Repository of Sergius's holy relics and their intercessory promise for those that honored him, provider of rituals and ceremonies that affirmed kin and social identities, hub of an economic empire reaching to every corner of the Muscovite state, the Trinity-Sergius Monastery, like other great houses in medieval Europe, was the charismatic center that defined a large community of benefactors and pilgrims.3 The names in Trinity's cartularies, its sinodiki (liturgical memorial lists), and donation books, and in Muscovite land records relating to Trinity, tell us who belonged to this community, as well as about the house's role in drawing kin groups into a web of interrelationships. Presently my database has over 2900 entries with names of people associated in one way or another with Trinity. It is virtually complete to 1533, over ninety percent complete to 1546, and perhaps eighty percent complete from there to 1605.4
Trinity's records also provide revealing glimpses of gender relationships in Russian society. In the period under review Russian familial relations exhibited a patriarchal caste.5 It would be folly to look for a single cause for this. Nonetheless, as in western Europe in the high Middle Ages, patriarchy revealed itself in sources which also document the settling of elites on agricultural estates and long-term trends showing rising land values and the growth of a money economy. Certainly historians of the family in western Europe are correct in assuming that the superimposition of patrilineal customs on older forms of spousal condominium in inheritance and control of property, and their eventual dominance, were in important ways a means to concentrate and preserve the unity of landed and commercial wealth.6 The same general trend held true in Russia, although the agricultural economy in Muscovite Russia was weaker, and one detects the emergence of a money economy only around 1500.7 And, although Russians generally transmitted property by partible inheritance, their patrilineal customs and the modes of controlling property in most respects would be familiar to students of Western medieval and early-modern trends.
But in the worship of saints, as Peter Brown has observed, "the compartments segregating sexes in public broke down"; moreover, in a society ordered by bonds of kinship, as Brown, citing St Ambrose, so aptly notes, "saints were the only in-laws [women] were free to choose."8 Even if in western Europe from the eleventh century on, and in Russia in the period under review, Brown's emendation on St Ambrose might seem exaggerated, it remains that women became visible in fulfilling devotional tasks in a way that was quite unlikely, and in a few instances, unthinkable, in any other context.9 What were these tasks and instances in the Russian context? A look at evidence of female devotion to Sergius can tell us something about the degree to which and under what circumstances women exercised control over property—whether dowry, family, or purchased. Worshipping Sergius's relics also exposed to public scrutiny women's concerns and obligations within kinship traditions in a manner not otherwise evident. We see this when we ask what special motives women might have had in making memorial donations. Whom did women memorialize? And how did benefactors, male and female, memorialize women?
The data for all periods in Tables 1 and 2 (both follow the end of this paragraph), excepting the statistically insignificant Period 1, show that the degree to which women initiated charters—in particular donation acts—or were executors of wills in which memorial donations were made, remained much the same. Their role in making grants ranged from only 12.8% (Period 4) to a high of 39.1% (Period 3), and for the ten periods averaged 20%. Variances are random; they exceed or fall below the average in an equal number of periods and show no discernible trend over time. In two thirds of such records women acted alone; again there is no significant variation over time. Table 2 in fact probably understates the frequency with which widows executed testaments of their spouses. This comes through in the language of many charters initiated by women to the effect that they acted "according to the instructions" of their spouses in making a memorial donation. Women, it would seem, initiated charters within parameters circumscribed by conventions and legal traditions which changed little over time.
