Russia A History Page 7
As diverse and dynamic as the centre was, even more volatile was the frontier on the west and south. In some ways calling this area the ‘frontier’ to the exclusion of the others is inaccurate. The north and centre were also riddled with ‘frontiers’—between Slavs and non-Slavs, Orthodox and non-Christians, farmers and trappers, Muslims and ‘pagans’. All these social interfaces generated tensions, synergies, and cross-cultural fertilization. But in the west and the south the classic meaning of ‘frontier’ as outposts of defence and conquest applies. In climate, precipitation, soil quality, and other key measures of agrarian fertility, these lands were far superior to those north of them and thus were coveted. On the west the frontier began with the Novgorod and Pskov lands south of the Gulf of Finland and extended south to the Smolensk area and south again to the upper Oka river region. This relatively narrow north-south strip, located between the sixtieth and fiftieth latitudes, moved from taiga at the Novgorod end through deciduous-coniferous mixed forest, approaching steppe in the south. These lands flanked the grand duchy of Lithuania and were hotly contested throughout the century; between 1491 and 1595 Muscovy spent a total of fifty years at war on the western front. After the rout of the Livonian War (1558–82) and the Time of Troubles (1598–1613) Muscovy yielded lands from Karelia to beyond Smolensk to Sweden (Treaty of Stolbovo, 1617) and the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania (Treaty of Deulino, 1618).
On the western frontier, as in the centre, Moscow tolerated administrative and social diversity. For example, when Smolensk was annexed in 1514, Vasilii III affirmed by charter the landholding and judicial rights historically granted to the region by the grand dukes of Lithuania. Similarly as we have seen, princes from the upper Oka area retained autonomies as ‘service princes’ in Muscovy well into the sixteenth century.
On the south the frontier ran just south of the middle, west–east stretch of the Oka river, from around Tula across the Riazan lands to the border with the Kazan khanate in the east. Moving south from this forested zone one quickly encounters steppe (a prairie rich in grey and black soils), a line that moves roughly diagonally, south-west to north-east, from Kiev to Kazan. This south flank was exposed to raids and warfare: in the sixteenth century the Crimean Tatars made forty-three major attacks on the Muscovite lands, and the Kazan khanate forty. After Moscow conquered Kazan in 1552, the Nogai Horde of the lower Volga took its place as Moscow’s steppe adversary. Already in the 1530s Muscovy fortified a line south of the Oka and at mid-century it conquered Kazan and Astrakhan (1552, 1556). A generally east-west line of fortifications pushed steadily southward from the 1550s; Muscovy also constructed a network of fortresses to fortify the Kazan heartland and Kama basin. In the 1580s Muscovy began to subjugate the Bashkirs, a Tatar nomadic people, on a southern tributary of the Kama, constructing a fort at Ufa in 1586; most of the Bashkirs remained subjects of the Siberian khan until Muscovy’s final defeat of the khan in the late 1590s. A final stage of southern frontier fortification witnessed bold extensions of fortresses down the land and river routes used by the Nogais and Crimeans: Elets (1592), Belgorod, and Tsarev Borisov on the Donets river (1593, 1600).
The Kazan conquest added ethnically and religiously diverse lands to Russia: the élite was Tatar and Muslim, descended from the Golden Horde, but it presided over a variety of peoples who followed animistic cults. They included Finno-Ugric speakers (the Mari or Cheremisy and the Mordva) and Turkic speakers (the Chuvash, said to descend from the Volga Bulgars who had controlled the Volga before the Mongol invasion). The Chuvash and Mordva by and large inhabited the high, right bank of the Volga; the Tatars and Mari, the lowland left bank between the Volga and Kama rivers which had been the heartland of the Kazan khanate. Although fur-trapping, bee-keeping, and trade all engaged the populace, this was also an area of settled agriculture from the twelfth century: the land here was thinly forested or steppe, and the soil was the famous ‘blackearth’ topsoil, a thick layer rich in humus and nutrients.
