Tituly russkikh gosudarei [The Titles of Russian Rulers] (review)

What the ruler of a territory is called, by the people he rules over or by those outside the range of his power, is a problem which sooner or later has faced every ruler, whatever the size of his dominions and the nature of his power. In this book Aleksandr Il´ich Filiushkin points out that this was a subject neglected by Soviet historians until the 1990s. He has endeavored to deal with the evolution of the titles by which the rulers of the lands which were eventually known as Russia came to be called, from the inception of the Russian polity in the early Middle Ages to the 16th century, when the nature and extent of Russia's external relations gave matters of titulature an increasing importance.

It is noteworthy that Filiushkin does not deal at all with what the subjects of Russian rulers called those rulers, nor does he refer to the study by Marshall Poe, "What Did Russians Mean When They Called Themselves Slaves of the Tsar?" where he discusses the meaning of, for instance, the word gosudar´ used by subject to ruler. But Poe does not in fact discuss the formal titles of the Russian rulers in international relations and seems to attribute changes in titulature to the deliberate intention of the rulers to intimidate and impress their subjects as part of a policy designed to increase their incipient authoritarianism at home.¹

Filiushkin is concerned with the origins and usages of a variety of titles up to the end of the 16th century in Russia. He stops short of the two great innovations at the turn of the 17th century: the change from an hereditary to an elected ruler; and the attempts, unsuccessful in the case of the Godunovs, successful in the case of the Romanovs, to establish a new dynasty, neither of which involved a new title. He is also primarily concerned with Russia and the West, though he does deal, at some stages, with the various titles in use between Muscovite Russia and the successor states of the Mongol Hordes, notably the khanate of Crimea, and between Russia and the Ottoman empire.

The titulature of a ruler in every country is composed of a number of different descriptive elements. One category defines the nature and extent of the ruler's authority over the territories which he rules, by the use of such titles as kniaz´, korol´, samoderzhets, gosudar´, tsar´. A second category defines the acceptance by other powers of the various titles enjoyed or claimed by a given ruler: for example, the fact that the king of England was legally regarded as and therefore called "king of France" from the death of Henry V of England in 1422 to the Congress of Vienna in 1815, while the king of France was called the Most Christian King; or the fact that the Holy Roman Emperor was given absolute precedence by all the European Christian powers, until Catherine II of Russia challenged this in 1781. Finally, there are conventions of polite speech, often going back to the Roman empire, as for instance the specific importance attached to the title of prince (from princeps) in the Latin world. The word "prince" applied to a monarch or king, one who comes first,² is not only the title of a ruler but also the attribute of a person who belongs to a royal or princely family and inherits an innate quality. It will be noticed that a monarch does not announce the birth of a child but of a "prince" or "princess" and is often spoken of in the third person in the language of diplomacy, French, as ce prince, denoting the fact that the rulers of European states, particularly the monarchs, were regarded as members of one big Christian family (whether Catholic or Protestant). Hence they addressed one another as brother and sister. For instance, Frederick II of Prussia always wrote to Catherine II as...