Untitled - OUDL Home

10,000 fighting Cossacks; equally formidable as riveror sea corsairs and as land buccaneers. For long theydespised the plough as the badge of bondage. Boasting"we serve for grass and water, not for land and estates,"they lived by fishing, stock-breeding, trading, and hunting,above all for slaves and booty, raiding far afield in'the wild grounds,' along the paynim shores of the BlackSea, or, as they sang, " like young falcons ... on MotherVolga. . . on the blue sea, the blue sea, on the Caspian."But they depended as well on the annual grant madeby Moscow, flour, munitions, and cloth. This was theirAchilles' heel. The distribution of the grant was madeby the Cossacks themselves, but the amount was fixedby Moscow, and it paid the 'host' to keep itself small.Yet they were too few to oust the Turks from Azov,save for a brief spell, and they needed the succour ofMuscovy. A democratic oligarchy began to harden;then an inner ring of the senior officers grew well-off;outside, the floating, unprivileged semi-Cossack fringeincreased as more and more runaways from the Northtrekked down; for the Don clung to its tradition of beingan asylum for all and sundry.The divorce between the richer, old-establishedCossack families of the lower Don and the needy newcoinersshowed itself to be acute when the former stoodagainst the two leaders of revolt, Stenka Razin andBulavin (1670-71 and 1707-08; see p. 162). Moscowsuppressed the risings with some assistance from theCossack oligarchy. Henceforward (1671) the DonCossacks were bound to the tsar by oath of allegiance.The right of asylum was more and more effectivelychallenged by the government. The southward surge ofcolonization from Muscovy made it possible to deprivethe 'host' of its middle Don lands (1708), and Peterthe Great went a long step further in state control byabolishing the free election of the commander (ataman)of the 'host' and directly appointing him himself (1723).Henceforward the atamans, holding office for longperiods but failing to become hereditary, worked incloser and closer accord with St Petersburg, and so didthe senior officers, themselves after 1754 no longer51