Perrie M. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 1: From Early Rus’ to 1689
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
brian davies
to sue for truce. In December 1618 a fourteen-year armistice was signed at
Deulino. This treaty’s terms were even harsher for Muscovy: the western
Rus’ territories of Smolensk, Chernigov and most of Seversk – holding about
thirty towns in all – were ceded to the Commonwealth, bringing its frontier
as far east as Viaz’ma, Rzhev and Kaluga (Russia’s western borders in 1618 are
shown in Map 21.1). Wl
adyslaw also maintained his claim to the Muscovite
throne.
3
The Stolbovo and Deulino treaties at least bought Muscovy time for recon-
struction and rearmament. Muscovy’s reconstruction occurred in two stages.
In the first stage (1613–18) the boyar duma worked with the Assembly of the
Landto restorebasic order by re-establishingchancellery control over the town
governors, appointing town governors to districts which had not had them
before, suppressing banditry in the provinces, co-opting cossack bands, pres-
suring communities to resubmit to taxation and militia levies and imposing
extraordinary taxes to raise revenue for further reconstruction. The second
phase (1619–30) proceeded under the leadership of the young tsar’s powerful
father Patriarch Filaret (F. N. Romanov), newly returned from nine years’ cap-
tivity in Poland; it devoted further effort to these tasks while also attempting
to repair and improve resource mobilisation for war. Filaret’s administration
gave priority to repopulating state lands and posad communes with taxpayers,
updating cadastres and restoring accounting for arrears and future regular
taxes, issuing commercial privileges to European merchants and restoring
chancellery control over the distribution of service lands and service salaries.
In both stages there were also unsuccessful attempts to secure large loans
from England, the Netherlands, Denmark and Persia in exchange for free
transit trade rights.
Filaret was strongly committed to a revanchist campaign to recover the
western Rus’ territories that had been lost to the Commonwealth during the
Troubles. Regaining control of Smolensk was especially important to him, for
its massive fortress commanded the main road from the frontier to Moscow.
The first few years of his government produced no opportunity to undertake
this, however; reconstruction had to take priority, there was some opposition
to a war of revanche in the Ambassadors’ Chancellery, and Filaret was as
yet unable to get assurance that Sweden and the Ottoman Empire would
join Muscovy in coalition against the Commonwealth. After their defeat at
Chocim (1621) the Ottomans had negotiated a peace with the Poles and were
makingsomeefforttorestraintheCrimeankhan fromraidingCommonwealth
3 Ibid., p. 220.
488
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Muscovy at war and peace
0
400 km
100
200 300
Moscow
Novgorod
Kiev
Lake
Onega
Lake
Ladoga
Polotsk
Pskov
Lake
Chud’
Smolensk
Chernigov
Novgorod
Severskii
Viaz’ma
Rzhev
Kaluga
Tver’
Beloozero
Baltic
Sea
Gulf of
Finland
LIVONIA
Ivangorod
FINLAND
POLAND-
LITHUANIA
Korela
Territory ceded to
Sweden, 1617
Territory ceded to
Poland–Lithuania, 1618
Map 21.1. Russia’s western borders, 1618
489
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
brian davies
territory; Gustav Adolf was interested in alliance with Muscovy, but on terms
of commercial concessions too high for Moscow to pay.
But by the end of the decade opportunity had finally presented itself. Gustav
Adolf’s war against the Poles had ended in an armistice, the Dutch and French
having pressed him to sign a peace at Altmark (1629) so he would carry his
war into northern Germany instead. But to be free to concentrate his forces
in Germany Gustav Adolf now needed a guarantee that the Poles would not
breaktheir armistice and drive his garrisons out of Livonia and Ducal Prussia. A
Muscovite invasion of eastern Lithuania to reconquer Smolensk could provide
the diversion needed to prevent this.
