Chapter 8 The Cossacks

In the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Ukrainian steppes underwent a major political, economic, and cultural transformation. For the first time since the days of Kyivan Rus’, the line of frontier settlement stopped retreating toward the Prypiat marshes and the Carpathian Mountains and began advancing toward the east and south.

The origins of that profound change were in the steppe itself. The struggle that began in the mid-fourteenth century within the Golden Horde, also known as the Kipchak Khanate, led to its disintegration by the mid-fifteenth century. The Crimean, Kazan, and Astrakhan khanates became successors to the Horde, none of them capable of uniting it and some even losing their independence. The Crimea became independent of the Golden Horde in 1449 under the leadership of a descendant of Genghis Khan, Haji Devlet Giray. The Giray dynasty, established by Haji Devlet, would last into the eighteenth century, but his realm would not remain independent. By 1478, the khanate had become a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire — the huge Turkic-dominated Muslim polity that replaced Byzantium as the major power in the western Mediterranean and Black Sea regions in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Ottomans, who made Istanbul, the former Constantinople, their capital in 1453, took direct control over the southern shores of the Crimea, establishing their main center in the port city of Kaffa, today’s Feodosiia.

Security concerns and commercial interests attracted the Ottomans to the region. In particular they were interested in slaves. The slave trade had always been important in the region’s economy, but it now became dominant. The Ottoman Empire, whose Islamic laws allowed the enslavement only of non-Muslims and encouraged the emancipation of slaves, was always in need of free labor. The Noghays and the Crimean Tatars responded to the demand, expanding their slave-seeking expeditions to the lands north of the Pontic steppes and often going much deeper into Ukraine and southern Muscovy than the frontier areas. The slave trade supplemented the earnings that the Noghays obtained from animal husbandry and the Crimeans from both husbandry and settled forms of agriculture. Bad harvests generally translated into more raids to the north and more slaves shipped back to the Crimea.

All five routes that the Tatars followed to the settled areas on their slave-seeking raids went through Ukraine. Two of them east of the Dniester led to western Podolia and then to Galicia; two on the other side of the Southern Buh River led to western Podolia and Volhynia, then again to Galicia; the last passed through what would become the Sloboda Ukraine region around Kharkiv to southern Muscovy. If the demand for cereals led to the incorporation of the Ukrainian lands of the sixteenth century into the Baltic trade, their connection to the Mediterranean trade was due largely to Tatar raiding for slaves. Ukrainians, who constituted an absolute majority of the population of the steppe borderlands north of the Black Sea and moved into the steppes in search of grain, became the main targets and victims of the Ottoman Empire’s slave-dependent economy. Ethnic Russians northeast of the Crimea were a close second.

Michalon (Michael) the Lithuanian, a mid-sixteenth-century author who visited the Crimea, described the scope of the slave trade by quoting from his conversation with a local Jew who, “seeing that our people were constantly being shipped there as captives in numbers too large to count, asked us whether our lands also teemed with people, and whence such innumerable mortals had come.” Estimates of the numbers of Ukrainians and Russians brought to the Crimean slave markets in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries vary from 1.5 million to 3 million. Children and adolescents brought the highest prices. The fates of the slaves differed. Most of the male slaves ended up on Ottoman galleys or working in the fields, while many women worked as domestics. Some got lucky, but only in a matter of speaking. Talented young men made careers in the Ottoman administration, but most of them were eunuchs. Some women were taken into the harems of the sultans and high Ottoman officials.

One Ukrainian girl known in history as Roxolana became the wife of the most powerful of the Ottoman sultans, Suleiman the Magnificent, who ruled from 1520 to 1566. Her son became a sultan under the name Selim II. Under the name Hürrem Sultan, Roxolana sponsored Muslim charities and funded the construction of some of the best examples of Ottoman architecture. Among these is the Haseki Hürrem Sultan Hamamı, a public bathhouse not far from Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, constructed by the best-known Ottoman architect, Mimar Sinan. In the course of the last two hundred years, Roxolana has figured as the heroine of novels and a number of television dramas in Ukraine and Turkey. To be sure, her life and career were the exception, not the rule.

