich, “Sermon on Royal Authority and Honor,” 17.

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manner: “Where is the head of headless Rome, deluding himself that the scepter and the kingly sword are his own instruments?”6 Finally, he makes clear his view on the duty of obedience regarding the clergy in a manner reminiscent of an anti-Latin polemic, the end of which occurs in the Spiritual Regulation: Someone might think (and many do think) that not quite all men are bound by this obligation, but some are excepted, namely, the clergy and the monks. This thorn—or better say sting, for this is the sting of the serpent—this is the papal spirit, but I do not know how it touches or applies to us; for the clergy is a different thing, a different estate [chin] among the people, but not a different state [inoe gosudarstvo].7 Among the many reasons justifying the establishment of the collegial administration in the Spiritual Regulation the one mentioned under point 8 is of great importance as it contains a clear distinction between church and state: In addition, there will be this advantage too, both to Church and State [Tserkvi i Gosudarstvu] emanating from such a Collective Governance [ot takovogo Sobornogo Pravitel′stva], that in this [collective governance] not only anyone of the assessors but even the President or Chairman himself is subject to the judgement of his brothers, which means that even if the College happened to make a grave mistake, it would not be acting in a manner where only one arbitrary pastor rules: for he does not want to be judged by the Bishops placed under him.8 The distinction, however, is also apparent in a previous passage of the text (as another reason justifying the abolition of the patriarchate) saying that the existence of a high pastor has caused problems as “it was shown not once in many States.” In Constantinople and in the West alike, where the pope “not only undermined the Roman State [Gosudarstvo Rimskoe] and seized a big part of

6 Prokopovich, Sochineniia, 90; Prokopovich, “Sermon on Royal Authority and Honor,” 24. 7 Prokopovich, Sochineniia, 88; Prokopovich, “Sermon on Royal Authority and Honor,” 25. Translation is somewhat changed! 8 Dukhovnyi Reglament, 18.

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it for himself, but also pushed other States [inye Gosudarstva], not once, to the brink of complete ruin.”9 The abovementioned words in the 1718 sermon and the Spiritual Regulation were directed against those who advocated the separation of lay and spiritual powers and supported the conception of the church not subdued to the ruler/ state. These ideas, expressed mainly in the metaphor of “two swords,” which first came up in the conflict between Nikon and Tsar Aleksei, surfaced in a stronger manner under Peter and were linked to the person of Stefan Iavorskii above all, who was well-versed in Catholic theories concerning the ruler’s role in spiritual affairs. Although he was an important Westernizer coming from the Kievan Academy, Iavorskii’s views were different from those of Prokopovich, who was influenced by Lutheran ideas that found expression, among others, in his views concerning the ruler’s prerogatives vis-à-vis the church. While not denying these influences on either side, the mutual accusations of opponents as “papist” or “Protestant” can also be interpreted, as Olga Tsapina claims, as labels of rhetorical device in the struggle to win the tsar’s favor, and not as a genuine adherence to these denominations,10 which is not to question, of course, the differences between Iavorskii and Prokopovich on the role of the ruler in church governance. Iavorskii’s position is best summarized in his work “Rock of Faith,” which was not published before Peter’s death—a fact not surprising in the light of the following quotation from it: Monarchs in Christian states rule over Christians not as Christians but as individual subjects, and in this way they may rule over Jews, Muslims, and over others. Monarchs’ power extends to their subjects’ bodies, not to their souls, whereas the Church’s authority applies to souls rather than to the bodies they inhabit. Rulers pursue the goals of temporal peace and their subjects’ material welfare; spiritual authority aims to preserve life itself and spiritual welfare, both body and soul. [Temporal] rulers contend with visible adversaries; the spiritual authority with unseen enemies. Essentially [temporal] rulers are preservers of God’s laws and of the Church’s laws but not the determiners of those laws.11

9 Ibid., 17. 10 Tsapina, “Was there a Russian Tradition of Church–State Relation?,” 16–17, 20. 11 Quoted from Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 263.

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This wording clearly shows the secularization of the perception of rulership in the sense secularization was used by Oakley and shows the real existence of rival ideas in Petrine Russia. Iavorskii would have preferred the appointment of a new patriarch and not the abolition of the patriarchate and stated: “We are always obligated to submit ourselves to the tsar in civic matters. In matters related to the faith—the highest pastor.”12 (It is an irony that, despite these views he became the first president of the Synod!) Iavorskii professed the doctrine of two powers, claiming explicitly that the church “had two swords [dva mecha] or two hands [dve rutse],” and stating, as seen, that the secular power was subordinated to the guidance of the church.13 Yet, it did not amount, in my view to the “pure” hierocratic doctrine expounded by Bellarmine, which implied even the right of deposition for the church—in the Russian case for the patriarch. However, it is true: the view of the parallel power structures of church and state also shaped Stefan’s dedication to the patriarchate. Monarchy, according to him, was “the best form of all governments”; therefore, the church should also be a monarchy, that is, ruled by a patriarch. Without the patriarch, the church “will be headless … and will therefore resemble a dead corpse with its head cut off ”.14 Iavorskii even compared the position of the patriarch of Constantinople in the Orthodox Church to that of the pope,15 yet, this did not mean hierocracy proper, that is, political supremacy of the high pastor. Prokopovich had quite different views regarding the power of the secular ruler over the church, which is aptly summarized by Ivanov: ecclesiastical monarchy, “whether in the form of a pope or a patriarch,” was unacceptable for him, and he “frequently conflated the two, seeing papal ‘immoderate lordship’ in the institution of patriarchate.”16 (A conflation evident in the abovementioned fragments quoted from the Spiritual Regulation.) Although it is true that in the field of church government Prokopovich was influenced by Protestant doctrines and practices,17 it equally may well be that his reference to antiquity was not sim-

12 Quoted by Adam Drozdek, “Stefan Iavorskii and Protestantism,” Perspectiva. Legnickie Studia Teologiczne-Historyczne 18, no 1 (2011): 61. 13 Ivanov, Spiritual Revolution, 33. 14 Ibid., 33–34. 15 Ibid., 34. 16 Ibid., 73. 17 Andrey Ivanov concludes that Prokopovich’s “theological relationship to Protestantism was rather eclectic; he never professed allegiance to any school of Reformation thought”: he did

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ply to mask his allegedly Lutheran (or Anglican?) position when he recalled the example of Byzantine emperors in referring to their rights in church affairs. Besides biblical examples Prokopovich used church history to buttress the rulers’ rights over the church, consequently, the clergy already in his 1718 sermon: he recalled the ecumenical councils that were convoked and supervised by the emperors and also referred to their procedure as a proof that bishops were subordinated to rulers, similarly to the legislation of the emperors on matters concerning the clergy.18 According to Ivanov the abolition of the office of the patriarch and the establishment of the new institution for governing the church rested on two grounds in Prokopovich’s thinking: one was the fear that “the mere existence of such an office might lead to a Catholic-inspired usurpation of the monarch’s power,” linked to persons such as Iavorskii, while the other was his conviction that the collegial church administration was “a more Orthodox (and theologically pure) model,”19 that is, representing the idea of collective wisdom, called sobornost′. Whatever fears and theological considerations stood in the background, the political result was quite clear. With abolishing the office of the patriarch and the establishment of the Spiritual College, which was almost immediately renamed as the “Most Holy Governing Synod,” known in literature simply as the Holy Synod, the subordination of the church to the state, or more exactly to Peter himself, became official and complete, as the tsar had the right to choose its members.20 Prokopovich’s view on the place and the power of the ruler in and over the church was given an elaborate treatment in his “Historical Investigation,”21 which, significantly, does not fail to mention his 1718 sermon. Furthermore, the “Historical Investigation” clearly summarized the scope of the ruler’s power in a manner similar to the one given in the “The Justice of the Monarch’s Will,” in the same year on sovereignty. Indeed, the “Historical Investigation” expounded this position, which amounted to a definition of monarchical sovereignty:

not become a Protestant but embraced certain positions of that theology “because he believed them truly and originally Orthodox and because he believed that Protestant formulations were cognitively effective weapons in cleansing the church from ‘Papist’ influence of the prior century.” Ibid., 51. 18 Prokopovich, Sochineniia, 89–90. 19 Ivanov, Spiritual Revolution, 73. Ivanov states that “Prokopovich did not appeal to Protestantism, but rather presented the biblical examples of the past synodal systems. The innovation was in fact a restoration.” Ibid., 74. 20 Hughes, Russia, 340. 21 Ivanov, Spiritual Revolution, 76–79.

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The Sovereign [Gosudar′], [who is] the highest power [vlast′ vysochaishaia], is a perfect, final, supreme and most real supervisor, that is, one having the power of both command, and final judgement and punishment, over all his estates and powers subject to him [nad vsemi sebe poddannymi chinami i vlast′mi], be they temporal or spiritual. I amply proved this from the Old and the New Testament alike in the sermon on tsarist/royal honor delivered on Palm Sunday in the year of 1718, and for this reason I do not repeat it. And since the ruler’s supervision [gosudarskoe nadsmotritel′stvo] over the clerical estate is too established by God, hence any highest legitimate Sovereign in his own State [vsiak vysochaishii zakonnyi Gosudar′ v Gosudarstve svoem] is truly the Bishop of Bishops.22 When Peter adopted the title Otets Otechestva in 1721, this act reinforced the association that he became the “head of the church” (even though the term itself was not used by him, and it would just appear in an official state document in 1797). The reason for that kind of association was that previously this title had been used only by the high clergy and especially the patriarch.23 The title Otets Otechestva, conferred on Peter by the Senate and intended to be the equivalent of the Roman pater patriae, had an unintended consequence in the light of the liquidation of the patriarchal office: the sacralization of the ruler was strengthened as the dignity of the high pastor was subsumed by ruler.24 Therefore, the adoption of the Russian version of the pater patriae (in which Prokopovich’s role was great), had an ambivalent effect: the Russian version of a secular Western epithet resulted in an increasing sacralization of the Russian rulers beginning with Peter,25 while Western concepts of rulership were definitely gaining ground. To summarize: the above quotations prove clearly enough that in both secular and ecclesiastical matters there existed only one single highest power for Prokopovich, that of the ruler, who in his state had full power over the church. These premises found clear expression in the following passage of “The Justice of the Monarch’s Will,” which also reveals the unlimited nature of this highest power, as this power is placed even above common good: 22 Rozysk istoricheskii. 23 Uspenskii, Izbrannye trudy, vol. 1, 52. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. The “placing of the tsar’s throne and canopy in the former patriarchal palace in Moscow,” as well as the coronation of Catherine by Peter himself in 1724, further strengthened this perception. Hughes, Russia, 340.

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A sovereign monarch [Monarkh gosudar′] can lawfully command of the people not only whatever is necessary for the obvious use of his fatherland [znatnoi pol’ze otechestva], but indeed whatever he pleases, provided that it is not harmful to the people and not contrary to the will of God … this includes: civil and ecclesiastical ordinances of every kind, changes in customs, housebuilding, procedures and ceremonies at feasts, weddings, funerals etc., etc., etc.26 The reiteration of the “etc.” signifies that the unlimited power of the ruler is allembracing in its scope: it is not taxative, which the listing of different spheres in the first part of the quotation would otherwise imply. In Zhivov’s view this quotation shows “the monarch’s right to introduce cultural (semiotic) innovations” and adds: “the need for such declarations did not arise in European treatises on absolutism, and a comparison with them shows that there were no direct analogues for the special nature of Peter’s cultural reforms in Europe.”27

15.2. Developments in the Notion of the State in Petrine Russia: Gosudarstvo and Its Relation to the Forms of Government, the Use of Monarkh and Otechestvo (Fatherland) as Factors Loosening the Bond between the Person of the Ruler and Gosudarstvo In the development of the notion of the state an important step was made in Russia with appearance of the distinction between gosudarstvo and forms of government that had been absent before.28 This distinction is already present in the 1716 sermon of Prokopovich delivered on the occasion of Peter Petrovich’s birthday29: besides discussing the different forms of government, among which he deems best the “the monarchical government” (edinovlastnoe pravlenie), we encounter the eloquent expression, “states of monarchic type” (gosudarstva

26 Prokopovich, Pravda voli monarshei, 222–223. Translation is modified. 27 Zhivov, Language and Culture, 50. 28 Mikhail A. Kiselev, “Forma pravleniia i sotsial′naia ierarkhiia v rossiiskoi politicheskoi mysli XVII–pervoi chetverti XVIII-go veka” [Form of government and social hierarchy in Russian political thought of the seventeenth and the first quarter of the eighteenth century], Istoricheskii vestnik 6, no. 153 (2013): 52; Kiselev, “Mezhdutsarstvie 1730 g. v Rossii,” 97. 29 Kiselev, “Forma pravleniia i sotsial′naia ierarkhiia v rossiiskoi politicheskoi mysli XVII–pervoi chetverti XVIII-go veka,” 52.

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china monarkhicheskogo).30 He also adds that there are/were other states that are/were not monarchies but republics. Using the transliterated Polonism rech′ pospolitaia (Polish: rczecz pospolita) for respublica, he mentions, among others, “rech′ pospolitaia Genuanskaia” (“Genoese republic”) and “rech′ pospolitaia Pol′skaia” (“Polish republic”) as examples. Of the latter, he writes that it “used to be a strong state in a monarchic construction” (krepkoe bylo gosudarstvo v stroiu monarshem).31 He also refers to Rome, as the most important and most pertinent example for Russia because of Rome’s changing from monarchy to a republic and to monarchy again, as well as because of it size and prestige. Prokopovich concludes: political theorists [politicheskie uchiteli] are right in their opinion that the different forms of government [razlichnyi pravleniia] should be analysed not in themselves but in accordance with the nature of the given peoples [po prirode narodov], which one fits them the best … as monarchy [monarkhiia] is not natural to all peoples, for not all of them are accustomed to being governed in this manner, a lesson that politicians [poilitiki] were taught not by philosophical wisdoms but the very nature of things, by experience and necessity.32 The expression “monarchic state” also occurs in the Spiritual Regulation. Before enlisting various reasons why the collective government in church affairs is superior to the patriarchal government, the document states plainly: Here the most important reasons are put forward that show that this Collective Government [Sobornoe Pravlenie] is eternal, and as being eternal the Synod or Synedrion is more perfect and better than the government of one person [edinolichnoe pravitel′stvo], especially in a Monarchic State [v Monarkhicheskom Gosudarstve], which our Russian [Rossisskoe] [state] is.33 This wording, and the “states of monarchic type” mentioned before, together with the use of the term rech′ pospolitaia for republics of the past and the present

30 Prokopovich, Sochineniia, 39, 40. 31 Ibid., 40. 32 Ibid. 33 Dukhovnyi Reglament, 13.

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alike, seem to imply a clear-cut distinction between the form of state (republic and monarchy), and the form of government. This was not really the case, yet, the above phrases represented an important step towards a later development of such a distinction in Russia. For the terminology used in his sermon implied that gosudarstvo represented “a universal political unit,” and there were states, which were monarchies, and there were states which were not.34 The main thing for Prokopovich, however, was the existence of different forms of government and the defense of monarchy, as we shall see, which is best documented in “The Justice of the Monarch’s Will”: Everyone knows that highest government has not just one form [ne edin … est′ obraz vysochaishego pravitel′stva] throughout the world: in some places the most important affairs of all the fatherland [glavnye vsego otechestva dela] are administered through the consent of all its inhabitants, which kind of government [pravitel′stvo] formerly existed among many of the people of the Greeks, and long prevailed among the Romans. In our days this kind of government [pravitel′stvo] exists in Venice, Holland and Poland, and is called democracy [demokratiia], that is, rule by the people [narododerzhavstvo]. Elsewhere the fatherland [otechestvo] is ruled neither by the will of all the people nor by that of one man, but by a small body of elected men; which form of government [pravleniia obraz] existed for a short time in Rome under the Decemviri: and this government [pravitel′stvo] is called aristocracy [aristokratiia]. Elsewhere all the power [vsia derzhava] is in the hands of one person: and this is called monarchy [monarkhiia], that is, selfrule [samoderzhavstvo]. In addition to these forms of government [obrazov pravleniia], however, there are others, which differ from all the abovementioned and which constitute a mixed structure, consisting of two or three of them.35

34 Konstantin Dmitrievich Bugrov and Mikhail Alekseevich Kiselev, “Respublikanskaiia ideia v Rossii v vek Prosveschcheniia” [The republican idea in Russia in the century of the Enlightenment], in Russkii respublikanizm ot srednevekov′ia do kontsa XX veka [Russian republicanism from the Middle Ages to the end of the twentieth century], ed. K. A. Solov′ev (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2021), 330. 35 Prokopovich, Pravda voli monarshei, 202–205. Translation is changed here and there.

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The comparison of hereditary and elective monarchy is discussed at length by Prokopovich, arguing in favor of the first one, as the best type among the forms of government. Of the many disadvantages of elective monarchy he mentions the internal divisions in case of the election of every new monarch, and as a negative example he refers to Russia’s western neighbor, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita Polska). This section deserves to be quoted at length for various reasons: in a hereditary monarchy, on the monarch’s demise, the people, having mourned its late father as a natural duty, remains peaceful and orderly, and with great joy welcomes the new monarch, who succeeds to the throne unopposed, as though no monarch had died in the state [v gosudarstve monarkh]. But in an elective monarchy it is painful to mention to what uprisings and upheavals [smushcheniia] a monarch’s death gives rise: how many disorders ensue until the election begins, and what factions [faktsii] arise at the election itself. And when there emerge two competitors of equal strength, that is, two rivals for the crown, and part of the people is for one, and part for the other, and the state is, as it were, split into two nations [na dva naroda gosudarstvo razdelitsia]: what dissension ensues, what civil feuds, internecine attacks, bloodshed, rapine and destruction! Truly, on the death of its monarch, such a monarchy itself comes close to death. Of such misfortune, our neighbor, the Polish Commonwealth [respublika Pol′skaia], will alone give many examples.36 To begin with, it is interesting that Prokopovich here does not translate into Russian the Latin respublica but simply transliterates it as respublika. But this term does not mean here republic in the sense of form of state, as Prokopovich treats the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as an elective monarchy, although previously in the same work he classified it as a democracy, together with Venice and Holland, which were genuine republics. This inconsistency indicates the difficulties of adopting Western political terminology, since in his 1716 sermon, as noted, he classified Poland as a rech′ pospolitaia, that is, a republic.37 More intriguing is, however, that the following wording, “the new monarch, who 36 Ibid., 238–239. 37 Regarding the meaning of the term respublika in Russian political thought and Prokopovich’s role in its development, Bugrov and Kiselev show that Prokopovich made the first steps on

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succeeds to the throne unopposed, as though no monarch had died in the state,” implies the idea of the impersonal and immortal crown, the principle known in Western Christendom as corona non moritur (“the crown does not die”), also expressed in the hailing: “The king has died. Long live the king!” This is the first occurrence of the corona non moritur idea in Russia known to me, and together with other phenomena already mentioned, it clearly indicates a shift towards the concept of state. Finally, we encounter the well-known metaphor of the family, clearly as the model of the state, in the sentence referring to the people’s mourning their ruler as their father on the death of “the monarch in the state.” Introducing the issue of the different forms of government (Prokopovich uses the words pravlenie, pravitel′stvo, and even vladychestvo as synonyms for government) was of great importance as it made possible the slow emancipation of gosudarstvo from the person of gosudar′ emphasizing their semantic separation. The condensed result is probably best shown in one of his later sermons delivered by Prokopovich on the anniversary of Empress Anne’s coronation in 1734 (part of which has been quoted before on the concept of tselost′): The most useful for the Russian state [Rosiiskomu gosudarstvu] is the monarchic [form of] government [vladychestvo samoderzhavnoe], the one which the Greek philosophers call monarchy or monocracy; the other forms or types of government [prochie pravleniia formy ili obrazy], namely, the government of many high-ranking men, called Aristocracy, or that of the multitude of all the people, called Democracy, or the others which consist of these elements, would not be without problems with us.38 This quotation can be an illustration of Maslov’s statement he made concerning Prokopovich’s 1716 sermon in which Prokopovich first expounded this view: “Feofan’s interest in practical aspects of [political] theory is itself an ideological principle that he articulated.”39 Besides the differentiation concerning the forms of government, the Westernization of political vocabulary was, of course, equally important in loosening the bond between gosudarstvo and gosudar′. In Mikhail Kiselev’s view, the

the road that finally led respublika to mean republic as a form of state in eighteenth-century Russian. Bugrov and Kiselev, “Respublikanskaiia ideia,” 327–330. 38 Quoted by Bugrov, “Russia’s Territorial Size as a Concept for Domestic Politics,” 493. Notice the linguistic policy mentioned before in the expression pravleniia formy ili obrazy. 39 Maslov, “Why Republics Always Fail,” 27.

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decisive factor in this process was the employment of the term monarkh for the ruler instead of gosudar′ and tsar′ by the élite in official political rhetoric by the end of Peter’s reign.40 Although the use of monarkh did not at all replace gosudar′ and tsar in the sources, of which Prokopovich can serve as a proof, there can be no doubt that Kiselev is right stating: this usage exerted a great influence on the development of the Russian notion of state.41 In what ways did the use of the word monarkh exert influence on the further depersonalization of gosudarstvo? Being a loanword, monarkh did not refer to the sacral nature and the divine appointment of the ruler, as was the case with tsar′,42 and it did not have a connotation with regard to gosudarstvo either, which was inevitable in the case of gosudar′. “The concept of the monarch was linked to that of monarchy only, which was simply a form of government, and not the sole way of organizing power.”43 For previously it had been taken for granted that gosudarstvo could mean the rule of one only, as it was the derivative of gosudar′. Therefore, the absence of the ruler was conceived as the non-existence of government itself, and this situation was called bezgosudarstvo, “a state of being without a government,” a situation akin to anarchy.44 In other words: highest power could only be conceived in its monarchical form, as the rule of one person only, and any other form was deemed an aberration. The adoption of new foreign terms, that of monarch (not instead of but besides gosudar′ as a general term for the ruler) and monarchy, changed this situation: “The lack of a gosudar′ in a gosudarstvo now would mean not exclusively a state of being without government, but a form of government that differed from monarchy.”45 Consequently, the adoption of the idea that there are different forms of government, together with the use of the term “monarch,” had the result that a polity without a ruler was not seen as an aberration but a normal way of political existence.46 “This was the very factor in the separation of gosudar′ from gosudarstvo in eighteenth-century Russian political language. Besides, this separation had another consequence, namely, that in eighteenth-century 40 Kiselev, “Forma pravleniia i sotsial′naia ierarkhiia v rossiiskoi politicheskoi mysli XVII–pervoi chetverti XVIII-go veka,” 52; Kiselev, “Mezhdutsarstvie 1730 g. v Rossii,” 98. 41 Kiselev, “Forma pravleniia i sotsial′naia ierarkhiia v rossiiskoi politicheskoi mysli XVII–pervoi chetverti XVIII-go veka,” 52. 42 Ibid. 43 Kiselev, “Mezhdutsarstvie 1730 g. v Rossii,” 98. 44 Ibid.; Kiselev, “Forma pravleniia i sotsial′naia ierarkhiia v rossiiskoi politicheskoi mysli XVII– pervoi chetverti XVIII-go veka,” 52. 45 Kiselev, “Forma pravleniia i sotsial′naia ierarkhiia v rossiiskoi politicheskoi mysli XVII–pervoi chetverti XVIII-go veka,” 52. 46 Ibid., 50.

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writings the defenses of monarchy as the best form of government made their appearance.”47 Kiselev is right stating that Prokopovich was a key figure in the processes just described,48 but it is strange that he did not quote examples from his main political writing where we have ample evidence of it. And the most eloquent examples in “The Justice of the Monarch’s Will” are probably the abovementioned two quotations on the forms of government and the advantages of a hereditary monarchy. Before tracing further proofs of the changes in the language of power in Prokopovich’s writings, it is worth taking a small detour to examine the language of state documents in this regard. Liah Greenfeld, concentrating on the terminology of decrees of the Petrine era, has given a summary of the change in the official language of rulership in Petrine Russia regarding the use of gosudarstvo, common good, and fatherland (otechestvo), which deserves to be quoted at length, although some of her statements must inevitably be corrected. “One critical concept—gosudarstvo—changes its meaning, and two others, otechestvo and general good (obshchee blago), appear and gain prominence, which results in the reinterpretation of the referent of service and loyalty.”49 In her view, before roughly 1700 the “transformation is tentative and appears to be unintentional” as service was still done to the person of the ruler and Russia was conceived as the “personal domain of the tsar.”50 Consequently the word gosudarstvo “appears in its original meaning as ‘Lordship’ or ‘Kingdom’”: it means either the Lord’s [tsar’s] personal government, the activity of governing, or his personal property, the domain over which he exercises his lordship. In this latter sense, Gosudarstvo is the synonym of Tsarstvo [Tsardom]; both are extensions of the person of the ruler, and have no meaning apart from him.51 Although the statements on service, loyalty, and gosudarstvo as the “personal domain of the tsar” are not correct, since (as argued before) service rendered to, and loyalty to gosudarstvo existed well before Peter, furthermore, gosudarstvo could be distinguished from the tsar, yet, the following characterization is acceptable. In the decrees from about 1700 service to the tsar is “systematically

47 Ibid., 52. 48 Ibid., 50–52; Kiselev, “Mezhdutsarstvie 1730 g. v Rossii,” 98. 49 Greenfeld, Nationalism, 193. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid.

