Ivan the Terrible

Front matter

IVAN THE TERRIBLE

Ivan the Terrible

IVAN THE TERRIBLE

Introduction

The work of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great show us modern Russia, armed already, cap-à-pie, for all the conquests, moral or material, gained then or since. But this work, as all men know, possessed certain antecedents, and Peter gave himself out to be a follower—of whom? His immediate predecessors we know—the earliest Romanoffs, obscure sovereigns of an Empire cut off from all European contact, closed to all external influence, and incapable of evolving even a rudimentary civilization from its own elements. Going back further, to the closing years of the sixteenth century, we see the sinoutnoié vrénica ('the troublous times')—that is to say, disorder, anarchy, barbarism, darkness. Yet, looking closely, the sudden brightness of the eighteenth century was no dawn. For a rising sun the light was all too brilliant. Peter the Great was not mistaken. The darkness out of which his vivid genius flashed was only an eclipse.

The internal and external development of the great Northern Empire seems to partake of the nature of the avalanche. At widely-parted intervals we have a sudden displacement of the centre of gravity, resulting in a swift movement forward, followed by a more or less lengthy period of immobility. This phenomenon has occurred several times already, and appearances are all in favour of its reproduction. The reason and the explanation are both very simple. The nation, in the performance of the mighty task laid upon it, was bound to meet with formidable obstacles, and consequently to make successive efforts. At this moment, and for the past twenty years, its progress has been apparently suspended internally, and checked on the lines it had previously pursued externally. This is because Russia's activity has been absorbed and diverted by the conquest of a new territory, destined to widen the field of her efforts yet further—to the Chinese Seas on one side, to the Persian Gulf on the other. But the problems momentarily put aside are ripening all the same, slowly but surely, and beware of the avalanche!

The predecessor whom Peter the Great invoked was a contemporary of the last Valois Kings, and to this period we must go back, indeed, to discover the reformer's political and intellectual origins. The task is a heavy one, but it is the price which must be paid for our comprehension of the final result, and it is the raison d'être of the volume I now place in my readers' hands. I shall be told, no doubt, that I ought to have begun with it; but in history, as in anatomy, it would be foolhardy to go, in the first place, to the very beginnings, to the embryo, to the cell-and in reality I am only following the regular order and method of every study.

From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, then, Russia dwelt apart, or almost apart, from the European community and from civilization. But she had made a previous effort to enter both, and the work to which Voltaire lent his aid and gave his praise was begun when Charles IX. and Henri III. reigned over France. At that moment Muscovy, huge and barbarous, set forth to enter into contact with her Western neighbours. She found the road barred. Poland, with Sweden, threw herself athwart it, and the removal of the obstacle was the work of more than a hundred years. But, if it had not been for Batory, the hands of the clock which marks the hours of all great historical evolutions might have whirled round the dial a century before. Externally, the acquisition of the Baltic seaboard, the destruction of the last vestiges of the Tartar power, the conquest of Siberia, the opening up of political and commercial relations with all the European countries; internally, the introduction of the elements of foreign culture, the reorganization of the State on the very basis we see at the present day—all this, accomplished by Peter and Catherine, was undertaken, outlined, even partly realized, in the course of that first morning on which an all too speedy evening fell.

Who did it? The man of whom Custine wrote that he had, 'so to speak, outrun the limits of the sphere within which God permits His creature to work harm,' the tortures, whose figure is a nightmare, whose name is a terror, the emulation of Nero and Caligula—the Terrible!

Here we have one of the most curious instances of aberration to be found in legend, and even in critical history.

To begin with the name 'the Terrible,' with which, to insure the recognition of my personage, I have been forced to head my volume-the name is, I say, a misinterpretation. The Russians of the present day, deceived by a translation imposed on them by foreigners, do not recognise this themselves. The Germans hesitate between der Schreckliche (the Terrible) and der Grausame (the Cruel), and while both versions are incorrect, the second is the worst. Never did the Muscovites of his time call Ivan thus. He was the groznyï. Now hearken: In the course of an epistolary dispute which is one of the curiosities of the period, Batory having reproached his adversary with surrounding himself with battle-axe-men (ryndy) when he received the King's envoys, Ivan replies, 'Eto tchine gossoudarskii, da i Groza' 'Thus it must be, for my rank and the respect I must inspire').

