Russia under the first Romanovs from Cambridge history of Russia, volume 1

Furthermore, support for Doroshenko was now ebbing on the right bank as well as on the left. He was perceived as having gone too far in servilising himself to the sultan, his Korsun' Articles (April 1669) having pledged his full alliance with the Porte and khanate and even his formal vassalage to the sultan. The terms of these Korsun' Articles were meant to commit Ottoman and Crimean Tatar forces to joint operations with Doroshenko's regiments without compromising the autonomy ofUkraine, but the sultan and the khan did not send quick and unequivocal assurance they accepted these terms. The right-bank colonels therefore began falling away from Doroshenko, leaving him all the more dependent upon his Ottoman and Tatar auxiliaries and all the more isolated from the Ukrainian population.

The most important development of all, however, was the escalation of Ottoman military support for Doroshenko into a full-blown Ottoman invasion of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the summer of i672.On 17 October King Michal signed a peace treaty at Buczacz ceding all of Podol'ia to the sultan and recognising the independence of right-bank Ukraine under Hetman Doroshenko.

Podol'ia thereby came under an Ottoman occupation that would last until 1699. And Doroshenko was emboldened to step up agitation on the left bank to unite all Ukraine under his leadership. Muscovite commitment to a protec­torate over a left-bank hetmanate now carried much greater risk of provoking war with the Ottoman Empire, the most imposing military power in Eastern Europe.

Yet Artamon Matveev accepted this risk and reaffirmed Moscow's com­mitment to Samoilovich's left-bank hetmanate. Ironically, Doroshenko's own intransigence had made this possible. Doroshenko was still talking to Mus­covite envoys and presenting himself as amenable to reconciliation with Moscow, but he had raised the price for this reconciliation: not only the cession of Kiev, the left bank and Zaporozhia, but also now Moscow's pledge it would assist him militarily to protect Ukraine from the Turks.[72] Thus Muscovy now ran the risk ofwar with the sultan regardless ofwhether it accepted or rejected Doroshenko's sovereignty over all Ukraine. War against the Ottomans was a frightening prospect, but Muscovy was at least better prepared for it now. The Muscovite army had had time to recover from the revenue and manpower shortfalls that had produced stalemate in the Thirteen Years War (by 1669 the total strength of the Belgorod and Sevsk army groups had expanded to over ii2,000);[73] G. G. Romodanovskii had emerged as a competent commander capable of carrying the war over to the right bank; Moscow knew it could count on the loyalty of the Zaporozhian host; great numbers of refugees were crossing the Dnieper to resettle on the left bank; and Samoilovich was as intent on conquering the right bank as Doroshenko was on subjugating the left. The Turks were at the time too preoccupied in Podol'ia to offer Doroshenko much help in holding the eastern reaches of the right bank. Furthermore, Matveev could still hope for alliance with the Commonwealth: the Sejm had refused to ratify the shameful Buczacz Treaty and a number of Polish commanders had joined Crown Hetman Sobieski in a confederatio to resume military operations against the Turks. The wretched King Michal died on 10 November 1673; that same day Sobieski dealt the main Ottoman army a crushing blow at Chocim and forced it to withdraw across the Danube.

In early 1674 Moscow therefore abandoned negotiations with Doroshenko. Romodanovskii and Samoilovich invaded the right bank, captured Cherkassk and a number of other towns, and put Doroshenko's capital of Chyhyryn under siege. An assembly (rada) at Pereiaslav proclaimed Samoilovich het­man of all Ukraine - prematurely, it turned out, for Chyhyryn was well fortified and able to withstand long siege and a large Ottoman army under Kaplan Pasha finally began marching to Doroshenko's relief in the summer. Romodanovskii and Samoilovich were forced to lift the siege and withdraw across the Dnieper. The real damage to Doroshenko's cause was done by his own ally, Kaplan Pasha, whose massacres of civilians at Lodyzhin and Uman' drove thousands of refugees eastward across the Dnieper, and by Hetman Sobieski, recently elected king of Poland, who re-entered right-bank Ukraine and captured a number of important towns as soon as Kaplan Pasha's army had withdrawn.

By December i676 Doroshenko's forces numbered no more than 2,000 and Doroshenko was compelled to surrender. But Samoilovich was unable to exploit this to establish his control over the right bank, for the Ottomans still claimed sovereignty over Ukraine, now as a principality of Lesser Sarmatia under their new puppet, Iurii Khmel'nyts'kyi, and they appeared to be ready to campaign on Iurii's behalf to seize not only Chyhyryn but Kiev and thereby eliminate any Muscovite military presence on the eastern side of the Dnieper. Sufficient provocations for an Ottoman attack had already been given - Zaporozhian cossack raids on the Crimean coast and small-scale operations by Don cossacks and Muscovite forces against the Ottoman fortresses on the lower Don. And the Poles could no longer be counted on to divert the Ottomans on the right bank: now that he was king, Sobieski found it harder to raise armies of the size he had commanded while in confederatio revolt, so in October 1676 he had signed an armistice with the Turks at Zorawno and ceded the right bank to them. The Turks seem to have led him to expect that Smolensk would be restored to the Commonwealth once Samoilovich and the Muscovites were defeated. Moscow was unable to present Sobieski with a compelling counter-offer, especially as Tsar Alexis had just died and Matveev's influence over foreign policy was fading.

In June 1677 an Ottoman army of 45,000 under Ibraim Pasha crossed the Danube and marched towards Chyhyryn, the symbolic capital of the Het- manate. Muscovy now risked being dragged into full-scale war with the Ottoman Empire. But Romodanovskii and Samoilovich were able to con­vince Moscow to reinforce the Muscovite-Ukrainian garrison at Chyhyryn and to let them lead a large relief expedition of over 50,000 men. Samoilovich was especially adamant about holding Chyhyryn, without which he could not maintain the loyalty of the Zaporozhian host much less extend his sovereignty over the towns and villages of the right bank. Moscow was probably more con­vinced by Romodanovskii's argument - that the capture of Chyhyryn would give the Turks and Tatars a staging area for attacks upon Kiev and the towns of the left bank - and by the realisation that failure to endorse Samoilovich's projects could weaken Samoilovich's support for Muscovite occupation over the left bank.

In late August Romodanovskii and Samoilovich succeeded in routing the Ottoman and Crimean forces besieging Chyhyryn. Their victory appears to have been one of the more striking Muscovite military successes to date: total Muscovite and Ukrainian casualties were reported at just 3,000 dead and 5,000 wounded, while the Turks and Tatars allegedly lost about 20,000 men.[74]The sultan subsequently expressed his displeasure by imprisoning both Ibraim Pasha and Khan Selim.

In June 1678 the Ottomans made a second bid to seize Chyhyryn. This time the invading Ottoman army numbered 70,000 (not counting Crimean Tatar auxiliaries), had a much larger artillery train and was commanded by Kara Mustafa Pasha, the grand vizier. Romodanovskii and Samoilovich again marched to the relief of Chyhyryn, with the same forces and nearly the same plan of operations as the year before. The crucial difference this time was that they halted their armies on the far side of the Tias'min River, nearly four kilometres from Chyhyryn, on 4 August, ostensibly to await reinforcements, and meanwhile made no serious effort to harass the Ottoman camp. This gave the Turks time to continue their bombardment of Chyhyryn and move their trenches up to its walls. On 11 August Romodanovskii ordered Chyhyryn evacuated and burned to prevent it from falling into enemy hands. He and Samoilovich then withdrew across the Dnieper.

Given Romodanovskii's insistence the year before on the strategic necessity of holding Chyhyryn, this had the appearance of a major defeat, and it led many Ukrainians to blame Romodanovskii for incompetence or even treason. Actually Moscow had issued Romodanovskii secret orders to do everything to avoid battle with the Turks, to seek peace talks with them and to be prepared to sacrifice Chyhyryn rather than his army so as not to leave Kiev and the left bank under-defended. Chyhyryn was of greater importance to Samoilovich than to Moscow, which placed higher priority on defending Kiev and the left bank.[75]

The Russo-Turkish war of 1676-81 is usually seen as a stalemate or even as a Russian defeat because Chyhyryn had to be destroyed and the right bank was thereby lost to the Turks and Iurii Khmel'nyts'kyi. In fact the right bank did not fall to them. The higher Ottoman priority at the time was consolidating control over Podol'ia, to hold the Moldavian and Wallachian hospodars in line and block Sobieski from invading Moldavia. A massive Muscovite force build-up on the left bank, in Sloboda Ukraine, and along the Belgorod Line provided sufficient deterrent against an Ottoman attackacross the Dnieper or a Crimean Tatar invasion from the south: in 1679 70,000 Muscovite troops and 30,000 of Samoilovich's cossacks defended Kiev and the left bank, while 50,000 Muscovite troops held the Belgorod Line; roughly equal numbers were fielded in 1680.[76] The Ottomans therefore made no effort to rebuild Chyhyryn as a base for operations against Kiev and the left bank, and most of the Ottoman and

Crimean troops supporting Khmel'nyts'kyi were soon withdrawn. By January 1681 the pasha of Azov was signalling the Sultan's interest in armistice talks.

Chyhyryn proved far less decisive in shaping the destiny of the right bank than the spring 1679 raids on right bank towns and villages undertaken by Samoilovich's son Semen and Muscovite troops out of the Kiev garrison and the regiment of Grigorii Kosagov. This operation came to be called the Great Expulsion. Several of the larger right-bank towns were burned and about 20,000 of their inhabitants were driven across the Dnieper into the left-bank hetmanate. This depopulated most of the right bank as far as the Bug River, turning it into a no man's land buffering the Dnieper frontier of the left-bank hetmanate. Iurii Khmel'nyts'kyi was left only with the western part of Bratslav palatinate as a resource base. The Turks deposed him in 1681 and tried to set Moldavian hospodar Gheorghe Duca over Podol'ia and the right bank, but this was frustrated by a cossack revolt supported by the Poles. Sulimenko, the next pro-Ottoman hetman on the right bank, was overthrown in 1685.

The 20,000 refugees pushed across the Dnieper could not all be resettled on the territories of Samoilovich's cossack regiments, where competition for ploughland was already intense, so two-thirds of them were transferred to Sloboda Ukraine, to perform cossack service from virgin steppe land along the Northern Donets and Oskol' rivers. This strengthened the Sloboda Ukraine cossack regiments serving in the Muscovite army and encouraged further Muscovite and Ukrainian colonisation of the region, to safeguard which the Military Chancellery began erecting a new defence line, the Iziuma Line, running 530 kilometres in all, linking up twenty garrison towns, enclosing an area of 30,000 square kilometres, and thereby extending the Muscovite frontier another 160 kilometres southward. With the construction of the towns of Maiatsk and Tor Muscovy now had garrisons within 150 kilometres of the Black Sea coast.²⁸

The build-up in Sloboda Ukraine and link-up of the Iziuma Line with the Belgorod Line provided much greater protection against Crimean Tatar raids. Khan Murad Girey was compelled to negotiate at Bakhchisarai a twenty-year armistice with Muscovy (1681), formally recognising Kiev and the left bank as Muscovite possessions and a 10-kilometre-wide strip ofthe right bank along the Dnieper as a neutral zone closed to territorial aggrandisement by any power. The khan subsequently induced Sultan Mehmed IV to ratify these same terms.

It could therefore be argued that Muscovy won its first great war with the Ottoman Empire. It had secured its position on the left bank, eliminated for

28 On the construction and colonisation ofthe Iziuma Line, see V P. Zagorovskii, Iziumskaia cherta (Voronezh: Voronezhskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1980).

some time the danger of a rival right-bank hetmanate, and further reduced the Crimean Tatar threat. A further indication that the war had strengthened Muscovy's military and political standing was the new foreign policy pursued by the Commonwealth after the collapse of the Gninski mission to Istanbul in 1678. The Sejm finally ratified a fifteen-year extension of the Andrusovo Armistice (on terms less advantageous to the Commonwealth than previously demanded) and King Jan Sobieski abandoned attempts to ally with the Porte and returned to his project of driving the Turks from Podol'ia and Moldavia. He therefore began negotiations to induce Tsar Fedor to join him, Emperor Leopold I and Venetian Doge Alvise Contarini in coalition to drive the Turks from Europe.

By 1684 Moscow was ready to join this Holy League. Sobieski's surprising victory over the army of Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa at the gates of Vienna (12 September 1683) undoubtedly helped to convince the Muscovite government, but there were other reasons. The most important consideration was the Com­monwealth's clear eagerness for Muscovite alliance, which showed Golitsyn the time had come to demand that the Poles renounce all claim to Kiev, the left bank, the Zaporozhian Sech' and the regions of Smolensk, Chernigov and Seversk. Golitsyn demanded the Commonwealth sign a treaty of permanent peace on these terms, and to the Sejm's dismay King Jan Sobieski's envoys signed it (26 April 1686).[77] Hetman Samoilovich was also angered by this, for the treaty had the effect of recognising Polish claims over the right bank and frustrating his campaign to unite all Ukraine under his own mace.

The Treaty of Eternal Peace can be said to mark the point at which Mus­covy achieved lasting geopolitical preponderance over the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Map 21.2 shows territory ceded by Poland-Lithuania after 1667). Sobieski had hoped to compensate the Commonwealth for these lost territories by driving the Turks out of Podol'ia and Moldavia, but neither of these objectives was accomplished in his lifetime and the lives and revenue he squandered on them ultimately provoked a backlash by the magnates, who further reduced the military power available to the crown. Nor was he able to re-establish control over the right bank; efforts by Polish magnates to recolonise the region drove the majority of right-bank cossacks into a new revolt led by Colonel Semen Palii.

Ratification of the Eternal Peace now obligated Muscovy to make good its pledge to the Holy League and wage war upon the Crimean khanate. Golitsyn

undertook two expeditions against Perekop (1687,1689) to pin the Tatars down in Crimea while the Poles invaded Moldavia, the Austrians engaged the Turks in Transylvania and the Venetians campaigned in Dalmatia. On both of these expeditions Golitsyn led an enormous army of over 110,000 Muscovite troops and 30,000-50,000 Ukrainian troops across hundreds of kilometres of empty and arid steppe; both expeditions failed to besiege Perekop and withdrew with heavy casualties, mostly from drought and lack of fodder; and Golitsyn con­tributed to his own downfall and the downfall of regent Sophia by trying to pass offboth campaigns as successes, to the disgust ofhis officers and the court. In fairness to Golitsyn, a successful expedition across the steppe to capture Perekop was probably beyond the capabilities of any other power of the age and may not even have been Golitsyn's real objective. The Crimean expedi­tions did divert the Crimean Tatars from reinforcing Ottoman operations on other fronts and did show the Holy League the tremendous powers of resource mobilisation Muscovy now possessed (if also of its ability to waste resources); they did establish two important garrisons and supply depots (Novobogorodit- skoe and Novosergeevsk) for future expeditions against the khanate and the Ottoman fortresses on the Dnieper; and they had the effect of tightening Moscow's control over the Zaporozhian host and the left bank, by planting Muscovite garrisons just across the Dnieper from the host and by creating the opportunity to scapegoat and depose Samoilovich and replace him with Ivan Mazepa.

Besides profiting politically from the discrediting of Golitsyn's Crimean expeditions, Tsar Peter and his circle initially saw no advantage to campaign­ing on behalf of the Holy League; they were convinced the Poles and Austrians were already bogged down in Moldavia and Hungary and inclining to a sep­arate peace with the Ottomans, so it would be better for Muscovy to seek its own reconciliation with the Porte and khanate lest it be left struggling on alone. For the time being, then, the new government would distance itself from Warsaw and Vienna and soften its demands upon the sultan and khan in hope of negotiating an armistice. It was not until 1694 that Peter would renew commitment to the Holy League by preparing a major expedition against Azov.

Muscovy's emergence as a great power

In Tsar Alexis's reign Muscovite foreign policy had played for very high stakes but had run high losses in the process. Tsar Alexis had entered the Ukrainian quagmire in 1654 in order to obtain Bogdan Khmel'nyts'kyi's aid in Belarus' and Lithuania; he had prolonged the war with the Commonwealth by set­ting unrealistic terms for peace, including his election to the Polish throne; and he had left the conflict with the Commonwealth unresolved in order to suddenly open an unsuccessful war upon the Swedes for control of the Baltic coast.

Muscovite foreign policy after 1676 was generally more cautious but sure­footed. The 1677 Chyhyryn campaign (which ended very fortunately) or Golitsyn's Crimean expeditions (which wasted lives but did not leave the south­ern frontier more vulnerable) cannot be compared with Tsar Alexis's gambles. Yet several major strategic objectives were achieved by 1689. Muscovy had won Polish and Ottoman recognition of the Tsar's sovereignty over left-bank Ukraine and had begun to exercise greater control over the Zaporozhian and Don cossack hosts. It no longer faced any significant threat from a right-bank hetmanate (the right bank's pro-Polish hetmans could seldom mobilise more than 5,000 men, its pro-Ottoman hetmans no more than a few hundred). The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was no longer Muscovy's mortal enemy; it had finally signed a treaty of permanent peace and abandoned its claims to the long-contested territories of Smolensk and Chernigov in return for Mus­covite entry into the Holy League. The Crimean khanate remained a threat to the towns of Sloboda Ukraine and the Belgorod Line, but no longer to the Muscovite heartland; more of the steppe had come under Muscovite mili­tary colonisation, advancing the front to just a few hundred kilometres of the khanate and encouraging Muscovite and cossack forces to go on the offensive with a series of operations on the lower Don and Dnieper. Muscovy still did not have mastery over the Livonian coast of the Baltic but had been able to enjoy a long respite from conflict with Sweden.

These successes were owed in part to blunders by Muscovy's rivals. A contributing factor was the greater experience and enlarged scope of Muscovite diplomacy. Now that Muscovy had demonstrated its military usefulness to the Ottoman Empire's enemies it became practical to send frequent missions to most of the European powers. Muscovy finally had its first permanent mission, at Warsaw, which served as a clearing house for reports from its envoys in other European capitals as well as a source of improved intelligence on foreign efforts to manipulate Polish political factions. The Little Russian Chancellery (Malorossiiskii prikaz) had also taken on great importance for managing political relations with the hetmans, colonels and towns of the left bank. Its work made it possible to reduce the ability of the later hetmans (Samoilovich, Mazepa) to pursue their own foreign policies while maintaining their loyalty for longer than had been possible before; by further servilising the hetmans it was possible in turn to force the colonels and starshina to accept Muscovite garrisons as an essentially permanent fact.

