Chapter 6 Slavery and Empire

The preceding chapters showed representations of slavery and liberation in political culture, and the ways in which Muscovites interacted with them. During the middle Muscovite period, such representations increasingly shaped the worldview of wider sections of the population. The Orthodox religious imagery inherent in these ideas of liberation might indicate that their scope was limited to Orthodoxy, in which the Christian flock closed in on itself, closed ranks against dangerous external slavers, excluded nomads and Muslims. However, this was not what happened. Muscovy employed large numbers of mounted Tatar warriors in its armies, and the conquest of Kazan would not have been feasible without the active participation of Tatar princes of the first rank, and many Tatar warriors serving the Muscovite tsar. 1 Muscovy depended heavily on Tatar military and leadership during some of its wars. 2 Some Tatars achieved high status, and many were able to redeem themselves through service and retained some of their status over several generations during the century after the conquest. Although they lost some land to monasteries and Russian landowners in the middle Volga region, and often found themselves moved to the new Arzamas steppe fortress line in the south, most towns remained predominantly Tatar, or Chuvash, or Mari or, in any case, non-Russian in ethnic terms. 3 Moreover, the very activities associated with ransoming demanded the involvement of Tatars. They communicated throughout inner Eurasia in their own language in a context foreign to Orthodox Muscovites, in order to find captives and slaves and negotiate with their masters. This chapter will, on the one hand, trace this socio-cultural context of ransoming and liberation from captivity, and on the other, investigate the symbolical means of communicating across cultural and religious boundaries for the sake of ransoming and empire-building. The question is whether and by what means such practices and ideologies contributed to the power of Muscovy's rulers.