Omeljan Pritsak Kievan Rus’ and Sixteenth-Seventeenth-Century Ukraine

I

Before addressing my specific topic of “Kievan Rus’ and Sixteenth-Seventeenth-Century Ukraine,” I feel obliged to elaborate on the question of what Kievan Rus’ actually was.

The term “Kievan (or Rus’) empire,” which one finds so often in scholarly literature, can be applied only to the reign of Iaroslav the Wise, beginning with his victory over the Pechenegs in Kiev in 1036 up to his death in 1054. Iaroslav apparently followed the example of other “sedentary” rulers in destroying a “nomadic” empire which challenged him, as Charlemagne had done with the Avars (ca. 800) and Otto I with the nomadic predecessor of the Hungarian realm (955). It seems fairly certain that Iaroslav patterned his imperial order, centred spiritually on St. Sophia, after the political structure of the Byzantine empire, which had a patrimonial system of rule of a neo-Hellenistic type.¹

Of course, the Slavic character of Kievan Rus’ must play a weighty role in our discussion. Therefore, let us turn again to the epoch of Iaroslav, since it was he who, having come from Novgorod, brought to Kiev the Slavonic rite² with its ready corpus of ecclesiastic, edificational and juridical literature, written in the foreign, artificial, so-called Church Slavonic language.³

Iaroslav apparently had no faith in the wisdom of leaving his empire in the care of his immediate offspring, as the Byzantine system of succession required. He may have been influenced by the experience of the Byzantine empire itself, which after the death of the valiant emperor Basil II, in 1025, was ruled by incompetent women and their favourites.

In order for the system to function successfully, it was necessary to establish three ruling branches of the dynasty. Each received a permanent hereditary domain (in Rus’ian, volost), also called a patrimony (in Rus’ian, otchina), which was its own possession. This domain or patrimony was distinct from a “political” state seat (throne) and the connecting territories (annexes) which were only temporarily at the disposal of the dynasty’s ruling members.

There were two types of succession: a) the private—the succession to the otchina; obligatory here was the regulation recorded in the Ruskaia pravda∖ “The father’s household as a whole always (passes) to the youngest son” (article IOO);⁶ b) the political—the succession to five thrones (one supreme and four subordinated) within the system of Iestvichnoe Voskhozhdenie; obligatory here was the principle of seniority, so that the senior members of each of the three ruling branches had, on a rotating basis between the branches, the opportunity to ascend to the highest ranking central throne. The system was designed to avoid separatism among the ruling branches and to prevent violent attempts to acquire the supreme throne.¹

Two senior members of each branch had the right to succession. After all the members of one generation had taken their place in the system, they were followed by the same assortment of members from the next gen­eration. Members of the dynasty whose fathers, because of death or other circumstances, did not reach one of the three highest political thrones were to leave the system to become non-ruling (non-political) landowners or “knights of fortune” (Old Rus’ izgoi, Turkic kazak).

In laroslav’s variant of Iestvichnoe Voskhozhdenie, the supreme throne in Kiev was reserved for the senior members of the entire dynasty, and the four thrones available to other rulers were, in descending rank order: Chernihiv, Pereiaslav, Smolensk and Volodymyr-in-Volhynia.

The thrones of the triumvirs were situated on territory where laroslav’s retinue had settled permanently. Only the lands of Kiev, Chernihiv and Pereiaslav had acquired this special recognition as the “land of Rus’” par excellence (rus’skaia zemlia)* Three main trading and “maritime” centres were attached to the two superior thrones: to Kiev, Great Novgorod and Oleshe at the two extremities of the Dnieper route; and to Chernihiv, Tmutorokan. The annexes of the Kievan throne were the former Derevlianian land (Volhynia), Pohoryna, Berestia and Galicia. The annexes of the Chernihiv throne were the land of the Siverians and the “towns of the Viatichians.” The annexes of the Pereiaslav throne were Posemia and Kursk. The lower thrones did not possess annexes, and were themselves under the direct control of the college of triumvirs.

The three branches of laroslav’s progeny were supposed to develop into three separate dynasties, which, in turn, were to guarantee the uninterrupted functioning of the system of Iestvichnoe Voskhozhdenie. The patrimonies which the three elder sons of Iaroslav received as subsistence for their dynasties were Turov-Pinsk in Polissia (Iziaslav’s dynasty), Murom in the Oka basin (Sviatoslav’s dynasty) and Rostov in the middle Volga basin (Vsevolod’s dynasty).

The system of Iestvichnoe Voskhozhdenie did not develop fully in Rus’. The immediate cause, although only one of several, was that not the two eldest, but the two youngest sons of Iaroslav were the first to die.’ Their sons were ineligible for succession because the fathers had not attained a throne of the triumvirate; these sons then became founders of the izgoi dynasties, of which the most important was the Rostislavichi dynasty in Galicia (ca.

I cannot dwell here on the reasons behind the non-functioning of the original Iestvichnoe Voskhozhdenie. It must suffice to say that the outcome was a “revised” edition of the system which resulted in political separatism. The dynasty of Iziaslav was permanently removed from the system (Iaroslav had previously excluded the Polotsk branch of the Riurikids; the izgoi dynasty of Rostislavichi were here considered to be in­cluded into the system). They became local rulers of Polissia (Turov-Pinsk) and did not participate in the political life of Kievan Rus’ in the twelfth-thirteenth centuries. The two remaining dynasties—that of Sviatoslav (originally Murom-based) and of Vsevolod (Rostov­based)—each created their own system of two superior thrones, and then began to compete for the supreme Kievan throne. In 1125 Murom had sep­arated from Chernihiv, the former superior political throne. Chernihiv had gradually become an independent political body that combined political rule with elements of patrimony (Putyvl).

Shortly after the death of Mstislav Monomakhovich, the great grandson of Iaroslav, while the Chernihiv dynasty was holding the Kievan throne, 1139-46, the older branch of the Monomakh dynasty turned Volhynia, hitherto the annex of the supreme Kievan throne, into their patrimony. The Rostov patrimony remained the undisputed possession of the younger branch of the Monomakhovichi and became a political body.

In the meantime, events of international importance had taken place. In 1070-1 both the army and the fleet of the Byzantine empire suffered resounding defeats—the army by the Turkic Seldjuks at Mazikert in East Anatolia, and the fleet at Bari in Italy.¹⁰ As a result, Byzantium-Constantinople-Tsargrad lost its dominant position in international economic and political life. The Byzantine international trade now moved to the Italian cities of Venice and Genoa.

Some decades later, we witness the commercial emancipation of the North. The German cities, predecessors of the Hanse, gradually made the Baltic Sea their internal lake. By the beginning of the thirteenth century they had established themselves both in Riga/Reval and Danzig (Gdansk).¹² The famous artery from the Varangians to the Greeks, the Dnieper route, which had once given rise to the Rus’ Kievan state, had en­tered a period of decline. Now new economic centres were established around the Baltic Sea, the Azov Sea and the Crimean peninsula, and the old Volga trade route was resurrected as the basic link between the two poles.¹³

The first signs of the new epoch were the loss of Tmutorokan and the proclamation of independence by Great Novgorod (1136).¹⁴ The glory of Kiev was fading and its economic and political importance was shifting to two hitherto marginal territories: Galicia-Volhynia, with its access, via the Dniester-San or the Western Bug rivers, to the Baltic Sea; and the Rostov land with its centres of Suzdal, Rostov and Vladimir-on-the-Kliazma, located within the basin of the Volga, the main highway of the Caspian, Azov-Crimean and Persian trade. The non-Slavic Lithuanians were also entering into the picture, partly because of German invaders, but also because of the attraction of the new commercial “bonanza” itself; the Polotsk zemlia, outside the system of the Iestvichnoe Voskhozhdenie, proved to be easy for the Lithuanians to penetrate.¹⁵

One hundred years after laroslav’s death, Kiev finally lost its standing as the supreme political throne. Its economic supremacy had waned and the Iestvichnoe Voskhozhdenie became bankrupt. The two destructions of Kiev—one provoked by the Volga ruler Andrei Bogoliubsky in 1169 and the other carried out by the Mongols in 1240—were to some measure coups de grace for the past giant.

Great Novgorod has already been mentioned. That commercial centre best preserved a system of governing that apparently went back to times long before the Riurikids ascended to power. The system was a variation on the classical and Hellenistic polis with an oligarchic system of government, although sovereignty theoretically rested with the city assembly (veche). Another very important trading town with a similar oligarchic system was Halych which, incidentally, had always maintained close ties with Great Novgorod (e.g., the izgoi Rostislavichi dynasty was of Novgorodian origin).

