Itinerary of Ivan IV (1530–1584): historical and biographical research

Abstract

The synthetic study develops the author's observations about the complex of sources on the itinerary of Tsar and Grand Duke Ivan IV. The ve identi ed and studied types of sources - acts, narratives, registrations, ambassadorial and memorial sources - make it possible, through their cross-analysis, to obtain a corpus of information on the stays and travels of Ivan IV from his birth in August 1530 until his death in March 1584. The systematization of the data allows to outline a general trend in the development of our data, covering 5100 chronologically organized records, which are distributed into 6250 messages, and to analyze it by periods and types of messages. Out of 2854 studied acts, 510 preserved in originals and analyzed de visu contain traces of chronological discrepancies, limiting the information possibilities of this type of sources, rst of all, due to the source analysis of their eschatocols. More than 830 reports of of cial chronicles and other narrative testimonies re ect Ivan IV's movements around the country in more details than the act sources, which is connected both with the speci city of of ce work of the epoch and with the function of of cial chronicles as such and individual chronicle records. On the other hand, annals, stories and hagiographies incompletely cover the period of Ivan IV's reign and are in their own way inaccurate, and in some cases contradict other known sources. Registration sources re ect not only the Tsar's travels, but also his involvement in the work of registration (in the inventory of the Tsar's archive, notes on acts, regiment books, donations, etc.). One of the types of registration, ambassadorial les brought 3105 dates concerning Tsar's life, obtained mainly in the main directions of Russian diplomacy - Polish-Lithuanian, Crimean and Nogai. At the same time, 10 out of 17 studied embassy missions of foreign representatives in Russia are absent in Russian sources, but contain various important details about the life and movements of the Tsar. Among the visual sources-memoria, special attention is paid to the Great Illustrated Chronicle of Ivan the Terrible, in which miniatures are considered as a special source, containing in some cases information about the life of the Tsar, which originates not from the known narrative sources of the codex.