Sefer Muratowicz and the Armenian Connection: trans-imperial subjecthood and diplomacy between Poland, Persia, and the Ottoman Empire

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Armenian merchant and Ottoman subject Sefer Muratowicz emigrated to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late 16th century. Soon after, he appeared before Safavid Shah ‘Abbas I as the personal envoy of King Sigismund III Vasa on a royal diplomatic mission unsanctioned by the Commonwealth’s parliament. Though the trajectory of Sefer Muratowicz’s life is not without precedence in the heterogeneous social milieu of Poland-Lithuania, his documented involvement in the private royal embassy of 1601-1602 to Safavid Persia presents an exceptional view into the critical role of the diasporic Armenian population in the diplomatic and economic relations between Europe’s largest republic and the Islamic world in the early modern period.

Throughout most of the 16^th century, a period otherwise characterized by intense regional conflicts, the maintenance of peaceful relations was a critical element of both Polish-Lithuanian and Ottoman grand strategies. This situation began to change, however, after the subsequent election of Sigismund III Vasa (r. 1587-1632), as the pro-French, Ottoman-friendly faction within the greater body of Commonwealth citizenry was confronted by the staunchly Catholic king’s desire for rapprochement with the Ottomans’ most potent enemy— the Habsburgs. Sigismund III, acting in accordance with historical attempts of Christian rulers to ally themselves with distant Persia against more proximate Islamic polities, viewed the Safavids as a potential ally in any future wars with the Ottoman Empire. Significantly, Safavid Shah ‘Abbas I had embarked on a diplomatic scheme in 1599 by sending his envoys to contact eight separate Christian rulers, including the King of Poland-Lithuania, in hopes of establishing an anti-Ottoman alliance. The failure the Persian embassy to arrive in Warsaw due to the purported intervention of the Muscovite Tsar appears to have prompted Sigismund III to send Sefer Muratowicz to the Safavid court. Upon his return to Warsaw in 1602, the Armenian merchant-cum-envoy left an account of his journey.

The shifting balance of power in the Black Sea region at the turn of the 17^th century offers fertile ground to expand the role of trans-imperial subjects within the unique political structures of the region. These individuals “straddled and brokered political, linguistic, and religious boundaries” (Rothman, 2009), serving as key interlocutors between the major regional powers of East/Central Europe and the Black Sea region; the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Holy Roman Empire/Hungary, Muscovy, the Ottoman Empire, and Safavid Persia. Although the populations of these polities were remarkably heterogeneous, they were dominated by Catholic, Orthodox, Sunni, and Shi’a religious systems respectively, and were further differentiated by disparate political structures drawing from diverse traditions of jurisprudence. Sefer Muratowicz, an Armenian merchant native to Anatolia who came to reside in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth royal city of Lwów, successfully navigated not only the vast geographical distances between Warsaw, Caffa, Istanbul, and Isfahan, but also the different sociopolitical spaces governed by these polities.

Muratowicz’s legal position within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was determined by his membership in the sizeable native Armenian community located in major centers of trade operating mainly along the Polish/Ottoman frontier. As a subject of both the Ottoman sultan and the king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Muratowicz inhabited liminal social and legal zones offering opportunities for advancement through his collaboration with power brokers in return for his unique abilities and personal connection to the diffuse Armenian ecumene that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific in the early modern period. In the context of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth society at the turn of the 17th century, Sefer Muratowicz acted as an agent in the protracted struggle between royal and parliamentary power. By privately engaging a member of the Armenian community through Krzysztof Dzierżek, the royal translator and former resident of Istanbul, King Sigismund III Vasa effectively circumvented his parliament’s legal right to determine the Commonwealth’s foreign policy and re-opened dormant channels of communication with the Safavid Shah, ‘Abbas I.

