The Correspondence between the Ottoman sultan and the Cossacks, also variously known as the Correspondence between the Cossacks and the Ottoman/Turkish sultan, is a collection of apocryphal letters claiming to be between a sultan of the Ottoman Empire (usually identified as Mehmed IV) and a group of Cossacks, originally associated with the city of Chyhyryn, Ukraine, but later with Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine.
According to traditional interpretations, the sultan's letter and the Cossack response (also known as the Zaporozhian/Cossack letter to the Turkish sultan; Ukrainian: Лист запорожців турецькому султанові) were written between 1672 and 1680. The sultan supposedly demanded the Cossacks to surrender by boasting about his titles and power, and the Cossacks, allegedly commanded by a man named Ivan Sirko (or "Zaxarcenko") sent an insulting sarcastic reply in which they vowed to fight against the sultan.
Although early commentators were in doubt whether the apocryphal letters were possibly authentic, modern scholars have known since the 1970s that the supposed "correspondence" is a literary forgery, that is to be understood within a large body of similar writings of early modern European Christian anti-Ottoman propaganda which emerged during the Ottoman wars in Europe. It is not certain whether the original text was written in Middle Polish or (less likely) Middle Ukrainian, but the Russian ("Muscovite") versions are almost certainly translations of a non-Russian original. It's also possible that the Polish original was first translated into Russian, and later into Ukrainian.
History
Examination
One of the first people who attempted to critically study the correspondence between the sultan and Cossacks was Andrej Popov (1869). He correctly linked it to a group of other apocryphal letters attributed to the sultan that appear in 17th-century Muscovite manuscripts, but he incorrectly concluded that all of these letters had to have been written by the same Muscovite author in the last quarter of the 17th century. Subsequent studies attempted to show that the original text of the sultan–Cossack correspondence was written in Polish, and then translated into Ukrainian and Russian, or that Ukrainian was the primary version. Kostiantyn V. Kharlampovych / Xarlampovyč (1923) did the first thorough textological analysis of several versions available to him, which he divided into two groups: short Russian versions (known to Popov) which connected the Cossacks to Chyhyryn, and longer Ukrainian versions (collectively called the "Ukrainian redaction") which connected the Cossacks to Zaporizhzhia and contained various other elements not found in the short Russian versions. Although Kharlampovych did not have access to any Polish versions, the internal evidence convinced him that Polish had to have been the original language, and that factual discrepancies in the Ukrainian texts made it extremely implausible that they had originated from the 17th-century Cossacks in Ukraine.
With her two 1950s articles, Marianna Davidovna Kagan-Tarkovskaia was the first scholar to thoroughly examine many Russian texts, concluding they were most likely translated from Ukrainian to Russian by the Posolskii prikaz (Muscovite Ambassadorial/Diplomatic Chancery), which was in charge of translating foreign pamphlets and newspapers. Nud'ha (1963) brought a so-far unknown Polish text to light and argued for an early-17th-century Ukrainian origin of the correspondence, but his conclusions were found to be untenable. In 1966, Eustachiewicz and Inglot published a number of Polish versions of the sultan–Cossack letters, which – with one exception – corresponded to the "Ukrainian redaction", and cited a significant amount of evidence to connect it to a well-established 17th-century literary tradition in Poland.
Observations and conclusions
U.S.-based Slavic and Eastern European historian Daniel C. Waugh (1978) observed: