The 600th Anniversary of Polish-Turkish Relations

How it all began: The Council of Constance, Hungarian/Ottoman rapprochement, and an Armenian named Gregory.

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THROUGHOUT 2014 historians and statesmen will come together from Poland and Turkey to celebrate the six-hundredth anniversary of Polish-Turkish relations. Some of our readers may be thinking, “600 years of Polish-Turkish relations?! That’s ahistorical!”  In a sense, they would be correct. The Regnum Poloniae (Kingdom of Poland) of King Władysław Jagiełło and the Osmanlı Devleti (Ottoman State) of Sultan Mehmet I differed greatly from the contemporary countries we know today as Poland and Turkey. Following consistent relations between the two states throughout the late medieval and early modern periods, the turbulence of the late 18th and 19th centuries witnessed the dissolution of Poland as well as political reforms and the territorial contraction of the late Ottoman state. In the 20th century the Polish state reconstituted itself, and the Ottoman Empire reformed into the Turkish Republic. This was followed by the eradication and forced migration of historically integrated minority communities in both states along with a massive reshuffling of the social order in both places.

Modern national histories have supplanted older narratives in order to affirm the timelessness of the nation. If one wished to engage six centuries of political and cultural interaction between the inhabitants of Poland(-Lithuania) and the involvement of Polish émigrés in Ottoman and Turkish society, it would be prudent to recall what we know, or what we think we know, about the first official diplomatic interactions between the Kingdom of Poland and the early Ottoman Empire.

Prior to the official commencement of Polish-Ottoman relations in 1414, both polities were heavily involved in large-scale conflicts in distant peripheries; the forces of Tamerlane defeated the Ottoman Sultan Beyazid in 1402 at the battle of Ankara, followed by a decade-long interregnum and bloody civil war. Meanwhile, after the death of the Piast dynasty and the personal union between the Catholic Kingdom of Poland and the Pagan Grand Duchy of Lithuania under Gediminid leader Władysław Jagiełło, decades of strife with the expansionist Teutonic Order culminated in the momentous battle of Grunwald/Tannenberg in 1410.

In the wake of these events Polish-Ottoman territorial and economic interests began to coincide as both states established zones of influence in the Black Sea region. Poland obtained suzerainty over neighboring Moldavia in 1387 with the cooperation of Moldavian Hospodar Peter, who feared growing Ottoman power. Soon after, the Ottoman patrimony grew to encompass Serbia (1389), Bulgaria (1396), and threatened the powerful Kingdom of Hungary.

The Council of Constance (1414-1418) had many important ramifications for the Papacy and East Central Europe. Concomitant with the resolution of the “Great Schism”, the trial and execution of Jan Hus, and the creation of “just war” doctrine due to continued conflict between the Kingdom of Poland and the Teutonic Order, the first envoys of the Polish King were dispatched to the Ottoman court. This event would have formative ramifications on the balance of power in East-Central Europe and the Black Sea region into the modern era.

Little is known about the Polish embassy of 1414. The earliest relation detailing these events is contained within the 15th century chronicles of Jan Długosz (Annales seu Cronicae Incliti Regni Poloniae). Historians have relied upon Długosz’s accuracy concerning the date of the embassy, though it remains possible that it actually occurred one year later (1415), when hostilities between Hungary and the Ottomans augmented. At this time, the growing power of the Ottoman dynasty caused King Sigismund of Hungary to send a letter from the Council of Constance requesting military aid from King Władysław Jagiełło. The Polish King was not willing to engage in open conflict with the Ottomans and instead offered to broker a peace between the two monarchs. Two envoys were sent to the court of Mehmed I (1413-1421): a Polish nobleman and veteran of the battle of Grunwald/Tanenberg, Jakub Skarbek of Góra, and Gregory the Armenian, a native of Lwów, who was both an advisor to and confidant of King Władysław Jagiełło. According to Długosz’s chronicle, the envoys were dispatched with the dual purpose of securing a peace agreement and ransoming Hungarian prisoners taken in conflict. Evidently Gregory and Jakub Skarbek were well received by Mehemd I and an ‘ahdname (charter) was drafted issuing a six-year peace between King Sigismund and Mehmed I.

After their successes in the court of Mehmed I, Jakub Skarbek returned to Poland while Gregory the Armenian accompanied the Sultan’s representatives to the Council of Constance, likely as a translator. As often occurred at a time when news traveled only as fast as the humans who carried it, violence broke out between Ottoman and Hungarian forces during peace negotiations in the far off court of Mehmed I, and resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of the Polish envoy Gregory upon his arrival in Hungary by members of the local Magnateria whose interests were threatened by the treaty. The Sultan’s representatives turned back at this news and peace was never established.

