Contract Chatters of Russian Grand and Appanage Princes of the 14th–15th Centuries as a Source of Knowledge for the History of Russian Criminal Law Development

The paper examines the value of the contract charters of the Russian Grand and Appanage Princes of the 14th–15th centuries for the national historical and legal science. During the period of feudal fragmentation, the charters formed one of the most important sources of criminal law in medieval Russia. It was the charters that enshrined the fundamental criminal law terms and elucidated the main elements of crimes, namely: «svada», «rubezh», «vyvod», etc., which have not yet been studied and described properly. The problem of their poor academic coverage gives rise to misconceptions in modern science of the history of the Russian state and law that a criminal act, up to the development of the Judicial Code in 1497, was designated in Russian legislation only by the term «obida [offense]».

The author focuses on the patterns of development of princely law-making activity under the influence of the norms of canon law, which was a characteristic feature of medieval Russia, where there was no division of public relations into «secular» and «ecclesiastical», as it is customary to assert and consider in scholarship, since princely law, also in matters of crime and punishment fully reflected the spiritual and religious values of society and should not contradict them, and the administrative activities of the princes were everywhere subordinated to church canons.

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