Hetmans and Metropolitans

Relations between the Cossack elite and the Orthodox hierarchy had be­come important to Cossackdom in the times of Petro Konashevych- Sahaidachny and Iov Boretsky, but never before the Khmelnytsky Uprising had they focused so clearly and directly on dealings between two individ­uals, the hetman and the metropolitan.

Another important change in relations between the hetman and the metropolitan during the Khmelnytsky era became apparent as those rela­tions expanded to include a complex of problems associated with the growth of the Cossack polity and the rule of the hetman as a sovereign en­joying de facto independence. As Khmelnytsky took it upon himself to es­tablish the parameters of Orthodox-Uniate relations in negotiations with the Commonwealth, there was no avoiding a direct clash between the inter­ests of the hetman and the metropolitan.

Cossackdom’s encounter with the Kyivan hierarchy during the years of Khmelnytsky’s rule was also a meeting of two forces representing distinct cultural and political traditions.

This chapter examines three facets of mid-seventeenth-century rela­tions between Cossackdom on the one hand and ecclesiastical authority and tradition on the other. The first section considers the role of Metro­politan Petro Mohyla in transforming the metropolitanate into a center of spiritual authority independent of the Cossacks. The second is con­cerned with the clash of interests between hetman and metropolitan in the Khmelnytsky era, from which the hetman emerged triumphant; while the third discusses the rivalry between the old princely and metropolitan capital of Kyiv and the new Cossack headquarters at Chyhyryn, which competed for primacy in Cossack Ukraine. The goal of this analysis is not only to reconstruct the intricate relations between the hetmans and met­ropolitans of Cossack Ukraine but also to give a fuller representation of the divergent cultural and political trends embodied in the rivalry be­tween church and state.

The Legacy of Petro Mohyla

Ever since the consecration of the new Orthodox hierarchy by Patriarch Theophanes in the autumn of 1620, Cossackdom had proved itself an in­fluential element in the political tandem that it constituted with the Orthodox hierarchs.

A clear indication of the importance of the Cossack role in the Ortho­dox Church was given by the events associated with the death of Iov Boretsky in the spring of 1631 and the election of his successor. The sig­nificance of the Cossack factor in that election was directly indicated in a letter to the palatine of Kyiv, Janusz Tyszkiewicz, from none other than King Zygmunt III. The king warned his correspondent against ‘some obstreperous man and rebel... installed in that post by the Cossacks who would then rouse them to revolt and incite them against the Catholics and Uniates’. Zygmunt instructed the palatine ‘to persuade the Cossacks not to install a metropolitan without our assent and presentation, since the right of presenting him belongs to us according to our royal preroga­tive and the laws of the Crown’. The king proposed the candidacy of Herman Tyshkevych for the office of metropolitan, but warned the palatine to proceed carefully, not to annoy the Cossacks, to avoid bloodshed, and not to provoke Cossack disturbances throughout Ukraine.^[494] Thus, in the eyes of the king, his patronage of the church and right of presenting ap­pointees was directly threatened by the Cossacks.

As might have been expected, success in the election went to the can­didate favored by the Cossacks, Isaia Kopynsky, who was opposed by Petro Mohyla and his supporters.

As discussed earlier, in 1633, Cossack resolve helped to bring about the Coronation Diet’s ratification of the royal diploma reaffirming the ‘Measures for the Accommodation of Citizens of the Greek Faith’, which legalized the Orthodox church structure on Commonwealth territory. The new king and the Diet as a whole could not ignore the demands of the Cossack Host, whose armed might was required to wage the recently declared war against Muscovy. Yet the principal role in legalizing the Orthodox hierarchy was played not by the Cossacks, who were not allowed to participate in the king’s election, but by the Orthodox nobility, which obtained the ‘accommodation of the Ruthenian nation’ from the king and Diet on terms that consolidated its control over church affairs.

It was premature, however, to speak of the triumph of the nobility as long as Kopynsky held the metropolitan throne of Kyiv. For that reason, Mohyla’s consecration took place not in Kyiv but in Lviv, regardless of the power base established by the future metropolitan at the Kyivan Cave Monastery. Mohyla’s arrival in Kyiv was preceded by his supporters’ seizure of St Sophia’s Cathedral from the Uniates—an effective show of Mohyla’s determination in the struggle with the Uniate Church and of the extent of his power, which was based on the king’s recognition and the loyalty of his backers in Kyiv. Characteristically, one of Mohyla’s first acts upon entering Kyiv was to arrange the arrest of Kopynsky, who was de­livered to the Cave Monastery and forced to sign a declaration renoun­cing his office of metropolitan. Mohyla effectively took over Kyiv without encountering any serious resistance from the local clergy, but that in itself meant little unless he could enlist the support of the Cossacks.^[496]

It is hardly surprising that even after Mohyla’s consecration as metro­politan, the Zaporozhian Host continued to support the deposed Kopy- nsky. This obliged Adam Kysil, the royal emissary to the Cossacks at that time, to apply himself to the task of resolving differences and preventing a possible conflict between the Host and the new Kyivan metropolitan. In the summer of 1633, accompanied by the new metropolitan and Ortho­dox nobles, Kysil paid a visit to the Cossack camp in the vicinity of Pereiaslav, clearly with the aim of forestalling a Cossack expedition to Kyiv to sort out relations. Kysil managed his task successfully, and in due course the Host acclaimed Mohyla as metropolitan.

To all intents and purposes, the Cossacks acquiesced in the nobiliary coup within the church. In ideological terms, they had little with which to counter Mohyla and his supporters. The king had ostensibly met the Cossacks halfway in their demands for the ‘accommodation of the Greek religion’, hence a categorical rejection of the royal nominee to the office of metropolitan would have been unseemly. The very cause of defending the rights of the Orthodox Church had been appropriated by the Cos­sacks from the nobility, depriving them of any opportunity or, indeed, justification for a conflict with the nobles on religious grounds. Mohyla’s decisive actions against the Uniates in Kyiv gave the lie to Cossack charges of clandestine conversion to the Union or of favoring the Uniate cause—accusations that the Cossacks had hurled against Boretsky and Mohyla in 1629, and subsequently against their moderate hetmans Hry- horii Chorny and Ivan Kulaha-Petrazhytsky. Ultimately, then, the Cos­sacks had to surrender to the Orthodox nobility the ‘controlling interest’ in the Kyivan metropolitanate.

In Mohyla’s time, the metropolitan see of Kyiv not only managed to throw off the tutelage of the Cossacks and their hetman but also took ad­vantage of Orthodox nobiliary support and the king’s protection to trans­form itself into a power largely independent of lay control. Within the church, Mohyla managed to subordinate the stauropigial monasteries and the once semi-autonomous bishops to his metropolitan authority. In that respect, the history of the Kyivan metropolitanate was deeply marked by the Mohylian era. The consolidation of the metropolitan’s personal authority in the church could not but have a profound effect on the role that he played in Ruthenian society as a whole.

The metropolitan was clearly intent on claiming the leadership of Ruthenian society and taking on a number of functions pertaining to the representation of the Ruthenian world that had earlier been carried out by the princely stratum. Even the first panegyrics to Mohyla, written and published while he was still an archimandrite, showed that the young cleric’s aspirations exceeded the ecclesiastical sphere. The panegyrists often stressed the fact that Mohyla belonged to the house of the Molda­vian hospodars and consistently referred to him as the son of the hos­podar.^[498] In a verse of 1628 on the Mohyla family’s coat of arms, Tarasii Zemka addressed himself to Mohyla directly:

Most justly did the King of Kings present you

With the throne of state and the scepter of your father’s kingdom,

For you have all within you that the coat of arms displays, And it does not adorn you, but is itself adorned by you.^[499]

At different stages of Mohyla’s ecclesiastical career, panegyrists repre­sented his political ambitions in a variety of ways. When Mohyla was archimandrite, and relations between the Orthodox hierarchy and the Zaporozhian Host were very close, the authors of panegyrics drew paral­lels between his authority and that of a hetman, the title used to designate both Commonwealth and Cossack military commanders. The Hymnal (1630) composed by the Kyivan printers and dedicated to ‘Petro Mohyla, Archimandrite of the Holy Wonder-Working Great Kyivan Cave Monastery, Son of the Hospodar of the Moldavian Lands’, expressed the following wish:

Grant also, O Conqueror of Death, to our lord,

Son of the hospodar, and now our hetman And pastor, that he defeat death in spirit.^[500]

Mohyla’s accession to the metropolitan throne brought new motifs into the writings of Kyivan panegyrists. Given the new metropolitan’s orien­tation on princely and nobiliary Rus’, panegyrics to him no longer in­cluded parallels with hetmans. They were supplanted by parallels with Kyivan princes, which had been traditional in the literature of Rus’. In Mohyla’s case, the parallels were clearly reminiscent of those employed by the Ukrainian bookmen with reference to Prince Kostiantyn Ostrozky and signified the continuation of the earlier tradition, even though it was now being applied to a prince of the church, not to a secular dignitary.