In 1630 Monier, Gustav’s ambassador to Moscow, negotiated a commercial
agreement of great potential benefit to the Swedish campaign in Germany:
Sweden would be given the right to purchase duty-free 50,000 quarters of
Muscovite rye annually, for resale at Amsterdam; given that war had disrupted
the traditional pattern of the Baltic grain trade, this would yield Sweden a
considerable windfall; and in return Sweden would export arms to Muscovy
for its invasion of the Commonwealth. The Monier Agreement paved the way
for an active Swedish–Muscovite alliance. By 1632 this alliance had expanded
into a tentative broader coalition with the Ottomans and Crimean Tatars.
Filaret’s campaign to recover Smolensk thereby became part of a more ambi-
tious coalition war conducted simultaneously on the German, Hungarian and
southern and eastern Commonwealth fronts.
4
In 1630 the Muscovite government began issuing large cash bounties to hire
mercenary officers in Sweden, the Netherlands and Scotland to train a new
foreign formation force (inozemskii stroi) in the new tactics used so effectively
by the armies of the United Provinces and Sweden. Six regiments of infantry
(soldaty), a regiment of heavycavalry pistoleers (reitary), and a regiment of dra-
goons (draguny) were formed from Muscovite peasant militiamen, cossacks,
novitiate middle service class cavalrymen and free volunteers from various
social categories. These regiments would comprise about half the force oper-
ating in the Smolensk theatre in 1632–4. Unlike the traditional formation troops
the new regiments were outfitted and salaried at treasury expense – at very
considerable expense, in fact, the cost of maintaining just 6,610 soldaty in 1633
exceeding 129,000 roubles.
5
Such a heavy investment in units of European type
4 B. F. Porshnev, Muscovy and Sweden in the Thirty Years War, 1630–1635, ed. Paul Dukes and
trans. Brian Pearce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 28–35.
5 A. V. Chernov, Vooruzhennye sily Russkogo gosudarstva (Moscow: Ministerstvo oborony
SSSR, 1954), pp. 114–15, 157–8; Richard Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 168–72.
490
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Muscovy at war and peace
was necessary, though, because the recent Polish–Swedish war had given the
Commonwealth reason to begin expanding and modernising its own foreign
formation (cudzoziemski autorament).
The death of Sigismund III in April 1632 was followed by an interregnum
whichFilaret thought would last at least several months and provide a window
of opportunity for war to recover Smolensk. Filaret therefore launched an
invasionin August1632, sending M. B.Shein into Lithuania with 29,000 men.By
OctoberSheinhadmanaged to captureovertwentytownsandplaceSmolensk,
his main objective, under siege. But then the Russian offensive stalled. Muddy
roads delayed the arrival of Shein’s heavy artillery. Wl
adyslaw IV finally took
the throne in February 1633 and immediately began assembling an army of
23,000 men to relieve Smolensk. Because Shein’s troops had neglected their
lines of circumvallation Wl
adyslaw’s army was able to surround them and
place the besiegers under siege in August 1633. In January 1634 Shein sued for
armistice in order to evacuate what was left of his army. As Moscow had not
authorised this, and because a scapegoat was needed for the collapse of the
campaign,theboyar dumachargedShein withtreasonandhad him beheaded.
6
Continuing the war against the Commonwealth was unthinkable now. The
war’s chief architect, Patriarch Filaret, had died in October 1633; Gustav Adolf
had fallen at Lutzen in November 1632 and Swedish forces in Pomerania were
now left more vulnerable to a Polish attack; help from the Ottomans could
no longer be expected, for internal revolts and war with Persia had prevented
the sultan from carrying out the invasion of Poland scheduled for spring 1634.
Above all Muscovy again faced a major threat from the Crimean khanate –
not so much from Khan Janibek Girey as from certain Crimean Tatar beys
and mirzas hungry for plunder opportunities after several years of harvest
failure, heavy inflation, and civil war in Crimea. In the spring and summer
of 1632 some 20,000 Tatars ravaged southern Muscovy. In 1633 they came in
even greater strength – over 30,000 strong – and this time circumvented the
fortifications of the Abatis Line and crossed the Oka into central Muscovy,
taking thousands of captives in Serpukhov, Kolomna, Kashira and Riazan’
districts. This invasion may have contributed to Shein’s defeat at Smolensk
by provoking mass desertion by those of his troops whose home districts had
come under Tatar attack.
