Examination of Poland. The sultan boasts of his military power, claims John has secretly met up with other Christian princes to form an anti-Ottoman coalition, and threatens to violently conquer his lands. Some early
turcica such as this one are addressed to the Polish king, not the Cossacks; they do not mention Cossacks, and are not accompanied by a reply from the Cossacks. The text is closely related to the
Kurtzer Bericht 1653 in German. , of the fake threatening letters of the Ottoman sultan (in this case allegedly
Mehmed IV) to the King of Poland (in this case unnamed). Its contents are broadly similar to the 1652 Dutch version, but textually, they are much closer to the 1621 Dutch version, which was evidently translated from German. One of the first people who attempted to critically study the correspondence between the sultan and Cossacks was Andrej Popov (1869). He correctly linked it to a group of other apocryphal letters attributed to the sultan that appear in 17th-century Muscovite manuscripts, but he incorrectly concluded that all of these letters had to have been written by the same Muscovite author in the last quarter of the 17th century. Subsequent studies attempted to show that the original text of the sultan–Cossack correspondence was written in Polish, and then translated into Ukrainian and Russian, or that Ukrainian was the primary version. Kostiantyn V. Kharlampovych / Xarlampovyč (1923) did the first thorough
textological analysis of several versions available to him, which he divided into two groups: short Russian versions (known to Popov) which connected the Cossacks to Chyhyryn, and longer Ukrainian versions (collectively called the "Ukrainian redaction") which connected the Cossacks to Zaporizhzhia and contained various other elements not found in the short Russian versions. Although Kharlampovych did not have access to any Polish versions, the internal evidence convinced him that Polish had to have been the original language, and that factual discrepancies in the Ukrainian texts made it extremely implausible that they had originated from the 17th-century Cossacks in Ukraine. With her two 1950s articles, Marianna Davidovna Kagan-Tarkovskaia was the first scholar to thoroughly examine many Russian texts, concluding they were most likely translated from Ukrainian to Russian by the
Posolskii prikaz (Muscovite Ambassadorial/Diplomatic Chancery), which was in charge of translating foreign pamphlets and newspapers. Nud'ha (1963) brought a so-far unknown Polish text to light and argued for an early-17th-century Ukrainian origin of the correspondence, but his conclusions were found to be untenable. In 1966, Eustachiewicz and Inglot published a number of Polish versions of the sultan–Cossack letters, which – with one exception – corresponded to the "Ukrainian redaction", and cited a significant amount of evidence to connect it to a well-established 17th-century literary tradition in Poland. In a 1620 letter, Sultan
Osman II addressed the Zaporozhian Cossacks not as subjects but as a sovereign power, using the formal title "Kazaklar" and offering them vassal status directly under the Porte to entice them away from Poland.
Observations and conclusions U.S.-based Slavic and Eastern European historian
Daniel C. Waugh (1978) observed: According to Ukrainian historian Volodymyr Pylypenko (2019), the letter is 'perhaps the most famous
forgery in Ukrainian history, a fake with a long and vibrant history (...). The text has undergone numerous translations and rewritings.' A French and a German translation became the best-known versions, as these made the text accessible to a large European readership. Pylypenko pointed out that the letter bears many stylistic similarities to other fake documents and forgeries that appeared in the 17th century, including the
Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the
Tsardom of Russia (Muscovy), which purported to be genuine correspondence between various Eastern European Christian monarchs and the Ottoman sultan, but were in fact works of political-religious propaganda. He summarised this genre as follows: • The Sultan's letters to the King of Rzeczpospolita (the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth) • fake correspondence between the monarchs; • the Sultan's letters to the Polish gentry; and • a set of false agreements related to the creation of a European Christian anti-Turkish coalition.' Russian historian Ivan Poliakov (2018) published the oldest known copy of the sultan–Cossack correspondence as found in a
Romodanovsky archive from the 1670s, which is very important for understanding how these texts came into existence. According to Russian historian Stepan Mikhailovich Shamin (2020), the evidence indicates that the text began as a simple joke in the form of a pamphlet by Polish nobles, in which the Chyhyryn Cossacks rebuffed the sultan's titles and threats with humour;
Grigory Romodanovsky found this text interesting and funny, had it translated into Russian and then gave it to his nephew S. V. Romodanovsky. Shamin stated that the originally Polish text thus probably found its way through the Romodanovsky family into the Russian language and into the Russian/Muscovite realm. By the late 17th and early 18th century, the pamphlet reappeared in a somewhat modified version every time a new war broke out with the Ottomans, and from the 18th century (especially the mid-18th century) onwards, there are also many Ukrainian versions of the sultan–Cossack correspondence showing up. The fact that the city of
Chyhyryn (capital of the
Cossack Hetmanate 1648–1676) was destroyed in the 1670s war, and its defence against Ottoman expansion faded from memory with the passage of time, is probably the reason why the "Chyhyryn Cossacks" were eventually replaced by the "Zaphorozhian Cossacks" (much better-known in later times) in most 18th-century versions of the text. Ukrainian historian Taras Chuhlib (2020) outlined two main reasons for considering all known versions of the sultan–correspondence as literary inventions rather than authentic historical documents: • The original text has not been found, but the numerous versions that have survived all contradict each other: • The letters are dated to different years, including 1600, 1619, 1620, 1667, 1672, 1677, 1683, et cetera. • The signature below the Cossack letter differs widely, including "grassroots Cossacks", "Otaman Zakharchenko", and "Ivan Sirko". • The recipients of the Cossack letter differ widely in identifying which Ottoman sultan they are replying to, including "Osman", "Mehmed IV", "
Ahmed III", and so on. • The Ottoman sultan addresses the Cossacks in numerous different ways, including identifying them with either Chyhyryn or Zaporizhzhia. • The style of the Cossack letter is not credibly historic: 'In fact, it is known about the diplomatic correspondence of Cossack rulers with the rulers of other countries, including the Turkish sultan,' that it had 'a completely different character and never violated the
etiquette of the time to address a person of this level.' == Versions ==