Knyazy
The title Knyaz (plural Knyazy), sometimes translated 'Prince', was held by the elite of various states centred in the Dovhyi Tableland and then the Lutoborsk from the 12th to 18th centuries. Although cognate to the southern Outer Joriscian title of 'Kunentsy', it does not seem to have been used to refer to holders of strany, who were described as zemljits instead. Initially restricted to senior nobility, it was gradually extended to all aristocrats whose activities formed the basis of a Knyazy class.
Confederal period
The knyazy of the Lutoborovid Confederacy were relatively homogenous associates of the ruling Lutoborovids, and many spent most of their time at the (mobile) royal court, exercising influence over collective decision-making and seeking patronage in the form of offices or gifts. The label did not cover even most of the nomadic military elite, who were clients of the nominally senior Lutoborovid host. Knyazes were appointed to lead or supervise these vassals, as well as installed in distant conquests (such as the Prince of the Khuikhs) to expand the reach of the Lutoborovid dynasty.
In the early Aborovid Confederacy this continued to be the case, but as the Aborovids' policy of liberal intermarriage led to an exponential growth in their numbers, this elite began to be divided. Junior knyazes were bought off with small land grants, becoming part of the nascent landowning class of knyazchiks. More commonly, during the Investing Movement, knyazes that retained their elite distinction were working as adventurers and warlords akin to champions, accumulating influence over sedentary and urban clients of the Aborovids on their own terms, and becoming lords over individual domains. Although this meant leaving behind prospects of high office at the Aborovid court, it also created complex new constituencies and sources of independent power for those who remained part of the senior elite. While some lineages remained semi-mobile, maintaining palaces became increasingly common, and the royal lineage in particular became essentially sedentary.
Attempts to at once create a stronger Confederal court and tend to their own domains caused major conflicts to break out along other cultural faultlines, namely the rise of Vaestism, of which the Banner of the Wide North became dominated by knyazy in the 16th century. The attendant tensions created an explosive political atmosphere ultimately touched off in the 17th century by the dispute over whether a Vesnite could be High King, resulting in a prolonged crisis (the Great War of Enlightenment, the War of the Exiles, the events of the Red Decade, the War of the Shackles) whose ultimate effect was to purge the Sirian lineages almost completely and to secure (under the Installation Edict) the remaining knyazy as a set of large landowners receiving rent (dan or Ožidomy) from tenants who actually worked the land. Further north, where state-building by knyazes belatedly spread to the Khuikh Quests, knyazy-descended elites consolidated their realms on an anti-Vesnite agenda and began a protracted conflict with the southern Vesnites in the Tardy War, but became themselves a generic landowning nobility.
Vesnite Lutoborsk
Although the Antiprophetic Rebellion of the 1680s saw a second round of elite conflict over the throne, this time in the name of the doctrinal form of Vaestism which was to prevail, the popular upswell of violence that this unleashed pushed the knyazy together and provided almost five decades of elite solidarity broken only by the belated arrival of the post-Neritsovid crisis in Lutoborsk in the 1730s. The fact that the conflict took the form of a succession struggle in which all possible contenders were knyazes conceals the extent to which the Legitimist cause in Lutoborsk was a popular phenomenon motivated (at least superficially) by shock at the Lethpol Covenant; as a group the knyazy largely rallied around the candidates invested by the Mirokrainy Plenipotentiary in the Lutoborsk and ultimately by his replacement Yarodar Rozoevsky, the younger brother of the Restorationist Spytihnev I, fearful as usual of non-elite groups' political ambitions, especially the knyazchiks.
When upstart Captains were installed as rulers of Khuikhland in the Peridot Wars rather than the knyazy, they rallied behind a succcessful reaction led by vozhd Vladibor V which reasserted their power against the knyazchiks. This was the last hurrah of the knyazy in politics, as when in 1772 many of them accompanied Vladibor in what was expected to be a straightforward intervention in the Imperial War, they were massacred at the Battle of Laukuna, and a knyazchik coup by Vladibor VI sidelined the survivors.
Although the knyaz lineages continued to play a prominent role in Lutoborian politics and their symbolic privileges were maintained under the so-called Flank State, they could largely be relied upon from this point on to support the High King. Insofar as they were to resist him, from now on it would be through court intrigues and alliance-building and not through armed rebellion. The consolidation of large estates in the new northern possessions and the cutting down to size of their own possessions meant that they were no longer economically clearly distinct from the smaller nobility.