Lovisa von Burghausen (1698 – 20 January 1733) was a Swedish memoirist who became famous for her story about her time in captivity as a slave in Russia after being taken prisoner by the Russians during the Great Northern War. She was sold as a slave several times before she eventually recovered her freedom, and her story became perhaps the most famous of the many stories of Carolinian fates of this period.
Kidnapped
Lovisa was born in the city of Narva in Swedish Estonia, one of five daughters to the noble Swedish major Gustaf von Burghausen and Margareta von Brundert. Her father had been taking part in the defence of the city when it was taken by the Russians after the Battle of Narva (1704). During the chaotic pillage of the city, Lovisa was separated from her family and taken captive by a Russian soldier. It was a common practice for individual Russian soldiers and militaries to take civilians captive, whom they sold as slaves, and many of the citizens of Narva, both Swedes and Estonians, were to be sold at the slave markets in Russia, Persia, and the Ottoman Empire, and among the others taken captive this way during the war the future Empress Catherine I of Russia and, possibly, Yefrosinya Fedorov. Lovisa's parents and sisters were taken captive as prisoners of war and deported to Siberia.
On the way to the Russian camp, another soldier demanded to have her, and when the first one claimed that he intended to give her as a present to his captain, the second one wounded her in the chest with his sabre. She fainted and woke up in a tent, where she cried for her mother until her throat was so swollen up she lost her voice and lost consciousness.
The first master
She was taken to Moscow and given as present to the Russian general Prince Anikita Repnin. He sent her to a nunnery for her to be converted to the Russian Orthodox faith, but unable to understand Russian, she was beaten as a pagan unwilling to convert. After three months, she was released from the convent by the intervention of the Prince's mother, the dowager princess, who showed her "all the tenderness of a mother." However, the prince's wife, Princess Prascovia Narischkyn, suspected her to be spying on the Prince's private affairs and often abused her. On one occasion, Narischkyn had Lovisa hung upside down in the garden, which would have killed her had the old dowager princess not intervened once again.
She was to accompany the princely family to Ukraine in 1709 and witness the Swedish army and prisoners march in under Russian captivity in the triumph of the czar Peter the Great in Moscow. In 1710, she was married to the chamberlain of the Prince, a sixteen-year-old Swedish son of an ensign, Johan, himself a captive and fostered in the Orthodox faith. Lovisa had a daughter who died six weeks later.
In 1713, Johan died from being shot in the leg during battle. The same year, Prince Dimitrie Cantemir, hospodar of Moldavia, a Russian ally at the time, visited Moscow with his family. During a visit to the Repnins, his wife, Kassandra Cantacuzene, gave Princess Prascovia a diamond as a gift; she noticed Lovisa among the court of the princess, and Princess Prascovia then gave Lovisa to Princess Cantemir as thanks for the diamond.
Second master
Princess Cantemir died the same year, and Lovisa was poisoned by the wife of the baker of the Cantemir court, who wanted Lovisa's place for her daughter, and only with good medical help was she saved. When an Armenian Captain asked the Prince to give Lovisa to him as a wife, she escaped and, on the advice of a fellow Swedish woman employed at the court, sought refuge at the home of an English merchant in the German Quarter of Moscow.
The English merchant sent her to Archangelsk to be educated in the Protestant religion and to learn German. After seven weeks, she was reported by a German tailor, arrested by the Russian police and taken back to prince Cantemir. She was chained by her hands and feet and nails were hammered through her shoes to make it difficult for her to walk, which made her feet and legs swollen. She was put to wash clothes in a stone-kitchen so cold that her arms were covered with ice. She would have frozen to death if it were not for the daughters of the prince, Maria Cantemir and Smaragda; they bribed the guard to fold her chains in cloth, to prevent it from giving any sound, and take her up to their bedchamber at night.