It was only during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that western Europeans discovered the lands now known as Russia. Travellers to these lands published their discoveries for an interested and curious public, revealing details of a country very different from what Western Europeans were used to. This collection brings together the most important ethnographic accounts of Russia from the period 1500 to 1700.
All the volumes contain eye-witness accounts of an analytic and descriptive, but not narrative, character, and are reprinted in their earliest editions, except for those volumes where the original edition was in a language uncommon amongst contemporary European readers, in which cases a translation into a commonly accessible European language has been used.