Although the Kangxi emperor would have met few such ‘losers’ on his southern tour in 1684, he mingled with members of the largest group of ‘winners’ of the mid-seventeenth-century crisis anywhere in the world: the Banner troops and their families. When Nurhaci declared war on the Ming in 1618, he commanded only a few thousand followers, with the grudging support of some of his Mongol neighbours, and he worried about how to feed them. Twenty-five years later, his son Hong Taiji commanded a powerful confederation of steppe people and ruled over perhaps a million Chinese settlers; but he too worried about how to feed them. In 1684, by contrast, tens of thousands of Manchus and their Mongol allies lived comfortably in the vast empire they had conquered. Each received a salary in silver, a grain subsidy, a housing allowance, arms and ammunition, pensions, wedding and funeral expenses, loans and land. Most of them also owned slaves.
Eventually, many of the Qing's Chinese subjects joined these ‘winners’. First in northern China and then in the south, the new dynasty restored law and order and secured the frontiers, enabling the surviving population to prosper and multiply even before the return of a benign climate in the early eighteenth century improved farming conditions. The Qing also solved other problems that had beset their predecessors. The high losses among civil servants, whether through death or resignation, opened up thousands of positions in the bureaucracy and allowed the promotion of many ‘alienated intellectuals’ whose constant criticisms had weakened the former dynasty. Similarly, in many rural areas, mortality and migration made available much rich farmland, and allowed surviving farmers to join several small plots together and enjoy greater prosperity. The central government also revitalized the infrastructure of their realm, above all the roads and granaries, and pioneered the technique of variolation, which dramatically reduced deaths from smallpox (see chapter 21 below). Finally, as Joanna Waley-Cohen has stressed, the ‘Great Enterprise’ strengthened ‘the empire by uniting its diverse people through the creation of a common basis, one that was founded on loyal pride in imperial achievement and in which all could participate’. When Yao Tinglin completed his ‘Record of successive years’ in Jiangnan in the 1680s, he commented on how the administration of justice was now much faster and more efficient; he listed commodities unknown in Ming times now offered for sale; and he considered the Qing fiscal system a ‘revolution’ (gaige), with lighter taxes and far fewer demands for labour services. Yao had no doubt that ‘at the end of the seventeenth century the people of Shanghai were living in a more prosperous and more peaceful world than has ever existed’.105
Perhaps, however, Yao's comparison was unfair to the Ming. The Chongzhen emperor had faced problems that possibly no ruler could have overcome: an inefficient and inequitable tax burden; contempt for martial values at a time when the state needed to defeat both domestic and foreign enemies; factionalism that paralyzed the bureaucracy; corruption that eventually ‘penetrated’ even the examination system; above all, the Little Ice Age. As Timothy Brook wrote, ‘No emperor of the Yuan or Ming faced climatic conditions as abnormal and severe as Chongzhen’ – adding, ‘the greatest puzzle might well be to figure out how the Ming remained standing for as long as it did’.106
The invaders, for their part, twice placed their Great Enterprise at risk, and thereby prolonged the suffering of their subjects – once in 1645 with Dorgon's tonsure decree and again in 1673 with Kangxi's decision to remove the Three Feudatories – but Qing military prowess eventually prevailed and the new dynasty went on to conquer extensive territories in Inner Asia, doubling the area controlled from Beijing to more than four million square miles (larger than all of Europe west of the Urals and far larger than China today). Westward expansion might have continued further, but for the fact that the Qing encountered the outposts of an even larger state marching east: Romanov Russia.
