82 Muscovite Roots, 1462-1689
sixteenth century men had been recruited according to the amount of land held
by owners in various categories, the norm being one for each lOOquarters. This as
we have seen left their masters considerable discretion to determine how many
of their dependents to send, since the Razryad officials were concerned
primarily with the scivice they lhemseives rendered personally~ and not with
that of their untrained followers. In the seventeenth century. a"flew criterion
was introduced: the number of peasant homesteads which an ow,ier held, as
ascertained by official census-takers. The changeover was gradual: in 1630/1
one recruit had to be furnished for each ten households, while two years later
some men were still being taken according to the old system (on~ per 300
quarters).^6 In 1646 the norm was put at one in twenty, and th_at year in a sym-
bolic move Tsar Alexis ordered some 30 courtiers who failed to provide such
recruits to be fined 20 roubles for each absentee.^7 By 1651 a Swedish agent,
Philip von Krusenstjern, was reporting that boys of 14 and 15 were being taken
as soldiers; in his view this 'makes it appear that there will be something of a
revolt should there be a single misfortune, a severe blow in any one place'.^8 He
was perhaps a little over-sanguine, but in 1653 trouble did indeed occur in
Kozlov where some two thousand men resisted enrolment as soldaty; their
alleged ringleader, a provincial gentryman named M. Amosov, w.as sentenced
to be taken round all the local settlements and knouted in each.^9 The affair
was, however, of purely local significance.
By the 1660s the authorities were conducting general levies over the whole
country except in exposed border areas and the eastern territories. 'Where a
father has two or three sons', wrote Grigoriy Kotoshikhin, 'or where three
brothers live together ... one of the three is taken; where there are four sons
or brothers, two are taken; and from whomever is found to have. more ...
more are taken. '^10 In Novgorod the levy of 1658, of one man per ten
households, netted 18,000 recruits, as well as over 10,000 roubles in commuta-
tion fees collected from hamlets with less than ten households.^11 In the Perm'
area inl662 the draft took one man in five, although they were used only for
local defence purposes.^12 Normally the figure was between one in 20 and one in
- Three such levies by the Foreigners' chancellery in 1659-61 yielded over
52,000 recruits and 31,000 roubles in cash; several thousand more were taken
by other central agencies.^13 It is thought that in all over 100,000 men were
taken as recruits during the Thirteen Years War.^14 The authorities required the
men to be of a certain age (in one documented case, between 25 and 40) and
6 AAE iii. 222, 225; Brix, Geschichte, p. 387.
1 AMG ii. 267; Hellie, Enserfment, p. 189.
8 Forsten, 'Dipl. snosheniya', cccxvi. 329.
9 Zagorodsky, Belgorodskaya cherta, p. 260.
10 Kotoshikhin, 0 Rossii, p. 133.
11 AMG iii. 504, cited by Hellie, Enserfment, p. 195; cf. PSZ i. 208.
12 PSZ i. 324; er. Brix, Geschichte, p. 387; Sh., 'Dvoryanstvo'. p. 541.
JJ AAE iv. 84; DAI viii. 40; Lappo-Danilevsky, Organizatsiya, p. 392.
14 Chernov, Voor. sily, p. 145; Kalinychev, Pravovye voprosy, p. 71.