Beyond the Ambassadorial Gift in Muscovite Russia

Abstract This article explores the role of gifts in embassies to Russia in the Muscovite period, primarily in the seventeenth century. While acknowledging the importance of the ambassadorial gift presented at court in signaling honor, respect, status, and friendship between sovereigns, it shifts attention to the less glamorous, but recurring shows of goodwill and liberality evident in an ambassador’s many interactions with the tsar’s subjects, officials, and courtiers as he travelled to his destination. Pulling together scattered references to such gifts from a variety of Russian and foreign sources, the article discusses how these lesser gestures of generosity functioned within shared diplomatic conventions of the early modern era relating to gift-exchange. The discussion highlights the intertwined function of hospitality, reciprocity, sociability, the ranking of social hierarchies, and public display in the dynamic of non-ritualized diplomatic giving. It also brings into focus the role of the ambassador’s road as an ongoing site of gift exchange and of knowledge acquisition pertinent to an embassy’s tasks, including that of largesse.