It would be difficult to exaggerate Mohyla’s role in ‘funding’ and restoring the historical monuments of Kyiv’s princely era. His activity was governed by a well-defined ideological purpose: Mohyla was not sim­ply renovating ancient Kyiv, but the city as it had been in the times of the Baptizer of Rus’, Prince Volodymyr. The latter’s image took on extraor­dinary significance in the battle of ideas and polemical writings on the issue of church union in Rus’, and Mohyla did everything in his power to ‘privatize’ the legacy of Prince Volodymyr in the struggle with his Uniate rivals. Having won possession of the churches previously claimed by the Uniates, Mohyla devoted a great deal of effort to their reconstruction in the spirit of the Byzantine tradition, seeking to make them appear as they had in the days of Kyivan Rus’. The churches restored and renovated at Mohyla’s initiative included St Sophia’s Cathedral, the Church of the Three Saints, and St Michael’s Church at the Vydubychi Monastery. The murals of the Church of the Holy Savior at Berestovo, which contained the crypt of the princes of the Monomakh line and Iurii Dolgorukii, were also restored.^[501]

Mohyla’s major project in this sphere was the restoration of the Cath­edral of St Sophia, which the metropolitan turned into the shrine of his revived cult of St Volodymyr. His role in reclaiming and later rebuilding St Sophia was characterized in one of the panegyrics as follows:

At Sophia ruins awaited you,

It was through your hands that they were to rise again, Therefore enter your capital with felicity, Live piously.^[502]

The cathedral was built in the times of Iaroslav the Wise, but that prince was by no means as symbolically important to the church and Ruthenian society as Volodymyr the Great, and for his own purposes Mohyla firmly adopted the view that Iaroslav had only completed the work undertaken by Volodymyr. In the inscription made on the central cupola in 1634, Mohyla ascribed the start of the cathedral’s construction to the year 1011 (in fact, construction most probably began in 1037), thereby making it the brainchild of Volodymyr, who died in 1015. Mohyla’s ‘amendment’ of historical fact continued with the addition of Volodymyr’s portrait to the wall paintings, which had originally depicted Iaroslav the Wise holding a model of the cathedral in his hands. Mohyla also dedicated one of the altars of St Sophia’s Cathedral to St Volodymyr. He planned to build a crypt there for Volodymyr’s remains, which he believed to have been dis­covered during the excavation of the Church of the Tithes. A separate chapel was built to house the prince’s relics, and in 1640 Mohyla appealed to the tsar of Muscovy ‘to build a sepulchre for the remains of our fore­father’, but received no positive reply.^[503]

Making reference to the Rus’ chronicles, the metropolitan also traced his own lineage back to the times of Prince Volodymyr. The link between the Kyivan prince and baptizer of Rus’ and the metropolitan was also im­plicit in an inscription in the Church of the Redeemer at Berestovo, which was restored at Mohyla’s initiative. The inscription noted particularly that the church, ‘built by the Grand Prince and Autocrat of All Rus’, Volodymyr the Blessed’, had been restored by ‘Petro Mohyla, Arch­bishop and Metropolitan of Kyiv, Halych, and All Rus’’. In the opinion of Ihor Sevcenko, the use of Mohyla’s name together with that of Volodymyr, as well as the similarity of titulature with reference to rule over all of Rus’, testifies to Mohyla’s view of himself as inheritor and continuator of Volodymyr’s cause.^[504]

Given that something of a leadership vacuum developed during the transition from the Old Rus’ to the Cossack era, Mohyla managed to as­sume the functions not only of a religious leader but also of head and sym­bolic representative of all Orthodox Rus’. This role of Mohyla’s was challenged only by the leader of the Orthodox nobility, Adam Kysil, who gained prominence in the 1630s and, even more, in the 1640s. Mohyla and Kysil formed a kind of dyarchy at the pinnacle of Ruthenian Orthodox society, with Mohyla playing the more prominent role in this tandem as the leader not only of the nobility, but of the nation as a whole.^[505] The role that Mohyla took on—that of indisputable leader and defender not only of the church but of Ruthenian society in general— entailed a sharp break with the whole prior tradition of the Ruthenian Church, which had sought and found champions among the princes or within Cossackdom. According to a panegyric published to mark Mohyla’s entrance into Kyiv,

Rus’, now at last you have a change of fortune;

You have the hour of fortune’s triumph: This is Petro, defender of your rights, The coat of arms of Zion...

Do you recall how famous Rus’ was before, How many patrons it had?

Now there are few of them; Rus’ wants to have you In the Sarmatian world.^[506]

Some of Mohyla’s works give an indication of his personal attitude to the relationship between spiritual and temporal power. At first glance, that attitude seems rather contradictory: Mohyla’s publication of a monu­ment of Byzantine political thought, the Hortatory Chapters by the dea­con Agapetus, may be seen as an indication of his support for the complete subordination of the spiritual power to the temporal, while his introduction to the Homiliary Gospel and some parts of his monumental Euchologion may be read as arguments for the supremacy of spiritual over temporal power.^[507] However, these contradictions in Mohyla’s treatment of the problem were more apparent than real, and can be traced to the specific circumstances that confronted him.

Mohyla was obliged to work out the relationship between spiritual and temporal power for himself and his metropolitanate while fending off constant interference from lay patrons and lay elements generally in the internal affairs of the church. Having been nominated to the metropol­itanate by the king, Mohyla never questioned the right of the monarch to nominate the Kyivan metropolitan, but fought incessantly for the right to limit the role of the lay element in the church, whether that element was represented by the rebellious Cossacks, Orthodox nobles, or burghers united in their brotherhoods. As the Euchologion compellingly demon­strates, it was here, within the church as an institution and in spiritual matters, that Mohyla insisted on the absolute dominance of the spiritual element over the temporal one.

By establishing his absolute authority over the church, Mohyla became a leader of distinction, articulating the interests and expectations of Orthodox Rus' as a whole. His efforts to maintain control of the levers of spiritual power not only within the church but also in secular society were rather well characterized in a poem written after his death (the poem puns on Mohyla’s name, which means ‘grave’):

While he lived, this very hierarch kept all Ruthenians in submission.

Now the sad grave [mohyla] and heaven hold him.

Mohyla’s body is in the grave; his soul soars somewhere in heaven. For him, the world both here and there will be too small.^[508]

Panegyrists often represented Mohyla as the sole champion of Rus’ and its exclusive leader. It is hard to disagree with Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s opinion that the panegyrists ascribed to Mohyla a variety of successful ac­tions in defense of Rus’ and the Orthodox Church that in fact should have been credited to those who preceded him in the offices of metropolitan and archimandrite of the Kyivan Cave Monastery, as well as to the leaders of the Orthodox nobility, who had brought the protracted battle in the Commonwealth Diet to a successful conclusion.^[509] In the present context, however, the major consideration is not so much whether Mohyla de­served the praises that were heaped upon him as the general tendency and the cultural and historical orientation that they represented.

During Mohyla’s administration, the paths of the Orthodox hierarchy and Cossackdom clearly diverged. Quite symptomatic in this regard was the conversion of the Cossack hetman Ivan Sulyma to Catholicism before his execution in Warsaw in 1635.^[510] The close alliance that had prevailed in the times of Konashevych-Sahaidachny was succeeded by a cooling of relations and mutual suspicion in the times of Mohyla. The Cossack elite, to which the Kyiv metropolitanate owed the restoration of its hierarchy in 1620, was decidedly annoyed by the generally anti-Cossack course of the Orthodox hierarchy’s policy while Petro Mohyla served as metropolitan.

Mohyla’s hierarchy clearly did not support the Zaporozhians' rebel­lious ardor, and the use of religious slogans by the Cossacks during the revolt of 1637—8 indicated not a rapprochement but an estrangement between Cossackdom and the Mohylian church. In 1636, at Kysil’s behest, Mohyla sought to prevent a Cossack revolt, calling on the Zaporozhians to keep the peace for the good of the church. When the victorious Mikolaj Potocki entered Kyiv after bloody reprisals against the rebels in Pereiaslav, Orthodox schools welcomed him with verses, and the metro­politan paid him a personal visit.^[511] Later, Orthodox church leaders sang the praises of Prince Illia Chetvertynsky, who helped to put down the ‘Cossack rebellion’. The Teratourgema (1638) of Atanasii Kalnofoisky was dedicated to him, and his exploits in suppressing the Cossacks were mentioned in the oration delivered at his funeral by Klymentii Starushych (1641).^[512] Not only did Mohyla’s hierarchy enjoy the support of the king, which allowed it to dispense with Cossack protection, but it was a sup­porter of royal policy toward the Cossacks. Its social base was not Zapor- izhia but the Orthodox nobility of Volhynia and central Ukraine.

Bohdan Khmelnytsky and Sylvestr Kosov

Not surprisingly, when the Khmelnytsky Uprising broke out, relations between the Cossack officers and the Orthodox hierarchy were far from ideal. Although the old alliance between Cossackdom and the part of the Orthodox nobility was revived in the course of the revolt, relations be­tween the hetman’s administration and the metropolitanate remained uneasy and full of tension. The attitude of the Cossack leaders to the Orthodox clergy—mistrustful, to say the least—found expression in the words of the Cossack colonel Fedir Veshniak spoken to the Common­wealth commissioners in January 1649: ‘... both your priests and our priests are whoresons all!’^[513]

The difficulty facing church leaders at the start of the uprising was, first and foremost, that on the one hand the Khmelnytsky regime had en­dowed Orthodoxy with unprecedented prestige, effectively making it the dominant religion on the territory of the Hetmanate; while, on the other hand, Metropolitan Sylvestr Kosov, the successor to Mohyla on the Kyi- van metropolitan throne, and his entourage were rather closely associated with the ruling circles of the Commonwealth and required protection from their own faithful—peasants, burghers, and rank-and-file Cos­sacks—during the uprising. The hetman’s administration could not guarantee such protection, especially during the early stages of the revolt. Moreover, the church hierarchs could not afford to neglect the possibility that Polish rule would be restored in Ukraine if the Cossack forces were defeated.

Kosov’s reaction at the start of the uprising gave a good indication of his attitude. As Adam Kysil wrote in a letter of 31 May 1648, ‘the most prominent clerical and lay figures of both denominations’ departed Kyiv on the eve of Khmelnytsky’s rumored entrance into the city.^[514] Kosov made his way to the Diet, where negotiations were to continue on estab­lishing a ‘universal union’ with Rome. These plans for union were de­railed by the military victories of the insurgents in the autumn of 1648, while Kosov was forced to seek an alliance with the hetman’s administra- tion.^[515] Toward the end of the year, Kosov was obliged to join Patriarch Paisios of Jerusalem in showing particular deference to Khmelnytsky dur­ing his triumphal entrance into Kyiv. The metropolitan found it neces­sary to acknowledge the importance, and in many instances the leading role within the ‘Ruthenian nation’, of Cossackdom, whose services Petro Mohyla had declined during his tenure of office. Although the new authorities left the metropolitan’s ecclesiastical powers largely un­touched, even increasing them as a result of the victories of 1648—9, they severely limited those prerogatives in the political sphere.^[516]

Bohdan Khmelnytsky was in many ways a typical representative of the Cossack officers of noble descent, sharing both Cossack and nobiliary attitudes toward religion. The young Bohdan studied in an Orthodox school in Dnipro Ukraine and then continued his education at the Lviv Jesuit college, where one of his teachers was the Revd Andrzej Humel- Mokrski, who later served as an envoy to the hetman.²⁴ Clearly, a student of Catholic professors who nevertheless remained faithful to Orthodoxy was well acquainted with the religious problems of his homeland from personal experience. During the years of the uprising, the hetman had his own spiritual mentor, or chaplain.²⁵ While Khmelnytsky showed unques­tionable loyalty to Orthodoxy, he also had a pragmatic approach to church-state relations.

