The homes in which the slaves labored belonged to a Muscovite elite made up of wealthy noble families and a growing cohort of non-noble court servitors and merchants. In the cities, these people lived in substantial walled compounds containing residential buildings; outbuildings such as kitchens, stables, storage sheds, and smokehouses for curing meat and fish; gardens devoted to vegetables and fruit trees; and wells. Geese, chickens, goats, and pigs wandered around the barnyards and through the trees; the family’s cattle and horses grazed on nearby pastures in summer and joined the other livestock in the compound in the winter. The human inhabitants of these mini-farms included the head of household and his wife, their minor children and unmarried adult ones, perhaps a few relatives too poor to live independently, and a household staff of slaves and servants. Working together, they produced most of their food and clothing, tended to their medical needs, and reared their children.
THE DOMOSTROI
The major contemporary source on these households is The Domostroi, a book written by a highly placed priest or government bureaucrat in the 1550s to instruct male family heads in managing their domestic affairs. This was no trivial matter, for the anonymous author believed, as did most Europeans of his era (and of ours, for that matter), that the family was the cornerstone of the social order. The welfare of the family, in turn, depended on its being run by a loving, mutually respectful husband and wife, a pair united in work and life. The “master” was the boss, and the author of The Domostroi devoted a lot of attention to his tasks. He also believed that the “mistress” made a crucial contribution to family success, and so he painstakingly laid out an idealized pattern of character and behavior for her as well. The resulting book became a classic of Muscovite literature that was still being consulted by Russian readers in the twenty-first century.10
The author of The Domostroi believed that the mistress should be chaste, obedient, and loving to her husband, stern and commanding to other members of the household, and modest in her dealings with acquaintances. Obedience to her husband was her most important obligation. “Whatever her husband orders, she must accept with love; she must fulfill his every command,” the author declared (124). She should also strive to live with him in amity. “A wife should not get angry at her husband about anything, nor a husband at his wife” (143). But the lady of the house was to take on quite other qualities when supervising her female servants. In that role she was required to be a no-nonsense manager. “The wife should… teach her servants and children in goodly and valiant fashion,” the author wrote. “If someone fails to heed her scoldings, she must strike him” (143). This was not an unusual admonition; physical punishment of disobedient subordinates, be they children, employees, soldiers, or slaves, was widely accepted across Europe. As widespread was the ideal of the elite woman who submitted humbly to her husband’s authority and that of others who outranked her, while unflinchingly exerting her own authority over inferiors.
The mistress also had to be competent and hard-working. She had to know how to perform all the tasks of the household, from raising chickens to making clothes, for it was her job to teach younger women and to supervise their work. She had to value cleanliness, in both her personal hygiene and the running of her home. She had to keep a close eye on expenditures. The author of The Domostroi had a positive horror of servants’ stealing, so he advised the mistress to count leftover fabric scraps at the end of the day before locking them up for safekeeping. He also urged the mistress to set a good example for the servants by getting up before them in the morning, rather than letting them wake her. At the end of the day, he advised, “She should even fall asleep over her embroidery (after she has first said her prayers)” (127).
The mistress’s duties included maintaining her reputation outside her family. Wealthy families in Muscovy were as deeply concerned as their Rus ancestors about preserving their honor, that is, their standing as morally, politically, socially, and financially respectable people. The honor of the mistress depended on her behaving correctly in polite company, and so the author of The Domostroi provided detailed instructions. “When she visits or invites people to her house, she must still obey her husband’s commands. While entertaining guests or visiting, she should wear her best clothes. During meals, she should not drink alcohol. A drunk man is bad, but a drunk woman is not fit to be on the earth” (132). In conversation she must stick to uncontroversial subjects. “With her guests she should discuss needlework and household management, discipline and embroidery. If she does not know something, she may ask the advice of a good woman, speaking politely and sweetly” (132). She should never gossip. These admonitions, it should be noted, were quite similar to those made to elite women elsewhere in Europe.