With Russian conquest the Tatar populace was forcibly removed from the city of Kazan and those dwellings and shops were awarded to artisans, peasants, and lesser military servitors imported from the centre. The lands surrounding Kazan were distributed as service landholdings; there were no free peasant communes here as in the north and little hereditary land (votchina) save that granted to the newly founded archbishopric of Kazan (1555) and new monasteries. Christianization remained a minor goal for the Muscovite state here. Local élites were left relatively untouched as long as they remained loyal to the tsar; they collected the tribute (iasak) and administered communities according to local traditions. Muscovite governors were instructed to govern fairly without coercion. Nevertheless Muscovy was challenged repeatedly by uprisings of Cheremisy, Tatars, and Mari in the 1550s and thereafter.
Culture and Mentality
So diverse a populace cannot be said to have possessed a single mentality. Certainly sources on this for the non-Christian subjects of the tsar are lacking. But since clichés abound about the Russian character even for the Muscovite period, it is worth assessing sixteenth-century Orthodox East Slavs’ attitudes towards the supernatural, community, and family, based on contemporary sources. (One should take with a grain of salt the reports of foreign travellers about popular culture since many were biased by Catholic and Protestant viewpoints, by a post-Reformation zeal for a more rational or more personal spirituality, or by a fascination with the ‘exotic’.)
Sixteenth-century Russians were nominally Orthodox Christian, but that statement is as misleading as saying that most Europeans before the Reformation were Catholic. Just as in pre-Reformation Europe, sixteenth-century Russian Orthodoxy combined Christian beliefs with practices drawn from the naturalist and animistic beliefs of the various Finno-Ugric peoples with whom the East Slavs came in contact. At the 1551 ‘Stoglav’ Church Council (called ‘Stoglav’ or ‘One Hundred chapters’ after the document it issued), the hierarchy identified a wide incidence of improper religious practices, but apparently lacked the resources to change them. Parish schools or seminaries were nonexistent, parish organization was weak, books, sermons, and learning were limited to ecclesiastical élites. The council had to content itself with establishing some mechanisms to supervise parish clergy but otherwise just exhort the faithful to avoid what it considered ‘pagan’ behaviour. By examining death rituals, marriage ceremonies, prayers, and a range of celebratory practices, one can discern a ‘popular culture’, that is, a range of beliefs and practices exhibited by the entire social range which was distinct from the prescriptions of the official Church. That culture featured a view of the world significantly different from the typical Christian one as Eve Levin points out. Rather than seeing the world as basically good, created by God and disrupted by the Devil, sixteenth-century Russians seem to have regarded it as a universe of powerful natural forces ‘neither good nor evil but wilful and arbitrary’. They identified these forces in Christian terms (the Devil) or terms drawn from Finno-Ugric beliefs (nezhit, a force of evil in nature; bears and foxes were equated with evil). They summoned supernatural forces to protect themselves, drawing both on Christian intercessors (Jesus, Mary, and others) and Finno-Ugric (appealing to the power of ritual sites like bathhouses or trees and herbs imbued with supernatural powers). These customs showed no social distinctions: even the tsar’s marriage ceremony shared folk customs associated with fertility; boyars are recorded consulting folk healers; wills with evocations of non-Christian attitudes stem from the landed class.
The Church in the sixteenth century railed against many of these practices, and had some success in asserting its presence and rituals at key moments such as death and marriage. It promoted a new vision of spirituality as well. Until the early 1500s, monasteries, monks, and an ascetic way of life had constituted the norm in church teaching about social and religious behaviour. But as monasteries became less exemplary with greater worldly success, the church hierarchy diversified the focus of spiritual life, offering saints’ cult
s, sermons, other moralistic writings and teachings, and more ritual experiences to appeal more broadly. As Paul Bushkovitch has noted, official spirituality in the sixteenth century emphasized the collective, public experience of the faith, not the more inner-directed, personal piety that developed among the élite in the next century.
