Download PDF | The Crimean Khanate and Poland-Lithuania, International Diplomacy on the European Periphery 15th-18th Century, Brill Publishing (2011).
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A large book must incur many debts. While looking back, the present author is more ready than ever to acknowledge the inspiring atmosphere constantly reigning in his home scholarly milieu in Warsaw and the benefit of fruitful contacts and generous fellowships that have made research abroad incomparably easier within just one generation.
Factors that—directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously— influenced the present study, are many. Among the colleagues, students and friends who helped shape the present book with their advice or scholarly expertise, fruitful discussion, and even such “trivial” things like ordering a scan from a manuscript or sending a rare or a recently published book, I would like to specially thank Meinolf Arens, Jerzy Axer, Tomasz Bohun, Almut Bues, Tatiana Cojocaru, Borys Cerkas, Sagit Faizov, Mateusz Falkowski, Hieronim Grala, Oleksa Hajvoronskyj, Maria Ivanics, Rafat Jaworski, Barbara Kellner-Heinkele, Michael Khodarkovsky, Svetlana Kirillina, Edmund Kizik, Kirill Ko¢egarov, Maria Koczerska, Wojciech Kriegseisen, Natalia Krolikowska, Gediminas Lesmaitis, Aleksandr Malov, Masako Matsui, Mihai Maxim, Mixail Mejer, Wtodzimierz Medrzecki, Vitalij Myxajlovs’kyj, Sandor Papp, Zofia Smutkowa, Jarostaw Stolicki, Elzbieta Swiecicka, Hacer Topaktas, Vadim Trepavlov, Michal Tymowski, Gilles Veinstein, Aleksandr Vinogradov, Marek Wagner, Michal Wasiucionek, Piotr Wecowski, Filip Wolanski, Anna Xoroskevi¢, II’ja Zajcev, and Andrzej Zakrzewski.
Even more credit should be given to Andrij Danylenko for his help in solving the puzzles of old Ruthenian language, to Marek Janicki for his help with medieval Latin and sharing his enviable erudition, to Henryk Jankowski for his unusual knowledge of Turkic languages and unlimited willingness to explain their peculiarities to the present author who after all is not a linguist, to Piotr Salwa for his help with vernacular renaissance Italian, and to Andrzej Cichal for drawing excellent maps. Needless to say, any possible mistakes or misspellings that may remain in the text are entirely the author’s responsibility.
Separate thanks should go to Suraiya Faroghi and Halil Inalcik, who at one time both acted as mentors with whom the present author was lucky to study, for allowing the present book into the Ottoman Heritage series. It will probably take some time until the Crimean Tatar studies will be able to afford a series of their own.
The author’s home institution, the Institute of History of the University of Warsaw, subsidized his scholarly travels and contributed towards the costs of publication. Many thanks go to the Director and Staff of the Main Archives of Early Acts (AGAD) in Warsaw for their assistance and kind permission to reproduce the documents held in this collection. While in Moscow, the author enjoyed both institutional assistance and great hospitability at the Institute of Asia and Africa at Moscow State University. A large part of this book was written in Sapporo, at the Slavic Research Center of Hokkaido University, which provided optimal working conditions, including a good library and a possibility to experience the Japanese onsen culture in the incredible (though somewhat rainy) mountain scenery.
My wife, Zosia, and my son, Szymon, were with me for all that time, even if the book is actually older than Szymon. They provided me with constant joy and support even though my son found it hard to understand why daddy was so often locked up in his room and kept mercilessly pounding at the door. It seems that until respective ministries introduce a compulsory celibate for all male and female members of the academia (by far a cheaper solution than fair salaries), writing a scholarly book will never be easy for all those involved. The good news for my folks is that the book is out now.
