POLITICS
In 1237, thousands of Mongol cavalrymen, clad in leather armor and riding small, sturdy horses, trotted onto Rus territory. They had come to stay; their wives, children, slaves, extra horses, and flocks trundled along behind them. Three years later the Mongols had conquered all the princes. Rape was a weapon in their arsenal, as it has been in the arsenals of so many armies; tens of thousands of Rus women probably fell victim to their assaults. Serapion, a thirteenth-century bishop, summed up the disaster when he wrote, “There fell upon us a merciless people who devastated our land, took entire cities off to captivity, destroyed our holy churches, put our fathers and brothers to death, and defiled our mothers and sisters.”14 The Mongols had already cut a swath of conquest from China through Central Asia, but the Rus did not know this, and so they came to see their defeat by the rampaging infidels as God’s punishment for their sins.
The Mongols, so brutal in conquest, proved to be tolerant overlords. As long as Rus rulers paid their taxes on time and performed occasional obeisance before the khan, the Mongol king, the Mongols mostly left the Rus rulers and people alone. Indeed, the Mongols who conquered the Rus did not even live among their subjects, as their cousins in China did. Instead, christening themselves “the Golden Horde,” they settled in the grasslands along the Volga River, far to the south of the centers of Rus population. There they could pasture their enormous flocks and stay in touch with their people’s extended trade networks. They got along amicably with the Orthodox church, despite their own conversion to Islam. Indeed, Mongol rulers practiced religious toleration throughout their vast empire. They did interfere in Rus politics by backing princes who were favorably disposed toward them, and this meddling had consequences for the history of the Rus, but it had little impact on Rus political institutions.
Those changed largely because of developments within the Rus polity that had started long before the conquest. As the Rus expanded across their huge territory in the Kievan period, regions far from the capital city came to contain princely families. Since every son of a prince was a prince, the list of claimants to titles and property kept growing. This was particularly true in the northeast, the forested region that was to become central Russia. The earliest important political centers there were Rostov, Suzdal, and Vladimir. The titular leader of the northeast Rus princes was the grand prince of the city of Vladimir. Galicia and Volynia to the west of Kiev, and Chernigov and Smolensk to the north, also contained ambitious dynasties and a growing population by the early thirteenth century.
This process of territorial diffusion, begun before the Mongols came, continued apace thereafter. Kiev, no longer an economic or political center, slipped into obscurity and was taken over by energetic Lithuanian rulers in the fourteenth century. The Lithuanians also established themselves as overlords of much of the southwestern Rus lands, with the result that only the northeastern principalities remained independent of all outsiders save the Mongols. The Mongols’ control over them weakened in the fourteenth century, as internecine warfare between the leaders of the Golden Horde intensified.
“Appanage” is a term from French medieval history that refers to grants, often of land, given by sovereigns to their junior sons. It was adopted by Russian historians as the name of the period from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries when Rus lands were divided into a multiplicity of small princedoms. Never does the meekness and forgiveness preached by the monks seem to have fallen on deafer ears than during this time, when the princes employed their armies in almost constant warfare. They betrayed one another to the Mongols; they took oaths that they quickly broke; brothers killed brothers and uncles and cousins. Out of this deadly pursuit of power there emerged by the mid-fourteenth century the Danilovichi, a family that made its headquarters in Moscow. “They were a warrior band,” Nancy Kollmann has written, “united in the quest of booty and benefit.”15 The Danilovichi proved to be luckier and cleverer than the other princely families. They were particularly good at cultivating the support of the Mongols and the church. Their most successful prince was Vasili II, who ruled from 1425 to 1462, during which time he completed the subjugation of the other independent princes. With the ascent of his son, Ivan III, to the role of pre-eminent prince in 1462, another political era in Russian history, the Muscovite, began.
SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENTS
The freebooting traders of Kievan times had faded into the past by the Appanage centuries, replaced by an elite that derived more of its income from landowning. Scholars debate whether it is legitimate to call these men and their families “nobles.” For our purposes it seems appropriate to do so, on the understanding that this term refers to a landed military elite that subscribed to a common code of honorable conduct, treated war-making and law-giving as its birthright, and claimed greater power than before over the peasantry.
