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the compulsory service obligations of the townsmen.
25
Commercial activ-
ity was probably essential to the livelihoods of such poorly paid groups. By
contrast, other minor servitors (gunners, artillerymen, gatekeepers, state car-
penters and smiths) who were engaged in commerce and trade were obliged
to pay the same taxes and render the same services as the townsmen (perhaps
because their military duties were such that they had more opportunity to
engage in commercial activities).
26
The indulgence granted to the musketeers
and other minor servitors was particularly important to the southern frontier
towns where the ‘black’ posad dwellers were at first a minority and much trade
was in the hands of servitors.
27
The other exception to the posad dwellers’
monopoly over trade was made in article 17 of chapter 19 which permitted
peasants coming to town with goods for sale to trade those goods in the mar-
ketplace from their carts or from boats but forbade them to buyor rent shops.
28
Peasants were similarly prevented from holding taxable houses in town.
Moscow remained the centre of Russian commercial life in this period.
Some scholars assert that the city’s population rose to 200,000 people during
the course of the century, but this seems high.
29
The sources are incomplete
and ambiguous and the population seems to have fluctuated considerably in
any case.
30
A spectacular instance of the latter came in 1654 when the city was
devastated by plague, killing up to 80 per cent of the population in the opinion
of some.
31
Nevertheless it is clear that the city, with its mixed population
and enormous range of occupations and activities, was a focus for trade and
production of all kinds. Moreover, Moscow merchants played a major role in
linking the various parts of the country’s commercial network together, as
with the northern trade via Archangel, the Volga trade, that towards the Urals
and Siberia, and to a lesser extent that with the north-west and the Baltic.
32
Moscow’s role was clearly a reflection of its status as the country’s capital and
the fact that it was the home of the country’s wealthiest merchants.
25 Ibid., p. 155.
26 Ibid.
27 E. V. Chistiakova, ‘Remeslo i torgovlia na Voronezhskom posade v seredine XVII v.’,
Izvestiia Voronezhskogo Gosudarstvennogo universiteta 25 (1954): 46–63; V. A. Aleksandrov,
‘Streletskoe naselenie iuzhnykh gorodov Rossii v XVIIv.’, in Novoe o proshlom nashei strany
(Moscow: Nauka, 1967), pp. 235–50.
28 Hellie, Ulozhenie,p.157. See also art. 15,p.156;art.9,p.155.
29 Istoriia Moskvy, vol. i: Period feodalizma, XII–XVIIvv. (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1952), p. 446; see
P. V. Sytin, Istoriia planirovki i zastroiki Moskvy. Materialy i issledovaniia, vol. i: 1147–1762
(Moscow: Trudy Muzeia Istorii i Rekonstruktsii Moskvy, vyp. 1, 1950), p. 121.
30 Eaton, ‘Decline and Recovery’, pp. 250–1.
31 Istoriia Moskvy,p.453; Eaton, ‘Decline and Recovery’, p. 250.
32 Bushkovitch, The Merchants of Moscow,pp.69, 83–4, 101, 125–6, 168–9.
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Outside the Kremlin seventeenth-century Moscow was subdivided into a
series of ‘hundreds’ (sotni) and suburban settlements (slobody) which were
the habitations of different social groups. Their exact number appears to have
variedthrough time, and the sources disagree. According to Snegirev,however,
theyincluded suburbs belongingtothe court and treasury, thoseof the military
servitors, monastic and Church settlements, foreign suburbs and the ‘black’
suburbs.
33
Basic to the commercial life of the city were the ‘black’ hundreds
and suburbs, the core of the posad community. Whatever may have been the
original difference in meaning between sotnia and sloboda, by the seventeenth
century the two words were synonymous, designating a settlement populated
by people of one status or origin (or sometimes occupation). In principle a
sloboda also had one communal organisation, but this was not always the case
in Moscow.
34
In 1649, as a result of the Ulozhenie, nineteen private (‘white’)
suburbs with 1410 households were transferred to the ‘black’ hundreds and
suburbs, thus enhancing the significance of the latter to the commercial life of
the city as a whole.
35
According to one source, eleven years earlier in 1638 the
‘black’ and ‘white’ commercial suburbs together with those belonging to the
court and treasury accounted for 48.7 per cent of the city’s population.
36
This
population formed the core of the city’s commercial life.
