Russian bayors

The coats-of-arms granted by the kings of Sweden almost invariably allude to military prowess and tend to include weaponry which was regarded as 'Muscovite' (sabres, bows and arrows, maces; sometimes ‘tamed’ or ‘Swedicised’ by the crown within which they are crossed), mounted warriors and ‘northern’ animals.

[2] During the seventeenth century, most of the bayor families were closely associated with the province of Ingria, where they were supposed to constitute a part of the ruling class that might be more acceptable to the Orthodox, to a large extent Russian, population than was the Lutheran Swedish and German nobility.

[3] This fact led to nearly full integration into the Swedish nobility by the end of the seventeenth century, although at home, and especially among the women, Orthodoxy and syncreticism may still have been fairly widespread.

The bayor families practiced endogamy to a large extent in the 17th century, which might have allowed Russian traditions to live on ‘at home’ but show increasingly less outwardly.

)[3] A measure of their integration with Sweden may be had from a glance at the considerable number of officers from the bayor families who fought in the Swedish armies during the Great Northern War (1700–1721), mainly on the Baltic front[citation needed] Notice that the Nassokins and Baranoffs derived from an earlier, pre-Ingrian, layer of bayors and had for all practical purposes lost their Russian cultural identity,[citation needed] living, as they did, in Livonia and Finland; the Swedish Rosladins, the Butterlins and the Zebotaioffs of the name were already extinct on the male line at the time.