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Letter by Peter the Great found in archives of Amsterdam

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Letter by Peter the Great found in archives of Amsterdam


16.05.2022

Photo credit: Paul Delaroche. Portrait of Peter the Great / commons.wikimedia.org/wiki (Public domain)

Russian historian Yuri Zaretsky discovered the original grant letter by Peter the Great in the city archives of Amsterdam. The letter granted a Dutch merchant with a permission to print books, maps and engravings in Russian at the Amsterdam printing house to educate Russians, Rossiyskaya Gazeta reports.

The idea to start a publishing business in Holland came to Peter the Great during his stay in the country during the Great Embassy. Peter the Great offered to carry out this plan to the local merchant Jan Tessing, who was guaranteed privileges in the sale of printed publications in Russia.

The grant letter discusses the terms of the agreement. According to Jacob Sheltema, the author of a study on relations between the Netherlands and Russia at the beginning of the 19th century, the letter also has a unique design.
 
The treaty of 1700 was in effect for several years. In the first year and a half, Tessing's printing house produced two maps of southern Russia, five textbooks on history, navigation, military affairs and other sciences, two trilingual dictionaries and a translation of Aesop's fables. The last book, a bilingual Russian-German calendar, was published after the death of the merchant.

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