Previous to Peter the Great, Russia was comparatively unknown, and in the Elizabethan age of England the Czar of Muscovy was considered only as a barbarian, whose subjects were far inferior in civilization to the Tartars of the Crimea. Indeed, it was not till the eighteenth century that the Russians were admitted within the pale of European politics, or their power reckoned as an element in the calculations of statesmen. The most important, we might almost say the only lawgiver previous to Peter the Great, was Ivan III., who reigned in the early part of the sixteenth century. Among the laws of that period, which were all sanguinary, was one fixing the value of a female life, in case of death by misadventure, at half the life of a man. Slavery was the institution of the state, each child being the absolute property of its parent. The women were more enslaved than among the Asiatics, no law protecting them against their husband's violence. A wife who killed her husband was to be buried alive up to the neck, and a guard was set around her to see that no one supplied her with food or the means of ending her sufferings.[271] Females lived in the strictest seclusion, and had no weight nor authority in the household. Their duties were to spin, to sew, and to do menial work. Peter I. came to the throne, as most Russian sovereigns have done, either through intrigue or usurpation. Both before and after Peter, the will and caprice of the ruling power was paramount. He might appoint his successor, either during life or by will, and such appointment was often set aside by a more powerful competitor. In Peter's public life, in his aspirations for the general welfare, in his self-devotion, in his conceptions of all that was wanting to his country's elevation and greatness, and in his iron will and supernatural energy, he was a hero; in his private life, in his passions, his tastes and habits, he was on a level with the lowest of mankind. Our object is the delineation of national characteristics, and individual propensities or delinquencies are unimportant except so far as they illustrate national character. It has been well observed that a people's virtue or vice does not consist in the arithmetical increase or decrease of immoral actions, but in the prevailing sentiment of an age or people, which condemns or approves them. It is in this respect that the conduct of monarchs and courtiers becomes of importance in the estimate of national manners, especially in a despotism. The Czar of Russia is at once the religious and political leader of his people, and his personal conduct becomes the standard of their moral relations, offering encouragement and support to the good, or sanction and justification to the depraved.