Tibet in the Crimea? Polish Embassy to the Kalmyks of 1653 and a Project of an Anti-Muslim Alliance

In early modern world, cross-cultural contacts were not a monopoly of Western European ‘trading nations’ and they were not made exclusively through trans-ocean trade. Buddhist Kalmyks arrived in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the seventeenth century and have remained there until today. Following the medieval tradition when Christian Europe looked for allies in Inner Asia against ‘the Muslim danger’, Moscow and Warsaw competed to win the Kalmyks over so that they would become their allies against the Crimean Tatars. In 1653, the Polish court prepared an embassy to the Kalmyks, proposing to help them conquer the Crimean Peninsula in return for a military alliance. Curiously, the letters of the Polish king and chancellor were written in Turkish and drawn in Arabic script, as in that period these were the accepted media of Eurasian communication, even though the letters’ tenor was anti-Muslim. Both letters are extant today and their content is analysed in the article.