Muscovite military power, near exhaustion by the end of the Thirteen Years War, had revived very quickly and grown to impressive new proportions. The number of effectives for field army service reached 164,600 men in 1680 (55 per cent of these were in the foreign formation infantry and cavalry).[78]Thousands more performed garrison duty on the Belgorod Line and the new Iziuma Line. The two Chyhyryn operations, the great defensive deployment of 1679, and Golitsyn's Perekop expeditions demonstrated Muscovite ability to mobilise and maintain campaign armies of extraordinary size.[79] The campaigns of the i670s-i680s also show more authority for command-and-control being moved out of the Military Chancellery at Moscow and closer to the front. The Chyhyryn campaigns also show the foreign formation infantry finally fulfilling its tactical potential, especially in their 26 August i677 night descent across the Sula River and their 3 August 1678 assault on Strel'nikov Hill.[80]

During or immediately after the Russo-Turkish war there were a number of important reforms further addressing the needs of the army. In 1678 the Military Chancellery issued revised standards for assignment to the traditional and foreign formation cavalry units in the Belgorod corps, limiting eligibility for service in these units to those holding a certain minimum number ofpeas- ant households, that is to men prosperous enough to maintain themselves in cavalry service from their pomest'ia alone. This made it possible to eliminate the need to pay cash allowances to cavalrymen and reassign less prosperous servicemen from cavalry units to the infantry regiments. Over the next two years the infantry regiments were further expanded through a drive to enrol thousands of vagrants, pardoned shirkers, impoverished deti boiarskie and cos­sacks and musketeers. By i68i these measures had succeeded in increasing the relative weight of foreign formation troops in the field army and establishing a ratio of infantry to cavalry of nearly 2:1. The strel'tsy were not abolished but their units were restructured along the lines of the foreign formation infantry, reformed into companies under captains and regiments under colonels, so that they could be put to drilling in foreign formation infantry evolutions. The centuries of traditional cavalry were likewise reorganised as companies.[81]

To raise more revenue for paying the expanded foreign formation infantry a major reform of state finances was undertaken in 1677-81. A new general cadastral survey was undertaken; a number of minor direct taxes were amal­gamated into one army maintenance cash tax (streletskie den'gi, 'musketeers' money'); this cash tax, along with the army grain tax, was now assessed by household (no longer by sokha, i.e. by area and productive capacity of culti­vated land); and authority over direct taxation was further centralised in the Grand Treasury to reduce collection costs and facilitate budgeting.

Command-and-control was strengthened in two ways. The razriad principle of territorial army group command and administration was extended across the rest of European Russia by creating five new territorial army groups, for a total of nine, and assigning to them all troops in field army service, either in traditional or foreign formation units. This had the effect of simplifying muster procedures (each army group had two or more permanent designated muster points), devolving more authority for logistics to the territorial level, and reinforcing the tendency to use army groups as large corps in operations. The abolition of mestnichestvo in 1682 was in part motivated by the need to improve command-and-control; the tasks of modernising force structure (reor­ganising traditional cavalry and strel'tsy units into companies and regiments) and mounting more complex operations (by territorial corps, and by multiple corps together) made it necessary to eliminate precedence suits and discourage quarrels over precedence honour that might undermine such efforts.

These reforms constituted a foundation for Peter I's programme of military modernisation just as the expansion of diplomatic activity paved the way for Peter's efforts to make Russia a leading player in the concert of European nations.

Non-Russian subjects

MICHAEL KHODARKOYSKY

From 1598 to 1613 Muscovy experienced the most severe crises known as the Time of Troubles. Despite the ravages of civil war and foreign inter­ventions which marked the Time of Troubles, some in the Muscovite government continued to attend dutifully to their daily routines and obli­gations. The local voevodas on the frontiers proceeded to govern their forts and towns and construct new ones. The Foreign Office in Moscow contin­ued to receive and dispatch envoys to the peoples on the distant frontiers and churn out reports about them. The pace of Russian colonisation might have been slowed down but it did not stop. The ascension to the Russian throne of the Romanov dynasty in 1613 put an end to the Time of Trou­bles. Russia emerged from the Time of Troubles with a rediscovered sense of national identity and a newly found confidence in its incessant territorial expansion.

Throughout the seventeenth century the Russian government expended great resources and energy on consolidating its hold over annexed territories and moving into new ones. By the end of the century, Moscow could boast of enduring success in expanding further east, where the Russians reached the shores of the Pacific Ocean, and south and south-east, where the newly built forts and towns pushed the imperial boundaries further into the steppe. The seventeenth century also marked the beginning of Russia's expansion in the west, where Moscow's acquisition of territories in Ukraine added a new dimension to the Russian imperial foundation. No longer did Moscow expand into lands populated by non-Christians: Muslims, animists, and Buddhists. In its western borderlands, Russia had come to acquire a large population of Orthodox Christians who were non-Russian. The ever-growing number of Russia's subjects now included non-Christians in the east and non-Russians in the west.

The steppe

Russia's steppe frontier remained ambiguous and ill defined. To the extent that this frontier was defined, it represented a boundary between Russia and those who were deemed hostile to it. A peace treaty (shert') prepared in 1604 by the government officials for the ruler ofthe Greater Nogai Horde, beg Ishterek, gave a clear indication ofwhere Moscowbelieved its southern frontierto lie. Ishterek was expected to have no contacts with the Ottoman sultan, the Crimean khan, the Persian shah, the Bukharan khan, Tashkent, Urgench, the Kazakh Horde, the Kumyk shamkhal or the Circassians. In other words, Moscow roughly delineated its southern boundaries stretching from the Crimea to the North Caucasus to Central Asia.[82]

By the early seventeenth century, Russia's policies in the steppe, which were meant to encourage the Nogais' dependence on Russia and to weaken them by promoting the factional struggle among their leaders, proved to have the desired effect. Once a powerful confederation of Turkic nomads, the Nogais' significance had been greatly reduced by the debilitating internal struggle. In the early seventeenth century, the Nogais of the Greater Horde were no longer capable of mounting any serious challenge to the Russian state in the south and instead grew desperately dependent on Russia's economic and military aid.

But the stability and relative safety on Russia's southern frontier was always short-lived, subject to the rapidly changing situation in the steppe. Continuing the centuries-old pattern, the steppes of Inner Asia disgorged another power­ful nomadic confederation which came to replace the Nogais in the Caspian steppe. The intruders shared with their new neighbours neither the overlap­ping structures of related Turkic clans nor their Islamic religion. The newly arrived steppe nomads were a Mongol people and avowed Tibetan Buddhists guided by the Dalai Lama. Their neighbours called them Kalmyks.

Even early exploratory forays by the Kalmyks used to send the Nogais fleeing in panic from their formidable foe. Moscow's attempts to arrest the movement of the Kalmyks further west and to control the situation in the steppe proved to be futile. In the first decade of the seventeenth century, most of the Kalmyks roamed along the Irtysh, Ishim and Tobol' rivers of south­western Siberia. In the second decade they had crossed the Iaik River, and by the early 1630s they reached the vicinity of Astrakhan', routed the Nogais and the Russian musketeers dispatched to help them, and occupied the pastures along the Volga. Russia's inability to protect the Nogais from the Kalmyk raids led some of the Nogais to join the Kalmyks, while the majority chose to flee further west towards Azov, seeking the protection of the Ottoman Porte.

The arrival of the Kalmyks in the 1630s had a dramatic impact on the entire southern region. The decades of Moscow's careful strategies of weak­ening, dividing and impoverishing the Nogais and its significant expenditures to implement such policies, seemed to have been wasted. The Nogais, whom Moscow considered long pacified, had now joined the Crimean Tatars and the Lesser Nogai Horde near Azov. Together they launched devastating raids into Russia's southern borderlands. Only in the three years of 1632, 1633 and 1637 the Nogais and Crimeans captured and brought to the Crimea more than 10,000 Russian prisoners. The newly colonised southern region with its towns and peasants urgently needed protection.

The danger of the Nogais and Crimeans breaking through the southern defences and approaching Moscow was no exaggeration. The intentions of the Kalmyks, who came to replace the Nogais in the Caspian steppe, remained unknown. It is unlikely that Russia's previous historical experiences in the steppe left Moscow sanguine about the prospect of peace with the Kalmyks. Faced with the new and dangerous situation along the southern frontier, Moscow hastened to conclude a peace treaty with Poland in 1634 and to turn its attention to the south. Indeed, this time Moscow decided to embark on a new strategy and to invest unprecedented resources in order to secure the lands already settled and populated by the Russians and to end the threat of nomadic invasion once and for all.

In a change from previous policies Moscow decided to play the 'cossack card'. The cossacks were the ultimate 'melting pot' in early modern Russia. Among several cossack hosts which Moscow claimed to control, the Don cossacks were the most powerful. In the seventeenth century, they included a motley crowd of Russians, new converts, Zaporozhian cossacks, Poles, Lithua­nians, peasants and various fugitives from justice.[83] Mirroring the lifestyle and the military organisation of the steppe societies, the cossacks were a perfect antidote to the nomadic peoples of the steppe. And like many non-Russian peoples, the cossacks proved to be some of Russia's most mutinous subjects.

In a shift from the previous policy of restraining the Don cossacks to avoid provoking the Ottoman Porte, Moscow was now prepared to further arm the cossacks and encourage their raids. Such raids, however, were to be carefully calibrated, and the cossacks were instructed to limit their attacks to the Nogais and Crimeans alone, and not to raid Ottoman possessions, Azov and Kaffa in particular.³

To be sure, controlling the cossacks was no easy matter, as the interests of the government and the cossacks did not always coincide. After all, it was not the impoverished Nogais that the cossacks were after. Their eyes were set on the wealthy Ottoman and Crimean towns and villages along the Black Sea coast. The only obstacles between the cossacks and the promise of rich booty and numerous captives were the fortifications of Azov, the Ottoman fortress in the estuary of the Don, which prevented the cossacks from sailing down the river to the sea.

When in 1636, enticed by the Crimean khan and under continuous pressure from the Kalmyks and cossacks, the Nogais abandoned the area around Azov and crossed the Don on the way to the Crimea, the Don cossacks quickly moved to lay siege to Azov. In June 1637, Azov was in the hands of the tri­umphant cossacks. In the next five years, taken aback by this unexpected and undesired development, Moscow was presented with an unpalatable dilemma: to support the cossacks and thus enter war with the Ottoman Empire, or to avoid war by having the cossacks abandon the fortress. After much hesitation and deliberation, the government chose avoidance over confrontation.

But the cossacks' degree of independence from Moscow and a history of their unruliness and participation in popular revolts made the government suspicious of their true intentions, and, as the Azov affair proved, not unrea­sonably so. Use of the cossacks along the frontier had to be supplemented by a more reliable strategy. In 1635, the government undertook a new and bold initiative; it began the construction of the fortification lines in the south. The duration of the construction, the expenditures on these extensive fortification networks, and the utilisation of human and natural resources for this purpose made the project the single most ambitious and important strategic under­taking in seventeenth-century Russia. It was to become Moscow's own Great Wall to fend off the 'infidels' from the southern steppe.

Constructing a fortification line in the southern region was not an entirely novel idea. Such fortification lines were already known in tenth-century Kievan Rus', and more recently, in the middle of the sixteenth century, they had been constructed just south of the Oka River. By the 1630s numerous forts and towns emerged far south of Moscow Still, these proliferating vanguard military out­posts had to be supplied from the central regions of Russia because agriculture

3 A. A. Novosel'skii, Bor'ba Moskovskogo gosudarstva s tatarami v pervoi polovine XVII veka (Moscow and Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1948), pp. 237-8, 296.

remained a dangerous undertaking on the frontier. It was paramount to pro­vide further security, if a peasant colonisation of the region were to take place. The fortification lines were to serve exactly that purpose, becoming, in time, both the primary means of Moscow's defence against predations and an effec­tive tool of Russia's territorial expansion.

In the decade from 1635 to 1646, Moscow moved its frontier defences much further south, connecting, in one uninterrupted defence line, the natural obsta­cles, such as rivers and swamps, with man-made fortifications: several rows of moats, felled trees and palisades studded with advance warning towers and forts armed with cannon and other firearms. The first such fortification line (zaseka or zasechnaia cherta), stretching for more than 800 kilometres from the Akhtyrka River in the west to Tambov in the east, became known as the Belgo­rod Line. It tookthe government another decade to extend the fortification line further east, from Tambov to Simbirsk on the Volga. By the mid-seventeenth century, both the colonists arriving in the southern regions of Russia and the residents of Kazan' province found themselves in relative safety behind the Belgorod and Simbirsk fortification lines.[84]

The Kalmyks were seen as the dangerous outsiders whose raids disrupted the status quo in the region and thus, in addition to Russia, threatened the interests of other regional powers from the Crimea to the North Caucasus, to the Central Asian khanates. At first invincible, the Kalmyks suffered a major debacle in the steppe and mountains of the North Caucasus in 1644. A large Kalmyk contingent was decimated by the combined forces of the Nogais and Kabardinians with the help of Crimean Tatar and Russian detachments which provided the crucial fire power. Driven by mutual interests, the Russians and Crimeans succeeded in pushing the Kalmyks back east of the Iaik River.

A few years later the Kalmyks were back in force. Led by their new chief tay- ishi, Daichin, the Kalmyks ravaged the Kazan' and Ufa provinces, routed the Crimean troops, and demanded the return of the remains of Daichin's father and brothers killed in 1644. When a Russian envoy approached Daichin with demands to confirm the Kalmyks' allegiance and submit hostages, Daichin called him a liar for making such grotesque claims. A realisation that the Kalmyks' arrival in the Caspian steppe was irreversible prompted the Russian authorities to drop some of their customary demands and to adopt a more conciliatory tone. To enlist the Kalmyks as a counterforce to the Crimeans, Moscow returned the remains of Daichin's father and brothers, offered Kalmyks payments and rewards for their military campaigns, and trade privileges in the frontier towns. In i654, after Moscow annexed parts of Ukraine, the rival alliances took shape: Poland and Crimea were facing Russia and its new ally, the Kalmyks.

Similar to Moscow's relationship with other nomadic peoples, Russia's alliance with the Kalmyks remained precarious. While the written treaties (shert') prepared in Moscow and written in Russian were inevitably phrased as the Kalmyks' oath of allegiance, they were, in fact, peace treaties with mutual obligations by both parties to maintain peace, trade and military co-operation. Insisting that the Kalmyks were the subjects ofthe tsar, Moscow objected to the Kalmyks' independent relations with the Crimea, Ottomans or other powers potentially hostile to Moscow, suspecting, and correctly so, that the Kalmyks' allegiances could be easily bought and sold. The Kalmyks, however, believed that Moscow often failed to live up to its commitments when the Russian officials did not deliver payments, demanded custom duties and bribes, did not protect Kalmyks from the raids of Russia's purported subjects, cossacks and Bashkirs, and above all, converted to Christianity fugitive or captured Kalmyks.

Throughout the seventeenth century, the Kalmyks' relationship with Russia continued to alternate between that of a military alliance against the Crimea and openly hostile acts against Russia. By the end of the century, a more pragmatic attitude prevailed in Moscow. In July 1697, a Kalmyk khan, Ayuki, and the high-ranking Russian envoy, the boyar Prince B. A. Golitsyn, signed a treaty which was strikingly different from the previous ones. This time it was the Russian side which undertook commitments to assist the Kalmyks, to put a stop to the Bashkir and cossack raids, not to dictate the boundaries of Kalmyks' pastures, and neither give refuge, nor convert the runaway Kalmyks.[85]

With the Russian conquest of the Ottoman fort of Azov in 1696, the Kalmyks realised that, for the time being, their fortunes lay with Russia.

At the same time, Moscow also concluded that it would gain more by mollifying the Kalmyks than confronting them. In addressing the Kalmyk grievances and putting down in writing its own obligations, the govern­ment was ready to admit that assuring the co-operation of the Kalmyks and achieving a modicum of peace along the frontier required more than emphasising the Kalmyks' submissive status and their obligations. Rather, it required a clearly articulated recognition that such a relationship was a two- way street with mutual obligations and commitments. Such an understanding of their relationship would last for the next two decades, when the newly confident Russian authorities would once again impose a new set of restric­tions on the Kalmyks and insist on their explicit submission to the Russian emperor.

Siberia

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, Moscow was well established in western Siberia and reached the banks of the Enisei River. Russia's further expansion in Siberia skirted a careful line between the northern boundaries of the steppe and the southern boundaries of the Siberian forest, thus avoiding the inhospitable terrain of the permafrost wilderness in the north and the open arid steppe in the south. Russia had to wait for another hundred years before undertaking an incremental expansion into the steppe lands (presently northern Kazakhstan), dominated by two powerful nomadic confederations, the Kazakhs and the Oirats.

In the meantime, the Russians moved south-east reaching the Ili River where in 1630 they founded Fort Ilimsk. From here, Russia's first colonists took two different paths. One route of colonisation took the Russians down the Lena River into central Siberia, the other moved south down the Ilim river towards Lake Baikal and the Amur River. In the first instance, the Russians met little resistance and advanced speedily to the shores of the Pacific Ocean. In two years, the Russian colonists sailed down the Lena River across the lands populated by the Evenk (Tungus) and Sakha (Iakut) to found Fort Iakutsk in 1632. In 1647, the Russians reached the Pacific coast and founded Fort Okhotsk in 1649. In the second half of the century, Russian forts and settlements emerged in the lands populated by the Even (Lamut), Yukagir, Chukchi and Koriak of north-eastern Siberia. By the end of the century several Russian forts dotted the landscape of the Kamchatka peninsula (see Map 22.1).

Russia's expansion along this northern route was no different from other parts of Siberia where the native population could offer sporadic but ultimately ineffective resistance, the local elites could be easily co-opted, divided and manipulated and the furs would be collected either in form of a tribute or trade. The native peoples were to become 'the iasak-paying subjects eternally' and the only choice they had was to 'enter the sublime protection of the Grand Sovereign, the Tsar' voluntarily or to be reduced into submission by Russian

arms.[86]

The second route of Russia's expansion into Siberia took the Russians into the lands of the Buriats and Evenk around Lake Baikal and the Daurs of the Amur River. Then Russia's advance had quickly come to a halt. Here, the Russians encountered another sovereign state and empire, whose ruler too claimed suzerainty over numerous native residents of the area. The Russians approached the imperial boundaries of Ch'ing China.

