A Hetman Sent by God

After the military victories won by the Cossacks throughout 1648—victor­ies as unexpected as they were definitive—the rule of the hetman of the Zaporozhian Host suddenly ceased to be purely military and extended to the civil, economic, judicial, and foreign-policy affairs of the entire terri­tory that was now under Cossack control.

That authority required justification, explanation, and legitimation. There was an urgent need to establish the hetman’s legitimacy even among his ‘own’ Cossacks, as he customarily exercised absolute power during a military campaign, but not in peacetime. Khmelnytsky’s au­thority was even more dubious in the eyes of the Commonwealth, as the rebellious hetman was elected to the office without the knowledge or con­sent of the king, and then led a bloody uprising against the government. Neighboring rulers and monarchs were no less skeptical, if not decidedly hostile.

Attempts by Khmelnytsky and the Cossack officers to solve the com­plex question of the legitimacy of the hetman’s rule have been analyzed as a historical problem by students of the Khmelnytsky revolt. One of them, Stephen Velychenko, has noted Khmelnytsky’s efforts to legitimize his rule by making reference to the ‘right of occupation’ (jus occupationis), a medieval legal norm according to which territory captured in wartime rightfully belonged to the victor.^[410] Claims based on the right of occupation did not, however, suffice to unravel the whole tangle of contradictions as­sociated with the need to legitimize the hetman’s rule.

The hetman of the Zaporozhian Host had yet to establish his creden­tials as a member of the exclusive club of European rulers. In order to do so, he badly needed additional political and legal concepts to shore up his claims to authority and to the applicability of his right of occupation. These were the goals that Ukrainian intellectuals of the mid-seventeenth century sought to advance with their efforts to legitimize Bohdan Khmel­nytsky’s rule by sacramentalizing his authority. Such attempts were clearly influenced by two processes then under way in the courts of Europe. The first was the development of the idea of rule by divine right (jus divinum), which was steadily gaining ground throughout Europe, from Muscovy in the East to Britain in the West. The second was the impact of confessionalization on European domestic politics and international relations, which resulted in a growing tendency toward the sacralization of the authority exercised by all forms of government.

The concept of rule by divine election was most fully developed in the works of seventeenth-century West European authors. The formation of nation-states and the growth of absolutism helped to give final form to the concept, whose origins may be traced back to the early Middle Ages. Among its essential components were the extraordinary rights pertaining to monarchical rule; the right of a particular monarch to rule on the basis of succession and divine sanction; and the recognition that the king was above the law, meaning that his rule was absolute.^[411] The quintessence of the theory of rule by divine right was the assertion that the king’s author­ity was granted (delegated) to him directly by God. Accordingly, the king was considered responsible only to God and not to his subjects (whether aristocrats or representatives of other social orders), who sought to limit his absolute power.^[412]

The confessionalization of public life and political theory in early mod­ern Europe brought about a certain ‘democratization’ of the theory of divine election, leading governments of all forms and rulers of all ranks down to magistrates to employ the formula ‘by the grace of God’ as an in­tegral part of their titles.

How did the idea of the sacralization of the ruler’s power come to be applied in Cossack Ukraine? In what ways were its principal tenets applied to the rule of the Cossack hetman? Finally, did the Cossack het­mans succeed in this attempt to legitimize their rule in that particular way? In our attempt to answer these questions, we shall begin by examin­ing the nature of the hetman’s authority as it took shape before and during the Khmelnytsky Uprising, as well as Cossackdom’s general atti­tude to the various forms of government.

The Cossacks and Monarchism

Cossackdom owed its very genesis to the weakness of royal and grand- princely authority ‘in the borderlands’, where the protectors of the Cos­sack order, the Ukrainian princes and magnates, reigned supreme in the sixteenth century. In time, however, the Cossacks turned decisively against their original patrons and came to rely on the support of the king in their struggle against the Ukrainian princely elite. The Cossacks’ sym­pathies for strong royal authority were well known in Warsaw in the first half of the seventeenth century. At first Wladyslaw IV sought to enlist them in his Turkish campaign, whose goal was to strengthen royal power and make it less dependent on the will of the Diet. Later, during the Commonwealth’s most difficult ordeal, the Swedish Deluge, Jan Kaz­imierz hoped to obtain the support of the Cossacks, well aware of their penchant for a strong monarchy.^[414]

The notion that the Cossacks had rebelled in 1648 not against the king but against the magnates, the border thanes, and the Polish colonels of the registered Cossack army contributed significantly to legitimizing the uprising in political and legal terms during its initial phase.^[415] No less popu­lar was the contention that the uprising was being waged with the per­mission of Wladyslaw IV, who had supposedly urged the Cossacks to take up the sword in defense of their rights.^[416] In the context of this rebel ideology, Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s own declarations in the early years of the uprising about the need to establish strong royal authority in the Commonwealth seem perfectly logical.

Khmelnytsky’s statement of June 1648 to the nobleman Sobieski lends itself to just such an interpretation: ‘But you, Messieurs Poles, do not obey the king and do not take him seriously; everyone keeps his own counsel and you do nothing.’^[417] In February 1649, during negotiations at Pereiaslav with the Commonwealth commissioners, the hetman was even more precise in delineating his view of an ideal political order for the Polish-Lithuanian state: ‘The king will be a king so that he may punish and cut down the nobles and dukes and princes; so that he may be free, should a prince transgress, to cut off his head; should a Cossack trans­gress, to do the same to him.’^[418] Having become disillusioned with the prospect of attaining a Ukrainian-Polish compromise and establishing strong royal authority in the Commonwealth, at various stages of the uprising Khmelnytsky pinned his hopes on the installation of the Muscovite tsar or the Transylvanian prince as king of Poland with the support of Cossack arms.

The sympathies of Khmelnytsky and the Cossacks for autocratic gov­ernment were reflected not only in their support for stronger royal power in the Commonwealth but also in the establishment of the hetman’s un­limited power over the Cossack Host and the entire population of the ter­ritory controlled by the Cossacks. At an officer council called in the autumn of 1649, shortly after the Battle of Zboriv, Khmelnytsky allegedly maintained that in order to extricate themselves from their difficult situ­ation, the Cossacks ‘... themselves will establish an autocratic king in office by force of arms and will subject both themselves and the Poles, the kinglets and the nobility in equal measure to the autocratic rule of the monarch’.^[419] The Muscovite envoy in Ukraine, Grigorii Unkovsky, re­ported in April 1649 that Khmelnytsky ‘does not want to be subject to the rule of His Royal Highness and the council, because they do not have one king and council, but they all call themselves king and rule the Zaporozhian Host’.¹¹

It was Viacheslav Lypynsky (1882-1931), the founder of the statist school in Ukrainian historiography, who developed a theory concerning the monarchical rule and dynastic aspirations of Bohdan Khmelnytsky.

