Great Muscovite Law Code (1649)
Context
Several factors contributed to the creation and promulgation of the Ulozhenie. Ostensibly, it was an effort to bring order to a corpus of law that, owing to the issuance of numerous edicts over the previous two centuries, had become confusing, contradictory, and ineffective. A more specific trigger was a major riot that shook Moscow in 1648. The riot was in response to an unpopular salt tax and perceived corruption and abuses among state officials. More generally, the Ulozhenie was intended as a means of enforcing authority, order, and social hierarchy in a state that had suffered numerous major upheavals in the preceding decades, including foreign invasions, civil war, peasant uprisings, “false” czars, and mass migrations, many of them connected with the difficult interregnum of 1598 to 1613 known as the Time of Troubles. This traumatic period followed the death in 1598 of Fyodor I Ivanovich, son of Ivan IV (known as Ivan the Terrible). Fyodor was the last member of...