Sefer Muratowicz came to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from the north Anatolian Ottoman village of Karahisar. He first arrived in the city of Lwów in 1597 by way the Ottoman Black Sea trade port at Caffa and the via tartarica trade route stretching over the Pontic Steppe into the heart of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the late medieval and early modern periods the Armenian population of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was deeply involved in trade with the Ottoman Empire, the Crimean Khanate, and Persia. Early waves of Armenian immigrants had their roots in the Crimea and spoke a Kipchak Turkish language until the end of 17th century. Taking advantage of these strong linguistic, cultural, familial and economic links, the Polish kings began to regularly employ individuals like Sefer Muratowicz as court translators, information gatherers, and couriers to the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Persia, and the Crimean Khanate as early as 1414, when a certain Grzegorz the Armenian took part in the first Polish diplomatic mission to the Ottoman Sultan.

After his initial arrival in Crown Polish territory, Muratowicz worked with other local Armenians

Carpet purchased by Muratowicz,
bearing Polish coat of arms

intrade with the Ottoman Empire. As a legal subject of the Sultan, Muratowicz was able to petition the Ottoman envoys to advocate on his behalf at the royal court in Warsaw. In 1601 King Sigismund III sent Sefer Muratowicz to Safavid Persia as his personal merchant and royal envoy. Muratowicz’s destination was stipulated by his contract with the King; under the rule of Shah ‘Abbas I, the city of Kashan was a key entrepôt for the Persian silk trade throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, and served as an ideal location to commission and purchase the King’s items. Several rugs purchased by Muratowicz can still be found in the Residenz-Museum in Munich. It is evident, however, that there were ulterior political motives behind Muratowicz’s sojourn in Safavid lands; the desire to ensure open and regular contact with a potential ally against the Ottoman Empire was the main reason that the king sought to re-open friendly relations with Persia. Sefer Muratowicz’s status as a trans-imperial subject of both the Polish king and Ottoman sultan, as well as his skills as an experienced merchant, allowed him to operate effectively in the vast distances between Warsaw and Isfahan, and he proved to be an ideal agent to deliver the king’s subtle message of friendship to Shah ‘Abbas I.

By engaging the services of this agent, the king pursued his own political agenda vis-à-vis two of the Commonwealth’s main rivals, the Ottoman Empire and Muscovy, by entering into dialogue with the Safavids. The most critical event that this document is connected to is Shah ‘Abbas I’s attempt in 1599-1600 to send an official embassy to “the princes, potentates and republics of Europe” in hopes of establishing an anti-Ottoman alliance. To this end, letters and gifts were prepared for the leaders of eight Christian states, including the King of Poland-Lithuania. The mission was led by the Persian ambassador Husayn ‘Ali Beg Bayat and the English soldier of fortune Anthony Sherley, who had recently appeared in the Shah’s court along with his brother Robert. The Safavid embassy of 1599 and was immediately beset with difficulties. Traveling north to Astrakhan and on to Moscow, the delegates were forcibly detained by Tsar Boris Godunov for a period of five or six months. When the Tsar released them, they traveled north to the port of Archangelsk, rather than directly overland through the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and took ship. The mission eventually made land in Stettin after two months of difficult Arctic Sea travel.

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In the end, the only rulers to officially receive the Persian embassy were Emperor Rudolf II, Pope Clement VIII, and King Phillip III of Spain. Apropos to the story of Sefer Muratowicz’s 1601 mission is the question of why the Persian embassy never made it to the court of Sigismund III. Once in the presence of ‘Abbas I, Muratowicz explained that Tsar Boris Godunov intentionally held the Safavid embassy captive and made Anthony Sherley promise that he would not visit the court of King Sigismund III before releasing the envoys and sending them on to Archangelsk. Sherley’s captivity in Muscovy is well attested to in numerous sources written by members of his party, though none mention the Tsar’s demand that the mission avoid the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. As the Shah’s embassy continued on its long, difficult journey through Europe, Sefer Muratowicz arrived in the Persian court. There ‘Abbas I learned from Muratowicz that his letters and gifts to King Sigismund III had never arrived. The Shah then questioned Robert Sherley, who knew of his brother Anthony’s confinement in Moscow. Robert Sherley stated that the Tsar let Anthony go only after receiving his promise to bypass the Polish-Lithuanian court.

