“I have no one who can translate and understand these letters”
Year: 2025

In the last quarter of the seventeenth and the early eighteenth century, the Left-Bank Ukraine hetman’s chancery faced a significant shortage of translators for Arabic-script documents from the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman Empire, despite the fact that many Ukrainian diplomats were fluent in Tatar and Turkish. Training staff to read and translate Arabic texts would have required considerable time and expense, which was deemed unnecessary given the Hetmanate’s relatively few contacts with Crim