The beard tax
1698 · Event
Home from Europe, Peter greets his boyars by taking a razor to their beards with his own hands — and then makes it policy: beards, the mark of Orthodox manhood, are taxed, with a copper token as receipt reading 'the beard is a superfluous burden'. Absurd on its face, it is the reform programme in miniature: the old Russia will be shaved into the new, by decree.
On these timelines: Peter the Great's Revolution, Russia & the USSR, Master, Economic History
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- Battle of Poltava (1709)
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- Grand Embassy of Peter the Great (1697)
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Around 1698
- Salem witch trials (1692)
- Jacobite rising of 1745 (1745)
- Great Plague of London (1665)
- Siege of Vienna (1683) (1683)
- Glorious Revolution (1688)
- Newton's Principia Mathematica (1687)
- Walpole's premiership (1721)
- Peace of Westphalia (1648)
- Peter the Great (1672)
- English Bill of Rights (1689)