The texts of records bear this out. Thus, in 1432 the widow Feodora executed her late husband's testament in which his estate in Bezhetkii Verkh went to Trinity "for [prayers] for her husband Aleksandr [Desiatinnich] and for her son volodia."10 About then the nun Anna, from a family of humble origin but obvious means, granted Trinity a quarter of a saltworks at Sol'-Galich with the admonition that "my husband Vasilii Mikhailovich [and] I, the sinner Anna, and my son Boris be written in the sinodik."11 The statistical prominence of women executors to the 1450s bears witness to the plight of these widows, the only survivors in their families in a time of plague. The pattern is the same for prominent families. The nun Maria, widow of Prince Semen of Borovsk and lord of the land where Trinity was situated, executed a testament for her mother-in-law. This was the nun Evpraksiia, formerly Princess Elena; she was the daughter of Grand Prince Algirdas of Lithuania and wife of Prince Vladimir of Serpukhov, hero of the victory over the Tatars in 1380 and first cousin to Grand Prince Dimitrii Donskoi of Moscow. Evpraksiia's will provided Trinity a village in Dmitriev "for [prayers for] the soul of her [Mariia's] husband's brother Prince Andrei volodimerovich." Mariia performed this unusual task because Evpraksiia and her sons Semen and Andrei had perished in the plague year 1432.12
Women, like men, also made gifts of cash and goods to Trinity that were not attached to requests for memorials. In this, as well as her active management of family lands, Anna Skripitsina, the widow of a Pereiaslavl' landowner living near Trinity, was exceptional. As early as 1510/11 she and her son Andrei—a minor—purchased Dulepovo village from the widow of her husband's brother and her children for thirteen rubles.13 In turn Anna gave Dulepovo to Trinity in 1525/26 to secure herself eternal remembrance. Should her relatives wish to redeem the property, she wrote, they must pay Trinity twenty-five rubles.14 That same year Anna gave Trinity a second estate that had been purchased by her late husband Foma so that he, their parents, and son Andrei would be memorialized, and yet another to memorialize her married daughter Anastasiia.15 In 1533 she gave Trinity a stack of rye; in 1536 she provided the brothers with more rye; and in 1540 she sent them still more.16 Of a wholly different dimension are the numerous and munificent gifts which Princess Evfrosiniia and her son Vladimir of Staritsa lavished on Trinity without ostensible memorial intent. Evfrosiniia was the widow of Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible's uncle who had been executed or otherwise died in prison in 1537. Her son Vladimir, who was next in line to rule should Ivan's male children not reach their majority, died while en route under guard to the headquarters of Ivan's Oprichnina at Aleksandrovo about 1569. In 1553 Evfrosiniia gave Trinity 300 rubles, two silk shrouds (pokrovy) sewn with gold and silver thread and decorated with jewels, and a cross of gold and silver. In 1558/59 she donated 600 rubles for a new sarcophagus for Sergius's coffin—and a gold ring set with a blue sapphire. In the following decade she sent several additional luxurious shrouds.17 It required far less to provide for eternal prayers of remembrance, or to arrange a tonsure or burial at Trinity. Evfrosiniia's extravagent generosity was an outpouring of a lifelong reservoir of grief.
Women were also parties to twenty-nine land transactions with Trinity other than memorial donations down to 1500. Although the number of such acts in the database decreases markedly after that, it may be because I have not yet fully entered such materials for periods after 1533. Of the twenty-nine charters, Sofiia Vitovtovna, the mother of Grand Prince Vasilii II of Moscow (1425-1462), and Vasilii's wife Mariia issued nineteen, of which seventeen were grants of immunities. Because Sofiia and Mariia were otherwise patrons of Trinity, I am inclined to consider these charters as a form of donation. Mariia, whose father had been Trinity's lord until his appanage was liquidated, also signed four sets of instructions to local officials affirming Trinity's ownership or tax liabilities on specified properties. They resembled many other acts coming from the grand princely chancellory, and it was unusual for a grand princess to originate them. Mariia signed one even after she had taken religious vows. One might speculate that after her father's death she had some authority over his patrimonies.
