Modern historical science cannot exist outside of close integration with the science of other countries, and informing some scientists and just people interested in foreign history is not only a consequence of the globalization of information flows, but a guarantee of mutual understanding and tolerance in the field of culture. It is impossible to understand each other without knowledge of history. Where, for example, do these same British historians and students get acquainted with the military history of foreign countries and, in particular, the military history of Russia? To do this, they have at their disposal numerous publications of such a publishing house as Osprey (Skopa), which since 1975 has published more than 1000 titles of various books on military history, both in England itself and in foreign countries. The publications are of a popular science and serial nature, which allows you to get an exhaustive picture of a particular period or event in military history. The most popular series include Men-at-arms, Campaign, Warrior, and a whole host of others.
The volume of editions is fixed: 48, 64 and 92 pages, there are no references to sources in the text itself, but there is always an extensive bibliography. The editions are richly illustrated with photographs, graphic drawings (sketches of weapons, armor and fortifications) and - which is a kind of "calling card" of the publishing house - the presence in each of the books of eight color illustrations made by the most famous British illustrators! Moreover, these illustrations are made according to sketches provided by the author himself, and in them the arrows indicate not only the colors and material of clothing and armor, the soldiers depicted on them, but - and this is the most important thing - from where this or that detail of the drawing was borrowed. That is, it’s impossible to just take and draw “from the head”! We need photographs of artifacts from museums, photocopies of drawings from archeology journals, page references to monographs of famous scientists, so that the degree of scientific character of these books, despite the absence of links directly in the text, is extremely high. The text is provided to the publisher in English, it does not make translations.
As for Russian history, the publishing house has no prejudice in relation to it, so in the list of Osprey books one can find works by Russian authors dedicated to the Seven Years War and the Civil War of 1918-1922, and books written by foreign historians about the army Peter the Great. Historians also paid attention to the early periods of Russian military history, and, in particular, such a famous British medievalist as David Nicole. It was in co-authorship with him that the author of this article had the opportunity to publish in the Osprey publishing house a book in the Men-at-Arms series (No. 427) “Armies of Ivan the Terrible / Russian Troops 1505 - 1700”. Below is an excerpt from this publication, which allows you to get a visual idea of what information the British and, for example, students of British universities can get from it on Russian military history and, in particular, the military history of the State of the Russian era of Ivan the Terrible.
“Archers The troops of Ivan IV, armed with rifles and cannons, were the first army in the history of Russia. The wars and diplomacy of Ivan III made Muscovy one of the most powerful states in Europe in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, but serious internal and external problems remained. One of the most pressing threats from the east and south was the threat of Tatar raids, while the regional independence of large feudal lords or boyars undermined the power of the grand duke from within. For several years, when Russia was actually ruled by the boyars, the young Ivan IV became a hostage of their abuse and willfulness; however, when the teenager finally ascended the throne, instead of being content with the title of Grand Duke, he took himself the title of "Great Tsar of All Russia" (1547). This was due not only to the desire to strengthen his royal dignity, but also became a warning to all those who surrounded him that he intends to rule as a true autocrat.
After becoming tsar, Ivan IV tried to solve two of his most pressing problems at the same time. His closest external enemy was the Kazan Khanate. In six previous cases (1439, 1445, 1505, 1521, 1523 and 1536) Kazan attacked Moscow, and Russian troops invaded Kazan seven times (1467, 1478, 1487, 1530, 1545, 1549 and 1550). Now Tsar Ivan ordered the construction of Sviyazhsk, a fortress city and a military warehouse on an island on the border with Kazan, so that it would serve him as a base for future expeditions along the entire middle reaches of the Volga River. The campaigns of the Russian troops in 1549 and 1550 failed, but Ivan was adamant, and in 1552 the Kazan Khanate was finally destroyed.
First of all, the creation of infantry units armed with firearms contributed to the strengthening of the military power of the Russian state. Now such units have been transferred to a permanent basis. According to the chronicle: “In 1550, the tsar created elective archers with pishchal in the number of three thousand, and ordered them to live in Vorobyovaya Sloboda.” The archers received a uniform consisting of a traditional Russian long-length caftan reaching to the ankles, a conical cap or a fur-trimmed cap, and They were armed with a match musket and a saber. was given to them from the treasury, and they cast the bullets on their own. Their earnings ranged from 4 to 7 rubles a year for ordinary archers, and from 12 to 20 for a centurion or a commander of a hundred. While the rank and file archers also received oats, rye, bread and meat (lamb), the senior ranks were endowed with land plots ranging from 800 to 1350 hectares.
