In fact, neither the word nor the notion was new to the Ottomans, nor is this the first document in which it appears. As has already been pointed out elsewhere (3), the word " occurs in the Turkish text of the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca of 1774, a document of some importance in Ottoman history. By the terms of this treaty the Ottomans were compelled to relinquish their suzerainty, over the Crimean Tatars who were granted a brief and rather formal independence as a preliminary
to their annexation to the Russian
Empire a few years later. While the clause was in fact little more than a face-saving device for the Ottoman sultan, it is of some interest as a document in the development of political thought and language. By the terms of the treaty, both the Çzar and the Sultan agreed to recognize the Crimean Tatars as «free and entirely independent of any foreign power.)) The Sultan was to be recognized by the Tatars as ttGrand Caliph of Muhammedanism», but this recognition was to be purely religious, and was agreed ((without thereby compromising their political and civil liberty as established.)) The treaty is extant in Turkish and French, but appears to have been originally drafted in Italian. The form of words in the Italian text for these two phrases are: «liberi, immediati, ed independent! assoiutamente da qua-lunque straniera Potenza..» and «senza pero mettere in compromesso la stabilita libertâ loro politica e çivile.» In the first phrase the Turkish text reads: «serbestiyet ve gayr-i taalluk müstakil vücuhla ecnebi bir devlete tâbi olmamak üzre»; in the second: «akdolunan serbestiyet-i devlet ve memleketlerine halel getirmiyerek.,»