Kizhskii pogost — Demidova Kartasheva — can be an illustration. In this vil- lage of 23 soldiers, fixed in 1657 only 7 lived till 1678. Besides, two soldiers marked by Divov to be fugitives, in 1678 lived in their own homesteads again. So, destinies of Karelian ploughmen soldiers can be studied in the period after the abolition of the soldiers' service because some peasants that served in the regiments lived till the Census of 1678. As a result, it is possible to follow the dynamics of change in the lives of the Karelian peasants from 1646 to 1678: place of residence and its change, family structure, social status, positions, rela- tion to the soldier's service, place of service, participation in the wars with Po- land and Sweden, relationships with relatives, neighbors and the authorities. Thus, the benefits of collecting and keeping prosopographical information in the electronic database are obvious, and when the database is filled with a sufficient number of cards for soldiers and their relatives, it will be possible to summarize and analyze collected information and make a convincing recon- struction of Karelian ploughmen soldiers’ destinies. Kimmo Katajala University of Eastern Finland Studying Noble and Gentry of Käkisalmi province and Ingria dur- ing the Swedish period (17th century) 1. Background: The Great Reduction of 1680 Following Russia’s ceding of the territories of Ingria and the province of Käkisalmi (Kexholm) to Sweden under the treaty of Stolbova (1617), most of the available lands in these areas, as in many other parts of Sweden, were given as fiefs, or donations, to members of the nobility or gentry serving the Swedish Crown in the course of the 1630s, and especially during the reign of Queen Christina in the 1640s and 1650s. These dignitaries usually built manor houses for themselves on their newly acquired estates, although in the case of the north- ern parts of the province of Käkisalmi they did not actually live there but in Stockholm, Riga or one of the other large cities of that era, leaving the manor houses in the hands of bailiffs. The holder of a fief was entitled to collect taxes from the peasants living on his land, although in principle the donation did not give him any other rights over the peasant farms or over the persons of the peasants themselves. During the 1660s and 1670s, however, the nobility tried to expand their powers to in- clude rights of possession over the peasants living on their fiefs, and in spite of the fact that their appeals were rejected by the Diet of 1672 and opposed espe- cially by the young King Charles XI, some of the manorial barons would treat their peasants extremely harshly. Actual serfdom was never practised in the Kingdom of Sweden, however. 82 The vast fiefdoms awarded to the nobility and the gentry nevertheless meant that the peasants concerned were paying their taxes to their manorial landlords and not to the Crown, plunging the latter into a series of serious eco- nomic crises. The problem was eventually solved at the Diet of 1680, by confis- cating the largest donations of land and re-establishing them as Crown property. This operation, known in the historical literature as the Great Reduction, meant that the peasants began to pay their taxes to the Crown once more, providing it with the necessary incomes. In practise, many of the confiscated manor houses continued to be leased to officers and civil servants as residences, often the same people who had previously owned them. 2. Tax farming — a solution for taxing the Baltic provinces In the case of the “Baltic provinces” (Sw. Östersjöprovinserna), i.e. Livo- nia, the territories of Estonia, Ingria and the province of Käkisalmi, the Crown arrived at a somewhat different solution after the Great Reduction, in that the manors and fiefdoms confiscated by the Crown after the decision of 1680 were rented to “tax farmers”. Tax farming was a system that had already existed in ancient times whereby a person paid a certain rent to the Crown for the right to collect and use the taxes paid by the peasants. In practice, many tax farmers ruled over their rented areas just as the nobility and gentry had done over their estates before the Reduction. The peasants themselves usually hated the tax farming system, as the tax farmers tried to benefit from their rented areas as much as possible, which meant adopting a strict attitude towards tax collecting and demanding day labour from the peasants. This paper will examine the people who acted as tax farmers in Ingria and the province of Käkisalmi between the years 1680 and 1700. The latter date marks the beginning of the Great Northern War, during which Russia re- captured Ingria in 1703 and the southern part of the province of Käkisalmi in 1710, both of which were annexed to the Russian Empire under the Treaty of Uusikaupunki (Nystad) in 