denisj.b.shaw
commerce and trade in Russia’s regions and their towns is also known only in
part. Very little is known about trade and commerce taking place below the
level of the official towns, even though there is plenty of evidence to suggest
the rise of trading centres and villages in various parts of the country from at
least the fifteenth century. In the north-west, for example,the Novgorod cadas-
tres record the existence of numerous small trading points or riady from this
time whilst in the north similar places, often dealing in furs, were sometimes
described as pogosti.The term posad could also be used to describe such centres,
as in the case of Tikhvin Posad in the north-west.
40
Their inhabitants were
often traders and craftspeople rather than agriculturalists. Many settlements
of this type were monastic centres. Serbina collected evidence for a hundred
or more small trading and commercial centres for various sixteenth-century
dates in thirty-four districts (uezdy) of the Russian state. For the ninety-three
centres for which it was possible to ascertain ownership, 82 per cent were
monastic, a quarter of these belonging to one monastery, the Trinity-Sergius
(Troitse-Sergiev), north-east of Moscow.
41
What became of all these centres
during the vicissitudes of the later sixteenth century is unknown, although it is
apparent that several of those located in the north-west and near the western
frontier disappeared, perhaps in consequence of the Livonian war.
42
Towns often acted as commercial foci for their surrounding regions and
many manufactures were oriented to the meeting of local and everyday needs.
These included the provision of food, clothing, footwear, fuel, building mate-
rials, horses and so on to urban and rural inhabitants. In this sense urban
economies bore the unspecialised character which was typical of early mod-
ern towns throughout Europe. Where they also engaged in more specialised
activities, this reflected their locations relative to such features as localised
resources, important trading routes, coasts, borders and the like. One exam-
ple was the fur trade which had once been the basis of the wealth of the city of
Novgorod. By the second half of the fifteenth century Novgorod’s leading role
Leningradskogo universiteta, 1973); K. N. Serbina, Ocherki iz sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoi
istorii russkogo goroda: Tikhvinskii posad v XVI–XVII vv. (Moscow and Leningrad:
AN SSSR, 1951); Paul Bushkovitch, The Merchants of Moscow, 1580–1650 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1980).
40 French, ‘The Early and Medieval Russian Town’, pp. 265–6; R. A. French, ‘The Urban
Network of Later Medieval Russia’, in Geographical Studies on the Soviet Union: Essays
in Honor of Chauncy D. Harris (Chicago: University of Chicago, Department of Geogra-
phy, Research Paper no. 211, 1984), p. 45; Serbina, Ocherki; V. N. Vernadskii, Novgorod i
Novgorodskaia zemlia v XV veke (Moscow and Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1961), p. 112.
41 K. N. Serbina, ‘Iz istorii vozniknoveniia gorodov v Rossii XVI v.’, in Goroda feodal’noi
Rossii (Moscow: Nauka, 1966), pp. 135–8.
42 French, ‘The Urban Network’, p. 46.
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