The Swedish force of 22,000-28,000 responded to a Russian challenge with a major assault, although Peter- at the helm of a much larger force of some 45,000 men-appears to have viewed Poltava as primarily a defensive encounter. However, confusing orders left part of the Swedish force attacking Russian T-shaped redoubts rather than the main camp. These Swedish units, led by Carl Gustav Roos, lost contact with the main force as well as two-fifths of their men. They eventually retreated and were forced to surrender. The other two-thirds of the Swedish force successfully regrouped for an attack on the camp awaiting Roos. The Swedes, however, lost their momentum during the two-hour wait, whereas the Russians were revitalized by news of the surrender. A Russian force of 22,000 men and sixty-eight field guns now attacked the remaining four thousand Swedes led by Adam Ludvig Lewenhaupt. Disorganization and inferior numbers ultimately led to a chaotic Swedish retreat. The Swedes lost 6,901 dead or wounded and 2,760 captured. The Russian losses were 1,345 dead and 3,290 wounded.
Three days after the battle, Charles went into exile in the Ottoman Empire and the Swedish force of 14,000- 17,000 surrendered at Perevolochna. Even though the Treaty of Nystad was only concluded twelve years later, the defeat suffered at Poltava marks the end of Sweden as a great power. See also: GREAT NORTHERN WAR
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Frost, Robert I. (2000). The Northern Wars: War, State and Society in Northeastern Europe, 1558-1721. Harlow, UK, and New York: Longman. Hughes, Lindsey. (1998). Russia in the Age of Peter the Great. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Polyane is one of the Eastern Slavic tribes that inhabited the Kievan Rus state, as noted in the Russian Primary Chronicle.
According to the Russian Primary Chronicle, the Polyane occupied the middle Dnieper River region: Kiev, the capital of the Rus state, as well as Vysh-gorod, Vasilev, and Belgorod. The Polyane received their name (meaning “people of the field”) on account of their settlement in the open terrain of the middle Dnieper. With its chernozem soils, the middle Dnieper was ideal for agriculture, the primary
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economy of the Polyane. Archaeologists believe that the Polyane belonged to a larger group of Slavs, known as Duledy, who migrated east from southeastern Europe sometime during the sixth to seventh centuries. By the eighth to ninth centuries, the Polyane settled both sides of the middle Dnieper and came to form their own ethnic identity. During the ninth century, the middle Dnieper was under the control of the Khazar state, to which the Polyane paid tribute in furs. Kiev itself functioned as the western-most military outpost and a commercial center for the Khazars. During the late ninth century, the Rus prince Oleg (legendary reign 880-913) allegedly incorporated the middle Dnieper and the Polyane into the expanding Rus state, although evidence suggests that it was Grand Prince Igor (r. 924-945) who brought the two under Rus control around 930. While predominantly Slavic, the Polyane appear to have had Iranian, Turkic, and Finno-Baltic ethnic elements. Evidence for this is found through archaeological and linguistic studies of the Polyane and from Chronicle descriptions of their pre-Christian religious practices. See also: IGOR; KHAZARS; KIEVAN RUS; OLEG; PRIMARY CHRONICLE; VIKINGS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Golb, Norman, and Pritsak, Omeljan. (1982). Khazarian Hebrew Document of the Tenth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. The Russian Primary Chronicle. (1973). Tr. and ed. Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America.
Pomestie, “service landholding,” was a parcel of land (hopefully inhabited by rent-paying peasants, later serfs [see Serfdom]) in exchange for which the holder (not owner) had to render lifelong service to the state, typically military service, but occasionally service in the government bureaucracy. Ideally, when the service ended, the landholder had to surrender the pomestie to another serviceman. The pomestie was granted for use only to support the serviceman and his family (including slaves) by peasant rent payments to him in lieu of cash. It has been calculated that this was far more efficient than paying servicemen entirely in cash: the transaction costs of collecting taxes, taking them to Moscow, and then paying them to the servicemen were likely to result in a fifty percent loss, whereas there was no such shrinkage when the rent and taxes did not go through Moscow. Occasionally po-mestie is translated a “military fief,” but this is totally misleading. There was no feudalism in Russia. The pomestie was granted directly by the government’s Service Land Chancellery (Pomestny prikaz) to a specific serviceman for his support in lieu of support of other kinds (such as cash, or feeding in barracks). There were no reciprocal rights and obligations between the Service Land Chancellery and the serviceman, and there was no subinfeuda-tion.
The pomestie bears at least superficial resemblance to forms of land tenure elsewhere, especially the Byzantine pronoia and the Persian ikhta. It is dubious, however, that the Russian pomestie was borrowed from either, and it seems likely that it was an autonomous creation by the Russians themselves.
The origins of the pomestie are shrouded in the mists of the early Muscovite Middle Ages. The first recorded use of the term was in 1499, but the phenomenon definitely existed before then. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, servitors (probably military) at the Muscovite court may occasionally have been given temporary grants of land in exchange for service, but that was an extraordinarily uncertain form of compensation and therefore cannot have been used often. Until the 1450s all peasants were free and could not be compelled to pay rent to anyone [see Enserfment], and they could move at a moment’s notice. Thus no system of compensating servicemen by conditional grants of land developed at that time.
The origins of the pomestie system (and also the service state) can be traced to Moscow’s annexation of Novgorod in 1478. Some elite Nov-gorodian laymen and churchmen preferred either to remain independent or to have Lithuania as a suzerain rather than Moscow. Those people were purged after 1478 and either executed or forcibly resettled elsewhere. Their vast landholdings were confiscated by Moscow and parceled out to loyal cavalry servicemen (pomeshchiki) for their support. The census books compiled subsequently by Moscow indicate that each serviceman was probably assigned land occupied by roughly thirty peasant households. It is fairly certain that the servicemen did not live directly on their land grants,
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but in groups nearby. A third party collected the traditional rent and gave it to the servicemen. Thus the servicemen had no direct connection with “their” peasants and no control over them. Moscow soon discovered that this was an efficient way to assure control over newly annexed territory while simultaneously maximizing the size of the army. As Moscow annexed other lands, it handed them out to servicemen as pomestie estates. The pomestie came to embody the essence of the service state. Each eligible serviceman had an entitlement (oklad) based on his service. If he could locate land up to the limit of his entitlement, it was his. This was an effective incentive system, and servicemen strove mightily to increase their entitlements.
Two or three generations later, during the reign of Ivan IV (“the Terrible”), several important events occurred concerning the pomestie. For one, the government advanced the service state significantly in 1556 by decreeing that all holders of service estates (pomestie) and hereditary estates (votchiny) had to render the same quantity of military service (i.e., provide one mounted cavalryman per one hundred cheti of land actually possessed). Second, it is probable that during Ivan’s reign sons began to succeed to their fathers’ service landholdings when their fathers died or could no longer render the required lifetime service. Third, during Ivan’s Oprichnina, service landholders were given control over their peasants, including the right to set the level of rent payments (a change that caused massive peasant flight from the center to the expanding frontiers [see Colonial Expansion]). And fourth, the Oprich-nina exterminated so many owners of hereditary estates that it appeared as though outright ownership of land was on the verge of extinction.
The holders of pomestie estates were primarily members of the provincial middle service class cavalry who began to live directly on their service land-holdings somewhere during the middle of the sixteenth century. This
