PETREIUS, Petrus

Very good first edition of a most influential C17 account of the duchy of Muscovy and the Russian provinces. Petrus Petreius (Pers Persson) (1570-1620) was a Swedish diplomat and intelligencer from Uppsala, who worked for several years in Russia in the early C17 century. Petreius first published his account in Swedish, as ‘Regni Muschowitici Sciographia’ (Stockholm, 1615), marking a new attitude towards the perception of Russians in Sweden. The ‘Sciographia’ was translated into German and published in Leipzig in 1620, with additional dedications and an appendix. The six parts are devoted to the cities and provinces, history (from Rurik to 1612), political ceremonies, warfare, customs, and religious rites of Russia and its people. Most of the second part is concerned with the period spanning the reign of Boris Godunov and the start of the Romanov rule. Petreius relied heavily, especially for the section on the False Dimitris, on the yet unpublished Latin eyewitness account by Konrad Bussow. He interspersed it with personal observations based on direct experience, like the sight of the corpses of Fyodor II Borisovich and his mother bearing the imprint of the ropes which strangled them.

‘Historien und Bericht’ is of fundamental importance for early modern European first-hand knowledge of Russian culture. Petreius adapted for the German language words relating to Russian society, making them more accessible to his new readers by avoiding, unlike in the Swedish original, Russian borrowings. In his account, the complex meaning of the term ‘Bojar’ is simplified to the title of ‘nobleman’ (‘Adel’ or ‘Herr’), and ‘keysare’, the same term used to address the German Holy Roman Emperors, appears as a translation of ‘czar’ in the reported speeches of Russian people. The ‘Historien und Bericht’ was among the sources used by I. M. Karamzin for his famous ‘History of the Russian State’ (‘ ’) of 1843.