town of Viaz’ma became a key borderland hub of trade into the Grand Duchy.
When Russia regained Smolensk after 1667, its trade oriented towards Riga in
Livonia, rather than into the still turbulent Grand Duchy.
After the Thirteen Years War (1654–67) won Russia a strip of territory of the
Grand Duchy and closer ties with the Hetmanate, export and domestic trade
developed in response. While Right Bank Ukraine and Poland-Lithuania were
embroiled in a half-century of war, the Left Bank’s export trade reoriented toward
Russia. Ukrainian goods that had previously shipped to Gdansk in Poland now
aimed at Moscow, traveling through the new towns of the Belgorod line. Exports
included distilled spirits and tobacco, cattle, sheep-skin, cloth of European and
Ukrainian production, potash (often shipped on to Arkhangelsk for re-export) and
saltpeter (for Russia’s growing munitions industry). Briansk and its fair at nearby
Svinsk became lively centers of trade by Ukrainian, Greek, and Armenian mer-
chants in goods from Ukrainian lands and the Ottoman empire. By the end of the
century, goods from the Hetmanate were in value about a third of Baltic and
Arkhangelsk exports, while the still-turbulent Smolensk route amounted to less
than a tenth.
TRADE ROUTES: EASTERN TRADE
The drama of the British“discovery”of Russia through their shipwreck on the
White Sea should not obscure the fact that Russia’s traditional trade with the east
was more profitable than European trade, at least from the sixteenth century to
the mid-seventeenth. Russia’s trade with the great Middle Eastern markets—the
Ottoman empire, Safavid Persia, Mughal India, China—remained a vital source of
income, as Russia’s persistent efforts to win ports on the Black and Caspian Seas
and to control the steppe attest. Accustomed to caravan trade, some Russian
merchants ventured farther into this arena than into northern Europe, traveling
into Persia, Central Asia, India, and eventually China, but as a rule eastern
merchants—Christian Armenians, Hindu Indians, Muslim Turks and Bukharans,
and others—brought most eastern goods to Russia. To traders from the great
emporia of the Silk Road, as Stephen Dale notes, Russia was“the most under-
developed or‘peripheral’European state in the early modern era,”inasmuch as
here, as in points north, Russia exported raw materials, or re-exported European
items. But demand was steady.
Russia’s biggest eastern trading partner and sphere in the seventeenth century
was not the Ottoman empire. Political relations were tense: thefirst direct military
engagement between Russia and the Ottoman army occurred in 1677 in the course
of war sparked by the Khmelnytsky revolt. Tensions stayed high as Russia tried
twice, unsuccessfully, to capture Azov in the 1680s. Thus, Turkish merchants did
not approach Russian ports directly, but through the vibrant market town of Jassy
in Moldova. Some traveled on to trade in Kyiv, Viaz’ma, and even Moscow. From
Muscovy Ottoman traders wanted luxury items of government monopolies—
walrus tusks, hunting birds, sable, and silver fox—as well as cloths and hides.
192 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801