The forced captivity of inhabitants of the Polish Republic by Tatars and Turks in the eye of the 17th-century memorialists

In the 17th century, both the Turks and (much more often) the Tatars invaded Poland. According to historians, the Tatars in particular treated the Polish Republic as an area of economic exploitation. Its most severe form was the forced captivity of inhabitants of the south-eastern borderlands. This was documented by diarists and memorialists of Polish seicento, including Jan Florian Drobysz Tuszyński, Mikołaj Jemiołowski, Joachim Jerlicz, Samuel Maskiewicz, Zbigniew Ossoliński, and Kazimierz Sarnecki. They drew attention to the mass character of the Tatar-Turkish thraldom: not only soldiers but also many civilians were kidnapped by the Tatars, who benefited from human trafficking and thus made them captives. The authors of the diaries documented the circumstances of the attacks, including the time and routes taken by the looters. They drew attention to the state of the captives and reconstructed the human martyrdom