1551 Stoglav Church Council depict Ivan IV asking the assembled hierarchs of the
Church to“speak in unanimity...assist me, all of you together and in unanimity.”
An early seventeenth-century chronicle castigated the people for their“foolish
silence...when they did not dare to tell the tsar about the truth.”The tsar and
his people were to work together to keep the tsar righteous; this was not a
constitutional connection, but a personal relationship of Christian compassion
and righteous advice.
The relationship between the ruler and his men was a central focus of ideological
writings. Here one might expect the theme of military prowess to be accentuated in
the latefifteenth and sixteenth centuries when Moscow’s grand princes and boyars
were conquering lands and assembling the state. Moscow’s grand princes and
boyars were a quintessential warrior band—a small cohesive elite notably successful
on the battlefield. Bravery and manliness is a mainstay of many imperial myths; the
Ottoman Osmanli family, for example, continued to style itself as frontier warriors
for Islam (gazi) even as it also embraced Byzantine and Persian imperial imagery.
But in most Muscovite sources (art, history writing, hagiography, encomia to
princes), warrior attributes such as courage, valor, and skill in warfare were
downplayed in favor of piety, as we see with the few warrior saints honored in
the Russian tradition (Boris and Gleb, Alexander Nevskii). Still, one element of a
warrior band ethos rings loud and clear in sources produced by the church, and that
is the obligation of the ruler to respect, honor, and consult his men. A twelfth-
century encomium (included in Muscovite chronicles) to Kyivan Grand Prince
Vladimir declared,“For Vladimir loved his retinue and consulted them about the
administration of his land, about wars and about the law of his land,”while the
mid-sixteenth-centuryChronicle of the Beginning of the Tsardomdepicts Grand
Prince Vasilii III telling his men on his deathbed,“I ruled the Rus’land with you
and I held you in honor”and entrusting his wife and children to their care.
Pragmatically early modern rulers needed the support of their elites, particularly
in Muscovy, which lacked the complex social structure (middle classes, gentry and
aristocracy, professional classes) with which kings in Europe leveraged power. The
expectation that the ruler receive the advice of his men was observed by monarchs
across Europe in the medieval and early modern periods, and in the Mongol horde
with which Moscow’s princes were personally familiar. While the Ottoman sultan
in the sixteenth century developed an aloofness that elevated his status, looking on
at council meetings and diplomatic receptions from hidden upper sanctuaries,
Muscovite ritual and text consistently depicted rulers surrounded by clerics and
boyars. Chronicles praised boyars as“wishing well”for the ruler and giving him
good advice, and condemned those who refused to participate in council or who
acted on their own volition. Significantly, in all the representation of consultation,
there was no reference to disputation, disagreement, or compromise, the stuff of
real politics; rather, stabilizing“unanimity”was the explicit goal of advice giving. In
diplomatic audiences, for example, the grand prince sat on a raised throne, but was
always accompanied by boyars who lined the room. Ivan III in 1488 is said to have
refused to discuss issues with a visiting diplomat without his boyars present, and
chronicle and diplomatic sources constantly underscore that the grand prince
136 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801