INTRODUCTION
Merely a decade ago, my older son, then in elementary school, came to me with his homework and asked to check whether his answers were correct. One fill in the blank question asked for three neighboring states with whom Poland had led wars in the 17th century. His answer was Russia, Turkey, i.e., the Ottoman Empire, and the Tatars, ie., the Crimean Khanate. It occurred to me that perhaps his textbook mentioned Sweden rather than the Crimean Khanate, and I proved right. Nevertheless, my son was not mistaken. In 1592, when Muscovian diplomats learned about a projected alliance between Stockholm and Baghchasaray, they tried to persuade the khan that the king of Sweden was “poor and hungry,” unworthy of the khan’s friendship.' The tsar had many reasons to fear the Tatars more than the Swedes as only a year earlier the Crimean formidable cavalry had pillaged the suburbs of Moscow. In the Muscovian diplomatic ceremonial of that time, the khan still ranked higher than the king of Sweden.
Certainly, the subsequent military triumphs of Gustavus Adolphus had changed the balance of power in Eastern Europe, so I assured myself that my son heard of Sweden as well. Yet, in his exercise book there were only three blanks to be filled. He asked whether he should erase the Tatars and enter Sweden instead but I resolved that it would be a lesson of conformism and pupils should be rather praised than punished for knowing more than is written in their textbooks. After all, his answer was correct.
On the following day, it turned out that it was not, at least for his history teacher, who did not acknowledge his third answer as correct. Until today, I bear the burden of losing my son’s confidence at an early stage and exposing him to a bitter lesson of life. Nevertheless, I hope that this book will contribute to a change of the still common stereotypical view of the Crimean Tatars as semi-illiterate predators, deprived of any real culture, not to mention a state, a sophisticated chancery, and diplomats skilled in international relations.
To be sure, the Crimean Khanate was an annoying neighbor. A detailed study of the material and demographic losses suffered by Poland-Lithuania in result of the Tatar raids committed in the years 1605-1633, by far not the uniquely violent period in the relations between the two states, disclosed that out of the 29 years covered by the study only 12 passed without any raids.’ A field research conducted in 1948 in a number of Polish villages near Rzeszow, a region once distant from the Commonwealth’s southeastern border and admittedly not the one most exposed to Tatar raids, revealed a traumatic memory of the seventeenth-century Tatar raids that almost overshadowed more recent experiences of WW1 and WW2. Anybody familiar with the Roman Catholic Church’s attitude towards the inviolability of marriage, expressed even today, will be persuaded how demographically serious were the Tatar raids on learning that in 1624 a Polish bishop of Przemysl allowed those members of his flock, whose husbands or wives had been kidnapped by the Tatars and apparently still alive as slaves in the Crimea, to remarry. A calculation, once proposed by Halil Inalcaik on the basis of Ottoman tax registers and confirmed by the present author on the evidence of Russian and Polish sources, suggests that the number of Slavic slaves transported across the Black Sea between 1500 and 1700 might have approached two million and surpassed the number of Black slaves transported in the same period across the Atlantic.’
Michael Khodarkovsky refers to “the towns not built and fields not plowed” while asking to what extent the Tatar raids were responsible for Russia’s weak urbanization in comparison to Western Europe.‘ Prevented by the Crimean Tatar military strength from reaching the warmer Black Sea, Russia could still find compensation in less hospitable Siberia and one might argue that, if not for the Crimean Khanate, the Russian drive towards the Pacific Ocean would have occurred at a slower pace, if it had occurred at all. No similar compensation offered itself to Poland-Lithuania, and it is its southern provinces, inhabited mostly by Ruthenians (later called Ukrainians) and constituting the present-day Ukraine, which suffered the most from the Tatar raids.
No wonder that the Tatars were rarely liked by their northern neighbors. In 1618, a Polish publicist, Szymon Starowolski (himself of Ruthenian origin), compared the Tatars to locusts and lice and proposed their ejection from the Crimea.> More projects followed in the following decades and in the 1640s the governments in Warsaw and Moscow seriously contemplated a joint conquest of the Khanate’s lands. Nevertheless, it soon proved, like many times earlier and afterwards, that mutual controversies were stronger than the declared Christian solidarity and in 1654 the tsar turned against Poland-Lithuania, while the khan resolved to support the latter. The Crimean loyalty, demonstrated during the so-called “long alliance” (1654-1666), helped the Commonwealth to survive and earned the Tatars long-lasting gratitude among Polish historians,° even though the alliance was followed by a series of new hostilities, when the khans stood at the Porte’s side in the Polish-Ottoman wars of the late 17th century.
