Correspondence between the Ottoman sultan and the Cossacks

Lore & Background

The correspondence 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 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 'Zakharcenko'), sent an insulting sarcastic reply in which they vowed to fight against the sultan.

Reader's Guide

Modern scholars have known since the 1970s that the supposed 'correspondence' is a literary forgery, to be understood within the turcica: a large body of similar writings of early modern European Christian anti-Ottoman propaganda which emerged during the Ottoman wars in Europe. The text began as a simple joke in the form of a pamphlet by Polish nobles, in which the Chyhyryn Cossacks rebuffed the sultan's titles and threats with humour. By the late 17th and early 18th century, the pamphlet reappeared in a somewhat modified version every time a new war broke out with the Ottomans. The best-known reflection of the nineteenth-century popularity of the Cossack correspondence is the famous painting by Il'ia Repin showing the uproarious Zaporozhians penning their reply. According to Ukrainian historian Volodymyr Pylypenko (2019), the letter is 'perhaps the most famous forgery in Ukrainian history, a fake with a long and vibrant history.'

Did You Know?

• The oldest known copy of the correspondence was found in a Romodanovsky archive from the 1670s.
• The text was originally a Polish noble pamphlet that was translated into Russian and later into Ukrainian.
• The city of Chyhyryn was destroyed in the 1670s war, which likely led to the Cossacks being re-identified as Zaporozhians in later versions.
• A 1620 letter from Sultan Osman II to the Zaporozhian Cossacks addressed them as a sovereign power, not as subjects.

The Alleged Exchange and Its Characters

The correspondence purports to be a two-part exchange between an Ottoman sultan—most commonly identified as Mehmed IV—and a group of Cossacks. Traditional dating places the letters somewhere between 1672 and 1680. In the sultan's letter, he is said to have boasted of his grand titles and military might while demanding the Cossacks surrender their resistance. The Cossack reply, attributed to a commander named Ivan Sirko (sometimes rendered "Zakharcenko"), is described as a sarcastic, insulting vow to fight against the sultan. The Cossacks in the text are variously linked to the city of Chyhyryn or to Zaporizhzhia, a distinction that proved crucial in later textual scholarship. The entire work is firmly apocryphal; no genuine diplomatic record of such an exchange has ever surfaced, and modern scholars have confirmed its status as a literary fabrication rather than a real act of statecraft.

A Century of Textual Detective Work

The critical study of these letters began with Andrej Popov in 1869, who correctly grouped them with other apocryphal sultan letters found in 17th-century Muscovite manuscripts, though he wrongly attributed all of them to a single Muscovite author writing in the last quarter of the 17th century. In 1923, Kostiantyn Kharlampovych performed the first thorough textological comparison, sorting available copies into short Russian versions tied to Chyhyryn and longer Ukrainian redactions tied to Zaporizhzhia that contained additional elements. Internal evidence led him to conclude Polish was the original language, and factual discrepancies made a 17th-century Cossack origin extremely implausible. Marianna Kagan-Tarkovskaia, working in the 1950s, demonstrated that the Russian texts were likely translations produced by the Posolskii prikaz, Muscovy's diplomatic chancery responsible for rendering foreign pamphlets. Eustachiewicz and Inglot (1966) then published multiple Polish versions matching the Ukrainian redaction, anchoring the letters in a well-established 17th-century Polish literary tradition.

Anti-Ottoman Propaganda and the Turcica Tradition

Modern scholarship, solidified since the 1970s, classifies the sultan–Cossack letters as a literary forgery belonging to the broader genre known as turcica. This corpus of early modern European Christian writings was produced during the Ottoman wars in Europe and functioned as political-religious propaganda. Volodymyr Pylypenko (2019) highlighted that the Cossack letter shares strong stylistic parallels with other fabricated documents of the 17th century, including fake correspondence between the Ottoman sultan and the King of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, letters addressed to Polish gentry, and spurious agreements aimed at forging a European Christian anti-Turkish coalition. These forgeries circulated across the Commonwealth and Muscovy, blurring the boundary between genuine diplomacy and polemical literature. In this context, the Cossack text is best understood not as a historical record but as a product of a specific polemical tradition that sought to dramatize Christian resistance to Ottoman power.

From Vulgar Satire to National Icon

Daniel Waugh (1978) traced a key transformation: in the 18th century the Cossacks shifted from Chyhyryntsy to Zaporozhians, and the originally controlled satire of the reply was debased into outright vulgarity. This coarser version spread widely in the 19th century and was frequently cited as authentic documentation. Waugh argued this popularity was tied to a romanticized image of the Cossacks as coarse, piratical heroes fighting for Ukrainian independence from non-Ukrainian controls, a narrative that dovetailed with the rise of Ukrainian nationalism and growing scholarly interest in ethnic distinctions. The most celebrated artistic reflection of this 19th-century enthusiasm is Ilya Repin's famous painting of the Zaporozhians composing their uproarious reply. Pylypenko (2019) called the letter "perhaps the most famous forgery in Ukrainian history," noting its long, vibrant afterlife through numerous translations and rewritings, with French and German versions reaching the broadest European audiences.