Topic: Archives
Some weeks ago I photographed most of the original documents in Carl Schirren's collection in Riksarkivet (15 volumes). At this point I have managed to make inventories of vol. 3-6 and 9-11. The content of these volumes is fairly typical of Schirren, i.e. a focus on Patkul and the struggle of the Livonian nobility against Swedish absolutism as well as on the intrigues leading up to the formation of the big anti-Swedish coalition in the late 1690's. Schirren's keen interest in the latter issue seems to have resulted in him pracitically cleaning out the collection of letters from the Swedish representatives in Poland to the Governor General in Riga. In the abovementioned volumes I have for examples found almost 30 letters from Georg Wachschlager and nearly 25 by Per Cuypercrona in Danzig (in the archive of the Livonian Governor General I have up til now only found two letters from Wachschlager).
Schirren also "took care" of some of the Russian correspondence (20 letters from Thomas Kniper in Moscow, 8 from Thomas Herbers in Pskov, 3 from Philip Vinhagen in Novgorod) as well as from Florian Thilo von Thilau at the borrder post of Neuhausen (Vastseliina). The collection also contains a few letters from the Swedish embassy to Moscow in 1699 as well as material pertaining to the Great Embassy and various other Swedish-Russian issues.
A couple of odd items (vol. 11) are copies of Steinau's and Paykul's explanations of the reasons behind the Saxon defeat at Düna in July 1701. The fomer's is dated Warsaw 20 September 1701 and numbers about 60 pages, while the latter is dated Berlin 14 July 1702.