Of the other non-memorial acts, several were purchase agreements. Between 1427/28 and 1432 for twelve rubles and a cow Trinity bought from widow Matrena Gnezdnikova and her son Ivan what must have been the family estate; and in 1454 Mariia, widow of Boiar Vasilii Kopnin, sold Trinity an unoccupied plot near the monastery. That she was able to do so might be explained by the fact that their children had predeceased her. Mariia's name appears again on a survey done in the 1480s or 1490s demarcating the boundaries of a property she had earlier donated to Trinity.18 The above-mentioned pious and energetic Anna Skripitsina's name is on another survey, dated 1525/26. It sets forth the border between her estate and the village of Dulepovo which she gave to Trinity. Two other Skripitsiny, Ilya "Buchug" Aleksandrovich, the son of Anna's late husband's brother, and Ivan Fillipovich, whose relationship to Anna I cannot fix, witnessed the act.19
The common thread running through these records is that the women were widows acting as the head of their immediate family, either because there were no heirs or because male heirs were minors. As mentioned before, one often finds the formula "according to the instruction of my husband" in their donation charters. Very likely the donations were "life estate" inheritances, and some of them say so. They provided for a widow's support while she lived and in death a memorial for her soul. There were exceptions. In a charter of 7 September 1592, without being instructed, Avdotiia Klobukova, while husband Andrei apparently was alive, gave Trinity fifty rubles "for [prayers] for her daughter Neonia."20 Perhaps the sum was a dowry that was never used. Widows in several instances made memorial gifts of their husband's estate and often donated purchased estates, so much so that it might be that they were acquired by women or their spouses so that widows could make a proper donation. In 1485, for instance, Matrena, widow of Boiar Ivan Saburov, stipulated that she and not her husband had purchased the half of a saltworks she was giving Trinity for prayers for him, herself, and their ancestors.21 Where the memorial was a dowry property, the act typically identified the woman's father as well as her husband.22
Women, however, exercised considerable control over dowries. As examples I cite a series of charters involving several of Moscow's most important families. The first is a dowry agreement concluded in 1513/14 between Aksiniia, the recent widow of Fedor Pleshcheev, and the husband of her daughter Anastasiia, Prince Ivan Obolenskii-Skurle. The agreement contains a meticulous inventory of contents: moveable property, including valuables such as an icon of the Mother of God with a bejeweled silver cover and a variety of clothing; a list of people who came with Anastasiia; and half of Bogorodskoe village together with its hamlets and half of the settlement Koriakovskoe and its Dormition church. In the agreement Aksiniia agreed to pay debts her husband had incurred on these properties so that they came to the couple free and clear.23 On 22 December 1515, Anastasiia then purchased the other half of these villages in a complicated transaction. Evidently they had been part of the dowry of Anastasiia's sister Irina when she married Prince Petr Khovanskii. But, unlike the halves that had fallen to Anastasiia, they came encumbered with half of her late father's debt. So, in addition to sister Irina and brother-in-law Petr, Anastasiia had to pay off her father's executor, Prince Ivan Strigin-Obolenskii, a relative who was also his creditor. The price was 200 rubles and a fur coat; 100 went to Strigin-Obolenskii to satisfy her father's debt, while the remaining sum and the coat constituted the Khovanskies' dowry. Anastasiia also pledged that neither she nor her children would sell, exchange, or otherwise alienate the property without her sister's and brother-in-law's consent.24
Next in the chain of documents is an affidavit dated 1516/17. In it Prince Khovanskii acknowledges that he sold the two half-villages on behalf of his wife Irina to her sister Anastasiia. Irina's consent must have been necessary for the deal in that Khovanskii says he was unable to complete the sale at the time agreed upon because she was ill.25 According to an agreement of 1541/42 over boundaries, we know that Anastasiia divided the villages once again. Half went with her daughter as a dowry when she married Ivan Sobakin; the other fulfilled the same function when her other daughter married Dmitrii Buturlin.26 In 1570/71 Buturlin's sons Roman and Leontii gave their portion to Trinity, requesting that they be tonsured and that the monastery "write them and their father Dmitrii in the [daily] sinodik and in the permanent sinodik."27 At his death Sobakin's portion went to his widow. For some reason it then passed to the state, which in 1576 granted it in service tenure to another. In 1595 Tsar Fedor traded it to Trinity for a nearby village.28
It is striking that as long as there were female descendants in the line stemming from Aksiniia, the dowry property remained intact. Anastasiia's "purchase," then, was a means of managing a common inheritance in the female line so as to underwrite the honor of her two unmarried daughters. In this it resembles the exchange written up as a purchase by which Anna Skripitsina gained an estate from her sister so that she might make a memorial donation for herself.
