232 and wider geographical areas, either travelling about themselves or sending representatives to purchase such things as grain and products produced by artisans, which they then either exported or sold in one of the larger Russian markets. The economic strength of commercial capitalismwas therefore becoming more and more evident during this period. One example of the economic potential of the merchants is provided by the Moscow grain market, which was entirely dominated by the capital’s rich merchant class during the latter half of the seventeenth century. It is estimated that the population of Moscow at mid-century was approximately 200,000, which provides a rough idea of the economic dimensions of the commerce in the capital.^^ The voevodas learned to take advantage of these merchants who had become so wealthy thanks to the development of the marketplace. It has been suggested above that conflicts between the voevodas and the local service nobility (sluzhiloe uezdnoe dvorianstvo) were common. The service nobility was used by the voevodas as a source of labor and was often saddled with various forms of special fees to be paid either in cash or in kind.^'* Nor could the voevoda protect the service nobility from the powerful estate-owning magnates, who often used violence in order to expropriate both land and serfs from the noble service estates (pomesde). The reason for these clashes lay in the shortage of labor."*^ Necessary increases in production could only be achieved by expanding the acreage under cultivation, but this required more hands to till the soil and create the surplus which could eventually be transformed, at least in part, into cash for the owner of the estate. This development is to be explained principally by the expansion of the market and of the cash economy, while it itself at the same time intensified market and cash conditions.^® To exemplify this, we can turn to the example of the powerful hoiarin. ■** D. I. Tverskaia, Moskva vtoroi poloviny XVII veka—tsentr skladyvaiushchegosia vserossiiskogo rynka (Moscow, 1959), 7, 62. ** Bogoiavlenskii & Veselovskii, 390—391; E. V. Chistiakova, “Volneniia sluzhilykh liudei v iuzhnykh gorodakh Rossii v seredine XVII v.,” in N. V. Ustiugov et al., eds. Russkoe gosudarstvo v XVII veke. Ocherk statei (Moscow, 1961), 271. E. I. Zaozerskaia, “Iz istorii feodal’noi votchiny i polozheniia krcst’ian v pcrvoi polovine XVII v.,” in N. M. Druzhinin et al., eds., Materialy po istorii sel’skogo khoziaistva i krest’ianstva SSSR (7 v., Moscow, 1952—1969), IV, 63—65. Ibid., 59. An example of a boiar estate that continually produced a surplus exclusively meant for the open market was that of the Princes Cherkasskii. The Cherkasskiis not only derived a surplus from their peasants consisting of the rents in kind and in cash, but also developed various forms of manufacturing enterprises producing goods for the market.
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