I recently added this post, The Greatest Mart Town of all Muscovy.
Veliky Novgorod, in northwest Russia, is something of a favourite on Clay Lane because of its historic connections with the English and its beautiful, largely unspoilt Mediaeval walled kremlin (citadel). Together with Kiev, it is one of the two mother-cities of all Russia: see Invitation to a Viking. In the sixteenth century, it was also larger and more prosperous than the capital, Moscow, thanks to its position at the eastern end of the Hanseatic League, a club of merchant cities that stretched at one time to London.
Those days, however, were gone. London had found the League to be An Odious Monopoly, and the League regarded the English merchants who defied them in the Baltic as pirates. Imagine, then, the irritation of the merchants of Flanders on a visit to Novgorod in 1553, hoping to persuade the Novgorodians to restore their trade privileges after a falling-out, when they bumped into Sir Richard Chancellor and his party of Englishmen.