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i

PROPERTY, POWER, AND AUTHORITY IN RUS AND

LATIN EUROPE, CA. 1000–​1236
ii

BEYOND MEDIEVAL EUROPE

Beyond Medieval Europe publishes monographs and edited volumes that evoke medi-
eval Europe’s geographic, cultural, and religious diversity, while highlighting the
interconnectivity of the entire region, understood in the broadest sense—from Dublin
to Constantinople, Novgorod to Toledo. The individuals who inhabited this expansive
territory built cities, cultures, kingdoms, and religions that impacted their locality and
the world around them in manifold ways. The series is particularly keen to include
studies on traditionally underrepresented subjects in Anglophone scholarship (such
as medieval eastern Europe) and to consider submissions from scholars not natively
writing in English in an effort to increase the diversity of Anglophone publishing on
the greater medieval European world.

Series Editor
Christian Alexander Raffensperger, Wittenberg University, Ohio

Editorial Board
Kurt Villads Jensen, Stockholms Universitet
Balázs Nagy, Central European University, Budapest
Leonora Neville, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Acquisitions Editor
Erin T. Dailey
iii

PROPERTY, POWER, AND

AUTHORITY IN RUS
AND LATIN EUROPE,
CA. 1000–​1236
YULIA MIKHAILOVA
iv

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

© 2018, Arc Humanities Press, Leeds

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-​
NonCommercial-​NoDerivatives 4.0 International Licence.

The authors assert their moral right to be identified as the authors of their part of this work.
Permission to use brief excerpts from this work in scholarly and educational works is hereby granted
­provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is an exception or
­limitation covered by Article 5 of the European Union’s Copyright Directive (2001/​29/​EC) or would be
determined to be “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act September 2010 Page 2 or that
satisfies the c onditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Act (17 USC §1 08, as revised by​
P.L. 94-​553) does not require the Publisher’s permission.

ISBN: 9781942401483
e-​ISBN: 9781942401490

https://​arc-​humanities.org
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
v

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Chapter 1. Rus and Latin Europe: Words, Concepts, and Phenomena. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Chapter 2. M
 edieval Texts and Professional Belief Systems: Latin, ​
Church Slavonic, and Vernacular Political Narratives. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

Chapter 3. E
 lite Domination in Rus and Latin Europe: Princely Power
and Banal Lordship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

Chapter 4. I nterprincely Agreements and a Question of Feudo-​Vassalic ​

Relations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153

Conclusions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195

Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201

Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
vi

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1. Descendants of Igor and Olga . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii

Figure 2. Descendants of Sviatoslav Iaroslavich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

Figure 3. Descendants of Vsevolod Iaroslavich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . x

Figure 4. Descendant of Briachislav Iziaslavich. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi

Figure 5. A “castle” in twelfth-​century England. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134

Figure 6. A “small town” in twelfth-​century Rus. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

Map 1. An approximate territory of Rus, with Novgorod’s dependent ​

lands, in the twelfth century ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 129

Map 2. Fortifications on the border with the steppe��������������������������������������������������������� 136

Note on Genealogical Tables

The genealogical tables (Figures 1 to 4) represent the first nine generations of
descendants of Igor and Olga. The tables are not comprehensive. Female members of
princely families, except Olga, are omitted, and so are some less significant princes,
especially of the later generations. For the eighth and ninth generations, only selected
members are included.
For many princes, the dates of births arie unknown; the dates of deaths are known
better, although for a significant number of princes they are not known either. The tables
provide the dates of the death only; if no date is given, this means that it is unknown. The
order in which the brothers’ names are listed does not necessarily represent the order
of their births. The patrimonial lands are indicated in some cases, when highly relevant
in the context of the book. The names of the Kievan princes are given in bold; for the pur-
pose of the tables, the prince is considered “Kievan” even if his tenure in Kiev was brief
and/​or contentious.
newgenprepdf

vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To the memory of Aleksei Konstantinovich Zaitsev.

I express my gratitude to all who have helped and encouraged me in writing this
book. The original impulse that led to this project came out of long-​ago conversations
with A. K. Zaitsev. I received invaluable support, as well as highly helpful comments and
critique from Timothy Graham, Jonathan Shepard, David Prestel, Tania Ivanova-​Sullivan,
Erika Monahan, Petr Stefanovich, and Charles Halperin. Christian Raffensperger was a
constant source of inspiration, and I am very grateful for his invitation to be published
in this series. My special thanks to Charles West for his generous comments on the man-
uscript. I am very grateful to Yury Morgunov, Vladimir Koval, and Inna Kuzina for their
help and guidance in the matters of Rus archaeology; special thanks to Yury Morgunov
for his generous help with illustrations. The project that led to this book owes much
to conversations with Nancy McLoughlin, Susanna Throop, Carol Symes, Anton Gorskii,
Paul Hyams Jehangir Malegam, and many other people, including the participants and
the audience of the session “Transnational Literary History I: East and West, from Rus
to Wales” at the 2012 International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo. Special
thanks to Jehangir Malegam for many ways he helped me during my stay in the Research
Triangle area. I also thank Heidi Madden, Adriana Carilli, Ekaterina Makhnina, and
Tatiana Makhnina for their generous help. I would also like to thank Erin Dailey for his
constant goodwill and patience, and the anonymous reviewer for the helpful suggestions.
Needless to say, I am solely responsible for all errors. I am grateful to all my Moscow
Lomonosov University professors, and especially to A. L. Smyshlyev, N. S. Borisov, A. D.
Gorskii, and N. V. Kozlova. Finally, a big thanks to my husband and daughters for their
patience and unwavering support.
 newgenrtpdf

viii

Igor Olga
d. 944? d. 969?
Sviatoslav
d. 972

Iaropolk Oleg Vladimir

d. 978? d. 977? d.1015

Sviatopolk (“Cain-like”)* Vysheslav Iziaslav Iaroslav (“Wise”) Vsevolod Mstislav Sviatoslav Stanislav Boris Gleb Pozvizd Sudislav
d. 1019 d. 1010? d. 1001 d. 1054 d. 995? d. 1036 d. 1015 d. 1015 d. 1015 d. 1063

Briachislav Elias Vladimir Iziaslav Sviatoslav Vsevolod Viacheslav Igor

d. 1044 d. 1020? d. 1052 d. 1078 d. 1076 d. 1093 d. 1057 d. 1060
See Table 4 See Table 2 See Table 3

Sviatopolk
Rostislav Iaropolk
d. 1067

Rurik Volodar Vasilko

d. 1092 d. 1124 of Terebovl, d. 1124

Vladimirko Rostislav
of Galich, d. 1153 d. 1143

Iaroslav (“Osmomysl”) Ivan (“Berladnik”)

of Galich, d. 1187 d. 1161

Vladimir Oleg
d. 1198/9 (“Nastasich”)
d. 1188

Figure 1. Descendants of Igor and Olga.

* According to the Primary Chronicle, Sviatopolk was “of two fathers,” because his mother, Iropolk’s wife, might have been pregnant
by Iaropolk when Vladimir made her his concubine after Iaropolk’s death. PSRL 1, 78.
 newgenrtpdf

ix

Sviatoslav Iaroslavich
d. 1076

Gleb Oleg* David** Roman Iaroslav

d. 1078 d. 1115 d. 1123 d. 1079 d. 1129

Vsevolod Igor Sviatoslav Gleb Sviatoslav (“Sviatosha”) Vsevolod Vladimir Iziaslav Rostislav George Sviatoslav Vladimir Rostislav
d. 1146 d. 1147 d. 1164 d. 1138 d. 1143? d. 1151 d. 1161 d. 1120 d. 1143? d. 1145

Sviatoslav Iaroslav Oleg Igor Vsevolod Iziaslav Rostislav Sviatoslav David Igor Vladimir Andrew Gleb***
d. 1194 d. 1198 d. 1180 d. 1202 d. 1196 d. 1133/4 d. 1167 d. 1147 d. 1162 of
Riazan, d. 1177/8

Roman Igor Vladimir Vsevolod Sviatoslav Iaroslav

d. 1216 d. 1195? d. 1207

Oleg Vsevolod (“Chermnyi”) Gleb Vladimir Mstislav Vladimir Roman Sviatoslav Rostislav Oleg
d. 1204 d. 1215? d. 1200/1 d. 1223 d. 1211 d. 1211 d. 1211? d. 1205
Rostislav Iaropolk
Michael
d. 1246

Figure 2. Descendants of Sviatoslav Iaroslavich.

* The founder of the Olgovichi dynasty. ** The founder of the Davidovichi line, sometimes referred to in the sources as part of the Olgovichi dynasty.
The Olgovichi and the Davidovichi were based in the Chernigov Land. *** The founder of the Riazan princely line, the father of the Glebovichi, discussed
in Chapter 4.
 x
newgenrtpdf

Vsevolod Iaroslavich
d.1093

Vladimir Monomakh* Rostislav

d. 1125 d. 1093

Mstislav (“Great”) Iziaslav Sviatoslav Iaropolk Viacheslav Roman George (“Long Arm”) Andrew
d. 1132 d. 1096 d. 1114 d. 1139 d. 1154 d. 1119 of Suzdal, d. 1157 d. 1142

Vsevolod Iziaslav Sviatopolk Rostislav Iaropolk Vladimir (“Macheshich”)

d. 1138 of Vladimir-in-Volhynia, d. 1154 of Smolensk, d. 1171
d. 1154 d. 1167

Rostislav Ivan Andrew (“Bogoliubsky”) Sviatoslav Iaroslav Boris Gleb Mstislav Michael Vasilko Vsevolod (“Big Nest”)
d. 1151 d. 1147 of Vladimir,** d. 1174 d. 1174 d. 1166 d. 1159 d. 1171 d. 1176 of Vladimir, d. 1212

Iaropolk Mstislav***
d. 1178

Mstislav Iaroslav Iaropolk Roman David Sviatoslav Rurik Mstislav**** Constantine Boris Gleb George Iaroslav Vladimir Sviatoslav Ivan
d. 1170 d. 1168 d. 1180 d. 1197 d. 1170 d. 1212 d. 1180 d. 1218 d. 1188 d. 1189 d. 1238 d. 1246 d. 1227 d. 1227 d. 1198?

Iziaslav Mstislav George Vladimir Iziaslav

d. 1165 d. 1173 d. 1187
Roman Vsevolod Vladimir Ingvar Mstislav
of Galich d. 1195 d. 1170 d. 1223 Alexander (“Nevsky”)
Rostislav Vladimir
and Volhynia, d. 1263
d. 1218 d. 1239
d. 1205

Daniel
of Galich and Volhynia, d. 1264

Figure 3. Descendants of Vsevolod Iaroslavich.

* The founder of the Monomakhovichi dynasty. ** Under Andrew and his brother Vsevolod the “Big Nest,” Vladimir became the capital of Suzdalia (the
original capital was Suzdal). Princes of Vladimir were thus supreme rulers of Suzdalia. *** The Rostislavichi who briefly ruled in Suzdalia after the murder
of Andrew Bogoliubsky. **** The Roistislavichi of Smolensk.
 newgenrtpdf

xi

Briachislav Iziaslavich
d. 1044

Vseslav*
of Polotsk, d. 1101

David Boris (Rogvolod) Gleb Roman Rostislav Sviatoslav

d. 1128 of Minsk, d. 1119 d. 1114

Briachislav Rogvolod Ivan Rostislav Volodar Vsevolod Iziaslav Vasilko Viachko David
d. 1134 d. 1144?

