Service Conditions
The Muscovite government was chronically short of cash and so did not often pay the streltsy well. While "entitled" to something like four rubles a year in the 1550s, they were often allowed to farm or trade in order to supplement their incomes. This reduced their combat effectiveness and often their desire to go on campaigns (since a season on campaign meant loss of income). Streltsy and their families lived in their own neighborhoods or districts settlements and received money and bread from the State Treasury. In certain locations, Streltsy were granted strips of land instead of money. The Streltsy settlement in Moscow was located near where the main campus of Moscow State University now stands.
Read more about this topic: Streltsy
Famous quotes containing the words service and/or conditions:
“The service a man renders his friend is trivial and selfish, compared with the service he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also. Compared with that good-will I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The worst of my actions or conditions seem not so ugly unto me as I find it both ugly and base not to dare to avouch for them.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)