The Tatars did not fare well in the opinion of the European Enlightenment. Emeric de Vattel, the famous Swiss lawyer who had entered the service of Augustus III, the king of Poland and the elector of Saxony, published in 1758 in London his monumental Law of Nations, where he maintained that: “those peoples, such as [...] certain modern Tartars who, though dwelling in fertile countries, disdain the cultivation of the soil and prefer to live by plunder, fail in their duty to themselves, injure their neighbors, and deserve to be exterminated like wild beasts of prey (méritent d’étre exterminés, commes des bétes féroces et nuisibles).”’ When the Crimean Khanate was annexed by Russia in 1783, few Western intellectuals would disagree with Catherine II, who praised this move as the triumph of civilization.
Paradoxically, Poland-Lithuania did not live much longer and was dismembered between St. Petersburg, Berlin, and Vienna in the three successive partitions of 1772, 1793, and 1795. To much regret, historians rarely trace the careers of such brilliant Russian generals and diplomats as Aleksandr Suvorov and Osip Igelstrém in the context of their deeds in both war theatres: the Crimean-Ottoman and the Polish ones.
By the late 19th century, the cult of real politics, assisted by social Darwinism, helped to promote the image of the Crimean Khanate as well as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as unruly states and anarchic societies, who in fact deserved their fate of being swallowed by more effective neighbors. Typical for that period is the classical monograph by Vasilij Smirnov entitled “The Crimean Khanate under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Porte.”* By stressing the “Ottoman suzerainty,” Smirnov advertently pointed to the fact that the Khanate had never been really independent and the Tatars, immature for a home rule, in fact benefited by escaping the despotic and corrupt yoke of the sultan and entering the benign and civilized rule of the tsar. Had Edward Said studied Russian history, he would have hardly found a better example of an orientalist scholar than Smirnov.’
The “colonial” perspective, typically promoted by victorious conquerors, also gained popularity among numerous members of “native” intelligentsias, such as the Crimean Tatar Ismail Bey Gaspirali or his Polish contemporary Aleksander Swietochowski, who accepted the Spencerian motto of the “survival of the fittest.” Critical towards the past of their respective societies, they aimed to modernize them through education and were ready to adopt models from the West, and even—if necessary—from Russia.
WW1, culminating in a series of revolutions and state implosions, put in question the Enlightened European rationalism, so much praised by Max Weber shortly before the war’s outbreak. It also gave a chance to rebuild ancient states, seemingly condemned to oblivion. The territory of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had turned by then into a breeding ground of conflicting modern nationalisms, which could all claim their roots in medieval and early modern past. The foundation (or restoration) of the now separate (and mutually conflicted) republics of Poland and Lithuania in 1918 proved more durable, but short-lived independence was also declared by Belarusians and Ukrainians, the descendants of ancient Ruthenians, transformed by then into modern nations by their respective intelligentsias. Also the Crimean Tatars had their moment of spotlight and in 1917 summoned a local parliament under the traditional medieval name: Kurultay. The extension of suffrage to Crimean Tatar women was not only unprecedented in the Muslim world, but preceded by almost three years the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution and by almost thirty years a similar reform in France.’
Although the Tatars failed to gain independence, historical studies on the Tatar past blossomed in the first decade of the Soviet Union. They were conducted in a relatively liberal atmosphere by Russian, Ukrainian, and Tatar scholars. Yet, few of these scholars were to survive the Stalinist hecatomb that followed. Let us invoke just a few academics, whose studies—often suddenly interrupted—are cited throughout the present volume: Mixail Xudjakov, a historian of the Kazan Khanate, arrested on 9 September 1936 and executed on 19 December of the same year as a “Trockist;”!! Aleksandr Samojlovi¢, a prominent turkologist and the director of the Oriental Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, arrested on 3 October 1937 and executed on 13 February 1938 as a “Japanese spy;”!” Ahatanhel Kryms’kyj, a leading Ukrainian turkologist, arrested in July 1941, who perished in prison in Kazakhstan in January 1942. The last days of Vladimir Syroe¢kovskij, a brilliant Russian historian, whose insights into the structure of the Crimean society are still surprisingly fresh, are even less known. Fedir Petrun’, a Ukrainian scholar who painstakingly studied the historical geography of the Black Sea steppe, was luckier and survived the repressions, but discontinued his academic activity. His research remained almost completely forgotten until it was republished in 1993, in the Ukrainian journal Sxidnyj svit that was also restored to life after sixty years of silence.