Now let us return to the question posed at the outset of this discussion: what was Kievan Rus’? Aside from laroslav’s twenty-year reign as tsesar, “emperor” of Rus’, Kievan Rus’ was a conglomerate of constantly emerging local states called zemli, having different and fluctuating degrees of independence. They were ruled either by a hereditary ruler or by an oligarchic clique with an elected prince functioning as a magistrate engaged by the town, and existed within or outside a superstructure of sev­eral variants of the steppe’s unifying system of Iestvichnoe Voskhozhdenie.

All these states, however, were distinguished by four common elements which can be called characteristics of the pre-political cultural sphere. The first, and one could say the primary, element was the (originally foreign) Orthodox religion in the “revised” Slavonic rite. In the course of the twelfth century, the original Slavonic rite, which was neutral in the struggle between the papacy and Byzantium, had been replaced by its Byzantine version. In the crucial thirteenth-fourteenth centuries, in Latin Europe (especially Poland and Hungary), as a result of the “nationalization” of the Catholic churches, a secular awareness of a national past developed. It, in turn, brought about a sense of national consciousness and a peculiarly national political culture.¹⁶

The greatest achievement of the contemporary Byzantine mind was the spiritual movement called hesychasm. Centred in the monastic republic of Mount Athos, it propagated the belief that the only purpose of human life was to achieve divine tranquility (Greek hesychia) through the contemplation of God in uninterrupted prayer.¹⁷ One outcome was that in Kievan Rus’ the spontaneous “barbaric” interest in history, which had produced such gems as the Povest’ vremennykh let, the Kievan Chronicle” and the "Galician-Volhynian Chronicle” in the eleventh­thirteenth centuries, was subsequently replaced by the “Lives” of saints and the “Patericon.”¹* The only literary products of Kievan intellectuals in the fifteenth century were two hesychastic redactions of the Patericon of saints of the Kievan Caves Monastery {Pecherskii paterik), the two so-called Kassian versions.” The first Kievan “historical” work to be published was notably the Polish translation of the “Patericon” by Sylvester Kosov in Kiev in 1635. In consequence, secular literature had no place in the territories of the former Rus’ in the fourteenth-sixteenth centuries. The interest in the political past of the territory and its people was now almost completely lost.

The second element common to the states was the dynastic-cultural sphere called “Rus’.” This term, which is of disputed origin, first referred to the dynasty and its retinue, as well as to the territories possessed by the dynasty in opposition to the territories ruled by other dynasties. laroslav’s attempt to nationalize his Rus’, specifically in the nucleus of his empire, i.e., in the lands of Kiev-Chernihiv-Pereiaslav, had, practically speaking, failed. In the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, the name “Rus’” was adopted to refer to other parts of the Riurikids' possessions, the former annexes, or non-political patrimonies, which were now politically “loaded,” especially by Galicia and Volhynia. Now several parallel Rus’es had come into being. The name “Rus’” in relation to Kiev—[Chernihiv]-Pereiaslav —was paradoxically enough gradually falling out of use and was s∞n to be replaced by another designation, Ukraina, with the result that—as one contemporary seventeenth-century author remarked—“na Rusi nie stalo Rusi,” i.e., “no Rus’ had remained in Rus’.”²⁰

However, the name Rus’ never lost its application in the religious identification of all territories that were part of the Kievan metropolitan see. (Attempts to divide this disproportionately vast ecclesiastical province were unsuccessful until the second half of the fifteenth century (1457).) The Slavonic rite in Eastern Europe had become identified with the “Rus’ian religion.” Its corpus of religious and edifying literature (now in hesychastic re-working) was named “Rus’ian script,” and the foreign, artificial Church Slavonic language was regarded as the native Slavo-Rus’ian literary language, and the “indigenous” written vehicle for communication was the Rus’ chancery language (“die West-Russische Kanzleisprache").²¹ Also paradoxically, the universal, pre-secular church in Eastern Europe received a “national” and “secular” label.

The third element unifying the states of Kievan Rus’ was the patrimonial state structure. I agree with Richard Pipes that Max Weber’s concept of patrimonial system applies here, namely, a political system where “the rights of sovereignty and those of ownership blend to the point of becoming indistinguishable, and political power is exercised in the same manner as economic power.”²² The ruler (a person or group) holds a monopoly of political, economic and legal power. There is no political authority other than the ruler, and therefore it is impossible to form or develop an elite.²³ Undoubtedly, this was a new phenomenon introduced by the Rus’ dynasty, which after it became a part of the Orthodox world (since 1054 separated from the “progressive” Catholic world) had no op­tion in choosing a pattern of governing other than to accept the only two political systems known in Eastern Europe, both ultimately of Hellenistic origin—those of the Bosporan Kingdom (later Tmutorokan) and the Byzantine empire.

The pre-Rus’ East European society was, one may speculate, a community of at least two “classes” of free peasants and merchants, and bound slaves (including artisans). The legal documents of the Rus’ imperial period (1036-54), as well as those from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, distinguish clearly between four strata, each having their specific wergeld'7ⁱ

1) muzhi, or the originally foreign upper class, the ruling dynasty and the ruling oligarchy;

2) Iiudi, the pre-Rus’ basic yeomen society, now the middle class of free men;

3) smerdy, freemen of somewhat limited status;

4) cheliad, half-free strata (artisans), freedmen and slaves.

During the thirteenth-sixteenth centuries, society was polarized between free oligarchic clans and bound serfs. The middle strata had two possibilities: either to move upward and become a part of the oligarchy (very few, of course, could attain such a goal) or to fall to the status of a serf. Since the majority of the populace of the former Kievan Rus’ did belong to these middle strata, they could hardly be satisfied with the exist­ing options and looked outside of the Rus’ cultural sphere for guidance and salvation.

The fourth element, a result of the previous three, was the fact that there was no basis for the development of a system of estates in Rus which could produce an elite able and ready to become involved in political and state affairs alongside the ruler. In Western Europe the emergence of an estate society was conditioned by the charters (immunities) granted from the twelfth century on by political rulers to the church following the outcome of the struggle for investiture. Gradually, the secular strata followed the path of ecclesiastics and were able to obtain similar charters for themselves. Their common struggle brought about an “estate solidarity” and an interest in public affairs. In this way an elite emerged that replaced the primitive oligarchic cliques.²⁵ “Estate solidarity” and involvement in public affairs bound the elite to the territory and to its past, which normally leads to the development of the feeling of separateness and uniqueness that is the foundation of national consciousness.²⁶

The Eastern church was totally subordinated to the patrimonial political power. Considering this and the hesychastic view of life which prevailed there in the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, one can readily understand why the Ukrainian church had no interest whatsoever in public affairs until the sixteenth century. Members of the secular strata knew only two virtues: service to the ruler and acquisition of fame in such service. There was no idea of a “national” ruler. Every master who controlled a territory and who was gracious to his servitors was recognized as suzerain.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Ukrainian upper strata were proud that they could serve the Polish kings with the same devotion as their ancestors had served the rulers of Rus’.²⁷

During the period between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries “Kievan Rus’” was not suited to produce a concept of a “political Rus’,” in contrast to the emerging Polish state in the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries, which, on the basis of its Western-type estate state system, created the notion of a “political Pole” irrespective of ethnic or religious origin.

II

In contrast to Kievan Rus’, which—as stated above—was basically patterned after the Khazar and Byzantine system, Galician-Volhynian Rus’ was strongly, if indirectly, exposed to developments in the West. For over two centuries the “West” (i.e., the Catholic West) was represented there by Hungary, for a long time the only kingdom in Central Europe. After 1320 Western influences were represented by the newly emerged Kingdom of Poland.

Because both Hungary and Poland had had no real feudal law, their transition to an estate society had some peculiarities. Military service (ius militari)—basic for land tenure—brought about a very numerous nobility (in Hungary about 5 per cent and in Poland about 10 per cent of the entire population). There were some differences between the two kingdoms: in Hungary of the twelfth-thirteenth centuries (as weft as in Little Poland) the nobility was divided into two strata. The upper stratum, comprised of several hundred magnate families called barones, concentrated all wealth, power and status in their hands. The barons, who were the early members of the king’s council, also ruled the country de jure, often to their own benefit. In contrast to the English Magna Carta, which the English barons extracted from King John, the Hungarian Golden Bull (1222) resulted from pressure by the lower stratum of free men “directed more against the barons than against the King.”²⁸

In Poland the Kosice pact (1374) assured the middle class of legal equality with the magnates; the new estate, now generally known as szlachta, was freed from all taxes and was independent of the royal judiciary; in addition, it received jurisdiction over the peasants on its own territory. It soon took almost total control over the emerging parliamentary institutions, thus preventing the involvement of two other estates—the clergy and the burghers—in the process.²’

