A warrior stands before you. His moustaches curl like the whiskers of a Tatar horseman and his hair is bunched at the back. His crimson silk-velvet coat reaches almost to the ground, figured with gold tassels and gold braid of woven thread. He has thrown back his sleeves to reveal a tunic of pearly silk, its low collar closed by a single jewelled stud. He wears a brooch, and a fur hat, and pantaloons stuffed into supple leather boots. His sword is at hand.

He stands at ease, but when he is fully armed he bristles with agents of death. In battle he bears a 20-foot lance, with a rattling pennant, and at his belt the curved sabre is joined by a sinister hammer that can crash through helmets of solid steel. He carries the short round bow of the steppe, the light, fast and accurate bow preferred by Mongols and Tatars and Turks and all other hard riders from the Eurasian grasslands; his saddle, too, is of the steppe. From his topknot to his quiver – itself a wonderful thing of dyed and chased leather, encrusted with gold filigree and pearls – this warrior is a dream of the East: but he is not a Tatar, or a Turk. He is a Latin-speaking Polish Catholic of the 17th century with, say, estates a day’s ride from Krakow or Lvov, and in choosing to dress in this exotic fashion he expresses his faith in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, in the Catholic Church, and the Golden Liberties of the szlachta, the multitudinous nobility of Poland–Lithuania.
He is a Sarmatian.

The recent show at Istanbul’s Sakıp Sabancı Museum celebrated the 600th anniversary of the first official contact between the Ottomans and that complex political entity known as the Commonwealth of Poland–Lithuania, which stretched from the Baltic down through Belorussia and Ukraine to the Black Sea.

The king whose emissaries visited Mehmed I in Edirne in 1414 was a pagan-born Lithuanian, Władysław Jagiello, who adopted Christianity to take the crown of Poland in 1386. In 1410 his coalition of Tatars, Poles, Lithuanians and Hungarians had crushed the Teutonic Knights at Grunwald, putting an end to centuries of German expansion towards the east. Mehmed was consolidating his position after the collapse of his father’s empire at Ankara in 1402.

The two sides shared many interests, and the meeting – to broker a peace in Hungary – was a friendly one. Over the next two centuries these empires, at the height of their power and prestige, often worked in concert to keep the Habsburgs in check, and to counter the rising power of Muscovy. Roxelana, the Ruthenian-born wife of Süleyman the Magnificent, kept up a friendly correspondence with the Polish king, stressing her particular affection for him as one of his former subjects, and the collapse of Hungary at Mohács in 1526 saw the two sides working hard to stop Hungary falling into the hands of the Habsburgs.

Some conflict was inevitable nonetheless, as the two empires competed for control of the so-called Wild Plains, which lie in the curve of the Dnieper between Kiev and Crimea. The Crimean Tatars launched annual raids into Polish territory, sometimes in advance of regular Turkish campaigns into Moldavia. They were matched by the Orthodox Christian Cossacks, who lived on islands on the Dnieper.

Regular Polish armies, fighting on the Baltic one moment, and on the Black Sea coast the next, were fabulously mobile, with horsemen outnumbering infantry by three to one and using Ottoman saddles, which placed less strain on a horse. When most European troops marched in a single mob, the Polish army already moved in divisions, and its elite cavalry, the Husaria, dominated the battlefield for most of the 17th century. They struck like a battering ram and manoeuvred like a London taxi, in spite of wearing extraordinary feathered wings, made of wooden runners covered in brass and velvet… Sheer weirdness was a respectable part of a batterie de guerre, too…

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Issue 51, Summer 2014 Istanbul Unwrapped: The European City and the Sultan’s New City
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