Musketeers and Other Traditional Forces 73The stref'tsy rising lived on in the popular imagination. A folk song portrays a
Cossack ataman riding to Moscow and asking the tsar why he was angry with
his troops, whose loyalty and bravery were beyond all doubt; dissatisfied with
the explanation he is given, he hurries back to 'the stref'tsy army' to warn it
that a massacre is impending-or, in another version, that they have been par-
doned and rewarded.^74 The motifs of such songs were traditional, and the
ataman here represents a popular hero in the most general sense. Nevertheless
this legend may reflect awareness of an important historical fact: that in their
rebellions the musketeers were not actively supported by the Cossacks of the
southern river systems, who had manifested violent antipathy to the Muscovite
social order on so many other occasions.
One of the early Romanov tsars' most signal successes was to win over
elements from the autonomous Cossack communities and to integrate them
into their own forces. They were called 'town Cossacks' (kazaki gorodovye), a
term which indicates, not that they were urbanized, but that they performed
service 'from the (provincial] towns' in much the same way as most privileged
servitors did. During the sixteenth century the practice developed of engaging
bodies of Cossack troops from the Don and Volga, and less frequently from
the Dnieper (who were known to the Muscovites as 'Cherkassians'), to fight
various foreign enemies. These auxiliaries were led by their own elected chiefs
(atamany) and were apparently free to return home when their services were no
longer required. Some of them chose not to do so; others entered Muscovy as
individuals (or in small bands) and enrolled in the tsar's forces. Although these
men were in most cases former serfs or slaves, they were not returned to ser-
vitude, for it was considered that claims against them by their former owners
had lost validity ·once the runaway had spent two years beyond the southern
border: 'Don air makes one free', ran the popular saying.^75 (No doubt there
were breaches of this principle in practice, especially after the legal establish-
ment of serfdom.) On entering the tsar's service these Cossacks were normally
exempted from taxes and given land allotments which they, like the strertsy,
held collectively. A document of 1594 instructed the commander of Voronezh
to ensure that their huts were built in a row so that their unit chief (sotnik) had
them under surveillance and control.^76
Apart from the Cossacks in Siberia, who cannot be considered here, such
settlements were most frequently located in the new towns along the southern
border. They seem to have been established in the main during the 1590s, when
the state was anxious to win back runaways who had fled to the Cossack lands
during or after the oprichnina. Their new experience in the martial arts could
be put to good use in this vulnerable region. Initially service Cossacks acted as
scouts and guides; later on, once they became more settled, they performed
military duties of the most varied kind, as did the musketeers. Here, too, a
74 Alekseyeva and Yemelyanov (eds.), /st. pesni, p. 36.
75 Zagorodsky, Belgorodskaya cherta, p. 30.
76 Anpilogov (ed.), Novye dokumenty, pp. 381-2.