the seventeenth century, when Moscow began to be able to protect its steppe
borderland more effectively. The Rus’palatinates of the Commonwealth suffered as
much if not more than Russia from slaving raids. The scale of the trade was
immense: in 1578, over 17,000 Eurasian slaves were imported into Caffa; another
estimate suggests that between 1607 and 1618, 100,000 slaves were caught and
between 1632 and 1645, another 26,840. The Ottoman and Persian worlds used
slaves in farming, domestic service, harems and administration, and manufacturing;
the Ottomans engaged them in the army and public construction work. There are
scattered references to eastern traders being able to purchase slaves in Moscow or in
Muscovite-controlled ports into the seventeenth century, but such slaves might
have been acquired as prisoners of war and these references are rare.
One Russian response to the problem was to ransom Russian Christian slaves
with funds regularly collected through the Church. A more effective one was to
construct fortified defensive lines on the routes of Tatar incursions, which were so
regular that Muscovyfixed scouting parties on the lookout for Tatar armies every
summer. Defensive lines were intended to stop the raids, to provide a protected
shield for agrarian settlement, and to prevent theflight of taxpaying serfs from the
center. Defensive lines also intruded into grazing lands, disrupting nomadic econ-
omies and making nomads more dependent upon Russia for market goods.
Inexorable advance of ramparts and earthworks into the steppe did not eradicate
nomads, but displaced them. Nogais, for example, were pushed south into the
Caucasus over the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century.
Moscow began constructing defensive lines into the rich black earth of the forest-
steppe and steppe south of the Oka valley and east of the valley of the Dnieper already
in thefirst half of the sixteenth century, against Nogai Tatars and loosely organized
Volga Cossacks on Volga shores south of Kazan. By mid-century a defensive line of
felled trees, ditches, and earthen ramparts south of the Oka about 150–350 km south
of Moscow had been established, anchored by fortresses at Riazan’, Tula, Kozelsk,
and Putivl’. Once Kazan was conquered (1552), settlement began. Displaced Middle
Volga peoples (Tatars, Chuvash, Mordva) moved towards the steppe; Russian gentry
and monasteries were awarded land here aspomest’e; court peasants were forcibly
moved by the state; runaway Russian peasantsfled here. To protect these settlers
from raids, Russia continued to build fortress lines.
Fortresses were established on the Volga (Samara 1586, Tsaritsyn 1588, Saratov
1590) and along a forest-steppe line on the right bank varying from 650 km south
of Moscow to about 350 km: Belgorod 1593, Veluiki 1599, Elets 1592, Livni
1585, Staryi Oskol 1596, Kursk 1587. After some destruction in the Time of
Troubles, Moscow fortified and intensified what came to be called the Belgorod
Line with new fortresses anchored by Kozlov and Tambov (1635–6); this border
was quickly settled by court peasants from the Riazan area and by Tatars from the
Middle Volga. By the 1650s the line included up to twenty-two forts, creating a
continuous defensive line of 800 km from the upper Vorskla in the west at the
border of Ukrainian lands to the Tsna River in the east, fronting Nogais
and Kalmyks. These provided safe havens for Ukrainian-speaking peasants and
Cossacks to settle what became known as Sloboda Ukraine; state peasants from the
Assembling Empire 67