Then followed WW2 with its demographic and material losses that particularly affected Eastern Europe. If it were not enough, in 1944 the whole Crimean Tatar nation was collectively accused of collaboration with the Nazis and deported to Central Asia by the Soviet authorities.
In the following fifty years, few publications appeared in the Soviet Union that would seriously treat the Crimean Khanate, and even those few ones were embellished with obligatory Marxist-Leninist jargon mixed with old imperial claims, adopted by then by the officially revived Russian nationalism. To give a few examples of small “tricks” detectable even in the most valuable monographs published in that period: when Boris Grekov and Aleksandr Jakubovskij published their monograph on the Golden Horde, they provided it with the title that unmistakably invokes the “orientalist” discourse: “The Golden Horde and its Downfall” (cf. the classical topos of decline or fall in the “orientalist” historiography of the Ottoman Empire)." In turn, the title of the painstaking study by Aleksej Novosel’skij reads: “The Struggle of the Muscovian state with the Tatars in the first half of the 17th century,” as if only focusing on the struggle excused the author’s interest in the Muscovian-Crimean relations.'* As late as in 1987, Gennadij Sanin flavored his monograph on the mid-seventeenth-century relations between Moscow and Baghchasaray with a mixture of biased judgments on the primitive and parasitic character of the Crimean economy, strengthened by a quotation from Friedrich Engels on Russia’s “progressive” role in the Orient.’° To be sure, all the above monographs are still useful today, although they must be read with a grain of salt. A much worse image was offered by Soviet encyclopedic and popular books, which refuted the Tatars’ claims to legitimate statehood and “reduced the Crimean Khanate to a predatory nest acting under the wings of the Turkish emperor.”"
Against the above background, it comes as a surprise that in the same period a leading Tatar scholar, Mirkasym Usmanov, managed to publish a monograph that not only met the highest scholarly standards but was entirely devoid of usual dismissing comments on the Tatar past. It certainly helped that Usmanov published his book in Kazan and focused on a relatively “safe” and less politicized topic, namely diplomatics and chancery. Besides, he consciously preferred the term ulus DZuci to the more widely known “Golden Horde,” not only as more scholarly correct but also in the hope to avoid negative connotations that the term “Golden Horde” usually evoked among censors.’
After the fall of the Soviet Union, official barriers to study the Tatar and Turkic past largely disappeared and monographs treating its various aspects mushroomed in the recent two decades in the Russian Federation. Anna Xoroskevi¢ and Aleksandr Vinogradov reminded that the Russian-Crimean relations had not always been hostile,'* while IP'ja Zajcev and Vadim Trepavlov restored the memory of the Khanate of Astrakhan and the Nogay Horde.’? While all the above studies were written and published in Moscow, also Kazan reclaimed its position as a major international center of Tatar studies.”
Tatar studies also revived in the Ukraine, where many scholars became affected by the powerful individuality of Omeljan Pritsak, who had always appreciated the input of Turkic elements in the making of the Ukrainian culture. A very interesting book has been recently published (in Russian) in the Crimea: its Ukrainian author, Oleksa Hajvoronskyj, infatuated with the history of the Crimean Khanate, aims to make it a common heritage of the peninsula’s contemporary inhabitants with no regard to their nationality: be they Russians, Ukrainians, or Tatars.’ The latter, whose large part has returned to the Crimea despite official bans and economic strains, also vividly participate in discussing their homeland’s past, although this activity has so far resulted in multiple historical websites rather than fully researched scholarly monographs. Before one makes any judgment, one must keep in mind that many members of the contemporary Crimean Tatar intelligentsia spent their youth in tents illegally erected by their parents on the confiscated grounds of their grandparents that no longer belonged to them, and at times these tents were set on fire by “unknown individuals.” How many an Ivy League college student would have written a decent Ph.D. if he/she were to live in a tent on the Harvard Yard, temporarily raided by hooligans and secret police?
