After the Thirteen Years War (1654-67) won Russia a strip of territory of the Grand Duchy and closer ties with the Hetmanate, export and domestic trade developed in response. While Right Bank Ukraine and Poland-Lithuania were embroiled in a half-century of war, the Left Bank's export trade reoriented toward Russia. Ukrainian goods that had previously shipped to Gdansk in Poland now aimed at Moscow, traveling through the new towns of the Belgorod line. Exports included distilled spirits and tobacco, cattle, sheep-skin, cloth of European and Ukrainian production, potash (often shipped on to Arkhangelsk for re-export) and saltpeter (for Russia's growing munitions industry). Briansk and its fair at nearby Svinsk became lively centers of trade by Ukrainian, Greek, and Armenian merchants in goods from Ukrainian lands and the Ottoman empire. By the end of the century, goods from the Hetmanate were in value about a third of Baltic and Arkhangelsk exports, while the still-turbulent Smolensk route amounted to less than a tenth.
TRADE ROUTES: EASTERN TRADE
The drama of the British "discovery" of Russia through their shipwreck on the White Sea should not obscure the fact that Russia's traditional trade with the east was more profitable than European trade, at least from the sixteenth century to the mid-seventeenth. Russia's trade with the great Middle Eastern markets—the Ottoman empire, Safavid Persia, Mughal India, China—remained a vital source of income, as Russia's persistent efforts to win ports on the Black and Caspian Seas and to control the steppe attest. Accustomed to caravan trade, some Russian merchants ventured farther into this arena than into northern Europe, traveling into Persia, Central Asia, India, and eventually China, but as a rule eastern merchants—Christian Armenians, Hindu Indians, Muslim Turks and Bukharans, and others—brought most eastern goods to Russia. To traders from the great emporia of the Silk Road, as Stephen Dale notes, Russia was "the most underdeveloped or 'peripheral' European state in the early modern era," inasmuch as here, as in points north, Russia exported raw materials, or re-exported European items. But demand was steady.
Russia's biggest eastern trading partner and sphere in the seventeenth century was not the Ottoman empire. Political relations were tense: the first direct military engagement between Russia and the Ottoman army occurred in 1677 in the course of war sparked by the Khmelnytsky revolt. Tensions stayed high as Russia tried twice, unsuccessfully, to capture Azov in the 1680s. Thus, Turkish merchants did not approach Russian ports directly, but through the vibrant market town of Jassy in Moldova. Some traveled on to trade in Kyiv, Viaz'ma, and even Moscow. From Muscovy Ottoman traders wanted luxury items of government monopolies— walrus tusks, hunting birds, sable, and silver fox—as well as cloths and hides.
They brought to Russia silk, cotton, linen, processed hides, sabers, dyes, spices and gems, and Turkish horses.
Most of Russia's eastern trade in the seventeenth century went through Russia's great emporium in the east, Astrakhan, designated by the New Commercial Code of 1667 an official customs gate; in the seventeenth century in volume of trade it rivaled Arkhangelsk. Russian merchants from Moscow, Nizhnii Novgorod, Kazan, and other Volga towns brought goods to Astrakhan down the Volga, sailing with the current in the summer; return trade made the journey north in late summer, rowed in boats owned by Astrakhan merchants. They awaited winter freeze in Nizhnii Novgorod, and in winter some goods proceeded overland to Moscow. Russian merchants sold the familiar local products (processed hides, linen, wooden utensils, furs, honey, and caviar) and transit goods (European woolen cloth, finished clothing, leather goods, and hats).
At Astrakhan, Persian, Armenian, and Indian merchants sold Persian silks and leather goods, raw silk (for production by Moscow artisans), rugs, cottons, and velvet. To encourage trade, from the 1630s Russia maintained a fleet of armed barges to ferry traders and goods safely across the Caspian, fearing Cossack raids. In addition to a trade center (gostinnyi dvor) for Russian merchants, Astrakhan hosted three other such centers, for resident Indian, Armenian, and Muslim traders (Persian and Central Asian).
