Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/37

 Rh for him. Their own interest had impelled them to impose some restrictions in the matter, but it was a Republican and so-called Liberal Government which had taken the decisive step. Republics are responsible for a good many misdeeds of this nature, and nobody can accuse me of dealing with present events—the fact occurred in the year 1368! At that date the Republic of Novgorod decreed that any citizen quitting her territory forfeited all right to hold any property within it. All Moscow had to do was to follow suit. For some time yet the principle was respected, but even under Ivan III. any 'man who served' who seemed inclined to leave the Prince was cast into prison; and to get out, he had not only to renounce his right, still nominally respected, but to undertake not to use it, and sometimes to furnish security as well.

I dwell on these details because they are indispensable to any comprehension of the interior development of the nation. Ivan IV. was to apply the precedents thus created in the broadest fashion, going so far as to establish a sort of mutual insurance against the infidelity of his sloojilyié.

Yet princes and boïars, even thus enlisted and settled in the ranks, preserved a certain autonomy, political and social, rooted in their illustrious origin and their possession of the ancient domains, or the remains of them—appanages and freehold lands—over which they still held certain sovereign rights and numerous privileges. To this the Muscovite Government applied a twofold remedy—first, by placing at the head of its new military hierarchy, not the descendants of Rurik and Guédymin, natural peers and rivals of the new master, but his own 'comrades'—those who had been his first helpers in the task of 'gathering up the soil of Russia,' even if their ancestors had been no more than humble stable-grooms. The absence of any corporate spirit, any caste feeling, in this aristocracy in embryo made the operation all the easier.

To this the Muscovite policy added another and a yet more efficacious expedient. A system of confiscation, energetically applied, amidst the destruction of the ancient principalities annexed to the Empire, placed a huge area of land at the Government's disposal. This Moscow parcelled out afresh, but, when she bestowed them on her 'servants,' she carefully avoided preserving the peculiar rights attending the possession of these lands by the old proprietors. They were no longer called appanages or freeholds (vottchiny): they were mere pomiéstia—in other words, as their name denotes (miésto, place), allotments, corresponding to the posts held by their occupiers in the 'service,' and intended as remuneration for their work. They were thus life interests, or hereditary only in so far as the pomiéshtchik's heir showed himself fit to succeed him in his