The evolution of hetman rule in Ukraine during the times of Bohdan Khmelnytsky followed the basic pattern of the genesis of royal and princely rule in medieval Europe. The progression from warlord and leader of military expeditions to ruler of conquered territory, whose power was initially limited by the traditions of military democracy but became steadily more absolute over time, was the path followed by Khmelnytsky in establishing his rule. The principal institutions of the Zaporozhian Host that shaped the distinctive features of Khmelnytsky’s hetman regime through internecine conflict were the general and officer councils. According to Ivan Krypiakevych, the competence of the general council was very broad:

It established the Host’s whole constitution; it laid down law and order for the Host. It decided on war and peace, conducted negotiations and concluded treaties, dispatched embassies and formulated instructions for them, received foreign emissaries and gave replies to them. The council elected the hetman and the whole officer staff, removing them from office at its own discretion. The council tried the Cossacks and had the right to punish them, even with the death penalty.^[422]

In the years of Khmelnytsky’s hetmancy, the major prerogatives of the general council were seriously undermined.

The ineffectiveness of the general council became fully apparent as early as the first months of the uprising. After the victories at Zhovti Vody and Korsun in May 1648, the Cossack army assembled for a general council at Bila Tserkva. In view of Zaporozhian traditions, the need to hold such a council was completely clear. Questions of extraordinary im­portance were on the agenda: taking stock of the victories and then pro­ceeding to formulate plans for the future. There are several extant accounts of the council’s deliberations, including a letter from Adam Kysil, whose envoy, the Orthodox monk Petronii Lasko, was then in Khmelnytsky’s camp. According to Kysil’s figures, there were 70,000 Cossacks at the council, and the question of whether to continue the march westward was discussed for seven hours amid the general din.^[423]

Despite the obvious ineffectiveness of the council as a decision-making body (as well as the impossibility of keeping the rebels’ plans secret from the Commonwealth forces), general councils continued to be held throughout the summer of 1648,^[424] for the spontaneous development of the uprising imposed its own demands on the leadership. The fate of the uprising often depended on the Cossackized peasantry, and the general council was the body through which the insurgent masses exercised their all-powerful will. As the revolt took on ever-more organized forms, the role of the masses in making decisions, and thus the role of their mouth­piece, the general council, inevitably declined and steadily lost its previ­ous importance. As Krypiakevych correctly noted, ‘Once Bohdan Khmelnytsky was established in the hetman’s office, he tried to convoke the general council as infrequently as possible.’^[425] The campaign of 1649 was already undertaken without a general council, nor was one held to discuss the conditions of the Treaty of Zboriv.

The hetman invoked the authority of the general council only at mo­ments of the greatest instability and threat to the Cossack state. Such a situation emerged immediately before and after the Battle of Berestechko (1651), which ended unsuccessfully for the insurgents. In the first half of the year, the hetman ultimately failed to obtain effective military assist­ance from the Ottoman Empire, and his alliance with the Crimean khan looked rather uncertain (Khmelnytsky’s apprehension on that score proved fully justified), hence the Cossack forces had to be mobilized psychologically. That was the obvious purpose of the general council of which the Poles were informed in June 1651 by Ukrainian prisoners. According to them, the rank-and-file Cossacks were compelled to swear their loyalty to Khmelnytsky and assure the hetman that they would not abandon him regardless of where he might lead them. The Berestechko catastrophe once again forced the hetman and the Cossack officers to seek support and confirmation of the legitimacy of their rule from the insurgent masses. In the besieged Cossack camp at Berestechko, with Khmelnytsky absent, the general council attempted to plan an offensive.^[426]

After the Berestechko catastrophe Khmelnytsky convoked a general council in Pavoloch, where he ‘announced to the plebs that the Poles were not to be expected in Ukraine for another two months’,^[427] but once the danger had passed, the hetman again abandoned the practice of calling general councils. Even the Council of Pereiaslav (1654), which formally ratified the Ukrainian-Muscovite alliance, was not a general council. Ac­cording to Krypiakevych’s calculations, it was attended by not many more than 200 men.^[428] During the years 1649-51, the Commonwealth command would obtain much less useful information from Ukrainian prisoners than it had in 1648: the prisoners said that there had been no council and they did not know where the hetman was preparing to go next. Thus the function of the general council had changed dramatically: instead of developing a specific policy, the council was being called to rat­ify and legitimize a policy decided by the hetman and his circle, as well as to swear loyalty to him.

The Cossack rank and file repeatedly demanded a return to the prac­tice of convoking the general councils that had prevailed in Zaporizhia and during the first year of the uprising. There were also several attempts to call and conduct such councils, but this was no longer done at the ini­tiative of the hetman or the general officer staff. Instead, the councils were summoned from below, and were known as ‘black councils’ (chorni or chernets’ki rady). The deliberations of one such council held in 1653 are known from the words of Colonel Syluian Muzhylovsky, as recorded by the Muscovite envoys Artamon Matveev and Ivan Fomin. The occasion for the council was an unsuccessful military action by the hetman’s son Tymish Khmelnytsky on the Ialovytsia River, where 4,000 Cossacks were said to have perished:

And the Cherkasians, it is said, having seen their misfortune—and famine came thereafter—began to come to the otamans and the captains so that they would go with them to Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky. And they came very rudely, and said: ‘You see your utter misfortune, that you are fleeing from your death and giv­ing your son Tymofii a free hand...’ And it would appear that if the hetman had said only a slight word to them in anger, I expect that there would have been a great calamity.

Khmelnytsky went to the dissatisfied Cossacks and began to explain the basis of his policy to them—the reasons for his alliance with the Crimea, the state of relations with the Muscovite tsar, and his immediate plans for military action. ‘And thus, apparently, the hetman dismissed them, and that is what seems to have given rise to all the trouble’, reported the Mus­covite envoys.^[429] By now the rank-and-file insurgents were no longer de­manding that actual power in the Hetmanate be vested in the general council with their participation, but that the hetman and the officers at least consult with them. But the times when the hetman would do so vol­untarily, without pressure from below, were now gone.

The general council’s loss of one of its most important prerogatives, the exclusive right to elect the hetman, also indicated the decline of its au­thority. Khmelnytsky himself was elected hetman by the Cossack council in Zaporizhia, and even though the details of the council’s composition and deliberations have not been preserved, the fact that the legitimacy of his election was not subsequently contested in the Cossack milieu leads one to conclude that this was indeed a general council and that the elec­tion was conducted in the traditional manner. A different situation arose in 1657, after Khmelnytsky’s death, in connection with the general coun­cil’s election of Ivan Vyhovsky as hetman. Khmelnytsky had attempted to decide the issue by having his son Iurii elected as his successor not by the general council but by the officer council, which met in April 1657. The council at which Vyhovsky was elected de facto regent for Iurii Khmelnyt­sky took place only after Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s funeral, and it was not a general council. The author of the Eyewitness Chronicle later com­plained that only ‘deceitful’ individuals had been admitted to the council, after which the gates of the Khmelnytsky estate, where the council took place, were closed.^[430]

The council of Korsun, which was convened in October 1657 and elected Vyhovsky ‘full’ hetman, was quite clearly under the control of the officers.^[431] The council conducted at the beginning of 1658 by the tsar’s envoy, Bogdan Khitrovo, which ratified Vyhovsky’s powers as hetman, was not a general council either. Present at the council were the officers, the newly elected Metropolitan Dionysii Balaban, and the higher clergy, but both the author of the Eyewitness Chronicle and the embassy sent to Moscow in 1658 by Colonel Martyn Pushkar of Poltava complained that it was not a full council: it was composed only of Vyhovsky’s supporters.^[432] Clearly, both Khmelnytsky and Vyhovsky attempted to supplant the Za- porozhian tradition of electing the hetman at a general council with the tradition of the registered Cossack army, whose hetmans were elected by the colonels.^[433]

