Oleg Rusakovskiy (Gerda Henkel Fellow, Oct ‘24 – Jul ‘25) will present his research on:

History Mercenaries in the Tsar’s Service: Muscovy and European Military Entrepreneurship, 1630 – 1634

on 07 November 2024 (Thursday), at 16:30.

Moderated by: Stefan Peychev

Abstract: The project aims to investigate the interaction between the state of Muscovy and the foreign military enterprisers in the 17thcentury, particularly, on behalf of a case study on the four mercenary regiments, serving in the Russian army during the Smolensk War from 1632 to 1634. This was the largest and the best-documented employment of large mercenary units, consisting completely of foreigners, in Early Modern Russian history. The presentation explores the significance of the case in the context of the army reforms and state-building in 17th-century Russia questioning the state-centered narrative still dominant in studies on Russian military history. The mercenaries’ employment of the 1630s demonstrates that the central government of Muscovy was willing to cooperate with foreign military commanders granting them sufficient administrative, legal, and financial independence, but also with bankers, arms traders, and merchants abroad actively playing on the market of European military service. During the presentation, I will discuss the theoretical and methodological framework of this study and also present my work on the database of European mercenary officers, who served the Russian tsar during the Smolensk War, as the main analytical tool to reconstruct their collective biographies.