11
Towns and Townsmen
Townsmen in primarily Russian towns were not as different from the empire’sEast
Slavic peasants as one would think. Legally, they suffered the same burdens of
taxation and conscription. Towns developed differently in Russia than in western
Europe and Eurasia. Muscovy’s urban populations were neither as many, nor as
densely settled, nor as prosperous as their counterparts elsewhere, nor did they as a
rule enjoy municipal autonomies as did most cities in western Europe. Here we will
explore what sort of“deal”the empire made with its urban populations, from
taxpaying townsmen to more privileged merchants, through the seventeenth century.
Russia’s urban landscape featured towns that were small in population but large
in size. Many townsmen lived in courtyards, with gardens and livestock, expanding
the urban footprint. In the sixteenth century, for example, Paris covered about 500
hectares, while at the same time Moscow sprawled over 2,000. In population, most
were decidedly modest. In the sixteenth century western Europe and much of the
Ottoman empire were experiencing a“new urbanization,”with rapid growth of
large cities, as discussed briefly in Chapter 1. Cities with populations over 40,000
nearly doubled from 26 to 40; a few had populations of 150,000 (Naples, Paris,
London, Milan, Antwerp, Palermo). In that century Istanbul was the largest city in
the Middle East and Europe, with at least 400,000 in population, rising to perhaps
800,000 by the end of the sixteenth century; its empire was dotted with other large
cities (Cairo, Aleppo, Bursa, Edirne). By the end of the seventeenth century, there
were at least twelve cities in Europe with populations over 100,000. By contrast,
only Moscow consistently had a population so large: foreign observers suggested a
population of 100,000 in the early sixteenth century, and records for 1730 suggest
a population of about 140,000.
Russia’s cities constituted less of the entire population than elsewhere. In 1678
there were only 185,000 male city residents in the entire realm, about 2 percent of
the total population, while in western Europe in the late 1600s the overall urban
population was 12.4 percent of the total. Russia’s cities were also relatively young.
While cities in the Ottoman empire boasted pedigrees to antiquity and many in
western Europe to medieval centuries, in the Russian center the oldest towns dated
to the twelfth century and new towns were being founded constantly. At the
beginning of the sixteenth century, there were about 130 towns in Muscovite
possessions; by the end of the century, over eighty new towns had been established
in the wake of conquests of Kazan, Astrakhan, and western Siberia. All began as
fortress outposts, but most gradually acquired local trading significance as well,
with artisans and markets. Urban growth intensified after the disruptions of the