Having established his rule over most of Ukraine, Khmelnytsky also sought to take over the royal right of patronage and of distributing ‘spir­itual bread’. This role of the hetman with respect to the Orthodox Church, which now became dominant on the territory occupied by the insurgents, seemed entirely natural to the new Cossack authorities, but met with strong resistance on the part of the higher Kyivan clergy. Met­ropolitan Kosov was a living witness and adherent of the Mohylian trad­ition in Ukrainian ecclesiastical and socio-political life, which sought a modus vivendi with the royal authority and regarded the church as the sole national institution—given the absence of a national state apparatus— capable of taking upon itself most of the functions of the latter, with the metropolitan serving as leader of the entire nation in the eyes of the royal administration and of society itself.

The success of the insurgents’ campaign of 1648—9 strengthened declare war on foreign powers without the knowledge of the hetman and metropolitan (see Akty IuZR, vol. 3 [1861]: 288—9).

These demands, cited in Kunakov’s report, find no corroboration in the commissioners’ diary or in other variants of the ‘points’ presented by Khmelnytsky. In all probability, they were either the product of Kunakov’s own interpretation, since he was well acquainted with the principle of dual power in Muscovite political practice, according to which both patriarch and tsar styled themselves ‘sovereign’, or reflected rumors circulating in the Ruthenian Orthodox clerical milieu, which may have treated any talks with Rus’ as negotiations with the metropolitan, espe­cially as the latter did indeed meet with the Commonwealth commissioners. Nor do other docu­ments of the period 1648—54 confirm Ohloblyn’s treatment of relations between Khmelnytsky and Kosov as a manifestation of dual power.

²⁴ Kryp”iakevych, BohdanKhmel’nyts’kyi, 1st edn., pp. 67—9.

²⁵ The ‘post’ was occupied by a succession of individuals. In November 1648, the Lviv coun­cillor Samuel Kuszewicz wrote to one of his correspondents that during the siege of Lviv Khmelnytsky transmitted a letter to the besieged city through his confessor and brother-in-law Fedir Radkevych (Kushevych, ‘Lysty zi L’vova’, 4: 119). There is surviving testimony that at approximately the same time members of the Lviv Orthodox brotherhood met with the hetman’s personal chaplain, Ivan Hoholovsky (Mykola Kucherniuk, ‘Pidpil’nyi front Bohdana Khmel’nyts’koho’, Zhovten' (Lviv), no. 10 [1987]: 139). In a report dated December 1650, the Muscovite envoy in Ukraine, Vasilii Unkovsky, mentioned yet another cleric from Khmel­nytsky’s circle: ‘A sable was given to a priest of the Church of the Redeemer, Levontii, the hetman’s spiritual mentor’ (VUR, 2: 442).

Khmelnytsky’s position in his undeclared struggle with the metropolitan. Making masterful use of religious demands in the course of the negoti­ations with the Commonwealth authorities, the hetman managed not only to obtain important concessions from the king but also to make Metropolitan Kosov a participant in the diplomatic maneuvers that he had undertaken. No episode better demonstrates Khmelnytsky’s success in imposing his own religious agenda in Ukrainian-Polish relations on the metropolitan, as well as in manipulating the religious demands of the Orthodox hierarchy, than the ratification of the Treaty of Zboriv. The treaty conditions were to be ratified at the Diet that took place in Warsaw from November 1649 to January 1650. Although the Zboriv terms pro­vided that the question of church union would be decided in consultation with Kosov, and that the metropolitan himself would be given a seat in the Senate, the royal administration attempted to prevent Kosov from participating in the Diet. Moreover, the clause of the Treaty of Zboriv concerning the Senate seat was treated as if the metropolitan’s denomination—Orthodox or Uniate—were a matter of uncertainty.^[517] The Diet became the arena of complex political maneuvers by the Cos­sack diplomats, whose ultimate goal was the ratification of the treaty.^[518] According to the papal nuncio Juan de Torres, the stormiest debate on religious matters took place on 8—9 and 14—15 January 1650. Kosov de­manded the return to the Orthodox of churches seized by the Uniates, as well as a seat in the Senate for himself. On the eve of Kosov’s departure for the Diet, Khmelnytsky allegedly gave him the following warning: ‘You, Reverend Metropolitan, if in those set speeches of ours you do not hold the line against the Poles and, further, if you should take it into your head to change our advice and agree to something new against our will, then you will, of course, find yourself in the Dnipro.’^[519] At one point in the Diet proceedings, Kysil, seeking a compromise and supporting the met­ropolitan’s demand for the return of church property to the Orthodox, asked that Kosov’s demands be satisfied, referring to those words of Khmelnytsky’s. As de Torres wrote to Rome, the Kyivan palatine assured the Diet that if Kosov’s claims were denied, the Cossacks would rise again, and Khmelnytsky would have the metropolitan thrown into the river. Kysil’s statement aroused no particular sympathy for the metropol­itan: the king replied that if Kosov did not settle down, he himself would throw him into the Vistula or have him drawn and quartered.^[520]

During the negotiations in Warsaw, Kosov himself frequently cited Khmelnytsky’s threat and emphasized that he was powerless to change his position, since he had been sent to the Diet by the Cossacks against his will. According to a supplication to the king prepared by Kysil and signed by Kosov, ‘We came here to the Diet according to the will and resolution of Your Royal Majesty, and then we were sent on our way both by the het­man and by the Zaporozhian Host more of necessity than of our own will.’^[521] While this tactic certainly made it easier for the metropolitan to conduct negotiations and defend his position, it also indicated the actual state of his relations with the Cossacks. Kosov was, in effect, functioning as Khmelnytsky’s envoy and representative in Warsaw, forbidden to devi­ate from the line established by the hetman. In one of his discussions with the metropolitan, Kysil referred directly to Khmelnytsky’s ‘order’, and Kosov, as an anonymous Orthodox author noted in his report on the negotiations, ‘did not question the hetman’s order’.^[522]

In behind-the-scenes negotiations, Kysil attempted to persuade the Orthodox bishops to accept minor concessions on the part of the king, threatening that if the Cossacks should triumph, the Orthodox hierarchs would become ‘servants of their servants’. Failing to persuade Kosov to moderate his position in the negotiations, Kysil finally turned for assist­ance to the hetman’s envoys, who appealed to the metropolitan not to force a suspension of the Diet. For all the importance attached to the re­ligious question, it was only one item on the overall agenda of the Za- porozhian Host, and immediately upon arriving at the Diet, Adam Kysil reported that he had convinced Khmelnytsky to withdraw the demand for abolition of the church union, arguing that if freedom of religion were demanded for one’s self, it should not be denied to others.^[523]

Clearly, Kosov was forced to show flexibility in moderating the claims of the Orthodox Church and taking the interests of the hetman and the Cossack administration as his point of departure. The Cossacks, having won the ratification of the Treaty of Zboriv, were prepared to make con­cessions in order to ensure that the Diet session was not dissolved.³³ In the end, the hierarchy decided to settle for a royal privilege, to which Jan Kazimierz affixed his signature on 20 January, although he dated it 12 January 1650, the last day of the Diet session.^[524] The privilege guaranteed the exemption of the Orthodox clergy from service obligations and rec­ognized the right of the Orthodox to the Vitsebsk-Mstsislau eparchy in Belarus, as well as the eparchies of Lutsk, Kholm, and Peremyshl (the latter after the death of the incumbent Uniate bishop) in Ukraine. The monasteries of Zhydychyn and Leshcha were granted to the Orthodox metropolitan.^[525] The hetman’s imposition of his terms could not, of course, have been gratifying to the metropolitan, but Kosov was in no position to do very much about it.

Kosov’s complex behavior at the Diet does not lend itself to simple and straightforward assessment. As may be deduced on the basis of the above­cited report on the Diet negotiations, Kosov was under pressure from his own clergy, which insisted on the fulfillment of the clause of the Zboriv agreement that called for the complete abolition of the Union. Under the influence of Kysil and Khmelnytsky, however, the metropolitan was com­pelled to agree to a more moderate solution that provided for the transfer to the Orthodox of all the possessions of the Uniate Church. Kosov de­parted for the Diet with instructions from Khmelnytsky to that effect. Kysil, however, taking account of the mood at the Diet, rightly con­sidered even this demand unrealistic, and urged the metropolitan to agree to the transfer of bishoprics and estates to the Orthodox only upon the death of the incumbents. Kosov opposed such a solution to the utmost, referring to Khmelnytsky’s unambiguous instructions. Only after Kysil received the support of the Cossack envoys to the Diet did Kosov find himself obliged to abandon his previous position and agree to Kysil’s proposal.

After the conclusion of the Diet and the ratification of the Treaty of Zboriv, Khmelnytsky was prepared to go some way toward accommodat­ing the demands of his metropolitan. As early as March 1650, Khmelnyt­sky began to revise his religious policy, complaining of the Uniates’ unwillingness to abide by the terms of the royal privilege. The instruc­tions to the Cossack embassy that took the register of 40,000 to Warsaw counseled insistence on the abolition of the Union. Clearly, Khmelnytsky considered that it was again time to bring religious demands to the fore­front. In the spring of 1650, Klymentii Starushych, a plenipotentiary of

Metropolitan Kosov, and the author of an anti-Cossack panegyric de­voted to Prince Illia Chetvertynsky (1641), also made his way to Warsaw. He was provided with detailed instructions for his negotiations with the royal administration in which every case of non-compliance with the points of the royal privilege was clearly indicated.^[526] As was to be expected, these efforts on the part of Khmelnytsky and Kosov yielded no tangible results. Equally fruitless were the demands of the Cossack envoys for the abolition of the Union at the Diet held in late 1650. A new war was immin­ent, and only military victory or defeat would determine the status of the two Ruthenian churches, Orthodox and Uniate.