At that time, it was a very high pay, comparable to the salary of an aristocratic, that is, local cavalry. For example, in 1556 payments for her riders ranged from 6 to 50 rubles per year. On the other hand, the horsemen were also paid a one-off allowance for six or seven years, which allowed them to purchase military equipment. Then they lived on the income from their lands, and their peasants accompanied their masters to the war as armed servants. This was the usual feudal system, in which landlords with large estates were to send more cavalrymen on the campaign.
In peacetime, such landowners lived in their villages, but had to be ready for military service if necessary. In practice, it was difficult for the king to gather large forces in a short time, which is why the archers, who were always at hand, were very valuable. Their number began to grow rapidly from an initial number of 3,000 to 7,000 under the command of eight "heads" and 41 centurions. By the end of the reign of Ivan the Terrible, there were already 12,000 of them, and by the time of the coronation of his son Fyodor Ivanovich in 1584, this standing army had reached 20,000. At first, the Streletskaya hut was responsible for the streltsy army, which was soon renamed the Streletsky order. These institutions can be compared with the modern system of ministries, and for the first time such an order was mentioned in 1571.
In many ways, the archers of the 16th and 17th centuries in Russia had a lot in common with the infantry of the Ottoman Janissaries, and perhaps their appearance is partly due to their successful experience of participation in wars. Each regiment differed in the color of its caftans, and, as a rule, was known by the name of its commander. In Moscow itself, the first regiment belonged to the Stremyanny order, because it served "near the tsar's stirrup." In fact, it was a regiment of the royal guard, followed by all the other rifle regiments. Some other Russian cities also had rifle regiments. But Moscow archers had the highest status, and demotion to "city archers" and exile to "distant cities" was perceived as a very heavy punishment.
One of those who personally observed these troops was the English ambassador Fletcher, sent to Moscow by Queen Elizabeth I. In 1588, he wrote that the archers were armed with a pistol, a reed on their back and a sword on their side. The barrel trim was very rough work; despite the heavy weight of the gun, the bullet itself was small. Another observer described the appearance of the king in 1599, accompanied by 500 guards, dressed in red caftans and armed with bows and arrows, with sabers and reeds. Nevertheless, it is unclear who these troops were: archers, "boyar children", junior noblemen, or, perhaps, stolniks or tenants - provincial nobility who were periodically invited to live in Moscow as the tsarist praetorian guard.
Sagittarius lived in their own homes with gardens and orchards. They supplemented the royal salary with the fact that in their free time they worked as artisans and even merchants - again, the similarities with the later janissaries of the Ottoman Empire are striking. These measures did not contribute to the transformation of the archers into effective infantry, however, during the assault on Kazan (1552), they were in the forefront of the attackers, and demonstrated good combat skills. The chronicles of the time claim that they were so skillful with their squeaks that they could kill birds in flight. In 1557, one Western traveler recorded that 500 riflemen walked with their commanders through the streets of Moscow to a shooting range, where their target was the ice wall. The archers started shooting from a distance of 60 meters and continued until this wall was completely destroyed.
Oprichnina army
The most reliable bodyguard of Ivan IV was the oprichniki (who were also called the omens, from the word except). Russian historians use the word oprichnina in two senses: in the broad sense, it means the entire state policy of the tsar in 1565-1572, in the narrow sense - the territory of the oprichnina and the oprichnina army. Then the richest lands in Russia became the territory of the oprichnina, thereby providing the tsar with abundant income. In Moscow, some streets also became part of the oprichnina, and the Oprichnina Palace was built outside the Moscow Kremlin. In order to become one of the guardsmen, a boyar or a nobleman underwent a special check in order to weed out everyone who aroused suspicion of the tsar. After enrollment, the person took an oath of allegiance to the king.
The guardsman was easily recognizable: he wore coarse, monastic-cut clothing with a sheepskin lining, but underneath it was a satin caftan trimmed with sable or marten fur. The guardsmen also hung the head of a wolf or dog * on a horse's neck or on a saddle bow; and on the handle of the whip a tuft of wool, sometimes replaced by a broom. Contemporaries reported that all this symbolized the fact that the guardsmen gnaw at the enemies of the king like wolves, and then sweep out everything unnecessary from the state.
