Russia. A History

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.