Introduction

Ukrainian Cossackdom, which is first mentioned in historical sources of the late fifteenth century, was one of the social phenomena produced by the existence of an open steppe frontier between the settled agricultural population of Eastern Europe and the nomads of the Eurasian plains.

Ukrainian Cossackdom existed for almost three hundred years and was ultimately abolished, along with its autonomous institutions, in the late eighteenth century. The Zaporozhian Sich, the headquarters of the free Cossack domain on the lower Dnipro, was destroyed in 1775. The process came to a head in the 1780s with the incorporation of the Het- manate, the autonomous Cossack polity on the Left Bank of the Dnipro, into the Russian state. The abolition of Ukrainian Cossackdom was part of the general process of centralization in the Russian Empire, made pos­sible by the ‘closing’ of the Black Sea steppe frontier after the victories of Russian arms over the Ottoman Empire, and by Russia’s neutralization and subsequent annexation of the Crimean Khanate, which was the main threat in that part of the steppe frontier.^[1]

Despite its relatively peaceful demise, Ukrainian Cossackdom left deep and markedly dissimilar traces in the historical memory of the Ukrainian people and its neighbors.

The subject of this book is the interaction of Cossackdom and reli­gion—the role of the Cossacks in the religious conflict that began in Ukraine in the late sixteenth century and the influence of religion on the ideology, social and political behavior, and identity of the Cossacks. An­other aspect of this theme is the effect of Cossack intervention in religious

1983); Carsten Kumke, Fuhrer und Gefuhrte bei den Zaporoger Kosaken: Struktur und Geschichte kosakischer Verbande im polnisch-litauischen Grenzland (1550-1648) (Berlin, 1993); Leo Okinshe- vich, Ukrainian Society and Government, 1648-1781 (Munich, 1978); Orest Subtelny, The Mazepists: Ukrainian Separatism in the Early Eighteenth Century (Boulder, Colo., 1981); Zenon E.

²On the role of Cossackdom in the formation of Ukrainian historical consciousness, see Frank E. Sysyn, ‘The Reemergence of the Ukrainian Nation and Cossack Mythology’, Social Research 58, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 845-64; id., ‘The Changing Image of the Hetman’, Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 46, no. 4 (1998): 531-45; Serhii Plokhy, ‘Historical Debates and Terri­torial Claims: Cossack Mythology in the Russian-Ukrainian Border Dispute’ in The Legacy of History in Russia and the New States of Eurasia, ed. S. Frederick Starr (Armonk, N.Y., and Lon­don, 1994), pp. 147-70; id., ‘Revisiting the Golden Age: Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the Early History of the Ukrainian Cossacks’, introduction to Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus', vol. 7, The Cossack Age to 1625, pp. xxvii-lii. affairs on the Ukraine’s Orthodox Church and its relations with other churches and religious groups.

The period examined in this book, extending from the late sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth, was one of the growth and de­velopment of Ukrainian Cossackdom as a distinct social estate. This process was accompanied by violent Cossack rebellions against the Com­monwealth that began with a revolt under the leadership of Kryshtof Kosynsky in 1591 and continued until the ‘great uprising’ led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky in the mid-seventeenth century. This period of Cossack- dom’s sustained development as a military, social, and political force also saw the definitive shaping of its ideological orientation, which manifested itself, among other things, in Cossack involvement in the religious strug­gle then taking place in Ukraine.

The Ukrainian religious crisis was closely associated with the estab­lishment of the Union of Brest (1596) between part of the Kyivan Ortho­dox metropolitanate and the Roman curia. In many ways, this regional union was based on the principles that brought Eastern and Western Christianity together in the Union of Florence (1439), which provided for the preservation of the Orthodox Eastern rite in exchange for the accept­ance of Catholic dogma and subordination to papal jurisdiction. The Florentine tradition and attempts to establish a new church union in Eastern Europe were revived in Rome after the Council of Trent (1545-63) and were at least partly inspired by efforts to compensate for the losses suffered by the Catholic Church in Western and Central Eur­ope as a result of the Reformation.^[2] One of the basic assumptions of the present work is that the Ukrainian religious crisis of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries must be understood as part of the upheaval of the European Reformation, which led to the confessionalization of reli­gious and civic life throughout the continent. The changes introduced by the Reformation thus provide the context for the implementation of church union in Ukraine and the confrontation of Counter-Reformation Catholicism with East European Orthodoxy, in which the Ukrainian Cossacks took an active part.