The Tatar attacks and the slave trade left deep scars in Ukrainian memory. The fate of the slaves was the subject of numerous dumas — Ukrainian epic songs that lamented the fate of the captives, described their attempts to escape from Crimean slavery, and glorified the men who saved and freed slaves.

Who were the Cossacks? The answer depends on the period one has in mind. We know for certain that the first Cossacks were nomads. The word itself is of Turkic origin and, depending on context, could refer to a guard, a freeman, or a freebooter. The first Cossacks were all of the above. They formed small bands and lived in the steppes outside the settlements and campsites of their hordes. Living off the steppe, they turned to fishing, trapping, and banditry. Many trade routes crisscrossed the steppe, and the early Cossacks preyed on merchants who ventured there without sufficient guards. We first hear of the existence of Cossacks in the steppe, coming not from the east or south but from the north, the settled area of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, in connection with one such attack on merchants.

In 1492, the year Christopher Columbus landed on the Caribbean island he named San Salvador and King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella signed a decree expelling the Jews from Spain, the Cossacks made their first appearance in the international arena. According to a complaint sent that year to Grand Duke Alexander of Lithuania by the Crimean khan, subjects of the duke from the cities of Kyiv and Cherkasy had captured and pillaged a Tatar ship in what seems to have been the lower reaches of the Dnieper. The duke never questioned that these might be his people or that they might have engaged in steppe-style highway robbery. He ordered his borderland (the term he used was “Ukrainian”) officials to investigate the Cossacks who might have been involved in the raid. He also ordered that the perpetrators be executed and that their belongings, which apparently had to include the stolen merchandise, be given to a representative of the khan.

If Alexander’s orders were carried out, they had no lasting effect. In the following year, the Crimean khan accused Cossacks from Cherkasy of attacking a Muscovite ambassador.

The Lithuanian borderland officials were trying to stop Cossack raids with one hand while using the Cossacks to defend the frontier from the Tatars with the other. In 1553 the grand duke sent the captain of Cherkasy and Kaniv, Prince Mykhailo Vyshnevetsky, beyond the Dnieper rapids to build a small fortress in order to stop Cossack expeditions from proceeding farther down the river. Vyshnevetsky used his Cossack servants to accomplish the task. Not surprisingly, the Crimean khan saw the Cossack fortress as an encroachment on his realm, and four years later he sent an army to expel Vyshnevetsky from his redoubt. In folk tradition, Prince Vyshnevetsky became a popular hero as the first Cossack hetman — the title that the Polish army reserved for its supreme commanders — and a fearless fighter against the Tatars and Ottomans.

By the mid-sixteenth century, the lands south of Kyiv were full of new settlements. “And the Kyiv region, fortunate and thriving, is also rich in population, for on the Borysthenes and other rivers that flow into it there are plenty of populous towns and many villages,” wrote Michalon the Lithuanian. He also explained the origins of the settlers: “Some are hiding from paternal authority, or from slavery, or from service, or from [punishment for] crimes, or from debts, or from something else; others are attracted to [the region], especially in spring, by richer game and more plentiful places. And, having tried their luck in its fortresses, they never come back from there.” Judging by Michael’s description, the Cossacks supplemented their gains from hunting and fishing with robbery.

While the original Cossacks were town dwellers along the Prypiat and Dnieper rivers, by the end of the sixteenth century local peasants had swelled their ranks. This influx ended the uncertainty about the Cossacks’ political, ethnic, and religious identity — whether they were Crimean and Noghay Tatars, Ukrainian subjects of dukes and kings, or a mixture of all peoples and religions. The absolute majority of Cossacks were Ukrainians who came from the huge manorial estates, or latifundia, of the magnates and nobility to avoid what historians call the “second serfdom.” As discussed in chapter 7, the magnates and gentry tried to attract new settlers to their newly acquired estates in the Ukrainian borderlands, which were dangerous to live in because of the continuing threat of Tatar raids, by promising tax-free periods. As these periods expired, many peasants moved farther into the hazardous steppe territories to avoid taxation. Quite a few of them joined the Cossacks and radicalized their social agenda.