The transition from forms of military democracy, of which the general council was an important instance until the Cossack elite established its rule through the supremacy of the officer council, paralleled the expan­sion of the governmental functions of all Cossack institutions from the Zaporozhian Host as such to the entire territory of Ukraine that came under its control. The officer council, whose convocation was practised in Zaporizhia and especially in the settled area long before the uprising, was transformed in the course of Khmelnytsky’s hetmancy into an ad­ministrative body that shunted the general council to the periphery of power, ultimately easing the transition of the fullness of that power into the hands of the hetman. It may be assumed that the officer councils, which almost always took place at the hetman’s residence, were more or less routine in character. The hetman, however, considered it very im­portant to enlist support from particular regions of the Hetmanate, rep­resented exclusively by the colonels who exercised administrative and judicial power at the local level. Ivan Krypiakevych, who enumerates most of the officer councils known to have been held during the uprising, notes that the colonels were the decisive participants in them. The gen­eral officer staff also took part, and the lowest-ranking officers admitted to participation in the councils were captains.^[434]

At least in the early years of the uprising, when there was a de facto tran­sition of power from the general council to the officer elite, Khmelnytsky was highly dependent on the latter’s support. In February 1649 he told the Commonwealth commissioners in Pereiaslav that he could not make independent decisions concerning relations with the Commonwealth: ‘the colonels and officers are far away; without them I cannot and dare not do anything—my life is at stake’.^[435] That statement would appear to have been not only a diplomatic maneuver on the part of the hetman, but also a description of the actual state of affairs. The conditions of all the more important treaties, including those of Zboriv, Berestechko, and Pereiaslav, were discussed at the officer councils, which also made deci­sions on undertaking new military campaigns.

Khmelnytsky’s skill in managing the officer council is fully apparent in the extant Latin paraphrase of his speech at the officer council that he convoked after the conclusion of the Treaty of Zboriv. It would appear from the document that his speech was a lengthy one. Toward the end, he called for a general discussion:

My brothers, what do you think of this complex matter? If that which I propose seems right to you, we will act accordingly; if you have other and more acceptable proposals, speak. What I have done, I have done not for myself, but for you, for your children and wives, for Cossack liberty and religion. Expect more. God will help us. I am your brother and your blood. I am prepared to live for you and to die with you.^[436]

This source says nothing about the actual course of the discussion: ‘The Cossacks listened to him with approval and entrusted the management of everything to his wisdom and fortune, promising unanimously to be pre­pared for war in order to win felicity for themselves.’^[437] Clearly, the coun­cil’s functions amounted to hearing out the hetman’s speech and conferring official approval on the course that he had decided beforehand.

As early as the summer of 1651, the first reports appeared to the effect that Khmelnytsky was ignoring advice not only from the rank and file, but from the officers as well. Cossacks captured by Commonwealth forces at Pochaiv toward the end of May 1651 said that ‘Khmelnytsky never took counsel either with the officers or with the rank and file. And so he him­self rules together with Vyhovsky.'^[438] Nevertheless, the unsuccessful con­clusion of the Berestechko campaign soon forced Khmelnytsky to appeal for support to the officer council and even to general councils with the participation of the rank and file.^[439] The consolidation of the hetman’s power was thus temporarily postponed, but fully resumed after the Pereiaslav Agreement. After 1654, reports of the convocation of officer councils become steadily less frequent, and after the hetman’s death the officers begin to state openly that the old Khmelnytsky had not held councils. Such statements pertain both to officer councils and to general ones.

Pavlo Teteria, who was on a mission to Moscow just as news arrived of Khmelnytsky’s death, urged Muscovite diplomats not to send an army to Ukraine or convoke a council for the election of a new hetman, since Iurii had already been elected to that post and might be advised ‘that he, the son of the hetman, [not] convoke a council so that his power might not be restricted, just as his father did not convoke councils, but managed every­thing himself: whatever he decided, the whole army would obey’.^[440] An­other statement made by Ivan Vyhovsky at an officer council in Korsun in October 1657, on the day following the ratification of his hetmancy, shows that in the last years of his rule, the old Khmelnytsky ceased to con­voke even officer councils. Attempting to win over the officers, Vyhovsky declared that there had been no councils under Khmelnytsky, but he, Vy- hovsky, would do nothing without the council.^[441] It may be assumed that the officers insisted on this and that it was one of the conditions of Vy- hovsky’s election as hetman.

Even before the Khmelnytsky Uprising, there were well-documented instances of hetmans acting contrary to the decisions of general and offi­cer councils, but it was only in the years of Khmelnytsky’s hetmancy that a clear tendency became apparent to relegate first the general and then the officer council to the periphery of power, while concentrating not only executive but also judicial power in the hands of the hetman himself. Judicial power, which in the Zaporozhian tradition was a prerogative of the general council, found its way into the hetman’s hands during the up­rising even more quickly than did the policy-making functions of the gen­eral council. In that case, the officer council did not function as an intermediate link in the transmission of power, and with the decline of the general council as the supreme judicial body, the hetman himself became the supreme judge. He delegated judicial powers to the lower courts, and general judges became his de facto representatives.^[442]

The growth of the hetman’s role in exercising supreme judicial power meant that the office of general judge was clearly underdeveloped in the Cossack state. In April 1649, a certain Matiash is mentioned as holding the office of general judge, but not until January 1654 do we encounter the first clear evidence of the existence of that office, which was then held by Khmelnytsky’s trusted associate, Samiilo Bohdanovych-Zarudny.^[443] Nor was the office of regimental judge securely established during the years of the Khmelnytsky Uprising. Thus judicial power was a function of the executive during this period—a branch that in turn was under the control of the hetman.^[444] The hetman’s exercise of judicial as well as execu­tive power was considered an important and natural aspect of Khmel­nytsky’s authority not only in Ukraine but also in neighboring lands, most notably in Muscovy. The brothers Grigorii and Stepan Pushkin, the Muscovite envoys in Warsaw in 1650, responding to rumors of rebellion among the Cossacks, recorded the following information in the reports of their embassy, based on conversations with Cossack envoys in Warsaw:

And their hetman, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, is now said to be living in Chyhyryn; he rules them, the Zaporozhian Cossacks, and judges them and administers pun­ishment (settles disputes) among them; and it is said that there is no dissension of any kind among the Zaporozhian Cossacks.^[445]

The hetman, as a rule, had no difficulty in meting out punishment not only to rank-and-file Cossacks but also to colonels and general staff offi­cers. There is the well-known episode in which he ordered Colonel Maksym Kryvonis to be chained to a cannon during the summer cam­paign of 1648. Shortly before his death, Khmelnytsky had General Chan­cellor Ivan Vyhovsky chained to the ground, suspecting him of engaging in intrigues with the goal of taking over the hetmancy.^[446] Only in special cases involving the use of the ultimate sanction—capital punishment— against colonels did Khmelnytsky seek the concurrence of the officer council. The execution of colonels Matvii Hladky and Lukian Mozyria, which took place in 1652, was clearly approved by the officer council. Ac­cording to the Muscovite envoys Matveev and Fomin, in 1653 the officer council had sentenced Colonel Danylo Vyhovsky, the brother of Ivan Vy- hovsky, to death because of his conflict with Colonel Pavlo Teteria, but this sentence was commuted by the hetman himself at the request of the general chancellor.^[447] The hetman, apparently, could not sentence colonels to death, but could grant them their lives.