It was not uncommon for both sides to claim suzerainty and the right to collect iasak from the same native people and for the natives to pay trib­ute to both Russians and Chinese. Russia's encroachment into the Chinese sphere of influence and the numerous arguments and disputes over the loy­alty and tributary payments of the native peoples were annoying enough for the Manchu rulers of China. But when the rebellious Russian cossacks arrived to found Fort Albazin on the Amur River in 1665 and Russian set­tlers, attracted by the stories of the Amur region's fabulous riches, began to arrive in larger numbers, Beijing realised that negotiations alone would not resolve the contentious issues. Chinese armies marched towards the Russian forts of Albazin and Nerchinsk, eventually forcing the Russians to raze most of their forts and settlements and to abandon any further expansion in the region. The Treaty of Nerchinsk signed in 1689 established a boundary between the Russian and Chinese empires along the Argun and Shilka rivers and the Stanovoi mountain range, effectively denying Russia any access to the Amur region. The Russians had to wait for over 150 years before annexing the Amur region and turning it into the far-eastern corner of the Russian Empire.[87]

The North Caucasus

Throughout the seventeenth century Russia could boast of no visible territorial expansion in the North Caucasus. Russia's advance here had been stalled for the same reasons as its march eastward into south-eastern Siberia was halted in the 1650s. In the Caucasus, Moscow approached the sphere ofinfluence oftwo sovereign states, the Ottoman and Persian empires. At the time when Russia's unquestionable military and economic superiority enabled it to expand with relative ease into the lands inhabited by various tribal societies, Moscow had to take a long pause before it was able to confront the similarly organised and dynamic empires of the Chinese, Persians and Ottomans.

Since its first penetration of the Caucasus in the 1560s Moscow struggled to maintain a foothold there. Forced to raze Fort Tersk several times, Moscow had decided to build a fort at a new location further north in the estuary of the Terek River. In 1588, Moscow dispatched a contingent of musketeers and cossacks to defend the newly built fort at the site of the old Turkic town of Tiumen'. Initially named Fort Tiumen', it was quickly renamed Fort Tersk. The survival of Tersk remained precarious for a few more years under the renewed Ottoman demands to raze the fort and the rumours of the impending Crimean campaign. But the Ottomans were busy prosecuting their successful war against Safavid Persia and their priorities were to maintain the newly won possessions along the Caspian coast: Derbent, Shemakha and Baku. The issue seemed to have been raised by the Ottomans for the last time in 1593. When Moscow assured the Ottomans of its peaceful intentions and promised not to interfere with the Ottoman interests in the region, the Porte stopped demanding the demolition of Tersk.[88]

If anything, Russia's presence in the North Caucasus in the seventeenth century was a testimony to its tenacity and determination. Moscow's attempts to move south of Tersk proved to be unsuccessful. Several large-scale military campaigns into Daghestan were a failure. Twice Moscow built and rebuilt Fort Sunzhenskii on the Sunzha River where it flows into the Terek River, and twice Moscow was forced to abandon it. The small cossack settlements which emerged in the foothills of the Caucasus along the Terek River (the Greben' Mountains) had to be razed in the 1650s. Only Tersk stayed and remained Russia's principal base in the North Caucasus throughout the seventeenth century.

The absence of a visible territorial expansion notwithstanding, Russia suc­ceeded in establishing itself as a major power in the north-eastern corner of the Caucasus. Throughout the seventeenth century, Moscow cultivated ties with the numerous chiefs and nobles among the local peoples: the Kumyks, Nogais, Chechens and particularly the Kabardinians. Occasionally, the Russian troops marched from Tersk to assist a loyal native chief against his rivals. But most of the time, Moscow extended its influence through a system of payments, rewards and other benefits to those who represented Russian interests in the region.

Throughout the seventeenth century, a growing number of native nobles chose to seek refuge in Tersk from their rivals and foes. They often arrived with their retinue and were given land, grain and cash in exchange for their military service. Native commoners too fled to Terskin ever-increasingnumbers fleeing justice, or heavy taxation or simply lured by promises of better life. Many of the commoners became converts to Christianity. By the 1620s, four large quarters populated solely by the indigenous people grew outside the walls of Tersk: Circassian (Kabardinian), Okochane (members of the Ingush clan of Ako who came to Tersk in the 1590s), New convert and Tatar. The Kabardinian quarter was the largest with about 175 households by the end of the century. All in all, the population of these four quarters was almost three times larger than the Russian population of Tersk.[89]

Perhaps the most celebrated example of the natives' co-operation with Russia was the Kabardinian dynasty of the Cherkasskiis, whose members for several generations faithfully served Russian interests in the region. With the construction of Fort Tersk in 1588, several Kabardinian chiefs offered their service to Moscow and arrived at Tersk to reside there with their retinues. Among these chiefs, one, Sunchalei Ianglychev, earned the complete trust of the Russian government. He travelled to Moscow several times, was granted an annuity, and in 1615 was appointed a ruling prince over the non-Christian population of Tersk. His son Mutsal and grandson Kaspulat continued to serve Russia faithfully.

In the last half of the seventeenth century, Kaspulat Mutsalovich Cherkasskii proved to be Russia's indispensable liaison in the entire southern region. He ensured that important chiefs in Daghestan and various Kabardinian nobles were at peace with Russia. His sister's marriage to a Kalmyk chief tayishi accounted for his special relations with the Kalmyks. On numerous occasions, his motley contingent of the Kabardinians, Kumyks, Nogais and others in Russian service joined the Kalmyks in their campaigns against the Crimea and in Ukraine against the Ottomans. Handsomely rewarded for his service, Kaspulat Cherkasskii was put in charge of all the non-Christians of Tersk, had fortified houses near Astrakhan' and Tersk and was granted for life the right to collect customs duties in Tersk.[90]

By the end of the century Tersk grew into an important frontier town. The Russian government was making sure that Tersk was adequately protected. In 1650 alone, 1,379 musketeers and cossacks were transferred to Tersk from other frontier towns and settled there with their families.[91] Tersk remained Russia's principal frontier garrison in the Caucasus until the second quarter of the eighteenth century when the advancing Russian forts and cossack settlements turned this once strategic frontier town into a provincial backwater.

The Baltics and Ukraine

Like its double-headed eagle, the symbol of the Russian monarchy, Russia faced simultaneously two very different worlds: one in the east with its animist, Mus­lim and Buddhist populations and the other in the west with a predominantly Christian population. Unlike its rapid advance in the east, Russia's numerous attempts to expand in the west were frustrated by the superior militaries of its neighbours: the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Sweden. Two wars in the Baltic region (1558-83,1656-61) brought Moscow in control of some parts of Livonia and Estonia, only to be given up shortly thereafter. Only in the early eighteenth century was Russia able to establish itself in the Baltic region. The significance attributed to the Baltics was inescapable when Peter the Great imposed his vision on the region and founded a new imperial capital on the Baltic shores.

In the second half of the seventeenth century, Moscow's newly claimed subjects in the west came from eastern Ukraine. They were also Orthodox and, in Moscow's view, shared the same historical traditions of Kievan Rus'. Yet for centuries, the residents of Ukraine had remained cut off from Moscow and instead subjected to influences from Poland and Lithuania. Linguistically and culturally, they clearly possessed an identity different from their Orthodox co-religionists in Moscow. Given their common confessional identity, Moscow considered the Ukrainians to be Russian, but with a small nod to their difference it referred to them as 'little Russians'.

Russia's acquisition of eastern Ukraine was very similar to its annexation of Siberia in the sense that Russia's involvement and expansion here was equally hesitant and cautious. The annexation of Ukraine might also have had to await the early 1700s, when the modernised Russian military proved superior to its western neighbours, had not the opportunity presented itself in 1654. For decades the Dnieper cossacks who resided in the well-fortified territory called the Zaporozhian Sech' enjoyed their freedom and privileges like their counterparts on the Don, Volga and Iaik rivers. But when the Polish govern­ment attempted to increase its control over the Zaporozhian cossacks, they revolted. The largest such uprising tookplace in 1648-9 under the leadership of Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi, who was able to unite the cossacks and the Ukrainian peasants under the anti-Polish, anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic banner.

First and foremost the cossacks were opportunists. Their sense of shared Orthodox Christian identity with the Russians mattered less than their inde­pendence and privileges. It was only after failing to form an alliance with the Ottomans and the Crimean Tatars that the cossacks approached Moscow. Realising that the support of the Zaporozhian host would mean a war with Poland-Lithuania, Moscow rebuffed Khmel'nyts'kyi and his cossacks. Yet a few years later in a momentous decision, the tsar, the Church and the boyars felt that they could no longer pass the opportunity to liberate their co-religionists from Catholic oppression and finally to acquire the lands of ancient Kievan Rus'.

In January of 1654, in the town of Pereiaslav the Zaporozhian hetman Khmel'nyts'kyi and other cossack leaders affixed their signatures to a doc­ument which the cossacks regarded as the terms of their military alliance with Russia and which Moscow considered an affirmation of the cossacks' new status as the subjects of the tsar. Such divergent understanding of their relationship inevitably led to a speedy fall-out. Two years later, in 1656, the cossacks entered an alliance with Sweden, and in 1658 chose to revert to the protection of the Polish king. But Moscow was no longer shy about its ambitions in Ukraine. The fate of Ukraine was decided in a war between Russia and Poland and the truce which the two concluded at Andrusovo in 1667. Ukraine would become divided: the left bank of the Dnieper River would come under Russian control and the right bank would remain in Polish hands.

Several other cossack revolts in the seventeenth century failed to change the status quo and to unify the cossacks again. For some time, the cossack hetmanate on the left bank of the Dnieper retained most of its privileges and sufficient autonomy. Typical incongruities of Russia's policies which were in evidence elsewhere were also present in Russia's relationship with the cossack hetmanate. While considering the occupants of the left bank to be Russian subjects, Moscow dealt with the hetmanate via the Little Russian Chancellery which was part of Russia's Foreign Office.

In many ways Moscow's relationship with the cossacks fell into a pattern of Russia's relations with the peoples elsewhere on its expanding frontiers. Like various non-Christian peoples along the Russian frontier, the cossacks too interpreted their treaty with Moscow as a military alliance with mutual obligations. They too initially were allowed autonomy which then was slowly eroded as Moscow engaged in co-opting the elites, manipulating the local rivalries and resettling those who chose to serve Russia and enrolling them in the Russian military (thus, the eastern part of the hetmanate became known as the Sloboda Ukraine and was settled with the Ukrainian cossacks who were organised into the regular regiments under the military command of the Russian governor in Belgorod). It seems that the nature of Russian autocracy allowed no exceptions, and the Russian imperial policies applied to both the non-Christians and Christians alike.

The fate of the hetmanate was likewise similar to many of its steppe neigh­bours. The Ukrainian hetmanate too was slowly stripped of its autonomy. By the 1720s the hetmanate was increasingly drawn into the Russian administra­tive and social structures, a process which was completed by the end of the eighteenth century.

The mid-Volga region

While rapidly expanding into the new areas, Russia also continued to consol­idate its control in the regions conquered in the previous century. By far the most diverse and important was the middle Volga region. Here, in addition to the conquered peoples - Tatar, Bashkir, Mari, Mordva, Chuvash and Udmurt - others arrived to settle and colonise the region. By the end of the seventeenth century, not only did many towns have a sizeable Slavic population, but the countryside too was transformed by the arrival of Russian landlords and peas­ants and exiled Polish prisoners of war. If in the frontier regions Moscow's objectives did not go beyond the initial demands of political loyalty, in the mid- Volga region the previously vanquished population was already thoroughly integrated into the Russian administrative system. Some non-Christians were enlisted into the Russian military and occupied a special position known as the service Tatars. Other non-Christians were levied specific iasak or other payments and performed sundry state services.

The natives had several choices: to succumb to the Russian dominance, resist it or to flee further away; and they exercised all of these options. The majority of the non-Christians stayed on their ancestral lands, but their acceptance of Russian domination was hardly peaceful. Throughout the centuries the non-Christians of the Volga region together with the cossacks of Russia's southern borderlands were the main source of resistance to Moscow and its policies. The mid-Volga region was systematically rocked by both small- scale popular disturbances and large-scale uprisings. Amongnumerous peoples of the regions, the Bashkirs unquestionably took the prize and suffered the consequences of being the most rebellious subjects of the tsar.[92]

The Russian conquest and colonisation policies of the mid-Volga region also triggered a large-scale migration of the non-Christians. Some reported fleeing to avoid onerous taxation, others were fearful of forceful conversion to Christianity, whether real or rumoured. Thousands of those who fled and settled on the Bashkir lands eventually formed two social categories of regis­tered peasants (tepter) and unregistered migrant peasants, who later became state peasants (bobyl'). In 1631-2, there were 8,355 tepter and bobyl' households residing on the Bashkir lands.[93]

While some among the native elites with the status of tarkhan had their traditional privilege of tax exemption confirmed and others were bestowed with it anew, a great number of the native population found itself labouring under the increased burden of taxation, corvee, state services and various legal restrictions. The impoverishment of the native peoples was evident in the flight of the population, numerous rebellions and a ceaseless paper trail of formal complaints to the governing Russian authorities. One desperate measure to which the natives resorted at the hard economic times was selling their children and kin into slavery to their wealthy co-religionists or the Russians.[94]

Russian policies of incremental integration of the conquered native popu­lation in the Russian Empire and their consequences were best described by the fugitive Bashkirs. In 1755, in the wake of yet another Bashkir uprising, a group of more than 1,500 Bashkir households came to seek refuge among the Kazakhs and warned them about the dangers of submitting to Russia. The fugitive Bashkirs explained that they had become Russian subjects of their own volition, had agreed to pay iasak and had provided numerous services and labour. In the beginning they too, like the Kazakhs, had been granted privileges, but then the government had begun to demand from them more than from their ancestors. Every year they were getting worse off, and now they were brought into such misery that they could not even feed themselves. Their petitions did not reach the empress, and their petitions to the governor remained unheeded. The governor forbade them to petition the empress, and seized, tortured and killed many of their people; they were no longer free in their own lands and waters. How could they live without the land? Military reg­iments came and ruined them; they cut their trees with the beehives, built forts and forced Bashkirs to fell trees, dig soil, cut stones, provide transportation, join the military patrols and buy salt at a higher price. Finally, the desperate Bashkirs resolved to flee, even though the Russian authorities tried to prevent them from fleeing by ordering executions of one remaining Bashkir resident for each fugitive. The Bashkirs warned that the same fate would soon befall the Kazakhs.[95]

Methods of conquest and colonisation

Russia's methods of conquest and colonisation appear to have formed a clear pattern. The newly encountered peoples were expected to submit an oath of allegiance seeking the tsar's protection and favour and pledging their eternal loyalty. These oaths of allegiance were prepared in Moscow and were often available only in Russian. After the native rulers, either coerced or beguiled by Russian promises, had agreed to affix their signatures to the shert', Moscow held them responsible and insisted that they became Russia's subjects. A disin- genuity on the part of both Moscow and the native chiefs was obvious. The chiefs were mostly interested in economic largesse and political advantages, but never considered such documents binding. Moscow too understood very well the precarious nature of its relationship with the various peoples on its frontiers. It might have claimed them as subjects, but it treated them as for­eigners and considered all related matters through Russia's Foreign Office. In a further sign of Moscow's conscious and deliberate obfuscation, the royal titles which claimed suzerainty over various peoples in the frontier regions were mentioned only in correspondence with the Western Christian rulers and were carefully omitted in letters to the Ottoman sultans and Persian shahs.[96]

In the initial stages, Moscow relied heavily on the local elites, winning them over through a system ofpayments and rewards and retaining their privileges. In time, however, the growing military and economic dependence of these elites on Russia and increasing proximity of the Russian settlements, towns, monasteries and forts allowed Moscow to move into a more intrusive stage of bringing the native population under a tighter Russian rule. In other words, Moscow proceeded cautiously from indirect rule in the borderlands to direct rule once the borderlands were more firmly integrated.

Of course, such an evolution of Russia's rule over the non-Russian peoples was not a straight line, and Moscow had to overcome numerous pitfalls along the way. One of the typical dilemmas confronted by the Russian authorities along the frontiers was whether to unite a native people by supporting a single authority of a strong local ruler or to divide them by encouraging the rivalry among their elites. Both approaches were deployed at different times: the former when Moscow was in a weak position and chose to rely on the non-Russians' military aid, the latter when such aid was no longer needed and Moscow's goals then were to weaken and subdue its new non-Russian subjects.

Other issues seemed to have worked at cross-purposes. It was well under­stood in Moscow that winning over the native elites was critical to Russia's interests and Moscow pursued the policies of co-optation. At the same time, other Russian policies served to undermine the collaboration of the native elites. One of the major issues which emerged throughout the seventeenth century was the flight of native slaves and commoners to seek freedom and a better life in Russia. While the arrival of the native elites to seek military service and protection in Russia was an old and established practice, the exo­dus of commoners was a new and disturbing phenomenon in the view of the non-Russian elites.

The native nobles bitterly complained that they were losing their people to their great detriment and demanded the fugitives' return or a monetary com­pensation. Such complaints were most of the time dismissed by the authorities in neighbouring Russian towns under the pretext that the fugitives had been converted to Christianity and therefore could not be returned. Even in Siberia, where the increased number of fugitives meant diminished quantities of fur iasak, the Russian authorities accepted such fugitives and converted them to

Christianity as long as their conversion was 'voluntary'. The drain of the natives into Russia remained an issue of great importance throughout the centuries and continued to undermine Russia's relations with various native chiefs along the frontiers.[97]

Even when, compelled by political circumstances, Moscow instructed its governors to return such fugitives unconverted, few of them found their way back home. The unaware native fugitives, who could be profitably exploited or sold, represented an attractive source of profit to the corrupt local Russian authorities. Half a century later, in 1755, respondingto the undeniable reality of massive exodus, purchase and conversion of the natives, the government gave a green light to those who wished to purchase and convert the natives in the frontier regions of Astrakhan', Orenburg and Siberia. In a remarkable violation of the exclusive privilege of the Russian nobility to purchase and own serfs, the government permitted priests, merchants, cossacks and others to buy, convert and teach non-Christians, who were to remain their serfs until the owners' death. The Senate sanctioned the purchase of Kalmyks, Kumyks, Chechens, Kazakhs, Karakalpaks, Turkmens, Tomuts, Tatars, Bashkirs, Baraba Tatars and other Muslims and idol-worshippers. Thus, the non-Christians would be acquired without force, 'so that they could be converted to Christianity'. Such transactions were to take place only with written permission from the native chiefs or parents of those offered for sale, and with the reasonable assurances that those to be sold had not been kidnapped.[98] Of course, given the desperate situation of many natives and the corruption of both the Russian officials and the native chiefs, these conditions were unlikely to prevent any illegal sales. What was in the seventeenth century still a cautious government policy by the mid-eighteenth century had developed into a direct encouragement of a wide-ranging enserfment and Christianisation of the non-Christians in the frontier regions.

Whether through deliberate policies or the circumstances of its overwhelm­ing dominance, Russia's impact on the indigenous societies was destabilising and destructive. In time, the native elites found themselves drawn into the orbit of Russia's influence, becoming dependent on Moscow in political, military and economic matters. The attraction of the Russian market and access to a variety of goods, cash and loans compelled the native elites to increase the tax burden on their own population in order to obtain various items of prestige and luxury. This in turn led to the problem of 'the labour drain', that is, the fleeing of the native commoners to Russia to escape their plight at home. The commoners in the indigenous societies had found themselves overburdened by the increasing demands of both their own elites and the Russian government.

