The Icon and the Axe

Nor were the reformed Protestant churches inactive. By the late 1620's there was at least one Calvinist church in Moscow supported mainly by BrnxHTesfdents as well as three Lutheran Churches;128 and the existence of jTRussian-language Calvinist catechism of the 1620's or 1630's for which no known Western model has been found indicates that there may have been some attempts to adopt Calvinist literature for Russian audiences.126

With'such a variety of Protestant forces operating inside Muscovy in the early seventeenth century, it is hardly surprising that anti-Catholicism grew apace. One of the first acts of Patriarch Philaret, after becoming in 1619 co-ruler of'Russiawith his son tsar Michael, was to require the re-baptism of all Catholics; and discriminatory regulations were enacted in the 1630's to exclude Roman Catholics from the growing number of mercenaries recruited for Russia in Western Europe.127 The continued expansion of Jesuit schools in western Russia and the Polish Ukraine, the establishment of a new Catholic diocese of Smolensk, and Sigismund's proclamation of a "Universal Union" of Orthodoxy with Catholicism had intensified anti-Catholic feeling in the 1620's.128 The Swedes supported and encouraged the Russian attack on Poland in 1632; and the Swedish victory over the Catholic emperor at Breitenfeld in the same year was celebrated by special church services and the festive ringing of bells in Moscow. Orthodox merchants in Novgorod placed pictures of the victorious Gustavus Adolphus in places of veneration usually reserved for icons.129

,-- Indeed, it was not until the crown prince of Denmark arrived in Moscow iri 1644 to arrange for a Protestant marriage to the daughter of Tsar Michael that Russian society became aware of the extent that the young dynasty had identified itself with the Protestant powers. The successful campaign of leading clerical figures to block this marriage^on religious grounds combined with the intensified campaign of native merchants against economic concessions to foreigners to turn Muscovy in the 1640's away from any gradual drift toward Protestantism. But by the time Russia began to restrict the activities of Protestant elements and prepare for battle with the Swedes, it had established a deepening technological and administrative dependence on the more distant "Germans"-and particularly the Dutch^this dependence was hardest of all to throw off, because it arose out of the military necessities of the struggle against the Poles and Swedes.

Beginning in the 1550's, Russia Had plunged into its "military revolution," as Ivan the Terrible mobilized the first full-time, paid Russian infantry (the streltsy) and began the large-scale recruitment of foreign mercenaries.130 The number of both streltsy and mercenaries increased; and in the first three decades of the seventeenth century, the total number of traditional, non-noble elements fell from one half to about one fourth of

the Russian army.131 Swedish and Dutch influences became evident in the introduction of longer lances, more mobile formations, stricter drill methods, and the first use of military maps. Polishjoes begrudgingly-and not inaccurately--referred to the "Dutch cleverness" ???? Russian troops.132

As the Dutch joined the^ Swedes in the building of the Russian army for its inconclusive war with Poland in 1632-4, the Muscovite army began the most dramatic expansion of its entire history, increasing from its more or less standard size of about 100,000 to a figure in the vicinity of 300,000 in the last stages of the victorious campaign against Poland in the 1660's.133 Most of the officers and many of the ordinary soldiers were imported from North European Protestant countries, so that a good fourth i of this swollen army was foreign.134

Those_Western arrivals (like many newly assimilated Tatars, Southern Slavs, and so on) were uprooted figures, completely dependent on the state. They became a major component in the new service nobility, or dvorianstvo, which gradually replaced the older and more traditional landed aristocracy. Other developments which accompanied and supported the "military revolution" in early-seventeenth-century Russia were the growth of governmental bureaucracy, the expanded power of regional military commanders (yoevodas), and the formalization of peasant serfdom as a means of guaranteeing the state a supply of food and service manpower.