The author attempts to find out under what circumstances Vasilii Tatishchev could have come to his assertion that Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa had sent an architect to Andrei Bogoliubskii, prince of Vladimir. Despite the wide popularity of this Tatishchev's argument among today's historians of architecture, it has never become the subject of a special study. Meanwhile, this case allows a deep look into the specific research methods of a historian in the first half of the eighteenth century, as well as into his narrative strategies and value orientations.