6
‘The great shaking’: Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 1618–861
The Humiliation of Russia
In September 1618 troops commanded by the Polish Crown Prince Władysław Vasa stormed Moscow. Although the assault failed, Tsar Michael Romanov agreed to the truce of Deulino, by which he relinquished all Russian lands conquered over the previous decade by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which now became the largest state in Europe, twice the size of France. The tsar had little choice: 20 years of famines, rebellions, civil wars and invasions by both Sweden and Poland had reduced Russia's population by perhaps one-quarter. In some areas more than half the villages and even entire towns had been abandoned. The intervening period soon became known in Russian history as smuta: ‘The Great Trouble’.2 A generation later, in 1648, angry Muscovites broke into the Kremlin, sacked the apartments of the tsar's leading ministers, and murdered two of them, triggering rebellions elsewhere in the empire. Astonishingly, Michael's son Alexei Romanov (r. 1645–76) not only survived this crisis but went on to vanquish the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, regain all the lands surrendered at Deulino, and extend the bounds of Russia until it covered six million square miles, making it the largest state in the world.
The extent of the tsar's dominions so impressed the Danish traveller Adam Olearius as he traversed Russia from north to south and back that he used longitude and latitude as well as ‘German miles’ to estimate the distances he covered: 450 miles from the Baltic to Moscow, and 900 miles more from there to the Caspian Sea. Olearius never crossed the Urals into Siberia, where in the course of the seventeenth century Russian settlers founded and fortified a chain of forts all the way to the Pacific and the Amur basin, on the Chinese frontier. Tobolsk, the administrative centre of Siberia, lay 1,500 miles from Moscow; Okhotsk, founded on the Pacific in 1649, and Irkutsk, founded on Lake Baikal in 1652, lay over 3,000 miles from Moscow. Messages to and from the tsar might take two years to arrive. Russia's rulers therefore faced an important dilemma: whether to leave local affairs in local hands, and risk political disintegration, or to maintain central control, and sacrifice both efficiency and potentially constructive local initiatives.3
Admittedly, environmental features reduced the dilemma somewhat. Above all, although the major rivers of Siberia – Ob, Yenisey and Lena – run north–south, their tributaries form an almost continuous east–west waterway from the Urals to Lake Baikal. Likewise the broad rivers that run from Muscovy south towards the Black and Caspian Seas – Dnieper, Donets, Don and Volga – allow communications by boat in the summer and on the ice in winter. These natural ‘corridors’ permitted not only mass migration, the transmission of orders, tribute and trade, but also dramatic military raids: Cossack adventurers captured Sinop in Anatolia in 1614 and Azov near the Crimea in 1641.
The principal strategic challenges to the Russian state nevertheless lay elsewhere. Smolensk, forward bastion of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, stood just over 200 miles west of Moscow, while Narva, a Baltic outpost of the Swedish state, stood scarcely 400 miles to the northwest. Each of the three neighbours adhered to a different branch of Christianity: Russia was solidly Orthodox, Poland-Lithuania was predominantly Catholic, and Sweden was overwhelmingly Lutheran.
Russia's two western neighbours, both ruled by branches of the House of Vasa, also covered vast areas. The Swedish state stretched from the southern shore of the Baltic to the North Cape, a distance of over 600 miles, while the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpopolita) stretched from the Baltic almost to the Black Sea, also a distance of over 600 miles. Yet although the dimensions of all three states dwarfed the size of their west European neighbours in the mid-seventeenth century, their populations remained far inferior. Russia and the Rzeczpopolita scarcely boasted 11 million inhabitants each, while the Swedish crown included only about 2 million; by way of comparison, both France and the Holy Roman Empire contained about 20 million inhabitants. These figures disguise striking differences in population density. Whereas parts of western Europe boasted 22 inhabitants per square mile, Poland averaged 8, Lithuania 6, and Muscovy not even 1. Moreover, according to the
first reasonably complete Russian census, in 1678, almost 70 per cent of the tsar's subjects lived in the lands north of Moscow while only 1 per cent inhabited the vast expanse of Siberia. The rest lived in the steppe south of Moscow, especially on a zone of chernozem (‘black earth’, so called because of its colour) some 200 miles wide that ran from the Black Sea into Siberia: 270 million acres of soil so fertile that, according to a western traveller, the ‘grass grew so tall that it reached the horses’ stomachs’ and, wherever farmers chose to sow grain, ‘everyone is confident of a rich annual harvest’.4
Throughout the seventeenth century three groups vied for control of the ‘black earth’. Initially, Muslim Tatar raiders based on the Crimea and owing nominal obedience to the Ottoman sultan predominated, but gradually Russian farmers spread southwards, first along the banks of the Don and then along the Dnieper, where they faced subjects of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth settling in Ukraine.5 Paradoxically, the colonization of their southern frontier destabilized both states. In Russia, the cost of defending the borderlands required heavy taxes, while the southward flight of so many peasant families to the new lands led northern landlords to demand draconian measures from the crown to prevent the haemorrhage of their servile labour force. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the southwards migration not only of serfs but also of Jews, trying to escape the restrictions imposed on them by various towns, increased the burdens on those who remained.
