1. 1. The conditions for the existence of the urban and rural population in the era of feudalism in Ancient Russia Contents: 1. What is feudalism 2. How it all started 3. Population 4. Colonization 5. Results 6. References
2. 2. Definition FEODALISM (from lat. feudum - flax) - the estate-class structure of society, characteristic of an agrarian in nature and leading by advantage natural economy a collective characterized by the presence of two social classes - feudal lords (landowners) and peasants economically dependent on them; the feudal lords are bound together by a specific type of legal obligation known as the feudal ladder. In some cases - in the ancient world - it replaces the slave system, in others (in particular, in Russia) it is associated with the birth of a class-stratified society.
3. 3. How it all began The first division of the lands took place under Vladimir Svyatoslavich, from his reign princely strife began to flare up, the peak of which fell on 1015-1024, when only three of Vladimir's twelve sons survived. Divisions of land between princes, strife only accompanied the development of Russia, but did not determine one or another political form of state organization. They did not create a new phenomenon in the political life of Russia. The economic basis and the main reason for feudal fragmentation is often considered subsistence farming, the result of which was the absence of economic ties.
4. 4. Population For 3 and a half centuries demographic situation changed significantly. Rapid population growth in the second half of the 12th - in the first third of the 13th century, as evidenced by the relatively high rates of colonization in almost all lands and principalities. Batu's invasion and subsequent campaigns and raids had the most severe consequences. Of course, the peasants were not only killed and taken into slavery, some of them went to safer areas. The first half of the 14th century was more favorable. However, already in the middle of the second half of the XIV century. and also in the 20-40s of the XV century. the demographic situation again deteriorated sharply. In the 50s of the XIV century. and in the 20s of the XV century. two plague pandemics spread in Russia, although their consequences were less detrimental here than in most European countries. In addition, at the same time, Horde campaigns and raids on Russia became more frequent, as well as a fierce military struggle between different principalities of the North-East of Russia. For the second half of the XV century. significant increase in the population. So, in the Novgorod land for 10-20 years, the population increased by 14 percent. The main territory of the developing Russian centralized state is characterized by rapid processes of colonization, which had as their necessary prerequisite the growth of the rural working population.
5. 5. Colonization The settlement network changed accordingly. Repair colonization dominated almost completely, which is characterized by new settlements with few yards (1-3 yards). The predominance of this form was due to a combination of both social (first of all, the leading role of quitrent in kind in the system of exploitation of peasants, as well as the main trends in the development feudal tenure), as well as economic and natural factors (extensive spaces suitable for arable farming were rare, in small-yard settlements, the allotments of peasants were usually larger, the most common among the peasant environment was a small family, etc.). Repair colonization was also widespread in areas with more favorable natural conditions. In them, however, the expansion of the area of ​​cultivated lands was partly due to the increase in households in relatively large settlements. By the turn of the XV-XVI centuries. the density of rural settlements in the central and northwestern regions of the Russian state became quite high (it reached its maximum by the middle of the 16th century). Sources of the turn of the XV-XVI centuries. testify to the close proximity of estates, estates, palace possessions and black-moss lands. The sharply increased number of land conflicts speaks of the same. A typical element of the settlement network was a village (a large settlement with a number of households from 1015 or more) with a complex of villages, repairs and wastelands stretching towards it. By the end of the XV century. regional differences in the types of settlements and the average number of households are quite distinguishable. The smallest number of households was in the settlements of the North, somewhat larger - in the North-West, in the upper Volga region, the forest Trans-Volga region. In the central counties, in the South and Southeast, it increased several times, primarily due to the large specific gravity multi-yard villages (they were larger here) and a greater number of households in the villages. The nature and pace of colonization testify, first of all, to the extensive development of agriculture, which is also confirmed by data on tools and farming systems. The evolution of arable implements was long. In the XII-XIII centuries. there were different types of archaic plows, the design features of which were determined by their functions: some were intended for lands introduced into cultivation, others for old arable land.
6. 6. Definition of EXTENSIVE [te], oh, oh; -vein, vna, obviously [Latin extensivus] (book). Directed not in depth, but in breadth, not collected in one direction, scattered; opposite intensive (book E. labor Extensive attention || Adj., by value associated with the system of agriculture, which develops due to the depletion, and not the reproduction of natural forces, and is characterized by an insignificant expenditure of capital and labor (econ.). Extensive farming E. method.
7. 7. The results of feudalism in Ancient Russia Russia broke up into 14 principalities, and a republican form of government was established in Novgorod. In each principality, the princes, together with the boyars, "thought about the land system and rats." The princes declared wars, concluded peace and various alliances. The Grand Duke was the first (senior) among equal princes. Princely congresses have been preserved, where questions of all-Russian politics were discussed. The princes were bound by a system of vassal relations. It should be noted that for all the progressiveness of feudal fragmentation, it had one significant negative point. The constant strife between the princes, either subsiding or flaring up with renewed vigor, exhausted the strength of the Russian lands, weakened their defenses in the face of external danger. The disintegration of Russia, however, did not lead to the disintegration of the ancient Russian nationality, the historically established linguistic, territorial, economic and cultural community. In the Russian lands, a single concept of Russia, the Russian land, continued to exist. “Oh, Russian land, you were already proclaiming the author of The Tale of Igor’s Campaign behind the hill.” During the period of feudal fragmentation, three centers emerged in the Russian lands: Vladimir-Suzdal, Galicia-Volyn principalities and the Novgorod feudal republic.
8. 8. REFERENCES 1. Konrad N.I. West and East. M., 1966 Nikiforov VN East and world history. M., 1977 Feb, L. Fights for history. M., 1991 2. Le Goff J. Civilization of the medieval West. M., 1992 Reynolds S. Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reintrepreted. Oxford, 1994 Markoff J. The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords and Legislators in the French Revolution. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996 Nortier T. La feodalité en crise. - Revue historique, 1996, v. 600. Oct.-Dec. 3. Gurevich A.Ya. Selected Works, vol. 1. M., 1999 Blok M. On the Comparative History of European Societies. - Odysseus: A man in history. M., 2001 4. Janitor Fr. Slavs in European history and civilization. M., 2001 Gurevich A.Ya. "Feudal Middle Ages": What is it? - Odysseus: A man in history. M., 2002 5. Danilevsky, N. Russia and Europe. M., 2003 6. Dictionary medieval culture. M., 2003 7. Chivalry: Reality and Imagination (Proceedings of the 2003 conference). - Odysseus: A man in history. M., 2004 8. History of the Middle Ages, vols. 1–2. M., 2005
9. 9. Thank you for your attention
10. 10. Thank you for your attention

What is feudalism ♦ Large land ownership in Ancient Russia ♦ Did large land ownership coincide with large farming? ♦ Estate economy: quitrent in kind ♦ Appearance of cash quitrent and corvée ♦ Relationship between patrimony and evil spirits; the process of feudalization ♦ The question of the settlement of the ancient Russian peasantry; "old-timers" ♦ The question of the community ♦ The evolution of the old Russian village ♦ How did large land ownership arise ♦ Award. Capture ♦ Indebtedness of small landownership: the black-sowed peasantry of the north of Russia in the 16th century ♦ The purchase of Russkaya Pravda and the isorniki of the Pskov charter ♦ The scale of land mobilization in the 16th century ♦ The combination of political power with the land ♦ The patrimonial right as a relic of the patriarchal ♦ The patrimonial court; patrimonial customs ♦ Lord's squads ♦ Vassalage: feudal ladder in Muscovite Russia ♦ Feudal Curia and Boyar Duma ♦ Protection of morality in Ancient Russia ♦ Can feudalism be considered as a legal system

The primitive social system, which we considered in Chapter I, has already become the past for Ancient Russia. From him only experiences were preserved, however, rather stubborn and tenacious, in the dead corners that have lasted almost to the present day. But what was real for Ancient Russia, its everyday reality, belonged to the later stage of social development. This later stage, which arose directly from those relations that we agreed to call primitive, Western European historians and sociologists have long called feudalism. Nationalist historiography, striving to prove that everything in the history of Russia was "original", original and unlike the history of other peoples, denied the existence of feudalism in Russia. She managed to inspire more than one generation of the reading public with the famous, which has become a classic, opposition to the stone, mountainous, rugged mountains and seas into many patches of Europe, in every corner of which sat its own “feudal predator”, stubbornly and successfully resisting all attempts at centralization, and wooden, even Russia, monotonous throughout its entire length, which did not know feudal castles, just as it does not know seas or mountains - and by nature itself, it seemed, intended to form a single state. This opposition, which proceeded from observations not so much of the social system as of the landscape, as it is depicted to us when we look out of the window of a railway car, undoubtedly suffered from a certain preponderance of visibility over science. It was worth asking a little more rigorously the question of what is feudalism and what are its distinguishing features, so that the expressive, at first glance, parallel of the stone castle of the Western European baron and the wooden estate of the Russian votchinnik loses all its persuasiveness. In modern historical science neither the material of buildings, nor the presence or absence of a mountain range in the landscape, are taken into account at all when determining the main features of feudalism. This modern science attributes to feudalism mainly three main features. This is, firstly, the domination of large landownership, and secondly, the connection with the landownership of political power, a connection so strong that in a feudal society it is impossible to imagine a landowner who would not be a sovereign in one degree or another, and a sovereign who would not would be a large landowner, and, finally, thirdly, those peculiar relations that existed between these landowners-sovereigns: the presence of a well-known hierarchy landowners, so that the smaller ones depended on the largest, the smaller ones depended on them, and so on, and the whole system was a kind of ladder. The question of whether feudalism existed in Russia boils down to the question of whether these three main features were present in ancient Russian society. If so, then you can talk as much as you like about the uniqueness of the Russian historical process, but the existence of feudalism in Russia will have to be recognized.

Large-scale landownership in Russia we meet already in a very early era. More complete edition"Russian Truth" (represented by the so-called lists - Karamzinsky, Troitsky, Synodal and others) in its main content is in no way younger than the 13th century, and some of its articles are much older. And in it we already find a large boyar estate with its necessary attributes; clerk, yard servants and peasants who are obliged to work on the land of the lords for a debt (“purchases)”). The “Boyarin” of Russkaya Pravda is, first of all, a large landowner. The indirect indications of Pravda also find direct confirmation in separate documents: at the end of the XII century, one pious Novgorodian donates to the monastery of St. She saved two whole villages “with servants and cattle”, with livestock, both four-legged and two-legged. For later centuries, indications of the existence of large estates become so numerous that it is not necessary to prove the existence of this phenomenon. It is worth noting, for the sake of clarity, only the dimensions of the then large property and indicate its characteristic features, compared with our time. In the Novgorod scribe books of the 15th century, we meet the owners of 600, 900 and even 1500 acres of one arable land, not counting the land - meadows, forests, etc. If we take into account that forests then were often measured not even by acres, but directly by miles , and that arable land was only a small part total area, then we must come to the conclusion that estates of tens of thousands of acres were not uncommon in ancient Novgorod. In the middle of the next 16th century, the Trinity-Sergius Monastery in one place alone, in the Yaroslavl district, in the Cheremkha volost, owned 1111 quarters (555'/2 acres) of arable land, which, with the three-field system, then already widespread in Central Russia, amounted to more than 1600 acres. Total; to this there were meadows, which annually produced up to 900 hay hay, and "a forest of the verst, 9 versts long, and 6 versts wide." This was by no means the most important of the land holdings of the monastery, on the contrary, it was only a small part of them: in the neighboring Rostov district, near the same Trinity-Sergius Lavra, also in the estate alone, the village of Novy, there were up to 5,000 acres of one arable land and 165 square miles forests. At the same time, in the Tver district we meet a landowner, which means not a hereditary, but a newly arisen owner, Prince Semyon Ivanovich Glinsky, who, in addition to the village where his estate was, owned 65 villages and 61 repairs, in which there were total 273 peasant households, and with them more than one and a half thousand acres of arable land and meadows, giving up to ten thousand hay hay. Glinsky was an important gentleman, a relative of the Grand Duke himself, but his neighbors, who bore completely quiet names, one - Lomakova, and the other - Spyachev, the first had 22 villages, and the second - 26 villages and 6 repairs. And in the Rostov district, in the village of Ponikarov, we will find not even a nobleman, but a simple clerk (clerks were "thin rank", according to the concepts of the Moscow aristocracy), who owned 55 peasant and bobyl households, which plowed together up to 500 acres of land.

