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Annual General Meeting of Shareholders. Share Information. Specialty Products. Catalogs, Flyers and Price Lists. Open Access. Open Access for Authors. Open Access and Research Funding. The council of boyars and higher clergy was, from the 10th century, one of the three agencies—along with the prince and the assembly viche —of the central government of Kyivan Rus'.
Together with the prince, the council discussed and decided important matters of internal and foreign policy, religion, and legislation. Sometimes it even ruled on the division of princely domains and sat as a court in judgment on princes and members of their families.
The Boyar Council was a permanent political-judicial body, which was based on the prince's obligation to confer with the boyars of his domain. He had important commissions in the southern defense forces at Livny and Belgorod in In , however, he took on a very different assignment, chairing the commission which compiled the new Ulozhenie. Although, like virtually all members of his class, he served in the army in the Thirteen Years' War with Poland, his most important duties were diplomatic.
He led the delegation which negotiated the tmce with Poland in , and thereafter dealt with Polish diplomats on a regular basis until the end of his career. The capstone of this activity was the conclusion of the truce of which left Kiev in Russian hands. At various times, he met representatives of other European powers. In later life, most of his activities were those of the courtier, participating in official ceremonies or watching over the court in the monarch's absence.
Consonant with that role, he directed the Aptekarskii Prikaz, an office which guaranteed him continuous access to the person of the ruler. If Trubetskoi's career reflects the traditional military ethos of the leading boyar clans, Odoevskii's represents a transitional stage, a mixture peculiar to the middle decades of the seventeenth century. Odoevskii was neither a soldier first and foremost, nor did he conform to the type which I have labelled the "noble official" who built his power on control of the right combination of administrative chanceries.
At various times, he followed each of these patterns or none of them. The descendants of the upper Oka princes were among the wealthiest landholders of the seventeenth century. In , Prince F. Mstislavskii, the last of his line, was the wealthiest landlord of the. Like all of the wealthiest landlords of the seventeenth century, the upper Oka princes owned a number of estates in widely scattered regions of Russia.
According to the summary li. The number of peasant households per district in each man's holdings varied widely, with the largest concentrations in the fertile regions to the south or east of Moscow. Under these circumstances, the upper Oka princes, like their fellow magnates, administered their scattered holdings from their principal residence in Moscow. Odoevskii and 1. Vorotynskii's widow both took a simple exploitative approach to their lands and peasants.
Through their stewards, they collected dues, supplies for themselves and their servants and retainers, and goods which they kept in storage - sometimes to no apparent purpose. In all of these respects, the descendants of the upper Oka princes behaved like other powerful princely and non-titled clans. Did their pattern of landholding preserve any traces of their origins?
By , two of these clans - the Mosal'skiis and the Trubetskois - still owned lands in their ancestral homeland as well as in other areas. The summary list for and cadastres from list the former clan's holdings in Mosal'sk. The case of the Trubetskois is more complex. Since these lands remained on the western side of the Polish- Russian frontier after , the Polish branch of the family remained in possession of the clan's ancestral home until the Thirteen Years' War.
It is not at all clear, however, that po. Since the records of the household management of these families have not survived, it is difficult to detenninc whether these ancestral estates had special economic functions or were centers of regional networks of clients. In all probability, they did not, for the Mosal'skiis and Tnibetskois conducted their lives in a manner indistinguishable from that of their fellow boyars who had lost all contact with the regions from which their ancestors had come.
One measure of the genealogical distinction, social connections and service tradition of these clans is the fact that virtually all of their adult men became boyars at the height of their careers.
Mstislavskii and A. Litvinov-Mosal'skii were the only adult males of their generation and last of their lines. The Mezetskiis present a somewhat different picture. The clan's sole representative in the Duma, Daniil Ivanovich, was the only scion of the upper Oka princely clans to be made an okol'nichii before a further promotion to boyar.
The clan produced at least six other male offspring who survived childhood. Their abbreviated service careers suggest that four of them died as young adults. Two, however - Nikita Mikhailovich and Foma Dmitrievich - lived well into middle age and had apparently normal service careers.
Nikita Mikhailovich, in particular, served in much the same military and administrative capacities as many future boyars and okol'nichie, but did not reach either of those ranks. Since we know nothing about him besides the formal outline of his career, it is impossible to determine why he did not reach the pinnacle of the Muscovite hierarchy.
Such evidence as we have strongly suggests that contemporaries regarded the Mezetskiis as less distinguished than the other upper Oka clans. In short, in their ability to maintain their position of preeminence in the Moscow court and administrative structure from generation to generation, the upper Oka princes closely resembled the other powerful princely and non-titled families of the period.