The Groza has never meant any other thing. Consult the 'Domostroï,' the famous Muscovite household book of that epoch, as to the duties imposed on the father of the family; he is expected to be groznyï—that is to say, respected and worthy of respect. But what, then, of the tortures, the scaffolds, the hecatombs of human lives, whereof the chroniclers speak? That is another matter. Do you know, in any European country, a chapter of sixteenth-century history that reads like an idyll? In Poland, perhaps, where the szlachta, with the last of the Jagellons, was inaugurating the perilous experiment of the noli me tangere. And there, again. Batory set things in order for a time. But from this point of view Poland and Russia were the very antipodes, and if the latter has succeeded where the former failed it is just because she has not been too dainty as to her methods. Look into the huge crucible in which this people has laboured, from the Ural to the Carpathians, the White Sea to the Black; it is not gentleness, politeness, consideration, that made it possible to mingle, and bray, and melt twenty diverse races into the compact block which is the Russia of to-day! That Ivan IV., in the course of his work, may have gone somewhat beyond the atrocity usual in his century, may be. We will go back to that. But both in legendary and in critical history the surname of 'the Terrible' has become synonymous with an unreasonable and inexcusable ferocity, purely barbarous in its origin, and carried to madness in its manifestations. To anybody who knows the power there is in words the consequence cannot be doubted: the word has set its false hallmark on the thing.

The evocation of the man and his surroundings cannot, indeed, be parted from some hideous sights and my readers must brace their nerves to meet some severe shocks. Yet athwart these gloomy visions they will perceive that of which I have spoken—the sunrise. The bright sun, the red sun, of the rhapsodists: in their tongue the two adjectives are one and the same. A blood-stained sun, lighting up a gloomy landscape. That, again, is another matter. The ideal here sought and gained is not, perhaps, the most seductive in the world's history; but an ideal it is, and it gave, and still gives, the law to a great nation.

In the last Rurikovitchy who ruled—for Feodor was a mere shadow—Kaveline, one of the leaders of the Slavophil school, has already recognised 'the central figure' of his country's history. Since then attempts at posthumous rehabilitation and apotheosis have so multiplied as to reach a not less evidently excessive point in the other direction. I shall endeavour to determine, between these opposing currents, what is truth and what justice.

It has not appeared to me possible to begin this study without preceding it by a general view of the geography, political, social, and intellectual condition, and habits and customs of a country into which, even nowadays, the historian must penetrate in the guise of an explorer. To these subjects the first four chapters of the book are devoted. Their length and detail must be excused; without them I should have run the risk of failing to make myself understood, and of talking in perpetual riddles. To most of my readers, I believe, this key will be indispensable.

My authorities this time include few unpublished sources. Of the documents I might have utilized most have either been printed or continue inaccessible. The literature of the subject is exceedingly abundant, so much so that, to avoid overloading my pages, I have abstained, with very few exceptions, from direct references. I may add that this literature exists, as a whole, in the form of unworked materials, collections of documents, or monographs. The historical edifice has yet to be built up.

I beg my friend, I. Stchoukine, whose rich library and unwearying kindness have alone enabled me to begin and accomplish my task, to accept the expression of my deep gratitude.

Part I: Russia in the Sixteenth Century

PART I RUSSIA IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

Part 1, Chapter I: The Country and the People

PART I

RUSSIA IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

CHAPTER I

THE COUNTRY AND THE PEOPLE

I.—RUSSIA, NEW AND OLD. II.—THE TERRITORY. III.—SOCIAL MATTERS: THE ARISTOCRACY. IV.—POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATION: THE ORIGIN OF ABSOLUTISM. V.—THE PEASANTS. VI.—THE SERFS. VII.—THE TOWNSFOLK. VIII.—THE CHURCH.

I.—Old and New Russia.

'An eagle, many-winged, with lion's claws, has fallen upon me. He has robbed me of three Cedars of Lebanon: my beauty, my wealth, my children. Our country is deserted, our city is in ruins, our markets are destroyed. My brothers have been carried to a place where neither our fathers, nor our grandfathers, nor our forefathers have dwelt. …'

Thus, by the mouth of one of her chroniclers, did Pskov, a free and republican town, absorbed, in the year 1510, into the new Muscovite Empire, lament her lost independence, her broken privileges, and her exiled sons. The father of Ivan the Terrible, Vassili Ivanovitch, had just passed by, had carried off the great bell which for centuries had called the townsmen to the viétchié—the popular meetings of the place—deported hundreds of families—quickly replaced by Muscovite immigrants—to the interior of his territories, and proclaimed the incorporation of the Republic with his State.

