The Crimean Khanate and Poland-Lithuania.International Diplomacy on the European Periphery (15th–18th Century). A Study of Peace Treaties Followed by Annotated Documents. The Ottoman Empire and its Heritage

This work is a translation from English of the first chapter “The language and preservation of documents” from the second part “A Study in the Crimean and Polish-Lithuanian diplomatics and diplomacy” of the scientific work “The Crimean Khanate and Poland-Lithuania. International Diplomacy on the European Periphery (15th–18th Century). A Study of Peace Treaties Followed by Annotated Documents. The Ottoman Empire and its Heritage” (pp. 223–265). The author of the work is a famous historian, director of the Institute of History of the University of Warsaw, professor of the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences Dariusz Kołodziejczyk. In his work Dariusz Kołodziejczyk examines issues related to the language and preservation of documents concerning the history of the Crimean Khanate and its relations with Poland-Lithuania. He analyzes various sources, such as diplomatic treaties, letters, chronicles, travel notes, maps and other original documents published in different collections: official translations kept in the Royal Archives, official copies entered in the Royal and Lithuanian Registers, and copies kept in various collections and written in the languages used by the Crimean chancellery, the Lithuanian and Polish chancelleries – Ottoman Turkic, Crimean Tatar, Polish, German, Latin, Russian, etc. Discussing the problems associated with the translation, transliteration, interpretation and authenticity of these documents, as well as their storage, publication and accessibility to researchers, Dariusz Kołodziejczyk also emphasizes that language and the preservation of documents play an important role in understanding the history of the Crimean Khanate and its international diplomacy on the European periphery.