Nomads in the Eurasian steppe depended upon trade and raiding to supplant what pastoralism could not provide. Nomads raided caravans for goods and settled societies for slaves. Slaves had historically been a major element of the interaction between the Eurasian forests and steppe; slaving certainly was a founding element ofthe Kyiv Rus' state in the 800s, as Rus' traders allied with local tribes to seize slaves and goods for Black Sea and Middle East markets. After Christianization (988), as the Rus' leadership, now claiming princely status, settled into territorial rule, they over time changed from predators to victims in the slave market. Italians ran the slave market from 1204 to around 1475, when the Crimean Tatars took it over, bringing slaves to Caffa where Greek, Armenian, and Jewish merchants sold them.
Statistics tell a sad tale. Halil Inalcik reports that the Crimean Tatars and other steppe nomads carried out annual slave raids into Poland-Lithuania, Circassia (northern Caucasus), and Russia from the early sixteenth through the middle of the seventeenth century, when Moscow began to be able to protect its steppe borderland more effectively. The Rus' palatinates ofthe Commonwealth suffered as much if not more than Russia from slaving raids. The scale of the trade was immense: in 1578, over 17,000 Eurasian slaves were imported into Caffa; another estimate suggests that between 1607 and 1618, 100,000 slaves were caught and between 1632 and 1645, another 26,840. The Ottoman and Persian worlds used slaves in farming, domestic service, harems and administration, and manufacturing; the Ottomans engaged them in the army and public construction work. There are scattered references to eastern traders being able to purchase slaves in Moscow or in Muscovite-controlled ports into the seventeenth century, but such slaves might have been acquired as prisoners of war and these references are rare.
One Russian response to the problem was to ransom Russian Christian slaves with funds regularly collected through the Church. A more effective one was to construct fortified defensive lines on the routes of Tatar incursions, which were so regular that Muscovy fixed scouting parties on the lookout for Tatar armies every summer. Defensive lines were intended to stop the raids, to provide a protected shield for agrarian settlement, and to prevent the flight of taxpaying serfs from the center. Defensive lines also intruded into grazing lands, disrupting nomadic economies and making nomads more dependent upon Russia for market goods. Inexorable advance of ramparts and earthworks into the steppe did not eradicate nomads, but displaced them. Nogais, for example, were pushed south into the Caucasus over the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century.
Moscow began constructing defensive lines into the rich black earth of the forest- steppe and steppe south of the Oka valley and east of the valley of the Dnieper already in the first half of the sixteenth century, against Nogai Tatars and loosely organized Volga Cossacks on Volga shores south of Kazan. By mid-century a defensive line of felled trees, ditches, and earthen ramparts south of the Oka about 150-350 km south of Moscow had been established, anchored by fortresses at Riazan', Tula, Kozelsk, and Putivl'. Once Kazan was conquered (1552), settlement began. Displaced Middle Volga peoples (Tatars, Chuvash, Mordva) moved towards the steppe; Russian gentry and monasteries were awarded land here as pomest'e; court peasants were forcibly moved by the state; runaway Russian peasants fled here. To protect these settlers from raids, Russia continued to build fortress lines.
Fortresses were established on the Volga (Samara 1586, Tsaritsyn 1588, Saratov 1590) and along a forest-steppe line on the right bank varying from 650 km south of Moscow to about 350 km: Belgorod 1593, Veluiki 1599, Elets 1592, Livni 1585, Staryi Oskol 1596, Kursk 1587. After some destruction in the Time of Troubles, Moscow fortified and intensified what came to be called the Belgorod Line with new fortresses anchored by Kozlov and Tambov (1635-6); this border was quickly settled by court peasants from the Riazan area and by Tatars from the Middle Volga. By the 1650s the line included up to twenty-two forts, creating a continuous defensive line of 800 km from the upper Vorskla in the west at the border of Ukrainian lands to the Tsna River in the east, fronting Nogais and Kalmyks. These provided safe havens for Ukrainian-speaking peasants and Cossacks to settle what became known as Sloboda Ukraine; state peasants from the
Russian center were also moved in. At the same time a protective line was constructed from Kozlov to the Volga at Simbirsk, extending the Belgorod line across the full flank of the "wild field" steppes.
These new settlements were supported by grain shipments from the center until settlers produced sufficient resources, which took decades. Fortresses were staffed by Cossacks and anyone else available, including runaway serfs, which set up a constant tension as enserfment in Russia was solidified in the seventeenth century. Frontier governors welcomed any available labor, ignoring government directives to send runaways back to their owners. Behind the line, peasants migrated in, runaways settled, landlords moved serfs and the state forcibly moved gentry and state peasants, turning some of the latter into border guards. Military units farmed their fields communally, creating over the seventeenth century a specific garrison defense formation of semi-agricultural settled musketeers and Cossacks. All this presaged social mobility; in the 1640s the "new model army" was organized by recruiting local peasants to become dragoons, cavalry, and infantry and by 1658 a Belgorod regiment had formed on this borderland.
SLOBODA UKRAINE
Since the 1630s Ukrainian-speaking or Ruthenian (this English term emerged from the Latin root for "Rus'") peasants fleeing enserfment and peasants and Cossacks fleeing the half-century of warfare sparked by the Khmelnytsky revolt (1648) populated black earth lands east of Kyiv in an area that came to be called "Sloboda Ukraine" (sloboda meaning neighborhood). Belgorod Line fortresses cut across these lands in the 1650s, providing protection that stimulated in-migration. Some newcomers joined Muscovite garrison service, others farmed. Towns sprang up: Sumy north of the line in 1654, Kharkiv south of it in 1656. By the end of the seventeenth century Sloboda Ukraine's population included 86,000 Ukrainian- speaking males, 22,000 of them Cossacks.
Moscow asserted loose control over this restless borderland by granting broad autonomies. Cossacks remained independent regiments that Russia deployed in campaigns and border defense against Crimean Tatar raids. Moscow's fortresses were manned by military governors, but the region itself developed administration and judicial systems patterned on Cossack regimental government elsewhere in the Rus' lands. Cossack officers oversaw five districts using Cossack customary law. Cossacks enjoyed autonomies unlike anything in the Russian center: rights to distill liquor, hire labor, engage in free trade, own land, and elect office holders. Russia did not institute serfdom or the service land tenure system; land was free for anyone to settle. By the 1660s Muscovy embarked on the Izium Line south of the Belgorod Line to protect Sloboda Ukraine and push towards the Black Sea. It stretched in a hairpin along the southern Donets and Oskol rivers, extending south from the Belgorod Line at Userd through Valuiki to the apex around Tsareborisov and Izium.
BASHKIRIA
Since the tenth century Bashkirs are recorded inhabiting the forested steppe east of the Volga; their traditional lands were bounded by rivers: the Volga on the west, the Tobol east of the Urals, the Kama to the northwest, and the Iaik (later Ural) to the south. They were Turkic-speaking steppe nomads who were Muslim since before being incorporated into the Golden Horde (itself Muslim since the fourteenth century) and used sharia law and customary law. In the forested northern part of their ancestral lands, Bashkirs were semi-nomadic hunters, trappers, fishers, and bee-keepers; some even farmed. But the majority of Bashkirs were nomadic pastoralists in the wooded and grassy steppe to the south; they raised horses, sheep, and goats. After the demise of Mongol authority, those in the northwest paid tribute to the Kazan khanate, those in the southwest to the Nogais ofthe lower Volga, and those east of the Urals to the Siberian khanate.