Ivan the Terrible Receives the Danish Ambassadors Together with His Eldest Son

Ivan the Terrible receives the Danish ambassadors together with his eldest son. Before the audience, the bailiffs strictly forbade the ambassadors to recite the titles of their king ahead of the titles of the Prince of Moscow, reminding them that envoys who had once broken this rule had been expelled from Moscow at once, without being granted an audience. Strangely enough, no sooner had the foreign guests recited their titles than Ivan the Terrible brought the audience to a close and withdrew to change for dinner, leaving the negotiations themselves to the boyars.

In 1575 Ivan the Terrible seized three Livonian fortresses, Ösel, Lihula and Lode, in breach of a treaty concluded thirteen years earlier, which had assigned these towns to the Danish king. To avert war, King Frederick II sent an embassy to the Prince of Moscow. One of the Danish noblemen, Jacob Ulfeldt, described in detail the whole journey of the delegation of 100 men to Russia. It must be said that by the standards of the time this was not so very many, for embassies from Moscow could number more than a thousand.