1721. In the northern parts of the province of Käkis- almi, which remained in Swedish possession, the tax farming system also came to an end after the war. The idea of this paper is to see what kind of data can be found concerning individual tax farmers and what we can say about them as a group. As almost all the people in the upper echelons of society in Käkisalmi and Ingria ended up as tax farmers after the Great Reduction for one reason or another, studying these gives us at the same time a certain amount of information about the life of the nobility and gentry in these areas. The paper will end with an example of the social networks that can be traced from the bibliographic data concerning the tax farmers. In this way prosopographical details can be turned into social history. The work is based on my own study of tax farmers and the tax farming sys- tem in the province Käkisalmi, entitled Säätyläisiä ja nousukkaita (Gentry and 83 Upstarts) and on the master’s thesis of a student of mine, Tiina Karjunen, on tax farmers in Ingria. 3. Sources: collecting the bibliographic data The main source for tracing the tax farmers consisted of the contracts they made with the Crown, which are archived with the Crown’s provincial account books (verification books). These contracts indicate the names of the tax farmers and sometimes their professions, including the ranks of military officers and civ- il servants. Sometimes it is mentioned that the tax farmer had served as the bail- iff of a fief prior to the Reduction, either the one he was later renting, or a dif- ferent one. It is evident, however, that not all the tax farming contracts have been preserved in the Crown’s accounts, but in most cases the "missing" tax farmers can be found from the annual financial statements in the provincial ac- counts, which mention the incomes accruing to the Crown from tax farmers and the names of the individuals concerned. In some cases names of tax farmers that are unfamiliar can be found in the records of the local court. The coverage of the source material is not perhaps entirely complete, but it must be very nearly so. This basic database of tax farmers was complemented with the data on the social status or rank of each tax farmer, his or her years of birth and death (in special cases women sometimes entered into such contracts), their social back- ground, i.e. the social status of their parents and the origins of their family, their marriages and children, and sometimes even the marriages of their children. In- formation is also provided on the size of the rented area or fief and the duration of the lease, if applicable. It was possible to collect all these data items with re- gard to most of the tax farmers, but not all, as there are some for whom we know only their name and title as given in the contract or in the court records. These biographical data were gathered into a register of tax farmers, which constituted the starting point for the research proper. 4. Bailiffs and officers in the Käkisalmi province We can now take a glimpse at the tax farmers of Käkisalmi and Ingria, their professions and their geographical backgrounds. There were 56 tax farmers in the province of Käkisalmi for whom the social status could be ascertained, 15 of whom (27%) had been bailiffs before the Reduction, some of them on the same lands prior to confiscation by the Crown, while others had moved and rented a different, perhaps more suitable, confiscated fief. In a certain sense, however, they were just continuing in the same profession as before: taking care of the manor and its fields and cattle and collecting taxes from the peasants. Previously they had done this for the holder of the fief, but now they were working inde- pendently as tax farmers. In effect, some owners of fiefs had rented them out to tax farmers even before the Reduction, so that six persons recorded as tax farm- ers (11%) had simply continued in this capacity under a new contract concluded with the Crown. These two groups, the former bailiffs and former tax farmers, 84 had made a contract with the Crown in order to earn an independent living. Thus running an estate and collecting its taxes was the principal occupation of 38% of the tax farmers in the province of Käkisalmi. The next most common group of Käkisalmi tax farmers after the former bailiffs comprised military officers, of whom there were 13 (23% of the total). This high proportion can be explained by the fact that the Swedish Crown had permanent military detachments garrisoned in the town of Käkisalmi (known as Korela in the 16th century and nowadays the Russian town of Priozersk) and their officers had to have a residence that was fitting for their social rank, for which the manor houses, larger or smaller, that were now available for them to rent from the Crown as tax farmers were highly suitable.