This is the stereotype. But does it agree with the known facts? The modern British historian, M. S. Anderson, who has made a special study of English perceptions of Russia in Peter's time, writes that in the seventeenth century less was known about Russia in England than a hundred years previously.[4] Richard Chancellor, who in 1553 became the first Englishman to visit Russia, for some reason entitled one of the chapters of his memoirs (published in England in 1589), not, let us say, "Of the Weak and Poor King of a People in a State of Nonexistence," but, on the contrary, "Of the Great and Mighty Tsar of Russia."[5] Another Englishman, Anthony Jenkinson, whose book was also published in England at the end of the sixteenth century, wrote: "The king of these parts is very mighty, since he has won a great many victories, both over the Livonians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Swedes on the one hand, and over the Tatars and pagans on the other."[6] In numerous documents which circulated in the 1560s at the court and in the chancellory of the German emperor, it was said that the grand duke of Moscow was the mightiest sovereign in the world after the Turkish sultan, and that, "from alliances with the grand duke, the Christian world would receive an honorable profit and advantage; it would also be an excellent counterforce and resistance to that tyrannical and most dangerous enemy, the Turk."[7] The French Protestant, Hubert Langet, prophesied in August 1558 in a letter to Calvin that, "If any power in Europe is destined to grow, this is that power.""
Chancellor found mid-sixteenth-century Moscow to be "as a whole, larger than London and its environs." The scale of trade there astonished the Englishman. The entire territory between Yaroslavl' and Moscow, through which he rode,
abounds with little villages which are so full of people that it is surprising to look at them. The earth is all well-sown with grain, which the inhabitants bring to Moscow in such enormous quantities that it seems surprising. Every morning you can meet between 700 and 800 sleighs going there with grain. . . . Some people carry grain to Moscow; others carry it away from there, and among those there are some who live not less than 1,000 miles away.'"
A quarter of a century before Chancellor, before the sea trade began, the ambassador of the German emperor, Sigismund Herberstein, concluded that Russia was making effective use of its central position between West and East, and was successfully trading in both directions:
Furs and wax are taken from there to Germany . . . and saddles, bridles, clothing, and leather from there to Tataria; weapons and iron are exported only by stealth or with special permission. . . . However, they export broadcloth and linen garments, axes, needles, mirrors, saddlebags, and other such goods."
W. Kirchner, a German historian, notes that after the conquest of Narva in 1558, Russia became practically the main center of Baltic trade, and one of the centers of world trade. Ships from Liibeck, ignoring Riga and Revel, sailed for the port of Narva. Several hundred unloaded there annually, including vessels from Hamburg, Antwerp, London, Stockholm, Copenhagen, and even France.'2
This is confirmed by extensive data indicating that the Russian economy grew significantly in the first half of the sixteenth century. Expansion was marked by intensive growth of the new peasant and urban proto-bourgeoisie, migration to the cities, rapid urbanization, development of large-scale manufacturing, and considerable capital formation. We know, for example, that at this time there appeared in the Russian North a multitude of new towns (KargopoF, Turchasov, Tot'ma, Ustiuzhnia, Shestakov). An even greater number of major fortresses were built (Tula, Kolomna, Kazan', Zaraisk, Serpukhov, Astrakhan', Smolensk, and Kitai-Gorod in Moscow). I am not even speaking of the scale of construction of less significant fortress-cities (Elets, Voronezh, Kursk, Belgorod, and Borisov in the South; Samara, Ufa, Saratov, and Tsaritsyn in the East; and Arkhangel'sk and Kola in the North). In the sixteenth century, urbanization became a truly national phenomenon. Some observers even got the impression of a mass migration of the rural population to the cities. In 1520 residents of Narva wrote to Reveclass="underline"
ll.S. Gerbershtein, Zapiski о moskovskikh delakh, p. 91.
12. W. Kirchner, "The Rise of the Baltic Question." The modern British historian T. S. Willan reports facts which indirectly confirm the extreme importance of the Muscovite trade. It turns out that the attractiveness of the Russian port was so great that it became a constant subject of argument on the part of free merchants—"crafty persons," as the lawyers for the Moscow Company, who were trying to close the Russian trade to outsiders, called them in a complaint to the royal privy council in 1573. The craftiness of these outsiders consisted in the fact that their vessels passed through the sound with an official destination of Danzig or Revel', when in fact they were going to Narva. This means that the magnetic qualities of the Moscow trade were at that time strong enough to justify the high risk of violating the monopoly (T. S. Willan, "The Russia Company and Narva, 1558-81").
Soon there will be no one in Russia to take the plow any longer, for all are running to the cities and becoming merchants. . . . People who two years ago were carrying fish to market, or were butchers, old-clothes dealers, or market gardeners, have become extremely rich merchants and money-lenders and deal in thousands of rubles.1'4
If, however, Russia was indeed undergoing significant economic expansion, and in particular a building boom, the necessary preconditions which existed in every European country—such as a free labor market, significant free capital, and judicial protection of private property—must have been present there too. As listed in surviving documents, for example, the materials used in the construction of the fortress of Smolensk included three hundred and twenty thousand poods of iron in bars, 15,000 poods of iron rods, 1,000,000 nails, and 320,000 wooden pilings. Inasmuch as iron and timber were not imported from abroad, this implies large-scale specialized production. And neither was such production artificially implanted and patronized and regulated by the state, as was the case under Peter. It was private enterprise in the full sense of the term.
Sixteen thousand workers were directly employed on the construction of the Smolensk fortress alone—all, according to the tsar's decree, freely hired. If we consider that dozens of such fortresses and cities were being erected at the same time, this presupposes an enormous free labor market. As far as free capital is concerned, a long list of extremely wealthy contemporary merchants is supplied by the Soviet historians D. Makovskii and N. Nosov.'4 I will cite only a few examples here. The Smolensk merchant Afanasii Yudin extended credit to English merchants to the sum—enormous for that time—of 6,200 rubles (equivalent to more than 450,000 rubles in gold as of the end of the nineteenth century). Tiutin and Anfim Sil'vestrov extended credit to Lithuanian merchants to the amount of 1,210 rubles (more than 100,000 nineteenth-century rubles in gold). A member of the English company, Anthony Marsh, is recorded as owing 1,400 rubles to S. Emel'ianov, 945 to I. Bazhen, and 525 to S. Shorin. In a contemporary letter to the pope we read that,
Muscovy is extremely rich in money, obtained more from the patronage of sovereigns than through mines—of which, incidentally, there is also no lack—since every year there is brought here from all corners of Europe an abundance of money in payment for goods which have almost no value for the Muscovites, while they bring an extremely high price in our parts.[8]