Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  Stenka Razin

  Moscow's religious intransigence also contributed to the major uprising in 1670 by the Cossacks of the Don and Volga valleys, who lived on hunting, fishing and raiding. Over the previous quarter-century, thanks to peasant migration from the north, the number of Don Cossacks had tripled to perhaps 25,000, which severely increased pressure on the scarce resources of the region. The situation remained tolerable in the Cossack settlements along the lower Don and its tributaries, where an elite of long-established families, known as the ‘householders’, monopolized the best hunting, fishing and grazing, pocketed the subsidies from Moscow, and held all political power; but conditions deteriorated for the immigrants, significantly known as ‘the naked ones’ (golytba or golutvennye). They lacked land, property and subsidies, surviving only if the ‘householders’ gave them work. In the words of a government report, ‘runaway peasants have come from neighbouring areas with their wives and children, and as a result there is now great hunger on the Don’.86

  The truce of Andrusovo between Russia and Poland in 1667 hurt the Cossacks. Not only did it deprive them of a fruitful source of booty, but it also reduced pressure on the tsar, no longer dependent on their services, to send grain and munitions punctually. Later that year, one of the disgruntled householders, Stepan (‘Stenka’) Razin therefore decided to lead an expeditionary force of ‘naked ones’ on a raid around the Caspian Sea. Like Bohdan Khmelnytsky in the Polish Commonwealth, Razin was familiar with the corridors of power long before he became a rebel: he had visited Moscow and also headed an embassy from the tsar to neighbouring steppe rulers. Now, despite the tsar's express prohibition, Razin and his men sailed safely down the Volga to the Caspian, where they took advantage of a series of natural disasters that weakened Iran (see chapter 13 below) to institute a reign of terror in 1668 and 1669.

  Razin's remarkable success in securing wealth during a famine year won over many more ‘naked ones’, and in spring 1670 he decided to lead his forces back to the Volga and advance on Moscow. His declared aim was to move ‘against the Sovereign's enemies and betrayers, and to remove from the Muscovite state the traitor boyars’ as well as the tsar's councillors, provincial governors and town magistrates, ‘and to give freedom to the common people’.87 In the event Razin's followers, who now numbered 7,000, determined otherwise: having advanced up the Volga as far as Tsaritsyn, which they captured, they voted to move south again and seize control of all Russian settlements down to the Caspian. This they accomplished thanks to two strokes of fortune. First, the Crimean Tatars, who normally attacked Russian outposts along the lower Volga each summer, campaigned elsewhere, relieving Razin of a potential enemy. Second, Tsar Alexei had deported many of those involved in the Moscow revolt of 1662 (page 178 above) to the lower Volga and these exiles, eager for revenge, betrayed their towns and joined the rebels.

  Nevertheless, Razin's position remained vulnerable because the economy of the entire lower Volga depended on goods, and especially grain, sent by the tsar. Razin therefore persuaded his followers that they must campaign against Moscow in order to secure the supplies without which they would starve. As he moved north in summer 1670, Razin won the support of others alienated by Moscow's oppressive policies – fugitive serfs, political exiles, unpaid soldiers, Muslims dispossessed by Christians – as well as of oppressed peasants anxious to take revenge on their brutal masters and of townsfolk impoverished because the tsar imposed a trade embargo on all areas in revolt. Many women joined the movement and disseminated propaganda; a few, including Razin's mother, commanded rebel detachments. Many clerics alienated by Nikon's reforms provided spiritual support and drafted ‘seditious letters’ (as the government termed them) inviting those along Razin's line of march to help him ‘eliminate the traitors and the bloodsuckers of the peasant communes’, and proclaiming that he was on his way to Moscow ‘to establish the Cossack way there, so that all men will be equal’. The clerics cleverly tailored each message to its audience – for example, writing to Muslim communities in their own language and claiming ‘this is our watchword: For God and the Prophet’. Razin even claimed that he had received letters of support from Nikon and that he represented the crown prince. By September 1670, the revolt that had originated with a subsistence crisis on the lower Don affected a swathe of territory along the Volga that stretched for 800 miles. Even subjects of the tsar in Siberia and Karelia received copies of Razin's ‘seditious letters’.88

  The revolt failed because of the ‘Great Wall’ created expressly to protect the capital against attacks from the south. The tsar sent reinforcements, bonus pay and extra ammunition to garrisons along the fortified ramparts, which foiled the attempts of Razin and some 20,000 men to secure Simbirsk, at the eastern end of the Lines. After a month, a counter-attack drove Razin back with heavy losses. He himself suffered serious head and leg wounds, impairing his aura of invincibility, and he retreated to the fortified base on the Don from which he had started. Meanwhile his brother, with another army, failed to take Voronezh, a key fortress on the Belgorod Line, and also fell back. When the tsar sent his New Formation Regiments southwards, the Cossack ‘householder’ elite decided that it would be prudent to arrest Razin, which they did in April 1671, and to send him to Moscow where Tsar Alexei had him tortured and executed.89