It was not for nothing that we moved from the number of acres to the number of households and villages belonging to one or another master: without this, the comparison would not be sufficiently clear. The fact is that we were very mistaken if we assumed that all these hundreds and thousands of acres belonging to one owner, plowed by this latter for themselves and constituted one or several large farms. Nothing of the kind: each individual village, each individual peasant household (“yard” and “village” then often coincided, a one-door village was even typical) plowed their own separate plot land, and the votchinnik himself with his serfs was content with one "village" or a little more. The richest landowner, which we only find in the Novgorod scribe books, had his own farm only in the village where his estate stood and where there were from 20 to 30 acres of all cultivated land. In the estate where the Trinity Monastery owned up to 5,000 acres, the actual monastic arable land was less than 200 acres, and the monasteries were still, in that time, very intensive farming and went ahead of all other land owners. Here we come to the main feature of feudal large landownership: it was a combination of large property with small household. The income of the then rich gentleman consisted mainly not in the products of his own arable land, but in what the peasants delivered to him, who each ran their own independent economy on their own plot. The scribe books, especially those of Novgorod, give us an extremely expressive picture of this collection of crumbs of the large income of that time. One landowner of Derevskaya pyatina received from one of his yards: “a quarter of bread, a mark of barley, a rosary of oats, ½ ram, 1 cheese, 2 handfuls of flax, 10 eggs.” Another, belonging to an already more progressive type, took from the same peasant household "4 ½ money or five five grains of bread, cheese, lamb shoulder, ½ sheepskin, 3 ½ handfuls of flax." Not only agricultural products literally were obtained in this way by the owner of the land, but also products, in our opinion, of the manufacturing industry: blacksmiths' yards paid with axes, scythes, coulters, frying pans. It is even more characteristic that personal services were acquired in the same way: in cadastral books we will find not only entire settlements of grooms and kennels - princely grooms and kennels were even relatively large landowners - but also buffoons with buffoons. The dues of these medieval artists obviously consisted in the amusements that they delivered to their master. The Grand Duke Simeon Bekbulatovich had a gardener in the village of Gorodishchi, “but he was given half a dozen arable land in the rural field to protect the garden and plant apple trees.” The most conspicuous way of acquiring personal services in the form of dues from the land, both here and in the West, was the demand for military service for the land.

It was impossible not to notice this type of feudal dues, and, noticing only it as something specific, our historiography built on this observation of its own a broad and complex picture of the so-called "local system". But the local system is only a particularly striking detail. feudal system in general, the essence of which was that the landowner ceded to others his right to land for all kinds of natural duties and offerings.

Only later did money appear as part of this feudal dues: according to the Novgorod scribe books, we can trace the transformation of natural duties into cash with our own eyes, and the initiative for this transformation belonged to the largest landowner, the Grand Duke of Moscow. And simultaneously with money, or only a little earlier than it, a prominent place in the series of in-kind duties begins to play the labor of peasants on the lord's arable land, which becomes too large to be handled by the hands of serfs alone: corvee. Both of them mark the emergence of a completely new phenomenon, unknown to early feudalism or playing a very secondary role at that time: the emergence market; where everything can be bought, exchanged for money, and, moreover, in any, unlimited quantity. Only the appearance of an internal grain market could force the patrimonial and landowner of the 16th century to seriously take up independent farming, just as at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries the emergence of an international grain market gave a new impetus to his great-great-grandson in the same direction. Only now did each extra pood of bread become valuable, because it meant extra silver in your pocket, and for silver it became possible to find satisfaction for all your needs, including those that would not be satisfied by any village dues. In the period of the birth of feudalism, buying and selling were not the rule, but the exception: they sold not for profit, but out of need, they sold not the products of their economy, but their property, which they themselves used before; the sale was often a ruin in disguise, and the purchase was usually the purchase of luxury items, because the essentials were at home, at hand, and they did not have to be bought. - the purchase was often the first step to the navel; to such destruction. In the old days, that economic system, where they try to make do with their own, without buying or selling anything, mowed down the name natural economy. Behind specific feature accepted, obviously, the absence or low prevalence of money and the receipt of all benefits in kind. But the lack of money was only a derivative sign, the essence of the matter was reduced to the absence exchange as a constant daily phenomenon, without which it is impossible to imagine economic life as it has become today. The isolation of individual farms was the main thing, and, as applied to large-scale land ownership, this era received from the latest scientists the name of the era of closed patrimonial or local economy (“manorial”, as it is sometimes called, from the name of the English medieval fiefdom - manor).

We see that this economic type has one significant similarity with the one we considered in Chapter I: with the “oven” or “courtyard”. Here and there, a given economic group strives to satisfy all its needs with its own means, without resorting to outside help and without needing it. But there is also a very significant difference: there are fruits common labor went to those who work themselves - the producer and the consumer merged into one close circle of people. Here producer and consumer are separated from each other: separate small farms produce, consume special group- the patrimony with his servants, children and household members.

How could such a relationship develop? What made these hundreds of small farmers give up part of their income in favor of one person who did not take any direct part in the production process? At first glance, medieval peasant dues bring to mind one category of relationships that are familiar to us. And now the big owner, without exploiting all his land himself, leases part of it to smaller owners. Are not all these rams, chickens, linen or frying pans just a form of rent in kind, a reward for rented land? If we put aside for a moment from any historical perspective, imagine that people at all times and in all countries are exactly the same - as writers of the 18th century often imagined, and sometimes contemporary lawyers do - such an explanation will seem to us the most simple and natural. . The undoubted fact of movement large masses of the Russian population from west to east - and later from north to south - especially for Russia, reinforced this natural, at first glance, idea to others: the Russian peasant was portrayed as a vagrant, constantly looking for a new place to settle. And now wandering peasants renting land in one or another estate for a year, two or three, then moving on, giving way to new newcomers - this picture was imprinted in the memory of many Russian historians for a long time. The simple consideration did not immediately occur to me that all these movements of the masses of the people, undoubted in themselves, are like those secular changes in sea level, which are completely inaccessible to the gaze of an individual observer, limited by the narrow limits of his personal life, and which become noticeable only when when we compare the observations of many generations. That the great-grandson of a Russian peasant often died very far from the place where his great-grandfather was buried, this is true, but it would be very hasty to conclude from this that both great-grandfather and great-grandson during their lifetime were wandering farmers who looked at their hut, as if - sort of like a hotel. In order to remain true to such an idea, one must close one's eyes to a phenomenon typical of ancient Russia, which appears before us in almost every document where we are talking about land and land ownership. Not a single dispute over land was resolved at that time without the participation of old-timers, some of which "remembered" for thirty, others for forty, and others even for seventy and ninety years. These old-timers often showed an amazing topographical memory of a given area: they knew how to show by heart all the bushes and swamps, any “burnt pine” and “forked alder”, which marked the boundary between this or that estate. In order to know him like that, one had to be born and raised in him - a wandering tenant, an occasional guest in the estate, even for ten years, would not have studied all these details, and would they be interesting to him? The old-timer was, no doubt, just as strong and settled a resident of the estate as the votchinnik himself; and if he paid the last quitrent, then hardly as a tenant of the land, which, as often happened, was plowed from time immemorial not only by himself, but also by his father and even grandfather. But this is not enough: the “old man”, according to ancient Russian legal ideas, could even turn a wandering person into a settled one. A newly arrived peasant in the estate could “get old” - and then he already lost the right to look for a new patrimony. What role this "old age" played in the later enslavement of the peasants, we shall see in its own place; for the time being, it is important for us to note that, legally, Ancient Russia also originated from the concept of the peasant as a more or less stable and permanent inhabitant of his village. Whoever wanted to roam had to hasten to leave the place, otherwise he merged with the mass of the surrounding inhabitants, whom the law obviously considered as a settled, and not as a nomadic population. In a word, the idea of ​​the ancient Russian farmer as a transitory tenant of the lord's land, and of quitrent as a special form of rent, has to be severely limited, and not only because it would be strange to find a modern legal category in a circle of relations so little similar to ours. but also because it is directly opposite to the facts. Obviously, the peasant had to share with the master the products of his household not as a tenant of the master's land, but for some other reason.

For feudalism, as a worldwide phenomenon, this foundation has long been indicated by Western European historical literature. It talks about the process feudalization land property. Here the picture is drawn approximately like this. At the very beginning of settled agriculture, the land is in the hands of those who cultivate it. Most researchers accept that the agricultural population then did not manage individually, but in groups, and the land belonged to these same groups; that the original form of landed property was not personal property, but communal. Little by little, however, communal property disintegrated, giving way to individual property; in parallel with this, there was a differentiation among the population itself, the community. Stronger families took more and more more land, the weaker ones lost the one that was in their hands initially, falling into economic and then political dependence on strong neighbors. Thus arose large-scale feudal property with the distinctive features familiar to us. For some countries - England, for example - a free community as a primary phenomenon, a feudal estate as a secondary, later, are now considered proven. This cannot be said about Russia. The dispute about whether a landed community existed among us from time immemorial, which is now disintegrating, did not begin from yesterday; in its classical form it is already before us in the articles of Chicherin and Belyaev, dating back to the 50s of the 19th century. But the data to resolve this dispute until recently remain extremely scarce. One of the most typical signs of a community is, as you know, redistribution: since in the community not a single inch of land is the property of an individual, then from time to time, as changes in the composition of the population, the communal land is redistributed anew in relation to the number of cash owners. But before the 16th century in Russia, only one case of land redistribution can be indicated, and even that was carried out on the initiative not of the peasants, but of the local patrimony, his clerk. In other words, feudal relations already existed here. What was before them? The most plausible answer would be that in our country feudalism developed directly on the basis of that collective landownership, which we defined as "primitive" - ​​landownership of the "stove" or "courtyard". We remember that this peculiar "commune" was by no means that association of free and equal farmers, which is drawn by some researchers, for example, the community of the ancient Germans. There was no individual property in the "peche" because there was no individual farm; but when the latter appeared, there was no mention of equality. If two brothers who previously made up “one family” were divided, then the oven fell into two equal halves. But the first could have three sons, and the second one: in the next generation, three of the grandchildren of one grandfather each owned 1/6 of the village (we remember that “village” and “yard”, farm, often, but in ancient times, probably , and always coincided), and the fourth grandson - a whole half. Such harsh examples, however, are rare: with an abundance of forests, anyone who felt cramped in their own oven could put up a new “repair”, which quickly turned into an independent village. But such cases, when in the hands of one of the villagers is ⅓ of the village, and in the hands of another the remaining ⅔, are very common in cadastral books. The notion of the equal right of everyone to the same land plot as another was nowhere to come from, yes, we repeat, and there was no economic need for this equality as yet.

Parodying famous expression that the Russian people occupied the East European Plain, “not settling, but moving”, it can be said that the development of the ancient Russian village went through not “partitions”, but “partitions”. In order for us to have a community with its redistributions, it was not enough those financial and political conditions in general, which we will have to talk about below: we also needed land tightness, and there was no mention of it in pre-Moscow and even early Moscow Russia. . It has long been pointed out that the best analogy in terms of land space for Ancient Russia is given by the least populated areas. modern Siberia. Both there and here, in order to enter into full possession of a land plot in the middle of an uncleared, virgin forest, it was enough to “outline” this plot by putting marks on the trees surrounding it. We meet such a drawing in the same way in Russkaya Pravda with its “meadow oak”, for the felling of which a large fine was due, and in the documents of the 16th milestone, which are even familiar with this word - “drawing”. In one court case of 1529, judges ask local old-timers, “Tell the Grand Duke by kissing the cross, whose land and forest we are standing on, and who drew that drawing, and dried the forest, and planted a barn, and plowed arable land, and how long ago? » And the borders of the estate, as in the days of Pravda and as in present-day or recent Siberia, were marked trees. Back in 1552, a monastery old-timer in one land dispute, proving the correctness of his monastery, walked with an image “from the road to the left to a crooked oak, and on it facet, yes to the pine tree, and on the pine tree facet, from pine to sluggish oak, on it facet, and from the forked oak through the mug with a swamp from the oak, and on the oak facet..»