Marriage alliances. A complex network of marriage alliances held the boyar aristocracy together. Over the course of the seventeenth century, they made marriages with many of the most distinguished clans of the court, especially princes ranging from the Golitsyns and Rostovskiis to the Cherkasskiis, but also non-titled clans such as the Sheremetevs.
The Vorotynskiis and Mstislavskiis married as well as the Odoevskiis and, in perhaps the group's best match of the century, A. Litvinov-Mosal'skii's sister married I. Romanov, Tsar Mikhail's uncle. Both of their recorded marriages linked them to the Bezobrazovs, non-titled servitors of no great distinction.
These observations suggest that, in making marriages for themselves and their children, the upper Oka princes behaved like the rest of the court aristocracy of seventeenth-century Russia.
The clans which occupied the pinnacle of the social and administrative structure constructed elaborate matrimonial networks whose objective was to link them with the ruling dynasty and its closest relatives and with as many other families as possible. At the same time, their choice of marriage partners gives no hint that the upper Oka clans saw themselves as a distinct subgroup within that aristocracy.
None of the recorded marriages of the period links them to one another. Reconstructing the collective self-image and world view of any group of men and women of earlier times is a very risky undertaking.
It is doubly hazardous when that group has left few letters or other personal documents from which to rebuild its mental and spiritual universe.
The only records of this type which the upper Oka princes of the seventeenth century have bequeathed to us are N. Odoevskii's matter- of-fact letters to his estate stewards and his will. The latter expresses, in moving language, commonplaces of seventeenth-century Orthodox piety, but can no longer be read as the frank confessional statement of a single individual. One other measure of the self-image of Russian aristocrats of the seventeenth century is the frequency and manner of their participation in the precedence mestnichestvo disputes of the period.
Several members of the upper Oka princely clans engaged in precedence litigation, particularly in the reign of Tsar Mikhail during the reconstitution ot the court aristocracy after the Time of Troubles. In the seventeenth century, the Odoevskiis and Trubetskois kept very exalted company. Dmitrii Timofeevich Trubetskoi engaged in at least five precedence disputes against a distinguished array of opponents - I.
Golitsyn, S. Golovin, V. Morozov, I. Romanov and I. In all but one of these clashes whose outcome we know, he won the case or received a nil ing that the assignment in question would not serve as a precedent in future litigation.
His only defeat was, in effect, a victory of sorts since the judges ruled that Trubetskoi's standing on the ladder of precedence was higher than Romanov's, but that the latter had to be given a preferred place since he was the new tsar's uncle. Early in his long career, Nikita Ivanovich challenged D. Cherkasskii and I. The former won a clear victory and Odoevskii was subjected to ritual humiliation.
The judges decided the second case in Odoevskii's favor and it was Sheremetev's turn to undergo ceremonial imprisonment. The Mezetskiis and Litvinov-Mosal'skiis had a considerably harder time establishing themselves in the highest echelons of court society and, in the end, settled on substantially lower rungs than the Tnibetskois and Odoevskiis.
Litvinov-Mosal'skii engaged in seven disputes in the 's-l's. Both his opponents and his record as a litigant were decidedly mixed. He lost his cases against S. Prozorovskii and B. Saltykov, representatives respectively of a newly powerful princely clan and one of the old non-titled families of Muscovy, but won against P. Pushkin and I.
Mezetskii had even less success against motley opponents. Out of four cases between and , he won only his dispute against A. They occupied honored positions in the restructured and rapidly evolving governing elite of seventeenth-century Russia.
The precedence cases suggest that the descendants of the upper Oka princes thought of themselves as integral parts of an aristocratic layer at the top of a hierarchically-structured society. Like aristocrats elsewhere in Europe, they derived their prestige and sense of self-worth, in part, from the fact that their forefathers had once ruled their own principalities. Their surnames served as a constant reminder of their distinct origins. At the same time, there is no reason to assume that the princes' awareness of their origins constituted a "separatist psychology" as works of literature and films have sometimes suggested.
By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the serving princes had been thoroughly assimilated into the top ranks of the tsars' servitors. They had moved their households to Moscow and administered their scattered estates from there. When not on campaign or administrative assignment, they advised and attended the ruler and reaped the generous rewards of royal favor. In short, the upper Oka princes had little reason to be nostalgic about their past as lords of Odoev or Trubchevsk now that they were lords in Moscow.
In most respects, then, the descendants of the upper Oka princes differed very little from the other aristocratic clans, princely and non-titled, which made up the boyar aristocracy in the seventeenth century. Like the other groups of clans within the ruling circle at court, they derived their power from the continuation of the tradition of service to the monarchy, their distinguished lineage, marriage alliances with other aristocratic clans, and landed wealth, much of which they acquired through service or family connections.
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