What followed was the interminable civil wars between the elites vying for power and closer ties to Moscow on the one hand, and popular uprisings against the Russian government and those native elites who collaborated with Moscow on the other. The ultimate result was continuous and irreversible political and economic debilitation of the native societies, their increased dependence on Russia and their eventual incorporation into the imperial structures.

For many non-Russian peoples, the seventeenth century marked the begin­ning of their integration into the Russian Empire. At the time, the Russian government was still struggling to close a large gap between the rate of Moscow's expansion and its ability to control and govern the new territo­ries and peoples. The under-governed nature of Russia's new territories and frontiers meant that the government preferred to rely on indirect control and mostly a set of non-coercive policies and incentives. It was in the eighteenth century, after the Petrine revolution, that the new Westernised generations of Russian bureaucrats and officers brought with them to the Russian frontiers the conviction ofRussian and Christian superiority and their determination to achieve both the submission of the natives in no uncertain terms and a change in their way of life. In relative terms, the events of the seventeenth century were less traumatic and destructive for the native societies than the following century would prove to be.

The economy, trade and serfdom

RICHARD HELLIE

Commerce and the merchantry

The Russian economy in the period 1613-89 was quite sophisticated. The leaders of the hypertrophic Muscovite state were basically monetarists a la Milton Friedman who understood well that the quantity and quality of the money in circulation determined the price level. The currency was based on silver, primarily reminted thalers imported from other countries in Europe because Muscovy in that period mined no precious metals, which did not exist on its territory. By manipulating the quantity and quality of silver in the currency, the government could make the price level rise, fall or remain constant.

Throughout these decades of the 'short Russian seventeenth century', the price level of commodities varied wildly for brief periods, but always returned sooner or later to the median for the period.[99] Events such as famines and wars also had an impact on the price level, but they were not nearly as dramatic as the monetary impacts. Thus prices tended to rise for the Smolensk war (1632-4) and the Thirteen Years War (1654-67), but the major inflationary swing in prices in 1662-3 was caused not by the war, but by the government's devaluing the currency. This commenced at the end of the 1650s, when the government decided to try to pay for the war by replacing the silver currency with copper coinage.[100] Probably because faith in the government was strong, the 'bogus currency' was accepted at 'face value' for four years. A crisis occurred only when the government began to refuse to accept the copper coinage for tax payments and when word began to circulate that government leaders were minting copper coins for their own profit. Then bedlam broke loose, prices skyrocketed and the populace of Moscow rebelled in the famous Copper Upris­ing. Almost immediately the government increased the silver content of the currency by 2 per cent, all protest subsided and prices fell back to the median. Aside from war years, prices generally were stable for long periods of time. Of course crop failures caused temporary, localised price spikes. The general rule of the data on this period is that whenever an agricultural commodity price veers far from the median (i.e. looks 'wrong'), the source will typically say that the high price was the result of a crop failure.

All commerce in Russia was based on cash or barter. Russia had no banks until the middle of the eighteenth century,[101] and the merchants were not Rothschild-types who could proffer loans to the government or to each other. The Russian merchantry had a reputation for dishonesty, and the level oftrust was certainly very low Monasteries had reserves, which sometimes the govern­ment would 'borrow': there is no evidence that such 'loans' were ever repaid. The nexus between the mercantile monasteries, integrated vertical conglom­erates which engaged in production and trade and the merchant class is not fully understood.

The government understood that its capacity to control prices generally was extraordinarily limited. One might expect that a government with pretensions akin to those of the Muscovite Agapetus state'[102] would have been in and out of the market all the time, but this was not the case. In its purchases, the government both in Moscow and at the local level generally was a 'price taker', that is, it paid market prices if it wanted to buy something. Only very rarely did the government impose price controls on ordinary traded goods, such as sturgeon in 1623 on the lower Volga.[103] The major exception was the price of slaves: the government set the price of limited service contract slaves at 2 roubles apiece during the Time ofTroubles and raised it to 3 roubles apiece in the mid-i62os.[104] Earlier the price for slaves had been set by the market;[105] the intervention by the government changed the composition of slaves. Forcing a buyer to pay the same price for a young child as for a prime-age worker motivated buyers to bypass the over-priced slaves who thus could not get the welfare which the institution of slavery provided. Whether the government had anticipated this consequence of its action is unknown. The government was able to intervene in the pricing of slaves because all purchases of slaves had to be registered with the government. Without registration of the slave in the Slavery Chancellery (see Chapter 12 above), the buyer had no legal claim to his chattel, who then would have been able to flee with impunity. The government was not similarly involved with any other sale transactions in Muscovy. One might imagine that the government, which by the time of this chapter had complete control over the economic factors of land and labour, would have been similarly involved with registration of the sale of immovable property, but the fact is that sales of agricultural land were almost non-existent.[106] As shown in Chapter 16 above, government control over most of the agricultural land fund plus the right of clan redemption combined to stifle free sales transactions in land.

The vast quantity of price data permit the calculation of costs for almost any­thing when quantitative data are available. Thus the cost of the great Smolensk fortress, built between 1596 and 1600, perhaps the largest construction project in the sixteenth-century world, can be calculated at about 1.5 million rou­bles.[107] One can further calculate that the government saved vast quantities of money by abandoning that stationary form of defence in favour of the system of the fortified lines south of the Oka in the seventeenth century, and that, moreover, around mid-century, the army cost about one-eighth of Muscovy's GDP.[108]

Muscovite legislation did much of what it could to facilitate commerce. Interest on loans in common law was limited to 20 per cent in the six­teenth century.[109] In 1649, however, it was forbidden.[110] Although Russia was in the Roman law tradition in many respects because much of its law came from Byzantium, Russia for some reason never developed the Roman law of contract.[111] Other areas of law of interest to merchants, such as the storage of goods, however, were well developed and it would be fair to say that the legal climate for trade was generally favourable. Throughout most of this period access to courts was inexpensive, trials were expeditious and judges seem to have been relatively (if not totally) honest. Muscovite law helped to lower commercial transaction costs.

Muscovy had a well-developed group of merchants of all types, ranging from petty merchants who traded in local market stalls to long-distance mer­chants such as the Stroganovs who traded in salt, furs, precious objects and imported goods. The long-distance merchants used slaves to expand their fam­ily firms as was done in other countries, especially in Africa. The merchants were greatly facilitated by a number of institutional factors which considerably ante-dated this period. Most crucial was the practice stressed during Ivan IV's minority that Russia had 'one faith, one unit of currency and one measure'. This was strengthened in 1653 by a proclamation of standard units as well as a rationalisation of internal customs fees. Although internal customs collec­tions were not abolished until 1753, they seem to have been relatively few and seem not to have inhibited commerce significantly. Given these factors, it is not surprising that Russia had something approximating a single market in the seventeenth century: costs of any similar item were similar throughout Russia, with differences being accounted for by the cost of transportation. Merchants had sufficient information to learn of differences in the costs of similar items throughout the country, and took advantage of arbitrage oppor­tunities wherever they might arise by shipping goods from low-cost areas to higher-cost areas whenever it would have been profitable. By 1689 merchants, who created dynasties often lasting three generations, could trade unhindered throughout much of the Eurasian land mass, from the White Sea in the north to the Caspian Sea in the south, from Smolensk in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. This trade provided opportunities for significant accumu­lation of capital - which was spent on large houses, the Church, luxury goods and household slaves, who produced little or nothing and consumed much.

The elite merchants were organised by the government into three groups: the gosti, the gostinaia sotnia and the sukonnaia sotnia.[112] The assignments were based on capital. Rather than being an honour, such assignments were some­thing to be avoided and even dreaded, for the government regarded them as members of the service class who could be pressed into government service as needed. This service took them away from their businesses and had the potential to bankrupt them. The first, the gosti, were based in Moscow and were the leading merchants of the realm. There were only a handful of them and they were assigned to run the major customs houses, such as at Archangel, in Astrakhan', and elsewhere. The second group, the gostinaia sotnia (some­times translated as 'the merchants' hundred') were also Moscow-based and ran lesser customs houses. If collections did not match anticipation, they could be charged the difference. The third group, the sukonnaia sotnia ('the cloth hundred') were the elite of the provincial merchants and were assigned lesser government tasks. All of these merchants from time to time were assigned to trade the tsar's goods, particularly sables.

Chapter 19 of the Law Code (Sobornoe Ulozhenie) of 1649 made the mer- chantry into a privileged estate or caste. Except for monasteries and the tsar himself, town merchants faced little competition. Peasants, landowners and landholders, clergymen and most military servitors were forbidden to engage in trade, manufacturing and the ownership of urban property. Townsmen, those juridically on the urban tax rolls, had an exclusive monopoly on trade, manufacturing and the ownership of urban property. A small exception was made for members ofthe upper and middle service-class capital and provincial cavalry: they could own one house in town and keep one slave there. Such properties could not be used as bases for enterprises which would compete with the townsmen.[113] Armed musketeers were allowed to engage in petty trade and urban employment to supplement their inadequate wages. Church establishments had to surrender their urban properties and keep outside a wide greenbelt around towns, where the townsmen could keep gardens and pasture livestock. In exchange for these monopolies, the townsmen, who were largely either craftsmen or merchants, had to provide the government with the cash it needed. This arrangement, the product of disturbances in many Russian towns in June 1648, produced a settlement that kept the townsmen from rioting for over a century while providing the government with its needed revenues.[114]

Although the Russian merchants did comparatively well domestically, they could not compete in the international sphere. The larger merchants expressed this in an elaborate petition to the government in 1649 in which they requested the expulsion of Western merchants from the interior of Russia and their confinement to the ports and frontier cities. The petition rehearsed foreign trade in Muscovy for the previous century and its dominance by the English and Dutch. They noted that the English gave local Russian merchants loans, which the Russians themselves could not do, and employed them as their factors. The foreigners kept the Russians confined to their White Sea ports.[115]The fact is that the English were just better merchants. This was proved in the Mediterranean in the last quarter of the sixteenth century when in two decades the English seized all long-distance trade from all competitors.[116] It was also proved in the period 1740-1810, when the French dominated Russian culture but were a poor third in the trade sector. The French complained about English loans to Russian factors, just as the elite Russians had complained a century earlier. In all of these cases, the Mediterranean, the pre-i649 era and the post-1740 era, the key to English success was communications.[117] This was high on the list of the things the Russians said that they just were unable to compete with.

Without any assistance from the government, by i6i3 the Russians were able to borrow the names and styles of much of their clothing from the Turkic peoples who had been their southern neighbours for the previous millennium.[118] But when it came to major technology transfer after 1613 from the West, nothing happened without governmental intervention. Moscow hired not only medical doctors, linguists, translators, astronomers andpainters, but also architects, silk weavers, ship builders, food specialists, paper makers, vintners, iron makers and ore prospectors from the West. Metal specialists were requested from abroad in i62i, and the Dutch in the i620s and i630s enjoyed monopoly hegemony in the iron industry. In 1623 Dutch entrepreneurs established a rope works, complementing that set up by the English at the end of the sixteenth century. The Dutch got a pitch monopoly in the i620s and a potash monopoly in the 1630s. Dutch and Holstein shipwrights built a fleet on the Caspian in the 1630s. In 1634, the Dutch got a monopoly on the manufacture of velvet. In the same year, the first glass factory was established. Westerners also organised a temporary postal system and taught the Russians how to dig deeper wells. The first paper mill was built in 1655, and foreigners established a rag paper factory six years later. In 1667 foreigners set up woollen mills and a decade later an Italian set up a silk factory. In the late 1660s, at the invitation of the government, foreign prospectors discovered copper ores in the north, north of the Volga, and began to mine and process them for the state. These people were in addition to the mercenaries who modernised the Russian army for the Smolensk war (1632-4) by introducing the new formation regiments. About half of the Russian army at Smolensk consisted of these mercenaries and their men. They proved to be a tremendous drain on the treasury, so the majority were sent home after the war. Recruitment was initiated again in 1647 in preparation for the Thirteen Years War (1654-67), but this time was largely limited to officers.²¹ In 1654 the government, primarily at the urging of the Orthodox Church, closed one of the last openings in the caste society created by the Ulozhenie of 1649 (see below) when it forced the foreigners, almost all of whom were very highly compensated, to live in the Northern European Settlement (nemetskaia sloboda: the Foreign - literally German - Quarter). This later served as the incubator for Peter the Great's Western orientation.

In the mid-seventeenth century mercantilism (a slight variation on the French Colbertism) came to Russia. The first mercantilist was Fedor Rtishchev, but its major spokesman was A. L. Ordin-Nashchokin. A native of Pskov, Ordin-Nashchokin wrote the Pskov merchant charter of 1665 and the New Trade Regulations of 1667. He advocated Western-style efficiency and gaining an outlet in the Baltic to the West. Inter alia, he was a mild protectionist who advocated keeping as much specie as possible in Russia, which may have been partially responsible for the general decline in the price level between 1663 and 1689.²²

The process of enserfment, 1613-49

The Muscovite economy did not provide well for most Russians. As mentioned, there are no useful minerals between the Volga and the Oka and all had to be imported. The thin podzol topsoil is acidic and provides very low yields, in this period three seeds harvested for each one sown. The growing season was too short and the precipitation typically considerably more than would have been ideal. Lesser yields led to famine and starvation, which occurred roughly once in every seven years in Russia.

Most people lived in smoky huts, log cabins with a large brick or stone and mortar stove which vented their lethal smoke into the room rather than

21 Hellie, Enserfment, chs. 10 and 11.

22 See most of the figures in Hellie, Economy.

outside via a chimney, to save heat. One may surmise that most people had very little energy, both because they were gassed six months of the year by their own air-polluting stoves and because of inadequate nutrition. Most people lived at a subsistence level with a life expectancy of less than thirty years. Per capita income was probably less than $600 (£ 350). The median wage for the entirepop- ulation was 4 kopecks per day, and for the 'working class' it was 3 kopecks per day. A smoky hut's median price was 3.25 roubles, or about 100 days' pay.[119] Fre­quent fires meant that housing was replaced often. As discussed in Chapter 12 above, there was little inside most of the huts: the three-chambered stove (which could be large enough for two people to sleep on the top), benches around two-plus walls of the room to sit and sleep on, occasionally a table, perhaps a trunk for extra clothing and little more.

The vast majority of the population in the years 1613-89 were serfs, perhaps 85 per cent. Of the rest, perhaps 5 to 15 per cent were slaves. Then the clergy, townsmen and military forces comprised around another 2 per cent each. These were of the roughly five million inhabitants in 1613, perhaps nine or ten million in 1689.[120]

For reasons that are still not clear, the Time of Troubles had little impact on the process of enserfing the peasantry. Shuiskii's 1607 decree seems to have gone into limbo, and the legal situation reverted to the decrees of 1592: the peasants were bound to the land with the repeal of the right to move on St George's Day until further notice and the five-year statute of limitations on the filing of suits for the recovery of fugitive serfs. What may be called 'the Soviet' explanation for this was that the government was so terrified by first the Khlopko uprising (1601-3) and then the Bolotnikov uprising (1606-7) that it lacked the spirit to repress the peasants any further. I would be inclined towards another interpretation: the 1592 provisions satisfied those who were running the government, so they were not about to make any changes unless forced to do so.[121]

Other elements, however, were restive with the status quo. In the social stratification sweepstakes, the townsmen held a special place. Their problem was the Russian system of collective taxation. The census takers came around and would find x number of people living in an urban area. Assuming that x number of people lived in the area, the tax collectors assessed the area y roubles until the next census. Problems arose when some townsmen moved away or fled. The tax collectors still insisted that the area pay y roubles, even though there were fewer taxpayers than there had been when the census was taken. As a result, the remaining townsmen began to ask the government to forbid any further people from moving away and that those who had moved away be returned to share in the tax burden. An early example of this was in 1590/1, when the people of Toropets (on the western frontier) asked that their fellow townsmen be forbidden to move. The government complied by extending the forbidden years concept from the peasantry to the townsmen of Toropets.[122]

The Time of Troubles was brutal to the Russian towns. Townsmen were sent scurrying in all directions, much as Ivan IV's savage reign had sent the peasants scattering. By 1613 many towns were completely depopulated.[123] 'Recovery economics' is an important branch of economics, and it is probably correct to infer that Russia had recovered from the Time of Troubles by 1629. The year 1613 became the reference point for urban residence. After then, when townsmen asked that their peers who had departed be returned, the reference point always was back to 1613. By the late 1630s, townsmen were being returned who had fled a quarter-century earlier. This example played a major role in the campaign to have peasants returned who had fled more than five years previously. Also exemplary for the institution of serfdom was the fact that the government in the late 1630s became directly involved in the search for and return of fugitive townsmen.[124] For fugitive serfs and slaves, on the other hand, the government took no role until after the Ulozhenie of 1649.

Monasteries also suffered from the dislocations caused by the Time of Troubles. This recalls the time in the 1450s, when monasteries initiated the limitation of indebted peasants to the period around St George's Day, the very first steps on the road to serfdom. Shortly after 1613 elite monasteries were the first to be heard from on the issue of fugitive serfs. They complained that five years were inadequate for the recovery of their fugitive serfs, and the government extended the time to ten and more years, depending on when the peasants had fled.[125]

Other than these developments, the social stratification front was relatively quiet between the end ofthe Time ofTroubles and the end ofthe Smolensk war. Recovery tookmost ofthe social energy there was, and Patriarch Filaret, father of Tsar Michael, ran a tight ship while he was at the helm of the Russian state between 1619 and 1633. After his death, self-serving and corruption became the order of the day in the Russian government between 1633 and 1648. The ruling elite were occupied with allotting lands to themselves and looting the treasury. Witnessing that orgy of corruption, the members of the middle service class decided that it was time to get theirs. So, in 1637 they initiated perhaps the most famous petition campaign in Russian history for the completion of the enserfment of the peasantry.[126] They enumerated the troubles the five-year statute of limitations on the recovery of fugitive serfs caused them. They noted that 'contumacious (literally, strong) people' (sil'nye liudi) used the statute of limitations to conceal fugitives; once the statute of limitations had expired, the 'contumacious people' would send the fugitives back whence they had come to recruit other fugitives. The only solution, said the petitioners, was to repeal the statute of limitations. The government responded by extending the statute of limitations from five to nine years.[127]

The provincial cavalrymen found this concession to be of little help, so in 1641 again petitioned for a repeal of the statute of limitations. The govern­ment responded by extending the statute of limitations from nine to fifteen years.[128] Here one must stop to examine the context of these petitions. After the conclusion of the Smolensk war, which ended in a 'draw' because the Poles surrendered their claim to the Russian throne but refused to return the great fortress of Smolensk to the Russians, the government turned its attention from the western front to the southern front. The Crimean Tatars were still a major threat to Muscovy; their annual slave raids had carried off tens of thousands of Russians into the slave markets of the Crimea, and their raids diverted the Russians during the Smolensk war from concentrating their full attention on Smolensk. So the Muscovites began to wall off the southern frontier by constructing what became known as the Belgorod fortified line in the years 1636-54. This moved the formal frontier of Muscovy hundreds of miles south of the Oka and added tens of thousands of hectares of some of the best agricultural land in the world to Muscovite control. Those directing the Belgorod Line operation wanted the region between the line and the Oka settled for strategic purposes. The new settlers could be recruited for military purposes for service on the fortified line if necessary, and as farmers added significantly to the GNP of Muscovy while providing ready food to the frontier forces. Peasants were delighted to oblige by migrating to the frontier because their incomes rose farming the rich chernozem vis-a-vis what they could get from the poor podzol soils north of the Oka; besides that, south of the Oka, they had no landlords to worry about or pay rent to. Government officials behind the Belgorod Line were reluctant to return fugitives to their places of origins north of the Oka.