After the first local dynasty died out, the Galician boyars often invited members of the Hungarian (Arpad) dynasty to be their princes (Andrew—1189, Koloman—1214-21, Andrew—1227-30, 1232-3). Some­times new Western knightly customs reached Volhynia and Galicia even earlier. In 1149 the “Kievan Chronicle” noted that the Great Prince of Cracow, Boleslaw IV (1146-73), a relative of Iziaslav II (1146-54) of Volhynia and Kiev, had, during a stay in Lutske, knighted sons of many local boyars by giving each the requisite ceremonial blow on the neck.³⁰ According to the ^uGalician-Volhynian Chronicle,” Galician and Volhynian princes fenced in the Western style (123O)³¹ and sometimes held tournaments outside a city “to pass the time of the siege” (1245).³²

The documents of Iurii II (1325-40) show that two classes of nobles existed in his realm: barones sive milites, the higher stratum; and nobiles, the lower stratum.³³ The barones, called boiary in Rus’ian, were of heterogeneous origin: among them were grandsons of priests and sons of smerdy (free peasants).³⁴ As during the Kievan period, these individuals acquired nobility by serving in the retinue (druzhina). On five occasions they committed crimes on a scale previously unknown in princely Rus’: they burned at the stake the common-law wife of Prince Iaroslav Osmomysl in 1173, because she belonged to a newcomer noble clan, and later, in 1188, they poisoned her and laroslav’s son Oleg; in 1211 the boyars hanged two princes of the Chernihiv branch of the dynasty (Roman and Sviatoslav), whom they had previously invited to rule over Halych; the last Galician-Volhynian ruler, Iurii II, was also a victim of poisoning, but this time in Volodymyr-in-Volhynia. In 1214 one of the boyars, Volodislav Kormilchich (son of the major-domo), made himself the ruling prince of Halych (the only case in the history of princely Rus’ where a boyar usurped princely power).

The Galician boyars were divided into several factions, usually in an ad hoc arrangement designed to assure a given clique political power based on the patrimonial “charisma” of a minor or incapable prince. It seemed to be the boyars’ “political” ideal never to develop group solidarity; therefore they were unable to become a legal estate.

Whereas in Galicia the barons were the dominant figures in politics, after 1250 in commercially oriented Volhynia townsmen seemed to play the pre-eminent political role. There were two types of towns in Volhynia-Galicia: the “Oriental,” where local traders resided side by side with the Armenians and Jews (the Sudak/Surozh—Kaffa-Centred Black Sea trade was in their hands), and the newly emerged urban patriciate in the cities under Magdeburg law. The latter had been settled by German colonists around 1250 and had close links to the Hanse cities and the Baltic trade.

The ^uGalician-Volhynian Chronicle” describes Mstislav’s ascendancy to the throne of Volhynia (1288) in the following way:

Upon his arrival [in Volodymyr-in-Volhynia], Mstislav entered the cathedral—the Church of the Blessed Mother—and summoned: [a] his brother’s boyars of [the city of] Volodymyr and [b] the Rus’ian mestich2 (townsmen) and the German mestiche. [Then] he ordered his brother’s docu­ment dealing with the bequeathal of the land and all the cities [including] the capital city of Volodymyr [in Volhynia] to be read before everyone, and they all listened, both the humble and the great ones (ysi ot mala ³ do velikd).ⁱⁱ

Unfortunately, we do not know how these two very different kinds of citizens co-existed side-by-side in everyday life. It seems, however, that the German urban patricians had the greater role: for instance, during the deliberations between the Galician-Volhynian princes and the Lithuanians in 1268, a German urban patrician from Volodymyr-in-Volhynia, Markholt, invited the princes to deliberate at his home and the proposal was gladly accepted.⁵⁶ In other ways the social structure seemed to remain without great change. The smerdy retained their free status as yeomen; the church people remained under the jurisdiction of the clergy; the slaves and indentured labourers continued to exist and serfdom was still unknown.

The superficial co-existence of the Western-type and Eastern-type social structures had a catastrophic end. When the patrimonial dynasty ended, the Galician-Volhynian state fell (1349), even though at the height of its development, and it did so without leaving any trace.

The Galician boyars (and Volhynian townsmen) educated in the system of Orthodox patrimonial culture were not prepared politically to form the legal estates that were given in somewhat limited form to their Polish and Hungarian contemporaries through the Western-based system of feudalism, which trained them in Roman inheritance law and taught them about the separation of clerical and secular fields. Therefore the boyars, attracted to Polish estate privileges, threw over their patrimonial state in return for privileges.³⁷ The Orthodox church leaders, having lost their protectors, emigrated to the North (Smolensk, Moscow) or gave up their estates. The Old Ruthenian (Ukrainian) inheritance did not die as a result of the fall of the Galician-Volhynian state in 1349. In fact, it did some forty years earlier, when it appeared to be at its highest point of development. The fall arose from the failure of the ruling strata (the patrimonial prince, the boyars, church strata, “local” and foreign burghers) to resolve internal conflicts at a time when they faced an immediate confrontation between the old Orthodox patrimonial, apolitical thought and the new Catholic political thought and legal system.

Ill

One myth still dominates Ukrainian and East European historiography. This is the idea of a Mongolian “chasm” in 1223-40, allegedly responsible for the political and cultural decline of Ukraine (and/or Russia) and for the break of tradition between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. According to the nineteenth-century Russian historian Mikhail Pogodin, the Mongol catastrophe caused the migration of the alleged Great Russians of Kiev to the North; their place was then gradually taken up by the ancestors of the Ukrainians, coming from Galicia and Volhynia. Ukrainian historians, from Pogodin’s friend Mykhailo Maksymovych to Mykhailo Hrushevsky, were obliged to invest much of their time and effort in combatting this artificial intellectual construction.³⁸

The major point here, however, is that there was no Mongolian chasm. Of course, the Mongols did invade Eastern Europe and caused destruction on a large scale, although still within a framework typical of any foreign military invasion of that day. But the Mongols did not excel in destroying cultural or religious life. The fact that I am an Orientalist, involved in Turkic and Mongolian studies, does not make me the devil’s advocate on this issue. On the contrary, knowledge of Mongolian history and culture (strangely enough, the Mongols did possess their own culture!) provides a perspective necessary if one is to view their East European activities impartially.

Let me add that the ^uPax Mongolicaⁿ prevailed not only in Eastern Europe, but also in Transcaucasia, Iran, Central Asia and even China. In every case, Mongolian rule fostered a very productive cultural life: for ex­ample, Persian poetry, both lyric and epic, reached its apex at that time, and Chinese literature, scholarship and visual arts bloomed in freedom from its isolation, and was now able to draw on the rich Iranian culture.” Also, it was under Mongolian rule, during the second half of the thirteenth century, that the most advanced work of Ukrainian medieval historical prose was written, namely the famous ^uGalician-Volhynian Chronicle.”

Not the Mongols, but the Lithuanians created a chasm in Ukrainian historical development. This statement will certainly be received by many with amazement and perhaps even outrage. For more than 150 years, Ukrainians have had a concept of a Lithuanian-Rus’ian/Ukrainian period in their history. Nevertheless, the truth is that neither the Mongols nor the Poles are responsible for the disruption of the Ukrainian historical and institutional process. Responsibility lies with the Ukrainians’ alleged alter ego, the Lithuanians. Now let me elaborate on this statement, weighty in its consequences.

In the first decade of the thirteenth century, the territory of the former Kievan Rus’ consisted of three differentiated zones of cultural Rus’ (as de­fined above), each of which was a system of patrimonial hereditary principalities and/or oligarchic cliques. Located in the South, in the interconnected basins of the middle and lower Dnieper, the Dniester and the Prypiat rivers, were three sets of hereditary principalities: Volhynia-Galicia, Turov-Pinsk and Chernihiv-Putyvl-Briansk. Each had the same origin: they were the former patrimony-dynasties, first conceived by Iaroslav (as discussed above). Outside that system there co-existed sev­eral oligarchic realms, among which the Kievan and Podillian were most significant. In the northwest, in the basins of the Upper Dnieper and of the Western Dvina, four political entities had developed: the set of the principalities Polotsk (estranged during the Kievan period) and Vitebsk, the principality of Smolensk and the two oligarchic (“ochlocratic”) “republics” of Novgorod and Pskov.