The Cossacks’ numerous interventions in the religious struggle on the side of the Orthodox Church have been extensively studied in historiog­raphy. Equally well known is the abundance of religious slogans employed in the Cossack revolts, most notably in the Khmelnytsky Uprising. By contrast, the influence of religious ideas on the general outlook of the Ukrainian Cossacks, as well as on their legal and political ideology, is less familiar and has remained almost entirely unresearched to the present day. It is these questions, which concern political, social, and cultural no­tions, attitudes, and stereotypes, as well as the dominant religious and political discourse in Ukrainian society of the day, that are the principal subject of the present work.

In my efforts to focus the work on the problems just indicated, I have found myself confronting a whole series of challenges, as was only to be expected. The most important of these are the complications involved in sifting through the mass of contemporary ideas, notions, and intellectual stereotypes in order to identify those relevant to the topic under consider­ation. In the Reformation and post-Reformation periods, religion was one of the basic sources for the development of political, social, and legal views and concepts, hence a separate treatment of it in the context of the history of ideas and attitudes necessarily involves a degree of artifice. Nevertheless, this somewhat contrived separation of the religious com­ponent from the admixture of many other elements of contemporary pol­itical discourse is absolutely indispensable to the present study. In carrying it out, I have often found myself obliged to walk a rather narrow path, striving to avoid, on the one hand, the extremes of Marxist notions of religion and religious discourse as mere shells for the expression of secular ideas, themes, and concepts, and, on the other, the temptation to present the whole ideology of the epoch as an exclusively religious phenomenon.

Another problem to be overcome in working on this book was the rather limited source base available for research. Studying the history of the popular masses or of an entire people without a state of its own, lack­ing an established system of archives, whose private papers have been in­adequately preserved, always presents the historian with additional difficulties. This pertains especially to the history of ideas, attitudes, and identities: given the lack or dearth of sources produced by the social group under study, it is very difficult to reconstruct its view of itself and of the world around it. One such ‘mute’ or, rather, ‘semi-mute’ social group is Ukrainian Cossackdom, about which we can glean only partial information from sources deriving from the Cossack milieu per se, mak­ing it necessary to rely on sources of non-Ukrainian provenance.

One way of overcoming these problems was to adopt an interdisciplin­ary approach to my research, drawing as broadly as possible on the avail­able sources for the political, social, intellectual, and cultural history of Ukraine of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Another was to use microhistorical methods of research in order to penetrate now-forgotten ways of early modern thinking and to reconstruct the process whereby religious, political, social, and cultural identities took shape in Cossack Ukraine. The source base for the present study consists of official documents of the Cossack administration and of the Orthodox Church, polemical religious literature, treaty texts, Polish Diet resolu­tions on the Cossacks and the Orthodox Church, diplomatic and official correspondence, and private letters, all of which contain information on the views of the Cossack leadership and, to a lesser extent, of the rank and file.

Another source of our notions about the thoughts, ideas, and stereo­typical consciousness of the Ukrainian Cossacks is information about their conduct presented mainly in non-Ukrainian documents pertaining to Cossack uprisings and disturbances. Especially valuable for the pres­ent work are the materials of the Muscovite diplomatic service, which have been rather well preserved and published in considerable quantity during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Given their character and the circumstances of their creation, these documents do not provide ex­haustive answers to the question of how and why particular decisions were made at the tsar’s court, but they do contain statements and speeches of Ukrainian clergymen and Cossacks, either quoted directly or related by Muscovite diplomats or scribes. This material constitutes a unique source for the study of religious and other discourse prevailing in Ukraine at the time. The main problem involved in making use of these and other diplomatic sources is that of determining to what extent they reflect the words and opinions of the Cossacks themselves, as opposed to the thoughts and conceptions of the Muscovite officials who composed them.^[3]

