The wives of the boyars were not less splendid. The combined influence of Mongol princes and Byzantinian monks had, as I said, lowered the condition of the Slav women. The _terem_, or women’s quarters of the house, was screened as carefully as the _gynecæum_ had been in ancient Athens or in Constantinople. The Russians had not indeed introduced that later Greek security for the behaviour of their women, the eunuch, and the frailer protection of religion did not prevent disorders; but the women were, as a rule, carefully guarded at home and abroad, while their husbands claimed the free use of slaves and courtesans. In public the wives of the boyars--or, as we may now call them, nobles--presented a curious spectacle. They painted as liberally as the Greeks had done. Thick coats of vivid red and white covered their faces, necks, and even hands; and their eyelashes, and even teeth at times, were dyed. In obedience to the ascetic teaching of the monks great masses of scarlet or gold cloth, silk, satin, and velvet, concealed, or preserved for the admiration of their husbands, the opulent lines of their figures; for a full habit of body was religiously cultivated.
Round this glittering court, with its Gargantuan banquets and its daily intoxication, spread the wooden city of Moscow, whose hundred thousand inhabitants lived, for the most part, in squalor and grossness. Beyond were the broad provinces of Russia which bore the burden of this barbaric splendour. The mass of the people had at an earlier date, we saw, become _moujiks_, or “mannikins.” Others called them “stinkers.” Now, by one of the most curious freaks of Russian development, they were known as “the Christians”; as if the quintessence of the Christian doctrine, as it was expounded by the Russian priests, was obedience to a lord and master. Their women had the hardest lot; the priests were content to urge the peasant or artisan, who, like his betters, drank heavily, not to beat his wife with a staff shod with iron or one of a dangerous weight. Drink was one of the few luxuries left, for the priests and monks gave fiery warnings against the song and dance and games that had formerly lightened the life of the people. Drinking heavily themselves, they could not, as a rule, rigorously forbid intoxication.