An important feature of Moscow’s economy in the seventeenth century
was the extensive ‘in house’ production for the benefit of the court, govern-
ment, army and other central agencies. Much of this took place in the court
and treasury suburbs located mainly to the west of the Kremlin. The residents
of these suburbs had a status which was rather similar to that of minor state
servitors, being obliged to supply the court or government agencies with nec-
essary goods and services in return for payments made in money or in kind.
Whenever possible, they might supplement their income by producing for the
market or in response to private orders. Many court craftsmen, for example,
worked for the Armoury, making firearms or other kinds of light weaponry, or
engaged in other skilled pursuits like joinery, cabinet-making, icon-painting,
map-making and ornamental arts. The Great Palace chancellery was respon-
sible for provisioning the court, whilst those working for the Treasury Court
prepared costume and cloth, and also furs for diplomatic exchanges. Trea-
sury craftsmen worked for the various government chancelleries as smiths,
carpenters, carriage makers, furriers, coinage makers, builders, brick makers,
33 V. Snegirev, Moskovskie slobody (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1947), p. 18.
34 Ibid., pp. 19–20.
35 Istoriia Moskvy,pp.373, 462–3.
36 Ibid., p. 450.
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stonemasons, furriers, costumiers, jewellers, workers in precious metals and
gems, cloth makers and so on. To the extent that such craftspeople also pro-
duced for the marketplace their relatively privileged situation caused resent-
ment among the ‘black’ posad dwellers.
Craftspeople among the latter group, working mainly for the market,
engaged in a wide variety of pursuits. Thus Moscow had many metalworkers.
An inventory of 1641 lists sixty-nine smithies in the Earth Town
37
beyond the
Tver’ Gate, thirty-five in different parts of the White Town,
38
twenty-nine
south of the river in Zamoskvorech’e and various others.
39
Other metalwork-
ers worked in copper, tin, gold and silver, all metals which were lacking in
seventeenth-century Muscovy. Carpentry in various forms employed many in
the city. For large projects like court or government buildings teams of car-
penters were sometimes brought to Moscow from other towns and regions.
Workers with hemp and flax and their derivatives were limited in number, per-
haps because of the significance of such crafts as rural pursuits, but Moscow
did provide a market for some specialists. Workers in leather were many –
perhaps 200 in 1638 – whilst there were about 100 furriers.
40
Other significant
crafts in the posad included wool-working, working in tallow and wax (there
were thirty-five candle makers and ten soap makers in 1638), producing food
(about 600 producers and traders of various kinds in 1638, including those
working for the court) and cloth (about 250 producers and traders in 1638).
Large-scaleactivityin the seventeenth-centurycity was essentially restricted
to that under the aegis of the government. It included the cannon foundry,
whichdated from the fifteenth century but whichexpanded from the 1620s, the
already-mentioned Armoury with its offshoots the Gold and Silver Chambers
(palaty), state powder mills, state brickworks, the mints, two paper mills, and
others. Such manufactories worked predominantly to state orders rather than
to the market.
Something was said in Chapter 13 about the hierarchy of merchants and
posad traders which characterised sixteenth-century Russian towns. This hier-
archy continued to be significant in the seventeenth century and nowhere
more so than in Moscow where the richest merchants of the realm lived. At
one extreme, wealthy merchants (gosti and members of the gost’ hundreds)
traded over wide regions and also with foreigners, and sometimes controlled
or had interests in local trade as well. At the other were minor traders, selling
37 For the location of the Earth Town, see below.
38 For the location of the White Town, see below.
39 Istoriia Moskvy,p.373.
40 Ibid., pp. 386–8.
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their wares in local shops (bought or rented), from mere temporary stalls and
carts in the marketplace, or working in shops belonging to others. The organ-
isation of trade lagged behind that of a growing number of European states.
Merchants lacked capital, there were no banks or modern credit facilities, and
Russian merchants sometimes found it difficult to compete with foreigners.
Not until the New Trade Statute of 1667 did they enjoy a measure of protection
from foreign competition, particularly in local and retail trade.
The essential geographical patterns of trade in seventeenth-century
Moscow did not greatly differ from those of the sixteenth century, for the
city continued to be a great consumer of food and other necessities as well as
of the many raw materials needed by its manufactories. As before, the Kitai
gorod with its large trading square adjacent to the Kremlin continued to be
the focus of activity. Retail trade was still conducted through shops organised
into specialised trading rows (and also through warehouses, cellars and other
outlets). The names of about 120 trading rows are known from the seventeenth
century. Wholesale trade and trade by foreign merchants was also conducted
through the two merchants’ bazaars (gostinnye dvory), completed in 1641 and
1667. Olearius and other travellers noted the liveliness and diversity of trade in
the city – of the ancestor of Red Square, for example, he asserts that ‘all day
long it is full of tradespeople, both men and women, and slaves and idlers’.
