Moldavia and the Crimean Khanate Between Pax Mongolica and Pax Ottomanica

Entangled Histories, Entangled Chancelleries? Moldavia and the Crimean Khanate between Pax Mongolica and Pax Ottomanica

Michał Wasiucionek

1 Introduction

By 1686, the Ottoman Empire’s military fortunes seemed to have reached their nadir. Although the imperial forces were able to fend off Polish-Lithuanian challenge in Moldavia, they suffered major reversals on all the other fronts. In Morea, the Venetians managed to entrench their positions and achieve significant gains; in Hungary, Habsburg armies succeeded in capturing Buda and advanced far into the Ottoman territory. Finally, the Russian authorities decided to join the war, exposing the empire’s eastern flank. It is under these critical circumstances that a curious case of miscommunication took place. In a letter addressed to Transylvanian prince Mihály Apafi I, the Crimean khan Selim I Girey (1671–1678, 1684–1691, 1692–1699 and 1702–1704) barely touched upon military matters. Instead, he complained:

despite the fact that people [at my court] know every language and read every script, they were unable to translate the contents of the letter that I had received from you (eğerce bu tarafta her dilibilur ve her yazıyı okur- adamlar var idi lakın sizdengelen kağıtı okuyub içinde olan ahvalı tercum- eye kadır olamadılar).1

Given the gravity of the military situation and the average speed of communication at that time, the Transylvanian prince’s choice to write the letter in Hungarian could have had disastrous consequences for the Porte. Such mis- haps were not uncommon in early modern Eastern Europe, which lacked a commonly utilized lingua franca similar to that of Latin employed in Western Europe or the triad of Ottoman Turkish, Arabic and Persian in the Middle East. The cacophony of languages spoken and written throughout the region had important political consequences. Some crucial documents went unread for the lack of competent staff, and crucial information was lost in translation.

1 Direcția Arhivelor Naționale—Instituție Centrală, București, Documente turcești, 2349.

While this particular mishap is fascinating in its own right, equally inter- esting are Selim Girey’s assertions regarding the skill of his chancery staff. Although one may be tempted to interpret khan’s claims as an attempt to save face and shift the blame for the embarrassing situation on Apafi, this was no empty boast. Throughout the early modern period, the rulers in Bahçesaray maintained a chancellery remarkable for its versatility and impressive skillset that allowed it to handle correspondence in a variety of scripts and languages and produce documents in no less than four different scripts. As Dariusz Kołodziejczyk noted, the multilingual chancellery “demonstrated the political pragmatism of the Crimean court and the ﬂuency of the Crimean chancery in various cultural spheres.”2 At the same time, this cosmopolitan approach was a point of pride for the Gireys and represented a continuation of the multilingual approach to diplomatics that had been employed by the Golden Horde and the Mongol Empire. Although the Crimean khans did not aspire to uni- versal sovereignty in the manner their Chinggisid ascendants had done, the ability of their scribes not only facilitated communication but also enhanced their dynastic pride and political prestige. The Gireys were not the only ones to subscribe to this model of chancery practice; so did their western neighbours, the voivodes of Moldavia and Wallachia. Tucked between Catholic powers of Poland and Hungary, the wan- ing steppe power of the Golden Horde and the expanding Ottoman Empire, their very existence relied heavily on the ability to adapt to their more pow- erful neighbours. Thus, although the foundations of the principalities’ political institutions and legitimacy drew on the models within the ‘Byzantine commonwealth’,3 the chanceries of Moldavia and Wallachia, from their forma- tion, were remarkably receptive to influences from non-Orthodox polities as well.4 Not only were the scribes able to produce documents in multiple scripts, but also skillfully utilize rhetorical conventions and diplomatic features to their advantage.5 Thus, while relying on different ‘primary idioms’ of document pro- duction, both Moldavian-Wallachian and Crimean chancelleries partook in cosmopolitan and multilingual culture that made them particularly important

2 Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, The Crimean Khanate and Poland–Lithuania: International Diplomacy on the European Periphery (15th–18th Centuries): A Study of Peace Treaties Followed by Annotated Documents (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2011), p. 240. 3 For the concept of the ‘Byzantine commonwealth’, see Dimitri Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453 (New York: Praeger, 1971). 4 Nicolae Gramadă, “Cancelaria domnească în Moldova până la domnia lui Constantin Mavrocordat,” Codrul Cosminului, 9 (1935), pp. 185–87. 5 On this topic, see particularly Marian Coman, Putere și teritoriu: Țara Românească medievală (secolele XIV–XVI) (Iași: Polirom, 2013).