Tibet in the Crimea? Polish Embassy to the Kalmyks of 1653 and a Project of an Anti-Muslim Alliance
Journal: Acta Poloniae Historica
Year: 2016

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 aga