You should see Charles V's official list of titles. 100-some years sounds like a lot of time, but things happened slower back then it took 11 years just to paint the painting.įinally, even if this particular letter is "not historical", we do have other, substantiated letters from the Zaporozhians to the Ottomans with various insults, and the painting was created with the help of historians, so the painting is fairly accurate even if the exact letter may have been a slight exaggeration of other contemporary letters. Furthermore, there's not a huge gap between the time of the incident in 1676 and the earliest version of the letter we've found so far, in the early 1800s. It simply wasn't mentioned in the summary, not explicitly mentioned as fake. The justification that it's "not historical" comes from someone saying it wasn't mentioned in a summary of Ottoman-Cossack diplomatic relations, but there were many letters between the two sides during that time. Hmm, I'm not terribly convinced by those comments that the letter never happened.