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represented as service ‘to the State’ and sometimes even replaced by this requirement,” while terms containing the adjective gosudarstvennyi such as “state interest,” “welfare of the state” become a regularity.52 Greenfeld considers it noteworthy that the new meaning of gosudarstvo “appears first in those Petrine edicts which are explicitly addressed to foreigners,” similarly to the idea of common good, and the most eloquent earliest instance of this usage is the often quoted Manifesto of April 16, 1702, which deserves to be repeated again but at greater length53: It is sufficiently known to all the lands subjected by the God Almighty to Our government [Nashemu upravleniiu], that since Our accession to the throne, all Our efforts and intentions tended to govern this State [sim Gosudarstvom upravliat′], so that all Our subjects [poddannye], through Our care for the general good [o vseobshchem blage], would more and more improve their situations; for this reason We attempted to guard the internal quiet, protect the State [Gosudarstvo] from external attack and by all means improve and spread commerce. For the achievement of this goal We were compelled to perpetrate in the government itself [v samom pravlenii] certain changes that are necessary and tending to the well-being of Our land [nuzhnye i k blagu zemli Nashi sluzhashschie peremeny] so that Our subjects [poddannye] would with more comfort acquire that knowledge, of which they are still ignorant. … We thought of other means to secure Our borders from enemy attacks and preserve the right and advantage of Our State [pravo i preimushschestvo Nashego Gosudarstva] and General Peace in Christendom.54 Not only do the new terms and the new way of using gosudarstvo deserve attention, as has been noted most of the time regarding this passage. Equally important are the aspects of statesmanship, the issue of dealing with the internal and external affairs of the state, and the “police state” concept of the common good, which is to be promoted and not so much to be preserved. Highly revealing is the fact, however, that the most important goal for Peter was not the common

52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 193, 195. 54 Translation (slightly changed) is from ibid., 194. Russian terms are inserted from the original text.

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good of his subjects, but the well-being of his state,55 as he stated in the same manifesto that he cared above all [naipache staralis′] to establish in the best way possible the Military Organization as the stay of Our State [iako opory Nashego Gosudarstva] … to perfect this further and induce foreigners who can … be helpful in this perfection together with other useful-for-the-State artificers [Gosudarstvu poleznymi khudozhnikami] … and We commanded to announce this manifesto … print it, and make it public in all of Europe.56 In this decree we can already see the strains between the embryonic idea of the “monarchical commonwealth” and the “monarchical state” (to use Collins’s terms): the intention to serve the common good and the improvement of the people (despite referring to subjects, not to citizens) on the one hand, and the good/utility of the state on the other as the real goal. But the strong monarchical connotation of gosudarstvo, besides the of lack of the notion of the public for centuries, made it very difficult to separate the interests of the community from the interest and the person of the tsar, although there was nothing unusual regarding the use of the term “Our state,” which was also common with Western rulers at that time. Greenfeld is right that the common good here was probably a cliché for a foreign audience57—together with reference to the “General Peace in Christendom and Europe,” a discourse familiar from later Petrine sources such as in Shafirov’s tract on the causes of the Northern War, as we have seen. And while it is true that the new discourse using common good and gosudarstvo was also to become an integral part of the sources regarding the subjects of the tsar,58 it must be noted that even before this manifesto, a similar use of gosudarstvo is encountered in a similar situation, namely, in the privilege given in March 1702 to a native Russian, Nikita Demidov, who soon was to become the greatest iron-producing private entrepreneur in Russia.59

55 Ibid. 56 Translation is from ibid. 57 Ibid., 195. 58 Ibid. 59 The aim of the privilege was “to provide as needed all types of iron on demand to the Muscovite state, in order that the state (gosudarstvo) may obtain all its requirements without recourse to Swedish iron, and to have any contracted foreign craftsmen teach the Russians iron handicrafts so that these arts may be firmly established in the Muscovite state.” Quoted by

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However, Greenfeld’s claim concerning the use of the title emperor (imperator) and the term fatherland (otechestvo) in “changing the character of the political discourse in Russia and implanting a new way of thinking in those below him” bears the test: these terms became interiorized after their use in foreign affairs.60 Peter had been using the title emperor “with remarkable consistency” from 1710 with regard to foreign affairs stressing Russia’s and his new European standing, before he formally adopted it in 1721 when it was justified by his service done for his subjects.61 The context in which otechestvo was first used is related to Mazepa’s alliance with Charles XII when Peter, addressing the troops under the hetman, called Mazepa’s choice an anti-Christian act, a “breach of personal loyalty,” and exhorted them to think about the “fatherland,” and consider Mazepa’s stand as an act harmful for the “Muscovite state.”62 The term otechestvo becomes part of the new discourse in government decrees from that time on, and it also implied the existence of an impersonal entity.63 The use of otechestvo was not confined to government sources, however: it was to become a commonplace in the panegyric literature on Peter, which again underlines the importance of Prokopovich. As Serhii Plokhy observed, Prokopovich “in his post-Poltava writings” often referred to Russia as “fatherland” (otechestvo): the use of otechestvo in the sense of the Western patria “was not entirely new to Muscovite political discourse” but a new phase started in its career when Prokopovich made it a central concept, stressing “loyalty to the fatherland as one of the highest civic virtues.”64 In his writings the concept of Russia as a fatherland linked the concept of the Russian monarch … with the concepts of the Russian state [gosudarstvo, derzhava] and the Russian nation. The new meaning of such terms as “Russia” and “fatherland” … manifested the emergence of a novel identity in the Romanovs’ realm—one based on loyalty not to the ruler alone or to his state but to a new type of protonational entity.65

Hugh D. Hudson, “Free Enterprise and the State in Eighteenth-Century Russia: The Demidov Metallurgical Empire,” Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes 26, nos. 2–3 ( June–September 1984): 184–185. 60 Greenfeld, Nationalism, 195. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid., 196. 64 Plokhy, The Origins of the Slavic Nations, 277. 65 Ibid., 282.

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This phenomenon also contributed to the widening of the emerging gulf between gosudar′ and gosudarstvo but I second Kiselev that it was not as important in the development of the concept of state in Russia as the discourse on the different forms of government.66 The novel significance attributed to otechestvo in furthering a non-personal loyalty would appear in a somewhat different light after Peter’s adoption of the title Otets Otechestva.67 It weakened the distinction between otechestvo and the ruler by the same token that nurtured the close link between gosudar′ and gosudarstvo. This association was the cause, I assume, that until the 1780s otechestvo could not be used as a term of criticism of the tsar and Russia’s autocratic political establishment, and could not be distinguished from gosudarstvo.68 Greenfeld’s above statements on gosudarstvo and otechestvo are all the more interesting because they offer a comparison between chancellery sources and ecclesiastical sources regarding their terminology and approach, in other words, they concern the languages of political thought in the Petrine period. Prokopovich, although being an ecclesiastical author, used freely in his works the same terminology as official government sources did, but the extent of its usage understandably depended on the genre and the purpose of the given writing, which were largely shaped by the actual political context. Although Greenfeld did not deal with Prokopovich, just mentioned him in passing, she nevertheless remarked that in his writings “existing civic terms appear with greater frequency and many new terms emerge,” such as the “glory of Russia” or “sons of Russia.”69

66 Kiselev, “Forma pravleniia i sotsial′naia ierarkhiia v rossiiskoi politicheskoi mysli XVII— pervoi chetverti XVIII-go veka,” 50. 67 Greenfeld noted that the spelling of the fatherland in the document was not Otechestvo but Otechestvie. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 196. 68 The term otechestvo used “in an oppositional sense” was linked the group of reformers at the court known as the Panin party. Dixon, Modernisation, 206. Fonvizin belonged to this circle, and in his “Discourse on the Unchangeable State Laws” (1783) this oppositional view of otechestvo, as well as the further separation of the person of the ruler from gosudarstvo, is clearly present. Fonvizin claims that in a state that lacks unchangeable (that is, fundamental laws) “neither the condition of the state, nor the condition of the ruler is stable [ne prochno ni sostoianie gosudarstva, ni sostoianie gosudaria].” Hence follows his criticism: “For where one’s caprice is the highest law, there cannot exist a common bond; then, there is a state but there is no fatherland [est′ gosudarstvo no net otechestva]; there are subjects but there are no citizens [est′ poddannye no net grazhdan]; there is no political body [net politicheskogo tela] the members of which are tied to each other by mutual rights and duties.” Quoted from Sobranie sochinenii, vol 2, 255. See in details: Sashalmi, “D. I. Fonvizin: ‘Discourse on the Unchangeable StateLaws.’” Fonvizin’s use of term otechestvo to criticize autocracy was also noted by Kharkhordin. Kharkhordin, “What Is the State?,” 223. 69 Greenfeld, Nationalism, 226.

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Still, as we shall see later, the old theological perception conceiving the tsar as the husband of the gosudarstvo also coloured his views! Although the separation of the gosudar′ from gosudarstvo, “the intention to draw a distinct line between the person of the czar and the body of the state is clear” under Peter, the further development of the concept of state was to face various difficulties: The main reason for these difficulties was the self-undermining character of Peter’s introduction of the notion of the common good: as many commentaries were quick to notice, the segregation of the body of the state from the person of the ruler was ordered and implemented by a personal whim of an autocratic ruler who controlled this body completely.70 This standpoint is most evident in “The Justice of the Monarch’s Will” in the already quoted statement that a “sovereign monarch [Monarkh gosudar′] can lawfully command of the people not only whatever is necessary for the obvious good of his fatherland [znatnoi pol’ze otechestva], but indeed whatever he pleases,” as well as in the frequent use of the term ego gosudarstvo (“his state”).

15.3.  The Origin and Purpose of State Power 15.3.1. Natural Law (Estestvennyi zakon) and State Power (Vlast′ derzhavnaia) The following quotations can serve as the most visible proofs of the change in the perception of ruling power compared to the Muscovite era, as they speak not of the ruler’s power but of the state’s power, despite the use of variable terminology (such as vlast′ derzhavnaia, verkhovnaia vlast′, or their plural forms.) The first one is a plain statement on the relationship between state power and natural law: “State power [vlast′ derzhavnaia] is necessary to natural law [estestvennomu zakonu nuzhna].”71 The second one contains two metaphors of state, that of the 70 Kharkhordin, “What Is the State?,” 221–222. 71 Prokopovich, Sochineniia, 82; Prokopovich, “Sermon on Royal Authority and Honor,” 20. Although there cannot be a greater difference between Prokopovich and Mikhail Speranskii, the great lawyer and statesmen of the early nineteenth century, concerning the extent of the ruler’s power in the state, Speranskii also used derzhavnaia vlast′ when he referred to the totality of state power consisting of legislative, executive, and iudiciary powers. And Prokopovich

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building and the human body, as the phrase, “disease in states,” implies the influence of the organic concept of state: And just as it is difficult to keep a chapel whole, when the foundation is undermined, so it is here too: when the highest powers [vlastam verkhovnym] are overthrown, all society [vse obshchestvo] shakes on the verge of collapse. And it is rare that this disease in states [bolezn′ v gosudarstvakh] is not unto death, as can be seen from the histories of the world. But what kind of histories do we need? Is not Russia herself witness enough?72 The 1718 sermon containing the above statements gives the clearest treatment of what Prokopovich thought of natural law and its connection with the origin of state power. However, it must be mentioned immediately, and it will be clear enough from the passages quoted below, that divine origin of political power was still axiomatic for Prokopovich. Highest power, and obedience to it, was deduced by him, above all, from the Scripture, and only in the second place was it derived from natural law,73 as he writes: “For besides Scripture there is in Nature herself a law laid down by God.”74 This is the order of his reasoning concerning the origin of power and obedience to it.75 Although it is admitted that also used derzhava in the title of Pravda voli monarshei, although in the work itself gosudarstvo was the common term for state. 72 Prokopovich, Sochineniia, 92; Prokopovich, “Sermon on Royal Authority and Honor,” 29. Translation is changed. It is clear that society and state were conflated, which was also characteristic of contemporary Western perception. 73 Tomsinov, Istoriia, 177. 74 Prokopovich, Sochineniia, 81; Prokopovich, “Sermon on Royal Authority and Honor,” 19. 75 This double reasoning, in the same spirit but in a less elaborated manner than here, is already present in Ifika ieropolitika, published in Kiev in 1712. This is a book containing entries on various moralistic and political subjects for educational purposes, accompanied with emblem illustrations (such as Truth, or Subordination) following the classical tripartite structure. In case of “Subordination” (serving as a motto) the image depicts a ruler sitting on a throne under a baldachin and wearing a headgear typical of the Ukrainian hetmans. The ends of the throne’s two armrests form the heads of a child and a man. The iconography of the image corresponds to the text on the different forms of obedience in the human world (see below). The subscription (epigram) reads: “God has most wisely created different powers, So that the universe shall never wither. But if it happens that someone opposes power, Like Dathan and Abiram, he will be surprised.” (Dathan and Abiram were leaders of a rebellion against Moses, and their names were enigmatically connected with disobedience to authorities.) The relevant entry in the book is “On subordination to power” (O podchinenii vlasti), which can be taken as a forerunner of the reasoning given by Prokopovich in his 1718 sermon. Beginning with Paul’s words on disobedience to powers, the text goes on saying that disobedience “is against and incompatible not only with God’s order but also with the laws of nature and nations

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“state power is necessary to natural law,” yet, by giving various examples from the Scripture, among which the teaching of Paul is crucial (“There is no power but of God”), Prokopovich drew the final conclusion: “State powers are the work of God Himself ” (Vlasti derzhavnyia sut′ delo samogo boga).76 Thus, in Prokopovich’s reasoning God is not simply a remote, final cause that could be dispensed with altogether, as he states in a conclusive manner on the duty of obligation too: Nature has witnessed for us, the unlying word of God has witnessed for us that the high powers are from God; the Scriptures have taught us sufficiently how much obedience we all owe to the powers, the perverse as well as the good ones, not only from fear of their anger but also for the sake of conscience.77 Therefore, in Prokopovich’s view the idea of the God-given nature of political power is much stronger than the legal argumentation, and it was mostly conceived in the personal interpretation of that power (buttressed with numerous biblical quotations). Nevertheless, it is significant that although subjected to theology, the necessity of state power is also deduced from natural law. Equally significant and eloquent is the fact that the definition of natural law is taken by him not from a lawyer or a political philosopher but from the Bible. When he mentions that “there is in Nature herself a law laid down by God,” he immediately turns to the definition of natural law given by Paul: “The Apostle says, ‘When the Gentiles which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these having not the law, are a law unto themselves: which shew the work of the law written in their hearts’” (Romans 2:14–15).78 Then, [estestvennym i narodnym ustavom] … for obedience [povinovenie] shall be, indeed, out of nature [po estestvu] and, indeed, out of reasonable arrangement [po razumnomu ustroistvu]: as the son to the father, the young to the old, the woman to the man, and the pupil to the teacher, the servant to the lord. And we see the same too, among the animals, the bees, cranes, and other herds of livestock.” Then comes the duty of obedience to the ruler: “as the ruler [vlastelin] exists for your greatest good, so you must obey.” For without powers “no towns, no countries [strany] can stand,” and “being without leadership [beznachalie]—this is the source of confusion and the gateway of all bad things.” Quotations from the text are from the 1774 version published by the Holy Synod, which does not contain images. Ifika ieropolitika, 1774, https://lib.pravmir.ru/library/readbook/1714, 32–34. Ifika was reissued in 1718 in St. Petersburg with images. 76 Prokopovich, Sochineniia, 85; Prokopovich, “Sermon on Royal Authority and Honor,” 22. Lunt’s translation is changed. 77 Prokopovich, Sochineniia, 90; Prokopovich, “Sermon on Royal Authority and Honor,” 27. 78 Prokopovich, Sochineniia, 81; Prokopovich, “Sermon on Royal Authority and Honor,” 19.

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citing the general directive of natural law (not to do to others what you do not want to be done to you), and enumerating some dictates of it, among which he includes even the love of God and the fear of God, and, of course, the respect for parents, raises the crucial question: And behold, might there not be in the number of natural laws this one, too, that there are to be strong withholding powers [vlasti prederzhashchie] among nations? There is indeed! And this is the very chief of all laws. For because, on the one hand, Nature orders us to love ourselves, and not to do to others what we do not like ourselves, while, on the other, the ill will of the depraved race of men does not hesitate to break this law, always and everywhere a guardian has been desirable, a defender and a strong fighter for the law, and this is state power [derzhavnaia vlast′].79 History also played a great part in Prokopovich’s works, and the 1718 sermon is no exception. Here he supports the necessity of establishing a government among men with a fragment (containing a parable) from the work of the Polish chronicler Striykowski (1582), right after the lines written above: This thought does not occur to many men. Why not? Because living safely under such guardians, they do not reason about their good position [dobro], for they are used to it. Yet, if anyone were to try to live with men outside such a system, he would at once become aware how bad it [nedobro] is [to live] without power [bez vlasti].80 We have the tale of Vejdevut, the first ruler [o pervom vlasteline] of the Prussians and Zhmuds. His people not being under any power [ne pod vlastiiu byvshii], when they had suffered many an ill from outsiders and from each other, were forced to ask him, as an intelligent man, for advice for their own improvement. Vejdevut addressed them thus: “If men,” he said, “you were not stupider than your own bees, it would

79 Prokopovich, Sochineniia, 82; Prokopovich, “Sermon on Royal Authority and Honor,” 19–20. Translation is changed. 80 It is to be noted that Prokopovich does not use bezgosudarstvo for describing a situation of being without government. Instead, he uses the expression bez vlasti, which was due to the change in the meaning of gosudarstvo.

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be well with you.”81 They asked in what way they were stupider than bees. “In that,” he said, “the bees, these small and speechless insects, have a king [tsaria] while you, men, have none.” They burst into applause at the advice and that very hour urged him to become their ruler [gosudarem]. … For we hold it certain that supreme power [vlast′ verkhovnaia] receives its beginning and cause from Nature itself. If from Nature, then from God Himself, the Creator of Nature. For if the origin of primary power comes from man’s condition and agreement [pervyia vlasti nachalo i ot chelovecheskogo sosloviia i soglasiia proiskhodit], yet because the natural law written on man’s heart by God demands a powerful protector for itself, and conscience (which itself is also the seed of God) urges him to seek the same thing as well, therefore we cannot help but call God Himself the cause of the state powers [vlastei derzhavnykh]. From this, then, it is likewise evident that Nature teaches us too of the obedience due to powers. Look within yourself and consider this: state power [vlast′ derzhavnaia] is necessary to natural law. … Consider further: I see that power has been made lawful by God for us through our sane understanding. Will your conscience not lead you on: Therefore to resist the powers is to resist God himself?82 This is very the part of the sermon where the balance between theology and natural law is most clearly defined: we have here not a parallel argumentation out of theology and natural law, for the navel-string between theology and natural law was not yet cut off in a way done by Hugo Grotius, stating, that humans would be able to follow the dictates of natural law even if we might suppose (although it would be a great shame to say this) that man were not the creature of God. Yet, what is significant is the fact that in Prokopovich’s thinking natural law could be reconciled with Orthodox theology, and this was a real novelty. As Ernst Bloch states: “neither Byzantium nor the czarist church knew any relative natural law.”83 This statement is also correct with regard to pre-Petrine Russia. Mainstream Orthodox Christian theology maintained that human nature has been completely corrupted by the Fall, hence humans, on their own, are not

81 See the reference to bees in the Ifika ieropolitika on the issue of obedience. 82 Prokopovich, Sochineniia, 82; Prokopovich, “Sermon on Royal Authority and Honor,” 19–20. Translation is slightly changed. 83 Ernst Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 26.

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capable to strive for the good84—Prokopovich’s view, however, was different. At the same time, it is significant that Prokopovich used natural law precisely “to stabilize ruling power” when he made the necessity of state power and obedience to it the chief prescription of natural law, “changing thereby the content” of  natural law.85 As a consequence, natural law became not a higher measuring standard of rulership, the foundation of rule of law and the guarantee of rights, but the most important rational proof of the subjects’ obedience. I second Hamburg’s statement that Prokopovich simply “employed any theory convenient to his conviction that the monarch is owed unconditional obedience,” be it secular or religious.86 Indeed, beginning from his early speeches and sermons (1709), “he stressed loyalty to the tsar” as “the most important virtue of a subject.”87 The issue of loyalty, or rather, unconditional obedience was the main topic of his 1718 sermon, as we have seen. He quoted only those biblical passages here and in his 1722 tract that advocated obedience, while those passages in which the message is that an “indiscriminate obedience should be balanced” were deliberately left out.88 Earthly life of the subjects concerning obedience mattered: “people should not be entirely heaven-oriented,” as obedience to the tsar is also a civil duty, whereas disobedience will ensue not only earthly punishment but also eternal damnation for the subjects; obedience, on the contrary, will bring eternal salvation.89 The whole complex issue was summarized by Adam Drozdek quoting another sermon of Prokopovich: “Who accepts God’s grace for nothing, who strives to keep the law of the Lord, who is loyal to the Monarch and the state, who is consentious in the service of his calling … who worships God without superstition … but working for the Lord in fear … has the hope of the glory of God, he will attain the blessed and eternal age.”90

84 Compare it with Dostoevskii’s maxim from The Brothers Karamazov: “If there is no God, everything is allowed!” 85 Helmert, Der Staatsbegriff, 328. 86 Hamburg, Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment, 266. 87 Drozdek, “Sermons of Prokopovich,” 166, 167. 88 Adam Drozdek, Theological Reflection in Eighteenth-Century Russia (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021), 26. 89 Drozdek, “Sermons of Prokopovich,” 166, especially fn. 5. This reasoning became especially explicit in Pravda voli monarshei. 90 Drozdek, “Sermons of Prokopovich,” 167–168. Note the order: “Monarch and the state!”

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15.3.2. Divine Grace and Contract (Soglasie)91 as Premises of Governmental Power, and the Idea of Unsuitability The idea of a contract between the ruler and the subjects is contained not only in the 1718 sermon. It also figures prominently in “The Justice of the Monarch’s Will,” although in a different manner with regard to God’s role in the contract. Similarly to the sermon, Prokopovich starts with the divine origin of power, buttressed by the biblical passages that were commonplace in Muscovite ideology: … every ruler, whether he received his scepter by inheritance or by election, receives it from God: for it is by God that kings reign and princes decree justice (Proverbs 8); power is given to them by the Lord [ot Gospoda daetsia im derzhava] and strength from the Most High (Wisdom 6); the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will (Daniel 4).92 Later, having finished with presenting the different forms of government (as seen above), he makes the following proposition: “And from this variety of forms of government it is clear that every form of government and hereditary monarchy itself owes its beginning to the first agreement of this or other people [ot pervogo v sem ili onom narode soglasiia], the will of which always and everywhere operates under the most wise divine providence [premudro deistvuiushchu smotreniiu bozhiiu].”93 Then comes the presentation of the contract in case of a hereditary and an elective monarchy, as the defense of hereditary monarchy is one of the aims of the treatise: Thus we can describe in these words what the people’s will [volia narodnaia] was at the beginning of the elective monarchy: unanimously [soglasno] we all want, says the people [narod] to the first monarch, that you rule over us for our common benefit [k obshchei pol′ze nashei] while you are alive; and we all renounce our will and submit to you, without retaining any kind of freedom

91 Soglasie literally means “agreement” or “accord” but in the context of the work it means “contract.” 92 Prokopovich, Pravda voli monarshei, 174–177. These are the common biblical passages used by Muscovite authors for God-given power! 93 Ibid., 204–205.

