After Tamerlane (19 page)

Recognizing Europe's diversity means rejecting the argument that Russia was (as some Europeans and Russians have always believed) a separate, distinct and alien civilization – so that the ‘real' Europe becomes northern Italy, France, western Germany, the Low Countries and Britain: a sort of proto-European Community. In reality, late medieval Russia had been, like late medieval Spain, an important cultural province of Christian Europe. Like Spain, sixteenth-century Russia embarked on a massive process of colonization. Like the Spanish monarchs, the rulers of Muscovy were eager to keep the spoils of conquest in their own hands for personal and dynastic advantage. There were crucial differences, however. Russia's religious distinctiveness and the intense antipathy with which the Russian Orthodox Church regarded the Catholic meant that the powerful channel of reciprocal influence linking Spain to the rest of Catholic Europe hardly functioned in Russia's case: not until the later seventeenth century were European Catholic ideas a major cultural force there.
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Secondly, Russian colonization did not yield the glittering wealth that helped fund the ambitions of the Spanish Habsburgs. However, commercial seclusion did mean that Russia's colonial gains in Siberia and the lower Volga were not easily plundered or penetrated by the European maritime states. It also made it easier for the tsars to keep a tight grip
on the mercantile and territorial profits of empire. Relative cultural and commercial isolation reinforced the individuality of Russia's expansionist path.

The scale of that expansion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was dramatic. By one calculation, Russia's land surface increased from 2.1 million square miles in 1600 to some 5.9 million a century later.
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Having established themselves beyond the Urals by 1600, Russian fur traders controlled the river routes and portages into the Yenisei basin by 1620 and reached the Lena in the following decade. In 1639 their advance guard reached the Sea of Okhotsk and the Pacific.
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At the same time other traders reached the region beyond Lake Baikal (‘discovered' in 1643) and the great Amur river in 1643. The Amur led down through Manchuria into the Yellow Sea, and the arrival of the Russians there coincided with the Manchu conquest of China. In forty years the Russians had thrown a skein of influence across North Asia. But it was hardly more than a fragile network of trade routes. Even in western Siberia, Russian occupation was confined to the northern forests: the steppes were still the preserve of the Kirghiz nomads. Needing food supplies from Russia and penned in their forts, the settler population expanded very slowly until the 1660s, when their strengthening military grip allowed the gradual colonization of the open plains. Even so, the male population of Russian Siberia amounted to no more than some 400,000 as late as 1760.
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Further south it was a similar story: the slow occupation of the open steppe by Russian gentry and their serfs migrating east from old or exhausted lands. The foundation of Orenburg in 1725 marked a crucial stage in this process of armed colonization.
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The old society of the steppe was slowly strangled as a series of defensive
limes
, fortified barriers constructed with enormous labour, blocked the routes of the nomads' trade and raiding. Even so, on the Russian side, poor communications and the shortage of manpower made rural settlement painfully slow. On Europe's Inner Asian frontier, demographic expansion long seemed as hobbled as it was in mainland North America until the 1750s.

For Peter the Great (1689–1725) and his tsar predecessors, the great strategic problem lay to the west and in the sparsely populated Ukraine (‘Borderland') to the south. The great Polish–Lithuanian
Commonwealth had threatened to crush Muscovy in a bear hug during the Time of Troubles between 1598 and 1613. After 1613 the Romanov tsars faced both the territorial rivalry of Poland and the new threat posed by the copper kingdom of Sweden, which was now carving out a wide Baltic empire. In the same way as the Poles, the rise of Swedish power threatened to drive Muscovite Russia away from Europe, destroy its claim to ‘reunite' the Russian peoples, and, in an opportunistic alliance with discontented Cossacks, uproot Moscow's influence in the Ukraine. Peter's great achievement was to smash this Swedish imperialism. He seized the rich Baltic Estland, an important granary and the defensive outwork for the new imperial capital at St Petersburg, to which his government was transferred in 1716. The Treaty of Nystad (1721) at the end of the Great Northern War signalled Russia's definite entry into the ranks of the European great powers and the elimination of Swedish and Polish rivalry as a serious threat. Peter himself abandoned the old name of ‘Muscovy' and adopted instead the grander title of ‘Russian Empire'. An address from his senate proclaimed that Russia ‘had joined the community of political nations'.
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Victory in the Ukraine was especially crucial to Russia's eastward imperialism. After the Treaty of Pereslavl in 1654, the tsars had enjoyed a special relationship with the autonomous ‘Hetmanate', the part of the Ukraine that lay beyond the frontier of Polish control in this semi-colonial region. In the Hetmanate an emergent landowning class, the
starshyna
, fearful of further Polish expansion and nervous of the turbulent Cossack frontier to the south, looked to Muscovite Russia as the most promising model of social order.
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With the elite so divided, the efforts of Ukrainian leaders, like the charismatic Hetman Mazeppa, to maintain their autonomy by alliances with the Ottomans, Poles or Swedes were bound to be risky. Peter's crushing victory over Mazeppa and an injured Charles XII of Sweden at the Battle of Poltava in 1709 marked the effective absorption of the eastern Ukraine into his imperial system. It offered fresh land for the colonizing nobility and (in the Cossack population) a valuable reservoir of military manpower. As a stage in Russia's advance towards Eurasian empire, the acquisition of the Ukraine, opening the road to the Black Sea, might be likened to the British conquest of Bengal after 1757.