If there are very few traces of a landed community in the old documents - up to the 16th century inclusive, then there are plenty of traces of stove land ownership on the patrimonial lands of this era. First of all, the legal form of collective family property turned out, as one would expect, to be much more stable than its economic content. Patronage, hereditary land in cadastral books very rarely appears as the property of one faces, much more often, as a subject of ownership, we have Group persons, mostly close relatives, but sometimes distant ones. In the village of Yeldezine, in the parish of Zakhozhye, in the Tver district, at the beginning of the 16th century, Mikhail and Gridya Andreevs, the children of Yeldezina and Gridya Gavrilov, the son of Yeldezin, were imprisoned: two brothers and one cousin. After their death, their heirs were divided among themselves, but again not into individual, personal plots. On one quarter of the village of Yeddezin, the widow of Grigory (otherwise Gridi) Andreevich Yeldezin, Matryona, with two sons, turned out to be, half of the village went to the three sons of Mikhail Andreevich, and only the last quarter of the Yeldezin estate found itself, obviously, quite by accident, a single owner in the person of Gribank Mikhailovich. In the same district, in another volost, there was the village of Klyuchnikovo, owned by a group of four people, consisting of Senka and Mikhal Andreev, Yarkov's children - brothers, and their nephews, Yurka and Matyusha Fedorov, Yarkov's children. We take two examples from the countless number found on the pages of Moscow scribe books. How unusual the idea of ​​personal land ownership was for Moscow Russia of the 16th century, shows us the curious fact that when the Grand Duke began to distribute land to estates for service, then, although the service itself was, of course, personal, it did not occur to him to distribute land also to individuals. The concept of a personal service area, a service "howl", developed only very gradually. And estates are initially owned, usually, by a father with sons, an uncle with nephews, several brothers together. And sometimes it also happens that a mother and son are sitting on a service plot, and although the son is three years old, and obviously cannot serve, they leave the land behind him, “until he is ready for service”: you can’t deprive the land of an entire family because for the fact that at the moment there is no one to serve military service in it.

But if the legal form was kept the same, in fact the “pechishte” began to split up a long time ago, as we have already seen several times; traces of this fragmentation are no less a characteristic indicator of the way in which the large patrimonial property of Ancient Russia arose than the remnants of collective ownership. We have seen how, after several generations, the fractions of the former "village" ended up in the hands of members of the same family; but the colossal "princely" estates were sometimes composed of the same fractional, small lots. In the same Tver district, according to the cadastral book of 1540-1559, a third of the village of Bykovo belonged to Prince. Boris Shchepin, and two-thirds remained in the hands of the former patrimonials, the Davydovs. Behind Mitya Ryskunov was half the village of Korobino, and the other half behind the book. Dmitry Pupkov. Half of the village of Popova was in the hands of Fyodor Rzhevsky, and the other half was "the patrimony of Princess Ulyana Pupkova." Sometimes, thanks to fragmentation, on the same land - and often a small one - estates of extremely diverse social status were united. The Shcheglyatev family, all in the same Tver district, had two villages and repairs - a total of about 60 acres of arable land. One of these Shcheglyatevs served Princess Anna, the wife of Prince Vasily Andreevich Mikulinsky. And a generation later, in one of the Shcheglyatevsky villages, we meet as many as three owners: the same Princess Anna, the “suzerain” of one of the Shcheglyatevs, as we have seen, another Shcheglyatev, who at that time was a priest, and a certain Ulyana Ilyinichna Fereznina, who exchanged from someone then from the estates one of the lots of this village in exchange for another land. As you can see, it would be very wrong to imagine the patrimonials of the times of Ivan Vasilyevich the Terrible or his father as exceptionally important gentlemen, lords or barons of their kind. I could be the owner of the land, I could be a priest, I could be a clerk, I could be a serf, yesterday or even today. Prince Ivan Mikhailovich Glinsky, dying in the 80s years XVI century, asked his executor Boris Fedorovich Godunov to "grant him" - to give him to "man" Bersegan Akchyurin one of the patrimonial villages of Glinsky in Pereyaslavl district. The heir, obviously, entered into all the rights of the testator - and the village, by virtue of this will, was to become the patrimony of Akchurin, who, according to the same spiritual charter, received freedom. Here, a freed serf turned into a votchinnik, and in the cadastral books of the first half of the century we find a votchinnik who renounced his freedom and turned into a serf. A certain Nekras Nazarov, the son of Sokolov, who was sitting in half of the village of Romashkov, in the Tver district, told the scribes that he was serving Prince Semyon Ivanovich Mikulinsky, “and he said a full letter and bondage of 8 rubles.” The votchinnik, like the peasants of that time, got even with the debt, giving himself in payment.

Not only was he, of course, not a very distinguished person, but he was, of course, not a large landowner, otherwise such a fate would not have befallen him. We have seen that large property already dominated in the 16th century, but this by no means meant that every fiefdom of that time was necessarily a large estate. By the time the scribe books were compiled, small property had not yet been completely absorbed, and in these books we often meet votchinniks, full, independent, hereditary owners of their land, owning a plot of purely peasant size - 10 or 12 acres of arable land in three fields. Such a "land lord" could turn into a proletarian in exactly the same way as any peasant. All in the same Tver district, scribes found the village of Prudishche, which belonged to a certain Vasyuk Fomin, for which they “were not given letters” at a very good reason: there was nothing to describe. There was not only no household, but there was not even any building, and the patrimonial Vasyuk Fomin went from house to house and ate the name of Christ.

Large property in our country, as elsewhere in Europe, grew up on the ruins of small property. How did this process go? How were small proprietors expropriated in favor of various princes of Mikulinsky, Pupkov and other land magnates - Trinity, Kirillovo-Belozersky and other monasteries? In the sixteenth century, we find only the last links of a long chain - it is natural that they first of all catch our eye, closing the older and, perhaps, much more widespread forms of expropriation. One of the most notable forms of this later period is award inhabited land to the patrimony of the sovereign. We saw (in Chapter I) that “granting”, as a legal ritual, was a necessary condition for the emergence of any landed property in ancient times, but now we have in mind, of course, not this legal ritual, but such an act that, over a mass of small independent farms, in fact, one large owner was erected, who could expropriate any part of the income of these farms for his own benefit. How simple it was done, one example will show. In 1551, Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich, then still very obedient to the boyars and the large clergy who were friends with him, granted the abbess of the Intercession Monastery (in the Vladimir district) with 21 black villages. Back in the 17th century, the black-eared peasants disposed of their lands as complete property, paying nothing to anyone except state taxes. And now a short royal letter obliged the entire population of these 21 villages “to listen to the abbess and her clerks in everything and plow arable land on them where they will inflict themselves, and tribute to pay them than they portray you." With one stroke of the pen, twenty-one free villages became the feudal property of Mother Superior Vasilisa and her sisters.

This completely “state”, arch-legal, if I may say so, form of the emergence of large-scale property is so clear, simple and so well known to everyone that there is no need to insist on it. The love of our historians of previous generations for everything "state" - it is not for nothing that they were, for the most part, students of Hegel, directly or indirectly - forces, on the contrary, to emphasize that the forcible seizure of foreign land was by no means always clothed in such a legally impeccably correct shell. It was a long time to wait for the sovereign to grant the land - a strong and influential person could much sooner get his hands on it, not embarrassed by this legal formality. Through the scribe books of the 16th century, a long line stretches a number of such, for example, marks: there lived two Dmitriev brothers, grand ducal grooms - small landowners who had only one village. “Grigory Vasilievich Morozov took away that harvest to the same village, and now that harvest belongs to Prince Semyon Ivanovich Mikulinsky.” Yes, to the same village there was a wasteland: “and that wasteland was taken away by Prince Ivan Mikhailovich Shuisky ...” Or: “der. Sokevitsyno ... is empty, but derelict from Prince Mikhail Petrovich Repnin. One legal charter of the 40s of the 16th century will give a very vivid illustration of these dry marks of Moscow state statistics. The Spassky Yaroslavl Monastery complains of its insult - a large landowner himself, of course, but smaller and weaker than the neighbor sent to him by fate. The man of this neighbor, Prince Ivan Fedorovich Mstislavsky, Ivan Tolochanov, having arrived at the monastery villages, “swept the monastery peasants out of the villages”, and settled in one village himself, while others imposed dues in his favor. But, "sweeping out" the peasants themselves, new owner he did not at all want to part with their property: he kept it for himself, driving the owners out almost naked. The list of robbed, which is given, one after another, by individual "swept" peasants in the same petition, is curious, first of all, as a concrete indicator of the level of well-being at which the average peasant household of the 16th century stood. One of these peasants, Ivanko, for example, shows that “that Ivan Tolochanov took a gelding from him, and two cows, and five sheep, and seven pigs, and fifteen hens, and a dress, lord, mine and wife, took a fur coat and a sermyaga, yes, a dyed caftan, yes, a home-made summer coat, yes, a Novogonsk black fringe, yes, five men's shirts, yes, fifteen women's shirts, and five lower ports, and half-thirty (25) embroidered and scolded and simple ribs, and twenty canvases, and seven canvases, Yes, nine combs, Yes, three axes, Yes, two plows with policemen, Yes, three scythes, Yes, eight sickles, Yes, twelve dishes, Yes, ten staves, Yes, twelve spoons, Yes, two pancake pans, Yes, six panev, Yes, three earrings, one alone, and two on silver with pearls, and men's boots, and four women's and children's boots, and twenty altyns of money ... "As you can see, the Russian peasant of the times of Grozny still had something to take, and it took more than one generation of Ivan Tolochanovs to bring this peasant to its present state.

But forcible seizure, in its legal or illegal form, was hardly the main way of forming large landownership in Ancient Russia. In history, as in geology, slow molecular processes produce more enduring results than isolated catastrophes. We have no - or very little - material for a detailed study of the molecular process that decomposed small property into ancient period. But we have already said that the so-called chernososhnye (later - state) peasants, who survived mainly in the north of Russia, preserved patrimonial property even in the 17th century. We can observe the evolution of small patrimonial landownership here quite closely - and, as we will see, there is every reason to think that what happened here in the time of Alexei Mikhailovich was not much different from what happened in the rest of Russia under Ivan III and Ivan IV or even much earlier . Here, in the north of Russia, we see with our own eyes how, under the pressure of purely economic reasons, without the intervention of state power or open force, more and more land is concentrated in the hands of some, while the possessions of less fortunate patrimonials melt like a snow block under spring sun. Comparing the situation of the Russian peasantry in the North according to the censuses of 1623 and 1686, his researcher comes to the following conclusion: “The difference between the thin, average and best peasants has become more palpable: the relationship between the minimum and the maximum (in three volosts: Kevrole, Chakole and Maryina Gora) changed from 1:48 (without arable lands) to 1:256 "- before the minimum peasant plot was 1/6 of a quarter, now 1/16. A quarter - half a tithe, "a quarter in the field" is equal to one and a half tithes of arable land in total, with a three-field system. This means that the smallest peasant plot in 1623 was ¼ of our tithe, in 1686 - less than 1/6. And the largest plot in the first case is equal to 8 quarters, and in the second - 16, and the yards with the largest plot in 1623 were less than 1% total number, and in 1686 - more than 6%. “Before, the difference between the most common peasant lot and the most significant did not exceed 2–2 ½: 8–10, now it is 2–2 ½: 16–20, that is, the subsistence man managed to greatly overtake the average peasant.” And in parallel with this melting of small property, the dependence of the small patrimony on his richer neighbors is just as clearly growing. Whereas in 1623 ordinary peasants did not have ladles at all either in Kevrol or in Chakol, in 1686 6 peasants had 11 ladles: one had 4, one had 3, the rest had one each.

Landless peasants already come across in the 20s of the 17th century: “In the Chakolskon volost, in the village of Burtsovskaya, Fyodor Moiseev wandered between the yards, and the arable land of his foals behind N. Alekseev, or in the village. Fominskaya A, Mikhailov became impoverished, his yard and arable land ½, thurs. village Sidorovskaya for the peasants Iv. Kirillov and L. Oksenov. In both cases, the buyers are the most subsistence residents: N. Alekseev has 5 ½ quarters, while the rest have from 1 ½ to 3 hours, Kirillov has 6 ¼ hours, his neighbor has only 2. These are not only buyers, in and creditors of low-income people: "Patricake Pavlov's yard is mortgaged to D. Nikiforov and arable land ¼ four." The impoverished peasants do not abruptly leave the village completely: “They were taken away by debtors, and they recent debts wandered off, ”as the Solvychegodsk scribe notes. Often they turned into ladles, sometimes hiring themselves to their creditors on their former plot; in the village of Svatkovskaya of the Kevrolsky camp in 1678, the brother of the departed peasant owned his sycamore and arable land, and in 1686 he, together with his nephew, the son of the former patrimony, lives as a ladle in the old plot, passed to the rich peasant Dm. I assure you.

