Conclusions

‘What other nations strive to win by means of words and discourses, the Cossacks accomplish with actions themselves’, wrote the Orthodox met­ropolitan Iov Boretsky in 1621 concerning Cossack participation in the struggle against the Ottomans.^[729] With his references to religious dis­courses and other peoples, Boretsky was in effect placing Ukrainian Cos- sackdom in the context of the broader religious conflicts of his age, and, in speaking of the Cossacks’ inclination to direct action rather than words, he was implicitly referring their specific role in contemporary relations not only between Christianity and Islam but also between Orthodoxy on the one hand and the Union, Roman Catholicism, Protest­antism, and Judaism on the other.

What would Kyivan Orthodoxy and its relations with other Christian and non-Christian churches have been like if Ukrainian Cossackdom had not become involved in the religious conflict of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and what might have been the fate of Ukrain­ian Cossackdom if it had remained aloof from the religious struggle? These questions, which are partly informed by recent writings in the realm of ‘virtual history’,^[730] can help us better understand the actual con­tribution of Cossackdom to religious developments in early modern Eastern Europe, as well as evaluate the influence of religion on the his­torical fate of the Cossacks. Providing ‘real’ answers to these ‘virtual’ questions can also serve to bring out some of the principal conclusions that follow from the preceding analysis.

In responding to the questions formulated above, it is worth remem­bering that the Cossack Host was only one of the actors on the Ukrainian political and religious stage, and the Cossack impact (or lack of it) on reli­gious developments in Ukraine should be evaluated in relation to the ac­tions of other social groups and institutions.

Could the renewal of the Orthodox episcopate have happened later, without Cossack participation? While the possibility cannot be excluded completely, it must be considered minuscule. Throughout the second decade of the seventeenth century, there was only one Orthodox bishop, Ieremiia Tysarovsky, remaining in Lviv. Perhaps the burghers and nobles could have obtained the royal nomination of one more Orthodox bishop, but with the demise of Prince Kostiantyn Ostrozky and the waning of the era of the Orthodox princes, the nobiliary and burgher strata were un­prepared to take on the struggle against the royal administration, which was openly hostile to Orthodoxy. The alliance of the Orthodox nobility and its Diet deputies with the Protestants was a powerful but somewhat limited weapon in the struggle to preserve the Orthodox Church.

The consecration of the hierarchy in 1620 under the protection of Cos­sack swords profoundly affected the course of Orthodox-Uniate relations and spurred the leaders of the Uniate Church, most notably Metropol­itan Iosyf Veliamyn Rutsky, to seek a compromise with the Orthodox. At­tempts were even made to convoke a joint sobor, with the subsequent prospect of uniting both branches of the Kyivan church, but the Cossacks opposed these efforts and found themselves in tandem with Rome on the issue, since both sides, for very different reasons of their own, opposed the notion of a joint sobor. The establishment of a new, ‘legal’ hierarchy in 1632 undermined the old alliance between Cossackdom and the Kyi- van metropolitanate, relegating the Cossack leaders to the periphery of the religious struggle and of Orthodox relations with the Uniates and Roman Catholics in Ukraine. It also opened new opportunities for dia­logue between Orthodox and Uniate Christians. In the latter half of the 1630s the Kyivan clergy, free of Cossack control and encouraged by the royal administration, was more ready to venture into contacts with the Uniates, and by the time of the Khmelnytsky Uprising there was already talk of a ‘universal’ union and the establishment of a joint Orthodox- Uniate patriarchate. Some form of association between the Kyivan Orthodox metropolitanate and Rome was clearly in the offing, but the outbreak of the Khmelnytsky Uprising in the spring of 1648 put an end to hopes for the incorporation of the whole Kyivan metropolitanate (not only its Uniate portion) into the Catholic Church.

The Khmelnytsky Uprising, which rather quickly took on the aspect of a defense of the native religion against the onslaught of a foreign one, almost immediately transformed Orthodoxy into a militant faith.

The Khmelnytsky Uprising proceeded under the banner of Ortho­doxy, but only in so far as Cossackdom itself desired and permitted the association. The rebel masses, for their part, recognized little if any authority over themselves and their immediate leaders. Not only Catholics and Jews were massacred in the first months of the revolt but even Orthodox monasteries were attacked by unruly mobs. The higher clergy eventually turned for protection to Khmelnytsky and his officers. Under the circumstances they had little alternative, even though prior to the uprising relations between Cossackdom and the upper Orthodox hierarchy were exceedingly cool. Not surprisingly, it was not the Kyivan metropolitan but the Zaporozhian hetman who was the leading partner in the state-church tandem of the Hetmanate, a fact that had a pronounced influence on the ideology and course of the uprising. The behind-the- scenes conflict between the hetman and the metropolitan, who had rid himself of competition from other denominations on the territory con­trolled by the Cossacks, but lost control of his own church, ended with the victory of the Cossack hetman. The Khmelnytsky Uprising saved Kyivan Orthodoxy from subordination to Rome, but also promoted its absorption by Moscow.