Kosov was certainly restive under the tutelage of the Cossack hetman. During the uprising he maintained a pro-Polish political orientation and, like Adam Kysil, his close collaborator of the period of ‘universal union’, favored a Ukrainian-Polish compromise. In the upper echelons of the hetman’s officialdom the metropolitan could count on the understanding of officers of noble descent, whose unquestioned leader was General Chancellor Ivan Vyhovsky. While in the camp of the insurgents, Kosov gave consistent support to the king’s envoys and other representatives of the royal administration who visited the court of Bohdan Khmelnytsky. As early as August 1648, the Commonwealth commissioners dispatched to Khmelnytsky wrote back to Warsaw, stating that Kosov was alone in calling on the insurgents to make peace.^[527] The metropolitan took a simi­lar stand during negotiations at Pereiaslav in February 1649, although he expressed regret that the commission was not empowered to resolve the question of church union.^[528]

Throughout those years, Kysil repeatedly availed himself of the metro­politan’s services. In August 1650, Kysil turned to Kosov once again on learning of Khmelnytsky’s negotiations with an envoy of the Ottoman Empire. Fearing harmful consequences for the Commonwealth, Kysil made a hasty trip to Chyhyryn and sent a messenger to the metropolitan, who was then at Pereiaslav, appealing to him to intervene and prevent the establishment of an alliance with the ‘infidels’. Over a three-day period, Kosov exchanged opinions with Kysil on the situation arising from the Ottoman envoy’s arrival.³⁹ Kosov continued to maintain close ties with the king and Commonwealth military leaders in late 1650 and early 1651.^[529] On hearing from Jan II Kazimierz that Khmelnytsky had ‘turned infidel’, Kosov dispatched a number of letters spreading this rumor, but the fiction met with very little credence.^[530]

Until the military campaign of 1651, which ended in defeat for the in­surgents, Kosov did not venture to come out openly against Khmelnyt­sky’s policies. Only in July 1651, as the forces of the Lithuanian field hetman, Janusz Radziwifi, approached Kyiv, did the metropolitan declare himself in favor of capitulation, which led to a conflict with the hetman. Eventually the Cossack forces had to withdraw from Kyiv, and the Kyivan clergy, led by the metropolitan, came out to meet the city’s new (if short­lived) ruler, Janusz Radziwifi. In the letter that Kosov addressed to Radziwifi on 24 July, when the Lithuanian commander had already taken Kyiv, he declared his devotion to the Commonwealth and wrote that he and his clergy had spent almost four years in captivity, living in daily ter­ror of the Cossacks and their own faithful.^[531] This statement was not based exclusively on political and tactical considerations, and the metropol­itan’s loyalty did not go unrewarded. It alone accounts for the king’s proclamation of 31 August 1651, which extended his protection to the Orthodox clergy.^[532] The outcome of the campaign of 1651 could not fail to influence the Orthodox hierarchy’s attitude to the hetman’s administra­tion. Khmelnytsky’s initial loss of Kyiv indicated that it could be quite dangerous for the metropolitan to rely on the Cossacks, especially as Khmelnytsky controlled only a portion of the Kyivan metropolitanate.

Facing a great deal of uncertainty in his relations with Kosov, Khmel­nytsky managed to forge a strong alliance with the Eastern hierarchs, pri­marily in order to legitimize the uprising and the political power obtained as a result of it. Apart from Patriarch Paisios of Jerusalem, who played an important role in legitimizing Khmelnytsky’s power during the first year of the uprising, there were a number of other Eastern hierarchs whose services the hetman found useful. One of most prominent was Metropol­itan Joasaph of Corinth, whom Khmelnytsky eventually turned into his court metropolitan. Joasaph, who, by his own account, occupied ‘the noble altar of the apostle Paul',^[533] made his first appearance in Ukraine in the spring of 1649 on his way to Moscow.^[534] By the autumn of 1650 he had evidently returned from there, for in November of that year he was al­ready serving the liturgy in the hetman's church at Chyhyryn and per­forming a special rite over Bohdan and Tymish Khmelnytsky together with the metropolitan of Nazareth. In his letters to the tsar in the spring of 1651, he reported that ‘I am staying with the pious hetman and serving holy matins', simultaneously referring to Khmelnytsky as ‘my sovereign' and ‘my spiritual son'.^[535] The post of personal chaplain to the hetman clearly made Joasaph an influential figure in the Chyhyryn milieu. At least, he often figured as the sponsor of other Greeks who found them­selves in Khmelnytsky's court. For instance, he promoted Joannes Taphlari's diplomatic career, and in February 1651 the patriarch of Con­stantinople, Parthenios, appealed to him together with Sylvestr Kosov, requesting that Joasaph assist the mission of Parthenios's representative to Khmelnytsky.^[536]

The hetman himself fully exploited Joasaph's presence in Chyhyryn. Rumors then circulating in Ukraine represented Joasaph as the patriarch of Constantinople, who was allegedly in residence at Khmelnytsky's court and serving the liturgy there.^[537] Among the insurgents, such rumors naturally added legitimacy not only to the hetman's rule but also to his war with the Commonwealth. The events of the Berestechko campaign shed light on the actual state of the hetman's relations with the hierarch. Although Khmelnytsky was indeed, in Joasaph's words, his spiritual son, he was primarily a ‘sovereign'. Requiring the support of spiritual authority in his new military campaign against the Commonwealth, Khmelnytsky insisted, against Joasaph’s will, that the metropolitan ac­company the army on the march. According to the testimony of the Greek ‘Manuilov’ and the Serb ‘Danilov’, who came to Moscow from Khmelnytsky’s camp at Zboriv in June 1651,

the metropolitan of Corinth is said to be in the army with the hetman. And it is said that when the hetman left Chyhyryn, he asked the hetman to leave him in Chyhyryn with his son. And it is said that the hetman did not leave him, and took him along with him for service. And it is said that he, the metropolitan, serves matins, and the hours, and vespers every day.^[538]

Before the decisive engagement, both sides, Polish and Ukrainian, at­tempted to obtain the blessing of the church. Prior to the campaign, the papal nuncio is known to have given Jan II Kazimierz a blessing from the pope, as well as gifts, including a sword to wage war on the ‘schismatics’. In the Polish camp at Berestechko, the Uniate bishop of Kholm, Iakiv Susha, served liturgies dedicated to the greater glory of Polish arms.^[539] It is known that Khmelnytsky asked Metropolitan Kosov to give his bless­ing for the war.^[540] The metropolitan of Corinth, whom the Cossack rank and file believed to be the patriarch of Constantinople himself—the supreme authority in the Orthodox world—was probably even more suited to the task of symbolizing ecclesiastical support for the Cossack uprising. Joasaph’s fate at Berestechko turned out to be a tragic one (his unwillingness to leave Chyhyryn is worth recalling). He perished during the Cossack withdrawal from the Berestechko camp. The event was im­portant enough that news of the demise of the ‘archbishop of Corinth and the Peloponnesus’ was included in the official account of the Berestechko campaign, and Joasaph’s pontifical insignia were presented to the king. In the Latin-language account, intended primarily for the Western and Central European reader, news of this presentation was given together with that of the Poles’ seizure of Cossack banners, which had initially been presented to the Zaporozhian Host by the Polish kings.^[541]

With the defeat at Berestechko, the period of the uprising’s unbroken success came to an end. The hetman’s actual power was shaken and con­siderably limited in territorial extent, and his search for ways of legitimiz­ing his authority receded into the background for a time. Subsequently we no longer encounter Eastern hierarchs as close to Khmelnytsky as Joasaph. Nevertheless, Eastern church dignitaries and even patriarchs continued to make their way through Ukraine to Moscow. The hetman attempted to exploit their presence in Ukraine both to promote his diplomatic goals in Moscow and, of course, to consolidate his own power.

A letter of Khmelnytsky’s dating from February 1653 to the voevoda of Putyvl, Fedor Khilkov, has been preserved: in it, he commends Patriarch Athanasios, ‘who is on his way to His Tsarist Majesty on important business, having virtually torn himself out of the jaws of the infidels’.^[542] If the further details of Athanasios’s sojourn in Ukraine are unavailable, the journey through Ukraine of another patriarch, Makarios of Antioch, is well known thanks to the detailed diary kept by his cousin (possibly his son), Archdeacon Paul of Aleppo. Makarios traveled through Ukraine on his way to Moscow in 1654 and on his return journey in 1656, meeting with the hetman both times. The notes taken by Paul of Aleppo contain interesting material that sheds light on Khmelnytsky’s attitude to the Eastern hierarchs and the significance he ascribed to those contacts.

Paul of Aleppo describes Khmelnytsky’s first meeting with the patri­arch as follows: ‘Having seen our patriarch from afar, he dismounted from his horse, and those who were with him did so after him. Approach­ing the patriarch, he bowed and twice kissed the hem of his garment, then kissed the cross and the right hand of the patriarch, who in turn kissed him on the head.’^[543] On the following day, when the patriarch rode from Bohuslav to Kyiv, his path took him through Khmelnytsky’s camp. On that occasion, Makarios blessed Khmelnytsky ‘for war and victory’. This is how Paul of Aleppo describes the occasion:

We rode into the midst of the Host and you, reader, might have seen how thou­sands and hundreds of thousands outdid one another, making haste in droves to kiss the right hand and cross of the patriarch. They threw themselves on the ground, so that the horses [of the patriarchal carriage] halted, and we were an­noyed that they were so powerful. But finally we arrived at the tent of Hetman Khmel, who was small and nondescript. The hetman came out to meet the pa­triarch and bowed to the ground. Then the patriarch read a prayer over him for war and victory, invoking God’s blessing on him and the Host. The hetman, holding the patriarch by the arm, led him into his tent.^[544]

There is no doubt that, given the piety and respect for the patriarch manifested by the Host, Makarios’s blessing of Khmelnytsky before the whole Cossack camp must have been particularly significant for legit­imizing the hetman’s authority.