41
But his account also makes it clear that there was a lively trade in other parts
of the city, notably in the White Town (‘Tsargorod’). In the latter, he asserts
‘are located the bread and flour stalls, the butchers’ blocks, the cattle market,
and taverns selling beer, mead and vodka’.
42
The seventeenth-century geography of trade and commerce outside
Moscow can only be reconstructed in part thanks to the patchy nature of
the evidence. Something has been said already about the location of the towns
with the largest posad communities along the major trading routes. Space will
allow a brief discussion of towns on only one of these routes.
The route northwards from Moscow to Archangel was the most important
seventeenth-century routefortradewithWestern Europe.After 1600 thistrade
was dominated by the Dutch. Although the English had first arrived at the
mouth of the Northern Dvina in the 1550s, the town itself was constructed
only in 1583–4 close to the nearby monastery. At first the foreign trade had
mainly taken place at Kholmogory, the goods being transferred upriver to that
town by shallow draft vessels from the anchorages in the mouth of the river.
41 Adam Olearius, The Travels of Olearius in Seventeenth-Century Russia,ed. and trans. Samuel
H. Baron (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1967), p. 114.
42 Ibid., p. 114.
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Gradually, however, Archangel assumed the character of a proper port. In
the 1620s it contained 115 posad households,
43
and the 1622–4 cadastre describes
government offices, warehouses and trading establishments.
44
A proportion of
the trade was in the hands of local servitors. It has been estimated that foreign
trade at Archangel increased by two to three times on average between the
beginning and the middle of the century.
45
The liveliest time for commerce
was the annual fair between June and September when the foreign ships
arrived and merchants and traders came from many parts of Russia, especially
Moscow, various northern towns and the important northern monasteries.
Between1668 and 1684 a largenewstone merchants’bazaar wasconstructed to
government order to cope with the trade. A community of foreign merchants
resided permanently in the town. But the overall population remained small,
no doubt reflectingthe restrictedperiod for trading. In fact Archangel’s seventy
shops in the 1620s (not counting the trading spaces in the merchants’ bazaar)
and limited number of trades contrasted poorly with nearby Kholmogory
which had 316 shops and a much wider variety of craft activities. The latter
was the true centre of the region for local commerce.
46
From Archangel the main trading route ran up the Northern Dvina and
then up the Sukhona to the transhipment point at Vologda. Before reaching
Vologda, however, traders wouldarrive at Ustiug Velikii, wherethe main route
to Siberia began. Ustiug Velikii had played an important role in the fur trade,
connecting Siberia with Archangel, and was also noted for a range of manu-
facture and commerce including metalworking, carpentry and woodworking,
leather, fur-dressing, clothing, food and others.
47
Nearby Tot’ma, also on the
Sukhona, was a centre for salt production.
48
Vologda itself was the principal
commercial point on the route to Moscow because merchants would wait
here for the winter freeze before proceeding overland to the capital by sledge.
In the 1620s it had a population of perhaps 5,000 and contained the houses of
eleven foreign traders and five Moscow gosti. It had a wide variety of crafts,
over 300 shops, a large merchants’ bazaar and other commercial facilities.
49
43 Eaton, ‘Decline and Recovery’, p. 235.
44 Iu. A. Barashkov, Arkhangel’sk: arkhitekturnaia biografiia (Arkhangel’sk:Severo-Zapadnoe
knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1984), p. 18.
45 Bushkovitch, The Merchants of Moscow,pp.51, 56.
46 O. V. Ovsiannikov, ‘Kholmogorskii i Arkhangel’skii posady po pistsovym i perepisnym
knigam XVII v.’, in Materialy po istorii Evropeiskogo Severa SSSR, vol. i (Vologda, 1970),
pp. 197–211.
47 A. Ts. Merzon and Iu.A. Tikhonov, Rynok Ustiuga Velikogo v period skladyvaniia vserossi-
iskogo rynka (XVII vek) (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1960).