What lay behind the emergence of this imperial conglomerate, which had now created on Europe's eastern wing such a powerful engine of territorial expansion – a ‘Turk of the North' as the philosopher Leibniz nervously put it? Russia's aggrandizement was driven by the fears and ambitions of the Romanov tsars, who skilfully exploited the dread of invasion and anarchy in the Orthodox Church and the service nobility. After 1650, tsardom strengthened its grip on both Church and aristocracy. It abolished the Orthodox patriarchate. A new standing army on the European model and Peter's ‘Table of Ranks' (which formalized the link between noble status and military and bureaucratic rank) emphasized the power and the claims of the monarch. Territorial expansion and economic growth were successfully harnessed to the centralization of power. Noble obedience was assured, in part, by the prospect of land grants in the zones of conquest – the source of many aristocratic fortunes, and one reason for persistent Cossack discontent in the Russian Ukraine. Through the
gosti
or official merchants, the tsars also controlled and exploited profitable sectors of foreign and internal trade, including the salt trade,
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while Peter also constructed state factories and arsenals to supply his armies. Finally, territorial acquisitions swelled the taxable resources of the empire, allowing Peter to triple his revenues, while adding the Estland and the Ukraine to Muscovite Russia almost doubled its productive capacity.
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Like the Spanish
conquistas
in the New World, therefore, Russian expansion fed on itself, fuelled by the windfall gains of conquest.

Even so, this can only be part of the answer. Seventeenth-century Muscovite Russia was also responsive to cultural and intellectual influences from elsewhere in Europe. Peter's famous incognito tours of shipyards in Holland were anticipated in the eagerness of earlier tsars to adopt the bureaucratic and diplomatic methods of the grander European monarchies. Russia's rulers and churchmen drew on ideas of the magnificent and spiritual from the baroque art and architecture of Central Europe, and adapted them to local tradition.
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Orthodox fears of Catholic influence also prompted new interest in Greek and Byzantine liturgy, and encouraged more sophisticated and regimented forms of worship. It was this ‘Russian reformation' of the 1650s and '60s that provoked the schism with the Old Believers. The importance
of these changes lay in the way that they endowed the emerging Russian (as opposed to old Muscovite) state with the cultural prestige, literary resources and ideological sophistication to hold the allegiance of the Germanic barons of the Estland, the half-Polonized aristocracy of the Ukraine and its own nobility. The alternative – a retreat into Old Russian traditions of primitive community and customary worship (hallmarks of the Old Believers) – was incompatible with territorial expansion, the absorption of other cultures, and the claim to great-power status in Europe, for all of which a powerful vested interest now existed.

Finally, like previous tsars, Peter the Great understood that the survival of his regime depended upon membership of the European states system and the diplomatic leverage it could be used to secure – like his useful alliance with Denmark against Sweden. To be driven out of ‘political Europe' by Poland or Sweden would have been a catastrophe. Fear of this was behind his furious impatience to adopt the administrative, technical and even sartorial practices of Western Europe: to outperform his European neighbours in the struggle for geopolitical survival. Peter's ‘symbolic reforms' were meant to drive home the terrible urgency of political change. After his European tour in 1698, he imposed a ban on beards and personally cut off those of his leading nobles. Russian traditional dress – a loose robe or kaftan – was also outlawed, and ‘German dress' was imposed. Ladies at court were instructed to adopt the plunging décolletage that Peter had admired on his travels, although the older custom of painting women's teeth black seems to have survived rather longer than old-fashioned modesty in female attire. Even in death, Peter pointed the way. In Western style, he lay in his coffin in a crimson coat, wearing boots and spurs, his medals and his sword.

