[6]
1500–1600: AGRARIAN SOCIETIES WEST OF THE VOLGA

In agrarian regions west of the Volga, we see more evidence of the technological and commercial dynamism of the sixteenth century. This chapter will briefly describe the role of the Ottoman Empire and Lithuania/Poland in the region, before focusing on the growing power of Muscovy.

OUTER EURASIAN OR BORDERLAND POLITIES

By 1500, Lithuania/Poland and the Ottoman Empire both had extensive interests in Inner Eurasia. Large parts of Lithuania/Poland were within Inner Eurasia, while the Ottoman Empire had some pastoralist populations and a strong symbolic, historical, and religious connection with the pastoralists of Crimea and the Pontic steppes. Nevertheless, both Lithuania/Poland and the Ottoman Empire were anchored in Outer Eurasia. That's where most of their concerns were, and that is why neither polity committed fully to the difficult and expensive task of building a durable empire within Inner Eurasia.

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

The Ottoman Empire became a significant Inner Eurasian power after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 encouraged Ottoman expansion into the Black Sea region. Between 1500 and 1600 the Ottoman Empire expanded to control eastern Anatolia, Egypt and Syria, parts of Arabia, and much of Hungary, and its population grew from c.12 million to more than 20 million.1 With control over the eastern Mediterranean, the Ottoman Empire dominated trade routes from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean, and Ottoman fleets could be found in both oceans. Indeed, it was the Ottoman monopoly over trade routes from the Indian Ocean that drove European navigators to seek alternative routes to Asia around Africa or across the Atlantic.

By the early sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was one of the world's great powers. Its vast territories yielded the recruits, the cash, and almost all the resources (apart from tin) to build a modern gunpowder army.2 But the era of rapid expansion ended after the reign of Suleyman (1520–1566), as European defensive lines were strengthened on the Hungarian frontier, as American silver began to flow through Europe, and as Christian navies secured the western Mediterranean after the battle of Lepanto in 1571. Nevertheless, for three more centuries, the Ottoman Empire would be a major power in both the Mediterranean region and western Inner Eurasia. In many respects, the Ottoman Empire would provide both Lithuania/Poland and Muscovy with a model of how to mobilize from diverse territories that included steppes, farmlands, oceans, deserts, and wealthy trading systems.

Like their Byzantine predecessors, Ottoman rulers sought to control trade routes through the north Caucasus steppes and the cities of Crimea, as well as the wealthy regions of Wallachia and Moldavia on the western shores of the Black Sea. By creating a protectorate over the Crimean khanate in 1475, Istanbul acquired a valuable military buffer against Lithuania/Poland. The Crimean khanate also provided a valuable new ally in Ottoman attempts to control the Moldavian and Bessarabian coasts of the Black Sea, which were vital to the defense of its Balkan provinces. In 1484, in alliance with Crimea, Ottoman armies captured the Moldavian fortress of Akkerman, which gave them control of much of the west coast of the Black Sea. They also established a garrison at Azov (Tana), east of the Crimean khanate, which gave them control of the Don river outlets into the Black Sea and enabled them to check Cossack naval raids on the Black Sea coast.3 Early in the sixteenth century, with bases at Azov, the southern Crimea, and along the western shores of the Black Sea, the Ottomans dominated the Black Sea and the trades that flowed through it, and gained significant influence in the Pontic steppes.

However, Inner Eurasia was of secondary importance for the Ottoman Empire, so it was normally content to manage the politics of the Pontic steppes indirectly, through the Crimean khanate and its Nogai allies. Geography explains why Ottoman diplomacy often seems so similar to that of the Byzantine Empire. But there was also a crucial difference. Whereas Byzantium had religious ties to the Christian and agrarian polities of Rus’, the Ottoman Empire's religious affiliations were with the Muslim societies of Crimea and the Pontic steppes. Over the next few centuries, this difference would lend a crusading edge to contests for control of the Pontic steppes.

THE COMMONWEALTH OF LITHUANIA/POLAND

By 1500, Lithuania/Poland included much of modern Belarus and Ukraine. Though its ruling dynasty was Catholic, its eastern territories contained large Orthodox populations and were exposed to devastating slave raids from the Pontic steppes. In 1500, Lithuania/Poland had a population of perhaps 7 million, scattered thinly over a region twice as large as France. Its economy was dominated by subsistence agriculture, but after the capture of the Baltic port of Danzig in 1455, it was buoyed by sales of grain and other agricultural produce to the expanding markets of western Europe. Loans from western European merchants helped Poles exploit large estates in western Ukraine, whose grain they sent down the Vistula to Danzig and on to Europe.4 With a population of 50,000 by 1600, Danzig was the largest and most commercial of Polish-Lithuanian cities. But there were many smaller cities scattered through the interior, such as Krakow (the capital, with a population of only 14,000 in 1600), and Lwow, Vilnius, and Warsaw, with populations of less than 20,000 people. Limited urbanization and commercialization explain why the towns were never powerful enough to rival the traditional nobility, the szlachta.

The szlachta made up about 7 percent of the population, though many nobles lived like their peasants. From the late fifteenth century, the upper levels of the szlachta wielded great authority through a bicameral parliamentary body, the Sejm. The Nihil Novi law of 1505 ensured that no new laws could be passed without the consent of the Sejm. The result was a long-standing political and fiscal standoff between different classes and ethnic and confessional groups. In 1569, at Lublin, an increasingly Polonized Lithuanian nobility (most Lithuanian nobles now spoke Polish rather than Lithuanian) agreed to a new and closer Union, the “Commonwealth of the Two Nations, the Polish and Lithuanian.” Lithuania and Poland now shared a common ruler and Diet, but kept separate administrations and armies. The Union of Lublin really marked the increasing economic, demographic, and political power of Poland, for much of Ukraine now passed into Polish control, and there were now three times as many Poles as Lithuanians in the joint Diet. In 1572, when the Jagiellon dynasty died out, the joint monarchy became elective.