Thus in the years after 1636 the middle service-class cavalry landholders north of the Oka came to know that every time they would report for their annual military service, their peasants would use their absence to move to a frontier region where they could not possibly locate them, both because of the distances involved and because of the hostility of the frontier officials should by some stroke of luck they manage to find their fugitives. Slaves reg­istered in the Moscow Slavery Chancellery were accurately enough described so that in a judicial contest for the return of a fugitive slave, the central records could be brought to the courtroom and a reasonable decision made whether the person being contested was the slave described in the government docu­ment. But in the case of peasant serfs, no such records existed.³³ In a hostile frontier courtroom, a serf-hunter could claim that the contested person x was his fugitive serf Ivan son of Pavel, x could respond that he was Nikolai son of Aleksei, that this was a case of mistaken identity - and the judge almost certainly would throw out the plaintiff's claim for x. The provin­cial cavalrymen, who only had 5.6 peasant households apiece, were hardly wealthy to begin with. When their labour force began to vanish, they became desperate.

Fifteen years proved to be of no more use to the middle service class than had nine or five. So, in 1645 they submitted a third petition asking for the repeal of the statute of limitations. This time, the government, in transition from Tsar Michael to Tsar Alexis, caved in and promised to repeal the statute

33 A decree of 30 March 1688 tried to compensate for this inadequacy by requiring the reg­istration of purchased and ceded/exchanged hereditary estate and service landholding serfs in the Service Landholding Chancellery (SLC) while loans and similar documents were to be registered in the Slavery Chancellery (SC). This measure could not be effective because the SLC was already overburdened with trying to keep track of the ownership and possession of much of the land in Russia, and could not possibly cope with keeping records on all the serfs as well. The SC's task was much more manageable. See RZ, 9 vols. (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1984-94), vol. iv: Zakonodatel'stvo perioda stanovleniia absoliutizma, ed. A. G. Man'kov (1986), pp. 102-3.

of limitations - once a new census had been taken.[129] The census was taken, in 1646-7, but the government was taken over (in the name of Alexis) by his tutor, Boris Ivanovich Morozov. Morozov was one of the most able men ever to head a Russian government, but also one of the most greedy and corrupt. Contemporaries reported that he had a 'thirst for gold as others thirst for water'. Morozov tried to rationalise and simplify the taxation system, which consisted of countless imposts on almost everything that moved or was stationary. Morozov got the idea of annulling many of them and consolidating them into a tax on salt. What Morozov forgot was that the demand for salt is elastic. With a dramatic rise in the price of salt because of the new tax, the consumption fell dramatically, and the reform collapsed. The rage against Morozov, however, did not collapse, but was only strengthened by many of his other activities. Of a rather minor if ancient Muscovite family, but not a noble, he began life with modest peasant holdings and ended it as the largest serf- holder in Muscovy. He enriched himselfboth with lands and peasants and with state property. He surrounded himself with a loyal cadre of equally rapacious individuals. Not only did he 'forget' the 1645 promise to repeal the statute of limitations, all the while he was luring away other landholders' peasants and dispatching them to distant properties he appropriated for himself on the Volga. He issued orders to his estate stewards to conceal fugitives even as his days in active government service were expiring in 1648.[130]

Morozov was so corrupt that the townsmen of Moscow could no longer endure it. They composed a petition to Alexis and tried to present it to him on 1 June 1648, as he rode through Moscow. That monumental document was translated into Swedish by a visitor at the time in Moscow and survives both in the original Middle Russian and in Swedish.[131] When the petitioners tried to present the document to Alexis, his accompanying musketeer guards tore it up and threw it into their faces. This touched off two days of rioting in Moscow in which a considerable portion of the city was burned, and two of Morozov's collaborators were torn to bits by the mob and their remains cast on some of the many dung heaps gracing the city's streets.[132] Morozov was saved from a similar fate only by the personal intervention of the tsar, who promised that Boris Ivanovich would never again serve in the Muscovite government.

In their petition the people of Moscow complained about the Morozov gang corruption and asked for the compilation of a new law code, with references to the Byzantine lawgivers Constantine and Justinian. The government, which was frightened out of its wits as the rioting spread to a dozen other towns, made several responses. First, Morozov and his cohort were permanently purged from the government and replaced with another group. Second, a commission of five men, headed by N. I. Odoevskii, was appointed to compile the laws. And third, calls were issued for the election of delegates to an Assembly of the Land (zemskii sobor), a proto-parliamentary body which originated in 1566 and was called at times when major national issues needed to be resolved, such as war and peace, dynastic succession and major legal issues. A full Assembly of the Land consisted of two chambers. The upper chamber contained members of the upper service class and the clergy. The lower chamber had elected delegates from the towns and the provincial middle service class. It is known that at least some of the 1648 delegate elections were vigorously contested.[133]

The Ulozhenie of 1649

The Odoevskii legislative commission was one of the most efficient in all Rus­sian history. Its members sent requests to the major chancelleries requesting that they send them their statute books, scrolls on which laws were entered as they were made. About ten of the forty chancelleries participated in that process. The commission extracted the most relevant provisions from the statute books and grouped them into what became the twenty-five chapters of the Law Code of 1649 (Sobornoe Ulozhenie), the most important written monument in all of Russian history before the nineteenth century - with perhaps the exception of the chronicles. On 1 October 1648, the delegates to the Assembly of the Land assembled with the petitions and demands of their constituents. About 7 per cent of the 968 articles of the Ulozhenie resulted from the petitions brought to the Assembly of the Land, including one for the repeal of the statute of limitations for filing suits for the recovery of fugi­tive serfs. The Odoevskii Commission read its draft to the delegates of each chamber, who voted each article either up or down. The provisions demanded by the delegates were integrated in with the Odoevskii Commission's draft extracted from the chancellery records. The whole project was completed in January 1649, and on 29 January the delegates who were willing signed the scroll copy of the Ulozhenie. This point must be stressed, for it is known that a number of the upper chamber clerics refused to sign the document to protest against the beating the Church had taken in the document on issues ranging from a semi-secularisation of the Church (a lay governmental chancellery, the Monastery Chancellery, was appointed to manage much of the Church; this was an ancestor of Peter the Great's Holy Synod) to issues on Church prop­erty discussed at the beginning of this chapter. The scroll copy, which is still extant, was taken to the state typography, and then 1,200 copies were pub­lished. This was the second civil (non-religious) book published in Muscovy. The 1,200 copies sold out rapidly, and a second printing of another 1,200 copies was ordered immediately, which sold out in a couple of years.³⁹ The entire Ulozhenie is a printed manifestation of the dictum of the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan that governments will acquire more power when­ever the opportunity arises. The Ulozhenie gave the government power over nearly all of society, thus consolidating its almost total control over two of the major economic factors (land and labour).⁴⁰ The third factor, capital, was

39 Richard Hellie, 'Muscovite Law and Society: the Ulozhenie of 1649 as a Reflection of the Political and Social Development of Russia since the Sudebnik of 1589', unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1965; Richard Hellie, 'The Ulozhenie of 1649', MERSH, vol. xl (Gulf Breeze, Fla.: Academic International Press, 1985), pp. 192-8; Richard Hellie, 'Early Modern Russian Law: The Ulozhenie of 1649', and 'Ulozhenie Commentary: Preamble and Chapters 1-2', RH 15 (1988): 155-224; Richard Hellie, 'Commentary on Chapters 3 through 6', RH 17 (1990): 65-78; Richard Hellie, 'Commentary on Chapters 7-9', RH 17 (1990): 179-226; Richard Hellie, 'Commentary on Chapter 11 (The Judicial Process for Peasants)', RH 17 (1990): 305-39; Richard Hellie, 'The Church and the Law in Late Muscovy: Chapters 12 and 13 of the Ulozhenie of 1649', CASS 25 (1991): 179-99.

40 Perhaps a chapter such as this should discuss in detail the evolution of the exploitation of the peasants/serfs in this period, but space limitations and other considerations prevent such a presentation. Soviet scholars did much work on this issue, but never systematised their findings. The problems are immense. One is the passage of time, and the facts that rents were always changing. Another is the fact that there were numerous forms of rent, ranging from labour rent (barshchina) in which a serf farmed his lord's land to money or in kind rent (obrok) to any possible combination of these forms of rent. Geographical variations were important. Perhaps most important was the variety of landowners and landholders ranging from the state itself to the tsar, from the Church (consisting of the patriarch, monasteries, individual institutions) to magnate landowners down to provincial cavalry landholders. With the passage oftime, pure 'rent' gets mixed up with taxes. The general assumption is that rent and taxes took about a third of a peasant's harvest and his time (ifproperly priced), the peasant could consume about a third ofwhat he produced, andhehad to save about a third ofhis harvest for seed for the following year. See e.g. A. N. Sakharov Russkaia derevnia XVII v. Po materialam Patriarshego khoziaistva (Moscow: Nauka, 1966), pp. 66-7; N. A. Gorskaia, Monastyrskie krest'iane Tsentral'noi Rossii v XVII veke. O sushchnosti i formakh feodal'no-krepostnicheskikh otnoshenii (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), pp. 239-339; Iu. A. Tikhonov, Pomeshchich'i krest'iane v Rossii. Feodal'naia renta v XVII - nachale XVIII v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1974), pp. 117-305. Tikhonov's table 59 shows the vast variations in rents on service landholdings in this period (p. 297). See also L. V Milov, Velikorusskii pakhar' i osobennosti rossiiskogo istoricheskogo protsessa (Moscow:

still largely in private hands, although the discussion above about technology transfers indicates that the government, which also was the largest merchant, had considerable control over this factor as well.

The Ulozhenie became known everywhere almost immediately and was referred to by those with legal interests for decades thereafter. The major changes in the law were announced by public criers. For the purposes of this chapter, the major items of interest were contained in the Ulozhenies chapter 11 (serfdom, 34 articles), chapter 19 (townsmen, 40 articles), and chapter 20 (slaves, 119 articles). The Assembly of the Land added little to chapter 20, which was a codification of the practices of the Slavery Chancellery. On the other hand, much of chapters 11 and 19 came from petitions by the delegates to the Assembly of the Land. The principles of these three chapters interacted with one another in the production of the system which was to last in Russia - even beyond the abolition of personal serfdom in 1861 - until the reforms of 1906 onwards.

The first principle of serfdom was that the peasant could not move without his lord's permission. The same was true for the townsmen (for whom the town was the 'lord'). According to articles 1 and 2 of chapter 11, this was true for all peasants, regardless of whether they lived on lay or Church seigniorial land, or on land that had no lord, 'taxable land', that still belonged to the peasants or to the state. Later on, in the eighteenth century, the provisions for seigniorial and state peasants diverged, but this was not the case in 1649. Second, there was the issue of the return of fugitives. Here the measures for serfs resembled more those for slaves than for townsmen. For the return of slaves, there had never been a statute of limitations for the filing of suits for the recovery of fugitives. Now, the same applied to serfs. As mentioned earlier, however, the evidentiary bases for the status of slavery and serfdom differed dramatically. Slaves were registered in the Moscow Slavery Chancellery; otherwise they were not slaves. There was no formal registration for serfs, so the issue arose ofwhat evidence would apply in the case of disputes involving serfs. The Ulozhenie preferred written evidence, and mentioned the land cadastres compiled in 1626, the recently compiled 1646-7 census, or records transmitting possession oflands to servicemen. In practice, such written evidence overrode the clause in the Ulozhenie which declared that a peasant was supposed to live where his/her grandfather had lived. On the other hand, there were no provisions for the return of townsmen who had fled prior to the Ulozhenie; for them,

Rosspen, 1998), pp. 483-5; Z. A. Ogrizko, Iz istorii krest'ianstva na Severe feodal'noi Rossii

XVIIv. (Osobyeformykrepostnoizavisimosti) (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1968), pp. 26-57;

Aleksandrov et al., Krest'ianstvo, p. 154.

the binding process began on 29 January i649, and continued indefinitely into the future. No definitive explanation for the difference has ever been offered, but one may surmise that the Odoevskii commission believed that townsmen were involved in a trade whose disruption would be economically deleterious, whereas peasants moved their agricultural site regularly because of soil exhaustion and thus transportation back to a legal lord's estate would be little more disruptive than moving to a new site on the same estate in slash/burn (assartage) agriculture, or rotating around in the three-field system. Of course the explanation may have been more political than economic, that the delegates from the middle service-class cavalry at the Assembly ofthe Land were more persuasive/intimidating than were the urban delegates.

A major issue that concerned all three population categories was that of marriage. If one or two fugitives wed while one or both were in flight from their lawful owners or places of residence, what should happen to the couple? The Russian Orthodox Church was adamant that marriage was inviolable. In response to this simple dogma, a simple solution for fugitives was found: receiving fugitive slaves, serfs and townsmen was illegal, so whoever received the fugitive was penalised by losing the couple. However, the family was not inviolable, so that if they had children, the law-breaking harbourer of the fugitive could keep the offspring born while in his 'care' even though he (or it: a town) lost the parents. If the fugitives married while on 'neutral ground', such as on the frontier where there were no lords, then the lords cast lots to determine possession. The winner got the couple and had to pay the loser 10 roubles. If a female fugitive serf married a frontier serviceman, he could keep her for 50 roubles. This was an impossible sum, presumably meant to deter servicemen from marrying fugitive women and the women from fleeing to the frontiers.

One final issue, the abasement of the person of the serf which began in the reign of Ivan IV (see Chapter 12 above) remains to be discussed. The Ulozhenie surprisingly has little to say about that, even though the chapter on slaves is the second longest in the law code and thus the Odoevskii commission cannot be suspected of having been squeamish on this topic. One may surmise that the legislators wanted to concentrate on the principle at hand, the perpetual binding of the peasants to the land, not its possible derivative which could easily enough turn into its opposite, the binding of the peasant to the person of a lord. The culmination of this fate of the serfs waited until the early eighteenth century, to last until 1861. But the forebodings of what was to come are evident in the Ulozhenie. Ominous is article 3 of chapter i5 which permits a hereditary landowner (votchinnik) to issue a manumission charter freeing his serf, but denies that privilege to a service landholder (pomeshchik). This, of course, equates one category of serfs with slaves, both of whom can become freedmen (nearly the sole category of free people in Muscovy). This also served as a vehicle for an owner of a hereditary estate to transfer his peasants to another holding. Article 7 of chapter 16 permits outright someone who acquired waste lands to move peasants from his other lands to populate those waste lands. Nothing is said about the consent of the serfs in this process, which probably enhanced economic efficiency at the expense of the personal freedom of the serfs.

Another ominous sign of the abasement of the peasant is in article 141 of chapter 10. It had long been assumed that a slave was an extension of his owner, and that putting pressure on a slave would force his owner to comply with the law. This article extends that provision to the serf: if a defendant hid from a bailiff, the bailiff could detain either his slave or his serf to force him to appear. Chapter 10, article 161 establishes the procedures for conducting a general investigation (poval'nyi obysk). Members of the middle service class (dvoriane and deti boiarskie) were to be interrogated separately, and their testimony was to be recorded separately from that of their slaves and serfs. Notice here that again the serfs are linked with slaves, and both are less full witnesses than their masters. (Further on, however, article 163 decrees that serfs who lied in such investigations were to be fined a rouble, but nothing was said about slaves who lied at all; their owners were fined 30 roubles for their own perjury. Article 261 contains further evidence that slave status had not yet been fully extended to serfs. A member of the middle service class who did not pay his debts could be placed in a righter (pravezh), a form of stocks, where force would be used to compel the debtor to pay. His slave could be put in the righter instead of the debtor, but this did not extend to serfs.) On the other hand, debts could be collected both from the slaves and the serfs of a landholder or estate owner (art. 262). In 1642 peasants had been denied the right to make contracts which, upon default, would have led to their formal enslavement.

At the request of the provincial cavalry delegates to the Assembly of the Land, apracticeborrowedfrom the history ofthe townsmen was soon adopted: the mass dragnet. The difficulty of finding fugitive serfs in the condition of constant labour shortage and the willingness of other lords to take them in was a constant theme of Russian history.[134] The same was true, of course, for townsmen, except that townsmen were likely to flee from one town to another;

the number of urban settlements was limited, and it was comparatively easy for a dragnet to go through urban areas and identify those who did not legally belong there. The magnitude of the difficulty of such endeavours in the vast Russian countryside and the new frontier areas can only be imagined. It was modestly facilitated by the Russian practice of living in villages, however, rather than on isolated farmsteads. Be that as it may, after the Ulozhenie, the government formed dragnet teams which scoured the countryside for fugitive peasants.[135] No doubt the legal practice ofthe mass inquisition (poval'nyi obysk) gave the Russian government practice in running dragnets; the mass inquisi­tion could be called for by litigants, and a team of investigators would go out to the area to survey the region to ask up to several hundred people such a question as, 'Who owned the spotted cow with the crooked horn?' Whichever litigant got the majority won the case. When hunting for fugitive serfs (slaves were thrown in, too), the interrogators asked everyone to prove that he/she lived where he/she was at the moment. If no proof could be offered, the assumption was that the object of the inquisition must belong somewhere else. Torture could be used to find out where that somewhere else was. Then the fugitives were loaded on carts and returned where they belonged. Records survive revealing that some investigators returned more than a thousand runaways.