The last years of Khmelnytsky’s hetmancy became a period in which he could return to the practice initially noted in sources dating from the first half of 1651—limiting the prerogatives of the officer council and making the most important decisions, including the imposition of capital punish­ment, independently. In the last months of his administration, Khmelnyt­sky apparently sought to throw off this final limitation on his power with respect to the colonels. He ordered the execution of Colonel Antin Zh- danovych, who commanded the Cossack corps dispatched by Khmelnyt­sky against Poland, but proved incompetent and failed to carry out the task entrusted to him. The hetman died before Zhdanovych’s return to Chy- hyryn, and his sentence was not carried out. It is uncertain whether the exe­cution would have taken place if Khmelnytsky had lived a while longer.^[448]

Khmelnytsky’s orientation toward the establishment of some form of authoritarian rule was not just a reflection of his own particular views, but developed in the context of a general trend of political thought that had many supporters in Commonwealth society of the time.^[449] As one may judge on the basis of rumors circulating among the Cossack rank and file, sympathy for absolute forms of government was shared by the Cossack milieu in general. Khmelnytsky’s policy of strengthening his own power, making it hereditary, and establishing the hetmancy within the Khmel­nytsky family also found support above all among the rank-and-file Cossacks. The behavior of the Cossack masses and the lower officer ranks—captains at the Chyhyryn election council after the funeral of Bo- hdan Khmelnytsky, as described by the author of the Eyewitness Chron­icle—shows that it was this social stratum that supported the candidacy of Iurii Khmelnytsky for the office of hetman, or, in practical terms, the idea of creating a dynasty of Khmelnytsky hetmans.^[450]

The forms of military democracy were of little use to Khmelnytsky in his capacity as state-builder, especially as the period of the uprising’s spontaneous development and the ‘warlordism’ associated with it had

passed, and both military and civil affairs had begun to assume more stable, duly constituted, forms. On the other hand, the indivisibility of military command and the unlimited authority of the hetman on campaign contributed to establishing the hetman’s authoritarian rule in the new Cossack state. In that sense, the Zaporozhian Host embarked on perman­ent campaign in 1648. Having obtained ratification of his powers as hetman from the general council at the very beginning of the uprising and having appealed to the Cossack masses for support only at the most critical moments in the course of the revolt, Khmelnytsky concentrated power first in the hands of the officer council, and then in his own. The growth of the hetman’s power in Ukraine in the times of Bohdan Khmelnytsky appears quite natural and even logically necessary if one considers the environment in which Cossack statehood took shape: the Commonwealth, Muscovy, the Crimea, and the Ottoman Empire all had a monarchic form of government. The hetman regime in Ukraine clearly borrowed from the experience of the Commonwealth form of government, especially when it came to the institution of an elective ruler, but also tried to overcome the perceived shortcomings of the Common­wealth model, with its weak and often ineffective royal authority. In this respect, Bohdan Khmelnytsky and his entourage apparently oriented themselves on the models of Moscow and Istanbul, where the institution of unfettered, absolute monarchical rule had become well established.

Divine Election

‘True enough, I am a wretched little man, but God granted that I am the sole ruler and autocrat of Rus’ ',^[451] stated Khmelnytsky in a conversation with the Commonwealth commissioners in February 1649. This state­ment, which stressed Khmelnytsky’s understanding of his own virtually unlimited authority as proceeding directly from God, was frequently repeated by the hetman in various forms during his meetings with foreign envoys. Often, as in Khmelnytsky’s negotiations with the com­missioners at Pereiaslav, it was associated with the idea of rule by right of conquest, which found expression in the hetman’s well-known dictum that God had given him the right to rule certain territories by means of the sword.

Khmelnytsky’s belief in the divine origin of his authority was clearly shared and reinforced by his entourage and ideologists of the revolt. The first traces of such a belief in the rebel milieu are to be found in Jewish and Polish sources. In describing Khmelnytsky’s visit to his native Chyhyryn after his first victories over Polish forces in May 1648, Nathan Hanover depicts the following scene, which reflects the messianic treatment of Khmelnytsky by his adherents:

All the people of the city came out to welcome him with timbrels and dancing and with great rejoicing. They blessed him and hailed him as prince and leader over them and their children after them. And they said to him: ‘You are a prince of God and our liberator. You have redeemed us from the Polish nobles, who oppressed us with hard labor.'⁴⁴

Another contemporary, Wojciech Miaskowski, a Commonwealth emissary to Khmelnytsky in early 1649, noted in his diary a very similar scene of the welcome given to Khmelnytsky by the students of the Kyivan College following the victories of 1648: ‘The whole people, all the com­moners came out of the city to greet him, and the Academy welcomed him with orations and exclamations as Moses, deliverer, savior, liberator of the nation from Polish bondage, auspiciously named Bohdan, the God-given one.’⁴⁵ The comparison of eminent Ukrainian figures with Moses was nothing new to the students and teachers of the Kyiv Brother­hood School. As early as 1633, they referred to Metropolitan Petro Mo- hyla as Moses in a panegyric written in his honor.⁴⁶ The view of Khmelnytsky as a ‘liberator’ is also attested by notes made by the Mus­covite envoy Grigorii Unkovsky on the basis of his conversations with Ukrainians in the spring of 1649: ‘And people of every rank in the Za- porozhian Host say: “The Lord God has now given us a defender of the Christian faith and a liberator from the accursed religion, Hetman Bo- hdan Khmelnytsky...”’.⁴⁷ More important in the instance recorded by Miaskowski is the fact that the comparison of Khmelnytsky with Moses was reinforced by the treatment of the name Bohdan as meaning ‘God­given’. The emphasis on this semantic significance of the hetman’s name, first encountered in the account of the students welcoming Khmelnytsky to Kyiv, soon became the basis on which Ukrainian Orthodox intellec­tuals of the mid-seventeenth century began to develop the concept of the divine origins of Khmelnytsky’s authority.

⁴⁴ Hanover, Abyss of Despair, p. 46.

⁴⁵ ‘Effusus populus, tota plebs witaia go w polu i Akademia oracjami, aklamacjami, tanquam Mojsem, servatorem, salvatorem, liberatorem populi de servitute Lechiaca, et bono omine Bog­dan, od Boga dany, nazwany’ (VUR, 2: 109). Although it is not entirely impossible that Hanover based his description of Khmelnytsky’s welcome in Chyhyryn on oral accounts of Khmelnyt­sky’s entrance into Kyiv in December 1648, the nature of the recorded information corroborates the assumption that the view of Khmelnytsky as redeemer of his nation was quite popular among the insurgents.

⁴⁶ ‘We render praise to the thunder-ruling Lord, | For He has given us Moses in the most recent years, | And he, with the Eastern mother [church], will give us steps of life [i.e., new life].’ Ukrains’ka poeziia XVII stolittia (persha polovyna). Antolohiia, comp. V. V. Iaremenko (Kyiv, 1988), p. 258.

⁴⁷ VUR, 2: 160.