Gleb Vseslav Gleb Vasilko Vladimir Briachislav Vseslav Iziaslav Volodsha Vsevolod

Vasilko Vseslav Vladimir Nicolas Andrew

Figure 4. Descendants of Briachislav Iziaslavich.

* Vseslav was briefly made the Kievan prince during an uprising in Kiev in 1068, where he was being imprisoned at the time of the uprising. Princes
and other members of the elite never recognized his legitimacy as the Kievan prince, and his descendants never claimed the Kievan throne. PSRL 1,
171–​73.
xii
1

INTRODUCTION

According to the description of the world and its peoples in the Primary
Chronicle compiled in Kiev in the early 1100s, when the sons of Noah divided the world
among themselves after the flood, the Orient fell to the lot of Shem, the South to the lot
of Ham, and Japheth received “northern and western lands.” The people of Rus belong
to the race of Japheth, and they live in his lot along with other peoples, such as the
Swedes, Normans, Angles, Romans, Germans, and Franks.1 “Rus” is the name used in
this book for the medieval polity located in present-​day Ukraine, Belarus, and parts​
of Russia; in Anglophone scholarship, it is also known as Kievan Rus, medieval Russia,
and medieval Ukraine.
For a twelfth-​century Kievan monk, it appears self-​evident that his country belongs to
the cultural sphere of the Angles, Romans, Germans, and Franks. To use modern terms, the
Primary Chronicle describes Rus as part of medieval European civilization. Most modern
scholars would not agree. William Chester Jordan expressed a widely accepted opinion
when he stated that medieval “Europe was where Latin Christians—​Roman Catholic
Christians—​dominated the political and demographic landscape. A profound divide […]
separated Catholics from Greek or Orthodox Christians.”2 In scholarly literature, Rus
has been traditionally presented as part of a “Byzantine Commonwealth,” an area dom-
inated by Greek Orthodox Christianity and separate from Latin Europe.3 Alternatively,
some scholars have argued that Rus, a huge polity the size of Charlemagne’s empire, was
not so much a Byzantine satellite as a world in itself: neither Europe nor Asia, neither
East nor West. According to this school of thought, the reception of Christianity from
Constantinople isolated Rus from Latin Christendom, but did not create strong ties with
Byzantium, which was too distant geographically and too different culturally to become
a formative influence. Thus Rus, separated from Byzantium by its geographic location
and separated from neighbouring Poland, Hungary, and Scandinavia by its different
form of Christianity, followed its own unique path of development. This “unique path” is
often invoked to explain the apparent inability of modern Russia, which traces its origins
to Rus, to adopt Western institutions and to integrate itself into Europe.4 Sweeping

1 Letopis po Lavrentevskomu spisku, ed. E. F. Karskii. Polnoe sobranie russkikh letopisei, vol. 1,
2nd ed. (Leningrad: Izdatelstvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1927) [hereafter PSRL 1], 1–​4; The “Povest’
vremennykh let”: An Interlinear Collation and Paradosis, ed. and coll. Donald Ostrowski, with David
Birnbaum and Horace G. Lunt, Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, Text Series 10
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003) [hereafter PVL], vol. 1, 2–​15.
2 William Chester Jordan, “‘Europe’ in the Middle Ages,” in The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the
European Union, ed. Anthony Pagden (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 75.
3 Dimitri Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–​
1453 (New York:
Praeger, 1971).
4 For a connection between the “special path” of Rus and political developments in modern and
contemporary Russia, see, for example, Marshall T. Poe, The Russian Moment in World History
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
2

2 Introduction

generalizations about the alleged profound differences between Rus and Latin Europe
are made in the virtual absence of concrete, source-​based comparative studies: the last
monograph that compared forms of social organization in Rus/​Muscovy with the medi-
eval West appeared in 1910.5
Recently, Christian Raffensperger challenged the notion of a Byzantine Common­
wealth that stood in opposition to Europe, and he argued that the very concept of
“medieval Europe” should be “reimagined” in such a way that it includes Rus, which had
much more ties with Latin Christendom than was previously believed. While it is hard
to dispute the significance of Byzantium for the polities that received Christianity from
Constantinople and whose churches were originally organized under the aegis of the
Byzantine emperor,6 it appears that past scholarship tended to exaggerate the degree to
which they were separated from Latin Europe.
Raffensperger, and before him Alexander Nazarenko, argued that at least until 1204
Latin and Orthodox Christians did not perceive the divide between them as “profound”
and that the lay elites in many cases were hardly aware of any divide at all.7 Thus, some
twenty-​first-​century historians seem to return to the viewpoint of their twelfth-​century
Kievan counterpart. I am one of them. One goal of this book is to present Rus as a regional
variation of European society.
I seek to achieve this goal through a comparative analysis of representations of
power and property relations in high medieval Rusian and Western political narratives.8
Thus, while other works on the place of Rus in the medieval world discuss its relations
with Latin Europe or Byzantium, the focus of this book is a comparison of the inner
organization of society in Rus and in the West. It is, of course, impossible to make a
source-​based comparison of Rus—​or of anything else, for that matter—​with the “West”
in general. For the purposes of my analysis, the best regions are those that, firstly, pro-
duced texts typologically analogous to Rusian chronicles, which are the most important
source on the social and political history of Rus, and, secondly, produced them in both
Latin and the vernacular.

5 N. P. Pavlov-​Silvanskii, Feodalizm v udelnoi Rusi (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia M. M. Stasiulevicha,

1910); reprinted in Russian Reprint Series 21 (The Hague: Europe Printing, 1966).
6 See Jonathan Shepard, “Crowns from Basileus, Crowns from Heaven,” in Milana Kaĭmakova,
Maciej Salamon, and Małgorzata Smorag Różycka, eds., Byzantium, New Peoples, New Powers: The
Byzantino-​Slav Contact Zone (Cracow: Towarzystvo Wydawnicze Histoira Iagellonica, 2007), 139–​60, ​
for a convincing interpretation of some political practices in the Orthodox polities as “a glimpse of
that generally elusive concept, the Byzantine Commonwealth” (p. 159).
7 Christian Raffensperger, Reimagining Europe: Kievan Rus’ in the Medieval World, Harvard
Historical Studies 177 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Aleksandr Vasilevich
Nazarenko, Drevniia Rus na mezhdunarodnykh putiakh: Mezhdistsiplinarnye ocherki kulturnykh,
torgovykh, politicheskikh sviazei IX–​XII vekov (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kultury, 2001).
8 Recently, “Rusian” is being increasingly used as an adjective derived from “Rus,” as opposed to
“Russian” referring to Russia. It has been pointed out that referring to Rus as “medieval Russia,” as
well as using the term “Russian” in connection with Rus, marginalizes Ukraine and Belarus by cre-
ating a false impression that Russia is the exclusive heir of Rus.
3

Introduction 3

I argue that the widespread perception of profound differences in the social and polit-
ical organization that set pre-​Mongol Rus apart from Europe is, in many respects, a product
of the nature of the sources. Most Western political narratives before the thirteenth cen-
tury are in Latin, and they were produced by authors who were influenced by classical
literature that medieval literati studied as part of their education. The Rusian written
culture was much more indigenous. Unlike Western Europe and the Balkans, which had
once been parts of the Empire, Rus did not inherit any tradition of classical learning, and
its literate elite had little, if any, knowledge of classical languages and literature.
It is in this area that we find an important—​possibly, the most important—​difference
between Rus and Western Europe. As a matter of fact, in this respect Rus differed not just
from the West, but from other Eastern Christian polities as well. The role of Latin in Rus
was “almost negligible”; the degree to which Greek was known is a subject of debate,
but all agree that it was much less than in the Balkan Orthodox polities and that it was
in no way comparable to the knowledge of Latin in the West.9 The language of religion
and learning was Church Slavonic, which was created by Byzantine missionaries for the
purpose of translating from Greek.
I seek to show that in the “learned” sources written in Church Slavonic, Rus looks like
a “normal” European kingdom. The idiosyncratic—​or allegedly idiosyncratic—​features
of its social and political organization are most visible in the texts written in the ver-
nacular East Slavonic and apparently close to the oral political discourse.10 This is the
majority of the Rusian chronicles, all of which apparently are compilations of various
extinct texts. Many of these texts are records of disputes; they use direct speech exten-
sively, and occasionally also report the characters’ physical location and gestures, for
example, “He said, looking at the Holy Mother of God, which is above the Golden Gate, ‘It

9 On Latin in Rus, see Simon Franklin, Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c. 950–​1300
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 106–​10. On the degree and the character of
the knowledge of the Greek language and of the classical culture in Slavonic translations, see
D. M. Bulanin, Antichnye traditsii v drevnerusskoi literature XI–​XVI vv., Slavistische Beiträge 278
(Munich: Otto Sagner, 1991); Francis Thomson, The Reception of Byzantine Culture in Medieval
Russia, Variorum Collected Studies Series (Brookfield: Ashgate, 1999); Simon Franklin, “Po povodu
‘Intellektualnogo molchaniia’ Drevnei Rusi (o sbornike trudov F. Dzh. Tomsona),” Russia Mediaevalis
10 (2001): 262–​70; Olga B. Strakhova, review of F. J. Thomson, The Reception of Byzantine Culture
in Mediaeval Russia, Russia Mediaevalis 10 (2001): 245–​61; Franklin, Writing, Society and Culture,
101–​6, 202–​6, 223–​28; Franklin, Sermons and Rhetoric of Kievan Rus’, Harvard Library of Early
Ukrainian Literature, Translation Series 5 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), ​
lviii–​lxxiv, xcv–​cix; Franklin and Shepard, Emergence of Rus, 238–​43; A. A. Alekseev, “Koe-​chto o
perevodakh v Drevnei Pusi (po povodu stat’i Fr. Dzh. Tomsona ‘Made in Russia’),” Trudy Otdela
drevnerusskoi literatury [hereafter TODRL] 49 (1999): 278–​95; G. G. Lunt, “Eshcho raz o mnimykh
perevodakh v Drevnei Rusi (po povodu stat’i A. A. Alekseeva),” TODRL 51 (1999): 435–​41; A. A.
Alekseev, “Po povodu stati G. G. Lanta Eshcho raz o mnimykh perevodakh v Drevnei Rusi,” TODRL
51 (1991): 442–​45.
10 The language spoken in Rus is known as “Old Russian,” “Old Ukrainian,” “Rusian,” and “East
Slavonic.” I follow Franklin in using the latter term (Writing, Society and Culture, 84).
4

4 Introduction

is for this most pure Lady together with her Son and our God to judge us in this and in
the future life.’ ”11
These features of the Rusian chronicles are important for another goal of this book,
which is an exploration of the interplay between the language and genre of the sources
and the ways in which medieval authors represent the life of their society. For this
purpose, I compare sources that belong to the same, or similar, genres and that have
the same, or similar, subject matters, but which are written in different languages and
occupy different positions vis-​à-​vis oral political discourse and high “learned” culture.
Hence my choice of Western sources for the comparative analysis offered in this book.
The large-​scale advent of the vernacular into the writing of chronicles and histories
in continental Europe started in the thirteenth century, when the West saw the rise of
central governments, universities, and academic law while Rus was conquered by the
Mongols. This period is outside of the chronological scope of this book. The earliest
narrative from continental Latin Europe written in what is apparently quite close to the
actual spoken language of the time is the already mentioned Conventum Hugonis from
eleventh-​century Aquitaine.12 Its subject matter is also similar to that of many Rusian
chronicle narratives, which display the same three elements—​dispute, settlement, and
orality—​that make the title of the essay on the Conventum by its first publisher Jane
Martindale.13 The Conventum can be juxtaposed with the Latin chronicle by Adémar of
Chabannes written within the same time period and containing an account of the same
events from a different perspective.14

