Crown sable
Crown sables are the best sable skins of a catch to be delivered as a tribute to the tsar (Jassak, Yassak or Iassak) or the sable skins or fur then given away by the Russian crown to foreign dignitaries.
From this, the top quality Siberian sable skins are still referred to as crown sable. The best origins are the Bargusinski from the Bargus Mountains , the foothills of the Jablonowy Mountains , the river basins of the Oljokma and the Witim . The color of the sable is called " water " in tobacco industry circles . The fine silky, soft, blue-gray undercoat of the so-called crown sable should be as dark as possible, almost black, and the isolated silvery awns should be distributed as evenly as possible in the middle of the dark awning hairs.
Tobacco retailer Emil Brass made a surprisingly different assessment of the crown sable skin : “The name Kronenzobel for the finest sable skins is written from this period, as the best skins made from these tribute skins were reserved for the crown. The name was wrong, however, because even if the skins intended for the crown were originally the best in the district, they passed through so many hands that on arrival at the Siberian chancellery in Moscow only very inferior skins arrived, and if for If the members of the imperial family were to make something out of sable skins, they had to be bought from the court furrier. "
For general sable skins see the main article → Sable fur .
Sable at the Tsar's court
In the tsar's Siberian chancellery “Sibirski Prikas”, the incoming skins were sorted, some went to free trade, another part to the crown trade and a further part went to court skinning for personal use. P. 116 There, the classic Russian court robes of both sexes, made of valuable fabrics, were lavishly decorated and trimmed with sable.
The crowns of the Russian tsars had a border made of sable, the Vladimir crown, the cap of Monomakh (among others the crown of Peter the Great ) and the Alexievitsch crown. The Siberian crown makes an exception, where every skin had to be delivered to the Russian conquerors.
At a ball at the Tsar's court in 1903, the participants appeared in classic Russian costumes. Dozens of the received photos of the guests show trimmings and hats made of sable fur:
Olga And. Golenischeva-Kutuzova
Nik. Dm. Obolensky
Nad. Serg. Timasheva
Alex. Petr. Strukov
Did. Mikh. Gagarina
Kronenzobel - tribute to the tsar, the Jassak
- Delivery of the yassak in sable skins
.jpg)
_paid_at_Siberian_Ostrog.jpg)
The Jassak is “ a tax in the Russian Empire, which wandering u. nomadic foreign tribe members, so-called inornces, mostly paid in the skins of different animals. It is carried out by the Mughals of the Perm Governorate, the Samoyed of the Arkhangelsk Governorate , the Kyrgyz in Siberia, the other Siberian foreign tribesmen, from whom he is collected for the emperor's cabinet, and the Chukchi. “At first the tribute to the crown consisted only of sable, later other types of fur were added. P. 117
Apparently the Jassak already had an old tradition. The Tatars already had to pay it, a little further south the Chinese and Mongols also used to collect the Jassak.
Sultan Etiger showed his loyalty to neighboring Russia by undertaking to voluntarily send thousands of sable skins to Moscow every year, in addition to other types of fur.
The Yassak was raised in different ways by the Russians. Either a whole yurt had to deliver a certain number of skins, or a whole company, but also for the individual persons. It was not uncommon for an individual to sell ten, twenty, and sometimes more sable hides per season. That was the equivalent of one hundred to two hundred or more rubles at the time.
These excesses meant that the indigenous people were less and less willing to voluntarily pay the tribute. When the Cossacks, disreputed by their evil methods, came, they disappeared into the endless taiga, hid in the caves in the mountains or elsewhere, so that the tax collectors sometimes had to withdraw without having achieved anything. The more bellicose southern tribes even more frequently resisted the levy by force of arms. P. 84
In principle, all fur hunters were required to deliver the tenth part of their hunting results to Felzwerk to the crown. The expeditions were therefore often accompanied by Cossacks, who had the right to collect the tribute from the indigenous population and from the hunters a tenth of everything that they had hunted or traded.
Catherine II tried to organize her huge empire better and more systematically and to abolish evils; so she also initiated new rules for the delivery of the yassak. Now it was no longer an individual who had to raise the jassak, but the whole camp, the whole tribe, or a certain amount was fixed for a family. Where the overexploitation was already too far advanced, the yassak was completely abolished, in its place there was a levy in money. In parts of Siberia this happened early (1626), in the more northern and eastern areas and on the coast later.
Crown sable - gift and currency of the tsars
The yassak, the tribute to the fur of the indigenous people of Siberia, has long played a significant role in the finances of the Russian crown. Even in 1940 it still says: “ With this tribute to fur, the Russian state still paid considerable parts of the imports from abroad, just as it was the case centuries ago when this was raised by the Prince of Kiev and his war retinue and at the same time served to 'feed Russia's foreign trade' ”.
Around 1594, for example, Tsar Boris Godunov sent 40,360 sable skins worth 28,907 rubles to Emperor Rudolf II of Habsburg in support of the preparations for a war with Turkey. These included 120 sable hides that were " so precious that no one could determine their value ".