And this, in a then unknown corner of the European world, was the repetition, at short notice, of a chapter of European history. Thus, at Liége, in 1467, Charles the Bold had overthrown the famous perron, the ancient bronze column, at the foot of which, for centuries past, the people had been wont to make its laws and accomplish all the acts of its public life. Thus, too, at the same time, and hard by, Louis XI., striving with his vassals of Burgundy, Brittany, and Guyenne, was labouring to réunir les fleurons of the crown of France.

From one end of the European continent to the other, this was the decisive hour of great political formations, everywhere attended by the same painful crises. But here, in the far North-East, the task of the 'gatherers of the Russian land,' as they have been called, was especially difficult and arduous. This was, in fact, no matter of welding together provinces already bound by numerous affinities, common traditions, an evident solidarity of interests. Conceive the France of the fifteenth century conquered by the English, and some Burgundian Prince founding, not at Dijon even, but in Germany, in Switzerland, or in Italy, the nucleus of a new monarchy, destined to gather into one whole the rsmnants of the French fatherland, dismembered, broken into pieces. There you have the equivalent of the obscure and laborious process of gestation which gave birth, in the early days of the sixteenth century, to that new world, the Russia of the Ivans and the Vassilis.

What was that Russia? Not the country you now traverse in your sleeping-car from Kiev to St. Petersburg, from Warsaw to Irkutsk. The Russia of Kiev had passed away; as yet the Russia of St. Petersburg was not. Of the lands which in the tenth and eleventh centuries had made up the Empire of the Jaroslavs and the Vladimirs, the Sovereign seated at Moscow held not an inch. He called himself Duke, or Tsar, 'of All the Russias' indeed, but his right to assume the title was much on a par with that of the English kings, his contemporaries, to reckon the crown and arms of France in their own patrimony. The Russia of Kiev was now part of the Polish territory; the Russia of Mokhilev belonged to Lithuania. Red Russia, White Russia, Little Russia, were all held by neighbours. Moscow was but a Russian colony in a foreign—a Finnish—country.

Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the Empire of Kiev had melted away in the fratricidal struggle waged by the sons of Vladimir Monomachus. In the thirteenth century, it underwent a Tartar invasion, in the next, a Polish-Lithuanian conquest, and naught remained. At the height of the tempest, George Dolgorouki, one of Monomachus' heirs, put himself at the head of a band of Russian colonists in quest of a new home. Crossing the huge forests which at that time parted the plain of the Dnieper from that of the Volga, he pushed north-westward, subjugating the tribes of Finnish origin he found on his way. And this led to Moscow, founded in 1147—a town set in a conquered country, an emigrant station. And here, again, the Mongol invasion had overtaken the scarcely settled colony, and imposed foreign laws and foreign customs. For two centuries, reckoning from the disaster of the Kalka (1224), it bowed the country down under all the weight of an Eastern tornado. It was only towards the close of the fifteenth century that the Muscovite princes, taking advantage of the slow crumbling of the Mongol Empire, felt strong enough to cast off the yoke. They had laboured, meanwhile, to bring together some neighbouring colonies, first, and then some other remnants, relatively near, of the ancient Russian fatherland, and thus had gathered them up a new empire, and endowed Russia with a new home. Novgorod had been theirs since 1478; Tver, Rostov, Jaroslav, soon joined them. Ivan III.—the Great, as he has been justly called—added more territory, which had not been included within the boundaries of Ancient Russia, pushing the frontiers of New Russia as far as Finland, the White Sea, and the frozen seas to the north, and towards the Ural on the east. His son Vassili added Riazan and Novgorod Siéverskiï, to the south. Did all this constitute a country in the historical meaning of that word? Not yet!

II.—The Territory.

When he succeeded to the throne, in 1533, Ivan IV.—the Terrible—inherited a territory already extensive, but which, geographically speaking, lacked unity and harmony. The tumult of battle, the confusion of conquest, were apparent everywhere. It was a scene of spoils scattered broadcast. Around the Muscovite nucleus in the centre had been grouped, in constantly broadening eccentric circles, territories which, for the most part, had no resemblance, even, to provinces, and can only be designated by topographical indications: the Governments of Arkhangelsk, Vologda, and Olonetz to the north-east; those of Novgorod and Pskov to the north-west; to the west and south-west, the region of the Dnieper, and the present Government of Smolensk, the western portion of the present Government of Kaluga, part of that of Tchernigov, and the western parts of those of Orel and Kursk; north-east lay the Steppe country, without any definite southern frontier, and for its northern limit the 55th parallel—the northern boundary, in other words, of the present Governments of Kaluga, Tula, Riazan, Tambov, Penza, and Simbirsk; and, lastly, to the east, the basin of the Kama and its tributaries, the Viatka, the Tshoussova, and the Biela.

