Such access to the courts was not unique to the Middle Volga; in Siberia as well, iasak-paying natives grieved against Russians and non-Russians alike when the issues were serious enough. In 1639/40, for example, a group of natives sued their local governor for not giving them appropriate gifts, bringing "shame" on them; in 1673 a Iakut sued another Iakut for raping his wife; in 1680 two Tatars in Russian service (sluzhilye Tatare) went to court in a land and dishonor dispute. When non-Russians sued each other for major crime, the trials showed no influence of local traditions but followed empire-wide procedures and punishments. This was the case in two murder cases of 1675 and 1685 involving Tatars accusing other Tatars; the principle was explicitly stated in a homicide case of around 1649. A Russian had shot a Tunguz prince, pleading self-defense, and the Tunguz community demanded that he be handed over to them "to hang or kill." The court ruled that the guilty party should be punished according to Russian law, explaining to the Tunguz tribe, "if he had planned this with intent, then he would be killed without mercy. But in an unintentional crime we sentence our Russian people to corporal punishment, we do not execute them. And even among the Tunguz, they don't give people who commit homicide without intent to the other side for execution." Here, the court asserted the state's monopoly over violence and applied the standards established in the Moscow criminal law chancery.
Courts of law provided a unifying network for subjects of the tsar to experience something from the state other than oppression and taxation. The tsar's courts could protect communities from bands of robbers, punish murderers, try to settle snarly land disputes, and defend the honor of even a slave. Furthermore, as noted in Chapters 3-5, on the local level for lesser crimes, communities maintained their traditional justice systems. East Slavic villages were self-governing by communes; Muslim communities used sharia law and Muslim judges; Siberian natives used their traditions; Don and Left Bank Cossacks had their own legal traditions and courts. Peasants and common people across the realm through the seventeenth century were touched by the tsar's taxation and East Slavic peasants were pinned down to their place of registration. But in true "empire of difference" style, through the seventeenth century the state did not endeavor to standardize its treatment of subject peoples.
On the peasant economy: David Moon, The Russian Peasantry, 1600—1930: The World the Peasants Made (London: Longman, 1999); Steven L. Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control in Russia: Petrovskoe, a Village in Tambov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Tracey K. Dennison, The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); B. N. Mironov and Ben Eklof, The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000); B. N. Mironov, The Standard of Living and Revolutions in Russia, 1700-1917, ed. Gregory L. Freeze (London: Routledge, 2012); Judith Pallot and Denis J. B. Shaw, Landscape and Settlement in Romanov Russia, 1613-1917 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). A classic still has value: Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia: From the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). On the rationality of peasant farming practices, see Janet Martin, "'Backwardness' in Russian Peasant Culture: A Theoretical Consideration of Agricultural Practices in the Seventeenth Century," in Samuel H. Baron and Nancy Shields Kollmann, eds., Religion and Culture in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997), 19-33. On enserfment: Blum, Lord and Peasant; Richard Hellie in Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1971); Evsey Domar, "The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis," Journal of Economic History 30 (1970): 18-32. Richard Hellie's work on slavery is based on a small and chronologically restricted collection ofcases (early seventeenth-century Novgorod region), but it provides fascinating insights: Slavery in Russia, 1450-1725 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Allessandro Stanziani puts Russian serfdom and slavery in a Eurasian context: Bondage: Labor and Rights in Eurasia from the Sixteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014).
On resistance: James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Paul Avrich, Russian Rebels, 1600-1800 (New York: Schocken Books, 1972); Maureen Perrie, "Popular Revolts," in Perrie, ed., The Cambridge History ofRussia, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 600-17. On punishment of peasant rebels, see my Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chap. 16.
On peasants engaging in the criminal courts: N. S. Kollmann, Crime and Punishment and By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999) and my "Russian Law in a Eurasian Setting: The Arzamas Region, Late Seventeenth-Early Eighteenth Century," in Gyula Szvak, ed., The Place of Russia in Eurasia (Budapest: Magyar Ruszisztikai Intezet, 2001), 200-6; Valerie A. Kivelson, Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and its Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006) and Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). Strong northern communes: Hans-Joachim Torke, Die staatsbedingte Gesellschaft im moskauer Reich: Zar und Zemlja in der altrussische Herschaftsverfassung, 1613-1689 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974).
Towns and Townsmen
Townsmen in primarily Russian towns were not as different from the empire's East Slavic peasants as one would think. Legally, they suffered the same burdens of taxation and conscription. Towns developed differently in Russia than in western Europe and Eurasia. Muscovy's urban populations were neither as many, nor as densely settled, nor as prosperous as their counterparts elsewhere, nor did they as a rule enjoy municipal autonomies as did most cities in western Europe. Here we will explore what sort of "deal" the empire made with its urban populations, from taxpaying townsmen to more privileged merchants, through the seventeenth century.
Russia's urban landscape featured towns that were small in population but large in size. Many townsmen lived in courtyards, with gardens and livestock, expanding the urban footprint. In the sixteenth century, for example, Paris covered about 500 hectares, while at the same time Moscow sprawled over 2,000. In population, most were decidedly modest. In the sixteenth century western Europe and much of the Ottoman empire were experiencing a "new urbanization," with rapid growth of large cities, as discussed briefly in Chapter 1. Cities with populations over 40,000 nearly doubled from 26 to 40; a few had populations of 150,000 (Naples, Paris, London, Milan, Antwerp, Palermo). In that century Istanbul was the largest city in the Middle East and Europe, with at least 400,000 in population, rising to perhaps 800,000 by the end of the sixteenth century; its empire was dotted with other large cities (Cairo, Aleppo, Bursa, Edirne). By the end of the seventeenth century, there were at least twelve cities in Europe with populations over 100,000. By contrast, only Moscow consistently had a population so large: foreign observers suggested a population of 100,000 in the early sixteenth century, and records for 1730 suggest a population of about 140,000.