Catholic and Lutheran clerics as members of Swedish diplomatic missions to Russia in the XVI century

The article analyzes clerics’ participation in Swedish diplomatic missions to Russia in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. It is demonstrated that until the 1530s clerics (mostly canons) were regularly included in Swedish embassies to Russia. It was in keeping with the general level of diplomacy in Sweden, the rulers of which often gave important diplomatic assignments to bishops. But the Swedish embassies to Russia, by contrast, started to include bishops only in the second half of the sixteenth century, when this practice had almost disappeared in other foreign policy directions. It is assumed that the reason for this might have been the attempt to utilize a person’s high clerical status as an additional symbolic resource in difficult diplomatic situations (primarily in the cases of the missions of Laurentius Petri and Michael Agricola, as well as that of Paul Juusten). It is also confirmed that during the whole period under consideration most (although not all) clerics carrying out diplomatic missions to Russia were from Finland.