regions of the country, and on these, economically speaking, the new Empire subsisted and depended.
Industries were trifling, trade brisker, but still confined to very modest proportions. The population of this land of desolate marsh and moor, living mostly by fishing and only quite exceptionally by husbandry, drew its chief subsistence from a certain flow of merchandise passing to and fro between the Baltic seaboard and the interior of the country. But on an area of 282,127 square versts there were but fourteen towns. Most of these, too, were no more than tiny forts (ostrojki), and in the districts (piatiny) of Biéjets and Olonetz, a huge country covering 171,119 square versts, there were no towns at all; their place was taken by villages (possiélki), with markets and small bazaars.
Up to near the second half of the sixteenth century, Novgorod, with its 5,300 dwelling-houses, was the most important of all the towns in the Empire, save Moscow; and at Pskov the inventories of the period enumerate 1,300 shops or trading-houses within the town alone, apart from the suburbs. But these documents everywhere point to a phenomenon which looms large in the sixteenth-century history of this particular sphere—the swift extinction of the civilian citizen, properly so called, eliminated by the military element which takes his place. At Gdov, which boasts the largest number of inhabitants belonging to this class, the lists for 1580–1585 only give fourteen! And this is the work of the Muscovite conquest, which, with its system of general confiscation and its bestowal of the confiscated properties on men of its own choice, has rapidly succeeded in changing the face of the country, even as to its social elements. Now, these newcomers are all warriors, and Moscow, in her invading march, her overflowing expansion, still preserves the primitive characteristic of her first settlement—a military colony in a conquered country.
And it could not be otherwise, for this, like all the other provinces of the new Empire, remains a battlefield, with frontiers ill-defined on one side, and constantly disputed elsewhere. Amongst the fortresses protecting it on the north-west, Smolensk, only conquered in 1514, is still the nominal capital of a Lithuanian-Polish Palatinate, and Viélikié-Louki will soon be snatched by Batory from Ivan IV. North-eastward colonization creeps gradually along the White Sea, from the Onega and the Northern Dvina to the Ural; but possession is limited along this coast—pomorié, as it is called—to the seashore and the river-banks, and even from the economic point of view, monasteries—strategically-occupied points more than pious foundations—take first rank here. That of Solovki, on the White Sea, possesses, with valuable salt-works and
