Herberstein and the English “Discovery” of Muscovy

Abstract

In 1847, the Russian scholar I. Kh. Gamel' (English: J. Hamel) posed an intriguing question which has been repeatedly referred to and commented upon but remains fundamentally unresolved to the present. Bridling at claims made by the English that they had first discovered the northeastern sea route to Russian in 1533, he wrote: Is it not worth considering whether Willoughby and Chancellor might not, prior to their expedition, have had some information or other about the White Sea, the Divina, and generally the northeastern regions of Russia?l He follows with a brief discussion of two relevant published sources they might have known, one of them an ancient account, but points most suggestively to the other, Sigismund von Herberstein's Rerum Muscoviticarum Commentarii. Gamel' notes that Sebastian Cabot (1474-1557), the famous navigator and explorer who is widely regarded as the guiding light of the expedition, had spent his youth in Venice, and that an Italian edition of Herberstein had appeared there in -1550. Cabot might have kept in touch with Venice, we may add, because in the mid-sixteenth century, together with Rome, it was one of the two principal cartographic centers of Italy, the country that then led Europe in the production of maps. Gamel' implies that Herberstein's opus suggest~d the idea of a northeastern expedition, exclaiming: It is difficult to believe that Cabot did not order the book ... from Venice.3 This paper is an attempt to determine whether Gamel's conjecture can be solidly grounded in evidence. Herberstein's book, first published in 1549, included much that would have been intensely interesting to men seeking a passage to Cathay. For one thing, he described a voyage made in 1496 by a Russian envoy named Gregory Istoma, from the White Sea westward around the Scandinavian cape to Dront (Trondheim) in Norway, thus proving the existence of an all-water route from