The Ambassadors’ Chancellery and boyar duma had already decided to
seek armistice in November 1633. But Shein’s capitulation at Smolensk made
6 For accounts of the Smolensk war see E. D. Stashevskii, Smolenskaia voina 1632–1634.
Organizatsiia i sostoianie moskovskoi armii (Kiev, 1919), and William C. Fuller, Jr., Strategy
and Power in Russia, 1600–1914 (New York: Free Press, 1992), pp. 7–14.
491
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
brian davies
it impossible for them to demand that the Poles should evacuate Smolensk
and Dorogobuzh as the price of peace. The armistice signed at Polianovka
on 4 June 1634 therefore left the Smolensk, Chernigov and Seversk lands in
Polish hands. Filaret’s project of recovering the western Rus’ territories had
failed. For Muscovy there was some partial compensation in Wl
adyslaw IV’s
agreement to abandon his claims to the Moscow throne, but it was no longer
realistic for Wl
adyslaw to pursue these claims through war.
The Crimean khanate and the Don cossack host
The peace established by the Polianovka Treaty was undisturbed for two
decades. Resumption of war between the Commonwealth and Muscovy was
deterredbybothsides’recognitionthattheirsimultaneouslyreformed military
establishments had put them at rough parity; and after 1634 Wl
adyslaw IV was
preoccupied with Sweden, cossack unrest in Ukraine, pay arrears in his army
and his magnates’ fears of royal military absolutism.
After the Polianovka Treaty Muscovy could no longer expect active support
from Sweden. The cheap Russian grain exports Gustav Adolf had counted on
to help subsidise Swedish operations had been cut back; Wl
adyslaw IV was
freerto concentratehisforcesagainst Swedishgarrisons on the Balticcoast;and
meanwhile most of Sweden’s allies against the German Empire were suing
for peace with Ferdinand II. Oxenstierna therefore had begun withdrawing
Swedish forces from Germany in anticipation of a Polish or Danish attack
somewhere on the Baltic front. Queen Christina’s other regents were even
more alarmed and made several important concessions, including Swedish
evacuation of Prussia, in order to obtain a truce with the Commonwealth (the
Treaty of Stuhmsdorf, 1635).
This shift in the balance of power in the Baltic made it necessary for Moscow
to disentangle itself from northern European affairs and maintain cautious
neutrality vis-
`
a-vis both Sweden and the Commonwealth. For the most part it
kept to this course, departing from it only briefly, in 1643, when Denmark and
the Commonwealth tried to tempt Muscovy into coalition against Sweden
by holding out the possibility of a marriage between Tsar Michael’s daughter
Irina and the Danish crown prince Waldemar. Entering such a coalition would
have been unwise, for Swedish military power had revived by that point,
strengthened by alliance with France and generous French subsidies. The
tsar and his councillors fortunately realised this just in time, when a Swedish
army under Torstensson invaded and overwhelmed Denmark on the eve of
Waldemar’s arrival in Moscow. The tsar immediately abandoned the marriage
492
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Muscovy at war and peace
project and even placed Waldemar under house arrest to reassure the Swedes
he would no longer listen to Danish blandishments.
As there were no opportunities for territorial expansion or influence on the
Baltic and western Rus’ fronts, Muscovite diplomatic and military activity in
1635–54 focused almost entirely on defending the southern frontier against the
threat from the Crimean khanate.
It was logical and necessary to give the Crimean problem priority because
the khanate was now more dangerous than ever, its behaviour more unpre-
dictable and more resistant to traditional means of containment. The Crimean
Tatar invasions of southern and central Muscovy in 1632–3 showed that the
khan was losing control of his beys and Nogai confederates, that they were
willing to defy him and launch attacks on Muscovite border towns with nearly
as many troops as the khan could mobilise on his own authority. Furthermore,
less could now be expected from Moscow’s traditional diplomatic approach
to deterring Crimean aggression – appealing to the Ottoman sultan to rein in
the khan – for the Crimean nobility was increasingly anti-Ottoman and even
separatist in spirit and the khans under greater pressure to play to this spirit in
order to keep themselves in power.