The author of The Domostroi believed that embroidery was a fine public way for a woman to demonstration her mastery of feminine virtues. “If her husband invites guests or his friends, they should always find her sitting over her embroidery,” he wrote. “Thus she will earn honor and glory, and her husband praise” (126–27). Perhaps the art of fine sewing seemed particularly feminine, because it produced linens and clothing that were delicate, beautiful, and decorative. Embroidery was also something wealthy women could do while entertaining, thereby demonstrating their industriousness and artistry to their guests. Poor women also embroidered, and in their circles, the ability to produce beautiful things out of humble materials was highly valued as well.
Last in the author’s list of the mistress’s tasks came mothering. This ordering of priorities was common in Europe in the early modern period because childrearing had to be subordinated to the endless labor of providing for material needs. The necessities of daily existence had less influence over the thinking of church leaders, but they too, when they commented on family life, said very little about parenting. They concentrated instead, as did the author of The Domostroi, on the relationship between husband and wife and the good family order that derived therefrom.11
When he did address parenting, the author of The Domostroi treated both parents as equally involved in their offspring’s upbringing. Here he parted company with other sixteenth-century Europeans; most contemporary works on family life portrayed fathers as stern enforcers of discipline, mothers as more tender-hearted nurturers. There is a bit of this in The Domostroi, but in his general statement of parenting principles, the author minimized gender distinctions. “If God sends anyone children, be they sons or daughters, then it is up to the father and mother to care for, to protect their children, to raise them to be learned in the good. The parents must teach them to fear God, must instruct them in wisdom and all forms of piety. According to the child’s abilities and age and to the time available, the mother should teach her daughters female crafts and the father should teach his sons whatever trade they can learn” (93).
The author adds that girls should be impressed with the importance of preserving their reputations as virtuous maidens and advised parents to begin saving for their daughters’ dowries when the girls were infants. In return for this care, the children were to obey and honor their parents throughout their lives and take care of them in their old age.
Spending so much time discussing The Domostroi’s treatment of women reflects our priorities, not the author’s. He addressed his book to male readers and devoted the lion’s share of his attention to portraying the ideal “master.” The foundational principles he laid out were similar to those he enjoined for women: “Be obedient and submissive to your superiors, loving to your equals, welcoming and kind to inferiors and the poor” (103–104). As head of household, the master had to serve as guardian of his home, “protect[ing] his people faithfully” (122) and dealing fairly with neighbors and friends. He should practice “good deeds and wise humility,” as all Christians should (138). He should be sober, sexually abstemious, hospitable, and charitable. These were ancient masculine virtues; we have seen them prescribed for Rus leaders. The author added a newer emphasis on the importance of service to the monarch that reflected the increasing power of the Muscovite crown. “Fear the tsar and serve him faithfully…. Obey the tsar in all things,” he enjoined his readers (71).
Within his household, the master’s primary obligation was to be a wise patriarch, “teach[ing] and lov[ing] your wife and children” (92). Above all, he should instruct them in Christianity by leading family prayers and attending church “every day” (86). Protestantism and Catholicism were also stressing the religious obligations of the family head in the sixteenth century; the notion had ancient roots in the faith, stretching back to the church fathers. When family members disobeyed, the master was obliged to discipline them, beating them if necessary, in private and without losing his temper.12 The Domostroi, like other such works published across Europe in the early modern period, gave instructions on how to whip disobedient wives and servitors without doing them serious bodily harm.
Also important were the managerial skills of the paterfamilias. He had to be a good organizer of domestic work, a frugal steward of resources, and a smart consumer who bought when prices were lowest. He should not go into debt but rather “live according to his means, thinking ahead, acquiring and spending according to his own true income” (123). If he was a merchant, he should be honest in his business dealings. The master could be pleased with his “justly acquired property,” for it was virtuous to “amass property according to Christian law.” Indeed, the manual went so far as to state that creating a prosperous household “merit[ed] the life eternal” (122).
This stress on sobriety, thrift, piety, and assiduous husbandry was popular in Muscovy, particularly among the merchants and clergy, to whom the author probably belonged. Such people did not care much for the swashbuckling masculinity of the Rus warrior, and hence the warrior is absent from the pages of The Domostroi. Instead there is the homey, comforting vision of a harmonious household headed by its benevolent, diligent patriarch and matriarch. These ideals had widespread appeal, even among the warriors, and so The Domostroi quickly became an influential synopsis of Muscovy’s gender ideals.
