Who held arms in the Russian city: the estate, the veche, and the boyar cavalry
How a Russian city in the 12th–14th centuries was transformed into a military force: a boyar estate, a veche, a clientele, and a feeding station in one mobilization chain.
In the previous article of the series, From Squad to Cavalry: How the Horseman Remade Russian Society, we've traced how the Russian druzhina, which relied on a foot core in the 10th–11th centuries, gradually transitioned to horseback, transformed into heavy cavalry, and formed a service class separate from the mass of free men. Now we take the next step: from the description of the druzhina and cavalry to the social stories troops, where the main elements are the city regiments, boyar corporations and the princely court.
On the night of June 28-29, 1174, according to the chronicle, Grand Prince Andrei Yuryevich was murdered in Bogolyubovo. The conspiracy was organized by the boyar family of the Kuchkovichi, relatives of the prince's former wife, along with some of the court's elite: the steward Anbal, Efrem Moizich (in some editions, Moizich), and other "princely servants." According to the chronicle tradition, about two dozen people participated in the conspiracy. It wasn't the peasants or the rabble who killed him. It was the very same equestrian and court elite who were supposed to protect the prince. This is where it's worth looking at who really had power in the Russian city. weapon.
"Andrei Bogolyubsky (Murder)", painted by Sergei Kirillov in 2011, depicts the scene of the murder of the Vladimir prince in his residence in Bogolyubovo.
The squad dissolves, a class is born
Boyars are usually portrayed as a distinct breed, while the druzhina is a fighting brotherhood around the prince. In reality, one grew out of the other. By the turn of the 10th and 11th centuries, the druzhina increasingly became horse-based, transforming into the professional core of the army, although its weaponry remained mixed. In peacetime, the druzhina served as an organ of government; in wartime, they became the core of the army.
I. Ya. Froyanov defines the squad as a special union of people, "constantly attached to the prince, living with him, and caring for him" (that is, those who care about him, who are devoted to him). A. E. Presnyakov formulated it even more sharply: the squad "stands out from the general structure of the people's community into a special, self-sufficient whole"From this whole emerge the boyars, ognishchane, gridi, and otroki. The top of the squad, the senior squad, receives land, a court, and governance, and becomes the boyars, the hereditary and service nobility.
By the end of the 12th century, the term "druzhina" increasingly gave way to the terms "princely court" or simply "court." This was not immediately or universally displaced: the old and new designations coexisted for some time. The druzhina was divided into two: the princely court, the closest service people, and the boyars, the broader nobility. At the same time, a lower class, the dvoryanie, literally "people from the princely court," emerged. V.S. Dubina, examining the debate about the "special path" of the Russian nobility, recalls: the Russian nobility initially signified not the hereditary aristocracy, but court servants who were removed from the court and placed on princely lands. A boyar was the heir to the druzhina elite and a major landowner. A dvoryanin was a court servant. Together, they formed a new class upon which the prince's power rested.
A regiment is a cavalry, not a crowd
The popular depiction of the city regiment is that of a people's foot militia, a mob of axe-wielding townspeople. A number of studies paint a different picture, though the issue remains controversial.
In these works, the "regiment"—the militia of the city and its subordinate suburbs—is presented primarily as a heavily mounted unit, a close analogue of the prince's court. Its core consisted of city boyars and their detachments. They exercised both military service and political influence through boyar service corporations, acting as collective feudal lords. Footmen are either barely mentioned in these texts, or only in special circumstances: during the defense of fortresses and siege work. The extent of infantry's role in field combat is a matter of debate in historiography; however, the fact that the striking force was provided by horsemen is less in doubt.
This partly echoes the urban militias of 13th-century Italy and Germany, where the core was also composed of cavalry from noble citizens, with the foot soldiers serving in support roles. The analogy is imperfect and requires some qualifications, but the general principle is recognizable.
The city's merchant and artisan militias were led by tysyatskie (commanders). In Novgorod, these were often representatives of the boyar class, although the composition and functions of this position varied over time. Posad merchants were included in the militia, but major merchants-guests (wholesale merchants engaged in long-distance trade) went to war only in extreme circumstances. Rural auxiliary troops were recruited from a conventional tax unit, the "sokha," and were called pososhny (pososhny). According to some sources, the Novgorod army was divided into Novgorodians proper and foreigners, called "shestniki" (newcomers, servicemen from outside), although the exact meaning and origin of this term are disputed. The militia was not permanent: city regiments were assembled when a single princely retinue was insufficient for war or defense.
