Notes on Muscovite Affairs

Notes on Muscovite Affairs (Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii) (1549) was a Latin book by Baron Sigismund von Herberstein on the geography, history and customs of the Grand Duchy of Moscow.

The Grand Duchy of Moscow, commonly referred to in the west as Muscovy, in the 16th century was one of the Russian states which emerged after the collapse of Kievan Rus' under pressure from the Golden Horde.

Beginning in the early 15th Century, the Princes of Moscow began asserting their claim as the sole inheritor of the legacy of Kievan Rus'.

Besides the man who achieved the unification of Muscovy, Ivan III was characterized by Herberstein as a cruel tyrant, drunk, and a misogynist, far from being a ruler of great fairness and equity.

His description of Ivan's unification campaign was a series of banishments and forced relocations of whole populations to break the power of regional rulers.

Similarly, the previously-touted ideal of the fairness of the Muscovy monarchy was contrasted with Herberstein's depiction of peasants as being in "a very wretched condition, for their goods are exposed to plunder from the nobility and soldiery".