11 Ipatevskaia letopis, ed. A. A. Shakhmatov, Polnoe sobranie russkikh letopisei, vol. 2, 2nd ed.
(St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaia archeograficheskaia komissia, 1908); reprinted, Moscow: Iazyki
slavianskikh kultur, 1998, with a new introduction by B. M. Kloss and a new index) [hereafter
PSRL 2], 431.
12 First publication: Jane Martindale, “Conventum inter Guillelmum Aquitanorum comitem et
Hugonem Chiliarchum,” English Historical Review 84 (1969): 528–​48. Published with a parallel
translation in Jane Martindale, Status, Authority and Regional Power: Aquitaine and France, 9th to
12th Centuries, Variorum Collected Studies Series (Brookfield: Ashgate, 1997), VIIb. Martindale
thinks that, in connection with the Conventum, “it is necessary to make some allowance for the
possibility that spoken Latin survived in some form—​even into the eleventh century,” and she
notes that “the ‘errors’ with which the text is studded have many affinities with the ‘late’ or ‘vulgar
Latin’.” Martindale, Status, Authority and Regional Power, VIII, 4, 24; for a review of literature on
the language of the Conventum, see ibid., VIII, 3–​4. Paul Hyams describes the Conventum as “a text,
which ought perhaps to have been written in the vernacular, Occitan?” Paul Hyams, Introduction to
the Agreement between Count William V of Aquitaine and Hugh IV of Lusignan at www.fordham.edu/​
halsall/​source/​ agreement.asp.
13 Jane Martindale, “Dispute, Settlement and Orality in the Conventum inter Guillelmum
Aquitanorum Comitem et Hugonem Chiliarchum: A Postscript to the Edition of 1969,” in Martindale,
Status, Authority and Regional Power, VIII.
14 Ademari Cabannensis Chronicon, ed. P. Bourgain, R. Landes, and G. Pon, Corpus Christianorum,
Continuatio Mediaevalis 79 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999); The Letters and Poems of Fulbert of Chartres,
ed. and trans. F. Behrends (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 92.
5

Introduction 5

Many of the other materials for my comparative analysis come from England with
its traditions of both vernacular and Latin historiography. Vernacular historiography
thrived before the Norman Conquest, when it was produced in Old English, and then
again in the twelfth century, when “a new vogue for writing history in Anglo-​Norman”
appeared more than half a century earlier than a vernacular historical culture began
to emerge elsewhere in Latin Europe.15 The Old English Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle covers
the period when Rus did not yet exist. I concentrate on Norman England, the history
of which in the twelfth century is exceptionally well covered by a significant number
of Latin historiographical works and by the first post-​conquest vernacular chronicle
describing contemporary events, known as Jordan Fantosme’s Chronicle.16 Not only is it
written in a vernacular language, namely the Anglo-​Norman variety of Old French, but it
also belongs to the same time period as the Rusian chronicles and it discusses a similar
subject: a conflict within the ruling strata of society. Even though Fantosme’s work is an
epic poem while Rusian chronicles are written in the traditional annalistic format, both
are vernacular accounts of political struggles in their contemporary societies, and as
such are worth comparing.
There is one more region that produced a vernacular historiographical work in
the twelfth century. This is Regensburg in Bavaria, where an unknown author wrote
the Middle High German Kaiserchronik (ca. 1140s–​1150s). However, this text does not
seem to be a suitable object for a comparative analysis with Rusian chronicles. It is
structured as a series of imperial biographies starting with Julius Caesar. Thus, most of
the Kaiserchronik is devoted to the distant past; it is sometimes described as an early
attempt at a world chronicle.17 A small section at the end of the chronicle describes
contemporary events, but, apart from a digression on Godfrey of Bouillon, the author
focuses almost exclusively on emperors and bishops and provides very little information
about the social organization of the lay nobility.18 The main subjects of the Kaiserchronik
have been described as the progress of the Gospel from the heathen to the Christian

15 Chris Given-​Wilson, Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England (New York: Hambledon,
2004), 138.
16 Jordan Fantosme’s Chronicle, ed. and trans. R. C. Johnston (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1981).
17 Graeme Dunphy, “Historical Writing in and after the Old High German Period,” in German
Literature of the Early Middle Ages, ed. Brian Murdock, Camden House History of German Literature
2 (Camden: Boydell and Brewer, 2004), 201–​26; Alastair Matthews, The “Kaiserchronik”: A Medieval
Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1–​2.
18 Even if “contemporary” is understood in the broadest possible sense as events that took place
within a century preceding the time when the Kaiserchronik was apparently written, this “contem-
porary” section starting with Henry IV and ending abruptly in 1147, in the middle of the reign of
Conrad III, takes only 748 lines out of the total 17,280 lines of the Kaiserchronik. Edward Schröder,
ed. Die Kaiserchronik eines Regensburger Geistlichen, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores
Qui Vernacula Lingua Usi Sunt 1 (Hanover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1895), vol. 1, 378–​92. For the
Godfrey of Bouillon episode, see Kaiserchronik, 381–​84 (lines 16618–​789).
6

6 Introduction

empire and as the translatio imperii from Rome to Germany.19 This imperial agenda sets
the Kaiserchronik apart not only from Rusian chronicles, but also from the historiog-
raphy of other regions of the medieval West.
Therefore, the comparative analysis offered in this book leaves out the Kaiserchronik
and concentrates on the political narratives from Aquitaine and Norman England, the
two regions of the medieval West that before the thirteenth century produced texts
thematically and typologically comparable to Rusian chronicles and written both in
Latin and in the vernacular, or in what can be considered semi-​vernacular. I suggest
that such a comparison, in addition to situating Rus within the broader context of
medieval European history, may also contribute to a debate on feudalism that has been
going on among Western medievalists since the 1990s. As a scholar of Rus and, there-
fore, an outsider to the subject, I enter this complicated and highly charged area with
some trepidation.
The absence of feudalism in Rus has traditionally been seen as a fundamental
difference that sets it apart from the West. Thus, according to a recent survey of Russian
history, the Rusian elite “were not […] a feudal ruling class, since they did not possess
extensive landed estates, but rather small domains and wealthy townhouses. What they
levied from the rest of the community was […] not dues based on ownership of land but
rather tribute extorted by superior military power.”20
In this passage, “feudal” has connotations of what is sometimes described as “Marxist
feudalism.”21 Feudalism in its Marxist sense is concerned with the relations between
nobles and peasants, while non-​Marxist feudalism describes predominantly the relations
within the noble class. In its original and most restricted meaning, “feudalism” signifies
a legal system regulating tenure of land among the medieval elite. A classic definition of
this system was formulated by François-​Louis Ganshof:

“Feudalism” may be regarded as a body of institutions creating and regulating

the obligations of obedience and service—​mainly military service—​on the part
of a free man (the vassal) towards another free man (the lord), and the obliga-
tion of protection and maintenance on the part of the lord with regard to his
vassal. The obligation of maintenance had usually as one of its effects the grant
by the lord to his vassal of a unit of real property known as a fief.22

19 Graeme Dunphy, “On the Function of the Disputations in the Kaiserchronik,” The Medieval Chronicle
5 (2009): 77–​86; Alexander Rubel, “Caesar und Karl der Große in der Kaiserchronik. Typologische
Struktur und die translatio imperii ad Francos,” Antike und Abendland 47 (2001): 146–​63.
20 Geoffrey Hosking, Russia and the Russians: A History, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press,
2011), 34.
21 See Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994), 3, 10–​12, 15; Fredric L. Cheyette, “ ‘Feudalism’: A Memoir and an
Assessment,” in Feud, Violence and Practice: Essays in Medieval Studies in Honor of Stephen D. White,
ed. Belle S. Tuten and Tracey L. Billado (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 121–​22.
22 François-​Louis Ganshof, Feudalism, trans. Philip Grierson, 3rd English ed. (New York: Harper,
1961), xvi.
7

Introduction 7

The broad definition of feudalism as a Veberian ideal type formulated by Marc Bloch
includes both relations between peasantry and nobility and relations among the nobles.
According to Bloch, fundamental features of feudalism are

[a]‌‌ subject peasantry; widespread use of service tenement (i.e. the fief) […];
the supremacy of a class of specialized warriors; ties of obedience and pro-
tection which […] within the warrior class, assume the distinctive form called
vassalage; fragmentation of authority; and, in the midst of all this, the survival
of other forms of association, family and State.23

Societies that had these features formed what Bloch called “the feudal zone,” to which
Rus did not belong.24
Most importantly, as scholars repeatedly pointed out, Rus lacked the type of social
relations known as the “feudal contract,” unequal, but nonetheless reciprocal, obligations
of the lord and the vassal towards each other created by the ritual of homage.25 These
contractual relations, as presented in much of pre-​1990s scholarly literature, “befitted
what was seen as the uniquely free character of European civilization,” in the words of
Susan Reynolds.26 In contrast with Western Europe, the absence of the tradition of a
free contract between the superior and the subordinate in Rus—​or in the “Byzantine
Commonwealth” in general—​has been connected with the failure to develop the rule
of law and with authoritarian and totalitarian tendencies in Russian history. When the
Soviet medievalist Aron Gurevich described Byzantine aristocrats as the emperor’s
“lackeys looking for a career and a chance to enrich themselves, devoid of personal dig-
nity,” his readers easily recognized a covert portrayal of Soviet high-​ranking officials.
Gurevich explained the nomenklatura-​like qualities of the Byzantine aristocracy by the
fact that “Byzantium knew nothing of the feudal treaty, the loyalty of the vassal or the
group solidarity of the peers. […] It is quite impossible to imagine anything like Magna
Carta—​a legal compromise between the monarch and his vassals—​in a Byzantine
setting.”27 An implicit connection between the “feudal” relations among the nobility and

23 Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 446.
24 Bloch, Feudal Society, 70, 228.
25 For a classic description of “feudal contract,” see Ganshof, Feudalism, 70–​81.
26 Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals, 54. According to Jacques Le Goff, “a system of loyalty” associated
with vassalage “was this that would make it possible for hierarchy and individualism to coexist”
in modern Europe. Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Europe, trans. Janet Lloyd (Malden: Blackwell,
2005), 59.
27 A. J. Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, trans. G. L. Campbell (Boston: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1985), 128. On the more recent position of Gurevich in regards to the debate about feudalism
and on his opinion about Fiefs and Vassals, see A. Ia. Gurevich, “Feodalizm pered sudom istrorikov,
ili o srednevekovoi krestianskoi tsivilizatsii,” in Feodalizm: poniatie i realii, ed. I. G. Galkova et al.
(Moscow: Institut vseobshchei istorii RAN, 2008), 11–​51. On the absence of the “feudal contract”—​
or, indeed, any concept of a contract in Rus and, subsequently, Russia, see Yu. M. Lotman, “ ‘Dogovor’
i ‘vruchenie sebia’ kak arkhetipicheskie modeli kultury,” in Lotman, Izbrannye statii, 3 vols.
(Tallinn: Alexandra, 1993), vol. 3, 345–​55. For the widespread opinions about the “feudal contract”
8

