Просителна грамота на Бохотския манастир „Св. Никола“ до руския цар Михаил Фьодорович Романов от 1642 г.

In the article an appeal for support from of the monastery of St. Nicholas near the village of Bohot (Pleven municipality, North-Central Bulgaria), issued on 26 October 1642 and addressed to the Russian Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich Romanov, is published for the first time. The original of the document is preserved in the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts and is so far known only from a brief summary by Olga Todorova. The monks begged the Tsar to support them with money, as they were in debt after the Ottoman deputy governor (mütesellim) of Nikopol had fined them unjustly for the murder of two people by wandering robbers within the monastery’s property. Based on an analysis of the preamble of the charter, it is assumed that the initiator of its drafting and the organizer of the delegation of the monks to Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich in 1643 probably was the then bishop of Rimnik (and future metropolitan of Wallachia) Ignatius, a Bulgarian and former priest from Nikopol. The delegation of the monks from Bohot was detained in the town of Putyvl on the Russian border (in present day North-East Ukraine) and was not allowed to proceed to Moscow. Nothing more is known about the fate of this monastery, which perished at an unknown date after 1643; even its location remains unknown.