Attitudes towards daily life in the élite can be gleaned from a handbook of household management (the Domostroi), which was most probably based on a foreign secular model, but edited in an Orthodox Christian vein in Muscovy in the mid-sixteenth century. The Domostroi depicts the family as the structuring principle of the community and of the polity; the grand prince is portrayed as the head of the realm construed as a ‘household’, just as the father is the head of an extended household of wife, children, servants, and other dependents. Both patriarchs rule justly but firmly; each demands obedience and responds with just and fair treatment. Women and children are to behave and obey; physical force is recommended to fathers to keep them in line. But women also have remarkably broad latitude and responsibility. Offsetting its otherwise more typical Muscovite misogynistic views of women is the Domostroi’s parallel depiction of them as capable household managers, empowered in the domestic realm. Theirs is the primary responsibility for leading the family to salvation by the example of virtue and piety; theirs is the responsibility of making the household economy and servants productive by skilful management. Christian values such as charity to the poor and just treatment of dependents are balanced by a keen attention to sexual probity all of which values worked towards social stability as much as piety. The Domostroi did not circulate widely in the sixteenth century, but to some extent it did reach the landed gentry.
One can hardly argue that Russians were particularly spiritual or ‘pagan’ in the sixteenth century. This was a typically eclectic premodern Christian community. And, significantly, the church’s de facto tolerance of syncretism, paralleled by the state’s toleration of religious diversity (the Orthodox Church was specifically enjoined against aggressive missionary work in newly conquered areas such as Kazan and Siberia), helped ensure that the sixteenth century passed with remarkably little societal tension over matters of belief, a stark and oft-noted contrast to the turbulent sixteenth century of Reformation in Europe.
Administrative and Economic Strategies of Autocracy
A similar flexibility characterized the administrative, political, and fiscal strategies of the state: rather than trying to fit a uniform policy to lands of dazzling differences, the state modified policies to fit local needs, while never losing sight of its fundamental goals. Muscovite rulers were obsessed with the same issues as their European counterparts: bureaucracy, taxation, and the army. The goal has often been called ‘absolutism’, but the term is applicable only if it is redefined. Recent scholarship shows that in England and France as well as in Muscovy, ‘absolute’ authority was achieved by tolerating and co-opting traditional institutions and élites, rather than by replacing them with rational bureaucratic institutions. What resulted was not homogenization, ‘centralization’, or ‘autocracy’, but resource mobilization.
Muscovy’s first concern in the sixteenth century was to expand its army. The army was primarily a cavalry, composed of a landed élite that served seasonally and provided its own equipment, horses, and training. Expansion was possible after Ivan III developed on a large scale the principle that servitors would be compensated with land given in conditional tenure (pomest’e). Until then hereditary landholding (votchina) had supported landowners and their retinues. The grand prince’s role in recompense was presumably limited to booty and largesse. The large-scale use of service landholding began in Novgorod: over 1,300 service estates were assigned to men transferred there from the centre, while Novgorodian deportees received lands in conditional tenure in the centre (Moscow, Vladimir, Murom, Nizhnii-Novgorod, Pereiaslavl-Zalesskii, Iurev-Polskoi, Rostov Velikii, Kostroma, and elsewhere). Recipients of service land were socially diverse: princes (mainly from Iaroslavl and Rostov), boyars and lesser non-princely families, and also clients (posluzhil’tsy) of such families (who constituted 20 per cent of service land recipients in Novgorod). Thus the service landholding system enriched and expanded the cavalry élite as a whole.
Muscovy found still other ways to expand the army. It recruited infantry militias from the peasants and townspeople by assessing a fixed number of recruits per unit of arable land or households in urban communes. In the north this system persisted through the sixteenth century for purposes of local defence; in areas where ‘black’ peasants were transferred to landlord control, landlords then recruited men according to a calculus issued in 1556—one man per every 100 chetverti of land. Richard Hellie estimates the resultant forces at 25,000 to 50,000 by the end of the century. But these forces were untrained and unspecialized. More valuable to the state were new formations of troops. Responding to the European ‘military revolution’, Russia began to develop regiments of artillery and musketeers (called collectively by the seventeenth century sluzhilye liudi po priboru or ‘contract’ servitors). In the mid-sixteenth century their numbers are estimated to have been around 30,000, thus outnumbering the cavalry servitors (approximately 21,000). By the end of the century there were about 30,000 cavalrymen, some 20,000 musketeers alone, significant numbers of artillery (3,500), as well as frontier Cossack and non-Russian troops (Bashkirs, Tatars).
