30 Muscovite Roots, 1462-1689an effort to associate the local elite more actively with Moscow's policies. As
such it was certainly a step in the right direction, and it was a pity that, largely
owing to the Livonian War and the oprichnina, this deconcentration of
authority was not sustained.
The high point for the gentry came in the summer of 1556 with the so-called
Service Code ( Ulozheniye o s/uzhbe). Its historic significance lay in the fact
that it formally extended the obligation to serve the tsar to all land-owners or
-holders. Over and above that it prescribed a fixed relationship between the
quality of their service and their entitlement to compensation. 'From each
hundred quarters of good arable land [c. 400 acres] one man [shall be provided]
with a horse and full armour, and with two horses for a distant campaign.'58
The original order has not survived and the texts available are characteristically
laconic. It was laid down that if a servitor brought more men (and horses?) than
his norm, he was to receive a bounty-and the men 2 Yi times more than the
standard monetary grant. Substitutes could be provided by those who-pre-
sumably on account of age or sickness-did not serve themselves. The code did
not state explicitly that the servitor was to report for duty himself, evidently
because this was taken for granted. Nor did it make clear that he had to bring
enough supplies to maintain himself and his men for the duration of the cam-
paign. He also of course had to bring his own weapons, the nature of which
was left to his judgement. Like their Tatar adversaries, sixteenth-century Rus-
sian gentry cavalrymen preferred cold steel to the new-fangled firearms, which
they evidently considered too clumsy and inaccurate, and so of limited usewhen fighting on horseback; they were also expensive. (^59) One can sympathize
with them up to a point, but on a long-term view this choice marked them out
for technological obsolescence.^60 The compensation scales were not mentioned
in the Service Code, but these matters were settled by subsequent legislation
and practice.
From the I 550s onward the gentry militia assumed a more regular shape. In
each district-particularly those situated in a great semicircle south of
Moscow, where gentry estates were concentrated-there developed a skeleton
organization responsible to the centre for the mustering and compensation of
all cavalrymen who lived there. (^61) It enjoyed a measure of autonomy but, as
with the local government reform, the essential decisions were soon being
taken in the capital or by military commanders appointed by the centre. They
were supposed to supervise the proper functioning of the gorod (literally,
'town', as this service organization was simply called), and not to interfere in
ss Vernadsky et al. (eds.), Source Book, i. 141-2; Russ. texts: PRP iv. 586, 600-1; Beskrovnyy,
Khrestomatiya, pp. 62-4.
S9 A battleaxe or a good spear cost 10 roubles, as much as a musket: Brix, Geschichte, p. 118
(for weapon types, ibid., pp. 108-10). This was more than a provincial servitor's annual salary.
60 Nasonov et al. (eds.), Ocherki, p. 330; this point is stressed by Hellie, Enserf""ent, passim,
who perhaps makes too much of the 'gunpowder revolution' in the Russian context. Gentry who
served in the new-model forces (see ch. 4), and no doubt some others, did have firearms.
61 The best studies are by Novosel' sky: 'Prav. gruppy', 'Raspad'.