The Commonwealth's human and material resources, though significant, were scattered, like those of Muscovy, over large areas, and levels of productivity and commercialization were low in comparison with western Europe. It had many poorly defended borders because its eastern provinces were, topographically, part of the huge Inner Eurasian flatlands. It faced European rivals in the west, Sweden in the north, Muscovy in the north-east, and constant raiding from the Crimean khanate in the south-east.

The social and political structures of the Commonwealth made it difficult to mobilize resources effectively enough to meet these threats. Cultural and political divisions exacerbated the difficulties, for the Commonwealth straddled many cultural, religious, linguistic, ecological, and political frontiers.

The whirlpool of foreign and national influences found concrete expression in the welter of different dress styles adopted by the nobility, with native, western and oriental influences (the latter arriving largely through Hungary) combining to produce a distinctive couture of caftan, boots, belts and breeches around the mid-[sixteenth] century.5

While much of the Polish nobility was militantly Catholic, Lithuania had been largely pagan until the fourteenth century. Then Lithuanian expansion incorporated large areas of Belarus and Ukraine, whose populations spoke Eastern Slavic languages and mostly professed Orthodox Christianity. By 1500, even in Lithuania, Slavic speakers outnumbered Lithuanian speakers.6

Political and economic interests tugged the Commonwealth in different directions. While Lithuania's natural orientation was towards the eastern shores of the Baltic or south towards Ukraine and the Black Sea, Poland looked westwards. Different borders also required different forms of military mobilization. On the eastern borders, traditional cavalry were effective until the seventeenth century, while in the west, gunpowder transformed warfare much earlier.

These divisions affected the Commonwealth in many ways. The nobility and towns protected their traditional privileges by limiting the power of monarchs. No monarch of the Commonwealth enjoyed the authority that Ivan III of Muscovy enjoyed in the late fifteenth century. To mobilize armies, monarchs had to engage in complex negotiations with suppliers of troops, revenue, and equipment, including nobles and princes, mercenaries, who had to be paid largely out of the royal purse, and the traditional levy of the nobility, the pospolite ruszenie. In principle, the feudal levy should have yielded armies of up to 50,000 in the middle of the sixteenth century, but rulers were forbidden to use it abroad without the consent of the Sejm, and then only for three months a year. When used inside the country, the army was supposed to be disbanded after two weeks on campaign.7 Not surprisingly, military discipline could be precarious. In 1537 the pospolite ruszenie, which had assembled for an attack on Moldavia, refused to fight and had to be disbanded.8 Securing funding for military campaigns was always difficult. The nobility regarded most forms of central taxation as exceptional, and expected their rulers to finance warfare from their royal domains, even though the Sejm restricted royal authority over royal lands.9 Polish nobles were particularly reluctant to grant taxes for campaigns in the east, as long as Poland and Lithuania remained separate nations.

By 1503 Lithuania/Poland had lost a third of the lands it held in the early 1490s, and in 1514 it lost the crucial fortress of Smolensk. In the 1550s, Sigismund II Augustus (1548–1572) had to resort to many different stratagems to form an army capable of attacking Livonia at the start of what would become a prolonged war with Muscovy. He managed to assemble substantial armies after selling royal lands, borrowing money, persuading the Sejm to levy the occasional special tax, or summoning troops from magnates or the pospolite ruszenie, but it proved impossible to hold armies together for long periods.10 In 1572 the Jagiellonian dynasty ended with the death of Sigismund II. His successor, Henri of Anjou, was elected on conditions that further weakened the ruler's power to mobilize.

The remarkable successes of Lithuanian/Polish armies in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries made it seem that such methods should work. And they would continue to work, just, throughout the sixteenth century. But as the costs and scale of gunpowder warfare increased, so did the importance of more effective fiscal and military mobilization. It may be that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the survival of the Commonwealth owed as much to Muscovite failures and Crimean raids as to skillful mobilization and brilliant military commanders, such as King John III Sobieski (r. 1674–1696), whose armies defeated the Ottoman Empire outside Vienna in 1683.

MUSCOVY IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

If the Crimean khanate provides a paradigm of the traditional, Inner Eurasian smychka, Muscovy offers a paradigm of the agrarian smychka.

Muscovy mobilized military power from an agrarian population to defend itself against steppe armies in the south, and gunpowder armies to the west. The first key to success was long-term growth. Over time, demographic, economic, and geographical expansion gave the rulers of Moscow increasing human and material resources. The second key was efficient mobilization of these accumulating resources, which allowed territorial expansion, which provided more land, people, and resources for further mobilization, in a powerful feedback cycle. Figure 6.1 and Map 6.1 hint at the long-term synergy between population growth and geographical expansion in Muscovite and Russian history over seven centuries.

Bar chart shows Muscovy’s population to Inner Eurasia’s population ratio which increases from below 20 percent in 1300 to above 100 percent in 1900.

Figure 6.1 Growth of Muscovy's population as a proportion of Inner Eurasia's population. Data from McEvedy and Jones, Atlas of World Population History, 78–82, 158–165.