Outside the Soviet Union, Tatar studies were continued in Turkey, especially by historians of Tatar origin, to mention only Akdes Nimet Kurat, Halil Inalcik, and—from a younger generation—Hakan Kinimli. Nevertheless, a suspicious attitude towards any pan-Turkic sympathies, demonstrated by the Turkish authorities especially after 1944, set visible limits to the development of this study area until the 1990s.
In Central-Eastern Europe, Turkic and Tatar studies traditionally flourished in Hungary and Poland, where ideological restraints were less visible than in other communist countries. The research by Istvan Vasary and Maria Ivanics seriously contributed to our knowledge of the Tatar, and especially Crimean Tatar chancery. The Polish input into the Crimean Tatar studies will be treated below. Here, it is worth mentioning that before WW2 an émigré Crimean Tatar historian, Abdullah Zihni Soysal, lived and worked in Warsaw.”
In the Western academia, studying the Tatar past was hardly a fashionable topic, but at least scholars were not constrained by ideological or administrative barriers. During the cold war, the fact that Tatar studies remained a taboo in the Soviet Union could even make their funding in the West more likely. For instance, when in 1978 Alan Fisher published a book that was to become for years the standard English language narrative of the Crimean Tatar past, it appeared in the Hoover Institution’s series: Studies of Nationalities in the USSR.” Largely due to one individual, an emigrant from Russia Alexandre Bennigsen, also Paris became a leading center for studying Islamic peoples of the Soviet Union. Bennigsen gathered an excellent team of scholars able to study Ottoman, Crimean, as well as Russian sources and initiated the edition of documents from the Topkapi Palace Archives regarding the Crimean Khanate. He introduced it with a touching and perhaps still up-to-date statement: Nul état n’a pas été autant décrié, honni et calomnié que le khanat tatar de Crimée, le dernier survivant du grand Empire mongol, le plus occidental des héritiers de la Horde d’Or.
Yet another Eastern European refugee, Josef Matuz, who had migrated to Germany from Hungary, made a lasting contribution to the studying of the Crimean chancery. Still another, Omeljan Pritsak, had promoted a number of students in North America before he returned to his native Ukraine in the 1990s. It is also within the US academia where a pathbreaking article was published in 1967 by Edward Keenan, who not only rejected the commonly held Euro- and Slavocentric views, regarding Tatars and other Turkic nomads as “Asiatic barbarians,” but praised the pragmatism and tolerance, characteristic for the “steppe diplomacy.”*
In the Polish modern national historiography, developed in the 19th century, the Crimean Tatars certainly figured as former invaders, but also at times as allies against Russia. Having in mind the Russian domination of Poland for the whole of the 19th and most of the 20th century, no wonder that the Crimean Khanate was typically treated more favorably by Polish historians than by their Russian colleagues. In 1935, Ludwik Kolankowski concluded that the political benefits for Poland-Lithuania resulting from the alliance with the Khanate “had prevailed over the irritating aspects of everyday neighborhood.””* In 1959, Zbigniew Wojcik labeled the Crimean Khanate as “the trusted ally in the struggle against Muscovy”—a bold compliment indeed if we remember that his book was published in communist Poland.’ Admittedly, such a pro-Tatar attitude can be justly criticized as equally biased as the anti-Tatar one, since the Tatars were praised not for their own virtues but merely as a useful instrument against Moscow.