By the time of Patriarch Makarios’s visit to Ukraine, Khmelnytsky had managed to reach a definite understanding with the local Orthodox hier­archy as well. The change in Metropolitan Kosov’s generally negative atti­tude toward the Cossack hetman and his authority came somewhat unexpectedly and was influenced by developments that in theory, at least, should have been welcome to the Orthodox hierarch. The Pereiaslav council of 1654 and the entrance of Orthodox Muscovy into the war with the Commonwealth abruptly changed the character of church-state rela­tions in Ukraine. Now Khmelnytsky had to win confirmation of his authority over the metropolitan not in competition with the king but with the Muscovite tsar and patriarch. In that situation, the hetman’s task was rendered somewhat easier. Given the choice of submitting to the Mus­covite authorities and the patriarch of Moscow, Kosov gave clear prefer­ence to Khmelnytsky.

Having accepted the tsar’s protectorate, Khmelnytsky managed to at­tract to the side of Cossackdom not only the Muscophile elements of the Ukrainian clergy but also the anti-Muscovite, pro-Polish elements that now required the hetman’s protection and intercession. It fell to the het­man to act as intermediary and resolve conflicts between Muscovite vo- evodas and the Kyivan clergy. This allowed the hetman to assume the right of patronage over the church, previously reserved to the king. The nomination of hegumens, archimandrites, bishops, and, in time, the metropolitan himself became the prerogative of the hetman, thereby securing the Kyivan clergy’s blessing for the hetman’s authority.

The first misunderstanding between Kosov and representatives of Moscow arose immediately after the council of Pereiaslav. The boyar Vasilii Buturlin, who came to Kyiv on 16 January 1654 and was met by the metropolitan and the clergy as he entered the city, asked Kosov in private conversation why he had not written to the tsar indicating his desire to come under the monarch’s high hand. Kosov replied that he had not been apprised of the hetman’s relations with the tsar. Later the metropolitan chose to defend his clergymen’s subsequent refusal to take an oath of al­legiance to the tsar. He explained their attitude by saying that if the Poles were to learn of such an oath, they would exterminate all the Orthodox clergy on their territory. Ultimately the metropolitan’s subjects were obliged to swear allegiance to the tsar, but a protest against the oath was entered in the record-books in Polish-controlled Ukraine on the metro­politan’s behalf. An even more serious conflict broke out in February 1654. Muscovite voevodas setting out to build a fortress on the metropol­itan’s lands encountered opposition from Kosov, who went so far as to threaten armed resistance. The metropolitan asserted that it was Hetman Khmelnytsky who sent messengers to present a petition and sub­mitted to the monarch's high hand together with the whole Zaporozhian Host, while he, the metropolitan, with all his clergy, did not send anyone to petition the tsar and is living on his own with his clergymen, subject to no one's authority.^[545]

In theory, Kosov's attitude, which was fundamentally hostile to Mus­covy and its representatives in Kyiv, also represented a challenge to Khmelnytsky's authority.^[546] Nevertheless, the hetman finally chose not only to ignore Kosov's ‘arrogance' but even to protect him from the ire of the voevodas and the tsar. Initially, Kosov's stand was clearly annoying to Khmelnytsky. There were rumors among the Kyivan monks that Vyhovsky had even written to the metropolitan and the archimandrites of the Kyivan monasteries, summoning them to a meeting with Khmelnyt­sky. Although the church leaders did indeed come to see the hetman, it was not to apologize but to persuade him not to take part in the war be­tween Muscovy and the Commonwealth, to await the unfolding of events and align himself with the victor.^[547] In the end, Khmelnytsky appears to have ‘thawed' and taken the metropolitan under his protection. Defend­ing Kosov in a letter to Patriarch Nikon, he wrote in particular:

And as Your Great Holiness had taken offense against our Most Reverend Pas­tor, who was allegedly spoiling the providential unification of holy Russian Orthodoxy and resisting our Grand Sovereign, His Tsarist Majesty, do not believe this by any means, or slanders following on these.^[548]

On the one hand, Khmelnytsky grasped Kosov's ambiguous position, given that most of his metropolitanate was subject to the authority of the king; on the other, the hetman was apparently interested in offering his protection to his old foe, thereby turning him into his newest ally. Indeed, the hetman's intervention led Kosov not only to make a concession to the voevodas, agreeing to take another parcel of land in exchange for the des­ignated fortress site, but also to recognize Khmelnytsky's authority to an unprecedented degree. In a letter written to the tsar, Kosov referred to Khmelnytsky as ‘the chief and sovereign of our land'.⁶⁰ Given a choice be­tween the Muscovite tsar and the Zaporozhian hetman, Kosov clearly opted for the latter. When it came to choosing between the hetman and the king, the matter was more complicated. Not without reason, the Muscovite voevodas suspected Kosov of harboring Polish sympathies, and the hetman himself complained that the metropolitan was dispatch­ing reports there about developments in Kyiv and in Ukraine. The tsar’s envoy Artamon Matveev even scolded Khmelnytsky for this, saying, ‘And this is not a small matter, for them to live under the high hand of our Grand Sovereign and write all kinds of reports to the Polish king’, and asked the hetman to inform the tsar about activities of that sort.^[549]

Aside from fleeing to avail himself of the king’s protection, Kosov the­oretically had another choice—to go over once again to the side of the Lithuanian field hetman, Janusz Radziwifl, who was making an ever more determined attempt to follow a line independent of Warsaw in Ukrainian affairs. In the autumn of 1654, in his instructions to the envoy whom he sent to negotiate with Khmelnytsky, Radziwifl particularly stressed his own tolerant attitude to Orthodoxy and that of his Protestant ancestors, and in a letter to the Zaporozhian hetman, he asked that Khmelnytsky second to him the archimandrite and hegumen of St Michael’s Monastery in Kyiv, Feodosii Vasylevych, with whom he wanted to discuss ‘what in that land pertains to the activities and ornamentation of the church and to the ancient Ruthenian liturgy’.^[550] Vasylevych did indeed go to see Radziwifl and proved useful to him, agitating among the residents of Mahilioti in the spring of 1655 to leave the tsar’s service and go over to Radziwilfls side. In the name of Metropolitan Kosov, Vasylevych called on them to end their resistance and wrote of the metropolitan’s own plans to move to Belarus:

For we are poor and cannot conceive of ourselves otherwise than with His Grace the Reverend Metropolitan and all the clergy, recommending that he place his trust in God, to take shelter here in Lithuania in the service of the Prince His Grace the Lord Hetman [Radziwill].^[551]

The Muscovite authorities accused Kosov of authorizing Vasylevych’s activities in Belarus,^[552] as well as of spying on Warsaw’s behalf and other misdeeds. At the root of the conflict was Kosov’s unwillingness to accept the authority and jurisdiction of the patriarch of Moscow. Regarding this issue, pressure was brought to bear on the delegation of Kyivan clergy­men dispatched to the tsar’s camp at Smolensk in the summer of 1654; pressure was also exerted through the hetman by the tsar’s envoys and vo­evodas. Khmelnytsky gave the appearance of neutrality on the question. On the one hand, in a letter to Nikon he titled the patriarch of Moscow ‘our Supreme Pastor’, a form of address reserved by the Kyivan clergy ex­clusively for the patriarch of Constantinople.^[553] On the other hand, he of­fered Moscow an apparent compromise: the current metropolitan was to remain subject to Constantinople, while the jurisdiction of his successor would depend on the will of the tsar.^[554] In fact, this was an expression of support for Kosov.

Khmelnytsky clearly valued the new understanding he had achieved with the Orthodox hierarchy and sought to protect his clergy from Mus­covite interference, while maintaining his own control over church af­fairs. After the Pereiaslav Agreement, the metropolitan’s administration indicated de facto acceptance of the hetman’s special privileges concern­ing appointments to the higher clergy. In June 1655, Khmelnytsky issued a proclamation confirming the election of Feodosii Sofonovych as hegu- men of St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv.^[555] With that proclamation, the hetman effectively took over a right that had tradition­ally belonged to the king.^[556] When in November 1655 Muscovite voevodas arrested Metropolitan Kosov’s trusted associate, the Revd Makarii Krynytsky (who had gone to Lutsk in 1654 and entered protests in the town’s record-books against the actions of the Muscovite authorities in Kyiv), it was not only the metropolitan who rose to his defense but also the acting colonel of Kyiv, Vasyl Dvoretsky. The Muscovite representa­tives were clearly impressed by this show of solidarity on the part of the Ukrainian spiritual and secular authorities. The prospect of the metro­politan’s complaining to the hetman and arousing ‘some kind of rebellion among the people’ obliged the voevodas to release Krynytsky on Kosov’s recognizance.^[557]

As might have been expected, following Metropolitan Kosov’s death in 1657, Khmelnytsky did not wait for the tsar or the Patriarch of Moscow to indicate who should be the next metropolitan and whose jurisdiction he should accept. Khmelnytsky ordained the convocation of a sobor for the election of a new metropolitan, effectively taking over the king’s prerogative to nominate metropolitans. It took place in October 1657, after Khmelnytsky’s death. This sobor was the first indication of the div­isions that began to appear in the church and in society at large after Khmelnytsky’s demise. The succession to the office of Kyivan metropol­itan was not resolved: the votes were divided between Bishop Dionysii Balaban of Lutsk and Archimandrite Iosyf Tukalsky, both of whose can­didacies Vyhovsky supported, and Bishop Arsenii Zhelyborsky of Lviv. Not until December 1657 did the new hetman, Ivan Vyhovsky, manage to turn the course of events in his favor.

