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 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 unpredictable and more resistant to traditional means of containment. The Crimean Tatar invasions of southern and central Muscovy in i632-3 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.[58]
Meanwhile Muscovy had lost much of its leverage over its own vassal polities 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.
As diplomacy could accomplish little, security on the southern frontier came to depend all the more on military measures: resuming military colonisation 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' arrays had been reduced to about 5,000 men. It was now substantially increased, 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.[59]
Military colonisation beyond the Abatis Line was resumed in order to establish 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.[60]
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 standards 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 Commonwealth 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 cossack 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 subsequent 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 Muscovy. 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 entitlement 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.
58
Mykhailo Hrushevsky
59
A. I. Iakovlev,
60
VP. Zagorovskii,