The principality of Smolensk deserves special attention. Originally it was one of the two lower seats in the system of Iestvichnoe Voskhozhdenie. But with Kiev’s decline and with its own proximity to the Baltic Sea (there was a portage system from the Upper Dnieper to the Western Dvina), Smolensk gradually took over Kiev’s dominant position on the Dnieper trade route, now reduced in importance. Rostislav Mstislavich, a grandson of Monomakh and himself for a time prince of Kiev (d. 1167), had established there a vigorous dynasty of the older Monomakhovichi, which for a time also ruled over Kiev (1180-1234). The other division of the older branch of the Monomakhovichi became rooted in Volhynia; this was the dynasty of Roman and King Danylo. In the thirteenth century Smolensk maintained close ties with the German Hanse merchant republics and therefore experienced a comparatively strong influence from Western Europe.⁴⁰

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries contemporaries viewed Smolensk as the successor to Kiev. When the Lithuanian ruler Vitovt (d. 1430) decided, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, to have the chronicle of the Lithuanian princes written down, he had a copy made of the ^uGalician-Volhynian Chronicle,” then preserved in Pinsk (with the successors of Danylo’s dynasty), but he also commissioned some literati of Smolensk to write down the Lithuanian historical memories. This marked the beginning of the so-called “Lithuanian-Rus’ian chronicles.”⁴¹

The third set of Rus’ principalities was Rostov-Vladimir-Moscow, located in the Volga basin and directly connected with the political centre of the Mongolian empire of the Golden Horde, which it was to succeed at the end of the fifteenth century.⁴² This area exported grain to Great Novgorod, which despite its commercial connections was never able to be Self-Sufficent in its food supply.⁴³ In consequence, Novgorod had to maintain close political ties with the Northeastern Rus’, later Moscow, with the result that it finally became incorporated into the Moscow state, although culturally and economically it belonged to the Northwestern Rus’ and to the Baltic economic and cultural sphere. (Incidentally, the three zones discussed here are identical with the three East Slavic nationalities—Ukrainian, Belorussian and Russian.)

In the first decades of the fourteenth century, the Lithuanian princes and their oligarchic ruling strata decided that Rus’ should become their hunting ground. The classic formulation of this expansionist programme was Olgerd’s (d. 1377), statement (in 1358): “Omnis Russia ad Letwinos deberet Simpliciter pertinere,” i.e., “All of Rus’ simply must belong to the Lithuanians.”⁴⁴ The fact that the still-pagan Lithuanians did not form their own higher “national” culture, but chose to create along the fringes of the Rus’ian lands (Novgorod of Lithuania, Grodno) a Lithuanian variant of the Rus’ culture which used both Rus’ languages, the chancery and the ecclesiastical (as did the Romance Moldavians after 1340 in the basins of the Lower Dniester and Pruth), made their advance an easy task. Intermarriage with members of the Rus’ian dynasties also contributed positively to the realization of the Lithuanian task.

Lulling the local populace with the slogan “we shall keep the tradition and not introduce novelties,”⁴⁵ the Lithuanians used every opportunity to fill vacant thrones and leadership positions in the oligarchic realms with members of their own dynasty. As a result, by the middle of the fourteenth century, all Ukrainian territories (with the exception of Galicia) had Lithuanian rulers. True, most of the new rulers accepted Orthodox Christianity or became culturally Rus’ian. The responsible Lithuanian policy-makers were, however, displeased with the prospect of de-nationalization. All they had wanted was to possess the Rus’ territories and the labour of their inhabitants. Realizing that they were numerically inferior to the masses of Rus’ians, the Lithuanians decided to exchange Orthodoxy for Catholicism thus separating themselves from the Rus’, and to enter into a political union with Poland. Both states had a common foe—the Teutonic Order.⁴*

It was Prince Jagiello, who in 1385-6 had the Lithuanians baptized in the Catholic rite, and Vitovt, his ñî-ruler, who began the process of destroying the Ukrainian local political structures. The principalities of Kiev, Lutske (Volhynia) and Podillia were liquidated as political bodies and absorbed into the now centralized Lithuanian system. Throughout their lives Jagiello and Vitovt competed for power in Lithuania; but on their general policy of destroying the vestiges of Rus’ian/Ukrainian separatism and humiliating Orthodoxy, they were in full agreement. (It was again Jagiello, who, as king of Poland, finally introduced the Polish administrative system into Galicia and liquidated the Orthodox hierarchy there.)

Internal difficulties induced the Lithuanian government to restore the Kievan and other Rus’ principalities for a time in the 1440s. But thirty years later, when the situation stabilized, the long-range policy had its final execution: in 1470, despite the protest of the local population, the Kievan prince (a member of the Lithuanian dynasty) had to make way for a Lithuanian voevoda. The same situation took place in the other princely seats.

We can now see clearly that the Lithuanians and not the Mongols are to blame for the interruption of the institutional and historical tradition in Ukraine. In such circumstances, it is small wonder that the Ukrainians (especially the middle nobility) pleaded for secession from the Lithuanian grand duchy and for incorporation into the Polish kingdom-the Lublin Union of 1569.

There are three periods in the economic (and socio-economic) history of Old Lithuania: the first lasted until the middle of the fourteenth century, i.e., until the Lithuanians obtained the Rus’ territories; the second lasted until the unions with Poland (end of the fourteenth century to the begin­ning of the fifteenth century); the third followed thereafter.⁴⁷

One can say that Lithuania owes its existence as a nation to the fact that its forests and meadows were rich in such products as hides, timber, w∞d ashes, wax and honey, which were all very desirable to the merchants of the German city of Riga, built (in 1201) at the mouth of the river Dvina. Riga was a “colony” (Tochtergrtindung) of Liibeck, later centre of the Hanse. Hanse merchants soon established themselves in the only major Lithuanian town, Kaunas. Throughout the thirteenth century and up to the middle of the fourteenth century, the merchants of Riga, its archbishop, and the Franciscans and Dominicans, did their best to tutor the inexperienced, newly emerged political entity and to protect it against the expansionist attempts of the Teutonic Order. The social structure of Lithuania at that time consisted almost entirely of free yeomen and slaves (the latter were former prisoners of war). The greater part of the cultivated land was divided into independent peasant farms, cleared by very primitive burning techniques.

After coming into contact with the more highly organized Rus’ system of ownership, the grand prince claimed possession of all uncultivated and uninhabited lands, and also those which were economically very productive, regardless of ownership. Soon the prince started to grant lands to his helpers—to village leaders (seniores, potentiores) and to the ever-growing number of warriors (homines militares). The first endowment of land occurred in 1387 when the Latin bishopric of Vilnius was erected. In the course of the fourteenth century, many great estates were granted to the numerous members of the dynasty and to other important people. In this way a privileged class of the rich nobility (barones, magnates, in Slavic, pany) was legally recognized. The recipients of smaller estates received the status of gentry (equal to the Polish szlachta) in 1386; they possessed manors comprising no more than thirty-two undivided farms. Many of the gentry, having no tenants, had to cultivate the soil themselves.

In 1434 the grand prince exempted his subjects from payments in kind directly for his own benefit, and in 1447 he resigned his claim to permanent money payments and labour from private-estate peasants. The Lithuanian boyars (barones, milites) were legally recognized as having equal rights with the Polish szlachta∖ they were now freed from all taxes, were independent of the royal judiciary and, in addition, had jurisdiction over peasants on their own territory. But there was a basic difference be­tween the Lithuanian and Polish systems: whereas in Lithuania the barones were able to legally establish themselves as a dominant class, there was legally only one gentry class in Poland.

The fifteenth century witnessed a new development in Lithuania which followed a Polish example: a considerable number of peasants became liable to corvee on the lord’s demesne. This development was tantamount to the so-called European second serfdom. The estates were organized in a more productive way patterned on the German Vorwerk (> folvarok}. The voloka (about twenty-one hectares) was introduced as a unit of measurement. The third Lithuanian Statute (1588) abolished slavery as an institution, since the voloki charter (1557) had already established serfdom as a legal institution. The Polish influence became decisive after the fall of Novgorod and the closing of the Hanseatic Kontore (trading post) there in 1494. The Lithuanian economy had at that time to make a shift from the north to the south and southwest.

Originally (until 1434), only Catholic Lithuanians obtained szlachta privileges. Orthodox Ukrainians under the Lithuanian regime had two op­tions: to move upward by becoming Catholics and members of the class of barones, which was possible only in exceptional cases; or to be downgraded to the position of serfs, certainly an unattractive choice.

The prospect of receiving Polish political rights on their own was tempting to the Ukrainian middle nobility of the Lithuanian grand duchy. Therefore, they opted for the Lublin Union, especially since it did not oblige them to change their religion in order to become a member of the szlachta estate. Soon, as we know, Polish religious tolerance ended and the Catholic Counter Reformation forced many a “political Pole” to renounce Orthodoxy in order to make a career in the commonwealth. But this outcome does not diminish the significance of the new development: for the first time, the Ukrainian territory had produced a political elite, conscious both of its political rights, privileges and duties, and of its estate solidarity rooted in the territorial principle. This concept was entirely secular; not religion or language, but estate solidarity was the decisive factor for this new political body. In this fashion, a Rus’ patria came into being, a political novum in the newly created palatinates of Kiev, Volhynia, Bratslav and (later) Chernihiv, that is, in practically all of Ukraine except Galicia. The formation of a new type of elite⁴’ had a great attraction for other strata of the Ukrainian population.