Another flaw of the nineteenth-, and even twentieth-century Polish historiography was the treatment of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as merely a part of Poland and the resulting disregard of the former’s separate stateship tradition. For instance, in 1881 a prominent Polish historian Kazimierz Pulaski published a book entitled “the relations of Poland with the Tatars,” even though most documents used in his study originated from the Lithuanian chancery and were originally composed in Ruthenian in Cyrillic script.**
Given the Polonization of Lithuanian elites by Putaski’s times, best illustrated by the fact that the Polish national epic Pan Tadeusz, published in 1834 by Adam Mickiewicz, opened with the author’s invocation “O Lithuania, my fatherland,” pronounced in Polish, this appropriation of the Lithuanian tradition into the Polish one was hardly surprising and not unique in the era of nationalisms. In due time, it was reciprocated by Lithuanian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian national historiographies who all claimed the heritage of the Grand Duchy and in turn tended to ignore the Polish influence on the decision making processes in Vilnius. For instance, even today, the uneasy relations between Jogaila (i.e., the Polish king Vladislaus Jagielo) and his cousin, the Lithuanian grand duke Vytautas, are often viewed differently by Polish and Lithuanian historians. The former tend to stress Jogaila’s more “mature” character and dismiss Vytautas’ policy as “adventurous” and “separatist,” while the latter are eager to disregard Jogaila’s role as Vytautas’ suzerain. As we will see, this historiographic conflict dates back to the 15th century and is fairly reflected in the correspondence that circulated in the triangle between Qirq Yer, Vilnius, and Cracow.
Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Polish historians have rarely described the conflicts with the Tatars in the frames of the “civilizational struggle” between Christianity vs. Islam or Europe vs. Asia, instead stressing the pragmatic attitude of the two sides. The term antemurale Christianitatis (“bulwark of Christianity”), popular in the Polish domestic and external propaganda since the Middle Ages, was reserved rather for the relations with the Ottoman Empire. Only the Polish pre-Huntingtonian, Feliks Koneczny, chose to see an antiCatholic axis between Istanbul, Qirq Yer, and Moscow already in the 15th century and regarded Mengli Giray’s policy as subject to the designs of the “Ottoman caliphate” (sic).”” Koneczny’s historiosophical theory that focused on the clash of civilizations, though appreciated by Arnold Toynbee, had yet—and perhaps luckily—a weak impact on future generations of Polish historians.
Apart from the studies by Kazimierz Pulaski, Feliks Koneczny, and Ludwik Kolankowski, devoted to the Polish-Lithuanian, or rather Lithuanian-Polish, political relations with the Crimean Khanate in the 15th and 16th centuries, one must mention a number of recent publications by two Ukrainian scholars, Borys Cerkas and Feliks Sabul’do. All the above studies are primarily based on the Lithuanian Register books that remain by far the most rich mine of information regarding this subject.
For the 17th century, we have at our disposal three valuable studies by Bohdan Baranowski that roughly cover the years 1624-1660.*° Recently, these studies have been supplemented by a detailed monograph by Dariusz Skorupa that covers the years 1595-1623.*! For the later part of the century, one should mention a number of publications by Zbigniew Wojcik as well as other scholars, either focused on Warsaw’s relations with Baghchasaray or invoking them as the factor influencing Warsaw’s relations with other capitals, most notably Moscow and Istanbul.
Perhaps the most neglected is the history of the relations between Warsaw and Baghchasaray in the 18th century. Notwithstanding a few articles devoted to separate subjects, the reader must still rely on the outdated monograph of the Polish-Ottoman relations by Wladyslaw Konopczynski, where Baghchasaray plays but a marginal role.”
The only book that chronologically covers the entire history of the Polish-Crimean relations is the popular monograph by Leszek Podhorodecki, published in 1987. Although it mostly follows the extant literature and relies on Alan Fisher’s monograph in the description of the Tatar state and society, it provides a useful narrative of the longterm neighborhood that lasted almost four centuries.*
Regrettably, with the sole exception of Baranowski, none of the Polish historians quoted above had a command of Oriental languages that would enable them the use of the Crimean and Ottoman chronicles as well as primary sources. On the other hand, Polish turcologists rarely endeavored into purely historical topics although they largely contributed towards studying the Khanate’s past by editing heavily annotated source editions and studying the Crimean Tatar language and historical toponymy.* Even Zygmunt Abrahamowicz, whose impressive knowledge of the Crimean past transpires from his numerous dispersed publications, usually limited himself to sharing it merely in footnotes or, at best, in short articles.