SECLUSION AND WOMEN’S HONOR
The Domostroi does not talk directly about one of the major aspects of elite women’s lives in the Muscovite period: their seclusion from public view. The highest-ranking women wore veils when outside their residences, sat behind screens in church, and moved around Moscow in closed carriages or sledges. These customs arose from the notion that elite women should avoid being seen by males who were not members of their families. In large households, women slept in their own separate quarters and were supposed to be very careful about how and whom they entertained. Consequently, foreign men visiting a Muscovite boyar or merchant in his home rarely laid eyes on his wives or daughters. If they appeared at all, it would be to greet their guests in highly ritualized ceremonies, after which they returned to their rooms.
The seclusion of elite women grew out of the Muscovite belief in the importance of shielding high-born women from contact with people who might sully their honor. This concern was not unique to Muscovy. One of the most famous statements of Western European patriarchal values, the instructions of the Goodman of Paris to his young wife, written in the 1390s, declared, “You ought to be moderately loving… towards your good and near kinsfolk… and very distant with all other men and most of all with overweening and idle young men, who spend more than their means and be dancers.” Muscovites, who were even more anxious about women losing their good names than was the Goodman, extended the circle of threatening outsiders to include virtually everyone outside the walls of their well-guarded homes.13
Seclusion was also a marker of a family’s status. A wealthy upper-class woman did not have to work in the fields or move around the city to make her living. Instead she stayed home, consulting with her husband, supervising her slaves, saying her prayers, and finally, at day’s end, falling asleep over her embroidery. “Their chief employment is sewing,” declared a befuddled German diplomat named Adam Olearius, “or embroidering handkerchiefs of white taffeta or cloth, or making little purses or some such toys.”14 Olearius had never seen the mistresses at work running their households. He believed that the ladies of the ruling class sat quietly stitching all day—which is just what the author of The Domostroi and the elites of Moscow wanted him to believe.
A less restrictive and more widespread expression of the Muscovites’ concern about women’s honor was their practice of permitting women who felt that they had been dishonored to take their complaints to court. This practice, begun in Kievan times, was unusual in Europe. In many Italian city-states, for example, insults to a woman were treated as insults to her family, and her male relatives brought suit and received compensation. Muscovite law, by contrast, permitted women to sue in their own names, awarded the fines to them as their property, and assessed higher fines for insults to women than for insults to men. A wife who had been insulted received double the fine her husband would have received, and their daughter four times as much.
These differences reflect the fact that women whose reputations were damaged suffered social ostracism greater than that inflicted on insulted men. If they were of marriageable age, their prospects of finding a good match were diminished. To defend themselves against such dire consequences, women of all social classes went to court, bringing complaints that ranged from verbal slander and minor physical assault, such as knocking off a headdress, to major attacks, including rape. Women were complainants in perhaps one-third of honor cases brought before Muscovite courts. Judges took the charges very seriously, investigated assiduously, and often awarded considerable damages to the injured women.15
THE ELEVATION OF ROYAL WOMEN
Ivan III and his successors portrayed themselves as divinely favored, powerful rulers. This transformation of the warrior prince into a sovereign tsar required a commensurate elevation of his wife, the tsaritsa, and her daughters, the tsarevny. Isolde Thyrêt has argued that this was a process of status-building in which the entire royal household participated. In court ceremonies and on icons and embroideries, the women of the royal family presented themselves as the blessed wives of their husbands and the mothers of their people. Tsaritsy prayed to God to bless their husbands, sons, and subjects. They made large, well-publicized donations to the church and the poor. By the reign of Ivan IV, church fathers, drawing on earlier ideals, were also suggesting that the tsaritsa, being female and therefore more naturally humble, submissive, and devout than her manly husband, could tame his cruder impulses and nudge him toward peacemaking.16
Portraying the tsaritsy as exemplars of Muscovite femininity and consorts of powerful tsars did not increase the powers granted them by custom. Instead, the royal wives participated in politics in much the same ways as had the princesses of Kievan and Appanage Rus. They advised their husbands, mediated family disputes, arranged marriages, and advanced their sons’ interests. Thyrêt has shown that tsaritsy were more likely to become politically involved during periods of instability at court.17 Sophia Paleologus, second wife of Ivan III, lobbied successfully for her son Vasili to be named successor. The mother of Ivan IV, Elena Glinskaia, served as regent for her three-year-old son after the death of her husband, Vasili III.