By the end of the sixteenth century, a mirror image of the Ukrainian territorial szlachta had emerged, the “anti-szlachta," in the form of the Ukrainian “registered” Cossacks. Their merger would later lead this newly created elite to attempt actively the restoration of the Rus’ historical past through the creation (in Hadiach in 1658) of the Grand Duchy of Rus’ as an equal political partner of the Kingdom of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

IV

The second half of the fifteenth century had become critical for Kiev and Rus’ proper. As already stressed, in 1470 the Kievan great principality was once and for all abolished by the Lithuanians, so that the term “Rus’” lost its political meaning in Kiev. A decade earlier, in 1458, occurred the definite partition of the former Kievan Orthodox metropolitanate. The two new successors were Moscow and Vilnius. Rus’ proper now became a religious tabula rasa, without even a bishop’s see.

The rivalry between Lithuania and Muscovy over Great Novgorod and Pskov and Lithuanian military weakness led to a coalition between Muscovy and the Crimean Khanate (which had come into being only three decades earlier as a Lithuanian creation). Thus in the spring of 1482, inspired by promises of gifts from Ivan III of Muscovy, the Crimean Khan Mengli Girey (1465-1515) captured and decisively destroyed Kiev, plundered the Caves Monastery and the cathedral of St. Sophia, and triumphantly sent Ivan III a golden chalice robbed from the latter. Kiev, the former centre of the Rus’ empire and of East European Christianity, gradually turned into a ghost town.

By the end of the century, one part of the Kievan principality proper became known as Ukraine, or the frontier of the civilized world, and the other received the name of wilderness, called in Polish ^udzikie pole." This turbulent frontier attracted adventurous frontiersmen, who dared to occupy the steppes in spite of the danger of the Tatar sword, and to fight for the sake of freedom without a landlord.

Every spring emigrants from Kievan Polissia, northern Volhynia and even from Galicia (very often peasants or poverty-ridden townsmen) moved to unoccupied country where they lived by fishing, hunting and bee keeping. As they increased in number, they began to organize themselves into armed bands and in the early spring went on expeditions (ukhody) into the steppes, staying there until early winter and coming back to their permanent residences with great supplies of hides, cattle, fish and honey. The more daring did not return for the winter at all, but remained in the steppes. Constantly on guard against Tatar attacks, these Ukrainian pioneers attacked the Tatars whenever they felt strong enough. In time they turned into freebooters of the Turkic qazaq type; they also became mercenaries hired by the governors of the Lithuanian frontier towns both as guards and for use in expeditions against Tatar forts.

Many members of the settled new Polish-Ukrainian nobility joined the “romantic” Cossack way of life. Their physical presence, intellectual influence and the very existence of the szlachta on the Ukrainian territories gave the Cossacks a model for their aspirations. One of them, Prince Dmytro Vyshnevetsky, was to play the decisive role in the organization of the Cossacks as a military force. About 1550 he built a strong permanent fortress (sich) on the Dnieper rapids; this territory was at that time the safest location for the Cossacks, since on the one hand, it was out of reach of the officials of far-off Lithuania or Poland and on the other, dense forest, whirlpools and water rapids prevented heavy Ottoman galleys from coming up the river. Shortly, the Cossacks from this fortress below the Dnieper rapids (“the Zaporogians”) established themselves as a kind of naval academy and also a military order of knightly condottieri (rytsari). They developed their characteristic ideology of a class equal to the Polish szlachta with claims of equal rights and privileges in exchange for their military service. The years 1600-20 marked the heroic era when the Cossacks in their light boats called “seagulls” (chalky) cruised unhampered on the Black Sea, inflicting defeats upon the Crimea and Ottoman porte at a time when all Europe was trembling in fear of the Turks.

The first attempt of the Polish government to control the rising Zaporogian Cossack power was made soon after the Poles acquired Ukraine from Lithuania (1569). In 1570 a Cossack detachment of three hundred men was enrolled in a register. These Cossacks were excluded from the jurisdiction of the local administration and served directly under the Polish crown hetman or military commander-in-chief. In 1578 Stephen Bathory, preparing for war with Muscovy, compiled a new register of five hundred Cossacks with a Polish noble as their elder. The centre (and the hospital) of the registered Cossacks was the town of Trakhtemyriv to the south of Pereiaslav. The Polish government made similar attempts later (a register was compiled in 1583, 1588, 1597 and subsequently) and increased the number of registered Cossacks initially to six hundred, and eventually to over three thousand.

But the Polish government was not in a position to put all Ukrainian Cossacks under its control. Their actual number was much greater than that determined by the register. (Internally, the introduction of registers caused the differentiation of the Cossacks and the growth of class consciousness among the registered Cossacks, distinct from the Cossacks not admitted to the register, the actual Zaporogian Cossacks.) In dealing with the Cossacks the Polish government met a contradiction which it could not resolve. The Cossacks were needed dearly to combat the many Tatar attacks and to implement each variant of the anti-Ottoman and/or anti-Muscovite policies of the Polish kings, since they were the only profes­sional military force available and equipped for such undertakings. However, once the conflict was over, it was inconvenient for the Polish government to have Cossacks in large numbers within their frontiers. First, the Polish king had neither the authority nor the strength to keep the Cossacks under control and to prevent them from making sea expeditions that led to threats of war from the Ottoman porte. Second, the Polish magnates, and especially the szlachta, feared the Cossacks’ demands for special privileges, since their fulfillment would make the Cossacks their rivals for power in Ukraine, viewed by the szlachta as its personal hunting preserve and private area for exploitation.

Although the majority of the Ukrainian Cossacks were probably of local ethnic Ukrainian origin, there was no racial or religious discrimination toward those who wished to join their bands. The sources show clearly that among the Ukrainian Cossacks were not only ethnic Poles and West Europeans but also Turks, Tatars, Armenians, Jews and others. Originally, the Ukrainian Cossacks had only their corporative interests in mind; national, ethnic or religious matters were completely irrelevant to them. They also, until 1615 (as will be shown later), had no knowledge or interest in the historical and cultural traditions of Kievan Rus’.

V

But what of the members of the former Rus’ dynasty, living in the Lithuanian (and later Polish-Lithuanian) state? Of the three basic centres of Rus’ proper, Kiev and Pereiaslav never managed to create a dynasty of their own, primarily because of the role both cities played as decisive steps in the mobile system of Iestvichnoe Voskhozhdenie. Only Chernihiv possessed a dynasty of its own; but its main lines were destroyed by the conquering Lithuanians: the Chernihiv line in 1372 and the Putyvl line (at that time ruling also in Kiev) a decade earlier in 1363. The very numerous and multi-branched Novhorod-Siversk line of the old Chernihiv dynasty, the Princes Karachevsky, Novosilsky, Obolensky, Tarussky, Volkonsky and others had opted by 1500—as did many members of the Lithuanian dynasty—for allegiance to the Orthodox Riurikids of Moscow, for reasons described so convincingly by Oswald P. Backus in his study of the Motives of West Russian Nobles in Deserting Lithuania for Moscow, 1377- 1514.⁴⁹ The only princely dynasty of landowners in Rus’ proper to survive Li­thuanian rule were the Princes Rozhynovsky-Polovtsi (with their domains in the basins of the Kamianka, Rostovets and Skvyra rivers to the south of Kiev) who claimed that their ancestor was the Kuman-Polovtsian ruler Tugor-ta[r]kan (d. 1096), the father-in-law of the Kievan king, Sviatopolk II (1093-1113); their residence was in Velykopolovetske near Skvyra.⁵⁰ In Volhynia several princely families claimed as their origin the Turovo-Pinsk branch of the Riurikids, the ancestor of which was the above-mentioned Sviatopolk II. They were the Dolsky, Horodelsky, Nesvytsky, Sokolsky and Sviatopolk-Chetvertynsky families. Roman Mstislavich’s (d. 1205) branch of the Rus’ dynasty, ruling a century and a half in the kingdom of Galicia and the great principality of Volhynia (1199-1349) was never very numerous. No single member of it survived in Galicia proper; the last ruling member of the dynasty, Iurii prince of Kholm (Chelm), died one year after his son passed away (in 1377), thus leaving his land to the Polish dynasty. Only one non-ruling side-branch survived in Volhynia: the Princes Ostrozhsky, the magnates who in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries owned about one third of Volhynia.

In the patrimonial Rus’ system (which later was also taken over by the Lithuanians) the actual ruler held a monopoly on political, legal and economic power, thus the non-ruling members of the dynasty never developed civic instinct and interest in political life. They were either military commanders loyally serving their masters, or landowners concentrating their attention on financial and family affairs. After 1470 they all recognized as their only master the Lithuanian grand prince residing in Vilnius (or Cracow, if he were also king of Poland).