The election of Dionysii Balaban and his adherence to Vyhovsky’s new course meant that in the contest between the hetman, king, and tsar for the right of patronage over the Kyivan metropolitanate, it was the hetman who emerged victorious. In July 1658 Balaban supported Vyhovsky’s decision to break off the alliance with Moscow and find a modus vivendi for the newly established Cossack polity within the framework of a reordered Commonwealth.^[558]

The Two Capitals

The uneasy relationship between the secular and religious authorities of the Hetmanate at the time of the Khmelnytsky Uprising was also re­flected in the rivalry between Kyiv, the seat of the metropolitanate and residence of Sylvestr Kosov, and Chyhyryn, the residence of Bohdan Khmelnytsky and the actual capital of the Cossack polity. In large meas­ure, the competition between these two centers of the Cossack state re­flected not only the complex power relations between the hetman and the metropolitan but also the presence of ‘nobiliary’ and ‘Cossack’ programs within the officer stratum. This was, in effect, a struggle between two concepts of the Cossack polity: the model of the Zaporozhian Host, dear to the hearts of the Cossack rank and file, with its capital in Cossack Chy- hyryn; and the notion of a Grand Duchy of Rus’, dreamed up by the Ruthenian nobility, with its capital in the princely city of Kyiv.

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a rather dramatic shift of the centers of Ukrainian religious and cultural life took place in several stages. At first, Galicia asserted itself through the activity of the Lviv Brotherhood, then Volhynia gained prominence through the activ­ities of Prince Kostiantyn Ostrozky and his circle, and finally Kyiv took first place with the restoration of the Orthodox hierarchy and the emergence of Cossackdom as a major factor in Ukrainian religious life. Outside Ukrainian territory it was Vilnius that played a prominent role in the cultural and religious life of the Orthodox Rus’.

The onset of the Counter-Reformation in the Commonwealth com­pelled many Orthodox intellectuals to seek refuge in Kyiv. With the re­settlement of intellectuals of the caliber of Iov Boretsky and Zakhariia Kopystensky from Galicia to Kyiv, the center of Ukrainian Orthodox life also shifted to the banks of the Dnipro. Kyiv’s geographic location far to the east of the major centers of the Commonwealth, as well as its expos­ure to Tatar attacks, weakened Polish control over the city.⁷¹ This turned it into an object of Cossack influence, which in turn made it possible to renew the Orthodox hierarchy there and revive Kyiv’s importance as the ecclesiastical capital of Rus’. In the eyes of ecclesiastical leaders, Kyiv considerably outshone Lviv in historical and religious terms, given its sta­tus as the capital of Prince Volodymyr and the site of the baptism of Rus’.

The memory of Kyiv as the traditional political center of Rus’, while never wholly lost in that city, was certainly overshadowed by the day-to- day realities of borderland existence in the former princely capital.⁷² The general appearance of Kyiv in the early seventeenth century may be imag­ined from the description given in Jan Dabrowski’s Latin poem ‘Camoe- nae Borysthenides’ (Muses of the Dnipro), written in 1618 to mark the installation of the Roman Catholic bishop Boguslaw Boksa Radoszewski:

Great Kyiv, which was rich in Lydian buildings

(Mighty walls protected them then), is empty now.

The great walls are still standing, and three hundred churches. Long ago, magnificent gilding gleamed there on the ceiling, Concave and grooved ornaments shone, and snow-white columns. Of that ancient beauty, little remains today, For temples and battlements lie in ruins all around.⁷³

The attention devoted to the Kyivan ruins by poets and artists of the day

⁷¹ The anonymous author of a manual of Latin poetics read at the Kyiv Mohyla College in 1647-8 wrote of Kyiv’s precarious location:

See how white with human bones are the hills of Kyiv That are constantly being eaten away by the resounding wave of the Dnipro. Mars has given the city to the Tatars, and as far as our eye can see Only here and there is the earth covered with green.

(Ukrams’kapoeziiaXVIIstolittia [pershapolovyna], p. 330)

⁷² On the Kyivan heritage in medieval and early modern Rus’, see Omeljan Pritsak, ‘Kiev and All of Rus’: The Fate of a Sacral Idea’, HUS 10, nos. 3-4 (December 1986): 279-300; Iakovenko, ‘Symvol "Bohokhranymoho hrada” u kyi'vs’kii propahandi’, pp. 53-6. The revival of the tradition concerning Kyiv’s role as a historical capital was due in part to the reading of Pol­ish chronicles, especially that of Maciej Stryjkowski (verses written by Polish and Ukrainian poets alike made reference to Stryjkowski’s assertion that Volodymyr had built 300 churches in Kyiv), and in part to the renewal of historical tradition in Ukrainian chronicles.

⁷³ Ukrams’kapoeziiaXVIIstolittia (pershapolovyna), p. 113. testified not only to the city’s desolation in the early seventeenth century but also to the tastes and interests inspired by the European Renaissance. No historical problem was of greater interest to Ruthenian society, div­ided as it was between the Union and Orthodoxy, than the baptism of Rus’—a motif indissolubly associated with Kyiv. The religious polemics aroused by the issue fostered an interest in Kyiv as the historical center of Ruthenian Christianity, enhancing the city’s prestige.

In ‘Roxolania’, the Polish poet Sebastian Klonowic^[559] stressed Kyiv’s links with the princely and Christian past:

Ancient Kyiv, former grand-princely capital,

How many traces have you preserved of glorious antiquity!...

Know that here in Rus’, Kyiv means as much as ancient Rome to the early Christians; it has the same importance. Kyiv does not lack marvels—it takes constant pride In all its wonders; all this it will show to you.

Deep underground there are great caves, and

The ancient crypts of princes may be seen in the darkness of underground vaults.

In the deepest caves there repose the uncorrupted remains Of the heroes of Rus’.^[560]

The consecration of the Orthodox hierarchy in Kyiv in 1620 by the pa­triarch of Jerusalem, Theophanes, gave rise to the image of Kyiv as a second Jerusalem. In his circular epistle of August 1620, Theophanes exhorted the faithful: ‘... may your memory not relinquish the holy city of Jerusalem’.^[561] And that memory did indeed take lasting root in Kyiv, at least in the epis­tles of Metropolitan Iov Boretsky. It was he who insisted that the restoration of the ‘Eastern temple’ in Kyiv had been inspired ‘by the most blessed city of Jerusalem’ and drew a parallel between the two cities: ‘the divinely re­deemed city of Kyiv, the second, Ruthenian, Jerusalem’.^[562] Both in pastoral letters and in a missive to the tsar, he wrote of ‘the most holy throne of the Kyivan metropolitanate of Jerusalem’ and bestowed ‘the grace of Christ’s most holy blessing and of the life-accepting Tomb of the Lord, which is in Jerusalem, from the Kyivan metropolitanate...’.^[563] References to Kyiv as a second Jerusalem are also frequently to be encountered in Atanasii Kalno- foisky’s Teratourgema, which was published at the printshop of the Kyivan Cave Monastery in 1638, during Mohyla’s incumbency.⁷⁹

The comparison of Kyiv with Jerusalem, which became traditional in Boretsky’s day, continued under Mohyla, but in somewhat different form. Mohyla, who was consecrated as metropolitan not by the patriarch of Jerusalem, as in Boretsky’s case, but with the consent of the patriarch of Constantinople, was not as interested as his predecessor in represent­ing Kyiv as a second Jerusalem. Accordingly, in his time Kyiv was more often compared with Zion, and the metropolitan himself figured in pan­egyrics dedicated to him as the creator of a Ruthenian Zion. Perhaps the first use of this topos occurs in a panegyric addressed to Mohyla by stu­dents of the Kyiv Brotherhood School and issued by the Cave Monastery printshop in 1633:

With them [prayers] you troubled the stars of the Creator Himself

So that he might give us what we desired in our time.

We wanted a Zion in the Roxolanian land, Swaddled of old in sacred customs.⁸⁰

The motif of Zion figures even more prominently in Glad-Sounding Eu­phony, which was presented to Mohyla on 5 July 1633 by the ‘typog­raphers’ of the Cave Monastery on the occasion of his enthronement as metropolitan.⁸¹ While Mohyla did much to restore Kyiv’s luster as the an­cestral capital of Rus’, his efforts to regain the status of primate city for Kyiv were by no means limited to architecture. The publication by Mohyla’s circle of the Kyivan Cave Patericon, one of the pre-eminent literary monuments of Old Rus’, should also be seen as an attempt to link Kyiv of the princely era with the seat of the seventeenth-century Ortho­dox metropolitanate.⁸²

referring to Kyiv as ‘a shrine renewed today from Jerusalem’ and ‘the true shrine of Jerusalem’. See Golubev, Kievskii mitropolit Petr Mogila, vol. 1, appendixes, pp. 279-83. Cf. Boretsky’s letter to the tsar in VUR, 1: 48.

⁷⁹ Athanasius Kalnofoyski (Atanasii Kal’nofois’kyi), Teratourgema lubo cuda, ktore byly tak w samym Swiqtocudotwornym Monastyru Pieczarskim Kiiowskim (Kyiv, 1638). Excerpts cited in Sbornik materialov dlia istoricheskoi topografii Kieva (Kyiv, 1874), pp. 27—48; AIuZR (1914): pt. 1, vol. 8, pp. 478—504. On the currency of the idea of the ‘second Jerusalem’ in Ukraine, see Vely- chenko, ‘The Influence of Historical, Political, and Social Ideas’, pp. 82—6; Iakovenko, ‘Symvol "Bohokhranymoho hrada” u kyi'vs’kii propahandi’, pp. 71—5.

⁸⁰ UkratnskapoeziiaXVIIstolittia (pershapolovyna), p. 259.

⁸¹ Here, the trope of Kyiv as Zion occurs several times: ‘Bellona has already experienced their power | They exerted themselves more than once for Mohyla’s Zion’; ‘What rejoicing in the Ruthenian Zion | In the Kyivan zone’; ‘Petro will give you a worthy defense | And a shield to Zion’; ‘Who does not know that you of the Athenian Parnassus | Are the founder, as well as the pastor of the lands of Zion?’ See excerpts from the text: ‘Evfonia veselobrmiachaa’ in Ukratns’ka poeziia. SeredynaXVIIst., pp. 63—5.

