Dariusz Kolodziejczyk the Ottoman Diplomats on Eighteenth-Century Poland

DARIUSZ KOLODZIEJCZYK THE OTTOMAN DIPLOMATS ON EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POLAND: CONTEMPT OR DISCOURAGEMENT? n 1990, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the first non-communist Polish prime I minister began his speech in the European Council quoting an old tra dition, still present in the Polish collective memory, according to which every audience of foreign envoys at the 19th-century Ottoman court be gan with the proclamation "The ambassador ofLehistan has not come yet". Mazowiecki's statement was a clear allusion to Poland's wish, after 40 years of the Iron Curtain, to be allowed to join the European Council. Leaving this aside, let us focus on this tradition, which I myself also heard from my father many years ago. Even if not true, it reflects the hopes which Poles shared for over 100 years. It is not an accident that the greatest Polish poet, Adam Mickiewicz, died in a shabby house at in Is tanbul, while trying to gain Ottoman support for the Polish cause during the Crimean war. Polish children still learn about Jozef Bern, the hero of the Polish uprising in 1830 and a chief commander of the Hungarian up rising in 1848, though it is hard to find in their textbooks that the same Jozef Bern later on accepted Islam and died as Murad P~a in distant Aleppo. In a lecture at Princeton University given in spring 1991, Roderic Davi son stressed the importance of the fate of Poland in shaping the mentality of the 19th-century Ottoman diplomats. In the 19th century, however, not much could have been done in Istanbul to influence the political situation in Eastern Europe, apart from some symbolic gestures towards Polish refugees. One century earlier Poland had still existed as an independent state which, though weakened and corrupt, could have been influenced and used by Ottoman diplomacy. Already in the 1660s the eminent Russian statesman, Afanasij Ordin Nascokin, saw the three main strategic goals for the Russian empire: reaching the Baltic coast, reuniting old Rus ' by incorporating Belorussian and Ukrainian lands into Russia and, finally, opening the Black Sea. By the mid-18th century the first goal had already been accomplished at the cost of Sweden. The second had to be achi.eved at the cost of Poland and the third at that of the Ottomans and their Crimean allies. It would be unjust to say that the Ottoman politicians were unaware of the common danger. However, their policy towards Poland seems to have been very inconsistent at that time. On the one hand, the Ottomans were pushing very hard to preserve Polish independence against Russia. In the 1730s they supported anti-Russian Stanislaw Leszczynski. Then, between OM, n.s. XVII (LXXVIII), I, 1999 98 DARIUSZ KOLODZIEJCZYK 1768 and 1774 and again between 1788 and 1792, both the Ottomans and the Poles were fighting against Russia. The Ottomans even called the first war Leh seferi. It resulted, for the Poles in the first partition, and for the Ottomans in the humiliating treaty of Kiijj:iik Kaynarca. But if we look closer at these events, the complete lack of co-ordination between the Polish and Ottoman troops is striking. This lack of co-ordination becomes less striking however, if we examine the 18th-century Sefaretname lit erature. Faik Re~it Unat lists 20 accounts of Ottoman embassies to various European and Asian countries written in the second half of the 18th cen tury. Such accounts, called Sefaretname, were usually written by pa~as and efendis (high ranking military or bureaucratic officials), and only two of them by lower ranked agas. And it is not surprising that both agas were ambassadors to Lehistan. 1 This might lead to the conclusion that at the dawn of Ottoman professional diplomacy educated men were sent to Berlin, Vienna and Moscow, but not to Warsaw. The two best Ottoman accounts of late 18th-century Poland were written by diplomats who did not even reach Warsaw. The first, Resmi Ahmed Efendi, was crossing Polish territory on his way to Berlin; the second, Abdiilkerim Pa~a, was travelling to Moscow. Let us consider what these two diplomats saw in their travels through Poland. Resmi Ahmed spent only one month in Poland in 1762. His road led through Kamjanec', Lviv and Krakow to Breslau and Berlin. In his general description of Poland we find several interesting points. First, the society was divided into three classes, Ruthenians, Jews and Poles, identi fied respectively as peasants, townsmen and notables, to whom the for mer two groups were subject. Polish nobles did nothing but drink, quarrel and sell their services to whichever foreign ambassador paid the most. Second, Poland was divided into small, completely independent counties (nahiye). Each county was ruled by a local noble family, which had no respect for the king. The city of Danzig made up another separate county. Third, the only reason that Poland still existed was that her neighbours could not agree on her fate. 2 This view is surely full of stereotypes. Perceiving Ruthenians and Jews as reaya and the Poles as some kind of Ottomans reflected the millet system, with which the author was familiar. Travelling mainly through Ukrainian ethnic territories, Resmi Ahmed hardly noticed the Polish peasants and transferred Ukranian ethnic and social realities to the whole Polish state. However, his other views fit in amazingly with the most recent views of Polish historians. In his recent papers, Antoni Mllczak has been argu ing that, contrary to existing stereotypes, Poland should not be considered l - Unat, F.R., Osman/, Sefirleri ve Sefaretnameleri, Ankara, 1968, p. vii-ix. 2 - Resmi, Ahmet, Sefaretname, Kostantiniye, 1303, p. 27-28. .

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