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for ourselves in things of general concern: but only until your death; after your death we shall be again in the possession of our will to decide whom to give the highest power over us, considering merit and according to our consent. In a hereditary monarchy, however, such was the people’s will [volia narodnaia] to the first monarch, even if it was not expressed by word, but by deed: unanimously we all want you to rule over us for our common benefit [k obshchei nashei pol′ze] for ever, that is, until your death; for the time after you, you yourself leave a hereditary ruler for us; and we, having once renounced our will, shall never use it either before or after your death; but we are obliged to obey you and your successors after you by a sworn promise, and we bind our heirs by the same obligation.94 The contention that the renunciation and transfer of the people’s will is irrevocable, as it was a once for all act, is forcefully argued by Prokopovich, relying on the abovementioned premise, the reconciliation of the contract with divine providence: It should also be understood that the will of the people [narodnaia volia] both in an elective and in a hereditary monarchy exists not without immediate divine providence (as was mentioned above), but its operation is moved by divine signal [bozhim manoveniem deistvuet]; for the Holy Writ clearly teaches, as we saw it fairly well above, that there is no power but of God. Hence all duties, both those of the subjects [poddannykh] towards their ruler and those of the ruler in respect of his subjects’ common good [k dobru obshchemu poddannykh] derive not solely from the will of the people [ot edinoi voli narodnoi], but also from the will of God [ot voli bozhiei]. … Even if the people obstinately desired to repeal its own will at a [later] time (which would be a great inconstancy and the monarchy could never be hereditary in this case), it cannot repeal the divine will, which moved the will of the people, and itself acted in concert with it in the establishment of that monarchy and in the election of the first monarch, as was amply shown above. Rather the people must

94 Ibid., 206–207.

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endure its monarch’s unsuitability [nestroenie] and wickedness [zlonravie] whatsoever (for the Holy Ghost too commands obedience not only to the good and gentle but also to the froward); unless, at the election of the first monarch, certain conditions [dogovory] were laid down with his consent or were confirmed by him on oath, whereby it was stipulated that if the monarch did not fulfil them, he would be deposed; such a monarchy, however, would not be a true monarchy, and would indeed be subject to continual misfortunes (for it would be open to wicked men to misrepresent even the monarch’s good deeds), and it is certainly not the kind of monarchy on which our present discourse is.95 Unlike in the 1718 sermon, here we do not have the feeling of any ambiguity concerning God’s role: God has an immediate role in the establishment of the contract, moving directly the will of the people. This view had its origin in Byzantine tradition, which taught that rulers were appointed to rule by God, and were put on their thrones by God through divine providence. According to Byzantine theory, when an emperor was elected by the Senate, the army and the people, they simply “revealed and implemented the will of God and the Holy Spirit.”96 The Byzantine influence is more striking in “The Justice of the Monarch’s Will” because of the reference to direct divine intervention. But “The Justice of the Monarch’s Will” was not the only one among the official documents containing the idea of direct, but hidden divine intervention in the establishment of political power. This idea can be found in Gavriil Buzhinskii’s panegyric sermon—like Prokopovich, he had been a divine of the Kievan Academy before

95 Ibid., 208–213. Translation is somewhat changed. Very recently Konstantin Bugrov emphasized the importance of providentialism in general in the thought of Prokopovich. Konstantin D. Bugrov, “Providence and Power: The Political Thought of Feofan Prokopovich,” Izvestiia Ural′skogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, Seriia 2. Gumanitarnye nauki 22, no. 1 (2020): 99–111. Andrey Ivanov attributed the importance of Providence in Prokopovich’s thought to reformation theology: “Similar to the jurists of the ius Reformandi in Europe, Feofan viewed monarchy as a sacred institution, sanctified by Providence to oversee and direct the ecclesiastical affairs of the realm.” Ivanov, Spiritual Revolution, 76. Joachim Klein pointed out that religious justification of power in the eighteenth century was reflected even “in the attempts of panegyrists to explain this or that palace revolution by divine providence—this is the commitment that should not be underestimated with regard to an eighteenth-century Russian.” Klein, “Pokhvala vlastiteliu,” 44. 96 Donald M. Nicol, “Byzantine Political Thought,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, ed. John H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 63.

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he was called to serve the tsar97—written for Peter’s birthday in 1723: “Powers preselected by God have something divine and God’s secret agreement in them, the mysterious motion of divine cooperation” (Predizbrannye bogom vlasti imut v sebe nechto bozhestvennoe i tainoe Bozhie soglasie, tainstvennoe bozhestvennogo sodeistviia dvizhenie).98 How can we classify the contracts presented by Prokopovich in his two writings? For the idea of the contract, despite the providentialist factor in it, is clearly a Western borrowing. Therefore, it is worth giving a sketchy overview of the history of Western contractarianism. Historically, though not logically, the earliest type of contract is the so-called contract of government, which in its early version appeared in the late eleventh century during the Investiture Contest. It is concerned with the relation between ruler and subjects and it means that government is based on a contract binding both parties, the ruler and the people.99 People promise obedience to the ruler, while he in turn promises them protection and good government, “but if he misgoverns the contract is broken and allegiance is at an end.”100 Consequently, in this case the people have the right to resist. It is possible, of course, to go further and search for the beginning of an organized society and the state, as many thinkers have done. This led them— provided they had a contractarian mind—to suppose another type of contract (the contract of society), which can properly be called a social contract “in the strict sense of the word ‘social.’”101 It means that the state “in the sense of a political community, and as an organized society” is the result of the contract of individuals.102 This type of contract, explicitly based on natural law or rather on natural rights, logically precedes the contract of government but chronologically appeared in the first half of the seventeenth century.

97 Buzhinskii served as the “first priest-monk” of the Aleksandr Nevskii Monastery as well as the “first chief chaplain of the fleet,” became a member of the Holy Synod (1721), and in 1724 was committed with the “politically sensitive posts of protector of the Moscow Slavic-GreekLatin Academy and of the Moscow Press.” After Peter’s death, he was ordained bishop of Riazan′ and Murom in 1726. Cracraft, Revolution in Petrine Culture, 213. Cracraft claims that he contributed to the writing of the Spiritual Regulation. Ibid. 98 Gavriil Buzhinskii, Propovedi Gavriila Buzhinskago (1717–1727) [Sermons of Gavriil Buzhinskii], ed. E. V. Petukhov (Iur′ev, 1898), 501. 99 Ernst Barker, Introduction to Social Contract: Essays by Locke, Hume and Rousseau, ed. Ernst Barker (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), XII. 100 John Wiedhofft Gough, The Social Contract: A Critical Study of Its Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 3. 101 Barker, Introduction, XII. 102 Gough, Social Contract, 3.

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There is a third type of contract—halfway between those mentioned above— which made its first appearance in the late Middle Ages and shares the characteristics of both the contract of government and the contract of society. This is the so-called “original contract,” which is essentially a contract of government made by the people with their first ruler.103 This type of contract “was not only the definition of the conditions of government but also an account of its inauguration, and in this respect it would resemble the social contract proper.”104 One problem with contractarianism is classification, since the typology outlined above by no means embraces all the nuances of the contractarian authors and sometimes it is hard to squeeze an author into these categories. Indeed, it would be an error to treat contract theory as “a fixed star in the eternal firmament of political theory,” and judge writers “according to how closely they adhered to the contract theory in all of its logically necessary parts.”105 Or, going even further, it can be said that “a history of contractualism is not, or not exclusively, a history of theories in any strict sense of that term, still less is it the history of a theory.”106 Rather, it is more rewarding to address the following issues: “What those writers endeavoured to do, what questions they themselves asked, what evidence they introduced in support of their arguments and enquiries, what ideas they associated with appeals to contract.”107 If this approach is accepted, the different conclusions drawn from the idea of contract should not be looked upon as a problematic issue.108 Up until the beginning of the seventeenth century the contract theory in politics was invoked, by and large, to justify resistance to rulers whose deeds were considered unlawful; “but soon after came the great exception—Thomas Hobbes.”109 Despite these reservations, the above classification is useful as an analytical scheme, as certain tendencies are noticeable that differentiate, although not clearly separate early modern contractarianism from its high and late medieval expositions. We can thus state that Prokopovich employed the idea of original contract in both of his writings, although in a different manner as for God’s role in the contract, because in “The Justice of the Monarch’s Will” God was the very mover of 103 Ibid., 3, 39. 104 Ibid., 3. 105 Harro Höpfl and Martyn P. Thompson, “The History of Contract as a Motif in Political Thought,” The American Historical Review 84, no. 4 (October 1979): 927. 106 Ibid., 928. 107 Ibid., 927. 108 Vicente Medina, Social Contract Theories: Political Obligation or Anarchy? (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990), 5. 109 Michael H. Lessnoff, Social Contract: Issues in Political Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 10.

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human will. That is why Tomsinov claims that the act of transferring power cannot be treated as a real contract “in the strict sense of the word,” as “the people was not an idependent party to this contract but rather the bearer of the divine will.”110 Moreover, unlike in the sermon where we have clearly a kind of a state of nature and a “ruler-to-be” (Vejdevut), Prokopovich in his tract referred not to a “ruler-to-be” but to a ruler, that is, a person already in office identifying him as one of the two parties to the contract of government, which by necessity would imply the previous formation of a politically organized society itself! An allusion to the idea of the original contract here is the explicit mentioning that the contract was made with the “first ruler.” A clear reference to a real original contract (again without mentioning the state of nature), however, was given when the irrevocable nature of the contract was discussed, stating that the people “cannot repeal the divine will, which moved the will of the people, and itself acted in concert with it in the establishment of that monarchy and in the election of the first monarch.” We should not blame Prokopovich for the absence of clear-cut niceties of contractarianism as they are often characteristic of those Western thinkers, too, who are conventionally called contractarians. I agree that more important than the occurrence of a simple word used in the sense of contract in political treatises—an issue complicated by the existence of Latin (and vernacular) terminological variety, employing pactum, pactio, contractus, or even foedus for this purpose with different connotations that reveal the fluidity of meaning111—is the existence of a “language,”112 or, I would say, a cluster of ideas and terms pointing to a contractual state of mind. This cluster is clearly present in the two writings of Prokopovich: a situation (implicitly or explicitly) reminiscent of the state of nature, natural law reasoning as the origin of government, general renunciation of will, existence or lack of conditions limiting the ruler’s power, the word soglasie (agreement, accord) and the like. Having said all that, more rewarding than pause on the so to say, “technical” questions or “niceties” is to capture the Russian attitude to contract in matters 110 Tomsinov, Istoriia, 184. 111 “The synonymity of these terms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is confirmed by the translating habits of the time and also by contemporary dictionaries.” Höpfl and Thompson, “The History of Contract as a Motif in Political Thought,” 927, fn. 11. While foedus, for instance, had a religious association meaning “covenant,” the word pactum coming from Roman law (see, for instance, the maxim: pacta sunt servanda, “contracts are to be served”) was, of course, a real legal term. Still, we have to be careful even with this term! For the “etymology of the late sixteenth century derived pactum from pax.” Ibid., 929. This means that a lot depended on the context in which the above words were used. 112 Ibid., 927–929.

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that we would call political. According to Iurii Lotman, the “contractarian mind” in Russia was regarded as pagan, and “contract was perceived as a thing wholly human (‘human’ in the sense that it was contrary to ‘divine’).”113 Therefore, human relations based on contract were given “a negative evaluation quite early.”114 Popular sovereignty and popular will were considered evil things by the clergy because of the sinful nature of man from the time of the Rus′.115 This attitude was expressed by Ivan IV when he stated that he came to his throne “by Divine will, and not by the ever-seditious wish of mankind” (po Bozhiiu izvolen′iu, a ne po mnogomiatezhnomu chelovechestva khoteniiu).116 And here we are touching the issue of continuity, the absence of a so-called medieval contractualism that is important, especially in a comparative study. In “The Justice of the Monarch’s Will” the location of the ruler’s authority by Prokopovich not in the power of the state but in divine will, that is, in the direct intervention of the Holy Spirit, was the heritage of the Muscovite era. In other words, rulership was was based on the old idea of God acting through the people.117 “The voice of the people is the voice of God”—this was the very justification in Mikhail’s Confirmation Charter to discard all doubts concerning the legitimacy of his “election,” as we have seen. But while in 1613 Mikhail was God’s elect, in the sense that he had been “pre-selected by God” through birth, already in his “mother’s womb,” and the people in the assembly of 1613 merely were the medium for the expression of God’s will, in 1722 “The Justice of the Monarch’s Will” claimed that the first ruler of the Russians (as any other first ruler of a given people) was elected by the people as a result of a contract completed under God’s direct supervision. Thus, the idea of God acting through the people was given a more elaborate, Westernized form in the treatise118: it became interwoven

113 Iurii M. Lotman’s words quoted in Boris V. Anan′ich, Vlast′ i reformy. Ot samoderzhavnoi k sovetskoi Rossii [Power and reforms. From the autocratic to the Soviet Russia] (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1996), 15. 114 Ibid. Valerie Kivelson, on the contrary, claims: “The idea that Russians saw contracts as evil does not apply in the commercial sphere, where law codes protect the idea of contract from the Russkaia Pravda on, and Muscovite litigation is full of suits over failure to fulfil contractual duties.” I am grateful to Professor Kivelson for this comments given on my 2003 article dealing with contract theory. 115 D′iakonov, Vlast′ moskovskikh gosudarei, 45. 116 Poslaniia Ivana Groznogo, 213. 117 For this, and the continuity of Muscovite notions in “The Justice of the Monarch’s Will” see Donald Ostrowsky, Muscovy and the Mongols. Cross-Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, 1304–1589 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 216–217, and Endre Sashalmi, “God-Guided Contract and Scriptural Sovereignty,” 143–146. 118 See Mironov, Sotsial′naia istoriia, vol. 2, 127.

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with principles of natural law, common good, and original contract between the ruler and the people, which the old idea lacked. Although the old idea of God acting through the people was dressed in a Western contractarian garb, the contract, at the same time, served to get rid of all those mitigating images or principles that in Muscovite times still had characterized the perception of the ruler’s power. Therefore, in Petrine ideology the tsar was invested with greater powers “than ever before in Russian political thought,”119 and the image of autocracy was clearly moving closer to the idea of total power.120 While in Muscovite ideology there had been a distinction between an Orthodox autocrat, meeting the ethico-religious expectations of the Russian Church (listening to the advice of the clergy and the wise counsellors), on the one hand,121 and a “tormentor” (muchitel′) on the other, who was not to be obeyed (although only in the way as Christian martyrs disobeyed), in the tract of Prokopovich we find no room for discussing the differences between a good and a bad ruler. There is merely a statement that “the people must endure its monarch’s unsuitability and wickedness whatsoever (for the Holy Ghost too commands obedience not only to the good and gentle but also to the froward).”122 The other novelty in the treatise is the issue of “unsuitability” or “unworthiness.” While wickedness was, of course, a quality of a tyrant both in the Western and Russian perception of tyranny, the issue of “unsuitability” or “unworthiness” was something completely new in Russia. The idea of princeps inutilis/inhabilis, the “unuseful,” “unsuitable ruler” had long been known to Western thought, and this kind of ruler was distinguished from the tyrant.123 The issue of idoneitas was raised in Muscovite Russia only in 1682 when, at first, Peter became the sole tsar

119 Lentin, Introduction, 38. 120 Kollmann, By Honour Bound, 155. 121 Likewise, the formula Tsar′ ukazal i boiare prigovorili—translated invariably as the “The tsar ordered and the boyars affirmed/decreed/assented”—which was characteristic of Muscovite decrees and verdicts and conveyed the consultative or collective nature of decision-making, disappeared. Peter “renounced the formula” and “from the 1690s legislation bore the tsar’s sole signature in the form of personal (imennye) edicts.” Hughes, Russia, 92, 93. 122 However, the Ifika ieropolitika, which Prokopovich surely knew, made a distinction in the category of the evil ruler (zloi vlastelin)—who, significantly, was also called muchitel′ by its author—concerning obedience, depending on “which way evil” he was. It stated that if the ruler “is evil with regard to faith,” then one should “run away from him and even refuse” obedience, without specifying any details about what this refusal entailed. But if the ruler “is evil with regard to [his] way of life,” then one “should not reason” about obedience “as powers were enacted [uzakoneny] by God,” and then the text referred to the passage from Romans. Ifika, 34–35. 123 Patrick Kavanagh, “The Deposition of Edward II,” Australian Journal of Law and Society 11 (1995): 227, 235–236.

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due to the incompetency of his half-brother, as we have seen before, and it was to become a central question in the conflict between Peter and his son Aleksei. Finally, the 1722 law on the succession made the issue of suitability its central point, similarly to the tract defending it. The introduction of the tract is straightforward on ideoneitas and it reads: This statute provides that those who succeed to monarchical power [monarsheskuiu vlast′] in the Russian state [v rossiiskom gosudarstve] shall be the best and most suitable persons [ugodneishie litsa] for the lofty and onerous task of government [pravitlel′stvu], who are sought and nominated by the rightminded sovereigns [blagorazumnykh samoderzhtsev] in good time.124 The theme of idoneitas comes up most forcefully in the tract when the duties of the rulers are discussed, linked to the common good, and through it, to the integrity of the state. The first passage of this section has already been quoted but now it is worth quoting at length: Now if a sovereign [samoderzhets] must take such pains for the common good of people subject to him [o dobre obshchem naroda sebe poddanogo], surely he must strive diligently to see that his successor is virtuous, brave, skilful and such as would not only preserve the good condition of the Fatherland in its integrity [dobroe otechestva sostoianie ne tokmo sokhranil v tselosti] but would consolidate and strengthen it still more; and who, if he found something incomplete, would strive to complete it. Now, if he himself having governed the state well [dobre gosudarstvo upraviv], leaves it to one who is unfit, unskilled, lazy and liable not to consolidate but only to dissipate the common good [obshchee dobro], of what use was his diligence? Will he himself not be to blame for all the disorder and ruin brought about by a weak successor? … Indeed a monarch [monarkh] who leaves the state governed by him [upravlennoe ot sebe gosudarstvo] to a weak and spendthrift heir, is as praiseworthy as a skilful steersman, who,

124 Prokopovich, Pravda voli monarshei, 134–135. Note the expression: “monarchical power in the Russian state.”

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having steered a ship well [dobre praviv korabl′], on disembarking, puts in his place at the helm a man utterly untrained for it.125 The terms of genuine political vocabulary in these two passages also provide a proof for the conceptual change described above in connection with the monarch, gosudarstvo, pravitel′stvo and the ship here is clearly the metaphor of the state. Finally, it is worth noting that the precursor to the 1722 law of succession and its emphasis on ideonitas can already be traced in the wording of the Spiritual Regulation of 1721 (a point not mentioned in literature before), namely, in the oath of loyalty required of the members of the Spiritual College (as the regulation called the governing body of the church), for the members had to swear an extremely long oath, a section of which reads: I swear by the Almighty God that I want and I am obliged to be a faithful, good and obedient slave and subject [rab i poddannyi] to my natural and true [prirodnomu i istinnomu] Tsar and Master, Peter the First, the Autocrat of All Russia etc., and after Him to the Great lawful Heirs [zakonnym Naslednikam] of His Tsarist Majesty, who are defined according to the wish and power of His Autocratic Tsarist Majesty, and will be defined afterwards, the ones who will be worthy of ascending the throne [k vospriiatiiu trona udostoeny budut]. …126 So, the Spiritual Regulation clearly prefigured the law on succession!

15.4. The Concept of Sovereignty, the Classification of Laws, and the Issue of Legally Unlimited Power 15.4.1. The Concept and the Main Function of Sovereignty in Prokopovich’s Interpretation Before moving to the discussion of the problem of sovereignty in the most important writing of the new ideology penned by Prokopovich, it is worth mentioning that the first definition of a sovereign monarch in Russia was given in 125 Ibid., 200–201. Lentin’s translation is modified here. 126 Dukhovnyi Reglament, 9.

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Peter’s Military Statute of 1716. The curiosity of this definition lies in the fact that it followed, although in a simplistic manner, the 1693 declaration of the Swedish Riksdag (assembly of estates), which made plain that “the welfare of the realm” was grounded in the sovereign power of Charles XI, as Sweden had already become an absolute monarchy in practice by the 1680s. The document stated that Charles By God, Nature and his hereditary right … he and all his heirs … have been set to rule over us as absolute sovereign kings, whose will is binding on us all, and who were responsible for their actions to no man on earth, but have power and authority to govern and rule their realm, as Christian kings, at their own pleasure.127 The adaptation of this definition served in Peter’s Military Statute as the justification of capital punishment meted out for political crime, an issue that has been touched upon briefly: namely, that abusive words about the ruler or his government will be punished with beheading. The Russian version of the above Swedish declaration, introduced with the heading “Explanation” (Tolkovanie), reads: As His Majesty is a sovereign [samovlastnyi] monarch, who is responsible for his actions to no one on earth. But has the power and authority [silu i vlast′], as a Christian ruler [gosudar′], to govern his states and lands [gosudarstva i zemlii], according to his will and good judgement.128 Since the Military Statute of 1716 was a composite legislative document, including the largescale regulation of military service called Artikul Voinskii (“Military Articles”) of 1715 as its constituent part, and this latter originally was written in German in which the term corresponding to monarkh samovlastnyi was ein souveräner Monarch (in article 20), the use of the term “sovereign” seems plausible in the translation, although samovlastnyi would literally mean “arbitrary.” This example also shows the importance of foreign models in adapting political

127 Anthony F. Upton, “Sweden,” in Absolutism in Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. John Miller (London: Macmillan, 1990), 116. 128 Ustav Voinskii, 121.

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concepts, as well as the difficulty of translating/transplanting them. To be noted: the above article defined the sovereign ruler, and not sovereignty proper! It was the definition and discussion of the concept of sovereignty proper that was the most significant novelty in Russian thought on rulership introduced by Prokopovich, besides the incorporation of the concept of natural law and contract into the ideology. Sovereignty, however, was useful for him not so much as a new ground to build a theory of political power on but as one of the pillars to buttress the ruler’s right to appoint his successor, and commanding unconditional obedience to his laws and orders. Before giving his arguments on the issue of the ruler’s right to appoint his heir in the section “Reasons and Arguments,” he states in an introductory proposition: We see that there are two kinds of reasons or arguments that support our proposition. Some derive from a consideration of the laws concerning parental authority in general, whatever class of persons; while others derive strictly from a consideration of the supreme authority [ot rassuzhdeniia vysochaishei vlasti] of emperors, kings and other sovereigns [samoderzhtsev], whatever their title.129 It is significant that in dealing with the first category, that is, general laws, his very first argument is taken from natural law. It proves that in case of indignity, disobedience, or wickedness of the heir the ruler can justly deprive him of succession. As Prokopovich concludes: “These abovementioned considerations, as they are the laws of nature [zakony estestvennye], are self-evident: for man’s common sense [zdravyi razum] can reach no other conclusion.”130 Then, he quotes relevant passages of Roman law and the Bible for the same purpose. Having finished with arguments concerning the private persons’ right to disinherit a son, he continues with a “Second series of arguments concerning the power of parents who are rulers,” stating that “a ruler [gosudar′], who is a parent, has a twofold authority over his son, namely, as a father over his son, and as a ruler over his subject.”131 And it is in this section that he introduces the concept of sovereignty into his argument:

129 Prokopovich, Pravda voli monarshei, 138–139. This is clearly the main structural division of his argument taken from Treuer. 130 Ibid., 138–145. 131 Ibid., 176–177.