7
MeanwhileMuscovy had lostmuchofits leverage overits ownvassalpolities
on the Kipchak steppe. It could not count on the fealty of the Great Nogai
beys as a counterweight to the khanate, for the Great Nogai Horde was in
disintegration and many of its elements driven west across the Volga by the
invading Kalmyks and forced into alliance with the Crimean Tatars and Lesser
Nogais. The Don cossack host remained implacably hostile to the khanate and
the Porte, but also ready to defy Moscow whenever their interests diverged; it
had baulked when called upon to support an expedition out of Astrakhan’ to
punish the Lesser Nogais in 1633, and it repeatedly ignored Moscow’s urgings
to cease making naval raids on Crimean and Ottoman territory. Don cossack
raiding activity thereby risked provoking retaliation not only by the Crimean
Tatars but by the Turks. But there was little Moscow could do to prevent
it; reducing the semi-annual cash and stores subsidy (Don shipment, Donskoi
otpusk) sent down the Don just had the effect of giving the host more reason
to turn to raiding to make up its lost revenue. In fact throughout this period
the independent political-military course taken by the host would be nearly
as much a problem for Moscow as the hostility of the Crimean khanate.
7 Mykhailo Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus’. Vol. viii: The Cossack Age, 1626–1650
(Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2002), pp. 179–80; A. A. Novosel’skii,
Bor’ba Moskovskogo gosudarstva s tatarami v pervoi polovine XVII veka (Moscow: AN SSSR,
1948), pp. 245–8.
493
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
brian davies
As diplomacy could accomplish little, security on the southern frontier
came to depend all the more on military measures: resuming military coloni-
sation in the forest-steppe and steppe, on a vastly expanded scale and using
new, more cost-effective manpower categories; strengthening and expanding
defence lines; experimenting with new military formations and tactics, and
reorganising command-and-control; and giving greater attention to small-
scale offensive operations, sending small forces down the Don to put more
pressure on the Crimean Tatars while tightening Moscow’s control over the
Don cossack host.
During the Smolensk war the total strength of the Borderland and Riazan’
arrayshadbeenreducedtoabout 5,000 men.Itwasnow substantiallyincreased,
to 12,000 men by 1635 and 17,000 men by 1636. This made it easier for the corps
of the Borderland and Riazan’ arrays to reinforce each other and for the Great
Corps (Bol’shoi polk) finally to begin providing a forward defence, to march
south from Tula to the relief of the towns south of the Abatis Line. The
Military Chancellery also undertook a general inspection of the Abatis Line,
and in 1638–9 it put 20,000 men to work rebuilding some 600 kilometres of
the line. The forces manning the repaired Abatis Line now included foreign
formation infantry and dragoons – some from regiments that had served in the
Smolensk campaign, others newly enlisted – and although their deployment
was only seasonal, this at least set the precedent for using foreign formation
units on the southern frontier against the Tatar enemy.
8
Military colonisation beyond the Abatis Line was resumed in order to estab-
lish an outer perimeter far to the south of the Oka. Several new garrison towns
were built in 1635–7 (Chernavsk, Kozlov, Verkhnii Lomov, Nizhnii Lomov,
Tambov, Userdsk, Iablonov, Efremov), mostly in the south-east, to secure the
territory threatened from the Nogai Road. An earthen steppe wall built from
Kozlov to the Chelnova River proved especially effective in blocking Tatar
raids up the Nogai Road. By early 1637 this had convinced the tsar and duma
to authorise 111,000 roubles to build similar new garrison towns and steppe
wall segments to the south-west, to stop Tatar movement up the Muravskii,
Iziumskii and Kal’miusskii trails. These new towns and steppe wall segments
were built in such proximity that it was an easy matter to link them with
the older steppe town of Belgorod to form a single defence line network, the
central length of the future Belgorod Line.