The settlement of Ukraine — the steppe borderland along the middle Dnieper depicted on Tomasz Makowski’s map, as described in the previous chapter — was a common project of the Volhynian princes and the Dnieper Cossacks. In 1559, Kostiantyn Ostrozky became palatine of Kyiv — the viceroy of the vast territories of Dnieper Ukraine. His jurisdiction expanded to Kaniv and Cherkasy, and his responsibilities included the Cossacks, who both enabled and hindered the continuing settlement of the steppelands with their freebooting expeditions against the Tatars and Ottomans. Ostrozky initiated the first efforts to recruit the Cossacks into military service, not so much to use them as a fighting force as to remove them from the lands beyond the rapids and establish some form of control over that unruly crowd. The Livonian War increased the demand for fighting men on the Lithuanian border with Muscovy, and a number of Cossack units were formed in the 1570s, one of them numbering as many as five hundred men.

The reorganization of the Cossacks from militias in the service of local border officials into military units under the command of army officers inaugurated a new era in the history of Cossackdom. For the first time, the term “registered Cossack” came into use. Cossacks taken into military service and thus included in the “register” were exempted from paying taxes and not subject to the jurisdiction of local officials. They also received a salary. There was, of course, no shortage of those wanting to be registered, but the Polish Crown recruited only limited numbers, and salaries were paid and privileges recognized only during active service. But those not included in the register to begin with or excluded from it at the end of a particular war or military campaign refused to give up their status, giving rise to endless disputes between Cossacks and border officials. The creation of the register solved one problem for the government, only to breed another.

In 1590, the Commonwealth Diet decreed the creation of a force of 1,000 registered Cossacks to protect the Ukrainian borderlands from the Tatars and the Tatars from the unregistered Cossacks. Although the king issued the requisite ordinance, little came of it. By 1591, the first Cossack uprising had engulfed Ukraine. The Cossacks, who until then had been harassing Ottoman possessions — the Crimean Khanate, the principality of Moldavia (an Ottoman dependency), and the Black Sea coast — now turned their energies inward. They rebelled not against the state but against their own “godfathers” — the Volhynian princes, in particular Prince Janusz Ostrozky (Polish: Ostrogski) and his father, Kostiantyn. Janusz was the captain of Bila Tserkva, a castle and Cossack stronghold south of Kyiv, while Kostiantyn, the palatine of Kyiv, “supervised” his son’s activities. The Ostrozkys, father and son, had full control of the region. No one from the local nobility dared defy the powerful princes, who were busy extending their possessions by taking over the lands of the petty nobility.

One of the Ostrozkys’ noble victims, Kryshtof Kosynsky, turned out to be a Cossack chieftain as well. When Janusz seized Kosynsky’s land, which he held on the basis of a royal grant, Kosynsky did not waste time on a futile complaint to the king but gathered his Cossacks and attacked the Bila Tserkva castle, the younger Ostrozky’s headquarters. A private army assembled by the Ostrozkys and another scion of Volhynia, Prince Oleksandr Vyshnevetsky, eventually defeated him. The princes managed to put down the revolt without asking for help from the royal authorities. Ironically, the godfathers of the Cossacks punished their unruly children with the help of other Cossacks in their private service. By far the best known of Ostrozky’s Cossack chieftains was Severyn Nalyvaiko. He led the Ostrozky Cossacks into battle against Kosynsky’s army and then gathered dispersed Cossacks in the steppes of Podolia to lead them as far away as possible from the Ostrozkys’ possessions.

There was, however, a limit to how much the Ostrozkys could control or manipulate the Cossack rebellion. The Cossacks elected their own commander, whom they followed in battle, but once the expedition was over, they were free to remove or even execute him if he acted against their interests. Then there were major divisions among the Cossacks themselves, which were not limited to registered versus unregistered men. The registered Cossacks were recruited from the landowning Cossack class, whose members resided in towns and settlements between Kyiv and Cherkasy. They had a chance to obtain special rights associated with royal service. But there was also another group, the Zaporozhian Cossacks, many of them former peasants, who had a fortified settlement called the Sich (after the wooden palisade that protected it) on the islands beyond the rapids. They were beyond the reach of royal officials, caused most of the trouble with the Crimean Tatars, and, in turbulent times, served as a magnet for the dissatisfied townsmen and peasants who fled to the steppes.

