35 at will. Service in the Muscovite army or civil administration brought with it a different type of landholding, the so-called pomest'e, or service estate, possession of which was conditional upon continued service, after which, at least in principle, such estates were to revert to the crown’s pool of service estates. When strictly enforced, this rule was especially hard on the lower rank of the service nobility, the so-called middle service class {sliizhilye dvoriarte, deti boiarskie), whose members often had no income other than that provided by the labor of the peasants on their service estates.** The meetings of the Duma, which were often held in the presence of the tsar, were opened by a d’iak, who presented the matters that were up for deliberation. Since no minutes were kept, it is impossible to reconstruct the manner in which the meetings were conducted. When a decision having the force of law was reached, the act recording it opened with the words “the tsar has decreed and the boiare have consented.” ^ The central executive administration consisted of a motley network of chancelleries, or so-called prikazy. There was no systematic division of jurisdictions between these organs; instead, administrative activities were distributed according to a markedly functional principle. When a new need arose a prikaz was created to meet it, and when it had been met the prikaz in question was disbanded. Thus, the number of administrative units was flexible and constantly changing. It has been calculated that eighty different prikazy existed at one time or another during the seventeenth century, of which approximately forty were permanent, while many lasted only a few years. What is more, it was often difficult to draw any clear boundaries between the areas of jurisdiction of the various chancelleries.** For some prikazy, including the Razriadnyi and Pomestnyi prikazy, the entire realm served as their area of jurisdiction. The Razriadnyi prikaz maintained the register of the service nobility and determined how many individuals were to be selected for civil and military service and where they were to be sent. The Pomestnyi prikaz, on the other hand, administered the realm’s pool of service lands and carried out the decisions reached by the Razriadnyi prikaz concerning how much compensation in the form of land {pomestnoe zhalovan'e) each member of the service nobility was “ Richard Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago, 1971), 5S. ’’ “Tsar’ ukazal i boiare prigovorili.” E. N. Kusheva &; N. V. Ustiugov, “Moskva— politicheskii i administrativnyi tsentr,” in S. V. Bakhrushin et al., cds., Istoriia Moskvy (9 V., Moscow, 1952—1959), I, 535. ** N. V. Ustiugov, “Tscntral’noc upravlenie. Prikazy,” Ocherki (1955), 366—367. For a clasification of the prikazy in different functional groups, see A. V. Chernov, “O klassifikatsii tscntral’nykh gosudarstvennykh uchrezhdenii XVI—XVII vv.,” Istoricheskii arkhiv, no. 1 (195S), 195—201.
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