VI

The second half of the sixteenth century brought a twofold transformation of the highest social stratum of Rus’ origin in the great principality of Lithuania. By 1550 the majority of these individuals had joined the Reformation, but since they were Orthodox, not Catholic, they did not have the basis and intellectual strength to create their own Rus’ version of the Reformation. Therefore the stratum became a component of the Polish reformational movement and by 1600 was wholly absorbed by the Jesuit Counter Reformation, as was the Reformation in Poland proper. In this way, members of the Rus’ Orthodox princely families and the highest stratum of formerly Orthodox Rus’ became religiously and culturally integrated into the Catholic and Polish body politic.⁵¹

But before that class disappeared from Rus’, it provided the first impetus for its own rebirth. In the 1570s Prince Vasyl Konstiantyn Ostrozhsky (1527-1608) followed the example of his Lithuanian colleagues who had fostered Protestant schools and founded at his residence at Ostrih in Volhynia the first Ukrainian intellectual centre since the fall of Kiev.⁵² The educational complex consisted of a school of higher learning (or academy), a printing shop and an assembly of secular and religious

textologists. In keeping with the spirit of the epoch, they set as their main task the creation of a Church Slavonic text of the entire Bible.⁵³ The majority of the scholars invited to Ostrih were members of the middle or petty Orthodox nobility or townsmen. While searching in the forgotten book repositories, they, among others, rediscovered the texts of the Old Rus’ Kievan and Galician-Volhynian chronicles (of the type of the Hypatian Collection) and put them in circulation.

By the time of Danylo Romanovych’s coronation (1253), a concept of Halych as the second Kiev, and Galicia as Rus’ par excellence had developed in Galicia (but not in Volhynia).⁵⁴ The idea was so strong that the Poles continued to call Galicia Rus’, even after they had occupied it and began to govern. In the official terminology the land was referred to as “the palatinate of Rus’.” This fact deserves special attention, for of all Rus’-Ukrainian territories included in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, only Galicia, a land which during the epoch of Kievan Rus’ (tenth to thirteenth centuries) was never understood to be Rus’, became associated with its name and, indeed, was considered to constitute Rus’. What social force lay behind this phenomenon?

It has already been mentioned that during the period 1387 to 1434, the Galician barones became, politically, Poles. This they did in order to keep their dominant position in the realm. But the local middle and petty nobility had no reason to give up their religion and their allegiance to Rus’, especially since only they were eligible for higher offices in the Orthodox hierarchy. Several bishoprics and monasteries existed, some with considerable lands. So this lower and middle Rus’ian nobility was in a po­sition to defend its rights successfully.

Like their Polish colleagues and competitors, the Rus’ian nobles possessed coats of arms, which at that time was the only unquestionable proof of their aristocratic origin. Heraldry, which rapidly took root throughout Western Christendom between the second and third Crusades (1147-92), became an essential part of the feudal system there during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries which now gave rise to a closed and hereditary society.⁵⁵ Approximately one hundred Galician Orthodox families, mostly from the Sambir and Zhydachiv districts, as well as from Kholm, managed, under circumstances still not entirely clear, to obtain entry into the “Polish genealogical tribe” and to bear their own heraldic symbols.⁵⁶ Most possessed either the Sas or the Korchak coat of arms, both of which were held by old genealogical tradition to be of Hungarian origin.⁵⁷ But some were part of the “genealogical tribe” of the Pobbg and others of the Abdank. Being a component part of the new social system, capable of preserving its peculiarities, the class of Rus’ middle and petty nobles used every opportunity and all channels of influence to guard the Kievan Rus’ historical traditions, once they had rediscovered and appropriated them at the end of the sixteenth century. The emergence of this small but very tightly-knit stratum had tremendous importance for the moulding of Rus’ sentiments which took place in the seventeenth century, and thus for the formation of the modern Ukrainian nation.

Another stratum existed which cannot always be separated from the heraldic nobility. It comprised the Orthodox townsmen of the cities under Germanic law in Galicia (Rus’) and Volhynia. Because they were not Catholics, on their own territory they were treated as second-class citizens, forced to fight for the very right to exist. The climate was conducive to organized collaboration between them and the Rus’ lower and middle nobility. This gave rise to the emergence of a sense of allegiance and the institution of Rus’ fraternal organizations (bratstva) during the sixteenth century.⁵’ Their activities included the publication of books and maintenance of schools. Prince Vasyl Ostrozhsky lost interest in the Ostrih Academy and that institution lost its protector, but cultural establishments of the Lviv Stavropigian Brotherhood emerged to take its place.

The first quarter of the seventeenth century witnessed the emergence of a Ukrainian historical consciousness, based on the re-adaptation of the accomplishments of the Orthodox Kievan Rus’. “Nationalized” Rus’ Galicians, such as Pletenetsky, Kopystensky, Boretsky, Zyzanii, Berynda, Kalnofoisky and others, went to Kiev—as did the Polish szlachta after 1569—and took the leadership of intellectual affairs into their own hands. In a very short period they transformed Kiev from a forgotten frontier town into a leading cultural centre of Eastern Europe. The printing house, the school and the brotherhood became the cornerstones for a new educational system. It was symbolic that in 1615, when the first Kievan brotherhood was established, the hetman of the Zaporogian Cossacks together with his entire army declared themselves its members and protectors. Hetman at the time was Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny (d. 1622), who epitomized the new development. He himself was a Galician of heraldic petty nobility (with the Pobbg coat of arms) who had studied at the Ostrih Academy and had connections with the Lviv brotherhood.⁵’

After the Union of Brest, the Polish government outlawed the Orthodox church. By 1620 not a single Orthodox bishop remained. The reaction was an unusual solidarity of all Ukrainian social and political groups (led by the Galicians). The Kievan burghers invited Theophanes, patriarch of Jerusalem, to visit Ukraine; the Zaporogian host, headed by the Galician nobleman Sahaidachny, and only recently displaying an interest in religious matters, provided security for the visit. The scion of the Riurikid dynasty, Prince Stepan Sviatopolk-Chetvertynsky, fulfilled the role of the host at his residence in Zhyvotiv (in the Bratslav palatinate) and the Galician-born Rus’ literati regarded the visit as a suitable occasion to present the prince with a copy of the Kiev-Galician-Volhynian chronicle about Old Rus’.⁶⁰

The patrimonial system of Kievan Rus’ could not have given rise to a concept of legal estates. The Lithuanians cut short the development of the institutional and historical traditions on the territory that had been Kievan Rus’ proper. These two factors, not the so-called Mongolian chasm, are responsible for the interruption of the Ukrainian historical process.

The re-establishment of the Old Rus’ traditions in Ukraine was mainly the work of the Galician petty Orthodox (heraldic) nobility and the second-class citizens of the Galician towns under Magdeburg law. They were attempting to retain the former loyalty of the descendants of the Old Rus’ princely elite to the Rus’ traditions. But the inspiration for their outlook and activity came ultimately from Western humanism, and especially its Reformation and Counter Reformation.

In their struggle for the Rus’ faith the Orthodox Rus’ nobility of Galicia succeeded in co-opting the new military power in Eastern Europe, the Zaporogian Cossacks. The nobles even secured for themselves the commanding posts in the host. But for this they had to pay a very high price: focus soon shifted from the new Western concept of the Rus’ body politic to the “Oriental” mercenary Cossack idea of Ukraine as a frontierland. The clock was set back.

Notes

1. At that time, the experience and means (structure) to perpetuate an empire after the death of its founder had not yet been developed. See, for example, the fate of Charlemagne’s empire. Concerning the term “patrimonial,” see Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organizations, trans, and ed. T. Parsons (New York, 1964), 346-51.

2. See the entry 6545/1037 in the Povest vremennykh let, ed. D. S. Likhachev, (Moscow-Leningrad, 1956), 1: 102-3. Here Iaroslav clearly had followed the pattern established by the Bulgarian Tsar Simeon (873-927). On the other hand, Volodymyr of Kiev, like the Bulgarian Boris I (852-89) before him, seems to have been baptized in the Greek (and not the Slavonic!) rite.

3. On the foreign character (from the point of view of the Eastern Slavs) of the Church Slavonic language, see the thought expressed by the late A. V. Isatschenko: Mythen und Tatsachen éÜåã die Entstehung der russischen Literatursprache (Sitzungsberichte der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 298) (Vienna, 1975), 5. See also H. G. Lunt, “On the Language of Old Rus: Some Questions and Suggestions,” Russian Linguistics 2 (1975): 269-81.

4. See Slovo î zakone ³ Magodati by Ilarion (about 1050): “Pokhvalim zhe ³ my, po silδ nashei, malymi pokhvalami—velikaa ³ divnaa Sfitvorshago nashego uchitelia ³ nastavnika, velikago kagana nashea zemlia, Vladimera, vnuka starago Igoria, syna zhe slavnago Sviatoslava.... ” L. Miiller₁ ed., Das Metropoliten Ilarion Lobrede auf Vladimir den Heiligen und Glaubensbekenntnis (Wiesbaden, 1962), 100.