What happened in the remote North in the second half of the 17th century and what we can observe here from year to year and from yard to yard, is still familiar to Russkaya Pravda of the 13th century and the Pskov charter of the 15th century: only there we have only more or less indirect indications of the process, which we can take into account here with almost statistical accuracy. Russkaya Pravda already knows a special category of peasants, which has always greatly embarrassed our legal historians; These are the so-called purchases. They occupied an intermediate position between a free peasant, a “smerd”, and a serf, and turned into serfs with great ease: a simple failure to fulfill the obligation assumed, leaving work before the deadline made the purchase by the slave of the owner, from whom he left. On the other hand, the purchase could be beaten like a serf - only "for the cause", and not on a whim. Modernizing the relations of the 13th century, some researchers would like to see just a hired worker in the purchase. Undoubtedly, he was such in the sense that he worked in someone else's economy, or at least for someone else's economy, for a certain remuneration. But this was by no means a representative of the rural proletariat: at the purchase, one of the articles in Russkaya Pravda suggests a “own horse,” that is, a horse that he personally owned, and in general, an “old woman” - his own property, which the owner, as can be seen from another article of the same Pravda, was often inclined to regard it as belonging to him.

It was, therefore, a hired worker of a special kind, hired with his own inventory; in other words, he was a peasant forced by circumstances to work on the lord's arable land. What put him in such a dependent position, Pravda indicates with sufficient clarity: the “purchase” was called that because he took a “kupa” from the master, that is, a loan - partly, perhaps in money, but mainly in the form the same inventory: a plow, a harrow, etc. In other words, it was a peasant who owed money - this was the economic root of his dependence. From one article in Pravda, one can conclude that he also had some kind of household of his own: this article suggests that the purchase could “destroy” the cattle lent to him by the owner, “the tools of his own deed”, at some kind of his own work. Probably, therefore, in some cases, at least, he still had his own plot of land. But he had already lost his independence to such an extent that at the trial he stood almost on the same level as a serf: one could refer to him, put him up as a “obedience”, only in a “small weight” - and then “out of necessity”, when there was no one else . Two centuries later, in the Pskov Judicial Charter, we find already detailed legislation on such indebted peasants, who here are called “izorniks”, “gardeners”, and sometimes even “polovnikovs”, as in the northern black-moss volosts of the 17th century. All these dependent people of various names still had their own property, from which in other cases the owner ruled his debt, his “twist”. But they were already so close to the serfs that their lawsuit against the master was not taken into account, while Russkaya Pravda still allowed such lawsuits.

The indebtedness of the peasants was by no means a phenomenon peculiar exclusively to the era of the birth of serfdom, the 16th-17th centuries. That is why this latter cannot be explained by debt alone. The dependence of the ladle of the Kevrol volost in the 17th century, as well as the purchase of Russkaya Pravda in the 13th century, did not reach slavery, which just did not develop in the north of Russia. In order for the enslavement of the entire peasant mass to arise out of debt, socio-political conditions were needed that were not always met. But enslavement was the final moment of a long drama, and now we are still quite far from this moment. Much earlier than the peasant became the full property of another person, he himself ceased to be the full owner. The first consequence of the debt was not yet the loss of freedom, but the loss of land. “Pray us, your orphans, bless us among yourselves, our lands for the sake of selling and mortgaging,” the Chukhchenem church peasants of the Kholmogory archbishop Athanasius asked: “ For the fact that we have nothing to feed ourselves, only not by selling earth and mortgage ". In the words of the researcher from whom we borrow this quote, the development of polovnichestvo "goes hand in hand with an increase in the mobilization of real estate, so that in the same county they (these phenomena) occur less often or more often, depending on how stable the peasant estate is: for example, in Solvychegodsk uyezd, in Luzskaya Peremets, where 95.9% of the peasants in 1645 own according to antiquity and scribe books of 1623, there is not a single ladle yard. On the contrary, in the Alekseevsky camp, where the main basis of ownership is fortresses (purchases), there are about 20 ladle yards, in the Polish volost there are 16 ladler yards for 80 peasant yards belonging to the same peasants ”, etc. One of the Moscow scribe books of the 16th century, to fortunately, she kept us indications of those documents that the owner of the land could present to prove his rights. In the overwhelming majority of cases, these documents are bills of sale. In two volosts of the Tver district, Zakhozhye and Suzemyo, Moscow scribes of the half of the 16th century described 141 estates, not counting the monastic ones, and several documents were submitted for some estates; of the latter: merchants - 65, mortgages - 18, exchange - 22. In twenty-one cases, the documents turned out to be lost, and only in 18 the votchinnik owned according to spiritual literacy, that is, he was the "patrimony and grandfather" of his land in the literal sense of the word, received his estate by inheritance. There is no need to think that these hereditary votchichi are some especially noble people: among them we meet, for example, the guest of Tver, the merchant Ivan Klementievich Savin. The earth is firmly held in the hands of the richer, and not the more well-born man. And most likely small estates are slipping away from hands, and from cadastral books we can sometimes very clearly trace how the mobilization and centralization of landed property took place in our country in the 16th century. “Mikhalka Kornilov, the son of Zelentsov, the village of Zelentsovo, arable land, half a half of a plow,” we read in one place. “And nonecha Zubatovo Ofonasiev son of Khomyakov: der. Zelentsovo, the Sakharov wasteland: arable land in the village 25 four in one field, and in two because of the same, hay 15 kopecks. Zubata serves as the mistress of Tver; the land is middle - and the fortress of bondage is mortgaged. "Beds and Ivashka Matveev's children Tarasova village. Brankovo, der. Repairs ... Gridka and Ivashka were gone in the stomach, and Ivan Zubatov, the son of Khomyakov, the village of Bryankovo, was repaired by Stepanov. Arable land in the village and repairing 20 children in one field ... Ivan serves as the mistress of Tver, and his fortress is a bill of sale. So, in the person of a successful "servant" of the Tver lord, one larger one grew out of two expropriated small estates.

The slow, centuries-long economic process worked for the benefit of large property, rather than the most spectacular "assaults" with robberies and bloodshed. By the 15th-16th centuries, we repeat once again, the expropriation of small proprietors was almost a fait accompli - there were only enough small estate owners to be able to refute the rather firmly held prejudice that the whole land had already been “princessed” or “boyared” by that time. The first of the main signs of feudalism - the domination of large property - can be proved for Ancient Russia, the pre-Moscow period inclusive, just as satisfactorily as for Western Europe in the 11th - 22nd centuries. Even more beyond dispute, the second sign is the connection of political power with the land by an inseparable bond.

That a large patrimonial aristocracy on their lands not only managed and collected dues, but also judged and collected taxes, no one in Russian historical literature has ever denied this fact, he finds too much documentary evidence, moreover, published a long time ago. But from the state point of view common in our historical and legal literature, these rights have always been presented as a special kind of exclusive privileges, the award of which was an extraordinary act of state power. “These privileges were granted not to the whole estate, but to individuals, and each time on the basis of special letters of commendation,” says prof. Sergeevich in latest edition of his work Antiquities of Russian Law. Two pages later, the same researcher finds, however, compelled to draw the attention of his reader to the fact that among those endowed with such a privilege there are not only big people whose names were spelled with "vicsm", but also "Ivashki and Fedka". He makes from here completely correct conclusion that “such awards constituted a general rule, and not an exception,” i.e., that the privilege belonged precisely to the “whole class” of landowners, and not to “individuals” in the form of a special sovereign favor. And two more pages later, the same author reveals an even more curious fact: the very act of granting could come not from the government at all, but from any votchinnik. With the charter of Metropolitan Jonah quoted by him to a certain Andrei Afanasiev (1450), one can compare an even more expressive example of the same kind - the charter of Prince. Fyodor Mikhailovich Mstislavsky to the same Ivan Tolochanov, whose exploits have already been discussed above. “Our tiuns and closers, and the righteous do not leave (to the villages granted to Tolochanov) for nothing,” writes Prince. Mstislavsky, - they don’t accept their exactions from them and they don’t judge his peasants, but Ivan himself knows and judges his peasants or to whom he orders him, and the court will come down to our peasants from his peasants and our tiuns judge them, and he judges with them , and the award is divided into sexes, besides murder and tatba, and red-handed robbery and tributes, and who cares about him, Prince Fyodor Mikhailovich will judge him or whom I will order. The publisher of this interesting document, Mr. Likhachev, rightly notes in the preface that this Prince Mstislavsky not only was not some kind of independent owner, but even among the servants of the Grand Duke of Moscow did not occupy any prominent place; he was not even a boyar. It must be added that the land that he, with such rights, "granted ... to his boyar son" was not his hereditary, but granted to him by Grand Duke Vasily Ivanovich himself. And this latter, apparently, did not at all consider such a further delegation of the “privilege” granted by him to an even smaller landowner as something abnormal: it was not for nothing that he himself, and his father, and his son gave such letters to their very small landowners. Above, we mentioned, according to the scribe books of the first half of the 16th century, about two grand ducal grooms who were systematically offended by their strong neighbors - boyar Morozov and princes Mikulinsky and Shuisky: in proof of their rights, these grooms presented, however, an uncontested letter of "Grand Duke Ivan Vasilyevich of all Russia," it is not clear whether it was Ivan III or Ivan IV. And a little lower in the same scribe we find a granted non-conviction letter for half a village, where there were only 50 acres of arable land. Thus, in our country, as in Western Europe, not only a great gentleman, but also every independent landowner was "a sovereign in his estate," and Mr. Sergeevich is absolutely right when he says, not quite in accordance with his original definition of the patrimonial court, as the exclusive privilege of individuals, that the rural population, long before the peasants were attached to the land, was already under the patrimonial court of the owners.

From an evolutionary point of view, the origin of this " patrimonial law"It is completely analogous to the emergence of patrimonial land tenure: as the latter arose from the ruins of "stove" land tenure - the patriarchal form of land ownership - so the first was a relic of patriarchal law, which could not distinguish between political power and property rights. One could even say that there was more than "experience" here; when the Grand Duke of Moscow granted “his servant (such and such) a village (such and such) with everything that attracted to that village, and with earthen bread(i.e. with winter rye already sown) other than murder and red-handed robbery”, then he continued to mix the economy and the state in a completely “primitive way” and even, obviously, considered his state functions mainly from an economic point of view, for it was possible to liken murder and robbery to “earthly bread” only if you did not see anything in the protection of public safety except income from court fees. There is no need to insist that this allocation of especially important criminal cases as exclusively subordinate to the princely court is, of course, explained by the same economic motives: the heaviest fines were imposed for murder and robbery - these were the fattest pieces of the princely judicial income. But having become generous, the prince could also refuse this profit: Grand Duchess Sofya Vitovtovna in charter Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery (1448-1469) wrote: “My volosts and their tiuns ... in murderousness do not interfere some things." There is no need to say also that the award itself was only the same exact legal formality as the letter of grant for land in general. It only demarcated the rights of the prince and the private landowner, as far as possible, because it was precisely thanks to the confusion of political power and private property that these rights threatened to be hopelessly confused. But the source of law was not at all necessarily princely power in itself: in a dispute over court and tribute, the estates referred not only to the princely award, but also, quite often, to the primordial nature of their right - to "old times". This is how one Belo-Zersky boyar of the half of the 15th century proved his right, from whom the Kirillov Monastery "took away" his patrimonial village "from court and from tribute." What was true of "judgment and tribute," i.e., court duties and direct taxes, was the same with respect to indirect taxes. We meet private customs not only in princely estates, where they can be mistaken for the remnant of the supreme rights that once belonged to the owner, but in the possessions of middle-class landowners, whom even a simple Moscow official, a clerk, could sometimes offend. From the complaint of one such Ryazan landowner offended by the deacon of the second half of the 16th century, Shilovsky, we learn that in the patrimony of him and his brothers “on their own shore they pour life into ships, eat from the shackle for money, yes they eat myto 4 altyns from a large ship, and altyns from a small ship, and half of the Telekhovsky monastery was washed. And the customs income could be divided in half with a neighbor, as, in known cases, court fees.