In the Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda, where the tsar moved his residence (now the city of Aleksandrov in the region of Vladimir), the oprichnina received the appearance of a monastic order, where the tsar played the role of hegumen. But this supposed humility could not mask their enthusiasm for robberies, violence and unbridled orgies. The king was personally present at the executions of his enemies, after which he experienced periods of repentance, during which he passionately repented of his sins before God. His apparent nervous breakdown is confirmed by many witnesses, for example, the fact that his beloved son Ivan was beaten to death in November 1580. However, the guardsmen were never an effective army of Ivan the Terrible. After the victory over Kazan in 1552, Astrakhan in 1556, and some initial successes in the Livonian war against the Teutonic knights on the Baltic Sea coast, military luck turned away from him. In 1571, the Tatar Khan even burned Moscow, after which the main leaders of the guardsmen were executed.
Local cavalry
The main force of the Russian army during this period was the cavalry, whose riders were from the noble landlord class. Their income depended on their possessions, so that each horseman was dressed and armed as he could afford, although the government demanded uniformity in their equipment: every cavalryman had to have a saber, helmet and chain mail. In addition to chain mail, or instead of it, a cavalryman could wear a traction - a densely quilted caftan with metal scales or plates sewn into it.
Those who could afford it were armed with arquebusses or carbines with a smooth or even rifled barrel. Poor warriors usually had a pair of pistols, although the authorities urged landlords to purchase carbines as a weapon of greater range. Since such weapons took a long time to reload, and gave frequent misfires when firing, cavalrymen, as a rule, had a bow and arrows in addition to it. The main melee weapon was a spear or owl - a polearm with a straight or curved blade as a tip.
Most of the riders had Turkish or Polish-Hungarian sabers copied by Russian blacksmiths. Oriental sabers with strongly curved blades of Damascus steel were very popular in Russia at that time. A broadsword with a straight blade was also popular, richly decorated and was a weapon of noble warriors; its blade resembled European swords, but was narrower than that of a medieval sword. Another type of edged weapon was suleba - a kind of sword, but with a wide, slightly curved blade.
The weapons of the Russian local cavalry were richly decorated. The scabbards of the sabers were covered with Moroccan leather and decorated with overlays with precious and semiprecious stones, corals, and the handles of sabers and the butts of squeakers and pistols were inlaid with mother of pearl and ivory, and armor, helmets and bracers were covered with a notch. A large number of weapons were exported from the East, including Turkish and Persian Damascus sabers and daggers, Egyptian misyurks, helmets, shields, saddles, stirrups, and horse blankets. Firearms, edged weapons, and saddles were also imported from Western Europe. All this equipment was very expensive: for example, the full armament of a 16th century cavalryman cost him, as contemporaries say, 4 rubles 50 kopecks, plus a helmet worth one ruble and a saber worth 3 to 4 rubles. For comparison, in 1557-1558 a small village cost only 12 rubles. In 1569-1570, when a terrible famine struck Russia, the cost of 5-6 poods of rye reached the incredible price of one ruble.
The term "pishchal" in the Russian army of Ivan the Terrible was more or less common for both infantry and cavalry, and artillery pieces were also called pishchal. There were squeaky squeaks - large caliber, used for firing from behind the walls; and the veiled squeaks, which had a leather sling so that they could be worn behind the back. The squeaks were, in fact, the common weapon of the townspeople and people of the lower class, whom the nobles regarded as rabble. In 1546, in Kolomna, where there was a serious clash between people armed with squeaks, and horsemen of the local cavalry, squeaks showed high efficiency, so it is not surprising that the first Russian archers were armed with this very weapon. But even after the archers became "the people of the sovereign" and proved their worth in battle, the local cavalry rarely used firearms.
Horse composition
Despite these strange contradictions, it was this time that became the golden age of the Russian noble cavalry, and this would have been impossible without improved horse breeding. The most widespread in the 16th century was the Nogai breed of horses - small, with coarse hair of steppe horses 58 inches high at the withers, whose dignity was endurance and undemanding food. Stallions of this breed usually cost 8 rubles, a filly 6 and a foal 3 rubles. At the other end of the scale were argamaks, including thoroughbred Arabian horses, which can only be found in the stables of the king or boyars and cost from 50 to 200 rubles.
