In 1415 Henry V, king of England, invaded northern France. In the east, two new powers, Muscovy and, above all, the Ottoman Empire, were putting eastern Europe to the sword. The 'modern states' of western Christendom were characterised by the provision of substantial revenues derived from national taxation raised by consent. Dialogue, political intercourse between prince and subjects, was essential to the modern state. Both theory and practice needed adapting to the particular political society of each state on at least two levels. Epitomising power, witnessed by an attentive audience, they became complex rituals, given tangible expression as dramatic presentations overlaid with symbolism. Speeches, in particular sermons, could convey unequivocal declarations of political thought. Clerics and ecclesiastics who had completed their university studies in the faculty of arts had become acquainted with the political works of Antiquity. History, like politics, was being transformed by literature; the success of Jean Froissart's work in aristocratic and bourgeois circles is testimony of this.

Politics: Theory and Practice

The Germans criticize the fact that here people of all ranks call themselves the “sovereign's slaves.” But they do not consider that among diem people call themselves “vassals,” and this word is not Latin, but German, and means “orphan,” and so all Germans once called themselves in their language. Similarly, the tide “knecht” was once dignified, and even today Scotsmen call their dignified cavaliers “knechts,” diat is, “slaves.“ —Iurii Krizhanich, Politika, 1663-66 The analysis of ritual plays an important role in efforts to reconstruct medieval mentalities. Often mute and always cryptic, medieval cultures rarely provide historians widi the rich programmatic texts that facilitate the study of political ideas. In response to this relative dearth of treatises and manifestoes, scholars have turned to various forms of symbolic behavior for clues concerning the character of the medieval mind. Students of Muscovy are certainly no exception. Recognizing that Old Russia was particularly “silent” (as George Florovsky put it), historians of late have turned their attention to the iconography of Russian life in an attempt to divine the nature of Muscovite ideology, and particularly political ideology.

https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context=history_pubs

What did Russians Mean When They Called Themselves "Slaves of the Tsar"?

The nobility of Europe at the end of the Middle Ages needs and deserves to be studied from a standpoint that is not merely socio-economic, but political and cultural, too. Europe is deemed synonymous with Latin Christendom. The Castilian nobility was distinctly divided into three categories: the titulos, the caballeros and later the hidalgos and the escuderos. Nobles from different parts of western Christendom could also meet at the court. The Prussian Reise, that cross-roads of western nobility, was more characteristic of the fourteenth than of the fifteenth century. Texts, in some cases translations, spread far from their place of origin identical concepts of nobility and chivalry, and stimulated commentaries upon them. The existence of noble classes of varying importance within different European societies is explained, first and foremost, by the long-term history of these societies, and, vitally, by its outcome.

The European Nobility

A study of local government raises several important questions about the nature of the imperial Russian state, the level of development of provincial Russian society and the relationship between government and society in Russia. This chapter is concerned with Russian local administration but it should be noted that different structures, different traditions and even different law codes applied in many of the non-Russian parts of the empire until well into the nineteenth century and sometimes until 1917. Local government was an issue which spawned extensive, and lengthy, legislation over the whole imperial period. The tsars, from Peter to Nicholas II, legislated at length on the structures of urban self-government and on the composition, responsibilities and privileges of the urban population. It has been seen that government hoped through legislation to 'Westernise' or modernise Russian towns by the introduction of Western-style guilds, the creation, and then re-creation, of categories of urban citizens and the development of corporate institutions.

Provincial and local government

(b): Yorkist and Early Tudor England

The Problem of Advice in Muscovite Tales about the Time of Troubles

cooperation. Taken together, we see that little has changed from the early days when ready-made models of “development” from the west were unsuccessfully imposed on the region, but that local reflections on these failures may lead to more informed local policies in the future. The conclusion, co-written by all the contributors together, is a fresh approach that does not seek to “tie everything up,” rather it sheds light on the struggles the authors feel as young scholars, largely native ethnographers, straddling the activist-engaged researcher divide in their work. This motivates their choice of an open source publisher that would bring their work back to the audiences that matter to them. They note that recent scholarly work focused on “emancipatory politics” tends to “reinscribe somewhat linear expectations and ideas about progressivism, using a language and framework not grounded in most of our interlocutors’ prisms and worldviews, let alone our own personal experiences (312).” This is perhaps one of the more important contributions of the book and could have been highlighted even in the introduction to frame the volume. These insights tell us a fair bit about the continuing significance of the politics surrounding not only the environment, but also scholarship, that needs to find new language to reflect the realities on the ground.

Succession to the Throne in Early Modern Russia: The Transfer of Power, 1450–1725. By Paul Bushkovitch. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2021. xvi, 397 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $120.00, hard bound.

Daniel Rowland

Papers

The Problem of Advice in Muscovite Tales about the Time of Troubles

Succession to the Throne in Early Modern Russia: The Transfer of Power, 1450–1725. By Paul Bushkovitch. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2021. xvi, 397 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $120.00, hard bound.