Contract servitors were most probably recruited from the peasantry or impoverished landed élite; they did not enjoy the high social status or landholding privileges of the cavalry élite. They were garrisoned in towns throughout the realm, but especially on the southern frontier. They stood as a middle social stratum between the taxpaying artisans of the posad and the landed gentry. They supported themselves from trade and farming their own plots; they paid no state tax (the obrok levied on posad people), but did pay tax on their sales.
These military innovations had tremendous impact on Muscovite social structure over the course of the sixteenth century, but differentially so. In the north, not including the Novgorod and Pskov areas, the land would not support nor did local needs require the service landholding system and a landed cavalry élite. Garrisons manned by locally mustered Cossack, musketeers, and militia met the need for border defence. Conversely, the southern steppe frontier had a preponderance of contract servitors living in commune-type regiments. This area had relatively little hereditary landholding (secular or ecclesiastical), few enserfed peasants, few large landholders. What service landholding estates there were were small, farmed by poor cavalrymen with few peasants, making a lower cavalry class distinct from their relatively better-off counterparts in the centre. Social boundaries were fluid on the frontier. Here one finds such anomalies as musketeers holding service landholdings and cavalrymen serving as infantry and holding no land in conditional tenure; here all servitors, even gentry, were obligated to farm state properties and to provide grain reserves.
But in the centre and north-west the service landholding system had a great impact on social relations. By the end of the century service landholding dominated here, although in the centre a significant minority of land remained hereditary. Hereditary tenure was preferred because in theory service landholdings could not be transferred. But since many service tenure holders also held hereditary land, and since service holdings from the very beginning were treated de facto as transferable and hereditable, and since hereditary landholders were also obliged to serve Moscow, hereditary owners (votchinniki) and service tenure holders (pomeshchiki) did not constitute separate social forces, as has traditionally been thought. The landholding élite constituted a consolidated élite, with divisions in power, wealth, and status based on regional association and family heritage, but not according to the type of landholding.
Muscovite grand princes used the system of service landholding to create stronger regional élites by resettlement. From the early sixteenth century they moved new settlers from the centre to areas previously conquered:
Novgorod (1478), Viazma (1494), Toropets (1499), Pskov (1510), and Smolensk (1514). Later they continued to make grants of land in conditional tenure to populate newly conquered areas or to bolster frontier economies shattered by war. In the 1570s, for example, petty landholders from the Novgorod environs were moved to the western border (Velikie Luki, Toropets, Dorogobuzh, Smolensk, Viazma), while others were moved to recently captured territories in Livonia. When Russians were driven out of Livonia, they were resettled on the Novgorod frontier. These relocations severed original regional attachments but created new ones elsewhere, forging new regional élites and perhaps a more integrated centre.
Other policies also worked to create regional ‘corporations’ and a central élite. Laws from Ivan III’s time forbade landholders in almost all regions, for example, to sell land to non-locals;parallel injunctions kept land within princely clans. Up until the mid-century Muscovy mustered the bulk of the army by region or princely clans; by the end of the sixteenth century it had developed a more differentiated system of regional gentry ‘corporations’ arranged around towns (goroda). At the social apex was the ‘sovereign’s court’ (gosudarev dvor) with about 3,000 men at mid-century and set apart by privileges and largesse. In land, for example, by the end of the century the highest ranks received 3.5 times more service tenure land than the lowest. They also received largesse from the grand prince: after the victory of Kazan, Ivan IV is said to have distributed 48,000 roubles’ worth of precious objects to his men in three days of feasting. The sovereign’s court also had access to the Kremlin and the person of the ruler, attending daily and at ceremonial occasions and accompanying him on pilgrimages.