After a fourteen-year boyar regency, Ivan the Terrible was crowned tsar and married to Anastasiia Romanova. In 1553 the tsar’s illness led to a succession crisis: some boyars hesitated to swear loyalty to his infant son. The birth of two more sons, Ivan and Fyodor, guaranteed an heir. As the oldest boy grew up, Tsar Ivan brought him to meetings with boyars and ambassadors, took him along for military campaigns, and had him married. The son’s untimely death left his younger brother the heir. Tsar Fyodor was incapable of effective rule and did not produce a son, leading to the election of his brother-in-law, Boris Godunov, as his heir.

Tsar Boris Godunov had a designated heir but was overthrown by the First False Dmitrii, and his son perished in the Time of Troubles. The false Dmitrii claimed to be the son of Ivan the Terrible and the true heir. After the people of Moscow had overthrown and killed Dmitrii, the boyar elite elected as tsar Vasilii Shuiskii. After further disorder, the Polish king Zygmunt III imposed his son Władysław on the Russian throne by a forced election, but the militia under Prince D. M. Pozharskii and the merchant Kuzma Minin defeated the Polish forces. In 1613 an Assembly of the Land elected Michael Romanov as tsar. Tsar Michael did not marry until his father, Filaret, Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, returned to Russia in 1619. After Michael’s marriage to Evdokiia Streshneva in 1626, he fathered many children, including his heir Aleksei. Michael followed the older procedures, requiring oaths to the whole family and demonstrating his choice of heir by giving his oldest son a role in court ceremonies. At no point did the Russians suggest that election was in any way inferior to heredity in succession to the throne.

This chapter looks at elective monarchy and also the way dynasties interacted with powers of a non-dynastic nature. The papacy is a notable example of elective monarchy but the most important case of elective kingship is the Holy Roman Empire, where the long-term dynasties of the tenth to thirteenth centuries never completely eroded the elective principle, and where the later Middle Ages saw seven different dynasties in power. Although the Church offered the chance of ecclesiastical office to members of the aristocracy throughout Europe, the ruling dynasties did not follow their practice of placing younger sons in the Church to any extent, though royal women were placed in monasteries. Republics, though rare, could be found in Venice and Iceland, and embryonic republican institutions arose in many of the larger cities, and this often led to conflict between towns and their nominal dynastic overlords, notably in the case of the Holy Roman Emperors and the Lombard Leagues of northern Italy. Relations might also be tense between dynasties and the kingdoms they ruled, where the community of the realm, perhaps organized in representative estates, might well decide it had its own interests distinct from and possibly antagonistic to its dynastic sovereigns.

Chapter 4 focuses on the institutional foundations of a republican order, including the mixed form of government (forma mixta). All Polish republican authors argued in favour of the mixed polity, although they disagreed as to which of the elements of the mixed constitution should be strengthened or how the balance between them should be achieved. A close examination of these issues demonstrates that it is possible to talk about several republican projects at the time, as well as in later epochs, but there is no doubt that in Polish sixteenth-century republican visions of politics only a mixed res publica of a monarchical character was seen as the best guarantee of its normative foundations. In the republican discourse, the institutional order of the commonwealth served the same goal as the normative categories, which was the attainment and the preservation of a free and well-ordered polity. The category of a republic in its original Ciceronian form referred to the political order of a civitas libera, a free political community governed by laws and not by men.