Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/35

 Rh without Princes. Later, in the eleventh century, we find the same democratic institutions at Kiev and Novgorod, at Smolensk and Polotsk. From one end of the country to the other the viétchie (from viéstchat, to announce), as the popular gatherings were called, are doing their work with varying privileges: here a full exercise of sovereign power, there a right to choose the ruler, and everywhere a more or less complete share in every authority, guaranteed by regular contracts and formal charters.

Autocracy itself, in its first form, was not synonymous, here, with absolute power. Certainly the Muscovite samodiérjets is the counterpart of the Byzantine autocrator, but the absolutism of the Byzantine Emperors admitted the clergy to a share of power. And for a lengthened period the Muscovite clergy recognised the samodiérjavié merely as a symbol of the national independence in dealing with the foreigner. It reserved the rights of the Church, at all events, if not those of the people, too. The word, nevertheless, favoured a dangerous misunderstanding, and, as a matter of fact, even long before the coming of the Tartars, the rival principle of popular sovereignty, compromised first in the North-Eastern regions, where the Princes of Souzdal and Riazan succeeded in establishing their dynasties on a firm basis of heredity and primogeniture, only maintained itself in exceptional cases. At Pskov and Novgorod it was preserved in all its integrity till the close of the fifteenth century. Elsewhere, from the beginning of the thirteenth, it had been eliminated or visibly weakened.

The phenomenon does not find its explanation in the Mongol hegemony any more than in the Byzantine influence. The former did, indeed, introduce a radical change into the relations between governments and the governed. For the traditional source of supreme power, the popular favour, it substituted the caprice of the new sovereign masters. A journey towards the banks of the Volga and gifts offered to the Khan were better than any election. The pilgrim hied him homewards with an iarlik which made any other investiture superfluous. The Florentine Union and the fall of Constantinople also worked, to some extent, in the same direction. Up to the end of the fourteenth century, the Church recognised but one Tsar in Russia—the Emperor of Constantinople—called 'Emperor of the Russians' and 'Sovereign of the Universe,' even in the prayers of the Muscovite clergy. After that date it became necessary to carry the same homage elsewhere, and the ruler of Moscow rose according to the measure of the Byzantine Sovereign's fall.

Yet all these incidences, we must admit, played but a