48 R. E. F. Smith and David Christian, Bread and Salt: A Social and Economic History of Food
and Drink in Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 46–8.
49 A. E. Mertsalov, Ocherki goroda Vologdy po pistsovoi knige 1627 goda (Vologda, 1885).
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The final important point on the road to Moscow was Iaroslavl’ on the
Volga, a major centre for leather and other kinds of manufacturing and a
centre of trade interlinking the Volga and routes to Siberia with those to
the north-west, as well as Moscow and the centre with Archangel and the
north.
As noted in Chapter 13, not all commerce took place in towns. Monastic
centres like Tikhvin Posad were also significant, as were numerous villages.
Not until the eighteenth century, however, do the statistics on trade at this
level permit anything like a comprehensive picture of the geography of trade
to be drawn.
50
The symbolic and religious role of towns
Religion was central to the life of Russian towns in the seventeenth century.
Something of its significance forthe individual town emergesin the 1627 cadas-
tre for Vologda, as discussed by Mertsalov.
51
In that year, the town of about
5,000–6,000 inhabitants had sixty churches, including the cathedral, and three
monasteries. In addition to more than eighty inhabited houses of priests and
otherchurchofficials,there werethe houses and homes of monasticpersonnel,
their dependents and the servants and dependents of the archbishop. Monas-
teries outside Vologda, including some of Russia’s most important, maintained
establishments in the town. All this infrastructure underpinned the elaborate
life of religious observance and regulation which characterised all Russian
towns in this period. Thus the lives of urban dwellers were punctuated by
the round of religious holidays, festivals, fasts and days of abstinence which
marked the Orthodox year. For the devout both public religious worship and
private devotion were regular and demanding. Processions and pilgrimages
were normal parts of urban life. The town itself, furthermore, was an assem-
blage of sacred spaces. Whether in the individual house, which might devote
a sacred corner to a holy icon, or in church confronted by the cosmic sym-
bolism of its architecture and its elaborate arrays of mosaics, icons and other
decorations, to say nothing of the verbal, musical and dramatic enactments
of its rituals, the town dweller was constantly reminded of religious truth,
and his or her behaviour was affected accordingly. Chapter 1 of the Ulozhe-
nie, for example, specifies the severest penalties for blasphemy or for any
50 See e.g. B. N. Mironov, Vnutrennii rynok Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XVIII – pervoi polovine XIX
v. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1981).
51 Mertsalov, Ocherki,pp.12ff.
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kind of unruly behaviour in church.
52
Chapter 10 enforces the observance of
Sundays and the principal religious holidays, and restricts trade during reli-
gious processions.
53
And chapter 19 forbids foreign churches from locating in
central Moscow – they were to be located beyond the Earth Town ‘in places
distant from God’s churches’.
54
In a similar spirit of spatial exclusiveness and
religious purity, legislation forced Europeans to sell their property in Moscow
and move to a new suburb north-east of the city (1652), and also forbade uncon-
verted foreigners to wear Russian dress, enter Orthodox churches or employ
Orthodox servants.
55
Whilst foreigners might be tolerated, the Russian town
was meant to radiate values which were at one and the same time Russian
and Orthodox. Those towns which served as episcopal centres, moreover,
were charged with the task of upholding those values in their surrounding
regions.
Numerous social thinkers, among them Elman Service and Paul Wheat-
ley,
56
have argued for the close relationship between political power and sacred
authority in traditional complex societies, and Wheatley in particular has
noted how cities in such societies were frequently structured to reflect pre-
vailing notions of cosmic order. The claim by the Russian tsars to divine
sanction for their rule has been noted by many writers, and in particular the
quest by the sixteenth-century tsars to have Moscow recognised as the ‘Third
Rome’, successor to Rome itself and to Constantinople as the centre of world
Christendom.
57
The location of the palace of the patriarch, or head of the
Russian Orthodox Church, in the seventeenth-century Moscow Kremlin next
to the palace of the tsar himself may be taken to symbolise the ‘symphony’
between Church and state which supposedly reigned under Orthodoxy. The
life of the seventeenth-century tsars and of their court was saturated with
religious symbolism, observances and practices, as noted by many foreign
visitors who were generally hard put to understand the significance of what
they saw. The tsars, for example, partook of numerous religious pilgrimages
and on particular feast days, notably on Palm Sunday and at Epiphany, the
52 Hellie, Ulozhenie, ch. 1,pp.3–4.
53 Ibid., ch. 10,art.25–6,pp.28–9.
54 Ibid., ch. 19,art.40,p.161.
55 Olearius, Travels,pp.29, 51, 73, 129, 263, 281 etc.; S. H. Baron, ‘The Origins of Seventeenth-
Century Moscow’s Nemeckaja sloboda’, California Slavic Studies 5 (1970): 1–17.
