First contacts with Europe

Muscovy had never been a sealed chamber waiting for the year 1700 to let in air. Novgorod’s Hanseatic trade, the diplomacy of Ivan III, and the English merchants who reached the White Sea in the previous century already belonged to a longer history of contact, sometimes violent, sometimes profitable, always incomplete. This chapter is about something denser and more intimate: the seventeenth-century crowding of mercenaries, doctors, clockmakers, merchants and envoys into a recovering tsardom that wanted their skills and feared their faith. After the Time of Troubles the court hired competence it could not quickly grow at home. It also tried to keep that competence in its place, useful at the fortress and the sickbed, less welcome in the parish. The tension is the story. Without it, later reforms look like a sudden opening that never happened.

The need was practical rather than philosophical. Fortresses, guns, medicines, ships’ stores and court display all rewarded men who had trained in workshops and armies west of the Orthodox world. Curiosity existed among individuals, but policy was not a grand tour. It was procurement under pressure.

Foreign soldiers and officers entered Russian service in notable numbers after the Troubles, when the army had to be rebuilt against Polish-Lithuanian and Swedish neighbours. They drilled troops in unfamiliar formations, advised on fortification, and sold their experience dearly. Some stayed a season; some married, converted, or died in Russian pay far from the place that had trained them. Around them came specialists: apothecaries, surgeons, gun-founders, engineers, and the makers of clocks whose public and private mechanisms fascinated a court that already understood time as liturgy and as power. None of this made Moscow a Dutch town. It made the Kremlin a buyer in a European market of skills, paying in wages, privileges and the dangerous honour of proximity to the tsar.

Out of that hiring grew infantry trained in what later writers call new-formation regiments: units that borrowed Western drill, weapons handling and command habits without turning the whole Muscovite army into a foreign copy. Russian soldiers still stood beside streltsy musketeers and cavalry of older style. The experiment was patchy, expensive and politically sensitive, because a colonel who could not speak Russian held power over Orthodox men, and because a foreign officer’s fortune depended on remaining useful to a court that could dismiss him. Failure in the field could be blamed on the foreigner; success could make him envied. Yet the court kept paying, because wars on the western frontier punished an army that refused to learn. Technique came first. Loyalty was hoped for afterwards, and not always received.

Merchants arrived by water that Russians already knew. The English Muscovy Company, formed in the previous century after Richard Chancellor’s White Sea voyage, had long treated Arkhangelsk as a seasonal door into the realm. Dutch traders competed with growing success, especially once Tsar Alexis withdrew the English company’s old privileges. Hemp, tallow and cordage went west; woollens, metals and Mediterranean goods came east. Arkhangelsk’s season was short, its warehouses crowded, and its bargains watched by officials who wanted customs revenue without wanting a foreign town to take root beside the White Sea. Trade was contact you could weigh, and it did not wait for a tsar to discover Europe as an idea. The ships came because the goods paid. The court let them come because the treasury and the army needed what they brought.

Residence was another matter, and here fear spoke as loudly as usefulness. Western foreigners in Moscow were, under Alexis, gathered again into the Nemetskaya sloboda, the so-called German Quarter on the Yauza, a suburb whose name misleads. Nemets in this usage meant a Westerner who did not speak Russian, not a subject of one German prince. Lutherans, Calvinists, English merchants, Dutch craftsmen and Catholic officers might all live within its streets, with their own churches permitted at a carefully measured distance from Orthodox parish life. The quarter had older roots, including a sixteenth-century foreign settlement disrupted during the Troubles. Its seventeenth-century refoundation under Alexis was a policy of concentration. Skills could be used. Mixing could be limited.

The clergy had reasons to worry, and so did a court that understood Orthodoxy as the realm’s public soul. Foreign households brought different calendars, sermons, books, clothes and table manners. They also brought tobacco, drink and a casualness about ritual that Orthodox observers could read as contamination rather than as private taste. Isolation was a sanitary idea applied to faith. It was also an admission that the strangers were not leaving.

Inside the suburb a small Western town tried to take root on Russian ground. Houses, gardens, workshops and taverns followed habits their owners had carried from the Baltic, the German lands, the Netherlands and the British Isles. Protestant congregations worshipped in churches the government would not allow to masquerade as Orthodox parish buildings. Children grew up speaking more than one language; craftsmen sold work to Russian customers who were not supposed to live as they lived. Later pictures of the quarter, whether painted reconstructions or tidied views, tend to make it look more finished than a muddy riverbank suburb ever was. They are still useful if we remember their distance from the thing they show: a licensed foreignness, close to the capital and fenced from it at the same time.

