relative status of the two clans according to official records of genealogy and military
service. Since virtually no challenger ever won a precedence suit in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, the practice functioned more as a face-saving and perhaps
precedent-setting defense of clan and personal honor rather than as a limit on the
tsar’s autonomy to deploy his men. In the rare cases when an eminent man refused
to accept a negative ruling, the tsar turned his“righteous anger”on him; Aleksei
Mikhailovich’s tongue-lashings to such recalcitrants were biting. In the last resort,
for defying the tsar, such men were subjected to a public ritual of humiliation that
functioned as a“social drama”in Victor Turner’s terms, providing a liminal space
in which both sides in the quarrel could claim a modicum of dignity, thus restoring
equilibrium in the riven elite.
The tsar’s courts were for high crime, including land disputes, service remuner-
ation queries, felonies (recidivist robbery and theft, murder) and political crime, here
construed to include religious crime (treason, heresy, witchcraft). The Church
participated in cases of heresy, but punishment was meted out by the state. The
state had no compunction in using the legal system to protect its interests: the early
Romanovs, for example, vigorously persecuted any whiff of political dissent by
instructing governors to expedite cases of suspected treason. Such“word and deed”
(slovo i delo) cases (accusations of treason) continued for thefirst four decades of
Romanov rule, but yielded few serious results. Governors often found peasants guilty
of nothing other than ill-considered words about the tsar blurted out in drunken
revelry. By mid-century the intensity of such prosecutions waned, although crafty
litigants often falsely claimed a“word and deed”case to delay their own prosecution.
Basic law and order was left to local communities and their norms; local
languages, traditional law, and elites held sway from German codes in Livonia to
East Slavic customary law in peasant villages to sharia law in Kazan to Cossack law
in the Don and Hetmanate and native custom in Siberia and Bashkiria. The
Church had jurisdiction over all Orthodox on issues of belief and religious practice,
as well as lower-level civil adjudication in minor disputes for its lay dependents. It
jealously protected its authority over the prosecution of clerics in non-religious
crime. In 1649 the state created a Monastic Chancery to collect church taxes and
try clerics in civil issues, but in 1669 the Church successfully negotiated shared
jurisdiction over such cases. The vast lands of the patriarchs had particularly broad
immunities from state jurisdiction.
A rudimentary handbook of East Slavic customary law (The Russian Law),
compiled by the twelfth century, resembles other medieval European codes of
common law; it circulated in Muscovy through the early modern centuries but
was superseded for procedure and punishment by grand-princely lawcodes (1497,
1550, 1649, 1669) and individual decrees. Most of Byzantium’s great heritage of
secular Roman law was not translated into Slavic or transferred to the Rus’lands,
although Byzantine church law was. In the seventeenth century, in lively exchange
with cultural centers in Ukrainian- and Belarus’an-speaking lands, particularly
among churchmen, some Byzantine law was revived in Muscovy; its influence,
and that of the Lithuanian Statutes of the Grand Duchy, is evident in the 1649
Lawcode and 1669 Criminal Articles.
The State Wields its Power 169