Since the great geographic discoveries of the 15th and 16th century, the people of Western Europe, and, in the end of the 16th century, also in Poland have had to take into consideration that, apart from the known parts of Europe, Asia and Africa, there was also a fourth continent – The New World, also called West Indies, or America. The Catholic Church played a significant role in educating people about the New World, especially the religious orders. Even in the Middle Ages, the Church tried to present its apostolic mission, for example through the thread of the Three Wise Men tribute. In the modern times, a trend arose of presenting the personifications of continents with their ethnic features, dressed in costumes more or less faithfully reflecting the exotic phenomena. The ideas about the other continents were also promoted during liturgical and paraliturgical celebrations in Jesuit colleges, with a recommendation of Piotr Skarga for students of these schools: “Whoever wants to know what happens in Japan, in China, in West India, in Peru, in America, in Brazil, in Mexico and other great and pagan kingdoms should ask and read”. It may be therefore stipulated that the Catholic Church greatly contributed to the popularisation of knowledge about the world beyond Europe by various means: sermons, schools, printed works. The sermons served as a kind of a weekly parish newspaper of sorts, because apart from the local news they also covered the events from other countries, including the missionary work in West India, Asia or Africa. According to Janusz Tazbir, “the church provided the most trivial and not very precise information, which were, however, the only ones available for people who could not travel abroad”. In Poland, similar to other countries, the majority of information about other continents came from the margins of the holy books.
The unknown territories, their inhabitants and their nature were also described in geographic and travel literature. One work by an Italian geographer Jan Boter titled Relacje powszechne albo Nowiny [Reports of the world or News], published three times in Poland (in Krakow in 1606 and 1613, and again in 1659 under a different title Teatrum świata wszystkiego [The Theatre of the Entire World], translated by Paweł Łęczycki. It was referred to as the “first common geography”, which was available to a common Polish reader. As a result, in the early modern period (16th–18th centuries), the horizons of knowledge about countries beyond Europe started to broaden, along with Russian conquest of Asia and the colonisation process in Asia and America led by Spain, Portugal, France, Netherlands and England. Also the papers in the 17th and 18th centuries contributed to the transmission of some elements of knowledge about the lesser known or even unknown territories to the Polish people.
In the Baroque handwritten newspapers one can distinguish several sets of information about the widely understood Orient. It was not a precise term, the correspondents used it to denote the Islamic countries (Oriens Islamicus) – mainly Turkey and Persia, as well as the countries of Levant (Oriens Christiamus), India (often understood as the Mughal Empire), countries in the Far East (China and Japan), as well as other pagan nations in Asia, barely distinguished in the 17th–18th century Poland. Therefore, in the Ab Oriente column one could find information about the Middle East and the Far East alike. Usually the news from the Orient came to Poland through two main channels: directly from Turkey, Venice or Rome, through Austria (Vienna) or through Gdańsk, as the so called overseas news from western countries, participating in the colonial competition for territories in Asia.
From the beginning of Jan III Sobieski’s reign until the beginning of the 18th century, the issues of Turkey remained one of the most widely covered topics in the Polish press. The information was highly stereotypical, they were concentrated on the descriptions of diplomatic actions, war campaigns, battles, as well as descriptions of theatres of wars, in which Turkey participated. The editors showed their good knowledge of geography of the vast Ottoman Empire, often using names of the provinces and territories that were a part of it. The analysis of the Polish narrative shows that it stereotyped Turks as non-Christians, pagans standing outside of the European-Christian civilisation. The myth of Sultan’s despotism was also present, which aroused strong aversion in Polish nobility, used to the Golden Liberty. Polish freedoms and liberties were contrasted with Asian tyranny. In the collective Sarmatian mentality the stereotype of Turks – Muslims, and what was worse, slaves to their master, was growing stronger. However, neither this stereotype, nor the fear of the Turkish might did stop the adoption of many Oriental elements into the Polish culture between 16th and 18th centuries. Many of them were taken straight from the Turkish culture. The examples from the Middle East, ruled by Turks and Tatars, greatly influenced Polish outfits, interior designs, weapons style and horse harnesses. As Tadeusz Chrzanowski noted, “the wars against Turkey did not move away Poland from the Orient as a cultural phenomenon, in fact, not only the Viennese were brought closer to it, but also the nobility from Biecz, Sieradz or Tykocin. The Orient in Poland became commonplace at some point, simultaneously the fashions and styles imported from the West were constantly changing”. The analysed source material however shows, that even though in the 17th-18th century Poland some aspects of Turks’ material culture were mimicked, there was an impassable chasm in both customs, as well as religious and civil values.
