Frontier Society

For ages, the sedentary population of Ukraine had attempted to colonize the fertile steppe regions. During the Kievan period, a network of fortifications was built below Kiev to keep out the nomads and encourage settlement.

The Mongol invasion, however, swept these strong points away. Later, under the Lithuanian grand princes, a more successful colonizing drive culminated in the establishment of several fortresses on the Black Sea near the mouth of the Dnister. But, with the rise of the Crimean Khanate in the late 15th century, these settlements were destroyed and the forts on the Black Sea fell to the Ottoman Turks. By the mid 16th century, the limits of Ukrainian habitation were pushed back to a line of strongholds that stretched along the northern fringe of the steppe and included Kamianets, Bar, Vinnytsia, Bila Tserkva, Cherkasy, Kaniv, and Kiev. Below this line lay the so-called wild field (dyke pole). The Tatars

What made the “wild field” so forbidding were the Tatars. Year after year, their swift raiding parties swept down on the towns and villages to pillage, kill the old and frail, and drive away thousands of captives to be sold as slaves in the Crimean port of Kaffa, a city often referred to by Ukrainians as “the vampire that drinks the blood of Rus’.” For the Tatars these raids were an economic necessity because their relatively primitive pastoral economy could not satisfy all their needs. Only in exchange for slaves could the Tatars obtain from the Ottoman Empire the finished products and luxury goods that they desired. This was hardly a consolation for the Ukrainians whose folk songs frequently reflected the numbing impact of these raids:

This night at midnight, before the cocks had crowed The Tatars flew like the wind into our village This night at midnight, an evil came to pass When the wild Turkic band plundered all our land.¹

The Tatar raids, usually directed against the provinces of Kiev and Bratslav (although Galicia, Volhynia, and Podilia were also not spared), were particularly devastating in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

For example, from 1450 to 1586, eighty-six raids were recorded, and from 1600 to 1647, seventy. Although estimates of the number of captives taken in a single raid reached as high as 30,000, the average figure was closer to 3000. In any case, the losses to Ukrainians were serious. In Podilia alone, about one-third of all the villages were devastated or abandoned between 1578 and 1583. Colonization

Tatars notwithstanding, the lure of rich, open lands was too powerful to resist. As the grain trade expanded, Polish and Polonized magnates, taking advantage of their contacts at court, obtained vast tracts of territory in the east. To colonize these lands, they coaxed peasants away from their previous owners by offering them the use of land, free from obligations, for periods of ten, twenty, and even thirty years (slobody). Many peasants also simply ran away from their oppressive masters in Galicia and Volhynia to seek their fortunes in the east. After a generation or two, these peasants in the newly colonized regions developed into a different breed from those in the more settled western provinces they had left behind. Simply by making the risky move to the frontier, they demonstrated that they were bolder and more self-reliant. Because they often had to plow their lands with their muskets at their sides in case of Tatar attack, they possessed military skills that their western compatriots did not. Their children, who had never known serfdom, grew up believing that they were free men who owed no obligations to anyone. This impression survived even when the terms of a sloboda ran out, for it was customary for peasants in the frontier regions to pay dues to magnates in cash or in kind, rather than in the form of demanding and demeaning labor. With more land available, the colonists tended to be better off, many owning as much as a lan (ca forty acres) of land, which was more than many noblemen owned in the West.

Another characteristic of the newly colonized (actually recolonized) provinces of Kiev and Bratslav in particular was the rapid growth of towns. In the early 1600s, over 200 new towns appeared in the province of Kiev alone, giving it a total of 348, roughly one-third of all urban centers in Ukraine.

By the middle of the century, once semideserted Bratslav province had one town per 218 sq. km. Although about 60% of the frontier population lived in towns by the mid 17th century, these were not urban centres in the real sense of the word. They were actually little more than frontier forts with rarely more than 100 households living within their wooden stockades. Many inhabitants were peasants who worked the land nearby but lived in the fortified town for protection. The vast majority of these towns did not have self-rule, but were owned by the magnates who built them and provided troops for their defense.

With most of the frontier lands in the hands of magnates, there was little left for the middle and poorer nobles. Those Polish noblemen who did arrive in the Dnieper basin did not, at least at the outset, come as landowners, but rather as administrators, officers, or servitors on the estates of magnates. Only gradually did they acquire relatively modest holdings. Another reason for the middle and lower nobility’s low profile on the frontier was their small numbers. In Kiev province in the mid 17th century, there were only 2000–2500 nobles for a population of 350,000–400,000, that is, less than 1%, whereas in the rest of the Commonwealth, nobles constituted, on the average, 8–10% of the population. But while the magnates’ rapid accumulation of the frontier lands impeded the influx of the lower nobility, it encouraged the immigration of Jews to central and eastern Ukraine. Because many magnates preferred to spend their time in Cracow, Warsaw, or Lviv, they frequently employed Jews as administrators of their lands in their absence. Most of the Jews who settled in the burgeoning towns, however, were craftsmen, merchants, and moneylenders whose skills were much in demand. There were already about 120,000 Jews in all of Ukraine in the early 17th century.²

At the highest level of frontier society, far above all other elements, was a small coterie of fabulously wealthy magnates.

Foremost among them were such Polonized Ukrainian families as the Vyshnevetsky (later Wiśniowiecki), Ostrozky, Zbarazky, and Koretsky families, and Polish newcomers such as the Zamoyski, Koniecpolski, Kalinowski, Ossolinski, and Potocki. By the early 17th century, their huge latifundia dominated the frontier. In the province of Bratslav, 60,000 of a total of 65,000 households belonged to eighteen magnate families. The richest of the magnates, the recently Polonized Jeremi Wiśniowiecki, owned 7500 estates in Kiev province alone and, in addition, controlled almost the entire Poltava region. It has been estimated that over 230,000 peasants lived on his estates. The size of these landholdings was unmatched anywhere in the Commonwealth or, indeed, anywhere else in Europe. Because these magnates controlled more territory and population than many West European princes at the time, they were often referred to as “kinglets.”

The epithet was appropriate: many of these arrogant lords behaved like sovereign rulers, building magnificent mansions decorated with Dutch paintings and Oriental carpets, maintaining lavish courts and large private armies. They scoffed at their king’s wishes and frequently broke the law of the land. One magnate by the name of Laszcz, notorious for his cruelty to peasants, also mistreated lesser nobles to such an extent that he was sentenced to exile 236 times. The backing of other powerful magnates prevented these sentences from ever being carried out and the brazen Laszcz even dared to have a suit of clothes fashioned out of the writs and to wear it to the royal court. Although representing an extreme example, the case of Laszcz is indicative of the growing strength and arrogance of the magnates on the one hand and the weakness of the royal government on the other.

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Source: Subtelny Orest. Ukraine: A History. Fourth Edition. — University of Toronto Press,2009. — 888 р.. 2009

Frontier Society

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