"The sovereign in his estate" could not, of course, do without the main attribute of statehood - military force. Even Russkaya Pravda speaks of the "boyar squad" on a par with the prince's squad. Documents of a later time, as usual, give a concrete illustration of this general indication of the most ancient monument of Russian law. In the composition of the servants of a wealthy patrimony of the 15th-16th centuries, we, along with cooks and titniks, kennels and buffoons, also find armed servants who served their master “on horseback and in sadak”. “And that my people are full and reportable, and bonded,” writes Vasily Petrovich Kutuzov in his spiritual book around 1560, “and those are all people in the settlement, and that they have my tribute dress and saadaks and sabers and saddles, then they are ready, but my clerks will give my man Andryusha a horse with a saddle and with a milk, yes tag, yes a helmet... " Such a patrimonial combatant, undoubtedly, by virtue of his profession, stood above a simple courtyard. He could provide the master with such services that cannot be forgotten, and become a privileged servant, almost a free servant. This Andryusha had, in addition to the master's, also "a horse he bought" and some junk, and Vasily Petrovich Kutuzov is very concerned that the executors do not mix this property with the master's. People of precisely this category, in all likelihood, were those slaves on a salary, about which the spiritual of another votchinnik, already quoted by us, says. Ivan Mikhailovich Glinsky. Asking his executor, Boris Godunov, “to give my people a gift according to the books that my salary went to them,” the testator above speaks of the same people that they are set free “with everything who served me”: but it cannot be assumed that the cook went away with the kitchen in which he cooked, or the kennel with that pack of hounds, which he was in charge of. Again, this could only be said about people who served their master on horseback and in armor; in another spiritual one (Pleshcheeva), it is directly stipulated that “do not give horses to them (serfs).” Glinsky was more generous to his former comrades-in-arms and, as we have already seen, bequeathed even to one of them his village as a fiefdom. But a servant serf could receive the same land plot from the master even during the life of the latter. According to the Tver scribe book of the first half of the 16th century, Sozon, a “man” of Prince Dmitry Ivanovich Mikulinsky, sat on one quarter of the village of Tolutin. It was already a stone's throw from such a clergyman placed on a land plot to a real small-scale nobleman. Twice mentioned above, Ivan Tolochanov, in a complaint against him from the Spassky Monastery, is called the “man” of Prince Ivan Fedorovich Mstislavsky, and the latter’s father in his letter of commendation calls Tolochanov “his boyar son,” that is, a nobleman. So imperceptibly the tops of the armed yardmen passed into the lower layer of the military service class: on one side of the thin line stood serf, on the other - vassal.

The existence of such vassalage among Russian large landowners of the 16th century - the existence of free patrimonials who carried out military service from their land, on their horses and sometimes with their armed serfs, not to the Grand Duke of Moscow, but to "private individuals" - is irrefutably proved by the same scribe book of Tverskoy county, which we mentioned more than once above. This book, compiled around 1539, lists 574 estates, for the most part small ones. Of these, 230 people served the Grand Duke, 126 private owners of various categories, and 150 people served no one. Of the 126 "Arrier-vassals" of the Moscow feudal nobility, 60 people served the Lord of Tver, and 30 - Prince Mikulinsky .. From other sources we know that the metropolitans and bishops had not only simple "servants", but also real boyars. “Bishop boyars,” says one of the historians of the Russian Church, “in ancient times did not differ in any way from princely boyars in their origin and in their social status ... They entered the service of the bishops in the same way and on the same conditions as to the princes , i.e., with the obligation to serve military service and serve at the court of the bishop, for which they received land from him for use. On these lands they could place their military servants - and their own master, in turn, was a vassal of the Grand Duke. The metropolitan military squad was supposed to go on a campaign together with the squads of the latter, “and about the war, if the Grand Duke himself sits on a horse, then the metropolitan boyars and servants,” says the letter. book. Vasily Dmitrievich (c. 1400). In the service of the Grand Duke of Moscow, the same ladder of vassals was extended, as in the service of medieval king France.

The nature of the relationship between the individual steps of this ladder - between free military servants different degrees and their respective overlords - studied in detail by the late N. Pavlov-Silvansky, who managed to summarize the results of his special work in his popular book "Feudalism in Ancient Russia" (St. Petersburg, 1907). “The service vassal contract was sealed with us and in the West by similar rituals,” says this author. - The ritual of homage, which consolidated the vassal agreement in feudal times, as well as the ancient ritual of commendation, delivery, consisted in the fact that the vassal, as a sign of his obedience to the master, knelt before him and put his hands folded together in the hands of the seigneur; sometimes, as a sign of even greater humility, the vassal, on his knees, put his hands under the feet of the seigneur. We find a ritual that is quite appropriate for this ritual petitions. Our boyar beat his forehead on the ground in front of the prince as a sign of his submission. In later times, the expression "to beat with a forehead" was used in the allegorical sense of a humiliated request. But in specific time this expression denoted the real petition, a bow to the ground, as can be seen from the usual designation of entry into service with the words "to beat with a forehead into service ...". In the second half of the appanage period, one rite of petition was considered insufficient to secure a service contract, and a church rite, the kissing of the cross, is added to this ritual. The same church oath, an oath on the Gospel, on the relics or on the cross, was made in the West to secure feudal treaty, in addition to the old rites of commendation or homage. Our boyar service is so close to vassalage that in our antiquity we even find exactly the same Western terms: to order - avouer, to refuse - se desavouer. As an example of the first, the author gives a modern formula for the news of the subordination of the Novgorod service people to Ivan III: “They beat forehead grand duke into service Novgorod boyars and all boyar children and lives, yes ordering left him." good example the second term is the story of the life of Joseph of Volokolamsk, which he cites a little further, about how this hegumen, not getting along with the local prince of Volokolamsk, passed from him to the Grand Duke of Moscow: Joseph " refused from his sovereign to a great state. One place in the Nikon chronicle has preserved for us the very formula of such a "refusal." In 1391, the Moscow prince Vasily Dmitrievich, the son of Donskoy, bought from the Tatars Nizhny Novgorod Principality, moved with his troops on Nizhny Novgorod in order to exercise the "right" he had just acquired. Nizhny Novgorod Prince Boris Konstantinovich, having decided to resist to the last opportunity, gathered his squad and addressed it with the following speech: “My Lord and brothers, boyars and friends! Remember the Lord's kiss on the cross, as you kissed me, and our love and assimilation to you. The boyars, under the first impression of a rude insult inflicted on their prince, warmly stood up for his cause. “We are all of one mind towards you,” the eldest of them, Vasily Rumyanets, told Boris, “and we are ready to lay down our heads for you.” But Moscow, in alliance with the Tatars, was a terrible force - resistance to it threatened the final death of those who resisted. When the first inspiration passed, the Nizhny Novgorod boyars decided that strength was breaking straw and that the cause of their prince was lost anyway. They decided to "abandon" Prince Boris and go over to his rival. It was the same Vassily Rumyanets, on behalf of everyone, who told the unfortunate Boris Konstantinovich about the change that had taken place. “Lord Prince! - he said, - do not rely on us, now we are not yours, and we are not with you, but we are on you". “So it is exactly in the West,” adds, citing these words, the historian of Russian feudalism, “the vassal, refusing the seigneur, openly told him: I will no longer be faithful to you, I will not serve you and I will not be obliged to loyalty ...”.

The case cited now vividly illuminates the features of the regime from which Muscovite Russia began and which lived for a long time under the shell of the Byzantine autocracy, officially adopted by the Muscovite state from the beginning of the 16th century. That the prince of the Kievan era cannot be imagined without his boyars, all historians have long agreed on this. As an example, the fate of Prince Vladimir Mstislavich is usually cited, to whom his boyars, when he undertook one campaign without their consent, said: “Thou art about thyself, prince, conceived, and we are not going along you, we did not know that.” But the "gatherers" of Muscovite Russia cannot be imagined acting alone; not without reason Dmitry Donskoy, saying goodbye to his boyars, recalled that he did everything together with them: he defeated the filthy ones, fought with them in many countries, had fun with them, and mourned with them - “and you were not called boyars, but princes of the earth mine." Just as any feudal state in Western Europe was headed by a group of persons (a sovereign, a king or a duke, a “suzerain” with a “curia” of his vassals), so was the head of a Russian specific principality, and later the state of Moscow, there was also a group of people: the prince, later the grand duke and tsar, with his boyar duma . And just as the Western European feudal "sovereign" in urgent and especially important cases was not content with the advice of his closest vassals, but convened representatives of the entire feudal society, "state officials", so our prince in ancient times sometimes conferred with his retinue, and the king - with Zemsky Cathedral . We shall later have occasion to study both of these institutions in more detail. For now, we only note that the roots of both - and thoughts and cathedral- are deeply rooted in that feudal principle which says that a free servant could only be required of the service for which he contracted, and that he could quit this service whenever he found it unprofitable for himself. That is why the feudal lord could not undertake any important business that could affect the fate of his servants without their consent.

How strong was this "social contract", a kind of contract between vassal and overlord in a feudal society? Medieval contractual relations are very easy to idealize. The "rights" of free servants are very often presented in the image and likeness of rights, as they exist in a modern constitutional state. But we know that in this latter case the rights of the weakest are often protected only on paper, while in reality "the strong always blame the weak." This applies to a feudal state to a much greater extent. more. The contractual relations of the vassal and the overlord, in essence, were much more like the norms of the present International Law, which only those who cannot violate do not violate. In inter-princely agreements, one could write as much as one wanted: “And the boyars and servants between us are free,” but in practice it happened every now and then that the prince of “those boyars and boyar children” who “moved away” from him, “robbed, villaged them and took away their houses from them, and their bellies, and all the remnants, and caught their livestock.” And no court and no justice could be found against him, except to turn to another, even more powerful rapist. In feudal society, still much more than in our modern society, force always went ahead of law. Studying the complex ceremonial of feudal relations, it is easy to get carried away and think that people, who so carefully established what gestures should have been made in this or that case and what words were uttered, were just as carefully able to protect the essence of their right. But where was there to protect one's right from the abuses of the feudal sovereign, when it was sometimes an impossible task to defend him and from the attempts of his smallest servants, ordinary and even medium-sized feudal estates? We cannot finish our study of the legal regime of feudal Russia better than with one picture borrowed from the same series of legal documents from which we repeatedly took examples above. In 1552, the Nikolsky Monastery was suing with its neighbors Arbuzovs, it was sued properly, according to the whole form: “They judged us, sir,” the monastery elders write in their petition, according to the Tsar’s sovereign’s charter, Fedor Morozov and Khomyak Chechenin. The judges "corrected" the monastery, and its opponents were "accused". “And so,” the elders continue, “Ilyins, the children of Arbuzov, came to that village ... yes Ilyins, the people of Arbuzov ... yes, me, sir, Mitrofanov, yes elder Danil, yes elder Tikhon they beat and robbed both the clerk of the monastery and the servants , and peasants and peasant women were beaten and robbed, and the old-timers, sir, who were with the judges on the ground, were beaten. And the judge, sir, Khomyak Chechenin, with the boyar children who were with us on earth, went out to take away (offended old-timers), and they, sir, beat Khomyak Chechenin and those boyar children ... And hegumen, sir, with the judge, with Fyodor Morozov, locked up, sat out... "It was not always convenient to solve the case despite the interest of the pugnacious feudal lord. Western European feudal law clothed this gross offense in a certain kind of solemn ceremony: one who was dissatisfied with a judicial decision could “defame the court”, fausser le jugement, and challenge the judge to a duel. In one of our court cases in 1531, the judge rejected the testimony of one of the litigants who referred specifically to him, the judge, stating that such a document as he spoke of had never been in the case. “And in Oblyazovo’s place (that was the name of the litigant), his man Istoma asked Sharap (the judge) for a field ... and Sharap caught himself behind the field with him.” It was also possible to call a judge to a duel in the Muscovite state of the time of Vasily Ivanovich.

That's why legal sign of agreement and should not be put among the main distinguishing features of feudalism. This latter is a much better known system of economy than the system of law. Here the state merged with the economy of the lords - in-kind quitrent and court duties flowed into the same center, often in the same form of rams, eggs and cheese; from the same center came both the clerk - to redistribute the land, and the judge - to resolve the dispute over this land. When the circle of economic interests expanded beyond the limits of one estate, the sphere of law had to expand geographically. The first time such an expansion took place was when city volosts grew out of the volosts of private landowners, and the second time, when Moscow took all the private estates under its hand. In both cases, quantity turned into quality: the territorial expansion of power changed its nature - the estate turned into a state. The first of these transformations happened quite quickly, but it was not, and very firmly. The second took place very slowly, but on the other hand, the final formation of the Muscovite state in the 17th century was also the final liquidation of Russian feudalism in its most ancient form. But until this moment, feudal relations formed the basis on which both of these political superstructures were erected - both the city volost and the patrimony of the Moscow tsars. And Mr. Veliky Novgorod and his happy rival, the Grand Duke of Moscow Ivan Vasilyevich, we must firmly remember this, ruled not over a gray crowd of monotonous subjects in their lack of rights, but over a motley feudal world large and small "boyars", each of which had its own little sovereign, behind forests and swamps Northern Russia who knew how to defend his independence no worse than his western comrade behind the walls of his castle.

