POLAND AND THE PORTE

Abstract

THE TREATIES PUBLISHED HERE are principally from the crown archives of Poland, established first at Cracow and then at Warsaw. On the. disappearance of Poland in 1795 theywere.transferred to. St Petersburg and later to Moscow, whence they returned in .1923.2 The Ottoman registers into which such treaties were copied all post-date 1699 and the reorganisation of the Ottoman chancery, but they contain most of the Polish treaties in the two volumes of Ahmed Feridun's manual of chancery practice, Man~eata 'l-Selatin. 3 Nothing. is known of the documents sent from the Polish side to Istanbul. Some of the documents edited here were utilised in Kolodziejczyk's earlier work, but he also exploits. an important unpublished doctoral thesis by Hans Theunissen (Utrecht University, 1991) on Ottoman decrees issued to the Venetian republic up to 1640. The documents amount to an exhaustive history of Polish-Ottoman peace treaties, all the way from draft to final document, backed by a chronological survey of successive armistices, treaties· and frontier demarcations and of the preceding negotiations. Their publication is overdue: no independent European state sent envoys so regularly to the Porte (there was never a permanent Polish mission in Istanbul), but the documents have attracted singularly little attention on the Ottoman side. The author's study, which he modestly concedes to be (totally obsolete', is allthe more necessary in that manuals of Islamic Chancery practice (which, however, do not appear to survive .. from Ottoman Turkey) are often normative and ignore actual practice. Its frankly Rankean tenor, though not perhaps uncongenial to readers of The Court Historian, turns A. J. P. Taylor's jibe that Ranke (almost assumed that men wrote [such] documents for the benefit of historians' against itself. These documents are basic for the history not only of Poland and Lithuania but. also. of Moldavia and Wallachia, Transylvania, the Crimean Khanate, the Ukrainian Cossack hetmanate and the Nogay horde-all states which tend to be marginalized by European historians but all at one time or another obstacles to Habsburg or Russian expansion. They thus highlight the key positions of Poland, and Ottoman Turkey, in the political and diplomatic history of central and eastern Europe.