Those peasants were bringing more land under cultivation and improving farming techniques, even as the demands of the nobility rose. The peasants believed that the land they farmed and the forests they harvested belonged to them, but their ownership was not recognized in formal titles. They had no legal recourse, therefore, when princes, boyars, lower-ranking military men, and the church claimed ownership of their land. So they went to work for the new landlords. The landlords remunerated the peasants at the lowest possible rate and required them to pay various fees. The princes levied taxes. The frequent warfare and the demands of the Mongols raised all these exactions, and peasants found themselves squeezed by rulers more intrusive and demanding than they had been in Kievan times.
Despite the growing pressure of the rulers, the peasants managed to increase their productivity in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Meanwhile, the merchants, who benefited from being connected to the Mongols’ vast trading networks, were expanding commerce. The coming of the bubonic plague in the mid-fourteenth century brought new hard times; the death of one-third of the population cut the food supply and slowed trade.16 By the early fifteenth century, the economy was recovering once again, and by the end of that century it entered a period of rapid growth.
THE LIVES OF PEASANT AND MERCHANT WOMEN
The upheavals of Appanage Rus did not alter gender ideas or the well-established patterns of women’s lives. Peasant women still spent most of their time working the land with their families, tending animals and children, and growing, preparing, and preserving food. Merchant women shared with their husbands and adult sons the management of large households, supervising servants and employees, buying supplies, and selling the products of the family business. Less prosperous women worked as shopkeepers, artisans, and weavers. Middle-ranking women also borrowed and lent money. Surviving documents from Novgorod, a major trading city in the northern Rus lands, show them writing letters and keeping accounts.17
THE LIVES OF NOBLEWOMEN
We know more about the daily lives of noblewomen in the Appanage period than in Kievan times. They grew up under the care of servants, most of whom were slaves, and their education consisted of learning household management. They and their menfolk were far less likely to be literate than were contemporary nobles in central and western Europe. As teenagers, noblewomen married men chosen for them by their parents. A girl’s parents considered themselves successful if they found a groom who was a strong, healthy young man from a wealthy family. Ever mindful of the importance of their daughters’ having spotless reputations, parents permitted them little contact with people outside their family circle, so often girls met their fiancés for the first time at their weddings. This practice made a mockery of the law’s requirement that daughters consent freely to the grooms chosen for them. Newly married wives moved in with their husbands’ families and learned the tasks of managing slaves, overseeing expenditures, and getting along with in-laws.
Women of the princely class were involved in the dangerous politics of their time in the same ways as Kievan princesses had been. Some became victims, captured, ransomed, or killed during the incessant warfare. One of these unfortunates was Konchaka, sister of the Mongol khan Uzbek. In 1316 or 1317, she married Iuri, prince of Moscow and candidate for the supreme title of grand prince of Vladimir. By giving his sister to Iuri, the khan signaled his desire that Iuri become grand prince. Iuri’s chief rival, Michael of Tver, laid claim to the throne also, and soon he and Iuri were at war. Michael prevailed and captured Konchaka, perhaps to intensify Iuri’s humiliation or perhaps to hold her hostage in order to extract concessions from Iuri. The stratagem backfired: Konchaka died in his custody and Iuri accused Michael of poisoning her. The two princes then headed to the Mongol capital of Sarai to explain to Khan Uzbek what had happened to his sister. The khan believed Iuri. Declaring Michael guilty of the murder of Konchaka as well as other crimes, Uzbek executed him. Iuri became grand prince.
