CHANGE IN THE WEST
This desire for change arose among the highest-ranking Muscovite women. By the last decades of the seventeenth century, some of them had learned that they were more confined than elite women elsewhere. They came by this information from tales spread by foreigners living in Moscow as well as from imported books. Their enlightenment was part of a larger exchange between Muscovy and Central and Western Europe, ongoing throughout the seventeenth century, that accelerated under Tsar Alexis.
Muscovites had always traded with merchants from the west, as had the Rus before them. By the seventeenth century, those merchants were coming from a region that was being transformed by political, economic, and cultural change. Centralized, bureaucratized monarchies had developed. Merchant capitalism, backed by the monarchs, was producing manufactured goods and expanding international trade. Intellectual life, which had flourished since the twelfth-century development of the universities and court patronage of the humanities, bloomed into the Renaissance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, leading to major scientific discoveries and promoting formal education. Technology was also advancing: artillery and primitive rifles were revolutionizing warfare, while the printing press permitted the dissemination of new ideas to an increasingly literate elite, among whom middle-class people figured prominently. The Reformation, even while producing major wars and witchcraft persecutions, promoted literacy as well as critical examinations of Christian doctrine by clerics and lay people alike.
These developments are the reasons why historians see the medieval phase of European history as ending in the fifteenth century and the early modern period beginning in the sixteenth. The intellectual, economic, and political currents spread into eastern Europe, affecting first those areas long in contact with the West, such as Poland and Bohemia, and then lapping at the gates of Muscovy. Tsars Michael and Alexis knew that the other Europeans had more effective armies than theirs, so they brought in foreign military advisers to teach the new weapons and methods to their troops. They and their courtiers also bought the latest luxury goods, including fine textiles and ingeniously automated clocks, from merchants come to Moscow. And they listened to stories about life among royals elsewhere. They heard that queens and countesses did not spend their lives cooped up in their houses, that they rode unveiled around their capital cities, that they wore beautiful, light, brightly colored silk dresses to elegant parties, where they danced with men they were not married to.
Although he presented himself as a pious traditionalist, Tsar Alexis was willing to bend the rules governing royal women. He was an unusually attentive father to his six daughters—Evdokia, Marfa, Sophia, Ekaterina, Maria, and Feodosia.47 He expected them to be politically informed, and when away on military campaigns he sent them detailed reports.48 He also took the unprecedented step of permitting his third daughter, Sophia, to study with his sons’ tutor, an erudite monk named Simeon Polotskii. And he chose as his second wife a young woman who had experienced, by Muscovite standards, a permissive upbringing. The tsar’s open-mindedness enabled Sophia, his daughter, and Natalia, his wife, to become important political actors.
NATALIA NARYSHKINA (1651–94) AND SOPHIA ROMANOVA (1657–1704)
Natalia Naryshkina was the niece of Evdokia Naryshkina, the Old Believer who had lived in the woods rather than submit to the tsar. The Naryshkins were one of the liberal families: they studied foreign languages, entertained foreign visitors, decorated their homes with imported luxuries, and allowed their daughters to learn to read. They also permitted them to socialize more freely than Domostroi custom would permit. When they decided, in 1670, to send Natalia to live in Moscow, they put her under the supervision of another liberal family, the Matveevs. Artamon Matveev, the family head, was a close adviser to the tsar. Alexis was now a widower, for his wife Maria had died in 1669, and when Matveev introduced his new ward to the monarch, Alexis was delighted by her outgoing ways. In January 1671 they married and on May 30, 1672, Tsaritsa Natalia gave birth to a son, who was christened Peter.
A contemporary portrait of Sophia in royal regalia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sophia_Alekseyevna_hermitage.jpg. Accessed June 27, 2011.
SOPHIA
Dressed in clothes like these, Sophia presided over ceremonial events at court. The Swedish ambassador, Kersten Gullenstierna, described being received by her in 1684:
“Sofia was seated on her royal throne which was studded with diamonds, wearing a crown adorned with pearls, a cloak of gold-threaded samite lined with sables, and next to the sables was an edging of lace. And the sovereign lady was attended by ladies-in-waiting, two on each side of the throne… and by female dwarves wearing embroidered sables and gold sable-lined cloaks. And the lady was also attended in the chamber by several courtiers and at the sides there also stood Prince Vasily Vasilevich Golitsyn and Ivan Mikhailovich Miloslavsky.”