• Content
• Introduction 2
• 2
• Features of feudalism 4
• Conclusion 15
• Bibliography 17

Introduction

Feudalism is a class antagonistic formation that has replaced slave system in most countries, incl. and among the Eastern Slavs - the primitive communal system. The main classes of feudal society were feudal landowners and dependent peasants. Along with feudal property, there was the sole property of peasants and artisans to implements of labor and products of a private economy based on personal labor. This created an interest directly from the manufacturer in increasing labor productivity, which determined the more progressive nature of feudalism compared to the slave system. The feudal state existed primarily in the form of a monarchy. The largest feudal lord was the church. Class struggle most sharply manifested in peasant uprisings and wars. In Russia, feudalism dominated in the 9th-19th centuries. Peasant reform of 1891 abolished serfdom, but the remnants of feudalism were destroyed only by the October Revolution in 1917.

The emergence of feudalism in Russia

“The beginning of Russian history (862-879), writes N.M. Karamzin in the book "History of the Russian State" - presents us with an amazing and almost unparalleled case in the annals: the Slavs voluntarily destroy their ancient popular government and demand sovereigns from the Varangians, who were their enemies. Everywhere the sword of the strong or the cunning of the ambitious introduced autocracy (for the peoples wanted laws, but were afraid of bondage); in Russia it was established with the general consent of the citizens - this is how our chronicler narrates: and the scattered Slavic tribes founded the state, which now borders on ancient Dacia and the lands of North America, on Sweden and China, uniting within its three parts of the world.

The Varangians, who had taken possession of the countries of the Chuds and Slavs a few years before that time, ruled them without oppression and violence, took light tribute and observed justice. The Slavic boyars, dissatisfied with the power of the conquerors, which destroyed their own, angered, perhaps, this frivolous people, seduced them with the name of their former independence, armed them against the Normans and drove them out; but personal strife turned freedom into misfortune, they did not know how to restore the ancient laws and plunged the fatherland into the abyss of the evils of civil strife. Then the citizens remembered, perhaps, the favorable and calm rule of the Normans: the need for improvement and silence ordered to forget the pride of the people, and the convinced Slavs - so the legend says - on the advice of the Novgorod elder Gostomysl, demanded rulers from the Varangians. Nestor writes that the Slavs of Novgorod, Krivichi, all and Chud sent an embassy across the sea, to the Varangians - Russia, to tell them: our land is great and plentiful, but there is no order in it - go reign and rule over us. The brothers - Rurik, Sineus and Truvor agreed to take power over people who, knowing how to fight for freedom, did not know how to use it. Rurik arrived in Novgorod, Sineus on Beloozero in the region of the Finnish people Vesi, and Truvor in Izborsk, the city of Krivichi. Part of the St. Petersburg, Estonian, Novogorodsk and Pskov provinces was then named Rus, after the Varangian-Russian princes.

Two years later, after the death of Sineus and Truvor, the elder brother Rurik, having annexed their regions to his principality, founded the Russian monarchy. “Thus, along with the supreme princely power, it seems that it was established in Russia feudal system , local, or specific, former foundation new civil societies in Scandinavia and throughout Europe, where the Germanic peoples dominated ... "

In his presentation of the history of Russia, N.M. Karamzin continued the educational concept of its progressive development in a single context with others European countries. Hence his idea about the existence in Russia of the "Feudal System", which he continued under the name "Udelov" until the beginning of the 14th century. At the same time, he considered the history of Russia as a special object of historical study, with national characteristics.

Features of feudalism

The feudal state is an organization of the class of feudal proprietors, created in the interests of exploiting and suppressing the legal status of the peasants. In some countries of the world, it arose as a direct successor slave state(for example, Byzantium, China, India), in others it is formed as a direct result of the emergence and establishment of private property, the emergence of classes, bypassing the slave-owning formation (as, for example, among the Germanic and Slavic tribes).

The production relations of feudalism are based on the feudal lord's ownership of the main means of production - land and the establishment of the feudal lord's direct power over the personality of the peasant.

Feudal landed property took shape from the ninth century. in two main forms: princely domain and patrimonial landownership.

princely domain , those. a complex of inhabited lands belonging directly to the head of state, the head of the dynasty. The same possessions appear with the brothers of the Grand Duke, his wife, and other princely relatives. In the XI century. there were still not many such possessions, but their emergence marked the onset of new orders based on the emergence of landed property and the appearance of dependent people living and working on land that no longer belonged to them, but to the master.

By the same time, the formation of their own land holdings, personal large farms of boyars and warriors belongs. Now, with the creation of a single state in the hands of the boyars close to the prince, the senior squad, as well as ordinary or junior warriors, who were the stronghold of the military power of the princes, there are more opportunities for appropriating both lands inhabited by peasants and empty plots, which, having settled, can be was quickly turned into prosperous farms.

One of the ways to enrich the ancient Russian elite was the provision by the grand dukes, first of all, to the local princes, as well as to the boyars, of the right to collect tribute from certain lands. We remember that a prominent figure from the times of princes Svyatoslav, Igor and Olga, the famous governor Sveneld, collected his tribute from the Drevlyans. These lands, with the right to collect tribute from them, were given to princes and boyars as if for feeding. It was a means of their maintenance and enrichment. Later, cities also moved into the category of such “feedings”. And then the vassals of the Grand Duke transferred part of these "feedings" to their vassals, from among their own combatants. This is how the system was born. feudal hierarchy. The word "feud" (from the Latin "feodum") means hereditary land ownership, which the lord granted to his vassal for various kinds of service (military affairs, participation in administration, legal proceedings, etc.). Therefore, one of the main features of feudalism as a system is the existence of relations between the lord and the vassal at many levels. Such a system just originated in Russia in the XI-XII centuries. At this time, the first fiefdoms of boyars, governors, posadniks, and senior warriors appeared.

Patronage (or "fatherland") called land ownership, economic complex, owned by the owner on the rights of full hereditary property. However, the supreme property of this property belonged to the Grand Duke, who could grant the patrimony, but could also take it away from the owner for crimes against the authorities and transfer it to another person. By the end of the XI-XII centuries. many junior warriors also acquire their own land holdings.

From the 11th century the appearance of church land holdings was also noted. The Grand Dukes provided these possessions to the highest hierarchs of the church churches.

Over time, the rulers began to grant their vassals not only the right to own land, but also the right to judge in the subject territory. In essence, the inhabited lands fell under the complete influence of their masters: vassals of the Grand Duke, who then granted part of these lands and part of the rights to them to their vassals. A kind of pyramid of power was built, based on the labor of peasants working on the land, as well as artisans living in cities.

But as before, in Russia, many lands still remained outside the claims of feudal owners. In the XI century. this system was just emerging. Huge spaces were inhabited by free people who lived in the so-called volosts over which there was only one owner - the Grand Duke himself as head of state. And such free peasants-smerds, artisans, merchants were at that time the majority in the country.

What was the feudal economy of some major boyar, who himself lived in his rich court in Kyiv, was in the service near the Grand Duke himself, and only occasionally ran into his rural possessions?

Villages inhabited by peasants, arable lands, meadows, vegetable gardens of the peasants themselves, economic lands belonging to the owner of this entire district, which also included fields, meadows, fishing grounds, border forests, orchards, kitchen gardens, hunting grounds - all this constituted economic complex of the estate. In the center of the estate was the manor's yard with residential and outbuildings. Here were the mansions of the boyar, where he lived at the time of his arrival in his patrimony. Princely and boyar mansions both in cities and in countryside consisted of a tower (a tall wooden building - a tower), where there was a heated room - a hut, a "source", as well as cold upper rooms - troughs, summer bedrooms - cages. The canopy connected the hut and summer unheated rooms adjacent to the tower. In rich mansions, including in princely palaces, in the city boyar courtyards, there was also a grid room - a large front room, where the owner gathered with his retinue. Sometimes a separate room was built for the gridiron. Mansions did not always represent one house, often it was a whole complex of separate buildings connected by passages, passages.

The courtyards of wealthy people in the cities and in the countryside were surrounded by stone or wooden fences with mighty gates. In the yard were the dwellings of the master's steward - the fireman (from the word "fire" hearth), tiun (keykeeper, storekeeper), grooms, rural and ratai (from the word "yell" - plow) elders and other people who are part of the management fiefdoms. Nearby were pantries, grain pits, barns, glaciers, cellars, and medushs. They stored grain, meat, honey, wine, vegetables, other products, as well as "heavy goods" - iron, copper, metal products. The economic rural complex of the patrimony included a cookery, a barnyard, a stable, a smithy, firewood warehouses, a threshing floor, and a current.

From the end of the XI century. we have information about princely and boyar castles, which are the centers of patrimonial possessions and are real fortresses reminiscent of English and French baronial lands. Castles could be three-tiered, with three high towers. In the lower tier there were furnaces, housing for servants, cages for all sorts of supplies. The second tier housed the princely mansions. Here were built wide halls for summer gatherings and feasts, next to it was a grill room, where up to a hundred people could fit at the tables. Near the palace, a small church with a roof covered with lead sheets could be cut down. Castles were adapted for powerful and long-term defense. Along their walls, in addition to crates with supplies, there were copper cauldrons dug into the ground for hot tar, boiling water, which were overturned on enemies attacking the walls of the fortress. From the palace, from the church, as well as from one of the cages in the wall, there were underground passages leading away from the castle. In a difficult hour, it was possible to secretly leave the castle through these deep passages hidden from the enemy. In such a castle, its owner and 200-250 defenders could hold out for more than a year only on their supplies. And outside the walls of the castle, a crowded city was noisy, where merchants and artisans, serfs, various servants lived, churches stood, bargaining was in full swing. Everything that was needed for the existence of the princely family was here.

Feudal possession, in addition to its vassal subordination, had another characteristic feature. It was inseparable from labor dependent population. On the master's land, be it the land of the prince, boyars, combatants, church owners, the inhabitants of villages and villages, which were subject to the feudal lord's possessive power, worked. For the right to use their own plots of arable land, meadows, forests, rivers, which were given by the Grand Duke to his vassal with all rights to these territories, they had to pay certain payments in kind to the owner of the land. The fact is that trade and money circulation in the countryside was not yet developed and the economy was subsistence, i.e. it consumed basically what it produced. It was this "nature" - grain, furs, honey, wax and other products that the inhabitants had to provide in the form of payments to their master. They were also obliged to perform an underwater duty - to provide, at the request of the master, carts in summer and sleighs in winter, drawn by horses, to perform various work related to the repair of roads, bridges, etc. All the duties that the population previously performed for the Grand Duke, for the state, were now performed for the new master - boyar, combatant, church, monastery.

Foreign economic forms of exploitation (tribute, “polyudie”) are giving way to economic ones based on the right of ownership.

It was land relations and land ownership that determined at that time the very face of society, the nature of its social and political system. The following features were characteristic of feudal landed property: 1) its hierarchical character; 2) estate character; 3) restriction of the right to dispose of land, and some categories, such as church lands, were generally withdrawn from civil circulation.

Le Goff writes: "In the Slavic and Scandinavian countries, local traditions gave feudalism other nuances." In general, there are three features of feudalism in Russia. Its three beginnings are the conditionality of land ownership, and the connection of power with land ownership, and hierarchical division. And the fact that the boyar could serve not the prince from whom he took the land, and the special transformation of boyar immunity, and the different nature of the feudal hierarchy, and the fact that not all principalities were interconnected by treaties, as was the case with Western seigneurs - all these are precisely these nuances, features of Russian feudalism, which by no means cancel it.

There are several other features that should be noted. Feudal society is anrar, cities and trade are in decline. It is the revival of cities and the growth of trade caused by it that are one of the many reasons for the destruction of feudalism. In Russia, as academician Rybakov noted, "it was in the twelfth century, simultaneously with the collapse of Kievan Rus the original isolation of the economy began to partially collapse: urban craftsmen increasingly switched to working for the market, their products increasingly penetrated into the village, without changing, however, the foundations of the economy, but creating fundamentally new contacts between the city and the emerging broad rural market. do not lose their significance at all, moreover, new cities appear, such as Moscow.

Conclusion: in Russia, most likely, there was feudalism, but with some features outlined above. And the high level of cities in comparison with the West seems to be just one of these features.

From this follows the complex hierarchical class system of feudal society, which reflected a special system of land relations. In addition, land ownership also gave a direct right to exercise power in a certain territory, i.e. landed property acted as a direct attribute of political power.

