Territorial and administrative division of the left bank of the Volga River (side of Prince Fedor Borisovich) of the Rzheva Volodimerova district in the first quarter of the XVII century.: application of GIS technologies.

Abstract

The object of the study is the volosts and camps of the left bank of the Volga River (half of Prince Fyodor Borisovich) of the Rzhev Volodimerov district in the first quarter of the XVII century. The main source in this work is the scribal and boundary book of Rzheva Volodimerova "Prince Fedorov's sides of Borisovich" letters and measures of Leonty Skobeltsyn and the clerk Makar Chukarin 1624-1625. In total, the source provides information on 2,691 toponyms. The subject of the study included the localization and characteristics of the geography of the volosts, the allocation of "assigned" ones from other counties among them, the identification of the causes and chronology of their entry into the Rzhev Volodimerov county, the study of the dynamics of the development of the territory of the county from the end of the XV century to the 1620s. The work was carried out using geoinformation technologies based on the methodology of localization of toponyms of scribal description with using sources of the XVIII-XIX centuries. The use of geoinformation technologies in the work on the continuous localization of toponyms of the scribal description of the county allowed us to get a more detailed idea of the location of the administrative boundaries of volosts and camps. Such a feature of the territorial organization of the county as the interlaced location of the lands of a number of volosts and camps has been revealed. The vagueness of some internal boundaries of the county is a reflection of the instability of its territorial organization, due to the dynamics of population and land ownership during the XVI-XVII centuries. Among the causes of this phenomenon are border conflicts, oprichnina, and ruin during the period of Troubles. The work with the assembly material allowed us to establish the key role of the oprichnina in increasing the size of the territory of the county in the second half of the XVI century. Thus, the results obtained became the basis not only for clarifying the boundaries of the county of the XVII century, but also for their formation in historical dynamics during the late XV – XVI centuries.