gentry, monasteries, bishops, and other hierarchs—and their“white”neighbor-
hoods enjoyed freedom from taxation. Some urban residents did specialized services
for the ruler, such as coachmen with tax-free status, or expert weavers who served
the Kremlin court in Moscow (kadashevtsy). Some were foreigners, who were
overseen by the relevant chancery, whether merchants, engineers, or military
officers. Many of these groups lived collectively—musketeers and Cossacks, coach-
men, court weavers, often foreigners; others lived throughout the town.
Seventeenth-century Moscow provides a good example of this urban legal diver-
sity. It is estimated that half the population was military (musketeers and other
servitors). A quarter of the rest was theposador urban commune (divided into
twenty-five neighborhood communes for self-government). Gentry and boyar house-
holds made up another 10 percent, clergy 5 percent (in about twenty-six small
settlements) and government officials another 4 percent. The rest were palace
settlements, foreigners, and other groups. The only specifically city government
applied to the taxed city people: paralleling villages, they organized themselves as
communes and a town assembly met to consider petty crime, apportionment and
collection of the tax burden, and other common concerns. They were subordinate to
a centrally appointed governor, or in Moscow to the Land Administration Chancery,
and had no independent executive orfiscal authority. The greatest bane in the life of
early modern townsmen was unfair competition from other town residents: Cossacks,
musketeers, and secular and ecclesiastical serfs could produce crafts or bring in goods
from the countryside and undercut the townsmen on the market.
From at least the difficult last decades of the sixteenth century, townsmen
abandoned their statuses just as did peasants; theyfled to other places or they
sold themselves into debt slavery. The state tried to prop up the urban commune in
coercive and supportive ways. In the 1580s townsmen were forbidden to sell
themselves into slavery to escape taxes; in 1591, like peasants, they were forbidden
to leave their communities. From this time into the seventeenth century the
government impressed into city taxpaying service any non-peasant, non-noble
vagrant who barely qualified for the role. Meanwhile, townsmen repeatedly
(1627, 1629, 1637, 1646, and 1649) petitioned the government for relief from
unfair competition by foreign merchants and locals and from unbearable tax
burdens created byflight from the commune. In 1637 Moscow townsmen com-
plained that a third of their commune hadfled; in the next decade some successful
efforts were made to track down and return runaway townsmen to their communes
and to their taxpaying roles within them.
The Lawcode of 1649 tried to answer some of these complaints in a way that
created a more cohesive urban social estate. It abolished the privileged neighbor-
hoods of non-taxpaying artisans and declared that urban artisans had exclusive
right to manufacture and sell in Muscovy. But that was difficult to enforce as the
economy and population continued to grow and, as foreign travelers often
remarked,“everyone was a trader.”Furthermore, the Lawcode also de facto
enserfed the townsmen with the peasants, in that it required townsmen to remain
in the towns where they were registered in 1649. Their mobility was cut off, but
little else had been done to bolster their economic prospects.
Towns and Townsmen 239