GENTRY CAVALRY AND MILITARY REFORM
Moscow also co-opted the landed elite with gifts of land, serfs, and status. Princes of
the Rus’principalities like Moscow traditionallyfielded a cavalry army, armed with
bows and arrows suitable for their steppe enemies. They assembled these military
forces from families who owned their land as family property (votchina); the
wealthiest among them in turn mobilized retinues of clients and peasants. As
Moscow conquered neighboring principalities, it absorbed their sovereign princes,
their retinues, and local cavalry elite. In this challenging climate and natural
environment, wealth was not to be had from working the land; landed elites
therefore did not tend to develop regional power bases or attachments to particular
territories. Rather, recognizing that winning booty in war was a more lucrative
prospect, they readily joined Moscow’s expanding principality. Moscow forestalled
resistance from conquered princes and their men by offering generous land grants,
as well as rewards in cash, gifts, and status, particularly after the conquest of
Novgorod in 1478 provided a vast land fund that could be distributed as land for
service (pomest’e). A string of later conquests added more land, and the state also
gave free peasant villages to landlords aspomest’e. By the end of the century virtually
all of the free peasants in the center where arable farming was productive enough to
support a landlord had been awarded to ever more cavalrymen. Initially men did
not reside on the land they were given, but merely lived off its income; gradually for
most of the gentry in the provinces, theirpomest’ebecame their home base.
Thepomes’tesystem allowed Moscow to centralize its army. Until then, the army
was apparently retinue based, starting with the grand prince, his boyars, and their
retinues, joined by other great men of the realm and their retinues (the grand
prince’s uncles and brothers, other sovereign princes, and forces mustered by
wealthy church institutions). Text and illustrations of Ivan III’s campaigns against
Novgorod in the 1470s visually depict the assemblage of these disparate armies.
Liberal distribution ofpomest’eland allowed Moscow, over thefirst half of the
sixteenth century, to disband private retinues and turn the army into a single grand-
princely force (gradually, as appanages were eliminated). Previously sovereign
princes and some of their men were now officers in Ivan III’s army, their allegiances
directly to the grand prince. Since everyone benefited, the process proceeded with
little apparent resistance. The resulting army by the middle of the sixteenth century
had a central core whose lands were near Moscow, the“Sovereign’s Court,”and
provincial gentry mustered from major towns.
This was an old-style cavalry militia. They were entitled to an annual cash
subsidy for equipment, but they equipped themselves; they mustered in local
regiments under the leadership of a Moscow-appointed captain; training was father
to son. Gentry mobilized for the summer battle season and returned home for the
winter. In 1556 the state established norms by which any man with 400 acres of
good arable land, whetherpomest’eor hereditary, had to muster to service, with a
reserve horse. Those with more land brought combat and baggage slaves according
to that ratio. By one estimate the cavalry army in the mid-sixteenth century was
composed of perhaps a third slaves. As late as 1681, the approximately 2,500 men
Co-optation: Creating an Elite 213