Musketeers and Other Traditional Forces 79often reclassified as musketeers or serving Cossacks; finally, the bulk of the
population consisted of yasak-paying peasants and others whose military
obligations were only sporadic.^103
Those with esiah~s 11u1111aiiy hctd iu provide: ilid1 own hu1~e:~. e:quip1i1C:iii,
and supplies. Only men unable to support themselves received pay or
allowances in kind, in which case they were referred to as kormovye (literally,
'with food'). The native aristocrats had the best of both worlds, for they
retained rights in their ancestral territories but were also initially granted land
in Muscovy. As a rule these properties were located along the Oka river line, so
that their holders could readily perform their military and diplomatic duties:
they were vital in intelligence work.1^04 The little town of Kasimov on the Oka,
south-east of Moscow, became a kind of Tatar feudal enclave within the
Muscovite state. It was named after its first beneficiary, Tsarevich Kasim of
Kazan·, who backed Vasiliy II against his rival in the civil war of the 1440s. Its
rulers remained Muslim until the 1650s. It was not until 1682, after the death
of the last of them, Said-Burgan, that the 'tsardom' (as it was called) was
abolished, as part of the military reforms associated with Golitsyn and his
group. The declining role of the oriental troops during the seventeenth cen-
tury10' is due to two factors: it was evidently thought impolitic to strain their
loyalty by committing them extensively to wars fought against Crimean Tatars
and Turks; and the tsars now disposed of other units with a higher level of
military efficiency. These were the so-called new-model forces, to which we
may now turn.
IOJ Id., Russlandserste NationaliUJten, pp. 213-16, 220; for their service as Cossacks: DA/viii.
S2 ( 1679).
104 Kargalov, f;/p "stepnoy granitse, p. 83.
105 A mere 1,667 native· troops were committed to the war with Poland, out of a force number·
ing 18,700: Chernov, Voor. sily, p. 169; id., 'Voor. sily', p. 441; Hellie, Enserfment, pp. 270-2.