Polish professor donates book to the Gasprinsky Library

We are very excited about the donation of a recent book to the English language collection of our library. I had read about Polish professor Dariusz Kolodziejczyk’s new book, The Crimean Khanate and Poland-Lithuania, and wrote him to ask if he would consider donating a copy to our library. He graciously agreed, and when I visited Poland two weeks ago, there was a package from him waiting for me at my hostel. I carried it through the remainder of my trip to Poland and the Czech Republic, and only when I returned to the library did I have the opportunity to really examine his book. What a rich treasure it is of information about the Crimean Khanate who ruled Crimea from the 15th to the late 18th century and their relationships with the other countries of the times. I look forward to when I will have more time to thoroughly read Professor Kolodziejczyk’s book.

Below is information from the publisher about The Crimean Khanate and Poland-Lithuania and author Dariusz Kolodziejczyk. The book can be ordered from Brill Academic Publishers.

This is an extensive study, supplemented by an edition of relevant sources, of the diplomatic contacts between Poland-Lithuania and the Crimean Khanate between the early 15th and the late 18th century. It contains a chronology of mutual relations, a formal analysis of various types of documents, and a glimpse into the working of the Crimean chancery, where Genghisid and Islamic forms mixed with those borrowed from Christian Europe.
The book provides a fascinating insight into the intercultural exchange between Catholic Poland (with Latin and then Polish as the main chancery language) and predominantly Orthodox Lithuania (with Ruthenian as the main chancery language) on the one hand, and the Muslim Crimean Khanate (with Khwarezmian Turkic and then Ottoman Turkish as the main chancery language) on the other. It depicts Eastern Europe as a zone of contact, where the relations between Slavs and Tatars were by no means always hostile.
Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, Ph.D. (1990) in History, University of Warsaw, is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Warsaw and at the Polish Academy of Sciences. He has published extensively on the Ottoman Empire and its relations with Eastern Europe including Ottoman-Polish Diplomatic Relations (15th–18th Century): An Annotated Edition of ‘Ahdnames and Other Documents (Brill, 2000) and The Ottoman Survey Register of Podolia (ca. 1681) (Harvard University Press, 2004).