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comparative investigation is needed before a final answercan be given to the disputed question as to how farfeudalism in appanage Russia can be substantiallyidentified with feudalism in Europe, itself varying greatlyin different regions and at different times.Appanage Russia had the equivalents of fiefs andvassalage, of commendation, homage, and fealty, ofimmunities and franchises; but the close tie of fief andvassalage seems to have been lacking. No feudal lawbooks or treatises are known to have existed in Russia.Above all, the personal tie of lord and man was weaklydeveloped as compared to the West, while the ' right ofdeparture' of a vassal from his lord was recognized to adegree and in forms which in the West seems to havebeen exceptional or confined to disputed or border regions.Immunities and franchises, both judicial and fiscal,both lay and ecclesiastical, in the fourteenth and earlyfifteenth centuries had increased the parcelling out ofpower and the weakness of the grand-princes, in titleand by descent the shadowy heirs of the pre-Mongolgrand-princes of Kiev, the descendants of Rurik andhis Varangians (cf. p. 24). If customary practice andusurpation had been the breeding ground of the jurisdictionand rule of the minor princes and lay landowners,immunities and franchises came to be sanctioned andgranted by charters from the grand-princes, and thekhans of the Golden Horde as regards the church (seep. 181); and in the fifteenth century more limitationswere imposed and the exclusion of the major criminaloffences from seigneurial jurisdiction became regular.Ivan the Great (b. 1440; grand-prince 1462-1505)went a long way towards breaking down the semiindependenceof the princes and other hereditary landownersand towards gathering Muscovy and northernRussia under one hand; by his reduction of Tver(Kalinin) and other principalities, in part through force,in part through negotiation, by his subjection of Novgorodand her northern colonial empire, by his military successesagainst Lithuania and the Kazan Tatars, and by hisending (1480) of any form of subjection to the GoldenHorde.95