Russia

Russia is both a point of military rupture and a landscape of coerced labor in the Old Woman’s account. She is sent there after a siege, made to serve a boyard, and eventually escapes; her passage across the country belongs to a wider itinerary of captivity and precarious service.

Military Arrival and Transfer

The Old Woman recalls that Russian troops arrived in flat-bottomed boats after the Janissaries had finished a meal provided by her companions. The Janissaries did not survive the encounter. A French surgeon then took the wounded survivors into his care, but the end of one ordeal did not bring freedom: once her companions could walk, they were made to set out for Moscow, while she was assigned to a boyard.

Forced Service and Escape

In Russia, the boyard made the Old Woman his gardener and subjected her to daily punishment. Her release came not through a decision to free her but through a reversal in her master’s fortunes: after two years, he and thirty other boyards were executed for court conflicts. The Old Woman used the upheaval to flee. Russia thus appears as a place where political violence changes her circumstances, but does not itself secure her safety.

A Route Through Misery

The Old Woman says she traversed all Russia before becoming a servant at inns in Riga, Rostock, Vismar, Leipzig, Cassel, Utrecht, Leyden, the Hague, and Rotterdam. The sequence turns her story into a map of repeated displacement: escape from one owner leads not to a settled home but to further service in successive towns. She describes growing old amid misery and disgrace while remembering her former identity as a Pope’s daughter.

Narrative Significance

Russia occupies a brief but consequential stretch of the Old Woman’s long personal history. The account links military intervention, court executions, forced labor, and flight without treating any change of place as a reliable escape from hardship. Its compressed itinerary also makes geography a record of survival: Russia is the country she crosses after escaping the boyard, before the story carries her onward through a chain of inns.