off—that is all. If peasants, who know nothing about anything, talk about an Opritchnina, people should not listen to them.' The same orders were given to other embassies, in 1567 and 1571 ('Collections of the Imperial Society of Russian History,' vol. lxxi., pp. 461, 777).
But facts began to speak in their turn. The part of the Empire originally given up to the Opritchnina was gradually increased till it comprised a good half of the Tsar's dominions, and till the Opritchniki numbered 5,000, instead of 1,000, men. In 1565, the provinces of Vologda, Oustioug, Kargopol, Mojaïsk, and Viazma were added; in 1566, all the Stroganov properties; in 1571, part of the province of Novgorod. Each fresh extension was accompanied by a distribution of freehold lands or fiefs, taken from their original possessors. These received territorial compensation in other provinces, where they replaced, by a process of exchange, the Opritchniki who had been substituted for themselves on their old holdings—unless, indeed, they had the good luck to be received into the Opritchnina without undergoing expropriation or exile. And the districts claimed by the Opritchnina in the central provinces were just those in which the remnants of the old appanage system were largest and strongest. It laid its hand, thus, on the hereditary patrimonies of the Dukes of Rostov, Starodoub, Souzdal, and Tchernigoy. It swallowed up, too, the territories 'beyond the Oka,' the ancient inheritance of yet another group of appanaged Princes—the Odoiévski, the Vorotynski, and the Troubetskoï. Some of these, Prince Feodor Mikhaïlovitch Troubetskoï, Prince Nikita Ivanovitch Odoiévski, allowed themselves to be enrolled under the banners of the new system, and proved its zealous servants. The rest were forced to migrate. Thus, in exchange for Odoiév, Prince Michael Ivanovitch Vorotynski received Starodoub-Riapolovski, some hundred miles further west. Other landowners in that country were given lands in the districts near Moscow, round Kolomna, Dmitrov, and Zvenigorod.
One instance will suffice to show the practical consequences of this moving to and fro. Out of 272 freehold domains in the district of Tver, the proprietors of 53 gave the State no service of any sort or kind; some of these were the lieges of Prince Vladimir Andreiévitch, the Tsar's cousin, the others owed service to descendants of the old appanaged Princes, one to an Obolenski, another to a Mikoulinski, or a Mstislavski, a Galitzine, a Kourliatev, or even to some plain boïar. The Opritchnina altered all this. It brought about a general devolution of everything that was owed on the one and only master who had set himself in the