From the historiographic viewpoint, a major difficulty besetting the present study has been the dearth of research concerned with the history of ideas and their social setting. Given the lack of synthetic works on the history of Ukrainian religious and political thought in the early modern period, the reconstruction of religious, political, social, and cultural ideas held by the Cossacks becomes an exceedingly complex task.^[4] To some extent, these difficulties are lessened by the considerably better, though still inadequate, treatment of these problems in Polish and Russian histori­ography. The works of Polish historians present the ideas and concepts then dominant in the Commonwealth, thereby providing some context for the study of prevailing views and opinions in the Ukrainian lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.⁶ The works of Russian historians and literary scholars discuss various aspects of Muscovite political culture and discourse that the Ukrainian Orthodox elites encountered and in which they participated to some degree in the mid-seventeenth century.⁷

As for the treatment of themes traditional in Ukrainian historiography, most notably the political and military history of Cossackdom, there is no reason to complain of scholarly neglect. Equally well represented in existing historiography is the factual side of relations between the Ukrain­ian Cossacks and the Orthodox Church, a subject long at the center of

Ukrainian Literature: From the nth to the End of the 19th Century (Littleton, Colo., 1975). Of particular interest to the historian of Ukrainian religious and political thought is Hrushevsky’s Istoriia ukra'ins’km Iiteratury, in which, given his interest in the history of socio-political thought, he sought to encompass and present all the ‘polemical’ material available to him. For an attempt to survey Ukrainian philosophical thought of the period, see V. M. Nichyk, V. D. Lytvynov, and Ia. M. Stratii, Humanistychni i reformatsiini idei' na Ukratni (XVI—pocha!ok XVII st.) (Kyiv, 1990).

⁶ On the history of Polish political ideas and institutions, see Juliusz Bardach, Boguslaw Lesnodorski, and Michal Pietrzak, Historia pahstwa i prawa polskiego (Warsaw, 1979), pp. 183-254; Antoni M⅛czak, ‘The Structure of Power in the Commonwealth of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’ in A Republic of Nobles: Studies in Polish History to 1864, ed. J. K. Fedorowicz (Cambridge, UK, 1982), pp. 109-34; Wojciech Kriegseisen, Sejmiki Rzeczypospolitej szlacheckiej wXVIIiXVIII wieku (Warsaw, 1991); Edward Opalinski, Kulturapolityczna szlachty polskiej w latach 1587-1652. Systemparlamentarny aspoleczehstwo obywatelskie (Warsaw, 1995).

For works by Polish political, philosophical, and religious writers, see Filozofia i mysl spoleczna XVII wieku, ed. Zbigniew Ogonowski, 2 vols. (Warsaw, 1979) and Pisma polityczne z czasow panowania Jana Kazimierza Wazy, 1648-1668: publicystyka, eksorbitancje, projekty, memorialy, vol. i, 1648-1660, ed. Stefania Ochmann-Staniszewska (Wroclaw, 1989).