Cossack intervention in the religious conflict in Ukraine not only helped to preserve the Orthodox Church and strengthen its ties with Moscow but also led to the deterioration of relations between the Orthodox on one side and the Uniates, Catholics, and Jews on the other. It is quite clear that without Cossack intervention in religious affairs, Orthodox relations with these churches and religions would have developed differently. In the first place, they would have been less hostile. The principal victim of Cossack intervention in church affairs during the Khmelnytsky Uprising was, of course, the Union, which the Cossacks treated as a Catholic intrigue against Orthodoxy and the principal threat to their own freedom of religion. Although none of the Cossack revolts of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, including the Khmelnytsky Uprising, claimed large numbers of victims among the Uniates, the rebels’ ideological opposition to the Union and their violent seizures of Uniate property could not help but increase hostility between Orthodox and Uniates. The Khmelnytsky Uprising led to the marginalization of the Union in Ukraine (and, to a lesser extent, in Belarus), driving the Uniate Church to the edge of extinction. Thus it is no accident that the Cossacks entered Ukrainian historical memory and tradition as implacable enemies of the Union.

Orthodox relations with Roman Catholicism also fell victim to the Cossack revolts and their religious policy. Although the Cossacks never questioned the right of existence of the Catholic Church (as they did with the Union), judging by the number of victims and the intensity of their religiously motivated violence, the rank-and-file Cossacks and the aroused masses were far more hostile to Catholics than to Uniates.

It is worth noting nevertheless that, however strongly the Cossacks de­fended Orthodoxy within the Commonwealth, they were very far from pursuing a consistent religiously motivated policy in their foreign rela­tions and were guided instead by the imperatives of the moment. Whether fighting on the side of the Commonwealth or taking part in the Thirty Years’ War with its blessing, the Cossacks generally ended up tak­ing the part of Catholic states at war with their Islamic, Protestant, or Orthodox neighbors. The Cossacks’ active participation in the restoration of the Orthodox hierarchy in 1620 did not prevent them from making peace with the Crimea and allying themselves with various Crimean fac­tions in their conflicts with the Ottomans in 1624-5.The Cossacks’ rela­tions with the Protestants were also generally pragmatic in character. When the Cossacks entered the religious struggle within the Common­wealth on the side of the Orthodox nobility and burghers, they automat­ically inherited the support of the latter’s old allies in the parliamentary struggle, the Polish and Lithuanian Protestants. Contrariwise, the ap­peals of Swedish diplomats in the early 1630s for the Cossacks to wage a joint struggle against the Catholic Commonwealth evoked no response from the Cossack officer milieu. For a long time, the Khmelnytsky Up­rising put an end to the spread of Protestantism in Ukraine, even though the revolt had no particularly anti-Protestant orientation. Bohdan Khmelnytsky invested considerable hopes in an understanding with the leader of the Lithuanian Protestants, Janusz Radziwill, and developed his foreign policy in a spirit of close co-operation with Protestant Transyl­vania and Sweden. Nevertheless, the very nature of the uprising, in which popular anger was directed against the nobility, forced many Protestant nobles to flee the territories occupied by the rebels and migrate deep into the Commonwealth. This was the fate of the rather numerous commu­nities of Socinians (Antitrinitarians) in Volhynia, and the prohibition of Antitrinitarianism in the Commonwealth following the Swedish Deluge made it necessary for nobiliary Ruthenian Socinians to choose among emigration, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy. Some of its representatives, such as the general chancellor in Vyhovsky’s administration, Iurii Nemyrych, chose Orthodoxy, making it possible to return to their estates with the prospect of continuing a military and political career in a Ukraine that was now Cossack.