Despite the brevity of Długosz’s account of the events of 1414, several elements of the initial diplomatic interaction between the Kingdom of Poland and the Ottoman Empire should be noted while attempting to understand the development of their long-term relations. The first is the importance of the geopolitical interests of both polities, as well of those of their often-contentious neighbors, in setting the tone for all state-to-state interactions. Polish claims to sovereignty in the border region of Moldavia would eventually be challenged by Ottoman patronage of Moldavian and Wallachian Hospodars. Here conflicting interests led to several full-scale wars and intriguing moments of cooperation in the Polish-Lithuanian/Ottoman shared frontier zone. Similarly, the status of the Kingdom of Hungary, which came to share a monarch with Poland and was eventually split and ruled by Ottoman Sultans and Habsburg Emperors, served as a continuous inroads for both states into each other’s geo-political spheres.

However tenuous the inter-state geopolitics were, private interests and autonomous actions of magnates and notables also facilitated or hindered interactions on both sides of Ottoman/Polish-Lithuanian frontiers. The historical connections between local nobility and the state power structures on both sides of the Polish-Ottoman frontier shaped the political climate of the region. This was the case in 1414 when Hungarian Magnates imprisoned Gregory the Armenian rather than sending him to King Sigismund with Mehmed I’s peace offer. Over centuries, the interests of individuals and blocs would often supersede the will of Kings, Sultans, and parliaments.

Finally, critical roles were played by members of minority populations, such as Gergory the Armenian, as interlocutors in the political and economic interactions between Poland and the Ottoman Empire (Nadel-Golobič, 1979). In particular, the Orthodox Christian Armenian community of Poland-Lithuania maintained Kipchak-Turkish as its mother tongue into the seventeenth century. Critical linguistic abilities combined with active participation in far-reaching trade networks that connected Armenian communities from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans, supplied Poland-Lithuania with generations of translators, ambassadors, and go-betweens with the Ottoman Empire and Persia (Połczyński, 2014). In appreciation of Gregory the Armenian’s loyal service to the Crown King Władysław Jagiełło awarded him with the village of Sroki in the vicinity of Lwów (Barącz, 1856.).

The short diplomatic episode of the first Polish embassy to the Ottoman Empire in 1414 was portentous. The local geopolitical rivalries, the private initiative of frontier notables, and the role of local minority populations as “trans-imperial” go-betweens (Rothman, 2012) that drove this political interaction would remain central to the dynamic relations between Poland and the Ottoman Empire over the next six hundred years. Subsequent to the 1414 mission, the first Turkish embassy to Poland was sent by Murad II and arrived in Kraków in 1439. This time, the Ottoman Sultan hoped to conclude an alliance against Albrecht Habsburg, the King of Hungary. This was not to be, however, as the young Polish King, Władysław III, would succeed the Hungarian throne the following year. Shortly after, he acceded to the demands of Hungarian nobles, who subsequently led the ill-fated crusade of Varna in 1444 (Kołodziejczyk, 2000).

Select Bibliography:

1.      Barącz, Sadok. 1856. Żywoty sławnych Ormian w Polsce. Lwów: nakł. Wojciecha Manieckiego.

2.      Długosz, Jan. Ioannis Dlugossii… Historiae Polonicae Libri XII (Kraków, 1877).

3.    Deletant, Dennis. 1986. "Moldavia between Hungary and Poland, 1347-1412". The Slavonic and East European Review. 64 (2): 189-211.

4.  Kaczka, Mariusz. 2011. “The Gentry of the Polish-Ottoman Borderlands: the Case of the Moldavian-Polish Family of Turkuł/Turculeţ”. Acta Poloniae Historica, (104): 129-150.

5.  Kołodziejczyk, Dariusz. 2000. Ottoman-Polish diplomatic relations 15th - 18th century: an annotated edition of ʻahdnames and other documents. Leiden [u.a.]: Brill.

6.   Nadel-Golobič, Eleonora. 1979. "Armenians and Jews in Medieval Lvov. Their Role in Oriental Trade 1400-1600". Cahiers Du Monde Russe Et Soviétique. 20 (3/4): 345-388.

7.  Połczyński, Michael. “The Relacyja of Sefer Muratowicz: 1601-1602 private royal envoy of Sigismund III Vasa to Shah ‘Abbas I”. Turkish Historical Review. (forthcoming, Spring 2014. For manuscript click HERE)

8.    Rothman, E. Natalie. 2012. Brokering empire: trans-imperial subjects between Venice and Istanbul. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

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Michael Połczyński is a Doctoral Candidate at Georgetown University. See academia.edu