8 Introduction

the subsequent development of democracy and the rule of law is also present in the
work of the Russian pre-​revolutionary scholar Nikolai Pavlov-​Silvansky, the only his-
torian who argued for the existence of the “feudal contract” in Rus.28 It is hardly coin-
cidental that he was a member of the Constitutional-​Democratic party that sought to
establish Western-​style democracy in Russia.29
The “feudal contract” is part of the classical concept of European feudalism best
represented by the works by Bloch and Ganshof. Since the 1970s this classical concept has
come under critique, beginning with the famous article by Elizabeth Brown who argued that
the concept of feudalism became too broad and imprecise to be a useful analytical tool; it
turned into an artificial construct that distorted realities it purported to describe. She called
the historians to end “the tyranny of a construct” and to discard the term “feudalism” as fun-
damentally misleading.30 Reynolds further developed Brown’s criticisms in her famous Fiefs
and Vassals (1994), where she argued that the concepts of vassalage and the fief “as they are
generally defined by medieval historians today, are post-​medieval constructs,” and as such
they “distort the relations of property and politics that the sources record.”31
Fiefs and Vassals generated a heated discussion, the ultimate result of which was,
paradoxically, a renewal of interest in the subject of feudalism. To be sure, many
historians now agree that this term is too nebulous to be useful, and they prefer to talk
about “feudo-​vassalic relations,” that is, relations centred on a land grant made on the
condition of the grantee’s performance of “honourable” service to the grantor, that is,
service not involving manual labour. “Feudo-​vassalic relations” appears to be the closest
English equivalent of the German das Lehnswesen, which Jürgen Dendorfer defines
as “the interplay of land grants, vassalage, and the duties resulting from them.”32 Few
medievalists heeded Brown’s and Reynolds’s call to discard all these concepts; instead,

in the present-​day Russian intellectual milieu see, for example, the site Historical Personality at
http://​rus-​history.ru/​feodalnaya-​razdroblennost-​na-​r/​rossiiskii-​feodalizm-​bil-​osobi.php; Igor
Kobylin, Fenomen totalitarizma v kontekste evropeiskoi kultury at www.dslib.net/​religio-​vedenie/​
fenomen-​totalitarizma-​v-​kontekste-​evropejskoj-​kultury.html; readers’ comments to Vasilii Zharkov,
“Zakreposhchennye istoriei,” at www.gazeta.ru/​comments/​column/​zharkov/​6242617.shtml.
28 N. P. Pavlov-​Silvanskii, Feodalizm v udelnoi Rusi (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia M. M. Stasiulevicha,
1910), reprinted in Russian Reprint Series 21 (The Hague: Europe Printing, 1966).
29 On a connection between the concept of the “feudal contract” and a liberal political ideology, see
Cheyette, “Feudalism,” 123.
30 Elizabeth A. R. Brown, “The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval
Europe,” American Historical Review 79 (1974): 1063–​88.
31 Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals, 2–​3.
32 Introduction to Das Lehnswesen im Hochmittelalter. Forschungskonstrukte—​Quellenbefunde—​
Deutungsrelevanz, ed. Ürgen Dendorfer and Roman Deutinger (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2010), 19, 21,
26. On the difference between the German concepts of Lehnswesen and Feudalismus, see Levi Roach,
“Submission and Homage: Feudo-​Vassalic Relations and the Settlement of Disputes in Ottonian
Germany,” History 97 (2012): 355–​79, at 356–​57. For Reynolds’s objections against the validity of the
term Lehnswesen, see “Fiefs and Vassals after Twelve Years,” in Feudalism: New Landscapes of Debate,
ed. Sverre Bagge, Michael H. Gelting, and Thomas Lindkvist (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 15–​26, at 23.
9

Introduction 9

recent works use them much more carefully than they were used in earlier scholarship.
Before the late twentieth-​century critique of the classic teaching on feudalism, it was not
unusual for historians to postulate the existence of the “feudal contract” every time they
saw references to a fief, homage, or any notion that was associated with “feudalism” in
historiography. If anyone was described in a medieval text as somebody’s homo (man),
the assumption was that he performed the ritual of homage and entered into a “feudal
contract” with the person whose homo he was, thus becoming his vassal, even if there
was no evidence in the source that this was the case.
Currently, there is general agreement that the words, such as fief, “were used in a
variety of contexts and senses in the Middle Ages, so that they seem to relate to rather
different phenomena—​that is, to different kinds of property entailing different rights
and obligations.”33 For Reynolds, this statement is part of her argument that the fief in
the sense of a land grant from a lord to a vassal did not exist outside of late medieval legal
treaties. However, for a number of scholars, Reynolds’s thesis provided a stimulus for a
critical re-​examination of the sources in order to see if there is, indeed, evidence for the
phenomena, the existence of which Reynolds denies.34 In this sense, “only recently has
the process of direct engagement with the kernel of Reynolds’s work begun,” as Charles
West observed in 2013.35
The discussion generated by Fiefs and Vassals soon intertwined with the debate on
the “feudal revolution,” which was started by Francophone scholars in the early 1990s.
The “feudal revolution” theory goes back to the celebrated study of the society of the
Mâcon in Burgundy from the ninth to the twelfth century by Georges Duby. He argued
that during a relatively short period in the late tenth to early eleventh century, this
region underwent a radical transformation, when the Carolingian system of public order
and formalized justice collapsed, and the exercise of justice and administration was
privatized by local lords, thus creating a distinctly feudal system.36 A number of subse-
quent studies found that various regions at the turn of the first millennium experienced
a similar transformation, which was deemed the “feudal revolution,” “feudal mutation/​
transformation,” or “mutation of the year 1000.” The systematic synthesis of the “feudal
revolution” theory was presented by Jean-​Pierre Poly and Eric Bournazel in 1980.37 In
the early 1990s, it was challenged by a number of scholars who argued that the change

33 Reynolds, “Fiefs and Vassals after Twelve Years,” 19.

34 Charles West, Reframing the Feudal Revolution: Political and Social Transformation between
Marne and Moselle, c.800–​c.1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Steffen Patzold,
Das Lehnswesen (Munich: Beck, 2012); Roach, “Submission and Homage”; Dendorfer and Deutinger,
Das Lehnswesen.
35 West, Reframing the Feudal Revolution, 200.
36 Georges Duby, La société aux Xie et XIIe siècles dans la région mâconnaise, 2nd ed. (Paris: Éditions
de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1971; first published in 1953; reprinted in 1988).
37 Jean-​Pierre Poly and Eric Bournazel, La mutation féodale, Xe–​ XIIe siècles (Paris: Presses
universitaires de France, 1980); English translation Jean-​Pierre Poly and Eric Bournazel, The Feudal
Transformation: 900–​1200, trans. Caroline Higgitt (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1991). For the
10

10 Introduction

was more apparent than real and that features, presented by the “mutationists” as char-
acteristic of the new feudal regime, had existed before the putative revolution.38
A number of recent works display what appears to be a reaction against the radical
critique of the “feudal construct” in the 1990s. Their authors do not believe that medi-
eval society had a system of institutions as coherent, as ubiquitous, and as clearly defined
in legal terms as the classic teaching on feudalism presented it; nonetheless, they tend
to see in the High Middle Ages not exactly the classic feudal system, but still “something
approximating” it, as Levi Roach put it in an important 2012 article.39 It appears that the
revisiting of the sources, largely inspired by Reynolds, is now bringing back and refining
the very concepts of fiefs and vassals that Reynolds sought to annihilate. However, the
1990s movement against “feudalism” left some important legacies beyond reviving an
interest in the subject. One of them is Reynolds’s objection against the claim of ear-
lier scholarship that feudo-​vassalic relations emerged already in the early Carolingian
period, in the seventh and eighth centuries. Another is a rejection of the idea that a
“feudal regime” emerged suddenly and violently within a few decades before or after the
year 1000. It appears that there is an emerging consensus about feudo-​vassalic relations
developing gradually and slowly over the course of the eleventh and/​or twelfth centu-
ries, depending on the region, so that a system “approximating” textbook feudalism can
only be seen in the twelfth century, especially in its later part.40
If the development of feudo-​vassalic relations was already underway in the elev-
enth century, that is, before universities and the revival of Roman law in Western
Europe, academic lawyers could not have played the decisive role attributed to them by
Reynolds. In the latest monograph-​length contribution to the feudalism debate, Charles
West presented feudo-​vassalic relations as a long-​term unintended consequence of the

most recent synthesis of the “feudal transformation” theory, see Thomas N. Bisson, The Crisis of the
Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2009), 22–​68, 574. For the significance of Duby’s work on the Mâcon for the
“feudal revolution” theory, see Thomas Bisson, “The ‘Feudal Revolution’,” Past and Present 142
(1994): 6–​42, at 6. For a somewhat different interpretation of Duby’s findings about the Mâconnais
region, see Dominique Barthélemy, The Serf, the Knight, and the Historian, trans. Graham Robert
Edwards (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), ix, 2–​3, 8–​9.
38 Dominique Barthélemy, La société dans le comté de Vendôme: de l’an mil au XIVe siècle
(Paris: Fayard, 1993); Barthélemy, The Serf, the Knight, and the Historian; Stephen D. White, “Tenth-​
Century Courts at Mâcon and the Perils of Structuralist History: Rereading Burgundian Judicial
institutions,” in Conflict in Medieval Europe: Changing Perspectives on Society and Culture, ed.
Warren Brown and Piotr Górecki (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 37–​68; White, Feuding and Peace-​
Making in Eleventh-​Century France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Fredric L. Cheyette, “Georges
Duby’s Mâconnais after Fifty Years: Reading it Then and Now,” Journal of Medieval History 28
(2002): 291–​317.
39 Roach, “Submission and Homage,” 355, 378.
40 Adam J. Kosto, Making Agreements in Medieval Catalonia: Power, Order, and the Written Word,
1000–​1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Roach, “Submission and Homage”;
West, Reframing the Feudal Revolution; West, “Lordship in Ninth-​Century Francia: The Case of
Bishop Hincmar of Laon and his Followers,” Past and Present 226 (2014): 3–​40.
11

Introduction 11

Carolingian reforms. Since the ninth century, the Carolingians “worked to formalize
social interaction across the entire social spectrum,” which eventually led to a new social
formation “that could conventionally […] be termed feudalism.”41
The present book poses the question of whether there were some deeper, pan-​
European processes at work that contributed to the emergence of this new social for-
mation. An analysis of Rusian political narratives offered below suggests that some of
them describe relations among members of the elite that are remarkably similar to
feudo-​vassalic. Arguably, they have not been recognized as such, because the men (all
of them are men) entering into these relations belonged to the social stratum described
in English as “princes,” traditionally considered to be members of an anomalously
extended and exceptionally disorganized ruling dynasty. Most studies that have tried to
find Rusian analogies to feudo-​vassalic relations examine relations between “the prince
and the nobles (boyars).”42 However, information about the boyars in the pre-​Mongol
period is too meagre to see details of their relations with princes and to reconstruct
these relations with any degree of precision.43 The sources provide a wealth of informa-
tion about the relations between the princes; however, this information has been studied
primarily through the lens of kinship, because for most scholars, Rusian princes are first
and foremost members of an extended kin-​group (rod).
The Soviet historian V. T. Pashuto offered a different view of Rusian princes, treating
them not so much as a ruling dynasty but rather as a ruling stratum somewhat analo-
gous to the top nobility in the West. Pashuto never formulated this analogy explicitly;
however, he has argued that lesser princes, along with boyars and other categories of
nobles, could be “vassals” of other princes, and he has interpreted interprincely relations
as “feudal.”44 Following Pashuto, P. P. Tolochko has described relations among the princes
as “based on vassalic principles.”45 However, neither Pashuto nor Tolochko explains what

