The period between late fourteenth and late seventeenth centuries witnesses the process of gradual incorporation of the region of South-Slavic Europe into Ottoman literary and professional networks not always directly revolving around the imperial capital in Istanbul. A corpus of texts characteristic for recording Slavic by the use of Arabic script is one of the products of the contact of South-Slavic speaking Europe with Islamicate languages and their rich cultural and literary traditions. The corpus has been commonly designated and studied as Slavic aljamiado literature, but has rarely been investigated from the perspective of cultural history of the Early Modern Ottoman Empire. The proposed paper analyzes linguistic, literary and political strategies applied in a four-language poem dated to the mid-seventeenth century, which was authored by an anonymous poet from Sarajevo. This quite exceptional poem, preserved in two slightly different versions, consists of ten quatrains in which each verse is in a different language (Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Bosnian). The poem is a concise critique of the state of affairs in the Ottoman province of Bosnia, and also in the empire as a whole. Focusing on the relationship between and the meaning of, the author’s linguistic, formal and thematic choices, the analysis of the poem is aimed to serve as a backdrop for a discussion of three broader, interrelated questions: first, the existing scholarly toolkit for the analysis of multilingual texts in the context of the Early Modern Ottoman Empire; second, the poetic function of the four abovementioned languages in the Ottoman Empire of the time; and third, the cosmopolitan literary, linguistic and formal strategies in the service of meaning-making within a particular locale, in this case Ottoman-ruled Bosnia.