However, the main subject of press reports from distant Asian regions was colonisation and missionary activity of Europeans on the continent. The newspapers reflected, among others, various phases and stages of the rivalry between France and Great Britain in India in the first half of the 18th century, providing a lot of geographic information, mostly in terms of names. On a side note, it is worth noting that the term “Indians” was used both in relation to the Hindu and to the native peoples of America. In a rather schematic way the correspondents provided information about the situation of the Mughal Empire in crisis, limiting the news only to the reports of conflicts between the Empire and the European countries.
In the middle of the 18th century the memory of the first missionary in India, St Francis Xavier (1506–1152) and his merits in propagation of Christian faith on Indian territories was still alive. Only rudimentary information about distant countries of Asia appeared in the press, mainly from sources in Rome – the missionaries who worked there. In the 17th and the first half of the 18th century Poland, among other countries, received news from Christian missions in China. One could learn about the persecution of Jesuit missionaries in Siam and the martyrdom of one of them – John de Brito, a Portuguese missionary, in 1693.
The press reports also discussed ways of spreading the Christian faith in distant Asian countries, especially in China. The issue of the so-called Chinese rites, introduced by the Jesuits, caused a doctrinal controversy in the Catholic Church, and since 1699 the issue was examined by a special papal commission. Although the Jesuit practices in Asia were banned by papal rulings from 1704 and 1715, disputes about methods used by missionaries in China were still raging. The press also reported some spectacular contacts between the Pope and the ruler of China, and their exchange of gifts and gestures. The press also informed about contacts between Beijing and Paris. However, in the eyes of the correspondents, China remained a huge and dangerous country for all Europeans, especially for missionaries. While reporting on the missionary work in China, the reporters always mentioned their devotion, courage and, finally, their martyr deaths.
The newspapers also amplified the stereotype of non-Europeans and non-Christians, who were often referred to as “Barbarians”, a term equal in meaning to “pagans”, meaning everyone who lived outside of the Christian faith and community. However, the reporters knew that the Chinese were not a community of people one could classify as knew that the Chinese were not a community of people one could classify as tabula rasa, they knew that China was a powerful empire with ideology based on Confucius’ teachings. The news about China were also published in newspapers, they mostly concerned the Russian-Chinese relations during the reign of Peter I, and his later successors.
Without doubt, any press releases regarding the distant China overlapped with some rudiments of knowledge that the Polish reader could obtain by, among others, reading the work of Jan Boter or from the correspondence of Polish Jesuits, for example from Michał Boym, author of Flora sinensis who stayed in China for a long time (ca. 1614–1659) and was considered an expert of Chinese culture throughout Europe. It is known that between 1627–1723, 114 Polish Jesuits volunteered to go for overseas missionary work, most of them asked to be sent to the Far East. It was a clear evidence of Polish interest in China. The studies conducted by art historians show that the reign of King Jan III Sobieski was also the point in history where Chinese culture became fashionable for the first time. The King himself was a great admirer of Chinese antique culture, and wanted to establish relations with the Chinese Emperor Kangxi. In 1686 a special Chinese cabinet was created in Wilanów for His Majesty the King. Undoubtedly it was the royal librarian, Jesuit Adam Kochański (1631–1700) who influenced the King to take interest in Chinese art; he was an avid sinologist, who corresponded about the subject with, among others, Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), and Athanasius Kircher. Among his possessions there was a map with a designated land road from Europe to China. Augustus II also showed passion for Chinese and Japanese art. As the owner of the Wilanów Palace between 1730–1733 he furnished the interior with a significant number of artefacts and objects of Chinese art. However, the fashion for Chinese culture was not limited to the royal court. In the beginning of the 18th century some churches, for example the Dominican church in Kamieniec used liturgical vestments made of Chinese fabrics, some of the church paintings were also created in the chinoiserie style – for example in the Jesuit Church of St Francis Xavier in Grudziądz.
