Our Notes & References

Extremely rare contemporary report of Ivan the Terrible’s Western campaign, printed the year of the foundation of Douai’s first press. Among “the very first European newspapers published in Latin” (Lithuanian Bulletin) and one of only nine 16th-century French polonica. No copy traced in US libraries.

Particularly remarkable for its sensational tone, this news-sheet reports on the Russian invasion of the fortified city of Polotsk in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (current-day Belarus), in January and February of 1563.

The siege was a turning point in the devastating and costly 24-year Livonian War, a massive conflict that pitted Ivan IV’s Tsardom of Russia against the Kingdoms of Poland and Sweden, the Dano-Norwegian Realm, and Lithuania. News of Ivan the Terrible’s victory on 15 February 1563, spread quickly—within three weeks, German-language Zeitungen began to appear, first from presses in Nuremberg and Augsburg, whose texts were sometimes illustrated, and included geographic inaccuracies, inflated reports of the number of soldiers and casualties, accusations of inaction on the part of Lithuanian leaders, and indictments against the Tsar.

News-sheets on the siege rapidly appeared in multilingual proliferation—Czech, French, and Latin—all short and to the point, with summaries of the alleged atrocities committed by the Russian army. As the news spread, the exaggerations amplified.

Our news-sheet was printed at Douai, in Northern France, 2,200 kilometers from Polotsk. The anonymous author asserts that an army of 260,000 soldiers besieged Polotsk, and that 20,000 residents of the city were summarily dismembered then strangled; that 62,000 women, maidens, and children were stripped naked and enslaved to the service of Moscow. – It is worth noticing that in about 1550, there were no more than 110 households in the walled portion of Polotsk, and only 1,532 households in the city at large, which amounted to a population of no more than 10-12,000 souls.

Before the siege, it was commonly thought that Ivan the Terrible could not martial an army large enough to mount a successful campaign to win control of trade in the Baltic states; scholars of the conflict suggest that the accelerating hyperbole in news reports, especially regarding the size of the army, were the only way to explain away the Tsar’s unlikely military victory.

Our news-sheet excoriates Mikołaj Radziwiłł the Red, Voivode of Vilnius, for his supposed cowardice in fleeing the region at the critical juncture, and urges the forces of the Holy Roman Empire to answer the threat posed by Ivan and the Muscovy. (Radziwiłł would defeat Imperial Russian forces at the Battle of Ula the following year.)

The author reports that following the siege of Polotsk, the Russian army, freshly equipped and armed with confidence, travelled to Kyiv with the intention of controlling the Dneiper River, then sending thousands of Tartar mercenaries into the countryside to wreak havoc and prepare the way for the larger army.

The textual implication in our news-sheet, and most others, is that Muscovy was equivalent to the Ottoman threat. At the end, the author states that Ivan IV (referred to throughout as “the Muscovite”) had sent word to the King of Poland, Sigismund II Augustus, advising him that a silver bier was being prepared to receive his severed head.

The work is based on a German text, which may well have been a work titled Warhafftige und erschröckliche Zeitung von dem grausamen Feind dem Moscowiter, printed at Augsburg a few weeks after the siege, though our Latin version is more of a paraphrase, with adjustments and inventions by the translator. Authorship is sometimes given as the playwright Johannes Reinhard, who did compose at least two vernacular poems on the siege of Polotsk.

The first press in Douai was established by Jacques Boscard in 1563, the year after the charter of the University; the Memorabilis was the fourth¹ book printed by the Flemish émigré Boscard, according to H. R. Duthillœul in his 1842 bibliography.

The University was the central feature of the Catholic stronghold in the year of the First War of Religion, and establishing a press there was seen as essential to the voice of the Catholicism in the face of rising Calvinism. The University of Douai, and its presses, would perseverate the Catholic voice until the institution’s dissolution at the dawn of the French Revolution.

The Memorabilis appears to be the first work that employs Boscard’s emblematic Summis negatum stare div[um] woodcut device, depicting a man chopping down a tree with an ax.

For reasons unknown, the text was rediscovered in the 19th century, and translated into French in 1858, and into English in 1874 in 250 copies. A very fine facsimile was also produced by Adam Pilinski in Paris around 1858, which was available at Solovev’s famous St. Petersburg shop (Ulianinskii). According to some also, this facsimile has fooled more than one bibliographer over the years, including those at the BnF, both of whose copies are likely facsimiles, not 1563 originals, which are invariably categorised by historians of the book as “très rare” or “absolument introuvable.”

A very good, complete copy, with the terminal blank, of the earliest known news-sheet in Latin, and a signal witness to prototypical European journalism.

Provenance

Philip Robinson (his sale of Part 1, Sotheby’s London, 23 June 1988, lot 20, where bound in later marbled wrappers, where acquired by:); Rodolphe Chamonal, Paris.

Bibliography

Wierzbowski III, 2429; Duthillœul No. 4; Labarre 53, 5; Pohler p. 203; Estreicher XXII, p. 486 cf. Ulianinskii 3973 (for the 1874 English translation); USTC 110876; Anon, Adam Pilinski et ses travaux, Paris: Labitte, 1890, pp. 26-27; Filiushkin, Aleksandr, “Evropeiskaia propaganda o vziatii Polotska v 1563 g,” SPOGU Bulletin, Series 2 (2012), No. 3; Hotten, John Camden, An early news-sheet: The Russian invasion of Poland in 1563: An exact facsimile of a contemporary account in Latin, published at Douay, together with an introduction and historical notes, and a full translation into English London: Chatto, 1874; Kappeler A. Ivan, Groznyj im Spiegel der ausländischen Druckschrift en seiner Zeit; ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des westlichen Russlandbildes. Bern: H. Lang, 1972., p. 206; Kolpakov, Maksim, “Pskovskaia zemlia i Livonskaia voina v opisaniiakh frantsuzskikh avtorov vtoroi poloviny xvi v,” Pskovskii voenno-istoricheskii vestnik, 2017, no.3; [MVD Frontier Guard Officer], “The Iron Curtain,” Lithuanian Bulletin, Lithuanian American Council New York: March-April 1948; Zawadzki, Konrad, “Szesnastowieczne gazety ulotne polskie i Polski dotyczące,” Rocznik Historii Czasopiśmiennictwa Polskiego, Vol. 11, no. 1 (1972), p. 24; Auerbach, I., “Russland in deutschen Zeitungen (16. Jahrhundert),” Russen und Russland aus deutscher Sicht 9. —17. Jh, Munich: Fink, 1985, pp. 183-195; Белы, А. Полацк у нямецкіх “лятучых лістках” XVI ст., Спадчына, 1997, no. 6. pp. 213-219; Сагановіч Г. Захоп Полацка Іванам IV у нямецкіх «лятучых лістках» 1563 г. // Матэрыялы ІІІ міжнароднай канферэнцыі «Гісторня і археалогія Полацка і Полацкай зямлі». (Полацк, 21-23 кастрычніка 1997 г.). Полацк: Нацыянальны Полацкі гісторыка – культурны музей-запаведнік (HПIГKM3), 1998. pp. 263-270; Poe M., Foreign Descriptions of Muscovy: An Analytic. Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources, Columbus: Slavica Publishers, 2008, p. 172.