Adam Olearius’s account of the journeys of an embassy from the Duke of Holstein to Muscovy and Persia was first published in Schleswig in 1647. Appearing with little fanfare, the work enjoyed a sensational success. By the close of the seventeenth century, it had gone through numerous German editions, and it also had been brought out several times each in French, English, and Dutch, and once in Italian. Moreover, for decades after its initial publication, foreign works on Russia were deeply colored by what Olearius had written. As in the sixteenth century Baron von Herberstein’s treatise largely shaped Europe’s image of Russia, so Olearius’s work influenced European opinion in the seventeenth.