5. The term appears first in the Nikon Chronicle in the entry 6704/1196. The senior of the Chernihiv branch, Iaroslav Vsevolodovich, refused to give up his (and his branch’s) rights to Kiev, arguing as follows: “Ne budi mnδ Otluchitisia velikogo stola ³ glavy ³ slavy vsea Rusi Kieva, no iakozhe ³ ot pradδd nashikh Iestvitseiu kozhdo Voskhozhashe na velikoe kniazhenie Kievskoe, sitse zhe ³ nam ³ vam, Vozliublennaia ³ dragaia bratia, Iestvichnym Voskhozhdeniem komu ashche Gospod¹ Bog dast’ vzyti na velikoe kniazhenie velikago Kieva, sego bratie ne razariaite, ne presetsaite, da ne Bozhii gnδv na sebe privletsete, khotiashche ediny vo vsei Rusi gospodstvovati.” Polnoe sobranie russkikh Ietopisei [PSRL] 10 (SPb., 1885; repr. Moscow, 1965), 26.

6. Pravda russkaia, 2: Kommentarii, ed. B. D. Grekov (Moscow-Leningrad, 1947), 665-7: “A dvor bez dela oten’ vsiak men’shemu synovi.”

7. As to the way the steppe-succession system operated, see my description of the situation in the Hunnic Hsiung-nu realm in: “Die 24 Ta-ch¹δn. Studie zur Geschichte des Verwaltungsaufbaus der Hsiung-nu Reiche,” Oriens Extremus, no. 1 (Hamburg, 1954): 178-202.

8. On the concept of “Rus’skaia zemlia,” see A. N. Nasonov, “Russkaia zemlia” ³ Obrazovanie territorii drevnerusskogo gosudarstva (Moscow, 1951).

9. Viacheslav (b. 1034) in 1057, and his immediate senior Igor, in 1060.

10. On Manzikert, see C. Cahen, “La Campagne de Mantzikert d’apres les sources musulmanes,” Byzantion 9 (1934): 613-42; C. Cahen, “La premiere penetration turque en Asie Mineure (seconde moitie du XIe siecle),” Byzantion 18 (1948): 5-67. On Bari, see I. Gay, LTtalie meridionale et Tempire byzantin depuis Tavenement Ie Basile Ier jusqu^,h la prise de Bari par les Normands, 867-1071 (Paris, 1904).

11. See R. S. Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950-1350 (Cambridge, 1976), and W. Heyd, Histoire du commerce du Levant au Moyen-Age, ed. F. Raynaud, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1885-6; repr. Amsterdam, 1967).

12. F. Rδrig, Wirtschaftskrafte im Mittelalter. Abhandlungen zur Stadt- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Weimar, 1959); Fritz Rδrig, Die europ'aische Stadt und die Kultur des Biirgertums im Mittelalter, 4th ed. (Gδttingen, 1964).

13. See A. P. Kazhdan, "Vizantiiskii podatnoi sborshchik na beregakh Kimmeriiskogo Bospora v kontse XII v.,” Problemy obshches tvenno-politicheskoi istorii Rossii ³ Slavianskikh stran (Festschrift M. N. Tikhomirov) (Moscow, 1963), 93-101; G. G. Litavrin and A. P. Kazhdan, ^wEkonomicheskie ³ politicheskie Otnosheniia Drevnei Rusi ³ Vizantii v XI - pervoi polovine XIII v.,” Proceedings of the 13th International Congress of Byzantine Studies (Oxford, 1967), 69-81.

14. See V. L. Yanin, Novgorodskie posadniki (Moscow, 1962), 94-106.

15. L. V. Alekseev, Polotskaia zemlia (Moscow, 1966), 287-8; N. de Baumgarten, ^wPolotzk et la Lithuanie,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 2, 1-2 (Rome, 1936): 223-53.

16. See Marc Bloch, “Transformation of the Nobility into a Legal Class,” Feudal Society, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1964), 2: 320-31; E. Lederer, ^wLa struc­ture de la societe hongroise du debut du moyen-age,” Etudes historiques publiees par la Commission nationale des historiens hongrois 1 (Budapest, 1960), 195-218; Z. Wojciechowski, ^wLa condition des nobles et Ie probleme de la feodalite en Pologne au Moyen-Age,” Revue historique du droit franςais et Gtranger 15-16 (Paris, 1936-7). See also O. Ranum, ed., National Consciousness, History, and Political Culture in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore, 1975), and Walter Ullmann, A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages (Hammondsworth, 1965).

17. J. Meyendorff, Introduction H TGtude de GrGgoire Palamas (Paris, 1950); T. A. Hart, ^wNicephorus Gregoras: Historian of the Hesychast Controversy,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 2 (London, 1951): 169-80.

18. See M. Hrushevsky, Istoriia Ukrainskoi Hteratury, 5 volumes (Kiev-Lviv, 1923-7), 5, part 1: 3-25.

19. Cf. M. Hrushevsky, Istoriia Ukrainy-Rusy (Lviv-Kiev, 1907), 6: 348.

20. See ^wSupplikatia do przeoswieconego ³ jasnie wielmo⅛nego przezacnej korony polskiej ³ w.x. Iitewskiego obojego stanu duchownego ³ swieckiego senatu, w roku tym terazniejszym 1623 do Warszawy na sejm wolny przybylego,” in W. Lipihski [V. Lypynsky] ed., Z dziejbw Ukrainy (Kiev, 1912), 99-111.

21. See C. S. Stang, Die Westrussische Kanzleisprache des Grossfurstentums Litauen (Oslo, 1935).

22. Richard E. Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York, 1974), 22-3.

23. On Hellenistic patrimonialism, see J. Kaerst, Geschichte des Hellenismus, 2d ed. (Leipzig, 1926), 2: 335.

24. See, e.g., George Vernadsky, Kievan Russia, 7th printing (New Haven, 1973), 130-72.

25. See D. W. Hanson, From Kingdom to Commonwealth: the Development of Civic Consciousness in English Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1970); Hans Roos, ^wStandewesen und parlamentarische Verfassung in Polen (1505-1772),” in Standische Vertretungen in Europa im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, ed. D. Gerhard (Gottingen, 1969), 368-97.

26. See J. Tazbir, Rzeczpospolita ³ Swiat. Studia z dziejbw kultury XVH wieku (Wroclaw, 1971).

27. See note 20.

28. D. Sinor, History of Hungary (London, 1959), 62.

29. J. Maciszewski, Szlachta polska ³ jej pahstwo (Warsaw, 1960).

30. PSRL, ed. A. A. Shakhmatov, 2d ed. (St. Petersburg, 1908), 2: col. 386: “I tu [in Lutske] pasashe Boleslav syny boiarsky mechem mnogy.”

31. PSRL, 2d ed., 2: col. 762: “I Obnazhivshu mech’ svoi igraia na slugu koroleva, inomu pokhvativshi shchit igraiushchi.”

32. PSRL, 2d ed., 2: col. 801: [Rostislav Mikhailovich] “gordiashchu zhe sia emu ³ s^utvori igru pred gradom.” The Hungarian troops which in 1150 came to the support of Iziaslav Mstislavich were invited to perform their knightly tournaments in Kiev: “I tu obδdav s nimi [Iziaslav with the Hungarians] na velitsem dvorδ na Iaroslavli ³ prebysha u velitsδ vesel’i; togda zhe Ugre na farekh ³ na skokokh igrakhut’ na Iaroslavli dvorδ mnogoe mnozhestvo. Kyiane zhe diviakhutsia Ugrom mnozhestvu ³ kmet’stva ikh ³ komonem ikh.” {Ibid., col. 416).

33. See the collection edited by E. Kunik, Boleslav Iurii II (St. Petersburg, 1907), 153-5 (the charters from 1334 and 1335).

34. See PSRL, 2d ed., 2: cols. 789-90 (s.a. 1240): ^uDobroslav zhe Vokniazhilsia bδ ³ Sud’ich’ popov vnuk ³ grabiashe vsiu zemliu.... Lazor' Domazhirets' ³ Ivor Molibozhich' dva bezakon’nika ot plemeni smerd’ia.”

35. Ibid., col. 905.

36. Ibid., col. 868.

37. Cf. Hrushevsky, Istoriia Ukrainy-Rusy, 2d ed. (Kiev-Lviv, 1907), 4: 221-2; (Lviv, 1905), 5: 82-9.

38. On the Pogodin hypothesis and its history, see Hrushevsky Istoriia Ukrainy-Rusy, 3d ed. (Kiev, 1913), 1: 551-6; M. I. Marchenko, Ukrainska istoriohrafiia (Kiev, 1959), [1]: 203-14.