How would Orthodox-Jewish relations have developed if there had been no Cossack uprisings, or if the Cossacks had not taken up the flag of religious war? On the basis of what is now known about Jewish relations with various segments of Ruthenian society, it may be concluded that those relations would hardly have been idyllic even without Cossack interference, but Cossack participation made them extraordinarily hostile. The destruction of entire Jewish communities at the beginning of the Khmelnytsky Uprising and the persecution of Jews in subsequent years turned the Cossacks and their leader, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, into a personification of absolute evil in Jewish historical consciousness and tradition. It is worth noting nevertheless that Cossackdom was not traditionally distinguished by strong anti-Jewish prejudice, and in all likelihood, the Cossack uprisings merely released previously suppressed but rather widespread feelings of anti-Jewish antagonism. Counter­Reformation influences fostered the rise and development of distinct anti-Judaic principles in the Kyivan metropolitanate—principles that Orthodox priests sought to promote and inculcate in their faithful. The granting of royal privileges to Jewish communities and the growth of their numbers on Ukrainian territory gave rise to competition and antagonism on the part of Ukrainian burghers. The peasants also resented the expan­sion of magnate landholdings and the nobles’ employment of Jews as leaseholders and tax collectors. Unlike the clergy, burghers, and peas­ants, the Cossacks initially harbored no antagonism to Jews on social grounds. Only in the 1630s, and to a greater extent in the 1640s, given the spread of Jewish leaseholding in areas of Cossack settlement, did Cos- sack-Jewish antagonism begin to grow, opening the door to Cossack at­tacks on Jewish communities during the Khmelnytsky Uprising. In the first years of the uprising, the Cossacks readily lent themselves to the prosecution of a ‘holy war’ against the Jews and to the promotion of mass Jewish conversions to Christianity.

Having declared the Orthodox Church dominant on the territory of the Cossack polity and prohibited, or greatly complicated, the presence within its boundaries of organized communities of Catholics, Uniates, Protestants, and Jews, Cossackdom effectively renounced the principle of religious toleration professed by the Orthodox of the previous age and took on the project of building a monoconfessional state. To some extent, that policy echoed the principle of ‘cuius regio, eius religio’ enunciated at Augsburg in 1555 and reflected the situation that had become dominant in Western and Central Europe by the mid-seventeenth century, with the end of the Thirty Years’ War and the conclusion of the Peace of West­phalia (1648). After the Cossack wars and Swedish intervention, Cossack Ukraine’s principal antagonist, the Commonwealth, also set out to per­secute those who professed other faiths in order to build a monoconfes­sional Catholic state. Thus, in its religious policy, the Cossack state followed the main tendencies of post-Reformation Europe, where the period of religious wars, or wars with a significant religious component, was succeeded by a period of consolidation of monoconfessional statehood. These tendencies were also welcomed and supported by the Orthodox world outside Ukraine. The Council of Pereiaslav and Khmelnytsky’s ac­ceptance of the Muscovite protectorate also could not fail to strengthen the Cossack officers’ resolution to establish a purely Orthodox Cossack state.

In assessing the influence of Cossackdom on the religious situation in Eastern Europe, one must also take account of the development of Orthodox-Islamic relations. Did their nature change as a result of Cossack military policy? Despite the very fact of Cossackdom’s rise and develop­ment on the conflict-ridden Christian-Muslim borderland and the Cos­sacks’ frequently reiterated anti-Islamic, pro-Christian attitude, the answer to this question must be more negative than positive. On the one hand, the Cossacks and their Orthodox allies made lavish use of the idea, developed mainly by Polish Catholic political writers, of the Common­wealth as the bastion of Christian Europe. They represented Cossack seagoing campaigns against the Turks and land-based ones against the Tatars as actions in the defense of Christianity. On the other hand, be­ginning in the 1620s, the Cossacks began to ally themselves with Tatar factions in the Crimea. In Khmelnytsky’s time, they concluded a treaty with the Crimean khan and even accepted the nominal protectorate of Istanbul in spite of protests and accusations of treason against Christian­ity from the Catholic Commonwealth, Orthodox Muscovy, and, in part, from their own Kyivan clergy. Nevertheless, the Orthodox of Ukraine were consistently hostile toward Islam, and Cossack warfare against the ‘infidels’, like their occasional alliances with them, could only effect a partial and temporary change in that attitude, not alter it in essence. After the Khmelnytsky era, the direct intervention of the Ottoman Turks in Ukrainian affairs in the 1670s and 1680s, their support for Hetman Petro Doroshenko, their campaigns against Chyhyryn, and their occupation of Podilia, which produced shock and true devastation in Right-Bank Ukraine, intensified anti-Islamic feelings in Ukraine and gave rise to polemics against Islam by the Ukrainian clergy.^[731]

