“All Sovereign Novgorod-the-Great” in Fifteenth Century Documents in Germanic Languages

Abstract

The article considers one of the designations of the Novgorod political community emerged in the second half of the 15th century—“All Lord Sovereign Novgorod-the-Great”. It played a very important part in the political life of Novgorod at that time, as it stressed Novgorod’s complete independence and therefore was directed against the claims of the grand princes of Moscow. In total, no more than ten mentions of this name are known so far. However, taking into account little-studied documents in Middle Low German and Old Swedish allows us to increase this number. Moreover, the treaty between Novgorod and Sweden on 10 April 1468 may contain the very first mention of “All Sovereign Novgorod-the-Great” in written sources. It also turns out that translators used the Middle Low German word herschopp or the Old Swedish word herskap to convey both the designation “Lord Novgorod-the-Great” known since the late 14th century, and the designation “Sovereign Novgorod-the-Great”. This may indicate that for them the semantic difference between “Lord” and “Sovereign” in reference to Novgorod was not obvious, as well as that they lacked lexical means capable of conveying this difference. Meanwhile, this difference was very significant in the context of the Moscow-Novgorod confrontation in the 1470s. At the same time, the concept of herschopp/herskap should be recognized as probably the best possible translation of both designations into Middle Low German and Old Swedish respectively.

DOI: 10.31168/2305-6754.2023.2.04