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Let us approach still closer to the royal throne, and ask the meaning of that glorious title majesty [velichestvo], or, as other European peoples call it, from the Latin, maiestas [maiestat] or Majestät [maiestet]. The word itself, in its grammatical usage, simply means any kind of superiority. … But we are not here considering majesty [velichestvo] in this broad sense but only in the sense in which it is used in political philosophy … among all peoples, Slavic and others, the word Majestät [maiestet] or majesty [maiestet ili velichestvo] is used of the supreme honor; it refers to the supreme authorities [verkhovnym vlastiam] alone, and it denotes not only their high dignity, than which, after God, there is none greater in the world, but also the real power of supreme lawgiving [vlast′ zakonodatel′nuiu kraine deistvitel′nuiu], the power of making supreme judgement [krainyi sud iznosiashchuiu], the power of giving undeniable order [povelenie neotritsaemoe izdaiushchuiu], the power that is itself not subject to any laws whatsoever. Such is the definition of majesty [velichestvo] by the most eminent jurists, including Hugo Grotius, who says as follows: “The supreme power (called majesty) [velichestvo] is that whose actions are not subject to the power of anyone so as to be annulled at the will of another; when I say another, I exclude him who wields this supreme power; for he is free to change his mind” (Hugo [Grotius], On the Law of War and Peace, bk. 1, chap. 3, no. 7).132 Besides the definition of sovereignty, this passage also contains the concept of the three branches of state power of which sovereignty consists. It is also taken from Grotius (bk. 1, chap. 3, no. 6), which is summarized laconically, but without naming the source.133 Perhaps even more important than the definition of 132 Ibid., 184–187. Translation is somewhat changed. In the reference to his source on sovereignty Prokopovich calls Hugo Grotius by his (Russianized) first name “Gugo” (instead of using his last name) but the reference to the section of Grotius’s work is correct. The English translation of the Latin original is as follows: “That power called sovereign, whose actions are not subject to the control of any other power, so as to be annulled at the pleasure of any other human will. The term any other human will exempts the sovereign himself from this restriction, who may annul his own acts. …” Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace (1625), trans. A. C. Campbell (New York: M. Walter Dunne, 1901), accessed April 19, 2020, https:// oll.libertyfund.org/titles/grotius-the-rights-of-war-and-peace-1901-ed. 133 Grotius gives a long discussion of this issue of which I just quote a fragment relevant to Prokopovich’s wording: “The moral power then of governing a state, which is called by

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sovereignty itself is its explanation, or interpretation, which reveals the peculiarity of the perception (reception): It must be understood, however, that when the jurists say that supreme power [vlast′ vysochaishaia] called majesty [velichestvom] is not subject to any other power, they mean any human power; for it is subject to God’s power, and it must obey the laws of God, both those that he has written in men’s hearts and those that he has handed over in the Decalogue; but it is not subject to the laws of men, even if they are good and promote general welfare [k obshchei pol′ze]. But it is subject to God’s laws only in the sense that it is answerable for transgressing it to God’s judgement alone, and not to man’s: and so no sovereign monarch [samoderzhavnyi gosudar′] is obliged to observe man-made law. How much, then, can he be judged for transgressing it: he must keep God’s commandments, but he will answer to God alone for transgressing them, and he cannot be judged by men; as to all of which we shall give ample proof from natural reason [ot estestvennogo razuma], from the word of God [slova bozhiia] and from the testimony of Early Fathers. We know this, first, from natural reason [ot estestvennogo razuma]: for since this power is called, and is, the supreme, highest and utmost power, how can it be subject to man-made laws [zakonam chelovecheskim]? If it were subject to them, it would not be supreme. Even when the rulers [gosudari] themselves do what the civil statutes [grazhdanskie ustavy] command, they do so of their own freewill, not out of necessity, in order by their example either to encourage their subjects to obey the law [zakonookhraneniiu] willingly, or else in order to confirm that the laws are good and useful. We also know this from Holy Writ. … Clearly, the Holy Spirit, in teaching subjects the duty of perfect obedience to kings [povinoveniia tsariam], shows that the king’s power [vlast′

Thucydides the civil power, is described as consisting of three parts that form the necessary substance of every state; and those are the right of making its own laws, executing them in its own manner, and appointing its own magistrates. … A true definition comprehends every possible branch of authority that can grow out of the possession and exercise of sovereign power.” Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, bk. 1, chap. 3, no. 6.

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tsarskaia] to command and to act is free [svobodna], and is not subject to any scrutiny. We also see here that kings [tsarei] are exalted in honor above all other men. … This was well known to the Early Church Fathers, who interpreted the repentant King David, ‘Against thee, thee only, have I sinned’ (Psalm 50, which David says to God, having transgressed God’s law through murder and adultery), to mean that a king [tsar′], even when he transgresses God’s law, cannot be judged by men, but is subject only to God’s judgement. … We now understand well enough how strong sovereign power [samoderzhavnaia vlast′] is: that it is not bound by the laws [zakonamy ne sviazuema] or in any way subject to human judgement; and this strength is contained in its glorious title of maiestas or majesty [maiestat ili velichestvo].134 Now if we have understood this, we understand beyond a doubt and must unreservedly acknowledge, that every sovereign [samoderzhets], in all his other deeds as in that which is our present subject, namely, the appointment of the heir to his throne, has a highly free will and liberty [volen i svoboden] to act.135 The above long quotations raise many relevant questions with regard to Prokopovich’s view of state and law. Let us begin with the conceptual and terminological changes, introducing this issue by recalling Rowland’s statement on sovereignty in Muscovite Russia: “Although Russian thinkers were ignorant of the concept of sovereignty as a term in formal political discourse, if we were to ask who was sovereign in the Russian state, the only correct answer from any abstract or theoretical point of view, would be that God Himself was sovereign.”136 Likewise, it is also worth recalling the lack of philosophical and legal abstractions in Muscovite ideology. To which we have to add Evgenii Roshchin’s crucial statement that “in the early stages of the appearance of the precursors of the concept of ‘sovereignty’ there was no discussion about them”—a statement

134 I think the phrase maiestat ili velichestvo is one of the most characteristic examples of the “semiotic function of borrowings” in the treatise. It was amply explained by the author that maiestat meant velichestvo—adding even that maiestat was the term used in Europe. Yet, he repeated it in the conclusion, framing, so to say, his argument this way! Furthermore, the importance of sovereignty was enhanced even more by giving two foreign versions for this word and writing them in italics. 135 Prokopovich, Pravda voli monarshei, 187–195. The very end of the translation is changed. 136 Rowland, “Muscovy,” 278.

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made by him in his analysis of the development of the concept of sovereignty in Russia considering “samoderzhavie and verkhovnaia vlast′ as precursors of sovereignty.”137 It is worth quoting him at length: Considering that sovereignty entered into the Russian discoursive field relatively late, it is not a generalization to suppose that it did not constitute a field as such but moulded into an already existing political-linguistic structure. This field or structure was already formed previously by concepts such as “samoderzhavie” and “verkhovnaia vlast′”. This is apparent when the first attempts of translations of Western “sovereignty” in Russian sources rely on these concepts. An eloquent example here is the translation of “sovereignty” by Feofan Prokopovich.138 Roshchin (quoting from Prokopovich’s work the section in which maiestat and velichestvo are explained by Prokopovich in a European context) states that in his attempt to provide “most exact equivalents” for maiestat and velichestvo (both meaning majesty), Prokopovich used verkhovnaia vlast′, and more often samoderzhavstvo.139 It means, so Roshchin, that there was a “set discoursive field,” which he buttresses with ample evidence, remarking that a question mark still remains, to what extent these “concepts [I would say: terms] were concepts [terms] with established meanings.”140 With regard to verkhovnaia vlast′ or verkhovnost′ (“supremacy”) Roshchin shows, that their new, secular and political meaning in the sense of “social-political hierarchy (the final instance of which, the tsar, is sanctioned by God)” was being stabilized “only after the first quarter of the eighteenth century.”141 He concludes that “the earliest usage in this manner can be traced in the works of Feofan Prokopovich, and after him,” while the transformation in the meaning is dated by him to the period from the end of seventeenth century to the first quarter of the eighteenth.142 Roshchin’s research, in which by the way, “special attention was paid to usages of ‘sovereignty’ and its precursors in official state documents as a special sphere of the concept’s

137 Roshchin, “Istoriia poniatiia ‘suverenitet’ v Rossii,” 191. 138 Ibid., 191–192. 139 Ibid., 192. 140 Ibid. 141 Ibid., 199. 142 Ibid., 200. Although Roshchin did not name the “Historical Investigation” or the “Sermon on Royal Authority and Honor” specifically, these two works are vital in this regard as precursors of the treatment of sovereignty in Pravda voli monarshei.

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existence,”143 underlines the importance of Prokopovich, and therefore justifies a nuanced analysis of his views. Returning to Prokopovich’s denoting of sovereignty, besides the indigenous term, velichestvo, he uses, as we could see, maiestat or maiestet, the Russianized versions of the German Majestät, which in turn was the derivative of the Latin maiestas. His use of these terms, at first sight, could betray a Bodinian influence, although not necessarily a direct one. It was the term maiestas (as I have mentioned) that Bodin most often used as a synonym of souveraineté but the fact that Prokopovich had Latin copies of two editions of Bodin’s De republica in his own library would not necessarily mean that he read Bodin. Rather, it can be taken for sure that he simply employed the terms maiestat and maiestet because he took them from Treuer’s work, as the Russian translator rendered Treuer’s Majestät as velichestvo.144 As for the definition of sovereignty by Prokopovich, it was a free borrowing from Grotius, as was made apparent by the above comparisons. Grotius, however, did not use the term maiestas but summum imperium and summa potestas as equivalents of sovereignty (writing specifically summa potestas in the fragment quoted). So, we can conclude that the term came from Treuer’s work, while the concept was a borrowing from Grotius. Despite these considerations, it is the long commentary given by Prokopovich that really makes plain that we cannot speak of a simple adoption of the Western concept of sovereignty. To begin with, his justification of sovereignty mostly relied on various biblical examples (of which so far I quoted only one.) One of his main arguments was that the “Heart of kings is unsearchable” (Proverbs 25), which for him meant that subjects had no right to search for the motivation of the ruler’s deeds, and “every subject must carry out the king’s orders without questioning his designs and intentions.”145 Therefore, not so much sovereignty itself, but obedience to the sovereign was foremost importance to him.146 And although the “copestone” of the ideology, the biblical premise coming from the Book of Proverbs, “The heart of the king is in God’s hand,” providing the continuity with Muscovite times is not mentioned here as a justification, it could obviously come to the mind of everyone reading the tract, when Prokopovich quoted and explained that the “Heart of kings is unsearchable.” Prokopovich,

143 Roshchin, “Istoriia poniatiia ‘suverenitet’ v Rossii,” 191. 144 Pol′skoi, “‘Istiazanie po natura′lnoi pravde,’” 424. Note that samoderzhavnyi gosudar′ is the version given in the Russian translation of Treuer’s work for souverainer Herr! 145 Prokopovich, Pravda voli monarshei, 190–193. 146 Bushkovitch “Political Ideology in the Reign of Peter I,” 13.

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of course, knew the premise “The heart of the king is in God’s hand” very well, and employed it in his sermon justifying the coronation of Peter’s second wife, Catherine, empress of Russia by the tsar in 1724.147 The issue of obedience as one of the main goals of the treatise was more than clear from the very beginning anyway, as Prokopovich stated it unambiguously in the foreword, that is, before adding any kind of reasoning based on religious or secular grounds, threatening disobedient subjects with damnation: Nor is this booklet being published to provide some kind of support to the monarch’s statute [ustavu monarshemu], in order to exhort and induce the subjects [poddannykh] to accept it. For statutes and laws of every kind [ustavy i vsiakie zakony] issuing from the sovereigns [ot samoderzhtsev] to people, do not ask obedience of the subjects of favour, but demand it as a duty; and demand it not only from fear of the ruler’s anger, but also from fear of God’s anger; for as the teacher of the Gentiles says: Ye must needs to be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience’s sake (Romans 13). He said, as it were: we must obey the powers that be, not only through fear of their anger, that is, from bodily fear, but also through fear of God’s anger, that is from spiritual fear in our conscience. For he deduces that statement from what he has said in an earlier passage: There is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. And therefore not only do a monarch’s statutes and laws require no aid from scholarly arguments, being fully sanctioned by power given to them from above, but whoever held himself out as a supporter of the ruler’s decision would commit no small sin against the

147 Marker, Imperial Saint, 199. This principle was known to Peter as well, and not only from Muscovite tradition. It was reinforced by contemporary correspondence with Greek prelates. Dositheos, patriarch of Jerusalem, who in 1669–1707 wrote numerous letters to Russian tsars and prelates, stated in 1698 concerning Peter’s visit abroad: “we have heard about your leave for a foreign state but we do not know its reason, only God alone knows it and your holy soul [sviataia dusha vasha], in which the Lord himself operates in a supranatural manner [deistvuet preestestvenno].” Quoted by Nikolai Kapterev, Otnosheniia Ierusalimskogo Patriarkha Dosifeia s Russkim pravitel′stvom (1669–1707) [Relations of Dosifei Patriarch of Jerusalem with the Russian government (1699–1707)] (Moscow: Tipografiia A. I. Snegirevoi, 1891), 173–174.

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incontrovertible imperative of sovereigns [povelitel′stva samoderzhtsev] by thus casting doubt on their decisions, as though they were of uncertain validity unless confirmed by scholarly arguments.148 It is clear that St Paul’s words on ruling power provide the primordial framework of interpretation for Prokopovich’s view. Antony Lentin eloquently formulated his assessment of Prokopovich’s argumentation: “While ostensibly branching out into political theory and absolutism … Pravda voli monarshei returns to its original starting point in Saint Paul [Romans 13], from which, in reality, it seldom strays far.”149 Natural law played just an auxiliary and subsidiary role compared to biblical theology: Prokopovich’s approach to ruling power concerning the novel ideas borrowed from the West, such as contract and sovereignty, can be called “God-guided contract and Scriptural sovereignty,” as I have termed it.150 One of the reasons to incorporate the concept of sovereignty was most probably the same that Kiselev wrote with regard to the employment of the natural law argument: Prokopovich’s work was written not only for a Russian but also for a foreign audience,151 hence he was expected to include Western terminology. Let us unravel the characteristics of sovereign power as conceived by Prokopovich: 1) it is not subject to any other human power; 2) it is not bound by laws; 3) it cannot be called to account; 4) it is independent.152 Taken together all the characteristics of sovereign power as given by him in his commentary, it is clear that when Prokopovich was discussing sovereignty “he had in his mind, first of all, that autocratic power which existed in Russia at that time.”153 The reason for this, beyond his goal of legitimizing autocratic power, is to be seen in the constraints framed by language, such as the connotation of samoderzhavnaia vlast′. Therefore, no discussion of marks of sovereignty was deemed

148 Prokopovich, Pravda voli monarshei, 122–125. 149 Lentin, Introduction, 51. 150 For a similar view recently: “It becomes evident from Prokopovich’s writings that, discursively, the Russian political regime remained explicitly theocratic with providence and god’s will being both the sources and the instruments of sovereignty.” Reshetnikov, “The Evolution of Russia’s Great Power Discourse,” 125. 151 Kiselev, “Pervye shagi estestvennogo prava v Rossii i reformy Petra,” 79–80. 152 Andrei V. Dubov, “Teoreticheskoe obosnovanie razvitiia politseiskoi gosudarstvennosti v usloviiakh rossiiskogo absoliutizma v trudakh F. Prokopovicha” [Theoretical grounding of the development of police-statehood in the context of Russian absolutism in the works of F. Prokopovich], Iuridicheskaia nauka 1 (2012): 109. 153 Tomsinov, Istoriia, 180.

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necessary—it was superfluous and irrelevant after the statement that “every sovereign [samoderzhets], in all his other deeds as in that which is our present subject, namely, the appointment of the heir to his throne, is unrestrained and free [volen i svoboden] to act.”154 The use of the term volen in the company of samoderzhets clearly echoes the Muscovite perception that the ruler is free to reward and punish at will, but here this power is buttressed with an appeal to the legal concept of sovereignty. According to Tatiana Artemyeva’s eloquent statement, the concept of the ruler presented by Prokopovich is as follows: “The monarch is not an institution of the state, but the owner of power.”155 (This could also be a short definition of samoderzhavie.) It also should be mentioned with regard to Prokopovich’s view on ruling power and sovereignty that it was strongly imbued with “patriarchalism,” which was characteristic not only of Pravda voli monarshei but also of his 1718 sermon. Ideas called by the umbrella term “patriarchalism” were centered around the relationship between fatherly power and royal power—a deep commitment of early modern perceptions of power everywhere. “Patriarchalism” had various interpretations,156 but most useful for our purpose are the broad analytical categories applied by James Daly, who made a distinction between “analogical” and “legal patriarchalism.”157 The first one relied on the Fifth Commandment claiming that it commanded obedience not only to natural fathers but also to rulers, since the monarch was pater patriae, the father of the fatherland; the second one derived ruling power from fatherly power through various means, going so far as to claim that royal power and fatherly power were identical.158 Both of these analytical categories show, in the West and Russia alike, that the real meaning of various metaphors, among them the family–state, father–ruler parallels, indeed, went much deeper than what we would call simply analogies, merely pointing to similarities between fatherly power and royal power, due to the different role and importance of the family and religion in society. The other word used by

154 Prokopovich, Pravda voli monarshei, 194–195. 155 Tatiana Artemyeva, “From ‘Natural Law’ to the Idea of Human Rights in 18th-Century Russia: Nobility and Clergy,” in Orthodox Christianity and Human Rights, ed. Alfons Brüning and Evers van der Zweerde (Leuven: Peeters, 2012), 113. 156 Erin Murphy, Familial Forms: Politics and Genealogy in Seventeenth-Century English Literature (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 29–34. 157 James Daly, Sir Robert Filmer and English Political Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 71. 158 Ibid., 71–72. The most extreme view was Robert Filmer’s who claimed that royal power was derived from Adam’s fatherly power, as he ruled the earth by virtue of being the father of the first family.

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contemporaries for this phenomenon besides “similarities,” that is, “correspondencies,” grasped the heart of the problem. The issue of patriarchalism, in both of the above aspects, is markedly present in Prokopovich’s writings. In the 1718 sermon we read: This autocrat [Peter], all autocrats [samoderzhtsy], everyone is a father [otsy]. … Honor your father! All the teachers, wise in God, affirm this, thus Moses the Lawgiver himself instructs. And what more? [Ruling] Power [vlast′] is the most primary [samoe perveishee] and very highest fatherly power [vysochaishee otechestvo], for on it depends not some single man, not one house, but the life, the integrity [tselost′], the welfare [bezpe­ chalie] of a whole great people [velikogo naroda].159 Autocratic power, therefore, by its nature is also fatherly power: and by their very natures both of them are undivided—this is the meaning of tselost′ here, and this is the very first occasion that this term occurs in Prokopovich’s writing to my best knowledge. The idea of legal patriarchalism is even more clear in the 1722 tract, which should not surprise us knowing by now well enough the reason for the composition of this writing. Its most relevant passage on this issue reads: For a sovereign ruler [samoderzhavnyi gosudar′] is a ruler [gosudar′] not only over his people but also over his children. Moreover, if a son is ruler, and his father is not (which can happen in a non-hereditary state, or even in a hereditary state, when a grandson succeeds to his grandfather’s state [gosudarstvo], passing over his father), then the son-ruler [syn gosudar′] will also be a ruler to his father, and although a son by nature, he will be a father to his own father, by virtue of his supreme power [po vysochaishei vlasti]. How much more, then, he who is both parent and ruler [gosudar′] wields power that is independent, free, and justly empowered [volen, svoboden i pravedno silen] in directing his children, to appoint as heir or to disinherit according to their good or bad character, their intelligence or lack of it, their zeal for the lofty science of government [k vysokoi pravitel′stva 159 Prokopovich, Sochineniia, 87; Prokopovich, “Sermon on Royal Authority and Honor,” 25. Translation of otechestvo is changed to “fatherly power,” instead of “fatherland.”

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filosofii] or their indolence and neglect, their due obedience to himself as father and ruler, or their insubordination, ingratitude and resistance.160 As the title Otets Otechestva, an official one from 1721 on, also occurs in the text, it further underlines the importance attributed to the notion of patriarchal power.

15.4.2. Sovereignty and Law as “Servants” of Autocracy, and the Sovereign as Lawmaker Adjectives such as “free” or “independent” that occur in Pravda voli monarshei with regard to the ruler’s power belonged to the vocabulary of contemporary absolutist thought, similarly to the idea that the ruler is not bound by positive laws (legibus absolutus), that is, he is absolved from these laws, not subject to them. While the words “free” and “independent” referred to the lack of dependence on any external or internal authorities, absolutus expressed the fullness of power in the legal sense. Paul Bushkovitch’s claim that Prokopovich did not have absolutist ideas in Pravda voli monarshei, and his contention that Prokopovich “did not advocate ‘absolutism,’ because it did not exist in either theory or practice in Western Europe”161 are both contrary to the facts. To begin with, there existed a clear theory of absolute monarchy in the early modern period, and in some states it was also a practice.162 And Prokopovich did use the language of absolute monarchy, albeit in a manner that was opposite to the sense employed by advocates of absolute monarchy. For them the king’s being absolutus did not mean complete legal unboundedness. The fullness of power was compatible with the idea of rule of law, as stated before, while for Prokopovich absolutist language buttresses an autocratic view of supreme power, which is confirmed by the manner of his use

160 Prokopovich, Pravda voli monarshei, 168–169. The wording is changed here and there. 161 Bushkovitch, Succession to the Throne, XI, 324. 162 There were a great number of genuine absolutist authors in the seventeenth century, such as Robert Filmer (1588–1653) in England; or Henning Arnisaeus (1570–1636) in Germany, whose De iure maiestatis (1610) served as the theoretical basis for drafting Denmark’s absolutist constitution, the Kongelov; or Cardin Le Bret (1558–1655) and Bishop JacquesBénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), the court priest of king Louis XIV. For the issue of absolute monarchy in practice see what has been written before.

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of Western legal maxims vital to absolutist thought.163 This is the other main feature of his interpretation of sovereignty, besides the lengthy biblical exegesis provided for its justification. These maxims became embedded in the tissue of the ruler’s unlimited power, especially in his commentary on the definition of sovereignty. The technical terms and maxims of absolutist thought were as follows: lex digna (keeping the law out of respect for the law); Princeps legibus solutus est (“The prince is freed from the laws”); Quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem (“What has pleased the prince has the force of law”); Voluntas principis est lex (“The will of the prince is law”); and vis directiva—vis coactiva (law as a directive and a constraining force). Legal unboundedness in Prokopovich’s perception was all-embracing: the ruler could change customs and positive laws of every kind at his pleasure, and there is no mention of fundamental laws, at least with regard to Russia. Moreover, the ruler’s will could overrule and stand even above the common good, which should have been the goal of exercising power—a contention unacceptable for Western absolutist theorists as for them salus populi was suprema lex.164 This approach greatly weakened the idea of the lex digna: lex digna became not the guideline for voluntary compliance with the positive laws, namely, that law has directive force for the ruler, but the proof that the ruler is not subject to the vis coactiva of the law, that is, he cannot be called into account in case he violates 163 See my two studies on this issue: Endre Sashalmi, “Some Remarks on the Typology of Official Petrine Political Ideology,” in The Place of Russia in Eurasia, ed. Gyula Szvák (Budapest: Magyar Ruszisztikai Intézet, 2001), 233–243; and Endre Sashalmi, “The Role of Law and the Rule of Law: Comparison of Swedish Absolutism and Russian Autocracy,” in Rossiia i Vengriia na perekrestkakh evropeiskoi istorii [Russia and Hungary on the crossroads of European history] (Stavropol′: Severokavkazskii Federal′nyi Universitet, 2016), 44–50. Bushkovitch’s claim, for instance, that John Barclay (1582–1621)—to whom Prokopovich referred in his introduction to Saavedra’s translation as one of the three authors he knew in political literature—was not an absolutist thinker in his Argenis (1621) because he “insisted that the king should rule according to the law,” is to misunderstand the nature of the mainstream theory of absolute monarchy. Bushkovitch, Succession to the Throne, 314–315, 315, fn. 106. Moreover, the most recent publication on Barclay states: “The familiar term ‘absolutist’ is entirely appropriate to describe him, so long as one accepts that there was a broad spectrum of absolutist thought, and that Barclay sat at the far end of that spectrum to the right of Bodin and James VI/I, his two most obvious influences.” Matthew Grohowski, “‘The most dangerous rudeness’: Anti-Populism and the Literary Justification of Absolutism in the Fiction of John Barclay (1582–1621),” in Democracy and Antidemocracy in Early Modern England, ed. Cesare Cuttica and Markku Peltonen (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 114. 164 For a detailed discussion of this point, see Sashalmi, “Some Remarks on the Typology of Official Petrine Political Ideology,” 237–240. This aspect is also noted by Pol′skoi, mentioning that here Prokopovich clearly and significantly deviated from Treuer’s position, which might well have been the cause of not quoting Treuer in the work at all. Pol′skoi, “‘Istiazanie po natural’noi pravde,’” 426–427.