The royal mothers lived with their daughters and young sons, ladies-in-waiting, administrative staff, and a host of servants in the Moscow Kremlin’s women’s palace, a household similar in its organization to those of other elite women, but much larger.18 The responsibilities of running this establishment were considerable, and some tsaritsy, given the opportunity, willingly applied the skills acquired there to the outside world. When plague struck Moscow in 1654–55 and Tsar Alexis was too far away to supervise the government response, Tsaritsa Maria took over, conducting her own correspondence with city officials. Her tone was that of a self-confident woman accustomed to exercising authority.19
She did all this while hidden away from the view of the people over whom she ruled, for the elevation of the royal women did nothing to ease their seclusion. And no women were more walled in than the tsarevny, the daughters of the tsars, for they were prohibited from marrying on the grounds that no Russian was high-ranking enough for them and no suitably prestigious royal foreigner professed the true faith, that is, Russian Orthodoxy. So the grandiose ambitions of the tsarevny’s fathers led to lifelong spinsterhood for them. We will return to this subject later, when we come to the time when one of those daughters rebelled.
PROPERTY AND INHERITANCE LAW
Muscovy retained the property-ownership customs established for women during Kievan and Appanage times. As in the past, women received most of their property as dowries and inheritances from their parents and they retained full rights over it after they married. Widows often held “life estates” that they managed and from which they received income. When they died, the land passed either to their sons or to other male members of their husbands’ families.
Over time, Muscovy’s landholding practices became more diverse, requiring jurists to reconcile women’s property rights with the new developments. Chief among these was the spread of pomeste. This term describes an arrangement whereby the tsars granted land to the men who served them, primarily to the cavalrymen who made up their armies. When pomeste began, the grants were provisional, that is, they lasted only so long as the service. If a man left the tsar’s employ, the land reverted to the tsar’s control. Over the sixteenth century, pomeste grants and service obligations became hereditary within families. Many nobles also owned land that they had inherited (called votchina) and they bought land from other landlords. The Herculean task of adjudicating property disputes in such a complex system was made still more difficult by the expansion of both the nobility and Muscovy’s borders. Fitting women into the mix was yet another complication. In 1562, Ivan IV’s advisers attempted to simplify matters by decreeing that pomeste and votchina land could belong only to men, and that all men owning such land had to do military service. Women could not receive either type of land in their dowries or inheritances.
This law proved impossible to enforce, because of Ivan’s demented behavior. His wars and his purges of the nobility created thousands of widows who needed the income from all their husbands’ land to survive. For their part, government officials realized that they needed the widows to keep the estates going in order to sustain the economy. The government therefore suspended enforcement of the ban against women inheriting pomeste and votchina. The importance of elite women’s work to the economy had been demonstrated in a particularly brutal way.20
The Romanov governments of the seventeenth century were more successful in defining women’s property rights. In 1627, Filaret, patriarch of the Orthodox Church and co-ruler with his son, Tsar Michael, renewed the prohibition on widows’ inheriting pomeste or votchina estates, but he declared that a husband could bequeath to his wife and daughters land that he had purchased. The decree also contained the generous provision that a wife was entitled to one-quarter of the couple’s moveable property. Filaret further ruled that childless widows could receive a share of the income from their marital family’s pomeste land and reaffirmed women’s long-standing rights to their dowries. His grandson Alexis expanded these provisions in the Ulozhenie of 1649, the law code that also defined serfdom. The Ulozhenie permitted daughters to inherit both votchina and pomeste land if the family had no surviving sons. It also granted life estates to all widows and unmarried daughters of nobles who had held pomeste land. The effect of these Romanov codifications was to continue the limitation on women’s right to votchina land but to expand their claims on estates gained through service or purchase, estates which made up the great majority of land held by the nobility in the seventeenth century.21
