THE INNER CIRCLE AND BOYARS
The court elite received the best deal. In Muscovy, these were the boyars, the great
men of the realm, who were easily co-opted as Moscow rose to power even in the
century before 1450. Moscow emerged as a partnership of grand princes and
boyar clans; boyars were constantly at the grand princes’sides: they witnessed
grand-princely wills and treaties, they stood by the ruler during diplomatic
audiences, they are depicted in theIlluminated Chronicleconstantly in attendance
on the ruler. As noted in Chapter 6, the central interdependence of ruler and his
men was idealized in the ruling ideology as the ruler’s obligation to take advice. In
principle he should listen to all righteous people, but two groups enjoyed constant
access to his counsels—clerics and boyars (Figure 9.1). Muscovy had a very weakly
developed concept of tyranny and resistance to rule, but the theme is repeated in
historical accounts that a bad ruler was one who did not listen to good advice but
ruled on his own. Grand princes tended to be related by marriage to the boyars of
their inner circle and they certainly knew all their boyars personally. Rulers
occasionally gathered larger assemblies to symbolically assemble the realm for
advice giving and consensus (the so-called Councils of the Land).
Figure 9.1This is one of several images in this late seventeenth-century illustrated history
of Tsar Michael Romanov’s marriage in 1624 that shows him consulting with his boyars.
(“Opisanie v litsakh torzhestva...,”Moscow, 1810). General Research Division, The New
York Public Library.
Co-optation: Creating an Elite 209