New-Model Army and Questions of Cost SS
tunates petitioned the tsar: 'We, thy slaves, served thee, Great Sovereign, each
year in the Lithuanian and German towns and on campaigns without cease, in
summer and winter; and while on thy service we became yet more impoverished
and in our villages, Sv·•cicign, the aiablc -n·as not ploughed and Vi.ii houses
emptied, and many of our [kinsmen] live by begging. '^29
A few years earlier another settlement project had been launched in certain
areas along the southern and south-western border. The soldiers concerned
here were cavalry rather than infantry. The first mention of such settlers
occurs in 1646, in Vyaz'ma district, but the main concentrations were to be
found in the strategic Belgorod and Sevsk regions. In 1647 the inhabitants of
several villages in Komaritsky sub-district, who had hitherto belonged to the
prominent military commander (and boyar) A. N. Trubetskoy, were enlisted
as dragoons. In return they were allowed to keep the land they worked and
were freed from certain taxes, but received no pay and had to provide their own
horses.^30 The Komaritsky dragoons, a force 5,500 strong, seem to have coped
more easily with their dual task of farming and soldiering simultaneously-no
doubt because they had more land of better quality than the hard-pressed resi-
dents of the northern forests. However, the same mistakes were made. In the
1670s they were committed to the campaigns in the Ukraine; their properties
were attacked by Tatars and the survivors eventually had to be reclassified as
soldaty.^31 This occurred about 1680, so that two generations of men will have
gone through this experience, exchanging the plough for the sword as and
when authority dictated. The failure of these experiments meant that most
soldiers in the new-model forces, not being endowed with land, were more
clearly dissociated from their civilian environment than the musketeers. Prob-
ably fewer of them raised families, so that a smaller proportion of recruits
came from within the corps, as distinct from the general population, and prob-
ably they suffered proportionately heavier casualties. Both these points admit-
tedly need substantiation.
The new army was not comprised solely of peasant conscripts. It included a
good many individuals of provincial gentry background, some of whom
volunteered while others were enrolled by force. The latter practice speaks
volumes about the real value of social privilege in the Muscovite tsardom and
should demolish the misconception that the dvoryanstvo constituted a 'ruling
class'.
In 1630 two thousand landless gentry servitors were ordered to present
themselves in Moscow for enrolment and training as soldaty. Only a handful
responded.^32 They were promised five roubles a year and a daily allowance,
but this incentive was insufficient to overcome their distrust of the 'German
colonels' who, the decree specified, were to instruct them; in any case they
29 DAI iv. 146 (p. 394).
30 Zagorodsky, Belgorodskaya cherta, p. 132.(^31) DAI iii. 21; ix. 106; Brix, Geschichte, pp. 284-5; Chernov, 'Voor. sily', pp. 445-6.
(^32) AMG i. 267; Myshlayevsky, 'Ofitscrskiy vopros', p. 51; Hellie, Enserfment, p. 171.