Most of the women active in politics in the Appanage period had happier fates than poor Konchaka. As they had done in the Kievan period, they advised the men in their families, particularly their sons, and participated in arranging marriages for their children. The authority that some achieved is documented in the last testament of the Moscow prince Dmitri Donskoi (ruled 1359–89), a hero of Rus history because he was the first prince to score a major military victory over the Mongols. When he dictated his will in 1389, Donskoi charged his wife Evdokia, a princess from Suzdal, with keeping the peace between their five fractious sons after he was gone. “I commit my children to my princess,” he declared. “And you, my children, live as one and heed your mother in all things.” He also bequeathed considerable property to his wife and charged her with far-reaching administrative powers over the family patrimony. At the end of his will, Donskoi admonished his sons yet again: “And you my children, heed your mother in all things, and do not go against her will in anything. And if any one of my sons does not heed his mother and goes against her will, my blessing shall not be upon him.” Evdokia appears to have been more successful than some of her predecessors; her son Vasili ascended the throne in 1389 without major internecine conflict. She also made a reputation for herself as a woman of great piety and spent a fortune building monasteries and churches.18
SOPHIA VITOVTOVNA (1371–1453)
Evdokia’s son Vasili was also married to an influential woman. She was Sophia Vitovtovna, the daughter of Grand Duke Vytautas of Lithuania. Although a foreigner, Sophia established herself as an important figure at court, by relying on her own political skills and the reputation of her father, who was a far more powerful and assertive man than her husband. Vasili, it is said, governed in Vytautas’s shadow and under his patronage. He demonstrated his respect for his wife by appointing her, in his will, regent for their young son, also named Vasili. So, after her husband’s death in 1425, Sophia governed the Moscow lands, advised by female relatives, church leaders, and allies among the boyars at court. After eight years of lobbying and over the objections of Prince Iuri, brother of the dead Vasili, whose claim to succeed was stronger than the young prince’s, Sophia and her supporters managed to persuade the khan to appoint Vasili grand prince.
Shortly thereafter, in February 1534, Sophia Vitovtovna presided over the wedding of her son. Iuri’s son Dmitri Shemiaka attended, wearing a gorgeous golden belt that he had received as a gift from his father-in-law. Sophia took this as a deliberate insult, for the belt, she had heard, should have been Vasili’s. The reasons why are convoluted; Sophia’s response was not. She went up to Dmitri and ripped the belt off him. This still graver insult set off a quarter century of civil war between the feuding clans, during which Sophia was captured three times by Shemiaka. Each time he released her unharmed, perhaps because he feared that killing the dowager princess would alienate his supporters. Vasili, on the other hand, he blinded after capturing him in 1446.19
Other women came to Vasili’s aid. A female servant named Poltinka, who worked for his sister Anastasia, provided intelligence about the disposition of Shemiaka’s forces, which were occupying Moscow in 1446. His aunt Juliana then traveled to the city on Christmas Eve, requesting entrance so that she could worship there. When the gates were opened, Vasili’s men flooded in and retook the city. In 1449, Shemiaka gave up and went into exile in Novgorod. He died four years later, poisoned, some say, on Sophia’s orders. What is clear is that the relentless politicking of Sophia and the occasional assistance of other female relatives helped Vasili become the pre-eminent grand prince.20
PROPERTY AND INHERITANCE LAW
As they expanded their land ownership, the elite of the Appanage period also expanded women’s property rights. In Kievan times, women could inherit moveable goods, but probably not land. In the Appanage centuries, parents and husbands began bequeathing land to their female survivors. Most of these inheritances were “life estates” given to widows; a recipient received the income from a parcel of land so long as she lived. On her death, it passed to her male heirs. Such “usufruct rights” were commonly employed across Europe because they provided for widows, while guaranteeing that real property would remain in the widows’ marital families.
Rus law during the Appanage period also allowed women to inherit land free of any encumbrances. Parents could dower their daughters with land, over which the recipients had full property rights. That is, they could sell, mortgage, and will it. Husbands could also leave land to their wives. Thus when Dmitri Donskoi granted huge acreages to Evdokia in his will, he was acting according to notions of women’s property rights that were becoming widely accepted. Anticipating that his sons might claim a voice in their mother’s management of her affairs, he wrote, “And I bless my princess with all these my acquisitions, and in these acquisitions my princess is free: she may give them to one of her sons or she may give them for the memory of her soul [to a monastery]. And my children shall not interfere in this.”21
The right of elite women to own land in the Appanage period increased their role in property management. Married female landowners probably had to defer to their husbands, for land, even if it formally belonged to the wife, was considered a part of a family’s overall holdings and thus was properly under the patriarch’s control. Widows such as Evdokia, who had been granted both authority and ownership in their husbands’ wills, had full managerial authority over their holdings, authority similar to that exercised by those noblewomen in Western Europe who inherited fiefs.
