New about the manufacturers of Batashevs
Even more important the impenetrable shield of Russia it acquired after the work of hundreds of thousands of peasants and working people about 1621 to 1566 years was built a large zashchaya line, stretching through the Kaluga, Tula and Ryazan land.
In zasechnyh jail-fortresses, border guards carried up to 20,000 streltsy and Cossacks, and even in Tula itself, of the four thousand people who inhabited it at the end of the 11th century, most were servicemen.
Since the border service was held in constant skirmishes with the enemy, the issue of repairing out-of-service weapons, about arming zasechnyh garrisons, was sharply raised.
The center of arms production in Russia then was the Moscow Armory Chamber, created by Ivan III in I486. In her workshops worked specialists, forging strong armor and good weapons.
To repair weapons and armor, and sometimes for the production of new sagas and beer, the Tula governors began to attract local village blacksmiths four hundred years ago. These masters had skills of blacksmithing, they could forge knives, axes of ploughshare, ooshki9 bridles, different utensils. It was not difficult for them to master the weapons business.
The development of blacksmithing was also promoted by the fact that thirty versts from Tula, near the ancient capital of Vyatichi Dedoslavl, now Dedilov, had long been lined with lumps of brown iron ore. The resulting metal was enough to satisfy the demands of all the blacksmiths of that time.
Already at the end of the 16th century, the distribution by the voevoda of lessons to the Tula blacksmiths for the restoration of the old and the manufacture of new weapons acquires a regular character.
Tuljaki already did a lot to arm musketeers and Cossacks, so Tsar Fedor freed him from special tax by special diploma and allowed them to settle separately from the townspeople.
Generously benefited the armourers and Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich father of Peter the Great. The king allowed them to have shops on the Tula bargaining near the Kremlin and buy and sell any goods duty-free.
With the advent of Peter the Great, Russia began to intensify its foreign policy aimed at fighting for its secession to the seas. To carry out these vast plans, it was necessary to have a large-scale weapons production, so the tsar, with his decree of 1694, will lead the armourers "... to live on Tula beyond the river Upya in the state blacksmith's bough."