A Letter from an Unknown Person with a List of the Tushino Embassy to the King of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

Abstract

The events of the Russian Time of Troubles are insufficiently studied due to the destruction of Russian archives during the hard times and in the Moscow fire of 1626. The state archives in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were not accumulated. Upon finishing their careers, statesmen took documents to their private collections, which were then shared by the heirs. The search for these documents and their introduction into scholarship have now accelerated due to the digitization of archival materials and their online publishing. A document entitled “Spis przedstawicieli Rosji przysięgających wierność Zygmuntowi III” by Polish archivists has become available on the Platforma Cyfrowa Biblioteki Kórnickiej resource, which lists 26 senior ambassadors from 259 members of the embassy of the Tushino boyars to the Polish king. Until recently, historians have had assumptions about the composition of this embassy on the basis of indirect data from other sources. The document published below, despite the distortion of the names, contains direct references to the members of the Tushino Embassy. The comparison of the data in this document with the information about lands granted to the Tushino boyars and nobles by the king in February — July 1610, available in the Lithuanian Metrica, enables to establish with high accuracy the personalities of the leaders of “the men of Tushino” who swore allegiance to the king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth Sigismund III Vasa. The embassy in question was an important stage in the formation of the project of installing a foreign prince Vladislav to the Russian throne, which led to the creation of a third center of power in the country.