Well into the seventeenth century, the personal, face-to-face relationship of the
ruler and his boyars endured. A boyar’s position was hereditary—succession to
boyar rank followed collateral succession within clans; in the fourteenth to mid-
fifteenth century there were ten to thirteen boyar families at any given time and
often fewer boyars, as men had to reach a certain maturity to take the role. This elite
changed and grew—new clans could be brought in as expanding clansfissured into
separate families or by choice of the grand prince and/or the group of boyars. From
1462 to 1533, a time of military and bureaucratic growth, the number of boyar
clans rose gradually from aboutfifteen to about twenty-four, and the new title of
okol’nichiiwas devised to accommodate more men in high rank about 1490. The
system of rule, based on heredity, was remarkably stable: behind a“facade”of the
grand prince’s claim to possess all power, boyars were there to run the army, foreign
policy, and other administrative leadership, regardless of the grand prince’s age,
health, or personal qualities.
Stability among the boyars was ensured, as it was in the elite at large, by generous
distribution of benefits: grants of service-tenure land (pomest’e), peasant labor,
outright gifts. The boyar elite was structured by affinity—alliances of dependency,
friendship, and kinship. Marriage forged enduring alliances and mutual obligations
between clans and determined the pecking order among all the clans. From the
mid-fifteenth century, as a rule the grand prince’s marriage, often to an elite clan
(although rarely one of the most powerful), established the inner circle, which was
then cemented by boyar marriages to kinsmen or kinswomen of the new royal
bride. Those inner circles often lasted two or three generations before being
displaced by another faction; the Vel’iaminov clan was there at the beginning,
dominant from a key marriage to the future Ivan II in 1345 until about 1433. They
were edged out by the faction around the prestigious Patrikeev clan (princes from
the Grand Duchy), which was ousted in 1499 by a coalition of clans including the
Zakhar’iny (future Romanovs) and Cheliadniny. These clans were dominant until
Vasilii III’s death in 1533 left the 3-year-old Ivan IV on the throne and a two-
decade-long minority. It was resolved with the victory of the same faction, now
including the Bel’skii princes and the Romanov clan (Ivan IV’s wife in 1547). One
of Ivan IV’s most pernicious acts was to marry upwards of six times after hisfirst
wife, Anastasiia Romanovna, died in 1560. Boyar clans strategized over decades to
cultivate connections with the tsar’s in-laws, and constant change of the tsar’s bride
wreaked havoc with status and power among the boyars. Ivan IV died in 1584, and
a stable, old-fashioned inner circle was restored around the Godunov clan on the
strength of Boris Godunov’s sister’s marriage to Tsar Fedor Ivanovich.
This clan-based system of court politics endured by the constant pursuit of
equilibrium: when political crises were resolved, for example, winners and losers
were both rewarded. In the years around Ivan IV’s marriage in 1547, after two
decades of struggle, the families of the losing faction (Shuiskie, Mstislavskie) were
rewarded along with the victorious Bel’skie and Romanovs with status (honorific
roles at Ivan’s wedding) and benefits (new families were given boyar status, boyar and
similar ranks were distributed to more members of established clans). The number of
hereditary boyar clans almost doubled at the end of the minority (from 24 in 1533 to
210 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801