“We have given our inviolable and salutary orders to the right honourable Delvet Gharai, Khan of Budziac, of Crimea, Nagai, and Circassia, and to our wise counsellor and noble serasquier of Bender, Ishmael (whom God preserve and increase in magnificence and wisdom), for your return through Poland, according to your first plan which has been again laid before us from you. You must, therefore, prepare to set out next winter under the guidance of Providence and with an honourable guard, that you may return to your own territories, taking care to pass through Poland in a peaceable and friendly manner. “You will be provided by my sublime Porte with all that is needed for your journey, both money, men, horses and wagons. But above all else we advise and exhort you to give the most express and detailed orders to the Swedes and other soldiers in your retinue not to commit any act of disorder, nor be guilty of any action which may either directly or indirectly tend to the breach of this peace. By that means you will preserve our good-will, of which we shall endeavour to give great and frequent proofs as we shall find opportunity. The troops to attend you shall receive orders to that effect, according to our Imperial will and pleasure. “Given at our sublime Porte of Constantinople on the 14th of the month Rebyul Eureb, 1214. Which corresponds to the 19th April, 1712.” This letter did not, however, entirely destroy the hopes of the King of Sweden. He wrote to the Sultan that he was ready to go, and would never forget the favour he had shown him; but he added that he believed the Sultan was too just to send him away with nothing but a flying camp through a country already overrun with the Czar’s troops. Indeed, the Emperor of Russia, in spite of the fact that the first article of the Treaty of Pruth obliged him to withdraw his forces from Poland, had sent recruits thither, and it seemed strange that the Sultan was ignorant of the fact. The bad policy and vanity of the Porte in suffering the Christian princes to maintain their ambassadors at Constantinople, and not keeping one single agent in any Christian court, gives the former an opportunity of probing and sometimes of directing the Sultan’s most secret resolutions, while the Divan is always ignorant of the most public transactions of Christendom. The Sultan, shut up in the seraglio among his women and his eunuchs, sees only through the Grand Vizir’s eyes; the latter is as inaccessible as his master, taken up with the intrigues of the seraglio, and without any communication with the world outside. He is therefore generally imposed on himself, or imposes on the Sultan, who deposes him or has him strangled for his first mistake, in order to choose another as ignorant or as treacherous as the former, who behaves in the same way as his predecessors and falls as soon as they.