Soft Power of Empire: Muscovy’s Turkic Engagement with the Persianate World

Abstract This essay examines the Romanovs’ diplomatic correspondence with the Mughal and Safavid courts, focusing on the Muscovite court’s persistent use of Turkic in written communications. The remarkable tenacity of the Muscovite court in maintaining written communication in Turkic with most Islamic royal courts (even those that primarily used Persian) was primarily due not to inertia or tribute to long-standing tradition, but to the distinct role occupied in the Muscovite foreign chancellery ( Posol’skii prikaz ) by Turkographic scribes—translators and dragomans mostly of the Tatar origin—whose principal remit was providing language assistance for diplomatic correspondence. By the second half of the seventeenth century, these Turkic language translators had organized themselves into family guilds, playing a pivotal role in establishing Turkic as the dominant language for diplomatic correspondence. Once entrenched in Muscovite bureaucratic practices, this reliance on Turkic persisted—even in situations where its use might appear to have been counterintuitive or at odds with the strategic logic of a specific diplomatic mission.