Creating a legal caste of peasant serfs, the Ulozhenie forbade them to leave their caste. Earlier, a down-and-out peasant could sell him/herself into slav­ery, but this was now forbidden. The government was always short ofmilitary personnel, and occasionally peasants joined the middle service-class cavalry or the lower service-class musketeers, artillerymen or cossacks. That was also categorically forbidden. Becoming a townsman had also been an option. It is doubtful that the townsmen reproduced themselves, and they always wel­comed additions to their numbers who would share the tax burden. Moreover, there were no guilds to keep interlopers out. But rural to urban migration was also forbidden. Nevertheless, it persisted, in spite ofthe law. After the Ulozhenie, the townsmen on several occasions asked that amnesties be granted to fugitive peasants currently living in their midst. The government, anxious to collect the cash taxes paid by townsmen, agreed in 1684,1685 and 1688 not to return fugitive serfs who had been registered in a town in the 1678 census. In 1693, this date was moved up to 1684.⁴³ Regrettably, I know of no way to calculate the economic cost to the Russian economy up until 1689 of the prohibition against rural-urban migration, but there must have been some - just as there unquestionably must have been economic costs from the stratification of the entire society. The fact was that the Muscovite state exhibited its maximalist tendencies in the social sphere, regardless of the economic costs.

In spite of the Ulozhenie, peasants continued to flee, both to other landlords and to the frontiers. About the latter little could be done, and it is not clear that the government was opposed to the settling of the frontier areas in any case.⁴⁴ But the government learned that there was something it could do to inhibit lords from receiving fugitives. The first step was a fine, which had no impact. Then the government decided to confiscate an additional peasant besides the fugitive being returned. This had no impact. So the government raised the number to two. This also had no impact. But when the number was raised to four, would-be recipients of others' fugitive serfs drove them out en masse.⁴⁵ Historians have been able to learn of only a handful of enforcements of this sanction. For the savage Peter the Great, this was still insufficient, so he decreed the death penalty for the receiver of another's serf. Whether this sanction was ever effected is unknown.

The post-Ulozhenie era was replete with legislation on serfs, as we have seen. The last measure which must be mentioned came about as a result of the census of 1678, which uncovered the fact that vast numbers of serfs, now differing little from slaves, had left the tax rolls by selling themselves into slavery. The following year the government solved this problem on 2 September 1679 by unilaterally converting all slaves engaged in agriculture into serfs, that is, putting them on the tax rolls.⁴⁶ This left household slavery as the sole exit for the exploited peasantry, a fact uncovered in the census of 1719. Peter liquidated that problem on 5 February i722, and again on i9 January i723, by making all household slaves subject to the soul tax (a head tax on all males), thus extinguishing the institution of slavery in favour of serfdom.⁴⁷

Ibid., pp. 146-7; PRP, 8 vols. (Moscow: Gosiurizdat, 1952-63), vyp. vii: Pamiatniki prava periodasozdaniiaabsoliutnoi monarkhii. VtoraiapolovinaXVIIv., ed. L. V Cherepnin (1963), pp. 298-30i. See also the decree of 5 March i677, permitting peasants of the Saviour monastery who had settled in the town of Iaroslavl' after the Ulozhenie to remain there (PRP, vyp. vii, p. 297). In 1699 a similar decree was issued for Kazan' (ibid., p. 302).

Hellie, Enserfment, p. 250.

Ibid., pp. 252-3. Additionally, fines of 20 roubles per year per fugitive were to be collected, and offending estate stewards were to be beaten with the knout: Vorms, Pamiatniki, pp. 84-6.

Hellie, Slavery, pp. 686, 697.

Ibid., p. 698.

The census of I678 changed the method of assessment of taxation. Previ­ously, peasants had been taxed on the basis of the quantity and quality of the land they tilled. As one might expect, this led to a diminution of agricultural tillage. So the government decided to tax on the basis of households. The mean household size had been four. The new provision changed the nature ofthe peasant/serf household. Like all economic creatures, the Russians soon figured out a way to 'beat' the tax collector: to crowd as many people into a house as possible. The smoky hut had limited capacity, but fundamentally soli­taries disappeared and the three-generational family was created. The same thing had happened earlier in the Balkans, when the Ottomans had introduced household taxation a few centuries earlier. Mean household size increased to ten, as surviving grandparents, their male children and spouses and their chil­dren all crowded into one hut. Nineteenth-century Slavophiles believed that the extended family was a primordial Slavic peasant institution, but in fact it had been created, really unknowingly, by the powerful Muscovite state. Peter figured out what had happened, and shifted to the system of soul taxation. Crowding so many people into one hut was undoubtedly deleterious for both health and social relations, but it saved money (first, on heat, like the stove ventilating into the room), so that the extended family persisted to 1861, and in many cases to the end of the tsarist regime. This was done under pressure from landlords desiring to maximise rents and peasant communes desiring each household to have maximum disposable income to pay its share of the collectively assessed taxes. Recall that the soul tax was imposed on all males. Only working males actually could pay the tax burden, whereas a widow with five small boys paid nothing, even though five 'souls' were entered in the tax records. Thus the tax burden of a community was collectively assessed and paid by the able-bodied males, who were interested in every household's taxpaying ability to support the demands of the hypertrophic state.

24

Law and society

NANCY SHIELDS KQLLMANN

Addressing the interconnections of 'law and society' in seventeenth-century Muscovy is challenging, because of the complexity of the judicial system. Russia was far from the uniformity in law, adjudication and procedure that the contemporary European Polizeistaat was striving for (and even there the goal was achieved more in the breach than the norm).[136] In its multiplicity of venues and legal norms and in the flexibility of the enforcement of those norms, Russian justice was decidedly medieval.

This is not to say that the state was passive in the legal arena. Codification and centralisation of judicial power were, indeed, key goals of seventeenth-century rulers. But their ambition exceeded reality. Moscow's rulers were hindered by the challenge of administering an empire that was immense, ethnically diverse and riddled with pockets of immunity. This chapter will explore that complexity by surveying the multiple venues of legal proceedings in Muscovy, then by examining judicial practice and finally by surveying changes in the positive law.

Judicial venues

In principle a centralised bureaucratic structure of chancelleries in Moscow and regional governors in the provinces provided the judicial system in the seventeenth century. Chancelleries sent governors, called voevody, to appointed regions. They exercised administrative, fiscal and judicial authority; they often oversaw subordinate officials and courts in smaller towns. On paper the system was hierarchical and empire wide. In practice, however, many groups and regions fell out of range of the governor's authority because of explicit or implicit charters of judicial immunity, religious, ethnic or colonial status, or personal dependency

The Russian Orthodox Church was a key beneficiary of judicial immunity. Collectively the largest landholder in Muscovy in the seventeenth century, the Church had enjoyed fiscal and judicial privileges since the time of Christianisa- tion in 988.[137] The most undisputed immunity enjoyed by the Church was the right to adjudicate cases involving spiritual issues over all Orthodox Christians. In the seventeenth century spiritual issues were defined widely, ranging from blasphemy, heresy and witchcraft to family law, inheritance and divorce. These cases were tried in bishops' courts, with the patriarch as appeal.

More problematic was secular jurisdiction over the Church's dependants. In the seventeenth century the state claimed a role here, providing in the Chancellery of the Great Palace a higher instance for trials of Church depen­dants and clergy (except for the patriarch's people) in secular cases. In practice, however, Church people litigated in a dizzying array of venues.

Since at least the fifteenth century Muscovite grand princes regularly granted charters of judicial, fiscal and/or administrative immunity, or priv­ileges of appeal directly to the tsar, to monasteries, private individuals, col­lectives of artisans and the like, reserving to the tsar only criminal law. The patriarch adjudicated over laymen and clergy in the parishes and monasteries on his lands under an immunity received in 1625 and affirmed throughout the century. Metropolitans, archbishops and bishops or the patriarch also granted immunities to monasteries or communities from their own courts, allowing monastic hierarchs to judge their dependants or allowing appeal to the tsar, not the bishop. Immunities could be limited to a certain type of crime or value of suit; the options were myriad and almost every imaginable combination can be encountered. Although the state proclaimed a policy of curtailing immu­nities in the mid-sixteenth century, they continued to be awarded through the seventeenth. The result was that almost each ecclesiastical community had a different relationship with Church and state courts, often preferring high-level secular courts to Church courts.

In the seventeenth century the state tried to gain jurisdiction over Church people. The Conciliar Law Code of 1649 (hereafter Ulozhenie) affirmedthe patri­arch's judicial autonomy (chapter 12), but created a Monastery Chancellery (chapter 13) for clergy and laymen in all but spiritual suits.[138] This prompted the 1667 Church Council to claim judicial authority over clergy in all affairs, even in criminal cases, where it established the primacy of Church investigators in a shared Church-state criminal trial. The Monastery Chancellery lost its juridical authority and was abolished in 1677, only to be reinstated in 1701 by Peter the Great.

As landlords, Church institutions exercised legal jurisdiction over their lay staff and peasants in petty crime. In principle, criminal cases involving Church dependants were to be judged by the tsar's courts. Even here, however, some immunity charters allowed criminal jurisdiction, and many monasteries rou­tinely usurped this authority and judged and punished criminal suits in-house.[139]In monasteries the hegumen often delegated the task of adjudication to the treasurer or cellarer, who presided over court with a council of monastic brothers; very large monasteries also maintained a network of local judicial officials. Bishops similarly divided their lands into 'tenths' and appointed an official (desiatinnik) in each area. These local judges were so harsh that bish­ops often awarded immunities from them to monasteries or parish churches.[140]The patriarch maintained a hierarchy of central and local judicial offices in his dominions as well. Church courts used Byzantine canon law for spiritual issues and a combination of Church and secular law for secular jurisdiction.[141]

All in all, never in the seventeenth century did one single principle govern the issue of jurisdiction for people associated with the Church. All depended upon one's social status, institutional affiliation and its immunity rights, physical location and type of crime.

A second large incidence of immunity from the tsar's judicial authority related to dependant status, that is, serfdom and slavery. The vast majority of the Muscovite population were peasants and in the seventeenth century a growing portion of them were transferred (by purchase, by tsar's grant) to private landholders. Perhaps 10 per cent of the population were slaves.[142] The right to own peasants and slaves was limited to the Church, the traditional cavalry army (Moscow ranks and provincial gentry) and Moscow merchants (gosti), who also had exclusive rights to ownership of hereditary (votchina) and service tenure (pomest'e) land. Landlords traditionally enjoyed jurisdiction over dependant peasants and slaves in petty disputes and the culmination of enserfment in the 1649 Ulozhenie simply intensified their coercive control. Landlords relied on village communal institutions for basic law and order, overseen by their bailiffs; in the largest estates a bailiff would hold court in a formal venue.[143]

Large areas ofthe Russian Empire, however, did not know serfdom. Serfdom was limited to the most fertile agrarian lands - the centre, the north-west and the expanding southern borderlands. In the north and Siberia the challenges of distance, low yields and labour scarcity made it impossible to keep peasants fixed to land and landlord. In areas without serfdom, peasants enjoyed local self- governance, subordinate to the governor's administration. Similarly enjoying more judicial autonomy than serfs were groups who stood midway between peasants and the privileged military elite, the so-called 'contract servitors'. These included military or quasi-military units such as engineers, artillery, cossacks, musketeers, postal riders. In addition to their military functions, they farmed (land was often granted communally to the group, rather than to individuals) and/or produced and sold goods. They could not own populated land or dependent labour. As we shall see below, jurisdiction over them was complex.

In addition to Church and landlord jurisdiction, much of the population of seventeenth-century Russia was exempt from the central administration in all but criminal cases because of ethnic, religious and colonial status. Muscovy's colonial policy was laissez-faire in the seventeenth century, tolerating diversity in law, judicial institutions and elites.

The acquisition of the key trade depot of Kazan' in 1552 served as a spring­board for Russian expansion into the middle Volga and steppe.[144] Expansion into the steppe was in full swing by the seventeenth century, with fortified lines and frontier outposts staffed by Russians and elites of the Tatar, Mari, Mordva and other native peoples. Such border troops were granted pomest'e as cavalrymen or were enlisted into contract servitor ranks. In the 1650s and 1660s the state also transferred to the southern frontier servitors from recently conquered Smolensk and Polotsk, often also transferring peasants from the centre to populate their lands. All these military servitors and non-enserfed peasants were subject to the governor's authority. But indigenous communi­ties were permitted to use their own administrative and judicial institutions and Islamic or customary law. Natives were subject to the governor only in criminal cases.

Siberia presented an equally complex task of governance when Russia sub­dued the west Siberian khanate in the late sixteenth century. By the mid- seventeenth, Russians had settled in thin lines along the southern steppe fron­tier and had established trade depots along the Ob, Enisei and other rivers to their mouths in the Arctic. The Russian population in Siberia was small, estimated by the end of the century at 25,000, including around 11,000 military servitors, about 2,500 urban dwellers (posadskie) and the rest peasants.

Peasants fled to Siberia from the Russian north, the heartland, the middle Volga area and southern frontier. They farmed their own land and a portion of the tsar's grain fields (which provided military grain supplies). Enserfment did not develop to any great extent, although the Church did own some peasants (by the end of the century about 1,500 peasant households belonged to Siberian monasteries). Russian peasants in Siberia governed themselves in local communes (on the model of the north discussed below) and were subject to the local governor in criminal affairs. Because of the sparseness of settlement and distance from Moscow, governors in Siberia were given longer terms (two to three years) and broader authority than governors in the centre. They were renowned for corruption, ruling like satraps far from Moscow's controlling hand.[145]

Siberian governors also oversaw a far-flung, sparsely settled population of ethnic groups, who were taxed primarily in precious furs. In economy these peoples ranged from settled forest exploitation and hunting to pastoral nomadism of horses and cattle in the steppe to reindeer pastoralism in the Arc­tic to hunting ocean mammals. Their communities were tiny, their languages numbered in the hundreds, most Paleo-Asiatic, unrelated one to the other. Siberian governors prosecuted natives for major crimes and made Russian courts available to Siberian natives as they wished, often making concessions to native customs, even in criminal cases. For petty crimes, governors allowed native communities to govern themselves with native elites, laws and councils.

The situation was equally complex in Russia's relations with the Bashkirs south of the Urals in the seventeenth century. The area was diverse in economy and ethnic groups. The more northern area was primarily agricultural, while Bashkirs settled to the south in the steppe practised pastoral nomadism. The judicial landscape was highly complex. Newly arrived Russians, Tatar peasants and military men, Chuvash, Udmurts, forcibly transferred Polotsk noblemen, all settled in the northern agricultural area, each with different social and political statuses. Some, like the Russian cavalrymen and Polotsk noblemen, received pomest'e with serfs. Service Tatars were equated with contract servi­tors and farmed land that they rented from native Bashkirs. Russian peasants fell into serfdom to military men or the Church, or settled state lands. Bashkir peasants, meanwhile, maintained their traditional customs, institutions and elites.

When Moscow acquired significant lands in left-bank Ukraine and Belarus' in the Khmel'nyts'kyi uprising and the subsequent Russo-Polish wars (ended by peace treaties of 1667,1687), it faced an administrative challenge far different fromthatposedby the sparsely settled farming, forest and steppe communities east of Moscow. The Ukrainian and Belarusian lands, previously part of the parliamentary noble democracy ofthe Commonwealth of Poland and Lithua­nia, were densely and diversely populated. The cossack state, or hetmanate, governed most of the left bank from 1648 into the last third of the eighteenth century. Muscovy placed governors in key centres such as Kiev, Chernigov and Pereiaslav and administered Ukraine through the Little Russian Chan­cellery, or Malorossiiskii prikaz (to 1722). But through treaties renegotiated with each new hetman Moscow allowed the cossack administration to remain essentially unchanged. The hetmanate was divided into approximately six­teen regimental units, run by cossack colonels, who served as head appellate judges for the regional courts in their area. In adjudication they used diverse law codes - decrees of hetmans and tsars, Lithuanian Statutes of 1566 and 1588 and customary law. The result was so complex that the cossack administration commissioned a codification of laws in 1728. The new code - submitted to the Russian Senate in 1743 but not approved - was nevertheless used in the Ukrainian lands in the second half of the eighteenth century.[146]

Pockets of judicial practice outside the hetmanate still existed in Ukraine. Landlords operated their own manorial courts with authority over civil and minor criminal affairs; so also did the Church, which was the largest single proprietor of land. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church (led by the Metropolitan of Kiev) maintained ecclesiastical courts for clerics, using Church law, and also for general issues of marriage, divorce and morality. Uniate Church institutions were almost unknown in this part of the Commonwealth.

Outside the hetmanate Muscovy ruled more directly through governors in Sloboda Ukraine and Zaporozhia. In the sixteenth and seventeenth cen­turies municipal self-government through German law was granted to major towns in Ukraine and Belarus'. About twelve towns in the hetmanate enjoyed such privileges, while smaller towns were privately governed by landlords or ruled by cossack administration. Magdeburg law was maintained for at least a century after Muscovy took over, finally falling into disuse in favour of the hetmanate's law codes by the end of the eighteenth century. After Moscow acquired the Smolensk and upper Oka areas in Belarus', it revoked municipal privileges and transferred the areas to governor control. But tsars affirmed the landholdings and privileges granted to Smolensk noblemen by Polish kings; special rights for the Smolensk nobility were revoked only in 1761.

So, large areas and groups stood beyond the tsar's courts. The judicial arena that was covered by the tsar's centralised system reflected his claims to power. A principal area was criminal law - murder, robbery, theft with material evi­dence, treason, heresy, arson. The tsar also claimed authority over immoveable property, dispensing land in service or hereditary tenure. Accordingly, great attention in seventeenth-century law codes was devoted to the issues of owner­ship and inheritance of land. By the same token, to support the landed cavalry and to produce steady revenues for state expansion, the state concerned itself extensively with social legislation. Not only did it enforce enserfment but it also regulated slavery and limited the mobility of the urban populace. These key areas - criminal, property and social law - were adjudicated by the tsar's governors.

As judge the governor in the seventeenth century tried civil cases.[147] Gov­ernors with large jurisdictions who were accompanied by a state secretary (d'iak) appointed by Moscow could judge cases beyond 20 roubles in value and also land and slave disputes. Governors of smaller towns, without a state secretary, were limited to cases up to 20 roubles in value, after which their corresponding chancellery took over (Ulozhenie chapter 13: article 3).[148] In the­ory criminal cases were done by locally elected criminal officers - the guba elders and swornmen. But by the mid-seventeenth century the guba system was falling under the authority of governors. Guba officers might develop a case and turn it over to the governor to judge, or resolve it jointly with him. Whole areas of the realm did not have guba institutions, and often did not want them. V N. Glaz'ev shows that in the seventeenth century communities often refused to support both a governor and a guba apparatus, since it was too

expensive. [149]

The legal system embraced by the system of governors was uniform across the state in law and procedure, but not in judicial venue. Leaving aside the many areas of immunity discussed above, legal jurisdiction was complex even within the tsar's system. F. Dmitriev argued that the Ulozhenie of 1649 had simplified legal jurisdiction from sixteenth-century complexity to three prin­ciples -jurisdiction by residence, by social status or by type of crime.[150] His simplification is deceptive: the resulting system still provided multiple court systems and judicial personnel, resulting in frequent transfer of venue and quarrels between centre and periphery over jurisdiction.