Nalyvaiko, charged by Ostrozky with managing the Cossack riffraff — largely runaway peasants — soon found himself in an uneasy alliance with the unruly Zaporozhians. By 1596 he was no longer doing Ostrozky’s bidding but acting on his own, leading a revolt greater than the one initiated by Kosynsky. The early 1590s saw a number of years of bad harvest, which caused famine. Starvation drove more peasants out of the noble estates and into Cossack ranks. This time the princely retinues were insufficient to suppress the uprising: the royal army was called in, headed by the commander of the Polish armed forces. In May 1596, the Polish army surrounded the Cossack encampment on the Left Bank of the Dnieper. The “old,” or town, Cossacks turned against the “new” ones and surrendered Nalyvaiko to the Poles in exchange for an amnesty. Executed in Warsaw, the princely servant turned Cossack rebel became a martyr for the Cossack and Orthodox causes in the eyes of the Cossack chroniclers and poets of the romantic era, including the Russian poet Kondratii Ryleev, who was executed in 1825 for his own revolt against the authorities.

At the end of the sixteenth century, the Cossacks entered into the foreign-policy calculations not only of the commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire but also of central and western European powers. In 1593 Erich von Lassota, an emissary of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II, visited the Zaporozhian Cossacks with a proposal to join his master’s war against the Ottomans. Three years later, a papal representative, Alessandro Comuleo, arrived on a similar mission. Little came of those missions, apart from Comuleo’s letters and Lassota’s diary, which described the democratic order that prevailed in the Zaporozhian Sich and have enriched our knowledge about the early history of the Cossacks. But the Cossacks, now known in Vienna and Rome, would soon gain notice as far afield as Paris and London, and present a major threat to Moscow.

The Ukrainian Cossacks, who had begun their international career in the 1550s by serving the tsar of Muscovy, Ivan the Terrible, paid an unsolicited visit to Moscow during the first decade of the seventeenth century. Muscovy was then in turmoil because of an economic, dynastic, and political crisis known as the Time of Troubles. It began at the turn of the seventeenth century with a number of devastating famines caused in part by what we today call the Little Ice Age — a period of low temperatures that lasted half a millennium, from about 1350 to 1850, peaking around the beginning of the seventeenth century. The crisis afflicted Muscovy at a most inopportune time, when its Rurikid dynasty had died out and a number of aristocratic clans contested the legitimacy of the new rulers. The dynastic crisis came to an end in 1613 with the election to the Muscovite throne of the first Romanov tsar. But before the crisis was resolved, a number of candidates for the throne, some of them “pretenders” claiming to be surviving relatives of Ivan the Terrible, tried their political luck, opening the door to foreign intervention.

During the lengthy interregnum, the Cossacks supported the two pretenders seeking the Muscovite throne, False Dmitrii I and False Dmitrii II. Up to 10,000 Cossacks joined the army of Field Crown Hetman Stanisław Żołkiewski of Poland when he marched on Moscow in 1610. The election to the Muscovite throne three years later of Tsar Mikhail Romanov, founder of the dynasty that lasted until the Revolution of 1917, did not end Cossack involvement in Muscovite affairs. In 1618, a Ukrainian Cossack army of 20,000 joined Polish troops in their march on Moscow and took part in the siege of the capital. The Cossacks helped end the war on conditions favorable to the Kingdom of Poland. One of them was the transfer to Poland of the Chernihiv land, which the Grand Duchy of Lithuania had lost in the early sixteenth century. By the mid-seventeenth century, Chernihiv would become an important part of the Cossack world. As always, however, the Cossacks both helped and hindered the Polish kings in advancing their foreign-policy agenda. In its war with Muscovy, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth never got the support it hoped for from the Ottoman Empire, partly because of continuing Cossack seagoing expeditions and attacks on the Ottoman littoral.

