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| - The first streltsy units were created by Ivan the Terrible sometime between 1545 and 1550 and armed with arquebuses. During his reign, Russia was fighting wars almost continuously, including the Livonian War in the North and wars against the Khanates in the South. They first saw combat at the Siege of Kazan in 1552. Initially, the streltsy were recruited from among the free tradespeople and from the rural population. Subsequently, military service in this unit became lifelong and hereditary. Thus, while earlier in the sixteenth century they had been an elite force, their effectiveness was reduced by poor training and lack of choice in recruiting.
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| abstract
| - The first streltsy units were created by Ivan the Terrible sometime between 1545 and 1550 and armed with arquebuses. During his reign, Russia was fighting wars almost continuously, including the Livonian War in the North and wars against the Khanates in the South. They first saw combat at the Siege of Kazan in 1552. Initially, the streltsy were recruited from among the free tradespeople and from the rural population. Subsequently, military service in this unit became lifelong and hereditary. Thus, while earlier in the sixteenth century they had been an elite force, their effectiveness was reduced by poor training and lack of choice in recruiting. Streltsy were subdivided into vyborniye (выборные), or electives (later – of Moscow) and gorodskiye (городские), or municipal (in different Russian cities).
* The streltsy of Moscow guarded the Kremlin, performed general guard duty, and participated in military operations. They also carried out general police and fire-brigade functions in Moscow. Grigory Kotoshikhin, a Russian diplomat who had spied for and then defected to Sweden in the 1660s, reported that they used axes and buckets and copper pumps as well as hooks to pull down adjacent buildings so that fires would not spread, but Adam Olearius, a Westerner who travelled to Russia in the seventeenth century, noted that they never used water.
* The municipal streltsy performed garrison and border duty and carried out orders of the local administration. Streltsy came under the control of the Streltsy Department (Стрелецкий приказ, or Streletsky prikaz), however, in times of war they came under their superiors. The municipal streltsy were also under the jurisdiction of the local voevodes. The largest military administrative unit of the streltsy forces was pribor (прибор), that would later be renamed into prikaz and in 1681 – into regiment (полк, or polk). Commanders of the Streltsy unit (стрелецкие головы, or streletskiye golovy) and colonels in charge of regiments were chiefs of prikazi. They had to be nobles and appointed by the government. The regiments (polki) were subdivided into sotni (сотни, or hundreds) and desyatki (десятки, or tens). They could be mounted (стремянные, or stremyanniye; стремя (stremya) in Russian means “stirrup”) and unmounted (пешие, or peshiye; пеший (peshiy) means "foot soldier").
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