Suchergebnisse

The relationship of the ruler to his advisors was a central issue of sixteenth-century Muscovite political theory. This article explores how narrative sources presented the ideal paradigm of the ruler consulting his subjects to Ivan in practice by analyzing passages containing forms of the verb sovetovati (to advise, to consult with) pertaining to Ivan. Such references did not occur uniformly throughout Ivan's reign. Two brief clusters, a smaller one when Grand Princess Elena exercised authority, and a much denser one dealing with the eventual conquest of Kazan', were each followed by periods of only erratic and scattered references. This disparity cannot be explained by any hostility during Ivan's maturity on the part of the compilers of narrative accounts, because those narratives, although they did not regurgitate every earlier usage of the concept, did not rewrite the past consistently to erase previous references. This chronological disparity in references to consultation cannot be attributed to content. Overall the chronicles did not lack for opportunities to allude to consultation. Though foreign policy decisions dealing with Lithuania and Kazan' dominate passages from narrative sources before 1554 that invoke consultation, Muscovite history still was not lacking in foreign policy resolved in a consultative manner between 1538 and 1549 or 1552 and 1567. Although it is tempting to see the apparent attrition of references to Ivan's consultations with the elite after 1552 to Ivan's growing 'autocratic' pretensions to rule without interference by his elite, such a line of reasoning cannot explain the comparable 'decline' of references to consultation between 1538 and 1549. Therefore proposing a rational explanation for the pattern of allusions to Ivan's consultation with the elite would be premature. Refs 19.

This article for the first time in scholarship surveys the contribution of Iurii Vasil'evich Seleznev of Voronezh State University to the study of Rus'-Tatar relations and the Juchid ulus, called the Golden Horde, during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. The article contains analyses of five major monographs written by Seleznev dealing with Rus'-Tatar relations from 1385 to 1434, the composition of the elite of the Juchid ulus, military conflicts between Rus' and the Horde during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, (with Andrei Olegovich Amel'kin) the history and historical memory of the battle of Kulikovo Field in 1380, and the role of Rus' princes as members of the Juchid ulus elite. The article identifies the strengths and weaknesses of each monograph. Finally the article attempts for the first time to draw connections among the conclusions of the five monographs. The strength of Seleznev's work are his equal mastery of the societies on both sides of the Rus'-Tatar border. His employs the Rus' sources and Russian translations of oriental sources in new and creative ways to extract hard data on previously unposed questions or on questions which have been previously posed but answered subjectively such as the parameters of Rus' princely trips to the Horde or the frequency of Rus'-Tatar military conflicts. In addition he appreciates the complex evolution of Rus' literary works such as those about the battle of Kulikovo Field in 1380. Seleznev also approaches questions of social history with an open mind inoculated against nationalist prejudices which would reject out of hand any possibility of Tatar influence on the Rus' mentality or society. He is sparing in his use of anachronistic and biased terminology toward the Tatars. The weaknesses of his studies include a lack of familiarity with studies of the Mongol Empire and its successor states other than the Juchid ulus in Western languages which by and large precludes comparative analysis and results in an insular presentation of Rus'-Horde relations in isolation from the parallel experience of other sedentary societies subjected to Mongol rule. He has not himself integrated the results of his separate monographs, for example by addressing the contradiction between what must have been the enormous Rus' expertise about the Horde with the often simplistic pejorative depiction of the Tatars in Rus' sources. Seleznev had not as yet written a comprehensive study of Rus'-Tatar relations which would encompass the totality of Rus'-Tatar interaction, including for example institutional borrowing. Nevertheless the strengths of his research far outweigh the weaknesses. Seleznev's ever-growing body of work makes a significant contribution to increasing historical knowledge of medieval Rus' and the Tatars of the Juchid ulus.

The concept of the Rus' Land (russkaia zemlia) became and remained an historical myth of modern Russian nationalism as the equivalent of "Russia," but it was actually a political myth, manipulated to provide legitimacy. Its meaning was dynastic—territories ruled by a member of the Riurikid/Volodimerovich princely clan. This book traces the history of its use from the tenth to the seventeenth century, outlining its changing religious (pagan to Christian) and geographic elements (from the Dnieper River valley in Ukraine in Kievan Rus' to Muscovy in Russia) and considers alternative "land" concepts which failed to rise to the ideological heights of the Rus' Land. Although the Rus' Land was never an ethnic or national concept, and never expanded its appeal beyond an elite lay and clerical audience, understanding its evolution sheds light upon the cultural and intellectual history of the medieval and early modern East Slavs.

After the Mongol conquest of the 13th century, the Kyivan myth of the "Rus' Land" played a less important role in the east Slavic lands that came under the control of Poland or Lithuania than in the northeastern territory that came to constitute Muscovy. Galicia, which belonged to Poland, became known administratively as the Rus' Land. The Belarusian-Lithuanian Chronicles revived the concept in the Ruthenian lands incorporated into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In these chronicles, Rus' Land referred to all of Kyivan Rus' historically, but could denote all the Ruthenian territories in the Grand Duchy, or only those in Belarusian regions, or only those in Ukrainian regions in the post-Kyivan period. In addition, the Belarusian-Lithuanian Chronicles borrowed passages from northeastern Rus' chronicles in which the Rus' Land meant northeastern Rus' or Muscovy. In the text of the Union of Lublin, the Rus' Land connoted the four borderland palatinates annexed by Poland after the Union of Lublin. The Rus' Land also occasionally appeared in other sources. However, Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi and the mid-seventeenth century Cossacks did not invoke the term to legitimize their new polity, thus discarding an element of the Kyivan inheritance. In Ukraine, this discontinuity of the Rus' Land myth has not been appreciated and remains unexplained.

Although no contemporary Tatar source presented a Tatar view of the famous battle of Kulikovo Field in 1380 the modern Kazan' Tatar historian Rustam Nabiev has published a major revisionist reinterpretation of the event based upon what he considers an objective analysis of fourteenth-century Rus'-Tatar history and relations. Nabiev concludes that the battle did not happen at all as narrated in Muscovite literary works of the Kulikovo Cycle. In reality Muscovite Grand Prince Dmitrii Ivanovich did not defeat Emir Mamai on the Don River; instead Dmitrii and his princely retinue participated in the defeat of Mamai by the army of Khan Tokhtamysh in the region of the Northern Donets and Kalka rivers. Nabiev's critique of the Russian national paradigm of the battle has some merit but it overlooks previous Western scholarship which had already made many of the same points, oversimplifies current Russian scholarship about the battle, and arbitrarily manipulates the sources to create a fantastic and fictitious scenario. Even so his views deserve to be refuted on scholarly grounds, not by anad hominemdismissal as a reflection of "Tatar chauvinism."