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the laws, natural law and divine law included.165 Therefore, not even natural and divine law are conceived as a compass to measure the ruler’s deeds, as the main message is: “a king [tsar], even when he transgresses God’s law, cannot be judged by men, but is subject only to God’s judgement.” Legal unboundedness was the message of Pravda voli monarshei for posterity too! In the nineteenth century it was incorporated into the Collection of the Laws of the Russian Empire, and hence it came to be read as a “legal tract by historians.”166 When I. I. Ditiatin set out to examine the historicity of the Fundamental Laws of 1832 regarding the ruler’s power, he recalled Pravda voli monarshei, stating its importance in the following manner: “To ground the unlimited autocracy of the emperor [neogranichennoe samoderzhavie imperatora] relying on the Scripture and all the data of science of that time.”167 All this was in clear contrast with the Western notion of the rule of law as it was conceived in the early modern period: power should be exercised in accordance with a normative system which had as its ends the good of the community. Within the system positive human law formed a stratum bounded and conditioned by the imperatives of divinely instituted and natural law on the one hand and the customs of the community on the other.168 And this definition was consistent not only with the idea of mixed monarchy but also with absolute royal power. “Royal authority and the rule of law were compatible because their objectives were thought to be the same,” to rule for “bono publico not pro bono suo.”169 Summarizing what has been just said, it seems highly probable that even the title of the tract, “The Justice of the Monarch’s Will,” was inspired by Western absolutist terminology, in particular, the phrase Voluntas principis est lex. 165 On the issue of the lex digna Bushkovitch reinforces the views that I set forth as early as 2001 in Sashalmi, “Some Remarks on the Typology of Official Petrine Political Ideology,” 239–241. Bushkovitch, Succession to the Throne, 322–323. 166 Kiselev, “Pervye shagi estestvennogo prava v Rossii i reformy Petra,” 80. 167 Quoted ibid. 168 Howell A. Lloyd, “Constitutionalism,” in The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450– 1700, ed. James H. Burns and Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 272. 169 David L. Smith, “The Idea of Rule of Law in England and France in the Seventeenth Century,” in Der Absolutismus—Ein Mythos? [Absolutism—A myth?], ed. Ronald G. Asch and Heinz Duchhardt (Cologne: Böhlau, 1996), 167.

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However, in the tract, it was taken out of its rule-of-law context in which it was embedded in the West. This maxim, standing on its own, was completely satisfactory to Peter: it was in accordance with his views on ruling power. Especially important in this regard is the fact that Peter read and approved the tract!170 This view of the Voluntas principis est lex allowed for no real depersonalization of sovereignty and, hence, a further depersonalization of gosudartsvo. No wonder that no “attempt was made to link sovereignty to the state” by Prokopovich, and the idea of the state as a legal entity (although not missing completely as Gurvich claimed)171 can be discovered in the writing in a limited way, notably in the allusion to the idea of corona non moritur, or in such phrases that “there are necessities in a state [v gosudarstve nuzhdy], which cannot be accomplished in a short time.”172 Therefore, I cannot agree with Bushkovitch that Prokopovich, similarly to Grotius, “was writing not about the power of the monarch but about the sovereignty of the state, in the Russian case, a monarchy.”173 It is true that the idea of sovereignty “was new to the Russians” and he “used it to buttress very traditional arguments for obedience to the monarch,” which, indeed, was not a novelty.174 While Prokopovich, indeed, understood the differences regarding the extent of royal power in various European monarchies, to claim that he saw the notion of 170 Lentin, Introduction, 65, Pol′skoi, “‘Istiazanie po natura′lnoi pravde,’” 415–419. 171 Georgii Gurvich, “Pravda voli monarshei” Feofana Prokopovicha i ee zapadnoevropeiskie istochniki [Feofan Prokopovich’s “Pravda voli monarshei” and its Western European sources] (Iur′ev: Tipografiia K. Mattisena, 1915), 13, 15. 172 Prokopovich, Pravda voli monarshei, 235, 236. 173 Bushkovitch, Succession to the Throne, 321. The only passage and expression I found in the tract that could give some credence to the view that Prokopovich was writing about the sovereignty of monarchy is this, which is not quoted by Bushkovitch: It can be seen here from the unanimity of these Early Fathers [Church Fathers quoted by him] what the doctrine was in those days on monarchical sovereignty [o samoderzhavnom velichestve], namely, that its power [ego vlast′] is subject to no other power [nepodvlastnaia], is subject to no human judgement, and is quite unimpeachable. … But the same doctrine also held good in later times. For Theodore Balsamon, patriarch of Antioch (who died after the year of 1200) … states as a general dogma that a king is subject neither to canon law nor to civil law. Prokopovich, Pravda voli monarshei, 194–195. Lentin’s translation is changed. 174 Bushkovitch, Succession to the Throne, 323. Strangely enough, despite his claim that the idea of sovereignty was new to the Russians, Bushkovitch translated gosudarstvo as “sovereignty” in texts related to the smuta where gosudarstvo (standing with the adjectives Rossiiskoe and Moskovskoe) clearly meant either “realm” or “throne.” Ibid., 149, 152. This translation occurs even with regard to an earlier period where gosudarstvo means “rule.” Ibid., 123.

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sovereignty “as the intellectual basis of the analysis of the state,”175 is to read too much modernity into his tract. Prokopovich transformed the notion of state sovereignty, borrowed from Grotius, into the ruler’s legally unlimited power to serve his goals—and obedience of the subjects, no doubt, was the most important one among them. As I put it long ago: “In Pravda voli monarshei the rights and duties of the monarch, and the subjects’ duty of obedience under any circumstance are emphasized with a great vigour, while the rights of the subjects are left in silence.”176 Yet, to look at Prokopovich’s use of the concept of sovereignty exclusively from the angle of obedience, as Bushkovitch does, is to leave unnoticed an important new phenomenon under Peter, namely, the changing attitude to law in framing the ruler’s power. What is apparent in Prokopovich’s writings, and especially in “The Justice of the Monarch’s Will,” is the rethinking of the role of law (zakon) under Peter. It is worth quoting Kiselev, who made the following statement concerning the change in the language of power under Peter with regard to law, although interestingly enough he did not analyse “The Justice of the Monarch’s Will” from this point of view: By the time of Peter’s death the concept of law [zakon] became the inalienable attribute of the ruler’s power. Of course, the monarch did not abandon the idea of defending justice [pravda]. But now he did it not as a judge, but as a lawgiver [zakonodatel'] with the help of the law [zakon].177 There was a shift from the static conception of the ruler “who dispensed justice [pravdu] to the dynamic and active ruler improving society through laws [zakony]”: “The [image of the] Mosaic judge was pushed into the background, and his place was taken over by the [image of the] monarch-lawgiver [monarkh-zakonodatel′].”178 175 Ibid., 323, 325. 176 Sashalmi, “Some Remarks on the Typology of Official Petrine Political Ideology,” 240. 177 Mikhail A. Kiselev, “Pravda i zakon vo vtoroi polovine XVII–pervoi chetverti XVIII veka: Ot monarkha-sud'i k monarkhu-zakonodateliu” [ Justice and law from the second half of the seventeenth to the first quarter of the eighteenth century: From the monarch-judge to the monarch-lawgiver], in Poniatiia o Rossii. K istoricheskoi semantike imperskogo perioda [Notions about Russia. On the historical semantics of the imperial period], ed. Aleksei Miller and Ingrid Schierle (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2012), 64–65. 178 Ibid., 65. The two seventeenth-century proverbs taken as a pair, “The tsar’s judgement is God’s judgement” and “Where the tsar is there is justice [pravda],” reflected the older perception of the tsar.

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The shift from the ruler as judge to legislator was best manifested in the Pravda voli monarshei,179 and there it was inseparable from the newly adapted concept of sovereignty: it is not a coincidence that the phrase legislative power (zakonodatel′naia vlast′) appears in the text, and the term “lawgiver” is encountered even in different forms: zakonodatel′, zakonopolozhnik.180 One consequence of this shift was that the word pravda gained a legislative interpretation, and it is in this sense that Prokopovich’s work employs it.181 This meaning is most explicit in the foreword to the booklet in which Prokopovich refers to the commission given to him by Peter to write the treatise: “this booklet to be written, in which the justice present [sushchaia pravda] in the monarch’s mentioned statute [v ustave monarshem], although amply demonstrated in the statute itself, is expounded more clearly and in greater length.”182 Wortman is right, that thereby the laws and decrees of the ruler were seen as “the embodiment of highest [divine] justice, pravda.”183 The other aspect of the change was what I call the conceptualization of law. Before ca. 1700 law (zakon) primarily had the meaning of divine law (zakon bozhii) or faith (vera), or confession of faith (veroispovedanie), and only after these came meanings such as “prescriptions of secular power,”184 while the concept of natural law (estestvennyi zakon) was practically unknown, and the civil laws of Byzantine emperors (called gradskie zakony in Russia) were considered equal to divine laws by Joseph of Volokolamsk. The quotations presented above with regard to sovereignty, are, however, clear indications of the knowledge of the hierarchy of laws—divine law, natural law, human (that is, positive) law,185 and even their relations to sovereignty were commented upon by Prokopovich. The relation of these laws to each other, however, was not the same if compared to the Western perception. In Russia “clerical discourse used the expression natural law as the higher law, and in this sense identified the natural with the divine.

179 Wortman, Power of Language and Rhetoric, 135. 180 Prokopovich, Pravda voli monarshei, 134, 144. 181 Lentin, “Prokopovich, Pravda and Proof,” 131–132. 182 Prokopovich, Pravda voli monarshei, 124–127. Translation is somewhat changed. 183 Wortman, Power of Language and Rhetoric, 135. 184 D. V. Rudnev and T. S. Sadova, “Delovaia rech′ petrovskoi epokhi: nasledie proshlogo ili radikal′noe preobrazovanie?” [Administrative language of the Petrine era: legacy of the past or a radical transformation?], in Literaturnaia kul′tura Rossii XVIII veka [Literary culture of eighteenth-century Russia] (St. Petersburg: Sankt-Peterburgskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2019), 183. 185 See his wording “statutes and laws of every kind” (ustavy i vsiakie zakony), which reflects familiarity with the various forms of legislation.

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Hence, natural (divine) was opposed to human.”186 The wording of Prokopovich implicitly suggested such an association in statements like “State power [vlast′ derzhavnaia] is necessary to natural law [estestvennomu zakonu nuzhna]”187 because the adjective derzhavnaia has a connotation of divinity (which I have previously discussed)—a connotation inevitably lost in translation. And Prokopovich had a clear preference for the adjective derzhavnaia in his writings, which is especially marked in the 1718 sermon. But the consequences emanating from the increased usage of the term zakon linked to state power or, more simply, to highest power—in other words, the close association between gosudarstvo and zakon—were far-reaching, and not limited to clerical circles. The extension of the use of zakon, “in the sense of the ‘prescription of the higest power,’” had the consequence of the “sacralization of highest power” in the language of administration due to the previous, overwhelmingly religious content of the term zakon.188 The phenomenon of “sacralization of highest power” was also reinforced from another angle: “For the Petrine era it is characteristic to treat crime in religious categories.”189 Therefore, terms such as grekh (sin), pogreshenie or pregreshenie (sinning), and the corresponding verbs were employed in case of breach of the law (zakon).190 It meant that the government “took over the language of the church for the creation of a new legal language.”191 The main reason for the above phenomena is to be found in the different prehistory of law in Western and Russian tradition. As the scholastic division of laws had been unknown previously in Russia, the centuries-long tradition of discussing natural law and its intermediary role between divine law and human positive law was missing: thus the idea of grounding positive law in natural law could not take firm root. Closely connected to this is the fact that in the scholastic framework natural law was linked to the idea of a secular community existing for a secular purpose: in other words, there was a close link between natural law and the state, which did not exist in Russia either.192 When under the reign of Peter, centuries later than in Western Christendom, the position of the ruler came to be perceived in legal terms, there was almost

186 Artemyeva, “From ‘Natural Law’ to the Idea of Human Rights in 18th-Century Russia,” 119. 187 Prokopovich, Sochineniia, 82; Prokopovich, “Sermon on Royal Authority and Honor,” 20. 188 Rudnev and Sadova, “Delovaia rech′,” 184. 189 Ibid. 190 Ibid. 191 Ibid., 184–185. 192 Bloch, Natural Law, 26.

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nothing to build on: the ruler remained outside legal thinking.193 He was the cornerstone of the legal system but not in the same way as the absolute monarchs in the West: he was not part of it, he was outside of it. And this perception was even strengthened implicitly by the above-mentioned extension of the use of zakon with regard to the highest power that led to the sacralisation of this power. Under these circumstances positive, man-made law was given absolute priority, and in the Russian autocratic context it was conceived as a law made by the ruler alone, according to his pleasure, which did not bind him. In other words, the “tsar’s ability to issue decrees [ukazy] that carried the force of law served as an essential feature of Russian law.”194 As Bushkovitch rightly stated: The idea that the monarch did not have to obey human law [to add: or even natural law] had to have a new meaning in a country without a learned legal profession and which was defining the powers of various state institutions in written law for the first time. Either Prokopovich did not understand the function of the idea of European law, or he realized that in Russian conditions it had different implications. For him, the issue was obedience.195 Law came to be seen not as a value in its own right standing above both ruler and ruled, but in a narrow sense of ordering and disciplining society. This socalled “police state” concept of the law, at the same time, was in accordance with the goal of the new Petrine ideology: to strengthen ruling power without incorporating legal limitations and rights of the subjects, which explains why Prokopovich left out those aspects of the works of Western theorists he used (such as Treuer) that did not fit the idea of the monarch with an allencompassing power. Understandably, this perception of law was not conducive to fostering the idea of self-limitation, a law-abiding attitude by those in power. Despite this kind of perception of law, it has to be noted that an important shift was made during Peter’s reign towards the technical aspects of legislation, namely, the framing of new legislation according to established norms.196 This attitude, as well as the emphasis on zakon, similarly to other aspects of change in 193 Sashalmi, “Some Remarks on the Typology of Official Petrine Political Ideology,” 242. 194 William E. Pomeranz, Law and the Russian State: Russia’s Legal Evolution from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 13. 195 Bushkovitch, Succession to the Throne, 322–323. 196 M. O. Akishin: “‘Obshchee blago’ i gosudarev ukaz v epokhu Petra Pervogo” [The “common good” and the ruler’s decree in the age of Peter I], Leningradskii iuridicheskii zhurnal 21, no. 3 (2010): 109–110.

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the language of administration, such as the spread of depersonalized phrases, or the use of the term poddannyi, reflected the shift from the perception of gosudarstvo as the tsar’s household to the image of gosudarstvo as a clockwork—a motif familiar to Peter from his correspondence with Leibniz, who “in his letters compared the ideal state to clockwork.”197 Equally important became the dissemination of different legal acts among the population.198 The differentiation of genres of legislation under the umbrella term zakon (law), such as ustav (statute), ukaz (decree), manifest (manifesto), ob′′iavlenie (declaration), and so forth, is in itself an aspect or mark of conceptualization of law. The establishment of the “College of Justice” (Iustits-kollegiia) no doubts played a key role in dissemination of various forms of legislation: for the first time in Russian history a separate organ was devoted specially to legal affairs alone. This was an improvement in the legal system but in other areas of legality there remained important lacunae. Peter “rejected the existence of an independent judiciary,” which could have filled the gap between Peter’s mushrooming decrees and the regulations of the 1649 Law Code, and taken the role of the interpreter of the law.199 Regarding the publicity of legislative acts, the importance of printing was given a great emphasis under Peter, now in a new genre of “printed lists.”200 But the old system of making legislation known to the public also remained in force: namely, to read them aloud in churches at great church feasts and in the market places.201 Besides the Senate, the newly established College of Justice played a great part in making legislation reach the public and in increasing legal transparency in general. For example, the College of Justice stated in one of its first resolutions in 1719 that cases should be treated according to the 1649 Law Code and the decrees be “printed and declared to all the people.”202

197 Rudnev and Sadova, “Delovaia rech′,” 181, 182. 198 Akishin, “‘Obshchee blago’ i gosudarev ukaz v epokhu Petra Pervogo,” 110. 199 Pomeranz, Law and the Russian State, 14. 200 Akishin, “‘Obshchee blago’ i gosudarev ukaz v epokhu Petra Pervogo,” 110. 201 Ibid. 202 Ibid.

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CHAPTER 16

Female Allegorical Personification of Russia during the Reign of Peter the Great and His Successors: Visual and Written Sources, and the Notion of State

According to Richard Wortman, in Imperial Russia, beginning from Peter the Great, the nature of the relationship between the ruler and the state can be interpreted in a proper way if we are aware of the conflation of “the Russian monarchy with the Russian state.”1 Indeed, “the relationship between the two was never clearly defined,” although “in many respects they refer to different entities.”2 Somewhat later Wortman gives a highly graphic description of this problem, which I accept completely: “I approach the monarchy as an institution set above the state, dominating and engulfing the organs of the state in the figure of the ruling emperor. Institutional and symbolic change took place within the parameters set by the political culture of a personal rule.”3 In line with Wortman’s magisterial works on the “scenarios of power,” I think it is highly plausible to illustrate this state of affairs (“the monarchy as an institution set above the state, dominating and engulfing the organs of the state in the figure of the ruling emperor”) by an iconographic source of

1 Wortman, Russian Monarchy, XIV. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., XVI.

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the Petrine era, which has a lot to do with Prokopovich too. What I have in mind is Prokopovich’s reference to Peter’s personal seal, which—as we have seen—he called the tsar’s “emblem” in the sermon delivered after Peter’s death, on the occasion of the tsar’s name day. The seal, containing the visual allegorical personification of Russia, shows more than anything else the relationship of the ruler to the state in Petrine Russia—and its message completely accords with the main idea expressed by Prokopovich in his Pravda voli monarshei. The seal, probably made in 1710–1711 but in use by 1714, was “far more than simply an allusion to the Pygmalion story,” as it was shown in an image in Peter’s “emblem book.” For the seal represents Peter’s work as being done with God’s help through symbolic elements that were not present in the image of the “emblem book”: the radiating triangle (the symbol of the Trinity) with the Hebrew name of God in it above the two figures (of Peter and Russia), and the corresponding wording [Deo] Adiuvante arching the triangle and serving as a motto.4 The figure of Russia, almost carved, has already taken the shape of a crowned woman with a scepter and an orb5—these latter regalia were absent from the image contained in Peter’s “emblem book.” The overall message of the seal is as follows: the “divinely sanctioned nature of the tsar’s mission as an artisan sculpting his country [rather state] in a perfected form.”6 Thus, the seal reflects well the providentially motivated belief to impose change! This is the very idea that Ernest Zitser (without referring to this seal) sees as the main commitment explaining Peter’s reform policy.7 And in this regard he called attention to the emblematic frontispiece of Peter’s Naval Statute (1720) where providentialism was expressed through visual symbolism in the radiating triangle above the mast of a sailboat, and explicitly in the poem at the bottom: “Divine Providence unveils [for us] that which in Time is carried out according to His will. The unthinkable is possible if Divine Providence makes it so. For His thoughts and ways are as removed from us as the distance between the heavens

4 Collis, Petrine Instauration, 370–372. In addition to the elements mentioned, on the right side of the seal there are two columns that Collis interprets “as the two pillars of Jachin and Boaz, as described in 1 Kings 7:15–22 that stood at the entrance to the first Temple in Jerusalem constructed by Solomon, son of David.” In his view, this shows the sculptor “as a new King David preparing his kingdom to take its place as the chosen nation in the New Jerusalem.” Ibid., 371. 5 Ibid., 371–372. 6 Ibid. 7 Ernest A. Zitser, “The Difference that Peter I Made,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Russian History, ed. Simon Dixon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 8.

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and the earth.”8 Thus, it seems, that providentialism was at the heart of both Peter’s and Prokopovich’s state of mind.9 The importance of the mythological Pygmalion story for Peter is also shown by the fact that it was used by Gavriil Buzhinskii, whose name was mentioned already in connection with the exposition of Petrine ideology. Buzhinskii “openly referred to Ovid’s Metamorphoses when he accounted for Peter’s reforms, but said that in Peter’s case it was for real, ‘Raise your eyes, blessed Russian state [Derzhavo], and see the ineffable metamorphosis in your forces, yet not the fable one, but the genuine.’”10 The iconographic message of Peter’s seal was also in accordance with the idea expounded by Prokopovich in 1722, namely, that the ruler, as sovereign, can do everything in his state: give it the shape he deems fit, due to his divine mandate. This creationist dimension of the ruler’s power, expressed in words and image, was quite new, and came from that aspect of sovereignty that emphasized lawmaking as its crucial attribute. Although Prokopovich did not discuss the relationship between sovereignty and state in any of his writings, the new approach to highest power is worth mentioning both from the perspective of the iconography of Peter’s seal, and of the reasoning that can be termed scriptural or divine sovereignty, encapsulating with this phrase Prokopovich’s arguments in his discussion of sovereignty in the “Justice of the Monarch’s Will.” Jens Bartelson, as noted before, called attention to the fact that “notions of supreme authority originated in the myths of divine omnipotence,” and relying on Cassirer’s theory of symbols,11 he raised the idea that sovereignty “can be best understood as a symbolic form.”12 Furthermore, with regard to political symbolism he followed Michael Walzer’s classic statement on the state, the one that I have already quoted at the beginning of this book: “The state is invisible. It has to be personified before it can be seen, symbolized before it can be loved, imagined before it can be conceived.” And Bartelson added immediately: “I take sovereignty to be crucial in this regard as it has traversed the different modes of symbolization identified by Cassirer.”13 I have shown aspects of this symbolization before with 8 Ibid., 2. 9 Visual expression of providentialism was employing an imagery borrowed from postTridentine Baroque art: the all-seeing eye in a radiating triangle is a frequent symbolic element in Petrine engravings. 10 Quoted from Reshetnikov, “The Evolution of Russia’s Great Power Discourse,” 119. 11 “Symbolic forms are not imitations, but organs of reality, since it is solely by their agency that anything real becomes an object for intellectual apprehension, and as such is made visible to us.” Quoted by Bartelson, Sovereignty, 15. 12 Ibid., VII, 14–15. 13 Ibid., 15.

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regard to one of George Wither’s emblems (1635), which is a good illustration of Cassirer’s words. The iconography of Peter’s seal can also be interpreted in the context of “divine omnipotence” and “symbolic forms”: sovereignty, rooted in divine omnipotence (triangle with rays, with the name of God in Hebrew in the triangle, the motto Adiuvante), was made visible through Peter’s work of hewing out (that is, forging and animating) the state, represented in the person of a female figure, in the shape of a queen, which is the allegorical personification of Russia. In connection with the theory of sovereignty as a symbolic form, it has to be noted, however, that before Bartelson’s book Thomas Maissen already dealt with this problem with regard to female allegorical personifications as symbols of sovereignty and state in Western Christendom. His research is highly relevant with regard to Petrine Russia, because of the Westernization of ideology and iconography. In his discussion of early modern political theology, namely, what kind of role it played in shaping and publicizing the “visual language of politics,” Maissen showed that, with the appearance of the Bodinian concept of sovereignty, the allegorical personifications of state/nation and sovereignty as female figures became increasingly popular.14 Either the figure of Minerva was used for this purpose, or the image of Virgin Mary sitting in a hortus conclusus was expropriated and adapted.15 The fact that visual allegorical personification of Russia as a female figure was surfacing only under Peter the Great had to do with the undeveloped notion of the state in Russia, and the differences in Western Christian and Orthodox Christian iconography. How and when exactly did this phenomenon make its appearance in Russia? The iconography of Peter’s seal was an early but not the first manifestation of this phenomenon. The first image of this kind probably was the celebratory jeton issued in 1696 on the occasion of the creation of the Russian Azov fleet, which also showed Russia as a queen. In1704 we find it written of Peter the Great in a panegyric by Iosif Turoboiskii, also a prominent Ukrainian cleric who entered Peter’s service and became the prefect of the Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy: “Every king/tsar is a bridegroom [zhenikh] in his kingdom/tsardom [na tsarstve].”16 Since this sentence was placed in the work in quotation marks, it seems to have been considered a general truth at that time. The context of the passage is eloquent, for this sentence

14 Maissen, “Die Bedeutung der christlichen Bildsprache für die Legitimation frühneuzeitlicher Staatlichkeit,” 76–93. 15 Ibid. 16 Panegiricheskaia literatura Petrovskogo vremeni, 179.