⁸² The Polish text of the Patericon was typeset at the Cave Monastery printshop and issued by Sylvestr Kosov in 1635. In the Patericon, Kosov dwells on the continuity of the Kyivan tradition

Khmelnytsky paid full homage to Kyiv’s princely and religious trad­ition during his ceremonial entrance into the city in December 1648. In the first months of the uprising, when there were widespread rumors of the rebels’ desire to establish a ‘sovereign principality’, Kyiv was often mentioned as the capital of that ‘principality’. As early as the spring of 1648, Polish letters were already bearing tales of Khmelnytsky’s ambition to rule Kyiv and create a princedom of his own. Toward the end of May 1648, after the rebels’ first victories, Adam Kysil wrote that Khmelnytsky had proclaimed Kyiv his capital and instructed the city’s inhabitants to prepare to meet him.⁸³ At the beginning of June, the Catholic bishop of Chelm (Kholm) made a point of noting that Khmelnytsky was beginning to style himself prince of Kyiv and Rus’.⁸⁴

As for the territorial extent of the future ‘principality’, Polish sources generally identified it with the Kyiv palatinate. Depending on current conditions, the fortunes of the uprising, and so on, such sources would add the palatinates of Chernihiv and Bratslav (or Ukraine proper, in Beauplan’s terminology), as well as Podilia, Volhynia, and the palatinate of Rus’. Whatever the case, the Kyiv palatinate remained an inalienable part of that hypothetical polity. During negotiations with Common­wealth envoys in Pereiaslav in February 1649, Khmelnytsky himself, while claiming a princedom that extended as far as Lviv, Kholm, and Halych, primarily asserted his right to rule in Kyiv: ‘Kyiv is mine; I am lord and palatine of Kyiv’.⁸⁵ The tradition of Kyiv’s primacy as capital of the palatinate and of Rus’ as a whole was associated with the political thought of the Ruthenian nobility, and the origins of that tradition went back to the appanage principality of Kyiv, which was abolished and trans­formed into a palatinate, providing the basis for regarding Kyiv as the leading political center of the Grand Duchy of Rus’.

In the Khmelnytsky era, the notion of Lviv as capital of Rus’ was main­tained, if at all, by the residents of Lviv themselves. Lviv’s earlier leader­ship in Ukrainian cultural life was due to three factors: its historical prominence as a princely capital, the presence (albeit with significant in­terruptions) of the Orthodox episcopal see, and the city’s status as capital of the Rus’ palatinate. The latter appears to have been the most important factor in Lviv’s claims to be considered the capital of Rus’. During the siege of the city in the autumn of 1648, the Lviv delegation entreated the from the princely era to his own day. He also depicts Kyiv as the firmament whose stars radiate the piety of the Cave Monastery’s saints. On the establishment of a ‘Canon to the Saints of the Lavra’ in Kyiv in the 1640s, see Ievhen Kabanets’, ‘Petro Mohyla i pechers’ka kanonizatsiia 1643 roku’, in P. Mohyla: bohoslov, tserkovnyi i kul’turnyi diiach, pp. 149—55.

⁸³ VUR, 2: 25. ⁸⁴ See DOV, p. 43.

⁸⁵ See the diary of negotiations at Pereiaslav in VUR, 2: 109, in. hetman not to destroy the ‘capital city of Rus”.^[564] Although Khmelnytsky spared Lviv, he was certainly very far from considering it his capital and treated it as a city located on the border of Ukrainian ethnic territory, in dangerous proximity to Poland. In 1651 he even allowed the Crimean khan to take Ukrainian captives in the territory beyond Lviv, while ac­cording to him no such right in the territory extending up to the city.^[565]

In the course of the uprising, Kyiv had effectively become the site where the Orthodox hierarchy gave its blessing to the rule of successive hetmans, even if it did not actually consecrate them. As noted earlier, the welcome that Khmelnytsky received in Kyiv from Patriarch Paisios of Jerusalem upon his arrival in the city in December 1648 was extraordinarily import­ant to him.^[566] Nine years later, Kyiv witnessed the blessing of Khmelnytsky’s successor, Ivan Vyhovsky, as he assumed the hetmancy. The practice of crowning (or consecrating) secular rulers in a former capital instead of the current one was well known in Ukraine, considering that Polish kings were still crowned in Cracow, even though their capital was Warsaw.^[567] The religious significance of Kyiv was clearly taken into account by the hetman’s office when Khmelnytsky administered an epistolary rebuke to Colonel Antin Zhdanovych of Kyiv, who withdrew from the city without offering resistance in the summer of 1651, following the debacle at Berestechko. Khmelnytsky wrote to Zhdanovych that he had ‘... deliv­ered the capital city itself, and the churches of God, and the sacred relics, from which the Orthodox faith rose and shone like the sun, into the heretical hands of the Poles to be scorned’.^[568] In his letter of March 1653 to the tsar, the hetman wrote of the defense of ‘the borderland houses of God and of the capital of Kyiv itself, also parts of this Little Rus’ of ours’.^[569]

Given its status as ancestral religious and princely capital, Kyiv was also considered a possible site for the Cossacks to swear allegiance to the tsar in January 1654. According to Muscovite reports, in December 1653 Colonel Ivan Fedorenko (Bohun) of Kalnyk said to the boyar Vasilii Buturlin: ‘... the hetman is to kiss the cross in order for them to be under the sovereign’s high hand, either in Kyiv, in the cathedral Church of Sophia of the Divine Wisdom, or in the Cave Monastery, or in Pereiaslav'.^[570] The references to St Sophia and the Cave Monastery attest to the religious and political significance attributed to the oath. Ultim­ately, it was decided not to administer the oath in Kyiv, perhaps for en­tirely practical reasons: it was too far away, or the hetman’s entourage did not wish to impute excessive significance to the new alliance. Nor is it to be ruled out that the hostility to Moscow (which soon made itself appar­ent) of one of Kyiv’s leading figures, Metropolitan Sylvestr Kosov, en­tered into the calculations.

The symbolic significance of Kyiv as the ancient princely capital and political center of a once mighty state was also well appreciated in the Commonwealth at large. The author of one of the works exalting the mili­tary victories of Janusz Radziwifi, in praising his patron, who nourished hopes of seceding from Poland, noted that in 1651 Radziwifi had entered Kyiv by the Golden Gate, through which two Polish kings had come into the city in their day.^[571] If that entrance was so fraught with symbolic meaning for Prince Radziwifi, it ought to have been even more so for the ‘ill-born’ Khmelnytsky. After the hetman’s death, rumors spread in the Commonwealth to the effect that he had been buried in Kyiv.^[572] Thus did Kyivan tradition enshrine the legitimacy of new rulers in the eyes of their subjects and neighbors.

Nevertheless, Kyiv did not become the capital of the new Cossack polity—not, at least, its exclusive and generally recognized capital. Khmelnytsky’s decision not to take up permanent residence in Kyiv and make it the political center of Cossackdom had serious consequences for the city and for Cossackdom itself. Since Khmelnytsky did not claim the office of palatine of Kyiv, he effectively turned the city into a regional base for the royal administration, placing it in open competition with Cossack headquarters in Chyhyryn. Even though Adam Kysil, who was appointed palatine of Kyiv at the insistence of the rebels, was an Orthodox Ukrain­ian and no supporter of the war party in the Commonwealth administra­tion, but sought compromise with the Cossacks, this did little to relieve the tension; neither did the fact that real power in the Dnipro region be­longed to the hetman, so that the Kyivan palatine held his office on Khmelnytsky’s sufferance. The following episode sheds light on the sta­tus of Kyiv as a royal administrative center. In December 1649, the het­man was in Kyiv with Kysil when news was received of the arrival in Chyhyryn of Muscovite, Tatar, and Lithuanian envoys. Even though Kysil soon left the city and traveled to Warsaw to attend the Diet, Khmel­nytsky did not instruct the envoys to come to Kyiv, but went to Chyhyryn to receive them.^[573]

Chyhyryn, a fortress town on the southern boundary of Ukrainian set­tlement, the administrative center of the palatine and of the registered Cossack regiment assigned to it, gained prominence and became the het­man’s residence in short order, during the very first military campaign of 1648. From mid-June to early July 1648, Khmelnytsky was in Chy- hyryn,^[574] and that was apparently the period in which he made the neces­sary preparations and issued the orders required to turn it into the hetman’s residence. At the beginning of October 1648, as Khmelnytsky’s army marched westward, Chyhyryn was the residence of acting Colonel Fedir Korobka. The hetman’s wife was also there.^[575] Toward the end of December 1648, after Patriarch Paisios had welcomed Khmelnytsky to Kyiv, the hetman proceeded to Chyhyryn. The patriarch sent gifts to Khmelnytsky’s wife there as well.^[576]

In all negotiations with the Commonwealth commissioners and agree­ments signed with the Commonwealth, Khmelnytsky treated Chyhyryn and its starosta district as a separate issue; according to circumstances, it was either recognized as the hetman’s personal possession or granted as a perquisite of his office (‘for the mace’). In the spring of 1649, Khmelnyt­sky himself explained the conditions of the Pereiaslav truce to the Mus­covite envoy Grigorii Unkovsky as follows: ‘they are giving me, as hetman, the town of Chyhyryn and four additional towns wherever I please, as well as the Kyiv palatinate, and the Poles and Lithuanians are swearing to us on those conditions’.^[577] Special reservations pertaining to Chyhyryn were also included in the March 1654 Articles with Muscovy and in the text of the Treaty of Hadiach (1658).^[578]