Another, very special, series of donations was made to Trinity by women for reasons specific to women. In 1499 Sofiia Palaeologa, a niece of the last Byzantine emperor and wife of Grand Prince Ivan III of Moscow, presented an altar cloth (pelena) to Trinity. Her artisans sewed on it a series of scenes and inscriptions, central to which is an iconographic portrayal of a cross near which Sergius, Moscow's protector, prayed to the Mother of God, its palladium. Isolde Thyrêt has demonstrated how this and surrounding images are a visual demonstration of divine support for the right of Sofiia's son Vasilii to succeed his father as grand prince. It was a claim thrust forward in open opposition to Ivan's coronation of his grandson by his first wife the year before.29 One may also take it to mean that through Sergius's intercession God had provided Sofiia with a son who was preordained to rule Russia.
In the sixteenth century this was precisely how Muscovites came to understand the image. In 1525 Vasilii's barren wife Solomoniia sent a textile to Trinity depicting Sergius praying to the Mother of God. On it she had inscribed an appeal that the Lord grant them "the fruit of the womb."30 Vasilii divorced a childless Solomoniia the next year and married Elena Glinskaia who, according to a mid-seventeenth century source, then made a pilgrimage to Trinity and donated a cloth (pokrov). Her visit was followed by the birth of Ivan the Terrible.31 The narrative compresses events in that Ivan was born five years after the divorce, remarriage and the otherwise undocumented pilgrimage; but a tradition linking them had come into being. In September, 1547, eight months after marrying Ivan and showing no sign that she was pregnant, Tsaritsa Anastasiia went on foot to pray to Sergius. Still without child in September, 1548, she again made her way alone there in a petitionary pilgrimage.32 By the 1560s bookmen would "embroider" Sofiia's donation of 1499 with a story according to which she too had made a pilgrimage to Trinity to pray for Vasilii's birth and that, while en route, Sergius appeared to her to thrust a male child on her.33 In 1585 Tsaritsa Irina, urged by husband Tsar Fedor, walked to Trinity to attend the translation of Sergei's relics and to pray for a child.34 By then it was well established that royal wives should seek in Sergius's relics divine empowerment to fullfill their function as royal mother.
Analyzing records of those memorialized by all benefactors (Table 3) and by women (Table 1, right-hand columns) reveals gender nuances in the motives of donors. For one, benefactors, male and female alike, when funding prayers for the dead at Trinity, memorialized women by name or family role—wife, parents—in well over half of the surviving charters between 1423 and 1478 and at a constant rate between twenty-nine and forty-eight percent thereafter. It was customary for men to memorialize spouses, alone or with themselves and their children, just as it was common for women to memorialize their spouses and children. After 1501, male donors memorialized their mothers alone almost as often as they memorialized both parents or fathers alone: between 1502 and 1522, three times for mothers compared to eight times for fathers or both parents; from 1522 to 1533, again three to eight; from 1533 to 1546, seventeen to eighteen; from 1547 to 1564, twenty-two to twenty-five; from 1565 to 1584, only five compared to fifty-three; but from 1585 to 1605, eight to five. There is nothing extraordinary in this if, as seems likely, such memorials came soon after the death of one or another or both parents and one posits that Russian donors conventionally memorialized cognate lines. But this seems hardly to have been the case.
When it came to memorializing parents, grandparents or ancestors—categories which, of course, include women—charters of all donors favored male lines to those of their wives by a ratio of almost four to one. This holds true despite the fact that women memorialized one or both of their parents almost twice as often as they memorialized their spouses' parents, and they memorialized their ancesters more than twice as often. If one deletes these from the total number of memorial charters, then male memorialization of male lines is even more pronounced and the differences that the gender of originator caused in lines to be memorialized are all the greater.
