By clustering around the towns commerce and manufacture were able to benefit from the military protection, access to important officials and geographical nodality available in urban centres. At the same time the state itself encouraged such patterns since it eased the problems of regulation and tax collection. Moreover, particularly from the time of Ivan III (1462-1505) the tsars pursued a regular policy of relocating wealthy merchants and craftspeople from peripheral towns to Moscow and other places. Such crude actions seem to have been motivated more by political than by economic considerations and they may well have been to the detriment of commerce. But they do indicate the importance accorded by the tsars to commerce in general and to merchants and craftspeople in particular. The financial significance of the towns to the state was, of course, one of the reasons why the latter attempted to eradicate the privately owned suburbs and towns from the fifteenth century onwards.
Crafts and manufactures were a key feature of the posad of many towns, as well as of many of the 'white' suburbs. Moscow in particular was characterised by numerous suburbs owned by the court, the state and private owners (including the Church) whose inhabitants lived not (or not only) by selling their products on the marketplace but by fulfilling the orders of their respective masters. Thus Moscow had its armaments manufacturers (most notably, the cannon foundry, established by Ivan III) and other metalworkers, some of whom were engaged in fine metalwork for the court, those engaged in textile and clothes production, the preparation of food, workers in wood and stone, those engaged in specialist crafts like icon-painting, printing and jewellery manufacture, and many others, often directly serving the needs of court, government or private landowner. But the key point is that the presence of manufacture did not necessarily imply market relations. Moscow's court (or palace and treasury) suburbs originally developed to supply the needs of the court and the government and worked in response to specific orders. Their inhabitants fulfilled the latter on the basis of their obligations as residents of the court suburbs. By the late sixteenth century, however, many of these people seem to have been working for the market also (which might include the state as purchaser) like other residents of the 'black' and 'white' suburbs.
Crafts and manufactures generally took place in the urban suburbs in the homes of the various artisans. The sources rarely permit an insight into the location of different kinds of manufacturing and craft activities in different towns, but in Moscow's case it seems that a few of the suburbs were specialised in this sense, including some of the court suburbs.[94] A prominent feature of many towns was the trading square (torg), usually located at a central and accessible point. In Moscow's case this was to the east of the Kremlin by the Moscow River on the site of the present-day Red Square, sometimes supplemented in winter by trading on the actual ice of the river itself. Much of what is now the open space of the square was occupied in the sixteenth century by a series of specialised trading rows (riady) consisting of individual shops (lavki), stalls and sometimes cellars and stores owned or rented by merchants, craftsmen, Church and monastic dependents and others. Shops were predominantly of wood, occasionally of stone. Sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century Moscow rows seem to have included a Surozhskii row (trading mainly in foreign goods), shoe row, ironmongery row, cloth row, glove row, women's row, kaftan row, iron row, silver row, tinkers' row and numerous others. Towards the end of the century one or more trading courts (palaty) are recorded which incorporated shops and rows, including a merchants' bazaar (gostinnyi dvor) where visiting or foreign merchants could trade. The streets of the Kitai gorod, Moscow's oldest posad to the east of the trading square, had many trading establishments, including the houses of foreign merchants, whilst some trading bazaars and markets were located in other parts of the city. The latter included markets for horses, cattle, timber and construction materials.[95]
The detailed geographical patterns of trade and commerce across Russia in the sixteenth century cannot be established because of the lack of adequate source materials. The exact nature of the links between Moscow and the rest of the country, for example, is only known in part, thanks to the researches into often difficult source material by a handful of scholars.[96] The character of 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 cadastres 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 aspogosti. The termposad 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 ofthe 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 oflocal and everyday needs. These included the provision of food, clothing, footwear, fuel, building materials, horses and so on to urban and rural inhabitants. In this sense urban economies bore the unspecialised character which was typical of early modern 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 example was the fur trade which had once been the basis of the wealth of the city of Novgorod. By the second halfofthe 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, I980).
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 Geography, Research Paper no. 211, 1984), p. 45; Serbina, Ocherki; V N. Vernadskii, Novgorod i Novgorodskaia zemliav XV veke (Moscow and Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1961), p. 112.
94
V Snegirev,
96
See e.g. M.V Fekhner,