46 in 1555), and the number of men in boyar orokol’nichiirank accordingly
expanded, from about 15 to 55, in pursuit of reconciliation and equilibrium.
When he de facto came to power in 1584 and became tsar in 1598, Boris Godunov
reconciled with his rivals by expanding the number of families and men in high rank;
thefirst Romanov ruler Mikhail Fedorovich did the same in 1613.
Generous distribution of benefits (made possible by imperial expansion) helped
to appease the elite in the sixteenth century as state building deprived some great
families of power. One strategy of centralization involved reeling back immunities
that had been granted to private landholders (lay and clerical) to supplant inad-
equate bureaucracy and build networks of local support. Such grants exempted a
landlord’s lands and people from the ruler’s taxation, judiciary, or administration.
At mid-sixteenth century the state centralized by reclaimingfiscal and judicial
immunities as it developed a network of governorships. Until about that time the
state also granted territorial appanages with limited sovereign rights to a variety of
prestigious families: the brothers of the rulers, princely émigrés of Gedyminide
heritage from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Patrikeev, Bel’skii, Golitsyn, Mstislavskii)
and sovereign East Slavic princes from lands that Moscow had conquered
(Shuiskii, Rostovskii). Similarly, in the mid-fifteenth century Moscow created a
virtually autonomous appanage for Tatar princes at the Kasimov“khanate,”ruled
by a branch of the Chinggisid Kazan ruling family. It endured until the 1680s,
while a similar enclave in the town of Romanov for some Nogai Tatars lasted until
the 1620s. These two Tatar appanages were exceptions where, as discussed in
Chapter 6, most appanages were eliminated over the sixteenth century and none
was awarded in the seventeenth century to men in the ruling family (fortuitously
there were few surviving males). Although the state continued to distribute im-
munities to political favorites and church institutions well into the seventeenth
century, these were deviations from a general trend away from subdivided rule.
Affinitive politics worked well for the small, face-to-face warrior band of the
fifteenth century, and they shaped the characteristic institutions of the state in the
sixteenth century. The system showed signs of strain, however, as imperial expan-
sion and military modernization demanded a larger and more diversified adminis-
tration. By the early seventeenth century the highest elite had four“conciliar”
ranks, the term derived from the verbdumat’(to consult). The so-called“dumnye”
ranks were boyar,okol’nichii, conciliar gentryman (dumnyi dvorianin) and conciliar
or state secretary (dumnyi d’iak). The last, representing the most expert chancery
heads, were rare bureaucrats in an elite defined by military status. Over the entire
seventeenth century there were aboutfifty state secretaries, and a few (thirteen over
the century) even rose to conciliar gentryman,okol’nichii, or boyar status once
reserved for the military clans.
That the most talented scribes broke into elite status demonstrates gradual
transformation in the elite. As the empire grew and the state modernized to control
it and mobilize its resources, the bureaucracy demanded more personnel. As skilled
bureaucrats began to impinge on the preserves of military elite status, military men
also invaded their sphere, becoming what Robert Crummey has called“noble
officials,” literate men who took leadership and judicial positions in central
Co-optation: Creating an Elite 211