Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/184

 160 the 'men who served.' At the close of Ivan's reign they numbered 12,000 men, 7,500 of whom garrisoned Moscow, and formed, with the town Cossacks, the first body of infantry the Russian Tsars ever possessed. A permanent corps of artillerymen, divided into gunners (pouchkari), fort artillery-men (zatinchtchiki), grenadiers (granattchiki), and artificers, and a special corps of arquebus-men (pistchalniki), was organized at the same time.

All this did not constitute an army. The bulk of the force consisted of the 'men who served,' and of what was called the rat, the germ of another regular force. In war-time two things were done. All or part of the 'men who served' were called out, on the one hand, and on the other, levies were ordered, such and such a town or diocese being obliged to furnish so many foot soldiers or mounted men, recruited outside the military class. This constituted the rat or possokha; and for one campaign alone—that undertaken to recover Polotsk from the Poles-Ivan was to collect 80,000 of these possochniki. They were not disciplined troops, as may well be imagined, nor calculated to cut any very brilliant figure on a battlefield. As a rule, therefore, they were employed in digging earthworks or preparing war material. The Muscovite Government, indeed, permitted its taxpayers to pay a money indemnity of two roubles instead of each man due, and even preferred this plan. It was simply a form of taxation.

Mobilized by circulars sent by the War Office, or Razriad, to the provincial voiévodes, and specifying the number of men to be called out, the points on which they were to be concentrated, and the nature of their armament, the 'men who served,' boïars, boïars' sons, and courtiers (dvorianié), were divided, from Ivan IV.'s time onward, into five regiments—the great regiment, the vanguard, the right hand, the left hand, and the rearguard. When the Tsar was present, a sixth regiment, called 'the Sovereign's regiment,' was added. The first regiment consisted of three, and the others of two divisions, subdivided into 'hundreds' (sotnias). Each regiment was commanded by a voiévode, each division by a lieutenant who ranked as a voiévode, and each sotnia by a dvorianine of the first class. In the Tsar's absence, the whole body was under the orders of a Court voiévode, the magister militarum of the Romans, the generalissimo of the present day, who was surrounded by a numerous staff, which included sborchtchtki, whose business was to bring the troops together; okladtchiki, who had to divide them; possylnyié, lioodi, or aides-de-camp; stanovchtchiki, or engineers; foreign artisans, employed in siege works, provosts, medical men, and priests.

How many men did all this come to? We have no data