SOURCE: E. LERMONTOVA, SAMODERZHAVIE TSAREVNY SOFI ALEKSEEVNY, PO NEIZDANNYM DOKUMENTAM (IZ PEREPISKI, VOZBUZHDENNOI GRAFOM PANINYM) (ST. PETERSBURG, 1912), 44; QUOTED BY LINDSEY HUGHES IN SOPHIA, REGENT OF RUSSIA, 1657–1704 (NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1990), 189.
Surviving accounts do not reveal how well Natalia got along with her many stepdaughters, but they indicate that she brightened life in the Kremlin. Jacob Reutenfels, a German living in Moscow, wrote of the new tsaritsa, “She is evidently inclined to tread another path to a freer way of life since, being of strong character and lively disposition, she tries bravely to spread gaiety everywhere.” Alexis entertained his young wife by opening a theater, where plays on Biblical and classical themes were performed. This was an audacious innovation, for the church disapproved of playacting and thought still less of pagan mythology. The royal family also traveled more often than in the past to its various estates. A particular favorite was a model farm at Izmailovo where the tsar experimented with windmills and glassblowing, while the ladies interested themselves in the gardens.49
This idyllic period lasted only five years. In 1676 Alexis died at age forty-seven. His fourteen-year-old son Fedor succeeded him and, despite his youth and chronically poor health, managed to carry out his duties competently until 1682, when he too died. The royal family was plunged into crisis. There were two Romanov heirs, Ivan, the fourteen-year-old son of Maria, and Peter, the ten-year-old son of Natalia. Ivan, the rightful heir, was physically and mentally disabled. Peter was healthy, strong, and precocious, so it seemed reasonable to some in the Kremlin to proclaim him tsar.
The choice outraged the streltsy, units of the standing army that were already unhappy because the government was not paying them on time and was extending their terms of service on the frontiers. It is not known whether anyone from the royal family helped to foment rebellion among the streltsy. What is certain is that some of the soldiers mutinied after the announcement of Peter’s elevation. Gangs of streltsy rampaged through Moscow, attacking those who supported Peter and murdering several of Natalia Naryshkina’s relatives.
Sophia, the educated tsarevna, stepped forward to lead the peacemaking and promote her own political fortunes. She played a major part in the negotiations that resolved the conflict, calming angry delegations of armed men and on at least a few occasions saving people from execution. Peace was restored by making concessions to the soldiers and declaring Ivan and Peter co-rulers. Thereafter, throughout the summer and fall of 1682, Sophia was involved in consolidating a new ruling coalition based on her mother’s family, the Miloslavskiis. From this politicking she emerged, at the age of twenty-five, as regent for her younger brothers, even though there was no basis in tradition for an elder sister to assume that position. The surviving tsaritsa, Natalia, was entitled to become regent, but her family had been decimated by the streltsy attacks, leaving her without powerful supporters at court. So she retreated with her son Peter to estates outside Moscow, while her stepdaughter gathered the reins of power.
The ambition and audacity of Tsarevna Sophia are astonishing. Nor only did she have no right to become regent, she was supposed to live her life out of public view. Tsarevny occupied lavish quarters within the woman’s section of the Kremlin, they owned estates outside of Moscow, and they controlled their private incomes and household staffs. Their good works included attending church services, patronizing the church, donating to charities, and embroidering icon cloths. In short, they had the privileges and obligations of all wealthy women, with the enormous exception that they were never to be wives or mothers.
Sophia decided to do otherwise, ruling Muscovy from 1682 to 1689 and ably continuing her father’s foreign and domestic policies. Assisted by a skilled diplomat, Vasili Golitsyn, Sophia negotiated a treaty with Poland in 1686 that gained Muscovy territory in Ukraine, including Kiev. By affiliating Russia with the Holy League, an anti-Turkish alliance of Poland, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Venetian Republic, Sophia broke down some of her government’s hostility toward its neighbors, thereby laying the foundation for the diplomacy of Peter I. She also fostered the continuing development of art and architecture in Moscow.50
While exercising a tsar’s power, Sophia presented herself to her courtiers and subjects as a pious, righteous tsarevna. She continued to live in the women’s quarters of the Kremlin, went to church regularly, and donated generously to convents, especially the Novodevichy in Moscow. She did not marry, though she may have had a romantic relationship with Golitsyn. She also held court, in a manner befitting a tsar, not a tsarevna.
