ABSTRACT
Up to about the middle of the seventeenth century, with some rare and insignificant exceptions, 'medieval' Russia, or Muscovy, had existed in relative isolation from Central and Western Europe; even with its immediate neighbours, Poland and Sweden, there had hardly been much cultural and economic exchange. While Muscovy recovered from the worst effects of the Time of Troubles, it fell into permanent crisis—religious, dynastic, socio-economic, cultural—in the course of the second half of the seventeenth century. In paying greater attention to the West, the Muscovite state had also become more interested in what was happening in the European states—and vice versa, of course, Central and West European diplomats and rulers were becoming more curious about Muscovy. West European intellectual achievements penetrated into Muscovy in a somewhat unexpected way. Political and ecclesiastical developments in the late sixteenth century had made possible infiltration of the Catholic Counter-Reformation into lands that had originally been exclusively Orthodox.
