sleepy backwater, in its heyday the town boasted an immense cathedral (1587;
Figure 8.1) patronized by the ruling family; the region was surrounded by enter-
prising monasteries also active in trade. With winter freeze, transit resumed
overland by sled to Iaroslavl’, where some goods took the Volga and others
continued on the Moscow. Arkhangelsk, therefore, became Russia’s most direct
link in a chain that connected its goods with global trade through the Volga route
and European maritime routes.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Baltic Sea itself continued to
be a constant focus for Russian trade, in spite of regular disruption: in the Livonian
War (ended in 1582) Russia lost its port on the Baltic (Narva) and had to use
Swedish ports (Riga, Reval), and during Russia’s“Time of Troubles”(1605–13)
trade virtually collapsed in this arena. Still, the Baltic was much more directly
connected to a demographically booming part of Europe than was Arkhangelsk,
being open for more months of the year. Here the Dutch were dominant in Russian
export trade until the 1680s, when the English surged ahead on the strength of
colonial goods and naval technology. As in Arkhangelsk, Dutch and English sold
European textiles and colonial products to Russian merchants in exchange for
linen, hemp, hides, andiuft’produced in Livonia, the Grand Duchy, and Russian
western borderlands.
In the Baltic arena local merchants were more active in trade than in the White
Sea. By the Treaty of Stolbovo (1617, affirmed in Treaty of Kardis 1661) Russian
merchants were allowed to trade in Stockholm, Vyborg, Reval, and Narva, and
Russian policy made sure to make goods available for this trade by shifting goods.
Russian merchants have a reputation for not venturing abroad (lacking capital to
maintainfleets of ships competitive with British and Dutch carriers), but in the
Baltic they did, using small craft to venture as far as Stockholm. They traded hides,
lard, hemp, andflax for Swedish copper and iron. They created informal trade
associations for credit and cooperation, cited from the 1640s: those from Novgo-
rod, Tikhvin, and Olonets formed a loose union for Stockholm trade, while those
from Pskov cooperated in trade with Narva, Reval, and Dorpat. Pskov and
Novgorod merchantsflourished on this trade, providing centers of exchange of
Russian and transit goods such as Persian silks between Livonian ports and Volga-
based trade.
Through the seventeenth century Russia’s balance of trade through the Baltic
was favorable, generally in the form of silver and copper money and bullion. By the
1680s and 1690s, on the eve of Peter I’s founding of St. Petersburg on the Gulf of
Finland (1703), trade in the Baltic rivaled Arkhangelsk.
Overland trade through the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania had existed for
centuries, andflourished in these centuries of European and Polish demographic
and economic growth,flexibly adjusting to disruptions of war and conquest.
Smolensk, acquired by Russia in 1514, was a key hub east, and in the sixteenth
century Russian merchants traveled as far as Vilnius (where their trade center and
customs house, orgostinnyi dvor, was cited from 1503), bringing furs, hides, and
fish, honey and hops to sell for textiles, wine, and metal products such as knives.
With the loss of Smolensk in 1618 and seventeenth-century warfare, the borderland
Trade, Tax, and Production 191