These measures strengthening southern frontier defences helped Muscovy weather the crisis that broke out in spring 1637 when the Don cossacks murdered the Ottoman diplomat Foma Cantacuzene and besieged and captured the Ottoman fortress of Azov. Azov had been left suddenly vulnerable to a Don cossack attackbecause Khan Inaet Girey's forces were mostly off in Bucak fighting Khantimur and Sultan Murad IV was preoccupied with wars in Persia and Hungary. The Don host couldjustify seizing Azov because its garrison had provided support for Tatar raids upon Don cossack settlements on the lower Don, and Ataman Ivan Katorzhnyi may also have calculated that possessing Azov would allow him to bargain for more generous treatment from the tsar and larger Don shipment subsidies. But Moscow had no reason to authorise the seizure of Azov. While Azov's Ottoman garrison was too small to pose a threat to the towns of southern Muscovy, its presence had been enough to serve as a tripwire providing the sultan with cause, if he chose to make use of it, to retaliate directly against Don cossack or Muscovite aggression. If the sultan should get the impression that Moscow was in any way complicit in the attack on Azov it would damage Muscovite trade at Azov and Kaffa and might even drag Muscovy into war with the Porte.
As long as the Don cossacks occupied Azov (1637-42) Moscow therefore followed the policy of strengthening its southern frontier defence while simultaneously using diplomacy to absolve the tsar of any blame for the crisis. Tsar Michael sent some grain and munitions to the host but refused their request to send troops and place Azov under his protection. An Assembly of the Land convened in 1642 was all for going to war, but Tsar Michael ignored it and resumed paying tribute to the new Crimean khan even while Muscovite envoys sent to Crimea were being abused. Missions were sent to Sultan Murad IV and, after his death in 1640, to Sultan Ibrahim, to give reassurance that the murder of Cantacuzene and seizure of Azov had been the work of brigands acting 'for reasons unknown... without our instruction'.[61] In June-September 1641 a large Ottoman army commanded by the pasha of Silistria besieged the cossacks in Azov; although it failed to retake Azov, it clearly demonstrated how important recovery of Azov was to Sultan Ibrahim, so when Ibrahim issued a new ultimatum to Moscow in March 1642 Tsar Michael complied and ordered the Don cossacks to evacuate Azov. Ottoman forces reoccupied Azov in September 1642 and reinforced its garrison.
War with the Ottoman Empire had been avoided. The new Turkish garrison at Azov carried out some retaliatory raids on Don cossack settlements but left the southern Muscovite border towns alone. There had been Crimean Tatar raids into southern Muscovy in 1637 and 1641-3, but they had been undertaken by beys and princes acting on their own, driven by famine and livestock epidemics in Crimea (Inaet Girey's successors Begadyr Girey, r. 163741, and Mehmed Girey, r. 1641-4, were no more able to curb the Crimean nobility).
Muscovite-Ottoman relations had suffered serious damage, however. The Don cossacks had rebuilt their forts and settlements near Azov and were again attacking Turkish troops; Sultan Ibrahim demanded the tsar remove the host from the lower Don, a request beyond the tsar's power to fulfil. The new Crimean khan Islam Girey III (r. 1644-54) decided the best way to tame the Crimean nobility was to realign with the Ottoman sultan and put himself at the head of major invasions against the Commonwealth and Muscovy. Therefore 20,000 Tatars invaded the Commonwealth and another 20,000 swept across southern Muscovy in the summer of 1644, carrying off about 10,000 prisoners. Another 6,000 Muscovite captives were taken the following year. Sultan Ibrahim gave his approval for these operations.[62] By unleashing Islam Girey III and threatening direct Ottoman military retaliation Ibrahim was able to stop the Polish-Muscovite rapprochement. In 1646 Wladyslaw IV renewed peace with the Porte and resumed tribute gifts to the khan.
Moscow therefore had to increase investment in its southern frontier defence system. The Tatar incursions of 1644-5 had taken advantage of particular weaknesses in that system: the absence of unified command in the corps of the southern field army, and the over-centralisation of command initiative in the Military Chancellery; the inability of the field army (still stationed along the Abatis Line) to offer a forward defence for the districts to its south; large gaps in the Belgorod Line, especially between Voronezh and Kozlov and between the Tikhaia Sosna and Oskol' rivers; and Moscow's inability to stop Don cossack raids further provoking the Tatars and Turks.
The new government of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich addressed each of these weaknesses in i646-54. Several more garrison towns were built and linked up with the Belgorod Line. Most of the gaps in the line were filled by 1654; by 1658 the line extended all along the southern edge of the forest steppe zone, from Akhtyrka on the Vorskla River to Chelnavsk about 800 kilometres to the east, and a second defence line some 500 kilometres long extended from Chelnavsk to the Volga. Twenty-five garrison towns stood on or just behind the Belgorod Line; thousands of odnodvortsy deti boiarskie, service cossacks and musketeers had been settled on ploughlands in these new garrison districts.
In 1646 the corps previously deployed far to the north in the Borderland and Riazan' arrays were restationed along the new perimeter formed by the Belgorod Line. The Great Corps, Vanguard and Rear Guard now stood at Livny, Kursk and Elets each spring and shifted in June to Belgorod, Karpov and Iablonov. Garrison contingents and small field units south of the Abatis Line no longer had to march north to rendezvous with the corps but could move south to join them on the Belgorod Line.
This in turn led to new command-and-control practices along the Belgorod Line. Because southern garrison forces could now play a larger role in reinforcing corps operations, it became necessary for the corps commander at Belgorod to take up broader year-round operational and logistics authority over all the troops residing in the Belgorod Array territory, those in the garrisons as well as the Belgorod corps. The town governors of the southern garrison towns were thereby subordinated in military affairs, and gradually in broader administrative affairs, to the commander at Belgorod, to whom the Military Chancellery could now devolve resource logistic and monitoring functions that had previously been centralised at Moscow. By 1653 one can speak of a large Belgorod Line regional military administration (Belgorodskii razriad) operating out of the corps commander's headquarters at Belgorod or Kursk. During the Thirteen Years War this new principle of regional military administration would take on even greater importance: similar territorial razri- ady would be formed on the north-western front at Novgorod and Smolensk and the westernmost districts of the Belgorod razriad spun off into a separate Sevsk razriad.
After the Smolensk war most but not all of the expensive foreign formation regiments had been disbanded. A few thousand foreign formation soldaty and dragoons had manned the Abatis Line in 1638,1639 and 1642, but it had not been considered cost-effective to deploy them every year. But in 1646 the government decided to make foreign formation units an important permanent element in the southern frontier defence system. A number of officers were hired abroad, especially in the Netherlands; a kriegsbuch on the exercise of musket and pike was translated into Russian, to help in training Muscovite infantry; a new census was conducted to levy troops by household rather than from inhabited chetvert'; and Tsar Alexis endorsed the Military Chancellery's recommendation that the southern garrisons cease relying on irregularly levied peasant militia to help defend the Belgorod Line and instead place entire peasant communities in standing service as 'settled' dragoons and infantry, drilled in their villages year-round under foreign officers. In Komaritskaia canton in 1646 5,125 state peasants were taken into three dragoon regiments; the next year several private votchina villages along the Voronezh River west of Kozlov were likewise put in dragoon service.[63]
61
S. I. Riabov,
63
Brian Davies, 'Village Into Garrison: The Militarized Peasant Communities of Southern Muscovy', RR 51 (1992): 481-501.