Lovisa von Burghausen
Lovisa von Burghausen (1698 – 20 January 1733) was a Swedish memoirist who became famous for her story about her time in captivity as a slave in Russia after being taken prisoner by the Russians during the Great Northern War.
[1] It was a common practice for individual Russian soldiers and militaries to take civilians captive, whom they sold as slaves, and many of the citizens of Narva, both Swedes and Estonians, were to be sold at the slave markets in Russia, Persia, and the Ottoman Empire,[2] [3] and among the others taken captive this way during the war the future Empress Catherine I of Russia and, possibly, Yefrosinya Fedorov.
[12] [13] She was to accompany the princely family to Ukraine in 1709 and witness the Swedish army and prisoners march in under Russian captivity in the triumph of the czar Peter the Great in Moscow.
In 1710, she was married to the chamberlain of the Prince, a sixteen-year-old Swedish son of an ensign, Johan, himself a captive and fostered in the Orthodox faith.
When an Armenian Captain asked the Prince to give Lovisa to him as a wife, she escaped and, on the advice of a fellow Swedish woman employed at the court, sought refuge at the home of an English merchant in the German Quarter of Moscow.
She would have frozen to death if it were not for the daughters of the prince, Maria Cantemir and Smaragda; they bribed the guard to fold her chains in cloth, to prevent it from giving any sound, and take her up to their bedchamber at night.
[24] [25] At the home of the Turk in Tobolsk, Lovisa was put to hard labour and badly beaten every time she made a mistake of sheer exhaustion.
The guard was distracted by a game of sports, and Lovisa mixed with the crowd and made contact with Sprengtporten, who took her to his friend Mattias Johan Reutercrona, where she remained hidden for eleven weeks.
[32] [33] She was taken to the house of Christoffer Laudau, which were searched after a tip from a servant who wanted the reward, during which she had to hide three days in water under a tub in the basement.
[34] [35] Reutercrona and Sprengtporten were arrested, suspected of aiding her to escape, and she was arranged to be taken from the city to Japantskin on her way to her parents in Solikamsk by a Russian farmer.
A maid warned her and Lovisa jumped out of the cottage to the farmer, who was feeding the horse, and up to the sleigh, and they quickly fled from the village.
[44] [45] The story of Lovisa von Burghausen was written down by "an honest man of the priest cloth" after her words and was read at her funeral.
Many Swedish, Finnish and Baltic people, especially women and children, had been sold as slaves in Russia and Turkey during the Great Northern War after having been taken captive by Russian soldiers, particularly after the fall of Narva in 1704.
From June 1710, the Swedish ambassador Thomas Funck regularly visited the slave auctions in Istanbul to buy Swedish citizens, and Sven Agrell noted that they, among others, had bought a "carpenter's daughter" from Narva for §82, a "Captain's wife" for §240, Catharina Pereswetoff-Morath, eighteen years old, for §275 and a whole family, Anders Jonsson and his wife and children, though the funds were not always enough to buy all.
