From the late sixteenth century the court evinced some interest in mapping the entire realm: in Boris Godunov's time (1598-1605) the Military Service Chancery produced the Great Draft, the first collection of maps of the empire, including western Siberia. When its original was lost in fire in 1626, it was recreated, along with a new map including territories on which Russian expansion focused—the Black Sea steppe and western border with Poland-Lithuania. Other chanceries— Foreign Affairs, Kazan, Siberia, and others—also engaged in mapping their subordinate territories and towns, with particular interest in strategically important Siberian and Chinese borders. The first surviving map of Siberia dates to 1666/7 and the great Siberian mapmaker Semen Remezov created, in Kivelson's words "a dazzling corpus" of maps of Siberia at the turn of the century. The Foreign Affairs Chancery in Moscow, led by A. A. Vinius, was producing sophisticated maps by the end of the century, if not yet up to modern cartographic standards. Rich in ethnographic detail, Muscovite maps lacked systematic scale, Cartesian coordinates, or other modern attributes. Focused primarily on pragmatic purposes— taxation, trade routes—the use of mapping to claim imperial possession did not enter the Muscovite practice of empire until the time of Peter I.
COMMUNICATIONS: ROADS AND COACHMEN
Fernand Braudel's quip, "Distance—the enemy of empire," reminds us of the importance of connections on the ground. Maps may have depicted the empire as connected territory, but communication networks—roads and rivers, coach and postal services—were crucial to the governing of empire. The greatest empires are renowned in this regard—Rome, China, the Mongols—and early modern European and Eurasian state builders put effort into this as well. Rivers and roads had run through the principalities and towns of the East Slavic forest since Kyiv Rus' times, as well as courier service for princely business. The Mongol empire deployed a system of coach stations across the steppe staffed by local populations with horses, carts, and coachmen: from the late thirteenth century principalities in the Mongol- ruled Rus' forest were setting up such networks, assessing taxes or service for their own and the Horde's correspondence.
Ivan III's conquests and diplomatic outreach prompted the development of better roads; constructing roads, including "winter roads" of packed snow, and repairing roads annually were another of the unpaid collective service obligations put on communities. A more formal system of coach stations is cited already in the 1480s by foreign diplomats. Intended only for official messengers or embassies, Moscow's system of coach stations was modeled on Mongol practice, taking the Tatar term "iam" and the model of taxation that paid for it. Initially "coach service" bureaucrats (iamskie d'iaki) in the Treasury oversaw the building of the network; by 1516 a separate chancery for the expanding coach service is cited. Since lines were dictated by the needs of war and diplomacy, the first followed existing roads to the west, to Novgorod, Pskov, Viaz'ma, Dorogobuzh, Smolensk, and Vorotynsk. When White Sea trade began to prosper with the arrival of English traders in the 1550s, existing roads were improved and more were developed; coach stations were set up as far as Vologda and Arkhangelsk. Foreigners found Muscovy's road system impressive, as John Randolph observes, since it did allow fast travel over great distances for government business. Anthony Jenkinson, a mid-sixteenth- century British traveler, reported that there were coach stops at intervals of 20 to 50 versty (a versta equaled a kilometer). A "tract" was laid out into Siberia by the end of the sixteenth century and from the late sixteenth century military roads were laid to southern borders (Tula, Belgorod, Tambov); as control over steppe lands was stabilized, they became trade arteries. By the seventeenth century coach routes, with stations every 40-50 versty, linked Moscow to Arkhangelsk, Novgorod, Pskov, Smolensk, Nizhnii Novgorod, and key southern frontier towns. Focused on state needs, the coach system left the private traveler to fend for himself. Furthermore, whole areas of the realm remained untouched, primarily most northern towns and most of Siberia. Here communities were held to the traditional obligation of providing horses and support for the occasional official envoy, but they were not made to pay the annual taxes and services for a coach system.
Initially Moscow's coach system was a network of stations with a few coachmen, supported by a direct tax (iamskie dengi) that was collected in cash already by the early fifteenth century as well as by community contribution. The coachmen's task was to summon horses from the community quickly when messengers arrived; the community's obligation was to provide horses, food, and feed promptly. These stations were not inns; the point was speedy, constant communication. Way stations used river travel where appropriate, but usually went overland for speed. Dry summer and clear winter days favored travel (as long as forage could be found in winter); estimates of speed of travel vary widely. Some sixteenth-century foreign travelers report speeds of 100 to even 200 miles in a day (Sigismund von Herber- stein, Jerome Horsey) in good conditions; Herberstein reported that his servant went 400 miles from Novgorod to Moscow in 72 hours! But these speeds are unusual. Others estimated that Novgorod to Moscow normally took five days in winter, seven to eight in summer; similarly the mercenary soldier to Ivan IV Heinrich von Staden reported that he traveled from Dorpat to Moscow, 200 miles, in six days. Mail traveled between Arkhangelsk and Moscow using water and land routes in the late seventeenth century in the summer in eight to nine days for 700 miles, and in the spring and fall, ten to eleven days. In practice, however, most travel was probably less speedy. Bad weather, poor road upkeep, back-breaking coaches without springs, lazy or venal coachmen, or lame horses slowed things down.
In the mid-sixteenth century the state imposed on communities a different format of coach service. The community was to provide not horses but "volunteers," individuals who would maintain a stable of horses at a way station. Communities supported these coachmen with subventions for them and their horses and were also obliged to provide food and escorts for official messengers and travelers. Communities joined coachmen in various public services, such as maintaining local roads and providing additional horses and carriages when major parties traveled through (embassies, supply trains in war). These permanent coachmen provided officials with fresh horses, food, feed, and occasionally drivers, escorts, and carts; travelers required official letters of passage (podorozhnye). Stations ranged in size from ten or so families to up to seventy. In addition to a residential enclave, coach stations included stables, hay fields, grazing fields, and strings ofhorses which were branded (coachmen had a system for returning horses to their home stations). The largest stations constituted independent suburbs on the edges of towns; Moscow had six coachmen's suburbs already at the end of the sixteenth century, at the gates to highways to Smolensk, Tver-Novgorod, Dmitrov, Iaroslavl', Vladimir, and Kolomna-Riazan. In such settings, coachmen could do well for themselves: with many hands to share the work, they could devote some time to lucrative side work in trade, artisan work, or private shipping. But the work could be onerous, particularly in small, isolated settings where the state struggled to maintain staffing as coachmen fled to the easier life of townsmen.