There is overwhelming evidence in the database that Russians, including virtually all of Moscow's elite, thought memorial donations to Trinity a potent means to establish their social identity, seek prestige for their lines as well as to save their souls. The statistical patterns I have described also suggest that both male and female donors conventionally thought it appropriate to memorialize lines descending to them through their mothers as well as through their fathers. To a lesser extent the patterns suggest that women held themselves responsible for assuring memorials for their own lines where this was not otherwise provided for.
Finally, I would argue that the degree to which women initiated charters and the thirty-two charters by which they memorialized themselves are evidence that women could act independently, albeit within a circumscribed range of accepted options. Their concerns range from the simple, poignant grief of the widow Evdokiia Bulgakova, who donated 100 rubles to Trinity in 1573 to memorialize her husband Frol, children Nikita and Elena, and eight infants who probably died in childbirth, to calculated maneuvers designed to attain a permanent place near Sergius's relics and to do so with maximum public display. Witness the testament of 1 August 1513 of the nun Evdoksiia, widow of Prince Fedor Strigin-Obolenskii.35 Being childless, Evdoksiia had numerous dowry properties to distribute, and Trinity was one of the monasteries to which she gave them for prayers "for the soul of my lord Prince Fedor Ivanovich, for my own soul, and for all our ancestors." Evdoksiia's will ends with the statement that after her donations were made and her debts paid she held "her lord and husband's brother Prince Vasilii Ivanovich Obolenskii ‘Shekhe' Strigin [the same Obolenskii mentioned above in another act as executor and creditor], and elders Rodion Kostrov and Varsonofii Gomzaikov of the Trinity Monastery" responsible for her memorial. On the back of the will, Prince Vasilii attested before Metropolitan Varlaam that, on the death of Evdoksiia, he had distributed her estate in accord with her wishes. At her request, he continues, he also gave Trinity twenty-five rubles for five feasts (kormy), a ruble for four offices for the dead (panikhidy) and two grivny (two tenths of a ruble) for candles. Following his statement Trinity's treasurer verified that he had received the memorial donation.
Evdoksiia's lavishness was in keeping with the high status and the wealth of her husband's family and that of her father Ivan Kuritsyn;36 nor was it unusual that in her widowhood Evdoksiia became a nun. But her testament is the first to record a woman's wishes regarding internment at Trinity: "And when God sends for my soul in whatever monastery I am living, my executor shall direct that my remains be transported to the lifegiving Trinity [Monastery for burial]." A decade later Anna Skripitsina's memorial provided that "during my life may the abbot and brothers remember me in the liturgies in their holy prayers and, when God sends for my soul, may the abbot and brothers order that I be buried at the lifegiving Trinity-Sergius Monastery and be inscribed in the sinodik for this donation."37 Like Evdoksiia's, Anna's family had a history of ties to Trinity. In her lifetime her relative by marriage, the monk Ioasaf, was its abbot (1529-1539) and then metropolitan of Russia. In succeeding periods I count at least thirteen other instances where women requested burial at Trinity, or their spouses did it for them. One example will suffice: In 1558/59 Vasilii Durov gave Trinity the dowry of his wife Afoniia, one-third of a village near Dmitrov and a dress. For it he asked that her tonsure be arranged, that a cell for her be purchased in a house of her choice, and that she be buried at Trinity.38 There are also records in which men or women request tonsure and/or burial at Trinity for other female relatives.
