Vladimir, Kolomna-Riazan’). Otherwise, streets were narrow and winding; homes
were built inside a wooden fenced courtyard, not facing out as in contemporary
Europe.
Physical characteristics alone, however, did not define Russian towns. Perhaps
their most interesting aspect was invisible, in their legal make-up. In the modern
world we are familiar with a type of city that was actually a rarity in world history,
namely the city as independent municipality. This type arose in Europe in the
medieval era on the model of the ancient Greek“polis”; over time cities negotiated
themselves out of the control of their owners, be they church hierarchs, local
nobles, or the king. The European“polis”was an autonomous legal and physical
urban sphere, separate juridically and politically from private overlordship, acting as
an independent subject in relation to monarchical administration. Towns governed
themselves with councils, generally elected from the propertied citizenry (although
in practice civic government often fell into the hands of a merchant oligarchy).
Citizens were free to work, invest, and prosper as they might. Towns of this sort
developed in the Polish kingdom and Grand Duchy of Lithuania over the medieval
and early modern centuries, receiving privileges of self-governance under Magde-
burg or other German lawcodes. Such cities paid taxes to the king, but their town
councils and burgher population were independent of the king’s administration.
When Russia took over a Magdeburg-law city—Smolensk (1514–1618, 1667),
numerous western border towns (Thirteen Years War 1654–67), and many during
the partitions of Poland (1772–95)—as a rule it honored these urban institutions
and privileges, even though they resembled nothing in the Muscovite past.
Historically most cities have been legally private entities, that is, they belong to
private owners, be they landlords, bishops, princes, or kings. Their inhabitants were
personal dependents of the owner, and the profits of the city went to him. That was
the sort of town that early modern Russia had until late in the eighteenth century;
they were private, and very complexly so. All their inhabitants were dependents of
private owners and owed their service and income to them, just as peasants owed
work and service to their owners. Russian towns were patchwork quilts of physical
and/or virtual neighborhoods belonging to different landlords. What we might
think of as the city per se—the artisans and traders of the urban commune
(posadskie liudi)—were only about half the population and were juridically the
equivalent of state peasants. They owed direct taxes (tiaglo), as well as sales taxes on
their trade and rent on their shops (obrok). They also owed public services that
included not only upkeep of city infrastructure (streets, wells, gates, bridges), but
also specialized services such as accounting, book-keeping, tax collection, helping in
customs houses, and the like.
Myriad other communities completed the urban landscape, each with a different
“deal”and virtually all of them allowed to trade on terms more advantageous than
those of the townsmen. Some of the city population might be musketeers working
as city police and/or garrison troops; other military people as appropriate to a given
locale could live there (engineers, artillery). They often inhabited their own suburbs
and paid no direct taxes, although they might pay tax on trade. Other urban
residents were serfs and townsmen who belonged to private owners—landed
238 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801