A singularity which in itself paints the nature of this settlement is that its most recent and distant conquests, Novgorod and Pskov, with their dependencies, were its most important constituents; for these included the industrial and commercial regions of the country, and on these, economically speaking, the new Empire subsisted and depended.

Industries were trifling, trade brisker, but still confined to very modest proportions. The population of this land of desolate marsh and moor, living mostly by fishing and only quite exceptionally by husbandry, drew its chief subsistence from a certain flow of merchandise passing to and fro between the Baltic seaboard and the interior of the country. But on an area of 282,127 square versts there were but fourteen towns. Most of these, too, were no more than tiny forts (ostrojki), and in the districts (piatiny) of Biéjets and Olonetz, a huge country covering 171,119 square versts, there were no towns at all; their place was taken by villages (possiélki), with markets and small bazaars.

Up to near the second half of the sixteenth century, Novgorod, with its 5,300 dwelling-houses, was the most important of all the towns in the Empire, save Moscow; and at Pskov the inventories of the period enumerate 1,300 shops or trading-houses within the town alone, apart from the suburbs. But these documents everywhere point to a phenomenon which looms large in the sixteenth-century history of this particular sphere—the swift extinction of the civilian citizen, properly so called, eliminated by the military element which takes his place. At Gdov, which boasts the largest number of inhabitants belonging to this class, the lists for 1580–1585 only give fourteen! And this is the work of the Muscovite conquest, which, with its system of general confiscation and its bestowal of the confiscated properties on men of its own choice, has rapidly succeeded in changing the face of the country, even as to its social elements. Now, these newcomers are all warriors, and Moscow, in her invading march, her overflowing expansion, still preserves the primitive characteristic of her first settlement—a military colony in a conquered country.

And it could not be otherwise, for this, like all the other provinces of the new Empire, remains a battlefield, with frontiers ill-defined on one side, and constantly disputed elsewhere. Amongst the fortresses protecting it on the north-west, Smolensk, only conquered in 1514, is still the nominal capital of a Lithuanian-Polish Palatinate, and Viélikié-Louki will soon be snatched by Batory from Ivan IV. North-eastward colonization creeps gradually along the White Sea, from the Onega and the Northern Dvina to the Ural; but possession is limited along this coast—pomorié, as it is called—to the seashore and the river-banks, and even from the economic point of view, monasteries—strategically-occupied points more than pious foundations—take first rank here. That of Solovki, on the White Sea, possesses, with valuable salt-works and fisheries, a police force and a little army of its own. Further on, east of the Dvina, the conquest is barely outlined: the only rallying-point of the poor fishing population is a half-yearly fair at Lampojnia, on the Mezen, and, the Mezen once crossed, there is a desert country.

A further singularity is that Moscow, girdled by a ring of fortified posts, remained an open town, with all the appearances of a temporary settlement. The city proper, indeed—the Kreml—was surrounded by battlemented walls studded with towers. But this enclosure, which included the Sovereign's palace, some boïars' houses, a few churches and monasteries, did not in any sense encircle the life of the capital. The town, with its wooden dwelling-houses, its shops, its markets, its gostinnyḯ dvor, a stone-built bazaar on the Levantine model, and all its busy trade, escaped outwards in huge suburbs, some open, some protected by mere wooden palisades, and all stretching out into the country, till its meadows and tilled fields mingled with the houses and shops. Industrial life was scattered still further afield, in spacious slobodas, perfect villages, which neighboured it, still amongst fields and woods and gardens, with more monasteries, whose white enclosures and gilded church domes carried the landscape, half urban, half rustic, far out to the horizon. And a fitting capital it was for this Empire on its outward march, moving to a future that still lay obscure, hidden in a perpetual beyond.

