From roughly the mid-fifteenth century, a centralized monarchy developed in the Moscow region of the Russian lands, and the building of the Russian service state got underway. Critical to the monarchy's accumulation of powers was the linking of noble status, including the possession of land and serfs, with service to the prince. Although a core of great noble families held patrimonial lands in hereditary tenure, the majority of nobles possessed landed estates on condition of service. By the mid-sixteenth century, all nobles, including holders of patrimony, performed obligatory service and, following the conquest of the khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan, and Siberia, Muscovy joined the ranks of the world's multiethnic, multiconfessional empires.

The process of political centralization, military consolidation, and imperial expansion came to a temporary halt due to Tsar Ivan IV's reign of terror (the notorious oprichnina of 1565-1572) and the biological demise of the dynasty in 1598. A period of civil war, social rebellion, and foreign occupation known as the “Time of Troubles” ensued. Order returned after 1613, when the “election” of a new tsar, Mikhail Romanov (r. 1613-1645), ended the troubles and inaugurated a period of institutional restoration and modern state-building. In the reign of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich (r. 1645-1676), the Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649 codified serfdom, the social ranks of Muscovite society, and the tsardom's legal-administrative apparatus. Throughout Russia's age of serfdom, until the emancipation of 1861, the Law Code provided the starting point for much of the legislation that defined the relationship between social status and military service.

Alongside a centralized bureaucracy and legally defined social groups, seventeenth-century Muscovy also produced a European-style military. Reform began between the 1630s and 1660s with the introduction of new-model infantry and cavalry regiments, large-scale conscription levies, and lifelong service, all of which constituted significant steps toward the formation of a regular standing army.1 The acquisition of Left Bank Ukraine and the city of Kiev in the period 1654-1667 revealed that Muscovy had indeed achieved a degree of military effectiveness. Still, the process of reform remained tentative and the monarchy's military capacity limited. The inability to sustain combat operations in distant theaters, illustrated by the failed Crimean campaigns of 1687 and 1689, led to a flood of innovation in the reign of Tsar Peter I (r. 1682/9-1725).