European Images of Muscovy
A slave-state where despotic superstition ruled - Herberstein's vision of sixteenth-century Russia set the agenda for future European attitudes.
West European diplomats, merchants, soldiers and technicians who either visited or resided in Muscovy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries doubtless registered many impressions, and some might even have ordered them into more or less coherent patterns. But obviously only if they committed their impressions and reflections to writings which then were published could such individuals contribute to the Western image of Russia. The question, what was the Western image of Russia in these centuries?, must therefore be answered preliminarily with another question: what were then the most widely published works on the subject?
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