The secretaries of the hetman’s chancery translated Khmelnytsky’s first name into Latin as Theodatus.^[452] This translation conveys the semantic elements of the name Bohdan and is rendered in Ukrainian as Fedot/Teodot, and as Theodotos in the Greek tradition. In Khmelnyt­sky’s case, however, the name Bohdan functioned primarily as a popular appellation, not an ecclesiastical one, given that on formal occasions the hetman was always called Zinovii, or Zinovii Bohdan.^[453] It is entirely pos­sible that, as Wespazjan Kochowski asserts, the name given to Khmelnyt­sky at his christening (and in that sense his first name) was Zinovii. It might also be assumed that because of the unpopularity of this name and possible reservations pertaining to the name of a martyr, the hetman was usually known by his second name, Bohdan.^[454] This was the name that served as the basis for the legitimation of Khmelnytsky’s newly acquired powers.

The first extant monument of Ukrainian political thought in which the idea of Khmelnytsky’s divine election is advanced in this manner is a set of verses appended to the Cossack register of 1649.^[455] There is very little doubt as to the time of the verses’ composition—the second half of 1649, that is, the period in which the Cossack register was drawn up. The place of composition was evidently the chancery of General Chancellor Ivan Vyhovsky, where the document must have been put into final form. Vy- hovsky’s participation in the composition is attested by the fact that the verses celebrate not only Khmelnytsky but Vyhovsky as well, while those

A HETMAN SENT BY GOD 223 holding other offices, no less important than that of chancellor, are not mentioned.^[456]

The author of the verses interprets the meaning of Khmelnytsky’s name, as well as the depiction of the cross on Khmelnytsky’s coat of arms, as clear signs of the divine origin of his authority:

Rightly does a cross rise in the coat of arms of the Khmelnytskys— In his name ‘Bohdan’ he has the name of God.^[457]

The idea of the divine origin of Khmelnytsky’s authority is also estab­lished in the text under discussion by a comparison of Khmelnytsky with King Jan Kazimierz:

Bohdan Khmelnytsky recognizes King Jan; King Kazimierz considers Bohdan to be hetman. The king is God’s anointed one, and Bohdan is given By God, hence named Bohdan [the God-given one]^[458]

In the first two lines, as we see, Khmelnytsky’s recognition of the king’s authority is dependent on a certain condition: the hetman recognizes the authority of Jan Kazimierz (whose candidacy he supported in 1648) pro­vided that the latter recognize Khmelnytsky’s authority as hetman. The attempt to place the hetman on a par with the king becomes even more obvious in the following two lines, where the explication of Khmelnyt­sky’s name as ‘God-given’ (in the author’s view, the name merely corrob­orates the fact) makes it possible to compare him with the king, who has been anointed by God.

Between the lines of this extract is the idea of the division of authority between Jan Kazimierz and Bohdan Khmelnytsky; the conferment of an equal measure of power upon them by God. The author states that Bohdan Khmelnytsky and Jan Kazimierz were sent by God to take the place of the late King Wladyslaw IV:

In place of the glory of Wladyslaw God permitted None other, unless God could give Bohdan. In exchange for one God rewards twice When he gives Hetman Bohdan [and] King Jan.^[459]

This ‘duumvirate’ (or, more precisely, the idea of it) is even more clearly expressed elsewhere:

Under Wladyslaw the laws in Rus’ were violated;

Under Bohdan and Jan they have been restored once again...

While King Kazimierz is master in Poland,

In Rus’ the master is Hetman Khmelnytsky Bohdan.^[460]

The hetman’s divine election to power is thus substantiated in connec­tion with the divine right of kingship and to some extent as an antithesis of the king’s right. The very idea of the hetman’s right emerges in the first instance as an external reaction, a way of establishing power relations vis-a-vis the king, and only afterwards as a means of entrenching and legitimizing that right within the Cossack milieu.

The concept of Khmelnytsky’s divine election to the hetmancy, based primarily on the semantics of his name and his tremendous success on the battlefield, became strongly established in the Ukrainian intellectual trad­ition.^[461] Besides the references in the diary of the Commonwealth em­bassy of late 1648 and early 1649 to the welcome given Khmelnytsky by the students of the Kyiv Mohyla College and the verses from Ivan Vyhovsky’s chancery, the idea of the divine origin of Khmelnytsky’s rule was reflected in another contemporary source, the Song of Lord Mikolaj Potocki, Crown Hetman..., included in the chronicle of Ioakym Ierlych:

God appointed him and presented him to the Host in order to command it,

And to keep them firmly in submission out of those proud hands.

Ordain, O God, for the good of us all, that by the mace That Host may abide gloriously, for the whole world to see, with him at its head.^[462]

Here the stress is not so much on Khmelnytsky’s role as liberator (as in the students’ greetings) or on the parity of his power with that of the king (as in the verses from Vyhovsky’s chancery) as on the divine origin of his authority over the Host—a motif subsequently lost to the view of those Ukrainian intellectuals who wrote about Khmelnytsky and his era. As the posthumous cult of Khmelnytsky began to take shape in the panegyrics and other eighteenth-century works of literature devoted to him, the treatment of the hetman as a God-given leader was revived, but under very different circumstances and to an entirely different purpose.⁵⁹

The idea of the divine origin of the hetman’s authority, which found ex­pression in poetry, was also employed in official Cossack correspon­dence, with the phrase ‘by the grace of God’ following the hetman’s titulature. As early as July 1648, in a letter to the Muscovite voevoda Semen Bolkhovsky, the hetman was already styling himself ‘Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Hetman by the grace of God, with the Zaporozhian Host’.⁶⁰ The formula ‘by the grace of God’ also appears regularly in letters from the representatives of the Cossack administration to the tsar’s voevodas from 1648 to 1654, corresponding to the analogous element of the tsar’s official titulature. This feature is quite apparent in a letter of April 1651 from Captain Sakhno Veichyk of Hlukhiv to Timofei Shcherbatov, voevoda of Sevsk. Veichyk models his title for Khmelnytsky on that of the tsar: instead of the words ‘by the grace of God the Great Sovereign Tsar and Grand Prince Aleksei Mikhailovich, Autocrat of all

⁵⁹ It may be asserted with some confidence that the glorification of Khmelnytsky, which, judging by the number of panegyrics devoted to him, developed in full measure in the eighteenth century, continued the traditions of the Kyivan clerical circles and not those of the Cossack sec­retaries. In other words, it was the divine origin of Khmelnytsky’s rule as liberator from Polish enslavement (the Moses motif) that received emphasis, while there was absolutely no attempt to develop the idea of the hetman’s equality of status with the divinely appointed Polish king, let alone the Russian tsar.

In the eyes of many Ukrainian autonomists of the eighteenth century, divine rule was dele­gated to Khmelnytsky for one purpose alone—that of liberation from Polish rule. This treatment is characteristic of the panegyrics to Khmelnytsky written at the Kyiv Mohyla Academy in the 1710s and 1720s. See, e.g., ‘Plach Maloi' Rosi'i’ in a manuscript of 1719-20:

And it would already have come to pass That our name would have perished If Bohdan, the chosen man, Had not been given to us by God.

(Ukrams’ka IiteraturaXVIIst., p. 290)

See also the following verses from Hnat Buzanovsky’s ‘Congeries praeceptorum rhetoricorum’ (1729):

Our avenger and chief and hero Bohdan, he has been sent to us by God, He drove the proud lords beyond the borders of Rus’.