39. One can add that in China during the Mongolian rule and under its influence there appeared the popular novel (unknown in China previously) and popular theatre, alongside new developments in the exact sciences, especially in mathematics and astronomy. Last but not least, it was as a re­sult of the impact of the Mongolian universal rule that the Jewish physician and politician Rashid ad-Din (d. 1318) created at the court of the Iranian Mongols the first truly universal history, Jdmi at-tawankh, in which he used, side by side, Persian, Latin, Frankish, Turkic, Chinese, Indian and other original sources.

See L. Kwanten, “Cultural Life under the Mongols,” in A History of Central Asia, 500-1500 (Philadelphia, 1979), 221-4; Ch’en Yiian, Westerners and Central Asians in China under the Mongols, trans. Ch’ien Hsing-hai and L. Carrington Goodrich (Los Angeles, 1966). See also O. Franke, Geschichte des Chinesisehen Reiches (Berlin, 1948), 4: 579-95; W. Eberhard, Chinas Geschichte (Bern, 1948), 271-4; C. T. Hsia, The Classical Chinese Novel, a Critical Introduction (New York, 1968), 34-114; U. Librecht, Chinese Mathematics in the Thirteenth Century: The Shushu chiu-chang of Ch’in Chiushao (Cambridge, Mass., 1973); E. G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia, 3: The Tartar Dominion (1265-1502) (Cambridge, 1920; repr. 1951); “Rashid ad-Din,” in Ch. A. Stori, Persidskaia Literatura. Bio-bibliograficheskii obzor, trans. Iu. E. Bregel (Moscow, 1972), 1: 301-20, and 3: 1,394-5; K. Jahn, Wissenschaftliche Kontakte zwischen Iran und China in der Mongolenzeit, Abhandlungen der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 108, no. 8 (Vienna, 1971).

40. See T. A. Sumnikova and V. V. Lopatin, Smolenskie gramoty XIII-XIV vekov, ed. R. I. Avanesov (Moscow, 1963).

41. M. Hrushevsky, Istoriia ukrainskoi Iiteratury, 5, part 1: 162-73.

42. Of the enormous specialized literature, one can mention for the purpose of this paper the following items: A. N. Nasonov, Mongoly ³ Rus’ (Istoriia tatarskoi politiki na Rusi) (Moscow-Leningrad, 1940); A. E. Presniakov, Obrazovanie Velikorusskogo gosudarstva. Ocherki po istorii XIII-XV Stoletii (Petrograd, 1918); L. V. Cherepnin, Obrazovanie russkogo tsentralizovannogo gosudarstva v XIV-XV vekakh (Moscow, 1960).

43. Especially when the harvest was poor: see N. L. Podvigina, Ocherki sotsialno-ekonomicheskoi ³ politicheskoi istorii Novgoroda Velikogo v XII-XIII w. (Moscow, 1976), 62; L. V. Danilova, Ocherki po istorii Zemlevladeniia ³ khoziaistva v Novgorodskoi zemle v XIV-XV vv. (Moscow, 1955), 22-3; A. P. Pronshtein, Velikii Novgorod v XVI veke (Kharkiv, 1957), 114-15.

44. See Scriptores Rerum Prussicarum, ed. F. Hirsch et al. (Leipzig, 1863), 2: 80.

45. See M. Hrushevsky, Istoriia Ukrainy-Rusy, 2d ed. (Kiev-Lviv, 1907), 4: 99.

46. On the early history of Lithuania, see H. Lowmianski, Studia nad poczftkami Spoleczehstwa ³ paħstwa Iitewskiego, 2 vols. (Vilnius, 1930-2); J. Ochmanski, “Uwagi î Iitewskim pahstwie Wczesnofeudalnym,” Roczniki Historyczne 27 (1961): 143-60; J. Ochmanski, Historia Litwy (Wrociaw-Warsaw-Cracow, 1964), and V. T. Pashuto, Obrazovanie Iitovskogo gosudarstva (Moscow, 1959).

47. On Lithuanian socio-economic history, see K. Avizonis, Die Entstehung und Entwicklung des Iitauischen Adels bis zur litauisch-polnischen Union 1385 (Berlin, 1932); M. Krasauskaite, Die Litauischen Adelsprivilegien bis zum Ende des XV Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1927); O. Backus, “Die Rechtsstellung der Iitauischen Bojaren 1387—1506,” Jahrbiicher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 6 (1958): 1-32; J. Ochmahski, Powstanie ³ rozw∂j Iatyfundium biskupstwa Wilehskiego (1387-1550). Ze studi∂w nad rozwojem wielkiej wlasnosci na Litwie ³ Bialorusi w 'Sredniowieczu (Poznan, 1963); W. Peltz, “Rod Giedygoida ³ jego majgtnosci. Z dziejδw tworzenia sig wielkiej wlasnosci ziemskiej w Wielkim Ksigstwie Litewskim w XV wieku,” Zeszyty Naukowe Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza: Historia, zeszyt 11 (Poznan, 1971): 23-44; P. Dgbkowski, Dobra rodowe ³ nabyte w prawie Iitewskim od XIV do XVI wieku (Lviv, 1916); S. Kasperczak, Rozwdj gospodarki folwarczej ïà Litwie ³ Biaiorusi do poiowy XVI wieku (Poznan, 1965); Z. Ivinskis, Geschichte des Bauernstandes in Litauen von der Hltesten Zeit bis zum Anfangdes 16. Jhs. (Berlin, 1933); D. L. Pokhylevych, Krestiane Belorussii ³ Litvy V XVI-XVIII w. (Lviv, 1957). Cf. also W. Kamieniecki, Spoieczehstwo Iitewskie w XV wieku (Warsaw, 1947).

48. The basic relevant literature is R. Grodecki, Poczptki immunitetu w Polsce (Lviv, 1930); M. Szczaniecki, Nadania ziemi na rzecz rycerzy w Polsce do koħca XIII w. (Poznan, 1938); J. Matuszewski, Immunitet ekonomiczny w dobrach ko'sciola w Polsce do roku 1381 (Poznan, 1936); W. Korta, ^uRozwoj terytorialny wielkiej Swieckiej wlasnosci feudalnej w Polsce do poiowy XIII wieku,” Sobdtka 16 (Wroclaw, 1961): 528-66.

49. (Lawrence, Kansas, 1957). See also S. M. Kuczynski, Ziemie czernihowsko-siewierskie pod rzpdami Litwy (Warsaw, 1936).

50. A. Jablonowski, Polska XVI wieku pod wzgl(dem Statystycznym 11: Ziemie ruskie. Ukraina (Warsaw, 1897), 579-80; Istoriia mist ³ sil Ukrainskoi RSR. Kyivska oblast (Kiev, 1971), 577.

51. G. H. Williams, “Protestants in the Ukraine during the Period of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 2 (1978): 41-72, 184-210. See also M. Hrushevsky, Kulturno-natsionalnyi rukh na Ukraini v XVI-XVII vitsi (Lviv, 1912).

52. O. Terletsky, Vasyl Kostantyn Kniaz Ostrozky (Ternopil, 1909).

53. ^uOstrozka akademiia,” in Hrushevsky, Istoriia Ukrainy-Rusy, 6: 479-98; la. Isaievych₁ Dzherela z istorii ukrainskoi kultury doby feodalizmu (Kiev, 1972).

54. A. I. Hensorsky, Halytsko-Volynskyi Htopys (Kiev, 1958), 84-95.

55. D. L. Galbreath, Handbiichlein der Heraldik, 2d ed. (Lausanne, 1948); S. W. H. St. John Hope, A Grammar of English Heraldry, 2d ed. (Cambridge, 1953).

56. See J. Szymanski, Nauki pomocnicze historii (Warsaw, 1972), 328.

57. See the stories in B. PaprockPs Herby rycerstwa polskiego [first published in 1584], 2d ed. (Cracow, 1858), 677-92 (Korczak) and 695-7 (Sas). In this connection see notes 30-2 above on the adoption of Western knightly customs in Galicia.

58. See la. Isaievych, Bratstva ta ikh rol v rozvytku ukrainskoi kultury Xvi-XVIIIst. (Kiev, 1966).

59. See K. Sakovych’s ^uVirshi na zhalosnyi pohreb zatsnoho rytsera Petra Konashevycha Sahaidachnohoⁿ (Kiev, 1622), reprinted in V. P. Kolosova and V. I. Krekoten, Ukrainska poezia. Kinets XVI - pochatok XVII st. (Kiev, 1978), 322-38.

60. See O. Pritsak, “The Hypatian Chronicle and Its Role in the Restoration of Ukrainian Historical Consciousness,” in Chomu katedry Ukrainoznavstva v Harvardi? (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 54-60; also 42-53.