ABSTRACT
Western textbooks have still not completely escaped from the habit of treating the history of Russia before Peter the Great as a minor appendix to the more significant affairs of Jülich-Cleves or Pinerolo. As for the Turks, though they are well known as a ‘menace’ to Europe proper, their internal regime and society tend to be seen as an Asiatic phenomenon unrelated to the development of civilized countries. Yet whatever the boundaries of the continents are taken to be, tsar and sultan between them claimed something like half Europe as their territories. Eastern empires were experiencing on a larger scale than the west the same conflicts in the establishment of a unified and centralized state. The power of landowners, administrators, and armies, the impact of Churches, and the threat of famine were fundamental in the life of communities; the ancestry of Byzantium and hence of Rome was a hazy background. Russia by the end of the century was beyond doubt a monarchy in the western style, and a part of the European international entanglement. The Ottoman Empire was in a period of retreat; but there was no reason to doubt that it would recover as it had before. The rulers of both countries had achieved more successfully than any of their western counterparts the universal aim of applying their resources to military power. There are many difficulties in the way of making the comparisons as enlightening as they ought to be. Barriers of language and accessibility still make the work of Russian historians slow to penetrate to the west; and in both Empires the seventeenth century left a limited range of surviving sources. Too many questions will have to go unasked.
