education, manliness, innovation, or worldly achievements. Implicitly, the purpose
of political power is to lead one’s people to salvation, set a moral example of
Christian love, and preserve tradition—a cautionary message to an audience of
rulers and elites busily pursuing empire and clan self-interest. Agapetus’advice to
princes circulated through the seventeenth century; Kyiv Metropolitan Peter
Mohyla printed a version in 1628 that was reprinted in Moscow in 1660. Peter
I owned a copy of it, alongside a collection of rather different European theories of
absolutism.
At the same time at mid-sixteenth century, as Boris Uspenskii and Viktor Zhivov
have forcefully argued, rhetoric from the Church elevated the sacred stature of the
ruler. By taking the title of“tsar,”by emphasizing the powerful half of the Agapetan
duality, by creating a coronation ceremony and later modifying it to add anointing,
ideologues were asserting that the tsar’s authority was other-worldly, connected to
God, unchallengeable. Uspenskii and Zhivov stress that the image of the tsar as
sacred was to be taken metaphorically, but that later generations often took it
literally, producing a broadening of the concept of tsarist power. One might remark
that such broadening complemented other discourses and political mandates that
penetrated Russia, particularly in the seventeenth century, that encouraged rulers,
particularly Aleksei Mikhailovich, to claim broader power over society and Church.
Another important implication of the heightening of sacred rhetoric, Uspenskii
notes, is that the only discourse of legitimacy in Muscovy became“pretenderism,”
that is, to claim blood kinship to the charismatic ruler. Uspenskii broadens the
concept of“pretender”to all manner of political rivalries, but even the most narrow
definitionfinds repeated examples in the political turbulence of the seventeenth
century and later.
Crucial to the realm’s legitimacy were the women at court, as Isolde Thyrêt has
argued. On the one hand, the tsar’s wife (tsaritsa), sisters, and daughters (tsarevny)
were players in court politics—tsaritsy were behind-the-scenes marriage brokers;
they could represent their fathers’and brothers’interests; they administered bur-
eaucracies, lands, and budgets of their own. In a unique cache of letters from 1654
to 1675 from Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich to his wife and sisters, he treats them as
partners in hard-ball politics. He informs them of how the military campaign was
going and how certain boyars were behaving and asks them to take care of the
families of men killed in battle. But ideology also gave royal women a more spiritual
role. They were considered intercessors for God’s blessing on the realm and for the
tsar’s mercy to his people. In his letters, Aleksei Mikhailovich implores their prayers
and attributes his military success to their intercession to God. The public peti-
tioned to tsaritsy to plead with the tsar for them. Their piety was as essential to the
legitimacy of the realm as was that of the church.
Just as the tsar was expected to heed the intercession of his family and clerics,
rulers were expected to be open to the advice-giving of all his people, speaking
righteously. A ruler who did not heed advice or patronized too narrow a circle of
advisors was criticized, although Muscovy did not work out a legal or even
theoretical right to resist a tyrant. Muscovite rulers are depicted regularly consulting
churchmen, great men of the realm, and even all the people. The protocols of the
Broadcasting Legitimacy 135