The class division of feudal society, being an expression of the actual and formal inequality of people, was accompanied by the establishment of a special legal place for each group of the population.

dominant feudal class as a whole and each of its parts separately represented more or less closed groups of people,

endowed with privileges enshrined in law - the right to own land, the possession of serfs and a monopoly on the right to participate in government and court.

Formation of the ruling class leads to the emergence of complex relationships suzerainty-vassalage, i.e. feudal dependency.

The political system of Kievan Rus can be defined as early feudal monarchy. Kyiv was at the head Grand Duke. In his activities, he relied on the squad and the council of elders. Local administration was carried out by its governors (in cities) and volosts (in rural areas).

During this period, there continues to be a numerical or decimal control system, which originated in the depths of the squad organization, and then turned into a military-administrative system.

The decimal control system is replaced palace-patrimony, with which political power belongs to the owner (boyar-vochinnik).

In the early feudal monarchy, an important state and political function is performed by the people's assembly - veche. Having grown out of the tradition of tribal gatherings, it acquires more formalized features.

The formation of the princely administration took place against the backdrop of the first administrative and legal reforms. In the tenth century Princess Olga was held " tax reform: points (“graveyards”) and deadlines for collecting tribute were established, its size (lessons) was regulated. At the beginning of the XI century. Prince Vladimir established "tithe" - a tax in favor of the church;

After the adoption of Christianity as state religion in Russia are formed church organizations and jurisdiction. The clergy were divided into "black" (monastic) and "white" (parish). Dioceses, parishes and monasteries became organizational centers. The Church received the right to acquire land, populated villages, for the implementation of the court under a specially allocated jurisdiction (all cases regarding "church people", cases of crimes against morality, marriage and family issues).

Relations between feudal lords in Europe were built on the basis of the dependence of some feudal lords on others. Some feudal lords acted as seniors, others as vassals. The lords gave their vassals lands and guaranteed their protection to them, the vassals were obliged to the lords by military service and some other duties. The relationship of suzerainty-vassalage created a specific political hierarchy within the feudal state.

The typical form of the feudal state was monarchy. feudal republic was characteristic of relatively few medieval cities in northern Italy, Germany, and Russia.

The well-known Western historian R. Pipes, who deals with the history of Russia, said that the Russian state "swallowed" society piece by piece, establishing an increasingly harsh authoritarian regime in the country. Indeed, in contrast to Western Europe, Russia has not established such relations between the state and society in which society influences the state and corrects its actions. The situation in Russia was different: here the society was under the strong overwhelming influence of the state, which, of course, weakened it (remember the basic principle of Eastern despotism: a strong state - a weak society), directed its development from above - most often by the most severe methods, although This often pursued important goals for the country.

Ancient Russia gave a variant of the non-synthetic and therefore slow development of feudalism. Like some Western European countries ( East Germany and Scandinavia), the Eastern Slavs switched to feudalism directly from the primitive communal system. A definitely negative role in the socio-economic life of the country was played by an external factor - the Mongol-Tatar invasion, which threw Russia back in many respects.

Given the small population and the extensive nature of the development of Russia, the desire of the feudal lords to prevent the peasants from leaving the land was inevitable. However, the ruling class was not able to solve this problem on its own - the feudal lords resorted mainly to personal agreements not to accept the fugitives.

Under these conditions, having assumed the task of non-economic coercion of the peasantry, the government created a system of state serfdom, playing an active role in establishing feudal relations.

As a result, enslavement was carried out from above, by gradually depriving the peasants of the opportunity to move from one feudal lord to another (1497 - the law on St. George's Day, 1550 - an increase in the "elderly", 1581 - the introduction of "reserved years") . Finally, the Code of 1649 finally established serfdom, giving the feudal lord complete freedom to dispose not only of property, but also of the personality of the peasant. Serfdom as a form of feudal dependence was a very difficult variant of it (compared to Western Europe, where the peasant retained the right to private property). As a result, a special situation developed in Russia: the peak in the strengthening of the personal dependence of the peasantry fell precisely at the time when the country was already on the way to the new era. Serfdom, which persisted until 1861, gave a peculiar form to the development of commodity-money relations in the countryside: entrepreneurship, in which not only the nobility, but also the peasantry took an active part, was based on the labor of serfs, and not civilian workers. Peasant entrepreneurs, most of whom never received legal rights, did not have strong guarantees protecting their activities.

However, the reasons for the slow development of capitalism, especially in the countryside, were rooted not only in this. Important role the specifics of the Russian community also played here. The Russian community, being the main cell of the social organism, determined the dynamics of economic and social life for many centuries. The collective beginnings were very strongly expressed in it. Having survived under feudal ownership as a production cell, the community lost its self-government, being under the authority of the feudal lord's administration.

The community itself was not a feature of Russian society - it existed in the era of feudalism and in Western Europe. However, the Western community, which was based on its German version, was more dynamic than the Russian one. In it, the individual principle developed much faster, which ultimately decomposed the community. Quite early in the European community, the annual redistribution of land was eliminated, individual mowings stood out, etc.

In Russia, in the patrimonial and black-moss communities, redistributions were maintained until the 19th century, supporting the principle of equalization in the life of the village. Even after the reform, when the community was drawn into commodity-money relations, it continued its traditional existence - partly due to the support of the government, and mainly due to the powerful support that it had in the peasantry. The peasantry in Russia made up the bulk of the population, and this mass was dominated by models of communal consciousness, covering a variety of aspects (attitude towards work, close connection between the individual and the “world”, specific ideas about the state and social role king, etc.). But most importantly, by supporting traditionalism and equalization in the economic life of the village, the community put up fairly strong barriers to the penetration and establishment of bourgeois relations.

The dynamics of the development of the ruling class, the feudal lords, was also largely determined by the policy of the state. Quite early in Russia, two forms of land ownership developed: the boyar estate, the owner of which had the right to inherit and complete freedom to dispose of the land, and the estate, which (without the right to sell or donate) complained about serving the nobility (service people).

From the second half of the XV century. the active growth of the nobility began, and the support of the government, primarily Ivan the Terrible, played a significant role in this process. Being the main pillar central government At the same time, it carried certain obligations (payment of taxes, compulsory military service). During the reign of Peter I, the entire class of feudal lords was turned into a service class, and only under Catherine II, in an era that was not accidentally called the “golden age” of the nobility, did it become a privileged class in the true sense.

The church was not a truly independent political force either. The government was interested in its support primarily because of the powerful ideological impact on society. Therefore, it is no coincidence that already in the first centuries after the adoption of Christianity, the grand dukes made attempts to free themselves from Byzantine interference in church affairs and installed Russian metropolitans. Since 1589, an independent patriarchal throne was established in Russia, but the church became more dependent on the state. Several attempts to change the subordinate position of the church, undertaken first by nonpossessors (16th century), and later, in the 17th century, by Patriarch Nikon, failed. In the era of Peter 1, the final nationalization of the church took place; "kingdom" defeated "priesthood". The patriarchate was replaced by the Synod (Theological Board), that is, it became one of the state departments. The revenues of the church came under the control of the state, and the management of monastic and diocesan estates began to be carried out by secular officials.

The urban population in Russia also had its own specifics and differed in many respects from the Western European urban class. Inside Russian cities, as a rule, there were patrimonial lands of feudal lords (white settlements), in which patrimonial craft developed, which was a very serious competition for the settlement - personally free artisans. (The exception was the city-republics of Novgorod and Pskov, where the situation was reversed: the feudal lords were forced to submit to the city.) Posad never became any significant socio-political force in Russia.

Conclusion

Many historians called the ancient Russian civilization feudal, but found it difficult to explain why Russia in its development practically bypassed the slave-owning formation. Some, relying on numerous evidence of the existence of slaves in Ancient Russia, consider it possible to call it slave-owning. However, neither definition corresponds to historical realities. There was neither a hierarchically organized class of feudal lords who owned land, nor a large class of slaves exploited by the state. The realities of Ancient Russia are completely different.

Let us recall what Western European feudalism is. Germanic tribes, consisting of community warriors, seized lands inhabited by citizens of the Roman Empire, and there already existed developed traditions of private ownership of land, enshrined in the system of Roman private and public law. The embodiment of the basic principle of the organization of the Germanic tribes was the brand community - a voluntary association of completely independent community members who individually owned a certain land plot. As you can see, the socio-economic structure of the late Roman Empire and the structure of the Germanic tribes were relatively easily combined with each other, and it is not surprising that feudal kingdoms arose relatively quickly on the lands of the empire, on the basis of the political organization of which the Christian church created an original culture.

We see a completely different picture in Russia. The main socio-economic form of life of the East Slavic tribes was the so-called family community - the union of many relatives as joint owners of land, including arable land, hunting grounds, collecting honey and wax, as well as rivers and lakes where they were engaged in fishing. Unions of such communities within compact territories united into a tribe under the rule of tribal elders - military leaders, who often took on cult (ritual-priestly) functions, uniting this tribe around the veneration of the spirits of ancestors and various natural elements.

The military organization of the Varangian squads, acting as if intermediaries between the East Slavic tribes, in a certain sense corresponded to their communal socio-economic organization: the Slavs also did not yet have individualistic principles and the main public organization was the genus. And besides this, just as in Western Europe a feudal system arose based on private ownership of land and the “vertical” principle of inheritance of power (from father to eldest son - the so-called majorat), so a very peculiar civilization with communal property appeared in Eastern Europe. to the land and the "horizontal" (from the elder brother to the next in seniority) principle of inheritance of power.

The “horizontal” principle, or “the next order of reign”, so named by Russian historians S. M. Solovyov and V. O. Klyuchevsky, created an amazing picture of the constant movement of the princely dynasty throughout all the cities of Russia. If the prince who occupied the “great table” in Kyiv died, then he should have been succeeded by the eldest in the Rurikovich family, who ruled in the second most important Chernigov principality. Behind him moved the entire chain of princes who ruled in other principalities.

Thus, one can speak of a significant originality ancient Russian civilization, which distinguished it both from medieval Western European and from traditional Eastern ones. Due to a unique combination of socio-economic, political and geographical reasons, it turned out to be an exceptionally mobile, centrifugal and therefore extensive civilization, built not so much through the comprehensive cultivation and maximum development of limited natural and social space, but by including more and more new spaces in its orbit.

A number of peoples passed immediately from primitive to feudalism. The Slavs also belonged to such peoples. Kievan Rus - this is how historians call the state of the ancient Slavs from the 9th to the 11th centuries, with the center in the city of Kyiv.

The process of formation in Kievan Rus of the main classes of feudal society is poorly reflected in the sources. This is one of the reasons why the question of the nature and class basis of the ancient Russian state is debatable. The presence of various economic structures in the economy gives reason to a number of specialists to assess the Old Russian state as an early class state, in which the feudal structure existed along with the slave-owning and patriarchal.

In Russia, patriarchal slavery also existed, but it did not become the predominant form of management, because the use of slaves was inefficient. In the XI century, along with the princely, boyar estates began to form. This happened in several ways:

the prince complained to his warriors on certain period territories for collecting tribute - food. Over time, these lands became the hereditary possessions of the boyars;

the prince rewarded combatants for serving with state land;

the prince could give his close associates part of his possessions.

From the 11th-13th centuries, a hierarchical structure of land ownership was established in feudal land ownership. At the head of the hierarchical ladder was the senior prince, who was the supreme owner in relation to the feudal lords. The heirs of the senior prince, who received full ownership of the land, became specific princes, and their possessions were called appanages. Under this system, the main privileged form of landownership was still the boyar estate as a large, independent economic unit. The patrimonial farms remained almost completely subsistence, all basic needs were met by products that were produced within the patrimony. The main form of economic dependence of peasants on landowners was quitrent in kind. ( product rent). Church land holdings were not inferior in size to the boyar estates. Churches and monasteries, as well as feudal lords, seized communal lands and attacked the rights of peasants. During the period of the dominance of the patrimonial economy, an increasingly prominent place began to be occupied by the estate, or conditional land tenure.

In the 14th century, increased public division labor, the craft began to be more and more separated from agriculture, which led to a more active exchange between the urban and rural population, to the emergence of the internal Russian market. But the creation of the internal Russian market was hindered by feudal fragmentation, since in each principality a large number of travel and trade duties and taxes were established. The development of domestic trade inevitably led to more active monetary circulation. As in the Old Russian state, during the period of feudal fragmentation of Russia, internal trade played a less prominent role than external trade. Already at the end of the XIII - early XIV centuries, foreign economic relations revived again.