Residence was the principal determinant of judicial venue. Different chan­celleries administered discrete regions ofthe country, and sent out governorsto their delegated parts of the realm. The Military Service Chancellery (Razriad) administered the southern frontier; the Kazan' Palace and Siberia Chancellery oversaw those areas. A handful of territorial chancelleries called chetverti (Nov­gorod, Ustiug, Kostroma and Galich) oversaw the north-west and northern areas to the Urals. The chancellery that oversaw the governor provided the higher instance for local cases. A significant exception was the city of Moscow, which did not have a governor. There the Moscow Administrative Chancellery enforced law and order for the taxpaying populace of the town.

A governor's administration varied according to the region he governed. Siberia, the middle Volga and the southern frontier were sparsely populated, had a high percentage of servitors of a contract service type, and relatively few taxpaying peasants to pay the costs of elected administration such as the guba system. The governor therefore ruled rather autonomously. But in the north - the lands stretching from the Novgorodian hinterland, to the Dvina watershed, eastward to the Urals and north to the White and Arctic Seas - peasant communities balanced meagre farming with forest exploitation, fishing, hunting, modest artisan work and trade and they organised them­selves into self-governing communes at the regional (volost') and village lev­els here. Those belonging to the large monasteries so dominant in the north (Solovetskii, Kirillo-Belozerskii monasteries) were dependant on them, but the majority of the population was not enserfed, subject only to the tsars. For petty crimes, such as minor theft, brawls, land disputes, disagreements between neighbours, drunkenness, these communities handled their own affairs, with limited oversight by the governor. In criminal affairs they were overseen by governors and sometimes by guba institutions, although these were weakly developed in the north.[151]

Following Dmitriev's second principle - social status - many corporate groups were subordinate in fiscal, administrative and judicial matters to one of the chancelleries in Moscow, bypassing the jurisdiction of the local gov­ernor. The Foreign Affairs Chancellery had jurisdiction over most foreigners visiting Moscow as well as the Don cossacks, while the Foreign Military Chan­cellery had jurisdiction over European soldiers in Russian service. The Postal Chancellery had jurisdiction over post riders, the Stonework for stone and brick-workers on the southern frontier, the Armoury for factory workers, the Musketeer for musketeers and cossacks serving in towns, the Engineers' Chancellery for artillerymen. Privileged Moscow merchants were granted jurisdiction by the Chancellery of the Great Treasury, while the Moscow and Vladimir Judicial Chancelleries judged the higher ranks of landed servitors in civil issues. The Chancellery of the Great Palace was court of appeal for the tsar's (dvortsovye) properties, for non-enserfed communes, and in principle for Church people. When a plaintiff presented a case, he followed the rule that the venue was determined by the defendant's jurisdiction.

Finally, Dmitriev's third principle - type of crime - also determined juris­diction. As we have seen, the Church claimed jurisdiction over spiritual issues. The Felony Chancellery had authority over the criminal law through the guba system. The Slavery Chancellery handled disputes about slave ownership, while the Service Land Chancellery handled probably the greatest volume of litigation in the seventeenth century, over land.

All in all, the Muscovite state was riddled with pockets ofjudicial autonomies within the overarching law asserted by the centre. These pockets included eth­nic, religious and political communities in non-Russian colonial areas; courts of private landlords and the Church; ecclesiastical courts for religious and moral issues. The law interacted with 'society' in myriad venues and laws depending upon one's social status, religion, ethnicity and crime.

The practice of the law

The 1649 Ulozhenie declared itself authoritative over 'all people of the Mus­covite state, from highest to lowest rank' (10: 1). In practice we see the full social range active in litigations. Even slaves could initiate suits, testify and offer evidence. Landlords also represented their dependants in court. Women could participate in court cases, although they were often represented by male kinsmen and spouses when such were available. Widows could litigate on their own behalf. Some limitations were introduced in this century: minors could not take an oath or sue (10: 185; 14: 5); the mentally incompetent could not litigate; peasants could not sue their landlords, nor spouses their partners, nor children their parents; freed slaves could not sue their former masters (10:174, 176-7).[152]

A striking aspect of Muscovite judicial practice in the seventeenth century was the lack of a specialised class of lawyers serving as judges or advocates. Muscovy had no professional legal schools. Most judges did not specialise in judging - provincial governors were jacks of all trades and relied upon the expertise of local under-secretaries or state secretaries assigned from Moscow chancelleries. The situation was somewhat different in the chancelleries, partic­ularly by the second half ofthe century, when judges began to serve consistently in one chancellery, building up expertise.

Moscow's bureaucratic stratum - state secretaries (d'iaki) and under­secretaries (pod'iachie) - constituted a repository of practical judicial knowl­edge.[153] These men wrote the documentation for stages of a suit, selected relevant excerpts from law codes to advise the judge and hired themselves out to write petitions for litigants. We also find parish priests writing petitions and signing documents in place of illiterate litigants. But in the seventeenth century these literate judicial experts did not develop into a notarial class or a stratum of lawyers and legal advocates.

Corruption and bribery were constants in this judicial system, so much so that we do well to reorient our thinking on the topic. Local governors lived off fees collected injudicial and bureaucratic activities and from payments in cash and kind from their communities. They stood in a gift-exchange relationship with their community: they expected gifts from their subjects and the subjects in turn expected attention and concern. Muscovites recognised several types of gifts to judges and officials, only one of which - excessive fees for services not rendered - was considered illegal. The others - gifts at holidays, gifts to the official's family - were just considered the cost of doing business.[154]

For reasons of lack of specialisation, or the press of other duties, or conflicts over venue, or corruption or a host of other causes, the law was not a highly professional arena in seventeenth-century Russia. Delay was endemic, as well as complaints against judges for favouritism and enmity. Moscow chancelleries were responsive to replacing a judge when a litigant complained, and law codes are replete with exhortations, incentives and punishments to ensure speedy and honest justice. The late seventeenth century saw several efforts to reform governors' authority to make it less predatory on the taxpaying and merchant populations, and in a few celebrated cases governors were punished for excessive graft and corruption.[155]

Muscovite law in the seventeenth century knew two types of procedure - accusatory (sud) and inquisitorial (sysk), the latter being used primarily but not exclusively in criminal cases. In an accusatory trial, litigants presented wit­nesses and evidence, while in the inquisitorial the judge directed the search for evidence. Accusatory suits, discussed in Ulozhenie chapter 10, were used primarily for material loss - land disputes, damage to crops and farm equip­ment, contracts and debts. A typical litigation began, even in criminal cases, with a complaint that listed the circumstances and value of the loss. The plaintiff couched his petition in formulaic language suggesting his personal dependency on the tsar. Each social class used a self-deprecating diminutive to describe itself - servitors styled themselves the 'slaves' of the tsar, clergy, the tsar's 'pilgrims', peasants and urban taxpayers, the tsar's 'orphans'. Litigants used the diminutive version of first names: Ivan presented himself as 'Ivashko', Vasilii as 'Vaska'. The conceit was that the tsar was personally bestowing his justice and mercy on the litigant, through his representative, the judge.

In an accusatory trial, the judge summoned the litigants, itself a complex process due to the expanse of the realm and demands of military service. Laws of the seventeenth century established detailed rules about time limits for appearing for trial, default for late appearance and norms for delay of trial.

Once assembled, both sides of the story were heard and the litigants presented evidence. Written documentation was preferred; each side could also present witnesses and reject any ofthe other's proposed witnesses.[156] The lawmandated that if they agreed on a small number of witnesses, they were to abide by that testimony. In the absence of documents and definitive witnesses, judges put litigants into a face-to-face confrontation (ochnaia stavka), or as a last resort asked the litigants to submit to an oath, which usually resulted in one side settling with the other before taking the oath.[157]

Many cases were not carried to conclusion, judging by extant records. Some of this might be loss of records over time. But a great proportion of cases were settled out of court, demonstrating the persistence of traditional concepts of distributive justice. Community sentiment valued social harmony and stability over strife and vindication. Even criminal cases were settled, contravening the law. Murder cases, for example, might be settled so that an aggrieved widow would be provided with upkeep for herself and her children. Other cases would be abandoned before conclusion because of expense, or preoccupations of military service, or waning of interest.

In an inquisitorial suit, the judge took the active role. When a complaint of major crime came to him, he swung into action, ordering the arrest of the accused, the investigation of the crime scene, corpse or injured party, and the defendant and other important parties to be put on surety bond (poruka; whereby a group of friends, neighbours and/or kinsmen guaranteed that they will show up for trial). Depending upon the alleged crime, the defendant was held in jail or released on surety.

The judge collected evidence through a few means of questioning. Wit­nesses could be questioned individually or the judge could order a survey of the community. Traditionally reputation and standing in the community had been a factor in assessing guilt and punishment in Muscovite litigation. By the mid-seventeenth century, however, the community inquest was declining in significance in favour of more 'rational', that is, eyewitness, evidence. The inquest was finally abolished in 1688 because of abuses.

The judge's most powerful weapon in questioning the accused and others implicated by him was torture, regarded as an ordeal of God. Such question­ing proceeded in stages: simple questioning, questioning in the presence of executioner and instruments of torture and under torture. The goal was to elicit confession and information about intent and accomplices. The methods of torture were not ornate, usually flogging, but for very serious accusations burning with fire was done.

A judge resolved a case after the entire transcript of the proceedings had been copied afresh and read to him. This lengthy document included copies of the initial and subsequent petitions presented by litigants in the course of the trial, all the judge's orders to subordinates, all their reports, copies of surety documents, excerpts of relevant laws and transcripts of torture sessions and community investigations. In most criminal trials the governors or guba authorities sent the case to Moscow for decision, although the 1669 Criminal Articles allowed investigators (syshchiki) for very serious crimes to resolve cases and carry out punishments, including execution, on the spot.

In criminal cases, judges rarely invoked the full terror of the law. They often sentenced felons to punishments less severe than prescribed by law, taking into account the circumstances of the crime, intent and community standing. In 1650, for example, a woman who admitted conspiring to murder her husband was spared execution because the community vouched for her character and maligned that of the deceased.[158] Extending the fiction that the litigant was appealing to and being judged by the tsar, after sentencing judges often proffered 'mercy' in his name, reducing punishments. Exceptions to this flexible sentencing pattern concerned the most serious crimes - political treason, heresy and witchcraft and the like - for which punishments were very severe.

In cases where material damage was at stake, losing defendants paid court fees, the value of the suit and sometimes a fine for losses incurred in the trial process (volokita). In cases of physical or symbolic harm (dishonour), sanctions ranged from fines to short periods of incarceration, exile to hard labour and a range of corporal punishment from beating to flogging to execution (var­ious types of corporal punishment in this period are illustrated in Plate 21). Punishment was not administered equally across social classes. Although the military servitors did not enjoy explicit protections from corporal punishment, de facto they were rarely subject to it, either because of a provision of 'mercy' or because the law avoided it.

When cases were appealed, it usually took the form of judges applying to a higher instance - for example, from the governor to his chancellery to the boyar council and the tsar - to resolve a disputed or difficult case. Corporal punishment, even execution, was administered promptly. The collection offees and fines could drag on for years, either because of poverty or vindictiveness. Many case transcripts end with repeated appeals to the court to force a losing litigant to settle his obligations.

Muscovite judicial practice was in many ways more medieval than early modern in its distributive justice: it widely used settlement out of court, counte­nanced reputation and community standards as evidence or mitigating factors; it bestowed mercy to lessen sentences and considered torture a credible form of evidence collection. Nevertheless, as the century developed, similarities with contemporary European practice emerged, such as a rationalisation of forms of evidence, standardisation of norms and procedure, a heightening of punishments and a more extensive claim of tsarist power.

Codifications of the law

The seventeenth century was remarkable for the generation and codification of secular law. Going into the seventeenth century, judges had available to them several codes of law. The Russian Law (Russkaia pravda), dating to Kievan times, was edited in an abbreviated version around 1630, but where and how its norms, that emphasised debt, slaveholding and punishments, were current is unclear. The Law Code (sudebnik) of 1550 of 100 articles, which extended the 1497 Law Code and was later extended by over seventy-three supplementary articles, clearly remained in force. It was primarily an advisory to judges, setting fees for services in an attempt to limit judicial corruption, decreeing punishments for some crimes and setting out procedural rules and standards of evidence. The 1550 sudebnik was followed by a longer (231 articles) edition of 1589 for the north and a compiled sudebnik of 1606-7 that added later decrees on landholding, debts and enserfment and developed the inquisitorial procedure. It was notable for being divided into thematic chapters, a first step towards more rational codification.[159] In addition, the Lithuanian Statute of 1588 was translated and disseminated in Moscow chancelleries, and Byzantine secular law became influential by the 1620s.[160]

In the seventeenth century the law proliferated. Moscow chancelleries kept books of laws and precedents that guided their work; these were occasionally compiled and then added to; at mid-century they became the basis for relevant portions of the 1649 Ulozhenie. Such ustavnye knigi from the first half of the seventeenth century are known from the Felony, Slavery, Great Palace, Moscow Administrative, Service Land and Postal chancelleries.[161]

Local governors made do with handwritten copies of the sudehniki and of decrees they received from the centre. The 1649 Ulozhenie was the first law code to be issued in print (about 2,500 copies by 1651) and it was distributed to local governors. Another body of law relevant in the seventeenth century comprised charters granting immunities and privileges to various corporate entities, as we have seen.

The 1649 Ulozhenie codified the preceding half-century of law and added some innovations, based on legal sources enumerated above. It was massive - in twenty-five thematic chapters, it included 967 articles. The second half of the century saw feverish legislation, presaging Peter the Great's legislative blitz of the early eighteenth century. By one count, 1,583 new decrees were issued in the second half of the seventeenth century, reflecting the state's desire to regulate society and mobilise resources through the law. Many new decrees concerned public order, reflecting European concepts of Polizeistaat.

New compendia appeared in various fields: in 1653 and 1667, tariff and trade regulations; in 1669, a new criminal code; in 1676,1680 and 1681, codifications on service tenure and hereditary land.[162] General codifications to replace the Ulozhenie were ordered in 1681 and 1695, to no avail. In 1700 Peter the Great created a commission to codify the laws but it too was fruitless. The Ulozhenie remained the standard in most areas of the law until late in the eighteenth century.

The most significant changes in positive law were made in the realm of social legislation.[163] Laws defined social groups and limited access into privileged ranks and egress from dependent ranks. The Ulozhenie's list of compensation for insult to honour is telling: longer (almost eighty articles) than those of the 1550 and 1589 sudehniki, it included ecclesiastical and lay social ranks from the patriarch and boyars to peasants and slaves (10: 26-99). Its guiding principle - that all people have honour, but higher ranks deserve greater compensation - reflects the law code's resolute emphasis on social hierarchy.

The military service class cemented its position with the Ulozhenie by the full enserfment of the peasantry, a particularly direct benefit to the provin­cial gentry, strapped for land and labour. Wealthy landholders (including the Church) were inconvenienced by the Ulozhenie's new prohibitions on their taking in runaway peasants or purchasing lands in the provinces, but were by no means severely hampered in their social and economic ascendancy.

The Ulozhenie devoted significant attention to the needs and duties of the privileged military elite, Moscow-based and provincial. Chapter 7 ofthe Ulozhe­nie concerned itself with their conduct during service, including strict punish­ment for desertion from service and from battle. Laws prohibiting gentry to sell themselves into slavery were repeated, as was the requirement of mandatory service (it was gradually reduced in the last quarter of the century, only to be reinstated by Peter I). Landed servitors enjoyed economic and legal privileges: preferential access to the grain market in time of shortage, lower tax rates on many commercial transactions, a higher rate of ransom if captured in war.

Major attention was given to landholding in the Ulozhenie (chapters 16 and 17) and legislation of 1676, 1680 and 1681. Norms, generally more theoretical than enforceable, were established for land grants to servitors. Over the course of the century service tenure and hereditary types of land converged in law and practice; there was an active market in the sale, mortgaging and devolution of service-tenure land and purchased hereditary estates. Norms of inheritance recognised this, and widened women's access to landholding despite legal attempts to limit it. By law widows and minor children and unmarried daugh­ters were granted portions of their deceased husband's or father's pomest'e for upkeep but had very limited access to hereditary lands. As Valerie Kivelson has shown, however, families disregarded the law to ensure that widows, sons and daughters were taken care of. Practising partible inheritance, they awarded almost as much land of all types to women for upkeep or dowry as to male

kin.[164]

Other groups - the Church, merchants - benefited from legal change in the seventeenth century. Since the mid-sixteenth century the state had been legis­lating against donating votchina land to the Church; these laws were repeated in the Ulozhenie, but ignored. Church landholding boomed in the seventeenth century. Church institutions continued to enjoy immunities from the local courts, despite the brief tenure of the Monastery Chancellery. Laws of the seventeenth century extended the privileges of Moscow merchants (gosti) and the other two merchant corporations (gostinnaia and sukonnaia sotni). Of the three groups, only gosti could trade abroad. Otherwise, all enjoyed the right to own hereditary land, to be immune from governors' courts, to distil and keep spirits and to enjoy various tax breaks and privileges. The tax privileges of the musketeers and cossacks were affirmed in the Ulozhenie as well (chapters

23-4).

The townsmen, like the provincial gentry, received significant attention in the Ulozhenie (chapter 19), resulting from their persistent petitioning to the state in the first half of the century. It provided that townsmen who had fled to join other social groups - musketeers, cossacks, merchant corporations - should be returned to their taxpaying town commune. Laws forbade townsmen to put themselves in dependent status. Most importantly, the Ulozhenie abolished the tax-exempt neighbourhoods of Church and wealthy landlords that had caused unfair competition to urban taxpayers, awarding taxpaying townsmen monopolies on urban trade, manufacturing and landholding. But, on the other hand, townsmen were in effect enserfed by the Ulozhenie - they were registered in their town commune and the statute of limitations to track down runaway townsmen was abolished. They had become a hereditary social class, but, like the peasants, an immobile one.

In the area of trade the seventeenth century saw significant codification, in response to Russian merchants' petitions against foreign competition and as manifestation of the state's developing mercantilism. The Ulozhenie of 1649 devoted little attention to foreign trade, but it addressed some domestic trade and taxation issues. It regulated tolls, ferry fees and bridge fees, assuring exemp­tion from them to servitors and foreigners and prohibiting fraudulent tolls (chapter 9); it established a sliding scale of rates to ransom Russian captives in war according to social status (chapter 8); it regulated illicit taverns, production of spirits and sale and use of tobacco (chapter 25).

