inexpensive for the state. Their economic position was superior to taxed peasants
and townsmen, and to that degree they were co-opted into service to the state.
A common English phrase for them—servitors by contract—is woefully inad-
equate; they were not hired laborers and their diversity was so great that it is hard
to connote with one phrase.
Perhaps the earliest group in this status (Richard Hellie calls them the“lower
service class,”with the gentry as“middle”) was the coachmen (iamshchiki), dis-
cussed in Chapter 7. These were the communities who maintained stations with
horses, carts, provisions, and escorts for state messengers. Over the sixteenth
century they became a hereditary social group separate from town and village
taxpayers; decrees of 1556, 1580s, 1619, 1627, and 1631 awarded them a semi-
privileged status. They were exempted from most taxes and labor obligations not
related to road upkeep; they received an annual cash salary (in 1714 their salaries, as
for bureaucrats, were rescinded and they lived off service and farming). Coachmen
received homesteads for households and stables and plots of arable and grazing
lands that they worked as a community. In addition to tax privileges, in their spare
time coachmen could hire out for general hauling and delivery work. Communities
of coachmen formed strong, self-governing communes, overseen in judicial affairs
locally by their own local bailiffs and centrally by the Iamskoi chancery in Moscow.
Coachmen stood in status between gentry and taxpaying peasantry and towns-
men; most other groups in this status were military. First to appear by the late
fifteenth century were artillerymen and engineers, trained in cannon warfare and
fortification by Italian masters. Both groups lived in towns in their own neighbor-
hoods with small plots to support themselves, and did not pay tax, save on trade
they might do on the side. Sappers and gunners, as well as gatekeepers, are also
mentioned in this form of service not compensated with land and serfs.
By the 1540s and 1550s the gunpowder revolution had arrived, with regiments
of musketeers recruited from non-taxpayers. By the end of the sixteenth century
there were 20,000–25,000 musketeers around the realm. Over time the musketeers
became a semi-closed caste, sons following fathers. Musketeers were infantrymen,
trained in arquebuses, swords, and pikes. Initially they were paid cash salary and
grain, supported by new “musketeer”taxes; in provincial garrisons or towns,
regiments of musketeers lived in their own“suburbs”on lands that they farmed
communally. By the end of the sixteenth century musketeers were also given the
right to tax-free trade in artisan items they produced, and the right to brew beer,
fixing their attachments to garden plot, community, and trade.
Musketeers provided massfirepower in battle and were assigned to year-round
garrison duty in border towns between military campaigns; as they became
bypassed militarily by new models of infantry at mid-seventeenth century, mus-
keteers became garrison troops and in Moscow they became the Kremlin palace
guards, city policemen, and a general military guard for the capital. In 1681, for
example, Moscow had twenty-one musketeer regiments, of about 100 men each.
By this time they had developed into a hereditary, closed social group, jealous of its
privileges; their propensity toflock to the Old Belief accentuated their sense of
distinctiveness. In the 1680s provincial musketeers were humiliatingly transformed
Co-optation: Creating an Elite 217