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is encountered in a text decoding the visual imagery of a triumphal gate erected on the occasion of Peter’s triumphal entry into Moscow after his conquest of Ingermanland. At the beginning of his work, the author makes clear that the purpose of his panegyric is the “explanation of the symbols and emblems” of the gate! Moreover, before the sentence containing the marriage metaphor, the author gives the following explanation of the relevant image of the gate, namely, the image depicting Perseus freeing Andromeda: “This represents His Tsarist Majesty since he freed Ingermanland, as if a bride, from the unjust Swedish captivity.”17 And a little later the work describes the liberation of this land metaphorically as a “new marriage [brak]” where Ingermanland (Izherskaia zemlia) is identified as the “gorgeous bride [nevesta] of the tsar.”18 As Ingermanland was regarded as part of the Russian state, yet under foreign rule until the tsar’s liberation of it, this liberation was conceived as a new union, or a new marriage. The triumphal gates with their new symbolism taken from the West, as well as the publication of their description with explanations, similarly to the engraved portraits of Peter, which were stripped of religious attributes, as in the central image in the frontispiece of his “emblem book”—depicting Peter as a military leader, in the original sense of the word imperator—had a clear purpose: “to reeducate society and to impress upon it a new conception of state power.”19 As we have seen, the idea that there is an entity distinct from the ruler could only be traced in an embryonic form in Russia before 1700 because of the lack of political thought in the Western sense. The words denoting this entity were “the land” (zemlia), then, increasingly, Moskovskoe gosudarstvo over the course of the seventeenth century, and then simply gosudarstvo under Peter. Gosudarstvo eventually would come to mean “state” in modern Russian, but even in the eighteenth century (and in the nineteenth as well) it remained very closely associated with the person of the ruler. The thorough analysis of oaths of loyalty under Peter by Claudio Ingerflom (and his whole treatment of the issue of gosudarstvo) deserves special attention, hence it is worth quoting his summary at length: Was there a separate oath to the state? Was it the rule? Let us summarise the answers. To go by the nine oaths pertaining to Peter’s reign that I have found, one can say that: 1. There was no separate oath of loyalty sworn to the gosudarstvo; 2. In only one oath, in 1711, Senators pledged loyalty to the “gosudar′” and 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Zhivov, Language and Culture, 49.

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to the “gosudarstvo’’ at the same time and in the same sentence; 3. In all the oaths loyalty is sworn to the Gosudar′; 4. There is no mention of the word gosudarstvo in four oaths dating between 1710–1722; 5. Four other oaths dating between 1716–1721 mention the duty to combat the enemies of “territories and gosudarstvo of his Majesty the Tsar” and service in the interests of the gosudarstvo after the duty to be loyal to the monarch; 6. The inclusion of loyalty to the gosudarstvo is totally unsystematic.20 This summary, similarly to Wortman’s above remarks on Russian monarchy and the Russian state, is a good indication of the fact that gosudarstvo was “striving” for its place in political vocabulary, yet, it remained, I would say, (in) the shadow of the monarch. Sergei Pol′skoi in his excellent article summarizing his research on the impact of Western ideas on Russian political concepts in the eighteenth century21— among them the crucial ones, sovereignty and state—called the decades between 1700 and 1720 the era of “terminological experiments,” and he sees the 1720s and the 1730s as “the turning point for the formation of a new political lexicon,” characterized by the “search for equivalents,” and considers the 1740s–1760s the time when gosudarstvo really acquired the meaning of “state” in Russian.22 Certainly, the following excerpt from the foreword written by an anonymous author to the Russian translation of Richelieu’s political testament in 1725 was rather the exception than the rule at the end of the period under analysis because of its clarity in rendering the concepts of the politician and of politics, and its use of gosudarstvo: For as the shadow follows every man, so does bad reputation the great men but especially the ones who are rulers of States [Gosudarstvennym pravitelem]. For it is impossible to do to the 20 Ingerflom, “‘Loyalty to the State’ under Peter the Great?,” 14. 21 He identified “two dominant ways through which European political concepts were adopted.” One was that “a concept could be introduced after people read the original written work,” or just part of it, and the result was that “the Russian language incorporated the semantic content” of a given concept. Then came the second stage: “A reader used the new terminology ‘translating’ it into Russian in his own writing.” This was the case, for instance, with some authors in case of sovereignty when maiestas and Majestät were translated as velichestvo. The other way was “through spontaneous translation” of such political writings that contained a cluster of associated political concepts. Pol′skoi, “Translation of Political Concepts in 18thCentury Russia. Strategies and Practices,” 248–249. 22 Ibid., 254–262.

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comfort of every man, either because State regulations and interests [Gosudarstvennye reguly i interesy] do not allow it, or due to accidental negligence, while human weakness is malicious, and it does not praise, but says spiteful things. However, it is not fitting for any minister to look upon these human weaknesses and treat them as an incompetence allowing [him to do] bad things but he has to fulfil his duty with magnanimity and strive as much as possible to be a good minister, which means: to be a good Christian, and a good politician [dobrym politikom]. To be a good Christian, for the reason that a minister wields not a small portion of monarchical power [chast′ monarkhicheskoi vlasti] over all other men, and if he is not a good Christian, he will not have a good conscience and will not do good things but will do evil with that power, and will care more about his own interests than those of the State and all the people [Gosudarstvennye i vsenarodnye]: to the harm of the State [vred Gosudarstvu] he will insult the poor, accuse the righteous, protect the evil men, suppress and persecute the good. … Such a minister without Christianity cannot be called a good minister but an evildoer and destroyer. He has to be a good politician [dobrym politikom]: for the reason that ministerial policy [ministerskaia politika] is to preserve the State in a good condition [Gosudarstvo v blagopoluchii], keep it away from an unjust war, spread the glory of his State and his Ruler [slavu svoego Gosudarstva i Gosudaria] and increase the wealth and all kinds of satisfaction of the people. For this reason, true politics [politika] is the art of governing the State [khudozhestvo upravliat′ Gosudarstvom]. …23 Regardless of the problems of adopting the concept of state and the fluidity of its terminology, I think it important that the emphasis laid by Peter the Great on gosudarstvo/otechestvo as an object of loyalty and an entity—even though in a “shadow position”—distinct from, or it might seem even higher than the ruler (though in many ways this was rather a lip-service), was crucial to the fact gosudarstvo could be allegorically represented.

23 Kiselev, “Pervye shagi estestvennogo prava v Rossii i reformy Petra,” 281. The argument is clearly reminiscent of the title of Saavedra’s work, “The Idea of a Christian-Political Prince,” translated by Prokopovich.

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It is interesting to note in this regard, as Claudio Ingerflom has shown, that a hidden fusion of gosudarstvo and the religious notion of marriage between tsar and Russia is to be found in Feofan Prokopovich’s description of Peter’s speech (probably fictive), allegedly delivered before the battle of Poltava in 1709: Peter, intending to raise the courage of the soldiers, called them to fight “not for Peter but for the realm entrusted to Peter [ne za Petra no gosudarstvo Petru vruchennoe].”24 A similar phrase, as Ingerflom pointed out, appeared in 1689 (under the rule of two tsars) where tsarstvie stood instead of gosudarstvo: “nashim oboim osobam Bogom vruchennoe nam tsarstvie pravit′ samim” (“to the two of us God has entrusted to govern the tsardom ourselves”).25 The English translations, however, cannot convey the contemporary meaning of the crucial Russian adjective vruchennoe, as “entrusted” is not the only meaning of the verb vruchit′. As stated before, it “also denotes the action of giving in marriage: God gives the tsardom to the tsar as his bride.”26 And referring to this interpretation the author calls attention to the “ancient device” legitimating the tsar’s power through the mystical marriage.27 Ingerflom concludes: “The lack of recourse to any system of legal concepts and rules (basic law and other clauses) in the legitimation of the tsar’s powers means that the only—or almost the only—legitimation was religious, thus preventing politics from establishing itself as a wholly autonomous sphere.”28 As the above phrase appeared in other important state documents under Peter, Ingerflom claims that Peter conceived his relation with his realm “through a religious mooring before all else.”29 Not unexpectedly, it is also evident at the very beginning of the preamble to the Spiritual Regulation, which begins as follows: Among the many duties, emanating from the obligation of Our God-given power [po dolgu Bogodannyia Nam vlasti], to care about the correction of Our people and other affairs of the states subject to Us [o prochikh poddanykh Nam gosudarstv], taking into consideration the spiritual estate too, and seeing in it many deviations and a great poverty in its affairs … not wanting to seem unworthy to the Most High, from Whom we, indeed, have got so gracious an assistance in the correction of both civil and military 24 Ingerflom, “‘Loyalty to the State’ under Peter the Great?,” 8. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 9. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 10. 29 Ibid., 9, fn. 36.

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matters, by showing negligence in the correction of the spiritual estate.30 So, here we have the mention of gosudarstvo (in the plural), the obligation towards God, and the text goes on referring to one of the principles of divine right, which contains the “religious mooring” of Peter’s relation to his state: And when He, the non-hypocrite Judge [that is, Christ], happens to call Us to give an answer concerning that kind of appointment entrusted to Us by Him [voprosit ot Nas otveta o tolikom Nam ot Nego vruchennom pristavlenii], we will not be without an answer. For this reason, by the example of the ancient pious kings of the Old and New Testaments alike, we have undertaken the work of correcting the spiritual estate, but not seeing any better means to that end than the collective administration [sobornoe pravitel′stvo].31 Whatever one speculates about Peter’s perception of his relationship to “his state,” the growing conceptual distinction between the ruler and the realm cannot be doubted. But in the emergence of female personifications of Russia in visual sources another factor is crucial, namely, the rapid Westernization of Russian political iconography under Peter on a scale and depth not seen before. The “Petrine Revolution in Russian imagery” included the use of classical mythology, with its pagan gods and goddesses that previously had been forbidden, as well as a heavy reliance on Roman Imperial iconography and the adoption of emblematic symbolism, a genre dominating the Age of Renaissance and Baroque (as we have seen in the case of Peter’s personal seal). In the early eighteenth century the turn to antique Rome by European rulers meant “the symbolic expression of sovereignty and military glory.”32 Commemorative medals, a Petrine novelty, along with engravings, were important in popularizing the female allegory of Russia: Russia’s personification as a queen. This was the figure used not only on the medal commemorating the creation of the Russian fleet but also in the grandiose engraving depicting Catherine I’s coronation by Peter in 1724.33 Besides the two living figures in the

30 Dukhovnyi Reglament, 5. 31 Ibid., 5–6. 32 Pissis, Russland, 306. 33 Mariia Andreevna Alekseeva, Graviura petrovskogo vremeni [Engravings of the Petrine era] (Leningrad: Isskustvo, 1990), 95, 97, 99.

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image, Peter (standing on a stage under a baldachin with Neptune and Hercules on his right and pointing to Russia’s territorial extension on a globe with a stick) and Catherine (in the company of female personifications of various virtues, stepping on the stage where Minerva stands34), two female figures deserve attention. They are the biggest ones in the engraving. On the left side, below Peter, there is a crowned woman, while on the right side, below Catherine, there is a muse holding a folded scroll on which Catherine’s service to Russia are praised.35 The crowned woman is most probably the personification of Russia asking for God’s blessing and inspiration for Catherine’s rule.36 The sense of the importance of cartography (the growing sense of Russia as a territorial unit) and the allegorical personification of Russia are both present in the engraving: the two phenomena that in the West visually contributed to the development of the modern concept of state. If the reign of Peter the Great was a turning point for the emergence of representation of Russia by female figures, a second epoch clearly began after Peter’s death in 1725. The crucial factor was that, for most of the period between 1725 and 1796, unprecedentedly for Russia, the country came to be ruled by females. This novelty required a massive propaganda of legitimation, and of the tools employed for this purpose the coronation jetons were crucial as a vehicle of legitimation. Beginning from 1730, female figures become prominent in the coronation jetons of female rulers, partly as the personification of Divine Providence: this iconography, in my view, clearly served to legitimize the given woman on the throne. Furthermore, female figures were also increasingly used as allegorical representations of Russia itself, a phenomenon that cannot be separated from the previous issue. To put it shortly: they were two sides of the same coin. To quote just a few examples. In the bottom right section of  Empress Elisabeth’s coronation jeton of 1742 we can see a woman, symbolising Russia, carrying a shield emblazoned with the coat of arms of Russia. On one of Catherine II’s coronation jetons from 1762 there is the inscription, “For saving the faith and the fatherland,” and corresponding to it are two allegorical female figures, one with a cross, the other with a crown on her head. In another of her coronation jetons an allegory of Russia, a woman in kneeling position, offers the regalia to Catherine II. In my view, in eighteenth-century Russia these jetons became an

34 Wortman, Scenarios, 67–68. 35 Ibid., 69. 36 Ibid., 68.

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important element attached to coronation, the ritual that Edward Muir classified as the most important ritual “enacting kingship.”37 Though female rule ended in Russia in 1796, representing Russia by a female figure had already become quite common by then. In the 1730s, a full-figure portrait of Peter the Great standing with Minerva was commissioned abroad and painted by Jacopo Amiconi. (Image 6.) This painting served as a model for an engraving popularizing this image. (The portrait was eventually placed in the small throne room of the St. Petersburg Winter Palace in 1833.) The arrangement of the pose of Minerva looking at/up to Peter with devotion is also a good proof that in the relationship between the ruler and the state, Peter dominated. Peter’s achievements in war (the fleet in the background and the cannon under his feet) and culture (books) figure prominently, and the new, European type of crown, which is an imperial type of crown, signifies not only Westernization but also the new standing of Russia in Europe. The culmination of this Minerva-like imagery in coronation jetons came in 1797. On the obverse of Emperor Paul’s coronation jeton there is the image of the emperor himself, but on the reverse we see in profile a seated woman in antique dress wearing a helmet and holding a lance. Her association with Russia is made explicit with the coat of arms of Russia on her shield. This female figure, resembling more Dea Roma than Minerva, was probably modelled on a contemporary coin depicting Britannia. The period of female rule may have revised the idea of the metaphoric marriage between the ruler and Russia by requiring a change of the term used for the coronation ritual: instead of venchanie, koronatsiia was used in 1724 when Peter crowned his wife Catherine Empress of Russia, and the latter was also used in 1730 and 1742, eventually changing into koronovanie in 1762. Cultural Westernization may not have been the main or only reason for abandoning the old term venchanie as Wortman claims.38 The word venchanie may no longer have been adequate, since it referred to the religious concept of the male ruler’s marriage to his tsardom as a bride. By 1762 the new term gained currency and was retained until the end of the tsarist regime, even under male rulers.

37 Muir distinguishes between rituals “enacting kingship” (that is, “performances necessary to make someone a king”) and “representing kingship” (performances of various kinds such as royal entries, which had the purpose of “signifying”), although he admits that the line between the two is hard to draw in some cases. Muir, Rituals, 247. In Russia, given the problems of succession until 1796, especially in case of female rulers, these jetons can be treated as an important auxiliary medium linked to coronations in conveying legitimacy. 38 Wortman, Scenarios, 70.

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Joseph (Giuseppe) Wagner, Petrus Magnus Russorum Imperator Pater Patriae, print made after Jacopo Amiconi (c. 1734–1739). British Museum, London. Permission received from the Trustees of the British Museum.

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To conclude on the notion of the state in the Petrine era: Frequent references to gosudarstvo, references in which gosudarstvo is distinct from and higher than the tsar and his will, were rather a lip-service—the iconography of Peter’s seal (and Prokopovich’s comment on it) as well as the “Justice of the Monarch’s Will” are clear proofs of this statement. Under these circumstances gosudarstvo remained, as Dixon subsumed, not a “political agent on its own right, to which all subjects owed allegiance and which the tsar had himself a duty to maintain, but rather as an object, itself under the control of the tsar—it was ‘his’ state he used as he pleased, the state that he upheld in order to maintain his own position.”39 The person in power at a given moment enjoys priority vis-à-vis the state, and bends its organs and structure (now even its constitution) in the direction he deems convenient for himself—this attitude became the keynote of Russian statehood. This relationship under Peter is best expressed visually in the engraving of F. Ottens printed in the year of 1722. On the bottom of the engraving the subscription (written in French) reads “Emperor Peter the Great presents Ancient Russia with Truth, Religion, and the Arts.” The engraving depicts Peter in the guise of a Roman emperor, wearing armor and a cloak, with a wreath of laurels on his head. Peter stands on a two-storey dais in front of a throne placed under a baldachin, and on the top of the baldachin the coat of arms of Russia can be seen. Peter’s right arm is held upwards pointing to two women sitting in a cloud, the female allegorical representations of Truth (a woman holding a scepter with an animated Sun on its top) and Faith (a woman holding a cross with her right hand that rests on a book), respectively. Peter’s left hand points to a round table in front of him, which is full of objects symbolizing various arts (for example, painting and music) and sciences, and in front of the table there are two globes, a sun-clock, and (a bit to the left side) two books. Opposite to Peter, lower than the emperor, stands a woman in traditional Russian clothes, showing deep deference to Peter, which is emphasized not only by her downward look focusing on the table but also by her bended knee and the gestures of her hands. Peter looks at her in giving the presents mentioned but her gaze cannot meet Peter’s (her eyes even seem to be closed!) due to her deep deference or subordination. No doubt, Peter dominates the allegorical personification of Russia. Autocracy excluded the possibility of the completion of the concept of the state, that is, the state’s existence fully in its own right and taking first place with regard to the person of the monarch. As Claudio Ingerflom put it wittily: “to say it almost in Russian, the samoderzhavnost′ of the gosudar′ was incompatible with the samoderzhavnost′ of the gosudarstvo.”40 39 Dixon, Modernisation, 190–191. 40 Ingerflom, “‘Loyalty to the State’ under Peter the Great?,” 14.

Epilogue: The Importance of Gosudarstvennost′ in Contemporary Russia

Framing my book in the context of the longue durée, the analysis of the Russian notions of power and state culminates in some remarks on the 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation, which, after its amendments, is in force at the present. In my analysis I do not intend to specify the most recent changes, so what follows is based on the text of the constitution, which was in force before the last amendment in 2020. The preamble to the constitution is particularly illuminating as it refers to the historical tradition of Russian statehood, furthermore, it contains those terms, which became the key issues of Russian political rhetoric under Peter the Great. Just to mention the “trinity” of gosudarstvo, Rossiia, Otechestvo, which came to be standard references in Petrine sources of various kinds, ranging from official state documents to panegyric literature. The preamble and the articles of the constitution, however, are also significant from an additional aspect, that is, they prove the continuity of certain “charismatic words,” which are par excellence related to the Russian notions of power and state in a document that is the most important piece of state law. As noted, some Russian phrases and words were called “charismatic” by Richard Wortman because they acquired quasi-sacral meaning in Russian, although they were not necessarily of religious origin, and the “aura of authority resonated” in them.1 One who is familiar with Russian mentality and to some extent the course of Russian history would not be surprised that these phrases and words in question “conferred this aura of transcendence” first on the person of the monarch2 (and I can add, also, on those in power), and as a consequence, eventually on the state itself. This is the case, first of all, with the word tselost′ (after 1917, tselostnost′), 1 Wortman, Power of Language and Rhetoric, 2. 2 Ibid.

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as Richard Wortman has demonstrated (and it has been treated at length in this book previously), while edinstvo was also used as its synonym in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Let us see some other historical examples of this charismatic word in the spirit of serial contextualism before moving to contemporary history. It was used by the greatest of the reformer tsars, Alexander II (1855–1881), in a context clearly embedded in the Russian idea, emphasizing the difference between Russia and the West. In 1865, in one of his letters, he expressed the “close connection between autocracy and the unity of the empire,” stating: “Constitutional forms on the mode of the West would be the greatest misfortune here, and would have as their first consequence not the unity of the State but the disintegration of the Empire into pieces [ne edinstvo Gosudarstva, a raspadenie imperii na kuski].”3 Similar examples can be found in the manifestos issued by Nicholas II in 1905 in the midst of a deep political crisis known as the revolution of 1905, which followed the Bloody Sunday of January 9. Although the manifestos were intended to calm down social unrest by promising political reforms, yet, all these reforms were clearly to be tamed by the persistence of the traditional attitude to power subsumed in the concept of tselost′. The Highest Manifesto of August 6, 1905, begins as follows: The Russian State was being created and strengthened by the unbreakable unity of the Tsar with the people, and of the people with the Tsar. The concord and unity [soglasie i edinenie] of the Tsar and the people is a great moral force that had shaped Russia during the course of centuries, preventing her from all kinds of calamities and disasters, and stays until now the guarantee of her unity [edinstva] independence and integrity [tselosti], her material wellbeing and spiritual development in the present and the future.4 While the tsar claimed in the manifesto “preserving unchanged the fundamental law [osnosvnoi zakon] of the Russian Empire on the essence of Autocratic

3 Quoted by Wortman, who adds that the last words were underlined by the tsar! Ibid., 166. 4 Vysochaishii manifest ob uchrezhdenii Gosudarstvennoi Dumy (1905 g. 6 Avgusta) [Highest manifesto on the establishment of State Duma (August 6, 1905)], https://russportal.ru/index. php?id=russia.manifest1905_08_06_01.

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Power,” he also proclaimed that he “deemed good to establish a State Duma, and confirmed a Statute on the elections to the Duma.”5 In the October 17 Manifesto promising civil rights and stating that no law shall be passed without the consent of the future State Duma, the events of 1905 were plainly called a smuta (three times). Nicholas declared that the “high calling of tsarist duty orders” him “to put an end to this disorder so dangerous for the state [opasnoi dlia gosudartva smuty],” and he also called “all loyal sons of Russia” to work for “the restoration of tranquillity and peace in the motherland.”6 It is, however, the introduction to the manifesto, which is even more eloquent on the issue: “From the disturbances that appeared most recently, may arise a great popular disorder, and a threat to the integrity and unity of our state/rule [tselosti i edinstvu nashei derzhavy].”7 As not the word gosudarstvo but derzhava is employed here with tselost′ and edinstvo, this wording clearly could convey the interrelated meaning: referring both to territorial integrity and the integrity of autocratic power (samoderzhavie)! Moving closer to the present situation, the charismatic phrase, “integrity of the state” (tselostnost′ gosudarstva) figures prominently in the 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation. Of course, the territorial integrity of the state is a concept that was/is vital to all states, and phrases like this acquire(d) special importance at moments of crisis elsewhere too. With regard to contemporary Russia, the occurrence of this terminology in the 1993 Constitution is understandable, given the context of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Still, the longevity of this phrase and the emphasis placed on it for three hundred years show that it means more than simply a contextual reaction to the dissolution of the Soviet State, which is apparent in the light of “serial contextualism.” William Pomeranz stated plainly with regard to the 1993 constitution: “search for unity, and the unified state, represented one of the essential links between the tsarist and the Soviet systems” and “state unity remained the ultimate political objective”—consequently, “nothing that could endanger the integrity of the state, could ever be tolerated.”8 No wonder that Gorbachev was the most unpopular of all party secretaries, as it was during his term of office that the Soviet Union disintegrated. No wonder that reference to the notion of state unity—in both wordings (tselostnost′, edinstvo)—appears in the text of the constitution from 5 Ibid. 6 Manifest ob usovershenstvovanii gosudarstvennogo poriadka 17 oktiabria 1905 goda [Manifesto on the impovement of state order, October 17, 1905], http://www.hist.msu.ru/ER/Etext/ oct1905.htm. 7 Ibid. 8 Pomeranz, Law and the Russian State, 64, 65.

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the very beginning. The 1993 Constitution is clearly statist in its spirit, and the main tenets of this perception were also reflected in Putin’s inauguration speech, as we shall see. Pomeranz nicely encapsulated the statist character of the constitution in the following manner: “One of the most distinctive features of the 1993 constitution concerned the prominent role given to the Russian state. No one chapter articulated the power of the state, yet it was omnipresent from the start.”9 Furthermore, the constitution is characterized as “a product of Russian history with numerous links to its statist past, rather than wholesale foreign borrowing.”10 I will argue that a careful analysis of terms and wordings of the preamble will show that state integrity was indeed just “one of the essential links” between the imperial and later periods of Russian history, although no doubt, it was the most visible sign of this continuity. The preamble reads: We, the multinational people of the Russian Federation, united by a common fate on our land, establishing human rights and freedoms, strengthening11 civic peace and concord [mir i soglasie], preserving the historically established state unity [gosudartsvennoe edinstvo] proceeding from the universally recognized principles of equality and self-determination of peoples, revering the memory of ancestors who have conveyed to us the love for the Fatherland [liubov′ k Otechestvu], belief in the good and justice, reviving the sovereign statehood of Russia [suverennuiu gosudarstvennost′ Rossii] and asserting the firmness of its democratic basis, striving to ensure the well-being and prosperity of Russia, proceeding from the responsibility for our Fatherland before the present and future generations, recognizing ourselves as part of the world community, adopt the CONSTITUTION OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION.12

9 Ibid., 124. 10 Ibid. 11 This word is missing from the translation I used. 12 I used the original Russian text, which I compared with the English translation, and modified the latter whenever I saw it necessary. Konstitutsiia Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 1993, accessed April 7, 2020, http://publication.pravo.gov.ru/Document/View/0001201408010002; and Constitution of the Russian Federation 1993, accessed April 7, 2020, http://www.constitution. ru/en/10003000-01.htm.

