While the threat of conversion to Christianity by force was avoided for the time being, the fears and rumours that such conversion was imminent drove many non-Christians to flee their lands. Some were expelled, others chose to flee to avoid the new landlords, administrators and tax collectors. The Muscovite conquests, particularly in the most densely populated mid- Volga region, resulted in a massive migration of the native population further east and south-east. By the early eighteenth century, some of the migrant Mari, Chuvash, Udmurts and others in the Bashkir lands formed a special social category of registered peasants, known as tepter (from defter - a registry book, in Turkic languages). By the middle of the nineteenth century, there were about 300,000 of them: they were all Muslim and were now listed as Bashkirs.
The newly conquered territories were ruled haphazardly. The official policies were a typical combination of carrots to those nobles and chiefs who proved to be loyal and sticks to the recalcitrant ones. Of course, the ultimate 'carrots' were reserved for those who chose to convert to Orthodox Christianity: the nobles could retain their lands, status and privileges and the commoners were promised temporary exemptions from taxes and one-time payments in cash or in kind.
Moscow's policies towards its new non-Christian subjects and Muscovite practices often happened to be far apart. The reality of governing the remote frontier regions populated by different peoples who spoke different tongues and abided by different laws proved to be far more ambiguous than the government's decrees allowed. The Muscovite government in the frontier regions was rife with corruption with the frontier administrators often subverting the very laws they were supposed to enforce. Thus, despite the government order banning the construction of new mosques in the Kazan' region, many new mosques were erected and the Church officials squarely laid the blame on the shoulders of the local governors. In Siberia, to secure the supplies of furs, the government tried to limit the conversion of the natives, who would otherwise be resettled among the Muscovites and stop delivering iasak. But the conversion of the natives to Christianity was one of the surest ways for the corrupt local officials to enrich themselves: the converts were often enslaved by the government officials, sold into slavery to others, or exploited in a number of different ways. In the seventeenth century, the instructions to each new governor sent to administer Siberian towns strictly forbade the government officials to enslave or sell the new converts.[136] It may not be much of an exaggeration to suggest that Moscow expended no less an effort in fighting the corruption
of its own officials than it did in subduing the natives.
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By the end of the sixteenth century Muscovy was dramatically transformed from the backwater principality ruled by the grand prince to one of the largest empires, whose rulers could no longer be dismissed as over-ambitious upstarts by other major powers. At the time, unable to challenge its neighbours in the west, Moscow pursued relentless expansion in all other directions. Building on the previous colonisation of the northern regions undertaken by Novgorod, Moscow's expansion in the north and north-east came across little notable resistance. The native population was quickly overwhelmed by a combination of state, peasant and monastery colonisation of their lands.
In the east and particularly in the south, the challenges were more formidable. In the east, Moscow's expansion was largely driven by commercial concerns with the primary goal to secure the supplies of furs at all costs: trade, tribute or whatever combination of the above. In the south, Moscow's objectives were military and geopoliticaclass="underline" to secure its frontiers from constant pre- dations and to turn their restless nomadic and semi-nomadic neighbours into reliable auxiliaries. With the exception ofthe brief interlude by the Stroganovs, the matters of colonisation in the east and south were entirely in the hands of the state.
The expansion of Muscovy was occurring at the same time as other European empires were expanding overseas. The New Worlds of both the Europeans and Muscovites included the territories occupied by large numbers of animists. What set the Muscovite empire apart from its European counterparts, however, was that it expanded into the contiguous territories populated by Muslims in addition to the animists. Only one other European power, Spain, found itself in the same situation in the fifteenth century when it expanded into the lands occupied by the Muslims. Spain's 'final solution' of purging itself of any non-Christian elements, Muslims and Jews, was quite different from Moscow's. Unable and unwilling to apply the Spanish solution, the Christian rulers of Russia would continue to rule over a heterogeneous empire with a large number of Muslim subjects. In this sense, Russia was much more like an Ottoman empire, where Muslim sultans ruled over their many Christian subjects.
The Orthodox Church
DAVID B. MILLER
In 1448 Grand Prince Vasilii II of Moscow and a council of bishops of the see of Kiev and all Rus' within his control elevated Bishop Iona of Riazan' to the office of metropolitan. They did so to forestall the appointment of a metropolitan unsympathetic to Moscow and, worse, sympathetic to the union with Rome concluded at Florence in 1438. Vasilii and the bishops expected that an Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople would consecrate Iona, but in 1453 Constantinople fell to the Turks. By the time Iona died in 1461, Vasilii and his bishops agreed that his elevation without the patriarch's approval was canonical. Moscow's rulers and their prelates chose Feodosii (1461-4) and Filipp (1464-73) to succeed Iona with the title 'metropolitan of all Rus''. But the Rus' they administered was commensurate with the authority of the Muscovite state. Moscow's metropolitans continued to claim jurisdiction over the Lithuanian and Novgorod eparchies, but they were to administer only those coming under Muscovite rule. Yet Muscovites interpreted Iona's elevation in a manner that accorded the see an exceptional destiny. In one of many letters demanding that they accept him, Iona told the Orthodox bishops of Lithuania that, when Constantinople accepted union with Rome, it forfeited divine protection and fell to the Turks. Another letter said that Iona was 'by God's will installed in this great office ... by all the archbishops and bishops of the present Orthodox great Russian autocracy of the sovereign and my son the Grand Prince Vasilii Vasil'evich'.[137]
The structure of the Church was as rudimentary when its Council of One Hundred Chapters (Stoglav) met in 1551 as it had been in Iona's time. Nine bishops and archbishops were in attendance. A tenth eparchy was created in 1552 for Kazan'. By 1589 Pskov became the eleventh. The vastness of the metropolitanate and its eparchies, and eparchial traditions ofautonomy, made supervision of the parish clergy impossible. The Church's solution resembled that of Moscow's rulers. It appointed plenipotentiaries called 'tenth men' (.desiatel'niki) to administer the ten districts of each eparchy. The 'tenth men' collected tithes from parishes and adjudicated cases falling under Church law. Their courts had jurisdiction over the clergy and, in cases of heresy, witchcraft, sexual infractions and family law, also over the laity. On Church lands they shared jurisdiction with civil courts in matters pertaining to Church properties and crimes threatening public order. Like the ruler's governors, they had arbitrary powers and, given the inability ofthe Church to pay them, lived from a share of the tithe and from fees for court judgements. Most were laymen and their titles - boyars, junior boyars (deti boiarskie), clerks - mimicked those of the ruler's officialdom. Parishioners or estate owners recruited priests who went to bishops for ordination. Most priests married locally and lived in rural settlements. They supported themselves by farming lands provided by the community, from fees for administering sacraments and from modest state subsidies. Priests viewed 'tenth men' as rapacious and resented being managed by laymen.[138] Needless to say, they were ill equipped to instruct the clergy, let alone their parishioners, in what it meant to be Christian.
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E. B. Emchenko,