"In the Lands of the Romanovs " Topic

"When in 1613, following the Time of Troubles, the first Romanov came to the throne of Muscovy, sixty years had elapsed since, in the words of Richard Hakluyt, "the strange and wonderful Discoverie of Russia" by the English. It was Hakluyt who gathered together in his Principal navigations, voiages, [traffiques,] and discoueries of the English nation (first published in 1589 and again in expanded form in 1598-1600) the corpus of writing left by the first English explorers, traders and diplomats for, as he further remarked, "I meddle in this worke with the Navigations onely of our owne nation".1 The accounts, beginning with that of Richard Chancellor, who survived the ill-fated expedition led by Sir Hugh Willoughby to make his way from the White Sea to Moscow for a momentous audience with Ivan IV in 1553, also include the several journeys that took Anthony Jenkinson down the Volga to Astrakhan and into Persia from 1557, as well as later embassies sent by Queen Elizabeth that produced the poetic epistles of George Turbervile, accompanying ambassador Thomas Randolph in 1568, with their characterization of the Muscovites as "a people passing rude, to vice vile inclin' d", and the no less damning appraisal by Giles Fletcher in his Of the Russe commonwealth (1591) that the Muscovy Company, fearing it would harm the all important trading privileges, scrambled to suppress and Hakluyt was careful to edit (as he had also done with Turbervile)…."
Main page
books.openedition.org/obp/2355

Amicalement
Armand