The Russian Empire 1450–1801

Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350– 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Erika Monahan,The Merchants of Siberi ...

9 Co-optation Creating an Elite One of the great challenges of empire was to maintain stability in a multi-ethnic, multi-confess ...

underscore the possibility of access to the ruler. Thefirst grouping would be his inner circle—kinsmen, boyar in-laws, and his c ...

THE INNER CIRCLE AND BOYARS The court elite received the best deal. In Muscovy, these were the boyars, the great men of the real ...

Well into the seventeenth century, the personal, face-to-face relationship of the ruler and his boyars endured. A boyar’s positi ...

46 in 1555), and the number of men in boyar orokol’nichiirank accordingly expanded, from about 15 to 55, in pursuit of reconcili ...

chanceries and important provincial governorships. Some amassed multiple posi- tions for power and income: in the 1620s, for exa ...

GENTRY CAVALRY AND MILITARY REFORM Moscow also co-opted the landed elite with gifts of land, serfs, and status. Princes of the R ...

in the tsar’s regiment each brought about nine armed slaves to battle with them. Thus, in essence, the retinue principle endured ...

introduced. The Moscow elite survived these challenges by reliance on landed wealth and by diversifying into high-level bureaucr ...

gentry joined bureaucratic work. In the north, state peasants staffed offices; on the frontiers, provincial gentry and contract ...

inexpensive for the state. Their economic position was superior to taxed peasants and townsmen, and to that degree they were co- ...

into new model infantry, while those in Moscow and some major towns (Astra- khan, Kazan) endured as urban policemen. Motivated b ...

cash to pay for the army prompted afinal expedient that made the Muscovite army overall quite distinctive. Alongside the growing ...

from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries the Polish and Bohemian elites won such legal guarantees as well. In each of the ...

Press of America, 2009); Richard Hellie,Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Pre ...

10 Rural Taxpayers Peasants and Beyond The majority of the Russian empire’s population was taxpayers, mostly agrarian, but also ...

half of Russia’s East Slavic peasants over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But the same processes that made peasants se ...

loans or upkeep. In a move that worsened the indebted person’s situation but helped to stabilize the gentry’s labor force, decre ...

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THE PEASANTRY Peasants in Russia’s forests and cultivated steppe lands organized their lives in a complex int ...