Hence the conclusion, albeit a cautious one. The right to be a mounted warrior gravitated toward the boyars and their corporations. The masses of townspeople and villagers more often provided auxiliary forces. The fighting core of the regiment was the cavalry, and boyar cavalry at that.
The City as a War Machine: Estate, Veche, Clientele
Let's start not with theory, but with a discovery. In the Novgorod region, excavations regularly yield birch bark debt notes: name, amount, due date, threat to come and collect. Each such document is a thread connecting two people: the one who lent and the one who owes. Now imagine hundreds of such threads converging on a single boyar court. What emerges is not an abstract "urban community," but a very tangible network of dependencies—and through this network, an army was assembled.
Birch bark manuscript No. 419, found in Veliky Novgorod
The mechanism was reminiscent of Roman clientelism: boyars controlled trade, crafts, and credit, while the "lyudin" (people) indebted to them became a support base at veche (assemblies) and in war. Birch bark letters and seals show that entire city blocks, composed of several large estates, belonged to a single boyar family, to which dozens of smaller estates gravitated. Novgorod was divided into "kontsy" (ends) and streets, but property and power were concentrated in a few families. Clans like the Miroshkinichs, whose representatives held the posadnichestvo (mayor's office) at the turn of the 12th and 13th centuries, or the Ontsiforovichs, represented a typical urban corporation: a boyar house at the head, surrounded by the boyar's "lyudiny" (people), from small traders to mounted servants.
The charters themselves show what it looked like from the inside. V. L. Yanin wrote that their discovery "made it possible to firmly connect archaeological research of Novgorod layers with specific everyday and economic situations"Most of the documents are economic: lists of debtors, promissory notes, and orders. Excavations in recent years have steadily expanded this body of work, and the nature of the finds remains the same. A typical promissory note is structured as follows:
- address, name of sender and addressee;
- debt fixation: money, fur, grain;
- conditions of when, to whom and through whom to return;
- sometimes a reminder of the consequences.
It sounds something like this: "From Oncifor to Ivan: you owe me three kunas of silver and a measure of rye. Send the debt to Osip before St. Peter's Day, and if you don't send it, I'll come and collect it myself." Such notes are based on a network of credit and client connections within the quarters. This suggests a guess: a debtor, dependent on a creditor, is a potential member of his detachment. I emphasize: this is just a guess, not an established fact; we have no direct evidence that debt transformed a man into a warrior boyar. But it fits well with the rest of the picture, where a quarter could become something like a military precinct, and a boyar would lead his men out during mobilization.
This power base had a tangible material basis. Some small settlements, judging by excavations, may have served as fortified country estate centers for boyars, where the economy was controlled by a single owner. Rurik's settlement, a trade, craft, and military-administrative center, has yielded numerous finds of Scandinavian origin. The abundance of locks and keys found in Novgorod excavations suggests a well-developed system of property protection. In the 13th and 14th centuries, individual boyar estates in the city and suburbs acquired the characteristics of fortified "mini-castles," where wealth, weapons, and supplies were stored and where people could gather before a campaign.
Now it's clear what the veche actually was. In Novgorod and Pskov, governance was exercised through veche bodies: the citywide veche and the veche of the ends. But according to a common historiographic interpretation, the real leverage lay with the boyar corporations, which controlled swathes of territory and trade routes. In this model, the veche becomes an arena for struggle and compromise between several clans, rather than an assembly of an abstract "people." The dual nature of the city army is demonstrated by the 1068 uprising in Kyiv: the city's citizens rose up against the prince. This means that the city's military potential was not limited to the prince's retinue: the city's citizens themselves possessed a force capable of opposing the prince, and only the city corporations could organize and lead it. A regiment could be both a "prince's regiment" and a "city's regiment" simultaneously.
Mercy and feeding: what kept the army going
Two more common notions: that the army was supported from the treasury and that a serviceman was a powerless servant. Let's start with the man.
