The Northeast Passage
Links:
Terms and people and places:
- Hansa/Hanseatic League
- Khanate (Kazan' and Astrakhan)
- Crimea (and the Crimean Tatars)
- White and Baltic Seas
- Kholmogory, Arkhangel'sk (Archangel)
- tsar/czar (Caesar)
- Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, Elizabeth I
- Ivan IV (the Terrible)
- Richard Chancellor
Quotations:
- “Arthur which was sometimes the most renowned king of the Britains, was a mightie, and valiant man, and a famous warrior. This kingdome was too litle for him, & his minde was not contented with it. He therefore valiantly subdued all Scantia, which is now called Norway, and all the Islands beyond Norway, to wit, Island and Greenland, which are apperteining vnto Norway, Sweueland, Ireland, Gotland, Denmarke, Semeland, Windland, Curland, Roe, Femeland, Wireland, Flanders, Cherilland, Lapland, and all the other lands & Islands of the East sea, euen vnto Russia (in which Lapland he placed the Easterly bounds of his Brittish Empire) and many other Islands beyond Norway, euen vnder the North pole, which are appendances of Scantia, now called Norway. These people were wild and sauage, and had not in them the loue of God nor of their neighbors, because all euil commeth from the north, yet there were among them serteine Christians liuing in secret.” (from: Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: E. & G. Goldsmid, 1885), 47-8 (originally 1598-1600))
- “they are a kind of people most sparing in diet and most patient in extremity of cold above all others. For when the ground is covered with snow and is grown terrible and hard with the frost, this Russe hangs up his mantle, or soldier’s coat, against that part from whence the wind and snow drives, and so, making a little fire, lieth down with his back towards the weather; this mantle of his serves him for his bed, wall, house, and all. His drink is the cold water of the river mingled with oatmeal, and this is all his good cheer, and he thinketh himself well and daintily fed therewith and so sitteth down by his fire and upon the hard ground roasteth as it were his weary sides thus daintily stuffed.” (from: “The Voyage of Richard Chancellor,” in Rude & Barbarous Kingdom: Russia in the Accounts of Sixteenth-Century English Voyagers, Lloyd E. Berry and Robert O. Crummey, eds. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 28)
- “They maintain the opinions of the Greek church. They suffer no graven images of saints in their churches, but their pictures painted in tables they have in great abundance, which they do adore and offer unto, and burn wax candles before them and cast holy water upon them, without other honor. They say that our images, which are set up in churches and carved, have no divinity in them … they hold opinion that we are but half Christians and themselves only to be the true and perfect church. These are the foolish and childish dotages of such ignorant barbarians.” (Chancellor, 35, 38)
A better map that includes the North:
Source: Rude & Barbarous Kingdom: Russia in the Accounts of Sixteenth-Century English Voyagers, Lloyd E. Berry and Robert O. Crummey, eds. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 20