An emissary of the Queen Christina of Sweden to the khan of the Tartars Islam Giray the 3rd, Iohann Mayer made a journey through Moldavia during May 1651. He was sent to accompany the Tartar messenger who had brought to the queen the letter of the khan that contained proposals of common operation against Poland and he was to hand over to the khan the answer of the queen as well. He passed through The White Citadel for the first time in December 1650 on his way towards Crimea. Now, in the summer of the next year, he was coming back on the same route and was finding again the same boatmen he had used six months earlier, on leaving. One cannot be aware of any other details of his winter journey towards Crimea, no other details about his itinerary through Moldavia he is most likely to have used to make his way to the khan` s court. His journey diary is preceded with the words: These are those that happened and occurred during my journey to Bakhchisaray and during the period I spent there, yet just the passage concerning his travel back was kept. He left Bakhchisaray, the capital of the khan, on May 1st, accompanied by a troop of janissaries and some Tartar guardsmen; on May 12th he arrived at The White Citadel, where he stayed for two days, then he resumed his journey through Iași, Cotnari, Botoșni, Dorohoi and Chernivtsi (1) and on May 31st he was on Polish ground at Sniatyn (2) . The original of Mayer` s account is written in German and is found at The Royal Archives from Stockholm. It was first published by N. J. Molkaniewsky in Kiev in 1908; it was reproduced with a foreword in German by the Romanian scholar Gh. I. Constantin in 1940 and first translated in Romanian and published in 1973.
Footnotes
(1) Romanian Cernăuţi, nowadays Cernivţi in north-west of Ukraine.
(2) Nowadays in north-west of Ukraine.
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