In 1606, descending the Dnieper and entering the Black Sea on their longboats, called “seagulls” (chaiky), the Cossacks stormed Varna, one of the strongest Ottoman fortresses on the western Black Sea shore. In 1614 they pillaged Trabzon on the southwestern shore, and in the following year they entered the Istanbul harbor of the Golden Horn and pillaged the suburbs, much as the Vikings had done some 750 years earlier. But whereas the Vikings had also traded with Constantinople, the Cossack expeditions were akin to pirate attacks on seashores from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean. They came to rob, take revenge, and, as Ukrainian folk songs related, liberate long-suffering slaves. In 1616, they attacked Kaffa, the main slave-trading center on the Crimean coast, and liberated all the captives.

The sultan, his court, and the foreign ambassadors who witnessed one Cossack attack after another on the mighty Ottoman Empire were stunned. The Christian rulers could now take the raiders seriously as potential allies in a war against the Ottomans. The French ambassador in Istanbul, Count Philippe de Harlay of Césy, wrote to King Louis XIII in July 1620, “Every time the Cossacks are near here on the Black Sea, they seize incredible booty despite their weak forces and have such a reputation that strokes of the cudgel are required to force the Turkish soldiers to do battle against them on several galleys that the grand seigneur [the sultan] sends there with great difficulty.”

While Count Philippe was informing his king about the inability of the Ottomans to curb the Cossack seagoing expeditions, advisers to sixteen-year-old Sultan Osman II were considering how to wage war on two fronts: against the Polish army on land and the Cossacks at sea. In the summer of 1620, the Ottoman army marched toward the Prut River in today’s Moldova against the commonwealth, whose troops included private Cossack armies of Polish and Ukrainian magnates. The campaign aimed ostensibly to punish the commonwealth for not curbing Cossack attacks on the Ottomans. In reality, the agenda was much broader. The Ottomans were trying to protect their vassals in the region from the growing influence of the commonwealth. The Polish army, numbering some 10,000 soldiers, and the Ottoman force, twice as large according to some estimates, clashed in September 1620 near the town of Ţuţora on today’s Moldovan-Romanian border. The battle went on for twenty days, ending with a crushing defeat for the commonwealth.

Since the commonwealth had no standing army, the court and the entire country panicked. Everyone expected the Ottomans to continue their march on Poland. Indeed they did. In the following year, a much larger Ottoman army, estimated at 120,000 soldiers and led by the sultan himself, passed through Moldavia on its way to the commonwealth. The Ottomans met a commonwealth force approximately 40,000 strong, half of it made up of Ukrainian Cossacks, led by Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny, hero of the Cossacks’ raid of 1616 on Kaffa and commander of their march on Moscow two years later. The battle lasted a whole month, waged on the banks of the Dniester River near the fortress of Khotyn, which the Ottomans besieged.

The Battle of Khotyn ended with no clear victory for either side, but that uncertain outcome was regarded in Warsaw as a triumph for the Kingdom of Poland. The Poles had stopped the huge Ottoman army at their borders and signed a peace treaty that involved no territorial losses. Everyone understood that this result would have been all but impossible without the Cossacks. For the first time — and a short time at that — the Cossacks became the darlings of the entire commonwealth. Books that appeared soon after the battle would lionize Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny, whose monument stands today in the Podil district of Kyiv at the head of the street named after him, as one of the greatest Polish warriors.

The Cossacks’ military achievement at Khotyn allowed them to reassert their political and social agenda in the commonwealth. Their main demand was noble status for the Cossack officers, if not for the whole army. In 1622, when Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny died in Kyiv from the wounds he had sustained at Khotyn, Kasiian Sakovych, a professor at the Kyiv brotherhood school, wrote verses on the death of the Cossack hetman that the Kyivan Cave Monastery press soon published. There he lauded the Cossacks as heirs to the Kyivan princes, who had stormed Constantinople back in the times of Kyivan Rus’. According to Sakovych, the Cossacks had fought for and deserved “Golden Liberty” — a code word for the same rights and liberties as enjoyed by the commonwealth nobility. “All strive ardently to attain it,” wrote Sakovych. “Yet it cannot be given to everyone, only to those who defend the fatherland and the lord. Knights win it by their valor in wars: not with money but with blood do they purchase it.” Recognition of the Cossacks as knights would take them only one step away from nobility.

