But the stability and relative safety on Russia's southern frontier was always short-lived, subject to the rapidly changing situation in the steppe. Continuing the centuries-old pattern, the steppes of Inner Asia disgorged another powerful nomadic confederation which came to replace the Nogais in the Caspian steppe. The intruders shared with their new neighbours neither the overlapping structures of related Turkic clans nor their Islamic religion. The newly arrived steppe nomads were a Mongol people and avowed Tibetan Buddhists guided by the Dalai Lama. Their neighbours called them Kalmyks.
Even early exploratory forays by the Kalmyks used to send the Nogais fleeing in panic from their formidable foe. Moscow's attempts to arrest the movement of the Kalmyks further west and to control the situation in the steppe proved to be futile. In the first decade of the seventeenth century, most of the Kalmyks roamed along the Irtysh, Ishim and Tobol' rivers of southwestern Siberia. In the second decade they had crossed the Iaik River, and by the early 1630s they reached the vicinity of Astrakhan', routed the Nogais and the Russian musketeers dispatched to help them, and occupied the pastures along the Volga. Russia's inability to protect the Nogais from the Kalmyk raids led some of the Nogais to join the Kalmyks, while the majority chose to flee further west towards Azov, seeking the protection of the Ottoman Porte.
The arrival of the Kalmyks in the 1630s had a dramatic impact on the entire southern region. The decades of Moscow's careful strategies of weakening, dividing and impoverishing the Nogais and its significant expenditures to implement such policies, seemed to have been wasted. The Nogais, whom Moscow considered long pacified, had now joined the Crimean Tatars and the Lesser Nogai Horde near Azov. Together they launched devastating raids into Russia's southern borderlands. Only in the three years of 1632, 1633 and 1637 the Nogais and Crimeans captured and brought to the Crimea more than 10,000 Russian prisoners. The newly colonised southern region with its towns and peasants urgently needed protection.
The danger of the Nogais and Crimeans breaking through the southern defences and approaching Moscow was no exaggeration. The intentions of the Kalmyks, who came to replace the Nogais in the Caspian steppe, remained unknown. It is unlikely that Russia's previous historical experiences in the steppe left Moscow sanguine about the prospect of peace with the Kalmyks. Faced with the new and dangerous situation along the southern frontier, Moscow hastened to conclude a peace treaty with Poland in 1634 and to turn its attention to the south. Indeed, this time Moscow decided to embark on a new strategy and to invest unprecedented resources in order to secure the lands already settled and populated by the Russians and to end the threat of nomadic invasion once and for all.
In a change from previous policies Moscow decided to play the 'cossack card'. The cossacks were the ultimate 'melting pot' in early modern Russia. Among several cossack hosts which Moscow claimed to control, the Don cossacks were the most powerful. In the seventeenth century, they included a motley crowd of Russians, new converts, Zaporozhian cossacks, Poles, Lithuanians, peasants and various fugitives from justice.[83] Mirroring the lifestyle and the military organisation of the steppe societies, the cossacks were a perfect antidote to the nomadic peoples of the steppe. And like many non-Russian peoples, the cossacks proved to be some of Russia's most mutinous subjects.
In a shift from the previous policy of restraining the Don cossacks to avoid provoking the Ottoman Porte, Moscow was now prepared to further arm the cossacks and encourage their raids. Such raids, however, were to be carefully calibrated, and the cossacks were instructed to limit their attacks to the Nogais and Crimeans alone, and not to raid Ottoman possessions, Azov and Kaffa in particular.3
To be sure, controlling the cossacks was no easy matter, as the interests of the government and the cossacks did not always coincide. After all, it was not the impoverished Nogais that the cossacks were after. Their eyes were set on the wealthy Ottoman and Crimean towns and villages along the Black Sea coast. The only obstacles between the cossacks and the promise of rich booty and numerous captives were the fortifications of Azov, the Ottoman fortress in the estuary of the Don, which prevented the cossacks from sailing down the river to the sea.
When in 1636, enticed by the Crimean khan and under continuous pressure from the Kalmyks and cossacks, the Nogais abandoned the area around Azov and crossed the Don on the way to the Crimea, the Don cossacks quickly moved to lay siege to Azov. In June 1637, Azov was in the hands of the triumphant cossacks. In the next five years, taken aback by this unexpected and undesired development, Moscow was presented with an unpalatable dilemma: to support the cossacks and thus enter war with the Ottoman Empire, or to avoid war by having the cossacks abandon the fortress. After much hesitation and deliberation, the government chose avoidance over confrontation.
But the cossacks' degree of independence from Moscow and a history of their unruliness and participation in popular revolts made the government suspicious of their true intentions, and, as the Azov affair proved, not unreasonably so. Use of the cossacks along the frontier had to be supplemented by a more reliable strategy. In 1635, the government undertook a new and bold initiative; it began the construction of the fortification lines in the south. The duration of the construction, the expenditures on these extensive fortification networks, and the utilisation of human and natural resources for this purpose made the project the single most ambitious and important strategic undertaking in seventeenth-century Russia. It was to become Moscow's own Great Wall to fend off the 'infidels' from the southern steppe.
Constructing a fortification line in the southern region was not an entirely novel idea. Such fortification lines were already known in tenth-century Kievan Rus', and more recently, in the middle of the sixteenth century, they had been constructed just south of the Oka River. By the 1630s numerous forts and towns emerged far south of Moscow Still, these proliferating vanguard military outposts had to be supplied from the central regions of Russia because agriculture
3 A. A. Novosel'skii, Bor'ba Moskovskogo gosudarstva s tatarami v pervoi polovine XVII veka (Moscow and Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1948), pp. 237-8, 296.
remained a dangerous undertaking on the frontier. It was paramount to provide further security, if a peasant colonisation of the region were to take place. The fortification lines were to serve exactly that purpose, becoming, in time, both the primary means of Moscow's defence against predations and an effective tool of Russia's territorial expansion.
In the decade from 1635 to 1646, Moscow moved its frontier defences much further south, connecting, in one uninterrupted defence line, the natural obstacles, such as rivers and swamps, with man-made fortifications: several rows of moats, felled trees and palisades studded with advance warning towers and forts armed with cannon and other firearms. The first such fortification line (zaseka or zasechnaia cherta), stretching for more than 800 kilometres from the Akhtyrka River in the west to Tambov in the east, became known as the Belgorod Line. It tookthe government another decade to extend the fortification line further east, from Tambov to Simbirsk on the Volga. By the mid-seventeenth century, both the colonists arriving in the southern regions of Russia and the residents of Kazan' province found themselves in relative safety behind the Belgorod and Simbirsk fortification lines.[84]
The Kalmyks were seen as the dangerous outsiders whose raids disrupted the status quo in the region and thus, in addition to Russia, threatened the interests of other regional powers from the Crimea to the North Caucasus, to the Central Asian khanates. At first invincible, the Kalmyks suffered a major debacle in the steppe and mountains of the North Caucasus in 1644. A large Kalmyk contingent was decimated by the combined forces of the Nogais and Kabardinians with the help of Crimean Tatar and Russian detachments which provided the crucial fire power. Driven by mutual interests, the Russians and Crimeans succeeded in pushing the Kalmyks back east of the Iaik River.
83
Grigorii Kotoshikhin,
84
On the evolution of the fortification lines see A. I. Iakovlev,