⁷ On Muscovite political thought of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see the follow­ing works: V. E. Val’denberg, Drevnerusskie ucheniia o predelakh tsarskoi vlasti. Ocherki russkoi politicheskoi literatury ot Vladimira Sviatogo do kontsa XVII veka (Petrograd, 1916); A. A. Zimin, I. S. Peresvetov i ego sovremenniki. Ocherki po istorii russkoi obshchestvenno-pravovoi mysli serediny XVII veka (Moscow, 1958); N. M. Zolotukhina, Razvitie russkoi srednevekovoipolitiko-pravovoi mysli (Moscow, 1985); L. N. Pushkarev, Obshchestvenno-politicheskaia mysl'Rossii: vtoraiapolov- inaXVII veka. Ocherkiistorii (Moscow, 1982). See also studies of the ideological content of Mus­covite polemics produced by Russian literary scholars: I. U. Budovnits, Russkaia publitsistika XVII veka (Moscow and Leningrad, 1947); Ia. S. Lur’e, Ideologicheskaia bor'ba v russkoipublit- sistike kontsa XV—nachala XVI v. (Moscow and Leningrad, 1960); A. N. Robinson, Bor'ba idei v russkoi literature XVII veka (Moscow, 1974); A. S. Eleonskaia, Russkaia publitsistika vtoroi polovinyXVIIveka (Moscow, 1978). For the application of semiotics to the study of Russian pol­itical and religious ideology, see B. A. Uspenskii and V. M. Zhivov, ‘Tsar’ i Bog. Semioticheskie aspekty sakralizatsii monarkha v Rossii’ in B. A. Uspenskii, Izbrannye trudy, vol. 1, Semiotika istorii. Semiotika kul'tury (Moscow, 1994), pp. 110-218; B. A. Uspenskii, ‘Raskol i kul’turnyi konflikt XVII veka’, ibid., 333-67; id., Tsar' ipatriarkh. Kharizma vlasti v Rossii (Vizantiiskaia model' i ee russkoepereosmyslenie) (Moscow, 1998). attention and debate among historians committed to particular religious viewpoints. Russian imperial and especially Orthodox historiography has traditionally devoted considerable attention to the Cossack struggle against Poland, which was also represented as a struggle conducted against Catholicism and the Union in the defense of Orthodoxy.^[5] Polish historiography of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries generally regarded the Cossacks as an unruly, rebellious element bereft of any higher ideological or religious motives and loyalties, and stirred up against the Union and Catholicism by the Orthodox clergy.^[6]

Ukrainian national historiography, which originated mainly in eastern, Orthodox Ukraine, interpreted Cossack support for the officially perse­cuted Orthodox hierarchy as an alliance of the people and the intelli­gentsia on a Ukrainian national platform, involving a commitment on the part of Cossackdom to the defense of Ukrainian national interests.^[7] Ukrainian Catholic historiography, both in western Ukraine and abroad, has generally found itself in difficulty when dealing with the relationship between Cossackdom and religion. Most of its representatives have been torn between two loyalties—their own church, which was persecuted by the Cossacks, and the Ukrainian national tradition, for which the Ukrain­ian Cossack has become the most recognizable symbol.^[8] A distinct legacy has been left to this field by Soviet historiography, which strove at its peak to combat both religion and ‘Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism’ (with Cossackdom as its historical icon), seeking to explain most histor­ical events as outcomes of class struggle, and later as progress toward or consequences of ‘eternal friendship’ between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples.^[9]

While the extraordinarily politicized and Confessionalized attitudes of historians to the history of Cossackdom and Orthodox-Catholic relations have had a negative effect on the historiography of the subject, they have also attracted the attention of leading scholars, who have built up a solid foundation of established factual material for further research. Here one must note particularly the contribution of the patriarch of Ukrainian national historiography, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, who produced a funda­mental history of Ukrainian Cossackdom (to the mid-seventeenth century), published as volumes 7-10 of his Istoriia Ukrainy-Rusy (History of Ukraine-Rus’), which remains unsurpassed for comprehensiveness and depth of analysis of the available sources.^[10]

One of the accomplishments of historiography on the subject of Ukrainian Cossackdom is the research carried out by historians of the latter half of the twentieth century on the prevailing ideas and conceptions of Ukrainian statehood in the Khmelnytsky era. Interest in these themes was already apparent in the Cossack volumes of Hrushevsky’s History, but they received particular attention from historians influenced to a greater or lesser extent by the statist school of Ukrainian historiography. Of crucial significance for the development of this school of thought have been the works of Oleksander Ohloblyn, who proceeded from the re­search undertaken by Ivan Krypiakevych^[11] on the Cossack polity of the mid-seventeenth century to an analysis of the political views of Bohdan Khmelnytsky and the problem of relations between temporal and spir­itual authority in the Hetmanate.^[12] Over the past decade, this theme has attracted considerable attention among historians in independent Ukraine, who have devoted a number of special studies to the develop­ment of Khmelnytsky’s political program and the idea of Ukrainian statehood.^[13]