Map shows territory of Muscovy which includes regions like Samoyed, Yugra, Komi-zyriane, Karelians, Vyakta, Perm, Moscow, Kasimov, Novgorod, and Iaroslavl along with year of establishment.

Map 6.1 Territorial expansion of Muscovy to 1598. Rywkin, Russian Colonial Expansion to 1917, 44.

For much of the sixteenth century, Muscovy's rulers played these mobilizational games with considerable success. But towards the end of the century, the strains of sustained mobilization began to show, and there was a real danger that, if mishandled, the system could collapse. Excessive mobilizational pressure encouraged peasant flight, particularly near underpopulated borderlands. It also encouraged predatory farming that threatened to exhaust the region's thin forest soils. There was no guarantee that the expansion of Muscovy, which had been so impressive in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, would continue indefinitely.

EXPANSION

In the sixteenth century, there was still plenty of scope for agricultural intensification. Peasants and landlords could and did introduce more intensive farming methods, such as three-field crop rotations. But with short growing seasons, thin soils, and limited financial and technological resources, the possibilities for intensification were limited. However, unlike most of its rivals, Muscovy also had the option of extensification, or growth through territorial expansion, because along its southern, eastern, and northern borders there were large areas of underpopulated and ill-defended but potentially farmable land. The contrast with Lithuania/Poland, which was surrounded by populous and powerful rivals on all but its easternmost frontiers, is striking. In Muscovy, for several centuries, mobilizing more resources meant, above all, territorial expansion (Figure 6.2).

Area versus years graph shows increasing S-shaped curve with segments representing expansion into regions like Novgorod, Udmurt, Khanti, Chuvash, Bashkiria et cetera during period 1400 to 2000.

Figure 6.2 Chart showing expansion of Russia on a logistic curve. Rywkin, Russian Colonial Expansion to 1917, xvii.

In the sixteenth century, Muscovy expanded in three main directions: to the east and south along the Volga river; to the south into the Pontic steppes; and to the west into the Baltic region and Belarus. At the death of Vasilii III in 1533, Muscovy controlled about 2.8 million sq. kilometers. In 1600, it controlled c.5.4 million sq. kilometers – almost twice as much territory.11

Expansion to the east began with the conquest of Kazan’ in 1552. When Vasilii III died in 1533, his heir, Ivan IV, was still a minor. Ivan's minority, from 1533–1547, provided a striking reminder of the importance of elite discipline to Muscovy's power, as the government was paralyzed by conflicts among the leading boyar families, and could not contemplate ambitious foreign adventures. But in 1552, within five years of his accession, Ivan launched an attack on an old rival, the khanate of Kazan’. Muscovy's armies were larger and better equipped. Ivan led 150,000 troops to Kazan’, whose armies numbered no more than 30,000. Moscow's armies also brought 150 pieces of artillery, an 18-foot-high siege machine, and explosives, which they used to destroy the city's water supply.12 The city fell on October 2, 1552.

The conquest of the Muslim khanate of Kazan’ marked a significant turning point in the history of the Muscovite mobilizational system because this was (with the partial exception of expansion into the far north) the first time that Muscovy had incorporated populations that were culturally different from those of Muscovy. If empire means rule over populations with different religious, cultural, and linguistic traditions, this was the beginning of Muscovite and Russian traditions of imperial rule. And, as a recent study argues, empires in this sense – “large political units … that maintain distinction and hierarchy as they incorporate new people” – have been the most important forms of large-scale political and mobilizational power for several millennia.13 As Muscovy, too, became an empire, it began to face new challenges, as cultural, religious, and historical differences were added to the traditional difficulties of mobilization. Like the traditional nomadic smychka, the agrarian smychka now had to cope with cultural, linguistic, and religious differences as well as the normal challenges of mobilizing in lands with limited resources.

Ivan's victory over Kazan’ recapitulated Prince Sviatoslav's conquest of Bulghar in the 960s. Like that campaign, it invited further expansion down the Volga river towards the Caucasus. As ruler of Kazan’, Ivan began to receive tributes from steppe polities, from the Nogai hordes, from the khans of the Sibir khanate, and from the Bashkir.14 In 1556, just four years after the capture of Kazan’, Muscovite troops conquered Astrakhan near the Golden Horde's first capital of Saray, 600 years after Prince Sviatoslav had sacked the Khazar capital of Itill in 965. Muscovy now controlled the entire Volga river trade route to the Caspian Sea, and Moscow's allies, the Nogai, settled in the steppes north of the Caspian Sea until they were displaced in the 1630s by the Oirat Mongols who came to be known as the Kalmyk.

Control of the Volga river created a new defensive barrier because, for most of its length, the river was too broad to be crossed easily by pastoralist armies. Now, strategically sited fortresses could block major incursions from the Kazakh steppes.15 The Volga also had huge commercial importance. Russian merchants were particularly interested in opportunities for trade with Persia, Central Asia, and India, so Russian south-bound trade began to shift eastwards, away from its traditional focus on the Ottoman Empire and the eastern Mediterranean.16 Astrakhan became Muscovy's commercial window on the south. Here, Muscovite merchants and officials received caravans from Central Asia and ships from Gilan and the khanate of Shemakha, both under Persian suzerainty.17 Persian ships trading in the Caspian Sea were mostly manned by Armenian merchants, though in the seventeenth century Indian merchants would play an increasingly vital role in Astrakhan's trade with Persia. Astrakhan became an important base for the trade in fish and locally produced salt. From Astrakhan, goods were hauled or rowed up the Volga river to Kazan’, in boats mostly owned by Astrakhan merchants. From there, they traveled to Nizhnii Novgorod, where they were unloaded before being carried to Moscow by land, in carts or sleds.