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The main message of the preamble is preserving “Russia’s historic ‘state unity’ and renewing its ‘sovereign statehood.’”13 In the text of the preamble to the constitution the wording related to the idea of consent is the reference to “peace [mir] and concord [soglasie],” which implies harmony. If we recall the leitmotif of Tatishchev’s “History of Russia” (“If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand”) calling for “peace and concord” as the key to the integrity of the state, we can notice that “strengthening civic peace and concord,” and “preserving the historically established state unity” are not accidently placed one after another! And we can also hear the reminiscences of the Highest Manifesto of 1905 referring to Russia’s history: the “concord and unity” (soglasie i edinstvo) of tsar and people, “the great moral force that had created Russia in the course of the centuries.” The importance of the concept of tselostnost′ is further enhanced in the very first articles of the constitution: Article 4:3.  The Russian Federation shall ensure the integrity and inviolability of its territory [tselostnost′ i neprikosvennost′ svoei territorii]. Article 5:3. The federal structure of the Russian Federation is based on its state integrity [na gosudarstvennoi tselostnosti], the unity of the system of state power14 [edinstve sistemy gosudarstvennoi vlasti], the delimitation of affairs with regard to the conduct and [scope of] powers15 between the organs of state power of the Russian Federation [gosudarstvennoi vlasti Rossiiskoi Federatsii], and organs of state power of the constituents [sub′′ektami] of the Russian Federation [gosudarstvennoi vlasti Rossiiskoi Federatsii], the equality and self-determination of peoples in the Russian Federation.16 This is the very clause that asserts the strong link between territorial integrity and unity of state power, using both tselostnost′ and edinstvo with regard to the 13 Pomeranz, Law and the Russian State, 124. 14 The translation here uses “state authority.” 15 The translation of the English text here is not correct as it reads: “the division of subjects of authority and powers between the bodies of state power of the Russian Federation, and bodies of state power of the subjects of the Russian Federation”. 16 Konstitutsiia, 2; Constitution.

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state, and reinforcing thereby the message of statism. And it was in reference to this clause that Pomeranz noted the crucial feature of the constitution quoted above: “state integrity” and a “uniform system of state power” form the base of federative structure, but “state power” is defined nowhere in the whole text!17 The omission of the definition of state I attribute to the legacy of the past. The close and mutual relationship between the territorial integrity of the state, and the strong, centralized, quasi-monarchical power is also explicit in the articles on the president: for the essence of tselostnost′ is the intimate link between territorial unity and centralized state power. Some commentators called this presidential power “super-presidentalism” and even compared the role of the president to that of the tsar:18 Article 80:2. The President of the Russian Federation shall be guarantor of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, of the rights and freedoms of man and citizen. According to the rules fixed by the Constitution of the Russian Federation, he shall adopt measures to protect the sovereignty of the Russian Federation, its independence and state integrity [gosudarstvennoi tselostnosti], ensure coordinated functioning and interaction of all the organs of state power.19 In accordance with this clause on his powers, article 82 contains the following oath to be taken by the president on his taking office: When taking office the President of the Russian Federation shall take the following oath of loyalty to the people: “I swear in exercising the powers of the President of the Russian Federation to respect and safeguard the rights and freedoms of man and citizen, to observe and protect the Constitution of the Russian Federation, to protect the sovereignty and independence,

17 Pomeranz, Law and the Russian State, 124. 18 Jane Henderson, The Constitution of the Russian Federation. A Contextual Analysis (Oxford: Hart Publishing Ltd., 2011), 112. 19 Konstitutsiia, 29; Constitution.

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security and integrity of the state [tselostnost′ gosudarstva], to faithfully serve the people.”20 Taken together, just the three last clauses containing the charismatic term tselostnost′, either standing by itself, or in phrases tselostnost′ gosudarstva, tselostnost′ gosudarstvennaia, clearly prove that Wortman’s following conclusion has much relevance to the present as well: “the integrity of the empire and absolutism [I need to change the term for autocracy] formed a symbolic and conceptual nexus. In such a context, tselost′  became more than a legal term: it represented a good in itself, unchallengeable and lasting.”21 Wortman’s long and elaborate discussion of the concept of tselost(nost)' is probably best encapsulated in this quotation: tselost′ is a cultural category, a category of representation of the monarchy that recurs in official statements and political writings. It does not, in this usage, necessarily assume legal moment, but rather constitutes one element of what I understand as a political culture of Russian monarchy. It acts to express goals considered crucial to the wielding and preservation of absolute [autocratic] power and to celebrate successes of the rule in governing a vast and diverse empire.22 It is worth analysing next in the spirit of “serial contextualism” Vladimir Putin’s Millennium Manifesto (December 29, 1999), published on his elevation to the presidency for the first time. Putin came to office at a turbulent time for Russia, which during the Yeltsin era was characterized by its diminishing importance as a great power, the strengthening of oligarchies connected to the armed structures (siloviki, from Russian sila, “force”), worsening of living conditions, and so forth. Under the umbrella term the “Russian idea” (Rossiiskaia ideia),23 the importance of which was emphasized by a separate heading in the written version of the speech, three main characteristics were identified in separate paragraphs: “Patriotism,” “Greatness [of Russia]” (Derzhavnost′), “Statism” (Gosudarstvennichestvo), and ‘Social solidarity’.24 20 Konstitutsiia, 30; Constitution. 21 Wortman, Power of Language and Rhetoric, 180. 22 Ibid., 179. 23 Vladimir Putin, Rossiia na rubezhe tysiacheletii [Russia at the turn of the millenium], December 31, 1999, https://www.ng.ru/politics/1999-12-30/4_millenium.html. Note the use of the statist adjective Rossiiskii! 24 Rossiia na rubezhe tysiacheletii.

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Greatness Russia was and will remain a huge country [velikaia [of Russia]: strana]. It is preconditioned by the inseparable characteristics of its geopolitical, economic and cultural existence. This determined the mentality of Russians [rossiian] and the policy of the state [politiku gosudarstva] throughout the history of Russia and this cannot but do so at present. … Statism: It will not happen soon, if it ever happens at all, that Russia will become the second edition of, say, the US or Britain, in which liberal values have deep historic traditions. Our state [gosudarstvo], its institutions and structures have always played an exceptionally important role in the life of the country and its people. For a Russian [citizen, dlia rossiianina] a strong state [krepkoe gosudarstvo] is not an anomaly, it is not something which should be fought with: quite the contrary, it is the source and guarantor of order, the initiator and main driving force of any change.25   Modern Russian society does not identify a strong and effective state [sil′noe i effektivnoe gosudarstvo] with a totalitarian one. We have come to value the benefits of democracy, a law-based state [pravovogo gosudarstva], and personal and political freedom. At the same time, people are alarmed by the obvious weakening of state power. The public looks forward to the restoration of the guiding and regulating role of the state [napravliaiushchei i reguliruiushchei roli gosudarstva] to a degree which is

25 Millennium Manifesto, December 29, 1999, https://www.ng.ru/politics/1999-12-30/4_ millenium.html. Italics are mine. Translation here and hereafter changed at several points. The wording of the last sentence was very similar to Gorbachev’s reference to the notion of the “good tsar”, in the sense of a “reformer tsar” in 1988. “It is necessary to expunge from people’s minds a belief in the ‘good tsar’, in the assumption that someone at the top will impose order and organize change.” This passage was the motto of an article by Whittaker, “The Reforming Tsar,” 77. In the Millennium Manifesto the state (gosudarstvo) stepped into the shoes of the ‘good tsar’, which was natural because of the strong personal connotation of gosudarstvo already mentioned.

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necessary, proceeding from the traditions and present state of the country.26 With regard to Gosudarstvennichestvo it was noted: “in that form this word tells more about an ideology precisely, than about the state as a system of institutions and procedures. Here the point is not the state [itself] but the relationship to it.”27 This is underlined by a separate section in the Manifesto devoted to the “strong state” (sil′noe gosudarstvo), stating that the main source of problems is “due to the weakness of state power and the organs of government” (iz-za slabosti gosudarstvennoi vlasti i organov upravleniia). Therefore: The key to Russia’s rebirth and rise today is in the sphere of state policy. Russia needs a strong state power [nuzhdaetsia v sil′noi gosudarstvennoi vlasti] and must have it. This is not a call for a totalitarian system. History proves all dictatorships, all authoritarian systems of government are transient. Only democratic systems are intransient. Whatever their shortcomings are, mankind has not devised anything superior.28 A strong state power [sil′naia gosudarstvennaia vlast′] in Russia is a democratic, law-based, workable federative state.29 The obstacle to the proper operation of the state was seen by Putin in the existence of the mass of laws at different levels, which raised the issue of constitutionality: 26 Millennium Manifesto. For a contemporary analysis of the issues subsumed in “statism” in terms of political culture or political tradition, James W. Warhola’s lengthy study deserves special attention where he treated the so-called “path-dependent political tendencies in Russia,” which he categorized as follows: “Public authority is viewed (and exercised) essentially as monocratic in nature; autocratic in practice, if not also in theory; ideally centralized in form and practice; and embodied in a strong state.” James W. Warhola, “Russian Autocracy Redux: Path-Dependency and the Late Modern State,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies (2012): 18. And his conclusion reads: “The persistent reappearance of autocratic traits of governance over time, despite otherwise remarkably different historical epochs, raises the suspicion that deeply rooted historico-psychological factors … continue to be operative.” Ibid., 17–18. 27 Aleksandr Kazakov, Lis severa. Bol′shaia strategiia Vladimira Putina [The fox of the north. The grand strategy of Vladimir Putin] (Moscow: Piter, 2020), 249. Generally, gosudarstvennost′ is the word used to convey the meaning that the state has priority over the individual and for the role of the state as the prime mover of society. It could also embrace the idea of Russia’s historical position of being a great power, which Putin treated here separately. The other meaning of gosudarstvennost' is “statehood.” 28 Obviously, a reference to Winston Churchill’s famous saying. 29 Millennium Manifesto. Italics are mine.

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Russia currently employs over a thousand federal laws and several thousand laws of the republics, territories, regions, and autonomous areas. Not all of them correspond to the above criterion [that is, constitutionality]. If the Ministry of Justice, the prosecutor’s office, and the judiciary continue to be as slow in dealing with this matter as they are today, the mass of questionable laws, or those that are simply invalid from the point of view of the Constitution of Russia, may become critical legally and politically. The constitutional safety of the state, the capabilities of the federal center and the manageability of the country itself, and Russia’s integrity [tselostnost′ Rossii] would then be questioned.30 In his book Wortman did not deal with the issue of tselostnost′ in the Russian Constitution but gave eloquent examples of its importance in Putin’s political rhetoric, save the Millennium Manifesto.31 From this point of view, besides the Manifesto, a special importance should be given to Putin’s 2003 speech addressing the Federal Assembly, which reflects the same premises contained in the 1993 constitution, as well as in his inaugurational speech. According to Wortman, in Putin’s 2003 speech “territorial integrity” was figuring “not only as a justification of autocratic power, but also as a unity forged by the Russian people and the state.”32 The relevant passage of the speech, quoted by Wortman, is as follows: Over the length of our history, Russia and its citizens have achieved and are achieving a truly heroic feat [podvig]: A feat in the name of the integrity [tselostnost′] of the country, of peace and stability in it. The maintenance of a state [uderzhanie gosudarstva] over a vast space, the preservation of a unique community of peoples [unikal′nogo soobshchestva narodov] under the strong positions of the country in the world—this represents not only an enormous labour. It also represents enormous sacrifices and tremendous deprivations.33

30 Millennium Manifesto. Italics are mine. 31 Wortman, Power of Language and Rhetoric, 175–176. 32 Ibid., 175. 33 The translation is Wortman’s but I also consulted the Russian text to give other important phrases from the original in brackets. Ibid. Poslanie Federal′nomu Sobraniiu Rossiiskoi Federatsii [Message to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, 2003, 2, accessed April 17, 2020, www.prlib.ru/en/node/438193.

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David McDonald remarked eloquently concerning the message of this speech: The language and imagery that Putin has employed in describing the role of the Russian state, as well as his use of state power, honour the logic of an impressively durable world-view among Russian statesmen and political thinkers concerning the attribute and raison d’étre of the state at home and abroad, that is, a specific understanding of Russian statehood [gosudarstvennost′].34 Brian D. Taylor called this phenomenon the “Code of Putinism,” meaning by that the “combination of emotion, habit, and ideas” or, in other words, “mentality.”35 And while it is true that it is not just “the code of Putin himself,” it cannot simply be restricted to Putin’s closest associates, as Taylor does.36 He refers to the “superpresidential” character of the Russian president’s power enshrined in the 1993 Constitution, which, in his view, Putin turned into “hyperpresidential,” meaning “a highly centralized version” of “electoral authoritarianism.37 Yet, there is nothing new in Putin’s rhetoric. For what he pursues in political rhetoric and political practice is, in fact, the “Russian state narrative.”38 Indeed, when Taylor quotes Putin’s words to the duma, still as prime minister, in August 1999, underlying the need of “all branches of power being subordinate to one goal—maintaining and the unity and integrity of our state,”39 then, we have a statement that could have been uttered by any nineteenth century conservative statesman or tsar. This “dirigist and mobilisational” concept of state was “historically determined by the continued hold of the absolutist worldview on successive generations of Russian statesmen.”40 And this “code,” as Gorbachev’s quoted remark attests, has made a deep imprint on mainstream Russian mentality. Putin has Peter the Great as his hero of Russian history. Beginning from Peter it has become axiomatic: strong, legally unlimited monarchic power and territorial unity of the vast state is the guarantee of the well-being of the Russian people

34 McDonald, “Domestic Conjunctures, the Russian State, and the World Outside, 1700–2006,” 147. 35 Brian D. Taylor, The Code of Putinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 2. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 4. 38 Taylor’s bibliography does not include Wortman’s book, Power of Language, which also deals with this subject. 39 Taylor, The Code of Putinism, 26. For the importance of the emphasis on unity see the name of Putin’s party, Edinaia Rossiia (United Russia)! 40 McDonald, “Domestic Conjunctures, the Russian State, and the World Outside, 1700–2006,” 147.

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and of Russia’s being a great power. All of these elements made their appearance in Prokopovich’s writings, and the vastness of territory acquired an additional and highly emotional aspect, as it has even become part of a national pride ever since in various genres of panegyrics (literature, songs, and so forth). The beginnings of this theme in literature are also linked to Prokopovich.41 Taken together, all these aspects form the Russian state tradition, the phenomenon that is otherwise called Rossiiskaia gosudarstvennost′. It was colored with various constitutional arrangements from 1906 on (the system established by the Fundamental Laws of 1906 is called semi-constitutionalism, nominal constitutionalism or sham/imaginary constitutionalism). Of the power of the president according to the 1993 Constitution, Medushevskii wrote in 2003 that “it is most closely reminiscent of the construction” established in 1906: “In fact, the Russian political system is constructed in a way that the president is placed above the division of powers, and acts as an intermediary between them and as the guarantor of the constitution.”42 I began my book with the statement that in the study of Russian thought on power and the language in which it is articulated, a long term analysis is crucial, the culmination of which can even be the present. In this case, we can speak not simply of political ideas but a political culture, or because of its centuries-long continuity, even of a political tradition. And as such, it is part of what we can call mentality. It was in the spirit of longue durée, but also keeping the compass of “serial contextualism” in mind, that I ventured to give an overview on the notions of power and gosudarstvo in the period pinpointed in the title of the book using both written and a limited number of relevant visual sources. And it was because of the issue of mentality that I included some proverbs on power in the book, whenever it was possible. For as Quentin Skinner noted, in case we want to understand what is called the political thought of societies of the past, we should try to reproduce their mentality.43 41 As Harsha Ram noted, “panegyric oratory” was one of the fields through which “the new discourse of empire was propagated,” and Prokopovich was “the key protagonist in this field, as in the theoretical elaboration of Petrine ideology.” Ram, The Imperial Sublime, 32. Prokopovich was the one to popularize “the soon influential topos that images Russia’s geographical breadth as an index of her might.” His discourses reflect “a powerful geopolitical sensibility, appraised Russia according to her power and physical extent more than for her religious piety.” Ibid., 33. As “panegyric oratory” had “close links to the religious sermon, it became a powerful tool for the festive propagation of Petrine ideology.” Ibid., 32. No wonder that the vastness of Russia’s territory has highly emotional implications in Putin’s speeches. 42 Andrei Nikolaevich Medushevskii, “Rossiiskaia konstitutsiia v mirovom politicheskom protsesse: K desiatiletiiu Konstitutsii RF 1993 g.” [The Russian constitution in the global political process: On the tenth anniversary of the 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation], Mir Rossii 3 (2003): 83. 43 Skinner, Foundations, vol. 1, XI.

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495

Index

As Russian Notions of Power and State in a European Perspective contains a detailed breakdown of a variety of topics, this index is intended to be a guide that predominantly includes (but is not limited to) the most notable figures (rulers, ecclesiastical leaders, political theorists, artists, etc.) and locations (and, occasionally, the events attached to them) that are discussed in the main text. Furthermore, the index includes the names of historians whose views are explicitly discussed in the main text and in the footnotes, whereas purely bibliographic mentions of their names in the footnotes are excluded.

Absolutism, 16, 59, 214, 255, 368, 379, 393, 428, 431, 459 Africa, 142 Agapetos, 332 Akhmatov, Ivan, 185–86 Alef, Gustave, 71 Aleksei, Tsar, 66–67, 77, 81, 134, 136, 170–71, 215–16, 228, 230, 233, 235–36, 240–41, 246–47, 266, 290, 334, 356, 366, 389 Aleksei Alekseevich, Tsarevich (son of Tsar Aleksei), 170–71, 233, 241, 356 Aleksei Petrovich, Tsarevich (son of Peter I), 285, 369–70, 373 Alexander I, Emperor of Russia, 181–84 Alexander II, Emperor of Russia, 454 Alexander Nevskii, 233 Alexandria, 229 America, 142 Amiconi, Jacopo, 450 Amsterdam, 39, 156 Ancien Régime, 5n21, 60 Andreevskii Monastery, 332 Andromeda, 444 Andrusovo, Truce of, 327, 366

Anna, Byzantine Princess, 31 Anne of Courland, 174. See also Anne, Empress of Russia Anne, Empress of Russia, 156, 397 Anthony, St., 170 Antichrist, 213, 216 Antioch, 229 Aquinas, Thomas, St., 211 Aragon, 55, 57 Aristotle, 21, 33 Armitage, David, 46, 90–91 Arnisaeus, Henning, 431n162 Arras, 55–56, 129 Artemyeva, Tatiana, 429 Asia, 142–44, 165 Assumption Cathedral, 201, 226, 233–34 Astrakhan, 30–31, 62, 67–68, 191, 245, 307 Athanasius, St., 367 Athos, Mount of, 246 Augustus, Roman Emperor, 65, 154, 221, 308, 347 Augustine, St., 131n72 Aurelius, Marcus, Roman Emperor, 133 Avraamii, 332–39 Avvakum, 216 Azov, 143, 332, 443

498

Index

Babur, Mughal Emperor, 268, 305 Backerra, Charlotte, 51–52 Bacon, Francis, 118–21, 202 Baehr, Stephen, 42n18, 235–36 Baldus de Ubaldis, 93 Balkans, 29 Baltic Navy, 82, 84 Baltic Sea, 67, 82, 84, 139 Barclay, John, 432n163 Bartelson, Jens, 15, 24, 237–38, 442–43 Bartolus of Sassoferrato, 93, 212–13 Basil, The Blessed, 222, 233 Báthori, Stephen, King of Poland, 270 Bavaria, 151 Belarus, 67 Bellarmine, 390 Benson, Samuel, 382, 384 Berezhnaya, Liliya, 140n8 Berger, Susanna, 112n1, 131 Berlin, 378 Berlin, Isaiah, 4 Bestuzhev-Riumin, Mikhail, 217 Bible, The, 119, 127, 131, 133, 221, 234, 241, 256, 344, 373, 378, 406, 421 Black, Antony, 94–95 Blackstone, William, 126, 127n59 Blanning, Tim, 59n77, 60 Bloch, Ernst, 408 Blockmans, Wim, 51n49 Bodin, Jean, 16–17, 23, 45, 60, 69n37, 78, 95, 99, 100n55, 102–4, 107–8, 189, 220, 223, 337, 347, 375, 426 Bogatyrev, Sergei, 285n8 Bokhanov, Aleksandr, 262–63 Bologna, Concordat of, 8 Bonney, Richard, 52n52 Book of Degrees, 31, 65, 169–70, 190–97, 199, 234, 349 Boris, St., 172 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, Bishop, 8n30, 359, 431n162 Botero, Giovanni, 107, 114–15

Bourbons, 55 Bourdieu, Pierre, 376 Bourges, Edict of, 8 Boyars, 65, 75, 222, 266, 277–78, 308, 312–13, 323, 330, 356–58 Braddick, Michael, 101n62 Brandenburg, 151 Brandenburg-Prussia, 54–55 Brandt, Bettina, 127, 130 Bretagne, Duchy of, 54 Brett, Annabel, 97, 108 Britain (Great Britain), 58, 119, 139, 141, 152, 460 Britannia, 112, 118–19, 124, 450 British Isles, 375 Brogi, Giovanna, 180 Bronze Horseman, 135 Brouwer, Sander, 202 Bugrov, Konstantin, 180n15, 195n27, 273n90, 396n37, 412n95 Burgess, Glenn, 291 Burgundy, Duchy of, 54–55 Burns, John, 297 Büsching, Anton Friedrich, 189 Bushkovitch, Paul, 21–22, 24n91, 161, 164, 208, 247, 250, 333n146, 348, 349n35, 350–51, 359, 380n24, 382n36, 431, 432n163, 433n165, 434–35, 438 Butler, John, 163 Buzhinskii, Gavriil, 161, 252, 369, 380n24, 412, 413n97, 442 Byzantium, 29–30, 32, 65, 73, 76, 203n58, 223, 236, 252, 351, 408 Callières, François de, 150 Canning, Joseph, 219–20 Canonists, 99 Capella, Martianus, 121 Cassirer, Ernst, 442–43 Castile, 55, 57 Catalonia, 55

Index

Catherine I, Empress of Russia, 135, 156, 174, 250, 263, 368–69, 373, 427, 448–50 Catherine II (The Great), Empress of Russia, 135, 150, 166–67, 180, 184, 263n42, 449 Catholics, 348 Caves, Monastery of The, 366, 368 Charles I, King of England, 115, 133, 213, 295 Charles XI, King of Sweden, 420 Charles XII, 138, 148, 164, 188, 368, 402 Charron, Pierre, 103–4 Chernaia, Liudmila, 290, 315 Cherniavsky, Michael, 47, 303–4 China, 22 Christ, Jesus, 66, 98, 122–23, 177, 179, 201–2, 208, 212, 217, 222, 229, 232–36, 278, 328, 370–71, 448 Christian Ernst of Beyreuth, Margrave, 332 Christianity, 32, 76, 86, 134, 142, 199–200, 206, 352, 446 Christianization, 30 Christians, 16, 140, 143, 159, 179, 301–2, 333, 389 Church Slavonic language, 97–98, 373, 375 Coleman, Janet, 204n59 Collins, James, 6n22, 8n31, 12n47, 92, 102n65, 104, 288, 337, 376n8, 401 Constantine (The Great), Roman Emperor, 134 Constantinople, 31, 63, 65, 76, 143, 156, 388, 390 Cosimo I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, 133 Cossacks, 169, 366 Cracraft, James, 26, 28, 80–81, 97, 161, 163, 329, 413n97 Crimean Tatars, 79, 331 Crummey, Robert, 79, 229, 271, 293 Cumans, 179, 181

Dal’, Vladimir, 206 Daly, James, 429 Daniil, 196n32 Daniil, metropolitan, 206n75 Dauber, Noah, 104n77 Davenant, Charles, 7 David (Dauid), Biblical King, 2, 210, 343, 424 de Madariaga, Isabel, 13n50, 15 de Vargas Machuca, Bernardo, 132 de Vos, Maerten, 127 Dea Roma, 119, 450 Decembrist movement, 185, 255, 257 Decembrists, 216–19, 255–56, 259, 284 Demidov, Nikita, 401 Denis The Aeropagite, 225 Denmark, 8, 16, 58, 60, 152 d’Entrèves, Passerino, 13n49, 93, 96n36, 219n128, 300n7 Desaguliers, J. T., 116n15 Devil, 208, 211, 213, 215–16, 330 Dewey, Horace, 73 Ditiatin, Ivan, 433 Dixon, Simon, 3–4, 221, 285, 311, 316–17, 319, 338, 379, 452 Dmitriev, Ivan, 324 Dmitrii, First False, 214–15, 302, 307, 330 Dmitrii, Second False, 312n61, 357 Dmitrii Donskoi, 351 Dmitrii Ivanovich (grandson of Ivan III), Tsarevich, 32, 351 Dmitrii Ivanovich (son of Ivan IV), Tsarevich, 233 Dnieper River, 366 Dolgorukii, Iurii, 179, 196 Don River, 142, 144 Dositheos, patriarch, 427n147 Doyle, William, 8n30 Drayton, Michael, 118–19 Drozdek, Adam, 409 du Rivault, David, 360n98