The above historiographical sketch does not pretend to list all relevant authors or exhaust the whole literature on the history of the Crimean Khanate, and especially its relations with Lithuania and Poland. Its major aim is rather to point out that sometimes the present author had to enter in polemics with his predecessors who wrote a century ago, and at times he had to establish facts on the basis of primary sources, although initially he considered such task as lying beyond the scope of the present study.
Part I of the book aims to provide the reader with a basic chronology, more detailed in cases when diplomatic negotiations and embassies resulted in formal instruments of peace. A longue durée approach, adopted in the present study, enables one to see the continuity and changes more clearly. When studied carefully, the yarliqs from ca. 1462, 1507, and 1560, at first sight almost identical in form and contents, disclose as many similarities as differences, reflecting the evolution of chancery forms and the changing political equilibrium between the two partners. It is hoped that more detailed narratives will follow, whose authors will focus on aspects only touched upon, or entirely left beyond the present study.
Part II traces the evolution of chancery forms, the typology, composition and contents of instruments of peace, and the procedure of peacemaking. As the Lithuanian and Polish chancery practices and diplomatic procedures are better known than the Crimean ones, the author focuses especially on the latter. In order to shed more light on the khan’s chancery, Crimean documents sent to other capitals, especially to Moscow, are often invoked for comparative reasons, along with extremely rich reports of Russian envoys, who described the ceremonial at the khan’s court.
The largest part of the present volume consists of the instruments of peace, published in original languages along with English translations (apart from the documents in Latin and Italian that are published only in the original). Out of the seventy-one instruments, selected for publication, forty-six were issued by the Crimean side: three of them can be classified as donation yarliqs, nine as “donation yarliqs cum sartnames,” six as sartnames, nineteen as ‘ahdnames, three as oathyarligs, and six as “others.” Most of these documents were issued by the khans, but four were issued by the qalgas (1527, 1637, 1640, and 1667, the latter issued collectively by the qalga and other Crimean notables), one by the nureddin (1640), one by the khan’s son and heir apparent who yet was not a qalga (1517), and two by the Crimean envoys sent to Poland (1541 and 1599).
Moreover, eight formulas of the oaths, taken by the khans, the Crimean envoys sent to PolandLithuania, or the Crimean plenipotentiaries appointed to negotiate the peace, which have been recorded and preserved, are published as well. The number of Polish-Lithuanian instruments, whose texts are preserved, is much smaller: these are eleven royal instruments of peace, one of them addressed only to the qalga (1637). In addition, three formulas of the oaths, taken by the king, the Senate members, and the commissioners appointed to negotiate the peace, have been recorded and preserved. The author also decided to publish three ready formulas of the khans’ instruments, prepared by the royal chancery in 1535, 1619, and 1622, although these formulas could not be regarded as instruments of peace unless they were accepted by the other side, rewritten in the Crimean chancery and corroborated by the khan (on the typology of documents, see Part II; cf. also the list of Instruments exchanged between the Crimean Khanate and Poland-Lithuania, appended on pp. 516-518).
Only fifteen instruments are preserved in the original, all issued by the Crimean side and today held in Warsaw. In addition, the texts of the oaths, taken in 1667 reciprocally by the Crimean and Polish commissioners, were written down and authenticated by Grand Hetman Jan Sobieski. Today they are also preserved in the Polish archives, bearing Sobieski’s handwritten signature, so they can be considered as “the originals,” too. The facsimiles of the above mentioned seventeen instruments are enclosed at the end of the present volume.
