The Russian Empire 1450–1801

forced to turn back. In the second campaign in 1689, better planning (leaving earlier in the season, strategic advance work) all ...

different on the forested steppe and steppe borderland, where the distance from the center and better farming conditions attract ...

through the rest of the century. These efforts, however, pale in comparison to the size of the empire. The problem of runaways a ...

relative status of the two clans according to official records of genealogy and military service. Since virtually no challenger ...

Muscovy’s legal infrastructure was rudimentary compared to the sophisticated courts, personnel, and jurisprudence of Byzantium a ...

towns such as Pustoozero, Kholmogory, Kol^0 skii ostrog; to the south, the northern Caucasus (the Terek). While in exile, crimin ...

condemned a few days for repentance (the 1649 Lawcode mandated six weeks, but that was rarely enforced) and to gather a crowd“to ...

Not surprisingly, offices to record the state’sfinances, human resources, and international relations accompanied Muscovy’s rise ...

2,762 in 1698; undersecretaries (poddiachie) from 575 to 2,648. Local offices expanded with empire—in total in 1626 there were 1 ...

the 1650s. As for secular documents, as Simon Franklin notes, the Lawcode of 1649 was the only complete administrative book publ ...

complex procedures of assembling, proof-reading, signing off, and recording docu- ments, with the goal of protecting documents’i ...

clan-based system of precedence (mestnichestvo); gentry and boyar families did not intermarry with scribal clans. Through the se ...

center where devastation had been great, and pinned people to their place of registration for ease of taxation. New systems of t ...

potential and trade routes, maps were drawn for military planning, sketches were made for land disputes, but the state did not i ...

repairing roads annually were another of the unpaid collective service obligations put on communities. A more formal system of c ...

back-breaking coaches without springs, lazy or venal coachmen, or lame horses slowed things down. In the mid-sixteenth century t ...

1654 and the outbreak of the Thirteen Years War (1654–67), an express courier network was created to Ukraine. Less urgent corres ...

Crimea, and ambassadors from the Crimea were forbidden to enter Moscow. At times in the early seventeenth century the government ...

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006) andDesperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia(I ...

1997), 431–49; D. J. B. Shaw,“Southern Frontiers in Muscovy, 1550–1700,”in James H. Bater and R. A. French,Studies in Russian Hi ...