I read somewhere that the Zaporozhian Cossacks wrote the following letter to the Ottoman Sultan at the time, Mehmed IV, which later inspired a painting:
Zaporozhian Cossacks to the Turkish Sultan!
O sultan, Turkish devil and damned devil's kith and kin, secretary to Lucifer himself. What the devil kind of knight are thou, that canst not slay a hedgehog with your naked arse? The devil shits, and your army eats. Thou shalt not, thou son of a whore, make subjects of Christian sons; we have no fear of your army, by land and by sea we will battle with thee, fuck thy mother.
Thou Babylonian scullion, Macedonian wheelwright, brewer of Jerusalem, goat-fucker of Alexandria, swineherd of Greater and Lesser Egypt, pig of Armenia, Podolian thief, catamite of Tartary, hangman of Kamyanets, and fool of all the world and underworld, an idiot before God, grandson of the Serpent, and the crick in our dick. Pig's snout, mare's arse, slaughterhouse cur, unchristened brow, screw thine own mother!
So the Zaporozhians declare, you lowlife. You won't even be herding pigs for the Christians. Now we'll conclude, for we don't know the date and don't own a calendar; the moon's in the sky, the year with the Lord, the day's the same over here as it is over there; for this kiss our arse!
So my question is whether they actually wrote and sent that letter to the Sultan.
There are several copies of that letter in different languages and different degrees of obscenity. Kagan-Tarkovsky supposes that it went from a SFW version in Polish into Russian and from thence into an obscene Russian dialect with Ukrainian influence.
Now, we have no original Polish letter, but the earliest (Moscow Russian) version (which is pretty safe for work) claims explicitly it was translated from "Polish".
Critics of Kagan-Tarkovsky's standpoint say that this earliest version could be a bowdlerised one and that the "Polish" language it refers to might as well be Ukrainian (since there was no word for the Ukrainian language at that time it was sometimes referred to as "Polish", as well.).
K.-T.'s point is the letter is clearly a (parody) reply to authentic sultan's letters to the king of Poland (two such letters survive, one from 1621 and another from 1636). Her supposition is that it has first circulated in the polite Polish elite which was aware of the presumptuous tone used by the sultan on the highest level and, naturally, it wouldn't have contained any obscenities.
However she also cites a Ukrainian scholar defending the standpoint that it could come from an authentic letter by cossacks employing a folksy Ukrainian language. You can read her article (it is in Russian) over here.
which later inspired a painting
Followup question: have you or anybody else a reference or a link to the painting in question ??
Follow up question, what was the influence of the Crimean Slave trade on this letter?