Armenians played a particular role in eastern trade into Russia. They had been engaged in Volga trade for centuries before the Ottoman and Safavid empires, and in those empires they enjoyed religious tolerance and autonomies. The Armenians cited as resident in Astrakhan as early as 1616 were probably the so-called New Julfa Armenians from Persia. Shah Abbas (1587-1629), in the midst of war over Armenia with the Ottomans (1604-5), had forcibly transferred many Armenians from Julfa to a diaspora suburb ofNew Julfa near Isfahan and had given them trade privileges. Capitalizing on their common Christianity, Julfa Armenians cultivated good relations with Russia. In 1659, for example, an eminent Julfan merchant of the Shahrimanian family gave a fabulous golden throne, studded with gems and diamonds to Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich; it was subsequently used in Russian coronation ceremonies. Armenians in Astrakhan were affluent enough to erect stone churches; by the mid-eighteenth century they had compiled a commercial code by which they regulated their community in their own courthouse.
Since the arrival of the British, they and many others—Dutch, Swedes, Germans—had wooed the Russian government for exclusive transit rights along the Volga. When the great German scholar Adam Olearius visited Russia in the 1630s-40s, he served in an embassy for Schleswig-Holstein Duke Frederick III, who hoped to win such a monopoly for his ambitious realm. In 1619 the Persian Shah granted the Dutch rights to export silk through Russia, but Russia jealously controlled that trade, limiting them to markets in the north and Moscow, consigning silk trade from Astrakhan north on the Volga to Russian merchants. At the same time, the Dutch worked closely with Armenian merchants in worldwide trade. Thus, when in 1667 Russia awarded a trade monopoly of silk and some other Iranian and India goods to the Christian Armenians, the Dutch were collateral winners. Russia took this step not only for the lucrative income of the monopoly license, but also as an overture to the Safavids, hoping to build an anti- Ottoman coalition. This monopoly directly violated the 1667 New Commercial Charter, inasmuch as it allowed Armenian merchants to traverse Russia and engage in retail trade in Astrakhan, Moscow, and Arkhangelsk as well as deliver Persian silk to their Dutch partners in Moscow. Armenians maintained their privileges for decades; they were confirmed and extended in 1711.
Equally important in Russia's Volga market were Indian merchants, like the Armenians an age-old Eurasian trade force. Indian merchants appear in the Volga trade by the early seventeenth century, and by mid-century had established a community in Astrakhan. Like Astrakhan's Armenians with their ties to New Julfa in Persia, Astrakhan's Indian merchants represented family firms headquartered in Isfahan, Kandahar, Bukhara, and India. For them, export trade to Russia was a tiny portion of a thriving global enterprise. By the 1670s and 1680s Astrakhan's Indian community had grown to almost 100 merchant families; it enjoyed privileges of religious observation and self-government for internal disputes.
Indian merchants in Astrakhan sold spices, Iranian silk, and Indian cottons, gems, and jewelry; they bought European re-exports and Russian goods—western woolens and other cloth, Russian leather, fox and sable, iron and needles—to ship back to Iran. In Astrakhan they were also famed as money lenders in a credit-starved business environment; they were better capitalized than their Russian counterparts because of their family-based international trade networks. According to the 1667 New Commercial Code Indian merchants were supposed to work with Armenian or Russian partners to bring their goods to Kazan, Nizhnii Novgorod, and Moscow, and many such shared caravans are recorded. But these protectionist regulations were not firmly enforced: in 1684 a small trade center (gostinnyi dvor) in the Kitaigorod neighborhood of Moscow housed a variety of eastern traders— Bukharans, Iranians, Armenians, and some twenty-one Indian merchants. When Russian merchants petitioned the state to prohibit their access to Moscow ("these Indians who live in Astrakhan without paying tribute enrich themselves because they never serve our state"), the Indian merchants responded by pointing out how much income they had brought the state in customs duties. The state reiterated the regulations but continued not to enforce strictly. At the same time Russia sought trade privileges for its merchants to trade in its eastern neighbors; ten embassies to Persia between 1590 and 1626 and many to the Ottoman empire were unsuccessful, as were repeated embassies to India (1646, 1651, 1675) until 1695.