Peter had great talents as an organizer and strategist; but he also profited from the incoherence of Poland's political system, the exhaustion of Swedish resources by
c
.1700, and the reluctance of the Ottomans to intervene against him at crucial moments.
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Indeed, the dynamic behind Russian expansion is not to be found in any single factor, but in the remarkable combination of favourable circumstances in the century after 1613: the consolidation of a social order whose savage discipline reflected the mentality of the ‘armed camp';
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its receptiveness to cultural innovation from elsewhere in Europe; Russia's profitable role as an entrepô t between Europe and the Middle East;
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its open land frontier, which helped fuel expansion and lubricate the rise of autocratic power; its pivotal role in ‘steppe diplomacy'; and the geostrategic fortune that allowed the exclusion of its European rivals from the whole of Eurasia north of the Black Sea after 1710. Here was a model of European expansion to set beside that of the maritime West.

RENOVATION IN EAST ASIA

Viewed from the West, the most striking feature of East Asian history was the retreat into seclusion after the upheavals that had convulsed the first half of the seventeenth century. In both China and Japan, the installation of new political regimes led to the search for political and cultural consolidation at home and to the deliberate shrinking of diplomatic and commercial contacts abroad. At first sight, then, a sharp contrast appears between East Asia – drifting into cultural stasis and economic stagnation behind the political barrier of xenophobic diplomacy – and Europe with its cultural openness, vigorous overseas trade and competitive politics. It would be easy to conclude that the check imposed on European expansion by the long economic downswing after 1620 was only a ‘loaded pause' that concealed the widening gap between a dynamic West and an unprogressive East, trapped in its conservatism and introversion.

Before reaching such a verdict, we need to look carefully at the consequences of the great renovation brought about by the Tokugawa shogunate and the Manchu (or Ch'ing) dynasty. Both created polities that lasted some 250years. Both presided over a period of rapid population growth, extensive agricultural colonization, widening internal commerce and rising demand for books. We should react sceptically to grand generalizations about stasis and stagnation. Nor should we be too quick to assume that China's very limited participation in international trade after
c
.1690 signalled its incorporation into the subordinate ‘periphery' of a European ‘world system'.
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Indeed, closer inspection may suggest that the reconstruction of East Asia after
c
.1620 played a crucial part in strengthening East Asian civilizations against the full impact of European expansion that was felt across much of the extra-European world after 1750.

The gradual collapse of the Ming dynasty in North China culminated in the seizure of the imperial capital by the Manchus in 1644 and, nominally, the beginning of a new dynastic era – that of the Ch'ing, as the Manchus styled themselves.
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But the real founder of the Ch'ing empire was K'ang-hsi (b. 1654, r. 1661–1723), whose long reign had the same importance for consolidating Ch'ing rule as Akbar's had had for the Mughals in India. At K'ang-hsi's accession, the prospects for a stable imperial regime were poor. The Manchus as a ruling elite had not yet made the transition from the clan system characteristic of steppe nomad societies.
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The idea of dynastic succession – vital for the continuity of imperial rule – was alien to them. Clan politics meant a continuous competition for power and influence, and a sharing (and resharing) of captured wealth and land among the dominant clans and their leaders. It was profoundly at odds with the Confucian system of empire consolidated in the Han era (
206 BC
–
AD 220
) and brought to its autocratic apogee under the Ming. Partly for this reason, large parts of South China, and large segments of the literati elite, remained unreconciled to Manchu authority. It had been this state of affairs, and their original dependence upon ethnic-Chinese allies to overcome Ming resistance, that had forced the Manchus to delegate wide powers to the Chinese generals responsible for subjugating the southern and south-western provinces. Indeed, by the 1670s three of these generals – the so-called ‘Three Feudatories' – enjoyed practically complete autonomy from Peking, with the tempting prospect of establishing their own dynastic claim. To add to this catalogue of difficulties, the Manchus faced new threats to their authority in Inner Asia: from the Kalmyks; from the theocratic empire of the Dalai Lama in Tibet; and, in the region south and east of Lake Baikal, from tsarist officials and Russian fur traders. Meanwhile, on the maritime frontier overlooking the South China Sea, the breakdown of Ming rule and the opportunities created by seaborne trade had spawned the trading and privateering state of the freebooter Koxinga (Cheng Ch'eng-kung), securely based, as it seemed, on the impregnable island of Taiwan.
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