Boyar
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A boyar or bolyar was a member of the highest rank of the feudal nobility in many Eastern European states, including Bulgaria, Kievan Rus', Moldavia and Wallachia, Lithuania and among Baltic Germans. Comparable to Dukes/Grand Dukes, Boyars were second only to the ruling princes, grand princes or tsars from the 10th to the 17th centuries.
Portrait of Russian boyar Pyotr Potemkin by Godfrey Kneller
Russian boyars in the 16th–17th centuries
A mounted Russian boyar from the 17th century
Wallachian vornic Șerban Grădișteanu wearing a kalpak, an indication of his boyar rank
Russian nobility
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The Russian nobility or dvoryanstvo arose in the Middle Ages. In 1914, it consisted of approximately 1,900,000 members, out of a total population of 138,200,000. Up until the February Revolution of 1917, the Russian noble estates staffed most of the Russian government and possessed a self-governing body, the Assembly of the Nobility.
An assembly of nobility at the time of Catherine the Great (reigned 1762 – 1796)
Maria Gendrikova's comital charter of 1742
Portrait of Princess Leonilla Bariatinskaya, by Franz Xaver Winterhalter.
Peter the Great (1672–1725) reformed the Russian nobility.