Ivan IV dreamed of conquering the Crimean khanate too. In 1567, Muscovite soldiers built a fort at Tersk, near where the Terek enters the Caspian Sea. In 1569, wary of Moscow's ambitions in the northern Caucasus, Ottoman and Crimean forces tried to reconquer Astrakhan by building a canal from the Don to the Volga. However, the arrival of Russian troops down the Volga showed that it was easier to control Astrakhan from the Volga than across the steppes. Ottoman forces were driven back to Azov on the Black Sea, in a tortuous retreat during which two thirds of the original army was lost. But Moscow's forces were almost as over-extended as those of the Ottomans, and in 1571, after just four years, Ivan abandoned Tersk.

Along Russia's southern steppe frontiers, expansion was slower and more difficult. Under Vasilii III, Muscovy had joined Crimea in attacks on Lithuania/Poland. But after Vasilii's death in 1533, Crimea allied increasingly with Lithuania/Poland, partly in pursuit of dynastic claims to Kazan’. Defending against Crimean raids became a primary motive for fort building along Muscovy's southern frontiers.

But fortified strongpoints also attracted would-be colonizers for whom they offered protection, markets, and employment, so that colonization and defense went hand in hand.18 Along Muscovy's disputed and poorly policed steppe borderlands, with their rich black soils, illegal peasant migrations would provide a demographic ground bass to Muscovite expansion until the end of the eighteenth century. Most peasant migrants hoped that Moscow and Crimea would ignore them, as they cleared land and built villages. But Moscow, though wary of peasant flight from its central provinces, was also keen to protect settlers in order to populate, supply, and defend its southern provinces.19 Over many centuries, such processes created a distinctive borderland culture, whose most striking symbol is the emergence of the Cossacks, culturally diverse borderland communities recruited as much from Tatars or peoples of the Caucasus as from Slavic populations.20

Similar communities had existed in the Pontic steppes in the time of Kievan Rus’ and probably a millennium before that. In the Kievan era, groups of Russified Turks or Caucasians sometimes received payments or resources from Rus’ principalities for border protection or information about potential raids. Muscovite rulers also understood that friendly borderland communities could harass Crimea in ways that Moscow could plausibly disavow, just as regional Crimean leaders harassed Muscovy or Poland. The easiest and cheapest way of influencing Cossack communities was by offering subsidies or gifts or privileges to their leaders.

In the later sixteenth century, for the first time, Cossack groups entered into formal alliances with Muscovy.21 The Don Cossack community dated its existence from 1557, when it had its first formal contacts with Moscow.22 The complex ethnic and cultural mix of Cossack communities is apparent from one of the earliest official references to the Cossacks, in a letter of Ivan IV to the Nogai Tatars. The Tsar wrote: “There are many Cossacks roaming in the steppe, Kazanis, Crimeans, Azovites, and other insolent Cossacks. Even from our frontiers they mix together with them and go around together.”23 Cossack communities defy easy classification.

Neither nomads nor peasants, the early [sixteenth-century] Cossacks represented a mix of nomads, fugitives, and entrepreneurs. Their numbers were no more than a few thousand. Their weapons and dress adhered to no common standards and can best be described as multicolored and multicultural: integrating elements from the steppe nomads and populations of North Caucasus. They combined steppe skills of horsemanship with expertise in sea, river, and portage navigation that can be traced to Rus’. Their hybrid raiding culture conducted amphibious operations in both the river basins and prairies of the southern steppes.24

Like the principalities of Kievan Rus’, Muscovy built fortified lines across the main Tatar invasion routes, and burnt nearby pasturelands to deprive raiding parties of fodder (Map 6.2). The first large-scale Muscovite defensive lines were built along the Oka and Ugra rivers in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, using the labor of local peasants and Cossacks. By 1530, this line had reached Tula. Further east, a similar line was built against the Nogai.25 The government of Ivan IV extended these fortified lines. The so-called Zasechnaia cherta, or “Abatis Line,” ran for about 640 kilometers [600 versts, 1 verst = 1.067 kilometers] from Belev through Tula to Riazan’.

Map shows Muravskaya trail, Izumskaya trail, Kalmusskaya trail, Nogai trail, Zaotskii towns, Severskii towns, Ukrainian towns and Riazan towns.

Map 6.2 Muscovy's southern frontier at the end of the sixteenth century. Shaw, “Southern Frontiers of Muscovy,” 123. Reproduced with permission of Elsevier.

Built of interconnecting stretches of felled trees, rivers, and ditches, punctuated at regular intervals with block houses and gates, overseen by a special official and a special chancellery (until 1580), defended by lower and middle-class military servitors …, patrolled by advance guards on the steppe placed in treetop lookouts, and charged with making sure that “men of war do not come without warning upon the sovereign's frontiers,” the line was massive, intricate, and costly.26

In the 1580s and 1590s, Boris Godunov ordered the building of several forts beyond the Abatis line. They included Belgorod and Voronezh, Samara (1586), Saratov (1590), and Tsaritsyn (1588) on the Volga, as well as new forts to the east of the Volga including Ufa in Bashkiria (1586).27 Once established, the forts attracted legal and illegal immigrants, drawn to the protection they offered and the rich steppe soils that surrounded them. During the Time of Troubles, after the death of Boris Godunov in 1605, this slow, shuffling advance, fort by fort, would halt, not resuming again until 1635.

