4 - A Case Lacking Contemporaneous Local Sources

Summary

The Novgorod genocidal massacre of 1570 is one of the major events of the reign of Ivan the Terrible (1533-1584). It shows the tyranny of the tsar in terms of the 16th century and has been used in the historiography for 200 years to show how a tsar who had reigned for 20 years as a reformer could change and commit the most horrible crimes against his own people before turning back to his normal reign again. Supposing the Novgorodians were planning treason, the tsar and his army went secretly to Novgorod, shamed the Archbishop and began a massacre among the population as well as forcibly looted the town and its environments. The sources all tell the same story, as if they were from the same eyewitness. Also, contemporary sources appeared only in Western Europe from 1570 on, 17th ct. Russian sources betray a textual relationship to the Western sources so that the conclusion is that the Russian history of the Novgorod genocidal massacre derives rather from the Western than from native eyewitnesses’ descriptions.