Sophia liked ruling Muscovy, and as the years passed, she sought ways to institutionalize her position. After the 1686 treaty with Poland she claimed the title “autocrat,” formerly reserved for male rulers, and ordered coins decorated with her image. In 1687 her supporters began circulating a proposal to have her crowned co-ruler with Ivan and Peter. Portraits portrayed her wearing a crown and ermine-collared robe, or holding the symbols of sovereignty, the orb and scepter. Court poets sang her praises. She went no further than this, for fear of alienating her brothers and powerful boyars.51 Perhaps she was also deterred by the fact that Golitsyn, whom she sent off to war in Ukraine, did not win victories that would have bolstered her reputation. When he returned from a second campaign in the summer of 1689, Sophia’s regency suddenly ended.
The dramatic events of August 1689 are well documented. Sophia hoped to glorify her adviser as a great conqueror, though the fact that he had mostly led his army on fruitless marches was well known. To that end, she expected that her seventeen-year-old half-brother Peter would perform the usual ceremonies welcoming Golitsyn back from the war. Peter, at the urging of his advisers, refused. Sophia demanded that he do so, rumors began flying that she intended to arrest Peter, the younger tsar fled to the sanctuary of a monastery, and in the stand-off that followed, Sophia’s supporters deserted her. On September 7 Peter ordered the tsarevna stripped of her title “autocrat” and remanded to the Novodevichy Convent. Her ruling days were over.
No woman could have kept power once a legitimate, healthy tsar was old enough to challenge her. Sophia managed as long as she did because she possessed extraordinary political skills and because Peter was an immature teenager. Having ordered her to spend the rest of her life in comfortable confinement, her half-brother left her alone. Then, in 1698, the streltsy revolted again. Peter suspected that Sophia was involved, even though investigations turned up no evidence to prove it. After an angry meeting at which he accused her of treason and she denied the charges, Peter imposed on Sophia the time-honored punishment of disgraced royal women—taking the veil. She became the nun Susanna. To remind her of the importance of loyalty to him, Peter ordered that the bodies of three of the streltsy conspirators be hanged outside the tower in which she lived. There the corpses dangled through the winter. The tsar also issued instructions limiting the number of visits Sophia could have with her sisters. His one-time regent lived out her life in the beautiful precincts of Novodevichy, died there in July 1704, and was buried in the convent grounds.
And what of Natalia, Peter’s mother, the effervescent tsaritsa who had stepped aside when Sophia made herself regent? From 1672 onward, Natalia lived with her son at the royal estate at Preobrazhenskoe, managing the household and avoiding politics. She did not subject Peter to the confinement and supervision imposed upon young tsars who lived in the Kremlin, and so the boy played war games using live ammunition, frolicked with foreigners, and studied occasionally, when his tutor was sober enough to teach him. There is little evidence that he spent much time with his mother. Natalia did arrange his marriage when he was seventeen. Curiously, she chose Evdokia Lopukhina, the daughter of a conservative noble family. Evdokia had been brought up in seclusion, so she and Peter were ill suited to one another. One wonders why Natalia, once an outgoing young woman, should have selected a retiring maiden for her rambunctious son. The tsaritsa died in 1694 and so did not live to see her boy abolish the seclusion of elite women.
Conclusions
The lives of women in the Muscovite era, like those of earlier periods, were shaped by the politics and economics of their times. The strengthening of the central government produced warfare that made more difficult the lives of some women. The establishment of serfdom legalized the subjugation of the peasantry. The tsars’ empire-building had devastating consequences for many native women in Siberia and brought women from scores of different ethnic groups under Muscovite rule and into contact, however remote, with Muscovite moral and social norms. The tsars also increased contacts with the rest of Europe, which led, by the reign of Alexis, to an easing of the seclusion of elite women.
Amid the instabilities fostered by these changes, gender norms held firm for most of the women of Muscovy. The elite values of the time were summed up by the author of The Domostroi, who promoted the notion that an ideal family was one in which everyone knew her or his place and all worked together to meet their material and spiritual needs. Muscovites extended these ideals to society as a whole, seeing the tsar and tsaritsa as master and mistress of the realm, presiding over a gigantic household in which the powerful took care of the needy, men guided and protected women, women served and cared for their families, and all obeyed those above them. This vision legitimated the ground rules by which women lived their lives. As in the Rus centuries, the rules empowered older women, particularly elite ones, even as they sustained boundaries beyond which women trespassed at their peril. By the end of the Muscovite period, a few women were pushing against those boundaries. The age of The Domostroi was drawing to a close.