Early Modern Travellers

By the sixteenth century, Ruthenian and Polish pilgrims to the Holy Land were much more plentiful, and many were writing about their travels. In 1512, the first description of Palestine by a Pole was published anonymously in Cracow.

A generation later, the Ruthenian pilgrim Meletii Smotrytsky (1578-1633) was born in Podolia (today in western Ukraine), studied under both the Orthodox and the Jesuits, as well as in various Protestant universities in Germany, and became one of the best-educated and most cosmopolitan eastern Christians of his time. Smotrytsky started as a fiery defender of Or­thodoxy in the Commonwealth, but after years of study and reflection on the trials of his times, the murder in 1623 of Archbishop Josephat Kuntsevych (now a saint), the leader of the Ruthenian Uniate church (in communion with Rome, founded 1595-96, under the Union of Brest), and, finally, a soul-searching journey to Constantinople, Jerusalem, and other places in the East, he converted to that “Uniate” church.

On his return to the Commonwealth, Smotrytsky penned an ostensible description of his journey, which urged communion with Rome. An Apol­ogy for the Pilgrimage to the Eastern Lands (1628) contained more about theology than geography, but did describe the places that he visited, and it remains a landmark of Ruthenian, or Middle Ukrainian, literature, and of the polemics surrounding the Church Union.¹³ Like Smotrytsky, several other learned Ukrainian pilgrims made their way to the Holy Land during this era, and some left accounts, including Danylo Korsunsky, Varlaam Linytsky, and the Monk Serapion.¹⁴

Moreover, Belarusans (at the time also called “Ruthenians”), most of whom, like Ukrainians, lived in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and were culturally very close to them, had long been producing a similar literature, which was widely read in Ukraine as well as in Belarus'. Princess Efrosiniia of Polotsk (1104-1167), now a saint, visited the Holy Land while the Cru­saders still held it. Ignatius Smolnianin went on pilgrimage in the late fourteenth century and left a detailed description of the Byzantine Empire's increasing vulnerability to the Ottoman Empire. A certain fifteenth-century Varsonofy from Belarus' travelled to the Holy Land twice and prepared the first description of Egypt by any author from the East Slavic lands.¹⁵

Two centuries later, the famous Belarusan poet Simeon Polotsky (1629­1680), who had studied at the Mohyla Academy in Kyiv but later took service with Tsar Alexis I of Muscovy, wrote several highly polemical works casti­gating Islam and the Islamic countries, including Skazanie o Makhomete i ego bezzakonnoe zakone (The Legend of Mohammed and His Lawless Law) and O brane (About Abuse), arguing that it was right for Christians to treat Muslims badly.

In vivid contrast, almost a century earlier the anonymous author “Michael the Lithuanian” wrote positively about the Muslim Tatars of the Crimea, apparently to embarrass his fellow countrymen into better behaviour. He certainly saw many positive traits in Muslim Tatar culture, despite the fre­quent Tatar raids on Lithuania (after 1569 part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth), and despite the repeated wars between the two states. Mi­chael's tract, written in Latin in about 1550 and bearing the title De moribus Tartarorum, Lithuanorum et Moschorum Fragmeti X (Ten Fragments on the Manners of the Tatars, Lithuanians, and Muscovites), was printed in Basil in 1615 and became relatively well-known in western Europe.¹⁷

The 1453 fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans, the spread of Renaissance ideas from Italy, the discovery of the Americas, and the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation marked a new era in European history, but on the Ukrainian Steppe, besides pilgrimages and polemics, certain other pat­terns of contact with both “east” and “west” remained strong. The Black Sea slave trade began in ancient and medieval times, but took on new and more intensive forms during the early modern era. So from about 1450 to about 1750, that is, for a full three centuries and more, the Crimean Tatars (who, together with Muscovy, were the major successors to the Mongols in Steppe Europe) systematically raided the Ukrainian lands along the south­east border of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) and carried off many hundreds of thousands of captives (over the centuries most probably a million or more) to be used as domestic and agricultural labourers in the Crimea and sold into slavery in Istanbul, from where they were dispersed all over the Middle East and North Africa.

These captives acquired by the Tatars on the Steppe generally called themselves Rus’ki, but Latin and western European sources often labelled them “Ruthenians,” sometimes confused with modern “Russians” by mod­ern historians, who are unacquainted with the early modern history of Ukraine and Muscovy. The original Kyivan Rus' (founded late ninth cen­tury), or “Ruthenia,” was largely in what is today Ukraine and neighbouring lands, while the early “Muscovy,” much further north, became the cen­tre of modern Russia, and its neighbours called its inhabitants Moskali, or Muscovites. So some historians label as Russian one of the most famous of all these Ukrainian-origin slaves, the concubine Roxelana (= Ruthenian woman), who became the wife of Suleiman the Magnificent (sultan 1520­66), although she was certainly from Poland-Lithuania, in fact, probably from what is today western Ukraine. Known in the harem as “Hurrem Sul­tan” (the Cheerful One), she soon became the most influential woman in the Ottoman Empire, corresponding with the king of Poland and other dignitaries, and building major mosques and other buildings in Istanbul, Palestine, and elsewhere.¹⁹

Of course, the numerous harem women of Islamic Turkey were only one aspect of this enormous slave trade. The sultan's administration was also made up largely of European-origin slaves, most of whom at some point had converted to Islam. Many of these were from the Balkans, but some were from the Commonwealth, principally the Ukrainian provinces, and so were many of the rowers on Turkish galleys, and many others.