41 West, Reframing the Feudal Revolution, 8, 260, 263.

42 For a review of literature on “feudalism” in Rus, see P. S. Stefanovich, “Boiarskaia sluzhba v
srednevekovoi Rusi,” in Feodalizm: poniatie i realii, 180–​89, at 180–​83.
43 An exhaustive analysis of information on boyars can be found in P. S. Stefanovich, “Boiarskaia
sluzhba”; Stefanovich, “Boiarstvo i tserkov v domongolskoi Rusi,” Voprosy istorii 7 (2002): ​
41–​59; Stefanovich, “Religiozno-​eticheskie aspekty otnoshenii kniazia i znati v domongolskoi
Rusi,” Otechstvennaia istoriia 1 (2004): 3–​18; Petr S. Stefanovič, “Der Eid des Adels gegenüber
dem Herrscher im mittelalterlichen Russland,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 53 (2005): ​
497–​505. (“Stefanovich” and “Stefanovič” are alternative transliterations of the same name.)
44 V. T. Pashuto, “Cherty politicheskogo stroia Drevnei Rusi,” in Drevnerusskoe gosudarstvo i ego
mezhdunarodnoe znachenie, ed. A. P. Novoseltsev, V. T. Pashuto, and V. L. Cherepnin (Moscow: Nauka,
1965), 11–​77. An example of a recent work which, in Pashuto’s tradition, describes interprincely
relations in “feudal” terms is M. B. Sverdlov, Domongolskaia Rus: kniaz’ i kniazheskaia vlast’ na Rusi
VI-​pervoi treti XIII vv. (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2003). Sverdlov provides even less
argumentation to support his view of interprincely relations as “feudo-​vassalic” than Pashuto does,
and no discussion at all of feudo-​vassalic relations in the West.
45 P. P. Tolochko, Kniaz v Drevnei Rusi: vlast, sobstvennost, ideologiia (Kiev: Naukova dumka,
1992), 178.
12

12 Introduction

they understand by “vassalic principles,” and their argumentation is often based on

speculations and conjectures. Tolochko’s book has been largely ignored, probably both
because its argumentation is not entirely satisfactory and because it was published in
Ukraine during the time of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The deficiencies of
Pashuto’s arguments have been criticized in recent works by Russian scholars who deny
that Rusian society had any significant similarities with the West. Even though Pashuto
and his followers did not provide sufficient argumentation to support their view of
interprincely relations, it appears to me that their suggestion about parallels between
the inner organization of Rusian princes and of Western aristocracy deserves further
study. This book offers such a study in the form of a comparison of political narratives
about Rusian princes, Aquitanian aristocrats, and members of the royal family and
nobility in England. I hope that the following chapters will show that such a comparison
can yield interesting, and probably unexpected, results.
13

Chapter 1

RUS AND LATIN EUROPE: WORDS, CONCEPTS,

AND PHENOMENA

A comparative study of sources written in different languages encounters

problems reminiscent of those described by Elizabeth Brown and Susan Reynolds in
their critique of the classic theory of feudalism. The two catchphrases capturing the
essence of this critique are “the tyranny of a construct,” and “the confusion of words,
concepts, and phenomena.” The confusion, according to Reynolds, results from the
way historians typically proceed: first, they employ one word, “fief,” to translate many
different medieval terms; then they define fief as a concept of “dependent noble or mil-
itary tenure.” Finally, they assume the existence of the phenomenon corresponding to
this concept every time they see words conventionally translated as “fief.” This habit of
“starting our investigation of phenomena by focusing on particular words” leads to cir-
cular argumentation that distorts the realities of the past.
Shedding the habit, however, is not simply a matter of scholarly integrity. Historians
behave in this way not necessarily out of prejudice or sloppiness, but because it is
often hard to come up with an alternative. Reynolds admits that “historians who work
from written sources have to begin with words: they are all we have”; she just calls for
thinking hard about what is being discussed (the phenomena) before coming up with
generalizations.1 To avoid generalizations entirely and to adhere strictly to concepts and
notions found in medieval texts, one must also avoid the use of any modern language and
write in Latin or whichever languages are used in the sources. Indeed, recent works on
medieval social and political history contain almost as many words in italics as not: they
are peppered with milites, homines, fideles, suis, benefitia, feva, casamenta, castra and
the like, whereas earlier scholarship would have used “vassals,” “fiefs,” or “castles.”
Nowadays, historians are careful not to to distort the actual content of their sources by
bringing in all the theoretical baggage carried by terms that had been used to describe
“feudal society.” They know that a vassalus was not necessarily a vassal in the textbook
sense of the word, and that there is no reason to think that every homo did homage and
every fidelis swore an oath of fealty.
Sticking with the original terminology of the sources may work well for research that
concentrates on one linguistic area. Scholars using medieval Latin texts can productively
discuss accounts of homines receiving casamenta and performing, or not performing,
homagium. When it comes to regions and historical periods where vernacular sources
appear alongside Latin ones, the situation gets more complicated, but it is still manage-
able: many vernacular terms are cognates of Latin, and even Germanic words have con-
ventional Latin correspondents. Scholars may disagree about interpretations of various
types of medieval property, but they do agree that Lehn corresponds to words such as
fevum or fius.

1 Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals, 12–​13.

14

14 Rus and Latin Europe

What happens, however, if we want to compare Latin texts about milites, fideles
and feva to documents written in a language unrelated to, and not influenced by, Latin?
Apparently, we need to come up with a way to refer to medieval institutions, social
groups, or types of property that would be comprehensible to readers not familiar with
both languages—​in other words, we have to translate. Anyone who, having embarked on
a comparative study of sources written in unrelated languages, does not have the luxury
of using the original terms, faces a hard choice. One may follow the injunction “not to
attempt definitions until after one has looked at usage and thought hard […] about what
may be implied about the notions of the time.”2 This is, undoubtedly, the right way to
proceed while comparing a specific phenomenon or institution in two different cultures.
However, a rigorous investigation of the usage of the terms involved in a more broad
comparison of two societies is unpractical: any conceptual argument would be drowned
by pages upon pages of technical discussions. Therefore, general comparative studies
usually do not go deeply into the question of terminology, but simply employ conven-
tional translations.
In practice, this means relying on the historiographical traditions out of which the
translations were born and, consequently, falling victim to the “tyranny of a construct”—​
or rather, of multiple constructs. The famous article by Elizabeth Brown, and a number
of later works, have traced the rise of “feudalism” as a “tyrannous construct” that came
to dominate the scholarship of the medieval West and to distort the realities that it pur-
ported to describe.3 “Feudalism” may have been especially pervasive, but in terms of its
power to distort medieval realities, it is hardly unique, as the scholars rising to over-
throw its tyranny were to find out. New explanatory frameworks proposed in the wake
of the dismantling of the “feudal construct” tend to turn “tyrannical” almost as soon as
they become widely accepted.4 Nor is historiography of the medieval West unique in its
tendency to create “tyrannical constructs.” In a sense, such constructs are an inevitable
by-​product of having scholarly terminology.
Every historiographical tradition has its own beloved theoretical models, which
simplify messy source material by privileging some aspects of what documents tell
us and marginalizing others. Conventional translations of Slavonic social and polit-
ical terminology carry baggage as heavy as “fiefs,” “vassals,” and other terms coined by
scholars working within the framework of “feudalism”—​only, in the case of Slavonic,
the baggage is created by different theoretical models, as we shall see. Not only do the
conceptual frameworks of Rusian historiography differ from those used by Western

2 Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals, 13.

3 Brown, “The Tyranny of a Construct”; Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals; Cheyette, “Feudalism.”
4 Paul R. Hyams, “Was There Really Such a Thing as Feud in the High Middle Ages?,” in Vengeance
in the Middle Ages: Emotion, Religion and Feud, ed. Susanna A. Throop and Paul R. Hyams
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 151–​75; Rees Davies, “The Medieval State: The Tyranny of a Concept?,”
Journal of Historical Sociology 16 (2003): 280–​300; West, “Lordship in Ninth-​Century Francia,”
36, 40; David A. Warner, “Reading Ottonian History: The Sonderweg and Other Myths,” in
Challenging the Boundaries of Medieval History: The Legacy of Timothy Reuter, ed. Patricia Skinner
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 81–​114, at 100–​101; Kosto, Making Agreements, 12–​14.
15

Rus and Latin Europe 15

medievalists, but they have never been scrutinized as closely as “feudalism.” In many
respects, the scholarship of Rus is still based on unexamined assumptions going back to
the nineteenth century.
Timothy Reuter described the historiography of medieval Latin Europe as “a set of
parallel universes,” where each scholarly tradition—​French, German, English, Spanish,
or Italian—​has its own specific way of looking at things while avoiding eye-​contact with
the others.5 From the perspective of a Rus scholar, though, these traditions look like solar
systems belonging to the same universe, or even more like planets in one solar system.
Grundherrschaft may be “not quite the same thing as seigneurie banale,”6 but we do know
which German term to juxtapose to which French term while discussing differences
between the two traditions. There is thus a common ground, a basis for conversation;
whereas if we try to include Rus in this conversation, we would simply not know where to
begin. Historiographies of Rus and the medieval West exist in truly parallel universes.
The goal of this chapter is to try to build a bridge between them—​or are parallel
universes supposed to be connected by a tunnel? Expressed in boring academic, rather
than metaphoric, language, this chapter is devoted to creating a context that would make it
possible to juxtapose Rus and Latin Europe. And boring it will be, at least in some parts: to
establish a common ground between diverse historiographical traditions, it is necessary to
engage with such dry topics as terminology and the general outline of the master narrative
of Rusian history.

