potential and trade routes, maps were drawn for military planning, sketches were
made for land disputes, but the state did not invest in developing native carto-
graphic expertise on the level of contemporary Netherlands, England, and France.
Rather, it leaned on imported sources. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
the Kremlin court collected western maps and atlases of Russian territories;
European geographical works were dominant among books translated into Russian
in the seventeenth century. Foreign travelers (Isaac Massa, Jan Struys, Guillaume
de Beauplan, and others) published maps in their accounts, sometimes producing
them with Russian informants, otherwise working from their scientific investiga-
tion, as in Adam Olearius’first accurate mapping of the Caspian Sea in the 1640s.
From the late sixteenth century the court evinced some interest in mapping the
entire realm: in Boris Godunov’s time (1598–1605) the Military Service Chancery
produced theGreat Draft, thefirst collection of maps of the empire, including
western Siberia. When its original was lost infire in 1626, it was recreated, along
with a new map including territories on which Russian expansion focused—the
Black Sea steppe and western border with Poland-Lithuania. Other chanceries—
Foreign Affairs, Kazan, Siberia, and others—also engaged in mapping their subor-
dinate territories and towns, with particular interest in strategically important
Siberian and Chinese borders. Thefirst surviving map of Siberia dates to 1666/7
and the great Siberian mapmaker Semen Remezov created, in Kivelson’s words“a
dazzling corpus”of maps of Siberia at the turn of the century. The Foreign Affairs
Chancery in Moscow, led by A. A. Vinius, was producing sophisticated maps by
the end of the century, if not yet up to modern cartographic standards. Rich in
ethnographic detail, Muscovite maps lacked systematic scale, Cartesian coordin-
ates, or other modern attributes. Focused primarily on pragmatic purposes—
taxation, trade routes—the use of mapping to claim imperial possession did not
enter the Muscovite practice of empire until the time of Peter I.
COMMUNICATIONS: ROADS AND COACHMEN
Fernand Braudel’s quip,“Distance—the enemy of empire,”reminds us of the
importance of connections on the ground. Maps may have depicted the empire
as connected territory, but communication networks—roads and rivers, coach and
postal services—were crucial to the governing of empire. The greatest empires are
renowned in this regard—Rome, China, the Mongols—and early modern European
and Eurasian state builders put effort into this as well. Rivers and roads had run
through the principalities and towns of the East Slavic forest since Kyiv Rus’times,
as well as courier service for princely business. The Mongol empire deployed a
system of coach stations across the steppe staffed by local populations with horses,
carts, and coachmen: from the late thirteenth century principalities in the Mongol-
ruled Rus’forest were setting up such networks, assessing taxes or service for their
own and the Horde’s correspondence.
Ivan III’s conquests and diplomatic outreach prompted the development of
better roads; constructing roads, including“winter roads”of packed snow, and
The State Wields its Power 179