Trinity's burial records are unreliable, so it is difficult to verify whether all these requests were honored. Certainly many were.39 And we know almost nothing about Russian convents of this period. What we have are records that specify the house in which a tonsured widow will reside. A memorial of 1571/72 asks that its donor, Anna Voronova, be tonsured at the [convent] "Pod Sosnoi," literally "under the pine," then buried, presumably, at Trinity. A donation charter of 1574/75 wherein the widow Mariia Zamytskova asks Trinity's archimandrite to arrange her tonsure and residence there, calls it the Convent of the Dormition of the Mother of God and locates it in the village of Podsosen'e. A namesake and descendant of Anna Skripitsina made a memorial donation in 1580/81 in which she requested a cell in the same nunnery until her death whereupon she was to be buried "at the great monastery." Podsosen'e was eight kilometers from the "great monastery." Trinity had acquired the village where it was located before the 1460s, but no document records when a convent was founded there. V. V. Zverinskii's list of Russian houses says there existed a convent there which Trinity had taken over by 1561, no doubt to provide a suitable residence for female venerators; M. S. Cherkasova's recent study of Trinity's property says that after Boiar Grigorii Ivanovich Drovnin-Zabolotskii died in 1570/71, his widow Matrena took vows as Merem'iana and became abbess of that house.40 From 1544 the Khotkov-Pokrovskii convent was another associated nunnary. By legend Sergei's parents were its founders and their relics were said to be there.41 With their donations women found a quasi-public sphere of their own near Sergius. This is an answer to one of the questions I posed at the outset; but what, to paraphrase Brown, was a woman's freedom to choose?
In Trinity's charters women figure prominently as initiators of memorial grants of property to Trinity; in fact, they made about twenty percent of all grants in the period under review. They make them in order to ensure memorial prayers for their immediate family, for parents and for ancestors. In this they almost always acted within conventions outside their control, frequently as companions of their spouse. Most women benefactors were widows. They did what they did because custom dictated that they act for themselves and minor children to provide suitable memorials for a dead spouse, or because they were the only member of their immediate family alive and able to meet its obligations. It is worth repeating that widows frequently said that they made memorial donations at the express will of dying husbands and, especially in early periods, were executors or co-executors of their late husbands's testaments. The lethal effect of plague on Muscovite elites probably accounts for the prominence of women executors in the first half of the fifteenth century; yet they continued to carry out memorial portions of their late husbands' testaments. In this Muscovite Russian women were not so different from the women of towns in Tuscany and Umbria described by Samuel Cohn who were redactors of between thirty and forty-eight percent of surviving wills.42 In the matter of dowries, my information is not complete enough to make such comparisons, and the topic deserves more than the anecdotal attention I have given it. Still, beyond the protection that women's dowries enjoyed in Muscovy, the preservation of a dowry in the female line across several generations noted in Anastasiia Obolenskaia's managment of the dowry her mother arranged with her spouse, and the degree of control Anastasiia subsequently exercised over the property, was unusual even in an all-European perspective.
Widowhood also provided Russian women a freedom to express personal feelings, if they did so within the conventions of religious giving. One can only interpret Anna Skripitsyn's frequent gifts, great and small and often without mention of a memorial, as sincere expressions of religious devotion. From the numerous cases where widows made lavish gifts to Trinity, with or without memorial requests attached to them, we may infer too that, in addition to whatever spiritual value they might have sought, women were as determined as men to call attention to their social standing and that of their family. In the face of the murderous trials that Moscow's rulers inflicted on her spouse and son, Princess Evfrosiniia of Staritsa, to show pride of place for hers, reacted in the only way a woman might to exhalt her family: she memorialized it at Trinity (and not only there) with lavish gifts. Finally, the clear preference of Russian women for memorializing their parents and ancestors is compelling evidence that they understood pride of place in terms of their own lineage as much as in that of their spouses. Knowing too that males frequently singled out their mothers in their memorials, cannot one after all argue that Russians in general understood honor to descend through matrilineal as well as patrilineal lines? Finally, Tsaritsa Sofiia's resort to embroidery, traditionally a woman's metier, and donation, an accepted woman's sphere of public action, for an impassioned political statement of her son's claim to the throne, was an assertion of family place quite out of the ordinary. The bookmen who transformed Sofiia's wiles into invented tradition had their own, less personal, concerns. But they made it possible for royal women with analagous asiprations to emulate what they thought Sofiia had done, thereby to make the extraordinary ordinary.