The fact that the Russian, Polish and Swedish Monarchies were all ‘composite states’ also caused instability. The tsar ruled over numerous distinct ethno-linguistic groups, including Muslims along the middle and lower Volga and nomads in Siberia, some of which preserved considerable political autonomy and even some of their own institutions after incorporation.6 Likewise, although the kingdom of Sweden boasted remarkable religious and administrative uniformity, its overseas territories – Finland, Estonia and (later) parts of Germany – retained great political autonomy, boasting their own separate Estates, languages and legal systems. Finally, each component of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth retained its own legal systems, treasury, army and local representative assemblies (Sejmiki). In addition, the Commonwealth boasted great ethnic diversity: large communities of Tatars, Scots and Armenians lived among the Poles, Germans, Lithuanians and Ruthenians; while Westerners predominated in many Baltic cities such as Danzig and Riga.
The Constitution of the Commonwealth deepened this diversity. At the death of each monarch, representatives from every region assembled in a federal Diet (the Sejm) to negotiate concessions from the various claimants before electing one of them king. Thereafter, representatives from the Sejmiki met together for six weeks at least once every two years, with emergency sessions when necessary, and at the end of each Diet, a plenary session debated all the legislation recommended for enactment. At this stage, the veto of just one representative on just one issue required the king to dissolve the Diet without passing any legislation (not even measures already agreed upon). Although both foreign contemporaries and most subsequent historians castigated the Liberum Veto as a weakness that doomed the Commonwealth to decline, they exaggerate: no one used it until 1652 – and even in that year a new Diet convened four months later and passed all pending legislation. In fact, the Liberum Veto safeguarded regional rights (which is why attempts to replace unanimity with some form of majority rule always failed); and the Sejm offered the earliest example in world history of a federal parliament that bound together a multi-national and multi-ethnic state.
The Commonwealth's principal weakness lay in its religious pluralism. Catholicism predominated in Poland, but in both Lithuania and Ukraine it competed with a powerful Orthodox Church and, after 1596, with a distinct ‘Uniate Church’, created specifically to reconcile an important group of Orthodox Christians with Rome. In addition, the Commonwealth was home to numerous other religious groups. Each landlord had the right to determine the faith of his subjects, and major cities had the right to grant toleration to whomever they pleased. Thus the city of Lwów (Lviv) contained 30 Catholic churches (and 15 monasteries), 15 Orthodox churches (and 3 monasteries), 3 Armenian churches (one of them a cathedral) and 3 synagogues. Nevertheless the Roman Catholic hierarchy, strongly supported by the crown, used a wide range of economic, social and political inducements to win converts. Their success can be measured by the fact that although the federal Diet in 1570 included 59 non-Catholic lay senators, that of 1630 included only 6; while over the same period the number of Protestant communities in Poland fell from over 500 to scarcely 250. In addition, especially in the 1630s, large numbers of Orthodox clerics and laity deserted either to the Catholic or the Uniate Church.
