The Northern Wars: War, State and Society in Northeastern Europe, 1558-1721 by Robert I. s> Frost (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 747 very first, treated as hereditary, were ceded in the expectation that the beneficiarieswould be absentees, and were even, indeed, awardedin the first instance to women. As Ostrowskisuggests, the distinction maintained in the historicalliteraturebetween pomest'e and votchina estates was blurredfrom the very start of the pomest'e's institutional inception in the second half of the fifteenthcentury. There is, however, much which Ostrowski'ssynopsis of individual grants does not elucidate. If these grants of estate were, indeed, ceded in exchange for service, then why were the termsof serviceso seldom laid?If the nature of service was by the late fifteenth century customary and so not needing any detailed elaboration, then this surely presupposes that notions of obligation and of reciprocity of rights were already comprehended in social practice. Likewise,none of the thirty-sixgrantsgiven here clarifyissuesof inheritance. Individual estates might thus (and repeatedly) be ceded to a father and his sons without any furtherdiscussion of the terms of its descent. Others might specify that the lands involved be retained within the family, or, should the beneficiary be a widow, that her lands would devolve to her son in the event of her remarriage. Escheat to the ruler likewise mainly occurred when the originalbeneficiaryhad no male descendantsto whom the propertymight be passed. All this suggests that notions of collective ownership by the clan, kindred or male line attended grants of pomest'eholdings, and that the beneficiaryof such service-holdings(ifsuch they reallywere)was not so much the individualpomeshchik as the largerfamily-groupin which he had his place. Ostrowskidoes not confront these issues.Instead, he appeals to the idea of the state as the principalactor and conceives of thepomest'e as the productof a 'shiftingof responsibility'on the part of a centralizedregime. In one place, he even converts the Muscovite administrationinto some sort of collective farm or MTS. As he remarks, 'Pomeshchiki. . . would pass the potyagloon to local officialsand have theirlivelihood, arms,etc suppliedby the local oklad' (p. 6o). This surely requires a degree of organization, social discipline and recordkeeping beyond most early sixteenth-century kingdoms, let alone what we know of contemporaryMuscovy. In short, in order to understandthepomest'e we should probably abandon the vocabulary of the state and look instead at kindreds,at custom, and at the formsof organizationwhich may prevailin the absence of a modern administration. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies MARTYNRADY University College London Frost,Robert I. TheNorthern Wars.War,StateandSociety inNortheastern Europe, i558-I721. Longman, Harlow, 2000. Xiii + 401 pp. Maps. Plans.Tables. Appendices. Bibliography.Index. Cig.99. THEnorthernwarsof Dr Frost'ssplendidnew book range acrossa vast swathe of territorybetween the White and the BlackSeas, with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as the epicentre. Previous histories in English of the period, most notably those of Michael Roberts, have focused theirattention upon the rise (and decline) of Sweden under the Vasas. Dr Frost'sbook offers a fresh 748 SEER, 79, 4, 2001 new perspective for those of us more used to viewing the battlefieldfrom the Swedishlines, and it mounts a vigorous challenge to a number of deep-rooted attitudesabout Poland-Lithuania.It is 'the traditionwhich presents the Poles as militaryDon Quixotes, and reduces Polish militaryhistory to the hopeless attack on Wellington's guns at Somosierra in I8o8 and legends about Polish cavalry charging German tanksin I939' (p. 17) that the author is concerned to rebut. He argues that, far from being a ramshackle,ungovernable land of factious magnates, the Polish-LithuanianCommonwealth was able to sustain a tremendous militaryburden and to devise flexible and imaginative ways of dealing with this. The belief that backwardnessand an inability to adapt to new developments in warfareled to Poland'smilitarydecline is belied by the plentifulevidence of active Polishinvolvement in the studyof militarytheory, and of the adaption of new methods and technology under John Sobieski. Nevertheless,the armycommand remainedfirmlyin the handsof those whose experience was limited to the cavalry, and in spite of reforms, the core of professionalswithin thearmyremainedsmall.In an age ofprofessionalization, the cherished ideal of the noble-dominated citizen army was no longer adequate, leading Frost to conclude that the explanation of the military decline of the Commonwealth lies more in itspolitical and culturallife than in an inabilityto keep up with the developments...