⁶⁰ DBKh, p. 64.

(Ukrams’ka Iiteratura XVIIIst., p. 50).

Rus”, he writes, ‘by the grace of God our Great Sovereign Lord Bohda[n] Khmelnytsky, Lord Hetman of the whole Zaporozhian Host’. The captain also objects to the voevoda’s continuing practice of address­ing himself in various matters to ‘the starostas and to the vice-starostas who fled across the Vistula three years ago now. And you do not write to our sovereign, Lord Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the hetman of the whole Zaporozhian Host.’^[463]

The idea of the equally divine origin of the authority of both king and hetman is also reflected in their titulature as it appears in the correspon­dence of the hetman’s administration of the period. In 1650 it was given as follows: ‘By the grace of God the Most Noble Jan Kazimierz, the Pol­ish King... and Bohdan Khmelnytsky, ordained by the same grace of God at the head of His Royal Majesty’s Great Zaporozhian Host.’ The two titles are cited similarly in a letter of 30 December 1652 from Colonel Martyn Pushkar of Poltava: ‘By the grace of God the Great Sovereign Jan Kazimierz, the Polish King... and from Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Hetman of the Zaporozhian Host, ordained by the same grace of God.’ Both letters were addressed to Muscovite border voevodas.^[464]

If one examines the chronology of the Cossack secretaries’ use of the formula ‘by the grace of God’, it becomes strikingly apparent that letters applying it to the hetman correspond to periods of the greatest success of the uprising. This applies to Khmelnytsky’s letter ofJuly 1648 to Voevoda Semen Bolkhovsky, as well as to a letter of July 1649 from Colonel Fedir Korobka of Chyhyryn to Voevoda Fedor Arseniev, both of which employ the formula ‘by the grace of God’.^[465] It may also be assumed that in the spring and summer of 1651, that is, before the Battle of Berestechko, the general chancery attempted to introduce the formula ‘by the grace of God’ as a regular part of the hetman’s title. Evidence supporting this as­sumption is to be found in the above-mentioned letter by Veichyk, as well as in missives from two other Cossack officials, Mykhailo Ratchenko and Petro Iakovenko. All were sent between April and June 1651 and used practically the same title with reference to Khmelnytsky: ‘By the grace of God the Great Sovereign Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Hetman of the Zaporozhian Host.’^[466]

For a time, the Battle of Berestechko put an end to the use of the for­mula ‘by the grace of God’ in the hetman’s title. Khmelnytsky once again found himself obliged to recognize the official authority of the king over him. But once that authority came under question as a result of Cossack preparations for the Pereiaslav Agreement, there was a new attempt to employ the formula: when meeting the official Muscovite embassy led by the boyar Vasilii Buturlin, Colonel Pavlo Teteria of Pereiaslav spoke once again of ‘Hetman Zenovii Khmelnytsky, given to us by God’.^[467] Pereiaslav somewhat changed the status if not the extent of the hetman’s authority, and complicated (without entirely eliminating) the hetman’s prospects of entering the international arena as an independent ruler. Nevertheless, when relations with Muscovy became strained in the last year of Khmel­nytsky’s life, the old pattern reasserted itself. In a letter of June 1657 writ­ten in Latin to the hospodar of Wallachia, the hetman’s title again includes the formula ‘by the grace of God’: ‘Clementia Divina Generalis Exercituum Zaporoviensium’.^[468] In general, though, the hetman’s chancery did not venture to add ‘by the grace of God’ as a constant elem­ent of the hetman’s title.^[469]

The Consecration of the Hetman

According to Fritz Kern, one of the most important components of the idea of the divine right of European rulers was the requirement that they be consecrated by the church hierarchy.^[470] Bohdan Khmelnytsky also con­fronted the problem of consecration and ecclesiastical blessing, appar­ently finding it difficult to resolve for a number of reasons, including his often strained relations with the primate of the church of Rus’, the met­ropolitan of Kyiv, Sylvestr Kosov. The hetman’s administration came up with its own solution by turning to the Eastern hierarchs, a device that had helped the Zaporozhian Host restore the hierarchy of the Orthodox Church in 1620. Khmelnytsky’s administration once again took advan­tage of the geographic position of the Ukrainian lands on the route from the East to Muscovy, where the hierarchs traveled to seek alms, and ob­tained from the Eastern hierarchy the support that the hetman lacked at home.

As noted earlier, an important factor in securing religious legitimacy for Khmelnytsky’s rule as hetman was the role played by Patriarch Paisios of Jerusalem, who was in Ukraine in late 1648 and early 1649. Heading a large retinue of ecclesiastics that included Metropolitan Kosov, the patri­arch met the hetman as he made his triumphal entrance into Kyiv at the end of 1648. Paisios’s presence in Kyiv at that time was no accident, and was orchestrated by the hetman himself. While encamped at Pyliavtsi, Khmelnytsky learned of Paisios’s desire to travel to Muscovy via Ukraine, apparently from letters written by the patriarch himself and by Vasile Lupu, hospodar of Moldavia. Khmelnytsky dispatched Colonel Syluian Muzhylovsky from Pyliavtsi to meet the patriarch at the Ukrainian- Moldavian border. Muzhylovsky escorted his distinguished guest to Vinnytsia, left him there, and returned to the hetman for further instruc­tions. Khmelnytsky ordered him to take the patriarch to Kyiv and await his own arrival there.^[471]

The meeting in Kyiv justified the hetman’s expectations, if it did not exceed them. The patriarch blessed his war with the Commonwealth, thereby providing the long-awaited religious legitimation of the uprising, gave public absolution for all past and future sins, and married Khmel­nytsky to Helena Czaplinska in absentia. Even more importantly for this study, Paisios compared Khmelnytsky with the emperor Constantine, protector of Christianity, and called the hetman ‘Prince of Rus’ ’. Rumors also circulated, and were noted particularly by a Cracow city official, Marcin Golinski, to the effect that the patriarch (here identified as the patriarch of Alexandria) had brought a miter to crown Khmelnytsky as ruler of the Princedom of Rus’.^[472] In conversation with Commonwealth commissioners in 1649, the hetman called Paisios a holy patriarch, saying that the latter had instructed him to ‘exterminate the Poles’, and asked his interlocutors, ‘How should I not heed him, such a great superior, our head and welcome guest?’^[473]

The diary of the Commonwealth commissioners of 1649 also preserves the interesting observation that Paisios titled the hetman illustrissimus princeps.^[474] This reference is of considerable interest in defining the level of Khmelnytsky’s authority as understood and sanctioned by the Eastern patriarch. In Ukrainian usage of the day, illustrissimus meant iasnovel’mozhnyi (‘most illustrious’). It may be assumed that in confer­ring the title illustrissimus princeps on Khmelnytsky, Patriarch Paisios was placing him on the same level as the hospodars of Moldavia and Wal­lachia—dependent rulers of polities under the protectorate of a larger state. That was the term Khmelnytsky used when addressing the Molda­vian and Wallachian hospodars in Polish and Latin; moreover, the term princeps was employed as an analogue to ‘hospodar’.^[475] It is noteworthy that the title ‘most illustrious’ was also used by secretaries of the hetman’s chancery in addressing higher Commonwealth dignitaries—the Crown hetman, chancellor, or quartermaster. The hetman’s letters to the Kyivan palatine, Adam Kysil, also addressed him as ‘most illustrious’.^{[476] [477]}