Like the Ming dynasty in China, which extended and reinforced its own frontier defenses in the sixteenth century, Muscovite officials saw the southern fortified lines as defensive. Steppeland raids exacted huge human costs, directly through the capture of slaves, and indirectly in tributes or ransom payments. Khodarkovsky estimates that Muscovy paid Crimea 1 million rubles in tributes and taxes, and lost between 150,000 and 200,000 Russians to slave raids just in the first half of the seventeenth century. Assuming an average ransom price of 50 rubles per person, redeeming just 100,000 of these captives would have cost about 5 million rubles.28 At a time when it cost about 5,000 rubles to build a small frontier town, the 1 million rubles paid in tributes to Crimea were equivalent to the cost of building 1,200 small frontier towns, a calculation that makes fort building look cheap. Khodarkovsky's calculations illustrate vividly the costs of continuous low-grade and occasional high-grade warfare with pastoral nomads in steppelands with few natural defensive barriers.

Expansion to the west was even more expensive, but it was motivated by the hope of getting easier and cheaper access to the rich trade networks of the Baltic and Europe. In 1558, Ivan IV sent Muscovite armies into Livonia (roughly modern Estonia and Latvia) to protect Muscovy's western borderlands and secure openings to Baltic trade routes to Europe. Though it began well, the Livonian campaign would turn into a brutal and debilitating contest with Lithuania/Poland and Sweden, lasting many decades. In 1561, the Livonian Order, which had controlled the Baltic region since the early thirteenth century, was dissolved, creating a power vacuum that lured Lithuania/Poland and Sweden into the Baltic, and started a many-sided war that would last until 1583.29 In truces negotiated in that year, Muscovy gave up all its conquests in Livonia and surrendered most of the northern Baltic coast to Sweden, except for the mouth of the Neva river. The Livonian war provided a brutal test of Moscow's growing mobilizational capacity.

MILITARY MOBILIZATION

Since the reign of Ivan III, the pomest'e system had provided the most effective way of building large cavalry armies in a society of scattered villages and limited monetization. It required pomeshchiki to serve in the army, using resources they had mobilized themselves from the peasants living on the estates they had been granted. In the sixteenth century, most of the army consisted of pomeshchiki. By 1600, there were probably some 30,000 pomeshchiki, increasing numbers of whom lived along Muscovy's southern fortified lines.30 The pomest'e system transformed the lives of Muscovy's peasants as well as its cavalrymen (Figure 6.3). In 1450 most peasants lived on “black” lands, with no landlords, so they paid dues and taxes only to their prince or the church. By 1600, most of these lands had been transferred to pomeshchiki, so the peasants living on them owed labor and taxes to landlords as well.31

Image shows page of book containing Russian text along with painting of three armed cavalrymen on horses.

Figure 6.3 Three Russian cavalrymen, published in Sigismund von Herberstein, 1556. Dunning, Russia's First Civil War, 41.

Early in his reign, as he prepared to attack Kazan’, Ivan began reforming Muscovy's mobilizational machinery, with the help of a group of talented officials and clerics. Some reforms were modeled on Ottoman practice, as described in a famous memorandum written in 1549 by Ivan Peresvetov, who had served the Ottoman Empire for many years.32

Always jealous of his rights as Tsar, Ivan tried to tie elite privileges more closely to service than to lineage, and to increase his own freedom to appoint and dismiss officials and servitors. Traditionally, government and army appointments had been shaped by traditions of mestnichestvo, or clan seniority, and these could limit even the Tsar's freedom to appoint senior military commanders. For example, individuals occasionally refused to serve under or obey those they viewed as social inferiors, for fear of dishonoring their family. To limit the impact of precedence quarrels on military operations, Ivan removed certain military commands from challenge on grounds of seniority. In another reform, that looks like a first attempt to build a personal following, he settled 1,000 provincial pomeshchiki near Moscow, so they could be called up rapidly to serve the Tsar. In 1556, Ivan extended the principle that landownership depended on service to all landowners, even those who owned votchina (patrimonial) lands, which had previously been free of formal service obligations.33 Though most nobles already expected to serve in practice, formally at least, the new rule marked a transformation in the legal status of all Muscovite nobles. The 1556 law on service required that every 400 acres of good land should support a fully equipped cavalryman and his horse.

Ivan also reformed the administration and bureaucracy. In 1555–1556, many regions, particularly in the north, were ordered to elect local officials instead of being ruled by centrally appointed namestniki. There was nothing democratic about the reform. It was really a way of passing the burden of administrative service to local populations so that resources previously used for the kormlenie or “feeding” of namestniki could be transferred to Moscow. It is tempting to see the reform as an extension of the pomest'e principle from military to administrative service. At the center, the number of government offices or prikazy increased, until by 1600 there were more than 24 prikazy. The most important of them handled recruitment. The razriadnyi prikaz kept lists of military servitors and their service obligations; and the pomestnyi prikaz recorded the allocation of pomest'e. The posol'skii prikaz handled diplomacy and foreign affairs. These three key prikazy were all headed by a boyar from the Tsar's inner council, the “boyar duma.”

Ivan also reformed the army. Cavalry recruited from pomeshchiki continued to dominate because the most important military threats still came from the steppes.34 Imitating Poland, Ivan's government also began to incorporate Cossack units within the army, by offering payment in grain, or cash, or in land. Cossacks were used primarily to garrison frontier towns.