“Kings,” “Princes,” and “Disintegration”

A comparison between Rus and the West runs into a major problem from the start. Medieval
Europe is normally conceived of as a collection of kingdoms. The place of the royal govern-
ment within the overall socio-​political structure varied greatly throughout centuries; schol-
arly interpretations of the significance of royal power in each given country and time period
may be extremely diverse, but “kingship” and “monarchy” as abstractions are undoubtedly
among the key concepts of medieval studies. In Rus studies, however, they are conspicuous
by their absence.
It is generally believed that Rus did not have a king. Instead, it had “princes,” also
known in scholarly literature as the Rurikids, whose origin tradition traced to the
legendary Scandinavian leader Rurik.7 The rex of Rus, who “belonged to the people

5 Timothy Reuter, Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities, ed. Janet L. Nelson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), 88.
6 Reuter, Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities, 88.
7 An alternative transcription is “Riurikids.” Some scholars object to the term “Rurikids,” because
there is no proof that Rurik was historical, and because Rusian princes are not reported to have
presented themselves as his descendants. On “Rurikids” (transcribed “Riurikids” in the article)
being a scholarly, not contemporary, term, see Donald Ostrowski, “Systems of Succession in Rus’
and Steppe Societies,” Ruthenica 11 (2012): 29–​58, at 30–​34. On Scandinavians and early Rus, see
Jonathan Shepard, “The Viking Rus and Byzantium,” in The Viking World, ed. Stefan Brink and Neil
16

16 Rus and Latin Europe

of the Swedes,” is first mentioned in The Annals of St. Bertin under 838;8 rulers with
Scandinavian names based in Kiev, a centre on the middle Dnieper, are documented since
the late ninth century; from the mid-​900s on, their names become Slavic. Sources also
mention tenth-​century princes of Polotsk, in modern-​day Belarus, apparently unrelated
to the house of Kiev, but also bearing Scandinavian names; by the eleventh century their
names become Slavic as well. In all likelihood, the princes of Polotsk were Scandinavian
leaders who subjugated the population of the area and who in the course of time became
assimilated, just as the Kievan dynasty did.9 By the eleventh century these two lines, and
possibly other prominent Scandinavian and local families, intermarried, and it is their
progeny that comprised kniazi, described in English as “princes” or “Rurikids.”10
The most well-​known Kievan prince is Vladimir, who in 988 converted to
Christianity, married a Byzantine princess, and sponsored a mass baptism of the pop-
ulation under his authority. In the traditional narrative of Rusian history, Vladimir and
other early princes, although not called “kings,” are generally treated as such. Rus before
the mid-​eleventh century has been presented as—​although usually not called—​a mon-
archy: most accounts of Rusian history assume that before 1054 the Kievan prince was
the supreme hereditary ruler of the country. Nonetheless, historians would not use the
standard word for such a ruler and call him a king.
A good example of terminological problems that emerge as soon as Rus is not so much
discussed, but is simply mentioned in passing in a wider European context, is an account
of the marriage of Henry I of France in the New Cambridge Medieval History: “Henry
married Anna, daughter of Jaroslav I, archduke of Kiev. The French kings had been
having difficulties […] in finding brides of suitably elevated status to whom they were
nor already related, and a Russian princess (contemporary chronicles called Jaroslav
a king) […] was a welcome if novel solution.”11 Indeed, contemporary Latin sources
called Jaroslav, or Iaroslav (r. 1019–​1054), rex Russorum, and viewed the marriage of his
daughter to the rex Francorum as a union of two royal families of equal status.12 Nor was
Iaroslav, in this respect, an exception among other Rusian “princes,” who were normally

Price (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 496–​516; Fedir Androshchuk, “The Vikings in the East,” ibid.,
517–​42.
8 Annales Bertiniani, ed. Félix Grat, Jeanne Vielliard, and Suzanne Clémencet (Paris: C. Klincksieck,
1964), 30–​31.
9 PSRL 1, 75–​76; Franklin and Shepard, Emergence of Rus, 152–​53; see also Omeljan Pritsak, The
Origins of Rus, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 136–​37.
10 Kniazia, sometimes used as the plural from of kniaz, is modern Russian; the East Slavonic form
is kniazi.
11 Constance Brittain Bourchard, “The Kingdom of the Franks to 1108,” in The New Cambridge
Medieval History, ed. David Luscombe and Jonathan Riley-​Smith, vol. 4, pt. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), 125.
12 Christian Raffensperger, The Kingdom of Rus’, 77–​78. I am grateful to Christian Raffensperger
for allowing me to consult a manuscript of his book before it was published. For a review of litera-
ture on the translation of kniaz see ibid. and A. V. Soloviev, “ ‘Reges’ et ‘Regnum Russiae’ au Moyen
Age,” Byzantion: Revue internationale des études byzantines 36 (1966), 143–​73, at 151–​52.
17

Rus and Latin Europe 17

described in Latin accounts as reges, and their land as regnum.13 Rex is the standard
medieval Latin translation for the Slavonic kniaz, which is what Iaroslav was called in
Rus. This is the same word that a Rusian pilgrim to the Holy Land applied to Baldwin I,
whom he described as the “kniaz of Jerusalem,” and the same word that Rusian authors
used in their discussions of rulership: God awards the righteous by appointing a good
emperor or kniaz to rule their land, while the sinful are subjected to evil and cruel kniazi
and emperors.14 The word “archduke” was unknown in Rus and no contemporary from
any region applied this title to Iaroslav or to any other Rusian man.
Apparently, Iaroslav becomes “archduke” in the New Cambridge Medieval History,
because for a modern scholar there can be no king in Kiev: the standard English trans-
lation for kniaz is “prince,” not “king.”15 The passage about the marriage of Iaroslav’s
daughter is found in the chapter “The Kingdom of the Franks to 1108.” It is a common
assumption that the regnum Frankorum was a kingdom, but the regnum Russorum was
not. It should be noted that this assumption is shared by scholars of Rus, including
Russian and Ukrainian nationalistic historians, who use the untranslated word kniaz for
Rusian rulers and do not refer to Rus as a “kingdom.” Thus, the exclusion of Rus from the
club of medieval kingdoms is not a product of bias or snobbery on the part of Western
scholars; on the contrary, Western medievalists, when they write about Rus, apparently
seek to find equivalents to the expressions normally used by Rus historians. The latter
do not represent Rus as a kingdom; one reason for this is a legacy of traditional histori-
ography, which focused on the so-​called “period of disintegration.” “Disintegration” is the
“feudalism” of Rus studies, the dominant lens through which Rusian history was viewed
since the early nineteenth century till at least the 1990s, and which is still present in
current scholarship. We need, therefore, to discuss it at some length.
Orderly monarchical rule, the story goes, ended in 1054 with the death of Henry I’s ​
father-​in-​law Iaroslav the “Wise.” He presided over a “Golden Age,” which ended all
too soon because of what the nineteenth-​century scholars saw as his unfortunate, and
irrational, decision to divide the realm between his five sons instead of designating a
single heir. The Kievan throne went to the eldest, whom his brothers were supposed
to recognize as their overlord. Instead they began to fight him and one another; the
next generation continued in the same vein, thus bringing about the “disintegration” of
Iaroslav’s realm.
In 1097 the six most powerful grandsons of Iaroslav convened at Liubech and
decided to establish peace by allocating to each of themselves a territory that had

13 Raffensperger, The Kingdom of Rus’; A. V. Nazarenko, Nemetskie latinoiazychnye istochniki

IX–​XI vekov: Teksty, perevod, kommentarii (Moscow: Nauka, 1993), 111, 149–​50; Soloviev, “ ‘Reges’
et ‘Regnum Russiae’.”
14 Zhite i khozhene Danila Russkyia zemli igumena, ed. G. M. Prokhorov, in XII vek, ed. D. S. Likhachev
et al., Biblioteka literatury Drevnei Rusi [hereafter BLDR] 4 (St. Petersburg, Russia: Nauka, 1997),
also available as an electronic text at http://​lib.pushkinskijdom.ru/​Default.aspx?tabid=4934; PSRL
1, 349.
15 On the history of the use of “duke” as a designator of the supreme ruler of Muscovy and, retro-
actively, of Rus, see Raffensperger, The Kingdom of Rus’, 25–​30.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
cover them with kisses, but dared not.
“You will soon make me superstitious,” she said; “I shall not feel
myself again until I have my robes of state and diadem.”
There was never a more brilliant spectacle at Leeholme than the
ballroom that evening. There was queenly Cleopatra, with dusky
brows; Antony, in mailed armor; Kenelm Eyrle, as Sir Launcelot; Sir
Ronald, as King Harry; Clara Seville, as the Queen of Scots, and the
magnificent blonde, Miss Monteith, as Queen Guinivere. The belles
of the evening were Miss Severn, as Jane Seymour, and Lady
Hermione, as Anne Boleyn.
“If I had been King Harry,” said Captain Gordon, “I should not
have known which of those two beautiful women I loved best; but I
should never have slain one to marry the other.”
“I would rather have been Anne than Jane,” said Queen
Guinivere, to whom he was speaking. “If Jane Seymour had any
conscience it must have been sorely wounded by Anne’s death—she
should never have been really happy afterward.”
Many a happy passage at arms took place between the fair
rivals. It was certainly most suggestive. The dead queens had not
struggled more for the sole possession of bluff Harry’s heart than
these two did most unconsciously for Sir Ronald’s love.
It was growing near the close of the evening when Sir Ronald
danced with Lady Hermione. The brilliant ballroom was very warm
then, and she laughed as she said:
“I should not like to be a queen always; the weight of my royal
robes is great.”
“You are always a queen, though not dressed en reine,” he
replied. “You look tired; let us go into the grounds—the cool, sweet
air will refresh you.”
Over her queenly costume and crowned head he drew a black
lace mantilla, in which she looked inexpressibly beautiful, and they
went through the corridor to the moonlit grounds, where many of
Lord Lorriston’s guests were enjoying the beauty of the night. Great,
fragrant roses sighed out their sweetness, and the lilies gleamed
palely. The song of a nightingale in the distant woods was heard
plainly, when there came a soft, languid lull in the music. The stars
came out like golden lamps in the darkling sky; and they stood, those
who loved each other so well, with the first faint pulse of love thrilling
each heart, too happy for words; for words, after all, do not tell the
heart’s sweetest and deepest thoughts.
Only once—when there was a faint stir in the wind, and the roses
all bowed their crimson heads, the white bells of the lilies trembled;
then he drew the lace mantle more closely round her—he bent down
and looked into her beautiful face.
“My queen,” he whispered, “see, even the flowers know their
queen.”
And, as she smiled at the words, she looked so lovely and so
loving, that he forgot everything except the passionate longing to call
her his own. He bent down and kissed the pure, sweet lips that had
never been kissed before.
 CHAPTER XIII.
LED ON BY FATE.

