richard hellie
Old Testament but also represented advanced knowledge in Muscovy. Their
adherents worked their way into the entourage of Ivan III, but were finally
purged at Church councils at the outset of the sixteenth century. The third
issue involved the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in the world. Since
the middle of the fourteenth century the Church, and especially monasteries,
had been accumulating lands, and by 1500 owned close to a third of all the
populated land of Muscovy. This brought the Church in a major way into ‘the
world’,whichoffendedpurists who believed that the role of the Church should
be the salvation of souls, not the accumulation of property. The camps were
divided into non-possessors/non-acquirers and possessors/acquirers. The for-
mer were also called ‘the trans-Volga [north of the Volga] elders’ and were led
by Nil Maikov Sorskii. Their major antagonist was the elder of the Voloko-
lamsk monastery, Iosif (Ivan Sanin). The trans-Volga elders were defeated at
the same councils which liquidated the Judaisers. Iosif was the victor in all
three contests: the dynastic succession, Judaiser controversy and the issue
of Church lands. Out of gratitude to Ivan III and Vasilii III, over the course
of several tortured years he reformulated teachings of the Byzantine deacon
Agapetus (fl. 527–48) into the doctrine ‘in his body the sovereign is a man,
but in his authority he is like God’.
8
This Russian version of the divine rights
of kings underpinned Russian law and the monarchy down to its fall in 1917,
and was then taken up in another format by the Soviets. For our purposes
here, the Iosifite slogan, which was widely debated at the time and known to
many people, served to legitimise Moscow’s formalisation of the triadic legal
system.
Before commencing the discussion of the Muscovite Sudebniki, a few words
must be said about two other previous Russian law codes, the Pskov Judicial
Charter (120 articles compiled between 1397 and 1467) and the Novgorod Judicial
Charter (42 articles compiled sometime shortly after Moscow’s1478 annexation
of the republic).
9
They represent the best of north-west Russian law of the
8 Ihor
ˇ
Sev
ˇ
cenko, ‘A Neglected Byzantine Source of Muscovite Political Ideology’, Harvard
Slavic Studies 2 (1954): 141–79.
9 Richard Hellie, ‘Russian Law From Oleg to Peter the Great’, the Foreword in Kaiser’s
Laws of Rus’, pp. xxiii–xxiv. Kaiser’s translations of the two codes can be found on pp. 66–
105. Other relatively recent editions can be found in PRP, 8 vols. (Moscow: Gosiurizdat,
1952–63), vyp. ii: Pamiatniki prava feodal’no-razdroblennoiRusi XII–XV vv., comp. A. A. Zimin
(1953), pp. 210–44 and 282–381 and RZ, 9 vols.(Moscow:Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1984–94),
vol. i: Zakonodatel’stvo Drevnei Rusi, ed. V. L. Ianin (1984), pp. 299–389.ThePskov Judicial
Charter (Pskovskaia sudnaia gramota) will henceforth be cited as PSG, and the Novgorod
Judicial Charter (Novgorodskaia sudnaia gramota)asNSG. The Muscovite Sudebniki can be
found in Sudebniki XV–XVI vekov, ed. B. D. Grekov (Moscow and Leningrad, AN SSSR,
1952) and in other collections such as PRP and RZ. They are cited henceforth as: 1497
Sudebnik; 1550Sudebnik, etc.
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