A broader spectrum of problems associated with the ideology of the Khmelnytsky Uprising is raised in the (so far unpublished) doctoral dis­sertation of the Canadian historian Stephen Velychenko, who seeks to re­construct the socio-political views of the mid-seventeenth-century Cossack officers and situate them in a general European context.^[14] One should also note as pertinent to our subject the recent work of the Ukrain­ian historian Petro Sas on the political culture of Ukrainian society of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Building on the methodo­logical developments and cumulative research of Polish historiography, Sas seeks to establish the main parameters of political consciousness among the various strata of early modern Ukrainian society, most notably the Cossacks. His survey of relations between Cossackdom and the Orthodox Church adds a number of new elements to the interpretation of Cossack attitudes toward the Orthodox faith.^[15] Besides these studies by Velychenko and Sas, those most relevant to the present work are the works of David Frick, Mikhail Dmitriev, and Natalia Iakovenko on Ukrainian religious and social thought.^[16] Also notable in this context are studies on the formation of Ukrainian national consciousness by Teresa Chynczewska-Hennel, Frank Sysyn, Zenon Kohut, Ihor SevCenko, Olek- sii Tolochko, and Boris Floria,^[17] as well as articles on Ukrainian intellec­tual history and mentality published in recent years in the Kyiv journal Mediaevalia Ucrainica.^[18]

In my consideration of problems involved in the interrelation between religious, political, social, and cultural ideas in the world-view of Ukrain­ian Cossackdom, I have also attempted to contribute to the discussion of several broader questions currently being debated in historical literature. Most important among them is the problem of the confessionalization of religious life in early modern Europe and its effect on society, political thought, nation-building and state-building projects, and eventually on the continental balance of power. What was the effect of confessionaliz- ation on religious life in Ukraine, and how did it influence the fate and outlook of Ukrainian Cossackdom?

In the broadest terms, confessionalization may be defined as a modern variant of Christianity that came into existence during the Reformation, influencing the religious and social life of early modern Europe on both sides of the Catholic-Protestant divide. The major characteristics of the newly formed confessions (Lutheranism, Calvinism, Anglicanism, and Catholicism, to list the largest ones) include the clear formulation of religious beliefs, the creation of religiously uniform and coherent com­munities, the reinforcement of church discipline, the formation of a new type of clergy, and the development of close co-operation between church and state.²²

It is one of the arguments of this book that confessionalization, as a phenomenon associated with the Reformation in Western Europe, also had a notable influence on the Orthodox lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Responding to the challenge issued by the West, the Kyivan metropolitanate, which split into Uniate and Orthodox branches, embarked on its own project of confessionalization. The church became more dependent on the state, which applied equally to the Uniates, who enjoyed the conditional support of the authorities, and to the Orthodox, who were in opposition to them. In both churches there was a tendency toward the expansion of hierarchical authority in matters of internal church discipline and greater control over questions of the faith. This period saw the development of a new type of parish and monastic clergy that obtained its religious education in domestic and foreign institutions of higher learning. Parallel to this, there was a growing role for the lay elem­ent in church affairs, well illustrated in Ukraine by the work of religious brotherhoods, the activity of princes and nobles, and, last but not least, the intervention of the Cossacks in the life of the church. All these changes that took place in Ukraine of the late sixteenth and early seven­teenth centuries have direct or more distant parallels in phenomena de­noted by the term ‘confessionalization’ in the history of the nations and churches of Western and Central Europe.

In noting parallels and similarities between Western and Eastern processes of confessionalization, it is also necessary to indicate the signifi­cant differences between them. The most important of these, in my view, pertains to the dissimilar effect of confessionalization on the Christian community as a whole. If in the West confessionalization involved the division of previously unitary Christendom (Christianitas latina) into a number of confessionalized churches, in the East it fostered the revival and growth in particular Orthodox churches of a sense of belonging to one Orthodox ecumene (Christianitas orthodoxa). In structural terms, the medieval Orthodox Church was traditionally divided into independent (autocephalous) or autonomous churches closely associated with polit­ical authority and national tradition, including the use of Church Slavonic