Lady Hermione did not utter one word. She was not angry; he
knew that, for the beautiful face flushed warm as he touched it.
“He has a right to kiss me,” she thought to herself, “for he loves
me. No one has ever kissed me before, and never shall.”
Then he would have told her the story of his love, the story that
rose from his heart to his lips in a burning torrent of words; but at that
moment, over the roses came the sound of light laughter, and there
was no more solitude; he was obliged to leave the story untold.
It was Captain Gordon and Miss Monteith, seeking the cool air of
the grounds. Simple accident led them to that path among the roses,
but the accident, simple as it was, altered the course of three lives.
Not again that evening did Sir Ronald find even three minutes’
leisure to devote to Lady Hermione. She was the belle of the ball, the
queen of the fête, always surrounded by a little court of admirers, the
center of all homage. Yet he was content.
“She cares for me,” he said to himself, over and over again; “she
was not angry when I kissed her face. She is so dainty, so pure, so
sweet, that if she had not meant that I should love her she would
have rebuked me with proud words. She loves me, and when I ask
her to be my wife, she will not say me nay.”
And the very thought caused his heart to beat high with triumph,
made his whole soul overflow with happiness, and while he stood
there he saw Miss Severn looking at him with wistful eyes. It struck
him at once how entirely he had forgotten her, and he hurried across
the ballroom.
The beautiful, passionate face seemed to glow with new life as
he bowed to her.
 “I thought your majesty had forgotten Queen Jane,” she said, with
all the music of reproach and love in her voice.
“I must plead guilty to the charge of losing my interests in one,”
he replied, “and yet I cannot accuse myself of forgetting you.”
He meant nothing but the most idle of words, such as no one
could refrain from speaking to a beautiful woman, who flattered him
with her preference.
“I must not be hard upon you, remembering you had six queens
to love,” she said.
“Complete the pardon by giving me the next dance,” said Sir
Ronald, and she gladly consented.
They stood together before a rich cluster of white hyacinths, a
flower of which she was especially fond. Suddenly she looked in Sir
Ronald’s face.
“Speaking seriously,” she said, “and remembering history, do you
believe that King Harry ever loved Jane Seymour as much as he did
Anne Boleyn?”
“Speaking seriously, as you say, Miss Severn, I am inclined to
think—yes; he did. She never displeased him; she died before she
had time to offend him; she increased his importance by leaving him
a son and heir.”
“But,” interrupted Clarice, “how passionately he loved that
beautiful Anne; how he wooed her, how he pursued her—what
thousands of tender words he must have lavished on her!”
“Words are but empty sounds,” he interrupted.
“And you believe, after all, that passion of devotion—after defying
all Europe for her sake—that he loved Queen Jane the best?”
“I have not thought much about the matter, but from rapidly
thinking over all I remember of the subject, I should say, yes, he
cared most for Jane.”
It pleased her to read a hidden meaning in his words of which he
was most entirely unconscious. He had for the moment even
forgotten how the historical characters were distributed; but Clarice
Severn gathered up all these words, and placed them in her heart;
she pondered over them, and they made for a few short days the
music of her life.
The brilliant evening came to an end, and left three people more
happy than words of mine could tell. Lady Hermione, with her lover’s
first kiss warm on her lips, his passionate words lingering in her ears,
her heart warm with the remembrance of all he had said to her, and
how dearly he loved her; Sir Ronald, happy because he believed the
bonnie bright bird he had wooed so long would flutter into his hand;
Clarice, happy under a false impression, and because she loved Sir
Ronald so well that she believed that which she should only have
hoped.
“I will lose no time,” said Sir Ronald to himself. “To-morrow I will
ask her that most honest of all questions: ‘Will you be my wife?’”
But Sir Ronald found that to propose and to accomplish a deed
was very different. Although he was remaining at Leeholme until
evening he found no opportunity of saying one word to Lady
Hermione; there were so many guests and her attention was so
incessantly occupied. There were always young girls eagerly talking
to her, or gentlemen paying her compliments, and, as the daughter
of the house, she was engaged in entertaining visitors. In vain Sir
Ronald watched and waited. He only asked five minutes, but even
that short space of time was quite out of his reach.
He sat by her side during lunch, but even the most ardent of
lovers could not possibly make an offer of marriage over cold
chicken and lobster salad. There was a little assertion of
independence, too, on her part. She knew what was coming just as a
wild, bright forest bird knows its fate when the net is drawn around it.
In vain Sir Ronald spoke to her. The lovely eyes, so frankly raised to
other faces, drooped shyly from his. The sweet, proud lips that
smiled so freely were mute and closed for him.
Maiden modesty and maiden pride rendered her shy, timid and
silent with the lover for whom she would have laid down her sweet,
young life. Sir Ronald only loved her the better for it; his heart beat
with impatience.
“Let me have only one minute with her,” he said, “and I would
soon change all that.”
But Sir Ronald was obliged to leave Leeholme without
accomplishing his wish. He rode home through the fragrant gloaming
with a heart full of love that was both happiness and pain.
“She will be mine,” he said to himself, when any cold or cruel
doubts came to him; “she will be mine because she let me kiss her
lips, and that kiss was a solemn betrothal.” There came to his mind
the words of a beautiful, quaint old German ballad, “Schön Rothant,”
wherein a lover says: “Every leaf in the forest knows that I have
kissed her lips.”
“She will be mine,” he cried aloud. “I would work for her twice
seven years, as Jacob did. I would be content to love her my whole
life through, satisfied if in death she rewarded me with but one smile.
I love her so that if I lay dead with green grass and forest leaves
heaped over me and she came to my grave and whispered my
name, I should hear her.”
The Aldens were a quick, passionate race. They did nothing by
halves. They knew no limit, no bound, no measure to their loves or
hates. With many men love is a pastime, a pleasing, light
occupation, a relief from the severity of daily toil. With others it is
deeper and more serious—yet one life holds many; but with men of
Sir Ronald’s stamp it is life or death, rapture or despair, highest
happiness or deepest woe.
For one whole week his suspense lasted. He rode over every day
to Leeholme, and every evening returned with the one question still
unasked, for the park was full of visitors and Lady Hermione always
engaged.
At length he resolved to write. He said to himself that he could
not bear another week such as this past had been; that even despair
itself would be easier to bear than suspense. He smiled as he said
the words, feeling sure there would be neither suspense nor sorrow
for him.
 CHAPTER XIV.
A THUNDERBOLT.

It is seldom that a tragedy happens all at once; there are

circumstances that lead up to it. These circumstances are seldom as
exciting as the tragedy itself. The details of what happened before
the strange, sad story of Lady Alden’s death thrilled all England, are
necessary, though not exciting, in order to make other events
understood.
Sir Ronald decided upon writing to Lady Hermione. He made one
last effort; he rode over to Leeholme one beautiful August morning,
when the golden corn stood in huge sheafs in the meadows, and the
fruit hung ripe on the orchard walls. It was just as usual. Lady
Hermione was in the grounds with a party of young people. Lady
Lorriston told him, and he could not do better than join them; they
were planning a visit to the Holy Well at Longston. Sir Ronald went
out into the pleasure grounds, and there, under the spreading,
fragrant shade of a large cedar, he saw a group that would have
charmed Watteau—fair-faced girls with their lovers, beautiful women
over whose stately heads more summer suns had shone, and, in the
midst of all, Lady Hermione.
“Here is Sir Ronald,” said one of the voices. Then he joined the
group under the cedar tree, and Lady Hermione greeted him with a
few measured words. How was he to know that her heart was
beating wildly; that her whole soul was moving in its deepest depths
by the pleasure of seeing him? Then the conversation became
general. He waited more than an hour. He saw plainly there was no
chance for even five minutes with his ladylove that day.
“I will go home and write to her,” he said to himself; then he held
her white hand in his own a minute while he said good-by, and a
flood of hope rushed warm and sweet through his heart when he
noted the rose-leaf flush and the trembling lips.
Was it accident that brought Clarice Severn into the broad
chestnut glade that led to the house? Other eyes might turn shyly
from his; hers grew brighter and happier, her whole face changed as
she bent forward quickly to greet him.
“I was just wondering whether we should see you to-day or not,
Sir Ronald,” she said.
“It would be a dark, dreary day that would not bring me to
Leeholme,” he said; and, again, in her foolish hope and foolish love,
she chose to think the words referred to herself.
“Clarice,” he said, his deep voice broken with emotion, “you know
what brings me here day after day.”
Her heart beat so quickly she could hardly reply. Believe me,
nothing misled her but her own vanity and her own love.
“I know,” she said, faintly.
“I shall not bear my suspense much longer,” he continued; “I am
going to try my fate. I am sure you wish me godspeed.”
“He is going to ask me to be his wife,” she said to herself; but
even then, in the delirium of happiness which that thought gave her,
she wondered why he could not ask her there and then.
“Thank you, Clarice; the good wishes of a pure-hearted woman
always seem to me like prayers.” Then he passed on, and was soon
out of sight.
Sir Ronald rode home again; he looked at the familiar trees as he
passed; he smiled at the nodding branches and the fluttering leaves.
“When next I pass you by,” he said, “I shall know my fate.”
He could not rest until that letter was written; all the inspiration of
his love was upon him as he wrote it; the burning words that had
risen so often from his heart to his lips found life; there was no delay
in the choice of his expressions. Never since Adam wooed Eve
among the bowers of Paradise was love more deeply or more
strongly told. A doubt must have crossed his mind once, for he said:
“If you say me nay, Hermione, I shall not importune you—a
queen has the right of denial to her subject if the favor asked be too
great. You have that same right over me. I shall not importune you,
sweet. I shall not drag my prayer again and again to your feet to be
denied; but you will mar my whole life, and change it into bitterest
anguish. But I need not write this. What are the little birds singing to
me? That my darling would never have let me kiss her lips until she
meant to be mine.”
Hour after hour passed, and he was still writing. It seemed to him
that he was in her actual presence, and the sweet, fiery words
flowed on. Then, when the letter was finished, it was too large to be
sent by post.
“An envelope of that size and thickness would be sure to attract
attention,” he said to himself. “I will send it by a messenger.”
So his most trusty servant was dispatched to Leeholme Park,
with orders to deliver the packet into Lady Hermione’s own hand, but
not to wait for the answer. But Lady Hermione was not at home, and,
after waiting some hours, the groom, beginning to fear Sir Ronald’s
displeasure, gave it to the lady’s maid, who, duly impressed by him
as to its importance, laid it on Lady Hermione’s dressing-table,
feeling sure that her mistress would see it at once when she entered
the room.
That same evening, keeping in mind what the groom had said to
her, the maid asked her mistress if she had found the small paper
parcel on her toilet-table. Lady Hermione smiled.
“Yes, I have it,” she replied, and then her maid forgot the whole
matter.
All that day Sir Ronald waited impatiently for his answer. No day
had ever seemed to him half so long before.
“She will send a messenger,” he said; “she will not keep me in
suspense until morning.”
 But, though he watched and waited, no messenger came. He
sent away his dinner untasted; he debated within himself whether he
should ride over to Leeholme or not, and he decided no—that would
not do at all.
How he lived through the night he did not know; no rest or sleep
came to him. But the morning brought him a letter, and that letter
contained his death warrant. He saw at once it was from Leeholme
Park, and he held it for some minutes unopened in his hand.
“It is either life or death,” he said to himself, “and brave men know
how to die.”
He took it with him to his favorite nook, the shade of a large lime
tree, known as “King Charles’ Tree,” from the fact of the Merrie
Monarch having once hidden there. He opened it there, and from
that moment the sun of earthly happiness set for Ronald Alden.
“Believe me,” the letter began, “that it costs me even
more to refuse your prayer, Sir Ronald, than it will cost you
to read that refusal. My whole heart grieves for you; but I
cannot be your wife. I have not the love to give you that a
woman should give to the man she marries. I am your
friend for life.
“Hermione Lorriston.”
Not many lines to break a man’s heart, and destroy the whole
happiness of his life, but Sir Ronald sat hour after hour under the
lime tree, and the summer sun never shone, nor did the flowers
bloom for him again.
 CHAPTER XV.
WITHOUT HOPE.