The Cossacks did not achieve their social agenda. Their attempt to take part in the Diet to elect the new king (restricted to nobles alone) was rebuffed in 1632. This humiliation came on the heels of a number of military defeats. The authorities crushed the Cossack uprisings of 1625 and 1630. At Khotyn they had had 20,000 warriors, but now the register was limited first to 6,000 and then to 8,000 Cossacks. The Cossacks rose once more in 1637 and 1638, only to suffer defeat by the royal army yet again. They claimed to be fighting not only for Cossack liberties but also for the Orthodox faith. Although this won them support initially, the government’s efforts to accommodate the Orthodox Church made it increasingly difficult to maintain the bond between the church and the Cossacks. Whereas in 1630 part of the Kyivan clergy had supported the Cossacks, in 1637 and 1638 their appeals fell on deaf ears, and they felt betrayed. The panegyrics issued by the Cave Monastery print shop no longer eulogized Cossack hetmans: instead, they lauded Orthodox nobles who had fought against them.

The suppression of the Cossack uprisings of 1637 and 1638 led the authorities to attempt a long-term settlement. The model was relatively simple — a grant of legal status for the warriors on condition of their integration into the commonwealth’s legal and social structure under a new leadership imposed by the king and trusted by the government. The Cossack ordinance of 1638 went far in accommodating the demands of the Cossack officer elite. It recognized the Cossacks as a separate estate with its own rights and privileges not limited to periods of military service, including the right to pass on such status and landed property to their descendants. The government took measures to control the newly recognized estate by limiting access to it on the part of other strata of the population, especially the townsfolk, with whom the Cossacks lived side by side in the towns of the steppe borderland.

Furthermore, the Polish authorities reduced the number of registered Cossacks to 6,000 (half the quota of 1625) and placed them under the jurisdiction of the Crown grand hetman — the commander in chief of the Polish army. The Cossack commissioner and six Cossack colonels were all Polish nobles. The highest rank that a Cossack could attain in the Cossack army was that of captain. The six regiments had to take turns in serving as garrison troops at the Zaporozhian Sich, the rebel stronghold of the Cossacks beyond the rapids. To stop Cossack seagoing expeditions and improve relations with the Ottomans, the authorities rebuilt the fortress of Kodak at the head of the Dnieper rapids, originally built in 1635 but subsequently burned down by the Cossacks. The architect sent to supervise the reconstruction was a French engineer, Guillaume Levasseur de Beauplan, who in 1639 produced the first map of Ukraine — the steppe borderlands of the commonwealth, including the palatinates of Podolia, Bratslav, and Kyiv. Beauplan’s numerous maps of the region made Ukraine a household word among European cartographers of the second half of the seventeenth century.

With the Cossacks pacified and accommodated to some degree, the Dnieper closed as an avenue to Black Sea expeditions, and the Zaporozhian Sich under control, the commonwealth entered a decade that became known as the Golden Peace. It brought continuing colonization of the steppe borderlands and expansion of noble holdings and latifundia. The population grew as new magnates, new peasants, and Jewish settlers acting as new middlemen moved in to take advantage of burgeoning economic opportunities. As things turned out, this was the calm before the storm. A new and much larger Cossack revolt was in the making.

The Cossacks had come a long way — from small bands of fishermen and trappers foraging in the steppes south of Kyiv to settlers of new lands along the steppe frontier; from private militiamen in the employ of princes to fighters in an independent force that foreigners treated with respect; and, finally, from refugees and adventurers to members of a cohesive military brotherhood that regarded itself as a distinct social order and demanded from the government not only money but also recognition of its warrior status. The Polish state could benefit from the military might and economic potential of the Cossacks only if it managed to accommodate their social demands. As subsequent developments would show repeatedly, that was no easy task.