Assessing how these changes affected elite women is difficult. As yet, historians have been unable even to agree on whether Muscovites obeyed the new regulations and whether the government enforced them. It is easier to assess the laws in the context of contemporary Europe; seen that way, the property rights of elite women in Muscovy were liberal, as Rus laws had been. They were similar to the rights contemporary Spanish women enjoyed, more limited than those granted women in the Ottoman Empire, and far greater than those possessed by women in England, France, the German states, and Scandinavia. Furthermore, rights in these last countries were shrinking as central governments issued new, increasingly restrictive laws governing women’s property holding.22
ELITE WOMEN IN THE COUNTRYSIDE
The laws were affected, as we have seen, by the important part noblewomen in the countryside played in the management of estates. Their service appears to have increased in the Muscovite period because their husbands were often away. Many cavalrymen were on duty every year from summer through fall, with the result that some couples spent as much as half of their marriages separated from one another. When the husbands were gone, the wives ran the estates, for only the very richest landowners could afford to employ estate managers. This meant that all over Muscovy, noblewomen were in charge during the growing season, when the workload was the heaviest and the need for good management the greatest. These women did not live secluded inside their houses nor did they veil themselves when out of doors, though they usually did stay close to home. Once again, we are not dealing with an exclusively Muscovite phenomenon. Increasingly onerous service obligations for noblemen were increasing elite women’s responsibilities and authority elsewhere in Europe in the early modern period.23
In the seventeenth century, Kallistrat Druzhina-Osoryin, the son of a provincial cavalryman, wrote a portrait of his mother, Iuliana, that sums up the life’s work of such a woman: “She occupied herself diligently with handiwork and managed her house in a manner pleasing to God. She provided her serfs with sufficient food, and appointed each of them a task according to their strength. She cared for widows and orphans, and helped the poor in all things.”24 The author rarely mentioned his father’s activities on the estate, and although he stressed his mother’s humility and piety, he did not include obedience to his father as one of her cardinal virtues. It was her competence and benevolence that impressed him.
NUNS
Monasteries for women flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The largest of these institutions were substantial walled establishments, containing hundreds of residents and supervised by abbesses, councils of nuns, and administrative officials such as cellarers, who were in charge of food provisioning. Convents also owned estates outside their walls; the land belonging to the Pokrovskii Convent in Suzdal extended across five counties (uezdy) and contained twenty-two villages.25 The female leaders of these convents ran the affairs of their enterprises as secular women ran their households, that is, they remained within the walls, assigning business that required travel to monks who worked for them.
In its organization, Muscovite monastic life was little changed from Kievan times. There were still no highly structured religious orders such as existed in Catholic Europe. Within individual convents, discipline was looser than in the West, allowing more scope for individuals to structure their lives. A woman entering a convent could bring servants to live with her; she could have her own quarters built within the compound; she could do her own cooking and her own washing or have her servants do it. Indeed, a widow could live out her life in a convent without ever becoming a nun.
Women wishing to enter the community did have to pay a fee, as did Catholic women, with the consequence that most of Muscovy’s nuns came from the propertied classes. The nuns who performed the physical labor may have been poorer widows who could not support themselves on their inheritances and dowries, daughters from city or countryside whose parents could not find husbands for them, and perhaps also the mentally or physically disabled. From time to time, a few women were banished to convents because they had fallen out of favor with the tsar. But most nuns were widows, in keeping with tradition since Kievan times. Once a woman had fulfilled her familial duties—married, served her husband, supervised the rearing of her children—she was entitled to choose a quiet life of religious devotion.
Was monastic life a little too pleasant? Church fathers occasionally charged that discipline in the convents was lax. They complained about nuns eating expensive food and drinking too much; they hinted at sexual liaisons. Similar complaints were made about monks when clerical reformers attempted to enforce asceticism in prosperous institutions, and the reports of Catholic inspectors to the West bemoaned the same sorts of straying from the abstemious monastic ideal. Undoubtedly there were miscreants, but, sadly, we will never know how much partying was going on in Muscovy’s convents. It is clear that most nuns kept up their daily devotions, ran their establishments, and produced beautiful handcrafts, particularly embroidery.