  In January 1672 victory celebrations in Moscow demonstrated Alexei's power. The shah of Iran, whose subjects had suffered from Razin's raiders, sent his congratulations; so did Charles II of Great Britain, who recalled with gratitude the tsar's refusal to recognize the Republican regime that had executed his father. For a while, some of Razin's followers found shelter in the Old Believer Solovetsky monastery, apparently impregnable on an island in the White Sea; but in January 1676, a defector revealed a breach in the monastery walls to the imperial besiegers, who broke in during a snowstorm. Many of the dissidents they killed, and many more killed themselves. Only 14 of the 200 defenders escaped to spread the story of the Old Believers’ heroic resistance.90

  Nevertheless, when Alexei died in his bed a few days later, leaving three minor sons to succeed him, the troubles resumed. Abroad, war broke out with the Turks in 1677 and lasted for four years; at home, opposition resumed in the smaller monasteries, which still resented the efforts of the bishops to put Nikon's liturgy into effect. In May 1682 a dispute over which of Alexei's sons should succeed led a group of musketeers, resentful of the growing prominence and higher pay of the New Formation Regiments, to storm the Kremlin. They received support from Old Believers in the capital and, the following month, submitted a petition calling on the Regent Sofia, Alexei's daughter, to restore the traditional liturgy. Sofia agreed to a ‘debate’ on the validity of the Nikonian reforms, but when an Old Believer spokesman suggested that not only the Patriarch but also her father had been a heretic, Sofia stormed out of the meeting and fled the capital, leaving it under the control of the mutineers until she could raise an army capable of defeating them. She had her revenge two years later when, having regained Moscow without firing a shot, Sofia issued draconian legislation against the Old Believers: all who failed to attend their local parish church must be questioned; all suspected of heresy must be tortured; all who refused to recant must be burned at the stake; and anyone who sheltered an Old Believer must be severely punished. Henceforth, Old Believers flourished only on the periphery of the state, where some staged mass suicides when threatened by government forces – and won new converts by their devotion. Although religious dissent never again threatened the integrity of the Romanov state, and although ‘the total number of suicides ran into tens of thousands’, by 1900 one Russian in six was an Old Believer, and the faith today numbers millions of adherents.91

  The New Order

  In the words of Frank Sysyn, ‘modern national relations’ in eastern Europe ‘begin with the Khmelnytsky revolt’ of 1648. Even a flurry of provincial rebellions a generation later failed to change the new political configuration in which, in the words of Brian Davies, ‘
the circle of serious contenders for hegemony had been narrowed to the Ottoman Empire and Muscovy’.92 The vast Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth never recovered from the mid-century crisis: its population had declined by at least one-third; one year after signing the 1667 truce of Andrusovo, John Casimir abdicated and emigrated; and the 1686 ‘Eternal Peace of Moscow’ perpetuated the transfer of all territory ceded to Russia.

  War and rebellion also ruined Ukraine. The measure of self-rule secured by Khmelnytsky between 1648 and 1654 did not survive, although for the next seven decades the tsar's guarantee that 60,000 Cossacks (and their families) would receive a regular salary from state revenues allowed the Cossack Host to evolve into both the civil administration and the social elite of the region. Moreover, the flight of Polish landowners ended Catholic patronage of builders and artists, allowing a renaissance in Ruthenian art, architecture and literature which profoundly influenced Russia. Throughout the Romanov state, Orthodox seminaries followed the model of Kiev; most bishops came from Ukraine; and Russian art and music embraced Ukrainian forms. Nevertheless, the ruina fully deserved its name. The death or flight of half its Jewish population in the massacres of 1648 created, in the phrase of Rabbi Nathan Hannover, an ‘abyss of despair’ for the survivors; while the continuation of war and extreme weather decimated the rest of the Ukrainian population. Even in 1700 the former Cossack state contained scarcely a million inhabitants – one-third of its former size – and those survivors remained dependent on support from the tsar. Although they retained some internal autonomy for a while longer, they could never again boast that ‘the tsar rules in Moscow but the Cossacks rule on the Don’.93

  Conversely, taken together, the ‘Time of Troubles’, the ‘great shaking’ of 1648–9 and the Thirteen Years War strengthened the Romanov regime. Even the Ulozhenie of 1649, which stemmed directly from the ‘great shaking’, reinforced the power of the tsars. Admittedly, the code gave most landholders what they wanted – total control over their serfs – but it also established the obligations of servitors and musketeers to the tsar, and the punishments for those who fell short; it extended the fiscal responsibilities of townspeople; and it established the religious protocols of the Church and the acceptable behaviour of priests. The code also offered equality before the law to Russians and non-Russians alike – one no longer needed to convert to Orthodoxy, or even to speak Russian, in order to plead in a Russian court – and it standardized court protocol, forensic procedures and fees. A single document thus laid out the entire Russian social and legal system with the tsar at the apex, and it proved a ‘best-seller’: two editions of 1,200 copies by the Government Printing Shop each sold out almost immediately, and regional administrators as well as many individuals soon possessed their own copy.94

