Medieval Russian Towns
Although the vast majority of the population dwelled in the countryside, Kievan Rus was known for its towns. Over eighty-nine towns were identified in the eleventh century and another one hundred and thirty-four that arose in the twelfth. On the eve of the Mongol invasion (1337—40), Kievan Rus boasted approximately three hundred urban centres. Although many of them were not true cities but relatively small fortified posts, some were lively diversified centres of commerce and crafts as well as civil, military, and ecclesiastical administration. Foremost among them was Kiev itself, the "mother of Russian cities". In different time there were totally more than three thousand towns in Russia, and more than one hundred and fifty of them were table towns. Almost all of them were wooden, small and only a few dozens of towns were relatively large.
The largest cities formed around princely strongholds, ecclesiastical seats, and trading posts. Any one or combination of those factors offered opportunities for merchants, master craftsmen, and unskilled workers, who gathered in the vicinity of fortified outposts and produced or exchanged a range of goods and services required by the elite.
Some cities swelled to impressive sizes. Precise numbers for their inhabitants, however, remain elusive. Calculated estimates are frequently based on the land area within a city's limits, the number of domiciles that area contained, and the number of persons per houseВhold. Weighing these factors, scholars have offered figures ranging from thirty-six to fifty thousand for the population of Kiev at the end of the twelfth century. At either end of the scale Kiev was comparable to Paris and London, whose populations in that time were about fifty and thirty thousand, respectively. Novgorod was also a large city by those standards. Its population grew from ten to fifteen thousand in the early eleventh century to twice that size by the early thirteenth century.
City populations had a more complex social structure than their rural counterparts. At the apex of the social hierarchy was the prince himself. His military retainers formed a layer beneath him. On a par with them were the hierarchs of the church. These groups constituted the elite of Kievan Rus' society. But the prince and his retainers, whose resiВdences were in the town, and clergymen made up only a relatively small portion of the urban population. The bulk of the residents were tradesmen, artisans, and unskilled labourВers. They too were socially differentiated. Some were foreigners and held a special status. Others were members of the prince's personal household and may have been slaves. Many, however, were free small-scale traders and craftsmen. Their status was slightly higher than that of the bulk of the population, free unskilled labourers. Slaves and other dependent labourers made up the lowest social stratum. Social status was reflected in living quarВters. In Kiev the prince and metropolitan occupied palatial dwellings atop the central hill: the working population not directly attached to elite households dwelled primarily in the wooden homes in separate sections of the city, located on outlying hilltops or at the base of the bluffs in a district known as the podol or podil.
In Novgorod dwellings were set in courtyards that lined streets made of logs that had been split in half lengthwise. Their houses were also constructed from logs or timber and built on foundations or decks to protect them from the low, damp ground that was charВacteristic of the region. Refuse from the inhabitants and their livestock, which were also stalled within the courtyard, typically was simply left in the yard. To provide a relatively dry and clean surface the decaying refuse was covered with twigs; some Novgorodians built log pathways across their yards. Rich and poor lived in these conditions: the sizes of their dwellings, however, varied. The relatively large courtyards and buildings from the eleventh and twelfth centuries probably belonged to members of the social elite whose servants, including craftsmen, lived and worked on their premises.
There was little to distinguish a medieval Russian town from a village. Even the city of Moscow, which from the fifteenth century covered a vast area, as foreigners frequently testified, was largely built up on the "courtyard" principle of the village or rural estate: full of gardens, sheds and livestock (the cattle would be driven out to pasture in the country each morning, to return spontaneously to their homes for milking each evening).
In Old Russia there was scarcely any sense of town life as being qualitatively different from that of the country (save maybe in Novgorod, till its enforced decline), no sense of privileged urbanism among its inhabitants, who on the whole shared the same obligations and limitations on their rights as the peasants. The concept of city dwellers as free and self-governing, that developed early in many parts of Western Europe, and was known in Kievan Rus, was entirely foreign to Muscovy.
In ancient Russia a fortified settlement was called "gorod". Defence was the main town's function. Other settlement functions: dwelling, hunting, trade, administrative, religious were under the town's cover, it provided stability of their existence. It is not possible to raise one of the functions, for instance, handicraft or trading, to the criteria of existence or non-existence of a town. But the presence of a fortress — "grad" — is such criteria.
The structure of the ancient Russian town was made of three parts. Usually, there was a fortress on the hill near a river, lake, called grad, gorod, krom, kremnik, detinets, ostrog. Such defences once stood on top of massive earthen banks, which can usually also be seen at the centre of many medieval towns in the Russian heartland. There are still moats and banks in some places, their descriptions and pictures are in historical documents of the centuries. In Muscovite times wooden fortresses were sometimes replaced with impressive brick kremlins (e. g. at Smolensk, Novgorod, and several other places — Tula, Kolomna, etc. — guarding the southern borderland).
Outside near the main fortress gates, using the space for shooting in front of the wall, there was a trade place with stores and trade rows. Further, behind the trade place there was a settlement with yard buildings and gardens. During extension the town did not change its structure, it was just gradually corrected, became more complex: extending fortress pushed the trade place, which also became a big one, and growing settlement surrounded the trade place at all sides, stretching its streets to it. Settlements of big towns got the barriers in middle town, outskirts town, etc. Correction of growth was usually made after town fires. The above three-part structure could be found both in hundreds of small towns, such as Ryazhsk, Shuya, Rzhev, Torzhok, Mozhaysk, Volokolamsk, Izborsk and in big ones: Pskov Tver, Rostov Veliky, Suzdal, Murom, Yaroslavl and even in huge, according to medieval standards, like Moscow.
Beginning from the tenth century there was another one and the main town structural element — its main holy thing — the cathedral inside the fortress. The look of wooden tew cathedrals of the sixteenth century is almost unknown. But from the eleventh century til our time there are stone churches in many cities and towns.
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