Page:Notes upon Russia (volume 1, 1851).djvu/105

Rh second in 1489. Adelung received the information which he has been able to supply respecting this traveller from Mr. F. G. Müller, keeper of the Russian Imperial Archives, which contain partial accounts of both these embassies. It is easy, says Adelung, to perceive that Poppel, the first time as well as the second, had been furnished with a letter from his emperor to the grand-prince, but that at Moscow the validity of the first letter was doubted. The Boyars had expressed their suspicion, that Poppel might have written the letter himself, and that he had been despatched by the king of Poland to operate for the advantage of the latter with the grand-prince. Poppel thereupon proposed, that the grand-prince should send an ambassador with him to the emperor, to testify to his innocence. It would appear that some one had really been sent to Vienna, but confirmatory accounts to this effect are wanting. In any case, we may take it, that Poppel’s first embassy to the grand-prince was not particularly well received; and hence it may have happened, that neither the original, nor a copy, nor a translation of the first imperial letter, is to be found among the archives.

Poppel’s second embassy, says Müller, had with it a peculiarity which tended in some measure to protect him from the suspicions to which he had been exposed in the first. It had for its object, among other things, to propose that a strict alliance should be entered into between the two courts to support each other against their enemies. The imperial letter, dated from Ulm, the 26th of December 1488, is