Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/65

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It means, theoretically, the right, not established by any code, but recognised by custom, whereby no sloojilyi ordered to serve with another of his class could be given a place (miésto) inferior to any held by himself or his ancestors with relation to the said comrade or his forefathers. Take two men appointed to command two battalions of the same regiment. Both are sons of boïars, but the grandfather of one, being a General, has had the father or grandfather of the other under his orders. Here is a case of miéstnitchestvo: the General's grandson has an absolute right to refuse to serve with the comrade suggested to him. There is no reason why his Sovereign, if such were his goodwill and pleasure, should not turn him into a stableman, and he would not dare to object, unless, sweeping the dung out of the same stable, he were to meet some other stableman whose father had been a scullion when his own progenitor was handling the saucepans. But he cannot be turned into a General willing to share his rank and command with that scullion's son.

Now consider that the calculation of precedence thus claimed affected ancestry in every degree and branch, and conceive the complication and frequency of the disputes thus engendered. The political life of the Muscovite State has been full of them, and they have constituted the sole restriction, but a serious one, on the Sovereign's absolute power.

Pogodine has sought the origin of the miéstnitchestvo in the relations between the appanaged Princes. But this theory has few partisans now. In the first disputes of this nature of which we have cognisance, and which, indeed, coincide with the appearance of the earliest books on genealogy (rodoslovnyia knigi), the family principle is more generally and strongly marked. The Muscovite Government, in its own interest, respected and cultivated this principle, on which its dynastic establishment was based, and out of its endeavour to combine it with its contradictory system of a hierarchy based on 'service' came the miéstnitchestvo. The Government welcomed it at first. The disputes it stirred, all directly and solely concerned with places conferred by the Sovereign, ran absolutely counter to the corporative spirit: they excluded all idea of an aristocracy, properly so-called, and strengthened that of 'service.' And at first they were mere private matters, and affected trifles only. One boïar claimed another boïar's seat at a friend's table; the wives of two high functionaries fought over their places in church; a Bishop—for the clergy were interested in the matter, too—refused to