Even before Dmitri had established the principle, the boyars saw the advantages which this order of succession held out to them. Here, as elsewhere, the fact preceded the law. This was the reason of their restoring the direct line in the grandson of Ivan Kalita; it was they who made him grand prince at the age of twelve years, and who subjected the other princes to him. In like manner, about 1430, they maintained this order of succession in Vasili the Blind. Contemporary annalists declare that these ancient boyars of the grand principality detested the descent from brother to brother; for, in that system, each prince of the lateral branch arrived from his appanage with other boyars, whom he always preferred, and whom he could not satisfy and establish but at the expense of the old. On the other hand, the most important and transmissible places, the most valuable favours, an hereditary and more certain protection, and greater hopes, attracted a military nobility around the grand princes. In a very short time, their elevation to the level of the humbled petty princes flattered their vanity, and completed their junction with the principal authority. This circumstance explains the last words of Dmitri Donskoi to his boyars, when he recommended his son to their protection. “Under my reign,” said he, “you were not boyars, but really Russian princes.” In fact (to cite only some examples), we see that his armies were as often commanded by boyars as by princes, and that, from this epoch, it was no longer a prince of the blood, but a boyar of the grand prince, who was his lieutenant at Novgorod. Nay, more, when the succession from father to son was once established, there were, at the very beginning, two minorities (those of Dmitri, and of Vasili, his grandson), during which the boyars composed the council of regency, governed the state, and were the equals, and even the superiors, of the princes who held appanages. This will explain why, in 1392, the boyars of Boris, the last prince of Suzdal, gave up him and his appanage to Vasili Dmitrievitch of Moscow. The motive is to be found only in their interest; as the grand prince of Moscow entrusted them with the government of the appanages, and thus substituted the nobles in the place of the princes. A very remarkable circumstance, with respect to Dmitri Donskoi, is, on the one hand, the energy with which he subdued those princes, and, on the other, his circumspect treatment of his boyars. According to Karamsin, it is more especially to their pride and jealousy of the tyssiatchsky of Moscow (the boyar of the city, or of the commune, a sort of civil and military tribune, elected by the people), that we are to attribute the abolition of that office by Donskoi. During the preceding reign, another tyssiatchsky of Moscow, who claimed precedence of even the boyars of the grand prince, had been murdered by them. [Illustration: DMITRI DONSKOI]