9
8 A. I. Iakovlev, Zasechnaia cherta Moskovskogo gosudarstva v XVII veke (Moscow: Tipografiia
G. Lissnera i D. Sobko, 1916), pp. 45–6, 57, 62–3.
9 V. P. Zagorovskii, Belgorodskaia cherta (Voronezh: Voronezhskii gosudarstvennyi univer-
sitet, 1969), pp. 93–4.
494
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Muscovy at war and peace
The Military Chancellery wanted to settle these new garrison towns as
rapidly and cheaply as possible, so it took up new methods and formats of
military colonisation. It mobilised thousands of volunteers by relaxing stan-
dards of social eligibility for enlistment in military service, even to the point of
permitting the enlistment of ruined former servicemen who had been forced
by poverty or calamity to take up residence under lords as peasant tenants;
and it altered standards and procedures in court hearings for the remand of
fugitive peasants, to make it harder for lords to recover peasant tenants who
had fled south to enrol illegally in the new garrison towns. Revolt in Common-
wealth Ukraine was driving thousands of Ukrainian refugees into southern
Muscovy; many of them were settled in special new service colonies in the
south-west, on the steppes below Belgorod and Valuiki, in what would come
to be called Sloboda Ukraine, while others were distributed among the new
garrison towns of the Belgorod Line, even as far east as Kozlov. Their cos-
sack experience and their skills at milling, distilling and mouldboard plough
farming would contribute significantly to the success of the Muscovite drive to
colonise the southern steppe. And in a decision very consequential for the sub-
sequent social history of southern Muscovy, the Military Chancellery chose
not to reproduce in the new southern frontier districts the kind of middle
service class – deti boiarskie with service lands of over 200 quarters per field
and peasant tenants – traditionally encountered in central and northern Mus-
covy. Instead it reconfigured the middle service class, adapting it to southern
frontier economic and service conditions, by enrolling deti boiarskie who were
also odnodvortsy and siabry – yeomen with much smaller service land entitle-
ment rates and land allotments, lacking peasant tenant labour and holding
their service lands as repartitionable allotments within collective block grants
administered by their village communes.
These measures strengthening southern frontier defences helped Muscovy
weather the crisis that broke out in spring 1637 when the Don cossacks mur-
dered the Ottoman diplomat Foma Cantacuzene and besieged and captured
the Ottoman fortress of Azov. Azov had been left suddenly vulnerable to a
Don cossack attack because Khan Inaet Girey’s forces were mostly off in Bucak
fighting Khantimur and Sultan Murad IV was preoccupied with wars in Persia
and Hungary. The Don host could justify seizing Azov because its garrison had
provided support for Tatar raids upon Don cossack settlements on the lower
Don, and Ataman Ivan Katorzhnyi may also have calculated that possessing
Azov would allow him to bargain for more generous treatment from the tsar
and larger Don shipment subsidies. But Moscow had no reason to authorise
the seizure of Azov. While Azov’s Ottoman garrison was too small to pose
495
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
brian davies
a threat to the towns of southern Muscovy, its presence had been enough to
serve as a tripwire providing the sultan with cause, if he chose to make use
of it, to retaliate directly against Don cossack or Muscovite aggression. If the
sultan should get the impression that Moscow was in any way complicit in
the attack on Azov it would damage Muscovite trade at Azov and Kaffa and
might even drag Muscovy into war with the Porte.
As long as the Don cossacks occupied Azov (1637–42) Moscow therefore
followed the policy of strengthening its southern frontier defence while simul-
taneously using diplomacy to absolve the tsar of any blame for the crisis. Tsar
Michael sent some grain and munitions to the host but refused their request
to send troops and place Azov under his protection. An Assembly of the Land
convened in 1642 was all for going to war, but Tsar Michael ignored it and
resumedpayingtribute to the newCrimean khan even whileMuscovite envoys
sent to Crimea were being abused. Missions were sent to Sultan Murad IV
and, after his death in 1640, to Sultan Ibrahim, to give reassurance that the
murder of Cantacuzene and seizure of Azov had been the work of brigands
acting ‘for reasons unknown...withoutour instruction’.
