The elite merchants were organised by the government into three groups: the gosti, the gostinaia sotnia and the sukonnaia sotnia.[112] The assignments were based on capital. Rather than being an honour, such assignments were something to be avoided and even dreaded, for the government regarded them as members of the service class who could be pressed into government service as needed. This service took them away from their businesses and had the potential to bankrupt them. The first, the gosti, were based in Moscow and were the leading merchants of the realm. There were only a handful of them and they were assigned to run the major customs houses, such as at Archangel, in Astrakhan', and elsewhere. The second group, the gostinaia sotnia (sometimes translated as 'the merchants' hundred') were also Moscow-based and ran lesser customs houses. If collections did not match anticipation, they could be charged the difference. The third group, the sukonnaia sotnia ('the cloth hundred') were the elite of the provincial merchants and were assigned lesser government tasks. All of these merchants from time to time were assigned to trade the tsar's goods, particularly sables.
Chapter 19 of the Law Code (Sobornoe Ulozhenie) of 1649 made the mer- chantry into a privileged estate or caste. Except for monasteries and the tsar himself, town merchants faced little competition. Peasants, landowners and landholders, clergymen and most military servitors were forbidden to engage in trade, manufacturing and the ownership of urban property. Townsmen, those juridically on the urban tax rolls, had an exclusive monopoly on trade, manufacturing and the ownership of urban property. A small exception was made for members ofthe upper and middle service-class capital and provincial cavalry: they could own one house in town and keep one slave there. Such properties could not be used as bases for enterprises which would compete with the townsmen.[113] Armed musketeers were allowed to engage in petty trade and urban employment to supplement their inadequate wages. Church establishments had to surrender their urban properties and keep outside a wide greenbelt around towns, where the townsmen could keep gardens and pasture livestock. In exchange for these monopolies, the townsmen, who were largely either craftsmen or merchants, had to provide the government with the cash it needed. This arrangement, the product of disturbances in many Russian towns in June 1648, produced a settlement that kept the townsmen from rioting for over a century while providing the government with its needed revenues.[114]
Although the Russian merchants did comparatively well domestically, they could not compete in the international sphere. The larger merchants expressed this in an elaborate petition to the government in 1649 in which they requested the expulsion of Western merchants from the interior of Russia and their confinement to the ports and frontier cities. The petition rehearsed foreign trade in Muscovy for the previous century and its dominance by the English and Dutch. They noted that the English gave local Russian merchants loans, which the Russians themselves could not do, and employed them as their factors. The foreigners kept the Russians confined to their White Sea ports.[115]The fact is that the English were just better merchants. This was proved in the Mediterranean in the last quarter of the sixteenth century when in two decades the English seized all long-distance trade from all competitors.[116] It was also proved in the period 1740-1810, when the French dominated Russian culture but were a poor third in the trade sector. The French complained about English loans to Russian factors, just as the elite Russians had complained a century earlier. In all of these cases, the Mediterranean, the pre-i649 era and the post-1740 era, the key to English success was communications.[117] This was high on the list of the things the Russians said that they just were unable to compete with.
Without any assistance from the government, by i6i3 the Russians were able to borrow the names and styles of much of their clothing from the Turkic peoples who had been their southern neighbours for the previous millennium.[118] But when it came to major technology transfer after 1613 from the West, nothing happened without governmental intervention. Moscow hired not only medical doctors, linguists, translators, astronomers andpainters, but also architects, silk weavers, ship builders, food specialists, paper makers, vintners, iron makers and ore prospectors from the West. Metal specialists were requested from abroad in i62i, and the Dutch in the i620s and i630s enjoyed monopoly hegemony in the iron industry. In 1623 Dutch entrepreneurs established a rope works, complementing that set up by the English at the end of the sixteenth century. The Dutch got a pitch monopoly in the i620s and a potash monopoly in the 1630s. Dutch and Holstein shipwrights built a fleet on the Caspian in the 1630s. In 1634, the Dutch got a monopoly on the manufacture of velvet. In the same year, the first glass factory was established. Westerners also organised a temporary postal system and taught the Russians how to dig deeper wells. The first paper mill was built in 1655, and foreigners established a rag paper factory six years later. In 1667 foreigners set up woollen mills and a decade later an Italian set up a silk factory. In the late 1660s, at the invitation of the government, foreign prospectors discovered copper ores in the north, north of the Volga, and began to mine and process them for the state. These people were in addition to the mercenaries who modernised the Russian army for the Smolensk war (1632-4) by introducing the new formation regiments. About half of the Russian army at Smolensk consisted of these mercenaries and their men. They proved to be a tremendous drain on the treasury, so the majority were sent home after the war. Recruitment was initiated again in 1647 in preparation for the Thirteen Years War (1654-67), but this time was largely limited to officers.21 In 1654 the government, primarily at the urging of the Orthodox Church, closed one of the last openings in the caste society created by the Ulozhenie of 1649 (see below) when it forced the foreigners, almost all of whom were very highly compensated, to live in the Northern European Settlement (nemetskaia sloboda: the Foreign - literally German - Quarter). This later served as the incubator for Peter the Great's Western orientation.
114
Richard Hellie, 'The Stratification of Muscovite Society: The Townsmen',
115
Richard Hellie (ed. and trans.),
i967, i970), pp. 63-9i.
116
Maria Fusaro, 'Commercial Networks of Cooperation in the Venetian Mediterranean: The English and the Greeks, a Case Study', unpublished paper, October 2001.
117
Richard Hellie, 'Le Commerce russe dans la deuxieme moitie du XVIIIe siecle (17401810)', in