At the beginning of the 15th century, the process of unification of Russian lands into a single state intensified, which ended mainly in the 16th century. The main reason for the strengthening of unification processes in Russia, in contrast to the West, was the strengthening and development of feudal relations, the further strengthening of patrimonial and local land tenure. The development of the Russian economy in the 15th-16th centuries is associated primarily with the gradual enslavement of the peasants who lived on the lands of the feudal lords.

The enslavement of peasants can be divided into 4 stages:

The first stage (the end of the 15th - the end of the 16th centuries) - part rural population lost personal freedom and turned into smerds and serfs. The Sudebnik of 1497 streamlined the right of peasants to leave the land on which they lived and move to another landowner, confirming the right of the owner-owning peasants, after paying the elderly, to be able to leave on St. George's Day. However, in 1581, in the conditions of the extreme ruin of the country and the flight of the population, Ivan IV introduced reserved years, which prohibited the peasants from leaving the territories most affected by disasters.

The second stage (the end of the 16th century - 1649) - a decree was issued on the widespread enslavement of peasants in 1592. By a decree of 1597, fixed years were established (the term for detecting fugitive peasants, initially determined at five years). After a five-year period, the fleeing peasants were subject to enslavement in new places, which was in the interests of large landowners, large nobles. The final enslavement of the peasants was approved by the Council Code of 1649.

At the third stage (with mid-seventeenth in. before late XVIII c.) serfdom developed along an ascending line. For example, according to the law of 1675, the owner's peasants could already be sold without land. Largely under the influence of the socio-cultural split caused by the reforms of Peter the Great, the peasants began to lose the remnants of their rights and, in terms of their social and legal status, approached the slaves, they were treated like talking cattle.

At the fourth stage (the end of the 18th century - 1861), serf relations entered the stage of their decomposition. The state began to take measures that somewhat limited the arbitrariness of the landlords, moreover, serfdom, as a result of the spread of humane and liberal ideas, was condemned by the advanced part of the Russian nobility. As a result, for various reasons, it was canceled by the Manifesto of Alexander 11 in February 1861.

As in other feudal states, agriculture was the main branch of the feudal economy in Russia. For centuries, it was agricultural production that determined the level and degree of economic and socio-political development of the country.

The state of agricultural production, especially in the early stages, largely depended on natural and climatic factors, which were generally not favorable. Summer for the Russian peasant is a period of extreme exertion of forces, requiring the maximum concentration of labor efforts and their great intensity.

Throughout feudal history, the main branch of agriculture was grain farming, since bread products accounted for the main share in the food structure. The leading place was occupied by rye, wheat, barley. They were supplemented by oats, millet, buckwheat, peas and other agricultural crops.

From the middle of the XVIII century. dozens of new plant species were mastered; experts count 87 new crops. The introduction of potatoes, sunflowers, and sugar beets was especially important.

The main form of arable farming in all areas inhabited by the Eastern Slavs was a two-field system. In the XIV - XV centuries. the transition to three-field land began, dividing the arable land into three parts (spring - winter - fallow). The widespread transition to a three-field crop rotation is the largest achievement of agriculture in Russia. Its introduction revolutionized agricultural technology and land use.

Other branches of agriculture were of an auxiliary nature. In the 17th century progress in animal husbandry. It was expressed in the allocation of areas where this industry became predominant, most adapted to the market (Arkhangelsk province, Yaroslavl, Vologda counties).

During the early and mature feudalism in Russia there were the following forms land feudal property: land "black" under the authority of the monarch; palace lands; lands of secular and spiritual feudal lords. In the same period, large landowners were monasteries, which from the second half of the XIV century. began to turn into independent feudal farms with large land holdings. In total there were 150 such monasteries.

Secular feudal lords have long and enviously looked at the vast land wealth of the church, dreaming of taking them into their hands. The Council Code of 1649 confirmed the government's course to freeze the growth of the possessions of the clergy. However, during the 17th century the church increased the land fund somewhat.

According to the type of feudal landownership, patrimonial and local lands were distinguished. A patrimony was a land holding, an economic complex owned by the owner on the basis of full hereditary property. Local - inalienable land property, due to the service to the ruler. The formation of landownership falls on the end of the 15th century.

The Council Code of 1649 authorized the established practice of transferring the estate in whole or in part from the father to the children.

The decree of Peter I of March 23, 1714 marked the merger of the estate and patrimonial forms of land ownership, turning the landed property of feudal lords into hereditary property.

In ancient Russia, in addition to agriculture, handicraft production was widely developed. how independent industry it began to take shape in the 7th-9th centuries. The craft centers were ancient Russian cities such as Kyiv, Novgorod, Polotsk, Smolensk, Suzdal, etc. Among them, the first place was occupied by Kyiv - a large craft and trade center.

The level of handicraft production in Ancient Russia was quite high. Skillful blacksmiths, builders, potters, silver and goldsmiths, enamellers, icon painters, and other specialists worked mainly to order. Over time, artisans began to work for the market. By the XII century. Ustyuzhensky district stood out, where iron was produced, supplied to other areas.

Feudalism contributed to the development of the economy, industry and trade. The development of trade caused the appearance of money. The first money in Russia was cattle and expensive furs.

AT early XVII in. the first manufactories were built. Most of them belonged to the treasury, the royal court and large boyars.

Palace manufactories served the needs of the royal court. State manufactories were created for the production of weapons (Cannon Yard, Armory) or for state needs (Money, Jewelery Yards).

In the XVII - XVIII centuries. the construction of construction and textile manufactories continued, progress was observed in railway construction and the development of communications, a river shipping company arose. The first steamboat appeared on the Neva in 1815. By 1850, there were about 100 steamboats in Russia.

Russia's exit to Baltic Sea increased the volume and expanded the scope of Russian foreign trade. The ports of St. Petersburg, Riga, and Tallinn have acquired great importance in foreign trade. A prominent place in Russian exports of the XVIII century. industrial goods occupied: linen, canvas, iron, ropes, mast wood, and at the beginning of the 19th century. corn. Russia imported cloth, dyes, luxury goods. Trade continued to develop with the countries of the East - Persia, China, Turkey, Central Asia.

We can say that the economic development of feudal Russia took place on the whole in line with those processes that were characteristic of other European countries. At the same time, it possessed a number of features and characteristics associated with external and internal political development, mentality, traditions, a vast territory, and a multi-ethnic population. Russia's later entry into the era industrial development predetermined its lagging behind the leading countries of Europe.

In general, the state initially arises most often as a reaction to an external threat. This requires a strong leader who is able to rally around him the most combat-ready and active part of the nobility.

Approximately such a picture we see in the days of Kievan Rus. Let's not argue the Vikings brought us the state, or it arose on the basis of local tribes. It's important that strong personality, which was Rurik, having achieved the unity of the glades with fire and sword, began to expand the borders, subjugating new peoples, moreover, all of them were economically and politically weaker than Kyiv.

Now let's look at the 11th century, when the feudal fragmentation of Russia finally took shape at the Lyubech Congress of Princes. Despite the presence of such a strong political figure as Vladimir Monomakh, Russia breaks up into a number of principalities, and the princes jointly agree to keep everyone “his patrimony”. Here we see how economically and politically equal principalities do not find a basis for unification, and even the threat from the steppe is not able to reunite Russia. What for? In all principalities, the same thing is produced, it makes sense to trade only with distant countries, the East, for example. Economic basis for unity, no, the aristocracy in each principality wants to be the most important of all, and categorically does not want to obey the Grand Duke. As a result, we get classical feudal fragmentation in Russia.

Its consequences were many-sided. For each individual principality of the XII-XIII centuries, they are rather sad. Not a single principality could resist the Mongol-Tatars. But at the same time, fragmentation is a necessary historical period in the history of any country. Russia is no exception here. Only through fragmentation, in the end, can one realize the need for unity, which happened during the time of the Moscow princes. Therefore, to say that the consequences of feudal fragmentation in Russia were extremely sad, and that it caused great harm to our history, is extremely unfair. Yes, we were not lucky that fragmentation coincided with the Mongol conquest, so we were thrown back in our development for a century. But at the same time, Russia was able to revive, largely due to the struggle against the Golden Horde. Let us recall Europe, in particular Germany, which avoided such shocks and was able to become single state only in the 19th century.

Causes of feudal fragmentation

Russia was a great state. It developed, and its territory also increased. She conducted a successful foreign trade, could repel the attack of enemies. So why did Russia break up into separate principalities? Consider the main causes of political fragmentation.

The first, and probably the most obvious reason is the increase in the descendants of Rurik. Each generation was bigger and bigger than the previous one, and everyone wanted to grab "their piece of the pie."

The second reason, which in principle can be connected with the first, is the absence of a strong charismatic prince. Before fragmentation, it was possible to maintain the unity of the state. And all because among the Rurikovich there was an authority that everyone respected.

The third reason is the independence of the economy of individual principalities from the center and among themselves. Each principality produced everything that it needed to exist. Therefore, it could become a separate state.

The fourth reason is the interest of the boyars in their prince, who would protect their rights in the field. Therefore, the boyars helped the prince to establish power in each land. However, later in the principalities a struggle for power arose between the boyars and the prince. In each land, the issue of power was resolved in different ways.

The fifth reason is the weakening of Kyiv, the center of Russia. The city was often attacked by nomads, which contributed to the outflow of the population to more peaceful places. The migration of residents led to a backlog in the economy of Kyiv from other principalities.

Other reasons for fragmentation include:

6. the absence in the middle of the XII century of a serious external enemy

7. strengthening the military power of the princes in the field

8. lack of a specific order of inheritance. The new ladder inheritance order was inefficient. All the princes wanted to rule, but no one wanted to wait for his turn.

It is worth noting that, despite political fragmentation, the Russian people were spiritually united: the Russian people retained a common language, common traditions, as well as a single religion - Orthodoxy. They did not forget about the common historical roots. All this made it possible to unite separate principalities under the flag of one state, which happened, but only after more than 300 years.

What economic, social and political reasons led to the feudal fragmentation of Russian lands?

The main reason for feudal fragmentation is the change in the nature of relations between the Grand Duke and his combatants as a result of the latter settling on the ground. In the first century and a half of the existence of Kievan Rus, the squad was completely supported by the prince. The prince, as well as his state apparatus, collected tribute and other requisitions. As the combatants received land and received from the prince the right to collect taxes and duties themselves, they came to the conclusion that the income from military robbery was less reliable than fees from peasants and townspeople. In the XI century, the process of settling the squad on the ground intensified. And from the first half of the XII century in Kievan Rus, the votchina became the predominant form of ownership, the owner of which could dispose of it at his own discretion. And although the possession of a fiefdom imposed on the feudal lord the obligation to perform military service, his economic dependence on the Grand Duke was significantly weakened. The incomes of the former combatants-feudal lords depended more on the mercy of the prince. They made their own existence. With the weakening of economic dependence on the Grand Duke, political dependence also weakens.

A significant role in the process of feudal fragmentation in Russia was played by the developing institution of feudal immunity, which provides for a certain level of sovereignty of the feudal lord within the boundaries of his fiefdom. In this territory, the feudal lord had the rights of the head of state. The Grand Duke and his authorities did not have the right to act in this territory. The feudal lord himself collected taxes, duties, and administered court. As a result, a state apparatus, a squad, courts, prisons, etc. are formed in independent principalities-patrimonies. appanage princes they begin to manage communal lands, transfer them on their own behalf to the boyars and monasteries. Thus, local princely dynasties are formed, and local feudal lords make up the court and squad of this dynasty. Of great importance in this process was the introduction of the institution of heredity on the earth and the people inhabiting it. Under the influence of all these processes, the nature of relations between the local principalities and Kyiv also changed. Service dependence is being replaced by relations of political partners, sometimes in the form of equal allies, sometimes suzerain and vassal.

All these economic and political processes in political terms meant the fragmentation of power, the collapse of the former centralized statehood of Kievan Rus. This disintegration, as it was in Western Europe, was accompanied by internecine wars. Three most influential states were formed on the territory of Kievan Rus: Vladimir- Suzdal Principality. Galicia-Volyn principality and Novgorod land. Both within these principalities and between them, fierce clashes and destructive wars took place for a long time, which weakened the power of Russia, led to the destruction of cities and villages.

The boyars were the main divisive force. Based on his power, the local princes managed to establish their power in every land. However, later between the strong boyars and the local princes, contradictions and a struggle for power arose.

Sources: xn--e1aogju.xn--p1ai, knowledge.allbest.ru, znanija.com, kurs-istorii.ru, otvet.mail.ru

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