Pomore

(Pomorskie Goroda), in the 15th-17th centuries, the name of the administrative area that included the shores of the White Sea and Lake Onega, as well as the valleys of the Onega, Severnaia Dvina, Mezen’, Pechora, Kama, and Viatka rivers, up to the Urals. The indigenous population of the Pomor’e consisted primarily of Karelians, Komi, and Lapps. By the 17th century, these groups had been partly assimilated by Russian settlers, who had begun to colonize the region in the 12th century.

A vast area controlled by the Novgorod Feudal Republic from the 12th to 15th centuries, the Pomor’e was united with Moscow in the early 16th century. In the 17th century most of the population of the 22 districts in the Pomer’e were free peasants. Some of the land was owned by monasteries and by the Stroganovs, a merchant family, but there were no pomest’ia (fiefs) in the region. The population of the northern districts engaged in fishing and in mining mica and salt (for example, at Sol’-Kamskaia, Sol’-Vychegodsk, and Tot’ma). Metallurgy was well developed in Karelia. Intensive trade with foreign merchants began in the mid-16th century at the mouth of the Severnaia Dvina and was centered in Arkhangel’sk by the end of the century. Land cultivation was well developed in the southern districts of the Pomor’e.