499

500

Index

Duchhardt, Heinz, 152 Dunbabin, Jean, 93 Dyson, Kenneth, 89n1, 309–310 Eastland, 162 Eleazar (Elisei), 365, 367 Elisabeth, Empress of Russia, 449 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 269, 274n97, 305, 326 Elliott, John, 52n52, 57 Enciso, Gonzalez, 58 England, 2, 8–9, 12, 22–23, 26, 48, 56–57, 91–92, 100–101, 109, 115, 118, 133, 135, 213, 291, 304, 319, 326, 341, 348 Enlightenment, 165, 218 Erren, Lorenz, 285n10 Ertman, Thomas, 58n75 Esau, 373 Esaulov, I. A., 120 Estonia, 67 Europa, 139–40, 142 Europe, 5–6, 9–10, 15, 21, 28, 51, 58–59, 63, 92–94, 97, 100, 119, 125, 129, 138–46, 148–50, 152, 154, 156–57, 159–61, 165, 202, 207, 252, 254, 264–65, 288–90, 292, 319, 325, 332, 337, 347, 381, 393, 401, 431, 450 Europeanization, 139 Europeans, 138 Evdokhiia Lukianovna, 313 Falconet, Étienne Maurice, 135 Fedor (Ivanovich) I, Tsar, 224, 233, 265, 297, 347, 354n59, 355–56 Fedor III, Tsar (also Tsarevich Fedor Alekseevich), 134, 136, 204, 233, 248, 350, 356–57 Feodosii, St., 170 Feofan Prokopovich, 21, 24, 37, 41–42, 85, 155, 160, 166, 186, 189, 223–24, 252, 264, 344, 362, 365, 367–68, 375, 397, 425, 447

Feros, Antonio, 297n82 Feuille, Daniel de la, 39 Figgis, Neville, 359 Filaret, patriarch, 233 Filimonov, Grigorii, 234–35 Filippov, Szergej, 165 Filiushkin, Alexandr, 68, 80n102, 253 Filmer, Robert, 429n158, 431n162 Florence, 63, 133 Florenskii, Pavel, 254n8 Fonvizin, Denis, 38, 403n68 Forset, Edward, 106, 108 Foucault, Michel, 6 France, 8, 12, 16, 23, 48, 54–55, 59–61, 92, 100–101, 141, 150, 152, 202, 258, 288, 292, 299–300, 309, 337, 358–59 Francis I, King of France, 102, 337 Franklin, Simon, 98 Frederick William I, King of Prussia, 151 Frederick III, Elector of Brandenburg, King of Prussia as Frederick I, 151 French Revolution, 6, 52, 185, 254, 294 Frost, Robert, 13n50, 14n51, 19n73, 20n76 Galatea, 41, 135 Genoese Republic, 394 George, St., 133 Gerhard, Dietrich, 51, 59n77, 79 Germania, 112 Getty, Arch, 50n43 Giambologna, 133 Gill, Graem, 118 Gizel, Innokentii, 169 Gleb, St., 172 Godunov, Boris, Tsar, 215, 225, 247, 301, 355–56 Golden Horde, 29, 31, 264 Goldfrank, David, 209 Gonneau, Pierre, 349 Goodrich, Peter, 127

Index

Gorbachev, Mikhail, 455, 460n25 Grala, Hieronim, 194n26 Greeks, 29, 395 Greenfeld, Liah, 359, 399–403 Griboedov, Fedor Akimovich, 169–70 Grotius, Hugo, 9, 24, 91, 95, 147, 161, 223, 408, 422nn132–33, 426, 434–35 Gurvich, Georgii, 434 Habsburg, 152, 286, 370 Habsburgs, 54–55, 74n67, 286 Halle University, 8 Halperin, Charles, 11n40, 12–13, 17, 68n36, 197, 253, 265, 279n128 Halpérin, Jean-Louis, 5n21, 6n23 Hamburg, Gary, 1n1, 4, 33n123, 180, 188n1, 199n42, 203n58, 243, 244n212, 301–2, 329, 333n146, 336n159, 374n1, 383n39, 409 Hartley, Janet, 264n49 Haude, Ambrosius, 378 Hellie, Richard, 322, 327n119 Henry II, King of France, 228n158 Henry III, King of France, 337 Henry IV, King of France, 55, 102, 133, 360n98 Herberstein, Sigismund von, 71, 73, 77–78 Hercules, 28, 44–45, 449 Hilandar Monastery, 246 Hippisley, Antony, 241n200 Hirschi, Caspar, 119 Hobbes, Thomas, 15n56, 24, 48, 49n39, 91, 93n20, 95–96, 106, 109–110, 115, 125–26, 147, 214, 223, 237–38, 247, 326, 347, 375, 387, 414 Hohenzollern, 151 Hohenzollerns, 54 Holenstein, André, 19n74 Holland, 395–96 Hosking, Geoffrey, 50

Howell, James, 56, 147 Hubbs, Joanna, 124 Hughes, Lindsey, 250, 351, 354 Huguenots, 9 Hungarians, 179 Hungary, 91 Iaroslav, 172 Iavorskii, Stefan, 389–91 India, 157 Ingerflom, Claudio, 48n38, 202, 263n42, 264, 307, 444, 447, 452 Ingermanland, 444 Ingraham, Barton, 325, 343 Investiture Contest, 229, 413 Iosif Volotskii, 197 Iosifliane ( Josephites), 199 Iov, patriarch, 233 Irina, widow of Tsar Fedor I, 354n59, 356 Isidore of Seville, 211, 303 Islam, 86 Italia, 119 Italy, 9, 133, 370 Iuda ( Judas), 218 Iurganov, Andrei, 295, 322, 355 Ivan III, 13n50, 14n51, 26, 31–32, 61–66, 69, 70–72, 74, 154, 168, 173, 178, 182–83, 196, 247, 267–68, 271, 289n29, 305, 349, 351–54 Ivan IV (The Terrible), Tsar, 12, 17, 29, 31–32, 62, 66, 75, 133, 163, 191–92, 194, 197, 201–2, 216, 246–47, 263, 265–66, 269–70, 274n97, 293, 305–6, 307n36, 330, 347, 355n69, 416 Ivan V, co-Tsar with Peter I, 350, 357 Ivanov, Andrey, 218, 365n1, 368–69, 386n3, 390–91 Jacob, 192, 373 Jagiellons, 66 Jellinek, Georg, 126n58

501

502

Index

James I, King of England, 115, 118–19, 122, 202–3, 212n96, 347, 360–61. See also James VI James II, King of England, 348 James VI, King of Scotland, 302, 343 Jena, 152 Jephthah, 226 Jerusalem, 134, 222, 370 Jesse, tree of, 192, 232–34 Jesuit, 22, 366–67 Jews, 226, 389 John III, King of Sweden, 270n78, 307n36 John Chrysostom, St., 235 John Climacus, St., 192 John of Salisbury, 123n44, 211 Jordan, 222 Joseph of Volokolamsk, 33, 75, 197, 199–201, 203–210, 213–16, 221, 223–24, 240, 333, 360n98, 436 Judaizer heresy, 197, 199–200 Judas, 75, 218 Julian, The Apostate, 210 Kahan, Arcadius, 83 Kalita, Ivan, 233–34, 350–51 Kämpfer, Franz, 134, 136n100 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 122–23, 202, 304, 345, 360 Karamzin, Nikolai Mikhailovich, 181–86, 224, 254–55, 259 Karpov, Fedor, 33, 206n75, 346 Kavelin, Konstantin, 185 Kazan, 30–31, 62, 67–68, 191, 222, 245, 307 Keene, Edward, 151 Kharkhordin, Oleg, 90n5, 269n76, 284, 289–90, 299, 310n55, 332, 337 Khmel’nitskii, Bogdan, 246, 366 Khovanskii, Ivan, 330 Kiev, 169, 190, 365–69 Kievan Rus’, 22, 61, 66, 122, 169–70, 190, 192, 267nn66–67

Kiselev, Mikhail, 380, 396n37, 397–99, 403, 428, 435 Kivelson, Valerie, 20, 24n93, 283–84, 295–96, 416n114 Kleimola, Ann, 73, 77 Klein, Joachim, 412n95 Kliuchevskii, Vasilii, 385 Koenigsberger, Helmut, 52n52 Kohut, Zenon, 169 Kollmann, Nancy Shields, 20n80, 24n93, 191, 223, 278, 292, 314, 319, 329, 336 Konstantinos IX Monomakhos, Byzantine Emperor, 30 Korkunov, Nikolai, 259 Koselleck, Reinhart, 337n161 Kotilaine, Jarmo, 83 Kotoshikhin, Grigorii, 81, 247, 266, 329–30, 337 Kozlov, 81 Kremlin, 222, 232–34, 355, 358 Krizhanich, Iurii, 377 Krom, Mikhail, 10, 11n40, 13n50, 14n51, 18, 68–69, 70n46, 190, 191n9, 268, 270n78, 279n128, 291, 309, 314 Latinophobia, 142 Latvia, 67 Law Code of 1649 (Ulozhenie), 26, 31–32, 66–67, 81, 83, 86, 158, 206, 266, 277, 316–22, 324, 326–28, 331, 335, 346, 439 Le Bret, Cardin, 103, 431n162 Lebanon, 171 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 439 Leipzig, 378 Lenhoff, Gail, 192 Lenin, Vladimir, 47n36 Lentin, Antony, 293n52, 344, 378, 428 Lesaffer, Randall, 148 Lidov, Aleksei, 203n58 Lipsius, Justus, 53 Lithuania, 54, 66, 169, 322

Index

Livonia, 67–68, 162 Livonian War, 140n8, 163 Locke, John, 49n39, 223, 247 Lodi, 146 Lohr, Eric, 88 Lotman, Iurii, 416 Louis XII, King of France, 337 Louis XIII, King of France, 54n59, 133 Louis XIV, King of France, 16, 133, 150–51, 262n36, 286–88, 299, 358–59, 431n162 Louis XVIII, King of France, 260n30 Lublin, Union of, 54 Lukashenko, Alexandr, 117n23 Lukin, Pavel, 294–96, 325 Lutheranism, 86 Machiavelli, 110, 214, 219, 220n130, 223 Madrid, 133 Mager W., 306n34 Maissen, Thomas, 123, 124n50, 443 Majeska, George, 353 Makarii, metropolitan, 75, 194, 222, 263 Marin, Louis, 287n16 Mars, 28 Martin, Janet, 353 Martin, Russell, 348, 350–51, 354–55, 356n75, 356n77, 372 Mary, The Mother of God, 124, 196, 232, 443. See also Mother of God, The Maslov, Boris, 383n38, 397 Matushka Rus’, 42 Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, 75n67, 153 Mazepa, Hetman, 366, 368, 402 Mediterranean Sea, 367 Mehmed II, Sultan, 29, 31–32 Middle Ages, 48, 50–52, 77, 89, 92–95, 99, 114, 121–23, 158–59, 212, 221, 303, 347, 414 Mikhail (Fedorovich Romanov), Tsar, 10, 18, 68, 134, 136, 183, 190, 217,

224–27, 233, 246–47, 268, 301, 307, 312–13, 315, 327n119, 350, 355–57, 416 Mironov, Boris, 361 Mitic, Andrej, 185, 254–55, 261 Mughal dynasty, 268 Mohyla College, 366–67 Mongols, 73 Monomakh, Vladimir, 31, 184 Monomakh cap, 30, 74n68, 137, 153n82, 202 Montesquieu, 49n39, 176, 220 Moscovia, 63, 138 Moscow, 18, 23, 61–63, 65, 75–76, 133, 142–43, 153, 155, 180, 190, 195–97, 205, 222, 224–26, 229–30, 233–34, 253, 268, 295, 306, 313, 315, 322, 324–25, 328, 332, 350, 352, 356, 367, 370, 444 Moses, 430 Mother of God, The, 124, 170, 196, 232–37. See also Mary, The Mother of God Mozhaisk, 294 Mstislav, 181 Muir, Edward, 277n118, 450 Mun, Thomas, 7n25 Münster, The Treaty of, 145, 149 Murav’ev-Apostol, Sergei, 216–17 Murav’ev, Nikita, 218, 256, 284 Muscovites, 66, 86, 138, 295 Muslims, 389 Naples, 370 Napoleon, 145, 183 Narva, 84, 266, 371 Navarre, 55 Nazareth, 241 Nebuchadnezzar, 192, 208–9 Nederman, Cary, 90–94, 211n93 Nefedov, Sergei, 31–32 Neocleous, Mark, 99, 113

503

504

Index

Neptune, 449 Nero, Roman Emperor, 210 Netherlands, 55–56, 108, 129, 213 Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, 259, 260n30, 454–55 Nikolev, Nikolai, 180 Nikon, patriarch, 77, 228–30, 232, 234–35, 334, 349, 389 Novgorod, 62n2, 65, 68–69, 79–80, 156, 178, 197, 267–68, 305, 352, 371 Novgorodian heretics, 199, 209 Nowak, Andrzej, 183 Nystad, The Treaty of, 145 Oakley, Francis, 188, 272, 390 Old Believers, The, 216 Olearius, Adam, 293 Olga, 179 Onuf, Nicholas Greenwood, 15n57 Orange, House of, 54 Ordin-Nashchokin, Afanasii, 327 Ortelius, Abraham, 107 Orthodoxy, 29, 69, 86–87, 144, 171, 185, 191–92, 196, 199–200, 228–29, 246–47, 273, 291, 326, 335, 349, 367, 379 Osiander, Andreas, 149, 306n34 Osnabrück, The Treaty of, 145, 148–49 Ostrowsky, Donald, 62, 70 Otechestvo (Fatherland), 395, 399, 402–3, 430, 446, 453 Otets otechestva (Father of the Fatherland), 392, 403, 431 Ottens, F., 452 Ottoman Empire, 12–13, 22, 29, 31, 82, 140n8, 143 Ottomans, 44, 63, 143–44, 156, 164, 246 Ouspensky, Leonid, 120 Ovid, 130–31, 442 Paisii, patriarch, 134 Palladium of Russia, 182, 255

Palm Sunday, 4n10, 222, 369–70, 392 Paris, 59, 133, 156, 337 Parker, David, 361n105 Parsons, Robert, 22 Paul I, Emperor of Russia, 287, 450 Pavlenko, Nikolai, 338 Pchelov, Evgenii, 194n26, 247 Pelenski, Jaroslaw, 31, 33, 190, 195n29, 345 Pereiaslav, The Treaty of, 169, 365 Pereira, Juan Solórzano, 57, 80 Peresvetov, Ivan, 29, 32–33 Perrie, Maureen, 1 Perseus, 444 Persia, 157 Peter I (The Great), Tsar/Emperor of Russia, 3n11, 15, 19, 21, 24–30, 39, 41–45, 49, 72, 81–85, 87–88, 97–98, 111, 131, 133–39, 143–45, 148, 150–61, 163–66, 168, 172–74, 177, 184–85, 189, 195, 206, 209, 222, 229, 250, 252–53, 261, 263–64, 267, 271, 285, 290, 302, 304, 316, 320, 332–34, 337–38, 344, 348–51, 356–59, 366, 368–76, 378, 380–82, 389, 391–93, 398–400, 402–4, 413, 417–20, 427, 430, 434–44, 446–50, 452–53, 463 Peter III, Emperor of Russia, 263n42 Peter Alekseevich (grandson of Peter I), Tsarevich, Peter II, Emperor of Russia, 372 Peter Petrovich (son of Peter I), Tsarevich, 156, 168, 369, 372, 393 Philip II, King of Spain, 129, 213 Philip III, King of Spain, 133 Philip IV, King of Spain, 133 Piccolomini, Aeneas Silvius, 140, 142. See also Pope Pious II Piedmont-Savoy, 54–55 Pimen, metropolitan, 194n26 Pious II, Pope, 140 Pipes, Richard, 268, 283, 288–89

Index

Plaggenborg, Stefan, 81, 205, 316–17, 321, 324 Plato, 248 Platon, metropolitan, 184 Pleshcheev, Fedor, 296 Pliny, The Elder, 45 Plokhy, Serhii, 172, 402 Poe, Marshall, 76, 292, 295, 300, 331n138 Poggi, Gianfranco, 14 Poland, 54, 91n7, 140n8, 171, 183–85, 266, 270n78, 315, 395–96 Poles, 164, 179, 258, 308 Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 23, 54, 82, 184, 301, 327, 347, 366–67, 396 Polotsk, 178 Polotskii, Simeon, 170–71, 236, 240–44, 247, 249 Pol’skoi, Sergei, 38, 191, 372–73, 383n38, 432n164, 445 Poltava, 28n104, 138–39, 172, 365, 368, 447 Pomeranz, William, 455–56, 458 Prokopovich, Feofan, 21, 24, 37, 41–42, 85, 135, 155, 157n103, 160–61, 166–69, 172–74, 176–78, 186, 189, 195–96, 223–24, 252–53, 264, 285, 344, 359, 362, 365, 366n6, 367–80, 376n8, 380n24, 382–87, 389–99, 402–3, 404n71, 405–417, 419, 421, 422n133, 424–32, 434–38, 441–42, 447, 452, 464 Protestantism, 212 Prudentius, 121  Prus, 65, 221 Prussia, 151–52, 156 Prussians, 407 Pskov, 79, 178, 327, 371 Pufendorf, Samuel, 9, 24, 39, 147, 161, 172, 223, 252 Pugachev, Emelian, 263n42 Purchas, Samuel, 141, 144

Putin, Vladimir, 50, 456, 459, 461–63 Pygmalion, 41, 135, 441–42 Raleigh, Walter, Sir, 103–5 Razin, Stepan, 330 Red Square, 3n10, 31, 356 Reformation, 6, 52, 129, 140, 212–13, 346 Reinhard, Wolfgang, 5n21 Religion, Wars of, 17, 23, 375 Renaissance, 100, 114, 119–21, 133, 204n59, 448 Reshetnikov, Anatoly, 261 Riasanovsky, Nicholas, 255 Ricardus Anglicus, 91 Richelieu, Cardinal, 9, 103, 325, 445 Robinson, Thomas, 139 Romaniello, Matthew, 19n74, 62, 68 Romanovs, 221, 226, 233–34, 247, 249, 344, 347, 350, 356, 402 Rome, 168, 367, 369, 388, 394–95, 448 Rosand, David, 41n15 Roshchin, Evgenii, 18, 424–25 Roth, Klaus, 110 Rowen, Herbert, 285, 287–88, 292, 299 Rowland, Daniel, 2, 12n47, 14, 23n89, 24n92, 37n2, 216, 235, 307, 331n139, 345, 424 Rozanov, Vasilii, 254n7 Rubens, Peter Paul, 133 Rubios, Palacios, 304n27 Rurik, Rurikid dynasty, 23, 66, 170, 179, 192, 221, 224, 226, 233, 270, 308, 347, 355 Russian Federation, 49, 87, 453, 455 Russianness, 50, 85, 87 Russians, 2, 45, 76, 87, 142, 148, 154, 170–71, 175, 185–86, 243, 254, 264, 289, 293, 297, 304, 416, 434, 460 Russification, 46 Saavedra, Diego, 41 Sadeler, Johann, 127, 131

505

506

Index

Saracens, 143 Sardinia, 151 Savoy, 151 Schierle, Ingrid, 85 Schmeizel, Martin, 152–55 Schmitt, Carl, 237 Schwanebach, Baron, 260 Scotland, 54, 56, 118 Sellin, Volker, 260n30 Senate, 25, 392, 412, 439 Sergii Radonezhskii, 233 Shafirov, Peter, 21, 27, 150, 155–57, 159–65, 368n16, 401 Shennan, Joe H., 299–300 Shuiskii, Vasilii, Tsar, 214–15, 300–302, 307–8, 311–12, 356–57 Siberia, 67–68, 79, 245, 307 Sicily, 151 Sigismund III, King of Poland, 226, 308 Simbirsk, 81–82 Simvoly i Emblemata (Symbola et Emblemata), 39, 43 Skinner, Quentin, 90–92, 94–95, 105, 127n59, 284, 290, 464 Slavophiles, 87, 166n3 Slavs, 29, 199 Smolensk, 155 Solomon, Biblical King, 210 Solov’ev, Sergei, 185 Sophia Alekseevna, Tsarevna, 136–37, 249–50 Sophia Paleologos, Byzantine Princess, 65, 353 Sorena, 180–81 Soviet Union, 87nn131–32, 455 Spafarii, Nikolai, 248–49 Spain, 80, 124, 141, 152, 286 Speranskii, Mikhail, 183, 224, 404n71 St. Petersburg, 135, 145, 169, 369, 450 Steinmetz, Willibald, 96–97, 380 Stockholm, 266 Stöckl, Günther, 194n26

Stoyanov, Yuri, 164 Strasbourg, 332 Strayer, Joseph, 10, 69, 124, 309, 325 Striykowski, Maciej, 407 Stuart, 23, 55, 115 Sudebnik (of 1497 and 1550), 81 Svea, 124 Sweden, 8, 16, 22, 82–83, 124, 139, 145, 148, 152, 155–56, 159, 162, 266, 305, 420 Swedes, 163–64, 368 Switzerland, 149 Synod, The Holy, 25, 371, 390–91, 394 Szűcs, Jenő, 49n39 Szvák, Gyula, 33n122 Tacitus, 131 Tartars, 173. See also Tatars Tatars, 30, 63, 65, 69, 73–74, 79, 164, 313, 331 Tatishchev, Vasilii, 144–45, 165, 176–80, 186 Taylor, Charles, 188 Tel’berg, Georgii, 318, 319n85, 322 Time of Troubles, 10, 214–15, 226–27, 278, 309, 330, 357 Timofeev, Ivan, 227 Tomsinov, Vladimir, 378, 380, 415 Torke, Hans-Joachim, 81, 264 Transylvania, 152 Trepavlov, Vadim, 29, 74, 246n227 Treuer, Gottlieb Samuel, 373–74, 426, 432n164, 438 Tsapina, Olga, 77n79, 389 Tudor, 55, 100–101 Turks, 29, 138–39, 143, 164 Turoboiskii, Iosif, 369, 443 Tver’, 267 Ugra River, 65 Ukraine, 24, 67, 143, 169, 365–66 Ullmann, Walter, 48, 219, 341

Index

Uniate Church, 367–68 Unions of Arras and Utrecht, 56–57 United Provinces, 53–54, 56n63, 58, 108, 149, 152 United States of America, 5n21 Ural Mountains, 144 Ushakov, Simon, 230, 234, 236–37, 240 Uspenskii, Boris, 212–13 Utrecht, 9–10, 55–56, 59, 129, 141, 145–46, 148–51 Uvarov, Sergei, 185 Valadés, Diego, 16n63 Valencia, Kingdom of, 55 Valois, 54, 286 van Dyck, Antony, 133 van Creveld, Martin, 343–44 Varangians, 179 Vásáry, István, 73 Vasilii II, 63n10, 64 Vasilii III, 66, 70–71, 153, 268, 353–54 Vejdevut, 407, 415 Velázquez, 133 Venice, 395–96 Vienna, 143 Voltaire, 181, 262n36

Wales, 57 Walzer, Michael, 113, 124, 442 Warsaw, 183 Watts, John, 11, 12n48 Weber, Max, 91, 94–95 Weickhardt, George, 247, 283n1 Westerners, 71, 138, 166n3 Westphalia, 59, 108, 145–46, 148–49, 151 Wither, George, 241, 341n8, 443 Władysław, 308, 315 Woltner, Margarete, 88 Wortman, Richard, 28, 47, 49–50, 166, 173, 175, 176n1, 206, 260, 300n8, 303, 436, 440, 445, 450, 453–54 Yakovlev, 261, 263 Zamir, 180–81 Zelensky, Elizabeth, 250 Zhivov, Viktor, 375–76, 393 Zhmuds, 407 Zitser, Ernest, 244, 441 Zmora, Hillay, 309–310 Zyzykin, Mikhail, 353–54

507