With the development and consolidation of the Cossack state, Chy- hyryn established itself more and more strongly as the center of the Het- manate’s administration, especially in the last years of Khmelnytsky’s life, when declining health made it difficult for him to venture out of town. More than half of the hetman’s currently known proclamations, letters, and other official documents were signed in Chyhyryn, which also be­came the venue for receiving foreign diplomats and conducting negoti­ations with them. The hetman’s entrances into Chyhyryn were accompanied by a special ceremony: the Chyhyryn company would ride out to meet him, cannon were fired, and the hetman entered the town with banners streaming, to the sound of drums and military bugles.^[579]

As far as may be judged from the sources that have come down to us, in the consciousness of Ukrainian society of the mid-seventeenth century Chyhyryn was not so much a capital as the ‘town of the mace’, or the resi­dence of the Cossack hetman. In a verse of the period, Chyhyryn is rep­resented in just that way: ‘And you, Chyhyryn, border town, now have | No lesser glory within you when you behold the mace in your hands.’^[580] In signing and dating his letters, Khmelnytsky made no mention of Chy- hyryn’s status. In most cases, a letter or proclamation would conclude with the words ‘done at Chyhyryn', followed by the date. Only one of the surviving letters, written in Latin in March 1657 and addressed to the commander of the Turkish Janissaries, concludes with the formula ‘Datum ex sede nostra Czehirin...’. Although ‘sede’ is translated as ‘cap­ital’ in the collection Dokumenty Bohdana Khmel’nyts’koho, the word ac­tually refers to the hetman’s seat.^[581] Similarly, there are almost no references to Chyhyryn as the capital of the Cossack lands in letters from other leading figures in the hetman’s administration. The sole exception would appear to be a letter written by Iurii Nemyrych in late 1657, in which he refers to Chyhyryn as the capital of the Zaporozhian Host.^[582]

Nevertheless, a number of strategic, social, and political factors told against Kyiv and in favor of Chyhyryn when it came to the choice of the hetman’s seat. The social composition of Chyhyryn must have been an important factor in the competition between this border town and the im­posing city of Kyiv. At the time, the population of Kyiv consisted largely of burghers organized in guilds and led by the local patriciate. There was also a significant contingent of clergy and monks of the wealthy Kyivan monasteries. Cossacks were in the minority. In the years of the uprising, only seven Cossack companies were recruited in Kyiv, while Cherkasy, for instance, mustered thirteen.^[583] Even though Magdeburg law had been conferred on Chyhyryn as early as 1592, most of its inhabitants were not burghers but Cossacks. This was true of the great majority of large and small towns in Ukraine. Accordingly, both rank-and-file Cossacks and officers felt completely at home in Chyhyryn.^[584] On the other hand, the Cossacks in general and the hetman in particular were by no means cer­tain of wielding unquestioned authority in Kyiv, as they were in Chy- hyryn. An important consideration that must have inclined Khmelnytsky in favor of Chyhyryn was the activity of the Kyivan metropolitan, Sylvestr Kosov, and the local Orthodox clergy, who, as discussed earlier, were relatively independent of the hetman’s administration and competed with Khmelnytsky for influence in Ruthenian society.

As for strategic location, here again Chyhyryn proved superior to Kyiv. It was closer to the Crimean Khanate, the rebels’ principal ally in the early years of the uprising, and farther from the major centers of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Kyiv was con­stantly threatened by the armed forces of Lithuania and, as mentioned earlier, was even occupied by the troops of the Lithuanian field hetman, Janusz Radziwifi, after the tragic Berestechko campaign of 1651. Kyiv was also considerably inferior to Chyhyryn in defensive capacity. It had no fortifications, while Chyhyryn, which boasted an almost unassailable fortress on a high hill, was renowned outside Ukraine for its defensive structures: Paul of Aleppo, who visited the Cossack fortress in 1654, thought it the best-fortified town in the land of the Cossacks. In Kyiv, new fortifications were built only in 1654 upon the arrival of Muscovite vo- evodas, who immediately found themselves in conflict with Metropolitan Kosov over the choice of a site for the fortress. As discussed earlier, Khmelnytsky helped resolve the quarrel, but it indicated the difficulties and restrictions that would have confronted him if he had chosen Kyiv as his headquarters.

Chyhyryn also outdid Kyiv in terms of relations between the hetman’s administration and the Zaporozhians. The latter not only questioned Kyiv’s status as capital of the realm, but even challenged the appropriate­ness of Chyhyryn as the hetman’s residence, maintaining that the capital of the Cossack lands should be the Zaporozhian Sich. Late in 1657 in Moscow, envoys of the Zaporozhian otaman Iakiv Barabash, who was dissatisfied with the choice of Vyhovsky as hetman, proposed that a new council be held at Zaporizhia to elect a hetman. Barabash’s envoys re­ferred to Zaporizhia as the military capital, where Zaporozhian hetmans had traditionally been elected. The envoys rejected the proposal of the Muscovite secretaries to hold a council in Kyiv—the capital of Little Rus’, as it was called in the document—and insisted on Zaporizhia or, al­ternatively, the Solonytsia River or Lubny, allegedly a central location that was ‘close for everyone to gather’. The Zaporozhians' hostility to the traditional centers of the Dnipro region was also readily apparent from their complaints in Moscow to the effect that the Muscovite official Bog­dan Khitrovo had given Vyhovsky the mace in the ‘ecclesiastical city’ of Pereiaslav, and not, as Zaporozhian tradition would have it, at the Sich or elsewhere ‘in the field’.^[585]

The attitude of the Zaporozhian envoys in Moscow shows that for the Zaporozhian Cossacks, who played an extraordinarily important role in the opening stage of the uprising, Kyiv was a distant if not an alien center, clearly outside the scope of Zaporozhian influence. Thus the choice of Chyhyryn reflected a compromise between the freewheeling Zaporozh- ians and the nobiliary stratum that cast its lot with the uprising. Khmel­nytsky’s native Chyhyryn was also an ideal location for the hetman, given the proximity of his ancestral property of Subotiv and his close acquaint­ance with the local Cossacks. In practical terms, Chyhyryn became the military and political center of the Zaporozhian Host and all the territory that it controlled in Khmelnytsky’s day: for most of the period, that terri­tory included the palatinates of Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Bratslav. Kyiv, on the contrary, was viewed as the ecclesiastical capital of the realm. Khmel­nytsky’s choice of Chyhyryn as his permanent residence and the seat of his administration was the first stage in the migration of the hetman’s resi­dence to a number of inconspicuous Ukrainian towns. In the long run, Chyhyryn did not manage to retain its status as the exclusive residence of the Cossack hetman, and the subsequent appearance of a number of Cos­sack polities with different political orientations, headed by competing hetmans, led to the establishment of several hetman’s seats, utterly con­fusing the issue of the hetman’s residence/capital, which was complicated enough to begin with.

In Vyhovsky’s time, there was some thought of moving the hetman’s residence to Pereiaslav. Vyhovsky evidently approached the tsar on the question shortly after his election as hetman in 1657 and received per­mission to live there.^[586] The initiative was also in keeping with Vyhovsky’s general intention of weakening the influence of the Cossack rank and file on the hetman’s administration, although it is unclear whether Vy­hovsky’s request was intended more as a display of loyalty to the tsar or as a prelude to the actual transfer of the hetman’s residence. Clearly, the choice of Pereiaslav would move the political center of Cossackdom closer to its new ally, the Tsardom of Muscovy, and further from poten­tial enemies, the Poles and Tatars. Not surprisingly, with the outbreak of the revolt against Moscow, the idea of moving his residence to Pereiaslav lost significance for Vyhovsky. Now, a residence further from Moscow would better serve his purpose. When in July 1658 the voevoda Sheremetiev summoned Vyhovsky from Chyhyryn to Kyiv for talks, the hetman did not go to see the voevoda, dispatching an army of 20,000 to Kyiv instead, but it was too late. The fortress, reinforced by Sheremetiev, repelled the Cossack attack and inflicted significant casualties, so that the Ukrainian forces returned with nothing to show for their venture.^[587]

If, in the eyes of the Poles, Ukraine consisted of three palatinates— Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Bratslav—then Muscovite politicians regarded UkraineZLittle Rus’ as two ancient princedoms with their capitals in Kyiv and Chernihiv.^[588] In Muscovite eyes, Kyiv was unquestionably the cap­ital of these possessions. The Ukrainian clergy shared the view of Kyiv as the capital of Rus’,^[589] but little evidence remains to suggest the prevalence of such a view among the Cossacks. Ironically, the very same Cossack stratum that had permitted the revival of Kyiv as the seat of Ruthenian Orthodoxy in the 1620s showed almost no inclination to restore it as a secular and then a political capital in the 1650s.

The extinction of the princely dynasties that claimed Volodymyr’s legacy and the emergence of the Cossacks as a political force in competi­tion with the nobiliary stratum severed the continuity of the Ruthenian political tradition and made Kyiv much less attractive to Cossackdom than to the restored Orthodox hierarchy, which steadfastly associated its origins with the activities of Grand Prince Volodymyr. Clearly, the reason for this should be sought in the political culture and orientation of the Cossack stratum. On the one hand, as shown earlier, Khmelnytsky paid considerable attention to re-establishing Cossack control over the Kyivan Orthodox metropolitanate, taking over the royal prerogative of granting ‘spiritual bread’ in the process. On the other hand, in gaining control over the Orthodox Church—the chief institutional embodiment of the polit­ical and cultural tradition of Old Rus’—Cossackdom declined fully to identify itself with that tradition and continue it.

The competition between two opposing concepts of political and legal order in the Cossack polity, represented by the ideas of further consoli­dation of the Zaporozhian Host and the establishment of a Grand Duchy of Rus’, ultimately determined the status of the two ruling centers, Kyiv and Chyhyryn. Since the idea of the Zaporozhian Host triumphed among the Cossacks, the hetman’s residence remained outside Kyiv and was thus removed from that city’s princely tradition. Cossackdom, which was still a very new phenomenon in Ukrainian politics in the mid-seventeenth century, could not or would not take over the older tradition of political thought from the vanishing princely stratum, thereby relegating Kyiv to those social groups that preserved the political tradition of Old Rus’—the Kyivan clergy and the Ukrainian nobility.

EIGHT