Yet isolation was never complete, because the state itself kept opening doors. Clockmakers served palaces and taught, by example if not by curriculum, that precise mechanism had a public use. Physicians stood near sick tsars and boyars, bringing remedies that competed, sometimes awkwardly, with pilgrimage and prayer. Translators and interpreters, the tolmachi, made bargains possible in German, Dutch, English, Latin and Polish. Printing inside Muscovy remained closely tied to Church and chancery needs; it was not a free market of pamphlets. Foreign books still travelled in chests and pockets, and a few Russians learned enough of a Western language to read a manual or argue with a colonel. Language contact was patchy, instrumental, and more common in Moscow than in a distant district. It was real, and it was enough to frighten people who thought a language might carry a creed.

Most of the realm never saw a Dutch surgeon or a German clock. A village on a northern river might feel Europe only as a price for hemp or a rumour of foreign mercenaries. Density of contact is a capital story before it is a national one, and even in Moscow it was a story of certain streets. That is why the suburb mattered out of proportion to its size.

Diplomacy supplied another theatre, older than the German Quarter and more ceremonial than a merchant’s warehouse. Envoys came from Sweden, Denmark, the Empire, Persia, the Ottoman world and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, bringing gifts, complaints and the endless etiquette of rank. Receptions were staged to show that the tsar was no mere frontier prince. Misunderstandings were part of the performance. So was magnificence.

Pictures of such meetings, including the later engravings that still illustrate them, are composed scenes. Artists arranged bodies, costumes and architecture for a European public hungry for the exotic. Use them as evidence of interest, not as a seating plan of any one afternoon.

Among the travellers who tried to explain Muscovy to readers at home was Adam Olearius, secretary to a Holstein embassy that passed through Moscow on its way towards Persia. He was a mathematician and librarian as well as a diplomat’s aide, and he later published a richly illustrated account of the journey. His plates of the city, the court and ordinary street life became some of the most copied European images of seventeenth-century Russia. They are travel engravings, not windows left open in the wall. Olearius looked with a learned, Protestant, sometimes scornful eye; Muscovites looked back with their own suspicions. His printed pages, not later embroidery, are the evidence for what he thought he saw. He observed, measured, drew and judged, and his book taught western Europe to see Moscow as a subject for description rather than as a rumour.

The hero image belongs to that engraved world: a Moscow imagined for readers who would never stand on Red Square. Its rooftops and processions may preserve genuine looking. They also obey the habits of European print, which liked crowded spectacle and clear costume. Memory of the visit and the market for pictures worked together.

The court wanted Western hands; it did not want a Western soul.

That sentence names the bargain, and it is older than Peter’s reign. Alexis encouraged trade and employed foreigners while still treating Orthodoxy as a boundary that should not dissolve. Conversion to the Russian Church could open a fuller life in the city; remaining Lutheran or Calvinist meant useful service behind a fence, literal or social. The fear was not of clocks, nor even of foreign speech in a fortress yard. It was of a faith, a calendar and a set of customs that might teach Russians to live as if the Church’s order were optional. The appetite was not for philosophy seminars. It was for surgeons who could save a boyar, gunners who could hold a wall, and merchants who could find a market for hemp.

A child of that world was growing up on the edge of it. Peter, son of Alexis, spent impressionable years near Preobrazhenskoye, close enough to the German Quarter for its inhabitants and their mechanical arts to become part of his education. Acquaintance with those neighbours kindled an interest in navigation and in the life of other nations, not because a philosopher instructed him, but because the suburb was there, noisy, skilled and incompletely fenced. This story stops before he travelled west in state, and before a new city on the Neva was even a thought in a swamp. The foreign presence he inherited already had streets, churches and quarrels of its own. What he later magnified, he did not invent from nothing.

To call the seventeenth century a sealed age is therefore to misread both the earlier diplomacy and this denser traffic. Muscovy remained a distinct Orthodox tsardom, wary of Latin Christendom, proud of its rites, and capable of expelling or corralling people it found inconvenient. It was also a state that hired, bargained, translated and watched, sometimes in the same week. The English lost privileges; the Dutch gained room; Holsteiners passed through; mercenaries took Russian pay. None of these facts requires us to treat Peter as the inventor of Europe in Russia. They require us to see him as a ruler who grew up inside a contact zone his father had already found useful and dangerous. The wall, such as it was, had gates. The gates had guards.

What changed later would be scale, compulsion and a new capital’s symbolism. What was already true is quieter and easier to miss. In a wooden suburb on the Yauza, in an Arkhangelsk warehouse, in a sickroom where a foreign doctor argued with an icon’s protection, Russia was practising a limited international life. The practice left traces in technique, vocabulary and suspicion alike. It also left a habit: take what is useful, fence what is feared. The habit outlasted any one embassy.