clan-based system of precedence (mestnichestvo); gentry and boyar families did not
intermarry with scribal clans. Through the seventeenth century, military men
began to develop into“noble officials,”in Robert Crummey’s term, intruding on
the most prestigious, influential, and lucrative chancery leadership roles, but that
did not raise the status of civil service in Muscovy.
One important strategy that kept this bureaucracy an effective institution of
empire-wide control was that the state, unlike its Ottoman and French counter-
parts in the eighteenth century, never farmed out local offices, and thus never lost
its grip on local control. All areas, from center to periphery, were under the
authority of a centrally appointed governor, however lightly his authority was
imposed on daily life. All were subject to the tsar’s taxes, his criminal law, his
bureaucratic procedures. This was reflected in the consistency of bureaucratic
paper: documents of the same genre separated by decades and produced as far
apart as Belgorod in the west and Irkutsk in Siberia use the same format and
language, bespeaking a centralized and professional bureaucracy. This persistent
achievement of centralized, highly focused control gave the Muscovite state
a purchase on local power.
COMMUNICATIONS: CADASTERS AND MAPS
Historical sociologists see“surveillance”at the heart of the early modern state
project, by which they mean the systematic gathering of information about the
resources of one’s realm. Through the seventeenth century, Muscovy focused
intently on resources, human and material. To identify and mobilize resources, it
developed censuses, cadasters, and tax registers that focused on people, borrowing
from Mongol practice familiar to Moscow’s princes as tax collectors for the Horde.
Adopting Chinese practice, throughout their conquered territories Mongols had
carried out counts of households in the Rus’territories in the 1250s and 1270s.
Their surveys introduced terminology of divisions of village and town populations
into“hundreds,”“fifties,”and other numerical units, used in Muscovy into the
seventeenth century. Muscovite rulers’first censuses surveyed populated land in
newly conquered territories in the latefifteenth century—Novgorod, Iaroslavl’,
Beloozero—in preparation for their being assigned as service-tenure grants to
expand the cavalry. Populated land was categorized into good, medium, and poor
quality and assignments were adjusted accordingly. Thereafter Muscovy regularly
compiled cadasters of populated, taxable arable land and urban properties not only
in newly conquered territories but also in the center to assess taxes and to regulate
service land. In the sixteenth century the use of cadasters accelerated the unification
of the currency (reforms of the 1530s and 1590s) and speeded a shift from tax
payment in kind to cash. Cadasters promoted enserfment: starting in the 1580s and
1590s, urban and rural taxpayers were forbidden to move from their place of
registration. In the aftermath of the Time of Troubles through the 1620s, cadastral
surveys assessed the loss of population and cultivated land in the northwest and
The State Wields its Power 177