The case of Sefer Muratowicz shows how widespread familial and personal contacts amongst the greater Armenian diaspora, and the knowledge of several key languages, allowed trans-imperial subjects to operate successfully in different sociopolitical milieus. We learn that the Safavid Vizier Tachmas, who initially presented Muratowicz to the Shah, was an Armenian and a Christian by birth who had never before met Sefer, but had “…heard all good things about him from his brothers, who were good friends.” It is unlikely that Muratowicz would have been chosen to lead the royal trade mission and royal embassy to Persia without a connection to notable individuals with that territory. It is therefore possible that the Vizier Tachmas was indeed a familial acquaintance of Muratowicz, whose position allowed the visiting Armenian access to the Shah’s court. The history behind this relationship can only be speculated upon, though Muratowicz’s knowledge of Turkish and Persian, both of which were in use in the court of ‘Abbas I, speaks to the young merchant’s personal connection to both Ottoman and Safavid lands. His linguistic capabilities made a positive impression on the Shah; in the Relacyja, ‘Abbas I is recorded as saying “I am not as content with any of [the Christian envoys] as I am with this one, with whom I am able to speak my own language, because through translation speech has no taste.”

The most peculiar portion of the Muratowicz’s account deals with the Shah’s relationship to Christianity. The author writes boldly of ‘Abbas I’s feelings towards the Christian faith, claiming that the Shah had been secretly baptized and desired the conversion of his entire nation. The naiveté of this notion is deep, though it reflects a larger notion present in Christendom’s vision of a Muslim ruler whose tolerance towards his Christian subjects was widely renowned. Pope Clement VIII, acting upon similar reports bearing witness to ‘Abbas I’s purported inclinations towards conversion, sent a brief to the Shah, as well as his mother, relating his joy at this news on February 24th, 1601. Additionally, a small detail contained within this passage appears in other contemporary sources; Muratowicz’ description of an ornamental crucifix worn by ‘Abbas I appears in several non-related accounts left by French and Italian observer in the Persian court. The religiosity of ‘Abbas I is further attested to in Muratowicz’s account of the leader’s departure on his famous 1601/1010 pilgrimage to Shi’a holy site in Mashhad

The immediate effects of Sefer Muratowicz’s unofficial mission to the Shah are evident in the revival of diplomatic activity between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Safavid Empire. In 1605, the Shah’s envoy, Mehdi Kuli ben Turkman, arrived in the Polish court in Warsaw with news of the Shah’s victories over the Sultan. It was hoped that this would entice the King into joining ‘Abbas I in an anti-Ottoman coalition. The parliament still desired peace with the Ottoman Empire, however, and the king became occupied with the Zebrzydowski rokosz (legal rebellion) in 1607. In 1609, another Safavid embassy arrived in Kraków, this time led by Robert Sherley, the brother of Anthony Sherley. He delivered two letters from the Shah proposing an anti-Ottoman coalition involving Spain, England, France, the Holy Roman Empire, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Muscovy. The plan proposed by the Shah suggested that the combined Christian forces rendezvous with the Persian army in Aleppo. Sigismund III had recently renewed peace with the Ottomans through the envoy Grzegorz Kochanowski, however, and could only offer his personal friendship to the Shah.

Bibliography:

1. Aslanian, Sebouh David. 2011. From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: the global trade networks of Armenian merchants from New Julfa [Berkeley: University of California Press].
2. Nadel-Golobič, Eleonora. 1979. "Armenians and Jews in Medieval Lvov: Their Role in Oriental Trade, 1400-1600." Persee.
3. Niesiołowski, Kazimierz. 1743. Otia Publica Vix Domestica, [Vanities, Public and Domestic]. (Warsaw)
4. Połcyzński, Michael. 2014. “The Relacja of Sefer Muratowicz: 1601-1602 private royal envoy of Sigismund III to Shah ‘Abbas I”. The Turkish Historical Review, 5. [Leiden: Brill]
5. Rothman, Natalie. 2009. “Self-Fashioning in the Mediterranean Contact Zone: Giovanni Battista Salvago and his Africa Overo Barbaria (1625)” in, Renaissance Medievalisms, Eisenbichler, Konrad (ed.) [Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies]
6. Szuppe, Maria. 1986. “Un marchand du roi de Pologne en Perse, 1601-1602”, Moyen Orient et Océan Indien 3.    

Posted by:
 Michael Połczyński, doctoral candidate at Georgetown University. For more on author see: academia.edu

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