Such, in general terms, was the influence of Cossackdom and the epoch of the Cossack wars of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth cen­turies on the historical fate of the Orthodox Church and its relations with other religions. But would the fate of Cossackdom itself and its identity have been different without the ‘Orthodoxization’ that it experienced in the early decades of the seventeenth century? With only a small measure of uncertainty, it may be asserted that that fate would have been decidedly different. Without the Orthodox Church and the social ideology associ­ated with it, it would have taken much longer for the Cossacks to find their way into the ranks of the Ruthenian nation, as well as to form and as­sert their own identity. The formation of that identity was an important project in which Cossackdom became involved at the beginning of the seventeenth century, as the formation of a distinct corporate estate on the basis of Cossackdom necessarily involved an effort on the part of its lead­ers to make a place for themselves in the traditional structure of Ruthen- ian society. Even with the help of the well-disposed Orthodox hierarchy, that process was neither simple nor straightforward. True, the effort under­taken by the hierarchs consecrated in 1620 to introduce the Cossacks into the socially exclusive club of the Ruthenian nation was not carried through to the end, while the new Mohylian hierarchy and the nobility that supported it no longer had any need or desire to remain in the same camp as the rebellious Cossacks. Nevertheless, this unsuccessful attempt showed Cossackdom the path to future union with other sectors of Ruthenian society on the common ground of the defense of Orthodoxy— a path confidently taken by the Cossacks in the course of the Khmelnyt­sky Uprising.

The use of religious slogans, most notably appeals to fight for the rights of persecuted Orthodoxy, gave Cossackdom a unique opportunity to le­gitimize its rebellions not only as a defense of the rights and privileges of its own estate but also as a vindication of the rights of the whole Ruthen- ian nation. On the one hand, religious ideology increased the legitimacy of Cossack uprisings in the eyes of non-Cossack Ruthenians; on the other, it was an important means of mobilizing the broader peasant and burgher masses for participation in Cossack revolts. We observe distinct efforts to employ religious slogans in order to broaden participation in the Cossack uprisings of 1630 and 1637-8, and most particularly in the Khmelnytsky Uprising, when the Cossacks succeeded in involving not only burghers and peasants but also a significant part of the Ruthenian nobility in their revolt. It is safe to assume that if the idea of defending reli­gious and national interests had not been proclaimed as one of its prin­cipal aims, the Khmelnytsky Uprising could hardly have developed into anything more than a Cossack revolt limited in social and territorial ex­tent and brief in duration. The religious sanction given to the Khmelnyt­sky Uprising by the Eastern hierarchs not only transformed the Cossack revolt into a religious war but also helped to legitimize Cossack rule over the territory and corporate estates of the new polity. This applied above all to the rule of the Cossack hetman, whose treatment by Ukrainian in­tellectuals as a leader and ruler given by God Himself was intended to bolster the status and legitimacy of the hetman’s authority in the eyes of the Cossacks themselves, as well as their neighbors.

The lack of a clearly defined religious identity and confessional allegiance would probably have complicated the search of Cossack diplomats, difficult enough as it was, for potential allies abroad. In a world defined by division into Confessionally based blocs and alliances, Cossackdom, having raised the flag of Orthodoxy, quite naturally found its place in the camp of non-Catholic opponents of the predominantly Catholic (and increasingly monoconfessional) Commonwealth. Islamic, Protestant, and Orthodox countries followed the course of the Cossack revolt with sympathy, seeing the Khmelnytsky Uprising as yet another of the religious conflicts in which the post-Reformation era abounded. The confessionalization of Kyivan Orthodoxy in the first half of the seven­teenth century popularized the notion of Orthodox commonality in East­ern and South-Eastern Europe and gave the Cossacks an important argument in their negotiations with Orthodox Muscovy. It is typical in this respect that the Pereiaslav Agreement of 1654 between Cossack Ukraine and Muscovy was legitimized and substantiated on both sides primarily in terms of religious commonality. Thus Orthodoxy became the binding ideological foundation on which the idea of a Cossack- Muscovite alliance under the protection of the ‘Eastern’ tsar was raised.

