Relations of Russia with the East in Church Affairs
A nineteenth-century digest of the Moscow foreign office’s files on dealings with the eastern churches. For 1588–1590 it follows the official report of Patriarch Jeremias II’s visit day by day and prints the letters exchanged, with references to the folios of the record.
The Muscovite foreign office kept a running report of every embassy: who arrived, how they were received, what was said on each side, what gifts were given. Muravyov, a Russian church writer of the nineteenth century, worked through these files and retold them in order, quoting speeches and letters and noting the folio after each passage. His book is therefore a secondary work wrapped closely round primary records, and it is used here for what the records contain: the arrival of Jeremias at Smolensk in June 1588, his audiences, the talks conducted by Boris Godunov, the council of January 1589, and the reception of the envoys who brought the charter of Constantinople in 1590.
The records are the tsar’s own. They present the Russian court as generous and the patriarch as grateful, and they give the Russian version of the negotiation, in which Jeremias is first invited to remain as patriarch at Vladimir and then asked to install a Russian. Muravyov’s linking sentences are his own and are not cited here as evidence.
Cited in
- 26 January 1589, firm date