²² For a discussion of the concept of confessionalization and a bibliography on the subject, see Heinz Schilling, ‘Confessional Europe’ in Handbook of European History, 1400-1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation, vol. 2, Visions, Programs, and Outcomes, ed. Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1995), pp. 641-82; Euan Cameron, The European Reformation (Oxford and New York, 1991), pp. 361-88; Carter Lindberg, The European Reformations (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, Mass., 1996), pp. 356-9. as a liturgical language in the Slavic lands. Accordingly, many Reforma­tion ideas, especially those related to the ‘nationalization’ of ecclesiastical institutions and making the language of sacred texts and liturgical services comprehensible to the laity, were neither new nor original to the Orthodox. At the same time, the new-found aggressiveness and proselyt­izing spirit of the confessionalized Western churches, most notably on the part of post-Reformation Catholicism, aroused a tendency in the Orthodox East toward the re-evaluation and reformation of its own ecclesiastical tradition.

In many respects, especially during the tenure of Petro Mohyla as met­ropolitan of Kyiv (1633-47), Kyivan Orthodoxy led the way in the process of Orthodox confessionalization. If the Uniate Church, the main rival of the Orthodox Ukrainians, declared its adherence to Catholicism and found a measure of support in Rome for the formulation, expression, and defense of its new doctrine, the Orthodox were in a more difficult pos­ition. The search for theological enlightenment in conservative Muscovy (which condemned not only Western but also Greek practices and inno­vations as heretical) and the Orthodox East, oppressed by the Turks, ended in failure, and the Kyivan clergy was obliged to reform its own church single-handedly, as well as to compose its own credo. The Ortho­dox confession of faith, written with the active participation of Petro Mohyla, was ratified in 1643 by the Eastern patriarchs, with a number of revisions, as an official account of the Orthodox faith.^[19] Kyiv was clearly turning into the motive force of Orthodox confessionalization, and Ruthenian society was one of the first in the Orthodox East to experience the numerous changes associated with this process of the reform of reli­gious and social life.

Religious divisions and the confessionalization of political life were among the factors that helped to establish and legitimize the rule of secu­lar and spiritual princes in early modern Western and Central Europe. No less important a role was played by confessionalization in creating what Heinz Schilling has called a ‘balance of confessions’ in the interna­tional arena.^[20] The confessionalization of domestic and international pol­itics was also strongly felt in Ukraine, where it played an outstanding role in the ideological substantiation and international legitimation of Cos­sack statehood. The characteristic Western association of a ruler’s legit­imacy (as well as that of the entire political structure that he headed) with divine election and sanction was fully manifested in the treatment of Het­man Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who was viewed by his panegyrists as a ruler sent by God Himself. From the very beginning of its existence, the young Cossack state found itself in a world sharply divided by religious and con­fessional boundaries. In entering the international arena as an independ­ent actor, it had to take account of those realities. The same was true of the Cossack polity’s decision to accept the protectorate of the Muscovite tsar at the beginning of 1654, which was largely justified in terms of con­fessional affinity—an international development that changed the long­term balance of both political power and religious confessions in Eastern Europe.

Did the religious struggle and the confessionalization that proceeded under Western influence in the Kyivan metropolitanate have an effect on nation formation in the Ukrainian lands of the Commonwealth? In the present study, I maintain that it did; indeed, I consider that effect so im­portant that unless it is taken into account, one cannot properly grasp the complex and contradictory process of the ‘nationalization’ of Ukrainian Cossackdom described in this book. The Union of Brest ‘awakened’ in­tellectually stagnant Ukrainian society. The publication of the Bible in Church Slavonic in 1580-1 and the distribution of printed polemical lit­erature discussing questions of church union and ecclesiastical and eth­nic divisions were important factors promoting the crystallization of pre-modern national consciousness in Ruthenian (Ukrainian-Belaru­sian) society of the time.^[21] In my view, Ruthenian identity was in constant flux during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, adapting to several processes, of which the most important were the religious division of Rus’, a change in the perception of the social characteristics of national allegiance, and the formation of distinct Ukrainian and Belarusian iden­tities. In all these developments, Ukrainian Cossackdom was fated to play an important role.