Was this first wave of fashion for Chinese culture tantamount to a wider knowledge of the Polish nobility on China? It seems that the knowledge they had was rather schematic and stereotypical. It was widely known in the Commonwealth that China is surrounded by the famous wall, not many information passed through that wall, though. Surely, the papers contributed to broadening the knowledge of China among the magnates and the noblemen, at least with regard to the aforementioned aspects. In the analysed material there were incidental mentions of geographical names connected with Japan and the Philippines.
In the papers published by Jakub Kazimierz Rubinkowski in the 1720s we can find a lot of interesting information on Siberia. The Thorn postmaster’s interest in this region, unknown in both Poland and Europe, was connected with the exploration of these territories by Tsar Peter I. It is known that during the ruler’s lifetime a Far East expedition was planned and carried out between 1725-1730, as the so-called First Kamchatka Expedition. The leader of this expedition, a Danish sailor Vitus Bering (1680–1741) in Russian service navigated in 1728 through the strait dividing Asia and America – later named after his name.
While under the reign of Peter I the Russian empire maintained control over vast areas of Siberia, the information about the newly discovered and conquered territories spread very slowly to other European countries. Therefore, the information available in Rubinkowski’s papers and the ones from correspondent of the Radziwiłł family, G.A. Trelewski, were even more precious. The postmaster even had some idea about the vast area of the newly discovered territories. For example, when he mentioned that Russia minted gold medals to celebrate the peace of Nystad, he emphasised that they were made of “gold dug up beyond Siberia, near the Arctic Sea”.
The reporters of the analysed newspapers knew about the competition of two Islamic powers in the Eastern world – Turkey and Persia. Generally, the news that concerned the latter, were connected with the descriptions of Polish diplomatic efforts in Persia during the reign of Sobieski, or the wars between Turkey and Russia against Persia – mostly due to the fact that the country was separated from Europe by vast territories of Turkey. The papers, however, widely described the King Jan III Sobieski’s effort to establish an anti-Turkish alliance with Persia.
We now know that the hope that Persia would help was in vain, however the Polish correspondents noted that the military actions of Turkey against Poland and other Christian countries were constantly hampered by the perceived threat of Persia. This is why news like “Spargebatur rumour, that the Persians destroyed the Turkish army at the gates of Babylon”, appeared throughout the first half of the 18th century. Other news often concerned the constantly troubled Turkish–Persian border, stretching from the Persian Gulf (Basra) to the Caucasus (Georgia).
In 1720s and 1730s these papers published a series of reports from the Caucasus and the south-western area of the Caspian Sea concerning the great crises that shook the Persian state, when the centuries-long Turkish-Persian disputes were joined by another power – Russia. Rubinowski once again became the main informant on the issue of the Tsar’s conquest of the Caspian territories – he listed multiple names of peoples living there, as well as provinces, rivers, cities and ports.
Even though the press reports did not always accurately name various Asian ethnic groups living in the Turkish–Persian–Russian borderlands, they popularised the geographical names of the little known, or even unknown in Poland parts of the Asian continent.
In conclusion, it may be said that the information published about the Oriental world in the Polish Baroque press was highly stereotypical. Often they were short pieces without further descriptions. It is, however, worth noting that these papers contributed to the popularisation of knowledge of previously little-known countries of Asia in the Commonwealth in 17th and 18th century. Undoubtedly they stimulated the imagination of the Sarmatian society and added some elements of Orientalism as a cultural phenomenon.
Translation: Lingua Lab
