Evgeny Vladimirovich Pchelov,
Candidate of Historical Sciences, Russian State University for the Humanities; S.I. Vavilov Institute for the History of Science and Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia, e‑mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
City Heraldry of the Russian Empire as a Source on the History of the Metallurgical Industry and Blacksmithing: 1720s – the First Half of the 19th Century
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2023-5-3
The territorial and city heraldry of Russia of the 16th – the beginning of the 20th century presents an encyclopedia of Russian geography, nature (animal and plant world) and economy, including agriculture, trade, crafts and industry. It reflects almost every sphere of economic life of the inhabitants of the Russian Empire. Handicraft and industrial production is represented in more than 40 city coats of arms out of a total of more than 700, which is about six percent. Among such coats of arms, an important place belongs to those reflecting mining, metallurgical industry, and metalworking. The purpose of this article is to consider the evolution of this complex of coats of arms, their relationship with the real history of industry at this time and in these regions, as well as the analysis of those emblematic and pictorial ways in which these branches of economic activity were embodied in coats of arms. The main complex of city coats of arms with “metallurgical” semantics was made at the turn of the 1770s and 1780s. However, the very first coats of arms of this type were developed back in the 1720s (the coats of arms of Tomsk and Tula). The following periods in the history of such coats of arms date back to the beginning and the first half of the 19th century. The coats of arms very accurately corresponded to the real industrial situation in these regions. The creation and development of factory enterprises, and the intensity of their activities were reflected in heraldry in the most active and direct way possible. The coats of arms were marked with all the main areas of mining exploration, metallurgical industry and metalworking crafts, ranging from traditional (Tula region, Russian North, etc.) to the newest at the time. To symbolize these areas of activity, a wide range of emblematic images were used, which were practically never repeated and gave each coat of arms a purely individual character. This demonstrates the wide possibilities of Russian heraldry, which used different symbols to express the same type or the same phenomena. The color scheme of the coats of arms, in which red and green were dominant in the second half of the 18th century, also had a deep symbolic significance. The general trend in the development of “mining and metallurgical” emblematics was a gradual evolution from the more pronounced symbolic forms to a visual image that brought the coat of arms closer to an almost full-scale drawing.
Publishing: 28/10/2023
The article has been received by the editor on 18/03/2023
How to cite: Pchelov E.V. City Heraldry of the Russian Empire as a Source on the History of the Metallurgical Industry and Blacksmithing: 1720s – the First Half of the 19th Century // Historical Courier, 2023, No. 5 (31), pp. 56–70. [Available online: http://istkurier.ru/data/2023/ISTKURIER-2023-5-03.pdf]
Links: Issue 5 2023
Keywords: heraldry; city coat of arms; mining; metallurgy; blacksmithing