In eastern and east-central Europe, poor migrants were rarely a problem. This was the
result not of better economic conditions, however, but of a reintroduction of serfdom
that tied people to the land, forbidding them to move or even travel. In the medieval
period, serfdom had declined faster in eastern Europe than in the west. By the middle
of the fi fteenth century, labor services (called robot in Czech, the origin of the word
“robot” in English) had almost disappeared, rents were low and long-term, and communal
village organizations were strong. This changed dramatically over the next
century. Ruling houses in eastern Europe were weak and frequently changing, dependent
on noble landowners (called Junkers in German) for money, troops, and political
backing. Often acting through the parliaments they controlled, such as the Sejm in
Poland or the Diets of Prussia and Hungary, these noble landowners introduced laws
that raised rents, required ever more extensive labor services, and ultimately bound
peasants legally to the land. They gave themselves tax exemptions and monopolies
on trade, crippling older cities such as Danzig and limiting the development of new
cities.
These measures were progressively sharpened. The 1497 Russian legal code restricted
peasants’ right to move to one two-week period during the year, and the 1603 code
abolished this right to move completely. The 1649 code set no limit on the lords’ authority
over their peasants, and who could buy, sell, and trade them. On estate surveys,
peasants were listed as private property, with legal contracts and later newspaper
advertisements describing their sale. During the American Revolutionary War, nearly
30,000 young men from Germany were sold to the British as soldiers. There were a few
limits to landlords’ power; they could not kill their serfs outright, and in some areas
village communal organizations remained strong enough to negotiate limits on labor
services or rents. Peasants also engaged in work slowdowns, rituals in which a landowner
or his manager was insulted or killed in effi gy, and at times even armed rebellion
or the murder of offi cials or landlords.
Because the nobles were the primary judicial and police offi cials on their lands, however,
such actions were often counter-productive. In Hungary, for example, the Diet’s
restrictions of peasant freedom and expansion of labor obligations led to a peasants’
revolt in 1514. Peasants under the leadership of György Dózsa (1470?–1514), a veteran
of wars against the Turks, attacked estates, but the nobles united against them and
Dózsa and other leaders were brutally executed. Later that year the Diet sharpened
serfdom even further, while giving the nobles the power to elect the king and granting
them freedom from taxation and military service (except in defensive wars). These
laws, known as the Tripartitum, were the basis of the Hungarian legal code until the
revolution of 1848.
Neo-serfdom was just as onerous in its labor obligations and limitations on freedom
as earlier European serfdom, but it was very different economically in that it was
designed for the market, not for subsistence. Landlords sold the grain produced on
their estates and taken in as taxes and rents on peasant land both regionally and internationally;
in Poland, for example, rye exports to the west were 6,000 tons in 1460,
70,000 tons in 1560, and 200,000 tons in 1618. Nobles sold grain locally to the increasing
number of peasants who had become landless when they could no longer afford their
rents, and to the armies regularly engaged in dynastic/religious wars or battles with the
Turks. Some landlords specialized in other types of commercial crops, such as winegrapes,
hops, and fl ax, but grain remained their primary product. Increases in the price
of grain during the sixteenth century encouraged landlords to raise rents, further expand
labor obligations, buy more land, and put still more land into grain cultivation;
all of these resulted in more short-term profi ts and were safer and easier than trying
new crops or new agricultural techniques. In the long run, however, such practices lowered
yields and productivity, and hindered economic growth of all types, not simply
in agriculture.
The situation was so terrible for serfs that slavery sometimes seemed a better option.
Slaves were quite common in Muscovy – perhaps 10 percent of the population – where
they included the offspring of slaves, military captives, indentured servants, and people
who had enslaved themselves or their whole family to pay off debts. Most slaves lived
in rural areas and worked the land, but some were estate managers, household workers,
or soldiers, although a series of slave rebellions in the early seventeenth century led
the government to prohibit military training for slaves. In the mid-sixteenth century,
a central offi ce for recording and handling all types of slaves, the Slavery Chancellery,
was established in Moscow. About half the slaves were limited-contract slaves, who after
the 1590s were freed on the death of their owners. The fact that slave status was thus
not heritable, and that slaves did not pay taxes, led peasants to sell themselves more
frequently, especially after the legal changes in 1649 made serfdom even more onerous.
Once the government realized what was happening, it converted all slaves back into
serfs, which effectively ended slavery per se, although Russian serfdom by this point
was not much different than slavery.
Russians, along with Ukrainians, Poles, and other eastern Europeans, were also captured
by Crimean Tatars and sold as slaves into the Ottoman Empire; perhaps as many
as 2.5 million slaves were handled through the Crimean town of Kaffa in the period
1500 to 1700. The Ottoman state used slaves for construction projects, galley service,
and in the army, while private individuals used them for agricultural and especially
domestic work. Islamic tenets encouraged slaveholders to free their slaves after a long
period of service, and census records indicate that slaves were only about 5 percent of
the population of the Ottoman Empire. The regular freeing of slaves meant that there
was a steady demand for new ones, however, which by the sixteenth century included
Africans imported through Egypt, Roma (Gypsies) brought in from India, and Slavs
traded by Italian merchants, as well as Russians sold by the Tatars.
Most agricultural work in the Ottoman Empire was done not by slaves, however, but
by peasants who farmed small family holdings, growing grain along with fruits, olives,
and vegetables. They raised sheep and goats, which supplied milk, along with wool and
hair to be spun into yarn and woven into cloth. Some agricultural goods were sold to
provide money for taxes, though taxes were also paid in kind longer than they were in
western Europe. Signifi cant production for regional or international markets did not
begin in the Ottoman Empire until the eighteenth century, when large amounts of new
land were put under cultivation for the fi rst time. Until then, stretches of empty land
often separated quite small villages, a situation that provided little incentive or capital
for agricultural innovations.
Shortly after the Ottomans conquered an area, offi cials surveyed all the taxable resources,
measuring the land, assessing its fertility, and counting the households. The state
then divided the land into timars , administrative units assessed at a certain value of tax
revenue. Military offi cers and government offi cials were given the right to collect the
taxes from one or more timars instead of being paid directly in cash. As we saw in chapter
3 , timars were sometimes granted to lords or monasteries that had previously held the
land – there were Christian timar holders, though their numbers decreased over time –
but the taxes demanded were less than had been imposed before the Ottoman conquest.
World History