  Tsar Alexei's wars also brought significant material gains, adding perhaps 120,000 square miles (about the same size as modern Italy or Nevada) and over a million new subjects to the Romanov state. They also discredited the military pretensions of the servitors so that, ironically, just as they received the economic benefits they had long sought, they became militarily obsolete. Instead of cavalry drawn from reluctant landowners, the tsars relied increasingly on highly trained New Formation Regiments under highly paid Western officers of unquestioned loyalty – even if some of them, like General Patrick Gordon, constantly considered ‘how I might ridd my self of this country so farr short of my exspectation and disagreeing with my humour … strangers being looked upon by the best sort as scarcely Christians, and by the plebeyans as meer pagans’.95

  Gordon was not alone in perceiving limits to Russia's ‘Westernization’. A few years later an English envoy belittled the Russians for their ‘rustick and barbarous humor, which is so natural to them’ and hoped they would ‘learn by degrees to live with more civility’. Indeed, he mused, if they ‘were under a gentler government, and had a free trade with every body, no doubt but this Nation would in short time be taken with our civility and decent way of living’.96 Even without such ‘civility’, however, the Romanovs had not only wrested important concessions from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at Andrusovo and again at the ‘Eternal Peace of Moscow’, but also forced both the Ottoman sultan in 1681 and the Chinese emperor in 1689 to recognize the tsar as their equal. The General Crisis, combined with the Little Ice Age, thus enabled Russia to emerge as a Great Power, a position it has never lost.

  7

  The ‘Ottoman tragedy’, 1618–831

  ‘The greatest [empire] that is, or perhaps that ever was’

  In the early seventeenth century the Ottoman empire overawed European visitors. A Venetian consul marvelled that it had acquired ‘like a lightning bolt’ so much territory that it ‘included 8,000 miles of the circuit of the world’ and ‘a great part’ of three continents, namely Asia, Africa and Europe; while an English traveller considered it ‘the greatest [empire] that is, or perhaps that ever was’. Such awe was justified: the sultan ruled over 20 million subjects and 1 million square miles. Although Istanbul lay more than 700 miles from Vienna, and 1,000 miles from Baghdad, thanks to the empire's efficient logistical infrastructure, imperial couriers carried orders from the capital to officials in Hungary and Mesopotamia in 14 days or less, while an army leaving the Bosporus in spring could normally reach either the Tisza or the Tigris in 10 weeks.2

  Nevertheless, in the mid-seventeenth century the empire saw two regicides, three depositions and significant loss of territory in both Europe and Asia, and by 1700 it had become ‘the sick man of Europe’. Until recently, the nature of this process remained obscure because, in the words of a recent article, ‘The seventeenth century has been the black hole of Ottoman history'; but the careful study of the available human and natural ‘archives’ reveals that the lands around the eastern Mediterranean suffered more from both the Little Ice Age and the General Crisis than almost any other part of the northern hemisphere.3

  Effective Ottoman government depended on a complex balance of forces. Every sultan claimed absolute and indivisible jurisdiction in all matters not explicitly covered by existing Islamic Law (the sharî'a), and issued decrees known as kanūn on fiscal, penal and administrative matters that every subject must obey. Although some sultans occasionally acted as supreme judge and heard cases in person, they ceded executive authority to a single minister, the Grand Vizier, while their council normally heard and decided the thousands of petitions that flowed in from subjects every year.4 In the seventeenth century most sultans lived in the imperial palace, and seldom strayed far from its grounds. This arrangement conferred immense power on those who controlled access to the imperial apartments, and particularly to the palace harem where the sultan's concubines lived under the supervision of several hundred eunuchs. Since no seventeenth-century sultan married, each concubine who bore a son intrigued ceaselessly to ensure that her offspring succeeded and, later, to influence his policies. The sultan's mother was the most powerful woman – and often the most powerful person – in the empire.

  The Ottomans divided their subjects into two categories: the reaya (literally ‘subjects’, those who paid taxes) and the ‘askerī (literally ‘of the military’, those who served the state). Among the latter, a select group of soldiers and government officials known as the kullar, the ‘sultan's slaves’, exercised great power. Until the 1630s, the sultans recruited their kullar by conscripting boys from Christian communities under their control in the Balkans and Anatolia: a practice known as devşirme (‘gathering’ in Turkish). Once the boys reached Istanbul, they began rigorous training to turn them into obedient, skilled and ‘Ottomanized’ converts to Islam, and afterwards they either joined the Janissaries (literally ‘new troops’, infantry equipped with firearms) or became palace officials (though they too received a military training – appropriately enough in a state that regarded war as its principal activity).5 The devşirme system enhanced the power of the Ottoman dynasty in three distinct ways. First, only the kullar could legally own and use firearms (both mus
kets and artillery). Second, since each regional centre boasted a similar provincial cadre – governor, provincial council, treasurers, garrison commandant and presiding judge – the imperial government could rotate its ‘slaves’ easily from one post to another because, wherever they went, the kullar encountered familiar administrative systems, procedures and expectations. Finally, the young converts who prayed, ate, slept and trained together developed a remarkable cohesion and loyalty; and, since they could never leave the sultan's service, risking loss of life and property if they refused or disobeyed an order, they normally formed a principal pillar of the state. Nevertheless the system possessed one obvious weakness: without constant supervision, the kullar might usurp their master's power and dictate policy.