56 E. Service, Origins of the State and Civilization: the Process of Cultural Evolution (New York:
Norton, 1975), p. 51; Paul Wheatley, The Pivot of the Four Quarters: A Preliminary Enquiry
into the Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1971).
57 G. Hosking, Russia: People and Empire (London: HarperCollins, 1997), pp. 4–8;D.B.
Rowland, ‘Moscow – the Third Rome or the New Israel?’, RR 55 (1996): 591–614.
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city itself formed the setting for the acting out of the elaborate ceremonials
which were performed.
58
How far such ceremonials derived some of their
meaning from a symbolism which was enshrined within the actual fabric of
the city – in the orientation of certain of its streets, for example, or in the
religious imagery associated with certain buildings (for example, the imagery
of the ‘new Jerusalem’ associated by some writers with St Basil’s Cathedral
in Red Square or with Boris Godunov’s plans to reconstruct the Kremlin) –
is a matter which deserves further research.
59
What seems quite clear is that
Russiantownswere, to use Wheatley’s phrase, ‘generators of sacred space’ and
as such helped underpin the prevailing political and religious order. That being
so, it is hardly surprising that the founding of a new town, as of Archangel in
1583–4, or Tsarev Borisov in 1599, was an act invariably inaugurated in religious
ceremonial.
60
But that, of course, cannot be the full story, for what has been said above
in a sense reflects the outlook of the state and of its rulers, rather than that
of ordinary people. It is by no means certain, for example, that Christianity
had in fact entirely managed to eradicate the remnants of paganism, even by
the seventeenth century.
61
Moreover, the seventeenth century was itself a time
of change and that fact was bound to be reflected in the heterogeneous life
of towns, especially the biggest ones. The mixing of foreigners with Russians
in Moscow and other towns meant the mixing of Orthodoxy with new ideas
and perhaps with ‘heresy’, no matter how much the latter might be resisted
by religious conservatives. The period was one of growing controversy. The
deposition of the Patriarch Nikon, and the schism in the Orthodox Church,
split society asunder. But such events were mere harbingers of the much
greater challenges to traditional religious authority and to the religious unity
of Russia which would follow from the time of Peter the Great. The religious
symbolism of the town, in other words, no longer reflected the beliefs of all
Russians. It seems likely that it had never done so.
58 Ivan Zabelin, Domashnii byt russkikh tsarei, vol. i (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 2000),
pp. 393–453.
59 Robin Milner-Gulland, The Russians (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 212–20;A.L.Batalov
and T. N. Viatchanina, ‘Ob ideinom znachenii i interpretatsii Ierusalimskogo obraza v
russkoi arkhitekture XVI–XVII vv.’, Arkhitekturnoe nasledstvo 36 (1988): 22–42.
60 G. V. Alferova, Russkii gorod XVI–XVII vekov (Moscow: Stroiizdat, 1989), pp. 56–61;D.I.
Bagalei, Materialy dlia istorii kolonizatsii i byta stepnoi okrainy Moskovskogo gosudarstva v
XVI–XVII vekakh, vol. I (Khar’kov, 1886), p. 9; Barashkov, Arkhangel’sk,p.17.
61 G. P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. i (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1966), pp. 344–62; Milner-Gulland, The Russians,pp.96–103;W.F.Ryan,The Bath-
house at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia (Stroud: Sutton
Publishing, 1999), p. 14.
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The physical form of towns
Thegreat majority of Russiantowns in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
were fortified. Not until the end of the latter century did fortification begin to
lose its significance.
62
This fact tells us much about the nature of life in Russia
at the time – a realm which was open to the threat of invasion from many
directions and within which the tsar’swrit was constantly frustrated. Nowhere
was such frustration liable to be felt more keenly than towards the frontiers.
Towards the end of the sixteenth century, for example, a series of northern
centres, including Archangel, Kargopol’, Kholmogory and Sol’vychegodsk,
began to be fortified.
63
They were felt to be vulnerable from the west and
also, in the case of those close to the White Sea, from the northern coast.