A typical 16th century saddle had a forward bow and a back bow, which was typical of saddles among nomadic peoples, so that the rider could turn to use his bow or sword effectively. This indicates that the spear was not at that time the main weapon of the Russian cavalry, since then its riders would have a different shape of the saddle. Moscow horsemen rode with bent legs, leaning on short stirrups. There was a fashion for horses, and it was considered prestigious to have expensive ones. Much, and not only saddles, was borrowed again from the East. For example, a whip - a heavy whip or arapnik was named after the Nogai, it is still used by the Russian Cossacks.
As for the organization of the Russian army, it was the same as in the 15th century. The troops were divided into large formations of the left and right wings, vanguard and horse guard. Moreover, these were precisely the field formations of cavalry and infantry, and not fixed regiments as in later times. On the march, the army marched under the command of a senior voivode, while voivods of lower ranks were at the head of each regiment. Military flags, including those of each voivode, played an important role, as did military music. Russian troops used huge brass timpani, carried by four horses, as well as Turkish tulumbases or small timpani attached to the rider's saddle, while others had trumpets and reed flutes.
16th century artillery
During the reign of Ivan IV, the role of the Moscow artillery, which was led by the Pushkarskaya hut, greatly increased. In 1558, the English ambassador Fletcher wrote: "No sovereign Christian sovereign has so many cannons as he does, which is confirmed by the large number of them in the Palace Armory in the Kremlin … all are cast in bronze and are very beautiful." The dress of the artillerymen was varied, but in general it looked like the caftans of the archers. However, in artillery, the caftan was shorter and was called a chuga. The early gunners also used traditional chain mail, helmets, and bracers. Their winter clothes were traditionally Russian, folk - that is, a sheepskin coat and a hat.
During this period of time, there were many talented cannon masters in Russia, such as Stepan Petrov, Bogdan Pyatov, Pronya Fedorov and others. But Andrei Chokhov became the most famous of all: he cast his first pishchal in 1568, then the second and third in 1569, and all of them were sent to strengthen the defense of Smolensk. Chokhov cast the first known large-caliber gun in 1575 and was again sent to Smolensk. 12 of his cannons have survived to this day (he made more than 20 in total). Of these, seven are in the State Museum of Artillery in St. Petersburg, three in the Moscow Kremlin, and two in Sweden, where they ended up as trophies during the Livonian War. All Chokhov's guns had their own names, including "Fox" (1575), "Wolf" (1576), "Pers" (1586), "Lion" (1590), "Achilles" (1617). In 1586 he created a huge cannon, decorated with the figure of Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich on a horse, which became known as the Tsar Cannon and which now stands in the Moscow Kremlin. However, the widespread belief that large cannons were mainly cast in 16th century Russia is incorrect. The most varied and varied weapons were cast, which entered service with many fortresses on the eastern border of Russia. There, heavy battering squeaks were simply not needed!
Gunners or gunners received a large salary, both in cash and bread and salt. On the other hand, their occupation was not considered a very noble deed, moreover, it required significant experience with no guarantee of success. Archers often refused to serve as gunners, and this branch of the military profession in Russia became more hereditary than others. Russian artillerymen often showed great devotion to their duty. For example, in the battle for Wenden on October 21, 1578 during the Livonian War, they, being unable to withdraw their guns from the battlefield, fired at the enemy to the last, and then hanged themselves on ropes attached to the trunks "[1, 7 - 13].
* Due to the fact that this information is a well-known fact, a number of questions arise, to which the sources of that time do not give answers. For example, where did these heads come from, because they needed a lot for the guardsmen? So you won't get enough of the dogs if you cut off their heads, and you have to go to the forest to hunt for the wolves, and when, then, will you serve the king? In addition, in the summer, the heads had to deteriorate very quickly, and the flies and smell could not but bother the rider. Or were they somehow made, and, therefore, for the needs of the guardsmen there was a certain workshop for the mummification of dog and wolf heads?
Literature
Viacheslav Shpakovsky & David Nikolle. Armies of Ivan the Terrible / Russian Troops 1505 - 1700. Osprey Publishing Ltd. Oxford, UK.2006. 48p.