Of the seventy-one texts preserved today in the original, copies, or translations, only twelve are written in Turkish: one in Khwarezmian Turkic and the remaining eleven in a mixture of Crimean Tatar and Ottoman Turkish, with the rising impact of the latter. One Crimean instrument is composed in Italian (1514), although it also contains seals (nisans) engraved in Arabic script. Twenty-three texts are extant in Ruthenian, thirty-one in Polish (including two Crimean documents corroborated with seals engraved in Arabic script), and four in Latin. The sartname of 1520, luckily preserved in the Khwarezmian Turkic original, is published along with its contemporary Ruthenian translation; the comparison between the two language versions facilitates one to reconstruct the original terminology of other Crimean instruments that are today preserved only in Ruthenian translations.
The above statistics demonstrate that most of the published instruments are preserved merely in Ruthenian or Polish copies or translations. As such, they have not evoked so far much interest among scholars specializing in Oriental chanceries. On the other hand, historians who have studied these translations without referring to analogous documents preserved in the Turkish originals, often have been unable to determine their function and reconstruct their proper composition and terminology. Although most of the instruments, published in the present volume, have already been published before (references to previous editions are provided in the headings of respective documents), these editions are dispersed, typically devoid of annotations, and quite often contain faults.
It is for the first time when they are published together in a volume devoted to the diplomatic relations between the Crimean Khanate and Poland-Lithuania. It is hoped that by this means scholars specializing in diplomatic history, Islamic chanceries, or simply Eastern Europe, will receive rich material, reflecting the diplomatic relations between two (originally three) early modern states situated on the edge of the Western Latinity, Eastern Slavonic Orthodoxy, Islamic Middle East, and the steppe nomad world extending between the Black Sea and northern China.
The very term “European Periphery,” used in the title of the present volume, is somewhat provocative. At the outset, it is worth stressing that there is nothing inherently positive in the adjective “European” as contrasted with “non-European” or “Asian.” As to the noun “Periphery,” long time ago scholars like Immanuel Wallerstein, and before him Marian Matowist, demonstrated that no “center” could survive without a “periphery” and the latter not only depended but also influenced the former.
To be sure, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, extending to the lands of modern Belarus, Ukraine, and even western Russia, can be described as Eastern rather than Central European, notwithstanding the amusing fact that today no nation and no government in Europe wants to be located in “Eastern Europe.” The Crimean Tatars and Nogays, relative newcomers from Central Asia attached to Islam, even though settled in the old nest of Greek civilization and mixed with its ancient inhabitants, were still more “Eastern European,” if they were—or wanted to be—European at all. A telling proof of the two states’ peripheral status in regard to Europe is provided by the fact that the Crimean Tatar documents were usually drawn on Italian paper while the Polish gifts to the khans consisted mostly of English cloth.
Nevertheless, if early modern Europe is sometimes identified with the radiation of Italian renaissance, all three East European states, PolandLithuania, the Crimean Khanate, and Muscovy, should be defined as fully European. The Polish royal court was one of the leading centers of renaissance art to the north from the Alps. Acquainted with the Italian art at the court of his older brother in Buda, in 1502 Sigismund—still as a prince—committed an Italian master from Florence, Francesco, with a renaissance reconstruction of the Wawel Castle in Cracow.
Three years earlier, another Italian master, Aloisio Lamberti da Montagnana, was hired by the envoys of Ivan III with the task of rebuilding the Moscow Kremlin. Yet, on his way from Italy to Moscow, Aloisio was detained in the Crimea, where Mengli Giray put him in charge of embellishing his new residence in Saladjiq near Qirq Yer. Only in 1504 he was allowed to proceed to Moscow to become famous as Aleviso Nuovo (Rus. Aleviz Novyj), the coauthor of the renaissance reconstruction of the Kremlin.»
The early modern “European Periphery,” depicted in the present study, was tremendously rich if measured by cultural traditions, reli-gions, and languages. It is there where one could find multilingual neighborhoods, Roman Catholic chapels illuminated with Byzantine frescos, wooden mosques remindful of parochial churches, and renaissance synagogues designed by Italian architects, who were simultaneously commissioned to execute royal tombstones.
Much of this world perished during the last “modern” and “rational” century of nationalisms, to be recently reappreciated in the new mosaic known as the European Union.
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