However, other people from the Commonwealth lived in or visited the Ot­toman Empire in the seventeenth century. Ambassadors, diplomats, and more distinguished hostages also passed this way. So the famous Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky (d. 1657) was taken captive after a great battle and spent two years in Tatar and Turkish captivity, where he learned much about Islamic culture and the Turkish and Tatar languages. His modern biographer, George Vernadsky, writes that the young man did not waste his time: “[Khmelnytsky] mastered the Turkish language, which later proved of exceptional value to him, for it enabled him to conduct personally his negotiations with Turkish envoys, as well as the Crimean Khan. Beyond this, he collected much information on the habits of the sultan's court and administration, which, again, was to be of use later on. He also became acquainted with the Greek clergy at Phanar, a suburb of Constantinople where the Greek patriarch had kept his quarters since the conquest of the city by the Turks in 1453.” All these connections, and his ecclesiastical con­tacts, proved invaluable when he later attempted to found an independent Cossack polity in central Ukraine after 1648.²¹

Moreover, the Polish king Jan III Sobieski (1629-1696), who thirty-five years after Khmelnytsky's successful insurrection lifted the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, had earlier accompanied a Polish embassy to Istanbul, where, like the Cossack leader, he learned some Turkish, something of the Ottoman court, and even more about the Tatars.

Sobieski's court translator of Turkish documents, Franciszek Meninski (1620-1698, born Franςois Mesgnien in Lorraine), spent much time in Is­tanbul, where he perfected his knowledge of Oriental languages and learned much about high Ottoman culture. He also went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, later producing in Latin an influential, multilingual explanatory dictionary of Turkish-Persian-Arabic, still useful on the history of those languages.²³

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw also a vigorous polemical liter­ature in both Polish and Ukrainian attacking the Ottoman Empire, Islam, and Muslim society, but probably no more scornful than Muslim accounts of the Kafir (Unbelieving) north - Dar al-Harb, the Realm or House of War. These Christian tracts concentrated on the Ottoman Turks then threatening Christendom, and largely ignored Persia and other Muslim lands further east. Some writers even held up Islamic society as a virtuous model to con­trast with Christian Europe. So the Polish Protestant poet MikoIaj Rej was a bit of a turkophile, and several Orthodox Ukrainian polemicists against the Catholic Church and the Church Union of 1695-96 praised Muslim society for its religious tolerance, something they did not see in Roman Catholic parts of Europe. Such polemics revealed the authors' contact with real life in the Muslim world, and, as we saw above, one such writer, Meletii Smotrytsky, later travelled in the Middle East, although it changed his mind in ways with which those other Orthodox polemicists most certainly could not agree.²⁴

Eastern European contacts with the Islamic east extended well beyond the Ottoman Empire into Persia, the Land of “the Great Sophy,” as its ruler was sometimes called in English travel literature. Certain travellers went as far as India, and recorded their journeys. The best example was a man from Tver, in northern Muscovy. In 1466, the merchant Afanasy Nikitin travelled through Iran to India, where he noted the religious practices, nakedness, and dark complexion of the people, and, in the absence of Christian churches, he preferred to worship with the monotheistic Muslims, in their mosques. He recorded a brief, but fascinating account of his adventures, considered a masterpiece.²⁵

The renowned Italian traveller Pietro della Valle (1586-1652), who spent 1614-26 in the Middle East and south Asia took back to Europe from Iraq examples of ancient cuneiform writing on clay tablets, toured the ruins of Babylon, and reached the court of Shah Abbas the Great at Isfahan; he also sought a great anti-Ottoman alliance of Persia, the Ukrainian Cossacks, and western Europeans. In Persia, he befriended a Zaporozhian Cossack from central Ukraine, who had been sent to conclude such an alliance with Persia's Shia Muslims against the Sunni Turks.²⁶

Two generations later, Russia's Peter the Great (reigned 1682-1725) invad­ed Persia in 1722 and sent a detachment of Ukrainian Cossacks along with his army. This event appeared in the extensive diary (1717-67) of the erudite Ukrainian military officer Yakiv Markovych (1696-1770), and later in the anonymous and fanciful Istoriia Rusov (History of the Ruthenians) (1827), which long circulated widely in manuscript form among the Orthodox gentry of left-bank (eastern) Ukraine before appearing in print in 1846.²⁷

Difficulties of communication and distance had prevented Pietro della Valle's anti-Ottoman combination from succeeding, and by 1683 the Otto­mans were at the gates of Vienna, threatening Habsburg hegemony in central Europe until Jan Sobieski arrived with a large relief force. About two-thirds of his Commonwealth army came from what is today Ukraine, including from the old Kyiv province Podolia, Red Ruthenia, and Volhynia, and a small unit of Ukrainian Cossacks accompanied the host. Meanwhile, other Ukrainian Cossacks in alliance with the Poles created a diversion in Ottoman Moldavia, helping to relieve Vienna. Sobieski himself put much faith in his Cossack supporters, although fewer arrived at Vienna than he had hoped.²⁸

The Ottoman defeat at Vienna was epochal, ending a centuries-long encroachment on European territories. From 1683 to 1699, the Habsburgs and their allies pushed the enemy back, liberating Hungary and other lands.

In Ukraine, the Poles recovered the large province of Podolia, the Cossacks largely freed themselves, and the Tatars lost most of their offensive edge. Warsaw was filled with booty captured from the Ottoman camp at Vienna, Polish nobles sported Turkish attire, and Franz Kulchytsky, believed to be a former Zaporozhian Cossack, opened one of Europe's first coffee-houses, using coffee beans from the Ottoman camp awarded him for his services at the siege of Vienna - an early instance of the growing fashion for things Turkish (“la Turquerie”), which spread across Europe, reaching its climax in France and England in the mid-eighteenth century.²⁹