The best known of such widows, other than the princesses, came from Novgorod, a prosperous city in northwest Rus. There, in the fifteenth century, three women, Oksinia Esipova, Nastasia Grigoreva, and Marfa Boretskaia, were among the city’s largest landholders. One of these women, Boretskaia, led a rebellion against Sophia Vitovtovna’s grandson, Ivan III.22
MARFA BORETSKAIA (BIRTH AND DEATH DATES UNKNOWN)
Fifteenth-century Novgorod was a thriving commercial hub. Its merchants and nobles imported woolen cloth, salt, beer, metal goods, and gold and silver from the Germanic ports to the west, and silk, cotton, jewels, spices, and steel weapons from the Middle East. Their most valuable export was fur. They also sold wax, honey, tar, and hides obtained from the city’s far-flung hinterland and from trade routes that extended into Siberia. Marfa Boretskaia was born into a boyar family that had grown rich from this trade; she married into another, the Boretskiis.23 Boretskaia worked with her husband, Izak, in managing their lands and marketing their products. She also supervised their employees and ran a large household in Novgorod. Boretskaia did all this without leaving home; it was not considered proper for elite women to travel. When her husband died, she took charge of the business herself. She then expanded it and thereby made her family one of the richest in Novgorod.
“Marfa at the Destruction of the Veche,” as imagined by the late nineteenth-century painter Klavdi Lebedev. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LebedevK_UnichN0vgr0dVecha.jpg. Accessed June 27, 2011.
MARFA BORETSKAIA
Lebedev portrayed Boretskaia as a heroic defender of her people against tsarist oppression. The monk who wrote the pro-Muscovy account in the Novgorod Chronicle of the fifteenth century saw her differently.
“AD 1471 The Grand Prince loan [Ivan] Vasilievich marched with a force against Novgorod the Great because of its wrong doing and lapsing into Latinism [Catholicism]….
That tempter the devil entered… into the wily Marfa Boretskaya, widow of Isaac Boretskii, and that accursed [woman] entangled herself in words of guile with the Lithuanian Prince Mikhail. On his persuasion she intended to marry a Lithuanian Boyar, to become Queen, meaning to bring him to Great Novgorod and to rule with him under the suzerainty of the King over the whole of the Novgorod region.
This accursed Marfa beguiled the people, diverting them from the right way to Latinism, for the dark deceits of Latinism blinded her soul’s eyes through the wiles of the cunning devil and the wicked imaginings of the Lithuanian Prince. And being of one mind with her, prompted to evil by the proud devil Satan, Pimin the [Catholic] monk… engaged with her in secret whispering…. This Pimin did similarly trust in the abundance of his riches, giving of them also to the crafty woman Marfa, and ordering many people to give money to her to buy over the people to her will.”
SOURCE: THOMAS RIHA, ED., READINGS IN RUSSIAN CIVILIZATION, 2ND ED., VOL. 1 (CHICAGO: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 1969), 44.
Perhaps her commercial success emboldened Boretskaia to become involved in Novgorod’s turbulent politics. This unusually independent city was run by a boyar oligarchy. Some office-holders were elected and an all-male city assembly, the veche, had a voice in city decision-making. The prince, on the other hand, was a hired gun, who served a limited term as commander of Novgorod’s army and was not permitted to live in the city. The boyars were able to maintain this happy arrangement until Ivan III, the grand prince of Moscow, came to power in 1462. Ivan sought to eliminate Novgorod’s special status so as to incorporate the city into his expanding kingdom. Marfa Boretskaia was among those who resisted him.