The designations of the hastily-formed provinces of the new Empire corresponded with the migratory nature of their constitution. Men said 'The towns beyond the Oka,' 'beyond the Kama,' the word town (gorod) meaning, to them, the territory with its chief town. For the central region itself, the nucleus of the Empire in process of formation, the expression was 'The towns beyond the Moskva, zamoskovnyié gorody.' Nijni-Novgorod, recently conquered by the rulers of Moscow from another group of the descendants of Monomachus, was sometimes looked on as belonging to this central region, and sometimes relegated, with Arzamas and Mourom, to the outer zone. And yet here the Russia of the North-West, just beginning her new life, possessed another Kiev, as it were, on the very marches of the annexed territories. The situation, the beauty of the site, were both the same. Jenkinson, the Englishman, starting thence. in 1558, with his flotilla of galleys, for the Far East, was to see a renewal of the period of the floating caravans despatched by the Princes of Kiev on the 'Voyage to Greece.' But all around, even to the neighbouring river basin of the Kliazma, save for Vladimir, where some remnants of vanished splendours still remained, the conquest had laid the country waste and scattered it with ruins. The population in the country parts still clung to the soil. In the towns no one was left, save the soldiers, who were everywhere. This is the general hall-mark of the new settlement. The populated centres of the province of Moscow, beyond a radius of some 60 to 100 miles, themselves bore this mark. Northward, at the distance thus indicated, stretched an essentially military zone, wherein military considerations were constantly mingled with peaceful occupations, and the urban districts—Tver, Rjev, Zoubstov, Staritsa—were all strategic points. South-ward, the towns of Serpoukhov, Kashira, and Kolomna, on the Upper Moskva, and the Oka, guarded the passage of the two rivers against an ever-threatening invasion. Beyond these lay another desert, the dikoië pole (wild field), not to be colonized till in the second half of the century.

Such was the territory to which the rule of Ivan IV. was to annex, with Kazan, Astrakan, and their dependencies, the low-lying lands along the Middle and Lower Volga, the Kama, the Viatka, and the Caspian seaboard, and to which, as a field for future hope, was to be added, from the banks of the Volga to those of the Don, the Northern Doniêts, and the Lower Dnieper, the enigmatic sphere of the Kozatchina, that huge reservoir into which, from the furthest depths of Poland and Muscovy alike, a whole population of willing exiles perpetually flowed; upon which, from either side, the same action of laws, political and social, poured forth, in one continuous stream, the same quota of diverse elements, driven out of their natural centres by those three eternal instruments of the formation and disaggregation of societies—the spirit of revolt, the spirit of enterprise, and the spirit of liberty.

As to the total numbers of the population within these borders we have no clue, not even approximate. Touching the capital itself, information varies to an extent which defies all certainty. The number of houses set down for the year 1520—41,500—would give us a population of at least 100,000 souls. But thirty years later the Pope's Envoy, Possevino, gives 30,000 as a more likely number. True it is, indeed, that the town, during the interval, had undergone a Tartar invasion which had laid it in utter ruin. But the same thing is true of most of the towns of this Empire, in which war still raged almost everywhere, and, between any two given periods—often in the space of a year—changed the whole face of a country.

From the ethnographical point of view, the Russian element in nine-tenths of this country was that exceedingly slight one arising out of a very recent colonization. There is no necessity, at this period, for scratching the Muscovite to discover the Tartar, or, above all, the Finn. The bulk of the population every is of this latter race. Yet, in this respect, the conquests of the Terrible and his successors have been the chief instruments of the introduction into the composition of the Empire of that great diversity, the existence of which Keppen's map even now demonstrates. We have no documents, indeed, on which to found any exact opinion as to the part played by the various races. This scarcely appears, except in the moral and intellectual life of the country, and these I shall set forth later. Politically it is almost non-existent; whether by elimination or absorption, the Muscovite hegemony has put down all resistance. Socially, the difference of origin does not appear, for another reason. It is hardly possible to assert that this Muscovite centre contained two, or several, distinct societies, in mutual but antagonistic contact. Was there, in fact, any society at all?

III.—Social Classes: The Aristocracy.

Amidst the divergencies on which a certain school of history and politics has been fond of dilating, even to exaggeration—divergencies greatly diminished at a later date, which then separated this growing world from Western Europe—the absence of all social classes holds the front rank. Other features of dissimilarity may easily be noted. There was no feudal organization, nor any of its modern offshoots; no chivalry, nor survivals from it; no Church armed with secular powers, and using them to battle with the State. But all these features are easily traced back to one common denominator—no social classes.