These are the ideas and approaches that have influenced the direction of my research and the structure of the book. Its first two chapters present the main tendencies in the development of Ukrainian Cossackdom and the Ruthenian Orthodox Church, providing a broader socio-political and ecclesiastical context for the work as a whole. The third chapter gives a rather detailed account of the Cossacks’ growing involvement in the reli­gious struggle in Ukraine from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. In writing these chapters, I proceeded from the premise that the major factors determining the interaction of Cossackdom and religion in the Ukrainian lands were, on the one hand, the formation of a distinct so­cial estate on the basis of the Cossack register, followed by the successful Cossack state-building efforts of the Khmelnytsky era; and, on the other, religious conflict and the confessionalization of religious life in Ukraine.

Chapters 4-8 examine the influence of religious ideas and conceptions on the Cossacks. Chapter 4 considers the interrelation of religious, social, and ethnocultural elements in the formation of Ukrainian Cossack iden­tity. Chapter 5 is concerned with the role and place of the religious factor in the ideology of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, which, more than any pre­vious Cossack rebellion, comprised elements of a religious war against Catholics on the one hand and Jews on the other. In Chapters 6 and 7 at­tention is focused on the congeries of religious, political, and legal ideas that significantly influenced the Cossack state-building project, con­tributing to the legitimation of the hetman’s revolutionary authority and that of the polity he represented and helping to determine the balance of political power between hetman and metropolitan in Cossack Ukraine. Chapter 8, which concludes the volume, examines the role of Orthodoxy in the Ukrainian Cossacks’ international alliances. It considers the prob­lem of establishing a dialogue between Polish-Lithuanian and Muscovite Rus’ on the basis of religious affinity and the role of the discourse thereby initiated in Khmelnytsky’s decision to accept the protectorate of Muscovy.

In this book, I make extensive use of terminology that reflects pre­modern political, territorial, ethnic, and national concepts and identities of the region. I use the term ‘Rus’’ to denote East Slavic territory and popu-lation, with particular reference to the East Slavic population of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. I also use ‘Ruthenian’ to designate the common Ukrainian-Belarusian culture and identity of the early modern period. In most cases, the terms Rossiia and ruskii (the Greek- influenced forms of Rus' and rus’kyi), which were used by the Ruthenian Orthodox clergy and Cossack officers to define their land and cultural identity, are rendered here as ‘Rus’’ and ‘Ruthenian’. I translate these same terms as ‘Russia’ and ‘Russian’ when they pertain to early modern Russian territory and identity. As a rule, I use ‘Ukrainian’ to designate lands, institutions, and people closely associated with the territory of Ukraine. This pertains first and foremost to the Dnipro Cossacks and the Hetmanate, a Cossack state established on Ukrainian territory as a result of the Khmelnytsky Uprising.

My use of ‘nation’ generally reflects the sense attributed to this term in early modern Europe, where it defined a pre-modern concept of group identity based on ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and historical commonality. Toponyms are usually transliterated from the language of the country in which the designated places are currently located. As a rule, personal names are given in forms characteristic of the cultural traditions to which the given person belonged, with the names of Cossacks rendered accord­ing to the Ukrainian tradition. If an individual belonged to (or is claimed by) more than one national tradition, alternative spellings are given in parentheses. In this case, as in the use of specific terminology related to the history of the Cossacks and titles of East European officials and insti­tutions, I follow the practice established by the editors of the English translation of Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s History of Ukraine-Rus^,.26

In the text, the modified Library of Congress system is used to translit­erate Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian personal names and toponyms. This system omits the soft sign (ü) and, in masculine personal names, the final ‘É’ (thus Khmelnytsky, not Khmel’nyts’kyi). In the notes and bibli­ography, the full Library of Congress system (ligatures omitted) is used, and the titles of publications issued after 1800 are given in modernized spelling.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Julian calendar used by the Eastern Slavs was ten days behind the Gregorian calendar, which was used in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Western Europe. Dates in this study are generally given according to the Julian calendar; where both styles appear concurrently, the Gregorian-calendar date is given in parentheses, for example 7 (17) April.

²⁶ Cf. editorial prefaces and glossary in Mykhailo Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus’, 7: xix-xxvi, liii-lvi.

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