Notes on Muscovite Affairs (Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii) (1549) was a Latin book by Baron Sigismund von Herberstein on the geography, history and customs of the Grand Duchy of Muscovy. The book was the main early source of knowledge about Russia in Western Europe.
Herberstein was an Austrian diplomat who was twice sent to Russia as Austrian ambassador, in 1517 and 1526. Born in Vipava (German Wippach), Carniola, he was familiar with Slovene, which became important later on his mission in Russia, when he was able to communicate with ordinary Russians as Slovene and Russian are both Slavic languages.
These visits occurred at a time when very little was known about Russia outside the region. The few published descriptions of Russia were in some cases wildly inaccurate.
Muscovy in the 16th century was one of the Russian states which emerged after the collapse of Kievan Rus' under pressure from the Golden Horde. Beginning in the late 15th Century, the Princes of Muscovy began asserting their claim as the sole inheritor of the legacy of Kievan Rus'. Muscovy would annex many of the other Russian principalities and would evolve into the Russian Empire under Peter the Great starting at the end of the 17th century. Russia was the region, Muscovy was the state until it no longer included just Moscow. Muscovy was then ruled by the Muscovite monarchy, starting with Ivan III (1462–1505), who expanded Muscovy, and ending with Ivan IV, who claimed the title "Tsar of Russia".
In this article, Russia and Muscovy are treated as similar entities. In land area there is not much difference between Muscovy and Russia west of the Ural Mountains. Herberstein wrote about Muscovy (region based on Moscow) because that is what it was known as in the West then. We know the area as Russia, so that is how it is referred to here.
Herberstein developed a keen interest in all things Russian, and researched in several ways:
As a result, Herberstein was able to produce the first detailed eyewitness ethnography of Russia, encyclopedic in its scope, providing a view that was very accurate for the time of trade, religion, customs, politics, history and even a theory of Russian political culture.
The book contributed greatly to a European view held for several centuries of Russia as a despotic absolute monarchy. That view was not new, but previous writers had presented an idealized view. Herberstein influenced the development of his view in two ways:
His investigations made it clear that Muscovy, contrary to the view of fanatical loyalty, had suffered a violent political struggle and that Muscovy had emerged only very recently as the dominant power in the region. Besides the man who achieved the unification of Muscovy, Ivan III was characterized by Herberstein as a cruel tyrant, drunk, and a misogynist, far from being a ruler of great fairness and equity.
His description of Ivan's unification campaign was a series of banishments and forced relocations of whole populations to break the power of regional rulers. That culminated in Ivan's "plan of ejecting all princes and others from the garrisons and fortified places" and all formerly-independent princes of Russia "being either moved by the grandeur of his achievements or stricken with fear, became subject to him.". All was very much at odds with previous-perceived reality but much closer to currently-understood Russian history. Similarly, the previously-touted ideal of the fairness of the Muscovy monarchy was contrasted with Herberstein's depiction of peasants as being in "a very wretched condition, for their goods are exposed to plunder from the nobility and soldiery".
One final thing for which Herberstein and his book was noted, though not widely understood, was his contribution to a spelling confusion which did not emerge until the end of the 19th century and still causes disagreement: he recorded the spelling of "tsar" (Russian царь, pronounced [t͡sɑrʲ]) as czar. This may cause confusion nowadays because the digraph ⟨cz⟩ is today only used in the Polish language and is there pronounced as [t͡ʃ]. However, early modern German (as Herberstain spoke and wrote it) and furthermore also pre-20th century Hungarian or the 'mazurizing' dialects of Polish used ⟨cz⟩ for [t͡s]. Contrary to what the ⟨cz⟩ might suggest, all Slavonic languages pronounce the title "tsar" with [t͡s], which is always written with a simple ⟨c⟩, in Latin-writing Slavic languages as well as in the transliterations of Cyrillic-writing ones. English and French moved from the ⟨cz⟩ spelling to the ⟨ts⟩ spelling in the 19th century.
Marshall Poe, who has written extensively on Herberstein and Russian history generally, uses the English title Notes on the Muscovites consistently when translating the Latin title. A slightly more precise English translation of the Latin title would be Notes on Muscovite Affairs, as used for this article. There are one partial and two complete English translations of this work, the most recent one, by J. B. C. Grundy, based itself on a German version.
Online editions:
Others:
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