A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

270 Ch. 7 •The Age of Absolutism, 1650-1720

Romanov family. The next two tsars restored order, regaining some of the
lands lost to Poland-Lithuania and Sweden.

For most peasants, life itself was an endless “time of troubles” in the face
of state taxation and brutalization at the hands of their lords. Revolts

seemed endemic, some led by men who claimed to be the “true” tsar who
would restore justice. One of the latter led a huge force of peasants, which
captured several cities before being decimated in 1670.
Serfdom emerged as one of the fundamental characteristics of Russia. In
times of dearth or crisis, many peasants traditionally had fled the region of
Moscow to settle on the frontier lands of Siberia in the east or in Ukraine,
standing between Russia, Poland-Lithuania, and a Tatar state on the
Crimean peninsula—the word Ukraine itself means “border region.” The
resulting chronic shortage of rural labor, and the need to provide landed
estates to loyal nobles, led the state in 1649 officially to establish serfdom,
which had already become widespread in the late sixteenth century. The
chronically indebted Russian peasants gave up their freedom in exchange
for loans from the crown and from landlords. The Orthodox Church, a
major landowner, also contributed to the expansion of serfdom. Nearly 90
percent of peasants in Russia were now bound to the land, assuring the state
and nobles of a relatively immobile labor supply. In exchange for the tsars
support of this system, Russian nobles, like their counterparts in Prussia,
pledged their service to the state.
In the meantime, the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania to the west,
Swedish territories to the north, and the Ottoman Turks to the south blocked
Russia's further expansion. The northern port of Archangel on the White
Sea, its harbor frozen solid much of the year, offered Muscovy its only access
to the sea. Polish territories included much of todays Belarus and Ukraine.
Most landowners in Ukraine were Polish Catholics. Most Ukrainian peasants
were, like Russians, Orthodox Christians and spoke a language similar to
Russian. Peasant revolts rocked Ukraine in the late 1640s, and, after an
uprising that drove back the Polish army, Ukraine accepted Russian sover­
eignty in 1654. Under the Treaty of Andrussovo (1667), which concluded a
war with Poland, Russia absorbed Ukraine east of the Dnieper River. To the
south, several peoples resisted incorporation into Russia as well as into
Poland-Lithuania. These included Turks, Crimean Tatars (an ethnic Turkic
group), and Cossacks, a warrior people living on the steppes of southern Rus­
sia and Ukraine.

The Rival Swedish Empire

In the 1640s and 1650s, Swedish kings added to their dynastic holdings the

regions of Denmark and Norway, Estonia and Lithuania, and West Pomera­

nia in northern Germany. Like the Habsburg empire, the kingdom of Sweden

encompassed a farraginous set of languages, including Swedish, Finnish,

Latvian, Estonian, and German, the language of administration. Sweden was