In many cases, valuable fur was given away to foreign potentates, for example to the Khan of the Crimea, the Persian princes and others. Emperor Maximilian was presented with sable skins, as was Queen Elizabeth I of England .
On the other hand, in the Middle Ages, sable clothing was often reserved for the upper class in the countries that received gifts. Under Edward IV's particularly extensive dress code, only members of the nobility were allowed to wear sable in England.
Kronenzobel today
.jpg)
Not only Elizabeth I received her crown sobel from the tsar, Elizabeth II was also given it as a present from the now Soviet government, from Bulganin and Khrushchev . Soraya , the then bride of the Shah of Persia, received a sable fur from the Soviet leader Josef Stalin for the wedding. According to the English Sunday newspaper Sunday-Express , the fur should contribute to further warming of Persian-Russian relations.
The planned economy of the Soviet Union regulated the sable trade far more restrictively than the tsars; The entire export of tobacco products was handled by the state-owned trading company Sujuzpushnina until liberalization in the early 1990s . In 2003, the company and the auction house were finally privatized.
Sable is still the most highly rated fur type . Furs made from the finest hides are still often touted today as crown sables, even if there has been no Russian crown since 1918. In 1959, in Leningrad, a batch of Bargusin sables was sold to a New York company for $ 719 each. In April 2011, the Topbund Bargusinski went to an English tobacco retailer who bought it for a Russian company. The fur price was $ 9,100, with an average sable price at this auction of $ 164.18. As a rule, however, such a lace bundle of fur consists of a maximum of fifty pelts, for which the bid is so high for reasons of prestige. As the average price shows, the remaining product ranges are much lower in price.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Emil Brass: From the realm of fur . Publishing house of the "Neue Pelzwaren-Zeitung and Kürschner-Zeitung", Berlin 1911, p. 479.
- ↑ a b c d Reinhold Stephan: On the history of tobacco goods trade in antiquity and the Middle Ages and the development of the Russian-Asian region from 16.-18. Century . Inaugural dissertation. University of Cologne, 1940, p. 81. Table of contents . Primary sources N. Witsen: Noord-en Ost tartaije . Amsterdam 1705, p. 112, vol. I; Bruno Kuske: The global economic beginnings of Siberia and its neighboring areas from the 16th to the 18th century. P. 89, Art. II; Carl Ritter: Geography in relation to nature and human history or general comparative geography as a reliable basis for studying and teaching physical and historical sciences . Berlin 1822-1859, XIV vol, p. 613, vol. II. In: Schmollers Jahrbuch. Volume 46, Volume II, Munich and Leipzig 1922, Article I, pp. 201–250, Article II, pp. 85–116.
- ^ Marie Louise Steinbauer , Rudolf Kinzel: Fur. Steinbock Verlag, Hannover 1973, p. 58.
- ^ Pierer's Universal Lexicon. Volume 8, Altenburg 1859, p. 759.
- ↑ Reinhold Stephan (see there), p. 69. Primary source J. Semjanow: Die Eroberung Sibiriens . Berlin 1973, pp. 50-51.
- ↑ Reinhold Stephan (see there), p. 81. Primary source Gustav Krahmer : Russia in Asia . Volume II, Siberia and the great Siberian railroad . Leipzig 1900, and Volume V, The Northeastern Coastal Area , Leipzig 1902, p. 211.
- ↑ Gustav Krahmer (see there), Vol. V, p. 212.
- ↑ Stephan (see there), p. 115. Primary source (subcitation) Kljutschewski: Textbook of Russian history. IV volumes. Berlin 1925. (German edition)
- ^ Christian Franke, Johanna Kroll: Jury Fränkel's Rauchwaren-Handbuch 1988/89 . 10th, revised and supplemented new edition. Rifra-Verlag, Murrhardt, pp. 49-53.
- ↑ Jos. Klein: The Siberian fur trade and its importance for the conquest of Siberia . Inaugural dissertation to obtain a doctorate from the Rheinische Friedrich-Humboldt-Universität Bonn. 1900, p. 38 and 189 Table I.
- ↑ Reinhold Stephan: On the history of the tobacco trade in antiquity and the Middle Ages and the development of the Russian-Asian region from 16.-18. Century . Inaugural dissertation. University of Cologne, 1940, p. 116. Primary source Juri Semjanow: The conquest of Siberia. Berlin 1937, p. 495.
- ↑ Elizabeth Ewing: Fur in Dress . BT Batsford, London 1981, ISBN 0-7134-1741-2 , p. 50.
- ↑ Soraja Esfandjari. In: Der Spiegel. January 1951.
- ↑ Bernhard Grzimek: The Tsar's noble sable. In: All about fur. December 1963, pp. 48-50.
- ↑ Sojuzpushnina homepage accessed on February 3, 2011.
- ↑ Vladimir Pavlinin: The sable . A. Ziemsen Verlag, Wittenberg 1966, pp. 1-4.
- ^ Fur market . German Fur Association, Frankfurt am Main, May 2011, p. 3.