The two centuries also witnessed considerable efforts to fortify towns close to
the western frontier.
64
And the energy which was expended upon the defence
of the southern frontier and on the building of fortified towns as an integral
component of that defence was particularly intense. It was in these regions in
particular where the military role of towns became dominant as every effort
was made to make all aspects of life subservient to it.
65
The tendency to fortify particular parts of the town as it expanded – first,
perhaps, the gorod, then the nearby posad, then perhaps individual slobody, or
newer parts of the posad as the latter expanded beyond the old walls – gave rise
to the characteristic ‘cellular’ structure of towns which has been alluded to
by many writers.
66
Moscow provides a characteristic example. From 1485 the
Kremlin began to be fortified in brick thanks to the efforts of Italian architects.
These walls replaced earlier ones.Some years later in 1535 what is now the Kitai
gorod (then known as the ‘Great Posad’) was also walled in stone. What is now
known as the Boulevard Ring was guarded by an earthen rampart. This was
rebuilt in brick in 1586–93, the space within it gradually becoming known as the
‘White Town’. After the 1591 raid by the Crimean Tatars, a fourth fortification
line in earth with a wooden wall was built along what is now the Garden
Ring.
67
The area within this final rampart became known as the ‘Earth Town’.
Thus arose the ring and radial pattern which is still a feature of Moscow’s plan
today. In other towns, however, the cells were less concentric or regular. And
62 Alferova, Russkii gorod,p.180.
63 O. V. Ovsiannikov, ‘Oboronitel’nye sooruzheniia severorusskikh gorodov XVI–XVII
vekov’, in Letopis’ Severa, vi (Moscow, 1972), pp. 211–23.
64 See e.g. G.V. Alferova and V. A. Kharlamov, Kiev vovtoroi polovine XVII veke (Kiev:Naukova
Dumka, 1982).
65 Pallot and Shaw, Landscape,pp.23–4.
66 French, ‘The Early and Medieval’, pp. 268–74.
67 Sytin, Istoriia planirovki,pp.42, 52, 58–9.
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in many cases, especially in the south, the fortifications were wooden rather
than of stone.
From a distance Russiantownstypicallymade a greatimpressiononforeign-
ers. Thus, encountering Plesko (Pskov) in 1661, the Scottish mercenary Patrick
Gordon noted that it ‘had a glorious show, being environed with a stone wall,
with many towers. Here are many churches and monasteries, some whereof
have three, some five steeples or towers, whereon are round globes of six,
eight or ten fathoms circumference, which – make a great and pleasant show.’
On closer acquaintance, however, Gordon was much less impressed. ‘Having
lodged in the town’, he noted that it ‘stunk with nastiness, and was no wise
answerable to the glorious show it hath afar off, and our expectations –’.
68
To foreigners Russia’s towns seemed dirty, unplanned, badly maintained and
primitive. Only the churches called forth praise, but even they were vitiated
by superstition and their strange architecture. Other buildings were predom-
inantly wooden and seemed quite unimpressive when compared to those
common in the West.
The towns, of course, suffered from severe disadvantages. Most of the build-
ing, as noted already, was in wood, which had the great advantage of being
cheap and readily available but the supreme disadvantage of being vulnerable
to fire. In fact so frequent and so devastating did urban fires tend to be that
rebuilding had to be done as quickly as possible and at minimum expense,
paying little attention to aesthetics or to style. No wonder the results failed to
inspire admiration. But the towns were not in fact quite as disordered as they
often appeared to foreign observers, particularly in the case of Moscow. From
the time of Ivan III, for example, measures were taken to provide fire patrols
and also to uphold law and order through forms of policing and controls over
traffic, especially at night. From the sixteenth century the tsars gave encour-
agement to building in stone. Some attention was paid to drainage and to the
planking of unpaved and often barely passable streets. From the early seven-
teenth century concerted efforts were made to widen and straighten certain
important streets, especially in the city centre, and to prevent infringements
of the building line. This was partly as a fire protection measure.
69
Wells were
constructed to give easy access to water in cases of fire. The security and well-
being of the capital, where the tsar himself resided, was naturally of crucial
importance to the government. Much less seems to have been done in other
towns.
68 Passages from the Diary of Patrick Gordon of Auchleuchries in the Years 1635–1 699 (London:
Frank Cass, 1968), pp. 43–4.
69 Sytin, Istoriia planirovki,pp.84–90, 162ff.
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