Given later developments, it is apparent that the Orthodox religion, as an element that bound Cossack Ukraine with tsarist Muscovy, and later with the Russian Empire, promoted the formation of a specific national identity in Ukraine. Considered from the viewpoint of the development of modern nations on Eastern European territory, Cossack influence on the nature of relations between Kyivan and Muscovite Orthodoxy height­ened the barrier between Orthodox and Uniate Ukraine, while easing communication between Muscovy and Orthodox Ukraine. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when concepts of a Cossack nation flourished and a Ukrainian national identity began to evolve on the basis of the views and perceptions of the Cossack elite, the religious di­mension could not be used to distinguish Ukrainians from Russians as it differentiated them from Poles, Tatars, or Turks. Politically and socially distinct, the Hetmanate was weakened by the lack of a church or even a clergy of its own. Eventually, in the course of the eighteenth century, the choice in favor of Orthodoxy made by Cossackdom more than a century earlier contributed to the dissolution of a specifically Cossack identity and its attendant political and social forms within a broader all-Russian identity. It should also be noted that the other hypothetical choice avail­able to the Cossacks, that of the Union, was not only unrealistic, given the needs and intentions of the Uniate hierarchy, but also impracticable in terms of early seventeenth-century politics, as it did not meet the needs of Orthodox Cossackdom in its opposition to the Catholic state.^[732]

For a better understanding of the role played by religion in the history of Ukrainian Cossackdom, especially considering its association with Orthodoxy, the example of Russian Cossackdom and its relations with the Old Believers is quite significant. Nothing demonstrates the unique role of the religious factor in the history of the Ukrainian Cossacks so clearly as the failure of a possible alliance between Cossackdom and reli­gion in Russia. There, the ‘true’ faith of the Old Believers, persecuted by the Muscovite authorities and opposed to official Orthodoxy, potentially constituted a useful religious platform for the legitimation of Cossack up­risings. The Don and the Yaik, like other centers of Russian Cossackdom, also attracted Old Believers fleeing tsarist persecution, but none of the Cossack and peasant uprisings that took place in Muscovy had a clearly defined religious program, and none developed into a religious war com­parable to the Khmelnytsky Uprising. Despite the powerful influence of the Old Believers, the Russian Cossacks, especially their officers, re­mained divided in religious allegiance. The attempt by supporters of the Old Believers to take over the leadership of Don Cossack forces in 1688 ended with the victory of Moscow and supporters of official religious pol­icy. Thereafter, the ecclesiastical structure of the Don region was de­prived of its particular autonomy and subordinated to the local bishop. Nor did the Old Believers succeed in taking control of other Cossack forces in which true religious pluralism prevailed and was countenanced by the authorities, as was so rarely the case on the territory of the Muscovite state.⁵

Why was Russia’s experience so different from that of Ukraine? Was it because the link between a persecuted church and an oppressed nation­ality, present in Ukraine, was missing in Russia? Or was it because of Re­formation and Counter-Reformation impulses, which were strongly felt in Ukraine but had little impact farther east? Answers to these questions lie far beyond the scope of the present work, but it may reasonably be sug­gested that these and other differences in the social, cultural, and reli­gious environments of the Ukrainian and Russian Cossacks contributed to the growth of divergent relations between the Cossacks on the one hand and organized religion on the other.

To a greater or lesser extent, the Cossack uprisings of early modern Ukraine, the most important of which were raised under the banner of Orthodoxy, were part of a whole series of social and religious conflicts

Russian Centralism and Ukrainian Autonomy; Viktor Horobets', Prysmerk Het’manshchyny. Ukraina v roky reform Petra I (Kyiv, 1998); Subtelny, The Mazepists.

⁵ On the role of religion in the history of the Russian Cossacks, see Seaton, Horsemen of the Steppes, pp. 56-7, 106-7, ill, 124, 171; Longworth, The Cossacks, pp. 141-2, 158-9. Cf. V. G. Druzhinin, Raskol na Donu v kontse XVII veka (St Petersburg, 1889; repr.: Slavic Printings and Reprintings. The Hague and Paris, 1969). that rolled across Europe in connection with the upheavals precipitated by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. In the final analysis, the Union of Brest and the religious conflict following upon it was brought about by the internal crisis of the Kyivan metropolitanate—a crisis rooted in the inability of the old Orthodox structure to respond to the challenge represented by the confessionalization of European religious and social life. Supported by the royal administration, whose long-term goal was to transform the Commonwealth into a monoconfessional Catholic state, the Union not only upset the traditional balance between Catholicism and Orthodoxy within the Commonwealth but also aroused the oppos­ition of the ‘traditionalists’ among the Orthodox clergy and the most in­fluential strata of Ruthenian society—the princes, the nobility, and the burghers—joined, in time, by the Cossacks. Having entered the religious fray, Cossackdom readily adapted and transformed Orthodoxy into a rebel faith, but, in the process, even more profoundly changed and transmuted itself.

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