Sublime

Vladimir Ulyanov,

Muscovy’s struggle to transform itself into a dynastic regime able to absorb the North Russian states, resist Poland–Lithuania and overawe the Volga khanates marked a decisive phase in the eventual emergence of Russia as the engine of Europe’s expansion into Northern Eurasia.

Un officier de rang plus élevé, qui avait commencé sa carrière dans le renseignement à Dresde, en Allemagne de l’Est, une fois rapatrié en catastrophe puisqu’il n’y avait plus d’Allemagne de l’Est se retrouvait sans emploi, sans logement de fonction, réduit à faire le taxi sauvage dans sa ville natale, Leningrad, en maudissant les « nouveaux Russes

functionary

territorial acquisitions swelled the taxable resources of the empire, allowing Peter to triple his revenues, while adding the Estland and the Ukraine to Muscovite Russia almost doubled its productive capacity.71 Like the Spanish conquistas in the New World, therefore, Russian expansion fed on itself, fuelled by the windfall gains of conquest.

Until well into the seventeenth century, the Ottoman sultans balanced their dependence on the political and military service of the Turkish aristocracy by recruiting a slave army of Muslim converts (perhaps seven or eight thousand a year) separated in childhood from their Christian parents. Devshirme recruitment obliterated the ties of kinship and