Chapter 5 Slavery, Ransom and Loyalty in Muscovy
Year: 2022

Legitimacy has been an important concept in recent studies on Muscovy, however it tends to prefer a top-down rather than a bottom-up perspective. Loyalty as a research perspective privileges the opposite. It presupposes legitimacy of the ruler and recalls the multitude of reasons among different groups and people to accept a given ruler as legitimate, so that their orders should normally be followed. While there may be grounds not to follow those orders, it is important to understand why people