Units fighting on the western borderlands began to include more infantry and artillery.35 In 1550, Ivan created an infantry guard of 3,000 salaried musketeers (strel'tsy or “shooters”), whose armor and dress imitated Ottoman musketeers. Two years later the strel'tsy took part in the siege of Kazan’. At first, strel'tsy were used in sieges or protected behind tabors modeled on the Hungarian wagenburg. This was a protective circle of wagons. Its Russian version, proposed by Peresvetov, was the guliai-gorod or walking fortress, a system of mobile wooden walls on small carts.36

Despite the strel'tsy units, the impact of gunpowder was limited in the sixteenth century. The English traveler Richard Chancellor wrote that, “All his [Ivan's] men are horsemen, all archers.”37 As late as 1600, Muscovite armies still used tactics that would have looked familiar in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The army normally fought in two to three echelons, with the Tsar's regiment and the strel'tsy as the core, the others surrounding them.

Though it might have seemed archaic by European standards, the Muscovite army was well adapted to steppe warfare. Above all it grew in size, until it could field up to 100,000 fighting men early in the seventeenth century. Its weaknesses were most apparent on the western front, but even here, Muscovy's mobilizational efforts were remarkably effective until the late 1570s. After that, the costs of the Livonian war escalated, Muscovite revenues declined, particularly in regions such as Novgorod, which had been devastated by the activities of Ivan's personal army, the oprichnina. Polish revenues increased after the 1569 Union of Lublin, and its alliance with Sweden in 1577. In 1576, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth acquired an energetic new king, Stephen Batory of Hungary (r. 1576–1586), while a massive Crimean attack on Moscow in 1571 forced Muscovy to divert troops from the Baltic to the southern frontiers.38 In 1578, Swedish and Polish forces inflicted the first major defeats on Muscovite forces since the start of the Livonian war.

MOBILIZING CASH AND COMMERCE

Muscovy's military failures were partly fiscal. The pomest'e system worked well where cash was scarce, but prolonged sieges and gunpowder warfare, the sort of warfare that dominated the Livonian war, required cash, and lots of it.39 The government worked hard to raise more cash, but never seemed to have enough.

Muscovite governments raised cash through taxation and trade. A standardized general land tax was introduced for the first time in the 1520s, and levied according to the “big sokha,” a unit of plowed land whose size varied according to the quality of the land. The land tax would remain the basic unit of Muscovite taxation until 1679. In the 1530s, during Ivan's minority, his mother, Elena Glinskaia, unified the currency in different parts of the country.40 This encouraged internal trade, and made it easier to commute taxes in kind to cash. Some existing taxes were increased and new cash taxes were introduced. Tributes from furs and income from government monopolies on salt and alcohol sales began to make significant contributions to government revenues.

But without a port on the Baltic, Muscovy found it difficult to earn money from Europe's booming commerce. Indeed, that is what the Livonian war was largely about. The importance of trade with Europe was shown by the government's efforts to find alternative routes. In 1553, British merchants from the English Muscovy Company arrived in Moscow from the north, led by Richard Chancellor. Their arrival opened a new route for European trade through the port of Archangel, founded a year after their arrival. Archangel rapidly became as vital to Moscow's European trade as Astrakhan was for its trade with Persia and India. Archangel's new “window on the west” nicely balanced Astrakhan's “window on the south.” From Archangel imported goods were carried down the Northern Dvina to Sol’-Vychegodsk, Velikii Ustiug, and Vologda, where merchants waited for winter before transporting them by sled through Iaroslavl’ to Moscow.

For a century, the Archangel route reoriented Russia's European trade away from the Baltic. England imported furs and naval supplies (timber, hemp fiber for naval ropes, tallow, and tar), while Muscovy imported armaments, metals, woolen cloths, and luxury goods. Merchants of the Muscovy Company received substantial privileges until their expulsion in 1649 in retaliation for the execution of their own “tsar,” Charles I. In the early days of the Archangel trade, they were exempt from customs dues and allowed to keep warehouses in Archangel, Kholmogory, Vologda, and Moscow. These rights were resented by Russian merchants, most of whom were engaged in trade to the Black Sea. However, despite the privileges enjoyed by English merchants, Dutch merchants had largely displaced them by 1600, creating a new channel for European cultural, economic, and technological influence.41 In the early seventeenth century, Moscow imported most of its silver, armaments, cloth, and metal goods from Holland, in exchange for furs, timber, canvas, hemp, grain, leather, and foodstuffs such as honey and caviar.42

With trade restricted to such narrow channels, the revenues the government could raise through commerce were limited. That left internal taxation as the main source of government revenue. Stable, efficient, and cohesive rule might have raised enough revenue to finance even the long-running Livonian war. But Ivan failed to provide stable government as his rule became increasingly oppressive and unpredictable.