The phenomenon is genuine, but most complex, both as to its causes and its manifestations. In this country, of course, as in every other, there are rich men and poor, labourers and tradesmen, townsfolk and country folk, and a variety, therefore, of social elements. But these elements have no real organic value here. Let me explain myself.

Ivan IV. was to spend his whole life warring against the boïars. The boïars certainly formed an aristocracy, and the country, indeed, recognised several of these. Along with the boïars, the descendants of the old appanaged Princes—who traced back their origin in some cases to Rurik, the first Russian, in others to Guédymin, the first Lithuanian, Prince, and who all held governmental powers in that country—claimed a predominant position. Some members of the elder branch of the family of the founder of the dynasty—the ruling house of Moscow was of the younger branch—and still holding remnants of their ancient patrimony, had just claims to high pretensions, and did not fail to put them forward. They enjoyed certain rights and privileges, clearly denoting their former quality as independent Sovereigns, and fought for them fiercely.

But read the Code drawn up by the grandfather of the Terrible, the Soudiébnik of 1497: not a trace does it bear of all these rights and privileges and pretensions! The clergy once set apart, it divides all the remaining dwellers in the country into two categories, which have no social quality about them, and in which the diverse conditions history creates count not at all: 'men who serve' on one side, 'men who do not serve on the other'—sloojilyié and niésloojilyié, nothing more. What does this mean? It means that the legislator wiped out all historical precedents, and, dealing despotically with the mass of beings at his disposal, divided it up according to the constitution of the existing settlement at Moscow—that, as I have endeavoured to show, of a campaigning army.

In a regiment, there are neither princes nor churls, neither merchants nor labourers—there are soldiers, corporals, officers. And here we have a regiment. In a prison, the prisoners are only known by their numbers. And this is, or is to be, a prison. The sloojilyié are soldiers, who are to help their chief to 'gather up the soil of Russia.' The niésloojilyié are the labourers, the fatigue-parties, who feed the army on its march. Neither class has any place, or dignity, or function, save that allotted to it by the regulation. Every man to serve in the ranks—that is the general order. No sign of any hierarchy of birth. In the first category, with the boïars, the Princes, the great officers of the Crown, the chief functionaries, and hardly distinguished from them by a subordination of a purely administrative character, we see the humble workers, civil and military, blacksmiths and gunners, carpenters and private soldiers. Merchants and agriculturists, again, in the other category, are mingled together under the common law of the taxation imposed on them. The sloojilyié of the highest rank do, indeed, enjoy certain privileges—they perform the higher functions, they own the land. In the eye of the law their testimony carries greater weight, and the indemnity rightfully paid them for an offence is three times that a mere diak (clerk) can claim. But this tariff of honour, varying according to grades and occupations, affects every rank. There is nothing social about it, as yet. It forms part of the emoluments assigned to each post.

I have yet to explain how it became possible to carry out this artificial grouping and despotic classification of the social forces. It was inevitable, in the first place, that elements so torn apart and cast into new and arbitrary moulds should have but little coherence at the outset. As regards the aristocratic element this was assuredly the case. Here, as in the West, the higher stratum of society found its first nucleus in the Prince's immediate following. Etymologists disagree as to the origin of the word boïar. Whether it comes from boï (fight), or from bol, boliï, bolchyï (greater), it was used, in the first instance, to designate the comrades of the leader of the primitive band, his droojinniki (droojina, suite, company), who played, at his side, the part played by the anthrustions of the first Frankish chiefs, the Anglo-Saxon thanes, the ministeriales in the heart of feudal Germany. But whereas in the West the relations thus formed between the Princes and their vassals were solidified by the establishment of each and all on domains, in political and social functions, clear, fixed, hallowed by law, by custom, and by habit, the same relations here continued vague, and shared thegenera mobility of all things. For a long time the Prince was a nomad, and his droojina followed, or did not follow, him. There was no rule nor any obligation in this matter. The chief could dismiss his comrades, and they could leave him if they chose. They frequently used their right. When the Prince of Volhynia undertook a campaign against the Prince of Kiev, in 1149, his droojina failed him, and exposed him to disaster. No constraint was recognised. When Russia was all cut up amongst a number of Sovereigns, the boïars had no scruple about going over from one ruler to another, according to their own interest or fancy, and these desertions were no disgrace whatever. They were not regarded as felonious acts. The deserters continued to hold their lands, and carried them into the pale of the authority of the new chief, chosen of their own free will.