The conflict burst into warfare in 1471. Novgorod’s elite families were divided: some wanted to make the best deal possible with Ivan, who, they believed, would prevail eventually. Others, Boretskaia among them, argued that the city should call for help from the powerful Lithuanians. She sent her two sons, Dmitri and Fedor, and her grandson Vasili to the city assembly to argue that if the city chose a Lithuanian to be its prince, that man would bring with him an army formidable enough to defend Novgorod from Ivan. Boretskaia herself may have spoken at the meeting, although it was not customary for women to do so. “We are free people of Great Novgorod,” a chronicler records her as shouting, “and the Grand Prince of Muscovy has caused us many offenses and has perpetrated many injustices; but we will be with Kasimir, King of Poland and Grand Prince of Lithuania.”24
Although the assembly remained divided, Dmitri Boretskii and several other boyars took the field at the head of a Novgorod army. Moscow chronicles record that Ivan III’s mother Maria urged her son to accept the challenge. When the Muscovites won, Dmitri Boretskii was captured and executed, but neither the death of her son nor the failure of the Lithuanians to give the help they had promised weakened Boretskaia’s resolve. Nor did the fact that Ivan made a peace offer that would have preserved some of the city’s liberties. Boretskaia refused to submit even after many other Novgorod families had done so. Her son Fedor fought the grand prince again in 1476, lost, and was taken as a prisoner to Moscow. The next year Boretskaia was driven from her home by a fire that was probably intended either to kill her or to persuade her to submit. Now Ivan was finished with conciliation. He ordered the rebels to leave Novgorod forever. Boretskaia and her grandson were arrested and exiled permanently to Nizhni-Novgorod, a city far to the east of Moscow. Nizhni-Novgorod means “Lower Novgorod.” Perhaps this was Ivan’s idea of a parting shot. Boretskaia died there.25
Assertive noblewomen such as Boretskaia and Sophia Vitovtovna were empowered by gender ideals that prevailed in Rus society and across Europe. Each was a middle-aged, widowed mother when she assumed leadership; each acted in defense of and through her sons. Women were supposed to fight for their children; adult sons, as we have seen, were supposed to obey their mothers. Boretskaia and Sophia also drew authority from their social rank, for female members of elite families were powerful people entitled to command the obedience of everyone lower-ranking than they. Like Olga centuries before, Boretskaia and Sophia Vitovtovna were gritty matriarchs eager to wield their power. There were undoubtedly others whose names we do not know, peasants and princesses, who took maximum advantage of the authority and power that were apportioned to them by law, custom, and fate.
The presence of such exceptional women among the Rus testifies to the opportunities for female agency that existed within European patriarchy. Women, particularly high-born women, exercised authority within their families and communities. In Appanage times, that authority was enhanced by expanding property rights. It bears remembering, though, that the rich and powerful were a tiny minority of Rus society. Most women were peasants, who shared with their menfolk short lives of struggle with the natural environment and the increasing demands of the ruling class.
Conclusions
The history of women in Russia began when Rus adventurers and Slavic peasants created a confederation that proved strong enough to survive for two centuries. Those centuries saw the establishment of patterns in women’s lives that would outlast the confederation itself. Elite women managed households and played politics; merchants worked in family businesses; peasants farmed. Christianity slowly spread among them, remaking their understanding of the supernatural and fortifying the protections afforded them in law. The upheavals of Mongol conquest, plague, and political conflict cost many women their lives, without appreciably altering the gender values and norms that structured those lives.
The Rus lands were an unruly frontier by comparison with western and central Europe—that is, they were characterized by vast tracts of unsettled land, minimally defined boundaries, and decentralized politics. Despite the challenges of this world, Rus women lived lives very similar to those of women in English or Saxon lands, because European gender values and mores were as functional on the frontier as in more densely populated, closely governed areas. The similarities would persist in the Muscovite period, but the differences, shaped by the consolidation of monarchical power in Muscovy and by major political, economic, religious, and intellectual change to the west, would grow.