10
In June–September
1641 a large Ottoman army commanded by the pasha of Silistria besieged the
cossacks in Azov; although it failed to retake Azov, it clearly demonstrated
how important recovery of Azov was to Sultan Ibrahim, so when Ibrahim
issued a new ultimatum to Moscow in March 1642 Tsar Michael complied and
ordered the Don cossacks to evacuate Azov. Ottoman forces reoccupied Azov
in September 1642 and reinforced its garrison.
War with the Ottoman Empire had been avoided. ThenewTurkishgarrison
at Azov carried out some retaliatory raids on Don cossack settlements but
left the southern Muscovite border towns alone. There had been Crimean
Tatar raids into southern Muscovy in 1637 and 1641–3, but they had been
undertaken by beys and princes acting on their own, driven by famine and
livestock epidemics in Crimea (Inaet Girey’s successors Begadyr Girey, r. 1637–
41, and Mehmed Girey, r. 1641–4, were no more able to curb the Crimean
nobility).
Muscovite–Ottoman relations had suffered serious damage, however. The
Don cossacks had rebuilt their forts and settlements near Azov and were again
attacking Turkish troops; Sultan Ibrahim demanded the tsar remove the host
from the lower Don, a request beyond the tsar’s power to fulfil. The new
Crimean khan Islam Girey III (r. 1644–54) decided the best way to tame the
Crimean nobility was to realign with the Ottoman sultan and put himself
10 S. I. Riabov, Voisko Donskoe i rossiiskoe samoderzhavie (Volgograd: Peremena, 1993), p. 24.
496
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Muscovy at war and peace
at the head of major invasions against the Commonwealth and Muscovy.
Therefore20,000 Tatarsinvaded the Commonwealth and another 20,000 swept
across southern Muscovy in the summer of 1644, carrying off about 10,000
prisoners. Another 6,000 Muscovite captives were taken the following year.
Sultan Ibrahim gave his approval for these operations.
11
By unleashing Islam
Girey III and threatening direct Ottoman military retaliation Ibrahim was able
to stop the Polish–Muscovite rapprochement. In 1646 Wl
adyslaw IV renewed
peace with the Porte and resumed tribute gifts to the khan.
Moscow therefore had to increase investment in its southern frontier
defence system. The Tatar incursions of 1644–5 had taken advantage of partic-
ular weaknesses in that system: the absence of unified command in the corps
of the southern field army, and the over-centralisation of command initia-
tive in the Military Chancellery; the inability of the field army (still stationed
along the Abatis Line) to offer a forward defence for the districts to its south;
large gaps in the Belgorod Line, especially between Voronezh and Kozlov and
between the Tikhaia Sosna and Oskol’ rivers; and Moscow’s inability to stop
Don cossack raids further provoking the Tatars and Turks.
The new government of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich addressed each of these
weaknesses in 1646–54. Several more garrison towns were built and linked up
with the Belgorod Line. Most of the gaps in the line were filled by 1654;by1658
the line extended all along the southern edge of the forest steppe zone, from
Akhtyrka on the Vorskla River to Chelnavsk about 800 kilometres to the east,
and a second defence line some 500 kilometres long extended from Chelnavsk
to the Volga. Twenty-five garrison towns stood on or just behind the Belgorod
Line; thousands of odnodvortsy deti boiarskie, service cossacks and musketeers
had been settled on ploughlands in these new garrison districts.
In 1646 the corps previously deployed far to the north in the Borderland
and Riazan’ arrays were restationed along the new perimeter formed by the
Belgorod Line. The Great Corps, Vanguard and Rear Guard now stood at
Livny, Kursk and Elets each spring and shifted in June to Belgorod, Karpov
and Iablonov. Garrison contingents and small field units south of the Abatis
Line no longer had to march north to rendezvous with the corps but could
move south to join them on the Belgorod Line.
This in turn led to new command-and-control practices along the Belgorod
Line. Because southern garrison forces could now play a larger role in rein-
forcing corps operations, it became necessary for the corps commander at
Belgorod to take up broader year-round operational and logistics authority
11 Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus’, vol. viii,pp.264–8.
497
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008