Mazepa’s Defection

In a sense, the decision taken by Ivan Mazepa in October 1708 to form an alli­ance with the Swedish king was just another example of Cossack actions fol­lowing the 1654 agreement of Pereiaslav.

After returning to Baturyn with the Swedish King, 1 intended to write a letter to his'I'sarist Majesty expressing our gratefulness and listing all our previous and current grievances: the privileges that had been curtailed and the impending destruction that faced the entire population. In conclusion, [I intended] to declare that we, having voluntarily acquiesced to the authority of his Tsarist Majesty for the sake of the unified Eastern Faith, now, being a free people, we wish to with­draw, with expressions of our gratitude for the Tsar’s protection and not wishing to raise our hands in the shedding of Christian blood. We will look forward, under the protection of the Swedish King, to our complete liberation.

Commenting on Mazepa's decision, the Ukrainian-Canadian historian Orest Subtclny w rites:

Mazepa’s line of argument is striking in how often certain phrases and ideas are repeated and stressed: rights and privileges; overlordship freely chosen and open to recall; and protection, always the issue of protection. For anyone with an acquaintance with medieval political theory, these concepts strike a familiar note. They are the components of the contractual principle, European feudal­ism’s most common regulator of the political relations between sovereigns and regional elites....

The contractual arrangement was an act of mutual obligation. The vassal prom­ised his lord obedience, service, and loyalty in return for the latter’s protection and respect for the vassal’s privileges and the traditions of his land. If the vassal had good reason to believe that his lord was breaking his obligations, he had the right - the famous /«r rtsislendi - to rise against him to protect his interests. Thus, in theory, the lord as well as the vassal could be guilty of disloyalty. Throughout Europe, the contractual principle rested on the prevailing cornerstone of legal and moral authority - custom. The German Schwabenspiegel, one of the primary sources for customary law in East Gentral Europe, provided a concise summary of the principle: ‘We should serve our sovereigns because they protect us, but if they will no longer defend us, then we ow’e them no more service’. Mazepa’s position could not have been stated more succinctly.

SOURCE: Orest Subtclny, ‘Mazepa, Peter 1. and the Question of Treason,’ Harvard Ukrainian Studies, II, 2 (Cambridge, Mass. 1978), pp. 170-171.

managed to escape and make their way to the Ottoman Empire. Even though hos­tilities were to continue along the Baltic Sea coast, the Battle of Poltava in July 17^O9 proved an important turning point. Sweden’s heretofore dominant role in eastern and east-central Europe, especially its influence in Poland, was coming to an end. Sweden’s place was taken by the tsardom of Muscovy, which under its powerful ruler Peter I would soon be renamed the Russian Empire.

Mazepa and Ukraine after Poltava

The epilogue to Poltava was disastrous for Ukraine. Those Cossack officers who had previously supported Mazepa but had denounced him in an effort to gain favor with the tsar were now stripped of their recently won rewards, tried for high treason, and executed. Cossack autonomy in the Hetmanate was substantially reduced, and the new hetman, Ivan Skoropads'kyi, became a puppet in the hands of Muscovite officials stationed in Hlukhiv to keep watch over him.

Mazepa died in the summer of 1709 in exile in Bendery, an Ottoman-ruled town along the lower Dniester River. The Cossacks who were with him, however, continued their struggle. Based in Bendery, they formed what might be consid­ered the first Ukrainian political emigration. They chose a successor to Mazepa, Pylyp Orlyk, who formulated a political program as part of a treaty with the Zaporozhian Cossacks. Orlyk’s program contained a constitution for a proposed independent Ukrainian state. The exiled hetman even invaded the Right Bank during the spring of 1711, but after some initial successes he was stopped by the Poles.

Tsar Peter I was worried by Orlyk’s invasion of the Polish-controlled Right Bank and, in particular, by an Ottoman declaration of war against Muscovy, prompted by diplomatic activity in Istanbul on the part of Charles XII. In response, Peter led a Muscovite army in an attack on the Ottoman Empire. Along the way, his troops occupied the Right Bank and scattered what remained of Het­man Orlyk’s forces. By July 1711, they had reached the Prut River, where they hoped to obtain help from the local Orthodox population in the Ottoman princi­palities of Moldavia and Walachia. The Muscovite forces went too far, however, and were resoundly defeated by the Ottoman Turks.

Thus, two years after his triumph at Poltava, Peter experienced a major setback at the hands of the Turks. As a result, Muscovy was forced to surrender the for­tress at Azov as well as other territory along the northern shore of the Black Sea which it had fought so hard to acquire during the last decades of the seventeenth century. Muscovy also had to remove its forces from the Right Bank and to renounce any claim to that region of Ukraine which was to remain part of Poland. In the wake of this reassertion of Ottoman power, the remaining Zaporozhian Cossacks from Orlyk’s army accepted protection from the Ottoman Empire and established a new sick at Oleshky, near the mouth of the Dnieper River.

In a sense, the years between 1687 and 1711, dominated in eastern Europe by the figures of Charles XII of Sweden and Peter I of Muscovy and in Ukraine by that of Hetman Ivan Mazepa, were an extension of the Period of Ruin that had racked the country after the death of Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi in 1657. From the very beginning of Mazepa’s tenure as hetman, his Cossack armies had been called on to participate in Muscovy’s wars against the Ottoman Empire in the south and against Sweden in the north. Only at the very end did Mazepa abandon his alliance with the tsar in return for a vaguely conceived independence under a Swedish protectorate. Mazepa’s decision came too late and without preparation. In the end, its only result was to divide Ukrainian society even further, to make it more dependent than ever on Muscovy, and to hasten what turned out to be the dissolution of Cossack autonomy.