There are certain indications that Khmelnytsky himself accepted and even used the title illustrissimus in documents drafted in Latin. Thus, in a letter to the Transylvanian princes Gyorgy and Zsigmond Rakoczi writ­ten in February 1649, shortly after Khmelnytsky’s entrance into Kyiv and his meeting with the patriarch, the hetman styles himself illustrissimus campiductor.^^,5 He is similarly titled in an instruction to Cossack envoys dispatched to Gyorgy Rakoczi in July 1656.^[478] Although the term campiductor corresponded to ‘field hetman’ or ‘hetman’, Khmelnytsky sometimes used dux (‘prince’) as an equivalent of ‘hetman’. There are two notable instances of this usage in documents signed by the hetman not long before his death—in a letter of April 1657 to Emperor Ferdinand III Habsburg and in a proclamation to the Cossack Host on the free passage of imperial envoys.⁷⁷

The patriarch of Constantinople also used the title illustrissimus with reference to Khmelnytsky. In a letter to Kosov of February 165ι, he calls the hetman ‘the most pious and most illustrious and most Orthodox General of the most prosperous and divinely protected great Zaporozhian Host, Lord Zinovii Khmelnytsky, our beloved and desired son... in spirit’.^[479] In this context, the word illustrissimus should be trans­lated as ‘most illustrious’, but in another letter from the patriarch of Constantinople, which has been preserved only in a Polish copy, Khmel­nytsky is titled ‘most eminent’ (najjasniejszy),^[480] which would be serenis- simus in reverse translation from Polish into Latin—a title applied to independent rulers.

The titulature of Khmelnytsky’s documents shows that the term serenissimus was employed by the hetman’s chancery in addressing inde­pendent rulers—the Polish and Swedish kings, as well as semi-independent ones—the elector of Brandenburg and the prince of Transylvania.^[481] The Austrian emperor—the ‘king of kings’—was titled augustissimus in Khmelnytsky’s letters.^[482] In this three-step hierarchy of early modern Europe, which was reflected in contemporary titulature and accepted by the Cossack administration, the hetman was accorded a place in the lowest rank, among the dependent rulers, making him the equal of the hospodars of Moldavia and Wallachia. This was the status recognized by the Eastern patriarchs, and this was the way in which Khmelnytsky was perceived by Archdeacon Paul of Aleppo. The archdeacon held up Khmelnytsky’s modesty as an example to the hospodars, adding that even one of the hetman’s colonels wielded as much power as they did.^[483] Khmelnytsky’s considerably greater power was thereby emphasized, but the scale of comparison remained the same: hetman/hospodar.

Compared with the actual extent of Khmelnytsky’s rule, the title ac­corded him by the patriarchs, as well as their definition of his place in the hierarchy of European rulers, may appear insignificant, but their use of that title should still be considered a major political achievement of the hetman’s administration. Indeed, a struggle still lay ahead for general recognition of the title. The course of Khmelnytsky’s diplomacy shows that for the hetman himself, the recognition of his place among the East European rulers (even in the first and lowest rank) was by no means unimportant. His policy toward Moldavia gives clear evidence of an effort to become more strongly identified with the family of rulers who ranked as illustrissimi.

Overall, it appears that no coherent tradition established itself in the usage of Khmelnytsky’s titles. Both his own subjects and correspondents from abroad might title him ‘most illustrious’ or simply ‘noble’. As a rule, the former title was more often used in letters from European countries whose rulers did not claim authority over the Hetmanate (i.e. letters that did not come from the Commonwealth or Muscovy). These tendencies also continued after Khmelnytsky’s death, during the hetmancy of Ivan Vyhovsky. The most important consideration here was that the title no longer pertained to Khmelnytsky personally, but to the office of hetman. Thus, Prince Stepan Sviatopolk Chetvertynsky, in addressing Vyhovsky with a request for his intervention in 1658, titled both him and Khmel­nytsky ‘most illustrious hetmans’. The same title was used in a letter to Vyhovsky by Charles X of Sweden. Once again, however, as in Khmel­nytsky’s time, no particular rule was established. In the treaty between the Hetmanate and Sweden drafted by Iurii Nemyrych, he refers both to himself and to the Swedish envoy as ‘most illustrious’, while in the Treaty of Hadiach, Vyhovsky and the Commonwealth representative at the ne­gotiations, the Volhynian palatine Stanislaw Beniowski, are styled ‘noble’.^[484] To be sure, the times of Khmelnytsky and Vyhovsky saw the be­ginnings of a tendency to apply the title illustrissimus to the hetman, but that was only a tendency, and subsequent developments did not give it scope to become a widely accepted practice or, in time, a tradition.

The question of whether Patriarch Paisios carried out a formal conse­cration of the hetman remains open. The rumors that he brought a miter for that purpose are not corroborated by evidence of an official ‘crown­ing’ of Khmelnytsky as hetman. The diary of the Commonwealth com­missioners, to which frequent reference has already been made, speaks of a solemn ceremony in a church (possibly St Sophia’s) on the hetman’s name day. Khmelnytsky

stood in first place, where all gave their blessings to him, and some even kissed his feet. The patriarch, that blackguard, served matins and bade him take commu­nion. At first Khmelnytsky did not wish to do so, for he was still light-headed from hops and had not yet made his confession, but he [the patriarch] gave him public absolution of all his present and future sins without confession and ex­horted him: ‘Go, then, go to holy communion and take the Eucharist.’... Im­mediately afterwards they fired all the cannon in triumph that our savior, the great sovereign, the hetman was taking communion.^[485]

The diarist who recorded this scene, obviously from an oral account, reflects an important nuance in the attitude of the Kyivan populace to­ward Khmelnytsky: the hetman is styled ‘great sovereign’, but the scene described in the diary bears little resemblance to an official consecration, if such a consecration (whether secret or public) indeed took place dur­ing Khmelnytsky’s sojourn in Kyiv. Instead, Stephen Velychenko con­siders that a ceremony resembling consecration was conducted on 8 (18) November 1650 and refers to a report of the Muscovite monk Arsenii Sukhanov, who, apart from his other duties, served as liaison between Patriarch Paisios and the Muscovite government.^[486]

The ceremony witnessed by Sukhanov in Chyhyryn on 8 November 1650 was a liturgy served in the hetman’s court chapel by metropolitans Joasaph of Corinth and Gabriel of Nazareth. According to Sukhanov’s report

the hetman stood at matins with his son in the right choir stall. Following the prayer from the pulpit, both metropolitans came away from the altar through the royal doors and spread a carpet before the royal doors, and summoned the het­man and his son to them, and bade them both kneel on the carpet, while the met­ropolitans placed their omophorions on their heads, and first the metropolitan of Corinth read a prayer in Greek, then the metropolitan of Nazareth read two prayers in Ruthenian from the Kyivan euchologion; in the ritual expression of wishes for long life and in the litany they called the hetman sovereign and hetman of Great Russia. After matins the hetman went home from church, and bade the metropolitans and all of us go after him.^[487]

Despite its solemn character and the participation of two metropoli­tans, the ceremony described in Sukhanov’s report does not appear to have been a consecration. The hetman’s routine behavior following the church service, the placing of omophorions simultaneously on the heads of Khmelnytsky and his son (Tymish is most probably meant here), and the lack of any mention of specific ceremonial elements of Khmelnytsky’s ‘crowning’ as hetman all support the conclusion that what took place on 8 (18) November 1650 was not the consecration of the hetman but an or­dinary church service in his domestic chapel. Certain elements of that service (the placing of the omophorions, the titling of Khmelnytsky as ‘sovereign and hetman of Great Russia’) permit the assumption that the actual consecration took place earlier. Perhaps it was held during Paisios’s sojourn in Kyiv, or was subsequently performed by Metropol­itan Joasaph of Corinth.

