The Russian Empire 1450–1801

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 ...

On sixteenth-century criminal law and tax reforms, see Robert O. Crummey,“Reform under Ivan IV: Gradualism and Terror,”in Crumme ...

8 Trade, Tax, and Production No one was going to get rich from taxing the peasant economy in Russia’s extreme climate and locati ...

“modernization.”The term should be used with caution, as it evokes a model that has been critiqued as Euro-centric (for discount ...

produce the commodity they most desired for export. They also bought tallow,flax, wax, and other items essential to Britain’s gr ...

from Europe was possible only in the summer season and took four weeks from Amsterdam in good conditions; the Arkhangelsk trade ...

sleepy backwater, in its heyday the town boasted an immense cathedral (1587; Figure 8.1) patronized by the ruling family; the re ...

town of Viaz’ma became a key borderland hub of trade into the Grand Duchy. When Russia regained Smolensk after 1667, its trade o ...

They brought to Russia silk, cotton, linen, processed hides, sabers, dyes, spices and gems, and Turkish horses. Most of Russia’s ...