Succession to the Throne in Early Modern Russia: The Transfer of Power 1450–1725
Mar 2021 · Cambridge University Press
Ebook
415
Pages
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About this ebook
This revisionist history of succession to the throne in early modern Russia, from the Moscow princes of the fifteenth century to Peter the Great, argues that legal primogeniture never existed: the monarch designated an heir that was usually the eldest son only by custom, not by law. Overturning generations of scholarship, Paul Bushkovitch persuasively demonstrates the many paths to succession to the throne, where designation of the heir and occasional elections were part of the relations of the monarch with the ruling elite, and to some extent the larger population. Exploring how the forms of designation evolved over the centuries as Russian culture changed, and in the later seventeenth century made use of Western practices, this study shows how, when Peter the Great finally formalized the custom in 1722 by enshrining the power of the tsar to designate in law, this was not a radical innovation but was in fact consistent with the experience of the previous centuries.
About the author
Paul Bushkovitch is Reuben Post Halleck Professor of History at Yale University where he has taught since 1975. He is the author of Religion and Society in Russia: the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1992), Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power (2001) and A Concise History of Russia (2011). He is a Member of the American Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, and a member of the editorial boards of Cahiers du monde russe and Quaestio Rossica.
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