Kâtip Çelebi (1609 AD – 1657 AD) was a Turkish polymath and author of the 17th-century Ottoman Empire. He compiled a vast universal bibliographic encyclopaedia of books and sciences, the Kaşf az-Zunūn, and wrote many treatises and essays. “A deliberate and impartial historian… of extensive learning”, Franz Babinger hailed him “the greatest encyclopaedist among the Ottomans.” Katib Celebi introduces the topic of the Cossacks in the Black Sea with the remarkable event of the last days of August or the first days of September 1614:
“With the guidance of renegades who fled from the land of Islam [the Cossacks] came to the fortress of Sinop on the Anatolian shore and entered that old castle by surprise and caused much damage… they took [with them] the goods and families that they had plundered and set out to sea.”
Ahmed Hasanbegzade, in the “Chronicles of the House of Osman” (Tarih-i al-i ‘Osman), presented a stark picture of the damage and harm done to the fortress:
“…going over the top of its [fortress’] ramparts and walls they entered inside and descended upon the center of the city and destroyed its circumference and edifices and shed the blood of several thousand men and woman and struck the mentioned city with the broom of plunder and the fire of devastation and they left neither name or nor sign of its buildings, turning it into a wilderness and a desert.”
Emidio Portelli d’Ascoli, an Italian Dominican resident mission ary in the Crimea, begins his famous ‘Description of the Black Sea and Tartary‘, written in 1634, with ruminations on why the sea is called “black”:
“However, if the Black Sea has always been furious from ancient times, then now it has become incomparably blacker and more terrifying, because of the many saiche (chaikas, Cossack long-boats), that lay waste to the sea and land … every year they bring such cruel harm, that the shores of the entire Black Sea have become completly uninhabitable, with the exception of some places protected by good fortresses. The Cossacks destroy, rob, burn,· lead off into slavery, kill; often they besiege fortified cities, take them by storm, devastate, and burn them down…
At sea, no ship, no matter how large and well-armed, is safe if, unfortunately, it encounters seagulls [Chaika Long-boats], especially in calm weather. The Cossacks are so brave that not only with equal forces, but also with twenty “seagulls” are not afraid of thirty galleys of the padishah.”
A contemporary Polish military commander, and Chancellor of the Polish Crown in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth Stanislaw Zolkiewski (1547 – 1620) in his speech delivered at a provincial dietine, provided the most concrete testimony on the effects of the Sinop raid:
“[They] plundered the fortress of Sinop, the Turks estimate the damage at 40 million, and the imperial naval that was there, galleons, galleys, everything went up in smoke… the Cossacks have snatched away from them [Turks] the possession and navigation of the Black Sea, which the Turks have had in peace before, and have ruined their main ports, and until now no one has effectively resisted them [i.e., the Cossacks].”
In a letter to King Sigismund III (1587-1632), Zolkiewski related the following:
“News of the sack of Sinop quickly reached Constantinople. Great was the consternation and anxiety, for that was a very rich city, in peace and untouched, since that part of Asia Minor was taken by Murad the First (1326 – 1389). The Emperor [Ahmed I]was so distressed that he wanted to order the hanging of the vizier Nasuh Pasha; he was mitigated by the pleas of his own wife and daughter and other fair-headed ones (women), and [so] he did not go through with his execution, but beat him with an iron mace, [an act] which has now become divulged all over Constantinople.”
Ottoman chronicles agree that Nasuh Pasha’s withholding the truth about Sinope became a contributing cause of his execution a few months later.
‘Gardariki, Ukriane‘ ebook has little-known facts about Kyiv Rus’ naval raids on Constantinople as early as 860 A.D.