The sun shone round him, the flowers bloomed fair, the sweet
south wind whispered of all bright things; but Sir Ronald never raised
his despairing face to the summer heavens.
Life and hope were crushed within him; he did not care to rise
from the ground where he had flung himself in the first wild paroxysm
of grief; he had some vague hope that he might die there; but it takes
much to kill a strong man.
The sunbeams grew warm; the day had its duties. He had
arranged to see his steward at noon. A tenant farmer had promised
to wait upon him concerning the renewal of a lease. Life was too full
of occupation for despair. He rose at last, and looked his future in the
face.
“She has killed me,” he said to himself; “surely as ever man was
slain.”
He crushed the letter in his hands.
“She has been false to me,” he cried, in his passionate rage.
“She has lured me on to my death! She has duped me with smiles
that meant nothing, with fair words that were all false, with looks that
were all lies! She was, I believed, the truest, the fairest, the purest of
women; yet she has duped me! She who had, I believed, the white
wings of an angel, let me kiss her lips, and yet never meant to marry
me. Does the curse of coquetry and falseness lie upon all women, I
wonder?”
Passionate anger flamed in his face; his eyes flashed, his lips
quivered. The Alden rage was strong upon him. Hot words leaped to
his lips, but he would not utter them.
 “I shall not curse her,” he said; “the ruin of a man’s life shall be at
her door, but I will say nothing harsh of her. She was my first, last,
and only love.”
He turned away and re-entered the house. He looked like a man
who had suddenly aged twenty years, on whom the blight of some
awful trouble had fallen, whose life had been suddenly checked in its
full, sweet flow, and frozen into living death.
For some days Sir Ronald did not leave Aldenmere; he was too
miserable to either care to see friends or strangers. His thoughts
were all steeped in bitterness. At one time he thought he would go
abroad; then he said to himself: “No; she shall not have the triumph
of seeing she has driven me from her! she shall never boast that for
love of her an Alden flew from his home.”
Then business called him from home, and people told each other
that Sir Ronald Alden had been very ill, he looked so changed from
his brighter, better self. On the first day, as he was riding to a near
town, he met the party from Leeholme. There was no time to avoid
them, or he would have turned away. With the keen eyes of love, he
saw Lady Hermione. She was riding with Kenelm Eyrle by her side.
He was obliged, by every rule of courtesy, to speak to her. He
reined in his horse by her side.
“Good-morning, Lady Hermione,” he said, gravely. “I did not
expect the pleasure of seeing you.”
“We waited half an hour for you,” said Mr. Eyrle. “Did you not
promise to join us in an excursion to the Holy Well?”
“I do not remember making such a promise,” he said; and then he
could not control his longing desire to look at her. He raised his eyes
to her face, and was astonished at what he saw there. Some great
change had come over that brilliant beauty. Her face was pale and
grave—stern as one who is nerved to go through a disagreeable
duty. The smiles that had been wont to play round her sweet, proud
lips had died away. There was no light in the eyes that met his so
coldly.
 She bowed coolly in reply to his greeting, but spoke no word. He
saw her draw her slender figure to its full height; then she said
something to a lady near her. Sir Ronald felt as though a sharp
sword had pierced his heart.
“She hates me,” he thought; “she is trying to show me how utterly
indifferent she is to me. Ah! Hermione, there was no need to be cruel
to me. I know now that you will not love me. I shall not ask you
again, sweet; I shall dree my weird alone.”
She was so still. The bright, gay words that charmed him were no
longer heard. He looked at her again, and saw an expression of
weariness on her face, as though she were tired and not happy.
Bitter thoughts crowded upon him. He loved her so that he could
have flung himself under her horse’s feet, yet he felt that she had
ruined his life, and, deep in his heart, he cursed the coquetry that
had been his blight.
He bade her good-morning in the coolest of words. She barely
responded; yet, to his surprise, he saw she had grown white to the
very lips.
“How she must dislike me,” he thought, “that the sight of me is so
distasteful to her. How utterly false she was when she offered to be
my friend for life, yet my only crime has been to love her.”
It was Lord Lorriston who rode up to him next, with a hearty
greeting.
“Where have you been, Sir Ronald? We all thought you were lost.
My wife and Lady Hermione were growing quite anxious, fearing you
were ill.”
“They are very kind,” he replied, thinking in his heart how quick
were all women to deceive. She had received an offer of marriage
from him, to which she had replied in barely courteous terms. She
knew perfectly well why he never came near Leeholme, why he
shunned and avoided them all; yet she had listened to the wonder
expressed, and had said nothing. To the parents who trusted her so
implicitly she had made no mention of a fact that a true and loving
daughter seldom conceals.
 She was false to every one alike, and yet he had believed her so
good, so true, so earnest. Her face was so fair and pure; yet the shy,
timid looks she had given him were all false as her words.
He said little in reply to the friendly greetings that met him on all
sides. Clarice was the last to address him. She was somewhat
behind the other riders, and Captain Thringston was by her side. She
held out her hands to him with a look that said more than a volume
of words.
“I have been wishing to see you,” she said, in a low voice; and
then a flush crimsoned the proud, passionate beauty of her face.
Captain Thringston seemed to have an instinctive idea that he
would be quite as agreeable to Miss Severn if he rode a little ahead.
“I hardly know if I dare speak to you, though we are old
playfellows, Sir Ronald,” she began.
“There is very little that you cannot say to me, Clarice,” he said,
kindly.
“Dare I tell you that I know—that is, I can guess—what has
happened, and that you have my truest, warmest and deepest
sympathy?”
“You are very kind,” he replied, “but I would rather not discuss the
matter with you; it is best left alone.”
“Do not be proud to me, Ronald. Remember, we played together
as children. Do you think, after all these years, you could have a pain
I did not feel, or a happiness I did not share with you?”
Her beautiful eyes were bright with tears as she spoke; he
hurriedly clasped her hand.
“God bless you, Clarice! you are very kind, but I cannot bear it.”
And then he galloped hastily away.
 CHAPTER XVI.
“THE ALDEN PRIDE.”

Time did not bring comfort to Sir Ronald Alden; the blow he had
received was too heavy and too cruel. He felt not only annoyed, but
aggrieved, that Clarice knew his secret.
“Lady Hermione must have said something to her about it. Most
probably all young ladies boast to each other how many men they
cause to suffer; yet one would have thought her as far above that
kind of feeling as the clouds are above the earth.”
It was some relief to him to know that no one else appeared to
guess the story. The “Alden pride” was strong in him. It was hard
enough to bear; it would have been doubly hard if the world had
known it.
Lord and Lady Lorriston continued for some time to send him
invitations, to wonder that he did not call, to express that wonder to
him.
It so happened that an eminent writer paid a visit to Leeholme,
one whose acquaintance all men were proud and honored to make.
Lord Lorriston immediately issued invitations for a large dinner party.
“I consider myself a public benefactor,” he said, laughingly, “in
giving men the opportunity of seeing that great genius of the age.
Perhaps I have been mistaken over Sir Ronald. Send him cards; he
will be sure to come.”
But, to his surprise, among all the letters of acceptance was a
note from Sir Ronald, short and cold, declining, with thanks, the
invitation, but giving no reason why.
Lord Lorriston handed it to his wife. They were at breakfast, and
Lady Hermione, usually silent and grave, was with them.
 “Sir Ronald declines, you see. What can be the matter with him? I
have known him ever since he was a child, and he chooses to treat
me with distant, scant courtesy. I cannot understand it.”
Suddenly an idea seemed to occur to him.
“Hermione,” he said, “have you given Sir Ronald any cause for
his strange conduct?”
She blushed crimson, and turned her face, lest he should read
something she did not wish him to see.
“I do not know that I have given him any cause of offense,” she
replied.
Lord Lorriston looked earnestly at his daughter, then said no
more.
“I am very sorry,” said Lady Hermione. “There is no one I like
better than Sir Ronald.”
Lord Lorriston did not make any further attempt at continuing the
friendship of Sir Ronald.
“He evidently avoids me—wishes to cease all acquaintance—he
has his reasons for it, even though I know nothing at all about them.”
And so, in course of time, the acquaintance gradually died out.
If by accident Sir Ronald saw any of the Leeholme Park people,
he simply bowed, raised his hat, and rode on. If he found himself in
the same room, he was courteous, calm and cold, as he would have
been to any stranger. It was so gradually done that it escaped all
notice and observation.
But if, on the one hand, all intimacy with Leeholme Park died
away, Sir Ronald accepted several invitations to Mrs. Severn’s. He
remembered how kind Clarice had been to him, how her eyes had
rained down kindness and affection upon him. There was something
soothing to the Alden pride in remembering that, if one beautiful
woman had rejected him, another was kind and gentle to him—
thought more of him than all the world besides. Of that much he was
sure. It was pleasant to ride over to Mount Severn in the warm
summer sunlight to meet with a welcome from the stately, kindly
mistress, to read a warmer welcome still in the passionate, beautiful
face that seemed only to brighten in his presence.
Yet all the time, while he tried to find comfort in bright smiles and
in every pursuit to which he could possibly devote himself, he knew
that, day by day, he loved with a deeper and more passionate love.
He left Aldenmere for a time and went up to London. On this part
of his life Sir Ronald never afterward liked to reflect. He did nothing,
perhaps, unbecoming to a gentleman—he did not seek oblivion in
low society—but he lived a life of incessant gayety. He went to balls,
operas, theatres, soirées; he seldom saw home before daylight, and
he spent money as though it had been so much dross.
Surely, amid this glitter and dazzle, amid this turmoil of pleasure,
leaving him no time for thought, he would forget her. Fair faces
smiled upon him, siren voices spoke in honeyed accents. Sometimes
in the morning dawn, when the sky was full of pearly tints and faint
rose-clouds, he would go home and look at his haggard wistful face
in the glass.
“I am forgetting her,” he would say, exultingly; and then, Heaven
be merciful to him! when his tired eyes were closed in slumber, her
face, so fresh, so sweet and pure, would be there, looking at him,
and he would cry out with a voice full of anguish, that he was
haunted and could not escape her.
The Aldens never did anything by halves. If they loved, it was
with passionate love; if they hated—well, Heaven help us all from
being the victims of such hate.
There was something pitiful in the way this strong man struggled
against his fate, in the way he fought against the passion that had
half maddened him. When the unflagging round of gayety had tired
him he returned home. He was then but the shadow of the young
and handsome lord of Aldenmere.
“As well be haunted at home as elsewhere,” he said to himself; “I
cannot escape my fate.”
 Sometimes a wild impulse came over him, urging him to go to her
again, to plead his cause with her, to tell her all the passionate,
desolate anguish of the past few months, to pray to her as men pray
for their lives.
But he remembered what he had said to her, that if she sent him
away he should not return to pray his prayer again. All the pride of
his proud race came to his aid. She had accepted his loving words,
she had taken a kiss that was sacred as a betrothal from his lips,
and she had rejected him.
He would not plead to her again; let his ruin and misery lie at her
door; it should never be told that he had stooped as no Alden before
him had done.
Yet had she but smiled upon him, he would have knelt like the
humblest of slaves at her feet.
 CHAPTER XVII.
TWO YEARS AFTERWARD.

Sir Ronald went home again. He found little or no change in that

quiet neighborhood. One of the visits he paid was to Mount Severn,
where he met with a welcome that would have gladdened any man’s
heart. Clarice did not attempt to conceal her delight; her eyes
beamed, her face brightened, her hands stole tremblingly into his.
“How long you have been away!” she said. “This is the dreariest
summer I can remember.”
Yet it was only two months since he had gone up to London to try
whether gayety would cure him.
They made him so welcome it was like coming home. Mrs.
Severn pitied him because he looked ill. She placed him in the
sunniest corner of the room; she made him stay for a récherché little
dinner. Clarice talked to him and sang to him. She poured out the
treasures of her intellect like water at his feet. Another man would
have yielded almost helplessly to the charm, but his haggard face
never changed, no smile came to his stern, gray lips.
He had vowed to himself before he entered the house that
nothing could induce him to mention Lady Hermione’s name, yet he
longed to hear it from other lips. Clarice told him of the Gordons and
the Thringstons, but the name he longed to hear was not mentioned.
He perceived that Clarice purposely avoided it, and wondered why.
Was Lady Hermione ill? Had anything happened to her?
At last he could endure the suspense no longer, and he said,
“You say nothing of the Lorristons. Are they well?”
Her beautiful face flushed, and her eyes rested on him for one-
half minute with an expression he could not understand.