title: Conclusion
abstract: Recent contributions have stressed that the Muscovite Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries consciously managed difference, and emphasized it by staging its rule over distinct regions. This book shows that the elite deliberately applied transethnic, transcultural and trans-religious rules and categories of enslavement and liberation, separating the loyal from the inimical. Beyond ex-post analytical descriptions of Muscovy as empire and contemporary emphasis on the particular, this ex