Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/378

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All over the Empire, the Cossacks formed an integral portion of the Muscovite population. In the northern provinces, they were nomad labourers, agricultural or industrial. In the southern zone, the perpetual state of warfare generally converted them into soldiers. Commonly speaking, however, the generic title of Cossack was applied to vagabonds of every description, whether husbandmen or warriors—peaceful labourers when the occasion served, robbers in convenient seasons. The word, of Tartar origin, originally meant a peasant who had no local or personal connections, but more particularly, a soldier recruited from this nomad class. These men, in whom the quality of submission was lacking, to all eternity, went whither their fancy led them—some fled into the farthest steppes, and there formed military brotherhoods; others stayed in their birthplace, and there organized armed bands, employed, for the most part, in robbery by violent means. For these last the official name was 'Cossack robbers' (vorovskiié).

The constitution, geographical and ethnographical, of ancient Russia, her lack of strictly-defined limits, and provinces possessing historical boundary-lines, resulted in the fact that this mobile element, nominally dependent on the State, but practically almost completely independent of it, became the vanguard of the great colonizing movement. Thus, under Vassili, the Riazan Cossacks had sought, and found, the road to the Don; under his successor they were settled on both banks of that river, and were soon a bugbear to the Tartars of the Crimea and of Azov, and the Nogaïs. The northern Ukraine was the first to send them a contingent of intrepid comrades, recruited among the Siévrouki, whose courage was proverbial; but the attractions of the settlement were soon felt on every side. Town Cossacks and country Cossacks, all of them, the moment they were guilty of any crime, hurried to the same city of refuge. It gave Ivan considerable trouble. The Tartars, who were perpetually harried, made complaints, and the Tsar was fain to plead his own powerlessness in the matter. He could not contrive to keep all the 'brigands' in order. Now and then, in the interval between two incursions into Tartar territory, the said 'brigands' would take to the Volga, turn themselves into pirates, and, manning their swift tchaïki, fall on the Russian merchants. Then the Tsar's troops took action, and regular campaigns were made against them.

Yet it was with the Sovereign's permission that the Stroganovs enlisted a body of these miscreants, 640 men,