ELITE DISCIPLINE AND UNITY

Ivan had inherited an exceptionally unified and disciplined political system. Since the fourteenth century, the culture of “autocracy” – the belief that unity under a single strong ruler was both right and in the interests of Moscow's elites – had sunk deep roots in Muscovite political culture. Those traditions help explain Muscovite expansion in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. As Victor Lieberman points out, west of the Dniester and Vistula there were in 1450 five to six hundred independent polities; and even in the late nineteenth century there were 25. In contrast, in “northeastern Europe, Siberia, and the Caucasus, over thirty city-states, princedoms, and khanates yielded to a single Russian imperial suzerainty.”43

However, during the latter part of Ivan's reign there were many signs of a breakdown in elite unity, caused largely by Ivan's increasingly unpredictable rule. Immediately after his coronation as Tsar, Ivan enjoyed immense authority, partly because the instability and weakness of the years of his minority reminded everyone of the dangers of political disunity. Rapid expansion and increasing wealth attracted high-ranking servitors from Muscovite princely families, but also from the ruling families of Lithuania and Kazan’ and principalities of the northern Caucasus.44

The church backed the Tsar's autocratic authority. As the most important educational institution in the land, the church taught a wider public about the virtues of autocratic rule under an Orthodox (pravoslavnyi) Tsar. In a largely illiterate world, church architecture, the church's public pronouncements, and its many ceremonies and pilgrimages provided a powerful sense of shared identity and purpose. Royal pilgrimages, public processions, the distribution of alms, and the founding of new religious institutions helped consolidate the image of the Tsar as a pious and powerful leader, as God's representative on earth.45 Unlike many rulers in the steppelands and Central Asia, Russia's Tsars enjoyed both genealogical legitimacy and the support of institutionalized religion.

From 1542, a strong Metropolitan, Makarii, put his considerable authority behind the young Tsar. Ivan's magnificent coronation, at the Kremlin's Dormition cathedral in January 1547, was deliberately choreographed to raise the authority of a dynasty that had lost some of its luster during the long regency. Ivan assumed the title of Tsar (“Caesar”), which had normally been reserved for sovereign rulers such as the khans of the Golden Horde or the Byzantine emperor, or, in religious texts, for Christ, the Tsar of Heaven.46 Ironically, the metaphorical potency of the title was demonstrated by the reluctance of European rulers to accept it. The Imperial Book of Degrees (“Stepennaia kniga”), prepared by members of the church, constructed a glorious, semi-divine pedigree for the royal dynasty. Later, in letters to his former friend, the boyar Andrei Kurbskii, who had fled to Lithuania, Ivan insisted passionately on his divine authority as Tsar.47

The culture of Muscovy's elites was also remarkably homogeneous, much more so than that of the Polish nobility. “In Russia there was one law (the sudebnik of 1550), one currency, one religion, one set of weights and measures, one language, and a unified army command.”48 At lower levels of society, cultural and religious homogeneity and widespread acceptance of autocratic rule generated early forms of nationalism that would provide a powerful cultural scaffolding for the Muscovite mobilizational machine. By 1600, Victor Lieberman argues, “Great Russian identity seems to have been rooted among townsmen, gentry, and sectors of the Muscovite peasantry.”49

These were great strengths. But the weakness of all autocracies, whether in the steppes or the agrarian lands, lay in their dependence on the personality and skills of individual rulers. And though Ivan clearly had great intelligence and political skill, over time his rule became increasingly irrational.

In 1560, Ivan's wife Anastasia Romanovna died. The dangers of Ivan's childhood may already have encouraged a tendency to paranoia, but his wife's death brought it into the open. Ivan accused two of his leading reforming officials, Aleksei Adashev and the monk Sil'vestr, of having poisoned his wife. Both were tried, and Adashev would die in captivity, while several other close advisers were killed without a trial. In the next few years, as Ivan's behavior became more irrational several leading boyars fled to Lithuania, including his military commander and close friend, Andrei Kurbskii, who left in August 1564. Ivan became increasingly fearful and suspicious of his boyars.

In December 1564, Ivan suddenly left Moscow with his family and settled in Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda, a fortified royal residence built by Vasilii III, 60 miles north of Moscow. From here, Ivan sent his boyars and churchmen a long letter in which he threatened to abdicate if he was not given absolute power to punish his many enemies who, he claimed, had been shielded from just punishment. According to the chronicles, representatives of the common people begged church leaders to ask the Tsar “not to leave the country and deliver them to the wolves like unhappy sheep with no shepherd.”50 A large delegation of churchmen, boyars, officials, and common people set out for Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda and begged Ivan not to abdicate. They also granted him the dangerous power to punish his enemies at his own discretion.

In February 1565, Ivan returned to Moscow and divided his kingdom into two separate realms. In one, the oprichnina (or the region “set apart”; the term was used of the portion of an estate set aside to support a widow), he would rule personally through a corps of several thousand personal followers, the oprichniki. Many, like the members of Chinggis Khan's keshig, were of non-noble birth. He left the rest of his lands, the zemshchina, to the boyars. The oprichnina included mainly lands in the north, well away from the frontiers, in regions that had flourished commercially in the early sixteenth century. He expelled most existing landowners from these regions, sometimes driving entire families from their homes in the middle of winter. The oprichniki swore to avoid all contact with the zemshchina, wore a special uniform of black, and carried whips, dog's heads, and brooms as signs of their willingness to bark at their enemies, bite them, and sweep them away.51 Ivan built a special palace for the oprichniki in Moscow's Arbat district.

Several months later, church leaders, princes, and boyars protested at his increasingly arbitrary rule, telling the Tsar that “no Christian ruler had the right to treat human beings like animals; instead he should fear the righteous dooms of God, who avenges the blood of innocents unto the third generation.”52 In 1566, Ivan responded by summoning an “Assembly of the Land,” or Zemskii Sobor, to discuss the Livonian war. The Assembly was a gathering of military servitors and clerics, and similar bodies would be summoned on several important occasions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Though the Zemskii Sobor has often been interpreted as a proto-Parliament, it is best seen as one more sign of Ivan's restless search for new allies. During the 1566 Assembly of the Land, some 300 nobles petitioned the Tsar to end the oprichnina.53 Ivan responded by arresting many members of the Assembly, and over the next few years he would kill several thousand members of the nobility, including his cousin, Vladimir of Staritsa, and the Metropolitan Philip. He had Novgorod sacked in 1570, and several thousand of its people were massacred. Finally, in 1572, after oprichnina forces failed to check a huge Crimean raid into Muscovy, Ivan abolished it.

