Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

On Muscovite servicemen’s lack of local rootedness and changes in the composition of the landed nobility in the districts of European Russia in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries

2020; Éditions de l'EHESS; Volume: 61; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

1777-5388

Сергей В. Черников,

Regional Socio-Economic Development Trends

The author’s analysis of cadastral and census documents calls into question the widely shared view that Muscovite servicemen felt no ties with their estates located in outlying districts. Many researchers agree that the lack of local rootedness sharply differentiated the Muscovite landed nobility from their West-European counterparts and affected the continuity of land tenure by families. In fact, and despite the growth of the real estate market, long-term retention of an estate within a same family varied by district and could reach high rates in some parts of the country. This can be seen in the most prosperous regions, where the proportion of families who kept their estates over the time elapsed between the cadastral surveys conducted from the 1570s to the 1590s and from the 1620s to the early eighteenth century (which represents an average of 90-150 years) reached 30 to 40 percent, sometimes more. At the time of the first census, these families owned between 40 and 80 percent of estates and between 40 and 60 percent of serfs. The highest indicators on the retention of estates within families can be observed in Pskov-Novgorod, Galich, Kostroma, Vologda, Iaroslavl´, Vladimir-Suzdal´, Riazan´ (including Meshchera) and Tula regions.The opinion that the scattered character of estates hastened the loosening of landholders’ links with regions fails to take important features of the location of estates into account. The present analysis demonstrates that an overwhelming majority of noble families (80 percent) concentrated most of their serfs in one district or in several neighboring districts. It also is important to note that the fragmentation of the estates did not divert Muscovite landholders’ interest away from their home regions: it is precisely families with numerous holdings – seemingly the most motivated by court service – that maintained the most stable local ties.