"Volga Vseslavyevich" (1895) by Russian artist Andrei Petrovich Ryabushkin
In the princely court of the 12th and 13th centuries, almsmen—servants dependent on the prince through "mercy"—played a special role. Z. A. K. Ismailova describes this connection as follows: "The relationship between the prince and his 'milostniki' can be characterized as that of patron and client. It was a personal-service relationship, distinct from that between the prince and his warriors."A warrior could leave for another prince; his position did not depend on any single act of favor. A benefactor was personally obligated to the prince, through the "favor" he had received: a gift, a grant, land, or a sword.
And here's the key detail: anyone who received a sword from the prince "as a favor" could not be converted into a serf. "Favor" functioned as a legal category that limited the prince himself. This was not a relationship between master and slave, but rather one of patronage and client, with its associated rights. The law generally singled out the upper crust of the service class. According to the Extended Edition of the "Russkaya Pravda," the vira for the murder of a prince's husband or princely steward was 80 hryvnia, twice the vira for a free man (Rusyn, Gridin, merchant, and others)—40 hryvnia. It was the prince's people who were elevated above the general level of freemen; the upper crust of the service class received a legally enshrined privileged position.
But there was no money as such. The army was not supported from the treasury: a treasury from which to pay wages simply did not exist. In the 10th century, the prince collected tribute in polyudye (a fee): he would ride through the lands with his retinue and take fur, grain, and honey in kind. By the 12th century, the system became more complex. Charters appeared, distributing fiscal rights. One of the surviving examples are the charters of the Smolensk prince Rostislav Mstislavich to the Smolensk diocese, issued in the 1130s. These documents show how revenue collection rights were divided among the prince, bishop, boyars, and monasteries.
The main mechanism became the system of "feeding." The prince granted servicemen the right to "feed" from a volost, collecting tribute and court fees there in exchange for service. Tribute was collected from cities and parishes, and troops were mustered from volosts, and both these networks relied on the same network of roads and camps, so that tribute collection and the mustering of troops followed common routes. The military corporation also became an economic one: for service in the regiment, the boyar and his men derived income from the territory, and the prince received a well-provided cavalry, which could be mustered from volosts. Feeding became so firmly entrenched that it survived until the 16th century, falling only under the labial and zemstvo reforms. By the end of the 15th century, city regiments were usually stationed alongside the prince's court and the staff army—one of the three pillars of the armed force.
What follows from this
Putting it all together, the picture is as follows. The city of the 12th–14th centuries was not a separate veche, separate boyars, or separate prince, but a single entity, where mobilization proceeded through the same connections as trade and credit. The boyar estate gathered around itself a clientele, the clientele provided men for the regiment, the regiment relied on a cavalry core and the prince's court, and the whole was fed from the volosts through tribute and gratuities. The term "druzhina" (squad) disappears from the sources, replaced by "dvor" (court); from the old druzhina milieu arose the boyars and the nobility, and "grace" (mercy) legally bound the prince and the service man, limiting the arbitrary actions of both parties.
Let's return to the Kuchkovichi. Many historians view the conspiracy of 1174 as a symptom, not a random outburst: by this time, the equestrian and court elite had become an independent political actor. I'll tell you frankly, as I think: the murder in Bogolyubovo wasn't a servants' rebellion against their master, but the first clear declaration by the class that it was capable of changing princes. Those who held arms in the city sooner or later wanted to hold power as well—and one day, it ended with a knife in Bogolyubovo.
The next step in the cycle is from the social structure to the material culture of war. In the article "A plate constructor that replaced chainmail in Rus'" We will discuss how the strengthening of the equestrian elite is reflected in their equipment: plate armor, scale armor, complex helmets, and aventails become both a technical response to the threat of knightly and steppe cavalry and a sign of class distance. The line is the same: from squad to cavalry, from regiment to armor.
Literature
- Froyanov I. Ya. Kievan Rus. Essays on Socio-Political History. L.: Leningrad State University Publishing House, 1980.
- Dvornichenko A. Yu., Froyanov I. Ya. Novgorod. L., 1988.
- Presnyakov A. E. Princely Law in Ancient Rus'. St. Petersburg, 1909.
- Yanin V. L. The significance of the discovery of birch bark letters for the study of history.
- Ismailova Z. A. K. "Almoners" of Ancient Rus // Bulletin of Pskov State University. Series "Social and Humanitarian Sciences". 2022.
- Dubina V. S. "The Special Path" of the Russian Nobility in Domestic and Foreign Historiography. 2009.
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