Explaining the oprichnina has occupied historians ever since, and there is probably no rational explanation. The oprichnina was not the only strange episode of Ivan's reign. In 1575, he suddenly announced that one of his leading military commanders and his nephew by marriage, the baptized Tatar and Chinggisid Simeon Bekbulatovich, was now the grand prince of Rus’, while Ivan remained Tsar of Kazan’ and Astrakhan.54 Ivan resumed power a year later, and it is clear that in practice he never surrendered real power. But explanations for this bizarre episode vary greatly. One possibility is that by putting a Chinggisid on the throne he was forestalling a possible plot to place the Crimean khan on the throne. Though raised as a Muslim, Simeon would end his life in 1616 as an Orthodox monk, after being forcibly tonsured 10 years earlier.

Other episodes illustrate Ivan's capacity for uncontrollable sadism and rage. A German translator in Muscovite service described the execution of Ivan's former chancellor, Ivan Viskovatyi, who had frequently warned Ivan not to shed innocent blood.

Making a sign with his hand the tyrant cried, “Seize him.” They stripped him naked, passed a rope under his arms, tied him to a traverse beam, and let him hang there. … Maliuta [Skuratov] ran up to the man as he hung from the beam, cut off his nose, and rode away on his horse; another darted up and cut off one of Ivan's ears, and then everyone in turn approached and cut off various parts of his body. Finally Ivan Reutov, one of the tyrant's clerks, cut off the man's genitals and the poor wretch expired on the spot. … The body of Ivan Mikhailovich was cut down and laid on the ground; the retainers cut off the head, which had neither nose nor ears, and hacked the rest of it to pieces.55

Several Soviet historians argued that the oprichnina represented a systematic restructuring of the nobility, in which boyars were demoted and new men elevated to power. These arguments work well during the early period of the oprichnina, but not for the entire period, during which the boyar class suffered little more than other members of the Muscovite elite. What seems to have happened is that Ivan's increasing paranoia encouraged him to push the logic of autocratic rule to dangerous extremes. Brutal ways of enforcing elite discipline were a vital part of autocratic rule, as later rulers would demonstrate, including Peter I and Stalin. But Ivan IV crossed a threshold beyond which erratic and violent behavior at the center began to weaken the entire mobilization system, by breaking many of the links through which power was transmitted to the peripheries.

OVER-MOBILIZATION AND A SYSTEM UNDER STRESS

As the system began to unravel, Ivan drove it harder. When the Livonian war got bogged down, the government increased its demands on the servitor class, who put more pressure on their peasants. Between 1536 and 1545 taxes may have risen 55 percent, then another 286 percent between 1552 and 1556, then 60 percent in the 1560s and another 41 percent in the 1570s.56 The oprichnina exacerbated the problem because many oprichniki, aware that their privileges would not last, exploited their peasants cruelly and unsustainably. A German, Heinrich von Staden, who served as an oprichnik, claimed that many oprichniki collected as much in a year from their peasants as had previously been collected over 10 years.57 Peasants fled to unoccupied lands or to less predatory landlords.

By the end of Ivan's reign, whole provinces had been depopulated and could no longer support their pomeschiki. This threatened the entire system of military mobilization. In Novgorod, in 1500, almost three quarters of all mobilized servitors presented themselves with mounted servants; in the 1570s, only one in five could bring mounted servants. In rural areas near Moscow and Novgorod, populations may have declined by 80 percent or more, and in many regions three-field crop rotations ceased.58 Depopulation reduced government revenues and left pomeshchiki without the servants, resources, and equipment they needed to serve in the army. In 1581, in a desperate attempt to check peasant flight, the government banned all peasant migrations for a year, by revoking the traditional right to move around St. George's Day (November 26). This temporary law proved an ominous early step towards permanent enserfment of the Russian peasantry.

The Muscovite system, built up so painfully since the late thirteenth century, came close to collapse. The English traveler Giles Fletcher, whose account of Muscovy was published in 1591, wrote of Ivan IV that

[His] wicked policy and tyrannous practise … hath so troubled that countrey, and filled it so full of grudge and mortall hatred ever since, that it will not be quenched (as it seemeth now) till it burne againe into a civill flame. … the people of the most part … wishe for some forreine invasion, which they suppose to bee the only meanes, to rid them of the heavy yoke of this tyrannous government.59

Curiously, the near collapse of the system also demonstrated its resilience. Despite everything, including several years of famine, civil war, and foreign invasion, the system kept working, though with diminished power, for two decades after Ivan's death in 1584. In 1582, Ivan signed a humiliating truce with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, surrendering his gains in Livonia. In the years that followed, despite the extinguishing of the royal dynasty and an uncertain succession, the government shifted troops to its southern borders, crushed major uprisings in Kazan’ province, built much of a new defensive line south of the Oka line, and built new forts in Kazan’ province, in Bashkiria, and at key points along the Volga, including Samara (1586), Tsaritsyn, and Saratov. In 1598, so well established were the new defensive lines to the south that the government abandoned the Oka line entirely.60 Like a piece of sturdy machinery in need of major repairs, the Muscovite mobilizational system kept generating just enough power to protect Moscow's borders until, early in the seventeenth century, it finally broke down.

NOTES

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