The Italian humanist Polydor Vergil of Urbino (1470-1555) made his fame as one of the founding fathers of English historiography thanks to his Historia Anglica. However, Polydor’s role in European culture reaches far beyond this work. When, in 1499, Vergil composed his encyclopaedic treatise De inventoribus rerum, he could hardly have imagined this book to become an instrument for Russia’s new cultural policies Peter the Great (1689-1725) tried to implement. Widely circulated, this work had a large readership until the beginnings of the nineteenth century. This article studies the reasons and context that gave rise to the Russian versions of this work, while enquiring into the identity of its translators. It also traces some of Vergil’s Russian readers by examining surviving copies held by the Russian State Library and the Lomonosov Moscow State University Library.