Despite such political and religious diversity, for the first half of the seventeenth century the Commonwealth held its own against its neighbours, largely thanks to its rapid adaptation of new military technology. ‘Antiquity has its virtues’, a Lithuanian nobleman who had served in the army of the Dutch Republic reminded his sovereign loftily in 1622, but ‘every century teaches soldiers some new trick. Every campaign has its own discoveries; each school of war seeks its own remedies.’ He therefore recommended that the army of the Polish Commonwealth should increase its gunpowder weapons just as the Dutch had done.7 King Sigismund III (r. 1587–1632) paid heed and created special musketeer infantry formations, standardized artillery calibres, and added field guns modelled on Western prototypes. Although progress remained slow – mainly because the Polish nobles resisted any measure that might enhance the power of the monarchy (such as hiring foreign mercenaries, arming serfs, and fortifying royal cities) – the military effectiveness of the Commonwealth's troops remained high.
The humiliating ‘Time of Troubles’ convinced Tsar Michael Romanov (r. 1613–45) that he must imitate the military methods of the Commonwealth. He therefore welcomed foreign military advisers to train and command ‘New Formation Regiments’ equipped with Western weapons; and when, on the death of Sigismund III in 1632, the Sejm bargained with Crown Prince Władysław before electing him, the tsar launched an invasion to recapture the lands sacrificed at Deulino. The Russian army, including the ‘New Formation Regiments’, swiftly captured 20 towns before they laid siege to Smolensk. Yet Smolensk held out until Władysław, now elected king of Poland, arrived with a relief army and besieged the besiegers. In February 1634 the Russian commanders surrendered, prostrating themselves at the feet of Władysław while his horse trampled on their standards. A few weeks later Michael reluctantly concluded the ‘Eternal Peace of Polianovka’, by which he not only confirmed all Poland's territorial gains at Deulino but also promised to dissolve his New Formation Regiments and to pay a huge war indemnity. The cost of this new defeat created tensions and problems that would shake the Romanov state to its foundations.
The ‘imaginary little world’ of the Muscovites
Understanding the Russian crisis of the mid-seventeenth century is complicated by the paucity of sources. Only Sweden maintained a permanent diplomatic representative in Moscow, and on some events his dispatches form the only surviving source; but normally foreigners in Russia filled their letters with laments about the conditions in which they had to serve – above all, poor communications. In winter, there never seemed to be enough sledges for transport; in summer, the rivers often lacked sufficient water to carry boats; and the spring thaw and autumn rains made all roads impassable for about a month (called rasputitsa, ‘quagmire season’, in Russian). The foreigners also lamented the complexity and malevolence of the Russian bureaucracy and, above all, the fact that the Russians refused to talk to them because they were either too fearful or too absorbed in what one of them dismissed as ‘upholding their imaginary little world’.8
Few Russian sources remain from which to reconstruct that ‘imaginary little world’. The archives of almost all the central departments of state have suffered grievous losses: some were burned (fire twice consumed the entire archive of the ‘Kazan chancellery’ which administered t
he lands along the Volga annexed in the 1550s) while others were lost when the Soviet government consolidated all ‘ancient documents’ in a single archive. Only the records of the Siberian chancellery have survived relatively intact for the early modern period.9 Luckily for historians, the ‘natural archive’ of the period supplements deficiencies in the ‘human archive’. Climatic reconstructions reveal notably cooler and drier conditions in the 1640s, with severe drought in 1639 and 1640 in Ukraine; poor harvests in the south in 1642; drought and a plague of locusts in 1645 and 1646; and early frosts and poor harvests in the south in 1647 and 1648.10 When the government carried out a land survey in 1645–6, the commissioners found that many communities paid significantly less than the amount assessed in the previous survey two decades earlier because they had shrunk in both size and wealth. One of the few detailed studies of this census data (for Karelia, the area between Lake Ladoga and the White Sea) reveals that between 1628 and 1646 the overall number of households declined by one quarter, and gentry households by almost one half, while the proportion of landless peasants doubled.11
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