Some idea of how a ceremony of Khmelnytsky’s consecration was (or could have been) conducted may be gained from a description of the cer­emonial consecration of Ivan Vyhovsky as hetman, described by the vo- evoda Andrei Buturlin in his reports to the tsar. Following the council of Korsun, at which it was decided to elect Vyhovsky not merely regent for Iurii Khmelnytsky but hetman in his own right, the new hetman came to Kyiv. The locum tenens of the metropolitan throne, Lazar Baranovych, celebrated a solemn prayer service at the Kyiv Brotherhood Monastery in the presence of the tsar’s voevoda, and after the service he sprinkled holy water on the insignia of the hetman’s office—the mace, sword, and standard.^[488] There was no pre-arranged ceremony for Vyhovsky when he came to Kyiv, as there had been, for example, when Khmelnytsky made his formal entrance into the city at the end of 1648. Vyhovsky arrived not by prior arrangement but in order to attend his sister’s funeral, and by that time circumstances were very different: the hetman was greeted not by the patriarch of Jerusalem but by a Muscovite voevoda. That is to say, conditions had changed fundamentally since the initial successes of the war, and did not favor the hetman’s independent rule. The salient aspect of the episode is that support for the hetman’s office on the part of church dignitaries, which Khmelnytsky had managed to win, gave rise to a cer­tain tradition that did not vanish with the death of the great hetman.

The mentioning of Khmelnytsky’s name in church services, which re­produced another important aspect of the sacralization of the power of local rulers in a confessionalized Europe, evidently began immediately after the first victories of 1648.^[489] In 1654, however, Paul of Aleppo recorded the ecclesiastical practice of mentioning not only Khmelnyt­sky’s name but also that of the tsar. Referring to the service in the Church of the Dormition at the Kyivan Cave Monastery, he wrote: ‘Then the dea­con went out to the round pulpit in the center of the church and pro­claimed: “We pray also for our Father and Lord, Patriarch Makarios of Antioch, for Archimandrite Iosyf, Hetman Zinovii, and the God- protected Tsar Aleksei.”’^[490] In view of Muscovy’s growing influence in Ukraine and the particular form of dual power that developed in the Muscovite state under the rule of Aleksei Mikhailovich and his aggressive patriarch, Nikon, both Khmelnytsky and Vyhovsky sought the support and blessing of the patriarch of Moscow.

It may be assumed that Khmelnytsky himself was the source of the semi-official proposal (not reflected in any of the official documents of the hetman’s chancery) delivered to Moscow by Fedir Korobka’s Cos­sack embassy that Patriarch Nikon visit Kyiv. The patriarch was to arrive for the consecration of the new metropolitan (Kosov’s successor) and of Iurii Khmelnytsky as hetman. The patriarch’s blessing would mean the recognition of Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s dynastic aspirations by both the spiritual and secular authorities of the Muscovite state, whose protect­orate had been accepted by Cossack Ukraine.^[491] Significantly enough, the proposal delivered by Korobka made no mention of the patriarch’s par­ticipation in the election of the metropolitan or of the new hetman.^[492] Clearly, it was only a matter of providing additional legitimacy for the idea of keeping the hetmancy in the Khmelnytsky family.

Ivan Vyhovsky also sought the ‘blessing’ of the Moscow patriarch. Once installed as hetman, Vyhovsky is known to have had a conversation with a Muscovite voevoda in which he proposed—again, unofficially— that the tsar and the patriarch visit Kyiv: ‘And I will request that they, the sovereigns, come to their ancestral realm, the city of Kyiv, to the joy and approbation of the whole Zaporozhian Host as well as the clergy, and it will be good for all of them to see their sovereign eyes.’^[493] If such a visit had occurred at that point, it would have been in Vyhovsky’s interest, adding legitimacy to his rule and stability to his family’s status. True, there are no grounds to suppose that on Vyhovsky’s part such a proposal was anything more than a simple attempt to win Moscow’s sympathy in his struggle with the internal opposition. More importantly, both precedents, Khmelnytsky’s embassy and Vyhovsky’s invitation, showed that the idea of having the hetman’s authority confirmed by the patriarch of Moscow had acquired a certain currency in post-Pereiaslav Ukraine.

At various stages of the uprising, the problem of obtaining ecclesiastical sanction for the achievements of the great uprising of 1648 and the secu­lar rule of the hetman that resulted from it was resolved in different ways, and recognition was obtained from a variety of ecclesiastical institutions. The decisive moment came when the support of the Eastern patriarchs was secured, most notably that of Patriarch Paisios of Jerusalem. Dependent on the material largesse of Orthodox rulers, constantly in search of alms from Moscow, the Eastern patriarchs and lesser church dignitaries readily granted the legitimacy required by Khmelnytsky, blessing the war with the Catholic Commonwealth and abetting the hetman’s efforts to win over Orthodox Muscovy. The same could hardly be expected of the Ukrainian clergy, and certainly not of the Kyivan metropolitan, Sylvestr Kosov, who vacillated and did not venture to bless the hetman’s policies or his authority, partly because of the uncertain prospects of the uprising.

Khmelnytsky’s orientation on Moscow, the signing of the Treaty of Pereiaslav, and the strengthening of Muscovite control over the territory of Cossack Ukraine obliged first Khmelnytsky himself (in the case of lurii’s consecration) and then Vyhovsky to seek the blessing of the patri­arch of Moscow, which was seen as a way of helping to establish and con­firm the legal right of succession to the hetmancy. On the other hand, a breach with Moscow and the renewal of the alliance with the Common­wealth by Hetman Ivan Vyhovsky could be legitimized only by the local Ukrainian clergy, whose hierarchy enjoyed the support of Cossackdom and already belonged to the upper stratum of Khmelnytsky’s new polity, the Hetmanate. Neither the Muscovite clergy nor the Eastern hierarchs, whose services Khmelnytsky had enlisted earlier, lent themselves to such a role. Thus Vyhovsky was supported by the new Kyivan metropolitan, Dionysii Balaban, who was elected to the metropolitan see with the hetman’s support.

In considering the extent of ecclesiastical recognition of the hetman’s authority in Ukraine during the years of Khmelnytsky’s rule and Vy- hovsky’s subsequent hetmancy, it should be noted that such recognition was never absolute or unconditional. The relatively brief period of un­qualified success enjoyed by the insurgents did not suffice to give rise to a tradition: no established procedure evolved for the consecration of the hetman. The title conferred on Khmelnytsky by Patriarch Paisios also failed to obtain broad, let alone exclusive, currency. Nevertheless, when assessing the efforts to obtain ecclesiastical recognition and sanction of the hetman’s authority, one should take into account not only the limited degree of success actually attained (as compared with the extent of the hetman’s de facto control over territory and population) but also the significance of that success.

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