Soon after the Ulozhenie, trade regulations of 1653 addressed issues of foreign trade. They instituted a single trade tariff for the transit of commercial goods for domestic merchants, and a higher, uniform rate for foreign merchants. These norms were included in the much broader 1667 New Commercial Regulations. Authored in part by the progressive reformer A. L. Ordin-Nashchokin, the articles also removed trade and the customs service from the jurisdiction of local governors, and further restricted foreigners to trading at the border towns in a limited range of goods and only at certain times of the year. Its protectionist norms remained in force until 1755.[165]

Peasants and slaves suffered most from seventeenth-century social legisla­tion. The Ulozhenie culminated the process of enserfment that began in earnest in the late sixteenth century. By the seventeenth century, laws forbade peasants to move from their landlords; the Ulozhenie capped the process by ending the statute of limitations on the recapture of runaways (chapter 11). Thereafter the state committed significant resources into sending investigators (syshchiki) to chase down fugitive serfs and townsmen. In the second half of the seventeenth century peasants could sue and be a witness in courts; they paid taxes, could be tried for crimes and could hold local elected offices. But gradually, in a process that reached its apex in the eighteenth century, peasants fell into more servile dependency on their lords. Serf owners could judge and corporally punish their peasants for all but criminal offences, they could force their serfs and slaves to pay their debts and, although serfs were legally supposed to be tied to their lands, de facto landlords moved them at will.

Even more dependent on their lords were slaves. Of the many categories of slavery cited in Muscovite sources, in the seventeenth century the most common was limited contract slavery (kabal'noe kholopstvo). In the seventeenth century this was hereditary slavery for the life of the owner. The state's interest in slavery in the seventeenth century was to reap fees from the registration of slaves and to limit the phenomenon, since slavery deprived the state oflabour power and tax revenues. The Ulozhenie devoted its second-longest chapter to slavery (chapter 20). After 1649 the state captured more of the productive power of slaves by including rural slaves in taxation when the household basis was introduced in the late 1670s and by merging household slaves with serfs in 1722.

Social legislation in the seventeenth century mobilised productive resources by binding people to a limited number of social ranks. Practice, however, often contradicted this trend. Slavery persisted, despite attempts to keep individuals from selling themselves into it. Peasants fled from serfdom to the frontier and to Siberia; contract servitors on the frontier transgressed the monopolies on landholding, serf ownership or trade guaranteed to other groups. Fanatic in the heartland at tracking down runaway serfs and townsmen and fixing people to social categories because of its great needs for labour and income, in the colonies the state tolerated social and legal diversity. Seventeenth-century leg­islation did not pursue a single goal of social control or Polizeistaat uniformity, but profited from an expedient diversity.

Nevertheless the state's ambition to aggrandise its stature through the law is striking in seventeenth-century legislation. The first several chapters ofthe 1649 Ulozhenie constitute an innovation. Borrowed from the 1588 Lithuanian Statute and motivated most likely by the social unrest of the 1640s, they introduce the concept of lese majeste, focusing on assaults to the state's dignity, embodied in the Church hierarchs and cathedrals, the tsar and his palaces, and in seals and official documents representing his authority (chapters 1-6).

Criminal law became harsher in comparison with sixteenth-century codes, under the influence of foreign, probably Byzantine, law codes (Ulozhenie chap­ters 21 and 22; 1669 New Articles). Harsher corporal punishments were intro­duced - burying alive, nose-splitting, branding and other forms of mutilation. Torture was prescribed more widely, the death penalty was applied to over sixty crimes (almost twice that number in codes of Peter the Great's time). Public floggings and executions were prescribed to deter others but the death penalty was not used as widely as in some West European countries of the time and was not carried out with such 'spectacle of suffering'.[166] Executions were usually performed by hanging within a day of sentencing. The Church schism in the second half of the century elicited an escalation in corporal punishment. Secular courts judged schismatics as traitors as well as heretics and inflicted extreme punishments. Similarly punishments for witchcraft and sorcery, as well as for recidivist crime, were harsher than those for less charged criminal acts.

For lesser crimes, the death penalty was often commuted to exile to capture the labour power of criminals. Long-term imprisonment was rarely used as punishment, but towns kept jails for the detention of criminals awaiting trial and people could stay in prison many years paying off fines from court cases (21: 92).

In the seventeenth century various principles affecting responsibility for crime were introduced into Russian law that were developed more thor­oughly in the eighteenth century. Notions of intent, negligence and malice first appeared; the law found defence of self and property to be exonerating, and punished unintentional assault and homicide more leniently than inten­tional. Drunkenness was considered a mitigating circumstance (21: 69, 71, 88). In the realm of civil law, unlike criminal, much regularisation but little sub­stantive change occurred. Chapters in the Ulozhenie (14,15,18) concerned oath- taking, settled cases and fees for documents. The Ulozhenie's longest chapter (10) addressed judicial corruption, courtroom procedure and civil suits. By the end of the century Moscow's legal heritage was rich and complex, but scattered in a panoply of thematic compendia and individual decrees and precedents.

Society interacted with law in a multitude of ways in seventeenth-century Muscovy. Traditional distributive justice shaped adjudication; the multiplic­ity of norms and venues undermined judicial consistency. But the trend was nevertheless towards a greater rationalisation. Codification was proceeding, standardised norms of record-keeping were being established; standards of evidence favoured rational proof. Scholars have deemed these trends 'abso­lutist'. So also might one term the concept of'the common good' that appears in the law by the end of the century. The concept that the state uses law to serve the public good came to court circles from Ukraine by the 1680s and inspired many of the projects of military and bureaucratic reform of that decade. Despite its complexity, seventeenth-century law provided Peter the Great with a firm foundation when he launched his bold effort to standardise law and administration on the 'well-ordered police state' model in the next century.

Urban developments

DENIS J. B. SHAW

The seventeenth century was a difficult period for Russia, as it appears to have been for much of Europe. Yet this is a very broad generalisation, difficult to substantiate from the limited evidence and paying scant heed to geographical and chronological differences. After 1613 Russia was able to enjoy the benefits of a stable dynasty, a situation in marked contrast to the anarchic times which went before. And it was a realm still undergoing vigorous expansion and colonisation. Such discordant processes were naturally reflected in the life of Russia's towns. Fortunately the sources which permit the study of urban developments are richer and fuller for this period than they are for the sixteenth century and they have been better explored by historians. But they are all too often sporadic and uneven, and their meaning sometimes obscure. This chapter will consider a number of facets of urbanism in the period. It will also address two issues, namely the symbolic and religious role of towns and their physical morphology, which do not figure in Chapter 13 on the sixteenth century but which can be profitably studied for both periods taken together.

The urban network

As was the case in the sixteenth century, the legal status of towns in the seven­teenth remained uncertain and the places referred to as 'towns' (goroda) in the sources were often fortresses with little or no commercial function, or some­times they did have a trading function but lacked a posad population.[167] Some 'towns' even had no subsidiary district (uezd), such as the threegorodki (literally, 'little towns') of Kostensk, Orlov and Belokolodsk built on the Belgorod Line near Voronezh in the middle of the century or, it appears, the nearby private town of Romanov which belonged to the tsar's kinsman, boyar N. I. Romanov.[168]Equally other places, like the monastic settlement of Tikhvin Posad towards the north-west, had commercial functions but were not referred to as towns. Adopting a catholic definition of the term, French has argued that there were around 220 towns in Russia at the beginning of a century which witnessed the appearance of about a hundred new ones during its course.[169] Vodarskii, however, argued for a stricter, Marxist definition of a town as a place having both a legal commercial suburb (posad) and a commercial function. On this basis he recognised 160 towns in 1652, rising to 173 in 1678 and 189 by 1722.[170]

The appearance of many new towns in Russia during the course of the seventeenth century is largely explained by the process of frontier expansion and colonisation of new territories. In the west many towns were acquired as the state expanded its frontiers in that direction. To the east numerous new towns were built as the Russian state took control of more and more of Siberia. The first Russian town on the Pacific, Okhotsk, was founded in 1649. Many Siberian towns remained quite small, however. Thus Vodarskii names nineteen principal administrative centres in Siberia for 1699, only thirteen of which were towns by his definition. According to his figures, at the end of the century Siberia had a total of only 2,535 posad households.[171] More significant in terms of town founding was Russia's southern frontier west of the Urals. Here a concerted effort was made from the 1630s to 1650s to set up a series of forti­fied towns along and behind the new Belgorod and Simbirsk military lines.[172]Subsequently, in the second half of the century, many new towns appeared in the forest-steppe and steppe south and east of these lines.

A number of studies have been made of the broad population data for towns, using the rather richer sources which are available for this period.[173]

The latter include cadastral surveys, census books and associated enumera­tions which provide statistics on numbers of posad households, most notably in censuses of 1646-7 and 1678-9. Additionally there are enumerations dat­ing from 1649-52 which record the households of traders and handicrafts people, many in 'white places',[174] which were added to the posady of towns as a result of the 1649 Legislative Commission (see below). Also important are enumerations of military servitors and 'able-bodied' personnel under­taken for towns in various years, usually under the auspices of the Military Chancellery (Razriadnyi prikaz). Most notable among these is a military cen­sus for 1678.[175] Vodarskii has provided urban household data for 212 towns (plus Siberian towns taken together) for 1630-50, 1670-80 and 1722 based on Smirnov's data for 1646-7 and 1649-52 and on his own analyses for the later dates.[176] Figure 25.1 reproduces his data for towns having 500 or more posad households in the seventeenth century His data for 1722 are omitted. For comparison the table also lists numbers of posad households recorded for the latter part of the sixteenth century where available, based on the study by Eaton.[177]

The data are too uncertain and too scanty to allow solid conclusions to be drawn about urban growth trends, though perhaps the apparent sharp fall in the size of the posad in some commercial centres (Kaluga, Nizhnii Novgorod, Novgorod, Suzdal') between the late sixteenth century and the i640s is worthy of note. Moscow was clearly dominant, as in the previous century, although once again the sources are sparse.[178] In addition to Moscow, the largest towns, with over 1,000 posad households (Vologda, Kazan', Kaluga, Kostroma, Nizhnii Novgorod, Iaroslavl') were all old towns which dated from before the sixteenth century and, apart from Kazan', all having a long history of connection with Muscovy. They were all situated on major river and trading routes. The fall of Novgorod from this group over the previous century no doubt reflects the troubles of the latter half of the sixteenth century and the early seventeenth, together with the problems of accessing the Baltic (see Chapter 13). The disappearance of Smolensk is also significant, connected to its loss to Poland down to the middle years of the century. The wars with

Poland badly affected Russo-Polish trade, which did not in fact recover until after about 1750.[179]

Eaton has ascribed the apparent fall in the size of the posad in some of the biggest towns (Vologda, Kazan', Kostroma, Nizhnii Novgorod and Iaroslavl') between 1652 and 1678 to general lack of economic buoyancy in the latter half of the century compared to the apparent recovery in the first half. He thus questions those Soviet scholars who took a more optimistic view, regarding the century as the time when the 'all-Russian market' appeared, following Lenin's dictum. It may be that Vodarskii exaggerated the overall growth in the total number of posad dwellers in Russia between the two dates, although numbers do seem to have grown absolutely. The sluggish growth or even stagnation of some of the older towns in central Muscovy was probably offset by greater economic vigour on some of the frontiers.[180]

The official posad dwellers were, of course, by no means the only residents of Russian towns in the seventeenth century. According to Vodarskii, they constituted only 34 per cent of the total urban population in 1646, 44 per cent in 1652 (after the addition of the 'white places'), and 41 per cent in 1678. Of greater numerical significance were the state servitors or military personnel who formed 53 per cent in 1652 and 45 per cent by 1678.[181] Figure 25.1, which shows only the towns with 500 posad households or more, omits some of those with really big urban garrisons. Belgorod, for example, recorded only 44 posad households in 1646 but 459 servitor households in 1650. Kursk recorded 270 and 396 respectively, Sevsk none and 6,017, Voronezh 85 and 1,135, and Astrakhan' none and 3,350.[182] Servitors often engaged in trade and craft activity, especially before 1649, though many were paid and others lived by agrarian pursuits, particularly in the south. In the 1640s the bigger urban garrisons were clearly located in Moscow, along the vulnerable western and southern frontiers, and at three strategic points on the Volga (Nizhnii Novgorod, Kazan' and Astrakhan') (see Map 25.1).

In addition to the posad dwellers and military personnel, towns had other elements in their populations, not all of whom were recorded in the various censuses. Depending on the size and location of the town, these would include state officials and higher or middle-ranking servitors, their dependents, clergy and their dependents, cottars (bobyli), peasants, beggars and other unofficial

groups, and sometimes foreigners and non-Russian peoples. To measure the level of urbanisation in Russia by considering only the proportion of the total population who were posad dwellers (a legal rather than an occupational or social category) is therefore quite misleading.

Russian towns of this period have often been described as static with little commercial vivacity and, at best, sluggish in growth. There is some truth in this picture for, as we have noted already, the seventeenth century was a difficult period. Sluggishness in a demographic sense, however, was a normal charac­teristic of early modern (pre-industrial) towns all over Europe.[183] Furthermore such assessments often overlook a most important feature of Russian towns in this period - their significance not as individual places but in the broader urban network which was developing across the Russian state. In other words towns had a pivotal role in the building of the state, acting as co-ordinating points for all kinds of activities which helped bind the state together. It is in this sense that de Vries talks of'structural urbanisation'.[184] It is this issue which forms the focus of the rest of this chapter.

Urban society and administration

The establishment of the Romanov dynasty in 1613 was quickly followed by moves to pacify and control the extensive territories of the state. Towns played a significant role in this process. Towns had long been regarded as admin­istrative centres for their surrounding districts or uezdy. This function was now strengthened as the office of voevoda, or military governor, which was an appointment of the central government, was now extended from the frontier regions to central and northern towns. The voevoda was now the tsar's rep­resentative in the locality, charged with upholding the state's interests and overseeing both military and civil matters within his area of jurisdiction. In these tasks he was aided by a small bureaucracy of officials centred in the governor's office (prikaznaia izba). Nowhere perhaps was the voevoda's function more apparent than on the vulnerable southern frontier where the entire defensive and civilian life of each town and its district was meant to be organised by the voevoda with the strictest eye on security.[185] It was also on the frontier that the closer co-ordination of the town's functions as nodes in the state's military and administrative structures at local level was pioneered. Here the founding and development of each town, and its subsequent life and defensive role, was the immediate concern of the Military Chancellery in Moscow. By the middle of the century that chancellery was attempting to improve defensive co-ordination between the towns by designating military districts (razriady) under the jurisdiction of one central town. The first per­manent one was established in the i640s and i650s centred on Belgorod. This was followed by other frontier districts (Sevsk, Smolensk, Novgorod, Kazan', Tambov) and, in the last quarter of the century, by some in the country's inte­rior (Moscow, Vladimir, Riazan'). This move was clearly a harbinger of Peter the Great's provincial reform in the early eighteenth century and was moti­vated by some of the same goals - to improve control and co-ordination over localities.[186]

The office of voevoda, characterised by a continual tendency to interfere in local affairs and not a little corruption, rarely sat well with the felt interests of urban communities or with the functions of locally elected officials like the police elders (gubnye starosty) and land elders (zemskie starosty) who were invested with the responsibility of carrying out certain key functions on behalf of the state. As has been remarked so often, the latter's elected status did not imply any real measure of urban autonomy. But numerous tensions arose out of the primitive character of the system of administration as well as from the conflicting nature of the state's goals - for example, between the need to raise as much revenue as possible from the towns, on the one hand, and the desire to foster urban trade and commerce on the other. Most towns, except the smaller frontier forts, were multifunctional, but the different functions were not always easily reconcilable.

The fragmented character of urban society which characterised sixteenth- century towns continued to be a feature of the seventeenth. However, as explained in Chapter 23, the situation was somewhat simplified by the Ulozhenie of 1649 which abolished the 'white' (tax privileged) status of many ecclesiastical and private suburbs and added them to the posad. According to Vodarskii's cal­culations, the total number of male posad dwellers in Russian towns rose from about 83,000 in 1646 to some 108,000 in 1652, a rise very largely accounted for by the effects of the Ulozhenie. The great majority of the households confiscated by the state in 1649 were in fact Church and monastic ones.[187] There had long been resentment on the part of the 'black' posad dwellers over commercial competition from their more privileged neighbours in the 'white' suburbs, and the 1649 reform was stimulated by a series of urban riots over this and other issues the previous year. However, another effect of the reform was to strengthen the attachment of the posad dweller to the posad where he lived. Henceforth the posad dweller was to stay put and share the burden of taxation and service laid upon the posad community as a whole by the government. He was not to move elsewhere, even if superior commercial opportunities seemed to warrant it. Similarly, those posad traders who were discovered to be living in non-urban centres (often engaged in trade there) were to be returned to their own posad, whilst no posad dweller was to 'commend' himself (sell himself into slavery, usually by reason of debt) to a wealthy landowner or to the Church.[188] In this way not only was the posad consolidated as a source of revenue for the state but its role as a co-ordinator of the commercial life of the country was strengthened.

Urban commerce

We have seen that the 1649 Ulozhenie abolished the 'white places', added their inhabitants to the ranks of the 'black' posad dwellers and tied the latter to the posad by forbidding migration. It also had a number of other implications. Thus article 6 of chapter 19 (the chapter dealing with the townspeople) orders any agricultural peasants from hereditary or service estates who have shops, ware­houses or salt boilers in Moscow or other towns to sell them to members of the posad community and return to their estates. 'Henceforth no one other than the sovereign's taxpayers shall keep shops, warehouses and salt boilers.'[189] Thus the posad community was guaranteed a virtual monopoly over urban trade. This monopoly was constrained by two exceptions. Firstly, article 11 permit­ted the minor servitors of provincial towns, namely musketeers, cossacks and dragoons who were engaged in commercial enterprises and kept shops to con­tinue with those activities provided they paid customs duties and the annual shop tax. Since, however, they were not members of the posad community but engaged in the tsar's service, they were freed from other urban taxes and the compulsory service obligations of the townsmen.[190] Commercial activ­ity was probably essential to the livelihoods of such poorly paid groups. By contrast, other minor servitors (gunners, artillerymen, gatekeepers, state car­penters and smiths) who were engaged in commerce and trade were obliged to pay the same taxes and render the same services as the townsmen (perhaps because their military duties were such that they had more opportunity to engage in commercial activities).[191] The indulgence granted to the musketeers and other minor servitors was particularly important to the southern frontier towns where the 'black' posad dwellers were at first a minority and much trade was in the hands of servitors.[192] The other exception to the posad dwellers' monopoly over trade was made in article 17 of chapter 19 which permitted peasants coming to town with goods for sale to trade those goods in the mar­ketplace from their carts or from boats but forbade them to buy or rent shops.[193]Peasants were similarly prevented from holding taxable houses in town.